#I literally already have so many projects I CANNOT get invested in this. I simply CANNOT. I've got too much on my plate as it is

[bugsnbites]

I was watching that clip of Scar and Grian putting on creeper costumes to scare Cleo and couldn't help myself. Scar and Gri scare Cleo by disguising themselves as Homeworld Gems, probably regret it immediately

[sang8262]

i also wanted to save this for when i could get the screenshots for evidence myself, but:

JP is canon a germaphobe/ neat freak

like as if it wasnt implied enough already, but it was mentioned in his profile for Pockest, the little tamagotchi clone you can play on the Buckler's Bootcamp companion website

this: if you have no idea what im talking about

sorry for stealing the screenshots from twitter thank you japanese mutual!! ;u;

but it roughly says:

"Has successfully invested in many projects as an entrepreneur. Brought wealth to Nayshall. Mysophobic/ germaphobic, so wearing gloves is essential."

Google translate and Papago also translates 「潔癖症」 as "fastidious", but I know the word in Korean (결벽증), which is literally mysophobia or germaphobia. The word is definitely more specific about the degree of his cleanliness, it isnt simply 'hates getting his clothes stained', he must REALLY hate it.

The last part too, about the gloves, gets translated a bit wonky. But it means he "cannot do without" his gloves, that he finds wearing them essential or indispensable.

So my guess that he wears the gloves to keep his hands clean (literally and metaphorically) was right on, yay me.

Again, I would love to have these in English just to make everything is correct, but I'm too excited and I have to share lmao

edit: this makes his win animation even MORE ruthless than it already is, because he seriously doesnt want to get his shoes dirty from stepping on the opponent's face. he's that disgusted by them, absolutely brutal

[azureflight]

My entire friend group have uninstalled WoW and started FF14

It still feels surreal we are doing this. Now, it is perfectly possible that we will be back to WoW within the month, talking about how disappointing the “weeb game” was, but, this stills feels like a seminal moment.

I have been a Warcraft fan since I was a literal kid trying (and failing :P) to play Tides of Darkness on my aunt’s desktop. I spent so many hours and so much of my allowance playing Reign of Chaos in internet cafes. 

When WOTLK trailer dropped, we had hijacked the computer lab and projected it to the auditorium for all to see. 

I have been part of real life, unironic Horde vs Alliance infighting in college gaming clubs. I remember us all wearing Horde/Alliance merch, enthusiastically and rather foolishly, but completely seriously, arguing about lore, about who did what wrong and who was “more at fault”.

I own, almost every single Warcraft book, comic, guide ever published. I own hard copies, I own digital copies. I have watched and read and listened to every single piece of lore ever produced about this setting.

I have kept my sub up and played through all of the content draught, the infamous SoO, the practically less than 2 patch worth expac that was WoD.

I have allowed my sub to lapse for the first time during BFA. 

I was so hyped for Shadowlands back when it was announced, and was annoyed when they changed the release date, causing me to waste my vacation time that I had taken for it. But a mere month of the expac in and I was already bored of it. And now, 9.1 is out and I am done. I barely played this patch and I have not only cancelled my sub, but went and removed the game from my PC.

Maybe this is a stupid overreaction and in the next patch, at the worst the next expac, I will be right back at the fur shop like the old fox I am. However, I know it feels different.

Throughout the years, I had many a thing that frustrated me about this game. Made me rage even. But I hadn’t quit then. No. The feeling that has been creeping up on me, isn’t rage. It is disinterest. I just, don’t care anymore. 

Most of my friends over the years have switched to the Horde and this has been a sore spot for me. I stuck with Alliance, having some alts to play with them, and they had some Alliance alts to play with me, but... It wasn’t the same, it wasn’t enough. Several online friends, I had already lost contact with.

And now we are all gathering in FF14! I had the discord chat of my life! So many people I hadn’t talked to in years, on top of my actual real life friends whom I hang out with, are all jumping into this new journey.

My best friend’s progression guild is looking to make a full guild transfer, currently all of them except one have characters and a guild in FF, trying to convince the last guy to make the switch.

And then there is the lore. That’s why I fell in love with this setting in the first place. I loved this story, the cheese, the heroism, the over the topness, all of it. It was never “high art”, but it was unique in its own way, it had heart and it had characters and stories that I got invested in. Deeply so. I hadn’t start playing WoW because I was a connoisseur of MMORPG genre and “calculated it to be the best among its contemporaries”. I dived head first in Vanilla because it was Warcraft.

And now, I honestly cannot bring myself to care about this story, or its characters, other than a passing resentment. This was not the case, less than a year ago. I had bought the bloody Shadows Rising novel, I had read it and I liked it.

Now I am just, over it. This sense was rising, this sense of feeling less and less care for it, as expac after expac went in wildly nonsensical directions. But I had things that I had liked well enough to keep at it and have hope, hope for a good enough story that would keep me engaged. But I lost it. Something broke in 9.1.

I guess I realized, or rather I perceive, that the actual writers of this story do not care about it and none of it matters. There is no story. There is no plot, no continuity. Just an endless stream of “cool” shots in cinematics that ultimately don’t matter because, it has no basis and it has no relevance. It exists because someone wanted to make this cool scene, without caring what came before it, or what will come after it. Each scene exist, not to progress a cohesive story, but simply because someone wanted it to exist. And the next “cool” piece will flagrantly retcon the last one, ignoring or outright invalidating the stakes and hooks that had been set up in the previous one. 

This is no longer a story of people, who were dramatic and weird and fantastical, but ultimately people. No. This is now a check list of what someone wanted to do in WoW setting and all the characters are empty puppets and all the plots matter only as much as they matter in any given single cinematic or questline. There is no pay off, and there is no logic. Characters aren’t allowed to live and react. Things only happen because the author said so, and the characters just bend and transform to do their bidding. And they feel no reason to explain nor establish as to why a character acts the way they do, let alone trying to make it believable or internally justified.

The gameplay aspect is the least important to me, the exact opposite of the majority. But I am sick and tired being punished with powerlessness for what I like story wise or aesthetically. I am sick and tired needing to read through guides upon guides, copying meta builds, just to have my class be remotely playable.

And most importantly, I am sick and tired of a game that will put me through genocide, deny me justice and vengeance under the guise of need for cooperation and then deny me playing with my friends across factions.

Now I get to play with all of my friends without jumping over the hoops or giving up on what I love. Because there are no stupid factions in FF14. And I can play multiple classes without hating myself.

I had several favorite characters in this game. They are still, mostly, alive. But do I care about them anymore? Jaina, Anduin, Sylvanas, Turalyon, Tyrande, Genn... No. I don’t care and it doesn’t even hurt anymore, it just feels like I had wasted my time and money. It feels exactly like how I felt during season 8 of GoT. An empty feeling of waste, so I leave.

Will I care about the characters or the story in FF14? I don’t know. I don’t think I will stick around if I don’t. But will I go back to WoW? A piece of me wants to hope for a superb turn around, but... Honestly? I don’t see it happening. And anything less than an epic turn around that fixes all of this, the lore, the classes, the playerbase division? I won’t bother anymore.

So off to the greener pastures! Maybe I will come crawling back within the blink of an eye, eating this post, repenting for ever having left. Maybe... I just don’t think so.

[captnjacksparrow]

Why was it that Kishi chose to write The last the way he did? Even if he had to pair NH, for spin off reasons, he could have done it other, more reasonable ways. Why make Naruto into some moron who doesn't know what love is since the whole crux of Shippuden was how for the first time ever in the history of ninjas, the cycle of hatred was broken with love, love between Sasuke and Naruto? Like am I missing something? This is not even meta, this is text. He literally is one of the most emotionally intelligent peole in the entire fucking series. He could tell when people are lying to them about love. He could tell, even as a twelve year old genin, that Haku loved Zabuza. That boy who suffered loneliness all his life and all he wanted was love and found it in Iruka, that was what changed him. That boy can't tell what love is? The fuck?!

Why do that Kishi?? Like why shit on Naruto, the protagonist hero, to make NH work when there were other ways, like idk, arranged marriage, which wouldn't show Naruto in such a bad light? Why did he need to retcon that shit when he could have written a more believable story for NH?

Haha:-) I feel you anon🤣🤣🤣☹️☹️☹️

I thought about this a lot. And I came up with possible theories, It may be any one or altogether which caused this mess. Anyways it’s fun to explore. 

STUDIO PRESSURE

He probably was fed up with Naruto series after the chapter 699. After all 15 years is a long time and he probably wanted to move on to something else. But Studio pressured him into doing this kind of ending, that is, to pair everyone to make babies and wanted to make a New Gen series based off them, which Kishi don’t liked I guess. So he decided to shit on the characters and indirectly screaming to us “Please move on from this shit hole”. Since Naruto is the titular character, making a movie on him doing corny romance shit would garner large audience and money.

LACK OF ABILITY

Kishi can write a short and cute romance like he did for Minato & Kushina, Dan and Tsunade. Otherwise he can write a lengthy Slow-burn love like he did with Naruto and Sasuke. But he simply couldn’t write something out of the blue for a character he invested a lot who never had any meaningful interaction throughout the series. 

OWN LIFE’S REFLECTION

Probably Kishi was a closeted bisexual, who had a gay crush on someone like Sasuke in his real life. But then, life happened. Reality has to be faced. So he decided for the next best option and settled for it. That movie probably is the reflection on his own life.  

I think it’s all of the above. 

Kishi may be many things. But he was always sincere in his work. I can feel that throughout the series. Except for the Kaguya retcon, which came out of nowhere, every other storylines synced so perfectly.

But in The Last movie, all I saw was insincerity and laziness. Many fanfic writers can do a better job than that movie.

Naruto made a Kage Bunshin (Shadow Clone) at age 6 to save Hinata.. Umm... Bullshit???

It was strongly established in the first episode that Naruto couldn’t even make a proper Bunshin (Clone) or Transformation jutsu. And that was at age 12. He got the sealing scroll only at 12. How can he make a kage bunshin at 6???

In Sasuke vs Killer Bee fight && Itachi vs Killer Bee fight, we all knew that a jinchurikki cannot be put in Genjutsu, even with Mangekyo sharingan. Sasuke got a Lariat punch in his chest because he was careless assuming that he already put Bee in Genjutsu. How come Naruto can be put in Genjutsu and fall in love at that??? 

So Kishi decided to vent out all his frustrations on this movie which was predominantly targeted at those viewers who were emotionally pumped up for any kind of romance thrown at them. Since he knew he won’t be working on this project anymore, he gave those viewers whatever they want and politely asking other viewers who watched for the core story to move on.

Now, probably you hate Naruto, the character. Because Kishi made us easy to move on. And another reason is to make you like Boruto, the character. 

However, you should be happy that we didn’t get to see any trash movie like this for the SS pairing. That would have definitely driven me off the cliff.

[postmodernmulticoloredcloak]

So due to popular demand I watched episode 2 of Walker for you guys. Part 1 of 2

So here’s my review of episode 2 of Walker. Is this going to be the episode where Walker lassoes a person? We’ll see.

The episode is titled “Back in the saddle” and I am already wishing I was eating my cookies. But the batter needs to rest in the fridge first, blah blah.

Night sky. Horses in their stables in the darkness. Security cameras switching off…? Fire! Someone set fire to the stable. Someone hurries to get the horses out. It’s clever, I’m actually invested in making sure the horses are okay. Maybe they’re luckier than Mary Winchester. Wait, wrong show.

The last one is trapped! A brave guy tries to free him but a wooden beam falls down and kills him. Oh no. Did someone at least save the horse?

The ridiculous title card plays, and then our favorite former Supernatural lead currently starring in a new show appears. He loads what looks like a toolbox in the back of his truck. There’s a horse saddle already on the truck. Soft music and the yellow sunlight shining behind him announce this is an emotional scene. The saddle has a leather bag on the side, with the initials of Walker and his wife engraved on it.

Ta-da! Flashback of Walker and his wife. Thankfully she is not elvish vision glowing this time, although the blurry effect of the flashbacks still make me think of a Lord of the Rings ripoff.

The saddle was a gift from her! Walker makes this face so we know he loves it.

Look at how ridiculous this is.

They’re trying sooo hard to appeal to bibro Supernatural fans. They’re BEGGING for the attention of bibro Supernatural fans. I’m not sure if redoing SamandDean iconic moments but with Walker and his dead wife (played by who I assume some hardcore bibros believe is Jared’s beard) is the best way of doing it? I mean, I wouldn’t take that direction. But okay. We take our Meaningful Moments from Supernatural because our viewers are not invested in these characters but are invested in those ones, so at least we’re provoking emotions by making them think of those ones. It is a strategy, I guess.

Fuck, I spoke too soon! The glowiness is not too strong - it is daytime in this flashback and not nighttime like in the pilot - but it’s there.

Back to the present, Walker is on the phone with his mother, explaining he’s back at his place to fix a leak or something. If the kids have been living with their grandparents and Walker has been away for almost a year, how is the patio so clean and pristine? But wait, someone’s been there. There are empty beer bottles. And then the funniest frame of the show so far.

Stella is a teenager. In 2021. Which teenager in 2021 texts like someone who had to spend 20 cents for text and press the button four times to get an s? Her father should be the one texting like it’s 1999. Stella would be the one texting like phones have automatic capitalization and predictive text and shit...

There is absolutely no fucking way the place can be so clean and pristine if no one’s lived there bar some teenagers who drank beer in the patio. But okay.

Oh no. Another glowy flashback. Holy shit. Why. We get it. He misses his wife. They had the perfect little life together. The music they use in the flashback is starting to give me a pavlovian response.

Even Jared is unhappy. Look at his unhappy face.

In the meanwhile, Ramirez and her boyfriend are having fun when her boss calls her. She dresses up to go to the fire stable place, in the meanwhile they have a conversation about their relationship. She has never really had a longterm serious relationship, and she’s confused because, I quote, “I am one of the first women ever, one of the first women of color, ever” [that’s it sentence finished]. I can’t believe Ramirez has been around for thousands of thousands of years.

She needs to focus on her job and he’s a distraction because he has a six pack. No, that’s literally the scene. He takes off his shirt and we see his six pack. Now, he’s a pretty impressive physique, that’s not a problem. Why isn’t he the main character of a show about doctors?

Meanwhile, Walker joins the family for breakfast. The brother, Liam, is great at making smoothies. What an interesting all-rounded gay character.

Walker’s mom says they should stay living with them because it means stability for the kids. Walker says they should move back to their house because normal whatever. Stella says, does it even matter to you where we want to live?, and leaves. August reveals she goes back to the house sometimes, meaning the beer was hers and she lied. Draa~ama. Stella is the only interesting character in this family.

Jared makes another discontented Jared thing at the end of the scene, I can’t gif them all, and we get to the crime scene. “Fire’s no way to go” Walker comments, because they watched the Supernatural pilot before writing the show.

Oh no, the horse didn’t make it either :(

So, the stableman who died had just come out of prison. Oh no. Is this another plot about convicted criminals doing shady things after they get out of prison? It must be, otherwise this detail wouldn’t be relevant since the guy just died. Oh no.

Ooooh James, the new boss, is making some changes which include following the rules to a t. Meaning Walker has been demoted until he passes all the tests again. I need to show you the face, sorry

This is it, this is Jared’s acting in this show.

Walker tries to argue with Captain James, but he says he wants to be “on the right side of history for a change”, so he cannot have him run around doing whatever he wants. James isn’t happy that he went to look at the footage of Emily’s murder again. He tells him again that the case is closed because a guy confessed, and he needs to focus on his family and job now. We’ve heard this so many times I’m so bored. But guys Jared’s acting gives us gems

Ramirez starts talking about the test, but he’s off, she asks him if he’s good and he says I’m fine. I’m Fine Lie #3! I think, I’m not really counting.

Something about the case. Whatever.

Stella is training for the big upcoming soccer match. Why can’t this be a sports show about teenage girls playing soccer? I can even give them a pass about calling it soccer.

Stella and her friend Isabel chat and Isabel says “ICE is sniffing around”, which I’m sure is not what ICE does.

I take it back. I don’t want a show about teenage girl soccer. Now there’s drama because Stella and Bel shouldn’t be playing in the big game because of their arrest, but apparently Stella is good and the couch will let her play, but not Bel, so she refuses to play. Unsure if this is about racism or Bel simply isn’t a great player. They should have made it clearer…

Meanwhile Augustus chats with a schoolmate called Ruby. Yeah. It had been too many minutes without an easter egg.

Walker and Ramirez take the tests. First shooting range. Then driving. He’s very good at these things. I’m bored. I don’t care about cops showing off their cop skills. I’d rather watch Ruby and Sam, er I mean, Augustus talk about high school projects, and I don’t care about high school projects.

I made the cookies in the meanwhile :)

[mage-and-the-tantrums]

The Courage of Letting Go

My project had crashed yet again. My laptop is telling me in all the possible languages that my hard drive is dying, and that I need to replace it soon. Yet I still ask +10 hours out of it daily. All I have left to do is reboot, see all of my data get wiped out, reinstall, reconfigure, wait and hope for the best. Again, again, again, until the green lines in my console numb my already half-asleep brain.

5:45AM. Early morning breeze is refreshing, birds are chirping annoyingly, I try to remember the last time I was able to really breath-in a morning, when I had a proper sleep schedule. I carefully navigate the labyrinths of what they might think or say, and plan accordingly. I realize that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, and that silence is indeed a divine language that I gladly speak.

25 imaginary conversations, one rant to my mom and 2 of my other friends, 3 weeks of self-inflicted isolation, and yet it still does feel right, in every possible aspect. I feel as if a burden had been cast from my back. I feel very light, and kind of excited for the unknown that would fill the void of what has been there. That huge chunk I orbited around for so long had finally pushed me a little bit too hard, into an open space suspension. In fact, it has been pushing me away for quite some time, but only equal to my desire to stay. Those forces eventually negated each other, and I stayed in inertia, comfortably numb, orbiting around a ruined star I thought was one of my riches.

We are creatures of habit. We are always afraid of change, and we prefer it would be inevitable and outside of our control. If change was inevitable, we would let it come to us rather than seeking it, even when we desperately need it. The human brain always sides with the known, within the confines of the familiar. We cling into relationships, belongings, countries, jobs, that are hurting us more than we could ever imagine. And yet we fail to realize that we are suffering directly because of those. And so letting go seems like a funny, extremely dark thought that one should never act upon it. Letting go does not even cross our minds for most of the time.

But some things do not require change. We value longevity, we identify with rituals and we appreciate sanctuaries. Places or people we go to regularly, and come running back towards when the world is unfair. Friends, family, romantic relationships, motherland, hometown. In fact these should not change at all costs, naturally and ideally, as they join to form our identity.

However, these deeply rooted landmarks should be questioned regularly. It's not because that one cannot change or disregard their family that we should put up with their toxicity for example. One should be brave enough to seek change in the forbidden "longevity" department I was talking about earlier, if change is required. One should take the leap of faith, and have the courage to break their own heart. One should listen to the deep voice within when it tells them to leave.

In my case, I had been among this gang of friends for 8 years or so now. We have been through a lot, and I thought I had a safe haven in which I could be simply me, and still feel loved and cared for. Being with my gang always meant recharge and safety, for quite some time.

As I went abroad for education, our relationships suffered heavily from the stress-test of distance. It was very clear to me that I mean nothing to them, and that they see nothing past the things I could offer: rides, professional advice, help with writing a CV, help with a university course, and so on. I soon discovered that they go out without me, systematically and on so many occasions, that I am kept away from their lives and that my struggles mean nothing but something to make fun of, collectively (yes, they mocked me openly once for falling in love with someone who later decided to marry someone else).

The thing that kept me going back to them is them being part of home, being part of something I achingly longed for when I was expatriated, and so I never thought twice before running back to them. My expectations surely lowered to rock-bottom, but I still invested my time and energy unto the gang.

Being back home once again has cast a very big light unto everything in my life. Now I can see very clearly that I am a mere decor, and that people call me only for my car or just to fill the space and not be completely alone. When they ask about some detail in my life, their questions hit me as mixed with a little bit of spite and envy. Maybe I am wrong on this last point, but I would not be surprised. It's no longer a serene sanctuary, it is a toxic tar pit.

The courage of letting go is a mystical force that descends, and suddenly everything is clear. Being honest with yourself is crucial for you to feel this. Once you open your gates, the voice of your gut that has been muffled for years is now a limpid, comforting sound. The courage of letting go is a force that once armed, should not be disregarded. The courage of letting go is another form of acceptance, a blessing.

You should not put up with a toxic friend or relative. You should not do something that does not make you feel good just because you're afraid what else is there for you. What if I cut loose my friends ? what will happen then ? No one knows, and quite frankly, it is exciting to get that space filled up by literally anything else.

This is not a piece of writing that would end with "maybe I am wrong after all". I have given every benefit; of doubt, of love, of affection, of temporary loss of interest, of casual indifference, of good intention. Not once, not twice. It has been years. And maybe it was not like this all the time. Maybe we changed. But I know for sure that I am better off without all of them. I know now that I had been exploited for the past years, and I know I represent nothing for all of them. I am not dumb to not realize when I am shoved away and made fun off systematically by people who are not necessarily better than me in any aspect. This feels like an echo of my early teenage years when I was bullied. That period also ended when I decided to stand up for myself because no one else did. I wrote a big-ass message and I cut all my ties with them. How ironically and sometimes stupidly history repeats itself.

I am glad I now have a wider perspective, and that now I accept the sight of you in my rear-view mirror getting further and further until you're an infinitesimal, irrelevant dot. A sight that has been silently hurting me for years. I always put that under the tab of my over-sensitivity as you would say, you being the expert know-it-all-even-psychoanalysis. I lowered my expectations, I doubted myself, I made myself believe what you thought of me, I asked less and less of you, while you took more and more. Time, effort, attention, consideration, ...

Now you're yesterday news, and I wish for you all the best on your journey, and for our paths to untangle and never ever cross again. Thanks for the memories, and thanks for the pain.

"Joy might visit us unexpectedly, set up the candles it might pass by us spray the way with tears Oh, my heart, where is your sorrow? I hid it away from the joy's path you keep whining you wail with tears of a distressed But this is a mere illusion, too high in heavens Take care not not shout sorrowfully, as sorrow can be heard." - Aziz Al-Samawi (sung by Ilham Al-Madfai : Khuttar)

[rpbetter]

I often see multis post that they want to make a new muse, at the same time as they're backed up on threads and asks, and they get their followers to "enable" them to make that muse in the post replies. What is your take on this? Is it a they-can-do-what-they-want situation, or is it reasonable to be annoyed when I see this? Or both?

Hey, Anon!

Both.

I mean, as usual, this is my opinion of an opinion-based matter. This isn't an equation that has an objectively right to wrong scale, it isn't actually hurting any living person or thing. But...it is incredibly annoying and can be hurtful.

They can totally do what they want, and much of the nature of genuine creativity is exactly that - the allowance of doing whatever you so desire. It's something I support rather adamantly, but it's also something I support trying our best to do responsibly and without being hurtful to anyone in a hobby that involves more than ourselves.

This isn't deciding to write another fic when you've not finished the previous four or five that others were interested in, or never finishing any of your original fiction, but continually starting new projects. While others might be enjoying those things as well, you didn't agree to interact with them. They're audience members, not participants.

When others are participants in a hobby that has to work both ways, it's different. Your actions do affect other, real human beings.

So, I totally feel like you've a right to be annoyed every time you see that happening. I do. I tend to unfollow people who do that repeatedly, as we're not pursuing the hobby in the same way. I'll argue all day that someone has a right to their, sometimes literally, eighty-plus muses they never develop or stick to, but that doesn't mean I want to engage with them as a writing partner.

For those of us who want long-term writing partners with the same, well-developed muses, this kind of thing just is annoying. As is everything else that comes with it.

As in...

They're constantly posting "talk me out of adding x" as code for "talk me into writing x."

No one actually wants to be talked out of it, which was probably more obvious to everyone else here than it was me for a little while lmao I tend to take things rather literally. This was, as one can imagine, not appreciated! Telling someone in total earnestness, "I really don't think that's a good choice. You're always saying how overwhelmed you are and just dropped multiple threads yesterday, so adding another muse is going to make you feel worse eventually. Don't do it! :)" is so not what they were looking for. As was evident by the return meltdown over how they could do what they wanted, like I said they couldn't or had any authority over what they're doing with their time.

It's an obnoxious bit of pandering for a foregone conclusion.

Have you ever seen anyone who posts that sort of thing not pick up that muse? I haven't. I've only seen muns who are legitimately on the fence about it asking others in private conversations or testing out the muse decide against it. The thing that makes this incredibly irritating is the attention-seeking and need to validate something they must know isn't a great choice, otherwise, they'd just do it. They're aware that they're behind on drafts, asks, and other things - aware that this is maybe a dick move when they owe everyone already. So, they're seeking "permission" with full knowledge that multiple mutuals are going to hop on that post with encouragement, even some of the ones being messed over by this choice.

It puts people in a bad situation.

Some of those people genuinely don't care, they just want to interact with any muse, and I'm going to be awful and say it - they don't care about totally interchangeable muses and have them themselves. That's fine, this isn't a problem for them. It is for the mutuals who are hoping that maybe if their writing partner gets into this new muse, they'll get a reply to their threads with that energy, or that they'll stick to this one and they can have consistent interactions with them. It is for the mutuals who feel pressured to respond positively because they fear not responding at all will make them seem like bad rpers.

One more thing playing into the counter logic excuse for shitty behavior of "it's just a hobby" is one more thing too many, and it does exactly that.

No one wants to be accused of being remotely too invested in RP anymore, of taking it too seriously, or having any emotional investment in muses, stories, or muns. Not accepting every choice someone makes that negatively impacts you with a grin on your face while you dump confetti on them for it just isn't a comfortable option for a lot of muns anymore. Honesty isn't a comfortable option. While the other option isn't either, it seems better than that mutual noticing you're the only writing partner who didn't hop onto that post with support any of the multiple times they reblogged it. It's only a hobby in which everyone can do what they want until what one wants clashes. Then, you're getting a callout for being addicted to RP.

And the way it tends to clash most is in having expectations of others. Ones that would be totally normal in any other hobby requiring interaction with other people.

Like not overburdening yourself at the expense not only of yourself but those on your "team." That's what is being done when someone knows they cannot keep up with themselves, but continues to add to the situation with new muses.

Not only are you no longer getting responses already while they're intending to add even more to their overflowing plate, you'll be dropped again when they have to "fresh start" their blog because they're burned out.

I have to put that in quotations because I don't know how it's a fresh start when you keep everything but the blog layout the same. All the muses and all the behaviors, including adding a new one despite not having the time or interest necessary to do so, is inevitably maintaining the problems that led to burnout. Dropping every thread, changing the URL, a new blog layout, new aesthetics, isn't fixing the issue even if it temporarily reinvigorates the mun.

The mun is definitely doing things that are not helpful to them, it's stressful and upsetting to experience burnout, but it's at least that mun's choice. Both to do it and to become defensive over fixing it, thus, never fixing it. It isn't anyone else's choice to be repeatedly dropped or ignored, though...unless they just keep sticking around for it.

Again, we're supposed to respect everyone's choices. That's fine when it really works that way, when it is truly everyone. But it's not an acceptable decision to see a multimuse of twenty or more muses and say that's your limit, that you've experienced too many muns who are serial muse-adders not being able to keep up with themselves, so you don't interact with these blogs. If one feels that way, they had better not put it in their rules or ever be upfront about this as a reason, when one is demanded, for not following back or interacting.

It's not acceptable to see a writing partner adding another muse after they've owed you for months, just wiped their inbox, and keep expressing being overwhelmed/behind and become annoyed. Let alone dropping them or explaining to them why you are doing so.

The only "acceptable" course of action is hoping that they totally forget you exist so you can quietly slip away.

I don't feel like that's especially fair or mature. It certainly isn't helping the communication problem we absolutely do have here in the RPC when only one party is allowed to communicate without fear of being labeled, rather ironically, as a bad RP partner.

While this problem seems to be most prevalent in more casual RPers, it's certainly not isolated there. I feel like it's necessary to say that I've had muns I both interacted with and were simply on my dash alike who were not on that more casual side who went from being multis to being muse collectors. Once they hit over fifteen of them or so, they stopped even bothering to try to refrain from picking up at least one muse from every new piece of media they consumed or were inspired by.

It was more annoying because they had been capable of writing truly unique characters they stuck to, and even if they were, with full and upfront admission before interaction, slower to respond, those responses were well worth any wait for the quality of writing and storytelling going on. That's so much worse than someone who was always at a lower skill level as a writer, didn't have a good grasp on characterization, and wasn't especially dedicated to anything. It's depressing and disappointing, but it's also not what you think you're getting into when trying to carefully pick who to write with. Like everyone else, my time to enjoy this hobby is far from twenty-four-seven as well. It's important to me to try to choose muns I'll work out with well so that neither of us is wasting the other's time. And that's what it feels like - the investment of time was a waste because their hobby became adding infinite muses, or rather, the idea of muses.

So, yes, while it is fully everyone's right to write what and how they want to (even if it amounts to not writing at all), it'd be nice if we were all as committed to doing so in a way that was adult enough to respect commitments we've made to each other as we are, as a RPC, to losing our minds when someone merely drops the words "commitments" or "respect."

For the inevitable muse-collectors running across this:

Fiction is inspiring! That doesn't mean you needn't be inspired by anything, just that picking up or creating a whole other muse might not be the best way to follow this inspiration.

If you're considering another muse, but you find yourself already behind and/or overwhelmed? Try one of these instead:

create a plot based on it! Write up the idea and put it in your wanted plots/wishlist tag. Bring it up to partners you think might be interested in it as well, or seek out a crossover from that fandom

make it a new verse for an existing muse! This is as close as you get to creating a new muse without actually doing so, and in many ways, it takes even more creativity. How is your muse different in this AU than they are in canon, how are they the same? In the ways that they are the same, what similar events but done in a way that is natural/logical to this universe have happened to maintain that? Get really creative!

for either/both of these, make some moodboards and aesthetics with that energy while you're waiting on someone to take you up on these new things. Answer some HC asks or tag games using your new verse, or write an independent HC for the verse or plot

talk to writing partners who already love that muse about their new verse/your desired plot! No, not pressuring talk, just normal conversation between friends, but maybe they will be interested in starting a thread

simply be inspired to include some aspect of what you liked in an existent thread. A particular scene you could pull ideas from, the overall mood of a film, or the way something was written in a book - include that in your replies somehow! RP is creative writing, be creative

There are so many, honestly more organic, directions to take inspiration than bluntly adding a new muse. Especially when you're already overburdened, not holding up your end of replies, and/or not able to portray each muse as their own character properly.

Sometimes, it's not just not a great idea to add a whole new muse, and that's alright. There seems to be a serious problem with fomo going on with this whole issue, too. You're not going to miss out if you do not immediately add this character to your multi, and you're never going to fully keep up with what is trending anyway. Do it because you still want to write this muse in four months instead, they're obviously not going anywhere if that's the case, and they'll be a better developed, interesting portrayal for that.

And people do have a right to be annoyed when they feel sidelined by you seeing a shiny object and repeatedly pandering for validation in dropping them for it. Particularly if you're a mun who, further, expects everyone to be just as interested in every new muse you make as the last. As in, you're annoyed when you keep creating muses no one is falling over themselves to interact with, guilting, shaming, or outright demanding that this new muse is interacted with before they have access to the previous ones.

They don't have a right to be mean you to, but they have a right to be annoyed and to drop you. They even have a right to politely decline explaining this to you if they feel unsafe, or to politely explain it to you before they move on.

Absolutely everyone's right to pursue RP and every facet of it as they so please, but no one else has to like what you're doing.

If this response grates on some of you out there? Consider the other options you have, how you might be making others feel, and that it's actually completely okay to tell yourself no. You won't perish if you tell yourself no to taking on a new muse when you, honestly, should not! It'll be okay! Maybe, you just need to evaluate if there is another muse, or more than one, you should remove before adding one. Maybe, you just need some time to reorganize how you reply before you add this one. "No" when told to yourself can simply mean "no, not right now, it isn't a good time/situation."

[anastkantdhangar]

How And What India Has Been Coping With During The Deadly Covid Second Wave

Last rites being performed by a family, like many, at the Seemapuri Crematorium Center in Delhi

The second wave of the coronavirus pandemic has been nothing less than that of one wreaking havoc and chaos for India - social media full of SOS messages asking for hospital beds, oxygen cylinders, medicines; crematorium centers had never witnessed such large amount of deceased being cremated, crematorium centers even had to be expanded with increased number of pyre-platforms at various parts of the country, and now the abandoned lifeless being found in rivers - simply nothing less than a catastrophe.

Heartbreaking visuals of people gasping for breath, lined outside hospitals unable to find beds, heavy shortage of important medicines like Remedesivir, lifeless bodies waiting for multiple hours at the crematorium centers for their turn to be cremated - this surely has been one of the worst health crisis India has ever seen. Exhausted frontline workers and workers at crematorium centers say they have never seen such huge crisis before. Woods have come to be short in numbers to cremate the dead. How have the authorities dealt with this?

There’s possibly not a single person in India who has not lost at least one of their relative, friend or a known one in last two months.

The centre alone did not fall well short and caught ill-prepared, states are equal culprits in their jurisdiction.

India has been under criticism by global media continuously for under-reporting of numbers of the deceased, and its lack of testing, with many reports from journalists on ground suggesting that the actual numbers of those deceased is actually at least 10-15 times more than the official numbers. A report showed that as the official data shows that in the capital of Madhya Pradesh, Bhopal, had seen only around 1,000 deaths due to covid since the pandemic began last year, whereas the data kept at crematorium centers shows that around 3,700 funerals have been done according to covid protocols in the city in the month of April alone in 2021. Such is the scale of under reporting of numbers in the official data, be it Delhi, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and a majority of the Indian states.

From VIP treatments to the well-off even during these hard times, a classic case of Delhi government’s attempt to book Ashoka Hotel for safety measures for Delhi HC Judges with no inputs from the latter raising many eyebrows recently, states too have had their own bit of criticisms of handling of things during the pandemic.

When urban parts, despite having all the infrastructure and facilities, have seen such destruction, things in rural India have slowly started to catch headlines. With lack of information amongst the people about the virus and vaccines, multiple people in villages have been dying everyday lately complaining of fever, fatigue and shortness of breath, with no oxygen and testing facilities in most of the rural parts of the country despite being 15 months into the pandemic. How cruel things could unleash in the rural areas is a dangerous thought having seen the recent peak in urban ones.

Almost all of the country have been either in a lockdown or strict curfew with almost all states imposing the same, and this has shown some positive results in the last week with positivity rate coming down in various urban areas. The issue of oxygen crisis, after weeks long deliberation by the Supreme Court and various High Courts, have been dealt with to an extent in some manner only after the apex court made a separate National Oxygen Monitoring body.

The true figures lay not in the official data, but the crematorium centers of this country.

People waiting in queues at vaccination centers to get their jabs

Vaccination drive in many states have come to a halt owing to shortage of vaccines, with even those who are due for their second doses having difficulties finding a slot in many parts of the country. When the second wave started to wreak havoc, the widely demanded move by the opposition to open the vaccination drive for not only 45+ but for all adults was being considered by the government and given a nod, only to open big loopholes in the world’s largest vaccination drive, with one being heavy shortage of jabs.

The gap between the two doses of Covishield vaccine has been increased to 12-16 weeks on the basis of scientific data to show for it, surely there must be data now to show for it, but if this is so, then why the same expert’s panel earlier in February 2021 had advised states that the second dose of covishield should not be administered after 8 weeks in any case as it may not work then, and why Union I&B Minister also tweeted this very advisory on the same day? We cannot possibly answer this question just like we cannot estimate that actually how many people have died due to covid in this country. But for the record, The Lancet and WHO have themselves clarified way before that the gap between two doses for AstraZeneca vaccine, or Covishield should be 12-16 weeks; The UK follows 12 weeks gap and Canada follows 16 weeks gap, and India will follow the same to tackle the heavy shortage of jabs. The gap between two doses of Covaxin, on the other hand, stands the same as before.

When The USA and the European Union gave vaccination orders of millions of dollars last year, India did not order a single jab. Should not have we placed such orders last year itself? Did or did not the experts gave this input at that time? Have we even been doing it till as late as earlier this month? If not, then this itself is a much larger issue, but there's no transparency. State governments have been left with no other alternative than to issue global tenders to buy vaccines, which actually the centre should do in the global market, and as a result, not India, but its states are competing each other in the global market to purchase vaccines. Starting with Uttar Pradesh, then Maharashtra, followed by Orissa, Delhi and Karnataka have issued global tenders already to purchase vaccines.

Not a single Indian media outlet is now projecting Atmanirbhar slogans anymore, which was literally served by the same media to its viewers for months, confining them in a whole different world altogether. And it's only a matter of time that a new slogan arrives, and literally the same channels project it again for months, confining its viewers to another new world altogether, yet again.

Surely, superpower India of 2021 would not have wanted itself to be projected in such a manner in the foreign media. The majority of domestic mainstream media would not show you this, and would continuously keep you distracted with bogus narratives and side of things, killing your ability to question the status quo and to sustain a healthy democratic India.

Indian media back in January widely publicised about the ‘World’s Largest Vaccination Drive’, which holds true given our population, but no questions were asked about procurement of vaccines. Frontline covid workers were the first priority to be vaccinated, rightfully, and plan was to vaccinate 30 crore frontline workers inside 3-4 months in first phase of vaccination drive; and 5 months into the drive not even all of the frontline workers could be vaccinated. By numbers, India is amongst fastest vaccinating countries, but when it comes to ratio of its population, it fares poorly with not even 3% people been fully vaccinated yet. It is important to look into the matter and understand how much India has spent on research and production of vaccines.

A report from The Guardian, issued on 2nd April, 2021, claimed that as the US and European Union nations have been spending billions of dollars as aids for companies for research, development and production of vaccines, there is no concrete evidence of India spending on research and production of vaccines. Before the coronavirus pandemic struck, India was the largest vaccine producer in the world, but when the pandemic struck, soon the US and China surpassed India as largest vaccine manufacturers. Indian media had to go from taking pride in largest vaccination drive to reporting of mass shutting down of vaccinating centers owing to lack of jabs, such has been the vast hallucination we have been served for some years now. Owing to this very pride of Indian media, which not only confuses its people between Indian companies and the Indian government, it also reminds its people everyday that their very ability to question to sustain the world’s largest democracy is being massacred everyday.

After this report from The Guardian on 2nd April, 2021, the Indian government submitted an affidavit in the Supreme Court on 11th May, 2021 in which the government has clearly and specifically stated that the Indian government has not issued any grant or aid to the Serum Institute of India or Bharat Biotech, which implies no funds on research or development even for domestically developed Covaxin. Only 46 crores were funded to Bharat Biotech for clinical trials of Covaxin, that too by ICMR. Which means Indian media has been taking pride in vaccines made by AstraZeneca and a domestic company Bharat Biotech, and did not question for even once that why we have not been helping at least domestic companies for vaccine research.

If the affidavit submitted in Supreme Court by the government stands firm on authentic data and information, then what about the announcement made on 13th May, 2020 about 100 crores being allotted as aids for domestic candidates developing vaccines? Around same time last year, the US was investing 15 million dollars in various vaccine developing candidates, and was advancing vaccine orders worth 300 million dollars even before vaccines were developed. On 12th December, 2020, Union Finance Minister announced 900 crores aid for vaccine production, but the affidavit submitted by the government itself in SC claims no such grants were ever made. 20th April, 2021, news came in that Finance Ministry is advancing loans worth 3,000 crores to SII and 1,500 crores to Bharat Biotech for vaccine production, the affidavit holds advancement of these loans valid, though the money is yet to reach the companies. Adar Poonawalla of SII said last month while talking to a media outlet that he has been expecting these loans on the basis of media reports, thus he too believes in the Indian media, and on the same expectations his company has taken heavy loans from banks to continue vaccine production of Covishield. By the way Adar Poonawalla has field away from the country citing pressure from "influential" people and has been shying away from answering to what might have led to such huge covid surge in India during its second wave.

Thus, there was no Indian penny involved thus far in the production of vaccines by both these companies according to the Indian government.

With how we have been coping with the pandemic, various experts have been giving their ideas and views to deal with issues, and “revolutions” in Indian healthcare system are urgently required in post covid-era.

When the UK and many members of the European Union were witnessing devastating second wave earlier this year, Union Ministers in India were claiming that India has defeated covid and that India is in the ‘endgame’ of the pandemic, in fact the numbers were actually very low during the same period, and India was starting to return to normal just when the second wave started to unleash around mid-March, exposing lack of plans to tackle a potential second wave. Lack of preparedness on health infrastructure was visibly evident, when every political party was busy campaigning in states assembly elections and large crowd gatherings were seen at Kumbh. Could not these two super spreader events have been avoided temporarily to control covid surge, just like Nizamuddin Markaz could have been avoided last year, which again acted like a spreader event in the last wave, and was presented as such a heated topic by the Indian media for months last year?

In order to cope with heavy shortage of jabs, many health experts have been demanding government intervention in expanding vaccine production by involving other vaccine manufacturers as well by providing them vaccine formula and advancing tenders for vaccine production, for which steps are being taken only in this last week. The pace of the vaccination process also has been under heavy criticism as to why door to door vaccination proposals by several states has been turned down by the centre citing the latter has no such policy, given that polio vaccination process was a great success with minimum volunteers.

If both, SII and Bharat Biotech, are providing vaccines to the centre, states and private hospitals at different prices, with lowest price being for the centre and highest for private hospitals, could not the centre itself buy vaccines and provide them to state itself given that if states buy them on their own then they will have to pay double the price compared to the centre. 

The money of 22,000 crore rupees Central Vista project, if used to buy covid jabs, would buy a whopping 146.66 crore jabs, potentially enough to fully vaccinate around 70-72 crore Indian citizens, which again is potentially enough to create herd immunity throughout the country, just a mere statistic based on facts.

It is important to keep current feedbacks in mind in order for the work to be done. No person in this country would have ever thought that private hospitals one day would run out of their capabilities to treat them, and potentially exposing that bulk of them are mere money making firms. It is high time India start to spend more on its healthcare and education, and the possibility of government taking complete control of healthcare and education, like successful western countries, should not be ruled out even after it being a slow process to come true.

Recent lockdowns and curfews by states have shown a dip in covid numbers and positivity rate, oxygen crisis seem to be in some control in the recent week, and vaccine production is being increased after government stepped in. Surely next few weeks are very critical to control the new surge of B.1.617 Indian mutant strain, with people hoping that they will overcome this health crisis soon.

But history will remember that India’s numbers ascribed not in the official data, but at the crematorium centers.

[jcmorrigan]

What movie or tv show scared you the most?

OH HEEHEEHEEEEEE MY TIME HAS COME

I think this was probably the sign I was meant to be a horror fan, because I'm gonna talk about two movies here and neither one is a standard horror film. Now, I avoided horror films like the plague, but I now realize that's because of my aversion to jumpscares and gore, which have very little to do with actual scary stuff. I feared actual horror imagery as a small child, but basically once I read Coraline it all just turned around because that book gave me nightmares but I actually WANTED those nightmares and kept going back to the book. So what are the movies I just COULD NOT contend with?

First up, I have found that a lot of people have said this one, but really and truly, fuck Chicken Run.

I was...maybe ten when I watched it. Signed up for a goofy claymation adventure. What did I get? First of all, a whole lot of bleak color palette that warned me that this was not going to be a happy story. We are then shown the stakes right away: our entire main cast lives in a dystopian prison and if they do not find a way to escape, they will die. One DOES die. This is where a lot of people say they noped out right away, but actually, the execution of the dinner chicken in the first scene was tame for me compared to what would come next.

The pie machine. It's assembled, it's talked about, and eventually our two leads fall into it in a way that is designed to be fatal. Look, there are a ton of horror tropes in this scene alone. I haven't seen it SINCE THE ONE AIRING and I can still vividly tell you a lot of this. And if I walked into a horror film and asked for this, I'd come out super satisfied, but I was not expecting horror from this. First of all, I remember vividly the shot where you're looking from Ginger's POV falling down the shaft and the divider comes up to shunt her into the "meat" line. It's incredibly claustrophobic and you just get this almost jumpscare reminder that the character through whose eyes you see is regarded as nothing more than meat to be consumed. There is then an array of blades designed for close calls, and dough that essentially glues the lead characters down to a conveyor belt so they have to helplessly watch the death machines that are coming. Sticky stuff that roots you to one spot; that's another thing that just REALLY unnerves me and I love it if I'm reading CreepyPasta but I was not reading CreepyPasta; I was watching a children's film. The leads escape certain death by jamming the gravy system, causing the machine to overload on pressure, and here I feel like I should've been relieved that they escaped but instead I was the most unsettled of all when the pressure meter started climbing. I don't know if this film *gave* me a phobia of industrial accidents or if it just awakened what was already in my OCD little brain, but suffice to say that after this movie, I was hyper-aware of my own fear of things like hissing steam, rising pressure meters, and being in a room where large metal things were clanking. (I'm since over it; I've been exposed to it in enough things.)

Now, I was no quitter. I should have just noped out. But I didn't. I continued to traumatize myself. The next part of the film until the climax I don't remember so well - it wasn't as traumatizing - EXCEPT for the part where Ginger finds and rebuilds Rocky's circus poster. And now, as an adult, I can see how that was kinda supposed to be funny, like, "The goddamn chicken padded his résumé and the way they found this out was a circus poster." But little me was invested in these chickens, I wanted them to be happy, and what I saw was basically their death notice being signed with that scrap of paper with a cannon on it. I FELT that in my bones.

STILL NOT HAVING THE GOOD SENSE TO JUST EJECT THE TAPE ALREADY, I proceeded to the climax, in which what happens to Tweedy might be one of the most fucking awful things I've seen ever? Pinned upside-down in a superheated, confined space with rising liquid from below as the pressure meter starts climbing again. And her husband arrives just in time to see her like this but not in time to actually stop the explosion. Thank God it didn't actually kill her because even though I was already traumatized, that would've absolutely made it worse.

Thing is, ever since this movie scared the absolute shit out of me - and was probably the cause of the weird stomachaches I had for A WEEK after - I've kinda had this thing about reclaiming the scary parts and stomping on them while laughing maniacally. I feel like every time I've done a crossover project, there's been a temptation to write in an arc where the mains go up against THE PIE MACHINE and fucking win. And also there's whump with tons of comfort in my version to mitigate it all. I haven't done any such thing for TBTC...YET. But I know what I must do. I know who must destroy the machine and the Tweedys along with it. Buckle your seatbelts.

My final word before I move on is that as I ascend into adulthood, I think that for the most part, a rewatch of this film wouldn't traumatize me so badly. It'd still be gross and creepy in a way I think shouldn't be sent to children without warning, but I could deal with the imagery, maybe enjoy using it as whump fuel even more, maybe my horror side would really get into the peril this time. But the one thing I've realized is that this premise is fucked EVEN MORE if you're a grown-up, because as a child, you're sympathizing with the chickens. You want them to get free of this death camp environment. But as an adult, you start to realize that all Tweedy wanted to do was be a chicken farmer who sold pie, and her supposedly nonsentient animals ganged up on her in a display of unheard-of intellect among farm stock. This would then lead to her undergoing at least one near-death fate. Think about being a farmer in our world and the animals you keep GANG UP ON YOU LIKE PEOPLE because you're killing them for food. No thank you, no THANK you.

But surely this was a one-of-a-kind phenomenon. Surely, after this...after so many other people agreed with me; "Fuck Chicken Run"...no animation studio would ever pull shit like this again.

I had hoped that was the case until Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.

This is one I don't actually see lambasted as often. Maybe because the Chicken Run trauma crew grew thicker skins before this movie. I only sort of did. Maybe because no one ever actually invested in this film, having already predicted how much it would be garbage from the dumb humor in the trailers. Oh, but not me. I was a fool. Also my family picked it for a movie night so my fate was sealed anyway.

The original book is actually pretty frightening on its own. Food falls from the sky in such great numbers that it starts to destroy the world. Okay, that's terrifying. But kind of in the alluring way. I would keep coming back to the one page about the giant pancake on the school because the way it was drawn unsettled me so, with something huge and immovable blocking off the way to a building that usually has hundreds of innocent children inside. The film built on this and made it a thousand times worse.

Let's start with the goddamn Spray-On Shoe. Our main character is a mad scientist (but the good kind, apparently) whose list of bumbling failed experiments dates back to when he was a child and invented a spray you could put on your feet to coat them in shoes. He then gets laughed at because he didn't engineer a way to get the shoes off, and runs home in humiliation. Guys, the teasing/bullying factor is...not the most worrying thing about this story. There's a throwaway line about how Flint wears THE SAME SHOES into adulthood because to that day they simply cannot be removed. This seems like an incredibly urgent medical problem? Having your feet encased in the same rubber for years? The same rubber as when you're a kid? I just found myself thinking "What if my shoes never came off one day" and that terrifies me, okay? It's stupid and it's silly and it scares me. Even more than that, though, is the canonization of a polymer in this universe that can be sprayed on sticky and will literally never break no matter what you do to it, because that goes back to the pie machine dough principle. Being glued to a surface permanently is inherently terrifying and we'll go over this later because this is not the last fuckin time the glue shoes get brought up.

Flint invents a food-spewing machine. It ends up in the sky. He rides his popularity as it rains larger and larger food down upon the town and also the world. Most of this film up until the climax is unsettling but not AWFUL. Where it starts to go to shit is when Flint realizes his machine is too dangerous and shuts it off, only for the town's local greedy politician to switch it back on into an apocalyptic mode. So can we start with "Local town finds out its elected official is willing to sabotage their well-being in order to capitalize on the fame of a disaster-causing object?". Like, the whole film would've been solved so much sooner if there hadn't been a saboteur in the works - not a fun campy villain, mind you, but a saboteur who exists to drive the plot to the scary place. But I guess we need that narrative tension to justify having a film in the first place, so fine, I'll ride it out.

The main crew saddles up to fly out to the machine, which is now encased in a FLESH LABYRINTH of food, and...I'm just gonna rapid-fire the shit that happens at this part:

-The food turns sentient in order to defend itself. The cute animal sidekick brutally dismembers an army of gummy bears that is fully sentient and rips them apart to devour them.

-We enter the flesh labyrinth and it's exactly as much a horror RPG setting as you think it is.

-Now sentient cooked chickens besiege the party. The comic relief character is consumed by one, only to kill it from the inside and decide to WEAR ITS SKIN in what is seen as his defining character arc's conclusion. Wearing the skin of a dead monster allows him to forge his new identity.

-One of our party has to go back because of a tight passage lined with her deadly allergen, causing her to undergo anaphylaxis after an accidental mild nick. In the flesh labyrinth.

-The entire horrific journey is instantly INVALIDATED when it turns out that instead of the kill code for the machine, all Flint has is a file of a cat video. Which he finds out as the town is about to be obliterated off the face of the earth.

-So he solves it by jamming the works with the spray-on shoe and DID I NOT JUST GO OVER HOW HORRIFIC INDUSTRIAL EXPLOSIONS ARE IN KIDS' MOVIES? DID I NOT? ARE WE REALLY DOING THIS AGAIN? Anyway it's canonical proof that NOTHING can break the shoe glue and I should be happy for the town and happy that there's no more flesh labyrinth of living meat but instead I'm just terrified because of the door we have opened. We have imparted the existence of an indestructible sticky polymer upon the world.

-It's later seen used in a credits sequence to repair damaged houses. Which, first of all, given its flexible nature, is fuckin stupid. It won't serve as an actual wall. Second, that got me thinking about construction accidents involving the fuckin shoe glue. If that stuff gets dripped on a person's face -

-So then cue me sitting awake in bed later thinking wide-eyed about Cloudy with a Chance of Fucking Meatballs and realizing that this compound that is essentially a chemical weapon in the making is now in the hands of the mayor who deliberately caused an apocalyptic event over the town because he wanted the food rain. And THAT'S not going to lead to pretty circumstances.

I think you'll see that a lot of my fears with these two movies is "THINK OF THE IMPLICATIONS!" and I think that just shows how my mind works and why I'm drawn to fanfic so much. I'm all about diving into a universe, exploring its corners, analyzing it to death.

And with the industrial horror stuff, I kinda wanna bring it around to two other films that actually really subverted my expectations and made it fun. 102 Dalmatians was a fave of mine through middle school, but I remember when the climax took us to a big ol' factory and I got plumb nervous. After the usual blades and ovens of horror, the fact that it concludes with Cruella basically wearing a cake and a lengthy montage of the dogs kicking toppings onto her is just one of the most wholesome imageries. She survived the thing and now you get to watch her be decorated Lisa Frank style by her victims who are more interested in humiliation than murder, and I love that.

But maybe more prevalent is that I'm well aware that if certain filmography or plot points had been handled in different ways, The Boxtrolls might've actually frightened the ever-loving fuck out of me what with all the industrial stuff and medical horror, but I just...felt like that film was holding my hand the whole way through going "It's okay." The industrial stuff was framed in a way that was just campy enough and yet also taken seriously. Putting a really charismatic villain - ACTUAL VILLAIN, NOT CHICKEN FARMER OR CORRUPT POLITICIAN SABOTEUR - at the wheel was just such a mitigating factor that it gelled the whole thing together and I ended up LOVING what was done with giant machines and garbage crushers and explosions. And as for the medical body horror, I really appreciate how it was so baked in that Snatcher did that to himself - that everyone, EVERYONE warned him "Do not do this, you will probably die, I'm serious, bad fucking idea" up to the point of Eggs trying to plead him during an anaphylaxis attack, one last time, DO NOT continue down this path, we can find a way to heal you psychologically and get you some self-fulfillment. And Snatcher fully chooses hubris over the many, many opportunities offered him to be able to step down onto a safer path and that removes the fear and pulls it more into a tragedy for the villain. Not at all the same thing as "Sam the reporter is trying to save the world and doing her best until a fixture of the landscape accidentally sends her into anaphylaxis."

(Oh, and by the way, can I just - when I do see CWACOM brought up these days, it's always in the context of "This is the one movie where the guy tells the girl it's okay to look nerdy!". Well, no, not the way I remember it. The way I remember it, Sam basically tells Flint "I used to have really tacky style but have since changed it up of my own volition" and Flint is just like "NOOOOO YOU NEED TO WEAR GLASSES AND A SCRUNCHIE. I WANT A HOT NERD GIRL." This could've been pulled off right with some more introspection into female beauty standards, even in a tongue-in-cheek way, but right now it really looks like Sam just wanted to make herself more glam for a new image and Flint bullied her into regressing her style. Which I've also realized meant he bullied her into dressing more like she did as a teenager and normally I think that kind of shit is just "You're overthinking it" but since it's CWACOM and I spelled it out on paper like that, I'm just now realizing how that can be seen as pretty...icky.)

The one saving grace of CWACOM is that I was older by that time, and so it didn't affect me as hard as Chicken Run. But I still hold it dearly to my heart as one of the MOST DISTURBING movies I know, and by "dearly" I mean "fuck this movie, really and truly." I want to extend my thanks to 102D and Boxtrolls for giving me industrial-horror-based climaxes that were actually really comfortable, and again, probably what drove both of these was the fact that we had a campy diva villain in the lead for the potential scary stuff to surround and radiate off. Not a fuckin...ordinary chicken farmer who is just trying to make bank but is somehow passed as a Nazi allegory for trying to live her life as a farmer? I dunno, maybe if I rewatched that film I'd see she has a thirst for human blood too, and if I could fix fic Chicken Run my first order of business would be to give her a thirst for human blood instead of/in addition to chickens.

Anyway. Fuck both these films, EXCEPT for the fact that traumatizing scenarios can always be recast as whump material, and the next time I wanna do some crossover aftercare from a physically and psychologically damaging mission, I have a pie machine and a flesh labyrinth to exploit. REALLY HEAVY ON THAT AFTERCARE COMFORT THOUGH!

[certifiedceraunophile]

More Salty asks 👀

18, 21, 5, 4, 3, 7, 10.

ty <3

So sorry it took me so long to answer anon but here's the salt you've asked for

18. Does not shipping something ‘popular’ mean you’re in denial and/or biased?

God no, wtf kind of logic is that, you can or not do something, as in shipping, or stanning or being an anti, for literally ANY reason including no reason, I repeat, you dont need a single fucking reason, much less a "valid" one, there is literally nothing called a valid reason when it comes to fandom bc all reasons are valid at the end of the day, since it's ffs JUST fiction. If you dont ship/stan something popular good for you, hang out w your rare pairs and fall in love w your minor characters, you want to write terrible fucking incoherent anti-metas about a character that's very popular, go ahead DO IT, literally nothing should stop you, it is not problematic to HATE an objectively good character w absolutely no reason, it's not problematic to LOVE a scumbag character for the shallowest reason, it's not problematic to condone evil acts done by your fav character and praise them and love them for it, it is not problematic to want a character killed simply bc they mildly grate you, it is not problematic to do or feel anything about a character as long as your aware that this character or ship cannot be removed from their fictional world and you are simply judging a fictional object who's actions and principles are bound to the fictional world they exist in and cannot in any way affect the real world beyond the value of entertainment.

--also completely tangential side note but if anybody thinks the depravities or deplorable actions explored in a fictional work can in anyway enable real life people who have consumed such media, to do and/or consider the same, I would politely suggest you to restrain from projecting your grossly malleable mind that's clearly more impressionable the wet stinking cement on to others, bc believe it or not most of us have this innate ability to not only separate fiction from reality, but also pick and choose what media we consume is allowed to influence us in addition to entertaining us--

But back to the point, my answer to that question is no, you are not biased, you are not in denial, you simply choose not to invest your time and energy and mindspace into this one fictional being or couple and that is just about the most valid thing as any.

21.What are your thoughts on crack ships?

absolutely love them, I really wish there are more absolutely WILD ships that have no logical reasoning behind them to exist in the fandoms I am part of.

5.Has fandom ever ruined a pairing for you?*

Nope. although it has made a ship I was already mildly averse to even more worse in my eyes, but I dont think that counts.

4.Do you have a NoTP in your fandom? Are they a popular OTP?

Yep and it's a LIST, let's see Steroline, Bamon, Klayley, Klamille, Marbekah, I HATE KOLVINA.

And yeah that's about it, don't get me wrong I dont like many ships and need to click off ff if they are a part of it as a side pairing, but these are the ones I loathe w a passion bc one half of the ship is a character I absolutely LOVE and the other half is just the GREATEST disservice done to said characters,

For steroline- I wish stefan was never fished out from the bottom of that lake.

Bamon- Damon can get his dick skinned.

Klayley- Klaus is a fucking cockroach I agree. but Hayley good god is not helping the situation at all. Same for Klamille.

Marbekah-it's incest yall first of all, and second Rebekah deserves a man who fucking chooses her EVERYTIME and not just once when it's convenient for him.

Kolvina: I-I-do I even need to elaborate?? THE DISSERVICE DONE TO KOL. Christ. I am sorry but this ship I truly hate w a passion too strong for me to even bother playing it cool.

3. Have you ever unfollowed someone over a fandom opinion?

Nope. But I do block that specific tag/content so that when they post about the specific topic we disagree on I am not able to see it, CURATE YOUR FANDOM EXPERIENCE ALWAYS THANKS, and also having shitty shipping opinions is the last thing you can do to get me fired up and stop talking to you, my bff is both a steroline shipper and a Kolvina shipper, but she's my ride or die, like fandom opinions and thoughts on a fictional character amount to literally NOTHING in real life, and I really hope people understand that, but also at the same time in tumblr specifically, if a blog you follow posts anti-posts about your fav character or something like that absolutely unfollow them if you are not comfortable seeing it? following them to engage in fandom discourse is not something I personally would ever do, but as long both the parties involved are interested in discourse i see no harm, but if youre not willing to engage or even see such content ma'am wtf is it even doing on your dash UNFOLLOW and block the tag please.

[already answered the next q so I'm copy pasting it here]

7. Is there anything you used to like but can’t stand now?

oh lmao I wouldnt have been able to understand this question yesterday, but like today I was again hunting scenes for gifs, and I found that Marcel actually holds no appeal to me, in fact, If Elijah decided to slap his head off, I wouldnt have minded at all. Also I was a forwood shipper at the time but now I look at them and have this inexplicable urge to scratch something.

10. Most disliked arc? Why?

Redemption arcs, jfc I HATE THEM, mostly bc my ability to perceive villains shuttles between two distinct opposites, "They are depraved, and evil and everything wrong in this world and I LOVE THEM." or "They are depraved and evil and everything wrong in the world and I HATE THEM" there is literally no in between, so in the first case I love them precisely because they are the scourge of the earth, and a redemption arc [not that I've ever seen one done even mildly ok-ish for the characters to actually redeem them] will literally work to unfuck their fuckiness that I absolutely ADORE. So no I do not want redemption arcs for them at all, and on the flip side when I hate an evil character the only redemption I will accept is them being of good use to the maggots that feast on their dead rotten corpse.

This is the ask

[fallout-lou-begas]

What inspired you to make a comic for Agnes? Wouldn't it have been easier just to write her story out? Not that I'm complaining at all, I love the comic and your art! I'm just curious how you decided on a comic

Oh!! Thank you anon, now THIS is an exciting question!!! This got pretty long so I’ll put it under the cut but I love going off about the craft and the art of comic-making and how it relates to storytelling so I’m reallky glad you asked:

I actually come from an essay and academic-writing background and earned my master’s degree for my thesis back in early June. After that, I got extremely invested in my art because I just...didn’t want to write anymore. I was working on and writing my thesis for over a year. I was simply extremely tired of the written word! What began as drawing for fun became something more dedicated and centralizing in my spare time (but still fun!) and then soon enough I wanted to channel all of this new passion into a project instead of idle doodles. I spent almost my entire childhood making comics of my own, and so making IKROAH a comic was a lot like returning to my creative roots for the first time in a genuine decade.

I also wanted to make IKROAH a comic because from the very beginning I had very little interest in simply recapping every event of FNV as it happens in-game; I was committed to this montage-like approach where every issue is its own vignette from the get-go. This is far easier, and feels far more natural, in comic form where visual information can be very dense and emotional as opposed to what would basically be microfiction if rendered in prose instead. The script for each issue is basically all just dialogue and no issue has ever been more than three-quarters or so of a page long yet. This idea of the density of visual information also ties into the ways in which I really try to “show, not tell” in IKROAH, eliding narration and often the explicit reference of notable character details in favor of evocative expressions, meaningful dialogue, and careful composition. Ask yourself, how much do you already feel like you know about Agnes just from reading IKROAH? How was that information conveyed, not only through the art and dialogue but through deeper details like character design, what characters carry with them, how they react to things, their reticence to say something, what they don’t say, and so on?

I also wanted to mention that comic books simply have medium-specific strengths that I’m extremely interested in, and that prose lacks. For example, you cannot have a moment of silence in prose. You cannot. You can say “it was silent,” but by narrating the silence you have broken it. Comics can have such beautiful pauses, and they can be tense or pregnant or pensive, and it gives you so much control over the way the story flows on the page. Comics can also overlap different stories or different scenes in a way that feels very organic and immediate, such as in IKROAH #3′s cutaways to Victor’s Shack, Agnes’ flashback to her childhood attack in IKROAH #7, and in the upcoming IKROAH #11 (stay tuned!) which has two completely different narratives going on simultaneously. Page and panel composition gives you so much power for structuring your story, and I do mean that very literally and in a way that feels very material. I could honestly talk about it for hours.

This isn’t to say that I think that comics are inherently better than writing, or that I’ll never write prose. I already wrote “Scar Tissue” as a companion to IKROAH #7, a short one-shot fic that goes into far more intimate detail about why exactly Agnes and Cass hit it off the way they do and the chain of events that led to that fateful encounter between Agnes and a Mr. Handy in the bomb shelter. The greatest strength of prose is its ability to let you make asides, prolong scenes, and generally have an infinite canvas with infinite dimensions for as many dialogues, ideas, scenes, and details as you want. With my creative writing background also being as rooted in horror as it is, a big difference I’m aware of is that prose gives me so much room for diving as deep into the sensory details of a scene as I can, something much harder to do in visual art.

And finally, would it have been easier and faster to just write a fanfic instead of drawing a fancomic? Hahahahahahaha yeah absofuckinglutely lmao, writing comes a lot quicker and more naturally to me than art, actually, and I’m the kind of person who can just pound out drafts as quick as I can think of them. Not to brag, but “Scar Tissue” took two days to write and publish from start to finish.

Ultimately, IKROAH exists as a comic because I just wanted it to be a comic, and I was interested in telling its story in a way that could only be done through the medium of a comic.

[southwindscoffee]

Um so I had an amazing year

You cannot get poor enough to help poor people thrive or sick enough to help sick people get well. You only ever uplift from your position of strength and clarity and alignment. – Abraham/Esther Hicks

 So.

 I had an amazing year.

 And I’m embarrassed to say it because I’m not dumb. (At least I hope I’m not.) I look around and can see suffering. Upheaval. Sickness. Poverty. I’m not denying those things exist or minimizing anyone else’s experience.

 But I wanted to share why I had an amazing year with the intent of uplifting someone else.

 Maybe you.

 I’m ending the year feeling happier, healthier, richer, more creatively fulfilled, and closer to my family than I have in a very, very long time. I credit this to a few small but key things—and overall, to one book.

 Last year about this time I listened to Atomic Habits by James Clear. I’ve lost track of how many copies I’ve bought of this book. Maybe four? At least two hardback copies, because I gave one away. Simply stated, the audio changed my life.

 Just—if you’re sick of listening to yourself complain about your bank account or weight or whatever, and you’re serious about changing things, go read/listen to this book.

 AND THEN ACTUALLY DO WHAT HE SAYS. The little, dumb, tiny changes. Because they add up.

 Last year I got sick of complaining about the same things year after year. And since I mostly complain in my journal or in my own head, it was a very boring place to be. I got sick of wondering why the balance in my bank account didn’t change, why I wasn’t losing weight, and why I wanted to write so much and wasn’t getting anywhere, even though I tried.

 But these things (richer, slimmer, more creative) were also what I really desired, deep down inside. I wanted to feel more financially stable, healthier (defined by weight loss), and to write more. (Well, I already wrote plenty. I wanted to write stuff and put it in public where people could actually read it.) These dreams felt very special and secret, but I think they’re somewhat universal—at least for authors.

 (Please note: I know that mental health can get in the way of taking any action at all. I’ve written about my depression and anxiety before. If this blog entry makes you feel overwhelmed, please know I’ve been where you are. Focus on taking care of yourself in whatever way you can and don’t worry about all this aspirational ambitious stuff I’m writing. Because the aspirational and ambitious can simply be getting out of bed and taking a shower. I’m proud of you for hanging in there.)

 After listening to Atomic Habits, I decided to do the following macro habits all throughout 2020—and I checked these off on a little grid in the James Clear journal:

 1. Take my vitamins.

2. Save $5 every day.

3. Write 10,000 words per week.

4. Post a blog entry every Wednesday and Saturday.

5. Go to the gym 3-5 times a week.

 I thought that these were things that could get me to my goals—richer, slimmer, more creatively fulfilled. And overall—happy.

 I also had some habits I already did. These were:

 1. Meditate for 10 minutes every day. (I usually use a guided YouTube video).

2. Write three pages longhand as Morning Pages (per Julia Cameron). (Incidentally, I’ve done this for decades and credit it to the reason I don’t get writer’s block.)

3. Take a Swedish lesson on Duolingo.

 I just wanted to keep these up.

 I have lots more habits … like brushing my teeth or whatever (and I actually floss because I bought the stuff and leave it out where I can see it), but the ones above are my more unusual habits.

 Well, what happened?

 1. I took my vitamins. Boring, but I’m also quite healthy, so maybe it helps my overall wellbeing. I haven’t been sick all year. I keep them by my bed where I see them and remember to take them.

 (Yes, I wash my hands all the time and don’t touch my face. And yes, I stayed home in quarantine. Yes, I wore a mask when I went out. But I think taking vitamins helped.)

 2. I ended up saving $5 every workday not every day. I either transferred the money to a Capital 360 account because it’s hard to transfer it back or put $5 into a Stash account. I sometimes would skip Starbucks or something similar and feel virtuous about transferring the $5. Other times I just transferred it.

 At the beginning of the year, the Capital 360 account had $5. It now has $806.

At the beginning of the year the Stash account had $50. It now has almost $2500. (Buying $5 here and there in March when the stock market was down ended up making about $500 over the year, a 23% increase.)

 Um, so that’s like $3200 I just kinda now have. Incidentally, $5 per day is $1825 over the course of the year, and I’ve almost doubled that because I invested it, not just saved it—and also sometimes I’d transfer like $10 or $25 if I was feeling wild. Over the months, I saw how the account balance would get close to an even number (like $500), so I’d transfer enough to make it that amount. And it just kept going.

 (Also, I’m not intending on this to be money advice. Go talk to someone who actually knows. My thought process was to hedge my bets with doing both safe and speculative—a savings account that earned interest and then various stocks. I also wasn’t spending money I needed for food, shelter, etc. I barely felt the expense, but I very much feel the accumulation of savings.)

 There really is magic in just starting to do something small, because it really does compound and snowball into good things. 

 Maybe in the grand scheme of things $3200 isn’t that much. To me it feels like I have this cute little cushion I literally created out of loose change in a year.

 Honestly, it feels like a lot, not “cute” or “little.” If I don’t compare myself to millionaires, it’s kind of amazing.

 What would happen if you transferred $1 or $2 a day? By the end of 2021, see how much you have…

 Another money habit: I wanted to stop buying so much online and one-clicking so many ebooks—even free ones—because it was just too much. I had like 800 unread books. So I kept track of the days I didn’t buy anything or download any books. My ecommerce moratorium ended up being streaks of time I didn’t buy anything and then a day where I would buy everything off of Amazon or whatever all at once. Not sure it did much except make me feel marginally better. With ebooks, while my TBR count is less than what it was at the beginning of the year, it isn’t the zero I’d hoped it to be. But I seriously read about 300-400 books—about 1-2 a day. (I read fast and don’t sleep.) My “read” pile jumped from 800 to 1100. Not sure what to make of it except I read so much and it was really fun. So, I still have about 680 books on my TBR pile for next year. That can be another habit to work on.

 3. I’ve written more than 530,000 words this year. The habit I tied it to incidentally, was opening my laptop. If I open my laptop—and that’s a habit I record with a tick mark on a grid—it’s a lot easier to get into the document and start writing. So the way I trick myself to write is I tell myself all I have to do is open my laptop. Simple. I check off the box that I did it and I feel virtuous. To reward myself for actually getting the word count, I have a little jar with binder clips in it and every 1,000 words I put a binder clip in a small old milk bottle. Then I can see the words add up.

 I also did a spreadsheet to know what I’ve written this year. I’ve never done one before because it felt too quantitative rather than qualitative. Writing is supposed to be this outlet for me, not something to beat to death with statistics. But I’m glad I did it because writing can be so amorphous. Putting parameters on it made it feel real.

 Oh, and I’ve finished one book, set to be published in February. I have a contract for another, and it’s (today) at 77,000 words. Three more books are 50% or more done. And I did NaNoWriMo. So, yeah. It was a productive year.

 I also learned that I like juggling projects. Focusing on one can make me stagnant. If I get stuck on one, moving to another really seemed to keep my momentum going.

 But I’m now focusing on getting them done and shipped. One at a time. Because they’re all just so close I can feel it.

 4. Before this year, I’d published eleven blog entries from 2017 to 2019. This year, I’ve posted 97, not counting this one. I missed a time or two at the beginning, but um, yeah… That’s a big difference.

 The reasons I wanted to focus on posting blog entries were multifold. I’d felt “out of it” as far as publishing, having worked on one book for so long that wasn’t gelling. I’d felt frustrated and jealous of those who got their work done. I needed the instant gratification—so to speak—of putting something out there while I worked on projects that took longer. I also wanted to inure myself to the fear of putting myself out there. With each entry—still—I feel fear, but I wanted to do it anyway. So that when the time comes to publish more fiction, I can go, “yeah, I’ve hit publish (literally) 100 times, what’s the big deal?”

 My guiding point for writing a blog post has been my gut feeling—tempered by wanting to reach out and help someone else. But to keep up a streak, there is a document on my computer called “Default blog post.” This is what it says in its entirety:

 Default blog post

 I told myself I just needed to post a blog every Wednesday and Saturday.

 Here is me keeping that promise.

 If you see that, well, you’ll know how the week is going.

 Is there an endgame here? What am I going to do with these blog posts? I can see me taking some ideas and expanding on them and creating some sort of nonfiction/self-help kind of book. I’ve always wanted to do that. I do see them as steppingstones to something bigger.

It also lets me be okay with imperfection. Typos. “Think-Os.” Whatever. This is me with no editor.

 5. So, the gym. Well, until it closed, I was going. My trigger was that I just had to check in. That was how I checked the box. Like opening the laptop, actually getting to the gym is the hard part. Once I was there, it was easy.

 But the gym closed and is still closed. Like all of us, I needed a Plan B. (C? D?)

 I’ve done short walks and long. Currently, I’m just working on doing pushups. I can do a lot of pushups with my knees on the ground. But I can only do a few “real” ones, so that’s what I’m keeping track of. I’m focusing on doing them slowly and properly, not faking my way through them. Faking them is easy, but I’d rather be able to do them right and have the actual arm strength. My trigger for when I do them is when I close my journal, I have to get down and do pushups. (Currently it’s seven.) To someone else that goal might be ridiculously easy. To me, it’s rather difficult and a little embarrassing to post, but whatever. I’m being honest.

 I’m ending the year a few pounds lighter than last year—and lighter than I’ve been in years—so I’m calling it a win.

 With the other habits, meditating keeps me happy as does dumping my brain in the morning pages. Oh, and I’m on day 622 in a row of Swedish on Duolingo. It feels like I’ve taken about a semester of college Swedish. Not enough to actually converse with someone but getting the hang of it. I’m motivated by a desire to go to Sweden and see some ancestral places—and actually understand some of the language, even though I know most Swedes speak better English than me.

 With COVID-19, like most of us, I’ve spent more time at home, but I’m temperamentally suited to that. I know it’s hurt extroverts hard, but as far as I’m concerned, I got to see my family more—even when I went to the office for work.

 What am I looking forward to next year? I like the habits I started for 2020. I just want to keep these systems up, because they seem to be working for me. I hope that by using these systems I end up with four to five books happily published in 2021 and I look forward to seeing how the exercise and money habits work out as well.

 This entry is about two or three times my usual blog entry, so if you made it this far, thank you. I hope it inspires you to take a small action and then keep taking that small action over and over again. They really do add up.

 I wish you the most amazing year ever in 2021. Know that it’s possible.

[smuttymess]

bts astro soulmate reading | for cat

sign: leo sun | scorpio moon | capricorn rising

lover: Park Jimin | soulmate: Jung Hoseok

This reading is for the lovely Cat, a J-Hope bias with a particular weakness for Jimin & V. It’s more rare for people to actually pair with both their bias and wrecker astrologically, so she has pretty much hit the jackpot on this one. I hope you enjoy ;) 

This specific star sign placement denotes a unique blend of ambition, power, and rebelliousness - a lethal combination that both intimidates people to their core while drawing them into you like moths to a flame. Your Leo Sun establishes you as the bold, go-getter of the zodiac who stops at nothing to reach greatness in all areas of your life.. The vibrant, outgoing, upbeat nature of your Leo is often exists in tandem with your moody, darker inner Scorpio Moon which also wants power but craves control and your Capricorn rising that presents a very  You are able to use traits from both signs alongside your wide emotional range to your to your advantage, your deep knowledge of people and their wants, needs, and desires getting you very far in your work and personal life. Some may call your skills dramatic and manipulative, but your intentions (however deliberate and calculated) are rarely deceptive and come from your innately passionate and ambitious nature. When it comes to your friends and family, it is hard to find a kinder or more loyal protector than you, the fierce nature of your Leo and Scorpio making you a true force to be reckoned with. Your Capricorn rising makes you a gentle, caring, big-picture thinker who is very aware of the world outside of yourself, and someone who actively seeks to make said world a better place. A natural leader, you are equipped with the energy, tenacity and optimism that makes people follow you in support of whatever lofty goals you have in mind - anything seems possible with you at the helm, and while people may not fully understand you they certainly respect you. 

Not one to stand still for too long, people are in your sign are likely to be found in high-level positions and involved in humanitarian efforts, mingling with the world's elite and moving progress forward. Your natural knack for communication lends to an actively social calendar, which on a cool fall night brings you to a fundraiser at a Seoul gallery where you are talking up your next project which has become your newest focus. When you believe in a cause, there is no fundraising goal you can't exceed or person you cannot sway into opening their purse. Strong, sexual and intuitive, you possess and air of power that is almost irresistible, which attracts many benefactors including one very special guest, Jung Hoseok. Like attracts like, and within seconds his Aquarius senses that beneath your cool and confident exterior that you are someone with equal fire, depth and passion to match his own - a true rarity that he must explore further. His eyes moving over your body, the buzz of the room doesn't hold a candle to the burning sensation taking over you as your eyes eventually meet his dark, knowing stare and he makes his way over to introduce himself.  Fueled by emotions on all cylinders, you are known to think with your heart instead of your head, your moon, sun and rising all lending to impulsive behaviors in the name of pleasure - your Capcicorn Moon makes you slow to commit emotionally but when it comes to physicality you can be all in. So it not too surprising when less than an hour later you find yourself getting against the wall of the coat closet, your skirt hiked up around your waist and your panties on the floor, Hoseok's gorgeous hands muffling your moans as he expertly thrusts his length into you, his voice hissing in your ear. Is this what you wanted, beautiful? You may just make me write a blank check. You're perfect, fucking perfect.

From the start, it is clear that you and Hoseok have a magnetic sexual connection that almost transcends logic. For you, sex and love is an all-consuming experience, one that you're not afraid to dive into headfirst without hesitation - a trademark trait of your fiery Leo/Scorpio combo. This pairs almost perfectly with Hoseok's Aquarius sun which seeks adventure, spontaneity, and intention in every movement he makes. At first, you two are less romantic lovers and more so the ideal fuck buddies, his Aquarius enthralled by the chase of the wild Leo, wanting to conquer you mentally and physically. For him, sex is something to be fully experienced with your entire body, a trait of his extremely intense Jupiter in Scorpio and also his dancer background. Coupled with this mind-body awareness and devotion to pleasure is his Mercury in Taurus and Venus in Pisces, making him both wildly unpredictable, dreamy, and playful when it comes to setting your body on fire. When your imaginative, enthusiastic and strong-willed signs come together, there is nothing that is off limits, with sex soon becoming a place for you to experiment and explore your bodies in ways that simply never were possible before.. Your sign is the "king" of the zodiac, and Aquarius impulse to is to break you down and bring you down, begging and to your knees - literally. He wants to consume every inch of you and make you crumble under his touch, sending jolts through your spine as he buries his perfect tongue in between your dripping center and his hands hold your bucking hips in the back of his car. Any thought of ruining the leather interior is gone as he looks up, eyes ablaze as he watches your head roll back while you clench tightly around his long, skilled fingers. This pussy is mine. Say it. Louder, baby, I want to hear you. I love it when you purr for me. Sometimes you wonder why you even bother wearing panties when you know he'll ruin them before dinner, the group of friends you're meeting completely unaware of the the fact that your juices are still lingering on his lips as he charms the room over rounds of soju and his signature charm.

Problems arise when you, Leo, want to connect emotionally with your Aquarius mate. Over time, you begin to demand more attention and affection from Hoseok who seems to be the one person you cannot fully crack - challenge accepted!. While you are highly independent, Leos innately want to be the star of any show, to be admired, courted and to be seen as friendly, fun, confident and generally likable, investing lots of energy into this persona but also keeping your secrets close. Nothing drives you crazier than being ignored, dismissed, or anything other than fawned over by others, especially your partner who you expect to walk to the end of the earth for you with no questions asked. Unfortunately, Hoseok's Mars in Aquarius can make him quite emotionally detached from a situation, able to strategically compartmentalize work and romance unlike anyone else. While that ability helps drive him towards success in his career (a total turn on for you), you also have expectations of a wildly successful partner who can offer the level of attention you require - the best sex of your life isn't enough to keep you satiated. You want Hoseok’s full attention outside of the bedroom, and when you don't get it you work double time to receive affirmation from others, which only seeks to turns him off further. Ultimately, perfectionist Hoseok can only give you a fraction of what you need - his Mercury in Taurus and Venus in Pisces often making him ego-driving and self-satisfying/generally allergic to difficulty and conflict. With you unable to fully let him and him unable to read your mind , he eventually decides a romantic relationship is something that he can offer.

Far be it for your to sit around and brood in misery, your Leo Sun likely throws yourself into a new activity, job, or person as a way to shift the focus away from the depths of your turbulent emotions. In contrast to Hoseok, you want someone who will tell you their deepest, darkest secrets and give you the keys to their heart without hesitation - it makes you feel like you're in control. Enter Park Jimin, who you meet while out at a very decadent club while abroad. As you move around the dance floor, the shimmer of the lights hits him perfectly, illuminating his already ethereal beauty which radiates throughout the room. When you is the champagne, the vibration of the instruments flowing through you, or some combination of the two, but it is not long before you find yourself sauntering towards him, bringing your bodies so close that you can feel the heat emanating from his skin. Looking up at him in a flirtatious invitation to dance, you become more intoxicated by the sparkle in his eye, the peak of collarbone poking out from his shirt, the plumpness of his lips that you could easily kiss right then and there. Jimin is a true Libra, dripping with elegance, charm and sex appeal. Without saying a word, you fall into a sway, and in that moment and the months that follow its as though nothing else in the world exists except for the two of you and the music.

A Leo/Libra pairing is all about pleasure in each other's company and in showing off your love to the world, your sociable, charming combination a true joy to be in the presence of. Jimin's desire to balance the scales balance, peace and harmony while you want to rebel and shake things up makes you a fantastically entertaining and attractive duo, the popular couple that hits red carpets and high-profile events, generating buzz attention wherever you go. Jimin's Venus and Mars in Scorpio makes him extremely romantic and passionate, his arm firmly wrapped around your waist and the top of your ass as he plants little kisses on your cheeks in front of the cameras. This translates to sex too, where you two are fully immersed in each others and sensuality and intensity. There is no such thing as a quick fuck with this pairing as you both are gluttons for pleasure and satisfaction in all ways, happy to spend hours beneath the highest quality silk sheets. Your confident Leo Sun shines with with the dreamy, romantic Libra who wants to worship you while you take the reigns which you do without hesitation. Few things bring you more satisfaction that watching his his eyes light up and cock twitch in anticipation as you strip down in front of him to reveal your sexiest lingerie set, his hardness clearly straining against the fabric of his briefs. You adore the power you hold over him, the way his lips slightly part as he takes in the sight of you as you tease him with a finger slipped in between your legs while the other hand caresses your nipples. Suddenly the strong, confident Park Jimin is reduced to a whining, pouty mess as he sits there, eyes glued to your frame and practically begging for you. He's practically irresistible in this state, his chest heaving as you bring the coated fingers to his lips as you straddle him and slide down onto his length, his breathy moans filling the room. His Saturn in Pisces makes him determined and energetic, wanting nothing more than to hear you scream his name and tell him how amazing he makes you feel, which you do over and over as he rubs your clit, thrusting in and out of you until you practically combust. Be a good boy for me and show me how much you love me. Just like that.

A fundamental, essentially inescapable component of this relationship is envy, which slowly erodes the partnership over time. Your signs make you both dependent on and competitive with each other, with you wanting Jimin's full devotion without revealing too many of your secrets so you do not lose the game of love and get hurt again. You both want desperately to be the center of attention, with Jimin's Sun and Mercury in Libra often seeking approval through others by playing to his people-pleasing tendencies, and his ability to flirt as easily as he breathes makes you feel out of control. While Jimin is initially attracted to your spontaneity and fiery Leo spirit, he feels threatened when you are weaponizing your power in a room full of admirers, his Venus in Scorpio moving the spotlight away from you in order to protect his own ego. Your Moon in Scorpio makes this type of control unbearable for you, making you likely to retaliate by pushing the envelope further, deliberately flirting in his line of vision just to punish him. While jealously can make for some exceptionally good make-up sex and public role play scenarios, at this level it does not bode well for a long-term relationship between these two signs as you cannot trust each other to be faithful and as a true partnership. As hard as it is to walk away from this genuine connection and the sex, this pairing is unlikely to go the distance. 

A cooling off period to reassess feelings is quite possible in the love story of a Leo and Aquarius. Absence always makes the heart grow fonder, and while whatever resentment you felt towards Hoseok subsides when you see his name reappear on your phone, calling in attempt to reconnect after months of reflection and introspection. While your Leo Sun is highly emotional and pretends you are above any pain, your Moon in Scorpio and Capricorn rising ties you deeply to the people you care about and making you intensely loyal once you have finally opened up. It is almost impossible for your to cut ties with those who you have grown to love, and your connection with Hoseok is not something you can ever let go. The power in your Leo nature w/ Capricorn rising is your ability to melt even the coldest, most protected heart, and it is that kind of gentle, idealistic, all-consuming love that his Aquarius soul needs.

Leo/Aquarius duo is an a textbook example of two extremely independent, passionate individuals who can make an almost perfect match if they learn to really let each other in, shedding any walls and false ego or confidence that serve as protective barriers to intimacy, which you both deeply crave. With a lot of communication and problem-solving, this is a relationship that can thrive beyond measure based on your shared qualities. Ultimately, the biggest lesson here is to learn the art of losing control in your love life, knowing that this is a person you can fully let go with. Once you are able to fully safeguard each others hearts, there is nothing that this incredibly creative and energetic duo cannot accomplish. Be it utilizing platforms to advocate for critical humanitarian efforts, or traveling to a new continent to consume new culture and experience, this is a power couple in the truest form that does not subscribe to traditional roles or modes of living, constantly thinking outside of the box and paving their unique paths through the world as an unbeatable team.

[not-poignant]

okay that uni AU with augus gwyn and the raven prince intrigues me but how do you manage so many story ideas? i hope your doing well also i do wonder what uni course TRP would take because he's always seemed a bit mystical to me thank for all your writing x

okay that uni AU with augus gwyn and the raven prince intrigues me but how do you manage so many story ideas? 

Mostly by being really strict with myself, lmao.

I’ve never had a problem with idea generation, I can only watch other people say ‘how do you come up with ideas’ and think PLEASE TAKE SOME OF MINE THOUGH because I go through these ‘idea generation’ phases where I come up with like idk, 30-40 things I want to write at a time and of those 30-40 things there’s like 5 I really want to write. My writing folders are filled with plot bunnies, including Fae Tales AUs from 6 years ago that I still think are good contenders (some still have playlists, like Hard Edges - a Gwyn/Augus/Ash OT3 human AU where Augus and Ash work as prostitutes and Gwyn is in the military and needs to keep his being gay on the down low because of his family).

If I start talking about or mentioning an idea, or brainstorming it, then chances are I really want to write it and it’s at the top of my ‘to do’ list, but that still doesn’t mean it will get written, because I am very loyal to my current stories. I feel like serials and longer stories are like a commitment you make to a person, if I decide to put the characters through my particular brand of hell, then I owe it to them (and the people invested in that story) to give them a happy ending and not abandon them. Ethically, that’s how I feel, it’s like an ethical choice, it’s very weird and dskaljfsda yeah. This is why I don’t abandon long stories halfway through (I may stop early on, and I can abandon PWPs but they’re both different for me). It’s also why I have to be so strict, my loyalty to current projects is always first.

It’s not even something where I get like, bored of current projects. I really don’t. I am 100% into The Ice Plague and Eversion and Spoils of the Spoiled and wish I had more time for those too! I just...have a lot of ideas. Tbh a lot of my life is like, as soon as I finish a project, doing a really crunchy assessment of what I really want to most work on, what is logistically a smart thing to work on (as much as I would like to spend all my life writing different fanfic ideas I cannot make an income off that and I think some of my original ideas are pretty good too!), and then idk, stare at like the 10 different ‘PLEASE DO THIS ONE URGENTLY’ list I have (and the 30 below that, which are like ‘PLEASE DO THESE ONES TOO’) and then I get to pick one thing and that’s...I mean that is the hardest part, always wondering if I’ve picked the right thing, and knowing that once I’ve picked it, that’s 1-3 years of my life gone to that project (longer, if it’s an original serial). 

This is why at the beginning of a project I’m often really angsty about whether people like it, if I should stop the project, if I need to quit, and I’ll go through a lot of agony and anguish and stupid anxiety over it like ‘oh god people hate it why am I even doing this I should pull out now because I won’t let myself once I hit chapter 10 so quick, quit now you made a MISTAKE.’ (It really doesn’t help that my beginnings are often the weakest parts of my stories, no matter how much work I’ve put into this, it’s still true even if it has improved).

(Btw - I never have regretted it, I’ve never regretted a single project I’ve put a lot of my time or myself into). Still, it’s when my poor beta/friend needs to offer the most tangible reassurance, and I turn into a pathetic lump over it, lmao. It’s especially hard if, around the same time, I’m getting asks like ‘when are you going to do more RotG stuff? When are you going to do more TGATNW? Are you ever going to work on this AU idea?’ because they cause major ‘OH GOD I AM, I AM DOING THE WRONG THING’ episodes. Tbh, starting to write Game Theory and committing to it, when - at the time - most of my asks were still about SAL for ages, and ‘when are you coming back to RotG’ and literally ‘I don’t want to read your original stuff so when you come back to RotG I guess I’ll come back and read’ - was probably one of my most trying times, but also taught me a really important thing: I have to write for myself, because other people want me to work on about 60 different things, and some of those things aren’t good for me to be working on. Like, I want to make everyone happy. I can’t.

At least I can (and do) work on more than one thing at the same time!

As for the Raven Prince, I’m not sure what course he’d take! It’s fun to think about though. I know Augus is probably taking botany, and I’ve had some thoughts about Gwyn, but the Raven Prince I think would end up around hard sciences like chemistry, bioengineering or chemical engineering with like, a minor in poetry or literature. He’d want something that was literally a chance to experience alchemy, and the chemistry sciences are the closest one gets to that these days.

But a human Raven Prince (whose first name would be Corvus, and yes, he legally changed it himself heh) in this universe would be in some ways very different to the Fae Tales Raven Prince. Like, he needs a completely different back story, and he simply can’t be as wise or learned as he is in the canon, so he’s probably going to be pretentious uppity dickhead with emo fashion sense and obscure taste/s in music and literature, and I already love him :D

[jaywireblog]

How Did I Get My Red-White-Red Card (Austrian Residence) As a Startup Founder

By John H. Shen

“Ok, that was faster than expected.”

I turned to my co-founder, as we just received a congratulations email from my lawyer about my rot-weiss-rot kart getting approved. The time frame from when I applied to when I got the formal approval took just 3 months, which was much faster than the average we have heard before. 

Gotta Love That Bureaucracy

Having lived and worked in both New Zealand and China prior, I had to say that Austria is much more difficult and process-heavy compared to NZ, especially for those who were not EU residence. We were very fortunate as we were getting a lot of help from the local agencies such as ABA, VBA and FFG. If you are a startup founder and new to Austria, I recommend look them up!

Then, why Austria? So many people asked us this question, mostly Austrians. I always start the answers by throwing bouquets at the cultural vibrance and my love for the local classical music. It always bring smiles to their faces. I mean it though. Vienna is such an exquisite city, always ranked high in the top 10 liveable cities in the world, many times No. 1.

But for our establishment, a FinTech startup founded in Shanghai China, Austria is our gateway to the limelight of the European market. Furthermore, in comparison to other European countries, the support in the innovation sector in Austria is phenomenal. From the public funding to the supports from the agencies, to the innovative and professional ecosystem. It literally took us much less time to find our first 10 beta B2B customers than to open a company bank account. 

Bureaucracy is annoying, but the ecosystem? Awesome!

A Little Bit About Me

I was born in Beijing, China. I went to New Zealand to study as a teenager. Graduated from University of Auckland with BSc - Computer Science in 2006. I worked as software developer, business analyst, then project/product manger. I decided to quit my job in the year 2015, to go full-time in entrepreneurship.

The first few ideas did’t work so well, no surprise there though. Then I met my co-founders in China in 2016. In that very year, I went back to Shanghai, China, to work with the team on the new business, Xencio. 16 years after living in New Zealand.

Xencio China offers corporate treasury automation via AI powered financial intelligence. We sell to many global corporates such as Unilever, Merck, GE, Herbalife, Didi, PingAn China etc. We now have 30 full-time hired hands in China alone. 

We felt it is appropriate in 2018 to explore reconnoiter an opportunity to expand to the global market, and that’s when we finally picked Austria as our hub to the EU market.

To Start a Company, You Need Residency 

Well, as long as you are not an EU citizen, you cannot really work here, let alone start a company. You can actually cofound a company, but you have to be a shareholder owing less than 50%.

But no worries, there’re 3 ways you could use inorder to obtain the red-white-red card which gives authorization to you to be the managing director, work in your business full time and get medical covers and kids to school just like the locals. 

1. Red-White-Red Card Start-up Founder Category

2. Red-White-Red Card Self-employed Key Workers Category

3. Other Key Workers Category

You can find more details from here about the red-white-red card yourself: https://www.migration.gv.at/en/types-of-immigration/permanent-immigration/

The rule of thumb is, for startup founders, 1 is better than 2, which is also better than 3. but 1 is much harder. So if 1 fails, you try 2, and so on. In this post, i will talk about the Startup Founder Category mostly, because that’s the one I did. 

Score Yourself Now!

https://www.migration.gv.at/en/types-of-immigration/permanent-immigration/start-up-founders/

Quite self explanatory, if you are young, tertiary level educated with good english and fair amount of accuaintance with work, you should be eliible with a >50 score. 

In my case, I got total 60 

20 - A university degree (not from Austria) 

10 - Work Experience more than 5 years

20 - English C2

10 - Additional Investment of €50,000, and

10 - Selected to a business incubator in Vienna

I just turned 35 when i applied, too bad I couldn’t get the additional 10 point for age (yeah that age up to 35 means it does not include 35, grrr!!). 

A Lil Hurdle to Get You Started - Frist Chicken and Egg 

Ok, so far so good right? Here comes the fun part:

If you want your application likely to succeed (which you definitely want, right?), you had better have a company already registered. Wait a minute, didn’t I mention earlier you need residency to be the managing director of a GmbH? Exactly! So here you go:

Company <--Dependency--> Director having citizenship or residency

There’re only two possible ways of tackling this: 

1. To apply for red-white-red without having a company (and risking getting rejected), or 

2. To form a company without having residence (the company formation will come to a halt at some stage, but regardless). We chose the second one. 

(actually there is a whole lot to talk about with company formation for non-EU citizens, I will write another blog about it.)

Document Preparation 

While the company formation is underway for me,  I started to prepare my list of documents. 

Let’s start with the easy and pettifogging ones: 

1. Passport and photocopies of passport

2. EU Sized Passport Photos

3. TOFEL Certificates to show sufficient language level (if your citizenship is not from a native German or English speaking countries)

4. Proof of Business Incubator - If you already in one, this is money for old rope. But if you are looking at a foreign friendly incubators to get into, here are some quick recommendations, google them: Global Incubator Network, Vienna Startup Package, Elevate by TheVentury, INiTS, weXelerate, ElevatorLab

5. Proof of Fund - for my case, i need to show a bank statement of more than 25.000 EUR. I also had to show that the new company bank account (Xencio GmbH) has over 50.000 EUR.

Then the slightly more complicated ones:

6. Work Certificates - to show your pertinent work experiences. I literally emailed or LinkedIn messaged all my ex-managers or HR department of my former companies, they were very corporative. Because mine is all from NZ, thus did not need translation into English. Yes English is ample enough for it.

7. New Company Related Files - As company formation was not fully completed, I just submitted all the documents or evidence as could provide. This shows the authority that you are resolute with starting a company, not just saying you would.

8. Business Plan - I will going to a bit more details later about it. you can message me directly to get a business plan for Xencio GmbH which we have submitted for my application.

Comparatively more challenging, these documents need apostille:

(I have documents from NZ and China both needing apostille, I found the one from China to be much harder. Simply because NZ has an E-apostille system, if your home country has it, you’re in luck! For my Chinese files, they need to be translated, notarised and diplomatically apostilled)

9. Marriage Certificate 

10. Criminal / Police Record

11. Birth Certificate

12. University Degrees and Transcripts - After being apostilled, your degrees need to be verified with ENIC NARIC Austria, this copy needs to be in your document too.

Ok this last one is ridiculous:

13. The proof of residential address in Austria 

Yes! You heard right! You Need A Residential Address  - The Second Chicken and Egg

You see, the fact you had to show proof of address as part of your residency application is simply absurd, says the former Minister of Digital and Economical Affairs (https://investaustria.at/en/news/2019/03/red-white-red-card.php). 

What if your application got rejected? What if (and it definitely will be) things gets impeded even after you got approved? Anyway, the only way to maneuver around it is to sign with explicit short to medium term accomodation mainstay or get some local friends who has properties to assist you with. I don’t really want to do any advertisement here, just message me if you want to know the list of these accomodations providers. 

Business Plan, Do's and Don't's

You are an entrepreneur, you know what a good business plan should include. You know, the basics such as:

- Executive Summary - The Problem - Solution - Benefits - Product / Service Description - Market Analysis - Business Development Plan - Competitor Analysis - Financial Planning

As mentioned earlier, please message me to get a copy of our submitted business plan as reference. 

Additional to a good startup business plan, there’re a few more things the authority are looking for: 

1. Micro-economical Benefit - Local employment - so you need to show how your company is going to hire more people in the next 2-3 years. As a startup you need to consider this and make plans for it.

2. Micro-economical Benefit - Concerning Disruption - this one is a little bit counterintuitive. For the authority, If your business is to provide more job opportunities or bring more money to Austria, well that’s just awesome! But if it’s a type of disruption that it simply moves customer from the competitor to you, then it is not considered economically beneficial. This is a fine line though, ideas like uber or airbnb can in theory considered having no micro-economical significance, in subject to how you frame it in your plan. This could be quite tasking

3. Technological innovation - similar to the governmental grants, there is a huge emphasis on technological innovation. The goal is to land more IPs in Austria. In your business plan, the touch on business development and marketing is important, but it cannot be all it is to your business. 

Ready Now? Let’s Submit It!

If you are lucky enough to be from one of the >90 days visa-free countries. You can actually submit your application in Austria. 

For me, applying via a Chinese Passport, even I was in Vienna on a business purpose visa, I had to submit it in China. This makes a huge difference and added additional 1-2 months of diplomatic courier transfer (YES, THAT LONG). 

What Happens After Submission?

The MA35 will do an initial mild check of your documents for sufficiency. Then it will be forwarded to the labour department - AMS. Your case would then be presented and discussed over a jury meeting (this is why the do’s and don’t’s are very important). The jury meeting is the ultimate determination of whether your case is successful or not. It takes up to 8 weeks for a decision to be made by the labour department. 

A notice from the MA35 will be issued that your application is approved, then there will just be more waiting for MA35 to check in detail of all the documents provided.  

Hooray, It’s Approved, Then What?

Again, if you are lucky enough to have a passport that grants you Schengen 90 days visa-free, your red white red card should be ready for collection. For me, unfortunately, I needed to fly back to China again (even though I was in Vienna with a business purpose visa at the time of approval), to apply for a Visa-D so that I could come back to Vienna to collect my red-white-red. 

Ok ok, no more complaining, with all that being done, I finally made it back to Vienna. Picked up the card and business is good to go, hooray!!

Business just started, More challenges Awaits

As I often say to may others, bureaucracy is challenging, doing business is much harder! In my next few blogs, I would like to share more about our journey with hiring, tax, social security, getting the grants, as well as living here as an English speaker (getting the drivers license, kids to kindergarten / school, and renting / buying a house). This is just my first blog. 

Feel free to contact me directly (linkedin.com/in/johntheshen). If you got any more questions. See you in my next blog!

Disclaimer: Information provided in this article does not serve as legal advice of any kind. If you have a particular question regarding the red-white-red card, please consult an immigration lawyer. For the most up-to-date information, please refer to https://www.migration.gv.at/en

[endwalkr]

this is an ask based thingy but im really in the mood to infodump so im just gonna answer them all under the cut !

Favorite video game?

starting off with the absolute hardest question huh? i can’t possibly name ONE favorite game of mine because i adore my favorites for many different reasons. my overall favorite video game is ffxv or botw. ffxv because it has brought me so much joy for such a long time, and because i have such a connection with the characters. botw because i was actually in the fandom when it first got announced in 2016 so i got to be there when the hype was at an all time high– and finally being able to play the game after waiting for so long was an unforgettable experience. i have more favorite games but ill talk more about them in the ‘’special place in ur heart’’ question.

First console you owned?

my first console wasn’t a console. my friend and i used to play on her nintendo dsi all the time and at one point tiny little me reeeally wanted one of my own so i saved up and got one in [redacted] when i was 7. my first actual console was a wii though, we got that around the same time.

A game that holds a special place in your heart?

ffxv and botw mean the absolute world to me, but super mario galaxy and skyward sword are very important to me too. skyward sword is the game that got me into zelda which got me into anime which got me into final fantasy etc etc etc.  super mario galaxy was the first non-mini game collection and more adventure story-ish game i played. i was so proud when i beat it for the first time and mario was my first ever ‘’fandom’’ :’) 

Favorite video game character?

bro. i cant pick just one so i’ll choose one per game : prompto, ryuji and link. they were all my comfort characters at some point and i projected like crazy onto them. this doesnt mean that i wouldnt absolutely die for noct or zelda. 

Least favorite video game character?

i dont think theres anyone i distinctly dislike? i always talk about hating ardyn but that’s because he’s just a salty bitch. as a character i think he’s a great villain and i rly love him. i honestly always end up liking everyone somehow, maybe there is someone i just forgot about but i cant remember at all. 

Favorite genre?

adventure games, or action rpgs. 

Video game character you’ve had a crush on?

every character ever, but i distinctly remember the moment i fell in love with prompto sjghfkshd i was watching a playthrough of xv in december 2016 because i didnt have a ps4, and the guy got to the scene in galdin quay where the bros learn insomnia fell. i had watched about 6 hours of the game by that time and wasn’t particularly interested in the characters but not uninterested enough to drop it. i hadnt even gotten a good look at the characters faces yet, so when the camera zoomed in on prompto when he said ‘’might not be save for us here!’’ i noticed he had freckles. oh god. oh fuck. oh my god hes fucking cute. oh my god better watch 30 hours of this game now

First video game you remember playing?

wayyy before i got my own gaming systems, my then-best friend had a gamecube in her attic. i was around 5 or 6 at the time. whenever i was over at her house and we didnt know what to do, she’d sometimes propose to play ‘’mario kart’’. important is that we are dutch, and i was a literal child. i thought mario KART meant it was a fucking card game, so i always declined whenever she asked. on one fateful day, i finally gave in and was pleasantly surprised it was in fact not a card game, but a viddy game. so we played mario kart double dash. (…i had never played a video game in my life besides browser flash games and was Very Very bad)

Age you started gaming?

so i played my first video game that i didnt own when i was about 5 or 6. then i got my first supply of games at age 7/8, but i dont really consider that time to be when i started ‘’gaming’’. i’d say that was when i started mario galaxy, so i’ve been playing video games for real (ie. story adventure games with boss battles) for about 6 years now.

Hardest video game you’ve played?

this is gonna sound stupid, but the witcher 3. there’s like 7 difficulties and i played on the EASIEST and still had a hard time, i just couldnt get used to the combat. i had the same problem with assassin’s creed syndicate, but after about 10 hours i actually knew what i was doing, and ive played the witcher longer than that and still am clueless. this is kind of an unpopular opinion but i dont particularly like that game

Video game you’ve spent the most time on?

i guess i am what you’d call a casual gamer; i really like video games but during a normal school week i only game for like 2-6 hours. most of the time i dont play for like 2 weeks if im busy. gaming has kind of taken over my life not because i play so much but because i get so emotionally invested lol i’m currently on summer break and even now im not playing a lot because of exhaustion and executive dysfunction. this derailed slightly but the game i’ve played the most despite my casual gamer status is …. … …. ffxv. surprise, right? the runner up is botw, but xv wins by a landslide. 630+ hours. botw is 350. my main save in ffxv is almost 200 hours i think. damn. i really managed to keep myself entertained with that game… (………i was thinking recently, since the loading screens in xv are so long, how much of this total amount was spent watching screens. i imagine it’s several hours, especially if you fast travel a lot.)

Most embarrassing gaming moment?

many moments in my gaming experience are embarrassing, but a more recent one: i was in xv’s postgame, beating some dungeons on my new save file. i had just finished daurell caverns and hadn’t saved in about 2 hours. (uh oh) i was driving around in the regalia type d and got to the big cliff near lestallum, and remembered someone made a gif of jumping in there so i wanted to try it too. i imagined the game would just put me back on the road, like it does when you crash into something. except it didnt. i got a game over. where was my last save? 2 hours back all the way in hammerhead. yippee.

Scariest video game you’ve played?

i never play horror games, cuz for me games are supposed to be relaxing experiences. no hate towards horror games of course, they just stress me out. the only time ive played horror is when friday the 13th was for free on ps+, and my friends really wanted to play it. (theyre kinda addicted to it now. huh) they had already gotten over the initial fear of having jason chase you, but i was still terrified. i can play the game without getting scared now tho. the horror sound effects just rly freaked me out at first jhsdkghsd

Most memorable gaming moment?

playing breath of the wild for the first time, or beating it for the first time. both experiences were filled to the brim with excitement and nostalgia. seeing botw as a blank slate, a world for you to explore, having no idea where you’re going… that was pretty incredible. now i know every nook and cranny of the map, so i wish i could play it for the first time again. i was so incredibly immersed. beating it was insane. i cried for 30 minutes and the end wasnt even sad, i was just so amazed at the fact that i was really here, playing breath of the wild, it was really real. the fucking main theme in the background (which i cannot for the life of me listen to without crying) didnt help with my emotions sgkdjh

Video game character you wish you could meet in real life?

…………..its prompto again. maybe 2017 me …. was .. kind of a kinnie

PC, Xbox, Playstation, or Nintendo?

i dont care about console wars at all, but i think hardware-wise, pc is the best, because if you have a good pc you can basically do anything. i however do not, so i just play on consoles. ive never particularly liked xbox, so i only play ps4 and nintendo. not the switch though. its kinda petty, but my best friend and i really dont like the switch djghks

Gaming company you’re most loyal to?

none. i used to call myself a nintendo nerd (oh my god…. i m. gonna die) in like 2015 but since the switch came out and since i got a ps4 they kinda lost me. i still like their game series of course, but as a company i don’t care for them. the only reason i see square enix as one of ‘’my’’ gaming companies is because ffxv took up like 70% of my gaming experience, but besides final fantasy i don’t really love them too much either.

If you could only play one video game for the rest of your life, which would you choose?

atm i’m really into ffxiv because theres just so much to do, but that’s just a new, possibly temporary interest. if i had to choose, i’d say botw. maybe i’d say ffxv, but i feel like running around doing nothing in that game isnt very fun, because the world is sorta empty after completing every quest and getting to level 120. in botw, just fucking around on your horse is still really relaxing and nice. 

Do you use strategy guides?

yup. in certain games i try to avoid them but i usually end up stuck or in need of advice. i couldn’t have gotten so many p5 trophies if not for the internet lol

How often do you use cheats?

never, simply because the games i play often do not have cheats. unless im playing the sims and are in need of a motherlode, i dont use them.

Competitive or single player?

single player. im bad at video games and like to do stuff at my own pace. online multiplayer can be fun every now and then in games like mario kart 8 or splatoon, and i also like teamwork stuff like ffxiv or comrades. but ultimately, i prefer playing on my own.

Video game character you want to/have cosplayed?

have never cosplayed, dont have plans to either, but it would be fun to cosplay link. omg. i just remembered i have that fucking chocomoogle shirt… sorry link im gonna slap on some sasuke hair, black jeans and ugly sneakers 

Ever go to a video game convention?

i have not, i have however gone to three (3) video game concerts which is basically the same thing. 

Hardest boss fight you’ve been in?

the hardest bosses for me are usually the ones with a gimmick. you have to use a certain item or tactic to beat them or something. other hard fights for me are when you fight someone with a similar skill set. (in ffxv, this happens twice, once with the iggy-noct sparring match and once against ardyn. somehow, the final boss was easier than getting the prince to eat vegetables.) i don’t know an actual example of THE hardest boss fight ive been in though. at the time, the first bowser battle in mario galaxy was the hardest thing in the universe and i got stuck for like a month. currently, i’m having trouble with the riku-ansem fight in kh1. 

Video game you wish you could burn from your memory?

the zelda cdi games? no, i dont really know. i dont hate a game so much that i’d want to forget about it altogether, but i dont exactly love ocarina of time that much. it hasnt aged well and playing it on the gamecube for the first time in 2015 wasnt a good idea. im sure it was revolutionary at the time, but i cant handle the outdated controls gsdgksjs 

Favorite gaming series?

see, i love ffxv itself more than the entirety of the zelda series, but i dont love ff as a SERIES more than the zelda games. so if were talking series, zelda for sure. i fucking love those games and they mean a lot to me. 

Do you skip tutorials, or find them useful?

i often skip them because i cant pay attention, but then find that i need them anyway. so i usually do skim through them. 

Best online gaming experience?

one really good one happened a few days ago in ffxiv, some guy and i exchanged emotes for like 30 minutes and it ended with us becoming friends on psn :’) ppl dont usually emote back at me in that game so this was really wholesome and nice gjshksdj 

Worst online gaming experience?

i dont really have a worst? theyre more annoying. think try harders in gta online killing you 15 times in a row because they want to show you how good they are or something. magically, online gaming hasnt been too hard on me (mainly because i dont game online that much)

Why do you game?

it brings me joy. it’s a fun way of relaxing, while being stimulated at the same time. games have meant a great deal to me the past 6 years and i wouldnt want to lose them for the world.