#Image Processing Project Help

[4giorno]

so hard when you dont know if the drawing youre working on is a case of "trust the process and it will be great" or "just delete it and start over and itll be great on the next attempt"

[burntoutdaydreamer]

Things That May Be Causing Your Writer's Block- and How to Beat Them

I don't like the term 'Writer's Block' - not because it isn't real, but because the term is so vague that it's useless. Hundreds of issues all get lumped together under this one umbrella, making writer's block seem like this all-powerful boogeyman that's impossible to beat. Worse yet, it leaves people giving and receiving advice that is completely ineffective because people often don't realize they're talking about entirely different issues.

In my experience, the key to beating writer's block is figuring out what the block even is, so I put together a list of Actual Reasons why you may be struggling to write:

(note that any case of writer's block is usually a mix of two or more)

Perfectionism (most common)

What it looks like:

You write one sentence and spend the next hour googling "synonyms for ___"

Write. Erase. Write. Rewrite. Erase.

Should I even start writing this scene when I haven't figured out this one specific detail yet?

I hate everything I write

Cringing while writing

My first draft must be perfect, or else I'm a terrible writer

Things that can help:

Give yourself permission to suck

Keep in mind that nothing you write is going to be perfect, especially your first draft

Think of writing your first/early drafts not as writing, but sketching out a loose foundation to build upon later

People write multiple drafts for a reason: write now, edit later

Stop googling synonyms and save that for editing

Write with a pen to reduce temptation to erase

Embrace leaving blank spaces in your writing when you can't think of the right word, name, or detail

It's okay if your writing sucks. We all suck at some point. Embrace the growth mindset, and focus on getting words on a page

Lack of inspiration (easiest to fix)

What it looks like:

Head empty, no ideas

What do I even write about???

I don't have a plot, I just have an image

Want to write but no story to write

Things that can help:

Google writing prompts

If writing prompts aren't your thing, instead try thinking about what kind of tropes/genres/story elements you would like to try out

Instead of thinking about the story you would like to write, think about the story you would like to read, and write that

It's okay if you don't have a fully fleshed out story idea. Even if it's just an image or a line of dialogue, it's okay to write that. A story may or may not come out of it, but at least you got the creative juices flowing

Stop writing. Step away from your desk and let yourself naturally get inspired. Go for a walk, read a book, travel, play video games, research history, etc. Don't force ideas, but do open up your mind to them

If you're like me, world-building may come more naturally than plotting. Design the world first and let the story come later

Boredom/Understimulation (lost the flow)

What it looks like:

I know I should be writing but uugggghhhh I just can'tttttt

Writing words feels like pulling teeth

I started writing, but then I got bored/distracted

I enjoy the idea of writing, but the actual process makes me want to throw my laptop out the window

Things that can help:

Introduce stimulation: snacks, beverages, gum, music such as lo-fi, blankets, decorate your writing space, get a clickity-clackity keyboard, etc.

Add variety: write in a new location, try a new idea/different story for a day or so, switch up how you write (pen and paper vs. computer) or try voice recording or speech-to-text

Gamify writing: create an arbitrary challenge, such as trying to see how many words you can write in a set time and try to beat your high score

Find a writing buddy or join a writer's group

Give yourself a reward for every writing milestone, even if it's just writing a paragraph

Ask yourself whether this project you're working on is something you really want to be doing, and be honest with your answer

Intimidation/Procrastination (often related to perfectionism, but not always)

What it looks like:

I was feeling really motivated to write, but then I opened my laptop

I don't even know where to start

I love writing, but I can never seem to get started

I'll write tomorrow. I mean next week. Next month? Next month, I swear (doesn't write next month)

Can't find the time or energy

Unreasonable expectations (I should be able to write 10,000 words a day, right????)

Feeling discouraged and wondering why I'm even trying

Things that can help:

Follow the 2 min rule (or the 1 paragraph rule, which works better for me): whenever you sit down to write, tell yourself that you are only going to write for 2 minutes. If you feel like continuing once the 2 mins are up, go for it! Otherwise, stop. Force yourself to start but DO NOT force yourself to continue unless you feel like it. The more often you do this, the easier it will be to get started

Make getting started as easy as possible (i.e. minimize barriers: if getting up to get a notebook is stopping you from getting started, then write in the notes app of your phone)

Commit to a routine that will work for you. Baby steps are important here. Go with something that feels reasonable: every day, every other day, once a week, twice a week, and use cues to help you remember to start. If you chose a set time to write, just make sure that it's a time that feels natural to you- i.e. don't force yourself to writing at 9am every morning if you're not a morning person

Find a friend or a writing buddy you can trust and talk it out or share a piece of work you're proud of. Sometimes we just get a bit bogged down by criticism- either internal or external- and need a few words of encouragement

The Problem's Not You, It's Your Story (or Outline (or Process))

What it looks like:

I have no problems writing other scenes, it's just this scene

I started writing, but now I have no idea where I'm going

I don't think I'm doing this right

What's an outline?

Drowning in documents

This. Doesn't. Make. Sense. How do I get from this plot point to this one?!?!?! (this ColeyDoesThings quote lives in my head rent free cause BOY have I been there)

Things That Can Help:

Go back to the drawing board. Really try to get at the root of why a scene or story isn't working

A part of growing as a writer is learning when to kill your darlings. Sometimes you're trying to force an idea or scene that just doesn't work and you need to let it go

If you don't have an outline, write one

If you have an outline and it isn't working, rewrite it, or look up different ways to structure it

You may be trying to write as a pantser when you're really a plotter or vice versa. Experiment with different writing processes and see what feels most natural

Study story structures, starting with the three act structure. Even if you don't use them, you should know them

Check out Ellen Brock on YouTube. She's a professional novel editor who has a lot of advice on writing strategies for different types of writers

Also check out Savage Books on YouTube (another professional story editor) for advice on story structure and dialogue. Seriously, I cannot recommend this guy enough

Executive Dysfunction, Usually From ADHD/Autism

What it looks like:

Everything in boredom/understimulation

Everything in intimidation/procrastination

You have been diagnosed with and/or have symptoms of ADHD/Autism

Things that can help:

If you haven't already, seek a diagnosis or professional treatment

Hire an ADHD coach or other specialist that can help you work with your brain (I use Shimmer; feel free to DM me for a referral)

Seek out neurodiverse communities for advice and support

Try body doubling! There's lot's of free online body doubling websites out there for you to try. If social anxiety is a barrier, start out with writing streams such as katecavanaughwrites on Twitch

Be aware of any sensory barriers that may be getting in the way of you writing (such as an uncomfortable desk chair, harsh lighting, bad sounds)

And Lastly, Burnout, Depression, or Other Mental Illness

What it looks like:

You have symptoms of burnout or depression

Struggling with all things, not just writing

It's more than a lack of inspiration- the spark is just dead

Things that can help:

Forget writing for now. Focus on healing first.

Seek professional help

If you feel like it, use writing as a way to explore your feelings. It can take the form of journaling, poetry, an abstract reflection of your thoughts, narrative essays, or exploring what you're feeling through your fictional characters. The last two helped me rediscover my love of writing after I thought years of depression had killed it for good. Just don't force yourself to do so, and stop if it takes you to a darker place instead of feeling cathartic

[echoekhi]

I’m Declaring War Against “What If” Videos: Project Copy-Knight

What Are “What If” Videos?

These videos follow a common recipe: A narrator, given a fandom (usually anime ones like My Hero Academia and Naruto), explores an alternative timeline where something is different. Maybe the main character has extra powers, maybe a key plot point goes differently. They then go on and make up a whole new story, detailing the conflicts and romance between characters, much like an ordinary fanfic.

Except, they are fanfics. Actual fanfics, pulled off AO3, FFN and Wattpad, given a different title, with random thumbnail and background images added to them, narrated by computer text-to-speech synthesizers.

They are very easy to make: pick a fanfic, copy all the text into a text-to-speech generator, mix the resulting audio file with some generic art from the fandom as the background, give it a snappy title like “What if Deku had the Power of Ten Rings”, photoshop an attention-grabbing thumbnail, dump it onto YouTube and get thousands of views.

In fact, the process is so straightforward and requires so little effort, it’s pretty clear some of these channels have automated pipelines to pump these out en-masse. They don’t bother with asking the fic authors for permission. Sometimes they don’t even bother with putting the fic’s link in the description or crediting the author. These content-farms then monetise these videos, so they get a cut from YouTube’s ads.

In short, an industry has emerged from the systematic copyright theft of fanfiction, for profit.

Project Copy-Knight

Since the adversaries almost certainly have automated systems set up for this, the only realistic countermeasure is with another automated system. Identifying fanfics manually by listening to the videos and searching them up with tags is just too slow and impractical.

And so, I came up with a simple automated pipeline to identify the original authors of “What If” videos.

It would go download these videos, run speech recognition on it, search the text through a database full of AO3 fics, and identify which work it came from. After manual confirmation, the original authors will be notified that their works have been subject to copyright theft, and instructions provided on how to DMCA-strike the channel out of existence.

I built a prototype over the weekend, and it works surprisingly well:

On a randomly-selected YouTube channel (in this case Infinite Paradox Fanfic), the toolchain was able to identify the origin of half of the content. The raw output, after manual verification, turned out to be extremely accurate. The time taken to identify the source of a video was about 5 minutes, most of those were spent running Whisper, and the actual full-text-search query and Levenshtein analysis was less than 5 seconds.

The other videos probably came from fanfiction websites other than AO3, like fanfiction.net or Wattpad. As I do not have access to archives of those websites, I cannot identify the other ones, but they are almost certainly not original.

Armed with this fantastic proof-of-concept, I’m officially declaring war against “What If” videos. The mission statement of Project Copy-Knight will be the elimination of “What If” videos based on the theft of AO3 content on YouTube.

I Need Your Help

I am acutely aware that I cannot accomplish this on my own. There are many moving parts in this system that simply cannot be completely automated – like the selection of YouTube channels to feed into the toolchain, the manual verification step to prevent false-positives being sent to authors, the reaching-out to authors who have comments disabled, etc, etc.

So, if you are interested in helping to defend fanworks, or just want to have a chat or ask about the technical details of the toolchain, please consider joining my Discord server. I could really use your help.

------

See full blog article and acknowledgements here: https://echoekhi.com/2023/11/25/project-copy-knight/

[hotguycomiczine]

EXTRY! EXTRY!

Behind the scenes, our team has been planning and plotting something BIG. And it's not just us, either; we've teamed up with the Scarland Artbook organizers! After months of nonstop effort, we're eager to invite YOU to our biggest project yet.

INTRODUCING...

What is A2Z?

Artbooks to Zinethologies is a collaborative charity event hosted by the organizers of both Scarland Artbook (@scarland-artbook) and HOTGUY COMICS (@hotguycomiczine), celebrating the Artbook's donation to Give Kids The World Village and aiming to fundraise a little extra in the process!

What will the event be like?

Falling somewhere between a streamathon and an online convention, our aim is to provide behind-the-scenes insight on how both of these massive projects came to life; answer questions on what it took to tackle them; and share our favorite anecdotes from each project. Three days of streaming, multiple panels, many participant-open activities, and several exciting announcements for the future are coming your way with A2Z's schedule!

So when is it?

Mark your calendars for May 23rd, 24th, and 25th to watch us dive deep into never-before-seen secrets and tidbits from these unique community projects. Keep your eyes peeled in the next few days for more information on our exact schedule, and what panels we plan to cover!

Any questions?

Send us your questions to our shared inbox on neospring!

Join us in celebrating Scarland Artbook's incredible donation to Give Kids The World Village, and help us raise more money for their cause.

We sincerely hope to see you there at the event!

A2Z | CARRD • INBOX • YOUTUBE

HOTGUY COMICS ZINETHOLOGY | ITCH.IO • CARRD • TWITTER

SCARLAND ARTBOOK | ITCH.IO • WEBSITE • TWITTER • TUMBLR

ALT IMAGES UNDER THE CUT.

[ms-demeanor]

Why reblog machine-generated art?

When I was ten years old I took a photography class where we developed black and white photos by projecting light on papers bathed in chemicals. If we wanted to change something in the image, we had to go through a gradual, arduous process called dodging and burning.

When I was fifteen years old I used photoshop for the first time, and I remember clicking on the clone tool or the blur tool and feeling like I was cheating.

When I was twenty eight I got my first smartphone. The phone could edit photos. A few taps with my thumb were enough to apply filters and change contrast and even spot correct. I was holding in my hand something more powerful than the huge light machines I'd first used to edit images.

When I was thirty six, just a few weeks ago, I took a photo class that used Lightroom Classic and again, it felt like cheating. It made me really understand how much the color profiles of popular web images I'd been seeing for years had been pumped and tweaked and layered with local edits to make something that, to my eyes, didn't much resemble photography. To me, photography is light on paper. It's what you capture in the lens. It's not automatic skin smoothing and a local filter to boost the sky. This reminded me a lot more of the photomanipulations my friend used to make on deviantart; layered things with unnatural colors that put wings on buildings or turned an eye into a swimming pool. It didn't remake the images to that extent, obviously, but it tipped into the uncanny valley. More real than real, more saturated more sharp and more present than the actual world my lens saw. And that was before I found the AI assisted filters and the tool that would identify the whole sky for you, picking pieces of it out from between leaves.

You know, it's funny, when people talk about artists who might lose their jobs to AI they don't talk about the people who have already had to move on from their photo editing work because of technology. You used to be able to get paid for basic photo manipulation, you know? If you were quick with a lasso or skilled with masks you could get a pretty decent chunk of change by pulling subjects out of backgrounds for family holiday cards or isolating the pies on the menu for a mom and pop. Not a lot, but enough to help. But, of course, you can just do that on your phone now. There's no need to pay a human for it, even if they might do a better job or be more considerate toward the aesthetic of an image.

And they certainly don't talk about all the development labs that went away, or the way that you could have trained to be a studio photographer if you wanted to take good photos of your family to hang on the walls and that digital photography allowed in a parade of amateurs who can make dozens of iterations of the same bad photo until they hit on a good one by sheer volume and luck; if you want to be a good photographer everyone can do that why didn't you train for it and spend a long time taking photos on film and being okay with bad photography don't you know that digital photography drove thousands of people out of their jobs.

My dad told me that he plays with AI the other day. He hosts a movie podcast and he puts up thumbnails for the downloads. In the past, he'd just take a screengrab from the film. Now he tells the Bing AI to make him little vignettes. A cowboy running away from a rhino, a dragon arm-wrestling a teddy bear. That kind of thing. Usually based on a joke that was made on the show, or about the subject of the film and an interest of the guest.

People talk about "well AI art doesn't allow people to create things, people were already able to create things, if they wanted to create things they should learn to create things." Not everyone wants to make good art that's creative. Even fewer people want to put the effort into making bad art for something that they aren't passionate about. Some people want filler to go on the cover of their youtube video. My dad isn't going to learn to draw, and as the person who he used to ask to photoshop him as Ant-Man because he certainly couldn't pay anyone for that kind of thing, I think this is a great use case for AI art. This senior citizen isn't going to start cartooning and at two recordings a week with a one-day editing turnaround he doesn't even really have the time for something like a Fiverr commission. This is a great use of AI art, actually.

I also know an artist who is going Hog Fucking Wild creating AI art of their blorbos. They're genuinely an incredibly talented artist who happens to want to see their niche interest represented visually without having to draw it all themself. They're posting the funny and good results to a small circle of mutuals on socials with clear information about the source of the images; they aren't trying to sell any of the images, they're basically using them as inserts for custom memes. Who is harmed by this person saying "i would like to see my blorbo lasciviously eating an ice cream cone in the is this a pigeon meme"?

The way I use machine-generated art, as an artist, is to proof things. Can I get an explosion to look like this. What would a wall of dead computer monitors look like. Would a ballerina leaping over the grand canyon look cool? Sometimes I use AI art to generate copyright free objects that I can snip for a collage. A lot of the time I use it to generate ideas. I start naming random things and seeing what it shows me and I start getting inspired. I can ask CrAIon for pose reference, I can ask it to show me the interior of spaces from a specific angle.

I profoundly dislike the antipathy that tumblr has for AI art. I understand if people don't want their art used in training pools. I understand if people don't want AI trained on their art to mimic their style. You should absolutely use those tools that poison datasets if you don't want your art included in AI training. I think that's an incredibly appropriate action to take as an artist who doesn't want AI learning from your work.

However I'm pretty fucking aggressively opposed to copyright and most of the "solid" arguments against AI art come down to "the AIs viewed and learned from people's copyrighted artwork and therefore AI is theft rather than fair use" and that's a losing argument for me. In. Like. A lot of ways. Primarily because it is saying that not only is copying someone's art theft, it is saying that looking at and learning from someone's art can be defined as theft rather than fair use.

Also because it's just patently untrue.

But that doesn't really answer your question. Why reblog machine-generated art? Because I liked that piece of art.

It was made by a machine that had looked at billions of images - some copyrighted, some not, some new, some old, some interesting, many boring - and guided by a human and I liked it. It was pretty. It communicated something to me. I looked at an image a machine made - an artificial picture, a total construct, something with no intrinsic meaning - and I felt a sense of quiet and loss and nostalgia. I looked at a collection of automatically arranged pixels and tasted salt and smelled the humidity in the air.

I liked it.

I don't think that all AI art is ugly. I don't think that AI art is all soulless (i actually think that 'having soul' is a bizarre descriptor for art and that lacking soul is an equally bizarre criticism). I don't think that AI art is bad for artists. I think the problem that people have with AI art is capitalism and I don't think that's a problem that can really be laid at the feet of people curating an aesthetic AI art blog on tumblr.

Machine learning isn't the fucking problem the problem is massive corporations have been trying hard not to pay artists for as long as massive corporations have existed (isn't that a b-plot in the shape of water? the neighbor who draws ads gets pushed out of his job by product photography? did you know that as recently as ten years ago NewEgg had in-house photographers who would take pictures of the products so users wouldn't have to rely on the manufacturer photos? I want you to guess what killed that job and I'll give you a hint: it wasn't AI)

Am I putting a human out of a job because I reblogged an AI-generated "photo" of curtains waving in the pale green waters of an imaginary beach? Who would have taken this photo of a place that doesn't exist? Who would have painted this hypersurrealistic image? What meaning would it have had if they had painted it or would it have just been for the aesthetic? Would someone have paid for it or would it be like so many of the things that artists on this site have spent dozens of hours on only to get no attention or value for their work?

My worst ratio of hours to notes is an 8-page hand-drawn detailed ink comic about getting assaulted at a concert and the complicated feelings that evoked that took me weeks of daily drawing after work with something like 54 notes after 8 years; should I be offended if something generated from a prompt has more notes than me? What does that actually get the blogger? Clout? I believe someone said that popularity on tumblr gets you one thing and that is yelled at.

What do you get out of this? Are you helping artists right now? You're helping me, and I'm an artist. I've wanted to unload this opinion for a while because I'm sick of the argument that all Real Artists think AI is bullshit. I'm a Real Artist. I've been paid for Real Art. I've been commissioned as an artist.

And I find a hell of a lot of AI art a lot more interesting than I find human-generated corporate art or Thomas Kincaid (but then, I repeat myself).

There are plenty of people who don't like AI art and don't want to interact with it. I am not one of those people. I thought the gay sex cats were funny and looked good and that shitposting is the ideal use of a machine image generation: to make uncopyrightable images to laugh at.

I think that tumblr has decided to take a principled stand against something that most people making the argument don't understand. I think tumblr's loathing for AI has, generally speaking, thrown weight behind a bunch of ideas that I think are going to be incredibly harmful *to artists specifically* in the long run.

Anyway. If you hate AI art and you don't want to interact with people who interact with it, block me.

[capsyst]

Sorry I haven’t posted much lately. I’m working on a new project. Here’s a sneak peek of what I’m doing!

The idea I had was that in the original NES manual there are these gorgeous anime cel illustrations highlighting some of the action you’ll get into playing the game.

However, these are not actually part of any long lost anime or anything. They were single images produced to look like an anime by hand painting cels and placing them over backgrounds.

So my thought was… why don’t I actually animate these scenes and try to make them look like true hand painted 80’s anime?

To help with this project I’ve identified a number of factors that go into what makes 80’s anime look the way it does. Take a look at the example:

SHADING: Unlike a lot of American productions where the shadow layer is a separate animation pass overlayed on top of the original through a composting effect, Anime is done much cheaper. Artists would actually ink the colors of where shadows are supposed to be on the cels themselves, and then paint the shadows onto the cels using a different color.

BRUSH WORK: 80’s anime has a rougher edge to it. Either through using the xerox method or by hand painting the ink lines with a dry brush, the one point that is clear is that the actual linework of each stroke is often broken up and brittle.

CEL LAYERS: Anime cels are actual sheets of celluloid painted and layed down on top of a background painting. No matter how flat you try to make it, the more layers you introduce the more likely cel shadows will start to pile up, and the foggier the background gets.

MY PROCESS: So this is what I’ve come up with as my method of reproducing this digitally.

1) I’m going to use a dry brush that cracks and will intentionally try to make the animation a little messy. I won’t be trying to clean it up much (if at all) and if I make a mistake it stays in. Anime was often produced very fast and very cheaply so I am trying to replicate that effect.

2) I’m going to use multiple shades of colors to represent the flats, shadows, and the painted lines depicting where shadows will go.

3) I will include a shadow layer underneath the animation to give it a traditional 2D effect of having multiple cels piled up on top of each other.

4) When all is said and done I will run the whole thing through a VHS filter to really sell the idea this is a long lost animation from a bygone era.

I hope you like the results, I think all this attention to detail has really paid off and makes it look like an old 80’s anime of Link tossing a boomerang. I hope to make more of these and stitch them all together to make a commercial for the NES Zelda.

[kpoplustzone]

Nayeon Smut - Sneaky Christmas

OC X NAYEON

More stories on Kofi - Link

The first time Nayeon walked into the room, it was like a spotlight had suddenly been turned on. Even knowing my brother was dating someone famous, actually seeing Nayeon in person was a completely different experience. The woman was breathtaking. The kind of beautiful that makes your jaw drop and your thoughts stutter. And not just regular celebrity beautiful – this was Nayeon from TWICE beautiful, the idol whose smile could melt glaciers and whose visuals were constantly praised across South Korea. She had that unique charm, that infectious cheerfulness that everyone adored, and seeing it up close, along with her undeniably sexy body right there in front of me, was almost overwhelming.

My brother introduced her, his arm casually draped around her shoulder, and my eyes couldn’t help but scan her from head to toe. She was wearing a simple but stylish outfit – tight jeans that hugged every curve of her shapely legs and a fitted top that showcased her perky breasts beautifully. Even in casual wear, her star power was undeniable, a radiant aura that seemed to emanate from her.

Her face, even without the stage makeup, was stunning. Those bright, captivating eyes that always sparkled in photos were even more mesmerizing in person, framed by long, dark lashes. Her nose was perfectly sculpted, and then there was that signature bunny smile, wide and infectious, revealing her cute front teeth. It was a smile that could instantly disarm you, making you feel comfortable and at ease, even as your brain struggled to process the fact that you were standing in front of one of the most beloved idols in Korea.

But it wasn't just her face. Nayeon’s body was just as captivating. The fitted top emphasized the roundness and perkiness of her breasts. They weren’t overly large, but perfectly proportioned, the kind that looked soft and inviting. You could tell she worked hard to maintain her figure; there was a subtle firmness, a toned quality that spoke of countless hours of dance practice.

Her jeans hugged her legs like a second skin, showcasing their slender yet shapely form. Her thighs were smooth and toned, leading down to delicate ankles. And then there was her ass. Even through denim, you could tell it was perfectly rounded and firm, the kind that would look incredible bouncing in a short skirt on stage. The way she moved, there was a natural grace and a subtle sway to her hips that hinted at a playful sensuality.

Standing there, witnessing her beauty and her undeniable sex appeal firsthand, it was hard to reconcile the sweet, cheerful image she projected with the undeniably desirable woman standing before me. She was a walking, talking fantasy, the kind of woman who made your imagination run wild with all the naughty possibilities. And she was my brother’s girlfriend. The thought sent a strange mix of disbelief and a flicker of something else, something a little forbidden, through my mind. This was going to be an interesting dynamic, to say the least. Just seeing her that first time, the details of her incredibly sexy body imprinted in my mind, it was clear that Nayeon was a different breed of celebrity, a true icon of beauty and allure

Nayeon’s charm had worked its magic on my family, just as it did on millions of fans. Her cheerful personality and that dazzling smile had them completely smitten from the first meeting. When she left after two days, the house felt strangely empty, a little less bright. I hadn't said much, a combination of shyness and being utterly awestruck keeping me mostly quiet.

But a week later, Christmas arrived, and with it, Nayeon. This time, she came bearing gifts, her arms laden with beautifully wrapped packages. And her outfit… it was something else entirely. She was wearing a pair of incredibly short denim shorts that showcased every glorious inch of her toned thighs and a fitted t-shirt that did little to conceal the perky shape of her breasts. Every curve, every delicious line of her figure was on full display. I felt my mouth go dry as I drank in her beauty, trying my best to appear nonchalant.

My brother, caught up in the whirlwind of family festivities, was soon occupied with other relatives. To my utter delight, Nayeon announced that she would be staying the entire weekend at our place. A thrill shot through me. Two whole days with Nayeon in the house? The possibilities, my imagination whispered, were endless. My cock immediately stirred at the thought. I tried to play it cool, busying myself with wrapping last-minute presents and helping my mom in the kitchen, but my eyes kept finding their way back to Nayeon. The way her shorts rode up her incredible ass when she bent over, the subtle sway of her hips as she walked, the way her t-shirt stretched across her chest, hinting at the treasures beneath… it was a constant assault on my senses. This weekend was going to be interesting, to say the least. Just the anticipation of having her in the house, knowing she was just a room away, was enough to keep my cock hard all day. I couldn't wait to see what the next few days would bring, hoping for any opportunity to get closer to this incredible woman.

It wasn't just her overall beauty; it was the subtle things she did, the almost imperceptible gestures that made me wonder if she was intentionally teasing me. Every time she was near me, it felt like a playful dance on the edge of something more.

For instance, we were in the living room, helping my mom decorate the Christmas tree. I was sitting on the floor, trying to untangle a string of lights, when Nayeon bent down to pick up a box of ornaments right in front of me. Her t-shirt, which was already quite fitted, stretched taut across her chest. And as she leaned forward, the neckline dipped just low enough for me to catch a glimpse underneath. My breath hitched. I could clearly see the outline of her bare breasts, the subtle curve and the darker circle of her areola, with only a small, round pastie covering her nipple. It was a fleeting glimpse, gone as quickly as it appeared, but it was enough to send a jolt of heat straight to my groin, my cock instantly hardening against my jeans. I couldn't help but wonder if she knew exactly what she was doing, if that slight dip of her shirt was deliberate. She didn't look at me, just smiled cheerfully as she handed the box to my mom, acting as if nothing had happened. But the image of her partially exposed breasts was burned into my mind.

Another time, we were all in the kitchen, getting snacks. I was reaching for a bag of chips on a high shelf, and Nayeon was bending down to get something from the lower cabinet right in front of me. Her shorts, already incredibly short, rode up even further as she squatted down, giving me an eyeful of her incredible ass. The denim was tight against her rounded cheeks, highlighting the deep cleft. I could see the smooth, pale skin of her thighs, almost all the way up to where the shorts ended. It felt like she was intentionally presenting her perfect backside to me, an offering I couldn't help but stare at. My cock, still remembering the glimpse of her breasts earlier, sprang to attention once more. She stayed in that position for what felt like an eternity, humming to herself as she rummaged through the cabinet. When she finally stood up, she turned around, smiled brightly at me, and grabbed her snack, again completely oblivious-or – or so it seemed–to the effect her actions were having on me.

These little instances kept happening throughout the day. A casual stretch that lifted her t-shirt just enough to reveal a sliver of her toned stomach, a playful twirl that made her shorts swing, and offered a fleeting glimpse of the curve of her inner thigh. Each time, it felt like a deliberate tease, a subtle game she was playing, knowing exactly how her body affected me. My pants felt tighter and tighter as the day wore on, my cock constantly thick and hard, a testament to her unintentional – or perhaps intentional – seduction. The anticipation of spending the entire weekend with her was building to a fever pitch

my father and mother were making a video call to my brother and I was also in the frame when nayeon stood in front of me very close and I could even smell her and her ass right in front of my cock. she was smiling at my brother and talking about something but my body froze when something touched my cock.

My body went rigid, every muscle tensing as Nayeon’s hand, soft yet firm, closed around my cock through the fabric of my shorts. The unexpected touch sent a jolt of pure electricity through me. My eyes darted downwards, confirming the impossible. Her fair hand was indeed there, subtly but deliberately stroking the growing hardness beneath her fingers.

My gaze shot back up to Nayeon, my heart hammering against my ribs. Her face was still turned towards the phone, her expression bright and cheerful as she continued her conversation with my brother, completely unfazed. The contrast between her innocent demeanor and the incredibly bold act she was performing just inches from my parents’ view on the video call was mind-blowing.

Her fingers continued their teasing assault, gently squeezing and releasing, her thumb finding and flicking the sensitive head of my cock. I bit my lip hard to suppress the groan that threatened to erupt from my throat. The sensations were intense, almost unbearable, especially given the precarious situation. My parents and brother were right there, virtually present, completely oblivious to the erotic intimacy unfolding right under their noses.

I could smell her perfume, a sweet, floral scent that was now inextricably linked to this illicit touch. Her ass, still tantalizingly close to my crotch, felt like it was radiating a heat of its own. My cock was now fully erect, straining against the confines of my shorts, throbbing with a desperate need.

Nayeon’s strokes became a little bolder, a little more insistent. She subtly shifted her hand, her fingers now working their way down the length of my shaft, her thumb continuing its playful flicking of the head. I could feel the warmth of her hand through the thin fabric, the pressure building with each deliberate movement. It was torture, exquisite torture. I wanted to pull away, to break the contact, but at the same time, the thrill of the forbidden, the sheer audacity of her actions, kept me rooted to the spot, my body completely at her mercy.

She let out a soft giggle at something my brother said on the call, and the movement of her body caused her hand to press even more firmly against my hardening cock. A low moan almost escaped my lips, and I had to clench my jaw even tighter to keep it contained. The risk of being caught, the scandal it would cause, flashed through my mind, but the arousal was so powerful, so all-consuming, that all rational thought seemed to evaporate.

Her fingers then started to dance, mimicking the movements of someone playing a tiny, secret instrument. Her thumb continued its teasing exploration of the head, while her other fingers rhythmically stroked the shaft. The pace varied, sometimes slow and sensual, sometimes quick and frantic, each change designed to maximize the pleasure-or – or perhaps the torture–she was inflicting. I could feel the precum starting to leak, dampening the fabric of my shorts around my straining cock.

The video call seemed to stretch on endlessly, each passing moment an exercise in restraint and barely contained lust. Nayeon continued to laugh and chat, her hand работая with a focused intensity that belied her cheerful facade. I could feel my face flushing, my breath coming in short, shallow gasps. I was teetering on the edge, one wrong move, one uncontrolled groan, and the whole situation could explode.

The moment the video call ended and my parents turned away, Nayeon’s hand snapped back as if a live wire had shocked her. She gave me a sly, knowing smile, her eyes sparkling with a mischievous glint. I quickly sat down on the sofa, angling my body so the obvious tent in my shorts wouldn't be too noticeable as my parents headed into the kitchen, their backs to us, already chatting about the call.

From the sofa, I had a clear view of them working at the counter, the clinking of dishes, and the murmur of their voices filling the air. Nayeon sat down beside me, close enough that our thighs were almost touching. She leaned back, seemingly relaxed, but her gaze kept flicking downwards, settling on my still-prominent hard-on.

“You were checking me out pretty hard that first day, weren’t you?” she whispered, her voice a low, breathy purr that sent shivers down my spine. “I noticed. A girl always knows.” She looked up at my face, her smile widening. “And I see you’re… still impressed.” Her eyes dropped again to my crotch, lingering there for a moment before flicking back up to mine.

My cheeks flushed, and I mumbled something incoherent, trying to play it cool.

Nayeon chuckled softly, a sound that was both innocent and incredibly seductive. “Don’t be shy,” she said, her fingers tracing a light path across my arm. “I don’t bite… unless you want me to.” Her gaze intensified, and I could feel the heat radiating from her.

Her fingers then moved a little lower, brushing against my leg, dangerously close to the bulge in my shorts. “That’s quite a reaction I seem to have on you,” she murmured, her voice laced with a playful arrogance. “It’s… thick, isn’t it?” She didn’t wait for a response, her fingers now daringly close to the seam of my shorts.

My breath hitched. My parents were just a few feet away, completely engrossed in washing dishes, and here was Nayeon, my brother’s girlfriend, openly talking about my hard cock and teasing me with her touch. The risk of being caught, the sheer audacity of her actions, was incredibly arousing.

She leaned in closer, her lips just inches from my ear. “I saw you looking at my boobs earlier too,” she whispered, her voice dropping to a dirty, seductive tone. “Did you like what you saw?” Her hand then slipped beneath the hem of my t-shirt, her fingers lightly grazing my stomach, slowly inching their way downwards.

I could barely breathe, my heart pounding in my chest. “Nayeon…” I started, my voice a shaky whisper.

She placed a finger against my lips, silencing me. “Shhh,” she said, her eyes sparkling with mischief. “Our little secret.” Her hand continued its downward journey, and then, with a bold move, her fingers closed around the undeniable hardness straining against my shorts.

A gasp escaped my lips, and I instinctively tensed. Her grip was surprisingly firm, her fingers gently squeezing and releasing. I glanced towards the kitchen, my parents still oblivious, their backs to us.

Nayeon’s smile widened, and she leaned in even closer, her breasts brushing against my arm. “You’re so hard,” she murmured, her thumb now tracing the outline of my cock head through the fabric. “I bet you’ve been thinking about me all week, haven’t you?”

I could only nod, my throat too tight to speak. The sensations were overwhelming; the forbidden thrill of her touch in such a public yet private setting was driving me wild.

Nayeon’s fingers, having danced with tantalizing restraint, finally slipped beneath the elastic of my shorts, the cool touch of her skin against mine sending another wave of pure anticipation coursing through me. With a slow, deliberate pull, she lowered the fabric just enough to liberate my straining cock. It sprang free, thick and heavy, greeted by the cool air of the living room. Nayeon’s breath hitched as she gazed down at it, her beautiful eyes widening in what seemed like genuine admiration. A soft, almost reverent sigh escaped her lips as her hand, now bolder, reached out to cradle its weight.

Her touch was electric, the soft warmth of her palm a stark contrast to the throbbing heat emanating from my engorged member. She ran her fingers slowly up the smooth skin, her touch feather-light yet undeniably firm, as if she were acquainting herself with every inch. Her gaze remained fixed on my cock, her expression a captivating blend of curiosity and undisguised desire. Then, her fingers tightened slightly, her grip becoming more possessive as she explored its impressive girth.

I held my breath, every nerve ending in my body tingling with anticipation. The sounds of my parents chatting and the gentle clinking of dishes from the nearby kitchen seemed to amplify the silence between Nayeon and me, a stark reminder of the precariousness of our clandestine encounter.

With a mischievous glint in her eyes, Nayeon leaned forward, her radiant face drawing closer to my exposed cock. My heart hammered against my ribs, the anticipation building to a fever pitch. Her lips parted slightly, revealing a tantalizing glimpse of her pink tongue. And then, with a slow, deliberate grace, she took the head of my cock into her mouth.

The initial contact was a shock of pure, unadulterated pleasure. The warmth and wetness of her mouth enveloping me sent a jolt straight to my core, igniting a fire that spread rapidly through my veins. I bit down hard on my lip, desperately trying to stifle the involuntary groan that threatened to erupt from my throat. The fear of being discovered warred with the overwhelming sensation of her lips and tongue working their magic on me.

Nayeon’s suction was gentle at first, a soft, teasing exploration, her tongue tracing delicate circles around the sensitive corona. But then, she deepened her hold, taking more of me in, her lips closing tightly, creating a vacuum that sent shivers down my spine. Her cheeks hollowed slightly with each downward motion, and I could feel her warm breath against my skin, adding another layer of intense sensation.

Her head bobbed rhythmically, her dark hair swaying gently against my thighs, a visual testament to the incredible act she was performing. My hands clenched into fists at my sides, my knuckles turning white as I fought to remain still, to keep my pleasure from becoming too obvious. The sounds from the kitchen seemed to mock my attempts at stealth, every clink and clatter amplifying the forbidden intimacy of the moment.

She was a natural, her mouth работая me with an intuitive understanding of what felt best. Her tongue flicked and swirled, exploring every inch of the head, paying special attention to the frenulum, that incredibly sensitive ridge beneath the tip. The sensation was electrifying, making my hips want to buck uncontrollably. She then slid her lips further down, taking more and more of my shaft into her warm, wet haven. I could feel the velvety softness of her tongue caressing my skin, the rhythmic pressure of her suction building with each stroke. Her throat worked visibly as she went deeper, taking me almost to the base, and then slowly sliding back up, repeating the process with a practiced expertise that left me breathless and aching for more.

My gaze was fixed on her face, just inches away. Her eyes were closed, her expression one of pure concentration and sensual enjoyment, a stark contrast to her usual bright and cheerful demeanor. Her lips glistened with my saliva, and the way she was so completely focused on pleasuring me, seemingly oblivious to the immense risk of discovery, was incredibly arousing. Her perky breasts, still partially visible above the neckline of her t-shirt, bounced ever so slightly with the motion of her head, a tantalizing distraction that only added to my mounting arousal.

She varied her technique, her pace shifting from a slow, sensual glide to a quicker, more urgent rhythm, always keeping me teetering on the precipice of control. She used her hands too, gently stroking the underside of my shaft, her fingers occasionally brushing against my swollen balls, sending shockwaves of delight through my body. She explored the textures, the veins, the sheer length and thickness of me with a focused intensity that was incredibly flattering and undeniably erotic.

She then did something that sent a jolt of pure fire through my veins. As she slid her mouth down my shaft, her fingers tightened around the base, gently tugging as her lips reached the head again. The combination of the deep suction and the gentle pull was almost unbearable, pushing me closer and closer to the edge. I bit down harder on my lip, my body tensing, every muscle screaming for release.

The sounds from the kitchen seemed to fade into the background as my world narrowed to the incredible sensations Nayeon was creating. Her mouth was a warm, wet vortex, and I was being pulled into its depths, each stroke bringing me closer to the point of no return. The risk, the thrill, the undeniable pleasure – it was an intoxicating combination, a secret indulgence happening right under the noses of my unsuspecting parents

My blood ran cold as my mom’s voice cut through the haze of pleasure. “Where’s Nayeon, sweetheart? I thought she was here with you.” My eyes snapped open, my heart leaping into my throat. Panic surged through me. My parents were turning, their gazes sweeping towards the sofa.

Without thinking, my hands shot out, grabbing the throw blanket that was draped over the back of the sofa. In one swift motion, I tossed it over Nayeon, completely covering her head and the lower part of her body that was currently работая on my cock. From their perspective, it would just look like I was lying down, perhaps even taking a nap, with only my head and shoulders visible above the blanket.

“Oh, she… she just went to the restroom, Mom,” I stammered out, my voice cracking slightly. I tried to sound casual, but the lie felt thick and heavy in the air. My eyes darted nervously towards the kitchen, watching my parents’ reactions.

Thankfully, my mom just nodded, seemingly satisfied with my explanation. “Okay, honey. Just let her know lunch will be ready soon.” She turned back to the counter, resuming her conversation with my dad.

Underneath the sheet, Nayeon’s ministrations continued, completely unfazed by the near-disaster. If anything, the added risk seemed to fuel her boldness. Her tongue left the head of my cock and trailed down, licking the smooth skin of my shaft before focusing on my balls. The sensation of her warm, wet tongue enveloping my testicles was intense, making me twitch uncontrollably. She then moved higher, her lips and tongue работая the base of my cock, where it met my groin, the pressure and suction almost unbearable in their exquisite intensity.

I clenched my fists even tighter, my body trembling as I fought to remain silent. The contrast between the innocent conversation happening just a few feet away and the incredibly depraved act unfolding under the blanket was mind-blowing. I could feel the heat rising in my face, and I prayed my parents wouldn’t notice my flushed complexion.

Nayeon’s tongue continued its tantalizing assault, her breath hot and moist against my skin. She was exploring every inch, every nerve ending, driving me further and further towards the edge of sanity. The rhythmic sucking and slurping sounds were thankfully muffled by the blanket, but I was still terrified that my own involuntary moans would give us away.

Nayeon’s head emerged slowly from beneath the sheet, her eyes sparkling with mischief. Her lips were still wet, glistening with the remnants of my precum, which she delicately wiped away with a finger. That same sly smile played on her lips as she brought her finger to her mouth, savoring the taste with a satisfied hum. This stunning woman was teasing me relentlessly, pushing the boundaries of what I thought was possible.

With a fluid movement, she straddled me, her knees pressing against either side of my thighs. She leaned down, grabbing the front of my t-shirt and pulling my face closer to hers. “I want your cock inside me,” she whispered, her voice husky with desire, her breath hot against my ear.

“Nayeon, my parents are right there,” I managed to say, my voice a strained whisper, glancing nervously towards the kitchen where my parents were still washing dishes, oblivious to the erotic drama unfolding just a few feet away.

She just chuckled, a low, throaty sound that vibrated against my chest. “They won’t hear us,” she insisted, her eyes blazing with a raw, unadulterated lust. “I’m too horny to wait any longer.” Her grip on my shirt tightened, and she pulled me closer, her body pressing against mine. I could feel the soft warmth of her pussy just inches away.

Without waiting for my response, she pushed me back against the cushions of the sofa, angling her body so that my parents, if they were to glance over, would only see her sitting on top of me. My upper body was now lower, mostly obscured by the back of the sofa, while she was positioned perfectly to block their view of what was happening beneath her.

My cock, still throbbing from her expert mouth work, strained upwards, eager to fulfill her desire. Nayeon reached down, her fingers finding the waistband of my still-lowered shorts. With a swift movement, she pushed them down further, giving her unobstructed access. Her touch was sure and confident as she guided my hard cock towards her wet entrance.

I felt the slick warmth of her pussy lips as the head of my penis nudged against them. She let out a soft moan, her hips tilting slightly as she positioned herself. Then, slowly, deliberately, she began to lower herself onto me. I gasped as she took me inch by agonizing inch, her tight muscles clenching around my shaft. She went all the way down, until I was buried deep inside her, the feeling of her hot, wet embrace sending waves of pure ecstasy through me.

Nayeon leaned forward, resting her hands on my chest, her eyes locking with mine. That playful smile was back, now tinged with a primal satisfaction. “See? They can’t see a thing,” she whispered, her hips beginning to rock gently. “And they definitely can’t hear this.” Her moans started soft and low, escalating with each slide of her body against mine,

Nayeon’s hips began to move in a slow, sensual grind, her tight pussy muscles clenching and releasing around my hard cock. I looked up at her face, her cheeks slightly flushed, a bead of sweat trickling down her temple. She was biting her lip, her eyes darting occasionally towards the kitchen, a clear effort to suppress the moans that were building within her.

“Feels good, doesn’t it?” she whispered, a naughty smile gracing her lips. Her hands gripped my shoulders, pulling herself closer, her breasts pressing firmly against my chest. I could feel her heartbeat racing, mirroring my own frantic pulse.

“Unbelievable,” I managed to whisper back, my gaze tracing the curve of her neck down to the tantalizing view of her cleavage. Being inside her, feeling her hot and wet around me, with the risk of my parents walking in at any moment, was an incredible rush.

She increased the pace of her movements, her hips rocking with a more insistent rhythm. Soft whimpers escaped her lips, quickly stifled as she glanced towards the kitchen. I could see my mom turn slightly, and Nayeon immediately broke eye contact with me, smiling sweetly in the direction of the kitchen.

“Everything alright there, honey?” my mom asked, her voice carrying from the other room.

“Yes, aunty,” Nayeon replied, her voice perfectly normal and cheerful. “Just admiring your lovely Christmas decorations!” She then looked back down at me, her eyes blazing with renewed desire, and resumed her sensual riding, her moans now barely audible breaths against my ear.

The contrast was surreal. One moment she was the picture of innocent politeness, charming my mother, and the next, she was straddling me, her hot pussy grinding against my cock with a primal intensity. It was incredibly arousing.

From my position beneath her, my view of her body was intoxicating. Her t-shirt had ridden up slightly, revealing a tantalizing glimpse of her toned stomach. Her breasts, now moving more freely with her riding, bounced gently, their hard nipples peeking out from under the fabric. I reached up and gently cupped one in my hand, feeling its softness and the immediate hardening of her nipple. She let out a soft gasp, quickly muffling it with a hand pressed against her mouth.

Her riding became more vigorous, her hips lifting higher with each thrust, giving me a deeper, more satisfying penetration. I could feel her wetness coating my cock, the friction building with every stroke. The sounds of our bodies coming together – the soft thud of her ass against my lap, her muffled moans, my own suppressed groans – were a secret symphony of pleasure.

Suddenly, my dad walked to the doorway of the kitchen, looking into the living room. Nayeon immediately stilled her movements, her smile turning into a wide, innocent grin as she looked at him.

“Having a nice chat, you two?” he asked, his gaze sweeping over us.

“Yes, Uncle,” Nayeon said brightly. “Just catching up. It’s so nice to finally have a quiet moment.” She subtly shifted her weight, pressing down on me, her pussy squeezing my cock tightly. I had to bite back a groan.

“Well, don’t be strangers. Dinner will be ready in about half an hour.” He gave us a warm smile and then headed back into the kitchen.

As soon as he was gone, Nayeon’s smile turned wicked. “That was close,” she whispered, her hips immediately resuming their passionate rhythm. “But it just makes it even more exciting, doesn’t it?” Her pace quickened, her moans becoming louder, her head thrown back, her body completely surrendered to the pleasure. I could feel her nearing another climax, her inner muscles clenching tighter and tighter around my cock. The forbidden thrill of the situation, the intense pleasure of being inside her, and the constant risk of discovery – it was all combining to create an experience I would never forget.

Nayeon’s breath hitched as her orgasm began to build, her movements becoming more frantic, her hips grinding down on my cock with a desperate intensity. Her muffled cries grew louder, and I could feel her inner muscles clenching rhythmically, squeezing me tightly. Just as I felt myself teetering on the edge of my release, I heard footsteps approaching from the kitchen.

My heart leaped into my throat. My dad was coming back into the living room.

Nayeon’s eyes widened in panic. Without breaking our connection, she quickly shifted her position, sliding off me just enough to turn her body slightly. She then leaned forward, pretending to reach for a Christmas ornament that had fallen onto the floor beside the sofa. From the doorway, it would just look like she was bending down to pick something up.

“Is everything alright, you two?” my dad asked, his gaze sweeping over the room.

“Oh, yes, uncle,” Nayeon said, her voice perfectly steady, a sweet smile on her face as she held up the ornament. “Just admiring this pretty little reindeer. It must have fallen off the tree.”

My dad chuckled. “Careful, you don’t break it! Those are old family heirlooms.” He glanced at me, still lying on the sofa, trying to appear relaxed. “Everything good with you, son?”

I managed a weak nod, my face flushed, my heart still pounding. “Yeah, Dad. Just… admiring the decorations too.”

He smiled and headed back towards the kitchen. As soon as he was out of sight, Nayeon quickly straddled me again, her smile turning wicked. “That was a close one,” she whispered, her pussy immediately finding its home on my still-hard cock. “Made it even hotter, don’t you think?”

She didn’t wait for my reply, her hips immediately resuming their passionate rhythm. Her moans, which had been so carefully suppressed moments before, now escaped her lips more freely, though still muffled by her hand. Her riding became more frantic, her body bouncing on mine with unrestrained desire. I reached up and cupped her breasts, my thumbs teasing her hard nipples, eliciting sharp intakes of breath.

“You’re so naughty,” I whispered against her ear, my arousal reaching a fever pitch.

“Only for you,” she breathed back, her hips grinding down on me with a delicious force. “You like it, don’t you? Being bad with me?”

“More than anything,” I admitted, my fingers now trailing down her back, feeling the smooth skin beneath her t-shirt. I reached under the hem, my fingers finding the curve of her ass, gently squeezing the firm flesh. She moaned louder, her hips bucking in response

Driven by the feel of Nayeon’s incredibly tight pussy and her escalating moans, I increased the intensity of my thrusts, bucking my hips upwards to meet her downward ride. Her head was thrown back, her breath coming in short, sharp gasps as she gripped my shoulders tightly, her body trembling with the force of her impending climax. I could feel her inner muscles clenching rhythmically around my cock, squeezing and releasing with increasing urgency.

“Oh, fuck… I’m gonna come again…” she gasped out, her voice thick with pleasure. Her hips began to grind down on me with a desperate frenzy, her body arching and twisting as the waves of her second orgasm washed over her. Her muffled cries reached a fever pitch, a series of high-pitched whimpers and moans that were barely contained by her hand pressed against her mouth.

Just as she reached her peak, I felt my own body teetering on the edge. The intense friction of her tight pussy milking my cock, combined with the forbidden thrill of our clandestine encounter, pushed me over the point of no return. A deep groan rumbled in my chest as my own orgasm erupted, a torrent of hot cum shooting deep inside her, filling her completely. My body shuddered uncontrollably as I held her tight, our mingled breaths and cries the only sounds in the living room for a brief, suspended moment.

When the tremors of our shared climax finally subsided, Nayeon slowly eased off me, a blissful smile gracing her lips. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes still glazed over with a dazed satisfaction. She adjusted her t-shirt, smoothing it down with a practiced hand, and then, with remarkable composure, turned towards the kitchen.

“aunty,” she called out sweetly, her voice sounding perfectly normal. “Is there anything I can help you with for dinner?”

I lay on the sofa, my heart still racing, watching her as she walked towards my parents. I had a clear view of her legs from my slightly lower vantage point. And as she moved, I saw it – a thick, milky stream of my cum slowly leaking from her pussy, tracing a path down her smooth, fair thighs. It was a blatant, undeniable testament to our secret, passionate encounter, a visual reminder of the raw intimacy we had just shared, right under the noses of my unsuspecting parents. The sight sent another wave of heat pooling in my groin, a silent promise of more to come lingering in the air.

[literalgrill]

Do NOT Support Hard Drive On Patreon

You might see friends today suggesting you support Hard Drive on Patreon today. You know, the funny video games version of The Onion? As a journalist, I will firmly tell you DO NOT GIVE THEM A DIME.

The CEO has pushed out all former staff that have built the site up to its current greatness and has been pushing the use of AI. The staff begged to have a Patreon before basically all being pushed out, but the idea was refused until now, when it will only line the pockets of a single person instead of hard working writers.

I know they might have provided laughs before, but Hard Drive is a shell of what it was once. Let it die and support the people who actually made those moments of joy possible. Don't believe me? Check out what former employees are saying below:

Kevin Podas: Okay you know what, I would feel bad saying nothing about this, so here goes:🚨SAVE YOUR MONEY🚨

We passionately advocated for a Patreon at Hard Drive & were aggressively shot down. The talent & people who built the site were pushed out. To see this now is beyond upsetting. For the past few years or so I put a lot of myself into this website. I pitched a ton of jokes, got over 120 articles published, & met a lot of great people. I'm sure if you've been following me for some time you could easily see this.

However, there is a lot of misinformation. I was eventually promoted to Managing Editor of the site & was ecstatic. Grateful for the opportunity. Felt like all of my hard work in the comedy mines was finally paying off. But things took a turn for the worst, & each day there were new surprises that affected our livelihoods. These were all very avoidable surprises, mind you.

A patreon was going to be our hail mary, but alas, for some reason, the power that be did not want it. Causing us to leave a dream job behind. "At least we did all we could," we consoled ourselves afterwards. I put a lot of myself into this project. I pitched all sorts of ideas that could have helped-- we all did. Merch collaborations, Patreon-integrated YouTube content, so much more. And most of them were shot down out of sheer stubbornness and nothing more. To see lie after lie spread, and multiple big publications and YouTubers that I am a fan of promote this Patreon under these pretenses is incredibly upsetting. There are so many receipts.

Please share this and consider pulling out if you've already put money into this. On Hard Drive using AI, also from Kevin Podas: I can't personally confirm that part aside from some of the recent header images for articles on both Hard Drive and Hard Times are being made with AI. As far as writing, it's been mentioned in the past, but I personally do not know. Maybe others do, maybe not. MORE From Kevin Podas suggesting the owner denying a Patreon being set up earlier cost an artist a job that was replaced by AI: We had a social media person who was awesome! He made the images until this AI implementation. He had to leave because ad revenue was low and a Patreon was aggressively refused.

Luca Fisher: at the risk of burning some bridges, i have to back up kevin here. i've only been part-time, in-and-out of hard drive since i got in last year, but i can corroborate that management doubled and tripled down about not hosting a patreon/crowdfunding and that many other suggestions and ideas, including mine (and ones much smarter than mine!), were shot down in really long, apocalyptic threads of everyone left on deck desperately trying to come up with ways to keep the lights on. managerially it has been messy and sad

i've written for multiple publications that have long since died, ones that were in the process of dying, and ones that, in this case, are soon to be put in the ground. it is sad and sucks every time. i don't know what could have been done differently, but i do know that a lot of great writers and content creators were left shorthanded and unhappy by the way things have gone. and it is sort of puzzling to see the sudden championing of patreon after we were all told plenty of times that it couldn't work and we should move on also, just to add my own personal two cents here, i was really disappointed by the shuttering of many different article sections on the site over the past 6-8 months. i understand cutting corners in a deficit, and i know it had to be done. that said…

all in all, i'm really sad to see this all happen. i don't fault anyone, if only because i don't really know enough about how this all can happen to make sense of it. games journalism is in a sad, sorry state, and will likely no longer be a thing in the next decade

VideoSealMan: I'm gonna say this because I think I deserve to. For months, MONTHS on end I was bugging Hard Drive management about a Patreon. Often I got ignored for a week+, but when I actually got a response I was encouraged to - of all things, write up a Google Doc pitching the concept I did it regardless. I wasn't the only one trying to sway management on a Patreon, but so fiercely was I fighting for it that last night, I was accused of making this comment directly by the CEO! With no evidence whatsoever! After I'd been gone for over a month.

I vouched so hard for Patreon because I wanted all the writers and creatives working with Hard Drive including myself to get paid better. When I actually got a response, the idea was often shut down. Eventually due to the state of my company, my pay was cut for a second time I confronted management alongside a couple other important figureheads at the org and told them that if we couldn't do a Patreon - I could no longer financially justify staying there. The answer was still no, so I left. Baffled at the decision, but whatever.

It is unendingly frustrating to know that myself and many other people who put their soul into Hard Drive LEFT because of management's absolute refusal to compromise on a Patreon, to then see them launch one anyway a month later and get over 1000 people pledging money. I'm seeing a lot of things float around about greed and people being fired. No one was fired. Everyone who left, left because they were sick of management's decision-making. And honestly, management is a lot of things but I would not call them greedy. (From my experience.) They did genuinely make an effort to pay people as much as possible. I found the pay very fair for a while. I am not disputing that I was paid what I was owed - yet management frequently feels the need to remind critics of that. Lmao, yes. I was paid what I was owed. No one is disputing payment. You did the bare minimum a business owner should do and paid everyone their due, very well done. I make no allegations of greed, cheating or foul play. I make allegations of poor management and incompetence that has fucked over other people.

Basically the only people left at Hard Drive have been there for about 2 months. They will reap the rewards of this successful Patreon I and so many others passionately fought for for so long. We will not see a dime.

I do not know the new people at Hard Drive, But I feel bad for them. They were haphazardly thrust into Hard Drive's workplace with little to no explanation on how anything works, or given any context on the state of the place. Even now managements feeds them half-truths and misinformation about other people's grievances. I am broke and have been for a while. I had to move out of my flat in Reading and back with my family because of how little money I was making. This has basically doomed my flatmate to moving back in with abusive parents, which is something I feel guilty about every day. If we had gone with the Patreon I worked myself hoarse over back then, this could have been avoided. Some of my other good pals could also not have been fucked over.

It was a bad judgment call, but it's not a crime. It's just management getting it wrong.

So should you give to the Hard Drive Patreon? I don't know! I don't think any of the new people working there to patch up the holes left by the recent mass exodus have any bad intentions. Maybe they deserve it! But it is not the same site you knew a year ago, or even a month ago. Myself and many people who were there far longer than me and did far more for it than I did are all gone now because we could not deal with management's terrible decision-making and dogass communication any longer. That's what you should know, imo

I had an agreement in place with management that I would receive the next 8 months of revenue from the Hard Drive YT channel from my leaving in November. This was a deal I appreciated, and thought was very fair on management's behalf. So far, the deal has been honoured for 2 months. However as of last night I was removed from the Hard Drive Slack without warning, and as an editor for the YouTube channel. This means I no longer have any way of verifying how much I am owed, I just have to take their word for it. I'm sure management will make their own statements full of half-truths and weird language on the many cases being brought against them - I'd take everything they say with a pinch of salt if some of the screenshots I've seen of them talking about me are any indication lol

To management; I do not want to talk to you. I want you to DM me a screenshot of how much I'm owed every month and then send me the money per our agreement until June, then we can go our separate ways. Do that and admit to your mistakes, and maybe you can recover your reputation! That's it from me, lol. If they pull out of the deal and fuck me over I'll have more to say, but most of what I know is other people's stories of incompetence and poor decision-making, lol. I genuinely get no pleasure out of doing this; I do not think management is evil - I just think they're really bad at what they do and it's cost other, more talented people, lol. You should believe the writers imo

One last thing I wanna say btw, management did often stress that no one should try to make Hard Drive a full time thing. They were transparent about that, and that is fair. I was working on it because at a few points, I was lead to believe we actually were doing a Patreon. Many other ppl have similar stories of being strung along by management changing their minds and stop-starting shit every 2 weeks. We all made the fatal mistake of overestimating our manager - who would tell you one thing one day and something totally opposite the next week lol

Hunter R. Thompson:

I'm not your dad, but speaking as a Hard Drive writer, I don't know that funding Hard Drive on Patreon is worth it

The driving talent on the back end—behind the kickass site I joined in 2019—have peaced out over the years as the site's been (in our view) increasingly mismanaged. Mismanagement like, not setting up crowdfunding before the ship sank and all its best crew failed; or publishing a screenshot of Andy Ngo pedojacketing a trans writer, complete with her deadname; or a disgruntled ex-writer getting falsely accused of shit-talk, by actual staff. I'm grateful for the writing I've gotten to produce for HD (and will forever be kicking myself for not writing even more, in the four years I've had to do it!! i'm a dumbass!!!) but it is very much no longer the site I signed up for.

I don't want to resign as a contributor altogether, because I'm open to the idea of the site recovering and bad practices being retired as finances level out-- it would just be dishonest for potential backers to not be Aware Of The Circumstances, I think.

Jeremy Kaplowitz: i truly don't want to start shit, but feel compelled to say: i want to see Hard Drive succeed w/o resorting to throwing former writers & editors, myself included, under the bus. surely there's a way to save the site without building it over the corpses of those who left. my $0.02 i don't blame anyone who wants to sign up for the HD patreon and i support the website, but that includes those who worked on it for years, have complaints, and don't deserve to be treated like bitter assholes like this kind of stuff is just objectively true, meanwhile there's these new writers who joined the site after i left (meaning, in the last ~3 months) claiming people are liars. decide for yourself if you care, but this is what happened! [Quotes this Tweet]

Seth Finkelstein: Writing for Hard Drive has been a privilege the past few years, and it makes me so angry to see people I looked up to get jerked around behind the scenes. The amount of grenades the editors jumped on our behalf is immense, and I don't think the way they're being treated is right.

Other Bits On AI: We do know for sure however that AI art has been used by the site. Its fucking owner confirms it here:https://twitter.com/MattSaincome/status/1743040541603123622. Seems the owner pushed AI written articles as well! TayFabe: My vaguetweet is making the rounds & these made me apoplectic. - owner regularly lobbied using ai. Once he tested it & said ai was writing better satire than 25% of the HT/HD writers. - ai images were used on the site & socials w/o consulting the team or disclosing it publicly I found the ai bit relevant to include bc 1) it illuminates a stark change in HD's current direction & leadership, 2) ai images have previously been used on the site and (since deleted) ig posts, 3) ai content fucking sucks, and repeatedly pushing to use it is a telling quality The "handful of writers who chose to leave" includes 2 editors-in-chief (both cofounders who wrote a combined total of >1,000 articles & defined the voice of HD), & at least 3 other editors. These guys put in WORK since 2017, so cool to be corrected by ppl who joined in Nov 2023 [Link to mentioned vague tweet from post.] More from TayFabe: owner continuously lobbied for using ai in every possible way. No one else wanted to do it, but he kept on, saying ai was writing better satire than 25% of the HT/HD writers. Also, ai images were used on the site & socials without public disclosure or consulting the team.

The owner has responded now multiple times in a private discord... Thank you for people sharing screenshots! First Screenshot:

Kevin's Response: He banned me from the server for speaking out, so no, I didn't see it. And he gave no indication of a timeline, it was just "we'll do one when *I* say so" and gave every inclination he was totally against it. It bred an environment that pushed our hands to have to leave. Screenshot Round Two:

Kevin's Response: "Starting one in 3 months" is an absolute lie. He denied it, I have screenshots and others who can confirm. No timeline was given. Just "this is what it is now" and like, I couldn't live off of that. I wanted to do more but he was allergic to good ideas from others around him.

Matt, owner of Hard Drive, responds publicly on Twitter.

Matt: Kevin, the patreon launch was delayed because I didn't think it would work. Everyone is happy that it did work. Everyone who left the site because we didn't have money to pay for creative content which didn't revenue is welcome to return home. But unclear why the hostility.

Hard Drive paid out literally every dollar it had, then a bunch more, to creative people who worked on the site. When we ran out of money, we couldn't pay anymore. We did our best.

Kevin: Right, and my point of this thread was that it was completely and totally avoidable. This is reasonable to be upset about. How could I have been any more clear?

Matt: If we knew with 100% certainly that the community would have supported us via patreon, we would have done that. We didn't know. We had tried 4 years ago and got no support. We were wrong this time. We did our best to figure it out. We paid all the money we could.

Kevin: So you knew with 100% certainty this time? Or you took a leap of faith?

Matt: It was a last gasp panic effort after ad rates got cut in half on january 1st due to seasonal spending changes. We didn't know it would work. We were embarrassed to ask for support. We wanted to figure it out.

Kevin: Every site has a Patreon. Every YouTuber, comedy group, etc. But you insisted that nobody cared about Hard Drive. Which is wildly untrue. I know you see that now, but again, I think you can see why I and many others are pretty upset. A last ditch panic effort was long overdue. A couple more things from Matt:

It was about the size of the hole we needed plugged budget wise, the time I had left of personal resources, and the past data I had about us trying a patreon (which turned out to be a bad indicator). I didn't think the Patreon would help us fast enough. I made a bad estimation

aka "if we make $1000 more dollars a month via patreon, which would be 10x what we got last time, we will not solve any of our problems. If instead we try to plow down path B, we might make it out in time." That was the thinking. I chose the wrong path, but didn't mean to Kevin also retweeted this comment from the user Matt was responding to: So you're saying that you're bad at running the business, didn't listen to any of your employees until after they were forced to leave their jobs, and now you're going to get more of the money from the Patreon that was their idea in the first place? Matt's Response: Respectfully, I made a mistake delaying the patreon decision. But keeping a comedy site alive for 9 years is not easy, there are lots of potential ideas, and think overall we've done a good and honorable job. Will leave this thread in peace now to allow people their space.

Sorry for linking to Elon's hellsite (derogatory), but sources need links so...

[meta-sequoia]

Rose genetics and the law of unintended consequences (or, ten rose bushes, reviewed)

I have a number of longposts in the backlog, including updates on a number of garden improvement projects I undertook over the winter, but I kept putting off posting them because there kept being Horrors. However, spring is here - in California anyway - and plants wait for no one.

Over the winter of 2025, as a coping mechanism for the aforementioned Horrors, I got really into roses. Because of who I am as a person, deciding what roses I wanted to buy also made me feel obliged to reconstruct the history of rose breeding, just to make sense of the teeming confusion of the tens of thousands of named rose varieties. Humans have been raising roses for food, medicine, and beauty for untold centuries, and so they've really grown up with us. The history of the development of roses, it turns out, is the history of the development of humanity in miniature.

This post has it all: history, some light phylogeny discussion, material analysis of English folk ballads, a conceptual framework for understanding how different kinds of roses vary and why, a #haul breakdown of what bare-root roses I got and what I thought of them, and some philosophical musings on what it means for an organism to be subjected to a long-term selective breeding process, to be remade wholly in the image of human desire. All that, and pictures of roses, under the cut.

My general region of California is considered to have a good climate for roses, much good may it do us. It never gets too hot or too cold, so they essentially never go out of season, and even though our winters are wet, the rest of the year is fairly dry. This is absolutely critical, because the main problem that makes garden roses hard to grow is fungal disease. Modern roses are incredibly susceptible to fungal diseases, which are caused, roughly, by Damp. This has typically been combated with toxic sprays (though there are now less-toxic options) and aggressive pruning regimens.

Needless to say, this is a ridiculous fucking problem for a plant to have. California natives, by comparison, hate irrigation - they have a natural life cycle involving being dry in summer and wet in winter, like California itself, so if you grow them in a climate resembling their natural range, without too much added water, they will be mostly OK. Roses, as far as I can tell, actually hate all water, including rain and humidity, which is much worse because gardeners do not control the weather. If it rains too often after, say, noon, the rose's leaves might get wet, fail to dry off, get a fungal disease, and die. If there is too much fog, or it is humid, as it is in most of the country in the summer, the rose's leaves might get wet &c. If you have a sprinkler system - you get the idea.

Fungal disease can also weaken roses and make them more prone to insect infestations. This is bad because modern garden roses are, without any help from The Weather, already incredibly prone to infestations from aphids, mites, beetles, and a mite-borne disease undescriptively called "rose rosette disease", which produces a habitus that I can only describe as "rose bush eldritch horror".

Now, this may all have you asking one question. Probably, that question is "why are you so obsessed with a plant that wants so badly to die?" I will not be answering this question today. Instead, I will be answering a different question, which is "Why do modern garden roses suck so bad?"

Now, if roses are subject to some manner of curse, then it isn't a family curse, phylogenically speaking. Roses - genus Rosa species extremely miscellaneous - are a member of the family Rosaceae, which contains a massive number of useful and delightful plants. It is possibly the most economically important family of plants next to the brassicas. The rose family brings us not just roses, but apples, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, plums, peaches, apricots, and almonds. And the wild rose, untouched by human efforts, is a lot like a raspberry, actually.

Its flowers have only five petals, in pink or white. It’s got thorny stems that form thickets, and oval (or, technically, lanceolate) leaves with lightly serrated edges. Its flowers are fragrant, which is an adaptation to their long and necessary coexistence with pollinators and other insects - fragrance serves as a chemical signal for insects to "come here" or "go away", depending. The wild rose is hardy, like all wild plants, tolerant of various environmental problems that would kill a garden rose: shade, salt, normal levels of ambient insect and fungal disease pressure, drought, being consistently rained on in the afternoon or evening. It may reproduce asexually from suckers - strong shoots from near the base of the plant - and this makes it able to withstand browsing pressure from e.g. deer. (Put a pin in that.) It also can reproduce in the normal way, by having its flowers pollinated and forming seeds, which are borne in prominent reddish-orange fruits called "hips".

This is not a rose I bought, but here’s Rosa gymnocarpa, a California native rose. It’s a wood rose, so it’s shade-tolerant, and it’s often found in redwood forests specifically, so it tolerates relatively dry soil and very acidic soil.

Honorable mention: Rosa gymnocarpa (wood rose)

Source: Calscape

A raspberry plant in flower, for comparison. Source

The wild rose has another trait, which may be surprising to those who have only ever seen garden roses: it blooms once, usually in the summer. This is typical of flowers, which almost always have a season, for the exact same reason fresh fruit has a season. Flowering plants are on a tight schedule: they need to finish up their blooming, so they can set fruit, so they can get their seeds out before winter, in case the frost kills them off. And mostly we’re used to that: tulips are for spring, so you don't expect a tulip to make a second showing in fall, or to flower continuously throughout the summer. But roses have been bred to do this, and have done it for centuries, for so long we barely remember what it was like when "roses blooming" was a time of year, an event.

It's possible that for most of human history, roses were all the more treasured for being fleeting, which simply isn't an aspect of how we moderns understand roses. I am constantly subjected to traditional ballads at home, both in English and German, so I am very aware that multiple Child ballads mention roses as a way of placing the events of the ballad at a particular time of year. In 'Lady Isobel and the Elf-Knight', a song traditionally associated with May Day, one version of the chorus references the events as occurring 'as the rose is blown'. And at the start of 'Tam Lin', the protagonist meets her fairy lover while plucking a double rose, is "laid down among... the roses red" by him, and finishes the ballad on Halloween night heavily pregnant with his child. The course of the ballad is inextricably intertwined with the course of the seasons, and the bloom of roses is synonymous with early summer. (There's so much symbolism in 'Tam Lin', but especially around roses. Can I interest you in tam-lin.org at this time?)

European religious literature even uses "a rose e'er blooming" as a purely figurative phrase, something impossible and magical enough to be a metonym for the Virgin Mary - but in the modern era, most garden roses are ever-blooming. The perpetual-blooming rose is not the natural state of the rose plant, but a kind of technology that had to be developed. And I don't know, I just think that's neat.

So what have we learned? The wild rose is: once-blooming, tough, possibly shade-tolerant depending on species, very thorny, bearing simple pink or white five-petaled flowers, that are fragrant, pollinator-friendly, and produce fruit readily enough. In short, a practical, normal sort of plant.

The garden rose is…not that. There’s no other way to put this: the modern garden rose is the wild rose, but bimboified.

Now, in case today is your first day on the Internet - well, first of all, welcome, it’s bad here - but secondly, bimboification is a niche fetish where someone is transformed into a hypersexualized version of themselves that is also very stupid. Plant domestication is obviously analogous. I didn’t originate this joke; in fact, I reblogged a joke like this just last week.

Roses are like this but even more so. Like, wheat is clearly bimboified. Its sexual parts (seeds) have been remade, swollen to ludicrous proportions, and wheat is probably worse at being a plant than wild grasses. But we created modern wheat from wild grass because it was more useful that way, and wheat could in theory survive and spread without human cultivation. Roses are Like That purely because we wanted to make them a more perfect decorative object. Centuries of intensive selection pressure for appearance have rendered roses useless as an independent plant: they are so disease-prone they need extensive intervention to even survive, and they are often physically incapable of propagating themselves - one of the basic features of plants! - without human aid. That’s plant bimboification.

Source: Heirloom Roses. This one is called 'Oranges 'n' Lemons. Hardly seems like the same plant!

Here are just a few examples, of what we've done to roses. Humans love rose petals - eating them, distilling them into perfume, smelling them, just looking at them - so the garden rose has massive flowers that are so stuffed with petals that pollinators cannot get at their centers, rendering the rose incapable of reproducing except possibly with the help of a human equipped with a paintbrush. Humans love bright colors, so modern roses come in every color their natural pigments allow. Garden roses are often - though not always - less thorny than their wild cousins, because thorns are inconvenient to humans, and so have been somewhat bred out.

And what’s just as important is what was bred out of wild roses in the process of becoming modern roses - by accident. As mentioned above, modern roses are often useless to pollinators, and, not unrelatedly, can’t reproduce without human help. They often lose their fragrance, if not specifically bred for it. They are very susceptible to disease, because gardeners can keep alive, through sheer stubbornness, plants that natural selection would have culled. Likewise, they need full sun where many wild roses can get by even in the shade of big evergreens, and they can't tolerate nearly as much cold, heat, or salt exposure as their wild relatives.

This 'use it or lose it' thing, by the way, is a general principle of selective processes like plant breeding, or like evolution. If you have two independent traits, A and B, and you select hard for A, then B is likely to gradually drop out of the population, simply because the subset of A carriers that also have B is likely to be small. It's pure statistics. (It essentially is a human-created population bottleneck.) The more intense and ruthless the selection pressure, the stronger the effect. Evolution cares a lot about seed production and hardly at all about color, so wild roses are plain but make enormous rose hips; humans like beautiful roses the color of sunsets, and are indifferent to seed production, so modern roses don’t make hips at all. The failure to select for eventually becomes an implicit selection pressure against.

(Highly-bred organisms are thus less, I guess, well-rounded genetically even before you get to issues of inbreeding, and if you assume there is no biological link between your selected-for traits and other ridealong traits, e.g. domestication syndrome. Genetics is complicated!)

One adapted wild-type trait that - I speculate - was not bred out, due to its direct usefulness to humans, was the ability of roses to grow back vigorously from having leaves or branches removed. This is, it seems to me, an adaptation to herbivore browsing - if you are a rose with minimal regrowth ability, and a deer chews on half your canes, it’s curtains for you. But humans also fully remove half of the canes of their garden roses every winter - it’s critical to controlling the fungal disease that so plagues them. Specifically, pruning improves airflow through the plant, which evaporates the water that keeps falling on the leaves from the sky. (You know. The rain, that roses both hate and need to live.) In some sense, we are acting as caretakers here, shaping the plant in inscrutable ways for its own good. But to the plant, we are basically deer: just another in a long line of animals that want to steal its leaves. Unbelievable! It needs those! Fuck you too, buddy: here’s a faceful of thorns.

Truly, a tale as old as time.

This brings me to my first actual rose review, a kind of bridge between wild roses and the world of cultivated roses.

#1: Rosa rugosa, probably "Hansa"

Source: the author's yard.

This is a sucker - a vigorous young ground-level shoot - from an unnamed rosebush from my mother's house. I say "probably 'Hansa'" because we have no idea what this actually is, only that it is a rugosa hybrid, purchased from an unknown nursery in the Midwest sometime during the Bush administration.

'Hybrid rugosas' are crosses between garden-type roses and a wild rose species called Rosa rugosa, which is native to much of Asia. This particular rose bush has many traits carried over from its wild parent: it's violently fragrant, a glorious sweet-spicy combo that smells to me like childhood and home; it has wrinkly leaves (characteristic of Rosa rugosa in particular); its stems are practically coated in prickles; and it's quite tolerant of shade, drought, and salt (Rosa rugosa is a beach rose).

The main virtue evinced by this rose, derived from its wild parent, is the same reason that it is still here in my garden: it is extremely difficult to kill. My mother, after hearing me say I wanted this specific rose bush at my house the same way it had been at my childhood home, dug up a sucker from her instance, put it in a bag with some wet dirt, carried it by hand on a multi-hour cross-country plane flight, and handed it off to me. Once I received it, I stuck it in a pot, because I was ripping up my lawn and had nowhere to plant it, and mostly forgot about it, because I was busy ripping up my entire lawn. It lost its leaves suspiciously early in the fall. ("That's not good," my mother said, over FaceTime, brow furrowed. "Are the rest of your roses doing that?")

But as the saying doesn't go, "where there's green cambium, there's hope", and I continued to take care of it throughout the winter. I eventually even remembered to put it in the ground. It is now March, and in defiance of the mockery of certain judgemental housemates, who said things like "why do you have a stick in a pot?" and "it's giving 'dead', my guy", this "stick" has now decided to become a rosebush, and has a grand total of (approximately) twenty-five leaves.

Like I said: extremely difficult to kill. It is currently planted 10-ish feet from the base of a redwood tree, a tough environment where some hardy garden-style roses have nonetheless been known to thrive. Given that its resurrection has occurred entirely while it was planted under the redwood, it doesn't seem too mad about its environment.

Review: holy shit, it’s alive???

#2: Zéphirine Drouhin, the "old garden rose"

Source: Heirloom Roses

Rosarians have conceived of many groupings of garden roses, based on known ancestry, phenotype, genetic studies, and Vibes, but one major breakpoint is those bred before 1867, the "old garden roses", and after 1867, the "modern garden roses".

The old garden roses were derived mostly from ancient European and Middle Eastern stock, which had themselves been created from wild roses centuries prior. For example, this is Rosa x alba, an ancient European rose strain; it was used as the heraldic badge of the medieval House of York during the English conflict known as the War of the Roses.

Source: not mine

Some of these roses are perpetual-blooming, a trait introduced as late as the eighteenth century, and which is entirely due to trade contact with China: as far as I can tell, the genes for strong reblooming only come from the Chinese rose-breeding tradition, which was itself centuries old by that point. So the modern Western concept of perpetual-blooming roses as the default kind of rose - like so many other aspects of modernity - is a direct result of Europeans cribbing from everybody else.

Interestingly, France was a major center for rose development during the early modern period. You can see it in the way old garden roses are named: overwhelmingly after some eminent madame or monsieur. This is probably connected to the fact that Josephine, Napoleon Bonaparte’s empress, was a rose fiend: she had two hundred and fifty new varieties of rose to be brought to her gardens at Château de Malmaison, which was probably pretty much all the named varieties of rose that existed then, and many of which were new to European cultivation at that time. Again, this represented a massive inflow of rose genes that were previously restricted to other countries or continents entirely. Inextricably, these gardens also represent the proceeds of early modern global trade, and of empire: Napoleon, on campaign abroad, himself sent her hundreds of specimens of flowering plants, and the French navy confiscated plants and seeds from ships captured and sea and sent them to her.

Anyway, Zéphirine Drouhin, created at the end of the "old garden rose" period and named for some now-forgotten madame or mademoiselle, is highly fragrant - one of the few roses said to really perfume the air - with a vibrant but old-fashioned color palette. (Apricot and yellow roses were also characteristic of the Chinese rose gene pool, and so were significantly less common in old garden roses.) Zéphirine Drouhin is also thornless, a rare trait that we nonetheless see in some old-fashioned garden roses, and a few modern garden roses as well.

Old garden roses have a variable but generally good level of disease resistance. Zéphirine Drouhin in particular, gets something of a bad rap for poor disease resistance; English rose breeder David Austin Roses says, tactfully, that it "prefers warmer climates" (versus, one must assume, rainy England) and that "controlling disease can be a problem". By this you should understand them to mean that it is a whiny little pissbaby that constantly gets blackspot, a diva that will defoliate at the drop of a hat (or the drop of, uh, water).

However, unlike certain other newer roses I will mention later, I have found Zéphirine Drouhin to be pretty healthy so far. I received this rose, like many in this post, "bare root", basically a stick, dormant in a bag of wood shavings. Upon being planted in a part-sun area, it has leafed out with only a scattering of aphids to show in terms of disease.

Review: So far, so good. Looking forward to the fragrance.

#3 and 4: 'Mister Lincoln' and 'Fragrant Cloud', the hybrid tea brothers

Remember how I mentioned that 1868 is the breakpoint between "old garden roses" and "modern garden roses"? That year marked the invention of a new type of rose, the 'hybrid tea', that is in some sense THE rose, the ARCHETYPE of a rose. If you ask someone who knows nothing about roses to draw 'a rose' - if you look up clipart of a rose - a hybrid tea rose is what you'll get.

Source: Star Nursery

This is Mister Lincoln, and although it was developed as late as the 1960s, it has the classic hybrid tea rose form. Hybrid teas have a very distinctive shape, described as "high-pointed", with a spiral of unfurling petals that curl at the edges, and they're borne singly on long stems, making them great for cutting and putting into vases and bouquets. They are not always strongly fragrant, and they are not generally very disease-resistant. They come in a very wide variety of colors, intense and subtle. They are reblooming.

Hybrid teas were developed by another East-meets-West cross, when the Chinese tea roses, freshly imported from Guangzhou in the early 19th century, were bred with the old garden roses. Tea roses have the same iconic form as the hybrid teas; they have those unique, pastel shades that were previously quite absent from European rose stocks; they smell like a fresh cup of tea. All these traits they impart to hybrid teas. Hybrid teas have been very popular ever since, and have been subject to a great deal of selective breeding for color and form.

Hybrid teas don't generally spark joy, to me. I find the 'cartoon rose' shape kind of twee, honestly. And the reputation for lack of disease tolerance puts me off. But I heard Mister Lincoln was incredibly fragrant, and that drew me in. Likewise Fragrant Cloud (1967), which also has the charming feature of being a violent neon coral that is allegedly very difficult to photograph.

Source: Heirloom Roses

“It'll be fine," I thought. "How much fungal disease can it get? It's not like it's humid here."

Never again. My trust is destroyed; fuck hybrid teas.

please, my son, he is very sick

This is my poor Mister Lincoln, planted from bare-root in mid-December. It has three different fungal diseases, and also an aphid infestation I can't seem to get it to shake. It looks like one of those diagrams of a liver in a medical textbook that has fatty liver and cirrhosis and liver cancer all at once, just so you can see what all the diseases look like. This is a rose that has every problem! No other rose in this flower bed comes close to having every problem! 'Munstead Wood' is also a modern garden rose (though from a very different lineage - see my review below) and it has no fungal diseases and not a single aphid!

Well, maybe the other hybrid tea I bought is doing better... well, nope, it rained last week and Fragrant Cloud has powdery mildew.

Review: Come on, man.

#5 Unidentified ‘sunset’ rose

I didn’t buy these roses; they came with my house. As a consequence, I have no idea what they are, but I am now intimately familiar with their traits, and I think they are very indicative of both the high and low points of modern garden roses.

On the surface level, the fact that these rose bushes are still with us is an impressive proof of their persistence under adversity. When I bought the house, these roses were being choked to death. Lily-of-the-nile had been planted way too close to them, and then permitted to grow unchecked and undivided for many years; their roots were completely infiltrated and surrounded with lily roots. The lily roots had also damaged the irrigation lines, which were dribbling uncontrolled amounts of water into the shared root zone. So when I excavated these roses, the whole area smelled strongly of rot, with visible mold throughout; the roots were fully wet even in the heat of August. The roses were also infested with blackspot, not surprisingly. I wasn’t sure if what I was doing was too little, too late.

But when they finally got some drainage, some direct sunlight, and some relief from the brutal root competition, they did start growing back, and even blooming. Come winter, I pruned hard, defoliated, and applied neem oil consistently. And they’ve made a comeback!

Source: these blooms are actually my roses.

They bloom, and they’re beautiful. They do this ombre thing, where the buds are bright yellow and as they open they go from yellow, to orange, and finally to red.

The growth is fairly vigorous, with no powdery mildew no matter how rainy it gets. But their foliage definitely suffers from blackspot, and occasional rose rust; the spores are probably ambiently present in the soil now, and they can’t quite seem to defend themselves, even with ample help from organic fungicides like neem oil.

They also have no fragrance. They smell like nothing. And that’s the standard modern garden rose in a nutshell, I think: beautiful color and form, shaky disease resistance, little fragrance. It’s a little sad, honestly.

Review: Okay, this one is really pretty, actually.

Interlude: Pesticides and the law of unintended consequences

So, yeah, you can sort of see how roses got a reputation for being picky divas. I can only imagine how bad this sort of thing must get in places that get (gasp!) rain or humidity in the summer.

Now, having created plants that are too disease-ridden to live, rose-lovers came up with practical and effective solutions to the disease problem they created. For the past century or so, the go-to fix for our increasingly disease-prone rose population has been chemicals: regular applications of synthetic insecticide and fungicide sprays, as well as plenty of fertilizer and herbicide to feed the roses and kill any competing weeds.

However, recall the theme of this post: the law of unintended consequences. In agriculture, the development of modern pesticides and fertilizers has been genuinely miraculous; the Green Revolution is estimated to have saved a billion people from starvation in the latter half of the twentieth century. Saving a billion people! Can you even begin to conceive of what it would be like to save a billion people, even grapple with the moral weight of that act? I know I can't; the number is simply too large for our moral intuitions to handle, I think. So I'm hesitant to bad-mouth pesticides and fertilizers too much.

But they do have massive downsides. Chemical fertilizers leach into the groundwater and cause algal blooms that make entire bodies of water go anoxic, rendering them uninhabitable to fish and the rest of the aquatic food chain. Insecticides are probably responsible for colony collapse, which endangers the pollinators that we rely on for our food supply.

And, well, even if you don't give a shit about the natural world - you are a part of the natural world. You are an animal, with all the frailty that implies. Our bodies use many of the same ancient metabolic pathways as insects and plants; the majority of your DNA is shared with a banana. And because you are an animal, it is very difficult indeed to create an insecticide that will poison other animals without poisoning you too, at least a little. Herbicides are somehow still worse, despite the more distant biological relationship between humans and dandelions: Roundup, for instance, is linked to non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, which has led to Monsanto paying out massive legal settlements to cancer patients who used their products.

So if we can't grow roses without coating them in poison, maybe we should just… not do that? Go back to growing super-hardy nearly-wild roses like rugosas, forgoing forever the elegance and sublime color of a modern rose?

Give up this? ‘Glowing Peace’, Heirloom Roses

Not so fast! Maybe this technological problem has a technological solution. If we bred roses so that they sucked, maybe we should just not do that! Make different roses! Make roses that don't suck!

#6-#8, ‘Ebb Tide', 'Eden', and 'Lavender Crush': roses that don't suck

Over the last fifty years, people have become increasingly aware of the impacts of modern lifestyles upon our health and the health of the planet and its ecosystems. So maybe this has made the public less willing to buy roses that need to be treated constantly with toxic sprays. Or maybe it's just that growing disease-prone roses is an enormous pain in the ass. Spray, prune, spray, defoliate, fertilize, spray, fertilize, spray, water - but not too much! Oops, powdery mildew. Defoliate and spray some more.

So the genetic health of the newer varieties of garden roses is greatly improved. The two hybrid teas I struggled with above were bred in the 1960s. All the named rose varieties in this section were bred since the 1990s or later: Eden in 1997, Ebb Tide in 2004, and Lavender Crush, the baby of the group, was introduced in 2016. All of them are vibrantly healthy and quite vigorous; Ebb Tide and Eden are shade-tolerant too, and Lavender Crush is allegedly very winter-hardy. After a scant two months in the ground, they've started to put out flower buds. And they keep some of the glorious color and form of older roses. Look at them!

Source: Heirloom Roses.

I don't mean to say all 20th century roses are bad and disease-ridden. I also have purchased 'New Dawn' (introduced 1930), due to it being the fifteen-dollarest rose at the Home Depot. (My toxic trait is that I am an absolute sucker for a good deal. I don't go into TJ Maxx anymore; it's too dangerous.) 'New Dawn' has all the ancestral, throwback traits I laud here: shade-tolerance, fragrance, disease resistance. It even brings in the pollinators! But it seems to me there's been a noticeable uptick in the quality of newer rose introductions, particularly when it comes to disease resistance. I'm not wired into the professional rose world to know what that is; I'm Literally Just Some Guy. But it's a good trend.

Review: I am so excited for the buds to open, you have no idea.

#9: 'Double Knockout': the 'landscape' rose

Wait, no, I take that back. These roses have too much ease of care. Put some back.

The Knockout rose has one virtue: you cannot kill it with an axe. Literally.

This rose was planted right at the foot of a redwood tree in my garden, because the previous owner of my house was an idiot. This is a terrifically bad setup for roses and redwoods: redwoods acidify the soil, and suck up water and nutrients aggressively, leaving little for surrounding plants, and of course they provide dense shade. Roses hate the acid, the dry and low-nutrient soil, and the shade; this plant never bloomed all last summer. For their part, the redwoods hate having anything planted in their inner root zone - their roots are relatively shallow for such a large tree. This is not a good situation for anyone, so I hacked this rose back to the ground, dug out as much of the root ball as I dared, and in my naivete thought that would be the end of it. Well, it has grown back. Now I am faced with the dilemma of whether to risk root injury to my redwood tree, or just let the rose be, bloomless as it is. Probably the latter is better for the redwood tree, on the whole. Maybe it’ll get choked out if I don’t water it? Anyone’s guess, really.

The category of landscape roses is a 2000s invention. The first Knockout rose was introduced in 2000 after years of intensive selective breeding for being easy-care, free-flowering, and disease-resistant; the similar Drift line was the product of an amateur rose breeder in 2006 to much the same ends. Landscape roses are so named because instead of being demanding prima donnas suited only to those who love roses enough to take on the Rose Tasks, they’re just another pretty shrub in the landscape.

And I will say this for them: in that bad, fungal spore–inundated flower bed I mentioned, my landscape roses (plus Munstead Wood, see below) are notably free of fungal disease.

Also, I think that's leaf tissue proliferating at the center of the bottom left bloom?? A rare but harmless growth disorder of flowering plants.

This comes at a cost, of course, at least if you’re a snob like me. I don’t think landscape roses are very interesting-looking - though of course they come in a wide variety of colors, the better to coordinate with the color scheme of your house! - and they are generally, tragically, without fragrance. While I can’t complain about anything that gets US gardeners to use less pesticides, they are barely roses to me. They are, in fact, the closest roses come to being an inanimate object, a decorative thing you can just plonk down in your garden wherever, like a tacky concrete statue. They’re a commodity; the enchantment is gone. I wouldn’t rip them out where they’re well-sited, but I sure wouldn’t plant more.

Now, this is incredibly mean to people who love landscape roses, but here goes. I’m reminded of a thread from r/Ceanothus, the California native gardening subreddit, that is now burned into my brain. OP asks for a native shrub recommendation, but not just any native shrub. OP wants a native shrub that will grow very tall, but also stay very narrow - 1’ wide in places. OP needs a native shrub that will grow thick and vigorous, to block out their view of the neighbors. OP needs this thing to be evergreen; OP presumably wants low water inputs. And OP needs all this, in a shrub that will grow in full shade.

In fairness, OP was polite about it, and this is a common problem for urban gardeners. The dark, untended canyon between buildings is a very common phenomenon in Californian cities. I too have a narrow, shaded side yard containing a tiny strip of crappy, gravelly dirt, that I’d love to grow something in: how do you think I found this post? Dear reader, I am very much at that devil's sacrament.

And the ceanothusheads of r/Ceanothus tried gamely. But one commenter replied with something that fully changed how I think about gardening:

Source: Reddit

Sometimes, what you need is not a living organism, with its own needs, that will change over time in ways you may not endorse, that interacts with the world around it. Sometimes what you really want is a man-made object. Sometimes what you want to grow in your tall, narrow, lightless, bone-dry side yard, for your privacy requirements, is a fence. And that’s what I think about landscape roses. In Mediterranean and desert climates, as long as there's enough sun, you can always fall back on planting a succulent. But not every location can grow succulents outdoors year-round. In temperate climates, landscape roses could probably be successfully replaced with a particularly attractive boulder. Or, if what you want is a smart-looking, easy-care hedge: consider a fence.

Review: I’d maybe rather plant a fence a succulent.

#10: 'Munstead Wood': the old English rose, reloaded

‘Munstead Wood’, my final acquisition, is a credit to another major modern rose breeding program, this time out of England: David Austin Roses. The main idea of the David Austin rose-breeding project seems to be combining the particular charms of traditional English old garden roses - their fragrance, their romantic, sophisticated forms - with the virtues of modern roses - continuous blooming, a wide range of highly Instagrammable colors - plus disease-tolerance that twenty-first century gardeners now expect. And judging by their singular impact on the contemporary rose market, they seem to have been very successful at that goal. The Reddit reviews are glowing, the forums are abuzz for their hottest new releases (Dannahue restock wen?), their most popular roses are often sold out, and other rose sellers have catalog filters for 'English shrub roses' that allegedly share the looks and fragrance of David Austin's best.

From the author's camera roll. 'I can't believe it's not Dave [sic] Austin!'

Their marketing is also very slick. Their website is very informative, with separate filters for various kinds of roses you might want to buy ('Best for fragrance', 'For a shady spot', 'Thornless or nearly so'), all the rose varieties have literary or historical names or else are named after charming British locations, and are all beautifully photographed in their idyllic show garden, and the prose is carefully engineered to incite lust in the winter-weary gardener. They even do periodic drops of new roses, like a sneaker company.

So last November, I allowed myself to buy one David Austin rose, 'Munstead Wood'.

Source: David Austin Roses

'Munstead Wood' is really gorgeous, I think, blooming in a deep burgundy color. The website claims the fragrance is "Old Rose, with fruity notes of blackberry, blueberry and damson".

An interesting fact about 'Munstead Wood' is that it is actually region-locked. David Austin Roses sells roses in both the US and UK (and maybe other places; sorry I am so American), but the climate of the UK has been changing, with more extreme weather events and even more rain. And you know how it is with roses and the rain. 'Munstead Wood' was no longer able to thrive, and has packed up its little rucksack and gone out to explore the world as a lone vagabond - specifically, America.

So how is it doing here? Great, actually. It may have been rained on every day for the past week, but at least it's not in England, I guess.

'Munstead Wood' has no fungal disease. It looks like it's never even heard of fungal disease. I'm pretty impressed! I can't actually tell you whether the roses are good, but this is a pretty good plant, which is a good start.

Review: I'm holding myself back from buying more David Austin roses right now. God help me, I have two more open full- to part-sun spots in my garden right now.

David Austin, "Lady of Shalott". Call me the Lady of Shalott the way I'm languishing in my tower, gazing only at the mere reflections of the real world (stuck inside, looking at my phone, because of the rain) and am about to throw myself in the river with longing (to be out in the garden)

[twitter-sakuranokaze]

FF14 Battle Portrait Tutorial

For the past few weeks I was trying to find a way to recreate the battle portrait from FF14 as there was a few characters that I want to see in that style but don't officially have one yet. I think I got it down more or less (see image below) so I thought it's a good time to share what I did.

First of all, I made a few files that would help make life a little easier. They can be grabbed here .

Note: I did use Reshade to do a bit of work at the screenshot stage to help speed up the process but the same effect can be recreated in Photoshop with a vanilla screenshot. There are a lot of tutorials on how to do comic/cartoon effect in photoshop and those would make good bases to work off of.

Step 1: Take the screenshot with the PortraitBase Shader on. I usually take two screenshots. One with "Comic" on and one with it turned off. This is so that I have more to work with if needed.

Step 2: Drag all the screenshots into photoshop and remove the background. In photoshop, arrange the layer so that the screenshot with the Comic lines visible is on top of the one with the effect off.

Step 3: Duplicate the the layer with the "comic" effect and apply Blur->Gaussian blur (radius 0.5)

Step 4: Take a look at the hair. In Eric's case, It still doesn't look blur enough to me so I used the blur tool and blurred it a bit more

Step 5: Create a new layer above the layer in the previous step and use the brush tool to start outlining the edges. Where to outline is up to you but the idea is to make edges defined so that it looks more like a drawing.

Step 6: Duplicate the outline layer and then hide that layer. Step 7: Merge everything under the outline layer. Step 8: Drag and drop the "Texture.png" into the project and Clip it to your character layer. Set the blending of the texture to "soft light". Step 9: Drag and drop the "stroke Texture.png" into the project and Clip it to your character layer. Adjust the size till you are happy then set the blending to "overlay". Step 10: Adjust the opacity settings of both texture layers until it looks good to you.

Step 11: Click on your character layer and go to image->Adjustments->Hue/Saturation (note: you will see I dragged in the official Hades portrait as a point of reference to work off of). Adjust the saturation till you are happy.

Step 12: Go to image->Adjustments->Color Balance and adjust the color till you are happy. In this example, since Eric is also wearing the Sophist robe, I tried to match that color to Hades' Sophist robe color.

Step 13: Once you are happy, drag the "Template.png" into the project and scale that to the size you want. Make sure it is completely covering the character. If it's not, you can just use paint more of it with the brush tool to extend it till it covers everything.

Step 14: Hide the "template.png" layer and select your character layer. Use the magic wand tool to select the outside of the character.

Step 15: With the selection still selected, click on the "Template.png" layer and press delete on your keyboard. You should now be left with a blank in the shape of your character.

Step 16: Drag the"Template.png" layer to be below your character layer. Then click on your character layer and clip it.

Step 17: Click on the "Template.png" layer and add a 2px stroke and shadow to it.

Step 18: Drag "Back_Deco.png" into the project and place it behind your character. Scale it till you are happy with it.

And that's it! Now you can recreate portraits for any NPCs that you want (in theory). A lot of it is also fine tuning to what you want but this should at least give you a decent base to work off of :)

[ghostlyferrettarot]

★🎸ᶠᶸᶜᵏᵧₒᵤ!⋆｡ °⋆Pick a Picture: How others see you vs How you really are★ᶠᶸᶜᵏᵧₒᵤ!🎧⋆｡ °⋆

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🐻Masterlist🐻 🐻Masterlist 2🐻

★🎸ᶠᶸᶜᵏᵧₒᵤ!⋆｡ °⋆Pile 1:

❤︎ How others perceive you: 🃏 The Star – Queen of Swords – Six of Wands

Hello, Pile 1! You may have heard of it before (or not), but many people see you as someone with a very special light. As if you were that person who walks into a room and suddenly everything feels a little calmer, more hopeful. They see you as elegant, wise, someone who's been through things but hasn't let them break you. In fact, you project an image of incredible mental clarity and focus, as if you have the answers others are looking for. Even if you don't say anything, your mere presence can inspire. It's no coincidence that people admire you, even if they don't always say so directly. Some may think you're "unattainable" or that you're always fine, that you don't need help because you seem to be in control of everything. Yes, that's how strong your aura is to others. Believe it too. 1.

❤︎ How you really are: 🃏 Page of Cups – Four of Swords – The Moon

But just between us, you know that appearances don't tell the whole story. Because even though you may seem strong and confident on the outside, there's a part of you that is pure tenderness and sensitivity. You have such a soft heart, full of dreams, fears, intuitions, and a deep need for rest, space, time to process what you feel. You're one of those people who dwells on a phrase someone said for days. Who gets moved by a song, a sunset, a sudden memory. Who sometimes feels misunderstood or invisible, even when surrounded by people. And there's an inner world so rich and complex that not everyone gets to see. You're also on a path of self-discovery. Sometimes you feel like you don't even know who you are, or what you want, and that's okay. You're learning to love yourself amidst the confusion, and that's braver than you think. You don't always have to be everyone's shining star. It's okay if you have cloudy days. It's okay if you need to slow down and breathe. Let them truly see you, even despite the judgment that being seen can bring. Because the people who truly love you will love both your light and your shadows. You're amazing, Pile 1, even when you doubt yourself.

★🎸ᶠᶸᶜᵏᵧₒᵤ!⋆｡ °⋆Pile 2:

❤︎ How others perceive you: 🃏 The Emperor – Knight of Pentacles – Nine of Wands

Hi, Pile 2! People see you as a rock, not in a bad way, but they can see you as someone who is hard to read. Like that person who never falls, who always has a plan, who thinks everything through and executes it with patience and precision. You're the one who gives advice, the one who seems to have your life together (even if inside you're sometimes improvising like the rest of us). Many perceive you as someone super focused, with a strong character and a will that's frighteningly firm. As if nothing could stop you. It may even be that, unwittingly, some people see you as unattainable or even somewhat closed off, as if there were a wall protecting what you truly feel. And what they may not know is that this "wall" isn't coldness, it's protection. Because what you carry inside is valuable, and not everyone is allowed to see it.

❤︎ How you really are: 🃏 Two of Cups – Ten of Wands – Ace of Swords

Inside everything feels so different, doesn't it? I really feel you pile 2, I've felt like this before. You are a person who wants real connection. A deep one. The kind that isn't just about nice words but about presence, someone who stays when you have nothing to give but your tiredness. You have a heart that wants to love and be loved, but you often find yourself holding everything up. Relationships, work, your own and other people's emotions. And that weighs on you. Sometimes so much, you don't even realize how much until your body or mind starts to say "enough." You are also very aware. You have a lucidity that cuts like lightning; you know how to see beyond the obvious. You have truths inside that scream to come out, but the world doesn't always give you the safe space to express them without feeling like you have to soften or hide them. You don't have to carry everything. You weren't born to be everyone's emotional support, or to demonstrate strength 24/7. It's okay to need. It's okay to let your guard down. There's a tremendous sweetness inside you that deserves to be nurtured, not only by yourself… but by others as well.

★🎸ᶠᶸᶜᵏᵧₒᵤ!⋆｡ °⋆Pile 3:

❤︎ How others perceive you: 🃏 The Fool – Three of Cups – Knight of Wands

Hello, Pile 3! When people think of you, the first thing that comes to mind is “freedom.” You have that high-vibrating energy, like a ray of sunshine. You're like a breath of fresh air for those around you. Cheerful, curious, spontaneous, like someone always ready for the next adventure, the next crazy idea, the next unexpected laugh. They see you as someone who doesn't complicate things, who goes through life with confidence and a contagious spark.

That person who lives up to their plans, who lifts others' spirits effortlessly. Some may even think you're a bit carefree, that everything slips away from you, or that you don't take things “so seriously.” As if your soul were always light, immune to the weight of the world. And yes… that's part of you. Im getting Sophie from Mamma Mia vibes, so others may see you similar as her.

❤︎ How you really are: 🃏 King of Cups – Temperance – Five of Cups

This is where things get real. Because behind that luminous energy, there's a heart that feels so much. Much more than you let on. You have an emotional depth that surprises. You are wise in the art of feeling, even if you don't always show it. You learned to balance yourself, to calm your own storms, and that gave you an emotional maturity that not everyone imagines you have. You are like the sea: on the outside, it may appear calm and bright, but inside, it holds secrets, currents, and intense stories. And even if people see you as happy, you are often going through things in silence. You've had losses, disappointments, moments when you gave more than you received… and that left its mark on you. But instead of hardening yourself, you decided to keep loving, keep trusting, keep shining. And that, love, is a form of courage that not everyone understands. Sometimes you wish others could see that other side of you. That they realized that being joyful doesn't mean not feeling pain. That your freedom doesn't mean detachment. That your laughter doesn't mean the absence of tears. It's okay if not everyone understands your depth at first glance. It's not your job to prove who you are: just to continue being. The people who see all that you are, not just your spark but also your soul… those are the ones worth letting in. Sending you a big hug, pile 3 <3.

⛧°.⋆༺♱༻⋆.°⛧ Thank you for reading and let me know if it resonated!⛧°.⋆༺♱༻⋆.°⛧

[kaivenom]

One piece men first reaction to having a wet dream about you

Characters: Zoro, Luffy, Sanji, Kid, Killer, Law

Warnings: NSFW, obviously

A/N: i am starting to think that i will put some of the future preferences with multiple parts, to give the One Piece Dilf a place too.

Masterlist

Monkey D. Luffy

Is surprised, a lot. He was dreaming about meat and suddently it transformed in your body, naked.

The cream of cakes and the juices from the meat covering all your body in a revealing pose.

When he oppened his eyes, he stared at the ceiling trying to process why you were on his dream.

Then he realized how his stomach felt strange and his pants incredibly tight.

He knew that feeling wasn't from hunger, so he let his hand travel to his crotch and palm it thru the underwear.

It felt really good, he finally slided his hand on his underwear and started to pump slowly his cock.

All he could think about is your body and how good would that image look in front of him.

When he was on the edge of cumming, he realized that maybe it he should go talk to you.

A broken moan escaped his lips while he got up from the bed, with a painfully hard member.

He needed to know if you can help him.

Roronoa Zoro

He feels "horrified", he tents to avoid feelings, talks or being emotional involved with anyone.

So, when he dream about you sucking him off with a smile, he got into a really bad mood.

Everyone noticed but nobody could know why, he got especially tense when you were around.

The end point came on lunch, when he had to saw you eat a hot dog, his mind went crazy of reminiscing all the things from his dream.

He went fast to the crow's net and tried to workout all the feelings away.

He got hard, really hard, to the point he couldn't concentrate on nothing.

After a whole hour of changing exercizes furiously, he sat down, trembling, sweating and whimpering... but not from the workout.

With a dissapointed grunt he started to jerk off, at first crusing your name with irritation and at the end letting out breathless moans.

He cummed a lot, all over his body. His only thought while he was heading to the showers was not to bump into you.

Vinsmoke Sanji

His hand was on his pants even before he wakes up.

He moans, whimpers and sights with every touch he imagine you do to him.

The vision of your breasts bouncing while you ride him, unable to touch you because his hands are tied up, that drives him crazy.

He doesn't know if he is still asleep or he is already awake, but he cums undone with a really loud moan.

He is not very good at pretending or trying to be quiet.

Then he felt bad about dishonoring you, but felt sooo good to him.

His day went crazy from there, having some avoidant attachment we could say.

He changes between being your living servant and licking your feet to locking himself on the kitchen.

You didn't understand that, it was really weird, but in fact, he gets away to hide the boner you make him feel.

He usually controls his impulses but after that dream he can't keep his hands out of himself.

He really wanted to aproach you on the kitchen and eat you out there, but he can't .... and then he feels bad about imagine it again.

He has a huge conflict between his desires and his chivalry.

Trafalgar Law

He feels ... unproffesional, he is your captain and you are his subordinate, he can't dream about that.

He tries to stay away from you, not from guilt but from embarrasment, from seeing you and only picturing your body riding him while he presses his chest against yours.

Then as the day passed by he starts to get closer to you, not conscientiously but his body someone tried to have some contact.

A little brush on the dinning room, setting himself behind you to get something on a "higher" shelf.

He tries to find excuses to see you alone, trying to have the courage to make a move... saying it to you or kissing you but he couldn't do it.

That lead to unnecesary visits to his office, helping him with some "new" projects on the lab, giving him books, etc.

At the end you spent all the day making stupid walks around the submarine and you got so angry you yelled at him.

He won't admit this part, but you made him hard with your yells at him.

Eustass Kidd

He gets up, not surprised at all to dream about you, he knows exactly what you do to him.

But dreaming about taking you from the back, all in four, his hands on your ass pressing firmly, that caught him out off guard.

He went to take a shower and couldn't resist to jack off under the hot water.

And It works, he is not hard anymore... Until he saw you later on the deck.

He is a very direct person but also a very arrogant one.

That results in having him trying to sound like a fuck boy, making you desire him and show it, before he even tells you he wants to fuck you.

Showing of his muscles and attributes, being extra confident and dominant thinking that the kind of stuff you like.

Once he realized he doesn't need to be that extravagant and just sit there and whisper naughty things on your ears, he will win his prize.

Killer

His dream his very connected with feelings becuase you two were in missionary, you looking at him with heart eyes full of love and lust. (without his helmet)

Goes straight forward to tell you.

Very mature from him, and plus having the helmet he can hide his blush.

When you go to take breakfast, he tells you, sounding very relaxed. He is trying to hide the fact that he is still hard.

He went so fast to tell you that his member didn't catch the message yet.

He presses his body to the counter trying to hide it.

He doesn't want to scary you or make you uncomfortable, he just wants to talk things.

After that, he tries to make distance a little bit to give you time to think.

But he can't help but give small glances to your body, he can't help it... and the helmet helps to be discreet.

[tsuutarr]

Concept: Yandere!Alice in Wonderland Characters (but it's only the White Rabbit for this piece) x Reader

“Wake up! Please, wake up!”

At the desperate call of the static-laden voice, your eyes groggily open. Your head hurts, thrumming with heavy noise. The artificial lights are too bright and yellow, staining your vision like aged-paper. It makes your headache worse.

“Oh no, are you ill?” a voice teeters. Face scrunched, you look up to see a screen hanging over you. A small image of a pixelated white rabbit flickers on and off. “Oh no, oh no… we’re so behind schedule…”

“What…” you being, head swirling. You don’t understand where you are or what’s happening. You don’t even really remember anything, for that matter. It makes you feel sick.

“Ah, I’m really sorry,” the pixelated rabbit apologizes, looking quite guilty. “Yes, yes, it’s quite a lot to take in…” 

Before you know it, the screen the pixelated rabbit is on moves closer to you. The blue light is bright, making you squint.

“Hello, [Alice],” it greets you softly. “My name is WH173-R48817, though most call me White Rabbit or White.”

“My name isn’t [Alice].” You’re not sure where that statement came from, but it feels wrong to be referred to as [Alice].

“Ah… Ah, yes, certainly,” White’s voice murmurs.“Apologies. What would you like to be called?”

You tell White a name – you’re not entirely sure where that name came from, but it feels right.

“Understood. I will refer to you as such.” With a comforting smile, White continues. “Now, as I was saying… I am the White Rabbit System, an AI system that helps manage things in this lab.”

“A lab?”

“Yes,” White responds. “We are currently in a laboratory.” 

Your eyes flicker around the room and it’s quite obvious now that you are, in fact, in a lab-like place. You’re comfortably resting on a surgery bed as jars of… body parts line the shelves around you.

“You are a part of the Wonderland Project as the most successful participant. Now that you’ve regained consciousness, we must exit the starting point.”

You stare at White blankly, its words doing very little to reveal anything substantial to you. However, White is far too frazzled to properly listen to you, going on its own little tangent. You didn’t think an AI could be so… anxious. 

“We’re already quite late!” it frets while you eye it. The screen White is on is embedded into some device on the wall. You doubt the device will be able to move outside of the room.

“How are you going to exit this place?” you ask. 

“Ah, look at me, being a klutz,” it sighs, somehow looking bashful despite being an AI. “A moment, please.” And just like that, the screen it was displayed on flickers off, the blue light fading away. Momentarily, you’re stunned, until you hear the soft footfalls approaching you. You turn your head to see a tall man with bunny ears.

“Greetings,” he says. His voice sounds like White’s, though a little deeper and more human. “I wondered which form would be the most efficient, and decided that this one would work best.”

“What.”

He continues walking closer to you as he talks. “I have a few bodies that I can connect my programming to. This is one of them.” When he finally reaches you, you can see how tall he is. He’s rather lanky and thin, but his height is enough to be intimidating. “Pardon me. I’m not that fond of touching others myself, but I have no choice,” he mutters, before reaching for you and cradling you in his arms faster than you can process what’s going on. “Hold on to me. We are quite behind schedule.”

“Behind schedule? For what?”

“The continuation of the Wonderland Project, of course.”

“And why exactly do I have to be a part of this project?”

White peers down at you curiously. “Well, isn’t it obvious?” he asks. “Because you’re the most important key, of course. We need you.”

With that, he leaves the room with you in his arms.

[a-suspicious-number-of-ducks]

Hermit-a-Day May, day 5: False + cross stitch.

[Image ID: A pixel art of Minecraft Youtuber Falsesymmetry. Behind her is a large, ornate clock face in shades of teal. False is wearing a dark teal overshirt, a red and white striped shirt, and a pair of gray steampunk goggles on top of her head. Her hair is blonde and straight. She has a neutral, thoughtful expression. /.End ID]

Welcome to my first post of Hermit-a-Day May 2025! I've actually half-finished every single day prior to this one, but haven't had anything ready to post until today, so. Here we go. This year, like last year, I will be challenging myself to use a different style or medium for each and every day of the event. Some of those will just be finishing up last year's pieces, since I am eternally full of hubris and am bad at estimating how long projects take. Some of them, like this one, are new!

Today's style/medium is cross stitch. Unfortunately, I didn't actually finish the...cross stitching part of the project on time. I'll be making this in real life eventually, but what you see pictured above is the digital pattern I created for the piece. Details about my process and additional images are under the cut!

I don't really have specific references for this one, other than False's skin and a google images page full of results for "fancy roman numeral clock." I'll take you through my process instead!

I started with pencil thumbnails to get my ideas down, and I settled on a clock background because... y'know, Cogsmeade. I know that's not technically Hermitcraft iconography, but I like it anyway. Then, I painstakingly measured out a pixel art clock in Krita, only to immediately cover up most of it. Here's the clock by itself, in all its glory!

[Image ID: Pixel art of an ornate teal clock face with Roman numerals representing each hour. The clock's hands are elaborate, with spirals and loops along their lengths. /.End ID]

Next, I added False herself. The colors and vibes here are my actual "vision" for the piece--the cross-stitched version is unfortunately limited by what colors of embroidery floss exist and are available at my local craft store.

[Image ID: The same pixel art of Falsesymmetry as earlier in the post, but with slightly different colors. The teal shades of the clock are lighter and more subtle, and the blonde shades of False's hair are more saturated and golden. /.End ID]

Finally, I exported the Krita image to flosscross.com, which is a delightful and extremely helpful tool to convert images into cross stitch patterns, complete with matching the nearest colors of floss available. That's how I got the image at the beginning of this post. Hopefully, before too long, I'll be able to show y'all what this looks like in real life!

(If you read this far, you have my respect and eternal gratitude. Thank you, and happy arting!)

[fuckyeahgoodomens]

Good Omens graphic novel update: June 2024

Welcome to the June update. A lot of behind the scenes work at the moment but we're grabbing the travel sweets, popping in the Bentley and hitting the road. More on that below.

Admin

Ongoing reminder that the project FAQ can be found here. 

I pledged using my Apple ID, or no longer use the address my pledge is attached to, or I cannot work out what email address my pledge is connected to. What should I do? Please contact us via your Kickstarter account where the pledge is connected; we will be able to see on our system which address it is. If it's one you have access to, great! The FAQ has information on how to resend your invite link to access the PledgeManager. If it's one you are not able to access, then you can let us know which email is preferred and we can update this on the system, which will automatically send a new invite.

Events

We've had a lot of queries about when the Good Omens team will be attending events more formally, after some Aziraphale and Crowley spotting at conventions we'd been to previously. Well, we're excited to confirm the first: Good Omens HQ will be at ACME Comic Con in Glasgow, Scotland this September.

We'll be bringing the actual-real-life-home-to-Crowley-and-his-plants Bentley from Season 2 of Good Omens, the first time the car has been made available publicly for fans to come see and get photos with, ahead of its journey back to the set and the start of Season 3 filming.

We also see Quelin Sepulveda, aka Muriel, has been announced for the event for some additional ineffable joy.

You can get your tickets for ACME Comic Con here. We hope to see some of you there.

While we won't be rocking up with the Bentley to this next one, we want to let you know about Ineffable Con which, though sold out in person, is also taking place virtually in July. The fan-run event hosts great panels, auctions and more, with money raised going to Alzheimer’s Research UK, in memory of Sir Terry Pratchett.

Where next? We have - not an exaggeration - a list of about 200 events somewhere from when we asked fans this on Instagram and while we can't promise quite that amount of convention attendance, we're certainly looking to do some more things in future with Good Omens at large. Watch this space.  

Good Omens items...

This month has largely seen prototypes and samples for the wider Good Omens merch store arriving, and while we can't share those yet, we are certainly excited to see more fan product suggestions coming to life. That does, however, leave our public item updates a little slim on the ground.

To make up for that, here's some new panels from Colleen:

Also known as, "What could possibly go wrong?" And:

Also known as, "Well why don't you ▇▇▇ ▇▇▇▇▇▇ ▇▇▇ ▇▇!@#▇" or words to that effect, we'd imagine.  

Update from Colleen

Following such a positive response to Colleen's piece last month, bringing you behind the scenes into making the Good Omens graphic novel, we are delighted to say that she has agreed to write something for our updates going forward! For June, she's going more in depth into the process of flatting and the technicalities of colouring on screen vs print. Over to you, Colleen.

---

I mentioned the other month that I use a flatter to help me with technical work on GOOD OMENS, and here is a great example.

This is my original, hand drawn line art.

And this is the flatting file which was created using the MultiFill computer program.

It will put your eyes out.

The raw image above demonstrates how the color art lines up solidly under the line art. If it doesn't do that, you get a weird phenomenon in print called ghosting, a tiny little line of white around each segment of color. I had this issue on one major project and ended up redoing every single color file after I got a look at the first printing. Nearly two weeks of work.

The same image with the line art on top.

The layer order looks like this.

Background copy is the clean, line art layer.

I scan the art at 600 dpi, then make the blacks pure black, the whites pure white. Then I convert back to greyscale, then RGB, then duplicate the layer. Then I delete the white on the upper layer so the line art layer is transparent but the blacks on that layer are not.

If you have blacks on a layer that has been multiplied, you can see slight color through those blacks. You want pure black.

The lower layer is where I use the MultiFill program to create the digital flats. First you use MultiFill to drop in the random colors, then the companion plug-in Flatter Pro to make those colors seal under the black lines.

This probably sounds like a silly thing to worry about, but if the flat colors don’t line up perfectly under the black line art, you get the dreaded ghosting I mentioned. You can see it below in this image. It’s a tiny little white line that will appear around the black lines and color areas.

This drives me nuts and is an absolute nightmare to fix.

It’s a very common problem, especially for people who work for web and don’t anticipate the problems going from web to print.

What looks great on your computer can cause big problems in print.

From here, my flatter Jul Mae Kristoffer, who is way over in the Philippines, does flatting that is more in keeping with the areas of color I want to isolate. As you see on Layer 1.

But again, this is still pretty ugly, and not what I would use for final color. Flatting is a technical issue, not a creative one, though in some cases a flatter will make choices you may use. Most of the time they don't.

Here is my final color page.

Sometimes my MultiFill flats are so wonky I have a hard time getting my brain to snap out of what I see before me. If I get stuck, it's a good idea to just pick at it and come back to it later.

If it really, really bothers me, I’ll take the MultiFill flatter layer and desaturate the color so it doesn’t poke my eyes out.

Here’s an example. The digital flat file.

The desaturated flat file that doesn’t make me want to poke my eyes out.

And the final color.

Sometimes I just put in a solid white layer so I don’t see the flats at all. Flatting is there to allow you to easily pick spots to color in, and doesn’t usually appear in the final work.

Sometimes I want to create my colors using transparent color over a white ground, which is more delicate in the final.

Here’s an example from Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. I also selected all black line art here and converted it to sepia to give it a vintage look. Except for the fairies. They’re green.

A colorist must also consider color settings.

Different clients can have different requirements. I find these color settings, which I got from the Hi-Fi Studio, to be pretty solid. I use them as my default for all my projects unless otherwise requested. If your publisher has other settings, they’ll usually send you a csf file which you can upload to Photoshop. The program will save your files and you can just switch between them as you need them.

This tells the printer things about the paper and the spread of the ink you will use. That’s what dot gain means - it makes printed color look darker than intended, so you set up your files to account for it.

When you hover your pointer over each box, it will tell you what each setting is supposed to accomplish.

Another really important thing to consider when coloring comics is color range.

I’m coloring this book in RGB range, but for print you use CMYK.

I’m about to confuse the heck out of some people with this post, I’m afraid. But here we go.

Here is this shot in RGB color setting.

And here is the same page calibrated for print in CMYK.

The biggest shift is in the reds. Print cannot match those reds.

You may not see much difference here, but it’s the sort of thing that drives artists crazy.

A computer should be perfect for conveying exactly what you want, right? It's all just 0's and 1's, binary information, and that information should be the same from one computer to the next?

Nope. Not even close.

First off, computer monitors must be calibrated. You can use a computer program or a tool that measures the color on your computer screen and then adjusts the color to an industry standard.

Have you ever been in an electronics shop where a bunch of TV shows were on display, all of them playing the same show, and have you noticed how different the color was from one TV to the next?

It's like that.

I freely admit I don't pay a whole lot of attention to calibration, but if I were a professional photographer I would. I'd have a little spectrometer attached to my screen and software would adjust my monitor to the best possible standard range. As it is, I just use the default setting on my computer and hope for the best.

If your monitor is properly calibrated and your art is shown on another monitor that is properly calibrated, the art will look almost identical from one monitor to the next.

YAY!

But from one monitor to the next, that's about where the resemblance ends.

Colors are calibrated to something called RGB, or Red, Green, Blue.

All colors come from a mix of red green and blue. At their greatest intensity, all the colors in the spectrum together become pure white light.

This is why RGB is called ADDITIVE color, because you ADD colors from the spectrum to get ALL colors, and all colors create the entirety of the rainbow, and pure white light.

Your computer monitor, your phone, your television, all images are created via light using RGB, a gamut that covers all possible colors that can be created.

That's a lot.

And that's why some of the colors you see on your TV or phone are so deep and intense.

For the widest possible range of color and intensity, you use RGB.

Unfortunately, there is what you can create with light, and then there is what you can create with pigment or ink. And that is why printing what you see on your computer almost never looks exactly like what you see in a book.

For printing, you must use a color setting known as CMYK. This stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key/Black.

In printing, the pure blue is actually Cyan and the pure red is actually Magenta.

CMYK color range is not created by addition, but by SUBTRACTION. In order to get the color you want, you reduce the percentage of one of the four colors for ink mixing. Mixing all colors, instead of giving you white, gives you black.

The gamut of CMYK is limited to what can be created with ink.

You've probably heard the term four color press? This is what that means. Four colors, with each color of ink run over the paper on rollers which, combined in varying layers of opacity, create all the printing colors you see.

But remember, what you see on your computer monitor and what CMYK gamut can handle are two different things.

Now, I’ve been really careful with the color settings on Good Omens, so there haven’t been any big surprises, but let me show you a snippet of a project I did for the French fashion house Balmain.

The RGB version:

And then this shot after it was converted to a CMYK file for print.

That's a pretty big difference.

Now, you see this shift mostly with vibrant colors, such as that pink there. But other colors hardly changed at all, right?

That's because this issue is about range of color. CMYK and RGB occupy a shared range which you can see demonstrated by this graphic I got from Wikipedia.

The graphic shows the RGB ranges supported by various digital formats. SWOP CMYK is the most common range my publishers use. Note that the bounding box line shared by the RGB and SWOP CMYK formats shares about half the range space. So whatever RGB colors you use that are outside that range will be digitally converted to the smaller SWOP CMYK range.

And you may not like what you end up with.

As you can see, some of the most ethereal and intense colors get lost outside of the SWOP CMYK boundary.

A look at the Dark Horse Comics color settings in Photoshop. Theoretically, this information should prevent your art from looking like mud on publication.

Now, after I just told you the dangers of coloring in RGB then converting to CMYK for print, I tell you I am coloring Good Omens in RGB anyway. There’s a couple of reasons for this.

Remember, RGB give you a greater range of color, so it can be to your advantage to preserve your original files using a format that gives you the greatest range.

Again, here is the unaltered file.

You can see what the CMYK result will be simply by clicking the Proof Colors button here. This will show you how the art will convert.

And the Gamut Warning will show you which colors are out of gamut range for print.

The intensity of that magenta and that purple in the top right are not going to print true.

This is how it will look in final.

So even if you do what you think is perfect color on screen, there is no way it can perfectly convert to print. Almost everything will involve a little bit of compromise.

Even though you have to consider the color shift issues, preserving your files in RGB gives you greater wiggle room, especially if you get lucky someday and get to work with a printer who can print in 6 colors. Or maybe some technology you don’t know about will pop up and make printing super glorious. Who knows.

Regardless, you should keep an eye on that gamut and color for CMYK print, while preserving your master files in RGB.

Until next time.

[dandelionsresilience]

Dandelion News - January 15-21

Like these weekly compilations? Tip me at $kaybarr1735 or check out my Dandelion Doodles!

1. Landmark debt swap to protect Indonesia’s coral reefs

“The government of Indonesia announced this week a deal to redirect more than US$ 35 million it owes to the United States into the conservation of coral reefs in the most biodiverse ocean area on Earth.”

2. [FWS] Provides Over $1.3 Billion to Support Fish and Wildlife Conservation and Outdoor Access

“Through these combined funds, agencies have supported monitoring and management of over 500 species of wild mammals and birds, annual stocking of over 1 billion fish, operations of fish and wildlife disease laboratories around the country, and provided hunter and aquatic education to millions of students.”

3. Philippine Indigenous communities restore a mountain forest to prevent urban flooding

“Indigenous knowledge systems and practices are considered in the project design, and its leaders and members have been involved throughout the process, from agreeing to participate to identifying suitable land and selecting plant species that naturally grow in the area.”

4. Responsible Offshore Wind Development is a Clear Win for Birds, the U.S. Economy, and our Climate

“[T]he total feasible offshore wind capacity along U.S. coasts is more than three times the total electricity generated nationwide in 2023. […] Proven strategies, such as reducing visible lights on turbines and using perching deterrents on turbines, have been effective in addressing bird impacts.”

5. Illinois awards $100M for electric truck charging corridor, Tesla to get $40M

“The project will facilitate the construction of 345 electric truck charging ports and pull-through truck charging stalls across 14 sites throughout Illinois[…. E]lectrifying [the 30,000 daily long-haul] trucks would make a huge impact in the public health and quality of life along the heavily populated roadways.”

6. Reinventing the South Florida seawall to help marine life, buffer rising seas

“[The new seawall] features raised areas inspired by mangrove roots that are intended to both provide nooks and crannies for fish and crabs and other marine creatures and also better absorb some of the impact from waves and storm surges.”

7. Long Beach Commits to 100% All-Electric Garbage Trucks

“[Diesel garbage trucks] produce around a quarter of all diesel pollution in California and contribute to 1,400 premature deaths every year. Electric options, on the other hand, are quieter than their diesel counterparts and produce zero tailpipe emissions.”

8. ‘This Is a Victory': Biden Affirms ERA Has Been 'Ratified' and Law of the Land

“President Joe Biden on Friday announced his administration's official opinion that the amendment is ratified and its protections against sex-based discrimination are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.”

9. A Little-Known Clean Energy Solution Could Soon Reach ‘Liftoff’

“Ground source heat pumps could heat and cool the equivalent of 7 million homes by 2035—up from just over 1 million today[…. G]eothermal energy is generally considered to be more popular among Republicans than other forms of clean energy, such as wind and solar.”

10. Researchers combine citizens' help and cutting-edge tech to track biodiversity

“Researchers in the project, which runs from 2022 to 2026, are experimenting with tools like drones, cameras and sensors to collect detailed data on different species, [… and] Observation.org, a global biodiversity platform where people submit pictures of animals and plants, helping to identify and monitor them.”

January 8-14 news here | (all credit for images and written material can be found at the source linked; I don’t claim credit for anything but curating.)