#It's mostly the @'s I get from the (very few) servers I'm in

[nervocat]

my discord so inactive it's kinda crazy........

[mylittleredgirl]

Hello friend! A friend of mine is doing a Stargate SG-1 rewatch and lamenting the slim pickings of fic on AO3. Do you know where she can find fic that perhaps is still on some old archive of yore? Or have any recs? She's mostly interested in Jack/Daniel and Jack/Sam. Ty!!

oh my. with all the love in the world to your friend visiting us from a very different fandom tax bracket than i have ever had the fortune to participate in (those two pairings have well over 6k fics each on ao3), i'll see what i can do!

[several hours of looking around later] bad news!! not much!

most of vintage sg-1 fandom was wiped out by expired domains, struck-through livejournals, ff.net's porn ban, yahoo lists, etc. some pages are still preserved in the wayback machine for heliopolis, the massive het-and-gen archive, and area52, the slash counterpart, but with the search and directory functions pretty much toast, they're almost impossible to navigate.

fanlore has an old list of archives (including plenty of jack/daniel ones). some smaller archives might yield wayback paydirt, especially if they were hand-coded. samandjack.net is still alive!

and, hate to say it, this was peak era for ff.net and they have like 30k fics over there... but all the explicit fic is gone.

i recently learned some people are still doing het-reccers (user-submitted fanfic recommendations, LJ archive is here). i don't know if any slash equivalents are still around (and i haven't looked at this site for genuinely fifteen years, so i can't speak to the quality of recs).

some sam/jack recs of mine; some of these authors multi-ship:

nanda: her resolution series especially should not be missed and i can't stress that enough. smut and action. fics great fics across the board.

it's kind of difficult to express how popular Salr323's fics were (under a different name) back in the day. i'm told that archive servers would crash when she posted something new. low on smut, high on PINING. rec: it was admittedly 1 am but as i recall this one made me feel like i'd just seen the fanfiction mona lisa

there are quite a few multifandom wonders who cut their teeth in this fandom, including missparker (rec: a small crime)

this cassandra fraiser fic dealt me some damage: nobody dies tonight by isawet

someone who's still in touch with her please harass splash_the_cat for writing 99 sg-1 fics and then walking away without cracking 100. lots of fun little snacks in there including this one

everything anr touches is gold <3

starting to get stressed out about who i'm missing!!!!

if your friend likes D/s this one is fun by tremontaine

lol read my stuff (i never wrote smut for sg-1 though)

hey everyone, please add recs in the notes/reblogs, especially jack/daniel recs because that's out of my wheelhouse but we aim to serve

[eldritchamy]

Hi, its the former Feralist again.

The worldbuilding just really struck a raw nerve on first glance? On second glance it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought but it STILL infuriates me on a couple of points, mostly in implications that people failed to think through. I've calmed down about it, because it IS just kink, but there are parts of the worldbuilding that I still cannot touch without being viscerally upset.

(I could get into depth if you want, but once again, it is just kink; I don't expect kink writers to think about every last implication of their worldbuilding.)

Anyway, I am currently reading my way through Abscission, which is helping somewhat with certain things that upset me wrt disability and stuff. I'm really excited to read your suggestions!

Signed, A (Formerly) Committed Feralist

(P.S. *specific* things... What appeals to me wrt inevitability in D/s is less "I can MAKE you submit whether you want to or not" and more "We both know you'll submit, because we both know that you *want* me to dominate you", which is not always the vibe in HDG. Sometimes it is, though! And that's why I'm still here! Also that little bit near the end of Grand Folia where Celosia says something along the lines of "Its not that I'm an Affini and you're a terran and I'm better and you're lesser. Its that I would ALWAYS find you - in any time, in any place, in any form - because you ARE mine" really REALLY fucking got me.)

(P.P.S. I may have written a few hundred words of a fic about an Affini playing a convoluted game of cat and mouse with a cute, awkward, evasive little terran who may or may not be a feralist spy. The Affini can't make up her mind, because every time she catches her at something suspicious, there's always a perfectly plausible explanation! Its gonna drive her absolutely NUTS.)

It sounds like you're more into dubcon than noncon. On one hand, this is the noncon intox kink petplay bdsm scifi setting, so a certain amount of noncon is pretty baked into the world at a systematic level that you're either okay with or you aren't.

But on the bright side, there ARE fluffier options that skew more in the direction of what I think you're looking for, because the setting ALSO heavily features things like hurt/comfort, recovering from trauma, learning how to love yourself, and accepting that you deserve to BE loved and cared for by others.

Abscission is a really good one for a protagonist that consistently and very insistently reaffirms their consent at all times. Autumn is very sure about what she wants and frankly spends a lot of time bullying Solanum about not being afraid to give it to her.

From what you're saying, I think you would really like a newer story that's only 3 chapters in called Good Sensory. The tl;dr is that there's an independent human who's too ace and autistic to feel comfortable around most Affini (who tend to be very flirty and touchy and she can't stand a lot of their textures), and an Affini who is ALSO really ace and autistic instantly wants to give her the world. The Affini is VERY sensitive, patient, and accommodating with her neurodivergence and goes out of her way to be very direct about her feelings and intentions.

Marsha (the affini) literally has this internal monologue about Sally (the human): "I admittedly could twist her mind and dull her dislike of certain sensations, but it would be far more satisfying to simply alter her life such that she never experienced them in the first place."

The story was written basically in honor of how much the author (a very autistic woman) loves her very autistic partners, and the joy of giving them experiences that are comfortable for them.

In particular, I think you will REALLY like their first date in chapter 2, which is one of the most gentle and accommodating scenes I have read for all of HDG so far. It's SO sweet.

Someone in the server actually just collected a list of recommended fics that skew much more on the consensual side. NOTE THAT I HAVE NOT READ MOST OF THESE AND CANNOT PERSONALLY VOUCH FOR THEM.

Intake Interview Wild and Domestic Child of the Wilderness How To Tame A Polycule Fermata Art Exhibition Flotsam Heart Cross Pollination Surrogate Bloom Sycanthe Lantana Alone in the Dark, Together Germination Reading the Leaves Nurture and Acquisitions Perturbance A Normal Grocery Run During Which No Domestication Occurs No Gods No Masters (the primary storyline anyway) Hers to Have, Hers to Hold Petals and Vines Weeklong Stay at a J-Cafe (edited)

I AM currently about halfway through Petals and Vines and can absolutely confirm it's one of the cutest stories in the setting so far. I'm loving every minute of it. 500/10 adorable. Millie is everything, she is the light of my life and I would die for her. She's approaching DAWN levels of cute. DAWN LEVELS.

I would also add to this list:

Inosculate by SapphicSounds (the affini refuses to do ANYTHING with the protagonist until she explicitly asks for it)

Through The Looking Glass by PyxxieStyxx and TheMothCourt (the protagonist does get embarrassed/humiliated quite a bit, but she is VERY INTO IT and is given ample opportunity to back out or revoke her consent at any time, which she never does because she is having the time of her newly lesbian life right now)

I WOULD caution you against writing for the setting if you have mixed feelings about the worldbuilding, and especially if you haven't read some of the most foundational works of the setting like the original, Abscission, Divaricated, For A Better Universe, and a couple others. You should also familiarize yourself with the Rules and Axioms for the setting, as they're important for how the community functions as a creative space.

(The point is not taking things we like OUT of the sandbox to play with, it's bringing something of our own INTO the sandbox so we can play TOGETHER. But we play NICE in that sandbox, because we want the people who play in it after us to have that same joy we did. If your goal is to CHANGE something about the setting, then you're not playing the same game as everyone else in the sandbox.)

I'm pretty confident at this point that I have a good feel for the lore, vibe, and mechanics of the setting to comfortably start writing for it, but even I'm still holding off because there are some other Big Foundational Stories (Divaricated, Wellness Check, No Gods No Masters, probably Nurture and Acquisitions) that I want to experience and understand first, because when I'm ready to start contributing, I want to make sure I do it right.

Also, there actually IS a story literally CALLED Cat And Mouse, and it's one of the top 10 stories in the setting (sorted for Kudos on AO3). I cannot personally vouch for it because I haven't read it and don't know anything about it beyond that it's a Predator/Prey dynamic, but it has the same author as Good Sensory and her stories (though incredibly varied, tone wise) haven't let me down yet. Sheepwave is a very evocative writer and whatever kind of mood she's going for her in her stories, you're gonna REALLY feel that mood.

Sweet Poppy (one of her more famous stories) is a blood curdling psychological horror story. I am terrified of Poppy. She's easily the scariest Affini I've read yet. That's a HARD story to read if you can't stomach it, but it's very well done. It's the kind of story that you can't stop reading and ALSO it makes you sick to your stomach.

The only other story I've read from the setting so far that filled me with anywhere near that kind of nauseating dread was Independence Is Easy by SapphicSounds. If you're REALLY into doll kink, you might love it, but if you're not, it's absolutely a horror story. I don't regret reading it, but I was definitely way more into the first half than the second half. The protagonist DEFINITELY needed to be domesticated, but not by this specific Affini. I've seen lots of people be REALLY obsessed with it, but based on what I can gather from your tastes, I would NOT recommend this one to you.

In regards to the worldbuilding, the main thing to remember is that HDG is at its core a WILDLY SELF-INDULGENT kink setting where the most immutable aspect is that everyone deserves to be loved and cared for and given a better life. It was made by gay auDHD trans women FOR gay auDHD trans women, and the real fantasy is just that there will always be someone there who loves us unconditionally while accepting us for our truest selves and telling us that we deserve to not hurt anymore. All of the scifi worldbuilding exists to supplement that. The Affini are overpowered by design.

It's not intended to be realistic, it's intended to be wish fulfilment where inevitability is coming for you, and that inevitability is kind, and loving, and PROFOUNDLY horny.

[xiakeponz]

for modern AU fics - what chinese media did diaspora consume?

making this post because some of us in the diaspora server were having a chat about what Chinese media "Diaspora Chinese" watched in the 90's - 2000's (and even sooner than that) while not having access to satellite chinese media or streaming services - this is in the context of writing modern AU fics based off Chinese media/novels (so your main character's grandpa or uncle is not, in fact, watching an episode of Friends or Shortland Street or something as flavour text because sorry what the hell-)

We generally watched a lot of stuff on VCDs, including bootlegged and non-bootlegged movies, shows, anime/donghua. My household had a whole VCD album of this, and a lot of VCDs (even if they were pirated editions) would have a fancy hardcover box with a magnetic clasp and some artwork representing the show on it.

All of this is Mandarin - so not TVB stuff, because I'm from Northern China and I don't know any cantonese - but Canto friends, please feel free to add to the list! This is mostly stuff my parents liked to watch, or I liked to watch with them, with the exception of a few which I mainly watched with friends/cousins when I was maybe (in most cases) eleven/twelve years old onwards. This is a pretty personal list, meant to give people general idea of a possible "ballpark" of sorts, and by no means exhaustive.

Now, for the list of shows which I can confirm I had or someone I know had on VCD or some kind of offline media format lol (I'll try add release year stamps and links to the EN wikipedia where possible):

Period dramas (mostly Qing Dynasty stuff):

Huan Zhu Gege 还珠格格 (1998, April-) This is a classic, so many memes come from this show; hugely popular series, basically cemented Zhang Tie Lin's face as the face of the Qing Emperor for about a decade. Tie Chi Tong Ya Ji Xiao Lan 铁齿铜牙纪晓岚 (2002-2010) - I loved this show as a kid and watched all four seasons on repeat with family... The "trio" in this show are well known and loved.

Amazing Detective Di Ren Jie / 神探狄仁杰 (2004) A very popular and addictive show. Ok now the Big Four:

Romance of 3 kingdoms 1994 / 三国演义 (1994) - a classic that has had many remakes, my older cousin would play this on repeat...

Hong Lou Meng/红楼梦 （1987） - another classic with many remakes, but I think the most recognised by the public one is the 1987 one.

Journey to the West / 西游记 live action (1986) - I think the 1986 version of the live action is the most recognised one. *Shui Hu Zhuan / 水浒传 (1998) - I am not too familliar with the live action of this one in my household tbh bc my mum doesn't like it lol (she keeps saying it's too depressing) but I'm sure it's up there with the rest of the big four, if anyone has an opinion on this one please let me know!

Modern setting shows:

My dad loved all the Sun Honglei (孙红雷 - actor name) stuff, iirc it was a lot of MinGuo period espionage stuff, your shanghai 1920's sxc aesthetic. This actor has been around since 1999? Qian Fu （潜伏）was very famous, and Ren Jian Zheng Dao Shi Cang Sang （人间正道是沧桑）。 These were around '08 and '09.

Chuang Guan Dong - 闯关东 (2008) (Baidu link, sorry - couldn't get an EN wikipedia one). This show was huge when it was airing, everyone was watching it. I was pretty young but even I watched it and got invested ... and I thought it was such an "old person" show at the time lmao. Xiao Bing Zhang Ga / 小兵张嘎 （2004） (sorry, again Baidu link) - yo, anti-japanese war movies set between 1937-1945 were crazy popular - this is one of them and was very popular):

Donghua/Anime (all the stuff kid me watched and some which I didn't but were popular):

喜羊羊与灰太狼 (2005-) Calabash Brothers / 葫芦兄弟 （1986-1987） Black Cat Detective / Hei Mao Jing Zhang 黑猫警长 （1984-2010） Lan Mao Tao Qi 3000 Wen 蓝蓝猫淘气3000问 AKA 蓝猫 (blue cat) (October 1999 - Present) Legend of Ne Zha 哪吒传奇 (2003) Journey to the West/Xi You Ji 西游记 This was truly the Donghua I grew up on from when I was a bb, the OP song and ED song are classic bangers all kids know. Slam Dunk/ 灌篮高手 - People truly watched a lot of anime that may or may not have been terribly dubbed into mando (possibly canto too). Late 80s and 90s kids were all over this, and Dragon Ball, Crayon Shinchan (labixiaoxin).

Taiwanese Dramas:

This is mid-late 2000's, I would be remiss to not talk about the Taiwanese dramas of this era. Mike He, Rainie Yang, Wu Zun (amongst many, many others) were huge. Stuff like Dou Niu Yao Bu Yao, it started with a kiss, Hua Yang Shao Nv (Taiwanese version of Hana Kimi) were all pretty popular. Not sure if these shows all hold up in 2023, but boy were they popular at the time.

Note about CNY:

For CNY, people would try to tune into 春节联欢晚会 (the CCTV official CNY show) at that One Friend Who Had China Satellite TV's house. Zhao Ben Shan / 赵本山 was a comedy staple, and the show would often feature people from the music industry to perform. Eventually these people became more and more relevant to my gen and Jay Chou etc started appearing.

Last but not least Xian Jiaaaan 仙剑:

In 2005 I was all over 仙剑奇侠传 (Chinese Paladin), based off the video game. This show was crazy popular and probably sent me and a whole lot of other kids into Xianxia / Wuxia hell (and Hu Ge hell, and later I came back to love Liu Yifei). Thank you. The OST is a true banger.

[blockgamepirate]

Techno's Minecraft Mondays!

Just wanted to give some more video recs: IMO the best weeks from Techno's POV are

week 1 with ShotGunRaids

week 3 with Ava Kris Tyson (she/her!) (note: this is pre-transition)

week 6 with Jschlatt

week 10 with Phil

Other weeks are also great but if you don't feel like watching all of them, these four would be my recs

Techno made his own highlights videos of weeks 1, 2, 3 and 14:

Jschlatt made a highlights video of week 6:

Phil made a highlights video of week 10:

^ All of these are great, can recommend. Week 10 is basically a must watch tbh, it's the beginning of a beautiful friendship (I actually prefer to watch the full VOD from Techno's POV but I included Phil's highlights video for people who don't have the time to watch the whole two and a half hours)

I also have a handy playlist for all of Techno's MCM VODs if you do wanna watch everything in full, unedited:

If you do though, I have a few potentially helpful content notes (these are from two years ago so they're not up to date but it's a start)

Week 5 Techno teamed with CallMeCarson but thankfully for most of the VOD they aren't together

If any of you would like to skip the Carson content, here's a handy list of timecodes and a summary so you can skip to the good bits:

20:06 Carson leaves

23:52 Carson comes back

28:35 Carson is muted

34:10 Techno joins team 11's call to find Carson

39:12 I think this is when Carson leaves the call?

48:15 Techno joins Carson again

48:57 Leaves the call

1:11:59 Carson comes back

1:14:50 Carson leaves again

1:16:30 And he's back

1:18:05 And he leaves for the last time

1:43:40 Techno attempts to contact Carson one last time but notices that Carson has left the server entirely

Summary: it's basically just Carson bullying Techno as a joke, which he did warn Techno he was gonna do ahead of time, except it gets very awkward very quickly and Techno hates it and asks Carson to stop but he just doesn't stop. Also it involved him spamming Techno with soundboard messages, most famously "Hey, Technoblade!" which became a meme. Also he tried to teamkill Techno a bunch, which led to Techno losing pretty badly in the first game

Techno spends most of the tournament either just doing solo commentary or hanging out in other teams' calls.

The parts without Carson are still great! Special shoutout to that last game where Techno plays hunger games solo

Also a warning for repeated jokes about a particular disease from AntVenom when Techno joins his and Jordan's call during MCM5. It's during Dropper if you wanna skip that

Other notes:

The first three weeks I would recommend maybe not reading the ingame chat too much if you don't wanna see people hating on Techno. Week 2 and week 3 are especially bad IIRC. But if you don't watch other POVs or read the chat you're mostly fine.

Also I wanna give a content warning for like a lot of food talk and also talk about not eating in week 4 (James talks a bunch about food and eats on stream and Techno has a running joke about not getting fed unless he wins)

I won't bother listing all his teammates. If Techno is teaming with someone you don't want anything to do with; unless it's Carson you're probably just gonna have to skip that week entirely.* Carson is the only one who Techno spends long periods of time not talking to, everybody else he's in VC with pretty much the whole time

(* actually week 14 might still be worth watching despite the teammate (Wisp). That one used to be on my recs list and I only took it off just now because of Wisp, but the highlights video really doesn't have that much of him in it and mostly everybody's just in a massive group call so I think it's fine? It's on the first playlist I linked. For the VOD maybe skip to about 1:01:00 and watch from there?)

Anyway I'm not gonna tell you what to do, I still feel fine about watching those weeks despite the teammates*, because the streams are mostly fine out of context as far as I can remember and it's not like I'm giving them views when I'm just watching Techno's POV, but if you don't feel comfortable doing that, that's understandable and you can skip those weeks.

(* this was written two years ago, I would probably skip week 13 now just because I personally can't handle hearing that guys voice anymore, not that there's anything bad in that VOD from what I can remember (it used to be one of my faves rip))

(Hopefully there isn't anything big that I'm forgetting)

[piosplayhouse]

Horse Isle 3: The Yandere Sim of Horse Games

(or, an extended study in how to hate your own playerbase as much as humanly possible)

(or, or, tldr there's pretty much no updated information on just how ridiculously bad this game is so here's a writeup on how I got banned and all the subsequent information I found during my time playing for documentation's sake)

Part I. The Backstory

My beloved followers will know that a few months ago I began playing Horse Isle 3, a horse-raising MMO surprisingly released in the year of our horse 2019 despite its 1997-era website and Runescape-esque graphics. Some of my play through (mostly just horse pictures) is chronicled in my tag #homophobic scum horse chronicles ¹ if you want to see how drippy my horses were before they killed me.

Now, don't get me wrong. I have endless respect for small teams of game devs that manage to create insanely impressive products-- which HI3's elaborate real-genetics breeding system, its main draw, certainly is. Coding is hard, modeling is hard, moderation is hard. Tip a coin to your local small indie teams that work hard to make incredible art.

However, HI3 is far from an admirable success story about a small dev team that triumphed over its obstacles.

The game is known for a variety of things, chief among them being the staff's rampant homophobia (which has earned it the moniker "the homophobic horse game"), hilariously uncharismatic mods (to the point where one of the main moderators, Connie, is mentioned by NAME in the majority of poor reviews of the game), the dev team's unrepentant rejection of criticism, and racism with a side of downplaying war crimes.

(Screenshots taken from Sitejabber, here)

Now, it's marketed as a game for ages 8+, which, as I've briefly talked about before, is unfortunately a rarity in today's hostile internet climate. I grew up on a variety of typical child friendly MMOs like ye olde Pixie Hollow and PetPet Park, and truly lament that so many of these have been shut down over the years. As such, I have no issue with strict rules or word filters in games, with the caveat that they are effective and genuinely intended to keep people safe. Kids are naive, and can and will say things that they shouldn't (I, for example, got kicked from a Minecraft server when I was 8 because I posted in chat that my mom told me sex wasn't a bad word. things happen). Filters are a very appropriate tool to aid manual moderation of chat features, especially in an environment where mistakes will be made.

However, HI3's, as shown below (words that are forbidden from chat are marked in red), are... questionably selective.

(Screenshot taken by Alice Ruppert, from here)

This appears to be attributed to the fact that along with having horrible moderators, HI3 also seems to have a remarkably horrible developer backend, which is a trend that you'll see pop up quite a lot in this post. Taken straight from the horse's (haha) mouth, the lead developer is the only person who seems to be able or willing to add to the filter list, and for whatever reason only wants to block the "most common inappropriate words"- because saying transgender is more of an issue than nazi and gulag I guess.

(Screenshot taken from Top R.'s Sitejabber review, here)

¹ I'm not sure how far this will reach out of my audience, and since people have already assumed weird stuff about me I thought I should probably clarify-- I'm not calling the game "homophobic scum" ghghg, my play through was focused on making horse versions of characters from a novel called "scum villain", so I took the scum and added horse (I actually have another tag for a different horse breeding game called "scum horse chronicles" so I needed to distinguish them easily but am not very good at tagging). That's it.

Part II. The Game

The game itself is, putting it simply, a mess at best and openly hostile towards newcomers at worst. The game's UI is comparable to your average petsite with 20 thousand things to click on but if you tried to navigate that while also watching the Pilgrim's Progress movie by Scott Cawthorn on 90% of your screen. This is a very good overview of what your experience first logging in will be like, with the added caveat that talking in global chat costs in game currency and that the game doesn't tell you this at ALL until you try to type in chat, and that depending when you log on it's entirely possible that you'll spawn into a completely dead town miles away from anyone who can help you, wilderness survivor-style.

To make things more complicated, information about the game is split between the game itself and the laughably horrible website/forums. Spectacularly enough, the forums, which provide vital game information and rule elaborations, cannot be searched in any way (not via Google or any hard-baked search bar) and are regularly purged by admins to erase evidence of scandals and poor moderation complaints.

Now, something you will find to be generally people's biggest issue with HI3 is their strict no "date-speak" rule, which sounds ok on paper but is worded *just* vaguely enough to give the moderators full jurisdiction over whether or not they think you're breaking the rules. Selective moderation is a major theme in the HI3 chronicle, but it is perhaps most documented with regards to this rule, because what the hell does "boyfriend/girlfriend talk" even mean?? Outside of vagueness, this rule has also been scrutinized extensively by others due to the fact that a pair of previous moderators were openly married with the igns "FrogLips" and "MrsFrogLips". I don't personally think this is super condemning, since kids usually address adults by Mr/Ms etc whether or not they know they're in a relationship, but regardless it's clear that the complete lack of elaboration on what this rule means can be easily manipulated to lodge any number of complaints against people.

(Screenshot from the Horse Isle website rules page, here)

What I will say, however, is that this rule would probably hold more water if the game wasn't literally about breeding horses.

You can pimp out your horses, you can pay others to breed your mares, you can put any number of special (real life currency-bought) amulets on your horses to make them more fertile/have twins/give birth faster. I paid $1000 to castrate Jiang Cheng. The word "stud" (which btw, is another word for a black butch lesbian) is used constantly. Perhaps most shockingly, horse inbreeding is very common and accepted among the community, to the point that it is explicitly mentioned and EXPLAINED in the game guide; the only penalization for it is that your incest product foal will have a lower intelligence stat. Call me old-fashioned, but I feel as though implementing and acknowledging that horses can breed with their own relatives is hmm perhaps more harmful than another player saying the word gay, but what do I know.

(Screenshot from the Horse Isle website game guide page, here (only accessible with an account))

Well, you might ask, after you breed and sell a horse, is there any way to put a brand on it so you know it's from your ranch? That's where the "prefix" system comes in. Prefixes are bolded titles that appear in front of a horses name in lists and in the overworld, and are described in the official game guide as follows:

(Screenshot from the same Horse Isle website game guide page as linked previously)

I think you can toggle them off if you don't want to see them, though I could be wrong. They're basically just 1-5 letter titles you can put on your own horses (nobody else's, importantly). There's no way to search prefixes, and you won't see them in game unless either a horse with a prefix is listed in auctions or you actually encounter someone in-game and see their horse.

In fact, I would learn later that not even the moderators monitor the prefixes, and apparently have no way to mass-delete them. At all.

(Image taken from an anonymous friend)

Now, it's not unusual that a game as complicated as HI3 would inevitably have a pretty taxing server-side code. Millions of multifaceted assets and features is really nothing to scoff at. However, the notion that your lead developer has to perform a manual search in the game's code to delete the equivalent of a stamp from every instance individually is hilarious. I'm not going to pretend to be a game developer, but there HAS to be a better way of coding a feature that intakes user-generated content that should probably be monitored regularly than that, right? Or, at least, there should be a robust filter system that could prevent any issues from occurring before they would need to be fixed so tediously. You might think.

On December 29th, 2022, I discovered how to register a prefix. It's very common to headcanon the characters I was naming my horses after as transgender, and I thought it would be cute to attach "TRANS" to my horses as a nod to this. However, a filter blocked the word. I was disappointed, but not surprised², and then tried to think of another word that was under 5 letters. To my complete and gay surprise, "GAY" was not filtered out, and henceforth, this worked as my prefix.

As you can see on the popup here, there are scant guidelines for what the requirements for a prefix should be. And, in this moment of apparently utter foolishness, I was under the impression that since "GAY" was NOT filtered out despite there clearly being a filter on this function, it was ok to register. Possibly it's not filtered because it's a synonym for "happy", I thought, which is also cute because I do like when horses are happy. Perhaps the staff had learned from their past criticism and had loosened the restrictions slightly because they felt restructuring was appropriate now that gay marriage is legal in the US, I imagined.

(My original post)³

What I could not imagine, however, was that the only reason the word wasn't filtered out, despite being possibly the most common sexuality-related word, was just because the lead dev couldn't be assed to add it to the filter list. And that apparently I was supposed to know this because it would lead to a permanent ban on my second offense with no warning.

² Hence typing "eat shit lol". Admittedly childish of me, but I didn't put a lot of thought into the post because it was just part of a casual silly live blog I was doing to blow off steam. The "if I get banned" tag surprisingly was not referencing "GAY", as I genuinely thought I was in the clear for that for reasons stated above, but because I tried to register "TRANS" and then posted about it online. You don't have to believe me, but I feel the need to defend myself since some people have wildly extrapolated that my actions were malicious instead of just a split second decision I made because I was bored one morning.

³ Despite the pop-up box saying that prefixes cannot be removed, they actually can at any time, given only that the person that owns the prefix unregisters the horse from it. The unregistering mechanic is for whatever reason not told to the player upon registering the prefix, but is mentioned in the official game guide linked above.

Part III. The Ban, The Report

I will preface this section by saying that I played the game normally. I do like being outrageous sometimes for my followers' entertainment, but I really don't like dragging random people into my antics if they aren't interested. Because of this, I really didn't interact with other players unless we were mutuals on some other platform. I rarely used the chat feature except to participate in server-wide events that required team participation, and I typically just explored on my own for fun. In general I think I was a pretty ok player, objectively, which lines up with my user trust score.

You see, the way moderators of HI3 allegedly keep track of rule breaking is through a "user trust score" with points added if you use features in the game, help people, etc, and points deducted if you violate rules. Anecdotally I've heard that around the -10 total points mark is when moderators put you on a sort of list to be monitored for suspension or punishment, which is pretty reasonable.

By the time I was banned, I had a score of +31. The -10 offset was a part of this debacle. The only thing I had ever done in the game which warranted any kind of violation was, as you will soon see, literally just naming about 30 of my own horses "GAY", a sin egregious enough to apparently offset about 200 hours worth of playtime with no issues.

Because of this, I was a little bit confused on multiple levels. For one, I had never even seen a moderator in game, nor been informed of discipline at any time before. On top of that, their permanent ban notification is extremely strange and vague. The text pop up when you try to log in just reads "Account currently banned -1 minutes ().", which is probably just copied straight from the server-side code for things and just wasn't translated into user-side comprehensibility. You'll also notice there is a "()" section in the notification, which I would assume is where they put the reason for bans, except for the fact that mine was completely blank.

The website which allegedly would hold more info just repeated a near identical code: "BANNED! -1min. Reason:".

So, with nothing else to go off of, I messaged support on the jankiest help center submissions I've ever seen on a website with this:

"Insisting" and "total disregard" are very strong words to use for a situation in which I just typed a word into a textbox because the game let me, I'd think, which is why I tried to reason with her. The prefixes mentioned in my message are well-known amongst the userbase and are much older and wider-spread than mine, so I would think that there would be at least some sort of precedent for this. The "geldings and yearlings" reasoning was mostly a joke, but also intended to express that the nature of an acronym (as the majority of prefixes seemed to be) is that it can be interpreted in many ways. Intent was thrown around a lot when I was discussing the issues of prefixes with other users, and it seemed to have been used to excuse previous behavior in situations where mods liked the users in question better.

I also cannot emphasize enough how much they did not warn me about my prefix being removed. When I logged in and saw my horses' names did not include it, I was suspicious that the moderators removed it just because of the history of their behavior. However, I had no hard evidence because they did not inform me at ALL. Not through in-game mail systems, not through server messages, not through the website. Complete radio silence except for the addition of an unexplained "-10" to my user score. I did complain to some people that I thought it was removed, but a combination of things suggested that it wasn't a huge deal, so I mostly let it lie. For one, I had over 100 hours of playtime and was mildly worried that one of my chat messages had been flagged without my knowledge. For another, my profile text had also mysteriously disappeared, probably because of a glitch, so who knows what could happen in this game. Lastly, I went to the prefix registry again just to check and hilariously enough, they didn't actually block "GAY" from the database. Yeah, they apparently individually deleted it from all of my horses, but couldn't be assed to add such an "inappropriate" word to their filter system.

So I just registered it again and publicly told people that I would do it again if the mods didn't actually tell me to stop. I didn't really care about the prefix because to me, the feature was purely cosmetic. All I wanted was transparency from the staff.

Well, anyway, I assume Connie couldn't think of a comeback, so she just closed my report. I was annoyed because quite literally none of my questions were answered and she didn't even refer to anything in specifics. It would take less than 1 second to type the number of the rule I violated, but I guess that was too much work for her.

I tried to give them as many outs as possible to just apologize about poor communication, but they didn't even take the bare minimum. I would also like to mention that this support ticket process is the ONLY way to directly communicate with any staff. There's no ability to upload files or images on this system, and no email listed that you could contact. So essentially, there's no way to give actual evidence for anything you say even if you want to.

Kat, who is known as the slightly-more-reasonable-but-still-pretty-bad mod then picked up the case. Her response actually provided specific information, which made it leagues above Connie's, but still included some very strange elements for sure.

The notion that this game is intended for a worldwide audience is especially funny to me because you would really think if they cared about other countries they wouldn't violate their own rule one by using a slur for Europe's largest ethnic minority, but ok. It's a weird hill to die on considering how USA-dominated the staff's opinions towards rules are (Connie justifies the usage of a slur for Rromani people based off the opinion of a single roommate she had who reclaimed it, Joe defends a store in-game being called "The Gulag" because Americans don't think gulags are that bad (discussed and cited in the conclusions section)). But then again, picking and choosing what parts of other countries' customs you want to respect is very American, which is why I think they should add an extra star rating for its patrioticness on the website.

As I mentioned before, the prefixes I included in my response are definitely older and more commonly-used than mine, so I'm not sure how they wouldn't have seen them before. This comment also ties back to the suggestion that the moderators have very little control or insight over a distinct feature of their game, which is not a great thing to admit so casually.

Kat has a strange habit of immediately contradicting herself in the same paragraph, as can be seen here. "The glitches never happen and bugs were quickly fixed, but games still have bugs". "People that break the rules usually write in to ask what was wrong, but most people usually never ask". At this point I think we can confidently say that they don't even make an attempt to proofread any of their responses, to be honest.

Her 7th paragraph has one of my favorite lines in this exchange. "If we had to notify players every time we made moderator changes to their account we would spend 24 hours a day" is giving huge Yandere Dev "stop emailing me because I have to spend 24 hours a day reading all my emails instead of coding" energy. You really have to wonder why these people that seem to hate moderating so much are moderators.

You can tell by my response, but I do not like the use of "most" and "usually" in this at all. What's your standard isn't others' standards, and this is a topic which needs to be navigated gently, especially when kids are concerned. I never played the previous Horse Isles. I had no experience with the mod team, or with violations, or with anything because no one bothered to take five seconds to send me a message. No, I did not know that you would permaban me for typing a word that's in one of the most popular traditional Christmas songs in a place were only people who interacted with me would be able to see it. Most games would not do this. To take a lackadaisical approach to your literal job of community management because you want people to moderate themselves is contradictory to your claims of keeping children safe.

I will admit I was being a bit cheeky here as a subtle hint that perhaps they should take feedback, but I also would have taken a genuine response. I try my best to be as polite as possible to tech support staff because not everyone is! But they're people too and a simple thank you is worth a lot in customer service, even virtual. But Kat... you're not really giving me anything to work with here! If anyone reading this has feedback for how I could've rephrased things, feel free to comment them honestly. I actually ran drafts of these messages through a few people before sending them to make sure I was as concise and polite as possible, even if support clearly wasn't interested in reciprocating the effort ("following out rules using the the GAY to begin with"...?).

Part IV. The Backlash

I won't go too into depth in this section because it's more personal than documentarian, so feel free to skip to the next section if you want!

After this, the girlies were not happy with me. The one saving grace of HI3 that I've heard pop up over and over again is that the community is great. And a lot of users are! Don't think I'm disparaging people who play the game because I'm not-- it's a really fun experience with the right people. I was in a Discord server with a lot of people who were extremely helpful and kind.

However, within the community, there's also a pervasive culture of silence. According to Alice Ruppert of The Mane Quest, a lot of people will refuse to go public with their complaints about the staff due to fear of retribution, which I feel is unfortunate but understandable. There's a pressure to shut up and eat your food lest you be seen as someone causing controversy for the sake of it and ruining the sanctity of the game, which is an attitude explicitly encouraged by the staff (discussed more in the next section).

I liveblogged my entire correspondence with the support team to a group of other players for the 2 days I talked to them, and did have a lot of acceptance from people who appreciated someone speaking out. After the 2020 Mane Quest article, public information had sort of just gone dark as the community was pushed further into niche seclusion, despite things not improving at all. However, towards the end of my messaging, a group of people that I had never even spoken to or seen online before accused me of a variety of things ranging from "displaying my sexuality to children" (note: all I ever did was name my horses "GAY". I never once talked about my own sexuality in-game, nor did I say the word in chat ever) to "joining the server to cause drama" to "mocking the lgbt community by throwing around the word gay" (actually I'll attach a picture of this one even though I don't want to put people on blast in this section just because its so funny).

I think most of this can be attributed to the game having gained such a notoriety that longtime players, especially those with strong nostalgic feelings, have become completely desensitized to it. And this compounds with the fact that the game is so niche it doesn't yet have a good alternative to turn to to create a toxic cocktail where people tell themselves that they have to be loyal to the staff to play this one of a kind game-- and that anyone who doesn't follow them just doesn't understand. It's really sad, honestly.

Part V. Conclusions

I don't necessarily think the devs of HI3 are legitimately consciously homophobic-- unfortunately LGBT rights are still controversial amongst the largely southern and rural population of horse enthusiasts, and I could understand if they felt it necessary to skim the line towards conservatism to maintain a userbase. It's cowardly and dumb but it's not a sin to do what you have to do to survive in a capitalistic hellscape as cutthroat as the game industry.

However, what I do think the devs are is power-hungry and hypocritical. They have failed at every turn at community management because they're unwilling to admit they make mistakes, instead choosing to issue non-apologies like "[we] regret you guys got so upset and did not realize neither our true intentions nor motivations nor the whole situation [that we said it's ok that a player has a shop called The Gulag because it's 'not direct or violent']". To respond this way to a userbase filled allegedly with young children as a fully grown adult with a wife and kids is laughably out of touch. 'Sorry your fee-fees were hurt by our adult moderator responding to a serious complaint about inappropriate user-generated content with "lol", but actually you just misunderstood us and we're going to ban anyone who brings this up again' is the sort of response you'd see from the teenage mod team of an Undertale amino, not the supposedly responsible head dev of a 'rare oasis of kid friendly content'.

Telling an audience of impressionable kids that the fact that their feelings are hurt is their fault for not intuiting the intentions of 40+ year old adults is unbelievably toxic, and it's no wonder why people are so nostalgia-bound to feverishly shut down criticism about the games. They've been guilt-tripped into believing the mod team can do no wrong and any controversy, even if valid, that springs up is just extrapolated by people that haven't been laboriously groomed to know what the mod team wants to hear.

Countless times throughout my time researching and playing the game, the number one advice I've heard has always been "suck up to the mods or they won't do anything for you". It's crystal clear that the moderators care more about the joy they get from having power over some 200 users who will kiss their ass if they say a buzzword more than they care about you, your child, or the game itself.

It's essentially a model scam Kickstarter's wet dream, a game propelled to release and popularity by its singular defining feature and left to fester on the shelf as the only game in its niche market. Because of this, I believe there's truly no better way to describe HI3, with its messy backend, refusal to improve, narcissistic moderators, broken features, poor visuals, and inefficiency than as the Yandere Simulator of horse games.

[pookiebearmick]

weekly tag wednesday 👀🌈❤️✨

thanks bbs for the tags!!! @gallapiech @spookygingerr @thepupperino @jrooc 🥰🥰🥰

Name and ao3 handle: Deckard, pookiebearmick

Current Location: My home!! 👏

Favourite thing you’ve created (or seen created) for the fandom? One day I will make little fanart but for now I've only written a few things and made a couple of gifsets hehe, I like this little ficlet I wrote and this gifset I made!! ✨ (if u wanna send me a prompt i would write some shit for you OR if u have some scene(s) you want a gif of i might be down for that - send me an ask!)

Why is it your favourite? I love fluffy shit and I think Ian hiding in the pool is SO funny (plus I hadn't seen a "pls Mick" gif and I needed it lol)

Did it come easily or was it hard to create? I feel a mix LOL gifs take so long and the most frustrating thing for me is always having too big of file sizes to actually upload them on this godforsaken website 😭

Last ao3 fic you commented on? Okay look I am SO behind on reading any fics, I've been in a "I don't wanna read" mood lately so I've mostly been listening to little YouTube vids or watching Shameless clips when I would usually be reading so I think it might be what do you know? by @em-harlsnow (so cute btw, def worth the read) 🥰

Biggest WIP heartache you’ve ever experienced? I'm with Pie on this one, Things Beyond Mistake by Grayola lives RENT FREE in my head 24/7 my god.

Favorite trope or head cannon you like included in a fanfic? Big fan of fluffy soft husband shit, enemies to lovers, slowburn, and slice of life 🌈❤️

Least favourite? I don't love the omegaverse stuff lol, just not my thing!

Secret or surprising kink or trope? I don't think so? I don't know that I'm very secretive with the things that I enjoy reading LOL

Describe how you feel after you’ve created something new? I feel pretty energized for a bit and super excited about the thing, but then mostly just like relief at finishing a task TM (even if it's not a required thing but just a personal "I wanna do this" thing)

Top hype man you have that always helps you get across the finish line: I'd say my partners 🥰

It's been a bad day, you turn to the fandom and you _____? Play snails in the Discord server lol I love that stupid little game. If I'm really feeling the bad day I'll either find a comfort fic (thank u Boy Best Friends by @whatthebodygraspsnot and from way up there (you and i, you and i) by @sam-loves-seb or if i'm feeling something longer Suncatcher by @wehangout) ✨

anyways i've yapped long enough lol, tags below the cut!

if you wanna!! (sorry if you've been tagged/posted already i've only been on for a bit and might not have seen your post yet hehe) @heymrspatel @mickeym4ndy @burninface @rxinbowwparadise @twinklyylights @transsexual-dandelions @transmurderbug @celestialmickey @gardenerian 🥰🥰🥰 also if u weren't tagged at all this is ur tag!!! i'm missing so many people lol

[dedalvs]

Hi, welcome back to Tumblr! Your Trigdasleng posts back in the day were fascinating, even though I never watched the show they're from. Keep on keepin' on.

Thank you! It's good to be back, and this is as good a place as any to talk about why I'm here and what I'm doing.

First, I left Tumblr when many others did when they instituted their infamous "female-presenting nipple" policy. It's not as if my Tumblr was ever a nsfw blog, or as if I had any female-presenting nipples, but I felt it was the wrong response to the difficult situation they'd been put in. It was something that hurt a lot of people who had a lot less of a voice and not much of a platform, and so I felt it was my responsibility to use the platform I had to take a stand, even if ultimately it didn't change anything.

As it happens, years later, Tumblr has finally reversed the policy (well done, @staff!). Tumblr may not be the wild west it used to be, but at least they aren't targeting anyone presenting a specific gender unfairly. I've missed my time away, and the people I got to know here, so I'm happy to be back!

As I see it, I'll probably be reblogging stuff less here, even though that's how I made my name way back when, and instead responding mostly to asks in my inbox.

To give myself a fresh start, I have deleted all 3,999 of my asks. I'm starting fresh—with this one, which was the first! My inbox got too overwhelming, so this was needed.

To answer some questions some may have, if you haven't followed me elsewhere recently:

I'm most active on Instagram, where I am @athdavrazar.

I have a YouTube series with partner and significant other Jessie Sams, who is @quothalinguist on Instagram. That series is called LangTime Studio, and we create a language from scratch together live on camera (we work on two hours a week every Thursday at 2 p.m. Pacific).

Jessie and I work together almost exclusively now, and we've done work on Freeform's Motherland: Fort Salem (which I hope you loved, Tumblr!), Peacock's Vampire Academy, the second season of Shadow and Bone (forthcoming), Amazon's Paper Girls (though you can blink and miss our stuff), and the second Dune film.

I worked on HBO's House of the Dragon, and got to create a writing system for High Valyrian, which I'm very excited about.

I created the Sangheili language for Paramount+'s Halo with Carl Buck, who is on Instagram as @tlacamazatl (he's on Tumblr as @tlacamazatl too!). We are presently working on season 2.

I worked with Christian Thalmann on Shadow and Bone seasons 1 and 2. The breakdown is this: Christian and I jointly created the Fjerdan language; I created the Ravkan language and orthography as well as the Kerch and Zemeni orthographies exclusively; Jessie Sams and I created the Shu and Zemeni languages jointly; Christian created the Shu orthography. I can't wait for you to hear and see our work in season 2!

Yes, I left Twitter (quite a bit ago). I'm now more active on Discord, where I'm on a few servers.

I created a wiki for all my languages, and am unevenly working on all of them, and some languages have a team of people working on them (in particular High Valyrian).

Despite being double-vaxxed and getting not one, not two, but three boosters, I got Covid in June, and that PoS hasn't completely left me alone since. (Note: I'd only had one booster before I got it; two have come since then, including the new one, which will hopefully be the last!)

I am traveling again, so I hope to announce those here when they happen.

If there's anything I missed, you let me know. I look forward to answering asks again, and joining in the general silliness of Tumblr! <3

[flamingwordsinthesky]

Hey, I'm really curious, why do you ship Spideycrawler? I don't know much about Night Crawler or his relationship with Spider-man and since you've made 66% of the Spideycrawler posts on Tumblr (there's literally 3 posts) I wanted to ask you.

Wow 66%? Damn.

Anyway it's started in a discord server I was in, there were a few people talking about these two. Mostly how fun they are, how they would work together, and how fun it would be for them to team up more. (and inevitably wouldn't it be neat if they kissed).

At first I wasn't too sure about it at first but once someone started laying out how Kurt could probably sweep Peter off his feet, how Peter and Kurt have similar senses of humor, how they both enjoy old media (This one could count as a headcanon but whatever).

And there was the fact that Peter lent a suit to Kurt when Nightcrawler became Spider-Man. I mean they aren't close friends but it's clear Peter at least respects Nightcrawler.

The first one being this issue.

While I will admit my knowledge of Nightcrawler is limited (I know him more from X-Men evolution and the movies, plus Wolverine and the X-Men). I am reading the comics to get a better idea of what his character is like. And I'm talking to people who adore Kurt.

From what I've read so far (in their teamup issues at least and Uncanny Spider-Man), they have an interesting dynamic. I think they would be good friends at least and would probably have fun just sticking to things and testing out their acrobatic abilities. Of course this is Spider-Man (Especially from the 70's and 80's) and he was known to pick fights with just about anyone. But that's just the name of the comic game

This is honestly my favourite moment of them (from Secret Wars). Peter's beating up his team and Kurt is just "Wow! Spider-Man is awesome!"

Honestly, this pair for me just really clicked and I love a good rare pair.

And I'll be real, there are people out there who could write better fanfics for these two (And I consulted them when I was writing my fics cause I can be very impatient). But It's a ship I support and want more people to discover and make more content for them.

I think there is a lot of potential for these two. I think there is a lot of things you can do with them. And overall. I just think they'd be cute together.

[writerscafehub]

MEET THE BARISTA: Stella

@a-lumos-in-the-nox

From one to five stars, how would you rate your writing? (No downplaying yourself!)

4.0, I've gotten better over the years, especially with just sharing over two ish years ago. I'd like to go back and brush up some descriptions but other than that I say it's good! 

What do you think makes your writing stand out from other works?

I say the characters I decide to make each one of my characters are their own person that I can see being real. They are definitely my favorite part of my stories.

Are there any writers that inspire you?

Right now, Brandon Sanderson. I'm reading through his first novels now. The way he uses descriptions to worldbuild is amazing! And I love his characters

And all my friends on the server, the people over there write some incredible stuff!

What’s the fic you’re most proud of?

Stella Archer, I wrote that story in college it's a decade old & I never thought I'd finish it let alone share it! Stella's been with me the longest so you can see how I used to write then vs. now all in one series. 

Which character(s) do you find easiest to write and which do you find most difficult to write?

Easiest to write: George Weasley cause anything goes with him. He's goofy, sweet, confident and a wildcard. That's really fun to play with. 

Hardest/Challenging: Neville Longbottom & Druig. These two are my heads & tails. They are complete opposites. Druig's is inquisitive and there's a depth to him that I can relate too, and hes smart mouth, my favorite kind of guy lol. 

Neville is soft, confident, brave & empathic. There are things i can have Druig do that i can’t do with Neville and vice versa. I could talk about their differences forever but they are still a fun challenge to write. 

Who or what do you find yourself writing about most?

Usually whatever idea I haven't done yet or I want to try. I write a lot about superheroes or powered individuals. Often with my own spin 😏. Friends to lovers mostly. 

Tell us about a WIP you’re excited about!

im working on the ending of Bloom, it's the last character arch for Neville. His eldest will be looking at school brochures and some of his past students will make a groundbreaking medicine for people who have pain caused from curses & his parents being among the ones able to get the medicine. Meaningful things happen & I'm excited to write it!!!

First fandom you ever wrote for?

Harry Potter; 😂 nothing has changed I still love the universe.

Any guilty pleasure trope(s)?

I dont feel guilty about them their all pleasures; so Soulmate AUs, soft dark, Coffee Shop AUs, threesomes, genderbending.

A trope you’ll never, ever write for.

A/B/Os the structure would be all over the place. 

Wildest fic you’ve ever written?

Never Too Late, I put as many of my favorite tropes in there as I could. Soulmate AU, Coffeeshop AU, gross loving couple, old married couple, Tall boi, short girl…etc. And they fucked for a hobby. It was so nuts I made a game out of it in that universe had it's own rules & everything 😂 So much unhinged stuff happens in that fic & I don't regret any of it 😂. 

Favorite pairing to write for? (platonic or romantic!)

OCs x main character. Which is usually an extension of me somehow cause i said so. Even the very few readers stuff i have i always pictured myself. 

Do you listen to anything while you write?

I have a playlist for each story i have & i cycle through thoes whenever i need the vibes 

One-shots or multi-chaptered works?

Both, I like both 

15. Have you ever daydreamed about side adventures/spin-offs from your fic? Tell us about them!

My ficts are day dreams haha. Hmmm I have a bunch of daydreams about Daphne & Charlie spending time with their parents as a family in some of the places they have traveled to when they didn't have kids. That and the adventures of Daphne & Lottie growing up. But I'm really stubborn about aging my OCs kids so most of them stop at a certain age.

16. Is there anything you’ve wanted to write, but you’ve been too scared to try?

Not scared, I just don’t know how to write it. I want to make my own villain somehow but i gotta figure out so many things first. Or the villain's spouse or something, it’s still on the drawing board. I don't do many dark things so it would be a challenge for me. 

What’s the nicest comment you’ve ever received?

All the comments on my first dark oneshot, Sweet Dreams. It was just me playing around with Druig’s powers to a higher level then flooring it. It was fun & the ones of my first series Stella Archer that story is a decade old. So to get comments on that was special 

Have you ever gone outside of your comfort zone for a fic? How did it turn out?

For Between the Shadows I did cause i was trying to portray my OC for that a certain way without making her sound boring. That was a hard fic for me in many, many ways. But it turned out great! I’ve never introduced an OC in a more profound way than I did with Juni and it was refreshing to experiment with that OC. 

Tooth-rotting fluff or merciless angst?

I'm a sucker for both. I’ve written both. 

Do you have any OCs? Tell us about them!

I have 13 fully developed ones and the rest are side ones. But here are some of my favorites!  

Stella Archer-Asgardian Demi-god think of Gaia with all the powers of the elements. She has 4 kids. And married her highschool sweetheart George Weasley. 

Flower- a nymph of mythology origins. Her power is growing flowers and plants from anywhere as long as she has a water source. She carries a pouch of soil around with her for such an occasion. She stayed with her love even though he was cursed by the flying dutchman. 

Ruby Morgan- Charms professor, classic style of dress, her magic specialty is levitation she can make anything levitate with a snap of her fingers. She grew up in France raised by her Dad and her Grandmother. She can read Latin, speak French and loves cats.  

Angus Kohler- Scottish, loves to drink. His magic specialty is tracking. He teaches Care of Magical Creatures. Head of Hufflepuff house. Werewolf, he’s Neville’s best friend and Ruby’s too. Plays the bagpipes at every graduation in full kilt attire that matches Hufflepuff.  

If you could enter the universe of any one of your fics, which would it be and why?

I’d enter Never Too Late cause that OC is the closest to me irl and I basically gave her everything I wanted and didn't skip any details lol. I would gladly love to be in that universe. 

Is there anything you wish your audience knew about your writing or writing process?

Have you ever daydreamed about side adventures/spin-offs from your fic? Tell us about them! My ficts are day dreams haha. Hmmm I have a bunch of daydreams about Daphne & Charlie spending time with their parents as a family in some of the places they have traveled to when they didn't have kids. That and the adventures of Daphne & Lottie growing up. But I'm really stubborn about aging my OCs kids so most of them stop at a certain age. Is there anything you’ve wanted to write, but you’ve been too scared to try?

Copy and paste an excerpt you’re particularly fond of.

From Kissed by the Land; Cursed by the Sea.

In a tavern miles away sat a bard playing a tune and weaving a tale.

Let me tell you a tale about a mortal man forced to sail the reaper of the blue…His eyes as blue as the cursed seas, and hair as black as the night, it's true…

He's fought sirens, an sailors, an swamp monsters too, all while sailing souls lost to the depths, to their final steps…it's true.

The reaper of the blue captured this man, for a century or two. Till it was over. An he returned home, to his dearest its true…

This is the tale of the reaper of the blue, and a man forced to sail it's sails wide and true for a century or two…

Ramble about any fic-related thing you want!

I wanna go back and write Kissed by the Land; CUrsed by the Sea as a darker tale but i have NO idea how but I totally could!!! I just played around with Fairytales in that one. Um my current series Bloom is almost over & I’m thinking of making a spin off of it only for Angus cause I love that man he’s my wildcard in every sense of the word lol. 

I love writing main character x OCs so i have an excuse to run around in all my favorite worlds as different personas!

[alittlefrenchtree]

Thankyou for your comment about that Chick a fil fan person. They don't seem to have any insight at all, to "deliberately touch him" and ask if he gets attacked? It's creepy. They're old enough to know better. But I think he wants to be seen, he could afford to get someone to pick up take away for him. It's like that cafe in Paris, from the servers account he kept talking until she asked him if he was TC and got a photo with him. So I don't know, it seems to have a purpose.

Hey Nonny! Thank you for your message.

I get where you're coming from but I feel like, even if we agree, there's more to say around your thoughts for them not to be taken in the wrong way.

I don't now how old this/these fan(s) are but even if they're not that young, they're young enough to have grew up with different codes and more importantly they're not old enough to understand every way how they grew up has an impact on their behavior. They don't understand that getting "deliberately touched" is something Tim (and every famous person in his position) must have experienced a thousand times already. That he sees right through them even if they try to act chill about it. They don't understand that they're sharing pieces of lives that don't belong to them, lives of people who have have huge needs to keep these very few pieces of their life for them because they're public people.

But how could they? They're sharing every detail of their lives online almost since the day they were born and they grew up seeing everybody around them doing the same thing, from their mom sharing pics of their food on Facebook to their high school friend who did a "what I eat in a week" video every month on youtube and became a micro-influencer doing so to their favorite singer vlogging through their promo. They grew up in a time where everybody is a famous person in the making and every famous person is a friend you can talk to with the phone in your pocket. Of course they see nothing wrong by telling everybody what Timmy's order is or when and how he was there.

That's why I'm more about opening up a conversation than saying they're disrespectful or should know better, even if I'm not sure any of them is on tumblr but maybe somehow the topic will end up on instagram or tiktok or whatever.

About Timmy. I haven't done this in a while but let's talk. And first let's remember two things about him: a) 99% of people who met him have perceived him as a nice person, b) he has anxiety about what people will think of him every time he knows the interaction he's having at the moment has a chance to be a worldwide news in the following 24hrs. So him chatting with random people he's ordering food from could very much be a) him being nice because he's nice or b) him being nice because he doesn't want the world to think he's an ass (which could also be being nice in some people's book but you know, i love nuances) or a mix of the two at the same time. And not necessarily be about him wanting to be seen.

On that same thought and the whole he can go unnoticed when he wants to/he could have someone do it for him. To start with the latest, of course he could but why would he? If he's hungry and he's driving past a drive-in (lol) why wouldn't he do it himself? To not interact with 3 people who might recognize him and be happy to see him? What a way to become completely disconnected from the real world and end up like these not so enviable rich people who are unable to survive a day without the help of two PAs.

I do also think "he can go unnoticed if he wants to" doesn't mean the same thing in 2023 that it did in 2018. I do believe that he didn't only buy a 12 millions dollars house because he could make Apple pay for it but because it's an easy way for him to be safe when he's home. Which might not have been possible in a regular house or building. I do believe that going unnoticed for him now mostly mean either staying home or only go to private places (like someone else's house) or some of these exclusive places where you only fine rich people and have every chance to make you become an ass. And even if you can live with that, I bet sometimes he just wants to take a bite on a good old fast food and live the same life as us peasants. Does it qualify as "he wants to be seen"? Not sure. For me it's more like a "he wants that thing and he doesn't care if he's seen in the process."

Sorry, that's probably way more than anything you were asking for. I hope you don't mind me sharing some (long) ideas around your own thoughts but since you stopped by my inbox, I guess you don't 😅😘

[dreamcatcher-roulette]

I've had your post up in a separate tab for ages, but life 😮‍💨😅

Just wanted to say I appreciate the in-depth response about RAID (and cosmic rays!) and especially the S.M.A.R.T. article - it'll come in handy as I'm quite complacent 😅 about my personal backups (I think my music files have the most "redundancy" via iPods 🤡)

*I dunno if you'll find it interesting, but the OP's schadenfreude in this Reddit post was amusing to me, at least 😅

https://www.reddit.com/r/Netsuite/s/Bxu6bFnrkS

But tbh, even for the outage referenced, 🤡 I would've been more angsty about the potential hours! of productivity lost (i.e. bc users getting anxious about deadlines, etc.) rather than the potential that our data pre-incident would be corrupted or lost.

Anyways, in any case! Thank you for sharing your tangents! I hope you're doing well!

Ahh what a great honour to be a long standing open tab. Funnily enough I started drafting this yesterday and got distracted from it as well. My original response to how I’m doing was going to be “semi patiently waiting for the Dreamcatcher comeback announcement” but since then we got Fromm messages saying probably not until at least June (noooooo) and now I'm also neck deep in ACC, much to my dismay. I have nothing intelligent to say about batteries, they’re complete mysteries to me as well, but they sure do exist. Unfortunately.

Anyway! I do have things to say about backups. Below the cut 😉

The thing about backups is that you can definitely get way deeper than you need to, I think it’s mostly important to be aware and comfortable with your level of risk. The majority of people don’t hold too much irreplaceable data on their personal computers, and the data that does come under that category often fits within free or cheap tiers of cloud backup providers. Before I had my current setup I used to take a less structured approach to backups. I sorted my data into three categories:

Replaceable, which encompasses things like applications and games which can be re-downloaded from the internet (and, if the original download source were no longer available, this would not be a huge deal);

Irreplaceable but not catastrophic, which encompasses things like game saves, half finished software projects, screenshots I've taken etc; and

Irreplaceable and catastrophic, which encompasses things like legal documents but also select few items from category 2 I'm just very personally attached to.

Category 1 items I had on a single hard drive, category 2 items I copied over selectively to a second every now and then when I got struck with a particularly large wave of paranoia, and category 3 items I did the same but with the additional step of scattering them through various cloud providers as well. Now that I have an actual redundant drive setup in a server I have Kopia running on my personal computer to periodically back up everything that isn’t on my SSD, but I still rely on those external cloud providers for offsite backups.

It’s important to note my setup is ultimately designed with hardware reliability engineering in mind but those aren’t the only factors at play when thinking about backups, especially for enterprises. That Reddit thread is hilarious and I can see exactly where both sides are coming from, it’s a common enough disagreement between people of different departments. Senior software engineers tend to be paranoid old bastards who loathe to trust anyone else's code, which is in direct opposition to so many “software as a service” business models these days. But from a business perspective it makes complete sense to always have your own copy of the data as well, even if it isn’t the copy being used. It’s not just loss of productivity (although I agree that’s the most likely extent of any service down time) but often there are legal obligations on keeping records of certain types of work, and, while I’m pretty sure a company could win a court battle to absolve itself of responsibility in the event of a trusted third party being the one to drop the ball, that’s not the kind of argument you even want to risk getting into when there’s such a simple extra safeguard that could be put in place.

My assessment of the risks of my own backup solution of course has a MUCH lower threshold for striking out controls based on cost. I'm a hobbyist after all, this whole thing does not generate money it only takes it. Most notably I don’t have any full offsite backups, which leaves me vulnerable to near total data loss in the unlikely event of a house fire or someone breaking in and just picking up and leaving with the whole lot. The problem with defending against either of these scenarios with a “proper” 3-2-1 backup strategy is that the first server already cost me enough, I don’t want to go investing almost the same amount into a second one to stick somewhere else! And paying any cloud provider to host terabytes is no friendlier on the wallet.

There’s also the issue of airgaps, which is something enterprises need to think about but I do not have any desire to entertain. If a bad actor were to infiltrate my network in such a way that gave them root access to the server hosting all my data I would have no ability to restore from a ransomware attack. Of course this scenario is very unlikely, I’m already doing a lot to mitigate the risk of a cyber attack because running my services securely doesn’t incur additional costs (just additional time, which does mean I haven’t implemented everything possible, just enough to be comfortable there are no glaring holes), but it’s still something I am conscious of when running something which is exposed (in a small way) to the internet. Cybersecurity is also a whole separate but interesting topic that I’m by no means an expert in but enjoy putting into practise (unlike BATTERIES. God. What is wrong with electrical engineers (I say this with love, I work with many of them)).

In conclusion, coming back to how this relates to my dreamcatcher images blog, you can rest assured that my collection of rare recordings is about as safe as my collection of rare albums is, in that, barring a large scale disaster, they should be safe as long as I want to keep them. Which is hopefully going to be a very long time indeed, because I don’t just enjoy the process I also enjoy the content I’m preserving. But the average person probably doesn’t need to put the same level of effort into archiving — Google and Microsoft’s cloud services have much more redundancy than a home setup could ever achieve and can hold all the essentials (like the backup of the Minecraft server on which you met your oldest friends, for example).

[risu5waffles]

[LBP - LBsP 01/19/24] 292 - You're Gonna Carry That Weight

Well, heck. Hopefully this won't be the last fresh (to me) level the we look at on the show; but if it is, i guess we get to go out wiv a bang. Or at least a chewy philosophical problem.

The level's an interesting one, and i feel like it ought to be viewed from two different lenses.

On a pure nuts and bolts side, it's a decent platformer wiv an interesting, elevating conceit. You've got this checkpoint, it's on wheels and you can drag it. You can choose to leave it behind at any time, and gamble on your skills. The earlier you leave it, but more ground you're going to have to go back over if you die. The tension there, if you're being a showoff like me and trying to ace the level wivout carrying the checkpoint at all, really adds to the trickiness of the platforming sections. There were a few times where i wound up getting myself killed because i was playing too conservatively, because i was thinking of having to do everything all over again if i got myself killed. That was really cool.

The gameplay bits themselves were fun once it got challenging. The ice bit, the gears, and that last monkeybar/lights section i had a lot of fun wiv. The first half, tho' does wear a little bit. i think that adds into the risk calculation i mentioned above, but after going through the level a couple dozen times (yes, like, actually a couple dozen times), i did wish i could hurry along some. Now, that's not really an issue most players will have, but it was there.

The environment felt the weakest to me. There are some definite standout bits. Guts, in particular, is a great setpiece presentation-wise; but mostly it feels very standard "this is an LBP1 cave platformer." i did, however, deeply appreciate the ability to select music up front. Song 2 really is the better track for the level, but @soupum well knows the copyright issues that causes for YouTube videos. i don't know that he was thinking specifically of me when he put that choice in, but i was very glad to see it.

So, like, on the level-qua-level it's neat. Definitely something i enjoyed playing, and i could really dig the gimmick.

But then, it's not just playing at being a level; it's also working a message, and this is where things start to get a bit dicey for me. Not that i don't think the message isn't one worth conveying, or is something that can't be conveyed in this medium; but i'm still not sure the level conveys it well or clearly, and it certainly feels like the form is (while honest, at least if i've read it right) ultimately more cynical than perhaps necessary? i don't know. i've got a lot of feelings about it still, and i'm still not sure if i well conveyed the message i was getting at in the video. At the very least i can say this is the most noodling i've ever had to do about an LBP community level, and more noodling than i do over most actually-published-by-studios games i play; and you can't say that's not some form of success.

-------------------------------------------------------

i have so much b-roll of this level, it's honestly made a bit of a dent in my PS4's storage space, so i'm glad the video's finally live and i can cull it.

Still no word on the servers, or much anything aside from StevenI's announcement of his departure as community manager. i'm going to record the DLC levels to fill in space in the Archive, and i'll be looking at my flags level on the 26th, and Distress in Ocean on February 2nd since both of those are on my moon (Distress was a copyable level, and i don't know why i copied it, but i'm awful glad i did). But eventually we're going to hit a spot where the rubber meets the road, and there's just nothing left for me to Archive.

i can still do LBsP things, behind the scenes looks at sets and things like Create Mode goofing around, but if the servers don't come back relatively soon, i think the DLC will only last... i'm not sure. Not super long. i didn't get every pack, even tho' i did get a bunch. i'm feeling some kinds of ways about this, and none of them are very good.

[oxeye-daisyy]

You touched on it in a recent post - that some of the HC9 storylines (namely King Ren) do not occur because of Martyn being there. Could you expand on that? Like at what point in the season is Martyn discovered, and other than obviously no one worrying about how many diamonds people have from the diamond pillar contest (I’m assuming that was at least started before Martyn arrived?? Did Martyn arrive in the middle of it and somehow change how that ended??) and thus not worrying about wealth redistribution - what else changes on a large server wide scale??

Thanks for this au btw I’m finding it super intriguing!!!

so, what i did for time-scaling when martyn's discovered is i sorta just went with 1.19's actual release date -- obviously, this was not when hermitcraft actually updated, but it's a little easier for me to remember the actual release than it is to approximate from videos when hermitcraft itself updated, and it's not like me fudging dates for my own convenience is the most unrealistic part of this au sjdgjfg

either way, this means that functionally, june 7th is The Date where literally everything gets canon divergent! world border drops, grian and pearl decide "hm we should go explore", they have probably some dare about which one of them can get more diamonds from branch mining in this untouched area of the world, and then they end up dropping into the city.

after this, on the server-wide scale, really the biggest change is that this does just avert the whole monarchy situation. the economy is maybe still a little bit fucked as a result of this, but it genuinely seems more likely to me that the bigger priority would become "something is potentially wrong with this world, somehow" and not "a bunch of people have more diamonds than they can reasonably figure out what to do with." i haven't thought a lot about how, like, this could affect anything else on a server-wide scale, frankly because i'm (sadly) not an all-seeing and all-knowing being and in fact watch very few POVs for hc9 so i don't always know what the server-wide scale looks like, and as such can't purposefully think about changing it

also, thank you for the kind words!! i sorta just started posting about this on a whim and never really expected to get many people who were actually as intrigued by it as i was, mostly just wanted a place to archive my thoughts that wasn't just discord DMs to a small handful of people, and so it's always really exciting for me to see you guys engaging with it and like, sending me asks and headcanons and such ! <3

[wanderingchocolateeclair]

Interdimentional Therapy AU?

Interdimensional Therapy AU!!

It is a crossover fic in the works with myself and @laughteronsilverwings and is about our respective versions of Best Jeanist, getting warped into the same dimension and meeting!!

My version of jeanist is referred to as 'e!jeanist' or 'Jean/Wren' and Silver's is referred to as 's!jeanist' or 'Arcane/Arc'. Any comments from me are in bold. Any comments from silver are in italics.

They get to go on an adventure together and the entire thing is at around 40k words now!! While I'm here, here's the next part:

Interdimensional Therapy AU - Part 6

Previous Part || Next Part

CW: mentions of scars, panic attacks,

Starts with s!jeanist's pov and switches with every -

-

Tsunagu blinked. Looked like Jean was also somewhat morally bankrupt. Good on him. They could be in debt to the ‘morality bank’ together. “It’s… decent? I can charm people out of arresting me in French, if that’s what you’re looking for.” He scanned the street for targets- it was nice that the two of them were dressed nicely, people only suspected semi-well-off people to steal money by scamming, not pickpocketing.

“Did your phone die? Like- you have one of those money-payment apps, right?” Tsunagu has one on a burner phone. It was the account of some rich asshole that he’d stolen. Though-

He reaches into his bag to check. Yep. Tsunagu’s phone has no power, though, it’s not as mangled as he expected it to be, after a teleport. Worldleap? Whichever one. The last time he’d been teleported, well… things with fiddly small bits sometimes just. Didn’t work afterwards. “I’ve got a power bank if you need one. What food does the night market have? Uh- is this a legal one, or…?”

He let the question trail off into the air. Mostly, the markets with food were nice and legal. Friendly. The ones without food, though. Those were the quote-unquote ‘black markets’. The ones that operated only a part of the day, then melted into brickwork and air. The markets that didn’t officially exist.

Tsunagu’s also seen hybrids of the two, but honestly those were kinda hard to find. Stall-server food and paranoid criminals did not get along. Sometimes. Most times. 

Oh, that gal looked like she had money. Tsunagu slipped out of the staircase-thing he and Jean were at, stole her wallet and watch -he put the watch back, it wasn’t very good- then took the cash out.

Then he put the wallet back where it was. Tsunagu isn’t an asshole. Most times. 

He goes with the crowd, blending in and ending back where Jean was. The whole thing had taken around a minute. He’s good at this. And Tsunagu’s also had some practice with… liberating things from people generally on a different level of paranoia than the general French public. 

Tsunagu holds up the wad of cash. The girl was probably a tourist of some kind- he’d stolen five hundred euros, that was a lot more than most people would carry with them on a day-to-day basis. “Is this enough? I mean- if it isn’t, then we should go for the tourists. They’re used to being pickpocketed. And it won’t ruin their week, probably.” 

-

“Huh, that was fast! Good job!” Tsunagu congratulated, giving a thumbs up. Okay, maybe congratulating someone for stealing five hundred euros wasn’t the best thing to do- but so what? It was impressive that Arcane had managed it that fast! “You beat me to it!” He joked, to be honest he was ever-so-slightly looking forward to nicking a few things- it had been a while, okay? 

“I’m sure that will be plenty!” He smiled, signalling for them both to start walking and head towards the main street. “Though we can get more if we need to.”

Tsunagu turned around, smiling - though you could only see it through his eyes… barely… the tinted glasses did a good job masking them as well. “Are you ready to get some food?” He laughed, somewhat mischievously.

-

“I was ready ten minutes ago,” Tsunagu snarks back playfully. “Night market, right? Oh- I think I saw a pastries store there… do you like apple-cinnamon muffins? I like them. There’s this place in my world that makes them perfectly, and with vanilla ice cream on top.” 

Beat Jean to it- well, good to know other-him could still pickpocket? His eyes flash at Tsunagu, even though the tinted glasses, and wow he doesn’t think his eyes were ever that attention-inducing. 

His stomach rumbles. “Actually. Do you mind if we, uh, get some real food first? Fried rice? Anything you want to get? We’ve got five hundred here, and we can both always get more. So we don’t need to worry about budget…” Tsunagu trails off, looking at the crowd of people. “Ah- which way was your night market again?” 

- 

Tsunagu laughed, his own stomach yelling at him for food. “Oh definitely. I can smell food from here-” He hadn’t really noticed how hungry he was until this point. “I’ve honestly been kinda craving souvlaki… there was a really nice stall that did them here, if they’re still here.”

“Apple-cinnamon muffins with ice cream, huh? I haven’t tried that yet, but it sounds amazing.”

‘Pastries…’ Tsunagu made a mental note, smiling to himself lightly. ‘I’ll keep that in mind.’

“Oh!” He hummed in realisation, just as they were about to get to the more crowded area. “Before we get to the food, I just wanted to check- Can I refer to you as Cane for the time being? Is that okay? It sticks out a little less as a name.” Tsunagu tilted his head in a questioning manner.

-

Cane. Hm- that… worked. “I think, uh, Arc might work better?” Tsunagu shrugged. “It depends. Souvlaki? That’s the tacos with meat, right? The ones with the spices.” 

His mouth watered. “Yeah, let’s go get that. You’re Wren, and I’m Arc-or-Arcane.” They approach the stall and vendor, sticking to the edges. Tsunagu resists picking another pocket. “Which one do you want?” He hurriedly scans the board. Ooh, that one looked good. Fried beef, cabbage, onions, doused with honey and in a skewer. Wrapped in one of those- rollable flatbreads. Tsunagu swallowed the mouthful of saliva. “I’m getting the beef one.” 

Ooh- there was! Milk tea. With grass jelly. And the chewy pearls… ooh, there was a warm option. He’s getting that, too. With extra sugar. “Wren? Do you know what you’re going to order?” 

Tsunagu turns to Jean, who’s looking at the menu, focused. Hm. He’s considering his options, probably.

-

“Arc… got it!” Tsunagu gave a thumbs up.

Ohhh the food smelt so good, he couldn’t help but let out a tiny sigh- god he was hungry. And there was the stall -the pot of gold (food)- right in front of them.

He scanned over the menu, eyes landing directly on the one he wanted. Pork, warm pita bread and tzatziki sauce. Simple, but heavenly. Drinks? ‘Hm…they’ve changed the menu around a bit.’ he internally complained slightly, he wasn’t a fan of changes in layout- but hey, it’s been a couple of years. Hot chocolate with chilli and cinnamon? That sounded good.

“Yep, I got it!” Tsunagu smiled. “Beef? That sounds good. I’m getting the pork one.” He caught the vendors attention and signaled they were ready to order. Oh, French, right- this would be a nice refresh of his language skills. “Hi, can I get… the number three- yeah the pork one with the- yeah.” He placed his order in between the vendors’ slightly-aggressive-looking but well meaning gestures.

“You want the pork souvlaki with pita and tzatziki, yes?” The vendor checked, scribbling down the order.

“Yes, please. And can I get a ‘Chilli and Cinnamon Hot Chocolate’ please?” 

The vendor nodded, scribbling the last bit and gesturing at Arcane.

“Oh-” Tsunagu turned to the smaller figure next to him. “What do you want, Arc?”

-

“The honey-beef wrapped skewer and a warm milk tea with grass jelly, pearls. Extra sweet for the drink, please.” Tsunagu told the server. He wasn’t… quite sure how to, uh, order things. But bluffing had seemed to work before, and if it didn’t, the worst that could happen was him getting poisoned. And that would solve all his problems, so. Yeah. 

“Meal twelve, drizzled with honey, warm, extra sweet for your milk jelly pearl tea, yes?” 

“Yes. Thank you.” The server wrote it down, and passed him a meal ticket. Two meal tickets. 

“Tell your older sibling we don’t bite. They are new to Paris, yes? First time in the night market?” 

Well. It was, aside from the ‘older sibling part’, entirely reversed. Jean had lived in Paris for years. The night market… he was probably a regular? But it worked out. So Tsunagu just went along with it. “I think so? I’m not too sure. He’s been to France before, though.”

“Ah. I can tell- he has a good accent on the vowels. Clean words.” They pat him on the head. “Take care of your older sibling, cheri.”  

He’ll ask, after the waiter goes away. After a few more rounds of pleasantries, they leave. He turns to Jean. “You’ve been here before, right? Is it the disguise?” Tsunagu tacked on, just in case Jean really didn’t want to talk about it.

He’d led them to this place, which indicated he was probably familiar with it. So- unless he’d gone through something that led to a personality change, or he hid behind a mask in Paris, or something like that, you’d think the server would recognize him. 

Or the guy was new. 

-

Ah. Shit. So…

How was he going to explain the whole… kinda-spiralled-and-had-a-meltdown-and-changed-his-entire-self thing he had, well, been going through? That would be a tricky one.

So he simply settled with: “Ah, well I've changed my look a little… I may have cut most of my hair off- for certain reasons…” He trailed off, avoiding eye-contact and playing with his sleeves. He cleared his throat, “Ah- yeah! It’s. It’s the outfits, mhm- uh- yeah- I, uh… I had a very different style back then- haha…” Okay, maybe that was the least convincing Tsunagu had ever been but…

That wasn’t something he wanted to go into. Not right now. The memories were… too there right now. Too fresh. He didn’t want to dump that on a kid he just met… even if he was an alternate version of himself.

Change the subject. How does he change the subject? What does he change the subject to?

-

Okay, well, good to know Jean was both absolute dogshit at lying and traumatized. “Huh,” Tsunagu says instead of all the questions he wants to ask, because he’s not totally heartless. “I guess we both had a style change. I used to dress all formal-like. Now I just do whatever.” Kind of a lie, but also not really. Tsunagu’s more practical these days.  He cocks his head at Jean. “Yeah, it’s probably the… outfit and glasses. Maybe even the boots, they’ve propelled you to too-tall heights.” 

Internally, his mind is working away. Outfit change… a big haircut, change in life. Probably something bad. Mhm. Yeah, this is a topic to touch upon later. His eye catches on a bakery- there. “After we get our food, we can probably go get something at that bakery over there.” He nods at it, and- 

Their numbers are called. “I’ll go get them,” Tsunagu says, slipping off the stool and leaving his bag on the table. Jean would probably take care of it, and this would give him a chance to calm down. 

He went to the vendor, got the tray and the two big paper cups with three skewers in them each, the two drinks on the tray, and paid them the money. Twelve euros. Maybe he should’ve taken less from the tourist, but… naah. 

Tsunagu took the tray, balanced it, and started walking back. 

- 

Tsunagu watched as Arcane walked away and let out a deep sigh, he’d be surprised if Arcane didn’t hear it to be honest.

Well. He most likely gathered that what Tsunagu had said was a massive lie. Well, not entirely, he did have a very different style back then, but still. Tsunagu’s ability to lie on the spot seemed to vanish into thin air- which was surprising, considering he used to do that a lot… it was probably the trauma… yeah…

He pulls Arcane’s bag a little closer and places his hand on it, just to be safe. They weren’t the only ones in Paris who were willing to pickpocket, and were awfully experienced at it too.

Tsunagu sighed. He appreciated how quickly Arcane moved on from the topic, and how he didn’t pry or ask questions. It would probably pop back up at some point and force itself to be known and shared, but for the time being he would happily just move on and eat some food. Arcane had said something but… he didn’t hear what he said. Maybe a little too preoccupied with panic.

He looked down at his hands. Ah. he’d unravelled his sleeves almost all the way to his elbows. ‘Shit shit shit-’ he very rapidly stitched the sleeves back together with his quirk and breathed.

‘Okay, Tsunagu, just focus on the food. The food. Think about how hungry you are, let’s just focus on that, shall we?’ He tried to calm himself down internally. It worked, to a certain degree.

Ah. Arcane was coming back. And with food… oh it smelt so good… Tsunagu’s focus had already been ensnared by the wafts of tasty aromas heading towards him. That was good.

-

Tsunagu slid the tray over. “Thanks for looking after my bag,” He muttered, attention focused on the food and food only. It looks good. He divides the tray neatly in half and drags his cup with the three beef skewers in it closer. And then he takes a bite. 

Flavor explodes in his mouth. Spices mingling but not overshadowing any tastes other than celery. The honey makes it sweet, lingering-at-the-corners-of-your-mouth sweet. Tsunagu thinks he might be in love. 

He blinks. 

The skewer is finished. “Oh, wow,” Tsunagu breathes out. “It’s- how did I miss this in mine? This is. Amazing.” He picks up another skewer and eats it. “Do you think they’ve got cheese sticks?” He wonders out loud.

Tsunagu kinda misses them. A conbini near his house used to sell them. Then the store got demolished by Endeavour. 

He still holds a (small) grudge over that. And to be fair, the guy had paid back all the money the store lost. It was just that the store had decided to move. He took a sip of the boba tea absentmindedly. 

It was good. Not as good as the skewers, but just warm-and-sweet enough for today. And by today, Tsunagu means it’s cold in Paris. So this is a nice change… the pearls are a little bit weird for chewing, though. But otherwise it’s perfect. “How’s your food?” He doesn’t bother looking up. 

-

Tsunagu looked down at the skewers, the warm bread… the sauce- oh it all looked and smelled so good- And the drink was steaming, he could smell the cinnamon and chilli, he couldn’t wait.

One tiny problem, however. He has to remove his mask, in order to get all this amazing food in him- and that meant one thing: lower face reveal for Arcane! That was… honestly, not as nerve wracking after the mini panic attack he’d just had, so he pushed it down and simply accepted that hey- it was going to happen eventually, and at least it’s for good food.

He glanced up at Arcane, who seemed to be very much enjoying his food… okay, maybe that was an understatement- he seemed to really be tearing up those skewers, like… like a very hungry wild animal that has never been fed. Actually. Tsunagu’s not sure if Arcane had actually been chewing the food or whether he'd just… bitten through the entire thing. The skewers. Like, the wooden parts. Tsunagu made a mental note to check that those were still intact later.

Sighing quietly, he pulled off his mask and rubbed his face. No matter how used to wearing the mask he was, it always felt itchy after so long. He folded the black mask and put it into his pocket, not looking up. He wasn’t ready to see another person’s reaction to his face again. Not yet, food could come first.

He picked apart the pork and took small chunks out of the bread, taking his time and very slowly making his way through the skewer. Damn. They were just as good as he remembered. This helped take his mind off of everything- food always helped.

-

Tsunagu had worked his way through his second skewer and looked up at Jean’s silence. Huh. He had long, thin, silver scarring, all across his neck and face. Tsunagu thought of his sides, where Aloys had pinned him down and worked a thin, sharp knife (so sharp that he’d barely felt the cuts at the time) through his sides. 

Jean’s face looked like… someone had just. Taken that same knife and went to town. No method to the madness, just thin lines of scar-silver over his neck and lower face. But hey- Tsunagu’s seen walking skeletons, barely held together by the (not) grace of (a) god. This doesn’t scratch anywhere close to his perception of body horror. 

So he turns his attention back to his food. Hm- Jean’s picking at his. Maybe he’s just a slow eater, though. He picks his beef-honey skewer back up and eyes Jean’s chocolate-drink-thing. Tsunagu’s pretty sure it’s got… chili? In it? And, listen. He’s not a person to judge food choices, but why chili? In hot chocolate? 

Tsunagu flicks a hand and tugs at Jean’s sleeve a little bit. “Does… your hot chocolate taste good?” He eyes it warily, slowing down on his eating a little bit. 

-

Ah. He forgot about the drink for a moment. “Oh!” Tsunagu laughed nervously. “I haven’t tried it yet!”

He picks up the cup, looking at it for a moment. Hm. The cup was red. Nice. Tsunagu likes red.

He takes a sip and coughs on the fumes. There's the chilli and cinnamon- but other than that… It tasted really nice! Warmth that ran immediately down into his core, the sweet hot chocolate, made even sweeter by the cinnamon and with that spiced taste… okay, maybe Tsunagu had a new favourite drink. He would have to try and make this at home- maybe make Kuugo try it. That would be fun.

“Well, it is honestly amazing.” He raised his eyebrows and smiled at Arcane. “Uh. How is yours?”

“It’s good.” Arcane frowns a little bit into his boba. “The pearls are a bit weird, but the jelly is perfect. Are you… sure your drink is good?” He eyed it warily. “I think I smelled chili.” His eyes flicker to Tsunagu’s face.

Tsunagu laughed a little. “Ah yes, it has chilli and cinnamon in it! Maybe it sounds a little strange as a combination, but it works surprisingly well!” He picked at his food some more, wishing it would go in and go down a little faster. “Yours smells lovely! Milk tea is always a good choice. Is your food okay?” Maybe that question didn’t need to be asked, considering it was all almost gone, but he was trying to make conversation to move the awkward atmosphere away.

- 

Tsunagu hums. “It’s good. I don’t know if I have this place in my Paris, I might have to look for it- actually. On second thought, probably not.” He glances at the hot chocolate Jean’s sipping from. He… is still slightly judgemental of this choice. 

He finishes the last of his skewers in a few bites. “I think I saw an ice cream stall over there.” Tsuangu points. “What flavours do you like? I’m pretty sure there’s slushies, too- I’m going to go get them, and then we can continue our ‘question for a question’ thing?” 

Jean hums. “Ice cream! Just a plain mint-choc-chip is good for me! I’m not the biggest fan of slushies.” He pauses, taking a small bite of food. “Sorry, it might take a little while for me to get through this, but sure! We can continue the questions!”

Tsunagu nods. “Don’t worry, take your time. Watch my bag?” He leaves the stool and his bag behind, cash in hand. It takes him a little while to weave through the dense crowd -he has to duck under a few hanging lights- and get to the stall. No line, which was nice.

“Excuse me,” He tells the vendor. She has a pronoun pin on. “One mint chocolate, medium and a double caramel-vanilla, please. Both in cups.” 

She nods and starts rolling the ice-creams into cups. Once she’s done, she slides them over the counter. “Thirteen.” 

Tsunagu hands the money over and walks back. “I’m back,” He tells Jean. “You can go first with the question thing.”  There’s no need to give him even more stress- it’s obvious that Jean really, really, really doesn’t like having his face in the open.

---------------End Part---------------

Hope you enjoy this part- I'll have to remember to post the next bit in a few days perhaps.

We are starting to approach the proper trauma-dumping moments -specifically for e!jeanist in this case- and so living up to the name of the au /lh (I haven't released my jeanist backstory hc into the world yet so this will give you parts of it)

((everything will be tagged accordingly, please let me know if I have missed anything!))

[rinion-b]

since we're about to hit the end of the year soon, and since i've been too busy with dev work to draw much recently, i've been putting some of my thoughts together on my relationship with art, social media, and all that.

like a lot of kids, i did some drawing and painting during my middle and highschool years. unlike a lot of kids, i was homeschooled. not having a social circle to pick up interests from meant two things: i rarely had to deal with people on a day-to-day basis unless they were my family (yay), and my life felt very boring (not yay). the art subjects, and being forced into a dichotomy of acrylic and watercolor as my main options, did not help.

it took me until the middle of college to start drawing for real. that year was the start of a lot of things for me, and tbh a big part of it was simply having other people that i didn't mind being around, even if i never truly connected with them. anyway, i made some assets for a tabletop game, and at that point i was following enough artists to know at least vaguely the kinds of things that i wanted to draw.

if i look at my files, i've been drawing for a bit over 2 years now. and there's undoubtedly a lot of improvement from when i started (i can only stand to look at like 2-3 drawings from back then, aside from the studies).

i do still want to go back to painting things like this eventually, but for the life of me i cannot figure out how to render a character or a full scene like this.

anyway, that's year 1. i started posting some stuff to twitter, and did mostly fanart or studies where i could find the time. i definitely noticed that i had a bit of an unhealthy relationship forming already with social media (i may not be diagnosed with ADHD, but the way notification indicators make me behave is a big reason i suspect i have it). i also started to fall off of drawing fanart of large, popular vtubers because, well... i'm not sure actually. the artificial interaction inflation from a vtuber fanart is definitely one part of it, but i also started to make friends within an indie vtuber's fanbase/friend circle which made me realize i was being a bit parasocial about one or two larger vtubers and hit the brakes there.

also, this was from an event from an art server where we did blind/telephone style chara design iteration off a picture of jewelry, and that opened my eyes to how much fun having an OC can be compared to being constrained by an existing design. (i do still have issues with fanart because i don't entirely understand how to adapt an existing design to my style the first few times i draw it.)

now, to take a slight detour, all this was happening on twitter or discord. i had used tumblr back in the day, but i barely posted anything and never really kept up with the popular stuff happening. until recently it was also still sort of weird memories because i never the friend group i had from back then... not going into detail, but there are some interesting types out there, and we all kind of grew apart until the group fractured and just sort of fell apart.

coming back here to start posting, even if all i have at the moment is reposting older art, is super comfortable and a bit nostalgic. that return also fell at a time where i had time and a proper idea for updating my personal site, and i do think that i'll be implementing a bit of a blog there as well. i don't mind getting personal on social media, but it's impossible to do easily on twitter and even here i'd prefer to never get notified that people i don't know interact with my more personal posts.

so that sort of brings the story to the current year. having a job makes it pretty hard to keep up with the friends i've made the way i want to, but i don't see myself ever going fully freelance because of how easily i burn out from outside pressure to create. i have a few OCs that i want to continue to flesh out, and i think my main goal for the near future is to evolve my art more with their designs until i can really say i like my ability to render a character and a scene at the same time (i have some ideas, but i need the time to tackle them, and to do a lot of studies).

next year, i want to focus on streaming at least a couple times a month after i get some graphics finished (or even before, and just work on those on stream). i want to just get a lot better at art. illustration is a lot of fun once i can get out of the sketch phase, and i also have dabbled a bit in animation, but 3D is also on the table for game dev purposes and also just character modeling (it's really cool i want models of my OCs and i'm a very DIY kind of person). oh and VR too.

basically, i guess next year is my year to push for being a little more "self-sufficient" and also self-indulgent, i suppose. also been picking up the guitar again recently, and might be buying a bass soon. the more time i spend having fun/working on things and the less time i spend looking at socmed notifications, the better it is for me.