#No audio source for this one. its not from a stream

[canon-gabriel-quotes]

Transcript:

Mmph, hey babygirl. Just closing up the cathedral for the day.

That damn object didn't even come by today.

Well, at least I got a little bit of worship in and sharpened my blades, adjusted my armor. Tighter than it was, I think.

Maybe just because I was thinking of you *laughs*

Probably going to bed soon, just wanted to check in. Remind you to pray.

I miss you, sleep well honey. Goodnight.

[stellophiliac]

how to build a digital music collection and stuff

spotify sucks aaaass. so start downloading shit!!

file format glossary

.wav is highest quality and biggest

.mp3 is very small, but uses lossy compression which means it's lower quality

.flac is smaller than .wav, but uses lossless compression so it's high quality

.m4a is an audio file format that apple uses. that's all i really know

downloading the music

doubledouble.top is a life saver. you can download from a variety of services including but not limited to apple music, spotify, soundcloud, tidal, deezer, etc.

i'd recommend ripping your music from tidal or apple music since they're the best quality (i think apple music gives you lossless audio anyway. .m4a can be both lossy and lossless, but from the text on doubledouble i assume they're ripping HQ files off apple music)

i also love love love cobalt.tools for ripping audio/video from youtube (they support a lot of other platforms too!)

of course, many artists have their music on bandcamp — purchase or download directly from them if you can. bandcamp offers a variety of file formats for download

file conversion

if you're downloading from apple music with doubledouble, it spits out an .m4a file.

.m4a is ok for some people but if you prefer .flac, you may wanna convert it. ffmpeg is a CLI (terminal) tool to help with media conversion

if you're on linux or macOS, you can use parameter expansion to batch convert all files in a folder. put the files in one place first, then with your terminal, cd into the directory and run:

for i in *.m4a; do ffmpeg -i "$i" "${i%.*}.flac"; done

this converts from .m4a to .flac — change the file extensions if needed.

soulseek

another way to get music is through soulseek. soulseek is a peer-to-peer file sharing network which is mainly used for music. nicotine+ is a pretty intuitive (and open-source) client if you don't like the official one.

you can probably find a better tutorial on soulseek somewhere else. just wanted to make this option known

it's bad etiquette to download from people without sharing files of your own, so make sure you've got something shared. also try to avoid queuing up more than 1-2 albums from one person in a row

tagging & organizing your music

tagging: adding metadata to a music file (eg. song name, artist name, album) that music players can recognize and display

if you've ripped music from a streaming platform, chances are it's already tagged. i've gotten files with slightly incorrect tags from doubledouble though, so if you care about that then you might wanna look into it

i use musicbrainz picard for my tagging. they've got pretty extensive documentation, which will probably be more useful than me

basically, you can look up album data from an online database into the program, and then match each track with its file. the program will tag each file correctly for you (there's also options for renaming the file according to a certain structure if you're into that!)

there's also beets, which is a CLI tool for... a lot of music collection management stuff. i haven't really used it myself, but if you feel up to it then they've got extensive documentation too. for most people, though, it's not really a necessity

how you wanna organize your music is completely up to you. my preferred filestructure is:

artist > album > track # track

using a music player

the options for this are pretty expansive. commonly used players i see include VLC, foobar2000, clementine (or a fork of it called strawberry), and cmus (for the terminal)

you can also totally use iTunes or something. i don't know what audio players other systems come with

i personally use dopamine. it's a little bit slow, but it's got a nice UI and is themeable plus has last.fm support (!!!)

don't let the github page fool you, you don't have to build from source. you can find the releases here

click the "assets" dropdown on the most recent release, and download whichever one is compatible with your OS

syncing

if you're fine with your files just being on one device (perhaps your computer, but perhaps also an USB drive or an mp3 player), you don't have to do this

you can sync with something like google drive, but i hate google more than i hate spotify

you can get a free nextcloud account from one of their providers with 2GB of free storage. you can use webDAV to access your files from an app on your phone or other device (documents by readdle has webDAV support, which is what i use)

disroot and blahaj.land are a couple providers i know that offer other services as well as nextcloud (so you get more with your account), but accounts are manually approved. do give them a look though!!

if you're tech-savvy and have an unused machine lying around, look into self-hosting your own nextcloud, or better yet, your own media server. i've heard that navidrome is a pretty good audio server. i unfortunately don't have experience with self-hosting at the moment so i have like zero advice to give here. yunohost seems to be a really easy way to manage a server

afterword

i don't know if any of this is helpful, but i just wanted to consolidate my personal advice in one place. fuck big tech. own your media, they could take it away from you at any moment

[kyeomic]

i decided to upload my little baby svt file collection for everyone. its rly just a small random grab bag but i have access to some source files (basically meaning ts files so not screen recorded or watermarked, i will mark these as "source quality") + ive collected some concert recordings as well. enjoy.

!!! dont forget youre helping hybe finance the killing of palestinians when you give them money. consider donating to a palestinian child here. thank you

the links are hosted on gofile and WILL EXPIRE in about 2 weeks! you can send me an anon any time if you need me to reupload something, i want to share these files with as many people as possible! the only reason they'll expire is bc i can't afford permanent storage right now.

full list and links under the cut~ includes nana tour in the soup a selection of concerts some caratlands yadda yadda

❣️ stuff that will be added as soon as i get it: caratland 2025 both days no watermark + dokyeom focus cam, follow to japan fukuoka source quality

NANA TOUR source quality, 1080p, this is the full non-shortened weverse release!

IN THE SOOP Season 1 - source quality, 1080p, eng & spanish subs, this is the amazon version meaning it's shorter than the weverse release by 2 episodes. i don't have the full version in proper quality, if you do PLEASE dm me Season 2 - source quality, 1080p, eng subs, this is the full weverse release / ‼️ ATTENTION: for this one the audio and video streams are split but when you open the video file in VLC player you can simply add the audio stream in the settings. send me an ask if you need help with that!

CARATLAND 2024 - source quality, weverse release! 2024 - both days, both with multi and single cam each

CONCERTS

Right Here in Goyang - both days Right Here in Osaka - day 1 Follow Again Osaka - day 1 Follow Again to Incheon - day 2 CONCERT FILMS Follow Again to Cinemas 2024 - source quality Power of Love: The Movie 2023 - source quality Follow to Fukuoka 2023, source quality Ode to You in Seoul 2019 - source quality

OTHER PLACES TO DOWNLOAD FILES: therosebay 3cmgoogie dadeuthannie svt vlive archive

if you don't care about downloading files you can check out svtflix. it's an archive of almost every show, concert, documentary etc free to stream. and then there's also this old archive.

if you have high quality files you want to share please dm me!! i can store, upload & maintain links

some other resources: jdownloader - this program is the best for youtube downloads, not 4kdownloader!!! jdownloader also lets you download from a million other sites.. no limit no ads no scraping your data weversetools - to download wv lives

ok bye~

[mygaynesshasnolimits]

How to watch UCONN WOMEN'S BASKETBALL GAMES (streams added below)

NOTE: Watching via SNY or FOX, you will need to sign in through a tv provider/cable.

To watch SNY:

Source: https://sny.tv/info/live-faq

You must be in their broadcasting territory. you can't watch SNY outside of its regional territory, which includes New York, Connecticut, parts of New Jersey, and parts of Pennsylvania.

you must also be an SNY subscriber through a participating TV provider. List of providers: https://sny.tv/watch-now

If you meet these conditions, you're good to go!

To watch on FOX Sports (if you don't have SNY or live outside of tristate area):

Out-of-market fans (those who don't have SNY from tv providers and people who live outside broadcast region meaning other states) you will be able to stream UConn's SNY games at no additional cost to authenticated subscribers who have FOX as part of their television package. Users will need to sign in with their TV provider credentials at https://www.foxsports.com/ or in the FOX Sports app. The games can also be accessed at www.fox.com/sports or in the FOX Now app. Source:https://uconnhuskies.com/watch/search

Source:

About UCONN+ (website and app)

Unless noted UCONN+ (web and app) will ONLY have audio. This is because they do not have rights to broadcast games. And to my knowledge they also do not have rights to post replays either. They will live stream post game conferences though (not sure if for all games though.)

For everyone without access to SNY or FOX and international fans:

Theres no hope. lol just kidding. There is some hope. As of now (8am est) I've checked a few popular sports streaming sites(vipbox, methstreams, NBAstreams, sportsurge, crackstream, streameast and some iptv channels for sny) and unfortunately they don't have the game listed on their upcoming events but these sites do sometimes put up links under "basketball" and/or "NCAA" but those links only go up around game time (~30 min before tip off). unfortunately women's college isn't as popular as the men's 🙄 so it's hard to find. If I do find anything, I will post

Edit: stream links

This one has replay available:

Sidenote: please save and use the following uconnwbb's tv schedule to see which networks will air the games throughout the season

(thank you to the anons that shared the streams)

[felassan]

New Dragon Age: The Veilguard Journal entry:

"Journal #9 Hans Zimmer & Lorne Balfe Co-Composers Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s Composers Announcement"

"Hey everyone! Today, we’re so happy to announce that two-time Oscar-winner Hans Zimmer and Grammy-winner Lorne Balfe have co-composed the Official Soundtrack (OST) for Dragon Age: The Veilguard, the new single-player fantasy RPG experience coming to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC via Steam, EA App, and Epic Games Store on October 31, 2024. The legendary composers have collaborated on dozens of projects throughout their careers and have worked closely with the development team at BioWare to create a score celebrating the world of Thedas and its heroes. Fans will be able to pre-order the Official Soundtrack album beginning October 18th on iTunes and Amazon Music, with the formal release to follow on November 1st via Lakeshore Records. Moreover, in celebration of the announcement, Dragon Age: The Veilguard Main Theme, has been released as the first single from the official soundtrack, and can be downloaded and streamed now on all major music services such as Spotify, iTunes, and more. “One of our goals with the music for Dragon Age: The Veilguard was to provide a strong anchor between the world of Thedas and the diverse characters that inhabit that world,” said Cody Behiel, Audio Director for Dragon Age: The Veilguard. “We wanted to ensure that throughout the game's story, whether at its most epic or its most intimate, players were able to feel their actions connect to the personal relationships they have been fostering. Working with Hans and Lorne took these ideas to greater emotional heights than we thought possible and I am so excited for players to experience it.” Oscar-winner Zimmer, one of the world’s most renowned composers, has won numerous awards and honors for his scores in such films as Dune, Dunkirk, Interstellar, Inception, and many more. With over 100 film scores to his credit, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is the first video game soundtrack composed by Zimmer in nearly 10 years. Speaking about his work on Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Hans Zimmer said, “Epic stories lend themselves to epic scores, and the narrative tapestry BioWare has woven in The Veilguard never left me wanting for inspiration, be it during the game’s moments of shining heroism or darkest emotional pitfalls. I’m proud to have shared the journey of creating the musical backdrop for the latest Dragon Age adventure with Lorne and the entire design team.” GRAMMY Award-winner Balfe has over 170 composer credits across movies, TV and games, including Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Assassin's Creed III, Assassin's Creed: Revelations, and Beyond: Two Souls, all of which received nominations for Best Original Music from the BAFTA Games Awards. “The world of Dragon Age is an unprecedented immersive experience, and never more so than in Dragon Age: The Veilguard,” said Lorne Balfe. “Crafting this score alongside Hans Zimmer has allowed us to bring an epic new majesty to the realm of Thedas, bringing these characters and their stories to the next level. I cannot wait for people to play this game.” Players can pre-order Dragon Age: The Veilguard now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC. We still have a few more things to talk about before release, and we hope you enjoy our main theme in the meantime!             — The Dragon Age Team"

[source]

(emphasis mine)

[luciacaminoz]

APOLOGY for the gaslight gamerbro himself perhaps? idk i would just love it if you had a reason to make julian grovel for his wife just a lil

Hearts/Wires (2.2k, nsfw)

February 2021

Here’s the thing about Julian Sim: when he wants to gut you, he uses a scalpel, not a cleaver.

The main area of the penthouse haven is all dark wood, black marble, muted LED underglow—reeking ego.

Three neon-lit servers hum like a hive mind stacked neatly in a small, panelled alcove; on top, a lacquered black terminal and various split-screen monitors. There’s an entire wall of vintage gaming consoles and rare, limited edition collector’s items, all bespoke shelving and shiny sleek casing.

A cyber koi dominates another wall on a matte black canvas, silver and teal metallic paint catching light, glowing circuit-board patterns along the scales and through its fins. There’s an Eames chair beneath that; dark grey, horrific little Licker plush perfectly centered, and a thin, bioluminescent algae tank splits the space, tints everything in cyan.

Portishead’s Glory Box is an audio autopsy; drags lazily from somewhere.

Sol leans against the back of a leather suite by the floor-to-ceiling windows, watching her first snowfall skirl thick over the city. Elena’s in the HQ sublevel garage; Nadia’s still spying downtown.

Julian’s fingers fly over a tablet.

“Hey,” he says.

Sol just glances over her shoulder.

He swivels in his chair, grinning—that fuckboy grin. That one.

“Got something for you.”

“If it’s another USB drive of NFTs I swear to god, Julian, I’m out.”

“Nope.” He stands, all lean lines in his stupidly expensive techwear, and gestures to a black case on the marble-topped kitchen island. “Open it.”

She saunters over, pops the latches.

Inside: a leather jacket—deep shade of grey-brown, oversized, buttery-soft, lined with Kevlar. The back’s embroidered with two tiny hummingbirds in black and silver thread; the cuffs studded with citrine and gunmetal hardware. Sewn into the pocket: a rosary—each bead delicately carved obsidian.

“Customized the Kevlar weave,” he says, too casual. “Stops .50 cals, UV-resistant, self-healing nano-fibers. Also, y’know. Looks hot on you.”

Sol runs a thumb over the hummingbirds.

“You had this made?”

“Nadia sourced the leather. I did the code for the nano-fibers.” He steps closer, smelling of designer cologne and mint gum—he’d held another 2100X lecture at the University of Denver earlier this evening. “And the embroidery’s mine. Took a week. Fuckin’… needlework.” He mimes stabbing himself. “Torture.”

Sol keeps her expression carefully neutral.

“You should’ve stuck to hacking.”

“Probably.” His grin fades.

The jacket’s perfect. Infuriatingly perfect. So perfect she wants to cry or hurl him through the ten-storey window. Instead, she shucks off her old one, slides into the new. It molds to her—alive.

Sol can’t help the small smile. Her palms run along the smooth leather and she turns to him with a brow raised, exaggerated bedroom-eyes: Like what you see?

Julian’s gaze darkens. He closes the distance and smirks as he fixes her collar, tucking loose hair behind her ear, and it’s like every drop of squirming vitae in her system suddenly streams towards his touch.

She slaps his hand away.

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t do that. The… soft shit.”

He catches her wrist.

“You’re mad. I get it, Sol. Be fucking mad.” They’re chest-to-chest, her back against the counter, so close his breath ghosts her scar. “But let me at least try while you’re mad.”

“Try?” She snorts. “Try what? Try to fix this? You get fucking and fighting and nothing else. You don’t know the first—”

Julian drops to his knees.

Sol shivers.

Hands on both sides of her hips, his mouth laves a hot, pleading stripe up the inner seam of her jeans. Sol grips the counter’s edge, knuckles white.

“Julian,” she hisses, but her thighs part anyway. Fuck him. Fuck his pretty little mouth, fuck his goddamn eyes—wide and wet like he’s the one being gutted. She shoves him back, but he catches her foot, pressing a kiss to the snake at her ankle. “Fuck. You.”

“You first,” he murmurs, tugging her jeans down.

She should knee him in the fucking face. She should. Instead his breath scalds through the fabric of her underwear and she whines like a kicked dog. He noses her clit, deliberately slow, savoring.

Sol’s head thuds back against the cabinet. She fists his hair—god, his hair, still so fucking soft, no one but her allowed to mess with the stupid fucking coiff—and grinds down.

“Hate you.” It sounds laughable on the tail end of a moan.

“Mmhmm.” Julian drags her panties with his teeth, then bites the fleshy inside of her thigh hard enough to leave a bruise. Two fingers slide into her, curling exactly right, and she hates how he remembers her body. “Tell me again, Sol.”

She doesn’t. She can’t, because his tongue replaces his fingers, lapping at her like she’s the last O-neg he’ll ever fucking see. The whimper chokes out of her throat, sharp, shallow, broken. Julian groans against her, vibration ratcheting her even higher.

“Solona,” he rasps, fucking her with his tongue now, deep and filthy. “Missed you. Missed how you taste—”

Her legs almost give out. Her claws unfurl, digging into the marble.

“Shut—fuck—shut up—”

He doesn’t. It’s Julian—he talks; words muffled but relentless against her clit.

“I remember when you used to beg me not to stop—”

“Julian—”

“Beg.”

“Go to hell—”

He pulls back, cold air hitting her soaked cunt. Sol nearly sobs. He looks up at her, lips glistening, pupils huge.

“Say it.”

She slaps him.

He blinks; when he meets her eyes he’s smiling again—shit-eating, I’m-untouchable—but his hands tremble.

She holds his gaze for two seconds before her heel slams his shoulder.

Julian crashes back into the algae tank, cyan light rippling violently over the room. In that moment he looks scary; his fangs drop with one slick schlick, eyes flat black fucking fury—

Then he laughs.

“You’re savage tonight.” He staggers up, licking vitae from the cut on his palm. He sounds as unhinged as she feels, spreading his arms like some shitty messiah. “Okay, Solona. Hurt me.”

She’s on him, fangs bared, slamming him against the server wall. Monitors clatter; the Licker plush tumbles to the floor. Julian’s cock strains against his pants, and the scent of his blood—wired monsoon nights, algorithmic zips of lightning; hers, her Sire’s, mine mine mine—drags a guttural moan from deep in her chest.

“Hate you,” she sobs, clawing his shirt open. “HATE.”

“I know. I know—”

It’s not a kiss she pulls him into. It’s teeth and tongue and ten years of fucked-up festering feelings. Sol shreds his belt with her claws. He lifts her onto the marble counter, ice-cold against her bare skin, and she resents how easy it brings her back—how his hands stay gentle, how his cock twitches against her stomach, leaking and desperate, how she wants to curl up and keep him inside her forever.

“Sol, look at me,” he whispers.

“No.”

“Please.”

“You left,” she snarls.

“I came back. I was always coming back.”

“To use me.”

“And you let me. Is that what you want to hear?”

She slaps him again, harder, tips of her claws splitting skin; two thin jagged slices across his cheek bone.

The crack echoes. Julian’s head snaps sideways, hair falling over his eyes. He touches the blood blooming beneath his eye and just sighs.

“Feel better?”

“No.”

He cups her jaw, pressing his forehead to hers and Sol exhales a shuddering breath between them.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“Forget it. Just fuck me.” Her eyes are steepling with red. She’s using every gram of composure to keep them from running over.

Julian fucks her like he’s trying to carve an apology into her bones. Sol fucks him like she’s digging a grave.

Her heels cut into the small of his back. The counter’s edge bites into her ass. He slows, angling deeper, hitting that spot that makes her vision white. It’s a conscious effort to retract the claws, but she does, finally gripping his shoulders, grasping the nape of his neck, their foreheads still tight together.

“Look at me.” Begging. Begging. “Solona, please.”

Sol opens her eyes and stares into him the way she did when she thought he hung the stars.

Then, tears.

“Fuck. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry—” The words glitch out of him—staccato, inelegant, cracking. His thumbs swipe, smearing blood like warpaint.

He kisses her. It’s clumsy. It’s not enough. It’s everything. His lips tremble against hers, hands cradling her face like she’s made of cracked glass.

She kisses him back, nails digging crescents into the softness of his neck. Blood mingles metallic and salt-bitter between them. Julian’s hips stutter, buried to the hilt, chest hitching.

“I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry,” he repeats against her mouth.

She doesn’t answer. She wraps her legs tighter around him. Her hips roll slow now, aching, like she’s trying to fuse their skeletons.

Julian matches her pace, each thrust deep and punctuated—I’m. Here. I’m. Here.

His kiss trails along the thin ridge of her scar, her throat, her collarbone, every mole and freckle he finds there. When she comes, it’s silent—clenching around him, full-body shudder. Julian follows with a choked groan, forehead to her sternum, watching mingled vitae paint her thighs.

For a long moment, they stay like that, suspended—sticky, bleeding, Julian’s arms locked around her waist like she’ll ash if he lets go.

The algae tank continues to pulse, low and steady.

Sol shoves him.

He stumbles back, red scratches across his cheek almost closed over, Dior shirt hanging in tatters. She eases off the counter, legs shaky, and stalks to the bathroom. Julian follows, silent, hovering in the doorway as she splashes cold water on her face.

“Sol—”

“Don’t. Please.”

He doesn’t.

She strips, steps into the shower. Julian leans against the sink, watching through the glass as steam fogs the edges of her silhouette. When she’s done, he’s there with a towel—

Sol snatches it, wrapping herself tight.

Julian’s fingers brush her wrist.

“Let me fix your hair.”

“Fuck off.”

He retrieves a comb from the drawer anyway.

She gives him a look… but perches on the toilet lid.

Julian kneels behind her, carefully detangling the damp mass of waves. He used to do this—since the first weeks after her Embrace, when her hair would snarl from Sonoran winds whipping through the Geo and in the later 00s after messier Camarilla hit jobs. His fingers move in gentle, practiced patterns.

“We’re so fucked up,” she mutters.

“Maybe.”

“Lettow should’ve killed us both in Tucson.”

His mouth twitches.

They don’t speak after that. She leans into his touch despite herself.

Julian finishes her hair, silently debating a shower. Not wanting to leave her alone long, he burns vitae to blur through the motions, veins sparking with hunger, then dresses in a faded Evangelion t-shirt and black sweatpants.

Ridiculous, giddying relief slumps his shoulders when he walks back out into the living area and finds Sol slouched in the Eames chair, toeing the Licker plush on the floor, wearing one of his older hoodies—still raiding his wardrobe even here, even now.

Snow whirls behind her in the darkness outside, choking Denver’s skyline. Her eyes are closed, head drooped, limbs heavy, and he feels it too—the pressure droning behind his brow bone, blood beginning to stick and clump as arteries dry up to collapse. Dawn’s close.

Julian rakes his fingers through damp, painfully mussed and un-styled hair, and grabs the prayer mat tucked in a compartment beside the arch leading to the bedroom. It’s silk, deep olive green and embroidered—ayat al-Kursi in delicate gold calligraphy.

“Prayer time,” he says lightly, mostly to bridge the awkwardness stretching between them.

Sol looks up and frowns. He’s paler than usual, deep circles under his eyes, movements sluggish as he hits in a key code on the far wall and then lays out his mat.

“Skip it.”

Julian pauses.

“You know I can’t.”

She strains and stands, grabbing the Licker plush and what can only be an incredibly expensive throw blanket from the arm of the leather suite.

Julian watches, an almost imperceptible tightening in his jaw, as she follows him over, drops both to the floor beside him, and lies down.

“Fucking hypocrite.” She sighs, eyes closing. “You think Allah’s cool with diablerie?”

“He’s cool with me surviving sunrise.” Julian shrugs. “I’ll be quick.”

She watches him kneel, forehead pressed to the rug, earring glinting as he rocks forward, and thinks he looks beautiful like this.

The murmured Arabic is a familiar rhythm. She’s listened to it a thousand times as a fledgling in their trailer, but tonight it aches differently.

When he finishes, he doesn’t move.

“Julian?”

“I meant what I said in Santa Fe, Sol. Monterrey’s yours if you want it,” he says quietly. “I’ll follow you. No scripts. No strings.”

“No backseat Blood Sorcery?”

He finally flashes a smile at her, but she’s still lying on her back, eyes closed. He rolls up the mat with quick precision, even half-dead and mid-dying, and crawls over.

“None.”

“Liar.” Sol opens her arms.

He collapses into her, face buried in the crook of her neck.

“Missed this,” he mumbles.

“Missed you whining through Fajr.”

“Mean.” He flicks her nipple through the fabric.

Sol tugs his hair just enough to hurt. Julian purrs, fucking purrs, like some deranged cat.

Right before daysleep takes her:

“...Thank you. For the jacket.”

Julian smiles against her skin.

“Wait til you see what’s in the garage.”

[ prompt list ]

[knabbdwa]

I don't think Bads efforts into his translations is very well known and I just wanted to talk about it a lil cause I think its cool and I hope he succeeds in his goals :D

This video is where he explains it in full detail, but basically he is testing out this locally run translation thing where it can pick up the words he is saying and put in on screen. He hopes for the future is route an audio from non-english streams and display it on screen with the hopes to use it to play with yd and possibly other non-english creators. Its open source and means it can be shared. Its not close to being used properly but its still a cool possiblity to look forward to >v<

He has also been testing different onscreen translations for a few weeks now, in order to replace the google one he currently has since there too expensive for the long run, but doesn't want to get rid of them without an replacement. Hes been putting the most well received one on the start of stream the past few days but it hasn't stuck yet because it freezes too much and formatting issues.

Theres also the recent efforts into implementing translation into his server munchymc which he revealed yesterday:

Its still a work in progress so it got it issues not every word gets translated and its not on all the munchy servers right now, only survival. But all these continued efforts to accommodate and include are just, I don't know a very appreciated and happy thing :) And a prime example of the impact the qsmp has left on people that I hope will continue.

[jackboxconfess]

Hi there, people who like to ship quiz killer with literally anyone without any common sence, because he is "canonically pansexual/romantic" or whatever. Im here to explain why i hate [REDACTED] (as a person, his character development is mid even bad if you please) and every ship with him.

TRIGGER WARNING!!1!

If you are reading it and REALLY into that kind of stuff and can get very defensive from some anon post on Tumblr in a CONFESSION blog, ignore it for your own sake. Im here to confess, rant, and let it all out. I warned ya.

also sorray for my bad english, its not my native language, deal with it, DUH.

Now lets begin.

Reason number one : an enormous canon facts dilemma

If there is some information about characters, and it mentioned anywhere, but not in a game — i have all my rights to ingnore all "silly random canon facts" from Facebook blogs, streams on youtube, etc. People may don't even have a clue about existence of that stream. That's BAD character development, and y'all ready to talk about it. I had headcanon that quiz killer is aroace evil spirit of darknes with developed psychopathy, who uses corpses as vessels for like 3 years and i won't change my mind.

P.S. Also i hate the way Jackbox devs do character writing if it even was planned. Some of them are just a designs without any personality, especially new ones. All that facts about god-blessed hosts with any backstory that hidden in voicelines are literally random. You can play YDKJ Full Stream and never get "Escape the Simulation" episode because IT IS RANDOM. All fanbase need "lore-accurate archive™" with all voicelines, subtitles and sources. But im getting off-topic and may post about it later.

Reason number two : daddy issues

"Im so sorry he had such a bad childhood i wanna beat up his dad >:((" ... U know what? F*-

That fact and other disgusting things happened with character can be a background for a childhood trauma, i cant disagree with that. But the way people in fandom treating that same fact as excuse to say "aww he is killing ppl because of it, so let's ignore the fact he is doing REAL CRIMES and sugarcoat it by comparing it with Pyro's POV from TF2 because he is so silly little meow meow". Nah-uh. Its a reason for a trauma development, but not a reason to justify all his actions.

I wonder how would you guys react if murdering and kidnapping would be simply replaced by sexual harassment or even more gross.

And there may be same people are judging other characters because of gags about violence, but simp over a serial killer. We all know that famous question section where Cookie cut a head of his assistant in half, but most of people believe it was a real thing, despite lack of demonstration. It all could be just part of scenario with audio, played by a soundpad. In Trivia Murder Party we always saw...how do i say ehh...killing process, i dunno. Think about it.

Reason number three : ship dynamics

That thing always contain "kidnapper/victim" + Stockholm syndrome in 90% of cases. If you unironically ship that sheet of peace with any host, who was kidnapped in TMP 1/2 or any dolls, using all that "he quit killing people for his beloved because of love at first sight"/"i can fix him"/"from victim to happy marriage" tropes or any lovey dovey mushy UWU tropes, thinking its cute, healthy and want same kind of bf - congratulations, you are crime/abuse-romanticizing freako who need to touch some grass 🎉🎉🎉

Shipping characters that never met is weird. I mean it has a ponetial, but not if people use tropes i already wrote about earlier.

Still, in TMP2 there is lots of details that showing IS LITERALLY WANTED. Would any person date a serial killer and put their life in danger by harboring a criminal, who can get rid of you easily because you automatically becoming a witness? Im afraid not.

Same thing to selfshippers. No, you wont fix a mentally ill person you never met in IRL with one hug or kiss. If you need to talk about problems - discuss it with people you can trust or a specialist.

PRO/COM/DARKSHIP sucks, guys.

okay! this is alot. the sheer length of this thing. there's somethings that i think need to be said:

some may find the "aroace serial killing psychopath" to be stereotypical or disrespectful, but i'm not aroace so do not take my word for it. it's just from what i've heard

please do not imply selfshippers are mentally ill, need help, or that they're not allowed to selfship with redacted; that is disrespectful. redacted is not real so of course they never met him "IRL." his crimes are not real and your interpretation of him isn't everyone else's interpretation. redacted is noted to have a girlfriend (in tmp1) and is shown loving his mom, so redacted CAN care for things. also please consider the fact a selfshipper may selfship as a coping mechanism. just be a little considerate please.

(on a much smaller note: cookie DOES murder his interns, as confirmed by an AMA (ik you think secondary evidence from anywhere but the games is dumb, but it's canon and you can't really judge otherwise))

i don't normally comment on confessions and i don't like to do it, but if a group of people is being disrespected in someway i WILL point it out.

[meimesworld]

I know everyone should focus on the allegations of Lily orchard because ultimately that’s the most important, I’d like to raise a point and swing back to the fanfiction to ask a question to die hard Lily supporters.

No need to get into specifics, Stockholm was a story created by Lily under her dead deadname that involved abuse, pedophilia, etc etc.

What i can’t seem to fathom when there’s an argument against her lying is…why? Lily has constantly changed her story of the fanfiction multiple times.

Starting with the most well known quote of “can’t use Stockholm, I wrote that one” Lily has multiple sources where she directly acknowledges that she was part of the stories creation

The most interesting part of this, is that multiple times she has addressed the work by its name, Stockholm.

Then she went on to deny ever creating the piece in the height of the drama with Josh, where he flat out states that she wrote it, only for her in audio to say that he “could’ve pulled it from any fanfiction site” and show a censored screen shot blurring any information pointing to the exact contents of the story. While that tweet directly had been deleted, this tweet, posted on the same day he showed a screenshot of the fanfiction, proving exactly what the contents involved were.

She then some years later posted that, no, actually, it was originally called Scars, and the sex scenes were only added in because haters gonna hate man. So now it was “I didn’t write Stockholm, I wrote something else” despite, for years, only ever acknowledging it as Stockholm

All of these things are flown out the water when you remember that the @the-last-alicorn is still up and if you search her name on the blog it directly shows her account (now nuked) tied to the series.

And now, in its conclusion, both in KP’s video and in a recent stream she did, she finally admits that she did write Stockholm, addressing it by its actual name, and that it was taken out of context and, in stream, that she simply was just dumb and shouldn’t have wrote the things she did.

So my apologies, that’s actually five different stories, not 4.

This is where I have to ask supporters: at what point do you acknowledge that Lily is simply a liar? Instead of from the jump just saying “I wrote something that I don’t agree with now” as she did in her recent stream, she went on for years blaming haters, bronies, AI even when it wasn’t in public use yet. I’m pretty sure the amount of dragging she got for that alone wouldn’t have been as severe as it has been. Yeah there prolly still would ppl be weirded out by her but at least she wouldn’t be a liar. And in turn, if she can lie about something as simple as this, why in the hell is it so unbelievable that she could lie about molesting her sister, or being an abusive friend, or anything else?

Personally, I don’t even buy the idea that her tumblr just suddenly got mass reported so bad it was deleted, I genuinely think she started to realize just how much shit is housed on her account that she simply deleted it herself, but I could always just be a biased lil shit waffle constantly inclined to think the worst.

[yurimother]

Yuri Isekai 'The Executioner and Her Way of Life' Audiobook Announced

On Saturday, Yen Press announced at its Anime Expo panel that it is producing an audiobook adaptation of Mato Sato's Yuri isekai light novel series The Executioner and Her Way of Life. Yen Audio, Yen Press' imprint from audiobooks, will release the first volume in December 2023.

Yen Press describes the series:

The Lost Ones are wanderers who come here from a distant world known as “Japan.” No one knows how or why they leave their homes. The only thing that is certain is that they bring disaster and calamity. The duty of exterminating them without remorse falls to Menou, a young Executioner. When she meets Akari, it seems like just another job…until she discovers it’s impossible to kill this girl! And when Menou begins to search for a way to defeat this immortality, Akari is more than happy to tag along! So begins a journey that will change Menou forever…

Eight volumes of the original light novels, which are illustrated by Nilitsu, are published by SB Creative's GA Bunko label in Japan. The series received praise for its play on isekai settings and tropes and its inclusion of Yuri elements, which was a relatively uncommon choice when the series first debuted in 2019.

A manga adaptation illustrated by Ryo Mitsuya began serialization in Young Gangan in 2020. Square Enix publishes five collective volumes of the manga in Japanese.

Yen Press licensed both the light novel and manga adaptations of The Executioner and Her Way of Life in English, publishing six volumes of the light novel and two of the manga as of the time of writing.

A television anime adaptation of the series aired from April until June of 2022. It is directed by Yoshiki Kawasaki at J.C. Staff and is licensed in English by Sentai Filmworks. The series is available to stream with English subtitles and dubbing on HIDIVE.

Source: Press Release

[zosonils]

saw your tags on the special interest thing. do teach me about the soundtrack of sonic cd and its many fascinating production oddities...

YOU GOT IT BOSS o7

as most people know sonic cd has two [almost] entirely separate soundtracks - the original, used for the japanese and pal region releases, and a different one made for the american release. the jp soundtrack is your typical upbeat early sonic fare, with added flair and lots of fun sound samples thanks to cd audio quality, while the us one replaces most of that with super grungy and more atmospheric tracks. i'm not sure if there's ever been an official source on why the entire soundtrack was swapped out, and i'm too tired to check lmao [there are no sources for this post. it's all dude trust me], but the prevailing theory is that the localisation team thought that americans wouldn't care for the playful and energetic original soundtrack, since it was 1993 so everyone hated fun or something

the general consensus is that the jp ost is better and fits the gameplay more, and most future games to musically reference sonic cd use the japanese tracks as their basis [and the 2011 port of sonic cd defaults to the jp soundtrack no matter what region you're in, though it includes both versions and lets you swap soundtracks whenever], but the us soundtrack has its fans for its atmospheric style and uniqueness among sonic soundtracks. [personally i'm a huge sonic cd us soundtrack defender - tidal tempest present, all three metallic madness mixes, and the special stage theme are absolute hidden gems to me - but i do think it's weaker in the context of the game it's for by virtue of most of the good and bad future mixes not being tonally distinct enough from the present mix or from each other to immediately clue you in on which one you're in the way the jp songs do.]

okay now we've gotten the basics out of the way we can get to the fun stuff. my absolute favourite Sonic CD Music Fact is that for every stage's set of four tracks, the present, good future, and bad future mixes are stored as streamed audio, but the past mix is *always* sequenced music, relying entirely on the sega genesis' sound chip. when you send sonic back in time in the game, the music itself goes back in time with you by virtue of being both composed and played back with less powerful tools! isn't that cool?? they did meta stuff in their video game! in 1993!! they had the constraint to do that with the music on their game for the console addon that was all about better audio and video quality, over a decade before faux-retro caught on and most developers were willing to adhere to any limitations they weren't absolutely forced to by the hardware they were working with! they willingly kneecapped a quarter of their soundtrack for an incredibly small detail that most players at the time of release wouldn't understand and it STILL sounds good as fuck! it's so cool!!!!

the past tracks being sequenced is also why i say that the two soundtracks are *almost* entirely different - while replacing streamed audio is just a matter of composing a new track and swapping out the files, sequenced audio for a console like the sega genesis/cd is as much a programming task as a composing one. manually unravelling the old tracks, replacing any needed instruments and programming in new ones, sequencing all the new tracks properly, putting it all back together, and then testing to make sure that all that replaced code didn't accidentally fuck up anything somewhere else in the program would've taken more time than the localisation team had to get the game on american shelves. as a result, the past tracks in the us release are unchanged from their original versions, for better or for worse. as far as i know, no official past versions of the us soundtrack have ever surfaced, and we have no idea if any were even composed in the first place

lastly, both versions of the soundtrack had some form of physical album release in 1994, presumably independently of one another. the us version got sonic the hedgehog boom, which contained higher-quality extended versions of the cd soundtrack as well as a couple arrangements from spinball, whereas japan got sonic the hedgehog - remix, which true to its name was a remix album. i haven't fully listened to boom yet so i can't tell you if anything particularly interesting pops up in it, but remix is a REALLY cool listen! if you're listening for the sonic cd music it's pretty easy to pick out, but they get so creative with the original compositions now that they aren't constrained to seamless loops or fitting on the same disc as an entire video game that it's an entirely different experience. it's also just a really delightful microcosm of the sort of music that sonic tended towards early on, before sonic adventure made hard rock the standard lyrical genre and sonic generations gaslit us all into associating classic sonic with near-exclusively instrumental faux fm synth. i love you mid-90s classic sonic visual and musical aesthetic!!!!

[anonymous-eggy]

The First Whisper Coos (Az lore)

the touchstarved server has inspired me to write this poor lad's core lore. enjoy!

CW- Heavily implied SA, death, light religious trauma, depictions of audio and visual hallucinations, angst

Words: 733

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

“You are forbidden from touching my hands. You needn’t be enlightened. You only need to be by my side.”

That was what Azazel had told his lover. His lover, his childhood friend, his most trusted religious advisor, and now his downfall. All of Azazel’s faith lay crumpled alongside his lover’s body. It was a curse. His hands, which were supposed to be a source of enlightenment were-- are -- a curse. That witch passing through hadn’t been deceiving, misleading. All of those people he had subjected to his madness in the name of his false god. There was no god to enlighten them to and now his lover was gone.

Why had he touched Azazel? Why had he done such a thing?! A fraction of that madness that was once was hands wrapped around his throat was now creeping into Azazel’s mind; Or so he thought it to be. The pain of having a forbidden part of one touched while they lay beside another they thought they could trust. It was its own unique madness to attempt to make sense of.

Bloodied scissors dropped and hit a puddle of blood spreading across the wooden flooring. Clattering, blood freckling Azazel’s feet. Those same scissors had so gently trimmed his hair just the night before. The scissors that had now created an irreversible stain upon the soft sheets.

That stain will never wash out, no matter how many times it’s washed. Azazel had thought numbly that night. Was it the scissors that first stained them?

They had to run. They were a monster. Murder was forbidden. Was it? What was allowed and what wasn’t? The truth was now lost to the hurricane raging and tearing Azazel’s mind. Blood sullied Azazel’s once unsoiled feet.

How had it happened? How was he standing bare when, just a moment ago, he was in a deep linen-warmed slumber beside his beloved? Was it even Az standing before their lover’s body, their ceremonial deer mask in a bloodied hand?

The noise that escaped Azazel’s throat was nothing short of gut-wrenching.

“leave Leave leave your broken faith.”

The first whisper cooed.

He dressed and ran.

Az still can’t recall much of that night. Bits and pieces present themselves in sleepless nights. In nightmares. In his dead lover’s figure, staring at him among a crowd or whispering over his shoulder like it did that night He told them to run. In the ghost of His hands around his throat. Yet, the full picture was always scattered. Always out of order and missing things. Always nauseating and turmoiled. The worst was when He stood in the doorway of an inn room and just stared with His gaping stab wounds. The wounds always accusingly blinked and dripped red streaming tears at Az, causing him to break into a cold sweat and curl in on himself. Az’s eyes always remained glued to the spot He was standing until the morning light chased the visions away.

Despite this, they couldn’t leave their past behind. Az clung to their mask and kept it pristine. Not a single speck of dirt. Not a single frayed thread on the embroidered blue sparkle star on its forehead that mirrored his own pupils. It was all he had left of the lie he used to live. What a comforting lie it had been. I wish sometimes that the illusion had not been interrupted.

He no longer could bear to be called Azazel. It was a thorned vine in their gums, in their brain, that pierced and bled them when they heard it uttered. Az was the alternative.

A name was an identity. Azazel was a false oracle. Nothing but a tool, a monster to be harnessed. Az is a blank slate. He had no idea who Az was. But Az had a goal; a future. The Senobium. He could remember that travelling witch’s words perfectly, though he had no desire to repeat them.

With determination, he finally weaseled his way into a travelling party heading for Eridia, as useless as he was. And they set off, desperate to be cured of their sin and curse. For if the curse was lifted, surely the voices and visions would cease. And then Az could just be Az. He could live a near normal life. He could dance to a song only he could hear and sleep in puddles of safe, secure sunlight without a care.

Right?

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

perhaps i will write more for Az soon 💖

[unculturedmamoswine]

Forduary 2024, Week 3: Portal Years

For week three, I finished a fic I've been working on for a while: 30 short fics, one for each year ford was lost in the multiverse. Each fic is based on a prompt from this prompt list. The fics are in the order of the prompt list, but I did number them based on chronology.

Warnings for violence, minor character death, some drug use, and some cursing

12. scrosciare - the action of rain pouring down or of waves hitting rocks and cliffs

Ford leaned against the jagged wall of his little cave, staring out over the raging sea. Rain poured down, streaming off the cliff face and into the water below. The world was gray; the dark shining stone, the grim clouds, the crashing waves that pounded the rock. Even the sound was gray: the dull rushing roar of the sea.

His cave was little more than a pitiful hollow cut into the cliff face. If he hunched over enough he could avoid scalping himself on the cave roof. If he kept his knees up against his chest he had just enough room inside to press back against the farthest wall and avoid the rain. His temporary shelter was a hundred feet above the waves, so he would have to do his best to not fall from his roost.

Avoiding the water was ultimately pointless, as Ford was already only one rung up from soaked. But he was a furless mammal, and avoiding the cascading rain made him feel like had some measure of control over his situation. At least he was warm; whatever he’d been drinking at that bar had done wonders on his hypothalamus, which was great considering he’d had to flee into the stormy night from a white-haired assassin most likely sent by Bill or his agents.

He’d gotten what he’d come to this planet to get. Or this universe, rather– he couldn’t rule out the possibility that he’d entered into a universe that, in lieu of planets, had only a single unbroken coastline stretching into eternity. In any case, the tiny implant he’d had installed into his brain would provide him with the information he needed to find a stable power source for his quantum destabilizer. He just needed to sleep for it to take effect before it was broken down and processed by his body.

It had been hours since he’d heard evidence of his pursuer, and Ford needed to get to sleep sometime in the next five or his temporary implant would dissolve before it had the chance to tell him anything. He let his head fall forward, forehead hitting his knees. He closed his eyes, the world going from gray to black, and tried to let the static roar of nature (or this world’s version of it) lull him to sleep.

6. aspectabund - letting emotion show easily through the face or eyes

“Don’t look him in the eyes, Borgith!” snapped Shhhessh, smacking its companion on the back of the head with spindly yellow fingers. “It’s a faux pas on Human-ka to communicate telepathically!”

“Sorry! I’m sorry, human,” Borgith dropped its gaze, possibly a contrite gesture, but most likely to avoid looking Ford in the eyes. Its mouth pulled down into an unmistakable, human-like frown.

“It’s no problem, I appreciate your willingness to leave my mind alone.” Ford hoped he didn’t sound as tense as he felt. The beings of Rennik-ka were kind and scientifically minded, but being surrounded by yellow mind-readers was not good for Ford’s long-term psychological well-being. “And my planet is named Earth, actually.”

Shhhessh turned its beautiful, luminous pink and turquoise eyes to Borgith, making a triumphant noise and doubtless communicating wordlessly with it through their species’s telepathy. Borgith beamed back at its companion, and, without turning toward Ford, said “Ground? The dirt? That’s what your planet’s named after? Wonderful! That’s actually very very common! We here, the Rennik, are actually statistically unlikely to have named our planet after ourselves!” The alien took a small device from the length of brown fabric it wore wrapped around its torso. “Can I record this? As a linguist, getting an audio recording of your voice would just be–!” It turned to look at Ford, who snapped his gaze down to the ground immediately. Having his mind inadvertently scanned and rifled through by Shhhessh and three or four diplomats had been bad enough.

“Oh, hsst, I’m so sorry! I’m normally so much better with alien customs. Look, I’ll do better, really!”

“Right. Yes.” Stanford took a steadying breath. “Audio recording is fine.” He stared just past Borgith’s head, seeing its enormous green-blue eyes and almost comically expressive face out of only the corner of his eyes.

“Great!” Its eyes bulged happily and it touched the smooth surface of the device, which gave no outward indication as it began recording.

“Can I ask a question about the Rennik?” Ford asked, suspecting he knew the response he’d receive. These people had been nothing but forthcoming with him so far.

“Of course,” gushed Borgith. “Oh, Shanford, you have no idea how thrilling it is to have an alien appear out of the nothingness into our world! And to have you be a scientist, too!” Borgith broke off, making a low noise like a distant foghorn.

“Try to calm down, Borgith,” advised Shhhessh. “If you tire out the human, you won’t be allowed back. It needs its rest. And that’s not its name, either.” Shhhessh radiated censure underscored with amusement, its proboscis twitching. It was Ford’s temporary guard/escort/valet as far as Ford could tell. Its day job was as an electrical engineer, though, so Ford wasn’t completely sure how this appointment worked. He did know, though, that Shhhessh was responsible for getting Ford into the nice soft bed he’d been recovering in for the last several days, so he was inclined to like it.

Ignoring the mispronunciation of his name, Ford asked “If you communicate telepathically through eye contact, why do you have such expressive faces? By all rights I, as an alien, shouldn’t be able to even interpret– oh I see.” Realization dawned. “The telepathy is constant, and low-level. You communicate directly via eye contact to access direct thoughts, but you’re always putting out what you feel! That’s fascinating!”

“Yes!” cries Borgith, grabbing enthusiastically at Shhhessh. “Yes, that’s it precisely! Oh, human, you are something else!” 

Ford felt, for the first time in at least five or six years, the joy of sharing a purely intellectual connection with another being. It wasn’t sullied by the fear of being found out or the dirty connotations that come along with using science only to further his cause of destroying Bill. This was pure, knowledge for knowledge’s sake.

Recklessly, as if he was simply sharing an insight with Fiddleford, he let his eyes meet Borgith’s.

It was like being hit by a train. He was flattened, bowled over, breathless with pain and shock, the entirety of his mind spread out before Borgith, who looked. Borgith who saw. No matter how he tried, Ford couldn’t pull any part of himself away from the mind that was suddenly inside his own.

It was the same as the other times the Rennik had accidentally crushed his mind, except that it was different the way they’d all been different. Borgith was curiosity, endless enthusiasm, joy, and fulfillment. Shhhessh had been caution and a love of the familiar, Gre had been quiet contemplation and a desire for universal siblinghood, etc, etc. They’d all been different, all individuals, but Ford couldn’t see the details of their conscious thought or their immediate emotions, just their general personalities.

In less than a second, Borgith, though, had scraped Ford’s mind flat so that every part of it was visible and had seen Ford laughing with Stanley in their room; cupping his hand over his nose, which was pouring blood; cradling a plaidypus gently in his arms and kissing its naked little head; tearing his fingernails into his own arm so he could stay awake, can’t sleep, Bill will be there–!

Ford was wonderfully alone in his aching head in an instant as Borgith broke away. He felt his muscles twitch, senseless little impulses being sent through his nerves like the aftershocks of a really good orgasm, but in a decidedly unpleasant way. His head swam and his stomach revolted as a wave of remorse and dismay pummeled him from the direction of Borgith. He wondered if he could get better at tolerating the horrifying invasion of his mind long enough to see back into the minds of the Rennik, learn more about their science and their culture.

As he curled on his side and began to retch, Ford decided it probably wasn’t worth it.

27. pyrrhic - won at too great a cost

Ford swung his gun toward the fleeing back of the pirate and squeezed the trigger. It kicked back satisfyingly. He’d added that effect himself, too familiar with Earth guns not to appreciate a solid recoil. The blue bolt flew into and through the fleeing woman(?) dissolving a hole in her(?) torso. She dropped onto the purple dust of the craggy moon, Ford’s stolen backpack still clutched in her fist.

What was left of her band of compatriots hesitated as they heard Ford’s shot. They stared in horror at her corpse and dashed back immediately toward her, but not in the hopes of rescuing her. They wanted Ford’s bag. They wanted the bounty he’d collected bringing an interstellar criminal to justice. Somewhat hypocritical of him, seeing as he was accused of worse crimes than the man he’d captured.

Still, the bounty was his and he wasn’t going to let these scavengers steal it from him. He leapt over the body of the gigantic man who’d first grabbed him, aiming at the two pirates hustling toward their dead friend who’d taken Ford’s bag. He had no real hope of hitting them while dashing over the uneven ground, but at least his shots might keep them from reaching the body first.

The one in blue and black armor finally thought to use his weapon, stopping to fire at Ford. It shot some kind of projectile rather than an energy pulse, but he was no better at aiming at a moving target than Ford was at aiming while running. 

Once he was close enough, Ford took a bounding leap for Blue Armor, the paltry gravity of the moon making Ford light enough for an impressive jump. Blue Armor’s eyes widened behind his visor. He must not have much experience as a heartless murderer, as he didn’t raise his weapon to protect himself at all. New on the job, perhaps? “Hah!” Ford said, bringing his gun to bear and shooting the man in the head.

The two remaining pirates knelt briefly by the body of the dead woman and stumbled to their feet, the one in yellow and black now holding the bag containing the bounty.

They fled for their ship as Ford advanced, firing off another shot. His weapon began to chirp a warning about overheating, which he ignored.

He fired again, watching the pirate with the maroon armor collapse as her hindquarters sizzled and slowly dissolved. She must have screamed over her suit’s comms, as the yellow-and-black armored pirate put a hand to his ear.

The final thief had reached the shadow of his ship. “Damn it!” growled Ford. He’d never reach the man in time on foot. He raised his weapon, aiming carefully, but when he squeezed the trigger the gun gave a pitiful whine and sounded its warning chirp again.

Ford cursed. He watched, panting in exhaustion, as the pirate boarded his small vessel. His face, unhelmeted, appeared in a porthole to watch Ford as his ship lifted off, slowly accelerating away. Ford grimaced around at the bodies of the slain pirates. They’d nearly all been killed in the effort of stealing what was rightfully Ford’s.

“I hope it was worth it,” he muttered bitterly.

9. rubatosis - the unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat

Ford swayed on his booted feet. The heat of the marketplace was overwhelming, or perhaps it was a symptom of his illness. Or a side-effect of the cure, which was untested on humans.

The color palette of the world seemed to shift as he watched, pulsing slowly from blue-tinged to yellow and back again. His hands shook uncontrollably, and his heart thudded distractingly in his own ears. Had it always had that unsteady rhythm? He hoped it wouldn't stop altogether. At that thought, the off-kilter thumping increased in speed and volume, drowning out the noise from the crowd of merchants, customers, and various aliens come to gawk at the wares on display.

Overwhelmed by the color and noise, Ford forgot his mission and fled, escaping the way he’d come. He wiped his sleeve over his running nose. Was it blood? Was he dying? He couldn’t die, Bill Cipher was still out there! Maybe this was all Bill, Perhaps Ford wasn’t sick at all, was instead still trapped alone in Gravity Falls and this was all a convincing dream Bill had crafted for him.

Ford wanted to cover his ears to block out the noise, but he knew it was coming from within himself.

He staggered into the darkest alley he could find and curled against a blessedly cool wall. Ford sat and wrestled with his fear, heartbeat thundering in his ears.

16. trepverter - a witty response or comeback you think of only after it’s too late to use

“You’ve not seen the last of me, filthy biped!” snarled the gigantic crocodilian monster, snapping its immense jaws, now short one or two teeth.

“Well, I… certainly hope I have!” Ford shouted back. He winced at his lame retort as his enemy’s ten-foot gray tail slapped contemptuously against the surface of the water. It sank out of sight as a large wave splashed over Ford’s head, knocking him down.

Spluttering, Ford struggled to his feet and cast around, hoping Grollo was alright. His gaze fell on his companion, who was tugging something from the sandy muck as seawater streamed around them, rushing back down the shore.

“It broke my crossbow, Ford,” said Grollo, waving the weapon’s broken stock at Ford.

“Well, I’m sorry about that, but we got the teeth, didn’t we?”

“Yeah.” Grollo raised two long, glowing blue fangs in one fist. “Two reality-warping dino chompers for your science pleasure.”

“Great!” Ford took one from her. “Hmm, yes, this is perfect! You can keep one, if you like,” he told her distractedly. “I only need one.”

“No kidding? Thanks, that rocks. What’s wrong?” Ford had just groaned and slapped his sandy palm to his face.

“That thing! The monster!” he moaned. “What, what about it?” Grollo demanded.

“I should have said ‘see you gator!’ You know, like ‘see you later’?”

“Okay,” said Grollo, implying with just one word that Ford was a complete moron. “Well. I guess you can’t win ‘em all.”

20. hiraeth - a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past

It wasn’t easy, being away from his home planet for so long. Stanford missed the smell of familiar flowers and trees, missed eating food he recognized and knew wouldn't kill him. There was nothing like exploring the cosmos, true, and he’d learned more about esoteric and hidden branches of science than he ever could have on his Earth. But… well, Ford’s occasional bouts of melancholy longing for the familiar would have shamed his younger self. Stanford at fifteen, or at twenty-five, would never have wanted to be bound to the ordinary, the average, the comforting.

Now, Stanford at forty-five had mostly shorn away the parts of himself that desperately wished to return to his home, but it seemed that there was always some insidious thread of longing ready to strangle him if he let his guard down.

He stood in the streets of a New Jersey not his own. This Earth was a lot like the one from which Ford hailed, other than all the dinosaurs. How weird that the architecture created by gigantic reptiles was almost identical to that created by relatively small mammals.

The cars looked different. Did cars in his own world look like that now, or was this just the way cars looked for dinosaurs? Would Ford ever find out? Would he ever stop wanting to? If he ever could return to his dimension, would it be recognizable? Things changed, and Ford hadn’t been home in fifteen years.

And Jersey wasn’t his home, regardless. His home had been Gravity Falls. What had become of his lab, his house? Had Fiddleford returned there to salvage any of his research? Doubtful. Most likely Stanley had taken as much expensive-looking equipment as he could carry and left the place behind to rot.

It was entirely possible that, if Ford could return home at all, home as Ford knew it no longer existed.

7. resfeber - thrill felt before an adventure

“Okay.” Ford dumped his supplies onto the table in front of him, barely able to restrain his broad grin. The flickering light of the magical orb overhead illuminated a handful of equally anticipatory faces. “I’m here. I’m ready.” It had been so long. Tonight he would embark on the adventure of a lifetime.

“Glad you could make it,” said Sil, amused. “Not sure how likely we are to succeed without your help.” They gave a sidelong look at their friend, a large, guilty-looking man.

“Don’t blame me, the last time wasn’t all my fault. You all just have terrible luck,” he said, scratching a long green ear.

“Terrible luck and nobody who can cast spells,” said a small, soft-spoken being named Lyle. “Arithaa would still be alive if Ford had been here the last time we tried to break in.”

“I know, I’m sorry, Lyle,'' said Sil’s large friend.

“Yes, it’s sad and everything,” said Ford impatiently. “But you can just make a new character.” “I did,” said Lyle, “but I liked Arithaa! She had a cool backstory that I’d been saving for the perfect character!” He grinned suddenly. “But I do love making new ones. I have like five backups for if my next one dies.” Lyle waved his character sheet in the air. “So I’m all set.”

“Alright then!” Sil rubbed their hands together, and Ford felt the electric energy of a game about to start. “Let’s storm a castle, kids!”

28. apricity - the warmth of the sun in the winter

Ford hummed in pleasure and turned his face toward the warmth. The twin suns of this planet kept the winter chill at bay and glowed red-yellow through his eyelids. Ford had been on-planet for a month and the weather hadn’t noticeably changed one way or another, so he supposed it might not actually be winter. For all he knew it was midsummer, or this part of this planet had no meaningful seasons.

He breathed deeply, noticing that his breath didn’t catch. His lungs didn’t burn. His ribs didn’t ache, or feel at all as if they’d been reconstituted from the mealy pulp they’d been when he’d been injured. (His mind skittered away from the occasion that had caused the injury. Best not to think of that. He would live, was living. That was what counted.)

When he’d left his temporary home, eager to test his now-healed body, he’d crunched through the icy top of the snowpack, but had had no difficulty in maintaining a brisk pace out to this clearing. His muscle tone had rebounded well, and if his hips ached a little, well, they’d done that before… the incident. He was getting older, after all. Still, he was well again. It was nearly time to move on, time to renew his dedication to his quest.

But for a few moments more, Ford sat in the rich warmth of foreign suns, and breathed.

15. messaline - soft lightweight silk with a satin weave

Ford felt he had disappeared into the background of the town, cloaked in purple fabric of a color he couldn’t describe. Well, it was purple, but the shade was so rich that he thought it merited a better descriptor than that. Pale… eggplant? Violet? No, those didn’t do it justice. Simply put, it was beautiful.

Gently, unseen, he wound his fingers into the light, soft fabric that enshrouded him from head to toe. It was like nothing he’d ever felt. If they had fabric like this on Earth, he’d never been able to touch any, much less wear it. Here, it was expected garb for every being that could reliably walk under its own power.

This backwater little town, hidden among towering, green-black trees, housed a university that was home to one of the most respected time science programs in local universes. Ford was here to learn what they could teach him.

A sudden gust of wind caused his, and everyone else’s, clothing to flutter dramatically around them, and amused titters bloomed up and down the street as the bright colors swirled, blurring everyone’s edges. Ford grinned, too. This planet had a lot to recommend it; he hoped he could stay a while.

23. psithurism - the sound of wind rustling leaves

The forest floor was warm underfoot– or underpaw? Ford clambered awkwardly over a large root, stopping atop it to look around. The thick trees and undergrowth limited his field of vision, and in any case he couldn’t see as well as he would have liked. His current eyes didn't see the range of colors he was accustomed to as a human.

Frustrated, Ford lashed his tail and hissed, then glanced around self-consciously, but he was alone.

Hoping to get his bearings, Ford closed his eyes. His sensitive nose told him about the prey animal that had scurried by sometime recently, the decay of the old leaf litter, the dampness of the moss, and the rich bloom of the flowers in the trees. A tug at his whiskers combined with the whisper in his ears told him the wind blew from behind his right ear and forward, to his left. The cry of a distant animal, high and dangerous, made his pelt, uh, hair, stand on end.

Clenching his teeth against his fear, Ford leapt down from his perch, surprising himself with his agility and the ease of his landing. He’d jumped down from a height of several times his own body length.

Forward seemed as good a direction as any. Stanford headed through this strange universe, the soft shush of ferns against his fur and the rattling of a few bare branches overhead keeping him company.

The wind picked up, tossing the leaves overhead even more, the sound overwhelming to his delicate ears. The shadows all around seemed somehow to deepen, and Ford realized he couldn’t feel the soft leaves and earth beneath him any longer.

Panicking, Ford thrashed, blinking his eyes open to find himself staring at a bland drop ceiling. Panting, he sat up, using human hands to feel at his legs, arms, his face, with its noticeable lack of whiskers.

Ford huffed and flopped back in bed in his cheap hotel room.

“What a weird dream,” he muttered to himself. Shhhhhh, advised the air conditioner. That was reasonable. Ford rolled over and went back to sleep.

19. lapidoso - full of stones, said of roads or of the bottom of a river

“Shit!” Ford threw the battered dagger onto the workbench. “Another failure! Damn it!”

His ally, whose name he didn’t know for security purposes, said “There’s got to be something you can do with this. Don’t just give up!”

Ford rounded on him. “I’m not giving up, this thing is useless! If there was any kind of ancient mystical power in the blade, this would have found it!” He waved the sensor he’d made under his ally’s nose. “We’ve wasted our time. Two years down the drain.” The words were bitter on his tongue.

Ford’s ally rubbed his face with his hands, tired. “A dead end. After all this time, everything I’ve done was for nothing?” He stared hopelessly into the distance.

“Get used to it. I’ve been hitting dead ends trying to get to Bill Cipher for years now. We’ll just have to find a different route.” Ford looked at his interdimensional translator, opening up the interface that would show him the weakest points in his current reality and predict where the paths might take him if he broke through. “There’s no point staying here now. If you want to return to your group and let them know what’s happened, feel free.”

Ford worked in silence for a few minutes, wondering if it would badly damage this universe if he tried to jump directly to the Slug World he liked to pass through on his trips. Slugs were good people, and pretty cute. He hadn’t been to their world in at least five years, so it wouldn’t be too much of a security risk to their peaceful universe to be seen there, he thought.

Feeling watched, Ford glanced up. His ally was staring at him oddly.

“What?” asked Ford.

“Just like that? We’ve worked so hard and so long and you’re… over it, ready to move on? How long have you been doing this?”

“Too long,” Ford said shortly. “So here’s some free advice: It’s not easy. It’s never going to be. You have to get over it and do everything you can to keep going, or give up. Bill destroyed your universe, didn’t he?”

Ford’s ally nodded, wrapping his wings around himself in a self-comforting gesture.

“If you want revenge you have to accept that it’s hard going.” Ford eyed the miserable man. “Look, I’m leaving. I have other leads I can follow. This road is a hard one, not everyone is suited to it.” He clapped his ally on the shoulder and pressed a button on his interdimensional translator, stepping down another path.

10. liberosis - the desire to care less about things

“Breathe,” Ford told Journey, holding their head in his lap, tipping their chin back so they might have some chance at catching a breath. His hands shook. There was nothing he could do to combat Journey’s blood loss, and nothing he could do to ease their pain. They would die here, and Ford’s heart broke.

Journey choked and burbled, spasming in pain or fear, their remaining arm grabbing at nothing. Ford caught their hand and held it. How many deaths had he seen over the years? Allies, innocents, even the occasional friend, like Journey. Why didn’t it ever get easier?

“I’m sorry,” he told them. “I’m sorry.” He wished, selfishly, that he could turn off the part of him that cared about them. He wished he could speed forward through time to a point where he could look back at their friendship fondly, with only a pang of guilt or regret. Instead he was subsumed by this full-body experience of grief. His eyes stung, his stomach knotted.

It seemed to take so long but eventually, Journey stilled. Ford clenched their hand tighter, choking himself now, not wanting to let go for the last time.

21. cafune - the act of running your fingers through the hair of someone you love

“My tongue feels really weird,” Ford mumbled to Jheselbraum. He lay slumped against her shoulder; she was carrying him as if he were a small child, one arm under him, the other gently looped around his back.

“Oh, yes?” Her soft, low voice was rich with some emotion he couldn’t place.

“Ugh.” Ford screwed up his face and stuck out his tongue.

“Are you dizzy? Confused?” “...Yes,” Ford realized to his surprise. “I’m not sure where we are.” He pressed his face into a fold of Jheselbraum’s cloak. It smelled strange. Like an alien.

Ford felt as if he floated and spun his way down onto something soft, but when he blinked to clear his eyes, he realized that Jheselbraum must have put him down, as she was now sitting beside him. She met his eyes with all of hers.

“You’re recovering from surgery, Stanford,” she explained, smiling. She reached up and smoothed his hair gently, or so Ford assumed. He couldn’t feel his scalp. "Bill Cipher will no longer be able to possess your body, though be wary– your dreams are still vulnerable to a creature of nightmares. Such is the way with mortals. You're all part dream by nature."

"Oh," Ford said dimly. The Oracle's hand hadn't stopped moving, carding gently through his hair. Even if he couldn't feel it, it was nice in concept.

Searching for something to say, Ford settled on "Your ceiling is nice." It was high and domed, a deep blue that glittered with yellow, white, and pink sparks. "It's like the one on Earth. The sky, I mean."

Jheselbraum hummed, leaning over him, smiling gently.

"Tell me about the sky of your planet, little human," she suggested, hand still moving softly.

Ford wondered if he was imagining the feeling in his head returning. "There's…Orion. The hunter. Not a very nice man, but…great. A hero." Stanford was making less sense than usual. "A constellation," he clarified. His head began to throb distantly. "He died," Ford forced out, "and ended up in the stars."

5. ignipotent - presiding over fire

“Is that real?” The young girl bent curiously over the scraps of paper and spearlike dried plant matter that Ford had just lit. The tiny flame grew, reflecting amber in her brown eyes, lighting her too-thin face.

“We only had the holo kind at home,” she said softly, not moving her gaze from the flames. “It looked nice, but it couldn’t make you warm.” She held out a shaking hand, gently cupping the scrap of warmth as though to protect it from the chill of the early morning.

“It’s real,” Ford confirmed unnecessarily. “Here.” He handed her a chunk of ration bar and a handful of sugar-encrusted insects, then gently fed the fire a couple small twigs.

“Back home… nobody would believe me if I told them I saw a real–” and here Ford’s translator tried to interpret her next word simultaneously as ‘fire’, ‘searcher’, ‘priest’, and ‘life-heart’, whatever that was. “How did you do it?” The girl looked almost afraid to know.

Ford smiled and held out his hand. “It’s a small container of fuel,” he explained. “Liquid that can catch on fire. When you roll this wheel here at the top, it strikes the flint inside. That makes a spark, which ignites the fuel!” He flicked the lighter, a steady flame appearing in his hand. “You close the lid to put it out,” he added, extinguishing the flame.

The girl looked awed at first, then she mirrored Ford’s grin. “That’s so… I don’t know how to even say! That’s the strangest, most wonderful thing!” She clutched her ration bar, too excited to keep eating. “I’ve never even thought of that– fire in your hands!”

Ford laughed. “Keep it,” he said, tossing her the lighter. He put a larger stick on the fire. “When you’re a scientist one day, mention me in your thesis’s acknowledgements.”

 13. balter - to dance gracelessly, but with enjoyment

The glowing moon shone a pink light over staggering, lurching forms. The stocky, lightly feathered humanoid aliens were ranged about in a large, grassy bowl that provided some shelter from the wind, sunk as it was into the sandy earth– or whatever they called the dirt on this non-Earth planet.

Ford smiled, noting in his mental journal that these aliens, though not talented dancers by his human standards, were clearly having quite a time. Delighted hoots and laughter rang through the night, accompanying their loud music. They stamped and staggered out of time, if there even was a time in the long, meandering song that had been playing for the past hour.

The prime minister, identifiable by the crown of blue stones upon his head, stomped over to Ford, offering a metal cylinder full of water. “Please dance, Stanford! This is a ceremony to honor you!”

Ford felt himself blush. The idea of dancing in front of anyone, even these graceless, kind aliens, made him cringe. He felt no different than he had at school dances as a teenager, or the single college party Fiddleford had dragged him to. That is to say, he felt the impending judgment of many people who all seemed to know the secret rules of social interaction that he wasn’t privy to.

“Um,” Ford scrambled for a plausible excuse. “Thank you, Prime Minister, but actually I’m a human, you see. We don’t dance at festivals held in our honor. It’s considered the… height of revelry to simply watch the festivities.” Years of roleplaying in DD&MD came in handy when lying to aliens. It’s harmless, he told himself guiltily. He’ll never know.

The prime minister shook himself, feathers fluffing out briefly before resettling. If that meant something, Ford didn’t know what. Finally the man sighed in defeat and slumped sideways into another dancer, who happily swept him up in a boisterous canter before they both fell, laughing, to the ground.

26. verklempt - completely and utterly overcome with emotion

The two beings smiled at Ford, as well as trees could smile.

“We didn’t think we would see you again, Stanford,” they said. Rather, it should be said that they conferred briefly with one another in order to come to a consensus and then transmitted the detailed concept into Ford’s mind without the messy and inexact middleman of spoken language. “It’s nice that you could come. We hope your fight with your enemy is going well. We hope you’ve killed him.”

“Well, not yet.” Ford shifted the gift in his arms uncomfortably. “But I’m still alive, anyway.” He craned his head down to his shoulder, using it to nudge his glasses higher up on his face. “And it’s nice to see you both again!” He smiled up into his friends’ leafy canopies. High above his head, their branches entwined. “Congratulations! I wasn’t certain of the traditions here, but on my planet it’s customary to bring a gift, so, uh, I’ll just leave this here.” 

Ford dropped the heavy bag at the roots of one of his friends. It didn���t really matter which one it was; they were bonded and were therefore treated as more or less one entity now that they had rooted together. Also, their names were so long that it would take forever to address them if he used them.

“Very kind. You’re a thoughtful meat bag,” they joked after a brief pause to confer. Ford laughed.

“Oh, wow, it’s been years since I’ve heard that one. We were a lot younger, back then.”

“Yes.” Warmth flowed through Ford’s mind to convey his old friends’ happiness. “Barely more than saplings. And now look. We have a sapling of our very own to celebrate.”

“Oh, right! I got her some mulch. The gift.” Ford gestured at the sack on the ground. “It’s, um, supposed to be good for young plants.” He looked around. “Where is she, anyway?”

In answer, Ford felt a tug at his awareness, one little trail of thought nudging him forward. He peered curiously around the bole of one of his friends. A short distance away, still well within the radius of her parents’ root systems, what looked like a tiny stick of pale wood jutted out of the ground.

“Oh,” Ford breathed. Although she was hardly sleeping (trees didn’t sleep, at least not in this dimension) Ford felt an impulse to keep quiet so as to avoid waking her. Now that he saw her, he felt her mind vaguely, floating all around him like a scent or a song.

She didn’t convey direct feelings or ideas in the way her parents could, but even as a leafless stick only as high as Ford’s knee, he could feel her mind. It was undeniable that she was a person, a little being who could so easily have never existed at all.

“Wow,” Ford said. “She’s lovely. What will you call her?”

“We won’t bore you with her long name,” the new parents murmured. “We know how cumbersome they seem to you. But for her short name, we are calling her after you.”

Ford looked from tree to tree, wishing that they had faces he could read. It was hard to perform an emotion when you didn’t know where to aim it. Underneath his shock, Ford’s chest felt constricted with a sort of painful happy pressure.

“I don’t– don’t know what to say.”

A slightly apologetic thrum wound through the next idea that appeared in Ford’s mind: “Actually, we aren’t calling her Ford, exactly. It’s not our way to call a sapling after a tree who still lives.” Ford smiled, blinking rapidly. “It’s the same in my culture.”

"Since you are Stanford but don't use all of your name, we will call her Stan."

Ford opened his mouth, then snapped it shut to hold back the various feelings warring in his chest that wanted to crawl up and out. It was hard not to feel anger, at least a little of it, when he thought of Stan, so that was there. But also there was chagrin that his friends were using his brother’s name to honor him, as well as pride that they thought he was worthy of such an honor. Then too there was the bubbling amusement of his namesake being a female tree, rather than, say, a male human.

Ford removed his glasses.

She was so small, that was all. She was a little tiny thing called Stan and he had had a hard few years.

He just needed a moment or two.

11. cruore - it literally means “flowing blood”

“I’m not dying, Connell, I’m fine!”

“I don’t believe you! You look gross! Your gross red human blood is everywhere!” “If you’d leave me alone I could clean it up!” “You can let me help you! Breathe, that’s the key! I don’t want another corpse in my crew quarters.” “Is that a common problem?”

“Uh. No. No, it’s never happened before. By ‘another’ I meant ‘the first ever!’ That’s definitely what I meant.” “Hmm… Ugh.” “Ah! Stop it, stop bleeding on everything! That’s it, I’m sending some MediBots here to save you!” “I do. Not. Need. Saving! This is not a calamity! Humans bleed sometimes!”

“Stop waving your arms! You’ll make more blood come out!”

“You don’t know. You don’t know what humans are like! Maybe arm movements make our blood stay in.”

“Eck. Blood really should not be that color.”

“If it was any other color I would actually need a MediBot.”

“Yeah, okay, that’s fair. I know everybody’s blood color is normal to them. I’ve watched a lot of sensitivity training videos!”

EMERGENCY EMERGENCY! “Wonderful. Connell, make them go away!” “Are you absolutely certain you don’t need them to plug those holes in you?”

EMERGENCY EMERGENCY! PLEASE COOPERATE!

“I need those holes to breathe! Damn it, get off me!”

ZZAPP

“Oh, Stanford, why? Do you know how long it will take me to repair them? I’ll have to get the maintenance bots up here, and they hate me!”

“I’m frankly not your biggest fan, either.” “You’re rude.” “I’m running on two hours of sleep and my body clearly isn’t tolerating the jump to intra-space, so deal with it. Usually I’m a scintillating conversationalist.”

“Hah hah hah. I know when an organic life-form is being funny. That’s a good one.”

…

“Don’t pout. Look, you’ve almost stopped bleeding!”

“I’m not pouting, I was planning on getting some work done. And yes, as I told you, I’m fine. This isn’t something that will kill or even slightly damage me.”

…

“Stanford.” “What?” “You aren’t bleeding and the MaintBots are coming. Will you pretend to be talking to me when they get here?” “Because they don’t like you?”

“Yes. They think I’m not cool because I don’t have a body. If you talk to me about things, they won’t talk to me. They’ll see that a person with a body likes me, you know? You don’t have to actually like me, though.” “I see. Okay, sure. No problem.” “Oh, great, thank you! Okay, okay. What should we say? Oh! We can talk about your blood! Does it evaporate? Or repel predators?” “Well, not usually. Its main purpose is to transport oxygen around my body.” “Oh, okay! Neat! And why was it coming out of you like that before? Is that common?”

“Nosebleeds happen to humans sometimes. I always get them jumping to intra-space. It’s why I prefer not to travel this way.”

“Ooooh I see. Just some normal, regular bleeding, eh? Just like all the organics do on your planet!” “Uh, well, I wouldn’t say that–”

“Or moon! Or whatever, it’s all cool, it’s all fine by me! You can be from wherever you’re from!”

“I–”

“Gosh, now that I’m getting used to it, I kinda like your red blood! Really pops against that space suit! Man! Wish I could see more!”

“You will. We still have to drop out of intra-space.”

“Great!”

1. marcid - incredibly exhausted

Bill was here; was everywhere that Ford was before he could get there, even in his mind. 

Especially in his mind. 

When he slept, and he would have to sometime, he hoped he wouldn’t dream of Bill, appearing with a laugh and a joke. It’s been fun, Fordsy, but I’m tired of the games! 

Even if Bill wasn’t literally in his mind, he was always metaphorically there. Ford’s years of friendship (why does he still call it that?) with that demon made it easy to conjure Bill’s voice to mock or to threaten.

(And in retrospect, their friendship always had had a high instance of mockery and at least implied threats. How had he been so stupid as to not see Bill’s true self? Could he really have been so pathetically lonely that he was willing to befriend anything that laid in his path, waiting?)

Ford staggered, hugging himself against the cold of this empty place. It was flat and barren, but at least he was out of the Nightmare Realm. He glanced down at his dimensional translator, but his eyes were so bleary that he couldn’t read it. The adrenaline lingering in his system after his flight from Bill was waning. Ford’s boots felt impossibly heavy, and his entire body ached.

He tripped on nothing, toppling to the ground. It was dusty, almost soft. And nobody was around to kill him that he could see. He would rest here, just for a moment, and then carry on.

17. temerate - to break a bond or promise

Ford glanced to one side, to the hulking individual striding along the canal with him. Ford’s… associate, Nere, seemed to think he was successfully leading Ford into a trap. He walked easily and with purpose, leading Ford to the narrow alley where they could complete their deal away from the intruding eyes of the law– and where Ford would be vulnerable to an attack.

Ford didn’t much like illegal deals with unsavory characters, but they were a part of life these days. He tried to smother the grin he felt trying to sneak onto his face. Maybe there was a small part of him that did enjoy the occasional brush with danger. He tightened his grip on the six-foot staff that was the only weapon commoners were permitted in the city as Nere silently gestured for him to enter the alley first. Typical.

“Alrighty,” Nere said with a sigh. “Here we go.” He held up a small case and shook it. It rattled. “Year’s supply is all yours.”

“Presuming I can pay, of course,” Ford said.

“Uh, yeah… that’s kind of the deal,” said Nere, frowning.

“Well, the deal’s off!” Before Nere could speak, Ford whipped his staff at the treacherous man’s wrist, dealing a vicious blow that made him howl and drop the case of pills. Ford dashed forward to grab it, scooping up the case and shouldering roughly past Nere.

“What the fuck, man?!” Nere yelled.

Ford didn’t know it, but as he dashed out of the alley and onto the wider street, fleeing the sounds of Nere’s gang behind him, he was grinning.

4. sweven - a dream

When all the lies and terror and confusion of the multiverse became too much, Ford wished there was some happy memory he could recede to. Not always, not for days or weeks at a time, just for a few minutes.

In the Banjo Dimension, beset by discordant twanging, Ford wished he could summon up the image of Fiddleford’s delight if he were to ever find himself here. But no, Fiddleford was a bridge too thoroughly burned to be a fond memory.

On the pirate planet and sick with an intestinal parasite, Ford could hardly imagine a world in which he had thrilling but never too terrifying seagoing adventures with a version of Stanley that had never existed.

There may have been good times in Gravity Falls, but so much of that was overshadowed by Bill, and by the thoughts that still plagued him– how long had Bill been watching, lying in wait? Would he never have approached Ford if Ford had heeded Modoc’s warning? Had there ever been even a moment that Bill might have considered Ford a true friend?

It was stupid. Stupid of him to try to imagine a world where his life had been different, where he’d made the right choices about who to trust and had never been betrayed.

Ford tried to remember the smaller things to get by, rationing his happy memories: the feel of the sun and the sea air on his face, and never mind who was just off his shoulder; the serenity of a chemistry lab at four in the morning, without the explosion an hour later caused by his roommate’s experiment; the joy of a trek through the woods a mile from his home before he knew anything was out there waiting for him.

22. petrichor - the pleasant smell that accompanies the first rain after a long period of dry weather

Sweat dripped down Ford’s face, rolling down his jaw and falling with a soft pat onto his saddlehorn. He sighed, shifting in the saddle. It had been a long, hot week in the Old West Dimension, and he was tired of it. He liked his horse, though. Pigeon was patient with his inexperience and unaffected by the perils of the trail. Ford leaned forward to pat her on the neck, and a bead of sweat fell this time onto her dappled gray neck. Ford blinked. Did she have more spots all of a sudden?

“Ford!” Ford’s head snapped up. Slim, at the head of the string of riders on the dusty trail that wound up into the hills, waved as if they weren’t sure they had his attention.”FORD! IT’S RAINING!” Their grin was visible even from a distance. The rest of the party cheered, raising their arms or throwing their hats. Then they had to dismount and pick them back up again.

“This is great!” Slim had guided their horse back down the trail full of celebrating riders to Ford. “It’s been a long damn time since we saw a drop of rain!” “Well, that’s wonderful, but if it’s raining on its own, then what do you need me for?” Ford asked. He was supposed to be helping these people with their weather problem using a Rainmaker he’d smuggled out of Dimension 7.6^3. It was the job they’d hired him to do, and if he couldn’t do it, he couldn’t get paid.

“Whaddy mean, Ford? Didn’t you finish the last touches on your machine last night?” Slim asked, cocking their head.

Ford wondered if they’d been drinking in the saddle again. “No… you know we need to be at a higher elevation for the Rainmaker to work. And I haven’t finished my repairs.” The light shower poured harder, and the sweet, earthy scent of rain filled the warm air.

“Naw,” said Smith from behind him. “I seen you fixing it up too. Pushed a lot of buttons and zap! Brought all those clouds over here.”

“I saw it too!” Lizard Lizzie shouted over her shoulder. “It was just like magic, I’ll swear on a Bible.”

“You college types can be so forgetful,” Slim said blithely. “Don’t you worry, we’ll talk to the Sheriff. You’ll get your pay.”

Ford grinned. “Thank you.” “Don’t mention it!” Slim turned to address the whole group, cupping their hands around their mouth. “Alright, folks, change of plans! Let’s get back to town and tell ‘em all what a good job we done!” They gave Ford a knowing look. “I’m sure you’d like to collect your fee and move on, huh mysterious loner?”

“It’s what we do best,” Ford acknowledged, and they shared a smile.

14. basorexia - the overwhelming desire to kiss

“Wow.” Ford leaned back. “That's some view.”

The sunset was a lot like Earth's; it painted the sky and sea in shades of orange and purple. Ford sat on a bench at the top of a rise that swept down to the shore. Next to him was Jason, a local biologist who'd been very welcoming to Ford, and with whom he could discuss marine life for hours.

Jason flashed with bioluminescence to indicate his happiness. “It really is. I suppose you'll miss it when you leave. Or maybe not. You'll be off exploring beautiful new oceans.”

“I'll still miss being here. It's always nice to be near the sea. And I definitely appreciate being free from assassination attempts.” Ford hooked his arm over the back of the bench and grinned at Jason, who floated next to him, tentacles piled delicately on the bench seat to imitate a seated posture. while his shorter, frilled arms bobbed in the breeze.

Jason laughed. “I appreciate you not being assassinated,” he said. “You… you’ll be alright, won’t you? Out there,” he waved an arm vaguely.

“I have to be,” said Ford, scratching at his chin. “Death would mean failure, and I can’t fail.”

“Ford, that’s… you’re just so…” Jason laid an arm on Ford’s, frills brushing his wrist. “Well, you’re crazy,” he said ruefully. Ford chuckled. “But you’re very brave,” Jason went on softly.

Ford glanced away, hoping he didn’t look too pleased by Jason’s compliment. When he looked back, Jason was closer. Ford looked up into his face, confused but also feeling a sense of foreboding. He felt that he knew what was happening on some level, but surely not. It couldn’t be what it felt like.

Jason’s mouth was almost on his by the time Ford really believed it. He yelped and jerked back, away from the gentle grip Jason’s arms now had on his knee, his shoulder, his arm.

“I, uh, sorry, I don’t know if you–” Ford had no plans regarding the end of that sentence. His face was on fire. He had no idea how this situation had suddenly taken a hard turn into incredibly uncomfortable territory.

“I’m sorry!” Jason twined his arms together, embarrassed. “Oh, that was really, extremely stupid. I’m sorry, it’s just– you’re so, uh, it’s just a very romantic setting and I got a little– I should have asked first!”

“It’s fine!” Ford assured him, although his heart was pounding as if he’d just dodged a bullet. “I just don’t. I don’t do that sort of thing,” he explained weakly. “Not that I’ve had a lot of offers!” he added, laughing awkwardly.

Inscrutable lights flickered across Jason’s face and bell. Ford wondered how he looked, leaning away as if terrified of this man, who had been nothing but a friend to him over the past weeks. “Well, I won’t offer,” Jaon said finally. “If you don’t want me to.”

Ford felt as if he should explain himself, but he didn’t think he could make his feelings about kissing make any sense to either of them. I’ve never imagined myself doing that. I thought wanting it would happen to me and it never did. I think you’re very beautiful, but like the sunset is beautiful, and I wouldn’t want to kiss the sun. None of these statements would be likely to explain much, or make Jason feel much better.

Before the silence could stretch on too long, Ford said “I’ll miss you.” He took one of Jason’s arms in his hand. “I won’t forget our friendship,” he added lamely. It had sounded better in his head.

Jason grimaced, but squeezed Ford’s hand. “Why don’t you just try to forget the last couple minutes of it.”

30. whelve - to bury something deep, to hide

It was Gravity Falls, but not as Ford knew it, or remembered it. The Institute of Oddology was huge, eclectic, well-equipped, adequately staffed, and world-famous. It buzzed with the businesslike, occasionally chaotic energy of science being done. The things he’d seen here, and the things his other self had accomplished…

Here was what his life could have been. Safe use of the portal, a world free of Bill… Ford swallowed back jealousy and irrational anger, and turned to the man his friend could have been.

“You look, good, Fiddleford,” Ford said. In truth, he looked as unremarkable as he always had. An ordinary exterior hiding an incredible mind, just older.

Fiddleford cracked a grin. “You look exactly like a character you’d come up with for DD and More D, if I’m honest.” He put his hands on his hips and made a show of looking Ford up and down. “Space Pirate, you know? You’re the spittin’ image. They got that subclass in your dimension?” “I wouldn’t know. I haven’t been there since I was thirty,” Ford reminded him.

“Oh yeah,” Fiddleford rubbed the back of his neck. “On account of that accident with Stan.” He eyed Ford closely, watching his reaction. “Things went south, you say.” “With Stan, and with you, yes.” Ford said shortly. “Very south.” He narrowed his eyes. “Why do you ask?”

“No reason, it’s nothin’.” Fiddleford put his hands in his lab coat’s pockets and tapped his foot rapidly against the tile. “Do you ever think about how they are now? That Stan, that Fiddleford?”

“They’re fine, I’m sure.” Stanley was always fine; he was slippery enough to survive anything. And Fiddleford, even with his anxieties, even with the temptation of that damned gun, was too brilliant to hang around in Gravity Falls, hunting the locals’ memories for sport.

“Good, good.” They stood silently for a moment.

“Did your family move up here?” Ford asked, wanting to turn the conversation from topics he wasn’t remotely willing to tell this Fiddleford about.

Fiddleford raised his brows, surprised at the change of topic. “Oh, yeah. Not too long after we got the portal all configgerified just how we liked it. Wife and kids came up. Well, I s’pose it was just the one kid back then,” he chuckled. “They always liked you, y’know. The kiddos. They liked that you’d rassle ‘em around and let ‘em do dangerous dang stuff when I wasn’t around.”

Ford’s stomach clenched unhappily at the thought of being a significant figure in the lives of Fiddleford’s children as they grew up. It was so desperately far removed from what his life had actually been. Ford wanted to turn away from this topic as well.

“Yes, well.” Ford gripped clasped his hands behind his back. “I’m glad that the other me has done… so well for himself.” He gritted out the words.

Fiddleford gave him a deeply pitying look. “I can help you, you know, Ford. We can get you back to dimension 46’\ lickety-split.” He patted Ford’s shoulder. Ford suppressed a wince, even though Fiddleford had just told him that only contact with his own alternate self could damage this universe.

“No.” He shrugged off Fiddleford’s hand. I don’t need to go home, I need to destroy Bill Cipher for good.” He fixed his gaze on Fiddleford. “You and your Ford may have made this universe safe– I don’t begrudge you that, but Bill took my life from me. He’ll do it to infinitely more people if I give up. I intend to put an energy pulse right between his… eye.” Ford finished. “I just need to refine my Quantum Destabilizer. I haven’t been able to find a power source that will work with it.” As Ford spoke, Fiddleford’s KBPS began to rise, and his eyes lit with interest.

“Power source, you say? Now that’s interesting…Come this way. I think I got somethin’ you’ll want to see!”

24. meriggiare - to rest at noon, more likely in a shady spot outdoors

Ford plopped down in the soft blue lichen covering the soil under the vast canopy of a towering mushroom. The steep rise he’d climbed to get here was perfectly positioned to show him a view of the picturesque little valley– its forests, clearings, and some of the inhabitants: the large but harmless lizards that fluttered through the air, glittering like strings of jewels. The sky was a dusky blue, the sparse clouds delicate feathery streaks.

A smile twitched at the corners of Ford’s mouth as he tried to open his pack and find some food. He fumbled it and burst into laughter. It wasn’t funny, and that knowledge just made him guffaw again.

Ford shoved his hands up under his glasses, trying to get ahold of himself. What was going on with him? He’d climbed this hill on a whim, just wanting to appreciate the view and have some lunch. Maybe get a few hours rest before carrying on. He was due to visit a weapons factory in a lava dimension, and had wanted to enjoy his last hours here in this world. (Dimension 0591 Dash Six (dash and six all spelled out for some reason.))

But now he felt both bubbly with good humor and even sleepier than he should after a sleepless night of traveling. Even the thought of his own unusual mood made him want to laugh again.

“How did I get stoned out here?” Ford asked himself out loud. Biting his lip to try to smother his grin, Ford waved his hand in front of his face, wondering what it would look like. It looked like a hand waving in front of his face. Not the most useful diagnostic tool. If the flying lizards were watching, it would look like he was waving to them, he thought, and snickered. He gave them a proper wave, in case they really were watching, and turned back to the matter at hand.

He hadn’t eaten anything he wasn’t certain of in weeks. It was an important element of survival in myriad universes. He hadn’t been poisoned in any other way. It must be something environmental. But what?

Ford thunked his head back against the soft, pale trunk of the mushroom, feeling decidedly less concerned about his drugging than he should be. He peered up at the rippling gills of the mushroom. He had walked through a forest of similar fungi all morning.

“Oooh. Yes, that could be it. Spores. Alien spores. Well, don’t feel bad,” he told the mushroom. He smiled drowsily up at it. “I’ll be fine, you know, probably.” Ford’s eyes closed. “Should probably leave. Get to that lava dimension and sober up,” he mumbled.

But a nap first, then back to it. Yes. Just a little rest, and he’d be fine.

8. ansare - to hardly breathe, to be out of breath

“No.” Ford gaped.

“Oh, yeah, totally.” The bartender wiped down the surface of thier bar with one hand, and polished a glass with a couple of others. “He’s a regular here. Probably not the Tesla that you know, but definitely some scrawny inventor guy. Wacko scientists are always washing up here, for whatever reason. Seen at least six in the last five years.”

Ford tuned out the bartender. His heart thundered. He glanced over his shoulder again at the mustachioed man drinking in the corner of the bar. He looked just like the poster Ford had had on his wall in college.

Tesla, Nikola Tesla, took a swig of his foamy brown cocktail and placed it back on the table so that it would hold down one corner of the pages that flapped in the breeze created by the bar’s oscillating fan. He licked whipped cream off his mustache and scribbled something. Ford felt faint.

What should he do? What could he possibly say? Tesla probably had people flocking to him all the time, Ford didn’t want to come off as just some hanger-on.

“Breathe, man!” The bartender smacked Ford on the shoulder. “If you pass out, he’s not gonna give you his autograph, you know.”

Ford gasped for breath, then fixed the slender alien with a scowl. “I don’t want his autograph, I want to tell him that I’m grateful for the incredible strides he made for science, and that I admire his ambition, and I want to let him know that his legacy never faded!” Ford fought off the urge to wave his hands in excitement and curled them into fists on the shining bar.

“Uh-huh,” they gave him an amused look. There was a pause while they stepped away to help another patron, and Ford drummed his fingers on the bar, trying to formulate an opening line. What did someone say when he met his childhood hero (or some version of him) in a spaceport bar?

“Hey, do you hear that?” The bartender was standing in front of him again. Their batlike ears twitched.

“No.” Ford looked around. It was quiet in the bar, both literally and in terms of patronage.

“It sounds so weird.” As they raised a hand to their head, the being they’d just served made an abrupt dash for the door. In the next instant, the back wall of the bar exploded.

Ford was knocked off his barstool and onto the floor, dazed and breathless. He rolled onto his belly and struggled to get his wobbly legs under him. As he rose, his head swam and his eyes streamed from the smoke and dust. He coughed, struggling to breathe, and looked vainly around for either victims who needed help or assassins who needed a quick death.

A couple of figures staggered through the smoke and out the front door, which looked completely intact. The explosive had been a small one, and Ford had been the nearest to it, so it was unlikely that anyone else was badly hurt. The bartender flashed through Ford’s mind– they’d been near him. They could be hurt or worse.

He turned toward the bar and leaned over it, only to be met with the sight of the bartender hauling themself to their feet. They coughed too, covering their mouth with one arm and flailing wildly with the other ones.

Ford grabbed them and tugged them closer, so that they leaned toward each other over the bar. “Is there another exit?” he shouted into their ear. It wasn’t ideal as an escape. If the explosive had been intended to flush him out, there would probably be watchers on all the entrances and exits, but it was either run or stay and suffocate.

They nodded, squinting in the smoke, and led Ford through a door into a small stockroom. Through that was a door into a closet, and then another door that led outside, or as outside as you could get on a spaceport. Ford glanced back and forth down the bright ‘street’, but it was deserted. He had to get away, and ideally get the bartender out of here, too.

He wouldn’t admit it, but Ford’s next thought was that he hoped Tesla hadn’t been a trick, a trap set for him by Bill’s agents. But how could they possibly have guessed he’d wander into that bar? Still, it hadn’t been Tesla to dash for the door, he’d been in his place along with everyone else.

“My bar,” the bartender moaned, bringing Ford back to the present. “What happened, what am I gonna do?”

Ford steadied them as they started to cough again. “I think that bomb was meant for me. I’m sorry, I didn’t intend to endanger you or your establishment. You should probably go home.” The bartender turned their incredulous gaze on him. “I lived in there! I don’t have anywhere to go! Who the fuck wants to kill you so badly?”

“Bill Cipher.” The name had no visible effect on them. In some places it was as good as a curse, but not here. “Okay, well, are you getting revenge or something? Is he going to pay for this?” They clearly didn’t mean financial payment.

“Yes,” Ford said simply. This was not even serious enough to count as a footnote on the list of crimes for which Bill should be killed, but if it would make them feel better to think Ford was seeking vengeance for them, then fine.

“Good. I’m coming with you. I’m going to help you and get this guy back for blowing up my house.” Their eyes were glassy with unshed tears. Ford didn’t argue. He knew from experience that it would waste time. He’d take them along and either they would give up and find some new place to call home or he could ditch them in a reasonably safe place.

“Let’s go, then. I’m Stanford,” he added, offering his hand.

“Journey,” they said, shaking it.

2. arcuate - arched; bow-shaped

Slate-gray buildings curved over Ford’s head, huge and entirely contradictory to the laws of physics. It was, he thought, what it might be like to be an ant, looking up at a forest of grass. If he was an ant, though, he wouldn’t be lost. He could use his antennae to scent his hotel and find his way there without fuss, using scent trails left by other guests.

Ford peered at the small ball of light he held in his left hand. The hospitality kiosk had provided it to him, along with a burble of the local language that he couldn’t understand.

Someone jostled his shoulder and snapped something unintelligible at him. “Oh, excuse me.” Ford fought through the foot traffic in the broad street until he could lean against a building. He couldn’t feel the curvature of the structure at this height. He tilted his head back, watching the shine of the lights in the windows against the nighttime sky.

He’d never been to a city so huge before, or so alien. The people here had blue skin, some of them. They were all a foot shorter than he was, and wore things and carried things and said things he couldn’t understand. Ford’s feet hurt. He was hungry and tired and cold– his coat was too thin for this weather.

If Ford had dreamed of being an adventurer as a child (and he now pretended he hadn’t) he wouldn’t have anticipated the aimless hours, or the boredom. He hadn’t considered what it would be like to have no home, and nobody to turn to.

Ford gazed blankly at his glowing orb. He was exhausted, and he was alone here. Nobody would notice for days if he didn’t make it to his hotel. The only thing for it was to move. Ford took a deep breath, pushed himself off his wall, and set out.

18. morituro - of someone who is next or destined to die

When Ford learned that Bill was widely known throughout many universes, he didn’t know if it was comforting (he wasn’t the only person to be tricked or harmed by Bill!) or dismaying (he was just another in a long line of rubes to fall for Bill’s trickery.) He wasn’t known quite everywhere, but in many places Ford heard whispers and rumors.

“Bill Cipher isn’t real,” scoffed a man in one dimension. “It’s just a silly trick created to scare children into obeying, like the Giant Cocoon!”

“I’m sorry,” breathed a sympathetic guard as she snuck Ford out of a heavily fortified prison. “Everyone here lives in fear of the One-Eyed Demon. Get out of here before you’re seen.”

The more Ford learned about BIll, the more grimly certain he became that he couldn’t begin to think of returning home yet. Indeed, he couldn’t take any other path until Bill was dead.

“My people,” said a hollow-eyed old arms dealer, xir hands clenched into a bony knot before xem. “Killed. Gone. Now I help other people to their own ends in the hopeless pursuit of the monster.”

And that arms dealer had been one of the lucky ones: Ford had found that few people ever survived Bill’s scouring of their universes.

“Murdered his own fucking people, you know? Just pfft.” This woman had snapped her delicate-looking wings with a startling sound. “All of them into the mist. And why? To cover up his crimes? For fun? Who knows?” She had shuddered in the sweltering heat. “Evil.”

Eventually, Ford began to hear an addendum to mentions of Bill. Not always, but sometimes, and increasing in frequency as the years wore on.

The first time he’d heard it had been from a child, who had peered solemnly at him from under a wide-brimmed hat. “The Deceiver will make you think fake things are real. He takes you away and replaces you with his own mind.” The little boy’s eyes had sparkled. “But don’t worry! My aunts say that there’s someone who fights the Deceiver! A man who appears from nowhere to strike and run before he can be caught! He’s a thief and a crook, but he helps. Maybe you can find him and he can help you too.”

25. noceur - one who stays up late

The problem with studying 0th dimensional physics was that it was so fascinating that Ford didn’t want to turn his attention to anything else. He’d budgeted two hours for 0d Physics, then two for exobiology (redundant– all biology was exobiology on an alien planet), then one for his Strygian literature class (the language was fascinating! The literature even more so!) and finally some philosophy he was taking to round out his studies and help him to understand the culture of the Strygians.

After that he would eat, sleep, wake, and attend class. And after escaping from that horrible dimension with all the M’s, Ford had washed up here, on the planet Strygis. Then there’d been two weeks of decontamination and rigorous interviews, and it had been decided that Ford should be allowed to attend Tytene University as what amounted to an alien charity case. They didn’t call it that, of course; he was an “Off-Planet-Originated Accelerated Admission” case. He was also, on paper, a woman, because the avian inhabitants of Strygis had organized themselves quite strictly by sex. As a scholar, Ford was female, legally.

Anyway, all of that was beside the point. The point was that Ford found himself in a university of kindred spirits. It had been years since he’d last earned a new PhD, and Ford thought he deserved a little treat. And the physics department at Tytene University should prove useful, you know, somehow.

A sudden rushing and fluttering in the aerie prompted Ford to raise his head. To his surprise, nearly his entire cohort had swooped in. They made their way to their nests, puttering around and getting ready for bed. Ford stared in surprise past the slender wooden poles that supported the thin canopy over the aerie. The horizon was turning pink. It was dawn. Had he really been awake all night?

“You keep telling us you’re diurnal,” joked Mask from her nest as she fidgeted with it, using her large talons to kick her bedding around. “And yet, here you are, every morning, as if you were just waiting for a good day’s sleep!” “She’s really making great flights with her study of our culture, eh?” came another jovial voice. “You’ll be sprouting feathers next, Ford!”

Ford grinned over his shoulder in the direction of the voice. He couldn’t be sure who it was, but it was clearly friendly ribbing, rather than nasty bullying. “Well, if Larna wouldn’t suggest such fascinating reading for my Science Qualification I could get some human-style nighttime rest!” Ford closed his textbook and relaxed back into his own nest as soft, amused hoots rang out around him.

“If you’re sleeping with us, you may as well get breakfast with us,” Mask suggested. She blinked her huge yellow eyes at him and fluffed up her gray feathers contentedly. “I could catch some oolie and you can explain what Larna is always going on about. I need all the help I can get with physics.” “Sounds lovely,” Ford said truthfully. (A tiny part of Ford already mourned the loss of this planet from his life. Once he moved on, would he ever be back? He pushed the thought aside.) His hand crept toward his exobiology scrolls, almost in spite of himself. Naturally, Mask spotted the movement. She rolled her whole head.

“At least try to be asleep before the sun is above the horizon,” she advised him, sounding like nobody so much as Fiddleford at age twenty.

Ford chuckled. “I’ll see what I can do. Old habits die hard.”

29. selcouth - unfamiliar, rare, strange, and yet wonderful

Footsteps thundered behind Ford as he dashed through broad, brightly-lit halls. Door after door flicked past on either side, but each one was a dead end, if the map Ford’s accomplice had given him was correct.  He could hide, but he’d be found eventually. He could run, but he couldn’t remember exactly which way to go to reach the outside. This is why you memorize the map! Ford’s brain told him unhelpfully.

At a T intersection, Ford stupidly hesitated for a fraction of a second before staggering to the right. He heard a shout much too nearby.

“There! He went that way!”

Shit. Ford dashed on, terror delaying the exhaustion he should be feeling by now. Even with the benefits of adrenaline he could feel a sharp stabbing between his ribs.

Another intersection, another turn. Ford stopped. Dead end. He was cornered, caught. And weaponless, to boot.

Well, there was only one thing for it. Ford groped in his pocket for a certain cheap plastic case and turned to face the way he’d come, backing slowly toward the dead end.

Guards dressed in green rounded the corner. They stopped, startled to find him facing them, clutching something small that they couldn’t see.

“Greetings, gentlemen!” Ford said, panting. Who knew if they were men at all, but it didn’t matter.

“Drop your weapon!” rang out the command from the frontmost guard. “You’re trespassing in a restricted area!”

“That’s the least of your worries! Get ready… to die!” Ford threw down the infinity-sided die.

Blue light blasted forth from the die; Ford drew his arm over his eyes, recoiling from the flash with his whole body.. He froze in that position for long moments, before the silence around him caught his attention.

Ford removed his arm from his face and was met with a riot of color. He was floating in what felt like a gravityless void, but the black backdrop of space and stars was missing. Instead, he was surrounded by glittering clouds of blue and pink mist so dense he couldn’t see through them, but which looked as soft as cotton. Lights glinted within the clouds, like stars if stars were the size of motes of dust. Instead of the black void of space, it was all set against a gentle blue ‘sky’.

Ford tried to gasp in awe, and found he could. What was this strange place?

He looked down (only designated such because it was the direction his feet were in) and saw a long swoop of pink. He frowned. It was hard to tell distance or size in this place, but it looked like an enormous tail. He looked more and saw a leg, a head, and external gills. It all made sense, he thought, in an abstract kind of way, but his mind bent gently away from the beautiful knowledge of what he was seeing.

A huge, gentle black eye blinked at him through a gentle cyan fog. Ford reached for a gun he wasn’t carrying as a full-body shiver ran through him, and a soft but persistent pressure began to squeeze him tighter and tighter. He tried to thrash in an attempt to throw off the invisible force, and his body obeyed, but the pressure only mounted.

A voice boomed all around and inside of him. The glittering clouds pulsed and flowed to the rhythm of the words.

“ZFYRJBITKMSGVXEFRE

RVYSWSEGVXZVXDXHH

MVWSHUWOFXLXHVOVH

AOVMDVMNRVYSYIAW”

He couldn’t understand. Ford suppressed his instinct to panic. He wasn’t in pain, technically. He could breathe and move. He closed his eyes, blocking out as much sensory input as possible. Think! Perhaps he could reason with… whatever. The thing. The thing he couldn’t quite think about. The voice rang out again:

“JDNULALFCTIGNCPLPETCI

ZFYVXUSUYMNZASGVER

RVYNRCSPPQJEQYLLE

CLXYHBHPEXBXSSOXLEKL”

Ford opened his eyes. They streamed with tears. The pressure was still increasing on his body, but he felt almost as though it didn’t matter. It was as though a pleasant haze was surrounding him, divorcing him from the fear of the situation. He blinked dazedly at a spark in a nearby pink cloud. It looked like shiny cotton candy.

“BEHDHUXGFVGXACPLVDBL”, the voice added. Was that amusement in its booming, glowing, unearthly tones?

A tiny blue object floated past. Ford blinked in surprise, and grabbed his die.

The next moment, Ford was sitting on a large flat stone in a forest that was disorienting in its normalcy. He sat for a few moments, struggling to understand. Then he gave up on understanding. He’d once accidentally eaten a planet. This was nothing compared to that. It was the sort of surreal misadventure that was best forgotten, surely. And, in the grand scheme of things, probably only the thirteenth most dangerous outcome of rolling the infinity-sided die so far.

“Chalk this one up to a victory, then,” Ford muttered to himself as he put the die back in its case and closed it with a snap.

3. astral - of or relating to the stars­

I’ve traveled so far, but this is my first time seeing space like this, the way it was always shown on television when I was a child.

I’m in an actual spaceship, and the view is incredible! Or, it’s actually a little less vivid and brilliant than I would have expected– mostly a big black backdrop with tiny white stars.

Oh, I’m making a mess of this. My first journal entry in years, and it’s complete nonsense! Not that this is a journal. I’ll have to destroy this page as soon as I finish writing it, but I just had to write something!

I’m rambling again. Let me start over.

Since escaping the Nightmare Realm, I’ve jumped from dimension to dimension, seen small towns, vast wilderness, and bustling cities. I’ve been running for my life, essentially. But yesterday I met a small group of outlaws who claim to be the enemies of Bill. I told them my story and they want to help me! Well, that and they also want my help. Perhaps together we can become strong enough, and learn enough, to free the multiverse of the threat that is Bill Cipher.

As it turns out, the outlaws’ base of operations is within this very galaxy. No interdimensional travel for us! So I got to board a real, actual spaceship.

I spent a good few hours discussing the craft’s propulsion with the engineer, a two-headed woman with six names. She talked about faster-than-light travel as if it were simpler than starting a combustion engine! Eventually she tired of my questions and I was banished to my tiny quarters.

Even if the view is duller than I might have hoped for, I can’t quite believe that I’m in space! Every star I can see from my window is brand new, never seen by human eyes. When I was eighteen, watching the moon landing in my parents’ living room, I dreamed of one day experiencing something like this.

It could be under better circumstances, but I’m fed, clean, reasonably unlikely to be killed (I think) and on my way to meet with those who will help me defeat Bill and make the multiverse safer for everyone!

For the first time in a long time, I have hope for the future.

[this-week-in-rust]

This Week in Rust 572

Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust! Rust is a programming language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software. This is a weekly summary of its progress and community. Want something mentioned? Tag us at @ThisWeekInRust on X (formerly Twitter) or @ThisWeekinRust on mastodon.social, or send us a pull request. Want to get involved? We love contributions.

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Updates from Rust Community

Official

October project goals update

Next Steps on the Rust Trademark Policy

This Development-cycle in Cargo: 1.83

Re-organising the compiler team and recognising our team members

This Month in Our Test Infra: October 2024

Call for proposals: Rust 2025h1 project goals

Foundation

Q3 2024 Recap from Rebecca Rumbul

Rust Foundation Member Announcement: CodeDay, OpenSource Science(OS-Sci), & PROMOTIC

Newsletters

The Embedded Rustacean Issue #31

Project/Tooling Updates

Announcing Intentrace, an alternative strace for everyone

Ractor Quickstart

Announcing Sycamore v0.9.0

CXX-Qt 0.7 Release

An 'Educational' Platformer for Kids to Learn Math and Reading—and Bevy for the Devs

[ZH][EN] Select HTML Components in Declarative Rust

Observations/Thoughts

Safety in an unsafe world

MinPin: yet another pin proposal

Reached the recursion limit... at build time?

Building Trustworthy Software: The Power of Testing in Rust

Async Rust is not safe with io_uring

Macros, Safety, and SOA

how big is your future?

A comparison of Rust’s borrow checker to the one in C#

Streaming Audio APIs in Rust pt. 3: Audio Decoding

[audio] InfinyOn with Deb Roy Chowdhury

Rust Walkthroughs

Difference Between iter() and into_iter() in Rust

Rust's Sneaky Deadlock With if let Blocks

Why I love Rust for tokenising and parsing

"German string" optimizations in Spellbook

Rust's Most Subtle Syntax

Parsing arguments in Rust with no dependencies

Simple way to make i18n support in Rust with with examples and tests

How to shallow clone a Cow

Beginner Rust ESP32 development - Snake

[video] Rust Collections & Iterators Demystified 🪄

Research

Charon: An Analysis Framework for Rust

Crux, a Precise Verifier for Rust and Other Languages

Miscellaneous

Feds: Critical Software Must Drop C/C++ by 2026 or Face Risk

[audio] Let's talk about Rust with John Arundel

[audio] Exploring Rust for Embedded Systems with Philip Markgraf

Crate of the Week

This week's crate is wtransport, an implementation of the WebTransport specification, a successor to WebSockets with many additional features.

Thanks to Josh Triplett for the suggestion!

Please submit your suggestions and votes for next week!

Calls for Testing

An important step for RFC implementation is for people to experiment with the implementation and give feedback, especially before stabilization. The following RFCs would benefit from user testing before moving forward:

RFCs

No calls for testing were issued this week.

Rust

No calls for testing were issued this week.

Rustup

No calls for testing were issued this week.

If you are a feature implementer and would like your RFC to appear on the above list, add the new call-for-testing label to your RFC along with a comment providing testing instructions and/or guidance on which aspect(s) of the feature need testing.

Call for Participation; projects and speakers

CFP - Projects

Always wanted to contribute to open-source projects but did not know where to start? Every week we highlight some tasks from the Rust community for you to pick and get started!

Some of these tasks may also have mentors available, visit the task page for more information.

If you are a Rust project owner and are looking for contributors, please submit tasks here or through a PR to TWiR or by reaching out on X (formerly Twitter) or Mastodon!

CFP - Events

Are you a new or experienced speaker looking for a place to share something cool? This section highlights events that are being planned and are accepting submissions to join their event as a speaker.

If you are an event organizer hoping to expand the reach of your event, please submit a link to the website through a PR to TWiR or by reaching out on X (formerly Twitter) or Mastodon!

Updates from the Rust Project

473 pull requests were merged in the last week

account for late-bound depth when capturing all opaque lifetimes

add --print host-tuple to print host target tuple

add f16 and f128 to invalid_nan_comparison

add lp64e RISC-V ABI

also treat impl definition parent as transparent regarding modules

cleanup attributes around unchecked shifts and unchecked negation in const

cleanup op lookup in HIR typeck

collect item bounds for RPITITs from trait where clauses just like associated types

do not enforce ~const constness effects in typeck if rustc_do_not_const_check

don't lint irrefutable_let_patterns on leading patterns if else if let-chains

double-check conditional constness in MIR

ensure that resume arg outlives region bound for coroutines

find the generic container rather than simply looking up for the assoc with const arg

fix compiler panic with a large number of threads

fix suggestion for diagnostic error E0027

fix validation when lowering ? trait bounds

implement suggestion for never type fallback lints

improve missing_abi lint

improve duplicate derive Copy/Clone diagnostics

llvm: match new LLVM 128-bit integer alignment on sparc

make codegen help output more consistent

make sure type_param_predicates resolves correctly for RPITIT

pass RUSTC_HOST_FLAGS at once without the for loop

port most of --print=target-cpus to Rust

register ~const preds for Deref adjustments in HIR typeck

reject generic self types

remap impl-trait lifetimes on HIR instead of AST lowering

remove "" case from RISC-V llvm_abiname match statement

remove do_not_const_check from Iterator methods

remove region from adjustments

remove support for -Zprofile (gcov-style coverage instrumentation)

replace manual time convertions with std ones, comptime time format parsing

suggest creating unary tuples when types don't match a trait

support clobber_abi and vector registers (clobber-only) in PowerPC inline assembly

try to point out when edition 2024 lifetime capture rules cause borrowck issues

typingMode: merge intercrate, reveal, and defining_opaque_types

miri: change futex_wait errno from Scalar to IoError

stabilize const_arguments_as_str

stabilize if_let_rescope

mark str::is_char_boundary and str::split_at* unstably const

remove const-support for align_offset and is_aligned

unstably add ptr::byte_sub_ptr

implement From<&mut {slice}> for Box/Rc/Arc<{slice}>

rc/Arc: don't leak the allocation if drop panics

add LowerExp and UpperExp implementations to NonZero

use Hacker's Delight impl in i64::midpoint instead of wide i128 impl

xous: sync: remove rustc_const_stable attribute on Condvar and Mutex new()

add const_panic macro to make it easier to fall back to non-formatting panic in const

cargo: downgrade version-exists error to warning on dry-run

cargo: add more metadata to rustc_fingerprint

cargo: add transactional semantics to rustfix

cargo: add unstable -Zroot-dir flag to configure the path from which rustc should be invoked

cargo: allow build scripts to report error messages through cargo::error

cargo: change config paths to only check CARGO_HOME for cargo-script

cargo: download targeted transitive deps of with artifact deps' target platform

cargo fix: track version in fingerprint dep-info files

cargo: remove requirement for --target when invoking Cargo with -Zbuild-std

rustdoc: Fix --show-coverage when JSON output format is used

rustdoc: Unify variant struct fields margins with struct fields

rustdoc: make doctest span tweak a 2024 edition change

rustdoc: skip stability inheritance for some item kinds

mdbook: improve theme support when JS is disabled

mdbook: load the sidebar toc from a shared JS file or iframe

clippy: infinite_loops: fix incorrect suggestions on async functions/closures

clippy: needless_continue: check labels consistency before warning

clippy: no_mangle attribute requires unsafe in Rust 2024

clippy: add new trivial_map_over_range lint

clippy: cleanup code suggestion for into_iter_without_iter

clippy: do not use gen as a variable name

clippy: don't lint unnamed consts and nested items within functions in missing_docs_in_private_items

clippy: extend large_include_file lint to also work on attributes

clippy: fix allow_attributes when expanded from some macros

clippy: improve display of clippy lints page when JS is disabled

clippy: new lint map_all_any_identity

clippy: new lint needless_as_bytes

clippy: new lint source_item_ordering

clippy: return iterator must not capture lifetimes in Rust 2024

clippy: use match ergonomics compatible with editions 2021 and 2024

rust-analyzer: allow interpreting consts and statics with interpret function command

rust-analyzer: avoid interior mutability in TyLoweringContext

rust-analyzer: do not render meta info when hovering usages

rust-analyzer: add assist to generate a type alias for a function

rust-analyzer: render extern blocks in file_structure

rust-analyzer: show static values on hover

rust-analyzer: auto-complete import for aliased function and module

rust-analyzer: fix the server not honoring diagnostic refresh support

rust-analyzer: only parse safe as contextual kw in extern blocks

rust-analyzer: parse patterns with leading pipe properly in all places

rust-analyzer: support new #[rustc_intrinsic] attribute and fallback bodies

Rust Compiler Performance Triage

A week dominated by one large improvement and one large regression where luckily the improvement had a larger impact. The regression seems to have been caused by a newly introduced lint that might have performance issues. The improvement was in building rustc with protected visibility which reduces the number of dynamic relocations needed leading to some nice performance gains. Across a large swath of the perf suit, the compiler is on average 1% faster after this week compared to last week.

Triage done by @rylev. Revision range: c8a8c820..27e38f8f

Summary:

(instructions:u) mean range count Regressions ❌ (primary) 0.8% [0.1%, 2.0%] 80 Regressions ❌ (secondary) 1.9% [0.2%, 3.4%] 45 Improvements ✅ (primary) -1.9% [-31.6%, -0.1%] 148 Improvements ✅ (secondary) -5.1% [-27.8%, -0.1%] 180 All ❌✅ (primary) -1.0% [-31.6%, 2.0%] 228

1 Regression, 1 Improvement, 5 Mixed; 3 of them in rollups 46 artifact comparisons made in total

Full report here

Approved RFCs

Changes to Rust follow the Rust RFC (request for comments) process. These are the RFCs that were approved for implementation this week:

[RFC] Default field values

RFC: Give users control over feature unification

Final Comment Period

Every week, the team announces the 'final comment period' for RFCs and key PRs which are reaching a decision. Express your opinions now.

RFCs

[disposition: merge] Add support for use Trait::func

Tracking Issues & PRs

Rust

[disposition: merge] Stabilize Arm64EC inline assembly

[disposition: merge] Stabilize s390x inline assembly

[disposition: merge] rustdoc-search: simplify rules for generics and type params

[disposition: merge] Fix ICE when passing DefId-creating args to legacy_const_generics.

[disposition: merge] Tracking Issue for const_option_ext

[disposition: merge] Tracking Issue for const_unicode_case_lookup

[disposition: merge] Reject raw lifetime followed by ', like regular lifetimes do

[disposition: merge] Enforce that raw lifetimes must be valid raw identifiers

[disposition: merge] Stabilize WebAssembly multivalue, reference-types, and tail-call target features

Cargo

No Cargo Tracking Issues or PRs entered Final Comment Period this week.

Language Team

No Language Team Proposals entered Final Comment Period this week.

Language Reference

No Language Reference RFCs entered Final Comment Period this week.

Unsafe Code Guidelines

No Unsafe Code Guideline Tracking Issues or PRs entered Final Comment Period this week.

New and Updated RFCs

[new] Implement The Update Framework for Project Signing

[new] [RFC] Static Function Argument Unpacking

[new] [RFC] Explicit ABI in extern

[new] Add homogeneous_try_blocks RFC

Upcoming Events

Rusty Events between 2024-11-06 - 2024-12-04 🦀

Virtual

2024-11-06 | Virtual (Indianapolis, IN, US) | Indy Rust

Indy.rs - with Social Distancing

2024-11-07 | Virtual (Berlin, DE) | OpenTechSchool Berlin + Rust Berlin

Rust Hack and Learn | Mirror: Rust Hack n Learn Meetup

2024-11-08 | Virtual (Jersey City, NJ, US) | Jersey City Classy and Curious Coders Club Cooperative

Rust Coding / Game Dev Fridays Open Mob Session!

2024-11-12 | Virtual (Dallas, TX, US) | Dallas Rust

Second Tuesday

2024-11-14 | Virtual (Charlottesville, NC, US) | Charlottesville Rust Meetup

Crafting Interpreters in Rust Collaboratively

2024-11-14 | Virtual and In-Person (Lehi, UT, US) | Utah Rust

Green Thumb: Building a Bluetooth-Enabled Plant Waterer with Rust and Microbit

2024-11-14 | Virtual and In-Person (Seattle, WA, US) | Seattle Rust User Group

November Meetup

2024-11-15 | Virtual (Jersey City, NJ, US) | Jersey City Classy and Curious Coders Club Cooperative

Rust Coding / Game Dev Fridays Open Mob Session!

2024-11-19 | Virtual (Los Angeles, CA, US) | DevTalk LA

Discussion - Topic: Rust for UI

2024-11-19 | Virtual (Washington, DC, US) | Rust DC

Mid-month Rustful

2024-11-20 | Virtual and In-Person (Vancouver, BC, CA) | Vancouver Rust

Embedded Rust Workshop

2024-11-21 | Virtual (Berlin, DE) | OpenTechSchool Berlin + Rust Berlin

Rust Hack and Learn | Mirror: Rust Hack n Learn Meetup

2024-11-21 | Virtual (Charlottesville, NC, US) | Charlottesville Rust Meetup

Trustworthy IoT with Rust--and passwords!

2024-11-21 | Virtual (Rotterdam, NL) | Bevy Game Development

Bevy Meetup #7

2024-11-25 | Bratislava, SK | Bratislava Rust Meetup Group

ONLINE Talk, sponsored by Sonalake - Bratislava Rust Meetup

2024-11-26 | Virtual (Dallas, TX, US) | Dallas Rust

Last Tuesday

2024-11-28 | Virtual (Charlottesville, NC, US) | Charlottesville Rust Meetup

Crafting Interpreters in Rust Collaboratively

2024-12-03 | Virtual (Buffalo, NY, US) | Buffalo Rust Meetup

Buffalo Rust User Group

Asia

2024-11-28 | Bangalore/Bengaluru, IN | Rust Bangalore

RustTechX Summit 2024 BOSCH

2024-11-30 | Tokyo, JP | Rust Tokyo

Rust.Tokyo 2024

Europe

2024-11-06 | Oxford, UK | Oxford Rust Meetup Group

Oxford Rust and C++ social

2024-11-06 | Paris, FR | Paris Rustaceans

Rust Meetup in Paris

2024-11-09 - 2024-11-11 | Florence, IT | Rust Lab

Rust Lab 2024: The International Conference on Rust in Florence

2024-11-12 | Zurich, CH | Rust Zurich

Encrypted/distributed filesystems, wasm-bindgen

2024-11-13 | Reading, UK | Reading Rust Workshop

Reading Rust Meetup

2024-11-14 | Stockholm, SE | Stockholm Rust

Rust Meetup @UXStream

2024-11-19 | Leipzig, DE | Rust - Modern Systems Programming in Leipzig

Daten sichern mit ZFS (und Rust)

2024-11-21 | Edinburgh, UK | Rust and Friends

Rust and Friends (pub)

2024-11-21 | Oslo, NO | Rust Oslo

Rust Hack'n'Learn at Kampen Bistro

2024-11-23 | Basel, CH | Rust Basel

Rust + HTMX - Workshop #3

2024-11-27 | Dortmund, DE | Rust Dortmund

Rust Dortmund

2024-11-28 | Aarhus, DK | Rust Aarhus

Talk Night at Lind Capital

2024-11-28 | Augsburg, DE | Rust Meetup Augsburg

Augsburg Rust Meetup #10

2024-11-28 | Berlin, DE | OpenTechSchool Berlin + Rust Berlin

Rust and Tell - Title

North America

2024-11-07 | Chicago, IL, US | Chicago Rust Meetup

Chicago Rust Meetup

2024-11-07 | Montréal, QC, CA | Rust Montréal

November Monthly Social

2024-11-07 | St. Louis, MO, US | STL Rust

Game development with Rust and the Bevy engine

2024-11-12 | Ann Arbor, MI, US | Detroit Rust

Rust Community Meetup - Ann Arbor

2024-11-14 | Mountain View, CA, US | Hacker Dojo

Rust Meetup at Hacker Dojo

2024-11-15 | Mexico City, DF, MX | Rust MX

Multi threading y Async en Rust parte 2 - Smart Pointes y Closures

2024-11-15 | Somerville, MA, US | Boston Rust Meetup

Ball Square Rust Lunch, Nov 15

2024-11-19 | San Francisco, CA, US | San Francisco Rust Study Group

Rust Hacking in Person

2024-11-23 | Boston, MA, US | Boston Rust Meetup

Boston Common Rust Lunch, Nov 23

2024-11-25 | Ferndale, MI, US | Detroit Rust

Rust Community Meetup - Ferndale

2024-11-27 | Austin, TX, US | Rust ATX

Rust Lunch - Fareground

Oceania

2024-11-12 | Christchurch, NZ | Christchurch Rust Meetup Group

Christchurch Rust Meetup

If you are running a Rust event please add it to the calendar to get it mentioned here. Please remember to add a link to the event too. Email the Rust Community Team for access.

Jobs

Please see the latest Who's Hiring thread on r/rust

Quote of the Week

Any sufficiently complicated C project contains an adhoc, informally specified, bug ridden, slow implementation of half of cargo.

– Folkert de Vries at RustNL 2024 (youtube recording)

Thanks to Collin Richards for the suggestion!

Please submit quotes and vote for next week!

This Week in Rust is edited by: nellshamrell, llogiq, cdmistman, ericseppanen, extrawurst, andrewpollack, U007D, kolharsam, joelmarcey, mariannegoldin, bennyvasquez.

Email list hosting is sponsored by The Rust Foundation

Discuss on r/rust

[putschki1969]

2023/06/08 Blog post by Wakana いよいよ今週はインストアイベント！！〜最近やっとリリース出来た事を実感しています〜

❗This is Fan Club EXCLUSIVE content❗ ❗PERSONAL USE ONLY❗ Do ❗NOT SHARE❗ on other sites ❗Join her FAN CLUB! Check out my detailed TUTORIAL ❗

this Week it’s Time for my In-store Release Event！！〜My Album has Finally Released〜

To celebrate the release of my album, I got to write a lyric essay for Uta Net. This was my first attempt at writing such an essay, I took on the challenge by reading many essays in advance😲!! II honestly had no idea what to do, I kept worrying until the very end😂 The recital was a lot of fun 😳Actually, I came across something very interesting called a “sound shield” at Yuji Toriyama-san’s studio where I did most of my vocal recording for the album. I was so intrigued by the item that I bought a mini size. These sound shields or microphone isolation shields are crucial because they provide a better environment for the microphone to produce good sound quality. They pick up reverberations that occur when voices or musical instruments echo in a room. Typically, I use a handheld mic when I practice but I record all my demo songs with a mic on a mic stand at home so I knew that investing in a shield like that would increase the quality of my recordings considerably! I took the plunge and bought one. When I recorded my reading of the essay using this filter, the audio was recorded very well 😳I think it sounded great because it delicately picked up my breathing! It felt like I was almost in a professional radio recording environment 😳However, it's quite a hassle to set up the filter on the mic stand so I've removed the filter at home but here’s a picture of Toriyama-san's studio! *laughs* (of course I have his permission to post this😉) It's a great way to easily improve the quality of your recording environment!

Hello, this is Wakana (0￣▽￣0)／

I recorded a total of 3 lyric essays at home using this newly acquired armature(?). Please be sure to listen to them😊

https://www.uta-net.com/user/writer/todaysong.html?id=13512

https://www.uta-net.com/user/writer/todaysong.html?id=13513

https://www.uta-net.com/user/writer/todaysong.html?id=13514

Well now. On May 31st of last month, I finally released my 3rd original studio album "Sono Saki e"!  \\\\٩( 'ω' )و ////On the release day, I visited Tower Records Shibuya where I will be holding a release event on Saturday! I'm so happy about the display😭! ! ! 😭✨✨By all means, if you happen to come to Shibuya, please visit Tower Records Shibuya♡＼(^o^)／

How did you like the album? 😊This 3rd album was a big challenge for me so please let me know what you think!

And on Saturday, June 10, I'll be holding my in-store event together with Hirotaka Sakurada-san. It’s been such a long time since I’ve worked with him! \\\\٩( 'ω' )و //// Saku-chan's piano playing feels even more tingling than before!😭😭😭😭✨✨Everyone, please come to the event! (((o(*ﾟ▽ﾟ*)o)))(The in-store event in Shibuya will also be streamed online! And you can get a clear file at the venue!) See you at Tower Records Shibuya on Saturday＼(^o^)／

Until next time☆(*'▽'*)

＊＊＊Wakana＊＊＊

2023/06/08 Instagram post by Wakana

Only 2 days left until the Shibuya in-store event 🥳🎉 These days I am finally starting to realise that my album has actually released. From last year to this year, I was busy creating the album, facing each and every song carefully. I’d like to look back on some of the fun photos which were taken during the album recording 🤭 Here we have a group photo of Konno Strings during the recording of "Asu wo Yume Mite Utau"🎻 Seeing Takebe-san in the booth giving instructions to the string players almost felt like we were on the set of a TV program. On the one hand it felt quite hectic but on the other hand, there was an overwhelming sense of reassurance that the production was in capable hands 😳✨It was a really amazing recording😍 (Source)

“Sono Saki e” Oricon Ranking

As mentioned in another blog post, “Sono Saki e” made it to #14 on its first day in the Daily Oricon Charts. That’s honestly a lower entry-position than expected but not too shabby (in comparison, Keiko managed to reach #8 on the first day).

However, Wakana is still in the Top 30 for the Weekly Oricon Charts which is actually pretty neat. Not as high as her 1st (#19) or 2nd (#22) original studio album but much better than her cover album (#42) => Oricon

.

[kiranapassionategamer]

Step-by-Step: How to Live Stream Your Ludo Matches

Gaming streams have developed to show the players’ activity, communicate with the audience, and sometimes even earn money. Ludo, a board game quite famous earlier and has even grown popular in this digital world, is no different. Live streaming is a great approach for a Ludo lover if you want to present your matches to the world. 

This live stream guide will help you effectively go about live streaming your Ludo matches.

Why Live Stream Your Ludo Game?

Ludo is one of several gamers that are following the trend of live broadcasting. You can: by streaming your Ludo game in real time.

Build relationships with other Ludo players to create a community.

Real-time tips and strategies exchanged.

Acquire followers and earn money from your articles.

Engage viewers in conversation to improve your game experience.

Time to Get Started with Ludo Live Streaming

To live stream your Ludo real money earning games, you need to follow the below-mentioned steps carefully:

Step 1: Choose Your Platform

Before you start streaming, decide which platform you want to use. The most popular streaming platforms are:

YouTube: Known for its vast audience and easy-to-use interface.

Twitch: The go-to platform for gamers, offering extensive live-streaming features.

Facebook Gaming: Great for reaching your existing friends and followers on Facebook.

Instagram Live: Ideal for quick, casual streams with a more personal touch.

Each platform has its features and audience, so choose the one that best fits your needs and where you believe your audience is most active.

Step 2: Set Up Your Streaming Software

To stream your Ludo matches, you’ll need streaming software. The most popular ones include:

OBS Studio (Open Broadcaster Software): Free and open-source, OBS Studio is highly customizable and works on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Streamlabs OBS: Built on OBS Studio, it offers a more user-friendly interface and additional features tailored for streamers.

XSplit: A paid option with a straightforward interface and powerful features for Windows users.

How to Set Up OBS Studio:

Download and Install: Visit the OBS Studio website, download the software, and install it on your computer.

Create a New Scene: Open OBS Studio and click the “+” button in the “Scenes” box to create a new scene.

Add Sources: Click the “+” button in the “Sources” box to add your sources. For streaming Ludo, you’ll primarily need a “Game Capture” or “Window Capture” source to capture the game window.

Configure Settings: Go to “Settings” > “Stream” and select your streaming platform. Enter the stream key provided by your chosen platform.

Step 3: Optimize Your Stream Settings

To ensure a smooth and high-quality stream, optimize your settings in OBS Studio or your chosen streaming software:

Resolution: Set your output resolution to 720p or 1080p, depending on your internet speed and computer capabilities.

Bitrate: Adjust your bitrate according to your internet upload speed. A 2500-3500 kbps bitrate is suitable for 720p, while 4000-6000 kbps is ideal for 1080p.

FPS (Frames Per Second): Set your FPS to 30 for a standard stream or 60 if you want a smoother experience and have sufficient bandwidth.

Step 4: Prepare Your Equipment

To create a professional and engaging stream, invest in some essential equipment:

Computer or Smartphone: Ensure your device can handle the game and streaming software without lag.

Webcam: A good quality webcam adds a personal touch and helps viewers connect with you.

Microphone: Clear audio is crucial for engaging with your audience. A dedicated microphone is recommended over a built-in one.

Stable Internet Connection: A wired connection is preferable for stability. Ensure you have sufficient upload speed for streaming.

Step 5: Create Engaging Overlays and Alerts

Overlays and alerts can make your stream more engaging and visually appealing. Use tools like Streamlabs or StreamElements to create custom overlays, alerts, and widgets. These can include:

Chat Box: Display viewer comments on your screen.

Alerts: Notify viewers of new followers, subscribers, or donations.

Overlays: Add a professional touch with borders, backgrounds, and other visual elements.

Step 6: Promote Your Stream

Promotion is key to building an audience. Here are some tips to get the word out:

Social Media: Share your stream link on your social media profiles before and during your stream.

Join Communities: Participate in gaming forums, Ludo groups, and other online communities to share your stream.

Collaborate: Team up with other streamers for joint streams, which can help cross-promote your channels.

Schedule Regular Streams: Consistency helps build a loyal audience. Let your viewers know when to expect your streams.

Step 7: Engage with Your Audience

Engagement is crucial for a successful stream. Here’s how to keep your viewers interested:

Interact: Respond to comments and questions in real time.

Be Entertaining: Keep your commentary lively and entertaining.

Encourage Participation: Invite viewers to play with you or suggest strategies.

Step 8: Analyze and Improve

After each stream, take time to analyze your performance:

View Metrics: Check viewer counts, engagement rates, and other analytics your streaming platform provides.

Gather Feedback: Ask your audience for feedback on what they liked and what could be improved.

Adjust Accordingly: Make necessary adjustments to your setup, content, and streaming schedule based on the feedback and metrics.

Step 9: Monetize Your Stream

Once you have built a steady viewership, you can start monetizing your streams:

Platform Monetization: Use built-in monetization features like YouTube’s Super Chat, Twitch’s subscriptions and bits, or Facebook Stars.

Sponsorships: Collaborate with brands for sponsored content.

Donations: Encourage your audience to support you through donations on platforms like Patreon or directly through your streaming service.

Conclusion

Live streaming your Ludo matches can be a fun and rewarding experience. Following this step-by-step guide, you can set up a professional stream, engage with your audience, and potentially earn money. Remember, consistency and engagement are key to building a loyal viewer base. 

So, prepare your equipment, choose your platform, and start streaming your Ludo matches to the world.