#This game rewired something in me the first time I played it

[hopesapowerfulthing]

The Perfect Birthday gift

[callofdudes]

could you do some hcs for platonic 141 and a techie/hacker reader? i’d love to see your take on their friendship with someone like that :) also love your work, thanks for making so many cool hcs and scenarios 🥰❤️❤️

I like this. This is good. 😄 Also thank you! I hope you enjoy your headcanons.

141 with a hacker/tech oriented teammate

Ghost 💀

Ghost is somewhat of a hacker himself. In the 09 game Ghost is the 141's hacker. Simon is in love with computers and codes. It's something of a hobby.

So when he meets you and discovers you are also a whizz with computers he's thrilled.

You two are both set up to work together and this is what brings you closer, bonding over your your shared skill set.

Sometimes you'll go to Ghost if you are having a particularly difficult problem, and him vice versa.

And despite Simon knowing everything there is to know about a computer from it's chip, to it's processing hardware, to the INS and outs of connecting wirelessly to and encrypted computer- he cannot figure out his own fucking phone.

Yeah yeah, laugh it up. He knows how to use it but sometimes he's socially inept.

"Sergeant. Johnny just sent me a link to this site... He put a smiley face emoji, and a... Heart?? Is this a threat?"

You take one took at the url and cringe. "Just ignore it. Don't click on it. I'm going to restrict Johnny's network access right now!"

Simon nods, not questioning it. Though he is curious what this site it. Knowing Johnny it can't be something innocent.

Simon also loves to spend his free time making complicated encrypted codes for you to puzzle through. If you're feeling bored he'll flip you a USB and tell you to clear the malware in an hour.

It's always fun.

And it's really what got the two of you close in the first place.

Simon always reaches out for your help in missions first.

"Y/n, can you open the door, it's blocked?"

"Is it online?"

"Bloody- yes it's online."

"Is there a key card for it??"

"Yeah... But I don't want to go look for it."

You chuckle. "Alright big guy, give me 2 seconds."

Johnny is scared of you two.

He came into the kitchen one morning and heard you using foreign 16 letter words and strange alien language while reading a book on computer engineering with Ghost. Worst part was, he spoke the strange language back!

Johnny thinks your aliens for a half minute until you define the words for him and he's good to go.

Simon knows you're a hacker, but he also tried to figure out your other hobbies. Like, maybe you take long walks around the neighborhood in the morning?? Or you play volleyball. Something like that.

He spends most of his time with you. He just likes hanging out with you in general. And after you rigged up a PS5 to the old ass TV in the common room it's been nonstop fun off duty.

He takes it upon himself to train you. You're both skilled but if there is something you aren't sure of or haven't faced before in your military training you'll go to him. And he's always willing to help.

Overall, Ghost really likes you. And he admires your skill. One day you might be as good a hacker as him 😉

Soap 🧼

You and Johnny are much more similar than you might think. Johnny does a bit of his own hacking when it comes to delaying a bomb, rewiring them or defusing them all together. So he knows a good thing or two.

He does a little bit of hacking, nothing spectacular like you or Ghost though.

Definitely asks you to hack the PS store so he can get more game points.

Asks you about video games in general. Yes, sure, your hacking is very professional and you use it for the missions but what about videogames!?

You find that jimmy rigging things for Johnny is just the best way to show your love. He came to you one afternoon asking if you could make one of his headphones play music and the other receive comms. From the others.

Silly Johnny.

Will ask you to somehow get the Christmas lights in his room connected to the main power. He is very disappointed when you tell him that electrician is a very different job from technician.

Will probably ask you to teach him some more advanced hacky stuff when he can. Definitely doesn't ask you for help pranking the recruits when it's tech involved. And you definitely don't occasionally help him.

Johnny is a bit scared by all the computer books on your shelf and all the big words inside. Your equally as scared by his quantum mechanics books and all his explosives manuals.

It's equal honestly.

He is like Ghost in the sense that when he could just ask you to do something for him instead of looking everywhere for something.

"Y/nnnnnnnn" he whines.

"What's up Johnny? Are you in the building yet??"

"No, it's locked and I don't know the code."

"Is it written down somewhere??"

"Y/n, could you just.... Open it??"

You chuckle. "Give me a minute buddy."

The door clicks and turns green. "Yippee! 😁" And in he goes.

You've found you need to wipe his phone every other month and set him up with an antivirus you need to remind him to pay for. Because he connects to any and all networks without a care.

MacDonald?? Connected. Ghost's hotspot?? Connected. Some random printer with one bar?? Definitely connected.

He's just kinda dumb like that.

You set up a little class for him about malware just to remind him.

You've started restricting his phone time so he can only use it for 4 hours a day before it completely shuts off. Just to tease him. Until he goes to Price and tattles ☹️

Johnny just thinks it's cool as shit. He didn't know it was an actual job for you? Like that's dope!

He likes to find different computer kits for you. The type of guy to dig old computers from the garbage and unpack it to get to the mother board.

If he finds a chip in there or a hard drive obviously he's gonna ask you to open it so he can snoop.

Johnny thinks your talent is really cool. He thinks you're really cool. And when you sit down and play video games with him even without all the hackers skill he still has fun.

Occasionally you are surprised when Johnny pulls out a super smash bros move so insane no one would ever attempt it in their right mind and wins.

So you both surprise each other with your different skills. You teach Johnny about computers, he teaches you about science and big things that go boom.

It's a nice partnership. Johnny would give this relationship 5 whole stars!!

Gaz 🧢

It immediately interests him. He's no hacker by trade, he has as much skill in the concept as Johnny does. But it really does catch his attention.

Wanting to spend a lot of his time alone, sometimes he enjoys just sitting there and watching you click away on your computer.

You even teach him a few things. Sometimes he'll feel like pointing out a code he's unfamiliar with or something else you do, and you're always happy to teach him.

Gaz is much quieter than the others, so you decide to make up some better headphones for him when on base so he can get the full quiet atmosphere experience.

He really like the glowing keyboard you have. (You know the one) he really likes it.

He isn't one to use you as a cheat code but sometimes you just like to spoil him. He doesn't want to ask you for unnecessary help when you are helping Captain Price across the building.

"Bloody hell, where is that stupid passcode!?" He looks around the desk, scattering papers in a hurry. If he doesn't get in this computer he would definitely be caught.

"Having some trouble Gaz??"

"I'm fine. Where is Captain Price at??"

You hum. Suddenly the computer in front of him flickers onto a loading screen and freezes. Several lines of code flash over the screen.

"Don't worry, using the wireless connection you set up earlier..."

The computer flashed on, past the passcode screen. "All clear sergeant."

He can't help chuckling. "Thanks."

He's 100% in the know of where to find all the best books and will often scan your shelves to see if your missing a volume of anything or if there is a new book he could get you.

He tries to make stuff for you. Like little computer decorations. It's a hobby of his making little decals and stickers, so your computer is glamorized in all of Gaz's little gifts.

Gaz isn't as interested in your computer sciences as Johnny, but he's also the only one you'll find lounging in your office at 2 in the morning reading one of your coding books because he couldn't sleep.

You flick on the lights in your office, startled when you see someone sitting in your chair. You sigh in relief when you see it's on Gaz, passed out with your heavy textbook open on his chest.

"Aw, buddy." You come over and gently tip his hat down, pulling the book from his arms. You slip a bookmark in it and place it on your desk for later.

He's much too heavy to lift him, so you drape a throw blanket over him and turn the lights off. You can do your stuff later.

Gaz thinks you're really cool. He likes to hang out with you and learn more about you. And you like learning more about him.

You're the type of friends to lay on his bed for hours saying nothing but happy in each other's presence. You could be on your computer and he can be reading. But each other's presence is what makes the interaction special, even if you don't talk.

Gaz is glad you came to the team. Your a good asset and a good friend.

Price 🥃

Your skills were what attracted Price to you first. He wanted you on his team once he heard of your level of skill. It would be nice to have two techies at his disposal.

But he didn't expect how well you'd get along with his soldiers. You were a tight knit group almost immediately, he couldn't ask for it differently.

He admires how much you care for the others, and how you're willing to use your skills to do seemingly silly things for the boys.

You're very smart, and he loves when you info dump on him. He's old enough that most of the topics you bring up he is familiar with. Maybe not a genius but you get used to certain terms and trades when you've been serving as long as he has.

And you're always surprised when he has a little tidbit of information to add to the conversation.

Now don't get me wrong, Price is very technologically aware. He can set off a missile by the flick of his wrist and shut down enemy hardware within an inch of his skin. But he doesn't know what to do when Facebook crashes.

Whether he overthinks it or he's just kinda stupid, you'll never know.

You might just be the hacker but he's always asking your opinion things. "These are electric doors, what would be the best way to get them open without attracting attention??"

Always gets your opinion.

He is the dad who will get you everything you need to further your hobby/job in the task force.

He always gets you new books and cool looking hardware.

"Knock knock."

You close your laptop halfway and pull off your headphones. "Come in."

Price smiles when he comes in, seeing you all set up on your bed. "Hey kiddo."

"Hey captain, need something?"

Price sat down and looked at what you were working on. "is that the new game Johnny has been ranting about you making him??"

"Yeah, it's just a simple code like the Google dinosaur game, I don't know why he's so excited 😅"

"Well, maybe these will help?" He pulls up a bag full of a couple books you'd been talking about buying of they weren't almost 50$ each.

"Price??" You pulled out the books. "Oh thank you."

"Any time." He ruffles your hair.

Literally the most supportive dad.

Sorry but you are his child now. He has adopted you into his little found family.

Again, he really likes letting you talk to him about what you're doing when you're on your computer.

And you've saved his butt more than once with your quick skills.

"I've got the wires set up y/n, it's your turn."

"I'm on, give me two seconds."

"Good, we don't want them to get alerted, Johnny and Gaz are near the west hall."

"Aaaaalright..." You are quiet for a moment. "Ok, cameras are blocked, you're free to move around."

"Copy that sergeant."

Like I said, supportive and protective dad.

You've been amazing support for the team both as a teammate and a friend. Overall he's really glad that you're a part of the team. Very valued, very loved.

He's glad he met you.

[oceanpulls]

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have a plan to soundtrack everything

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross – best friends and Nine Inch Nails bandmates – found unlikely creative fulfilment (and a couple of Oscars) by reassessing what they had to offer as musicians. Now they’re thinking even bigger, and imagining an artistic empire of their own making

By Zach Baron

Photography by Danielle Levitt

Every weekday, Trent Reznor makes his way from his house, a cottagey sprawl behind a white wall in a canyon on Los Angeles’s Westside, to a studio he’s built in his backyard. There he meets his best friend, bandmate, and business partner, Atticus Ross, and they get to work. Reznor and Ross observe the same hours, Monday to Friday, 11am to 7pm. “We show up,” Reznor told me. “We’re not late. We’re not coming in to start to fuck around.” It’s a methodical, orderly existence that Reznor could not have foreseen in the ’90s, when he was fronting Nine Inch Nails and struggling with a drug-and-alcohol problem that was his answer to success. “I would do anything to avoid writing a song,” Reznor said. “I’d rewire the studio 50 times.”

Now Reznor has a wife, Mariqueen Maandig, five children, and multiple jobs. He is sober. Since 2010, when the director David Fincher asked Reznor and Ross to score The Social Network, for which Reznor and Ross won an Oscar, the two men have had steady employment composing for film. This year, Reznor and Ross are also starting a yet-to-be-named company, built around storytelling in multiple disciplines: film production, fashion, a music festival, and a venture with Epic Games.

And then, of course, there is the oldest and perhaps still the most complicated of Reznor’s jobs: being the frontman of Nine Inch Nails. In 1988 Reznor formed what was then a one-man band; the first two full-length records Nine Inch Nails released, Pretty Hate Machine(1989) and The Downward Spiral (1994), have sold more than eight million copies. (Over subsequent years and subsequent albums, the band has since crossed the 20 million mark in sales.) In the ’90s, for a time, Nine Inch Nails were ubiquitous: a phenomenon on the level of Nirvana or Dr Dre. During that decade, the success of the band nearly killed Reznor. “I didn’t feel prepared to process how disorientating that was,” he said. “How much it can distort your personality.”

These days, Nine Inch Nails, which Ross joined as a full-time member in 2016, present a different problem – how do you make something old, something so already well-defined, new again? There are years when Reznor feels like he has the answers and years when he’s less certain. He has put the band on hiatus more than once; after the last Nine Inch Nails tour, in 2022, Reznor deliberately took a break from playing shows as well. “For the first time in a long time I wasn’t sure: what’s the tour going to say?” Reznor told me. “What do I have to say right now? We can still play those songs real good. Maybe we can come up with a new production. But it wasn’t screaming at me: this is what to do right now.”

But he and Ross still come to work, daily, in search of transcendence. “We sit in here every day,” Reznor said. “And a portion of the time organically becomes us just figuring out who we are as people and processing life and a kind of therapy session. And in those endless hours it’s come up: why do we want to do this? And the reason is because we both feel the most in touch with God and fulfilled.”

It is easy to make things when you are a teenager growing up in rural Pennsylvania, near the Ohio border, as Reznor was, and you have nothing to lose and everything to gain; it is considerably harder, once you’ve got older, and found a way to make things that people like, to keep going. It’s an old story: the act of creation can lift you up, but those sharp gifts can also destroy you, and if you make it past that, the sheer blissful regularity of life with money and a family can even you out so thoroughly that there is no friction left to work with. You look inside the cupboard and the cupboard is bare, or it’s a mansion and living inside of it is a person you’re bored of, and so you stop looking. But Reznor and Ross have never stopped looking, and the search for that magical feeling of finding something – that feeling of, in Reznor’s words, “I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know how I just did what I did, but I’ve channelled it into something that worked” – is still the thing that organises their days and their moods.

We were talking in their studio, which was low-lit and cold and full of synthesizers’ blinking lights. Reznor was on a sofa and Ross sat in a chair nearby. The two men first met in the ’90s, when Reznor signed Ross’s band, 12 Rounds, to Reznor’s Nothing Records. Soon after, they became friends, and then musical collaborators. “I was just getting sober,” Reznor said, “and I was in a pretty fragile transitional phase. And I just hit it off with Atticus right off the bat. And part of it was, he was someone who was on much firmer ground, in a mentor-y kind of way, than I was.”

Ross is two years younger than Reznor, but when they met, he’d already been through certain things Reznor was just getting around to. “I got clean when I was very young,” Ross told me. “So I had a bit more experience than him. Put it like this: I knew you could have fun without being high.”

Their friendship has been a constant in both their lives since. “I don’t know if parts of us are broken and we don’t feel good enough,” Reznor said, staring at the ceiling of the studio, “but we know if we work as hard as we can and do the best work we can, it fixes something. At the core of it, that’s what unites us creatively. On top of that, I think his take on the world and role in life helps me understand my place and not feel as detached in some ways.”

Reznor often jokes, or simply explains, that he is a “quart low” on whatever it is that makes people happy. “I think we can both, on our own devices, run below zero as a baseline,” Reznor said. “I don’t mean manic depression, I just mean we don’t take compliments well. It’s like when we won the Oscar, it was the day after: ‘Let’s take today guilt-free, kind of say fuck yeah.’ And tomorrow we’ll have settled back down to a few feet below sea level.”

In their years of collaborating with each other, both men have found some mutual reassurance – a little lift. Reznor gestured at Ross.

“I remember something he said to me – I don’t know if you want me to say this or not – in one of our talks years ago: ‘Here’s what I want today.’”

“I see what’s coming,” Ross said, nervously.

“I just want to feel OK,” Reznor said, quoting his friend. “I want to feel like I’m OK.”

One day this winter, Reznor greeted me at the door of their studio – in the course of reporting this story, I never saw him anywhere else – wearing a black hoodie made by the synthesizer company Moog, black jeans, and black running shoes. At 58, Reznor still retains the angular intensity and jet-black hair of his youth, but time and fatherhood seem to have made him quicker to smile. He looks a little like a college professor now, or an unusually-well-cared-for software engineer. He led me back, past walls of unused gear and several black-clad mannequins, all of which startled me, to their primary workspace, where Ross – a tall west Londoner (he grew up in Ladbroke Grove) with a stern face and a pleasantly reedy voice – sat at a computer, also all in black. (Once, I asked the two men whether their upcoming clothing line would feature any colour. “No,” Reznor said, incredulously. “Of course not.”)

They were on deadline for two films at the moment, including Luca Guadagnino’s forthcoming Queer. “But we’re trying not to work,” Reznor said, drily. Leaned up against one wall was a photo of the two in tuxedos, accepting the Academy Award for best original score for their work on The Social Network. Reznor had contributed to soundtracks before, in the ’90s, but he’d never formally scored a film until The Social Network.

But Reznor and Ross quickly realised that the work, in some ways, wasn’t so different from songwriting. “What do we do when we write a song?” Reznor asked. “We’re trying to emotionally connect with somebody.” Take the Mark Zuckerberg character in The Social Network:“Here’s somebody who thinks this idea is so important that it’s worth kind of fucking your friends over for it. And then realising maybe it wasn’t worth it, or I didn’t realise how I’d feel if I got what I wanted at the price of this. I can relate to that in my own language. Suddenly there’s music.”

“I’m grateful not to be as angry and frustrated and desperate as I have felt in the past,” Reznor said. “I couldn’t have predicted that I would feel this level of fulfilment.”

And Reznor found that he enjoyed the exercise of solving someone else’s problems instead of his own. “There’s something about not being the boss and working again in service to something that I initially felt guilty for feeling kind of fulfilled by in a weird way.”

Reznor said that on another Fincher film, Mank, the director suggested: “What if it sounded like maybe inspired by Bernard Herrmann and as if it were recorded in 1935 and this film canister sat on the shelf for 60 years?” OK, interesting. (Ross and Reznor were nominated for that one too.)

On the first film the two men scored for Guadagnino, Bones and All, “we got a cut of that that was nearly four hours long with no music and we kind of thought, Oh, fuck,” Reznor said. “Four hours we sat without a pee break, transfixed. It didn’t need music. And when you watch that you approach it differently.” Then Guadagnino brought them Challengers, due for worldwide release in April. Reznor said, “He started us down a path, saying, ‘What if it was very loud techno music through the whole film?’” (This is exactly what it turned out to be.)

“I wish I had his notes,” Ross said of Guadagnino. “His notes were so fucking funny on what each piece was meant to do.”

“Oh, yeah,” Reznor said. “‘Unending homoerotic desire.’ It was all a variation on those three words.”

They liked the challenge of scoring, they found, and that feeling of not being in control. They also liked the way it made them crave being in control again: “It makes you more inspired to work on other stuff when we’re finished,” Reznor said. “Even if it’s just, Thank God it’s done now and we can appreciate the freedom we had before we gave it up.”

These days, Reznor and Ross also like having jobs that let them be at home, around their families. Both men had tumultuous or lonely lives when they were younger; both men have found that fatherhood soothes certain unresolved aspects of their pasts. Ross has three kids, and “probably the greatest reward is how balanced and happy they all are compared to – certainly my growing up was an unusual sort of scenario. It was a fairly chaotic youth.” Ross comes from a notable English family, but his immediate lineage was more unstable. “My dad had a club called Flipper’s Roller Boogie Palace in LA in the ’70s,” Ross told me. “He went bankrupt in England and had a judgment passed against him where he couldn’t talk to a bank manager for 15 years. So he moved here and opened this sort of Studio 54 on roller skates on La Cienega and Santa Monica.” Ross held up a coffee-table book full of photos of the club. “You don’t need to look at it, but it was just a mad life. So I grew up in some madness.”

It is particularly endearing to see Reznor, who at a distance was a fierce and terrifying figure in his 20s and 30s, find domestic bliss. I am old enough that my adolescence coincided neatly with the S&M-flavoured, I wanna fuck you like an animal era of Nine Inch Nails; when I was leaving Reznor’s house one day, I noted with some amusement the cheerful mundanity of a basketball hoop in the backyard. “I’m grateful not to be as angry and frustrated and desperate as I have felt in the past,” Reznor told me. “I couldn’t have predicted that there was a world where I would have a sizeable family with kids and feel the level of fulfilment and comfort and be able to live in that.”

Was that something you were consciously seeking before you found it?

“I think I had some abandonment issues from my parents splitting up, or feeling I never fit in, and I’d gotten accustomed to being on my own. And largely due to my own, I think, inability to really be intimate with people, or share or be open or know how to be a friend or a partner to somebody… Trying that out and doing it with pure and full immersion has led to an unexpectedly great outcome.”

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

The other film project Reznor and Ross were on deadline for was Scott Derrickson’s The Gorge, a science-fiction thriller starring Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy. They were working on a lengthy, music-dependent scene that they’d already mostly scored. But, Ross said, “the director wants it to be a bit more, I can’t think of a better word than just a bit more scary and intense.” They weren’t sure what that directive meant, exactly, but they were content – they were happy – to try to figure it out: to enter the room once again, carrying nothing, and to try to leave it with something that didn’t exist before.

Ross called up the scene on a monitor at the centre of a long mixing board: Teller and Taylor-Joy in an evil-looking spiky forest. Reznor and Ross have somewhat fluid roles in their collaboration, but today the plan was for Reznor to improvise some music while Ross edited and manipulated it in real time. “Atticus’ superpower,” Reznor said, “is that I can come up with a melody and a chord change, and he can make that sit on the scene in a way that is meticulous, and mind-numbingly boring to watch him do.”

A studio assistant, also in all black, presented himself to help Reznor set up a microphone and a cello next to a keyboard that sat underneath another computer monitor. Ross hit play on the footage and what they’d already completed of the score, a kind of haunted, chanting murmur. “It’s basically atmosphere at the moment,” Ross said. Next to him was a synthesizer whose make and model he asked me not to print and which the two men use as a kind of sound ecosystem to feed stuff into.

Reznor began by pushing down on the piano’s keyboard, while with his other hand he manipulated the sound with a flat synthesizer on the desk in front of him. It began as a kind of mellow pan flute thing, and then, with a push of a few buttons, became more of a sad, Social Network-ish plonk. Ross stood up and started tapping the synthesizer to his left, and the sounds Reznor made began to loop and accumulate – little melodic figures that plunged in and out of feedback. Reznor moved from the piano to the microphone, where he sang a few soft passages in a baritone falsetto, more sad than spooky, and then to the cello, which he played slowly and choppily. Ross moved between the computer and the synthesizer, trying to harness it all as it built to a loud, echoing crescendo.

After about 20 minutes, Reznor sat back in his chair, and Ross soon followed suit. Everything got quiet again. “It’s going fishing,” Reznor said to me, shrugging. “Sometimes something happens.”

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

Or, sometimes, everything happens. One of the first things you see when you arrive at Reznor’s home studio are two original paintings by the Yorkshire artist Russell Mills – on the left, a razor against a rusty red background; on the right, a decaying yellow-and-black collage – that ultimately became the insert and the cover art for Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral. This is the record with “Hurt” and “Closer” on it. It’s an album Reznor nearly didn’t survive.

Why do I bring this up? Well. If I may, for a moment, sound like the ageing dude in a black T-shirt leaning against the back wall of a bar where you’re just trying to be young and free of recitations of what the year 1994 felt like, there was a different quality to the way things would happen in music. Bands would labour for years, unknown, and then just get struck by lightning, is the best way I can put it: one day, you’re just a guy, and then one radio station plays your song, and then every radio station plays your song, and everyone is listening to those radio stations, because there is nothing else to do, and then MTV loops your video, and everyone watches it because, again, there is nothing else to do, and all of a sudden you are known by millions of bored people in a way that doesn’t quite happen now. This is a gross oversimplification, of course, but here Reznor is, one of the very few people who have experienced the thing I’m describing. I thought: let’s just ask him what that was like.

Reznor said, OK, he could tell me exactly what it felt like. He gave me a single moment: Woodstock ’94, which Nine Inch Nails almost didn’t play – “it seemed like it was going to be gross, to be honest with you” – but ultimately did. “And when we got there, it was terrifying,” Reznor said. “It was way bigger than I pictured in my head and walking on stage. But this is the point of the story: I knew. You could feel like you were in the right place at the right time.”

In retrospect, how did you handle success?

“Had a drink. That’s what sent me down the path. I wasn’t the guy that, you know, at 12 years old cracked a beer. That wasn’t it at all. Just, I feel anxious around people. I’m not sure how to act, especially now that you’re someone that’s supposed to act a certain way. There’s a projection. It feels uncomfortable to walk down the street and people are looking at you because they recognise you. That’s weird. Suddenly everybody wants to be your friend and you’re the coolest. Everyone wants to date you and shit like that.” Reznor said he found it was “easier to have a beer before I go in that room, and then a couple of beers before I go in that room. And pretty soon over a period of time, wait a minute, things start to get out of control. And you know how the story goes.”

Here’s how the story went: Reznor began to wonder if Trent Reznor could ever live up to the Nine Inch Nails guy that people had in their heads. “The reason I was having to drink was to fix that problem, my own insecurity. But the net result is: I’m not really who I am because now I’ve got drugs or alcohol in my system and I’m not thinking as who I really am. And that comes into focus once one gets sober and has time to reflect and kind of think about what got you there and shit you did.”

Eventually, Reznor got sober, and built himself back up. Today he’s happy to talk about all of it, obviously, but he and Ross have done a lot together since – 10 albums’ worth of Nine Inch Nails (Ross was an official member of the band for five of them), among other things – and Reznor is, by nature, not one to dwell too much on the past of a band that he’s still very much trying to figure out. “We’re not fans of resting on our laurels. We’ve been afraid of thinking about nostalgia. That’s a whole other conversation, but the reality is we’re getting older and our fans are getting older and that’s a fact. And I think, say, during the pandemic, not that you asked this question, but as I’m sure everybody was, I was pretty genuinely freaked out and very clearly came into focus: I’ve got to protect my family.”

He was consumed by fear, by terror of what might happen, of what he might do about it. “I can’t even fit all my kids in a car,” Reznor said. “But in the midst of that anxiety, sitting alone in here, I found comfort in nostalgia. I found comfort looking back at things from my youth that I’ve been afraid to even allow myself to glimpse at because it meant artistic death. Because one has to look forward. One can’t be self-referential. I was so afraid growing up in a little shitty town. I could see people that thought the highlight of their life is junior in high school catching the football. You know what I mean? That’s it. That was the peak. I don’t want to fucking be that person. I could see my fate if I stayed in that town.”

In those moments sitting by yourself, what were you getting nostalgic for?

“I miss parts of living in Pennsylvania. I miss a simpler life that I grew up with. I really loved the first INXS album in 1983. I was a senior in high school, and when I listen to it now I could almost start crying because it fucking reminds me of driving in a shitty fucking car in the summer in Pennsylvania. You know what I mean? Man. I allowed myself to kind of immerse myself in who I was at that time, and what it felt like.”

Reznor had been trying to remake himself ever since he left where he grew up, and now here he is in Los Angeles, over 40 years later. “And I kind of went on a deep dive for a while and allowed myself to realise: I am who I am. And the things that made me weren’t the cool things. I’d always been ashamed of: I came from a shitty town; I didn’t have an exotic upbringing; shitty education, you know what I mean? That’s who I am. I’m not sure what the point of all that confession was.”

Well, except: “It plays into where I’m at now.”

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

The last time I saw Reznor and Ross, it was once again in their studio. They were sitting very still. Had they been working before I got there?

“We were for a little bit,” Ross said. “And then nervously thinking about you arriving.”

Really? It’s OK if that’s the truth.

“That’s the truth,” Reznor said. They’d just been in this room for the past weeks, months – years, really, he said. Head down. Working. He gestured at me. “It’s a different mindset.”

And “I was thinking about something you said the other day,” Reznor said. That was on a Friday. I’d asked a somewhat rude question about their soundtrack work, which was: why would Reznor or Ross work for anyone else when they didn’t have to?

Now it was Monday. “I thought about that over the weekend,” Reznor said. “It’s like, Why are we doing this? The idea comes from what we think is a good place of ‘Let’s break it up. Let’s get sent down the rabbit hole on certain things and feel like we’ve got tasks being assigned to us rather than us just blindly seeing what happens creatively.’ ”

But, he said, “I think coming out of a stretch of a number of films in a row, I want some time of seeing where the wind blows versus: there’s a looming date on a calendar coming up and we’d better get our shit together. And certainly in the last few weeks I’ve been itching to do what we often do, which is just come in and let’s start something that we’re not even sure what it’s for.”

Some of that energy, he and Ross said, would probably become the next Nine Inch Nails album. Doing soundtrack work, Reznor said, had “managed to make Nine Inch Nails feel way more exciting than it had been in the past few years. I’d kind of let it atrophy a bit in my mind for a variety of reasons.”

But now, “I do feel excited about starting on the next record,” Ross said. “I think we’re in a place now where we kind of have an idea.”

And then there was the company, which Reznor and Ross spent the last two years putting together, piece by piece, with the help of John Crawford, their longtime art director, and the producer Jonathan Pavesi. The idea was, what could they do that they hadn’t already done around storytelling? Some of that might take the form of examining Nine Inch Nails from yet another angle – “we’ve been working on homegrown IP around Nine Inch Nails, stories we could tell, and we’re working on developing those in a way that are not what you think they’d be.” (As in: not a biopic.) They also have a show in development with Christopher Storer, the creator of The Bear, they said, and a film with the veteran horror director Mike Flanagan.

Reznor put on a pair of black-rimmed glasses so that he could examine a piece of paper next to him. “We just wrote some notes because I knew I’d forget what the fuck I’m about to say.” There was a short film coming with the artist Susanne Deeken. There was a clothing venture, a T-shirt line made in collaboration with a notable designer whose name they’d like to keep secret for now, which will arrive this summer. There was a music festival that they were currently planning, “where we’re going to debut as performing as composers along with a roster of other interesting people,” and a record label, both scheduled to launch around the same time.

And for two years they’ve been working with Epic Games on something that is not exactly a video game, in the UEFN ecosystem Epic has built around Fortnite – “It’s what Zuckerberg was trying to bullshit us into calling the metaverse,” Reznor said. “You can’t say that word any more, but in terms of the tool kit, thinking about it through the lens of what could be possible for artists and experiences, we thought that would be an interesting way to tell a story through that.”

They were nervously contemplating the prospect of having day jobs again, of being responsible for more than just themselves. Early on, as they contemplated launching the company, they’d sat down with David Fincher to ask him about movie production: how does it work? “And he’s like, oh, you’re fucked,” Reznor said. “I can distil a two-hour conversation into that. Because, he said, ‘I know you guys, and no one’s going to care more than you do, and you will not be able to let it go.’”

Reznor has actually had this experience before, of being sucked into a project bigger than Nine Inch Nails and having it take over his entire life. Years ago he worked as an executive, first for Beats and then for Apple, building a streaming-music service.

“Trent was very clear when we started,” Ross said. “We cannot let this get into Apple terrain.”

Reznor laughed. “What I mean by that is – I will make this brief; I’m trying to think through what I’m about to talk shit on. Just to self-censor for a second.”

Reznor paused for a moment and then explained. For years, he said, he’d wondered: what would make a good streaming service? This was before the advent of Spotify in the US or Apple Music. Jimmy Iovine, Reznor’s old label boss – later, Iovine would also become Ross’s brother-in-law, after he married Ross’s sister, Liberty, in 2016 – was launching a music service at Beats, which was then acquired by Apple, and Iovine said to Reznor: come try to make this thing a reality. And Reznor surprised himself by saying yes.

“It was a unique opportunity to work at the biggest company in the world at a high level,” Reznor said. “And it was interesting, the scale of the people that you reach through those platforms, just the global amount of influence those platforms can have was exciting. The political situation I was dropped into was not as exciting.”

Reznor enjoyed working with Apple’s design team and its engineering team. “But it made me realise how much I want to be an artist first and foremost.” Reznor also became discouraged with the possibility of fixing the problem that he was trying to solve. “I think the terrible payout of streaming services has mortally wounded a whole tier of artists that make being an artist unsustainable. And it’s great if you’re Drake, and it’s not great if you’re Grizzly Bear. And the reality is: take a look around. We’ve had enough time for the whole ‘All the boats rise’ argument to see they don’t all rise. Those boats rise. These boats don’t. They can’t make money in any means. And I think that’s bad for art. And I thought maybe at Apple there could be influence to pay in a more fair or significant way, because a lot of these services are just a rounding error compared to what comes in elsewhere, unlike Spotify where their whole business is that. But that’s tied to a lot of other political things and label issues, and everyone’s trying to hold onto their little piece of the pie and it is what it is. I also realise, I think that people just want to turn the faucet on and have music come in. They’re not really concerned about all the romantic shit I thought mattered.”

Anyway, Reznor said, turning to Ross, “That was a long-winded way of saying, when we talked about this company, I just said, ‘Be aware of what success might look like because it will turn into something that eats up lots of cycles and time and attention and energy.’ ”

But, Ross said, taking on new responsibilities was, paradoxically, also a way to stay a little younger. “I know we’ve all been talking about being dads and being adults and all that,” Ross said, “and there is a part of me that thinks: it’s important to keep the kid alive.” Meaning the child inside yourself, rather than the one you’re responsible for.

He told a story about him and Reznor visiting the director David Lynch at his house to work with him on the 2017 revival of Twin Peaks. “And I don’t know how old he was at the time,” Ross said, “but he was older. But just walking in there, and he had the room set up and there’s a screen there, there’s some chairs here and there’s some musical instruments there and he’s smoking a cigarette. There’s nothing old about that dude. You know what I mean?”

Lynch showed them some Lynchian footage. It was incredible, even if they didn’t quite know what they were looking at. Lynch was probably 70 or 71 at the time. “But it’s that thing of it doesn’t matter how old he is,” Ross said. “He is alive. It’s that bit of it all that one doesn’t want to lose with age.”

The point was, Reznor said: “Let’s try some stuff. We’re bored. We are. You know what I mean? We’re grateful. We enjoy doing films. We can write a better Nine Inch Nails record, I think. We can put on a cooler tour. We are aimed to do that. But man, what if we try to do that?” Meaning, the company. “What if we could take what we’re good at, like we did with film? We identified something I think we’re good at and we figured out how to apply it to something else. What if we take that theory and try it on some other things? And that’s led us into: we’re not beaten down completely yet. And it feels exciting. That’s what matters to us right now.”

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

Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu Grooming by Johnny Stuntz using Dior Capture Totale Hyalushot SFX Makeup by Malina Stearns Grills by Alligator Jesus Tailoring by Yelena Travkina Set design by Lizzie Lang at 11th House Agency Produced by Emily O’Meara at JN Production

[gunsandspaceships]

Tony’s behavior: Teenager/Young Adult (17-18 years old)

In the First part (Kid) and the Second part (16 years old), we learned that at least for his first 16 years, Tony did not have an Alter Ego. He was brave and smart, as we all know him, but also surprisingly calm and quiet. Despite the popular opinion about him, he was not a spoiled bragging brat. He was the opposite.

However, in this part we will see some changes. What caused these changes will be discussed later in another series of posts.

What sources we have on 17-18 year old Tony? Just a few: What If? S2, E2 and an MIT Alumni article.

Let's start with the article:

“I saw him a few times at the chess boards near Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square. There was this guy down there, a chess master, and you could give him five or ten bucks and he'd play you a game. A couple of times I remember [Tony] breezing in and throwing money on the table, and kind of wiping the floor with the guy.”

What can we get from this?

Tony is exceptional at chess. Well, no surprise. He is in every universe.

Despite his repeated victories against the chess master, he never participated in professional chess championships. As we know from the previous part, he was interested in robotics competitions, but it seems like he did everything else just for fun, not for recognition or a list of his achievements.

He never mentioned being good at chess or actually playing it in the MCU. I guess he was waiting for the right partner (Reed Richards).

He was the smartest, most skilled and capable guy on campus, but again, we can see how little we hear about him from that time.

“No one really knew him, he was just a rich kid. Everyone wanted him around, though, because he'd always bring something fun for the party.”

By this time he was already partying. Too bad we don't know what that "something fun" was.

"No one knew him". Still. He didn't really interact with other students and didn't have any relationships with them. He met Rhodey at that time though.

Despite that, they all wanted something from him. In this case - being around and bringing them fun. Nothing has changed decades later, has it?

“I remember him at after-parties on Thayer Street. He was up later than anyone else. But you could always get a ride home with him, because he always had a car.”

Wait. Did they just say he gave drunk students rides home from parties? He was SOBER?! What the heck was he doing there then?!

And did they just say that he helped everyone, even if they were all strangers to him? And like, always?!

"He was up later than anyone else". Tony is definitely not a morning person. We all knew that, this is just for official confirmation.

Next we have Henry Jenkins, the former co-director of MIT's Comparative Media Studies:

“Some students are larger than life—they leave a trace across the entire campus, and people talk about them well after they have left the building, so to speak. Stark was one of those people.”

“And don't get me started about the hacks that have been ascribed to Stark through the years. I have heard all kinds of claims about what Stark put on the Great Dome to the ways he rewired the elevators in the Green Building. They can't all be true, can they?”

That means:

This is the first time we hear about Tony's sense of humor. We know from AoU that he was already a great hacker. Maybe the best. But it seems he did it for fun, like chess. "Cracked the Pentagon firewall in high school on a dare", "put something on the Great Dome", "rewired the elevators". Did he do it to "bring fun to the parties"?

He was popular on campus. People were probably interested in a relationship or "friendship" with him. But we've already heard that "No one really knew him". If others tried to get closer to him, and still got this result, then it was he who tried not to get closer to them. Still, he was at the parties, providing them with entertainment and helping them get home afterwards. Strange.

What If? S2, E2 - 03:43

Tony is 18 years old, and this is the first (actual) time we see him (or, in fact, Howard) having father-son relationship issues.

We don't know why he was "a pain in the ass" to him. Maybe because of hacking, maybe because of pranks. Or parties where he didn't drink? Maybe because he wasn't a blond super soldier with a shield? Or because he was a kid? I don't know.

But Peggy seemed to see deeper and respect him, unlike his father. And she didn't really like Howard's attitude towards his son, judging by her expression in that scene.

Here she also confirms what was already said about him in the 1986 article (see previous part) - "has spunk", "has single-minded determination". Courage and determination were not part of his "character development." As I already said months ago, Iron Man was not born in the cave - Tony has always been like that.

Here we see 18-year-old Tony starts to put on a mask: the quiet nerd who is always ready to help anyone begins to pretend to be someone else.

[gaybroons]

Talk Hockey To Me

( @ghostgeno's tag game)

The thing that got you hooked on hockey

Started reading “hey now, you're an all star (get your game on, go play)” by @buckyismybicycle while it was ongoing because even though I was 1) completely uninterested in hockey and 2) also uninterested in Stucky as a ship, this specific author’s works have always been phenomenal and with each new chapter email I started getting more and more intrigued until I eventually gave in and started reading it (literally so worth it everyone should read it). In the end notes of each chapter, HR (the author) would add some fun facts and extra context for the hockey related stuff (considering it’s a whole hockey AU) that made me go “huh that sounds fun” more than once but I was still not super into the hockey thing.

Until. 

I reached the chapter with a beautifully written match and I was like???? Is hockey like this irl?????????? This sounds so good?????????? Cue YouTube hacking into my brain and suggesting me hockey compilations which included the infamous Lick. I saw this random man just being a menace to everyone and decided he is now the love of my life.  (i usually omit the stucky fic part bc ppl have opinions about marvel that i do not want to hear lol. so if i told you abt this before without the full context i'm sorry!!)

Your first ever fandom friend

@hard4softthings !!!! Love is stored in the ao3 comment section uwu 

The jersey you would most like to own

I can’t pick one so I’m just gonna list in descending order: Marchand home jersey (with a C !!!!!!!!😤) ,  Pasternak (also home. Sorry it’s just nicer than the away version) , Quinn Hughes (the pride one because I’m obsessed with the design it’s so pretty) 

YOUR player (you only get ONE so choose wisely)

The rat king himself 🖤💛🖤💛🖤 can u tell I have a favorite 

A pairing that deserves more fic

Sid/Ovi ‼️ tuukks/pasta and Brady/Quinn too, there’s just so much potential for them. 

Your favourite on-ice moment

Picking is difficult so you’re just gonna get a bunch <3.

Bertuzzi stealing cousin’s stick and trying to break it

Marchy kidnapping The Child

pigeon

dancing with the stars

tuukks Exhibiting homicidal tendencies (rightfully so)

flower wanting to feel included

whole team under arrest

Brady Tkachuk: why is there a fucking animal loose on the ice he’s going to give me rabies

marchy waving to a booing crowd

marchy blowing kisses to a booing crowd

flower asserting his dominance tripping TWO first round picks

Quinn Hughes seeing a fight break out and says ✨no✨

Marner spinning like a ballerina

+ link someone else's art/fic/etc that you love & think everyone should check out

ART: 

this ADORABLE mcdrai art by @saviorified

MattMcDrai art by @adelphenium , obsessed with the blushing and the HAIR plz it’s so cute.  

Awfully pretty sid and geno art by @ceanspam

Captaincy transfer by @adelphenium I’m so weak for rat marchy, and ALSO bergy’s eyes <33333 i’m so <33333

the kiss of life by @stillfertile

FICS: 

The “All Caps” series by @makeit-takeit rewired my brain I’ve reread it countless times i think i can recite it by heart. 

“hard to be soft, tough to be tender” The Hanahaki fic by @hardforsoftthings I love love love the emotional progression AND denial in both of these fics (also, horny. Thank u) 

speaking of which, in less emotionally charged and more horny fics, the “spit cup” and “scratch that itch” non-traditional omegaverse doulogy by @ whitchbhitch (i do not know their tumblr)

+ link something you made & are proud of & want people to see

I’m honestly really proud of my flowertalbo fic, “Inevitably you will burn (as all living things do)” it’s really short (646 words) but I think I did a good job on it :>

Also, I find myself coming back to this one McDrai crack fic, “Oh Puck No!” idk what possessed me to write it but I had fun with it and i still find it silly and enjoyable lol

no pressure tags: @lindholmline @darkangel0410 @gilliebee @owchar1ie and anyone else who wanna do this!!!

[rosesradio]

a little caswen smut-drabble i wrote just now because my body won’t let me sleep :’)

EJ’s hands are on him in the dorm room, and Ricky feels in his core that this is something they should not be doing.

And that’s what makes him like it so much.

There was a nervousness when he told his dad about why he wouldn’t be home for dinner—there was always this electric nervousness when talking about EJ.

The room was dimly lit by EJ’s desk lamp, though Ricky could still map out the perfect surface of EJ’s face against his thumbs. They breathed against each other’s lips for a beat, fragile and innocent, until EJ takes the tip of Ricky’s thumb between his lips.

He’s utterly obscene in the tiniest of ways—Ricky can’t get enough.

“Yeah—yeah, I’ll just be at EJ’s for the night, I’ll get dinner while I’m with him,” Ricky explained. “I have the money, it’s all good—I just missed him because I hardly get to see him anymore.”

“I hardly get to see you anymore,” Ricky reflected, his voice faint as he kissed EJ again, then again. “I get so fucking wound up, you don’t get it…”

“Oh, you don’t even know,” EJ insisted lowly, laying Ricky down, pinning his hips to the bed, rolling his own down against him so he could feel for himself. The pair let out a soft moan at the feeling, and Ricky didn’t complain when EJ continued rolling his hips—he wouldn’t complain if he came that way, if only because he knew it wouldn’t be the last time that night.

“What do we plan to do?” Ricky echoed. “Oh, you know…playing video games…”

“We should make a game out of this,” EJ suggested, a hand roving up Ricky’s shirt. “The first one to come has to edge himself with a vibrator until the winner stops him—how does that sound?”

“Talk about girls…”

Ricky tilted his head to the side as EJ kissed and nipped at his neck, his tongue soothing the particularly sensitive areas.

“Just hanging out and catching up. It’ll be nice.”

Ricky let out a shaky breath as EJ’s hand moved under his sweatpants. There was no way in hell he would have told his dad the truth no matter how cool he was about everything. Even so, there was something about lying so blatantly and then coming here to let EJ play with him that seemed to rewire his very body. It made him arch into EJ’s touch with more desperation, every moment hotter than the last, and the final moment when his orgasm hit felt even sweeter.

[sincerely-sofie]

Completely out of the blue question based on recent Hollow Knight posts, what's your favorite boss track from the game?

Hmmm... if I'm in the mood for a good time, it's tied three ways between these:

If I had to choose between these three, my answer is likely to change based on my mood. I'd probably most often answer with the Mantis Lords theme, purely because I listened to that one tiny audio byte of the Tall Man playing a harpsichord in the Chzo Mythos as a young teen and it rewired my brain chemistry.

However, False Knight is an absolute bop! And I would love to somehow cover Nosk... Maybe I could write lyrics or something? This is all me avoiding the stereotypical answers that are the Grimm / the Nightmare King themes, but it should be said that I whenever I hear the opening of Grimm's battle theme I start head banging.

DO NOTE that this all assumes I am in the mood to have a good time. If I want to cry then I just listen to that first note of Sealed Vessel at 0:43 after all the atmosphere building ambience and crumple to the floor in a heap of limbs and tears to sob.

[un-local]

Nine Mutuals I'd Like to Know Better

tagged by @argisthebulwark! Hi! :D

3 Ships

Malenia x Knight Finlay. Tragic Battlewives....

Killian Jones x Emma Swan. From when I was 13, lol. Hah, that show was a trainwreck. I saw it in middle school and immediately shipped those two from their first episode together. (If the writers could get out of the TV trap of "constant escalation and twists for shock value"... That ship could've gone somewhere phenomenal.) (Ah. If only.) (From what I remember, it ended up being a dumpsterfire in execution...)

Serana x Female LDB. I almost wrote a fic for that ship back in the day. I feel like there's so much potential for something sweet between them, as Serana figures her life out after being freed. Though, at this point, anything I'd write has already been done 1000x better with Dame Aylin and Isobel. (Baldur's Gate 3) God, what a pair.

^^^ Not in any particular order. I could go on for centuries, lol. Rogier x D (Divorced), Miraak x LDB, Fia x Rogier (Divorced).... Bethesda x Better Game Design—

First Ship

Katniss x Peeta, probably. I would've been about 12 at the time. Quickly followed by Roy x Riza—I saw Riza try to kill Lust to avenge Roy's presumed murder and... Those heartbroken shrieks Riza let out, with the tears streaming down her face.... It rewired something in my brain. Ugh. 10/10. Fuck yes

Last Song

Ascending, by Long Distance Calling [Guitar Instrumental] From my labwork playlist, lol.

Currently Reading

Roadside Picnic by Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky. Still. I love it so far, but I just haven't had the time to pick it back up.

Last Film

I saw the Barbie movie with some other people a month or so ago.

Currently Craving

Ough, pasta. Penne, with that smoked cheese, asparagus, and that fancy italian bacon stuff. Prosciutto. God.

Also, sourdough. A character in a fic I'm writing mentions it, and it's been haunting me for the last few days.

Savory foods my beloved <33333

Tagging (if you'd like to play:)

@ludicrous-musings, @ocarinamegara, @zeico, @slavonicrhapsody, @localsya, @entirelyuncanny

Hi mutuals <3

[p1nk-b1tes]

i have also been playing bg3 obsessively and its so funny to see someone else from the ghost fandom doing the same :D hope your playthrough is going amazingly (and that astarion isnt giving you as hard of a time as he’s giving me </3)

omg hi <3 this ask feels like I’ve been wandering around in a crowd and finally found a familiar face to gravitate towards.

I just finished my first playthrough two nights ago and it completely rewired my brain emotionally /pos, and now I’m onto my other campaigns. I’m finding it super funny how easy it was for me to romance astarion in my first playthrough/ just simply get him to like me and now that I’m playing a character that doesn’t really have a direction for a love interest he apparently HATES ME. every single time I interact with him he’s practically snarling at me and it makes me laugh

I’m having so much fun with this game—exploring everything (and everyone) and realizing how much I missed in my first campaign—and it’s safe to say that this game has taken over my life recently. and my thoughts.

I wish you the best of luck in your campaign and that you get all of the kisses you ask for and kill so many goblins (if that’s what you’re into). I’m so glad to see you over here on this side of tumblr

on another off topic note, I’ve been slowly drafting and gathering ideas for little ficlets and maybe even oneshots lately, and I can’t wait to start writing again once I get the motivation back. my masterlist outline is patiently waiting in my drafts for me to pump something out

[causetheturtle]

Thoughts while rewatching season 3 of Riverdale:

1. K why did Alice’s farm style slay so hard? Like she looked so great

2. Love how Archie is literally in this prison FOR FUCKING MURDER and still nobody is scared of him - they saw this man in his nice little shoes his rich girlfriend gave him and were like “yeah this man is ducking useless”

3. VERONICA STOP BUYING YOUR BOYFRIEND NICE THINGS WHILE HE’S IN PRISON! He’s just gonna get this shit stolen your dad was in jail how do you not know how a prison works?

4. It’s so sad that the normies got hold of the “epic highs and lows of high school football” line because it really is such a perfect Archie line - this man is naive and kind hearted enough to believe a game of football is all that’s needed to fix the structurally broken prison system but if you haven’t watched the show and don’t know anything about Archie then it’s obviously gonna seem ridiculous

5. Riverdale relationship drama is so funny cause it’s like “Betty had a stress related seizure due her mother and sister joining a cult and didn’t tell Jughead” or “Veronica isn’t sure of the best way to help Archie through his time in prison”

6. Kevin asking Moose if he’s embarrassed by him of course he is Kevin have you met yourself? Your literally the worst

7. Organising a musical number and cheerleading routine for her boyfriend while he plays a game of football in prison is actually the most normal reaction Veronica Lodge has ever had to any situation ever

8. Realising I talk about Riverdale the same way all of the G&G players talk about G&G

9. Imagine being an adult in Riverdale and hearing that a new bar opened up under Pop’s and going for a night out to check it out but you get there and it’s just a load of teenagers doing musical numbers and drinking mocktails

10. Why is FP’s immediate reaction to any situation ever to just grab his son’s face and yell at him? Begging for this man to have a normal non-abusive reaction to something just one time

11. Will never stop thinking about the Midnight Club. It was the first episode of Riverdale I really watched and it’s still one of my favourites. Like the way all of the parents tried so hard and came so close to breaking their moulds and forging their own paths but they never did and just fell into exactly what the world and the people around them wanted to be AND how their kids are all in the same situation now? The narrative, the cycles, the generational trauma! This episode has everything

12. Knowing now that Sheriff Keller actually WAS into guys the whole time and it was just that he didn’t want to be with Moose’s dad makes the whole situation so much funnier

13. The idea that they were all booking out the bunker for certain nights a week is so funny - like did they have physical a schedule? Who kept the schedule? Did it just sit in like the offices of the Blue and Gold?

14. I fucking love Archie and Josie together and have fully convinced myself that Josie is somehow California Women

15. It needs to be studied what exactly the Heathers episode did to my brain because that one episode of TV completely rewired my brain chemistry and changed the trajectory of my life

16. It’s so sad that the happiest Polly ever got to be was when she was part of a cult. It’s also sad how much everyone’s farm fashion went off cause they all looked so good during that era

17. It’s actually a miracle it took so long for Fangs to actually die there were so many attempts on his life

18. God Veronica running multiple businesses at age 16 and none of the Riverdale adults batting an eye and just respecting her as a business women will never not be funny to me

19. The plot twist that Alice was actually working undercover to take down the farm actually makes her being so awful to Betty make less sense. Sure, she was doing it for the greater good I guess but like she didn’t have to give away her college money or sell their fucking house leaving Betty with the options of homelessness or moving to a cult to get it done

20. FP maybe if you need to get your teenage son to regularly come and help you with your job as sheriff then you shouldn’t be doing it? Although on the other hand Jughead would’ve gone to those crime scenes anyway so like maybe it’s a good thing FP was there as adult supervision

21. GOD the cult break out and scavenger quest are such amazing finales for this season. Everyone nearly dies about ten times, Kevin and Fangs no longer have kidneys, the core four staggering through the woods in formal wear close to death together, Cheryl and Toni coming to save them all with the power of gangs and bows and arrows, it had literally everything you could want!

22. Love how Hal Cooper is canonically one of the worst serial killers ever and every woman he’s been with tells him this to his face

[red-dyed-sarumane]

what are some cool games u have played? dont matter if u mentioned before. tell me again tell me again :D

uhh hmm.

well okami is my all time favorite the art & the music & the message/story are all just incredible theres not a single time ive finished it i havent cried. i absolutely adore ryoshima coast ive spent so many hours just running around there to listen to music. which fun fact for u i only know about this game bc in about 6th grade i picked up okamiden bc i thought the little doggy was cute & was like fine i'll play as this boy if i get a cool dog and u cannot imagine how excited i was to find out u DID play as the little dog. i was SOOOOO obsessed literally my exact thoughts were 'if issun is ammy's celestial envoy then i am going to be chibis' i have a metric fuck ton of fan art i did at the time bc i thought it was quote "the epic-est game for ds ever" also cried every time i finished it. i was 13 so i didnt know what "being down bad" was but do know i was as obsessed with kurow as i was with d-ne later and now tenshi not a single irl friend was unaware i was in love with him. also fun fact for u bc at the same time i was also getting super into vocaloid i was so convinced my vocap name would end up as chibiP to the point i named myself that in pkmn x chibiP after chibiterasu of course. please enjoy my banger old art which is not even a fraction of my output

yume nikki is my next favorite game specifically the og that changed my brain chemistry as a kid. i adore that game so much its hard to put it into words. its just so unlike anything else. there is absolutely nothing in the game that can directly harm u theres no real health meter theres no way to die during the main play the absolute worst that will ever happen is u get stuck or woken up. in a horror game. which is already just amazing. and the whole horror aspect just plays on something i dont think is often done as well in many other things. ur alone. u wander and wander thru worlds that loop and connect and seemingly have nothing to do with each other. theres no dialogue; talking to npcs just gets u a noise or animation at best. ur entirely alone with just urself. its all dreams so u know everything is of madotsuki's own creation, another layer to the all u have is urself feeling. the art is just unusual i cant even say any of it on its own is in anyway scary. the whole thing shouldnt be scary and yet every time i start wandering in a world i cant help but feel unease. amazing 10/10 no other game will ever have what this gave me.

everyone knows i play pkmn the best is still pmd sky that also rewired my brain i still cant play it without crying.

its been a long time since i was really just playing it as the chapters released & got translated but 1bitheart is so so so important to me too. i dont kin for multiple reasons but if i did nanashi would be my first choice. like- without saying that to her i got my one irl friend to play once & when she saw how nanashi was she turned to me and went "this is just you" hes very important to me even now. absolutely loved the whole friendship sim & the story & its twists & the endings & their implications left me in shambles at 1 am on a school night. my fave charas are nanashi enri & saaya btw. i should replay this.

i also love the etrian odyssey series i love the character portraits (esp with the more recent games' color customization) i LOVE the dungeon art & i think all the monster designs are so cool. adore the whole make ur own map aspect keeps me so entertained to take a step & look around & chart all the walls & path ways. unfortunately i fucking suck at every single one i am not very good at strategy games so i end up stuck at or before the 3rd stratum. but thats okay its still fun to me.

the other one i'll talk about at length is spirit of the north another game i loved the art of. u play as a fox & get a partner spirit fox & i just love it SOOOO much. its also a game with 0 dialogue but theres A Lot going on it if u care to follow along & explore & dig into details & the game play is also pretty fun to me. this is the one game i started learning the speedrun btw thats also a very fun way to play it but ABSOLUTELY play it as intended first it has so much to offer

aaaand special mentions to omori, oneshot, witch's house, mermaid swamp, corpse party, & limbus company

[anaalnathrakhs]

👄,🌷,🧑‍🏫,🎬 for the fic ask game :))))

ooooh thaat's a lot :DDD

👄 Your OTP are having their first kiss. What song do you imagine is playing?

oh god.... assuming my otp is marlee, cuz that what i put in the bingo game, as much as i'm a multishipper............... hmmm......

Tomorrow is the End of the World by Steel Panter

Mick would hate it but that's a plot I can definitely see happening. Plus the Steel Panther fic abt it is like, really good.

🌷What’s one of your fics that isn’t as popular, but you hold dear?

trick question none of my fics are popular

uhhh my least popular one is probably uhhh a Formula 51 het ficlet in french, which is. so unpredictable really. but i still like it i like the vibe i was going for in there.

but i didn't expect anyone to read it lmao so... probably Silky Sweet, because i thought it was really cute and it really does come from a place of love and massive author appeal, but crossdressing fics are divisive and it was INCREDIBLY ill-timed coming out the day after Mick's retirement announcement. so.

🧑‍🏫 i assume is 👩‍🎓 sorry if I'm wrong

👩‍🎓 Do you have an ‘official’ creative writing background such as a degree or previous experience publishing?

Nope. I was teeeechnically published once as a kid, and I work/help out in the publishing house my dad works for (niche side hustle thing for bored academics, to be clear, I'm not in Hachette Inc. or something). It would be awesome to have some experience in some kind of short story journal or smth, but I'm nowhere near the level of discipline and method I'd need for that.

🎬One of your fics gets turned into a TV series. Which one is it and what network is it on?

PONYKLOK

Listen. I had fun trying to translate the cartoony style of both shows into prose. I don't think I perfectly nailed it, and it was hellish. It was also a blast and great practice. I was reading Pyramids by Terry Pratchett at the time, and it was a great inspiration and technical manual for writing visual gags. It was awesome dissecting what made these shows, which I love with all my heart, function the way they do, and work on mixing it together into a cohesive piece.

WHICH IS EXACTLY WHY, MUCH LIKE PINOCCHIO WANTS TO BE A REAL BOY, I WANT IT TO BE A REAL CARTOON

I want a stupid youtube fananimation of it like, yesterday. Twelve years ago. I need one stupid talented animator doing that as a hobby, and to watch it at age eleven to experience my brain matter being rewired. I wrote it because it was sorely missing from my life.

If it HAS to be TV, I want to see adult swim's take on it. That one drawing of Nathan Riding a G3 pony in Fanklok is EXACTLY the vibe I'd want. I love both shows and I think for me to like the crossover it'd need to come from a place of love for BOTH shows, not just the fun of shitting on a pony corpse bc we're on adult swim and we can say piss shit fuck, but yknow. Whatever. I want to trust that Brandon Small can understand the hilarious potential of treating the magic ponies with as much tact as the more serious plot elements of Metalocalypse.

thank you for askingggg <3333333

[canongf]

hi liv!!! i just wanted to ask if you had any advice on how to like. reclaim self shipping for yourself. i had a friend i talked about it with all the time but unfortunately we’re no longer friends, and it’s felt weird ever since. but it’s such an important part of my life and it makes me so so happy so i wanna get back into it somehow but im feeling stuck. anywayy i hope everything is going well for you cause you deserve it <33

hiii anon!!!

friendship endings are weird. they make things weird. you're not alone in that. a friendship of mine ended a year ago, and it was for the best, but i'm just now listening to certain songs and albums and artists again because for the longest time it just felt weird. i'm sorry it's weird! i'm sorry you're stuck!

but something that's really helped me is going back to the beginning.

and it doesn't have to be the beginning beginning, 'cause maybe the beginning beginning was with this person and things would still feel weird. but there are probably moments where self shipping was all your own. try to go back to those.

like... the friend that i'm no longer friends with, i introduced them to a band. and when one of their albums came out, we listened to it together the first time around. so that album made me feel weird for a long time. but the first song i ever heard by that band, i listened to it alone. so i went back to that song instead.

maybe your f/o is from a movie or a show that you saw without them. get a snack and a soda, turn down the lights, and watch it again. maybe your f/o is from a game you spent all night playing. pick another night, get comfy and cozy, and stay up playing it again. maybe you bought a piece of merch without them. keep it close. maybe you doodled pictures of your f/o or maybe you wrote headcanons of your f/o, maybe they never saw the light of day. look back on them.

fall in love with your f/os again. the canon parts of them that were decided by nobody else but the creators, like the things they do and the things they say. strip them down to the bare bones and remind yourself why you liked your characters at all. recognize that those feelings are there, with or without anyone else around.

go back to the parts of self shipping that had nothing to do with your friend. it might be hard and there might only be a couple, but they're there somewhere. get reacquainted. be patient and understand that it may take a little while to rewire the wires in your head, but eventually it'll be about you again. 🖤

[panicroomsammy]

if you're still doing the ask game! 9, 18, 21 and 24

9. tell a story about your childhood

Okay so I live in the rural area surrounding a town with a population of <2000 and there’s state forest on all sides of my neighborhood except for the side where the river flows past, which means I grew up playing in the woods. When I was 11 I was spending a lot of time mountain biking around the woods with my dad out past the abandoned barn. One day we happened upon a horse skeleton… well, half of a horse skeleton. We went looking for the other half and found it over a mile away. A few days later we returned with bags and brought home the first half of the skeleton that we’d found because what 11 year old doesn’t need to own half a horse skeleton.

18. do you believe in ghosts and/or aliens?

I do not believe in ghosts in a literal sense, but I think it is very useful to analyze legends and stories of them and that there is always an element of truth to those stories. For example, the abandoned building doesn’t have the literal disembodied soul of someone who died there, but if there is a history of slavery or rape or abuse of some kind tied to the house then those true traumas and fears are being expressed through the stories.

I think aliens are highly probable and that the absence of aliens is highly improbable.

21. are you a spiritual person?

Oh my. What a question. Yes I am. I have existential OCD which makes me incapable of belief, full stop, but I feel that if there is anything meaningful in the universe it is stories. I have a bit of a complex about God (what tumblrina doesn’t) as is probably exemplified by my blog header. My blog header is a reference to the Hannibal novels. If you’re a writer, have you ever felt that you were just watching the events of your story play out and not actually making anything up? The author of the Hannibal novels, Thomas Harris, talks about this a lot. He also says that while he is watching the story play out Hannibal is looking back at him. The character Hannibal in the novels is looking through the fourth wall. He is looking back at God, but his god isn’t actually controlling anything. I like the idea that God is just an author writing things down without any control over them, and that would make me God too since when I write I too feel like I’m just writing down something I’m observing rather than making it up. This would mean that my stories are real and my life is a story. I find this very comforting, because stories are meaningful so if my life is a story then my life is meaningful. If you think about it, the Bible is just another story as are all religious texts. I don’t *believe* in any of those but I do believe that they are meaningful by virtue of being stories. Anyway you can see why Supernatural is rewiring my entire brain.

24. what’s one thing you are proud of yourself for?

I started a podcast a few months ago to educate on the censorship of colonial history and I am incredibly proud of this. I won’t link it here because I am open about my plurality here and don’t want any connections between that and my irl “singletsona” but every day I wish I could tell all of you because I know my podcast is something my circles on tumblr would love.

[tokyo-tower-symbolism]

For the revue starlight ask game, Q3 and Q13 please!

3. what is your favorite friendship / character dynamic from the franchise?

I adore Kaoruko/Futaba, Junna/Nana, Maya/Claudine, and every combination of Hikari/Karen/Mahiru, but all of those are too easy so I'm gonna break out my favorite re:live duo which is Ichie and Fumi.

Like Ichie is the kind of person who refuses to let others see her get sad, and Fumi is the kind of person who refuses to let others see her get happy. Ichie's the type of person who acts first and thinks later, and Fumi is the opposite. Ichie's hesitant when it comes to speaking up because she doesn't want to ruin the mood, but Fumi's direct when something needs to be said, even if it's harsh. They really do compliment each other.

Plus Ichie's crush on Fumi is really cute in a series where literally no one else is normal about their feelings. She's just super interested in Fumi and wants to spend time with her. And Fumi has this soft spot for her which always makes my heart melt.

13. how did you get into revue starlight? how long did it take you to get into the game after watching revue starlight (if you did)?

So there's this manga about the Takarazuka Revue called Kageki Shojo!! I don't entirely remember how I found it, but I was super confused by literally everything since I had no context for it. So I looked it up, and then found out about Takarazuka Revue, which was interesting. But anyways, while looking it up, I found out about Revue Starlight which was also inspired by it. I had some time to kill, and coincidentally the sub for the movie had just came out, so I decided to give it a shot and watch it.

And then my brain was rewired forever.

As for the game, I still haven't actually played it, but what got me into reading the stories was the Aqours Crossover. Honestly it was a little too crowded so it didn't leave that big of an impact, but that led to me reading the other stories there and now I'm here telling you that you Arcana Arcadia is Peak Fiction and also that you should watch Shojo Conte All Starlight where Claudine teaches Junna and Futaba how to talk shit in French

[heavensblessing-official]

Ask game

thanks to @sirenofthegreenbanks for tagging me, and sorry it's a bit late!

Favourite Colour: I love green, especially the dark, forest-y ones

Last song: I'm literally listening to the TGCF ost rn, I am on absolute brainrot hours

Last Movie: I think My Neighbor Totoro? It was playing in the cat cafe I went to a few weeks ago

Currently watching: TGCF Season 2 (aformentioned brainrot)

Currently working on: A novel or two. Outside of the world of my little blog, I write original fiction. Also working on healing my knee, if that counts.

Current obsession: TGCF; it always seems to come back around, and I re-read the novel while I was in the hospital because of my knee. It might've been because of the time of my life when I first watched/read TGCF, but something about that unhinged, romantic, silly, tragic, and long story rewired my brain, healed something within etc. It's the story I turn to when I'm going through something difficult, and I feel like I get something new out of it every time I read/ watch it. As for who to tag.. I'm terrible at remembering people and I have no idea who's already participated but? @sokkalore and @pretty-dianxia

or anyone else! I'd love to get to know people better