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griimhilde-a · 3 years

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if you know, you know.

——— a response to those who refuse to move on.

EDIT: after some encouragement and realizing that, while i tried to be respectful and private about this situation, i was not given the same treatment, i’ve decided to be upfront and filterless. here is a link to my page of receipts that i did not provide in this post.

i would like to point out that when i made the DNI, it was buried and sandwiched in my super long rules purposely so that it wasn’t explicitly visible and drawing attention. it was specifically put there for mutuals to understand my boundaries for the new blog, and as soon as i moved blogs, my guidelines underwent heavy reconstruction and the DNI section was removed overall ( i don’t like DNIs for myself ), as well as on this blog. all statements made in the DNI were what i felt to be true and based off of not only my experiences, but others’ as well, backed up with evidence i have saved that i didn’t feel the need to provide because it wasn’t meant to be a big deal, but i also felt i needed to explain why this person was on a DNI and that it wasn’t done out of malicious intent. again, if something sounds bad it is because “bad” things were done and i can’t control that.

reading the call-out had me ( and others ) confused on where it was i had bullied her, when i had her blocked since november, where it was i had manipulated her, and so forth. i’m always wanting to be a better person, so i was extremely confused on where i had done anything wrong. i also didn’t appreciate my new blog url being attached to it as it had nothing to do with it and i was trying to move forward, and it read very much like an attempt to blacklist. despite everything, i never wanted it to be a spectacle. the pinned, public call-out by this person doesn’t read to me as someone wanting to move on, but wanting to drag things further. this is not a call-out post, this is me defending myself. i will not name drop. if you know who this is about, i ask you just read this to understand the full story.

this is going to be a long boi ( i really tried to keep it short but alkfjdklfksldf nope ). i would also like to apologize for any dryness here, but i am aiming to just state facts as they are. it feels ---- ridiculous writing this all out because it’s something that could and should have been handled privately. but, here we go !!

everything on the DNI is true. i will not post or reveal the sources because one, they are not my stories to tell, and two, i am not going to give her the excuse to bother them. they deserve to be safe, and i am walking proof of what happens when you speak out against someone like her. if i have to bear that burden, then so be it.

it stopped being about “just a url” a long time ago. it became more about how i was treated in that interaction, and how i was continued to be treated afterwards. not to mention the increasing tension within the rpc and having to second-guess whether or not i was truly wanted. it was about how it was affecting those around me, my time in a hobby i love, and my mental health. the amount of times a mutual has tagged me by accident when they meant to tag her is insane. it most definitely did not feel good !!! if that kept happening, it was a problem. i also had to shut off the anon feature because of the amount of anons i was receiving. some had good intentions, but others had resorted to hate.

regarding the messages on discord --- i stand by them. i thought if you were friends with someone on discord and have previously talked over time, it was okay to message, otherwise what was the point of discord? i didn't realize it would make her uncomfortable to do so, and i’m more careful about how i approach people now !!!

regarding the messages: there was no change in tone other than that i grew exhausted and extremely anxious ( shaking !!! palms sweaty !!! knees weak !!!! mom’s spaghetti !!! ) and wasn’t in the proper mindset to sound happy while i was being invalidated to my face. i have even apologized there if i came off as mean. i don’t “present myself” in a way. that’s just how i talk, i prefer communicating one-on-one and i try to alleviate tension that arises no matter what because these types of conversations aren’t always a walk in the park. i wanted things to be good and not stressful for all parties involved. i’m sorry my tone came off as insincere. after being in desc rpc for a year, i was a little surprised seeing a near-identical url so i think it was fair for me to message her about it. she made the decision use it, and i was allowed to react. it was said misspellings in urls made her anxious so i wanted to help and i was shot down and vilified, essentially told i made her feel unsafe and shouldn’t have messaged. if it wasn’t okay to claim i felt “unsafe” and “paranoid”, why was it okay for her to claim the same based on a choice she made herself, but not me to feel anxious about those choices?

i have never told a blog to block her. i have never initiated conversation about her, nor have i spoken negatively about her as a person. ever. i have, in fact, even stated that i didn’t want anyone blocking and that it would be okay to interact. here’s one example after i was approached about her. i cannot control what other people do.

hardblocking her on my end was to avoid seeing her on dash as much as possible.

i am allowed to softblock / unfollow people who interact with her after months of trying to be okay with it. what kickstarted this process was someone i thought was a close friend had dropped me and suddenly i realized i didn’t need to sacrifice my comfort for the sake of keeping a mutual. if they could do it, so could i. while i adore the descendants rpc, the rpc is not a family, we’re not obligated to interact IC or be mutuals with every single person in the rpc. it’s not causing a rift when we don’t interact on dash. i have even emphasized that i would love to stay in contact via discord and write there if possible !! why am i being vilified for trying to make my blog a safe space for me?

regarding the “vagues”: they were all responses. a mutual wrote the post, i reblogged it, my tags were in response to the post ( said mutual’s url wasn’t even blocked out so ... ). if it felt like a vague, i can’t control that. the meaning behind the url post was circulating on dash, i didn’t see any vaguing in it other than me recounting my process of choosing this url, which was true ( was i not allowed to participate?? ). the shrek meme was in response to a public dash event ( which i originally thought was a joke ) that had received copious amounts of criticism for. it wasn’t a vague and it was explicit on what it was referring to, it was meant to be silly dash commentary, nothing deep.

this is in my rules but i have explicitly stated that my headcanons about my characters are not a vague if they differ from yours. the talk about hair styles was actually initiated in a conversation with my friends in private. it had absolutely nothing to do with her. if it sounded like a drag, i encourage everyone to look at how i’ve “dragged” many other things including the original outfits for descendants, evie thinking mermaid dresses are ugly, evie not liking wine, and so forth. my portrayal of evie =/= other portrayals of evie. while she may never do so-and-so, it doesn’t make it wrong for another portrayal to do it. ( why was my blog being kept tabs on and compared with, in the first place? that’s not duplicate friendly ).

regarding sex week: i've stated it was an inappropriate event because the descendants rpc had been heavily criticized for smutting and felt it wasn't the best response, nor was it the best way to promote sex positivity. it was insanely uncomfortable to witness, as someone in this rpc. it doesn’t matter if the people or the muses involved were adults, i would still call it inappropriate had it happened in any other rpc. it wasn’t a “block and move on” situation. i’m also allowed to defend myself because i didn’t want to be associated with something she posted. i didn’t want it tied to my url. i would like to clarify that when i said "embarrassing" in the responses under that anon, it was directed at the anon for misreading the url, nobody else. ostracizing occurred when the descendants rpc was being added to DNIs because of sex week / smutting, which was posted by this person ( if you post it, you start it. simple ). i had been blocked simply because i am a descendants blog and that had never happened before.

i was also notified that people uninvolved with this have been namedropping me on dash in an attempt to have me “written off” ( their words, not mine ) because my rules stated that i was open to exploring evie’s sexuality. below is a screenshot of my rule regarding smut. i deleted the rules page from this blog when i moved so i snatched it from my other canon descendants blog that i reuse on all blogs. the second is my elaboration on sexual content in my new evie rules. the third is what’s on my google doc, a condensed version of my rules. there is a major difference between smutting and posting a public dash event dedicated to sex versus being open to explore sexuality as a topic. they are not the same. also, me not choosing to smut does not dictate my opinion on smut, so do not make assumptions about that either. if you want to move on, why are you still talking about me on dash, especially when unprompted? if you just want to move on, why are you upset that i’m not “written off”?

this person has vagued me multiple times ( which they conveniently did not show in the call-out ), this person has been shown to talk badly of me in private ( and now, publicly as well ) ---- all of which i have not done. i have screenshots sent by others to show for it, but do not feel it’s relevant to share because this is not about her. this is just about defending myself.

i have spent three months apologizing for feeling things, apologizing for reacting, apologizing for things i should not have been apologizing for. i have spent so long accepting blame because i felt it would help. i’m done doing that. i know what i did and what i didn’t do. people know what i did and didn’t do.

all in all, i am confused on why a call-out was made when the content provides nothing other than catty remarks meant to air out personal drama. the messages exchanged only show how i tried to remedy things. the screenshots of my “vagues” were just responses, and most of which had nothing to do with this person. my initial silly dash commentary and later discomfort over a sexual dash event posted by this person is not a vague.

if you ( referring to maker of the call-out and others who partook ) are upset about people not talking about me in regards to the “rest of the call-out”, maybe consider the fact that there was nothing about me in it that warranted a call-out in the first place. people saw that i did nothing wrong. the only thing of substance in the call-out was something the maker themselves did : the public, sexual dash event. people are allowed to identify that as a more prominent issue as opposed to how my messages or public posts could be perceived through basic, biased narrative manipulation.

me deciding to unfollow / softblock blogs that interact with this person =/= involving the descendants rpc or making it public. i am allowed to softblock whoever i want to cultivate my dash experience. most people i know have it in their rules that they are okay with people softblocking for their comfort and that it won’t be taken personally. you know what IS making it public and involving the entire descendants rpc? this person messaging a descendants server and name dropping me in the server, reducing the situation to just being about a “url” and publicly announcing it in the server. here are the facts to consider: her message was sent jan. 21. my DNI went up feb 2.

so, regarding the call-out: there was no bullying, no manipulation, no harassment, no gaslighting, nothing from my end, and the call-out shows precisely that the claims are just that: claims. whatever was felt is valid, but feelings =/= gravity of the actual action itself - the most common thing pointed out in therapy: feelings are valid, but are they justified? call-outs should be reserved for people who cause actual harm, not because someone wants an excuse to blacklist. if i am a “bully” for unfollowing blogs for my own comfort, then i think the rpc really needs to reevaluate what these terms mean because the misuse is harmful.

here are the things i did do: treated everyone i talked to with respect. approached things civilly. communicated. tried to accommodate for others. attempted to make a safe space for myself. did not involve the entire rpc by announcing it in a server. did not make a call-out post nor pin it. did not continue to name drop afterwards despite claiming to want to move on.

this entire situation is absurd and should have never been public, much less made a call-out for !! while this was meant to defend myself and state facts, i understand it may not change minds. a friend has told me that people will hate me because they want to hate me, no matter what. and i can’t do anything about that !! all i have to say is that holding hate in your heart never ends well. i hope everyone can find peace at some point.

so please, let me move on. let me write with my friends. let me unfollow / softblock people to keep my dash comfortable. let me take a break from descendants while also having the choice to return at anytime. please stop talking about me when i’m not even giving this another thought and haven’t since i moved blogs. please stop name dropping. stop keeping tabs on me, stop stalking my new blog. please leave me alone. i hold absolutely nothing against anyone i may have softblocked / unfollowed or am not currently interacting with on my new blog. my IMS / discord is always available, you will not be violating my safety by messaging me, everyone is welcome, but i also understand if you feel the need to separate yourself !!! as for those of you who have interacted with the call-out post, i wish you the best but i hope you understand why i do not want to interact with you by any means in the future.

i’m hoping this post lays everything to rest, seeing as my first one did not. honestly, what are you trying to prove if you still have to post about this? it helps nobody. this back-and-forth is exhausting and unneeded. no more. let’s be better people, yeah?

i hope everyone takes care of themselves, i hope you all have a great day / night !!! thank you for reading this long boi !!

#this is a long boi.#thank u to everyone who's offered their support these past few days!#i refuse to let people push me out with baseless claims !!!#so here are all the facts #i really don't want to talk about this anymore but if u need proof of the things this person has done u can msg me #otherwise. this ends here.#pls don't reblog!

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yoonia · 4 years

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❥ What I’m currently working on ❥

I know that I haven’t been around much (or nearly at all) for the past week month because my life has been quite hectic and I needed to take a quick break from everything (and when I say ‘everything’, I actually meant the internet lol)

But I’m still writing, still not stopping. It’s just taking me longer to update on things. Aside from my ongoing series (Blood Moon Rising and About Time), below are a few things that you will see me working on all through this month.

Note: I don’t usually do any taglist on my works, but since it has been quite some time since my last update and I probably won’t be updating things regularly until my life returns to normal, I’m opening a chance for anyone to join my taglist. How to join taglist: reply to this post with your url and which fic you want me to tag you on :)

↳ Title | Show Me Something

↳ Pairings | Jeon Jungkook x reader

↳ Genre | Road Trip!au, Enemy to Lovers!au, First Love!au, Smut, Voyeurism

↳ Summary | He was your first kiss years ago, only to become your first heartbreak the next day. Your life would have been much easier if only you would forget about him and move on, instead of having to see him almost every day because your best friend had fallen in love with his best friend. When your pal had suggested to have a road trip for the final days of summer break before going back to campus, you said yes for a reprieve. Too bad she forgot to tell you about the two extra passengers tagging along.

↳ Ratings | +18 / M for Mature

↳ Note: I know that I have announced this fic since two months ago. I have actually finished it around the designated time of its original posting day, but both me and my beta-reader were not too happy with the final product, so I decided to go back and re-write the parts that I wasn’t happy about. Don’t worry, it’s coming. I’m just not sure when T^T

Current word count: 25k words and adding

[Teaser]

Update: posted!

➬ Title | Bed & Boyfriend(s)

➬ Summary | It was meant to be a simple weekend away with your boyfriend. Inviting his best friends for the ride had sounded like a brilliant, yet an innocent idea just the same. Until the secrets are out and revealed, and the heat from the weekend becomes the sinful flame that may engulf you until you are left into nothing else but sparkles of dust tethering in the blissful wind.

↳ Pairings | Taehyung x reader; Jungkook x Yoongi, Jungkook x reader x Yoongi

↳ Genre | Smut, Polyamory!au

↳ Ratings | +18 / M for Mature

Current word count: 10k words and adding

Update: posted!

➬ Title | All Fervent Manner

➬ Summary | He is a man of class, but also a man with secrets. And he has no qualms in giving you the entire universe if you had asked him to. At least, those are the exact words he had given you then. But as time passes, you cannot help but notice that no matter how fierce he seems to love you, he always appears to be walking on eggshells. Perhaps it is your duty to release him from his binds. If only you just know how.

↳ Pairings | Jimin x reader

↳ Genre | Established Relationship!au, Smut, Angst

↳ Ratings | +18 / M for Mature

Current word count: 4k words and adding 7k words and adding

Update: posted!

➬ Title | A Touch of Fate [from We Are All Dreamers: a drabble]

➬ Summary | You have waited a long time to finally find him, to be united with the one that the universe had chosen for you. Yet what people had failed to tell you is that finding your soulmate is only the first step of everything. Nobody ever had the decent mind of preparing you to go into the next step, to move on from the past and surrendering to the mate bond.

↳ Pairings | Jeon Jungkook x reader

↳ Genre | Soulmate!au, Smut, Angst

↳ Ratings | +18 / M for Mature

Progress: Story mapping

Update: posted!

↳ Title | Blurred Lines

↳ Pairings | Kim Seokjin x reader

↳ Genre | Smut, Sexual Tension!au, Teacher!Jin, Teacher!reader, Tattooed Biker!Jin

↳ Summary | A new place to live, a new job, a new beginning. Six months have passed and everything has been going well for you in starting over. The warm welcome from your students and peers have quickly made you feel at home, yet you still long to have one calm day where you wouldn’t have to walk into the school with a heavy weight on your shoulders and the air thick with tension. Blame it on him—the strict English teacher who keeps giving you cold shoulders no matter how many times you try to play nice. One night out with your girls and a drunken dare ultimately lead you to uncover what he’s been trying to hide. People do say that the quiet ones always keep the biggest secret.

↳ Ratings | +18 / M for Mature

Progress: Story mapping

Update: posted!

➬ Title | Threads

➬ Summary | Life is full of surprises, just like how people are full of secrets. Just when you had thought you have been lucky enough to have your life figured out, life decides to throw you a curve ball when you least expect it. And there is nothing you could do to avoid it, except to hope that you could hold your secrets as tightly as you possibly could before everything blows up into smithereens.

↳ Pairings | Yoongi x reader, Namjoon x reader

↳ Genre | Slice of Life!au, One-sided Love!au Smut, Angst

↳ Ratings | undecided, most possibly +18 / M for Mature

↳ Warning | Sexual tension, mutual pinning, jealousy, will be adding more as I continue working on this one.

↳ Estimated Word count | 4-6k words

Progress: Story mapping; 2k words written

Update: posted!

#misc: fic announcement #misc: work in progress

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kiarcheo · 3 years

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Pirate AU

Almost 3000 words of a half-developed AU idea vaguely inspired by Pirates of Caribbean.

You know when you have some scenes clear in your mind and then the inspiration/motivation to write the overall connecting story fizzles out? Yeah. That is what happened with this one. But I didn't want to leave it languishing forever in my drafts folder so you can also read it in the miscellaneous collection of random stuff that I have on Ao3 (if lately you had the same problem with links on Tumblr as me, try removing the https://href.li/? part from the URL)

_______________

Catalina is the de facto governor of a small island. In theory her husband, Henry, is the governor, but he’s never there, preferring the mainland and doing his own things. Leaving Catalina in charge gets her out of his way while keeping up the façade of him being a respectable married man (if you ignore all the mistresses he has, but that’s another matter).

Catalina doesn’t particularly mind. She has no lost feelings for him and plenty of stuff to keep her busy. Governor’s businesses. Raising her goddaughter. Pirates infesting the surrounding waters.

Catherine ‘Cathy’ Parr is Catalina’s goddaughter. After her mother died, Catalina took her in and she has been with her since she was a child. When Catalina is sent to her ‘glorified’ exile on the island, she goes with her.

During the trip, Cathy sees something, or better someone, in the sea and convinces the crew to rescue them. It’s a young girl, some years younger than Cathy, Catalina reckons. She is a weak, thin, frail slip of a girl. Whether from the physical trauma (she has a deep gash on her head, blood caking her hairline) or from the psychological one of barely surviving a shipwreck, the girl can’t remember how long she has been lost at sea or pretty much anything else, except that her name is Katherine.

Catalina takes her under her wing too, albeit not officially. Not like she can adopt her without her husband’s agreement. And he was already not happy about her taking in Cathy. But what she can do is keep an eye on her and make sure she does not lack for anything.

Whether because of the long trip to their new home, being the only children on board, or just them clicking with each other, Cathy and Katherine, who most call Kat, quickly become inseparable. And as they grow up, things don’t change, making Catalina’s promise to herself to keep an eye on Kat quite easy.

Kat apprentices as a carpenter. Any problem at the residence, Kat is called, and she always brings with her small trinkets she made herself to gift them to Cathy. Kat’s services are not necessarily cost-time effective. Mostly not time-effective, since she always ends up spending way more time than needed there. And Catalina insists on paying for the time rather than for the work, another manner of taking care of Kat in her own way. Also, along with books, Kat’s presence seems to be the only thing that makes Cathy happy and Catalina won’t deny her that. Life on the island is not exactly the pinnacle of excitement or social engagement or entertainment. Not that Cathy complains. If asked, she would say that she has all she needs.

Of course, Henry has to ruin everything. A letter arrives announcing that he has arranged Cathy’s marriage with one Thomas Seymour. The captain bringing the letter is in charge of taking Cathy back to the mainland.

There is nothing anyone can do. Not Catalina – if she wants to avoid diplomatic incident...and raising her husband’s ire – not Cathy, and certainly not Kat. They have to say their goodbyes. Cathy makes Catalina and Katherine promise that they will take care of each other. Then Catalina leaves them so they can have some few last precious moments alone.

Fast forwards to days later, the ship that is taking Cathy to her doom, I mean, wedding, is attacked by pirates. Everyone is killed except Cathy, who is taken hostage.

Realising the ship that attacked them is the Greensleeves, Cathy thinks it’s on purpose. The captain has a beef with her godmother. But then she realises it’s just that a young woman, the only woman on board of a government’s ship, would make a good hostage regardless because it’s clearly someone important and probably worth quite a bit if a ransom is demanded.

‘And who do we have here?’ A woman circles around her.

‘You might want to read this, captain.’ Another, taller, woman hands her a letter.

While she reads it, Cathy has time to look at her. Had to admit, not how she imagined the famed pirate Anne Boleyn, scourge of the seven seas, and pain in Catalina’s backside as well as pretty much any navy.

‘Catherine Parr, uh?’ The pirate looks her up and down. ‘Let’s see how much old Lina is willing to pay for you.’

Cathy scowls at her.

‘Or would you prefer your future husband?’

‘No!’ She can’t stop herself.

‘Thought so.’ Anne nods to herself. ‘Not that I blame you. Seymour is a scumbag.’

‘Ehi!’

‘Not you, Jane. Not most of the time, at least.’ She sends a grin towards a woman standing one step behind her.

When everything is said and done, Cathy considers herself lucky. She might go back home. Delaying her marriage, at least. See Kat and Catalina again. Despite them being pirates, she feels more comfortable on their ship than the one sent by Henry, surrounded by guards.

All is nice and well, until a wave has the ship rolling quite violently. Cathy loses her balance and stumbles forward, a golden A on a necklace slipping out from under her dress and now dangling. Before she knows it, Boleyn has the pendant tight in her grip, pulling Cathy along towards her, almost choking her.

‘Where did you get this?’ she demands with a growl.

Cathy stands corrected. She can now see why Anne inspires such a terror.

‘Take it off.’

‘No!’ Not the smartest thing, but Cathy is not going to give it up without a fight.

‘You either take it off yourself or I do it for you, and I’ll take your head off with it too.’

‘Anne.’ The woman who had been called Jane tries to put a hand on her shoulder, but it’s shrugged off.

Cathy feels someone grabbing her from behind. She tries to wriggle away, but she can’t, the hold too strong. Then she feels a hand on the back of her neck, and suddenly the comforting, familiar, weight of the pendant is gone.

Anne lunges to catch the necklace before it hits the deck. Cathy instinctively takes a step back. Well, she tries, only manages to stumble back into the pirate behind her, still holding her.

‘I’m going to ask you again.’ Anne seems to struggle to pull her eyes off the necklace clutched in her hand. ‘Where did you get it?’

‘You better answer her.’ The voice behind her sounds honest, no malice or threat. Almost sound worried about what Anne would do if denied.

‘She gave it to me!’ Cathy blurts out before biting her lip. She might be terrified, but she doesn’t want to say more. Like how Kat had given it to her, asking her to put it on and never take it off to remind her by. How Cathy had argued that she wouldn’t need a physical object, she would be thinking about her every day of her life until she dies regardless. How Cathy had tried to give it back, saying that she didn’t want to take away the most precious thing she had. And how Kat had replied that it was the second most precious…and both of them would leave that day. She would be missing the necklace just like she would miss her heart, that Cathy was taking with her on the ship.

‘Take me to her.’

‘No.’ Cathy doesn’t know where she is getting the courage to stand up to the pirate captain.

‘Take me to her and I promise I’ll let you go. I won’t even ask a ransom. I swear.’

‘As if I’d trust a pirate’s word.’ Cathy spits out.

‘Fine.’ Anne growls with a scowl. ‘Then I will just go back there myself.’

‘But don’t you want to see her again?’ The person behind Cathy speaks up again, acting as the voice of reason of the situation. ‘She’ll find her anyway. She won’t rest until she does. Or she’ll die trying.’

Cathy tenses up. Just the thought of the pirates around Kat makes her terrified and furious at the same time.

‘Anna, get her out of my sight.’

‘She won’t hurt her. If that’s what you’re worried about.’ Said pirate makes one last attempt.

Cathy relents. Not that she has much choice. Or well, she does. But when the options are 1) going back with them 2) she is killed and they go back without her 3) she is delivered to Seymour and they go back without her...is that really a choice?

So they sail back to the island, but then it’s just a small boat rowed to the shore by Jane and Anna, with only Cathy and Anne, as passengers on board.

‘If this is a trap…’ Anne trails off, the threat clear even if not spelled out, as she looks around the workshop.

‘How would she even-’Anna tries to reason with her captain, as usual.

‘Let her go and I’ll consider not blowing your head up.’

Not the first words Cathy expected to hear from Kat if she ever saw her again, to be honest. The pirates seem taken by surprise too. Jane is only loosely holding her arm, and nobody has their weapons out.

‘Do it.’ Anne orders.

As soon as she is released, Cathy hurries to Kat’s side and Kat immediately wraps an arm around her, holding her close. She leans her head against hers, trying to get as much physical contact as possible, but she keeps her eyes and her pistol trained on the pirates.

‘Did they hurt you?’

Cathy shakes her head. She just had some bruises around her neck from Anne’s grabbing the necklace and pulling her along with it, but they faded away and there is no trace of them now. And they actually treated her quite well. She might have even enjoyed the trip if she had not been terrified and worried.

‘What do you want from her?’ Kat speaks again.

‘She had something that didn’t belong to her.’ Anne opens her hand, the necklace falling and dangling down.

‘Give it back!’ Kat growls, lunging.

Anne takes a step back, before calmly wrapping the chain of the necklace around her wrist and tucking the pendant into her sleeve. ‘And why should I?’ She asks, impish smirk making it clear she doesn’t feel threatened.

‘Because it’s mine, and I gave it to her!’

‘Yours?’ Anne’s attitude immediately changes. But before she can say anything- ‘What’s going on?’

This time the pirates aren’t taken by surprise. They all aim their weapons toward the new arrival.

‘Boleyn?’

‘Catalina.’

‘Cathy??’

‘Madrina.’

‘Katherine?’

‘Are you just listing all the presents? Because this is Jane and this is Anna.’ Anne chimes in, drawing back to herself Catalina’s attention…and pistol.

‘Give me one good reason why I should not shoot you on the spot.’

‘Because you’re outnumbered?’

‘She is not.’ Cathy now has a small pistol too, given by Kat, the pirates can only assume, since they are sure she had none before.

‘Parley?’ Anne breaks the silent standoff.

The other two pirates start quickly and softly talking to Anne.

‘What’s that?’ Cathy asks.

‘Pirate code.’

‘Temporary truce.’ Kat answers without hesitation at the same time as Catalina.

Cathy turns to her, surprised. ‘You know pirate code?’

‘I...don’t?’ Kat is clearly second-guessing herself. ‘I don’t think so? I just…knew it? Don't ask me why.’

‘Parley granted?’ Anne’s question reminds them of the situation.

Catalina looks at the pirates. Then at her girls. Then at Anne again. ‘Pull one of your usual dirty tricks and-’

‘Where is the trust?’ Anne brings the hand not holding the weapon to her chest. ‘I’m a pirate of my word.’

‘As if I’d ever trust a pirate’s word.’

The pirate captain looks between Catalina and Cathy. ‘That’s where you learned it?’

‘Guns away at 3?’ Anna tries to get them back on track.

They all nod warily before slowly and reluctantly lowering their weapons.

‘To what we owe the displeasure of your visit?’

‘Hurting my feelings, Lina.’ Anne quips.

‘Don’t call me that.’ Catalina snarls. ‘And answer the question.”

Anne gets serious. ‘This is what brings me here.’ She once again shows the necklace.

‘Why do you have it?’ Catalina looks between it, Anne and Katherine.

‘She took it from me.’ Cathy spits out, still upset about it.

‘You gave it to her?’ Catalina turns surprised towards Katherine. She knows how important it is to her. ‘But that’s the only thing-’ she stops. It suddenly makes sense. Kat giving Cathy the most precious and important thing she owned…the girl would give her goddaughter the world if she could.

‘Where did you get it?’ Anne turns to Kat.

‘I always had it.’ The younger girl answers reluctantly. There is no hurting doing that, right? ‘And I would appreciate having it back.’ She holds her hand out.

‘Spunky.’ Anne nods, appreciative. ‘But not yet.’

Kat huffs. ‘What?’ She grinds out.

‘Do you know what this is?’ Anne fishes out from her shirt another similar necklace, but with a K instead of an A.

The girl shakes her head.

‘I had it made because you loved mine. So I commissioned one for you. But you still insisted on wearing mine so I kept yours.’

‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

‘The K is for Kitty.’ Anne carries on.

‘Nobody called me Kitty since-’ Kat stops in her tracks as her brain catches up with what her mouth is saying. She had honestly forgot about anyone ever using that nickname.

‘Since you used to throw tantrums about losing at cards.’

‘Jane always cheats!’ Again, Kat surprises herself as she replies without thinking.

‘I do not!’

Anne, Anna and even Cathy, look at Jane in disbelief. She had seen her playing at the tavern at the only stop they had on shore while on their way back to the island, cleaning out the locals because they needed funds...

‘Okay, maybe I do now, but not at the time!’ Jane amends.

‘I don’t understand.’ Kat repeats, her voice wobbling.

Anne explains how they grew up together, inseparable cousins until the moment their family’s ship they had been on had been attacked. In the chaos they had lost sight of the younger cousin and when they got rescued, all except Kat, they all thought that she had died in the shipwreck.

Anne, consumed by desire of vengeance, had joined a crew hoping to find out which pirate was responsible for the attack. Only to find out that it had not been pirates but government masquerading as pirates, hoping to get their families’ riches in a quicker and easier way. So Anne had decided to harass, rob and destroy government ships as revenge. Jane had joined her soon after, a life on the sea better than the prospect of a lifetime serving men at home. Anne had met Anna in her first crew and when Anne left to form her own, some of them, including Anna, Maggie and Joan, had joined her. They are the only ones, besides Jane, to know why Anne had chosen the pirate life.

‘And then we met your girl and I saw the necklace and here we are.’ Anne concludes her tale.

‘Met.’ Cathy snorts.

‘Not mine.’ Kat comments dolefully at the same time.

‘Engaged to Seymour, right?’ Anne turns to Catalina. ‘I expected better.’

‘Not my choice. Henry arranged it. Can’t refuse without a diplomatic incident. And enraging him. The Seymour family is a powerful one and I know that he will say he found the best for Cathy, and who knows what he’d do, whom he’d choose, just to spite me, if I were to refuse.’

‘What if you could do better?’

‘What do you mean?’ Catalina looks at the pirate captain, who appears deep in thought.

‘It would be reasonable to break off the engagement if a better opportunity arises, right? Even for… Henry?’ she spats out the name.

‘In theory. But in practice? Hard to find better.’ Catalina sighs. She had thought about it, of course. ‘I mean, better name. I’m sure there are lots of better people than Thomas Seymour.’

‘Definitely.’ Jane confirms.

‘What about marrying into the Howard family?’

‘Howard? Like those Howards?’ Catalina asks in confirmation. They are even more powerful and rich than the Seymour.

‘As a captain I can marry you off tomorrow.’

‘What?’ The girls had been silently resigned. Cathy knew she had no voice or choice in her marriage, and Kat knew she could not stop it. All they could do was enjoying their time together before the inevitable separation.

‘You’re a Howard, Katherine.’ Anne tells her. ‘We,’ she gestures to herself and Jane, ‘might have been disowned by the Boleyn and Seymour families, but not you.’ She adds after a bit. ‘Mostly because we thought you were dead, but you know, not important right now.’

‘Seymour?’

Jane waves at Cathy. ‘Trust me, dodging a bullet with my brother.’

Kat and Cathy get married, and once Catalina’s retire as governor, they take over albeit always unofficially. Central government can’t be bothered with that little island almost lost in the sea as long as it doesn’t cause problems.

Anne and Jane are torn because on one side they want to be with Kat after finding her again, but they also took a liking to life on the sea, so Catalina pardons Anne and her crew in exchange for them working for her, patrolling the waters around the island and keeping the ships carrying and trading goods safe from pirates...and anyone else.

_____________

Yes, I was going full fantasy with gay marriage being accepted and recognized, pirates getting pardoned, women governing islands and ship captains marrying people (looked it up, they mostly can’t unless already invested/ordained with power to do so).

#six the musical #six the musical fanfiction #six the musical au #six fanfiction #parrward #six queens #mywork #six au #six the musical fic #six fic #my ideas #six writing #my posts #my six posts #six the musical fanfic #six fanfic #beheaded cousins #cousin trio #pirate au

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nonpuppet-sanderssides-ep · 3 years

Text

Learning New Things about Ourselves Transcript

This transcript was done by @rosesisupposes @everphantom @crushingonanartist @fandomsofrandom (who’s urls may or may not have changed at some point, and others, who’s urls had been lost to time and my disorganization.)

This transcript was created for the purpose of creating a comic-version of the video for those who were uncomfortable with the puppetry. This project has been effectively abandoned, and the blog shall be treated as an archive for the work that had been completed. (as explained in this post)

The transcript had been partly split up to create places for artists to draw individual sections, which has remained in tact in this transcript. If people want to utilize this transcript for creating a comic or drawing, I entirely welcome it! As long as all the characters follow a human design, tag this blog and I’ll reblog it.

14:58 Thomas: Oh, Logan! You’re up!

14:59 Logan: If by up you mean I am not down...to do this, you are correct.

15:04 Roman: Oh big surprise coming from no fun-son honey dew-dew. Last second addition there, made it, stuck the landing.

15:10 Patton: Aw, Logan come on! We need you at the table if we’re gonna be learning!

15:14 Logan: Please. It has become quite clear that me cosigning all of your ridiculous antics is just a formality. When all of you decided on using puppets to address a serious issue, logic was already figuratively thrown out the window.

15:25 Roman: *dramatic sigh* Again, you don’t have to use the word figuratively. We know you that you weren’t literally thrown out of a window.

15:31 Logan: How? Have you been watching me constantly?

15:33 Patton: Don’t assume Roman! You know what happens when you assume. You make an as out of su and me.

15:39 Logan: *exasperated sigh* *mumbled* Thank you Patton. *back to normal volume* I just don’t want to concern anybody by suggesting I was throw through a window. I wanted to communicate five by five that I’m five by five.

15:47 Thomas: It’s okay Roman, his intentions are there. I mean, who does going above and beyond with clarity hurt?

15:54 Roman: Going above and beyond? *laugh* More like going overboard. It’s stupid.

15:58 *Logan inhales, glares at Roman as he crumples up a paper and throws it at Roman with a yell*

16:01 Roman: Ow! Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh!

16:02 Patton: Meep meep!**

16:03 Roman: You hit me in the eye. You hit me in the eye, you freaking bookgerm!

16:07 Virgil: Geez, L, that was pretty rough.

16:09 Logan: Eh- I’m sorry. I-I don’t know what that was. *pause* Maybe I should go.

16:13 Patton: NO! We are not about to leave it there, mister! We can’t continue this convo, if you’re gone-zo

16:21 Thomas: THAT’S RIGHT!

16:21 Thomas: Look, Logan, you can be like one of those Sesame Street human friends!

16:27 Logan: Like Maria?

16:28 Thomas: Like Maria!

16:29 Logan: Okay... I mean, a more accurate comparison would be that you’re our Big Bird, and we’re all your… Snuffleupagus**.

16:36 Thomas: Pre-1985, before they canonically confirmed Snuffleupagus wasn’t imaginary.

16:40 Logan: Of course. *softly* Clarity

16:41 Roman: Hmph-

16:42 Logan: Okay, so- you’re puppets. Care to explain to me how this is going to help?

16:47 Patton: Well, we could start by having an open and honest conversation about our feelings?

16:54 Thomas: *takes a deep breath*

16:55 Roman: Hmmm…

16:56 Virgil: *groans softly*

16:57 Thomas: I don’t think so.

16:57 Roman: Yeah, I don’t like that.

16:58 Virgil: I’d rather go live in a garbage can.

16:59 Patton: No! Really, this is important, guys! Thomas, you have to face your feelings head-on! Tell me… *singing* do you ever feel like a paper bag?

17:10 Thomas: Wha- I thought we were talking about a loop!

17:13 Patton: Well, how do you suppose we get out of the loop, mister Looper?

17:16 Thomas: Well, I guess I don’t know… but I mean... like- what do I have to feel bad about? I mean, really. Like- yeah, I feel iffy with my videos. So what?

17:27 *Roman sighs as Thomas continues*

17:27 Thomas: Big deal. The ‘problems’ I have wouldn’t even exist without all of the incredible privileges I’ve received. I should feel lucky. I asked for this. So I- I don’t feel like I’ve got a right to feel this way, but-

17:42 Patton: Thomas, that’s ridiculous! Now should you count your blessings? Absolutely! Lots of people are way worse off!

17:49 Thomas: … oh

17:50 Patton: Yeah, I should not have said that as cheery as I did. --break-- *louder* But… you shouldn’t feel guilty for having feelings! Sure, sometimes your feelings may not make sense, but it’s not your feelings job to make sense! You just… experience them. And you have to do your best to deal with them.

18:07 Thomas: Well that… makes sense.

18:11 Patton: Not talking about them... is not dealing with them.

18:14 Thomas: Yeah, but I don’t even know where to begin talking about my feelings, because I don’t… understand them right now.

18:19 Virgil: Maybe you won’t have to understand your feelings if you fix the problem.

18:24 Patton: Well…

18:25 Virgil: Logan’s gotta cool it with the deadlines.

18:26 Logan: What?

18:27 Roman: *blows a kiss at Virgil* Thank you!

18:28 Virgil: Too much pressure.

18:29 Logan: Oh, I’m sorry. Except I’m not! Are the deadlines really the cause of that pressure, or is it… I don’t know… *quickly* Roman’s inability to perform adequately?

18:35 Roman: *offended gasp* No!

18:37 Virgil: Well- it’s a little of that.

18:38 Roman: *weird shocked noise[?]* What??

18:40 Logan: Exactly, boom.

18:40 Virgil: Look dude, doesn’t it make sense to think you have something to do with this? The issue has to do with creating content and his pride? That’s a lot of you.

18:48 Roman: Well pardon me, Vomit-y Central, but when were either of you the experts on creative content? Who are you to criticize my work??

18:58 Virgil: Oh my gosh, what is up your butt?

19:00 Roman: An arm!

19:00-19:34

THOMAS: Okay, I think it’s clear that pointing fingers is getting us nowhere. So let’s avoid that

PATTON: [Pointing at Thomas] Agreed. Oh, butterfingers!

VIRGIL: [Muttering] That’s not what butterfingers means

THOMAS: Logan, would it be fair to say that with all of this arguing, order is not actually being obtained?

LOGAN: Perhaps we are in a state of disorder because no one is adhering to my instruction

THOMAS: Okay, okay, well, okay, I’m - I’m happy to hear you out, then. What do you think we should do, Logan?

PATTON: Yeah, Logan, help us out, what can you tell us about learning new things about ourselves?

19:34-19:58

LOGAN: Well, it all goes back to the point you made earlier, Patton. Asking the right question: why?

ROMAN: That’s right, today’s video is brought to you by the letter “Y”

LOGAN: No, stop it, stop it, the question “why,” W-H-Y. “Why?” So much of what you feel, Thomas, comes down to whether or not your actions are aligning with your goals.

PATTON: Oh! I think I get it!

LOGAN: What?

PATTON: Yeah!

19:58 - 20:12 [Cut Scene]

[Electric Company Bit: Profiles of Patton and Thomas]

PATTON: Why do you make videos?

THOMAS: Because they’re fun

PATTON: Why did you make it a job?

THOMAS: So I could support myself, and so I could try bigger things

PATTON: Why did your old friend’s question stick with you?

THOMAS: Because…

[End cut scene]

20:12-20:42

THOMAS: Because I always wonder if I’m doing the right thing for a living

LOGAN: Okay, interesting! Elaborate on that. And nobody do any puppet bits

PATTON: Well, that was from The Electric Company

LOGAN: [Waving arms at Patton] Shhhhhh. Thomas?

THOMAS: I don’t know, I guess… As far as I know, we have one life, and I guess I have doubts about… whether or not I’m making the most of mine.

LOGAN: Okay! We’re getting somewhere. Expand upon those doubts

THOMAS: Oh man, um, I… I don’t even know where to go from there

20:42-21:02

LOGAN: I mean if you asked me, I could certainly list off several factors that could be contributing to your doubts.

[Cut to Thomas, then Patton, then Roman all silently looking around as well. No one responds]

LOGAN: If you asked me, I could… gladly share them

THOMAS: [Sigh]

ROMAN: Welp

VIRGIL: [Sigh]

LOGAN: Just lemme know if you want to hear what I have to say

21:02-21:45 epilepsy warning

VIRGIL: Hey Logan, can you list off some of those factors you mentioned?

LOGAN: I’m glad you asked, Virgil. Firstly, there’s no job security, I mean, people fall out of public favor very quickly

VIRGIL: One! One cause of unease, ah ah ah [lightning flash]

LOGAN: You’re balancing a great deal of responsibilities. People have limits; perhaps you can’t continue at this pace indefinitely

VIRGIL: Two! Two nervous thoughts, ah ah ah [lightning flash]

LOGAN: Your work is inessential. Several may claim that they have been [air quotes] “inspired” by one thing you’ve said or another, but who’s to say they couldn’t have found the inspiration they needed elsewhere?

VIRGIL: Three. Three depressing speculations, ah ah ah [lightning flash]

LOGAN: And oh, oh! I can think of another one. No one takes you seriously!

PATTON: [Audible gasp]

VIRGIL: Four. Four uncomfortable characters in this room right now.

THOMAS: Logan, is that really what you think?

LOGAN: Thomas, I have held back my opinions for too long, and that’s obviously not benefiting you. I refuse to withhold my perspective any longer. You need to get a real job.

ROMAN: Hey, yeah! Like being a movie star!

LOGAN: No! A real job.

VIRGIL: Sheesh, you sloppily eat some jam, accidentally make a few puns and now you’re all sensitive about not being taken seriously?

LOGAN: [Interrupting] I’m not a joke! I mean, I can’t be thought of as such. Because there will be times in which I must be heeded and given our current circumstances, I clearly haven’t been. So I’m saying what must be said. I can’t tolerate this foolishness any longer. [To Thomas] You need to change your life around.

VIRGIL: Logan, I appreciate what you bring to the table and all, but the thing you just recommended would be a massive change in Thomas’ life sooo I kinda hate you a little bit right now andddd shut your dirty mouth

LOGAN: Ah, typical

THOMAS: I don’t know, Virge, maybe he’s right. Maybe that’s the cause of all this

VIRGIL: Thomas, don’t start. I have plenty of hate to go around

PATTON: Ohhh very funny, Virgil, you cute little muppet! Thomas, you know he doesn’t mean it. And Logan, that was… helpful! When the chips were down, you brought up some very meaty points, you ol’ crackerjack, but this stuff is more than just silly or cheesy, and I’m sorry I keep bringing up food, it’s just the inside of this bag smells like first grade lunch in the cafeteria and so many memories!

ROMAN: [Snaps] Patton, stay with us

23:17

PATTON: Sorry! Boy, I really milked that bit, wakawaka!

ROMAN: (stares in silence, before taking a deep breath) What I think Patton is trying to say is that Logan’s just proven that he’s the worst, and that he’s been the thorn in your side all along

VIRGIL: Could you even contribute like an ounce of constructive input to our conversation today, Dr. Doo-the-Most?

ROMAN: Okay, why don’t you just go get lost in a dryer

VIRGIL: You know, Roman, it’s just too bad your brain isn’t as big as that chin

ROMAN: Well you smell like FOOT!

THOMAS: Roman-

ROMAN: No, Thomas, I know. That wasn’t helpful. In truth, I do feel bad

THOMAS: You do?

ROMAN: Yes

VIRGIL: Well then maybe you should say you’re sorry

ROMAN: You’re right

VIRGIL: Oh, really?

ROMAN: Logan-

VIRGIL: Okay

ROMAN: -earlier, I made you angry. I do that quite a bit, actually. I provoke you, and you retaliated with violence… like a stupid caveman. But! I am responsible for my actions and my actions alone. So, I’m sorry.

LOGAN: Oh, well. That’s. Very kind.

ROMAN: Okay, well, I gave that a shot. I still feel bad.

PATTON: Well, why not try expressing your feelings in a way that makes sense for you?

24:27

ROMAN: Well, that might work. Let’s see (clears throat, then gestures to his right) Maestro?

[MUSIC STARTS]

[Singing] So you’ve gone and called someone stupid And in response, they damaged your eye But, there is where the conflict must end Lest you both end up blind

LOGAN: [Speaking] Another song? Really?

ROMAN: [Singing] Sometimes, the problems at play Are not all plain to see So, we lash out at our loved ones Disregarding our bond sanctity PATTON: There are several sides to us that may seem abstract at first Until we discover where everything fits And, people can be like a half-missing puzzle set As we find the pieces, things make more and more sense THOMAS: Nice imagery, but I'm not sure I follow.

25:27 - 26:00

PATTON: Well I’ll give you an example.

PATTON: [Singing] I had this problem where I’d often hide my less than awesome feelings so when I would feel like sobbing I’d just smile and crack jokes! I thought that that was coping. Only joking, never showing sadness, hoping it would go away.

LOGAN: [Spoken] Did that work?

PATTON: [Singing] Nope! I still felt bad

ROMAN: [Spoken] Aw pat..

PATTON: [Singing] It’s okay

THOMAS: [Spoken] How’s that?

PATTON: [Singing] Everybody gets sad. Even dads that have people to care for! And therefore- You don’t have to hide your pain. Life without rainy days is incomplete!

PATTON: [Speaking] Or, like not even a thing, you know? Rain goes to plants, plants feed animals, plant-eating animals feed animal-eating animals, and humans feed animals corn and inject them with hormones until they can barely walk anymore

THOMAS: Patton?

PATTON: Yes?

THOMAS: How does all that relate to rain?

PATTON: Oh, right! Rainy days. Forgot what I was talking about. Umm... putting it simply, rain is a necessary piece of the puzzle that is, uh, life.

LOGAN: So true. Are we done singing, or is this just one of those musical interludes?

26:22

VIRGIL: On the subject of storm clouds because, you know, you need storm clouds to... make... rain. I'm just gonna get into it. [Singing] You once knew me as real gloomy This weird spooky broody dude Because I knew you'd listen to me As too scary to ignore I thought that I could take it All the hate could just be shaken But when you lo-- care for someone Not much hurts more than their scorn I also felt bad

ROMAN: [Speaking] Come, now

VIRGIL: [Singing] In a different way

THOMAS: [Speaking] Different how?

VIRGIL: [Singing] By bad I mean, well, mean But I did what I thought that I had to Which is bad, too I don't have to act all tough

THOMAS: Sometimes love is enough

PATTON: Or what we need

27:00 [END]

#non-puppet ep project #learning new things about ourselves #transcript #sanders sides

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jocktrolls · 4 years

Note

Could it be that I'm just tired and want to have fun without being an asshole? That, despite everything, I'd gladly give my creative talents for the sake of being recognized positively? It's been a year. Please just leave me be.

Y’know it’s really funny how @technical-trolls managed to find a post with no reblogs that doesn’t mention your (or any past urls) of yours! Given that I blocked @technical-trolls made the post, and didn’t reblog the post I was referencing. In order for @technical-trolls to have seen it, either someone who knows what you’ve done had to have linked it (unlikely, given the content) or @technical-trolls saw the new blocks and decided to dig through my blog. Which seems really nosey for someone who Just Wants To Be Left Alone. It’s really surprising that that’s what’s considered bringing Old Shit Up though, instead of, I dunno, bringing up old receipts of you pretending to have drama with yourself so you could suck up to a BNF who blocked you, only to turn around and out yourself as a fraud to someone else.

Or that time you blamed artists for being poor b/c they blocked you, despite the fact that they did not, in fact, block you in a way that would prevent you from commissioning them?

How about that time you went into some kids’ discord to harass them over their gender and not being “a good trans,” only to turn around make a misgendering CALLOUT POST for them?

This is just SOME of the stuff I have ON HAND. If we wanted to look into other actions of yours, we could move on from hard evidence to the the Clock-Work-Testimonials!

What do you think is going to happen when I bring up even “older wounds” like the fact you tried to make someone die? I don’t have receipts for now, sure, but I get the feeling that if I talked to “peons of the siren-legion,” they’d have something. Maybe not as much as an in-depth account of the emotional abuse you put an artist whose art you continue to use despite not paying a penny for it, but something.

Anyways! Point is, I was leaving you be before, by airing my grievances in a vent that I intended to delete, with no identifiable information (save for what you did and the fact that, again, you still use art from someone you harassed into giving it to you for free.) If you want to get up in MY business and say I’M the one opening up YOUR woulds, I’ll show you how far I can dig, and what I can find.

The only thing I won’t be able to find a receipt for is an apology from you, because for all this talk of wanting to move on, it’s the one thing you refuse to do. You don’t apologize. You never actually make any efforts to become a better person, nor do you make any efforts to ensure people can move on. All you do is say “Well maybe I want to be a better person and move on so YOU should forget what I did!” and get mad when nobody does. You talk about being willing to give up Your Creative Talents for a good reputation, but you can’t even seem to give up this fandom for it.

[ETA: If you’re looking at this now, I’m assuming that you’re doing so b/c of the renewal of one of what’s his face’s old URLS & the subsequent self-adverising campaign. I’m fine with this being shared via links, but I advise AGAINST reblogging this (or posting publicly abt it at all, but I can’t stop you.) No vagues, no callouts, nothing.

If you reblog this w/ this note added, you also kinda look like a dickhead lol.

technical-trolls was deleted long after he stopped getting negative attention. This is pretty clearly an attempt to probe and see who remembers him, and an attempt to get back in the spotlight.

NTM this is sorta out of date lol. Just inform & ignore.]

#asks #technical-trolls #callout post #drama /#long post /#clock-work-intelligence #clockworkintelligence #insanity-claimedchildren #but also like what creative talents #you use bloody art & your storytelling skills are so lackluster #that you couldn't even convincingly pull off a second identity #Anonymous #anyways the fact I blocked you should have been proof enough that I didnt intend to bring you up further #since I don't fight w/ ppl who cant hit back #speaking of! You're unblocked :-) for now #skeletal-undead

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gamersonthego · 4 years

Text

Blaseball: The New National Pastime

Blaseball is my favorite game to come out this year so far, and that’s kind of an odd thing to say considering Blaseball barely feels like a game at all.

Blaseball is a splort in which 20 teams compete under the Internet League Blaseball organization, day and night, rain or shine, and at the behest of us fans who vote to remake the league in our own image.

That’s what the Blaseball FAQ says anyway. Less cryptically, Blaseball is a browser game — a massively multiplayer one at that — in which a league of fictional teams play something vaguely baseball adjacent while we as fans watch from afar through the window of an ever updating list of box scores. We don’t actually play the game — the in-universe game rather — but we are able to participate in a number of ways, like eating peanuts, which...well, I still don’t understand what eating peanuts does, but it’s a thing you can do.

When you first log in to Blaseball, you’re asked to choose a team, with little to go on other than their name and logo. Dallas Steaks, Baltimore Crabs, Hellmouth Sunbeams (wait, where is Hellmouth located?): once you’ve chosen, you’re now a fan of that team and are given a small amount of coins with which to gamble (virtual currency only, this is one of those rare free-to-play games that is actually free.)

And that’s how you’ll be interacting with Blaseball most of the time: betting on the day’s games, Salty Bet style. Every hour, there are 10 games going on, and you can look at the next 10 games starting the next hour and place your bets accordingly. Blaseball developer The Game Band even helpfully puts the odds next to each team’s chances of winning, so you can make an informed decision.

The money you earn from gambling can be spent on a handful of items in the Shop tab, but the most important one is purchasing votes. Votes can then be cast in a weekly election that can affect individual players, teams and the entire league itself. This is where Blaseball truly shines, and it’s what takes it from a relatively straightforward clicker/idle game into something special.

Elections are split up into two categories: Decrees, which are often league-shifting decisions made by majority vote, and Blessings, which are drawn raffle-style to bestow benefits to specific players or teams. An early decree voted upon was “Eat The Rich,” which redistributes the coins of the top 1% of participants to the other 99% at the end of each week/season (Bernie would be so proud.) While a blessing like “Vulture” would let your favored team steal the best hitter in the league and add them to your squad.

Watching the league evolve week to week is engrossing. Elections give fans just that tiny bit of interactivity, tilting the splort in one direction or another, and watching the results with bated breath. It’s a phenomenon I haven’t experienced since 2014’s Twitch Plays Pokemon, and similar to that socially-driven experiment, the community has embraced the game wholeheartedly, creating a deep, crowd-based lore behind every little detail and enhanced by the developers’ sometimes light — and sometimes quite heavy — touch.

After the first season of Blaseball ended, the blessing “Max Out Hitter” gave then-Dallas Steaks’ Jessica Telephone a five-star rating in batting. Fans interacting on the Official Blaseball Discord Channel began to attribute this surge in power to Jessica’s bat, dubbing it The Dial Tone. The Game Band supported this, and by Season 3, where player items were officially added to the game, The Dial Tone now was called out in the box score whenever Jessica came to the plate — and later, on her player profile after fans voted to “lift the Microphone” so they could get to know the players better.

The give and take from developers and fans is a fascinating one. While sometimes the interaction is friendly and collaborative, like in The Dial Tone instance, others have a very SUPERHOT-style antagonistic tone to them (and it doesn’t hurt that they share a similar color scheme as well). An example of this comes from Season 6, where the concept of Idols were integrated into Blaseball. Fans could idolize one player from any team and their accomplishments (hits and home runs for batters, strikeouts and shutouts for pitchers) could net fans extra cash. Jessica Telephone, being one of the best hitters in the league and a fan favorite, easily topped the idol leaderboard. But then, in a targeted form of discipline that’s plagued fans in a variety of ways since Season 1’s opening of the Forbidden Book of Blaseball rules, Jessica Telephone was “Shelled,” literally trapping her inside a giant peanut that skips her in the lineup. How long is she stuck like this? Who knows…

But that’s the great thing about Blaseball: nobody knows. And sometimes, the developers seem surprised at what’s happening as well. A recent blessing stated that the team who won it would steal the 14th most idolized player in the league. Fans began a campaign to make sure pitcher Jaylen Hotdogfingers was number 14. While normally this wouldn’t be a issue, the problem was that Jaylen Hotdogfingers was actually dead at the time, having been the first player to be incinerated by a rogue umpire after a game (another of the disciplines handed down by the Blaseball Gods). This isn’t something that could easily be done. You couldn’t just navigate to Jaylen’s player profile on the Blaseball site. You had to know the specific URL to the profile’s page, which seems to support the idea this wasn’t something intended by the developers.

When Hotdogfingers ended the season as lucky number 14, he…she….it (the Blaseball community is mixed on this, and The Game Band is staunchly in the camp of allowing every fan’s canon to be valid, only making things like The Dial Tone official when they appear to reach a critical and consistent mass in the community) returned from the void and seems mostly ok…other than the fact that random opponents are sometimes hit by Jaylen’s pitches and become Unstable, temporarily affecting their stats for a number of games. Probably nothing to worry about.

It’s a beautiful mess of a game. A never-ending ant farm where every ant has a backstory and occasionally a random ant gets an exploratory surgery that increases their pitching stat by one star (sorry, kind of lost the metaphor there…)

There’s a 2018 interview with game developer Jade Raymond where she envisions what games might be like 10 years in the future:

Well, I’m thinking in the past maybe what we were trying to create was the Pixies concert or whatever. And now I think that we want to create this neighborhood bar. You could go and hang out and sit alone and read your book at the neighborhood bar. You could go and participate in karaoke night with your friends. You could go become a regular and everyone in the bar knows you, like in Cheers; you walk in and it’s like, “Norm!” You could be like the VIP. What you’re looking for out of that place can be very different, but it’s an appointment and a place you can go over and over again, and do pub trivia night with your friends if that’s what you’re into.

She goes on to talk about utilizing data to change the way a game works over time:

There’s some simple ideas, like, for example, if you take Game of Thrones, you know let’s say at one point in the story you’re going to have the Red Wedding. You know that at one point some family is all going to be obliterated. You can put these kind of big story beats there in your overall story. Then you could say, we’re going to do it based on data.

Let’s say you have a traditional faction system and let’s say players are really gravitating towards this one family, and they’re the most beloved. If you really want to shock the community the most, those are the ones you plug in to kill off — based on who players are really interacting with.

These are things Blaseball is doing right now, not 10 years as Raymond foretold, but in just two. Fans participate in Blaseball in a number of ways. Some make streaming audio broadcasts of the games, some share theories on Discord, some create incredible fanart and others just check in on the site every few hours or so. And as for the Red Wedding? Well, I told you about players getting incinerated and shelled, right?

So go play Blaseball right now, tell the commissioner he’s doing a great job and become a Hades Tigers fan to help my team win some blessings. It’s truly the cultural event of the season.

#blaseball

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luckdogpuppy · 3 years

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Why I Hate Electronics

In the old days we had ms-dos and had to fiddle with config.sys and himem.sys spending endless hours and sleepless nights trying to get the computer to run a program. Computers have come a long way since windows 95 but using them certainly hasn’t gotten any easier. I remember wondering back then why they couldn’t make a computer that actually worked, that actually figured out how to make itself work and work with other programs and devices…after all, it is a computer, isn’t it? No, instead they just get more complicated and mystifying. Now its modems and routers and ethernets and wifi that drive me crazy, and trying to cope with constant buffering when I try to watch Netflix. Who the hell can remember which remote to use to access the right button? And when you do find the right remote to access your tv who can figure out how to get to whatever it is you need to fix? And how many fucking passwords can a person remember? And passwords have to be more complicated every year. I can barely use my phone, flipping from one screen to another with my finger. It seems the only way to get out of certain screens is to shut your phone off and restart it. And nobody tells you this stuff…you have to figure it out on your own. Ever read the Microsoft manual? Who does? Just looking at the pages makes me scream. And even when you go to Youtube they go so fast you have to pause it every two seconds to write that shit down. I have endless sheets of paper in a drawer filled with step-by-step instructions on how to do computer problems. Why? Why can’t computers do these things by themselves? The last time I lost my internet connection I got all excited when I discovered this thing on my computer that told me it would run a diagnostic of my system and troubleshoot it. Wow, that sounded great. When I went there and ran it it said “you have lost your internet connection.”

They say that computers can do everything, but they still haven’t given us a computer that can fix itself or even do something as simple as letting us plug it into a router without having to go through an eleven step process to get the damn thing to work. What pisses me off is that I know they could do this. I can’t even get my two wifi extenders to work. By some miracle I did get them to work for a while but one day they both just shut off and I haven’t been able to get them running since. I can’t get past the step where I’m asked for a password. It says I’m supposed to use the one on the back of the router. Well, what it says on the back of the router is “password: (leave the field blank)”. Except when I am asked for the password it won’t let me leave the field blank. Instead it says “your password is not long enough.” Then I’m told to go to my wifi icon on my taskbar to find out what the password is. But I don’t have a wifi icon on my taskbar. So I go online and find that there are pages on how to find and/or replace the wifi icon on my taskbar, and after going through all five of the different methods of finding and replacing that icon on the taskbar without success I learn that there is no way I’m gonna get that icon to appear on the taskbar because the Windows 10 system that came with my computer doesn’t come with a wifi icon on the taskbar; Microsoft removed that file in the latest version of Windows 10. I learn that I have to buy Windows 10 Pro to get that stupid wifi icon. Are you shitting me?

I finally did find an obscure site that explained a convoluted way to find out what your router and extender passwords were. You have to start with your command prompt to get there…but that didn’t help…surprise, those passwords there didn’t work either. And don’t even ask me how to go back there and look at those passwords again. It took me an hour to figure out how to get to my command prompt from my start menu. Hint: don’t left click like you’re used to doing. When you left click on the Start menu you are presented with a long and very impressive list of places to go, all in alphabetical order, and you would think that the “Command” prompt would be there under the “c” column. But no, there is nothing that says “Command Prompt”. No, you have to right click instead. You’ll find another list of places to go there. But even then there is nothing that says “Command Prompt.” You have to click on “run” for the command prompt to come up. There is a lot of shit you can do through the command prompt but nobody is going to tell you what the secret codes are that will allow you to do those things. It used to be easy to get to the command prompt. All you had to do was click on the “Start” button. But now they’ve decided to make this an hour-long quest to find it. I have all this shit written down on endless sheets of paper in that drawer. Truth be told this electronic world makes me tear my hair out. I hate it with a passion. What pisses me off even more is that I also love it…when it’s working.

I can’t even get my computer to recognize my own email address. I bought a new Dell desktop three years ago and still get a daily message saying that I need to fix a problem with my Microsoft account. So I periodically go through the process and change my password but no matter what I do I still get that stupid message. I even had Microsoft tech reps guide me through the process three times now yet I still get that same old message. And every time I try to access my Microsoft account I’m told “that email address is already used by a different account.” I deleted all my accounts and started over but the message still comes up…the problem remains. I’ve explained all this to those tech reps but nothing keeps that message from coming up. I even signed up for a different email address but that didn’t fix the problem either and now I have an extra “Outlook” email address that I never use and wouldn’t know where it is if I did want to use it. I think the problem started when I bought a new Dell laptop. I had to sign up for a Microsoft account then. But I didn’t care for the laptop and sent it back two days later and ordered the desktop…and now Microsoft still thinks that whoever owns that laptop has the rights to my email address and not me. I explained all this to those Microsoft tech reps but that didn’t solve anything either. Yeah, this stuff bothers me. I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t like loose ends. I like things to be neat and tidy and feel like everything is in its place. But this computer stuff feels all scattered and disconnected and just fucked up. I know it’s working on my mind even when I’m not struggling with it.

In order to fix my Netflix buffering problem (and my wife’s need to have internet access for her work-at-home job) I bought a new router. I’ve had the same old cheap router for 6 years so I figure its time for a new one. I did just buy a 40 ft ethernet cable that I plugged into the back of the router and ran it along the ceiling down the hall and into the back of the tv in the living room, but we’re still having problems with “Home not available” still coming up at times. I actually bought a new router last year; an Archer A7. But I was never able to get it to work so I had to send it back, thinking it must have been defective. I realize now that it probably worked just fine and that the problem was me…that I couldn’t figure out how to get it to work. Then I had a helluva time trying to get the old one up and running again. Did you ever feel that your brain was on fire and ready to burst? That was how I felt after struggling with those two routers for 3 days. So my new router came last week and it turns out it’s the same model; the same one I tried to set up and sent back last year. I thought it was a different one because it was called a Tp-link, but its actually an Archer A7 too. On the box it says it’s a AC 1900 and on the instruction sheet it also says it’s a MU-MIMO Wi-Fi Router, so just figuring out what these things are called is a science in itself. So now I’m frightened to death to even try to set it up. The first thing the instructions say is “if this” and “if that”…as if I know the answers to these ifs. There is also a long list of FAQs in case you have problems and need help. That scares the shit out of me, too, cause I know I’m gonna need help…and lots of it. Then it gives me three different methods of setting the thing up, all of them quite convoluted and requiring me to access various internet sites, SSIDs and wireless passwords. Then I have to go to a number url: 192.188.1.1 and I remember that this is where I had to go to get my extenders to work but I was never able to get those urls to come up. Then I found out that they only come up if you use Google Chrome, and of course there is nothing in the instructions that tells you you can only use Google Chrome. No, you have to find that out on your own too. So now I have to change my browser and come up with another password so I can access Google Chrome. I am so afraid that I will not be able to complete these steps correctly and that I will then have to struggle another two days to get my old router to work again that the new router is still sitting on a shelf two weeks later. I’m thinking that I should go to Best Buy and have the Geek Squad come and set up my router but I know I’ll have to listen to them explain their convoluted tech plan that will ask me to decide whether to get a one visit deal or buy a year subscription…and I know one visit will not fix all my loose ends. And it makes me wonder if that is the reason why computers intentionally aren’t made to fix things.

Oh, by the way, I’m sitting here writing all this down with my Microsoft Word, and now I find that I am unable to save what I’ve written because I don’t have a subscription to Word any more. I guess my free time is over. God, don’t you love it? You can’t even buy a computer with a simple word processor in it without having to pay a yearly fee to use it. Next thing you know somebody will figure out how to put a chip under your skin that measures how many breaths you take so they can charge you for the air you breathe.

Dear Lord, if reincarnation is real please let me go to a world that is either before computers or way beyond computers. Or better yet, where computers and routers and extenders actually use a computer so they can work together.

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multiipl · 4 years

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*; OOC » I wanted to exclude myself from any kind of drama, but with a lot of drama surfacing on my dash recently I just have too big of a trap to shut. This is not about any person or any incident in particular. This is about the poison that is call out culture.

As it may come to a surprise (or not) I am very much charmed by Heinrich Heine and his poetry/writing as he followed me through my life. (More literally than you can imagine. Moving on.)

There’s a famous sentence Heine wrote. "Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen" -- Now I know not everybody speaks German, and I don’t expect you to, so let me translate it for you. You might have heard of it.

"Where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people."

What does this have to do with Call Out Culture, you might ask?

Most of the time I see callouts or hate it is often directed at someone (a person) for something fictional (A book). Call Out Culture largely supports the act of shaming the person and their piece of fiction at the same time. They are trying to burn the people and their books.

Most reasons people have been called out, as far as I have observed over so many years, on Tumblr is closely tied to a fictional character, topic or scenario that someone else does not agree with. This someone else doesn’t have to be just one person. It can be, but it’s not limited to one person. I will continue to refer to that group of people as ‘someone else’ or ‘SE’ as I go along with this. Furthermore, the accused people will be referred to as ‘the shamed’. Just to keep it clear who I am talking about.

Often times, this someone else attacks the shamed for something trivial. Shipping something SE doesn’t like. Roleplaying a character that has been deemed problematic, sometimes rightfully so, roleplaying dark topics or triggering content.

Someone else is not afraid to boldly accuse the shamed and their piece of fiction in any way shape or form that can and will harm them. Why is it, that they do it? Because someone else disagrees with the shamed.

There is however another vital point, and that is key. You are NOT forced to engage with people or fiction that make you uncomfortable. You are free to remove yourself from the situation at any given time. The anonymity we are granted on the internet, that many of us uphold, is a blessing and a curse.

If you disagree with someone, if you see something you do not want to see, you can remove yourself from the situation and prevent contact with that person or the media. Many platforms offer you the option to block people and to blacklist their URLs and tags.

Nobody forces you to follow someone who roleplays topics or themes that upset you. Nobody forces you to have someone who roleplays topics or themes that upset you follow you either.

You are responsible for exposing yourself to the things you see and the people you follow. You are not responsible or entitled to put the shamed into ‘their place’, because most of the time, ‘their place’ is your comfort zone.

The shamed gains nothing by getting groomed to fit into SE’s comfort zone. The disagreeing party that calls out the shamed is doing so to expose the shamed for their wrongdoings that could have oftentimes been prevented by making use of the “block” function Tumblr provides. It is the most efficient way to keep someone else’s and your comfort zone discomfort free.

The shamed gets attacked for their choice of word, character, topic. While the initial problem is the fiction that upsets someone else, they forget that the shamed is a real person that gets hurt in the process of those Callouts or negative commentary.

It is not someone else’s choice what other people are allowed to write. It is, however, someone else’s choice what they themselves want to see and expose themselves to. If they fail to protect themselves taking the measures of un-following, blacklisting, and/or blocking, it is not the shamed to blame for their choice of fiction, it is someone else’s blame.

Someone else is accusing the shamed of inhumane acts based on their choice of fiction. In doing so, they are doing something as inhumane as their claims: They are hurting and upsetting an actual person. For what? Self-proclaimed Justice?

Call Out Culture supports mob-mentality that turns bystanders, that had nothing to do with someone else’s issue, into an opponent to the shamed, a person they haven’t previously interacted with, and by default, everyone that stands by the shamed’s side.

I’m not saying there aren’t justified cases of Callouts. If the shamed themselves has actually done wrong, e.g. purposely deceived, abused, manipulated, or even blackmailed other people, or inflicted physical or mental pain/trauma onto people, they deserve to be put on the spot.

It is important to separate the shamed from their fiction. The fiction can be problematic, but that does not mean the person behind it has to be equally as problematic. What is important is respect. Respect for other people. Respect for their boundaries, their preferences, their triggers, etc.

We are hundreds and thousands of people on this website. We can not expect everyone to know everything about our preferences and triggers. The only person who can keep ourselves save online is each and every one of us individually for themselves.

We are all online. We’re all here. We are not in court. Nobody is entitled to perform the task of bringing others to (self-proclaimed) justice for the fiction they engage in. I want everyone to remember they are not obligated to interact with people that make them uncomfortable. Nobody owes anyone an apology for stepping away from a situation that is attacking their personal comfort.

However, the shamed are often not allowed or able to step away from the situation once they have been called out. They will have too many hateful people to deal with. The only way they are able to step away is to leave Tumblr and maybe other platforms for good.

I want to thank anyone who has made it to the end of this. I’m truly grateful, trust me. I know this is a very long post and lots of people will probably not react to it since the tags I am using are often blacklisted and will hide the post, which is a perfect execution of the point to protect yourself from things you do not want to see.

As of now, June 19th 2020, 1:06 AM, this is my personal statement about why call out culture is problematic itself. People are free to reblog this and share their opinion, thoughts, support, disagreements, everything, regarding the matter and topic of this post. There is just one thing I want to ask of everyone at any time:

Please be considerate towards people. Thank you.

#drama #discourse #negative #anti call out culture #long post #*; here we go again » ooc

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frenchibi · 5 years

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you bring me home

(another fic? yeah. more on my ao3 too btw; same url)

2k ineffable husbands wedding fluff fic, you’re welcome lol - full fic under the cut!

~~~

It’s 45 minutes away, and Crowley cannot stop his hands from fidgeting.

He’s abandoned the mirror – stupid thing was making him feel antsier by the minute, messing with his hair and conjuring imaginary wrinkles and stains on his clothes from the corner of his eye, definitely not productive. So he’s turned away – but that’s left him with no other options than to pace, and fidget, and worry.

Today’s not meant to be for worrying.

He’s not even really sure why, and that’s what’s most annoying, really. Today has been six thousand years in the making, and objectively he’s never been surer about anything.

He didn’t think he was prone to pre-emptive nerves (there’s a benefit to taking life as it comes, to winging it, to not thinking too much about plans for the future that go beyond “dinner, tomorrow night?”) – but then again, he’s no stranger to anxiety.

Christ’s sake, this isn’t a trial he’s facing, after all.

He wishes he wasn’t so fucking stressed.

He tugs his tie loose, then refastens it. Tugs it loose again – it feels weird, being so done-up. There’s too much gel in his fucking hair, isn’t there? And fuck, he’ll have to take off his sunglasses, won’t he? Shit.

He’s never felt so woefully unprepared and yet so ready for something at the same time. It’s strange and unpleasant and he wants to throw something at the nearest wall and maybe scream for fifteen minutes.

He does neither of those things, though he does aim a half-hearted kick at the foot of the mirror.

The room seems to shrink and contract around him, too-small and cramped and stifling. Fucking hell. The last time he’d felt this bad, he’d changed into a snake before he’d even finished the thought, and hid in Aziraphale’s sock drawer for a week.

Can’t very well do that now. 43 minutes. Shit.

If he were a snake right now, he’d curl up in some tiny, tiny space and sleep until he forgot what was giving him such panic, such endless energy and restlessness.

He’s never been good at pacing.

In an impulse decision, he throws open the door. Fuck this.

The corridor beyond is empty, thank Someone, and Crowley is moving without any destination in mind except the one he’ll always, inevitably end up at, no matter how far he goes. Circling back like a planet, like a satellite.

He almost forgets to knock, but catches himself at the last minute, remembering the time, the place, the day. His stomach flips.

“Yes?”

Even just that voice, just that tiny word, and the world feels like it will be okay.

“Angel,” Crowley says, and shit, his voice is doing the exposing thing, the vulnerability thing, “can I- can I come in?”

There’s a beat of silence, only a beat, and all of Crowley’s fears live in that tiny moment, expanding, swallowing everything.

Then: “I don’t believe you’re quite supposed to – but alright.”

Crowley hesitates, with his heart in his throat and his knees about to buckle.

“A-are you sure? I know this matters to you, angel, I just-“

The door opens. Tiny miracles.

Crowley clamps his mouth shut and walks inside.

“Close it behind you, would you, dear?”

Aziraphale is standing at the far end of the room, facing a mirror not unlike the one Crowley just fled from. He’s in a suit (not unheard of), but a black suit, which, although they’d discussed this before – seeing it is something else entirely. He’s got a cream-colored tie, one Crowley knows matches his own suit, and he’s fussing with it.

He gives Crowley a look through the mirror, a brief glance, a glance away – and then he turns to take him in properly.

There’s weight in his gaze, and a part of Crowley regrets that this moment isn’t occurring in 42 minutes and in a different room – but a much larger part is overcome with potential relief from the ever-present strum of nerves, and that feels more important. And selfish. But the longer he’d pictured not reaching out to the only person who helped, the worse he’d felt, exponentially.

A small frown crosses Aziraphale’s face – he knows. He always, always knows.

Crowley steps forward with a slight shake of his head, just so, and reaches for the tie. Fusses now, too. Loosens it up. Tightens it. Miracles a bowtie, then changes it back. His hands are shaking.

“Oh, darling,” Aziraphale says, and it’s soft, and the warmth in his voice could melt even the hardest of hearts.

“Just,” Crowley says, but no other words want to leave, they’d rather stay and constrict his windpipe and bring tears to the corners of his eyes.

He knows what he needs – and either Aziraphale really is a telepath, or he just knows, somehow, as well. Knows from the years upon years upon years he’s been carrying Crowley through panic attacks, been shielding him when no one else would have ever thought he’d need it, protecting him, holding him-

Aziraphale steps closer, and his arms come up and Crowley falls, because this is the only place he can let it go, let everything go and just breathe.

There’s a familiar scent, a familiar embrace, a comfort, and a slowly-calming heart. A shaky breath, and another, and another, until the path is clear again.

Aziraphale has pulled him close, supporting his weight, holding him up. His hands are warm and gentle, and he catches all the fear, the jitters, the doubt, like it’s nothing. Holds.

“M’sorry, angel,” Crowley breathes, into the space where his head is tucked, against Aziraphale’s shoulder. “Ruined the surprise.”

“Nonsense,” is the reply he gets, and another squeeze. “You needed something else today. I’m glad you came to find me.”

He’s said things before to that same effect – thank you for trusting, thank you for reaching out. Little reminders that it’s not a one-sided thing, even if Crowley always feels like he’s the burden. That it’s okay to want, it’s okay to need, and it’s okay to voice the need that isn’t being met. That he won’t be judged, or shunned, or cast away. Aziraphale would never.

It’s a process. And this is a big day. The biggest.

A tiny confession, massive in size: “Christ, I’m bloody terrified.”

Aziraphale pulls back, just enough to see his face. His voice is soft. “Terrified of what?”

Crowley shakes his head. How does one even answer that?

“…nothing. Everything. I- I don’t know.”

Aziraphale takes hold of his hands, coaxes him over to the red-velvet couch. Tacky. Terrible. But it takes the weight off his ever-shaky knees. His eyes dart around the room, like they’re afraid of what they’ll find. Don’t look at the concern, don’t look it in the eye. But he can’t help it.

“Afraid of… someone interfering?” the angel asks, quietly.

Crowley shrugs. “Maybe. No. I don’t… no.” They’ve given them no reason to. That part of their lives is over. It should be, for a long time. It should be.

“So then… afraid of embarrassing yourself, dear?” A bit of a teasing tone, and Crowley feels his burden lift when he sees the soft, fond smile. “I promise I won’t hold it against you if you trip. Though I can’t guarantee I won’t be laughing.”

He wants to laugh, too, but all his body does is huff, still so strung with nerves.

Aziraphale is still holding his hands, tugging them just a little bit closer. “…not that, either, is it? Darling, are you…” He swallows, like it’s taking effort, and there’s a shadow on his face, “are you having second thoughts? I just- I want you to know that that’s alright, if that’s it. If you need more time, we can-”

Crowley shakes his head with much haste and vigor; “No, angel, God no-”

He pulls Aziraphale’s hands into his own lap, twists the small vine-y ring on his pinkie, holds them close. “I’m. I’ve always been sure about you. I just. I’m so- Fuck, I’m so terrified, that like. We do this, and then one day you’ll wake up and you’re chained to me and I’m the burden you carry for the rest of your life, I- are you sure? Angel, you could have the world, are you- do you really want-”

Even as he says it, it feels like an injustice, for him to doubt like this, for him to hurt like this, even though the angel’s shown him nothing but kindness. It’s giant and looming and it’s all that he can see, despite all the light his angel brings. And that’s it, isn’t it, the fear? That his own darkness will always overpower that light.

Aziraphale is shaking his head, and oh, oh no, he’s made him cry, he’s made the angel cry-

“Crowley, Crowley, love- don’t you even dare suggest- I’ve been alive for six thousand years and nobody, nobody completes me like you do. Nobody has seen every aspect of me, and chosen to hold them in love. I have never, not ever, not even for a second- no, Crowley, look at me. Please, I need you to understand. I’ve never- never ever wanted anyone but you.”

Angels don’t lie, just like demons don’t love. Crowley knows they both can - there’s enough human in both of them, shining through the cracks, but Aziraphale wouldn’t, not about this. He radiates concern, and truth, and love, oh, so much love.

This isn’t a lie, because he taste the truth of it on the air, feel it in every crevice of his being.

“I’m sorry,” and his voice, it breaks, like tiny splinters tearing through icebergs, “angel, I know, and God, I’m so sorry-” But the angel catches him again.

“None of that,” Aziraphale says, “that is quite enough. You never have to apologize for feeling overwhelmed. My dear, that’s what I’m here for. And if you forget, or you’re afraid it’s stopped being the truth, just ask me, and I’ll tell it to you again. As many times as you need to hear it.”

Crowley ducks his head; it’s still hard to be seen like this, to be loved like this, so completely, so openly. Aziraphale, as ever, knows. He opens his arms again, pulls him in, tucks him into his shoulder. Crowley remembers to breathe.

He’s not sure how long they just sit, and breathe, and hold. Long enough for apprehension to be sucked away, and slowly creep back in – they can’t be late, not for this.

Crowley shifts, slow, reluctant. “…angel? Do you… what time is it?”

Aziraphale pulls back, equally reluctant. “Just about time to go, I’d expect. Do you feel ready?” Something in his voice says that it doesn’t matter. That he’ll slow time and stop for as long as Crowley needs.

Crowley grimaces, but his humor is returning, slowly, slowly. “Ready as I’ll ever be. Always was, really.”

The angel tuts, but it’s not offended, not really. “I think excitement is rather appropriate, don’t you? That’s the prevalent feeling, in good ceremonies, or so I’ve read.”

“…these ceremonies are usually for humans,” Crowley says, “we don’t need to conform. Though I guess you’re right about excitement. It’s… a commitment. A- a promise. That is exciting.”

Aziraphale beams. “Well, there you go.”

He pulls himself to his feet, extending a hand to Crowley as he does so. “Shall we break with tradition, and walk down together?”

Crowley thinks of the plan, thinks of the different ideas they’d has as to who would be waiting (he’d always been waiting) and who would take the walk (always toward one another, no matter where they’re coming from). Thinks how it could go both ways and make absolute ineffable sense.

“Yeah. Yeah, I do think we should.”

It feels fitting, poetic. Their own side, as always. Their way. He links their hands, and lets his angel pull him to his feet.

“I’m going to cry,” Aziraphale tells him, before the doors are opened. “Just- just warning you. I will. I seem to be incessantly emotional today.”

Crowley turns to face him, through his own watery eyes. “Bet I’ll beat you to it.”

And he does.

~~~

(Thank you for reading, give me a shout if you liked it!! & maybe consider reblogging to support a new writer in the fandom :D)

#good omens #good omens fanfic #good omens fanfiction #ineffable husbands #ineffable hushands fanfic #aziraphale x crowley #aziraphale x crowley fanfic #my writing

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itsqueencyrine · 4 years

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I started web logging my thoughts and some bits and pieces of my life here on Tumblr in 2009. Ever since I discovered this place, I never want to leave. I mean, how could I? How could I leave the place where I feel safe? The place where I learned how to be honest with myself, how to get real with my own thoughts without feeling mortified about getting judged?

Even before coming upon the world of journalling, this platform has already been present in my life. The people that I followed back then were great at putting into words everything that’s on their mind. I thought that their blog contents were so good that I wanted so bad to emulate them. I loved how raw their narratives were. And I thought they were utterly brave for being shamelessly vulnerable on the world wide web and didn’t care if they’d get mocked or judged because of it.

Through Tumblr community, I learned how to be comfortable in expressing myself — in words and in photographs. Here also is where I discovered that I can be creative with words and writing simple anecdotes and essays has become one of my interests. I must acknowledge the fact that my writing skill is a huge bold, italized, and underlined bllltttthhh compared to those people who are truly gifted in this department but, I won’t allow that to stop me from doing what I love to do.

I began to get more comfortable in unloading my thoughts and feelings in this place that each time something good and amusing happened to me, I go straight to this place and babble about it as if talking to a friend about my day and/or experiences. Or if something or someone upsets me, I find my blog to be a convenient avenue where I can rant non-stop and freely vent out my anger. I thought nobody would ever care to read my blog so I didn’t feel the need to filter my cyber mouth. And even if they read about my rants, I thought they’d be more forgiving because it’s just the internet and hope that they would forget about what they read and move on with their lives.

I’ve been doing that for the last 10 years —broadcasting some parts of my life on the world wide web. And then an epiphany happened.

A few of my friends started to read my blog since I sometimes share my posts on Facebook. I notice that there are informations and details of my life that I only shared on my blog that were mentioned or brought up in our conversations. I’d be a little shock and sometimes panic internally whenever that happens and ask them how did they know about that piece of information. They’d then be surprised with my reactions and say, “you wrote that in your blog, right?”

I have come to a realisation that, for 10 years, I’ve been too comfortable and too confident in this place. I’ve been sharing too much of my life on the world wide web that the fine line that separates what and what not to share on the internet has become blur, almost blotted out. And even in the real world, or the world that’s outside the internet, I often find myself sharing too much to a lot of people.

I have never really told anyone everything about my life, yet. If you’ve been reading my posts since way back, all the things you know about me through my blog is just the tip of the iceberg. All of those things are only trivial compared to the stories that I would never ever tell.

But it still feels like I have given a huge chunk of myself already and I regret sharing some parts of me that I wish I shouldn’t have. And because some cold-hearted people used what they’ve read on my blog against me, I now care too much about how the world would perceive me with my content.

My draft folder is full of unfinished narratives and essays that I can’t get myself to finish because I now care too much and I want to be more careful as well. I have never told anyone everything about my life yet and I don’t want to reach to that point where even strangers know the number of freckles on my arms.

Right now, I want to deal with everything that’s going on in my daily life outside Tumblr. I confine my throughts and ideas in my journal nowadays. I’ve also been journalling for years now but I am spending more time unloading my baggages in my journal since I decided that blogging will have to take a back seat. For now. I want to bring the line that separates my reality from the internet world back to life. (Ka char ba sa back to life uy.) And this is why I am taking a break.

I’m giving myself at least 6 months to a year of hiatus (but I doubt I could last until next year. hahaha!) I made this new account in January to have a fresh start... I guess? My old blogs are still alive but I changed their URLs so none could read back my old posts (except for my followers in those blogs).

I’ll be back, I promise. I’m just taking a short break.

#03143020 #personal #on hiatus #mao siguro ni ang reason ngano uninspired keu ko mo suwat

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eeveelutionsforequality · 4 years

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"(I’m happy for you to post this, just please keep my url out) I’m the pewdiepie anon from colours and you’ve changed my mind a bit on the whole pr team thing. I was thinking more along the lines of you’d think he’d know by this point not to say that sort of thing on his channel and a pr team would help not to make those little slip ups that humans do make, but I hadn’t thought about the fact that would lead to all the things you listed. And in terms of the whole voice thing, I kinda got...

...fucked by the ask limit and that ended up being a thought cut short. I wasn’t trying to say that by making dark jokes he condones the act (id be pretty hypocritical to say that given my sense of humour), I’m approaching it more from the fact that I know jokes like that can upset some people so I only make them around people I know won’t be. I won’t loudly tell an abortion joke in a pub because I don’t want to upset people. I tell jokes to make people laugh. I don’t think it makes him a ...

... a racist, just that if a person I didn’t know well made a joke like his (or mine) in public it would make me a bit weary. Not because I immediately brand them as a racist, but just the fact they think that sort of humour can be used with people you don’t know is okay. Same way I don’t make weed jokes around my family because (although they’re fine with me doing it) I know they just don’t find that sort of thing funny and it would just make the atmosphere awkward. Maybe I’m more ...

... thinking about how it almost feels like pdp is just being a bit socially oblivious or ignorant. He knows that he has a huge audience so maybe making a n word joke won’t go down well. Does that all make sense? Like I said, I’m bad at wording things out sometimes so sorry if some of this is a bit confusing, just ask if something isn’t clear :)"

Yeah, a PR team sounds like a good thing on the surface until you remember that it just becomes this divide between creator and real world. Heck, mishaps like the black kid being put in the monkey hoodie for that clothing line happened in spite of PR teams, and potentially because PR teams are just as susceptible to the kind of detachment that they can create in others.

I know that some of this is personal preference, but I prefer watching a human being who makes somewhat regular dumb little mistakes and engages with the conversation about them in a human way (even if that can include defensiveness), to watching a smiling figure who's words are chopped up and siphoned through by faceless people in pursuit of inoffensiveness, only for said figure to seem to have "let the mask slip" when they fuck up because we've got such high hopes and it all comes tumbling down when they have no idea how to interact with the real world, and who then give the most cookie-cutter apology that is hard to believe.

The ask limit is an asshole, I'm sorry you didn't get everything out.

Yeah, I do try to be careful with my sense of humour around people that I know could be upset by it, but if I'm making a joke at the bus stop with my incredibly crude friend and somebody starts glaring at us, I'm not going to give that stranger a heartfelt apology because they made the mistake of listening in to a private conversation at a normal volume and taking it personally when we hadn't even noticed that they were there or could hear us.

I give people heartfelt apologies if I'm talking to them and I forget that something is a sore topic for them, but not people who are eavesdropping and certainly not people who could click away from a video or walk out of a comedy club at any time. I think ultimately you have to pick your apologies as much as you have to pick your battles, because it can be as bad to be a doormat as it can be to be confrontational.

I think there's a difference between being in a group of people you know with whom a certain joke would be awkward, and being on your own channel making a dark joke - people can click away from your channel and never see you again, you don't have to hold up a pleasant relationship with them for the sake of the future. The ability to leave at any moment is also very important in this conversation, and it's what's lacking in the social interactions we talk about and experience.

I can understand why people think that it is okay to make jokes around people that you don't know, especially people who've faced hardship in their lives and have had to learn to have a "tough outer shell" and think that the rest of the world should too. Even I'm guilty of sometimes internally thinking "Man, if I went through all of that shit and came out the other end, how come some people can't handle a bad word?" even though I know that it's not that simple.

Contrapoints tackled the "huge audience" thing in a new video, mentioning how it holds people to this ridiculous standard of perfection when they're still human and no matter what you say, if you're saying it to enough people, somebody is going to be upset by it.

It's a new frontier too - I think that younger people forget how new the internet is and how, at least for those of us who are a bit older or who grew up very poor, this is a very difficult world to adapt to, especially when you're somebody who had to adapt while amassing literally millions of people monitoring your every move and thus less chance for genuine social interaction in this medium (I mean, a lot of his interaction is with fans who he can't truly let his guard down around, or other creators who also can't truly let their guard down and navigate this world as a "nobody"). Even classic celebrities never had this kind of instantaneous connection to millions of people to deal with.

Add to that the fact that comedians can say and have said much worse jokes on stage, but they're not (or at least didn't used to be) judged for it because we recognise that the on-stage comedian is somebody there to make us laugh and not somebody who's word should be taken at face value and interpreted as an offence. He's expected to perform like a comedian without the freedoms that we grant to comedians, on a stage that is only a stage when we the audience deem it one.

He, like most of us, comes from a world where this wasn't normal, and we've had to adapt quickly to it - if you grew up watching massively more offensive stuff coming out of comedians, it's not unreasonable to be surprised when you're on your "stage" and people decide that you're not allowed to make those jokes.

I think that I understood what you meant, at least I hope I did! I'm not good at doing the whole words thing either though!

#Mod Vaporeon

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fdhfjdafdajfa · 5 years

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tl;dr I’m a homeless sex trafficking refugee in third world poverty and I’m fleeing again for my safety.

the old post got too long

my life so far

again hi it’s me vivi or pearl or sibyl. some of my old urls are whimslcott, fistdeserver, lalondeite, and there are a whole lot more I don’t remember. my history on this website starts in 2009, when all my friends got called out for things like stabbing people and trafficking me for sex. i've been reforging my entire personality in this dark crucible from before we realised that softboys watching my little pony wasn’t going to revolutionise gender relations, and, as should surprise nobody by now, i am in need of some assistance.

back when i lived in USA, my primary source of income was social security disability. i made some posts about how shit it was. before i got on SSD, I was homeless for six years, which I hope helps bring home how much I needed it. but when i got sick of spending my whole life waiting for an awkward reunion with my sex traffickers I fucked off to a completely different part of the world. because I did that SSDI cut me off and i’m now without a source of income, but I’ve had tumblr come through before in a pinch. my list of mental health diagnoses is as extensive as you might imagine. i imagine i’ve cycled through about half the DSM by now and it’s not like I have access to a therapist right now. Let’s just say I have a lot of post-traumatic stress and leave it at that.

anyway, in addition to the big list of horrific disabilities i still have, there’s also a big allcaps notice on my visa saying NO WORK/BUSINESS so that’s that on that. i’ve asked a few ngo-people about it but they mostly just kinda make :/ expressions and then tell me they’ll look into it. But my visa status requires me to periodically throw lump sums of a couple hundred dollars at the Indian embassy about once a year or so and if I don’t have that I’ll go from being a kind of hoopty immigration status to being straight-up undocumented and nobody wants that.

since my legal immigration status is kind of hoopty, I haven’t been able to get things like a bank account and am dependant on my roommate for stuff like that. as such I don’t have anything like a venmo or an impactguru.

i have these things:

https://ko-fi.com/vivyansarlas https://www.paypal.me/pcoolpearl https://www.patreon.com/vivyansarlas

while I’m technically capable of *surviving* for another few months off of what’s left of my savings, attempting to isn’t a very good idea. my computer is starting to age a bit, my cell phone fell off a 13th story window almost a year ago and so is not really functional, i really need new clothes, and i’ve got a few neglected medical needs, like therapy and jaw surgery. also, my meds are about $30 a month. this is to say I need to have some income so I can start working out a plan for these issues in the medium-to-long term.

aside from my web presence, which is pretty good these days (ask me about my twitter), i’m also working on my first book, which is about 3/7ths of the way complete by current trajectory and I've gotten publishing offers from a couple pieces of shortform I’m working on.

my current living situation

i am currently homeless. the earlier iteration of this post was about how I lived in a shitty delhi slum flat that was extremely injurious and hazardous to my health due to heat and dust. as of writing the earlier iteration, I had been suffering from heat stroke on and off for about a week, and had given up trying to sleep In the flat itself, and had started straight up carrying my mattress out onto the roof.

hilariously enough, my situation has gotten immeasurably worse since then. my roommate had a lot of personal flaws I’d been making excuses for, because as anyone who knows me will tell you, I’d rather make excuses and trust people and run the risk of getting screwed over every now and again. when my roommate snapped and started verbally abusing and threatening me for like. hours a day. i figured no problem, it’s not too hard to find a place to live here.

i made a miscalculation. what i didn’t account for is that in the past 2 months all the hindus have gone crazy and now there are hindus who keep mass reporting my posts in the housing groups so I can’t use housing groups anymore. there’s a lot more info on that on the old post. but between them and other subtle changes in hindus in delhi i’m really feeling like it’s time to get the fuck out of dodge.

the political situation making me unsafe

it’s hard to impress just how bad things have gotten over here. so here’s some news articles to do it for me.

You know India’s democracy is broken when millions wait for election results in fear

A country where some live with fear has failed

This Is What Young Muslim Voters Are Thinking About This Election: “I keep fearing something like the holocaust can happen here.”

This is pretty much ground consensus. Delhi is no longer safe for Muslims. Period. it doesnt really even matter how the election goes. what matters is that hindus are crazy now and can’t be peacefully coexisted with. Now that I have seen what this monstrous religion is I can’t go back to pretending not to know how they’re just dormant until the next riot or election when they will become rabid dogs again. the coordinated reporting campaigns against me, a homeless muslim trying to find a place to live, are absolutely targeted hate violence and the only reason i’m alive is because it happened behind a computer screen.

the person i was going to stay with from the 21st on has also left the state so i’m packing up and going to muslim-majority kashmir, which from everything i’ve heard is way safer than you’d expect with the extreme levels of militarisation. i guess i’ll find out! i do not have any plans for what to do once I am in Kashmir or any idea of where I am staying. It is a scouting mission to find stuf like that out. that’s the level of desperation we’re dealing with right now.

i’m really in a dilly of a pickle here so it’s definitely a “future deeply uncertain, every bit helps” type situation.

https://ko-fi.com/vivyansarlas https://www.paypal.me/pcoolpearl https://www.patreon.com/vivyansarlas

#signal boost #add testimonies about me perhaps

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theartofmedia · 5 years

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Kotaku and the Art of Game Leaks

(Full disclosure: this piece was commissioned by a friend. The topic has changed from the initial pitch, but still. I don’t know how that may or may not affect your view on this piece, but I still feel it’s important for me to be transparent about this.) On May 30th, 2019, Laura Kate Dale announced her departure from Kotaku UK. Dale is a controversial figure among the games journalist community for... multiple reasons (please note the latter link lacks any actual evidence and how she apparently didn’t report this Uber driver for ‘nearly kidnapping her’ despite posting it publicly on Twitter, hence the controversy around it), but that’s not what we’re talking about today. What we’re going to be discussing is what she is known for the most: video game leaks.

LKD is most known for leaking video game information prior to their release, from information about Dark Souls Remastered, to unboxing a PS4 Slim before Sony itself even announced its existence, to Switch software. It got to the point where LKD was blacklisted by Nintendo UK, most likely for leaking so much information.

Now as I was researching LKD, there was something I noticed. A lot of people supported LKD’s leaks, calling it “real journalism,” and commending her for doing her job so well. As shown by the link above, many people mocked Nintendo UK for blacklisting her for “doing her job too well.” People are always scrambling for new leaks, new information, though in many cases, this can lead to fake leaks, misinformation, and confusion among players.

And it got me to think: how do leaks really affect both the devs and the consumers of games?

The conclusion I’ve come to about it is: it does more harm than good on both sides, but especially to the devs.

Here we will be defining four categories of leaks (three of which are explained here by Griffin Vacheron of Game Revolution), though our main focus will be on two.

Accidental leaks are just like they sound: they’re accidents. Something happened, something went wrong, and people got a hold of information before they were supposed to. Like when Capcom put all the pictures of the roster of Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 on their website when a good portion of the roster hadn’t yet been announced, and the unannounced characters could be found via a small URL change. Or when Walmart’s Canadian site revealed around 40 unannounced titles due to a(n alleged) glitch in their system just weeks before E3 2018. Or when Bethesda accidentally streamed their E3 2015 rehearsal which ended up confirming the existence of Dishonored 2. Yeah.

The main component of accidental leaks is just that--accidental. Someone did something wrong, something in a system went wrong, someone didn’t think through the consequences of what probably seemed like a good idea at the time--it happens! Nothing is perfect, people included, and shit happens. But the key part is that it’s not intentional. Someone may (or, really, will) be reprimanded, punished, or even fired depending on the leak, but there was never any intention to reveal this information.

Company leaks are... not entirely proven, from my research. This is the idea that the developers themselves leak information in order to draw attention to their game and hype it up. Often, this will be the other determination of certain leaks--was it an accident, or a PR stunt? There’s no real definitive proof and seems to simply be rumor, but the possibility still exists, as there’s no real way to disprove it, either.

Ethic leaks are generally the exception, not the rule. These are leaks of working conditions, such as an employee from NetherRealm talking about the toxic work environment, or Rockstar employees opening up about how they were mistreated and underpaid and burned to ashes, or Blizzard’s layoff of 800 employees. (Further reading here on the abuse of game devs, as well as what can be done about it.) These are things that need to be talked about, because these relate to the treatment of actual, real people. These aren’t issues then of game content or development, it’s an issue of ethics in the workplace. Same with the leak of this document that details how AI can be used to encourage microtransactions, though that is an issue related to the consumer rather than the workers. Shady tactics and the maltreatment of workers is something that needs to be shown and discussed and talked about, because these things affect the actual workers, as well as the quality of a product and the company’s integrity in relation to the consumer. (Basically, if you intentionally make your game in such a way that players have to use microtransactions to make any significant progress, you’ve ruined your integrity as a company by trying to drain your player base of more money, regardless of the base price they paid for the game anyway. It’s a scummy business practice, and that kind of thing should be revealed to the public that you’re going to try to bleed dry.)

Intentional leaks are just as they sound: they’re the intentional leak of information. This is when people outside the company hack in and reveal secrets, or when people inside the company reveal information (whether directly or indirectly via being sources for journalists) before they are to be officially announced. The information given is given with the knowledge that yes, someone is going to reveal it to the public.

So let’s talk about the ramifications of intentional leaks on game devs.

Remember Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle? The cover image had been leaked before the team had a chance to actually showcase the game. Nobody knew anything about the game other than the cover, and universal reception at the time was: “This is going to be terrible.” Because of a leaked image, the public already had a strong negative opinion about it. However, the showcase that showed off actual gameplay was well-received, and the Metacritic score is 85. So the game itself was pretty damn good, according to the critics. An unlikely crossover turned out well! But the initial reaction was incredibly demoralizing to the team. It’s one thing to have criticism given to a game based on a trailer or gameplay showcase; it’s another to get criticism based on a single image and the concept alone with no other information given. As the director and music composer explain, the dev team was very worried and stressed not just about the game reception but about the showcase, as they were afraid that the reception to the showcase was going to be bad due to the already-negative opinion on the game.

Let’s also talk about how CD Projekt Red had demo gameplay and audio of Cyberpunk 2077 leaked by a journalist (who later complained about not being credited, about how his relationship with CD Projekt Red and the PR person he was friends with) after being asked not to. The company had their trust in the journalists--someone who they had a fifteen year relationship with--used and abused, leading to secrets being leaked. The devs had politely asked the journalists not to do so, but one did, and apparently saw nothing wrong with leaking private information and posting it to the public.

Or let’s talk about how, way back in the day, the entire source code for Half-Life 2 was revealed to the public and Valve (allegedly) lost $250 million dollars. The article actually states some of the effects of the leaked source code: “Meanwhile, the team at Valve, which had been in crunch mode for months, was left reeling by the leak. The game was costing the company $1 million a month to build and the end was still far from sight. The leak had not only caused financial damage but had demotivated a tired team. One young designer asked Newell, "Is this going to destroy the company?" (found under the heading “A Red Letter Day”).

Or we can talk about the Sm4sh leaks back in 2014 and how it led to an employee (allegedly) being fired and sued due to leaking this information. Now, this can very easily be viewed as justice being served to the leaker, and I would agree. But what is the issue here can be summed up by PlatinumGames producer JP Kellams:

The people working for years and years on a project suddenly have parts of their project--that they wanted to surprise players with, this particular instance being the Sm4sh roster--given out to the public before they wanted it to be. Imagine working for years on your life on a project, and then having someone reveal your work to the internet without your knowledge or permission. I know I would feel dejected, exhausted, hopeless, hurt, regardless of any positive reception to what was revealed. You, as someone who has worked so incredibly hard--and, in many cases in the game industry, been thoroughly abused--apparently don’t have the right to reveal the thing you’ve been working on the way you want.

I want to make this clear: I am not talking about “the Big Corporation” here. I don’t care about the higher-ups who put the pressure on the workers. I care about the workers, the little people that are being trampled on and forced to work in abusive, toxic conditions in order to meet a deadline and the outrageous demands of the higher-ups. They are the ones suffering.

Case in point: the Blufever leaks for Final Fantasy XIV. The details are a bit murky, as is with most leaks, but the story as I understand it is: user Blufever is/was an employee at Square Enix who leaked massive amounts of information on upcoming expansions/patches for FFXIV. Then, their account went dark, as they apparently feared for being found out by Square Enix. Vergeben, a known reputable leaker within the Smash community, had this to say about the situation:

Now, of course, there is no way to truly verify these claims. However, due to Vergeben’s reputation as an accurate leaker (and the fact that he was right about one of the upcoming DLC characters being from Square Enix) leads me to believe him. Assuming that his claims are true, someone leaking all of this information to the public put a lot of innocent people in the line of fire--and it’s very possible that these

So, what does this have to do with Kotaku?

Here’s something interesting.

When known E3 leaker WabiSabi was given a cease & desist warning from Nintendo for leaking information, take a look at some of the top replies. (Note that a lot of them are ninja gifs, here’s a sample so I don’t have to do it for every one.)

Not all of the replies are against WabiSabi, however, though a majority seem to be:

(About the above: I can’t really find anything suggesting that LKD was leaking things for “customer advocacy,” other than confirming that the next gen console (now known as the Switch) was not using the Wii branding like its predecessor did, thus easing some fears because of the bombing of the Wii U. Other tweets about that are here, but don’t really sway me in terms of “consumer advocacy.”)

As shown, the replies seem to be pretty divisive on whether or not it was a good or bad thing that WabiSabi got hit with a cease & desist.

However, let’s have a look at some of the replies to LKD’s tweet about how she was blacklisted by Nintendo.

And again, not all are supportive of her:

I actually had to look quite a bit to find any negative comments. Many were supportive of her.

(I would like to take this moment to get unprofessional for a second and unleash my full opinion of this: NO FUCKING SHIT YOU GOT BLACKLISTED, SHERLOCK. THEY TRUST YOU WITH THEIR SECRETS AND THEN YOU DISRESPECT THEM BY REVEALING THEM BEFORE THEY DID. I DO NOT FUCKING UNDERSTAND WHY PEOPLE WOULD SAY IT’S A COMPANY BEING “SHADY” WHEN IT’S JUST INFORMATION ABOUT UPCOMING PRODUCTS. NOTHING ABOUT ETHICS OR CONSUMER TRUST OR PRODUCT QUALITY. anyway,)

Now, you can say, “But Sakra! That’s a three-year difference!” And I rebuke with: people still support her to this day in spite of this. Kotaku UK kept her on though all of this and then some. It wasn’t until a kerfuffle happened in April with the “Persona 5 OST Has A Disability Slur” thing happened, and soon after, LKD left. It seems that the immense backlash with that was what fully pushed her off. (Now whether she was forced to resign or legitimately wanted to leave, that’s something only Kotaku UK and she know for sure.) The point is, her departure from Kotaku UK seems to have been completely unrelated to her leaks.

And why would it when Kotaku themselves--not just the UK chapter--are clearly very supportive of video game leaks of this nature?

Just have a look at their recent posts. All I did was put “leaks” in the search box. You may say “they’re just reporting the news of leaks!” But they put some of the leaked information IN the articles. The one on Watch Dogs Legion even confirmed the leaks. “Kotaku can confirm that this one’s real, as we’ve heard the name from several sources plugged into the company.”

Oh, and let’s not forget this lovely fucking article from 2015 where a Kotaku writer apparently speaks for the site and basically victimizes themselves for being blacklisted by Ubisoft and Bethesda. In fact, we’re going to dissect it, just because there is so much bullshit in here from the author, who is clearly speaking for Kotaku as a whole!

Buckle up, kids, your local Sakra is about to get fucking pissed.

The author describes how the Bethesda blackout came after “we reported insiders’ accounts of the troubled development of the still unreleased fourth major Doom game. In May of that year, we reported that Arkane Austin, the Bethesda-owned studio behind Dishonored, would be working on a new version of the long missing-in-action Prey 2 and that some at the studio were not pleased about that. When top people at Bethesda started making statements casting doubt on our reporting, we published a leaked internal e-mail confirming that those statements had misled gamers and that Arkane had indeed been working on a version of Prey 2.”

However, Kotaku at that time had also posted “our December 2013 report detailing the existence of the then-secret Fallout 4.” Reporting on troubled development isn’t an issue. Leaking emails just to confirm a game when Bethesda was desperately trying to preserve their secrecy that you had broken (probably not first, but Kotaku has a lot of mainstream reach) is an issue. I don’t like Bethesda, don’t get me wrong, but they were trying to salvage the secrecy of a project. Do I think trying to lie to the audience in order to keep the existence of a project secret is okay? No, not really. But I understand what they were trying to do. And whether you agree with their choices or not--no shit you would be blacklisted, especially if you have insiders as described here! You can’t go crying victim and martyr yourselves when you do this kind of shit. Especially if you were reporting on Fallout 4, a major fucking entry in a popular franchise!

As for the Ubisoft blackout...

“The current Ubisoft blackout is actually the second in as many years. The company tried a similar approach in the spring of 2014 after we published early images of the then-unannounced Assassin’s Creed Unity—images that had been leaked to us by an independent source. That article confirmed news about the company’s extraordinary plans to release two entirely different AC games in the fall of that year, one for new consoles and one for old. Ubisoft had warmed back to Kotaku by the summer of 2014, several months after the Unity report, but has cold-shouldered us since the Victory story one year ago. It’s possible other articles angered them, too. But that Victory piece is a safe bet.”

Ubisoft actually gave Kotaku another chance after leaking Unity, and the Victory (now Syndicate) story was, guess what, more leaks. You broke Ubisoft’s trust once, then you broke it again. Frankly, it’s fucking disgusting, knowing about how these leaks really affect devs, that Kotaku would dare to turn itself into a “journalism martyr,” as it were, because they were ignored by the devs whose trust they broke.

Now, you can say that maybe they didn’t know the information of how it affects devs--but a) the Sm4sh leaks and the fallout had already happened by then (it was 2014) and the Half-Life 2 source code fiasco had happened in the previous decade. Also, if they had insiders, wouldn’t they know just how serious leaking this information was and how it puts their sources and other devs at risk? Maybe Ubisoft and Bethesda aren’t as strict on their leak policies as Square Enix and Nintendo are--we don’t know. But I can’t imagine that they like it at all.

“I’m sure some people will sympathize with Bethesda and Ubisoft. Some will cheer these companies and hope others follow suit. They will see this kind of reporting as upsetting, as ruining surprises and frustrating creative people. They will claim we are “hurting video games,” and, as so many do, mistake the job of entertainment reporting for the mandate to hype entertainment products.

“We serve our readers, not game companies, and will always do so to the best of our ability, no matter who in the gaming world is or isn’t angry with us at the moment. In some ways, the blacklist has even been instructive—cut off from press access and pre-release review copies, we have doubled down on our post-release “embedding” approach to games coverage. We’ve experienced some of the year’s biggest games from street level, at the same time and in the same way as our readers.”

No.

It isn’t just about “spoilers” and “ruining the surprise.” In some cases, yes, a lot of people don’t like or actively avoid leaks because they do want to be surprised. But that’s not the only thing.

By “serving your readers” and trying to dig for this information, you’re putting devs at risk. You’re putting your “sources” at risk. Now, if you were reporting on development or shady tactics or awful work environments or specific negative incidents behind the scenes or things that should be talked about, I would absolutely agree with you that you should continue digging deeper. But that’s not it. The companies trust you not to reveal something until a certain time, and you go and do it anyway.

By claiming victim and demonizing the “big bad corporation” for blacklisting you, you minimize the actual stress and hardships it put on the smaller guys in the company that the entire company is built on. You completely brush it aside and paint the entire company as irrational. You completely neglect the plight of the actual people working on it, and disrespect them by revealing their information before they do, when they have worked for SO LONG on whatever project it is. Like JP Kellams said, devs earn the right to talk about their product because they worked on it for so long. You haven’t.

And then... this paragraph.

“Too many big game publishers cling to an irrational expectation of secrecy and are rankled when the press shows them how unrealistic they’re being. There will always be a clash between independent reporters and those seek to control information, but many of these companies appear to believe that it is actually possible in 2015 for hundreds of people to work dozens of months on a video game and for no information about the project to seep out. They appear to believe that the general public will not find out about these games until their marketing plans say it’s time. They operate with the assumption that the press will not upend these plans, and should the press defy their assumption, they bring down the hammer. We make our own judgments about what information best serves the news value of a story, and what our readers would prefer not to know—which is why, for example, we omitted key plot details from the Fallout 4 scripts that were leaked to us. We keep covering these companies’ games, of course. Readers expect that. Millions of people still read our stories about them. The companies just leave themselves a little more out of the equation.”

I never thought I’d see the day when video game companies were being victim-blamed.

Frankly, by leaking information, it ruins the relationship between the companies and the journalist, because then the company will start to make generalizations about journalists and not trust them, thinking that they will reveal whatever information they give them, which makes journalists like this press harder for information, and can you see where I’m going with this? It’s a cycle of mistrust, perpetuated by journalists like these who go against the wishes of a company that just wants to keep something a surprise until a certain date.

And then this motherfucker has the audacity to frame companies blacklisting reporters that leak information as bad! “They operate with the assumption that the press will not upend these plans, and should the press defy their assumption, they bring down the hammer.” Why are companies wrong for trusting journalists? Are you implying that all games journalists are untrustworthy, because they won’t respect the wishes of a company that gives them the information in good faith that they won’t leak it? You do say that “it is nearly unfathomable to me that a reporter would sit on true information about what’s really happening in gaming, that we would refrain from telling our readers something because it would mess with a company’s marketing plan,” so I don’t know, maybe you DO think that all games journalists should immediately report on confidential information that the game companies are going to eventually reveal anyway and while only really receiving clout in return. Oh, whoops, got a little bitter there.

“They appear to believe that the general public will not find out about these games until their marketing plans say it’s time.”

Maybe because people like YOU are the ones who leak it! You can just as easily, you know, not fucking do that! This feels more like an excuse to not accept responsibility/deflect criticism, because ‘the companies shouldn’t have expected us to stay quiet!!!’ This is just straight-up victim blaming. Like it’s actually kind of scary.

It’s this ideology that Kotaku seems to stand by, as LKD once stated that higher-ups look over the written articles to approve them, and to my knowledge, Kotaku hasn’t redacted any of these statements, so I’m assuming that they still stand by it. Them spreading this ideology is what perpetuates the idea of game leaks (of the non-accidental, non-ethics-related kind) being “good journalism,” and with how much reach Kotaku has, it has the power to be legitimately damaging.

“They have done so in apparent retaliation for the fact that we did our jobs as reporters and as critics. We told the truth about their games, sometimes in ways that disrupted a marketing plan, other times in ways that shone an unflattering light on their products and company practices. Both publishers’ actions demonstrate contempt for us and, by extension, the whole of the gaming press. They would hamper independent reporting in pursuit of a status quo in which video game journalists are little more than malleable, servile arms of a corporate sales apparatus. It is a state of affairs that we reject.”

And here it is: Kotaku was just the humble, underdog reporter just doing their job, and the publishers show off contempt for the entire industry (rather than just Kotaku itself, I guess blacklisting one site means you hate all of games journalism) for Kotaku simply doing their jobs!

No, you ignorant twat, you broke their trust, so they don’t want to talk to you anymore. You don’t get to play victim when YOU were the one who blew the whistle.

Now, I cannot stress this enough: I am only talking about leaks related to game announcements, content details, etc. that are deliberately leaked to the public from an inside source. I am not talking about leaks related to ethical violations or troubled development or other negative things within companies. Those are things that should be reported on. But that kind of thing isn’t primarily what Kotaku is talking about and promoting; they are promoting the reveal of information because it’s “just good journalism.”

Except, as shown above, it has some very dire, very real consequences for the people you don’t see, and maybe that’s why Kotaku is so adamant about defending themselves in this regard. Maybe they don’t see the living, breathing people who get affected by their leaks, and so they think they’re fighting against the Big Bad Corporation when, in reality, it’s much more complicated than that. It doesn’t feel real to them. Or, maybe they do and they just don’t care. I genuinely cannot say so one way or the other.

I really, truly hope that by reading this, you the reader have a new perspective on how leaks of that kind affect the industry, and the little people whose backs the companies are built on.

As for the article and Kotaku as a whole...

“Kotaku readers always deserve the truth. You deserve our best work. It doesn’t matter which company is mad at us today, or which companies get mad at us in the future. You’ll continue to get it.”

Fuck yourselves.

#kotaku #video games #games #games journalism #hooo BOY this one got angry #but!! it's done and i like it

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catboyfeli · 5 years

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It's been almost half a year. The only reason I found out about this Tumblr account is from aimlessly scrolling through your navi before blocking you. No one is stalking you anymore and unless someone like Hannibal mentions you, no one even talks of you. We've given up on hating you ages ago. We more fear everything about you. I even fear that with what you say of me in your byf someone you're close to might report me for nothing.

you say you’re scared yet continue to hate on me as if i’m evil and you were perfect. you’re the one who was consistently guilt tripping me every time i tried to apologize and patch things up. i may not have been perfect but i did my best to fix things. every time you broke down i tried to console you and you’d proceed to say how you should die and stuff. that’s straight up guilt tripping. and according to my friend, if anyone told you this, you’d blame it on your depression. but somehow i was always the bad guy when i did my best to be civil? just because i was honest about your behavior being toxic? real friends are supposed to call you out when you do bad shit, not sit there and let you continue to be awful.

all of it LITERALLY started over you being upset i didn’t tag my negative posts, but didn’t message me about it and expected me to know. then i posted about thinking you hate me because surprise, bpd anxiety and abandonment issues, and it all spiraled into this.

i don’t know your urls and i don’t care either. literally nobody gives a fuck about me or cares enough to even read my byf. i’m trying to heal from the past and heal from my mental illness, and apparently you only came here to get me to fix your image instead of actually fix anything.

i tried so hard to be nice to you and only got fucking hurt and hated on in return. i’m sorry but i’m tired of this. i’ve been so much better with my bpd lately and i don’t want anyone ruining it, and i don’t trust you whatsoever and for all i know this is some elaborate scheme to get people to hate me again. i literally only put you in my byf because i was in yours, and so people wouldn’t believe whatever lies you said. that’s literally it. you reflected everything you were doing onto me. but i literally never cared about getting revenge or whatever. we don’t like each other. i blocked your accounts. it’s that simple. i’m trying to live my life and have fun and heal and grow, not obsess over old drama.

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suspendrs · 5 years

Text

annual writing self-evaluation 2018

thank you @lululawrence for tagging me!! also i know nobody even really reads these things but i like to do them for my own reference year to year so if you’re actually interested in my answers they’ll all be below the cut!!

ALL FICS MUST HAVE POSTED ON AO3 IN 2018

1. Number of stories (including drabbles) posted to AO3: 7

2. Word count posted for the year: 231,933

3. List of works published this year (in order of posting):

thrills don’t come for free (feb. 1)

keep this love in a photograph (apr. 16)

it ain’t right, but isn’t it amazing (may 5)

there are no atheists in foxholes (june 12)

sugar in a plum (july 24)

satellite (oct. 5)

what’s inside your imagination (is as real as anything else) (oct. 20)

4. Fandoms I wrote for: one direction

5. Pairings: harry/louis

6. Story with the most:

Kudos: satellite (556)

Bookmarks: satellite (441)

Comments: satellite (53)

9. Work I’m most proud of (and why):

satellite, without a doubt. that fic took every ounce of my heart and soul and was absolutely worth every second i spent on it. i’ve never written something that took a mind of it’s own like that fic did, and it was so fun to be able to use myself as the mouthpiece for that story to tell itself.

10. Work I’m least proud of (and why):

probably thrills don’t come for free, only because it was something i wrote years and years ago and let sit in a folder for a rainy day, and i only posted it because i felt like i needed to get something up to remain relevant. that’s definitely a mindset i’m planning to leave in 2018 and i’m learning how to write and post for me and me only, which is a cool place to be in.

11. A favorite excerpt of your writing:

from satellite (bc it’s freshest in my mind and this was the first thing that came to mind when i saw this question):

“If you’d told me a year ago that I’d spend the next year sleeping in the same place every single night, I’d have told you the only way that was possible was if I was in the ground,” he says. “People like me don’t get things like this.”

“There aren’t people like you,” Harry says quietly. “You’re the only one, and you’re so much more special than you’ll ever admit.”

Louis huffs a quiet laugh, shaking his head. “I hope you’ll always think that way,” he says.

“I will, because I’m right,” Harry says, sticking his tongue out at Louis. “I know the world has made you feel like excess, like you don’t have a place to belong, but that’s not true. You belong everywhere, in the sunshine, in gentle summer breezes, in soft snow flurries and in the color the leaves turn in the fall. You belong in the sparkle in the ocean and the sound of a birdsong, and I wish you could see yourself in all of those places the way that I do. You’re every cozy rainshower in spring and every electrical storm in summer, you’re everything, and the world’s done itself a terrible injustice making you feel any other way.”

(I actually turned that piece of dialogue into a sonnet for my poetry workshop class last semester that’s how much i loved it dsjdbssda)

12. Share or describe a favorite review you received:

honestly any and every positive and/or constructive comment tbh. my favorite comments are the ones that tell me exactly what and why they liked my work, and the ones that analyze and connect my work to their own lives. my only goal in writing and in having an audience is to mean something to someone, to hopefully string at least a couple of words together that change the way someone looks at the world, or at themself, or at anything, tbh. i just love being able to impact people in any way and i love being told how i made someone feel something or think something or realize something. that’s the good shit.

13. A time when writing was really, really hard:

writing is always hard, especially when you’re not sure that you’re writing what you want to be writing. i’ve been feeling the pressure to move away from fanfiction and onto original fiction, and i even started writing my novel last month, but i’m having trouble pulling away from harry and louis, even if my original characters are still just harry and louis with different names.

14. A scene or character you wrote that surprised you:

the entirety of satellite. like i said before, that fic wrote itself, and i was only a bystander. when i first got the idea for that story, it was absolutely nothing like the finished product. originally, it was just a short piece, something a little more witty and funny and disastrous in nature, but it turned out really deep and heartfelt and philosophical. i’m very very pleased with it, obviously, but it’s absolutely nothing like how i pictured it would be.

15. How did you grow as a writer this year:

i figured out how to let a story happen instead of making it happen, and it made all the difference in my writing. i think my new favorite method is going in with a loose outline and some key plot points and just seeing where the characters want to go with it, because that’s when the story feels the most natural and those are the stories i’m happiest with.

16. How do you hope to grow next year:

i hope to keep learning and growing and producing more things that i’m proud of, and i hope i keep losing my interest in the numbers and gain more interest in the process.

17. Who was your greatest positive influence this year as a writer (could be another writer or beta or cheerleader or muse etc etc):

all of my amazing friends and their encouragement and all of the lovely people who left comments and sent messages to let me know they enjoyed my work are my biggest motivators so thank you everyone who’s ever said a single positive thing to me!!!!

18. Anything from your real life show up in your writing this year:

i think that my writing is a pretty accurate documentation of where my head is at at any given time tbh. my work reflects me and my life at the time of writing and i think it’s pretty easy to track my highs and lows through the quality and content of my work lmao

19. Any new wisdom you can share with other writers:

don’t force anything. if you don’t feel like writing today, don’t. if you don’t feel like writing all week, don’t. don’t let writing become a chore, let it be a fun hobby and something you look forward to doing.

20. Any projects you’re looking forward to starting (or finishing) in the new year:

my fic for the dystopian fic fest!!! it’s coming along v well so far and i’m excited to see where it goes dbsjbjas. i also have a bunch of other ideas and i’m about 160k away from hitting a million words on ao3 so that’s my goal for 2019!!!

21. Tag some writers whose answers you’d like to read.

@foolsholouday @harrytum @lesbianharrie @louwus and everyone else in the funfic gc i’m so tired i can’t remember everyone’s urls goondihgt

#twas a good year #i can't believe i wrote over 200k that's insane #granted satellite alone was half of that #but STILL #writing eval #tag thing

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