#aughties

[redravenblogs]

Uquiz is cool and all, but I miss Quizilla

[venusprincess-ts3]

>> Af Arisu Outfit_VenusPrincess <<

Download on Patreon Earlier

Polycount: 6849 (skirt v1), 7168 (Skirt v2 shorter), 9146 (top cropped), 9058 (top v2)

V2 skirt is shorter and made with wicked body. It has v*gina and b-hole

Will be available on tumblr in four weeks.

[vifetoile]

American Girl Minis, tiny dollhouse-dioramas engineered with real lights and magnetic walls, so the wallpaper was reversible

Copyright 2000 by Pleasant Company

[joanofarc]

summer love, the brunettes (2002).

i wanna be bruce 'cause he was born to run and brian, 'cause he was fun, fun, fun

[ambassadorquark]

there's also a lot of rap music about weird shit by nerds is the thing. i think a lot of people on here would like deltron 3030

[void-botanist]

the Night Shift powerpoint, in which I tell you nothing about the plot because idk anything about the plot, is real and it's coming

[xmenred2022]

Watching quantumania made me reread ewings antman mini and oh my god it’s so good and I’m not even talking about the writing. The way each issue mimics the era of marvel comics it’s set in is incredible. Jordie Bellaire, the colorist, is a superstar and Tom Reilly’s art is always incredible. Everyone read it it’s so so good.

[pinkfey]

i feel like just thirty years ago if you whipped out a camcorder and recorded random unaware strangers on the street to commentate on them you would be ostracized and considered a huge creep and yet,,

[butcharondir]

i just found a mix CD i made for my dad when I was 16 years old and oh. my god. can u believe that it’s even worse than i expected

[sniffanimal]

if Generative AI is so good then where is the procedurally generated crossword app that doesn't repeat the same ~100 clues in various orders

[acecampbellsaunders]

the fun (read: weird) thing about rewatching the first half of spn season 8 was that it came out during the year that i remember like. bits and pieces of due to how shitty my brain was, so i'm like. oh did i like this episode? do i even remember watching this episode???

eventually i checked what scattered liveblogs i did and started like. regaining a few memories but it's all still SUPER fuzzy and that's wild. i truly thought for so long that i hated bitten when actually i loved it. i don't know WHY i thought i hated it. i think it just was the first episode to make me feel Strong emotions that lasted so i was like THEY HAVE TO BE NEGATIVE RIGHT???

insane to me. when you're suicidal everything REALLY feels different.

[nicholasr]

Analogue Days in The Evergreen Review #112

When Harper is at home on her own, She keeps the light off so it won’t burn out. It is only switched on for good books and gatherings of her best friends and their best friends too.

Early in the morning, camping in the country, the sun burns straight through the day. Wasted in her sleep, light sets cold just when she needs a bulb the most.

The trip was planned before him. Now, after him, she may as well have come. Before she left, she unplugged all of her appliances. [a quirk he witnessed and said he loved]

Uncertainty swells: (in night’s time of siring) the backdoor, the hall light, her skitter-scattering of feelings of him ... unlocked, left on, latent ...

Harper–stuck in dark on public land remembers her youth: throwing sand back into the ocean to stop the encroaching waves; taping fall leaves to their branches to stem the tide of autumnal colors piled dead on the sidewalk.

And worst: desperately counting times at church she crossed herself for prayer because to her, an accidental odd number brought the next week under the bright gaze of God’s piercing realm. She’d leave in a panic– is God off or on?

Now, she only has faith in Esther, the computer, [visibly unplugged] who will know the time and date exactly – unjudging – even if it is years until Harper returns the electricity to her system.

[qqueenofhades]

I don't know why I thought it was a good idea to argue with people about the worthlessness of voting third party. They just keep insisting that the influence is worth it, and that I was a coward for daring to suggest that we don't HAVE any other options than Democratic. I even cited how voting third party likely played a part in Al Gore losing ffs.

There's no "likely" about it, Ralph Nader DID directly cost Gore the election. He ran explicitly on the same "both parties are the same, so leftists/liberals should vote for me instead" rhetoric that we are still seeing among the Online Left, and it was successful: he got, for example, over 97,000 votes in Florida. Bush won Florida (and thus the presidency) by a miniscule 537 votes, after the fuckery of Bush v. Gore and SCOTUS ordering the recount stopped in Bush's favor. If the tiniest percentage of those Nader voters had gone for Gore, we would have had a president who was arguing in favor of tackling climate change in the year 2000. We would have been incredibly ahead of the curve. We would, in all likelihood, have a president who took the CIA's warnings of an impending al-Qaeda attack in the US seriously. We would not have had the disastrous Afghanistan and Iraq invasions and the "War on Terror," the rampant Islamophobia, "No Child Left Behind," the 2008 economic crash, and everything else that Dubya and his band of bloodthirsty neocons inflicted on us in the early aughties. Look, I try not to look back too much, but having Gore instead of Bush as president would have reshaped the entire timeline we're living in to such an unfathomably better degree that every moron thinking of voting third party For The Protest should be sat down and forced to learn this history intimately. Of course, they already saw it happen in real time in 2016, but they didn't care about that either.

The good news is: there are plenty of persuadable voters out there, and you can do work to reach them and convince them to vote for Democrats! They're just not online, because all the Online Leftists are terminally brain-poisoned against voting anyway and trying to argue with them is generally a waste of time. Instead, what you should do is take a gander at the following links:

This is the one-stop shop page for volunteering to get Democrats elected. You can do in-person and remote work, there are tons of different ways to get involved (i.e. you don't have to go directly out and knock doors if that's not something you're comfortable with), and your local Democratic party will welcome the volunteer help. There is also a page for finding your state party website:

I went there, clicked on my state, opened the webpage, and there was a "Volunteer" link right in the header, with an easy and quick form to fill out to register your interest and explain the kinds of work you would be interested in doing. You can canvass directly, you can manage data on the back end, you can phone bank, you can send texts and postcards to voters who may need an extra nudge, you can otherwise work with your state party in lots of ways, and it will be so much more productive and make you feel so much better than arguing with online idiots who will never, ever change their minds. What you can do is reach out to voters in your own community, in your own state, and have conversations with people who actually ARE willing to listen, but might need a little more educating on the facts, what's at stake, the truth about this election, and the danger that Trump poses. All of this will convert into critically important Democratic votes, and you can actually put your desire to make a difference into action. So yeah. I would 100% suggest you do it this way instead. Good luck.

[werewolvesrights]

Buster Wilde Weerwolf

I recently was recommended a late 90's/early aughties Internet comic by my good friend @glitchbirds, and I enjoyed it immensely. Buster Wilde Weerwolf is a gay slapstick comic strip created by Scott Zellman about a straight office worker who turns into a queer werewolf, or weerwolf, at night.

Buster is found frequenting gay clubs and is usually getting up to various nonsense caused by his furry predicament.

We also get some brief glimpses into Buster's "normal" life as an office worker named Bernard, which are pretty humorous, as well.

Originally hosted on Geocities, you can read all fifty-two Buster Wilde strips on this website. Or, you can purchase a physical version of the comics here.

[void-botanist]

1 & 15 for writeblr end of the year ask!

1. what was your writing-highlight this year? what made it special and how will you reflect on it next year?

I talked about launching Nicea over here but I feel like I'm also in the middle of a writing highlight now, listening to my Spotify Wrapped playlist on shuffle and writing scenelets for most songs (it has come to my attention that "drabble" means 100 words? whereas these are ~300). I'm just having a lot of fun with it. I'm gonna post the songs and scenelet titles as an ask game when I've made it through the playlist.

15. time for shameless self-promotion! answer with a piece of writing you want others to see/read! (if you have nothing posted/published this year, any other year is fine too ^^)

I posted a lot of excerpts this year but I really want anyone who hasn't to go read the scenelets I've already posted:

heartbroken too (Small Memory by Jon Hopkins) / lavish affair (bad idea by Ariana Grande) / umbrella (Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic by The Police)

just like Heavens (All I Wanna Do by Sheryl Crow)

say hi (Broken Monitors by B. Fleischmann)

also that one scene where Sorian meets Leon for the first time.

[lets-go-hurt-someone]

I know this is a BG3 blog, but humour me.

A good decade before Astarion could step gracefully out onto our computer screens and into our hearts, there was Zevran Arainai. I want to shine a little love on my first delightfully murder-y elven rogue.

Ruminations beyond the cut. Fair warning, it’s long and there’s heavy discussion of how they each reflect on trauma and abuse. The similarities are honestly never ending.

Of course there is the obvious— they’re both blonde, they’re both pretty, they’re both the unambiguously pansexual elfy rogue boy of the group. They are sassy and sarcastic and cynical but in a fun way! Oh, and the accent! You take them along for the sneak attacks but keep them for the delightful snark.

And of course, they both introduce themselves by tricking and then trying to murder you.

It makes absolutely no logical sense to trust either of them, really: they’re both prolific killers who express no real remorse, but instead some enjoyment, in what they do.

They’re quick to sleep with you, but slow to trust. If you show them compassion, it confuses them. They both have trouble understanding love, wanting love, being loved. After all, they were both slaves. And they both have only been free for all of about 30 seconds when they meet you.

And once they realise they care about you… they stop sleeping with you because their past has so warped the way that they relate to their own bodies and sexuality that they don’t even know what to call it, let alone how to cope with it.

Because they’ve both been forced to make their entire identity seducing victims for slaughter. They’re both survivors of pretty horrific mental, physical, and sexual abuse.

But there’s the difference: that statement is true of both Astarion and Zevran, but only one of the two would really describe it that way. Astarion knows he’s been abused. Zevran… has convinced himself he’s thankful for his lot in life. Until he’s not.

Zevran has late aughties sexism and edgy sexual banter written all over him, to be sure. He outright sexually harasses pretty much every woman he meets, and a few of the men. It’s meant to be light-hearted teasing, but not all of the dialogs have aged well. I remember not thinking much of it back then, it was standard stuff, but now… now I just read it a different way. I don’t know if this was the writers’ intention, but to me he’s always clearly been a victim of sexual abuse who’s coping using hypersexuality. He’s rationalising the hell out of the fact that he sleeps with all his targets (which is rape, of course, but rape perpetuated by someone who has been so abused as to be unable to even consider framing it that way… or he’d have to consider reframing what was done to him, too). Unlike Astarion, a killer and a practiced lover are the only identities Zevran has ever had: so he leans into them, holds them close.

I feel like they managed to sweep some really heavy nuance under the rug by making Zevran seem like he’s just another shallow playboy stereotype for the player to “fix.” Like he’s telling you all these charming stories about bedding his targets before assassinating them, telling you how he’s been trained to be an expert in seduction, and it’s all very intriguing and compelling but then you think… he’s like what… 24? The math from the extended universe puts him out as a working assassin when he was 15 or 16 at the latest. He says he dodged sexual abuse as a child growing up in the whorehouse, and that being sold to Crows was a better alternative… but really, the Crows pimped Zevran out the same exact way Cazador did to Astarion. They both had no choice but to lure countless people to their deaths with their looks.

But while Astarion resents it, Zevran tells you all about it with a wink and a grin… so we get to sigh in relief and move on. You don’t have to interrogate it too much if you don’t want to. But it’s there. And it’s damaged both of them. Right to the end, if you tell Zevran you love him, he will lament it as cruel — he can’t comprehend anything else.

Zevran paints a more impressionistic picture of someone coping with abuse, but with Astarion the game takes us a step further and gives us a closer look at the internal struggle of actually healing. If the archetype is moody sassy trauma elf, Zevran to Astarion is the most wonderful progression of the character trope I ever could have hoped for. (And I’m sure there are some Fenris stans who could write an essay on where he falls in the pipeline.)

What I boil it down to is this: While Zevran was a bit more of a veiled, blink-and-you-miss it sort of representation that hugely reflected what was socially acceptable at the time, Astarion gets to be a fully-fledged meditation on trauma and abuse. He gets to be ugly, and seen as ugly or sympathetic depending on how you treat him. He gets to examine why he acts the way he does, and consider new ways to relate to the world. He gets to make what was only really implied with Zevran explicit.

And finally, at the end of his arc, Astarion gets to say “I love you.” I just love that for him— and for me. The young person I used to be who saw herself in Zevran has grown up and saw herself in Astarion, too, now more mature and nuanced and reflective, putting herself back together piece by piece. These two characters somehow each struck me at a very particular time in my life, in a mirrored way that reflects how their stories mirror each other.

For me, before Astarion, there will always have been Zevran. Two characters I never thought I’d see in a video game, that I can’t help but be dumbfounded at how they each helped me process my own trauma. It’s incredible. It feels important. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way, at least about Astarion.

But I do wonder how many other people have held onto Zevran in a little piece of their hearts too, the way that I have. For all his flaws, he’ll always be my first.