#best sites to learn coding

[mtariqniaz]

The 20 Best Programming Languages to Learn in 2024

In this article, I’ll share the best programming languages in 2024. Choosing the best programming language can be tricky. Plus, when you consider that the Stack Overflow developer survey alone lists more than 40 different programming languages, there’s a lot to choose from! So, if you’re curious about the best programming language to learn, I’m here to help! Perhaps you’re interested in data, and…

[vetyr]

hi, i ireally love your work and i don't know if you've answered this before but, what kinds of studies do you do or how did you learn color theory? i wanna get better at rendering and anatomy but im having trouble TT TT

Hi! Long answer alert. Once a chatterbox, always a chatterbox.

When I started actively learning how to draw about 10 1/2 years ago, I exclusively did graphite studies in sketchbooks. Here's a few examples—I mostly stuck to doing line drawings to drill basic shapes/contours and proportions into my brain. The more rendered sketches helped me practice edge control & basic values, and they were REALLY good for learning the actual 3D structure behind what I was drawing.

I'd use reference images that I grabbed from fitness forums, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, and some NSFW places, but you could find adequate ref material from figure drawing sites like Line of Action. LoA has refs for people (you can filter by clothed/unclothed, age, & gender), animals, expressions, hands/feet, and a few other useful things as well. Love them.

Learning how to render digitally was a similar story; it helped a lot that I had a pretty strong foundation for value/anatomy going in. I basically didn't touch color at all for ~2 years (except for a few attempts at bad digital or acrylic paint studies), which may not have been the best idea. I learned color from a lot of trial and error, honestly, and I'm pretty sure this process involved a lot of imitation—there were a number of digital/traditional painters whose styles I really wanted to emulate (notably their edge control, color choices, value distributions, and shape design), so I kiiind of did a mixture of that + my own experimentation.

For example, I really found Benjamin Björklund's style appealing, especially his softened/lost edges & vibrant pops of saturated color, so here's a study I did from some photograph that I'm *pretty* sure was painted with him in mind.

Learning how to detail was definitely a slow process, and like all the aforementioned things (anatomy/color/edge control/values/etc.) I'm still figuring it out. Focusing on edge control first (that is, deciding on where to place hard/soft edges for emphasizing/de-emphasizing certain areas of the image) is super useful, because you can honestly fool a viewer into thinking there's more detail in a piece than there actually is if you're very economical about where you place your hard edges.

The most important part, to me, is probably just doing this stuff over and over again. You're likely not going to see improvement in a few weeks or even a few months, so don't fret about not getting the exact results you want and just keep studying + making art. I like to think about learning art as a process where you *need* to fail and make crappy art/studies—there's literally no way around it—so you might as well fail right now. See, by making bad art you're actually moving forward—isn't that a fun prospect!!

It's useful to have a folder with art you admire, especially if you can dissect the pieces and understand why you like them so much. You can study those aspects (like, you can redraw or repaint that person's work) and break down whether this is art that you just like to look at, or if it's the kind of art that you want to *make.* There's a LOT of art out there that I love looking at, probably tens of thousands of styles/mediums, but there's a very narrow range that I want to make myself.

I've mentioned it in some ask reply in the past, but I really do think looking at other artist's work is such a cheat code for improving your own skills—the other artist does the work to filter reality/ideas for you, and this sort of allows you to contact the subject matter more directly. I can think of so many examples where an artist I admired exaggerated, like, the way sunlight rested on a face and created that orange fringe around its edge, or the greys/dull blues in a wheat field, or the bright indigo in a cast shadow, or the red along the outside of a person's eye, and it just clicked for me that this was a very available & observable aspect of reality, which had up until that point gone completely unnoticed! If you're really perceptive about the art you look at, it's shocking how much it can teach you about how to see the world (in this particular case I mean this literally, in that the art I looked at fully changed the way I visually processed the world, but of course it has had a strong effect on my worldviews/relationships/beliefs).

Thanks so much for sending in a question (& for reading, if you got this far)! I read every single ask I receive, including the kind words & compliments, which I genuinely always appreciate. Best of luck with learning, my friend :)

[girlkisser13]

being married to scott summers would include

• scott is incredibly dedicated and loyal, he'd be an amazing husband, always there to support you through thick and thin.

• expect a lot of schedules, plans, and routines.

• he encourages regular physical training sessions, both for your safety and to spend quality time together.

• he LOVES listening to you. he loves hearing about what you think, about what you did that day; everything. he would sit and listen to you for hours and hours if you let him.

• being married to scott means being deeply involved in mutant rights and advocacy.

• you'd likely attend meetings, protests, and other events to support mutant causes.

• despite his stoic exterior, scott has a deep emotional side.

• he'd open up to you about his past, his struggles with his powers and his fears.

• you listen to the stories about his childhood, when he developed his powers, and how alex was the one who helped him stand up and begin to accept that he was a mutant.

• he constantly worries about hurting you unintentionally, because his power is unpredictable the moment his glasses come off.

• you help him accept his powers, how strong they are and try your best to help him not let the fear of what he can do blind him.

• there would be moments of intimacy where he trusts you enough to remove them in controlled, safe environments.

• sometimes, he even lets you wear them.

• since everything he sees in tinted red, his favorite thing is to feel yours and pretend to guess its color (he always guesses the most bizarre colors).

• if your hair really IS colored, he always suggests different colors for you to dye it even though he cant see it.

• you teach him how to braid your hair and it becomes his favorite thing to do when he’s stressed or has just come back on a mission

• he’s so gentle with you, as though he’s scared you’ll break or scared he’ll somehow end up hurting you. his touches are always gentle. you help him trust himself when touching you by guiding his hands and telling him that he doesn’t have to be gentle all the time.

• date nights often include strategic games like chess or tactical discussions, as scott’s mind is always working on the next move.

• he has a deep appreciation for history, particularly military history. he enjoys visiting museums and historical sites with you, sharing interesting facts and insights.

• living with scott means being prepared for emergencies. you’d have detailed evacuation plans, safe houses, and emergency kits, ensuring both of you are ready for any crisis.

• he constantly plans getaways to secluded locations where both of you could recharge, away from the constant demands of being a mutant.

• he’s EXTREMELY protective of you and will do absolutely anything if it meant keeping you safe.

• the two of you develop code words and signals that only the two of you understand, allowing for discreet communication.

• you learn to love his mature, serious side, along with his immature and more silly side.

• he absolutely adores it when you fall asleep on his chest; he loves knowing that you trust him, it eases his mind and makes him trust himself a little bit more. <33

[jtargaryen18]

The Arrangement ~ Chapter 4

Series Masterlist

Words: 8k (Because apparently I lack self control)

Pairing: Thomas Shelby (Peaky Blinders) x Reader F

Warnings: References to disappearances, kidnapping, threats, and emotional angst. Explicit sex (reader is taught a couple of things). The calm before the storm.

Your stepfather is spreading rumors like wildfire, pushing Tommy to consider his options. Polly tries to prepare Tommy for what's coming soon. You're still awake when Tommy gets home late after a long day of business. You surprise him.

Disclaimer: The author of this work claims no ownership of characters aside from the reader, and original secondary characters mentioned. This work is not intended for those under the age of 18 due to explicit sexual content and darker themes. By reading this work or any works on my blog (jtargaryen18), you agree that you are at least 18 years of age. I do not consent to have my work hosted on any third party app or site.

The dull roar of conversation and the sound of clinking glasses filled the Garrison’s packed front room. Music from the old upright piano came from somewhere in the background, a few drunken voices rose in song, and boots scuffled against the floorboards. It was Friday night, and Small Heath drank like it needed to forget its many troubles for one night.

But behind the frosted glass of the Shelbys’ private booth, the mood was anything but festive. Here, the air was filled with cigarette smoke, tension, and quiet calculation. Tommy Shelby’s eyes scanned the manifest in front of him—half reading, half somewhere else entirely. Because truthfully, he wanted this meeting over with. The logistics, the dock delays, the endless talk of cargo and contacts and who needed reminding of which alliance—he could recite it all in his sleep. 

He wanted to get through it quickly—to get back to the quiet of his house, to the girl sleeping upstairs in his bed right now. Each day, she seemed to feel a little better, refusing the laudanum after the third night. In the last week, he'd managed to take a couple of his meals there with her, enjoying the fragile bond that was forming between them.

It was more than that. She’d been calmer in his presence. There was trust in her eyes, in the way she looked at him when she thought he wasn’t paying attention. Each night she fell asleep on her side of the bed, and he woke up with her sprawled across him and his side of the bed early the next morning. Fortunately, she never woke when he did before dawn. It spared her from seeing the state their newfound intimacy left him in every morning.

Everything was still going according to his plan and he reminded himself of that in those moments when impatience got the best of him. Soon, Small Heath would learn the lesson he wanted to teach them. He'd have himself a nice young bride, all that was left were the formalities the way he saw it. Maybe he'd have her brother too as an addition to his crew.

All he knew was that it made him want to leave the ledgers behind, push the folders across the table, and walk out the door without a word. But for now, he focused on the task at hand —because business came first, and nothing could look out of place.

"Tom?" John's voice pulled him out of his thoughts.

The three brothers and Liam were seated around their private table. The door was closed, the whiskey untouched, and the air held the kind of tension that meant money was moving, and so were men. The ledgers were open, papers spread across the table—manifest lists, customs logs, coded letters from France. Tommy scanned a page in silence, a cigarette between his fingers, while the others waited. 

“Imports from Marseille docked two days behind,” he said finally. “Customs was paid off, but someone held the cargo. You and Liam’ll see who’s sniffing around the docks,” he told John without looking up.

John nodded. “We talking bribes or trouble?”

“Could be both,” Tommy said flatly. “But we find out before they do.”

Arthur was still nursing a hangover from last night. He wasn’t talking much—just watching, brooding, his eyes red and tired. Liam took notes quietly, nodding when assigned to shadow the dockmaster, handle payouts, and verify the goods hadn’t been tampered with. It was business that had to be dealt with. The kind that kept the guns loaded and the books nice and clean. 

At least, it was—until John mentioned the whispers from the street. “You hear what they’re saying about us down by the canal?”

Tommy didn’t look up. “They're always saying something.”

“No,” John said, a little firmer, leaning in now. “This is different.”

That caught Arthur’s attention and he tensed. 

John continued in a low voice. “Sean O’Grady’s running his mouth about the coin toss he had with Arthur. He's complaining that the Shelbys took more than they were owed. Says the girl’s gone—vanished.” He glanced sideways at Arthur. “People are saying he took her and didn’t return her.”

The words hung thick in the air like smoke that wouldn’t clear. Arthur’s jaw locked. That old, familiar twitch started just below his eye—the one that usually came right before something got broken. No one spoke in that moment. Even John, who’d just delivered the news, went still. He watched carefully, knowing he just lit a fuse.

Arthur abruptly rose, color flooding his face. “Fuckin’ bastard,” Arthur muttered, fists already curling. “Talkin’ like I’m the one who crossed the line.” He was breathing harder now, pacing like a caged dog trying to burn off the anger in his blood. “I didn’t even touch her. I passed out cold, just like he planned it. And now my name’s getting dragged through the muck while he—” Arthur gestured to Tommy without finishing the sentence.

The tension was thick. John looked between them, like he was waiting for someone to throw the first punch—or stop the second. Tommy stayed in his seat. He pinned Athur him a stare. This wasn’t just about Sean O’Grady’s lies. It was also about Arthur’s pride.

And the Shelby's control in Small Heath.

“Arthur,” Tommy said.

But Arthur was already marching for the door. He didn’t slam it, but the click behind him was louder than any shout. 

John leaned back as he watched him go, whistling low. “That’s not gonna be the last time we hear about it.”

Tommy stubbed out his cigarette, lit another one.

John swirled his drink in its glass. “Apparently no one’s seen O’Grady’s wife in days.”

That got Tommy's attention. “What’s that?”

John shrugged. “Could be nothing. Could be she’s embarrassed. But Polly heard the mother’s beside herself. Grieving, crying. Not taking jobs.” He paused. "No one's really seen her."

Tommy exhaled slowly through his nose, smoke curling upward in a lazy spiral that drifted toward the low ceiling. Their room fell silent again, just the din of the rest of the bar in the background. John and Liam sat still, watching him. They knew what had happened. They’d been part of it. John had helped move the girl. Liam had been there that night too—a silent shadow keeping things tidy while the rest played out.

It wasn’t a secret. Not between them. Tommy didn’t lie to his own—not about business. Not when it mattered. And did he care that they knew? Not really. They were family. They understood the difference between personal and strategic—how sometimes the lines blurred when power was on the table. Besides, he hadn’t asked for approval. He didn’t need it. They might whisper when he left the room, might wonder if this one girl would shift something deeper inside their brother—but they’d still follow orders. Still fall in line. Because Tommy Shelby didn’t ask for permission. He moved pieces. And they knew better than to question the hand that moved the board.

Tommy hated rumors. Not because they were lies—he could handle lies. Lies were useful. Lies could be shaped, steered, crushed under a boot or fed back to the streets with a smile and a drink. But rumors… rumors had teeth. They spread without control. They bred in silence, passed from one mouth to the next until truth didn’t matter anymore—only perception. And perception was power.

The Shelbys thrived on it—on the fear, the respect, the sharp silence that followed their name down every alley. But now the whispers said Arthur Shelby couldn’t finish what he started. That the girl had vanished. That the Shelbys were hiding something—or someone. He could feel it coming. There would be glances that lasted a little too long. Men would lower their voices when he passed. They were watching. Waiting. And Tommy knew—that couldn't stand. Not because his pride demanded it. Because power demanded it. And if Small Heath thought for even a second that the Shelbys could be questioned, that a drunk like Sean O’Grady could take a swing at their name and walk away unbloodied—then everything he was building would begin to rot from the inside out.

And it was more than just the bloody rumors. It was about damage control. Arthur’s pride, dented and dangling in front of the wolves like bloody bait, was a match in a powder keg. His girl’s safety, and the fragile hold Tommy had on the peace she was beginning to settle into, was at risk. It was about the next move in a game Sean O’Grady didn’t realize he’d already lost.

Tommy leaned back slowly in his seat, tipping his head back as thoughts layered one over another. He considered her mother who no one had seen in days. Was she truly ill? Or had Sean raised his hands, punishing her for his shame? Polly described the woman was delicate, quiet. The type who would break easily in silence.

Then there was Rory. The lad had steel in him—enough to walk into a Shelby-owned betting shop with a weapon tucked in his coat and a question in his heart. If he’d seen his mother bruised, broken… would he act on it? Would he go for the knife this time instead of turning it over in his palm? Tommy’s fingers tapped against the edge of the table. If Rory made a move now, it could really throw a wrench in his well-laid plans.

And then, his thoughts shifted  to her. She was still unsure, but inching closer to trusting him. She didn't know about the rumors nor her stepfather's public slander. She didn't know about her mother. He had to keep it that way. She’d bolt if she found out and run straight back into danger.

Stubbing out his cigarette, Tommy regarded each of them slowly—John, then Liam. Arthur was gone, and letting him stew wasn’t the worst thing. He needed to burn some of that fury off before Tommy could use it properly. But these two—they were still here. Still waiting. Time to make a move. Before someone else did.

“We don’t let this drag,” he said finally, voice low but sharp enough to cut through the silence.

John sat up straighter, already keyed in. “You want him silenced?”

Tommy shook his head once. “Not yet. Silenced men can’t suffer. We make it slow.”

Liam raised an eyebrow, but didn’t speak.

Tommy continued, eyes narrowing. “Find out where he drinks, who he’s talking to. Find the wife. I want eyes on her, too.”

John nodded. “You think he’s laid hands on her?”

Tommy didn’t answer right away. “We make him nervous,” Tommy went on. “Not dead. Not yet. Let him feel the breath on his neck. Then we remind him what it means to put the Shelby name in his mouth.”

He sat back again, lighting another cigarette with quiet finality.

“And if he sends anyone near the house…” John didn't finish the sentence.

Smoke curled from Tommy’s lips as his gaze met John's. “We send them back in pieces.” His kept his tone casual. It wasn't a threat. It was a fact.

John didn’t smile. Didn’t joke. He just gave a single sharp nod.

Let them whisper about wagers. Let them question Arthur’s name, the girl’s disappearance. But if anyone came near that house, near her, if Sean O’Grady so much as looked in that direction—the response would be surgical. No negotiation. No second chances.

Tommy tapped ash into the tray, slow and steady. “If they test us,” he said, eyes still on John, “I want the answer to be so clear they never ask again.”

Then he looked away, finally, his attention shifting to the window and the distorted shapes of the Garrison beyond the glass. Because the game had changed. Now it was personal. And that meant it had to be handled… perfectly.

Tommy took a long drag from the cigarette between his fingers, as the others absorbed what he'd said. But even as he laid out the next steps—another name edged back into his thoughts. 

Rory.

The lad had held it together the first time. Had come to Tommy instead of spilling blood. That had earned him a measure of respect—and, more importantly, a stay of consequences. But this was different. Sean’s name was in everyone’s mouth now. The girl’s absence wasn’t just whispered about—it was noticed. The mother had disappeared, and if Rory had seen what Tommy suspected he’d seen, his temper would be at a rolling boil. And Rory Flynn, for all his quiet strength and good intentions, was still young, desperate, and dangerous.

Tommy sighed, the thought twisting in his chest like a nail worked loose. He couldn’t risk Rory doing something stupid. Not just for the boy’s sake. Not just for hers. But because if Rory acted out of emotion now—if he laid a hand on Sean—he’d throw the whole balance off. It would disolve into chaos.

Tommy turned to Liam. “Find Rory Flynn. Tonight.”

Liam straightened. “Want me to bring him in?”

“No,” Tommy said. “Just watch him. Make sure he doesn’t do anything... irreparable.” He tapped ash into the tray. “If he starts sharpening a blade, I want to know before the first drop spills.”

John leaned in slightly. “Think he’ll go for O’Grady?”

Tommy stared at the swirling smoke in front of him. “He wants to... But he won’t. Not yet. He’s smart. Smarter than people give him credit for.”

John leaned back in his chair, one arm slung casually over the backrest, but there was a flicker of something sharper in his eyes—curiosity, maybe. Or caution. He took a sip of his drink, then asked, “So… are you givin’ her back?” John didn’t say her name.

The question hung in the air—blunt, bold, and only something one of his brothers could get away with. Liam looked down quickly, pretending to reread the papers in front of him.

Give her back? As if she were borrowed. As if she were something he’d taken on a whim and could now return like a misplaced coat. No. That wasn’t how this worked.

Now, when the meetings dragged too long or the nights stretched thin, he thought of her. Not as leverage. Not as property. As someone. He thought of the way she looked at him—guarded but watching. Waiting to see if he was a man or just another monster in a sharper suit. He thought of her voice when it softened. She'd stopped flinching when he entered the room now.

Tommy wasn’t used to being someone people trusted. Feared, yes. Respected, when it counted. But not trusted. She made him want to be that man. Even if he didn’t believe he could be.

So no—he wouldn’t give her back. Not to Sean O’Grady. Not to anyone.

Tommy turned his head slowly, met John���s eyes with a cool, unwavering look. “No,” he said simply.

John nodded, like he expected that answer. “Didn’t think so.”

***

The house was quiet and still when Tommy returned. It was well after midnight. Only the soft tick of the grandfather clock echoed as he hung his coat  and cap, running a hand through his hair, weariness clinging to him like smoke. 

Everyone was in bed—except Polly. She waited in the archway to the sitting room with her arms crossed. The dim lamplight cast deep shadows across her face. “We need a word,” she said, not asking.

Tommy didn’t argue, just followed her inside. She poured a splash of whiskey into a glass—just one—and handed it to him before sitting.

“Arthur’s melting down.” Her voice was steady, but her eyes were sharp. “Everything coming from O’Grady’s camp is eating at him. He’s not just angry, Tom. He feels betrayed. By you.”

Tommy didn’t drink, just stared down into the glass for a moment. “I know.”

“What do you plan to do?”

The answer wasn’t simple. Arthur was fire and glass—burning and breakable all at once. You couldn’t just scold him into sense or soothe him with empty reassurances. He didn’t respond to softness, not when the damage ran deep. The weight of what had happened—the lie, the shift of control, the humiliation of having his name whispered through pubs like he’d lost his edge—that didn’t sit quietly in Arthur’s chest. It twisted, boiled, curdled into something worse. He’d trusted Tommy and followed his lead, even when it meant swallowing his pride and taking a step back. And now he was being painted as the weak one, the fool who’d made a deal he couldn’t finish.

It was the sort of thing that festered in Arthur. He’d take it in for a while, laugh it off, drink it down. Until something snapped—and then, it would come out in a burst of fists or a broken bottle or a body left in the wrong alley.

And Tommy couldn’t afford that.

Arthur needed to be managed—not with orders, but with truth. And maybe, this time, Tommy would have to give him more than he usually did. A glimpse behind the curtain. A reason not to burn everything down. Because if Arthur went off the rails now, they’d all feel it.

And Tommy was already holding the line tighter than anyone realized.

“I’ll talk to him,” Tommy said at last. “Soon.”

She leaned forward, lowering her voice. “We also need to talk about what I’ve been hearing from O’Grady.”

Tommy’s gaze lifted, sharp and immediate. There was a different edge to Polly’s tone—one that meant it wasn’t gossip.

Polly nodded grimly. “His wife hasn’t been seen in days. Word is, she’s taken to her bed, worried. I doubt that. O'Grady's a brute. Always has been. He used to beat his first wife black and blue. She died with the child she tried to birth. After that, many of us hoped he wouldn't marry again, but...”

She trailed off, lips pursed in quiet contempt.

What a bloody waste.  That Malachy Flynn’s family had fallen into the clutches of a bastard like Sean O’Grady. He'd died a war hero. And what was the fate of his family? His daughter, bartered like livestock. His wife, left to rot under the bruising hands of a man who never should’ve been allowed to lay claim to them. And he’d left behind a good son, too. He’d walked in ready to take on the Shelbys, not because he was stupid, but because he was desperate. Because he loved his sister. Because someone had to protect what was left of their family. His were the actions of a man. Malachy would’ve been proud of that. Would’ve wanted better for his boy. Better than the factory lines. Better than a household soaked in silence and bruises. Better than being forced to carry the weight of a man like Sean O’Grady.

It sat wrong in Tommy’s gut. Not just as strategy—as a man.

He downed the rest of the whiskey and set the glass down hard enough to rattle. “He should’ve been buried with his first wife.”

Polly just nodded, grim and silent. “It’s getting out,” she continued, folding her arms. “People are talking. They’re saying the girl disappeared after the wager, and that her mother’s sick with grief. And O’Grady?” She gave a humorless laugh. “He’s unraveling, but still loud enough to make it sound like we’re the villains.”

Tommy didn’t speak. He moved instead—slow, deliberate—rising from the chair and walking to the sideboard. He poured himself another measure of whiskey, let the bottle clink softly back into place. Then he turned, lifting the glass, taking a slow sip as if he were thinking it over—but he wasn’t. He already knew.

O’Grady was shifting public sympathy. Playing the wounded father. Painting himself as the man whose household was ripped apart by Shelby greed. And worse—people were beginning to listen.

“The pity changes things,” Polly said quietly, reading the same map Tommy was. “When they start feeling sorry for the girl, for the mother… the pressure builds. They’ll want answers. And they’ll come looking. Eventually, someone’s going to try and find her.”

Tommy stared into his glass. “Then they won’t like what they find.”

It was going the way he’d planned—for the most part. The girl was safe. Hidden. The message was building. The streets were talking. Good. Let them wonder. Let them whisper. Let every man in Small Heath who’d ever tossed a coin and wagered a woman’s dignity feel the cold edge of consequence tightening around their throats.

But what he hadn’t counted on… Was O’Grady attacking Arthur. Not with fists—but with whispers. Spinning the story. Playing the victim. Rewriting the wager as a betrayal. Painting Arthur as the man who couldn’t keep his end, stealing more than was owed. And worse—people were starting to believe it.

Because Arthur, loud and volatile, always wore his shame on the outside. And Sean O’Grady? He knew how to bleed in front of the right crowd. A drunken brute turned grieving stepfather. It was clever. Cowardly, but clever.

And now Arthur was fraying at the edges, his temper boiling just beneath the surface, and if he broke—if he snapped in public— everything Tommy had set in motion would come undone.

He'd put men around the house, unseen but there, until everything was done. To keep his family safe and to protect her.

“She can’t hear it,” he said flatly. “Any of it. Especially not about her mother. Not until I know the truth.”

Polly nodded, lips pursed. “So you do care what she thinks of you.”

Tommy didn’t take the bait. 

“She’s feeling better,” Polly said, shifting gears. “Restless. Getting underfoot a bit. She reminded me that she worked as a seamstress and can do sewing or mending if we have any.”

Tommy looked up at that. He remembered. That's how he met her, taking his coat for mending. But she hadn’t said anything to him about sewing. Not a word. He thought back—how she’d been quiet, polite, cautious, always watching for signs of what he expected from her. How she’d never asked for anything more than what was given. And even then, only what she thought she could return in silence. A bitter taste rose in his mouth at the thought of it—how little she must expect from the people around her. How small she still made herself, even now.

He could see it clearly in his mind—the old Singer sewing machine tucked in the corner of one of the guest bedrooms, covered with a cloth no one had moved in years. It had belonged to his grandmother.

And those dresses she now wore. Ada’s old clothes—well enough for a temporary fix, but they weren’t hers. They didn’t fit her right. They didn’t move like they belonged to the woman who now walked his halls. He didn’t like it. Didn’t like that she was walking around in someone else’s shape, like she didn’t deserve her own.

“If she wants to sew,” he said at last, voice low, “let her. Make sure she sees the machine.”

Polly tilted her head, watching him. “We're in agreement then. Good. She’s not asking for much, Tommy. She's barely asked for anything since she got here.”

“Then give her what she needs.” Because if she was going to stay—and she was—he didn’t want her patching together the pieces of someone else’s life. He wanted her building something new. Something that was hers. 

Polly watched him, reading more than he gave. “She’s not just sewing, Tommy. She’s looking for something to do. Somewhere to belong.”

He downed the rest of the whiskey in one drink. “Then she’ll have it.”

And he meant it. Whatever came next—Arthur’s temper, Sean’s trap, the girl’s questions—it would all be dealt with. Because keeping her safe wasn’t just about the outside world anymore. It was about keeping her whole, even if he wasn’t.

Tommy just stared into the fire, thumb slowly circling the rim of his glass.

Polly sighed. “You do realize that she doesn’t know.”

His gaze shifted, but he didn’t interrupt.

“Not really. Not the truth of it. She thinks she was caught in a bad deal between men.” Her eyes narrowed, voice low but cutting. “She doesn’t know you were the one who steered Arthur into making that wager. You had her delivered. That you drugged him just to keep her untouched until you could step in.”

He didn’t flinch. But he knew she saw it anyway. 

“You created the entire bloody scenario, Tommy. Don’t pretend it was all about sending a message to Small Heath. You used that to justify your reasons.” She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, voice softer but sharper now. “You did it because your eye fell on her. And you decided, in all your brilliant, broken logic, that you were going to have her.” She let that sink in. “What happens when she finds out?”

He looked away, only for a second. When his gaze returned returned to hers, it was steady. Polly wasn’t accusing. She was warning.

“You think she won’t? That someone won’t slip up? That she won’t put the pieces together herself?”

Tommy’s grip tightened on his glass in his hand. Polly was right. She would find out. And when she did, he’d have to face more than her fury. He’d have to face the possibility that she’d never look at him the same way again. And that, more than anything, unnerved him the most.

Polly watched him closely, her tone softening slightly. “I can usually hear you at night, you know,” she said. “From across the hall. When the nightmares come.”

Tommy didn’t look at her. 

Polly continued, her voice low, matter-of-fact. “You thrash. You shout. Sometimes you cry out names you don’t remember in the morning. Sometimes you don’t sleep at all.”

The darkest visions from the war visited him often at night. The nightmares didn't come from the bullets or the blood, but from the silence between the shell blasts—the moments when he had time to realize he was still alive while better men were not. Now that Polly mentioned it, he hadn't had a single one since he'd moved her into his house, his bed.

Polly waited, but he said nothing.

“But since you moved her into your room…” She paused. “Well, I've heard some things... But not your nightmares.”

The truth settled between them like smoke.

“She calms something in you,” Polly said, quieter now. “And maybe you don’t want to admit that, maybe you can’t… but it doesn’t make it any less true.” She straightened, blowing out an exhale as she studied him. “So the question isn’t if she’ll find out what you did to get her. The question is what you’ll do when she does. Because if she walks out that door, Thomas…” Her gaze was sharp, but not cruel. Just honest. “You won’t sleep again.”

And with that, Polly turned and left the room, leaving him alone with the fire and the weight of everything he hadn't yet said.

***

The moonlight spilled across the floor in soft pools of light, casting long shadows across the floorboards. You sat in the window seat, knees drawn up, arms wrapped loosely around them, chin resting on the crook of your elbow. The night was quiet and still. But your mind wasn’t. Your eyes followed the curve of the moon as it rose over Small Heath, pale and full in a sky smeared with clouds. You hadn’t meant to stay awake this long—had tried to will yourself to sleep—but your thoughts wouldn't quiet.

When the door opened, your fatigue evaporated.

Tommy. He looked tired tonight—shoulders tense, tie loosened—but he smiled when he saw you.

“You should be asleep by now,” he said, voice low and warm as he stepped into the room and closed the door behind him.

“I tried,” you admitted. “But it’s hard… It's like my mind won’t stop when it gets quiet.”

He said nothing at first, just watched you for a moment—like he understood more than he was saying. 

But you had another reason for staying awake. You wanted something. You lowered your knees until you were sitting normally at the window, fingers twisting gently in your lap. It was worth a try. The endless days of being confined to Tommy's house with nothing to do were wearing on you. You were prepared for his answer no matter what it was. But a needle and some thread to do any mending they needed wasn't a lot to ask for. 

And if he wanted something in return? 

Tommy had been so kind to you for the last week during your monthly. To your surprise, he hadn't demanded anything at all. Your mother had once explained that keeping men happy in a marriage was one of the few cards women had to play. Granted, you weren't married to Tommy, didn't know if you'd ever be married to anyone now. But you'd already been intimate with him. It was only a matter of time before he turned his attention back to that, right? Someone as powerful as him wasn't doing any of this out of the kindness of his heart.

But sometimes... it felt like he was.

No, you had to stop thinking like that. As soon as Tommy got what he wanted from this situation, you had some plans to make. You'd need to go somewhere else and pray this scandal didn't follow you.

But first, you had to get through tonight. If he wanted something... Honestly, it wasn't too unpleasant, especially the second time. You'd even enjoyed some of it. But what kind of woman did it make you to be thinking like that? Shaking your head at yourself, you sighed, battling your anxiety.

“I actually stayed up because… I wanted to ask you for something,” you admitted, wilting under his steady gaze. 

He raised a brow, moving closer now. “Go on.”

You glanced back out at the moon for a breath, gathering yourself. "You probably remember that I help my mum with sewing for people. Mending and repairs. I can even make clothing. Nothing fancy, but… if there’s anything in the house that needs stitching or patching, I’d like to help. If you'll allow it." Your gaze met his. “You told me to ask you. So… I am.”

For a moment, he said nothing. Just stood there, painted by the soft gold of the lamp by the bed. His eyes stayed on you—unblinking, unreadable. It made your breath hitch, the way he could go so still. You looked down again, already regretting it. Maybe it had been the wrong time. Maybe he thought it was foolish. Maybe—

“Alright,” he said, simply.

You blinked, glancing back up. His expression had softened, just a little. Enough to make your chest tighten. 

“You’ll have what you need,” he added. “Thread, fabric… whatever Polly hasn’t already set aside.”

You could only nod, the relief flooding through you too quickly to find words. He stepped closer, slow, and crouched a little to meet your eye level.

“That wasn't so hard. I'm hiding you from Small Heath right now.” His voice was quiet but firm. “But in this house, you're not invisible. You're allowed to ask for what you need."

You swallowed hard, trying not to look too moved by the kindness in that—because it wasn’t just approval. It felt like permission to exist. Your lips parted. A quiet, shaky, “Thank you.”

He stood again. 

Then, without quite thinking, you added, “I think about my mother, and Rory, every day. This will help keep my mind busy.”

His shoulders stilled, just slightly. Tommy looked at you with something close to understanding—and something else, too. Something fierce and quiet. "I’ll see to them,” he said. “When the time is right, you’ll know everything. You'll get to see them.”

And strangely, you believed him. Not because he said it gently. Because he said it like a vow. You thought him saying you'd "get to see them" was a little odd. Once everything was over, you'd be going back home, right?

You watched him in silence as he moved about the room—shedding the weight of the day one layer at a time. Jacket off. Waistcoat next. He rolled his sleeves up with practiced ease, every movement smooth and unhurried. It wasn’t the first time you’d seen him like this—quiet, tired, thoughtful—but there was something different about tonight. Maybe it was the way he paused slightly, glancing over his shoulder at you as he unbuttoned his cuffs. Maybe it was the way his brow lifted just a little—curious.

“You got your answer,” he said casually, the corner of his mouth tugging upward. “Was there something else?”

You shifted your weight slightly, embarrassed to be caught lingering. "I'm sorry," you muttered, rising from the window seat and moving to the bed.

He didn’t say anything as you crossed the room—just followed you with his eyes. You climbed onto the bed, keeping close to your side, careful not to take up more space than necessary. The sheets were cool, the pillow soft, but your skin tingled with awareness. You turned to your side, back to the wall, knees drawn slightly up. It was habit by now—putting a little distance between yourself and him, even if he’d never asked for it.

Still, you couldn’t help it. You watched him. Tried not to, but you did.

He finished unfastening his shirt, pulling it off with a fluid motion before draping it neatly over the back of a chair. The soft lamplight caught the lines of his back—strong, lean muscle shifting beneath skin marked by old scars. Pale against the shadows, silent testaments to a life that had never been gentle. He moved with a kind of quiet confidence, not trying to impress or intimidate—just existing in the way only a man who'd seen too much could.

"If you're going to keep looking at me like that," he said, "I might start wondering about your intentions."

Your breath caught. You were caught. Still, your gaze lingered just a second longer before you turned your eyes away—but it was too late. He'd seen it.

And when he crossed the room to join you, it was with a quiet, self-assured ease. He stretched out on his back beside you, one arm tucked behind his head, the other resting loosely across his abdomen. A small smile played at the corners of his lips—not smug, but amused. 

“Something else you wanted?” he murmured, tone casual, teasing.

The hint of amusement in his voice was unmistakable, and it made your stomach flip. You looked over at him, just briefly, then back toward the ceiling. 

What were you doing? He'd given you the answer you were hoping for and he wasn't asking for anything in return. Maybe he was just being kind and not wanting to bother you during your time. Men had no idea how any of that worked. Or maybe... You didn't like the small voice whispering in the back of your mind that maybe he didn't want you anymore. Maybe once his business was settled with your stepfather, he wouldn't need you anymore and you'd be on your own. Maybe he already had what he wanted from you.

Those worries lingered but didn't feel quite right.

"Someone's thinking very hard over there," he mused, still with that note of teasing in his tone. 

Just sleep. Tell him goodnight and go to sleep.

No, you couldn't. Because you wanted an answer to that question. You needed to know if you were reading too much into things.

He was the most powerful man in Birmingham. If he hadn't been trying to use your stepfather to get his point across, would he have even looked at you twice? Was it just the wager? You'd never seen him with anyone but if he ever had a woman on his arm, you'd expect her to be beautiful, sophisticated. You were neither of those things.

Still, it was the random moments when you were alone together that made you wonder if there was more to it. The way he could be caring. Those rare smiles he'd flash. Was it only in your head?  

With no idea what you were doing, you sat up in bed. His gaze stayed on you, the look in his pale-blue eyes pure intensity. You moved closer to him, your hand trembled as you raised it, sliding it along his cheek. Tommy held completely still for you as you held his face in your hand but his expression shifted. The amusement faded, replaced by challenge and desire. How easily the man could burn you down with a single look. 

You leaned in close, feeling like you couldn't breathe but unable to turn back now. You just brushed your lips against his at first, soft and seeking. Tommy wasn't stopping you. He held still and you took it as permission to continue. You kissed him again, more insistently. You weren't sure what to do with your tongue so you shyly ran it along his bottom lip as you went. From there you weren't sure what to do next, and started questioning yourself on what you were doing to start with.

The moment you hesitated, his arms closed around you tightly, hauling you against him. He claimed your mouth with a kiss that sent your heart flying. One hand clutched the back of your gown, the other clutched in your hair. Your hands landed on his bare chest, your fingertips smoothing over muscle and warm flesh. He smelled of sandalwood and whiskey. His warm breath pelted against your face as he pulled back, his gaze searching yours. 

Apparently he found no lie, no duplicity. He smiled, it was just so gorgeous, so genuine that it had your heart shifting in your chest. "Is this what you were after, love?"

You didn't know what to say. You just wanted him to keep smiling at you like that. You nodded. And for good measure, you slid your arms around his neck and kissed him again. You were learning. The deep moan you pulled from him with that kiss made your entire body tingle. Your lips danced together feverishly as his hands yanked up your gown with haste. He only broke the kiss to pull it over your head, to reveal you to him, leaving you only in your drawers. Yes, you were exposed and didn't like the vulnerability it brought, but the heat in those pale blue-colored eyes as his gaze moved over you, froze you to the spot. 

"I called you pretty before," he whispered, "but I changed my mind... You're fucking beautiful." 

He left you no time to react to that. His rough hands skimmed all over your body as he tantalized you with his kisses, seeking out the places that would make you tremble. Your nipples were so tight they hurt under his palms. Tommy pulled you onto his lap as he kissed you but arranged you so that you straddled his body, the center of you just above his muscular thighs. He left you panting when he broke the kiss, his hands going to the front of his trousers, pulling them open and pushing them down his slim hips. Tommy laid back then, taking himself in hand. You watched how his hand moved, the carnality of the act fascinating you. 

"Touch me," he whispered, his voice rough. Impatiently, he grabbed your hand and guided you to wrap your fingers around him. He felt like warm velvet under your fingers as his hand closed over yours, showing you what he liked in gentle, easy movements. Once you picked up the rhythm he wanted, his own hand fell away, landing on your bare thigh. You must have done something right because his eyes slid closed, his jaw slack like the only thing he wanted in the entire world was your hand on his cock. 

"I've thought about this for days," he whispered. "Could barely focus on my meeting earlier, thinking about you."

You knew he was only talking about sex but you couldn't help the way your heart skipped a beat, hearing that he thought about you at all. You kept your hand moving on him, trying to be careful. When you squeezed him just a little, his breath huffed out. He hardened in your hand. You made your grip a little firmer and he moaned, a deep sound that you felt everywhere. It had your own body clenching in need, weeping for him.

"You're a fast learner," he muttered, his eyes slitting open to watch you. "Now, put your mouth on me."

While you had no experience with men before Tommy, you had heard of what he was asking for before. Your mum's best friend had a daughter named Anne who was only a couple of years younger than you. Once when your families visited each other, she told you about what she got up to with the local boys. How she drove them wild. She hadn't been instructing you per se but she told you enough about her exploits that you had an idea of how it went. 

You pressed a kiss to the head of him, shiny and smooth. Then another. You jerked a little at first, to feel his hand on your head, not moving you but there. When you swiped at him with your tongue, he sucked in a breath. You froze. Was that a good thing or had you hurt him? A quick glance at his face showed you that amazing eyes were on you, watching you as you teased him with your mouth. 

When your lips spread around him to pull the head into your mouth, you tasted him. Slowly, you kept going, wrapping a hand around him at the base while your mouth teased the top. You got braver, working more of him into your mouth as he watched. You kept your tongue moving around him, kept your teeth away. Tommy's hips moved with you now, a silent demand for more. All the while he watched, color flooding his face, that blue-eyed gaze on you so intently. Now the hand on your head did guide your movements, urging you to continue.

"Such a good girl." Tommy was breathless. "Feels fucking amazing."

You carried on but within seconds, both of his hands were on your head, urging you to stop. Tommy was panting above you and when your gaze met his, you were so confused. Had you done something wrong? Had you hurt him?

It was like he could see the question in your mind, his expression softened. "That's good. Too good... Not the way I want to end though."

You weren't sure what that meant and you didn't get a chance to think about it. His hands darted between your thighs, fingers sliding into the drawers you wore, sliding easily on all the wetness he found there. He groaned, grabbing your hips and moving you up his body, positioning you over his cock. You didn't understand what he wanted until he pulled your drawers to one side, creating a path for himself at your entrance and you were shaking. Him pushing into you while your drawers were still on was indecent, had your heart pounding in your chest. 

He was inside you but this time you were on top and you weren't sure what to do. Tommy realized that, holding onto your hips and pushing up into you. It felt different, hitting new pleasure points inside you. His movements had you leaning forward, your hands on his chest. He started rolling his hips up into you, using his hands to pull you down on him at the same time. 

"Ride me," he whispered as he kept moving you on his cock, his thrusts speeding up until it felt like he was punching the air from your lungs. 

Changing the position of your legs, you found a way to move on him, helping him along. Your walls clenched around him and you tried circling your hips on him as you moved. 

"Fuck, yes." The heat in his gaze letting you know you were onto something.

You kept going, moving in ways that you hoped made him feel good. It definitely made you feel good. Your nails raked over Tommy's chest as those sensations built in your lower body. Your gaze locked with his as you were joined as one, both chasing relief from the heat and the lust rushing through your veins. When you leaned closer to him, each thrust hit your most sensitive point. You were shaking as all that sensation came for you, and when it hit, it took your breath away. Beneath you, Tommy went faster, his grip on you almost painful as he came. 

Your arms trembled and gave way, leaving you to collapse over him, both of you struggling to breathe as if you'd run a mile. His heartbeat was so loud as you lay sprawled over him and his arms wrapped around you. You liked the way his fingers drew lines over your back, the way his damp skin felt against your cheek.

He pressed a kiss into your hair. "Ever used a sewing machine?"

"No," you replied. "Always wanted to. Mum and I once thought about trying to put some money back each week from what we made to try and save up for one. There was always something more important that came up, that we needed the money for."

You didn't mention that your stepfather with his drinking and gambling was the reason you could never save money, why you struggled to put food on the table.

"We have one," Tommy said. "Polly will get it for you tomorrow, along with any sewing notions we have for you to use."

You lifted your head in excitement, your gaze meeting his. "Really?"

"Really," he said, the corners of his mouth curving up. "Tomorrow. It's after midnight right now. Get some sleep."

You were sleepy, and happy to have something to do tomorrow to keep from worrying about your Mum and Rory every waking moment. And your future.

You fell asleep in his arms, unaware he stayed awake for a while, just watching over you. Polly's words ran through his mind, haunting him.

@outlanderuniverse

@alyssajunelle

@gothic-chinadoll

@sparda1234

[hms-no-fun]

you were on cohost? i guess too late now, how was it for you?

cohost had its fair share of problems and i could often find the community there a bit too tumblr-core fingerwaggy if you know what i mean. but the site's dead now so it's kind of a moot point. what i find myself reflecting on most these days are the positives.

first, no numbers. i think their no numbers policy was probably a bit over-aggressive, but it quelled some of the rat race popularity contest aspect of social media that often makes it so tedious. i liked their tag tracking system, their robust content warning options, and the absence of infinite scroll. what i miss most about cohost is that their text editor supported CSS, which led to people programming elaborate text effects and puzzles and games in-site that harkened back to the days of flash animations. there was something in this combination of elements that drew out a rebellious creativity in users.

cohost came at a time when social media was across the board feeling terrible (and it's only gotten worse hahaha), particularly as someone who makes shit that relies on you clicking links that take you away from the website or app. algorithms hate this and punish it. users also just seem kind of lazy and disinterested in using the internet so much as letting the internet happen to them passively. but when a post of mine went viral on cohost, people engaged with it. it wasn't just likes and shares, it was comments and additions. it felt like a place that (at its best) encouraged actual conversation and the development of new ideas among like-minded peers. when my posts did well and i included a donation link, people gave me money. it felt genuinely like a website that COULD support professional blog work in a way that was more customizable even than substack yet still RSS friendly, and the Following tab which let you easily see posts of specific users was a REVELATION, like a mini RSS reader within the website itself.

but the enterprise was unsustainable for various reasons (not all of them outside the dev crew's control) and the haters got what they wanted. now our big social media alternative is bluesky, a website that dares to ask the question "what if there was another twitter?" the answer is that it fucking sucks. i hate microblogs so much dude, why on EARTH are we still acting like these disambiguited 300-character-limit posts are the most preferable means of social communication online??? why would you set out to make a better twitter and then deliberately choose to replicate literally every aspect of the user experience that encouraged low-information high-drama conflict fabrication? WHY WOULD YOU MAKE A VERSION OF TWITTER WHERE YOU CAN EASILY LOOK UP THE ACCOUNT OF EVERYONE WHO HAS YOU BLOCKED AND IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE A FEATURE NOT A BUG???????? i just don't get it. i don't even get the optimism of the early adopters. i've seen people decry the post-election decay of the platform like "of course the cishets come in to ruin a community that was defined by trans & queer people" i'm sorry HELLO???????? from literally day zero bluesky was aiming to be a hands-off centrist IPO-friendly tech startup, there was never anything structurally embedded within the platform itself to keep this kind of decay from happening, you just happened to be on there when there were dramatically fewer users most of whom were curious tech enthusiasts. seriously, how have we not learned this lesson yet? you can't define a digital culture by the vibes of random user behavior! unless you have LAWS and GUIDELINES whereby you fucking BAN people for being shitheads, unless you enforce an actual code of conduct and punish bigoted speech and design a system that encourages constructive conversation, you are always always ALWAYS going to wind up at unhinged facebook boomer slop!

the death of cohost and the utterly predictable decay of bluesky are a big part of the reason why i've been posting so much more on tumblr. this is like the last bastion of anything even remotely resembling the old web, with its support of longposts and tagging and how easy it is to find random hobbyists doing cool shit you never knew existed before. like, yeah, you have to search that shit out and tailor your feed to not drive you crazy, but that's what i like about it!!! i am an adult with agency who understands that life is complicated and as such i expect to have to put some work into making my experience with a website positive! but in the hellworld of the iphone everything is walled garden apps for aggregating content where the content and its creators are structurally established as infinitely replaceable and uniquely worthless punching bags to be used and cast aside. everyone's given up on moderation and real jobs don't exist anymore especially if you happen to work in the "creative economy" IE are a writer or critic or artist or hobbyist of literally any kind. we've given up on expecting anything from the rich moneyboys who own and profit immensely off of the platforms whose value we literally create!!! especially now with the rise of "AI" grifters, whose work has ratcheted good old fashioned casual sexism and racism and homophobia up to levels not seen in such mainstream spaces since the early 2000s.

i like tumblr because i don't have to use a third party app to get & answer asks at length, and because it is a visual artist friendly platform where i won't be looked at funny for reblogging furry postmodernism or transgender homestuck OCs. it is a site that utterly lacks respectability and that's what makes it even remotely usuable. unfortunately it also sucks! partly it sucks because this place was ground zero for the rise of puritanical feminist-passing conservatism in leftist spaces, so it's like a hyperbolic time chamber for brain-melting life or death discourse about the most inconsequential bullshit you could ever imagine. but it also sucks because it's owned by a profit-motivated moneyboy who has consistently encouraged a culture of virulent transphobia and frequently bans trans women who call this out. so like, yeah, this place is cool compared to everywhere else, but it is exactly like everywhere else in that is also on a ticking clock to its own inevitable demise. the owners of this website will destroy everything that makes it interesting and will EAGERLY delete the nearly twenty years (!!!!!!) of posts it's accumulated the instant it will profit them to do so. this will be immensely unpopular and everyone will agree it's a tragedy and it won't matter. the culture and content of a social media platform is epiphenomenal to its rote economic valuation. i mean, obviously it isn't, zero of these massive tech companies would be what they are if so many people weren't so eager to give their time and labor away for free (and yes, writing a dumb dick joke on tumblr IS a form of labor in the same way that doing a captcha is labor, just because it's a miniscule contribution in an economy of scale doesn't mean you didn't contribute!), but once a tech company reaches a certain threshold its valuation ceases to be tethered to anything that actually exists in reality.

all of which is why i remember cohost with a heavy heart. yeah, it was imperfect. it was also independently owned, made with the explicit goal of creating a form of social media that actually tries not to give you a lifelong anxiety disorder so it can sell you homeopathic anti-anxiety sawdust suppositories. for the brief window of time when it was extant, i was genuinely hopeful for the future of being a creative on the internet. part of why i spend so much time on godfeels, a fucking homestuck fanfiction with no hope of turning a profit or establishing mainstream legitimacy, is that my readers actually ENGAGE with the material. what brought me back to using this website consistently was precisely the glut of godfeels-related questions i got, and the exciting conversations that resulted from my answers. meanwhile i put so many hours into my videos and even when they do well numerically, i barely see any actual engagement with the material. and that is a deliberate design choice on the part of youtube! that is the platform functioning as intended!! it sucks!!!

what the memory of cohost has instilled in me is a neverending distaste for the lazy unambitious also-rans that define the modern internet. i remember the possibility space of the early web and long for the expressiveness that even the most minor of utilities offered. we sacrificed that freedom for a convenience which was always the pretense for eventually charging us rent. i am thinking a lot these days about what a publicly funded government administrated social media utility would look like. what federal open source standards could look in an environment where the kinds of activities a digital ecosystem can encourage are strictly regulated against exploitation, bigotry, scams, and literal gambling. what if there was a unionized federal workforce devoted to the administration of internet moderation, which every website above a certain user threshold must legally take advantage of? i like to imagine a world where youtube isn't just nationalized but balkanized, where you have nested networks of youtubes administrated for different purposes by different agencies and organizations that operate on different paradigms of privacy and algorithmic interaction. imagine that your state, county, and/or city has its own branch of youtube meant to specifically highlight local work, while also remaining connected to a broader national network (oops i just reinvented federation lmao). imagine a world where server capacity is a publicly owned utility apportioned according to need and developed in collaboration with the communities of their construction rather than as a deliberate exploitation of them. our horizons for these kinds of things are just so, so small, our ability to imagine completely captured by capitalist realism, our willingness to demand services from our government simply obliterated by decades of cynical pro-austerity propaganda. i imagine proposing some of this stuff and people reacting like "well that's unrealistic" "that'll never happen" "they'd just use it for evil" and i am just SO! FUCKING! TIRED!!!!

like wow you're soooooo cool for being effectively two steps left of reagan, i bet you think prison abolition and free public housing are an impossible pipedream too huh? and exactly what has that attitude gotten you? what've you gained by being such a down to earth realist whose demands are limited by the scope of what seems immediately possible? has anything gotten better? have any of the things you thought were good stayed good? is your career more stable, your political position more safe, your desire to live and thrive greatly expanded? or do you spend every day in a cascading panopticon of stress and collapse, overwhelmed to the point of paralysis by the sheer magnitude of what it's cost us to abandon the future? you HAVE to dream. you HAVE to make unrealistic demands. the fucking conservatives have been making unrealistic demands forever and look, they're getting everything they want even though EVERYONE hates them for it! please i'm begging you to see and understand that what's feasible, what's reasonable, what's realistic, are literally irrelevant. these things only feel impossible because we choose to believe The Adults (and if you're younger than like 45, trust me, to the ruling class you are a child) whose bank accounts reflect just how profitable it is to convince us that they're impossible. all those billions of dollars these fuckers have didn't come from nowhere, it was stolen from all of us. there is no reason that money can't and shouldn't be seized and recirculated back into the economy, no reason it can't be used to fund a society that is actually social, where technological development is driven not by what's most likely to drive up profits next quarter but by what people need from technology in their daily lives.

uh so yeah basically that's my opinion of cohost lmao

[b1rds3ye]

Radio Silence

The mission required you to separate from the rest of Task Force 141 but when the operation is compromised, all he can do is listen to the panic through the comms until everything goes silent.

Pairings: Captain John Price x GN!Reader, Simon “Ghost” Riley x GN!Reader Reader Aliases: Breeze (Callsign), Bravo 1-5 (Squad-Member Code) Genre: Angst (open-ended), Drama Warning: Descriptions of violence/crashes, blasphemy/religious references, (probably) inaccurate military terms Word Count: 3k (~1.5k each)

Captain John Price

The captain was not a superstitious man, but when you’re on the battlefield, you take all the good fortune you can get. With age he’s picked up a range of small habits and lucky paraphernalia to get him through the mission; an aged penny in his left breast pocket, a four leaf clover stored in another, he finds himself reciting the lord’s prayer even though he’s not particularly religious (and if there is a god he’d like to personally go up and sock them across the face).

When you noticed his little rituals, you added on a good luck charm of your own - his favourite by far. A quick peck on the cheek followed by a teasing little “good luck, captain” in his ear. Price swears there’s something divine in your affection, it does wonders for his morale and efficiency. He thought nothing of it the first few times, but when he realised that this little gift of yours was here to stay, he started to reciprocate in kind when the others weren’t looking. His soul has become tainted over the years - if anything a kiss from him should be a bad omen - but your beaming smile in response convinces him that maybe he’s given you some luck your way.

And perhaps that’s why, after your ritual good luck kiss, he feels a little more than bothered when Laswell calls you away before he can reciprocate. You notice the slight furrow of his eyebrows and laugh, telling him not to worry and that you’ll see him on the other side. The hold you had on his arm disappears as you pull away, bidding him and the rest of the Task Force good luck as you join your own squadron. Price then returns to commandeering his own men, but the thought lingers in the back of his mind. Perhaps you need that extra little bit of luck today.

Price hates how good his intuition can be.

“Bravo 0-6, do you copy?”

With his squadron grounded and on the perimeter of the site, he stiffens at the tone of your voice. That’s not how you usually sound like over comms, that hint of uncertainty didn’t suit you.

“Loud and clear, in position of Site A.”

“Copy, we’re at the compound but… we’ve got company.”

“Al-Qatala?”

“No, looks like Al-Qatala is buddy-buddy with some mercs and- shit.”

“Breeze, what are you seeing?”

“How’d they get us surrounded…?” You mutter more to yourself than to Price but his blood runs cold regardless.

“Bravo 1-5 you are to fall back and wait for backup-”

He’s cut off by various layers of static but he’s learnt to decipher them. The deeper base of the rustle of fabric as you manoeuvre, the sharp trill of gunshots all overlaying the white noise of distant shouting.

“Price, our exits are blocked, they knew we’d be here, how’d they- Corporal! Fuck, stay with me! We’re dropping like flies here. Bravo-1, we’ve got no choice, we have to push through, full offensive!”

He hears the screams of nearby soldiers. While he’s grateful none of them are yours, he knows that the ride back to base will be a rough one regardless. He feels the eyes of his subordinates burn holes into him and the walkie talkie. Gaz, who was beside him, was the only one moving, animatedly talking to Laswell and filling her in on the situation.

“Bravo 1-5-”

There’s an audible sigh on your end that shuts him up.

Through the time it has taken for Price to become captain, he’s learned a lot the hard way. One of the most important things he’s learned is that earning Lady Luck’s favour is more crucial than any skill for the battlefield. Some of the best he’s ever seen has fallen because they pissed her off somehow, but he still never expected her to shun you.

“Just my luck…” your voice starts off quiet as you curse to yourself. A gulp breaks up your panting as you stabilise your breathing. Your next words are far too calm.

“I’m sorry, Price.”

“Sergeant.” Price’s voice was low, cautious. A warning. He knows how you fight, he knows you don’t do anything extreme unless the situation he calls for it, and once again he’s praying to the unknown that it hasn’t come to that.

“I said next time we hit the pub with the 141 that the first round will be on me but I don’t think I can make that.”

“Don’t talk to me like that, Breeze.”

“The merc company goes by Order of Ashes.”

Your words are becoming harder to hear as the explosions seem to be getting closer and closer. Gaz is becoming louder, literally screaming into his comms as he near begs for an evac for your squadron. The rest of his team is becoming restless. Price’s grip tightens impossibly tight on the walkie talkie, any tighter and he could probably crush the metal.

“Rain hell on them for me, yeah?”

Price starts calling for your name, only to be interrupted by a deafening static that has him reeling from his own technology. Inexperienced privates that surrounded him flinched at the sound while Gaz fell silent. Soon Price’s walkie talkie falls silent too.

He brings his hand up to activate communications again, a tentative check in.

“Bravo 1-5, do you copy?”

He waits for a moment.

“Fuck. Breeze? Do you copy?”

The next time he calls out to you is the first time he’s hesitant, to the untrained ear he sounded as strong as ever but to him he recognises how his own voice wavers. A gentle call of your actual name, the last resort.

Silence.

Price gives you a few more seconds to answer, each moment more damning than the last. Gaz sends a concerned look his way but words fail him. He’s a good sergeant but his inexperience is showing. He hasn’t fully mastered the poker face, not like Price has. 

Eventually he lets out a heavy exhale through his nose, counting each racing heartbeat it takes until it has marginally slowed.

Gaz instinctively straightened up, he didn’t need to see Price’s face to know his captain was transforming before his very eyes. Price adjusts his hat, looking at the rest of his team under the brim.

“Alright, we’ve got double the work and half the manpower. No time to lose, I want this site cleared within the hour, and then we're finding our other half."

With affirmatives all round, the soldiers get to work and so does Price. To the untrained eye, he’s calm, eerily so. As captain, Price can’t afford to lose his cool, it’ll bleed over and smother his team, blanket them in a tense atmosphere of panic and uncertainty. So he stays resolute, acting as the team’s anchor as he guides them towards the objective with precision.

The only emotion that breaks his facade is anger. Pure, unbridled rage that casts a frightening glaze over his eyes. His allies can see it as Price stomps towards the entrance of the site. Al-Qatala most certainly feel it as their lackeys are pummeled to the ground, bones cracking against stone and tiles. They’re not gifted the mercy of a quick bullet, but the pain of slowly bleeding out with broken bones, bruised bodies and limbs jutting out in all the ways they should not. Every bruising punch, every bullet delivered does little to quell the raging storm within him. It brings him closer to the mission objective but it doesn’t bring him closer to you, and that’s the only thing that matters right now. There’s no hostages, no chance of salvation for his enemies. Any form of good will in Price was taken away when you were taken away from him. He hopes whatever god that sees the carnage he’s inflicted knows that it is only a taste of what to come if he ever meets that poor sod.

When his side of the operation is done and the squadron is now leaving the site, Price returns to his comms. He needs to address the other half of the mission, you. Suddenly his tongue feels thick in his mouth as his throat tightens. His collar is suffocating.

“Bravo 0-6 to Watcher-1 do you copy?”

Laswell’s voice rings out.

“Affirmative. We’ve already dispatched birds to Bravo-1’s location, we’ll do what we can and sort out that compound.”

“Do me one more thing. Find me everything you can on the ‘Order of Ashes’. I want names, locations, families, the whole fucking mile.”

“Can do. … Is this for Breeze?”

“Breeze wanted me to rain hell on them…”

Price’s voice is low as he puts a cigar in his mouth. He lights it up, even when the cigar smokes he keeps the lighter on. His eyes narrow at the flickering flame, fixated on it for a moment longer. He’s never been a particularly superstitious man, but he’s asking for Lady Luck to be on his side once again. For the slim chance that you’re somewhere out there, breathing. He’s never been worthy of her favour, but you damn well are so surely she’ll put that into account. She’ll consider that you still have a lot to do, you still have a good luck kiss that Price needs to return. He puts his lighter away.

“... and I intend to deliver.”

Simon "Ghost" Riley

Ghost preferred his quieter missions. Others feel safer when in a team but more people mean more variables, and more variables mean more fuck ups, and heavens know he’s had enough of those. For Ghost, the less, the better. And yet, when it came to 141, and in particular to you, he’d pick company over going solo in a heartbeat.

Reconnaissance missions were a personal favourite, they were quiet, less violent if done right and often required only a few people. Of course his first person of choice is you, even if you’d always call these missions an “impromptu date” and then chastise him for not planning something more extravagant just to rile him up.

Even now, when you two were starting on opposite sides of the target site a good few kilometres apart, you were connected through communications. He’d listen as you ramble about anything and everything on your mind when the mission gets quiet. It was endearing, it was soothing. Ghost never thought he’d find someone like you with the power to give him a respite even when on duty - or if he ever deserved such a thing. And yet here he was, sitting against a wall, waiting for further instructions from Laswell as you started the purely hypothetical debate on who in the 141 would best survive the zombie apocalypse.

“Honestly, with a mask like yours you could probably blend in with the horde. 10 out of 10 you’d last your entire life like that.”

“Surrounded by brain dead morons? Already have that.”

He heard your laugh that you tried to mask as an exaggerated scoff.

“How long do you think I’d last?”

“One hour at most.”

“Oh come on Ghost, have a bit more faith in me.”

“All Bravo to Watcher-1, we’re awaiting further action, copy.”

As Laswell replies, Simon can already imagine your offended expression as he changes the topic.

“Bravo-1 this is Watcher-1, you are all clear to close in on the perimeter. Do not engage, just tell us what you see.”

“Watcher-1 this is Bravo 1-5, I’m already seeing hostiles.”

Ghost stills, his hand reaching back up to the comms. You’ve always managed to keep it cool but he heard how your sentence ended with a slight waver. It was too early for speculation, but the alarm bells were already going off in his head. The enemy should be clustered within the site, nowhere near where you currently are.

“I’m counting a dozen men, a couple of trucks and- that’s looking like some impressive cargo.”

There’s some extra static as Ghost finds his pace increasing. He won’t be able to reach you soon, but it doesn’t stop his legs from moving towards the site.

“They’re moving quickly, they’ve got an agenda.”

“Stay frosty, Breeze.”

“Got it, Simon.”

Your voice is more of a whisper now, almost blending in with the static. Was the enemy that close to you already?  Usually, he loved when you used his actual name. Everyone calls him ‘Ghost’ even off-duty, but you were proper enough to at least always call him by his callsign in battle. You were getting spooked and he was too far away to even try and comfort you.

It was a strain to unclench his balled fists. He wasn’t going to have a mission go wrong, at least not one that involved you. He’d be damned if something took you out before him, because he refused to return to a life where you weren’t yapping his ear off.

“Breeze, head back to exfil.”

“Fuck, they’re heading this way.”

If you found a good place to hide, Ghost could reach you before any enemy did. He had to.

“I’m heading towards your position. E.T.A 20 minutes.”

“Ghost, my spot is now crawling with hostiles. I know you’re a one man army but I think you’re pushing it this time.”

Your laugh was different this time. It wasn’t as hearty as the one he heard before, it was a weak wheeze. Half-hearted, the sound of a bitter and quiet defeat. He could hear your rugged breathing against the end of the mic. If he was actually with you, he’d stand beside you in moments like this, letting you put your body weight on him discreetly as he anchored you to the world. His gloved hand instinctively curls as he imagines himself holding onto your arm.

“Breeze, stay with me. Focus on the objective.”

“You owe me a proper date after this, Ghost.”

“Then make sure you get back in one piece-”

The comms are disrupted with a voice that Ghost can’t recognise, with you returning an indistinguishable shout and a curse. He can’t help calling your name into the comms, only to hear the static of indescribable commotion, bodies shuffling and the harrowing crack of broken bones and limbs. It escalates into a deafening crescendo spanning only a few seconds before the grand finale of a thump of a fallen body. The transmission ends with a damning click. He stops in his tracks before he returns to the comms.

“Breeze? How copy?”

The line has gone dead. Ghost slams his fist into the nearest wall, but it does little to quell the pain from within.

“Bravo this is Watcher-1, what’s your status?”

Ghost pauses at Laswell’s request, he wants you to be the one who replies on his behalf, you usually do. Never did a moment feel so heavy, outweighing his military gear and weapons, almost bringing the hulking man to his knees. His hand reluctantly comes up to activate his walkie talkie. He takes his sweet time, giving you the chance to interrupt. When he finally speaks, his voice is slow as he draws out every syllable, every pause a desperate invitation for you to speak up.

“Bravo 1-5 is M.I.A.”

Laswell is silent on the other side. Ghost lets his head tilt back until it rests on the wall beside him, the guilt made his skull too heavy. With that sentence alone he felt like your executioner, as if he just brought the possibility of you being gone into reality. The only thing he can hear now is the slight rustle of grass against the wind, a backdrop to the rhythmic bass of his pounding heartbeat. This was a typical ambience for solo missions, and Ghost was used to being alone.

But lonely? He had forgotten how it felt ever since you barged into his life. And now that the feeling has returned, he forgot just how utter shit it feels.

“We’re sending immediate backup to their position. We’ll meet you there.”

But by the time he and the squadron make it to your position, there are only the remnants of a battle left in your wake. A few unrecognised bodies are slumped against the walls, furniture is overturned, and dried blood paints the floor as a macabre dye. Most - if not all - of this must have been your handiwork, and if it was any other circumstance Ghost would feel proud, but you’re not beside him for him to praise you. That being said, there is no sign of you, and that leaves him optimistic, but the other soldiers seemed to think differently.

“You know, they say Al-Qatala never takes prisoners,” one jittery private said to another.

“What’re you trying to say? I've seen the Sergeant. Breeze is tough.”

“I’m just saying, even if we can’t find their body they’re probably d-”

“That’s enough,” Ghost snaps his head to them, eyes alight with a rage usually reserved only for his worst enemies. His voice is near unrecognisable, more akin to a growl than any human sound. He will not tolerate anyone speaking ill of you or doubting your capabilities as a soldier. He tells himself he does it for your honour, nothing more, nothing less. He disregards the selfish need for you to return to him as it wittles him down to the bone and contorts his face to a scowl concealed under his mask.

The soldiers hurriedly salute before exiting the room, leaving the lieutenant alone, shoulders and chest heaving before he moves to continue the search.

The team returns empty handed, but that means nothing to Ghost. Even as he’s issued new missions he does not falter. He fights with the same brutality, killing his enemy before they can kill him because he needs to return home. Return home so he can organise a covert mission of his own - retrieving you. No matter the rank or squadron that separates you, no matter if you’re shipped out to the other side of this godforsaken earth, you two are a team. Combat has hardened Ghost into a brutally honest man, many would call him a pessimist, but a stubborn voice in the back of his mind refuses to believe that you’re gone. You’ve always been a tough nut to crack, if you weren’t you wouldn’t be dating him. He’s seen you stare death in the eyes only for you to stand back up beside him. And so he faces forward and doesn’t look back. Because until he has to rip off the freezing metal of a dog tag from your neck, he swears on his stone cold heart that you’re still out there. Maybe a little tattered, perhaps even broken, but living.

Call of Duty Masterlist

[archivlibrarianist]

"Bots on the internet are nothing new, but a sea change has occurred over the past year. For the past 25 years, anyone running a web server knew that the bulk of traffic was one sort of bot or another. There was googlebot, which was quite polite, and everyone learned to feed it - otherwise no one would ever find the delicious treats we were trying to give away. There were lots of search engine crawlers working to develop this or that service. You'd get 'script kiddies' trying thousands of prepackaged exploits. A server secured and patched by a reasonably competent technologist would have no difficulty ignoring these.

"...The surge of AI bots has hit Open Access sites particularly hard, as their mission conflicts with the need to block bots. Consider that Internet Archive can no longer save snapshots of one of the best open-access publishers, MIT Press, because of cloudflare blocking. Who know how many books will be lost this way?  Or consider that the bots took down OAPEN, the worlds most important repository of Scholarly OA books, for a day or two. That's 34,000 books that AI 'checked out' for two days. Or recent outages at Project Gutenberg, which serves 2 million dynamic pages and a half million downloads per day. That's hundreds of thousands of downloads blocked! The link checker at doab-check.ebookfoundation.org (a project I worked on for OAPEN) is now showing 1,534 books that are unreachable due to 'too many requests.' That's 1,534 books that AI has stolen from us! And it's getting worse.

"...The thing that gets me REALLY mad is how unnecessary this carnage is. Project Gutenberg makes all its content available with one click on a file in its feeds directory. OAPEN makes all its books available via an API. There's no need to make a million requests to get this stuff!! Who (or what) is programming these idiot scraping bots? Have they never heard of a sitemap??? Are they summer interns using ChatGPT to write all their code? Who gave them infinite memory, CPUs and bandwidth to run these monstrosities? (Don't answer.)

"We are headed for a world in which all good information is locked up behind secure registration barriers and paywalls, and it won't be to make money, it will be for survival. Captchas will only be solvable by advanced AIs and only the wealthy will be able to use internet libraries."

[geoledgy]

your oc website is SO SO SO SO INCREDIBLY COOL how the hell do you even start learning how to do this ?? if you learned how to do this by yourself online, are there any tutorials or resources you can share with us? was making this website free??

omg THANK YOU SO SOOOOOO MUCH!!! It makes me so happy to hear that folks like my little site. I code my site with Phoenix Code (for the live viewer and number dials) and I host my site on Neocities - it is all free. Phoenix can be used in browser or on desktop, but I like having it on desktop more for big projects in case my files get deleted. I use the browser version when I just want to test something quickly.

The 2 videos I use and can not recommend enough to anyone who asks me are this HTML tutorial and this CSS tutorial. They are simple and easy to understand, but I recommend watching it the first go, and then following along the next few watches until you get the flow of basic parts to a website, how they're organized, and what order they go in. At this point, I've memorized exactly where everything goes, and it is all thanks to these 2 videos.

If I am being honest, I learned how to code by myself, not quite even with online tutorials but just from being stupid and messing around myself (1, because I was a kid, and 2, because I didn't understand English very well to know what tutorials are saying.) I used to do html coding for Neopet pages when I was a kid with too much online time, first by just editing the default petpages and adding info and images, and then just doing trial and error with the html. I'll just try something and then if it doesn't turn out the way I want it, I try to find out why it didn't work and also get inspiration from other similar sites to figure out where things go or how they coded (with this nifty thing called right click > inspect page or right click > view page source). And BOOM, working webpage.

It was rudimentary, white blank background without any boxes or anything, you just scrolled down the page and sections were separated by a horizontal bar. OH and every text was centered! I had no idea how to make scrolling boxes or fancy assets, but damn I still had so much fun working on it every weekend. When you find authentic selfmade sites from the 90s and 2000s, most of them aren't super fancy either unlike what modern nostalgia makes you think. So I hope you don't feel discouraged if you begin making a website and feel it isn't "fancy", you're already doing a first big step which is making a webpage and learned your first set of html code!

It was over a decade later before I coded webpages with html again. I've gotten lazy and started relying on site builders, but nothing was quite as versatile as html. I wanted to try coding my own OC site again, so that was when I started working on OutKrop (the site I posted). Until I started coding again, I had literally no idea what CSS even is (and let me tell you, it's a game changer!)

Personally, I work best when I can do things hands on. I don't read through tutorials, I code first then go back and read through coding help sites like w3schools when I find myself stuck and unable to figure something out. Sometimes I grab existing codes and play around with them to see what changes and what I can do with it, cuz having visual context is what helps me a lot.

I can also share my process:

Once I gather up some ideas, I make a sketch, including what boxes (divs in css) should approximately go. It is very rough, but shows me exactly what I need to know.

Next I load up my coding app (Phoenix Code in my case) and "sketch" the layout. Nothing fancy going on here, just putting things where they need to be, and fixing size of boxes and margins if needed. I give my boxes all a background color so I can easily see how big they are and where they are located.

After some adjustments like moving stuff around and adding assets like backgrounds and images, and changing colors of the boxes, rounding off corners, etc., we get this!

so recap + additional useful sites I use:

Coding app: Phoenix Code

Site hosted on: Neocities

Video tutorials: HTML and CSS

Sites for learning code: w3schools, also lissa explains is a great site that is written for kids to learn html so it's easy to understand. Finally, sadgrl has a lot of great resources for coding as well!

I recommend looking through these sites AFTER you tried taking a spin at coding - it doesn't have to be anything fancy just follow the HTML video tutorial I linked!

Thanks for the ask, and I hope this helps you and many others out there who are interested in building a site with html/css! Don't be afraid to get things "wrong" or have an "un-fancy" site. This is how you learn to code, and it'll become so easy once you get the hang of it.

Anyone is always more than welcome to reach out for coding help and advice :-]

[captdedeyes]

Friendly reminder that Wix.com is an Israeli-based company (& some website builders to look into instead)

I know the BDS movement is not targeting Wix.com specifically (see here for the companies they're currently boycotting) but since Wix originated in Israel as early as 2006, it would be best to drop them as soon as you can.

And while you're at it, you should leave DeviantArt too, since that company is owned by Wix. I deleted my DA account about a year ago not just because of their generative AI debacle but also because of their affiliation with their parent company. And just last month, DA has since shown their SUPPORT for Israel in the middle of Israel actively genociding the Palestinian people 😬

Anyway, I used to use Wix and I stopped using it around the same time that I left DA, but I never closed my Wix account until now. What WAS nice about Wix was how easy it was to build a site with nothing but a drag-and-drop system without any need to code.

So if you're using Wix for your portfolio, your school projects, or for anything else, then where can you go?

Here are some recommendations that you can look into for website builders that you can start for FREE and are NOT tied to a big, corporate entity (below the cut) 👇👇

Carrd.co

This is what I used to build my link hub and my portfolio, so I have the most experience with this platform.

It's highly customizable with a drag-and-drop arrangement system, but it's not as open-ended as Wix. Still though, it's easy to grasp & set up without requiring any coding knowledge. The most "coding" you may ever have to deal with is markdown formatting (carrd provides an on-screen cheatsheet whenever you're editing text!) and section breaks (which is used to define headers, footers, individual pages, sections of a page, etc.) which are EXTREMELY useful.

There's limits to using this site builder for free (max of 2 websites & a max of 100 elements per site), but even then you can get a lot of mileage out of carrd.

mmm.page

This is a VERY funny & charming website builder. The drag-and-drop system is just as open-ended as Wix, but it encourages you to get messy. Hell, you can make it just as messy as the early internet days, except the way you can arrange elements & images allows for more room for creativity.

Straw.page

This is an extremely simple website builder that you can start from scratch, except it's made to be accessible from your phone. As such, the controls are limited and intentionally simple, but I can see this being a decent website builder to start with if all you have is your phone. The other options above are also accessible from your phone, but this one is by far one of the the simplest website builders available.

Hotglue.me

This is also a very simple & rudimentary website builder that allows you to make a webpage from scratch, except it's not as easy to use on a mobile phone.

At a glance, its features are not as robust or easy to pick up like the previous options, but you can still create objects with a simple double click and drag them around, add text, and insert images or embeds.

Mind you, this launched in the 2010s and has likely stayed that way ever since, which means that it may not have support for mobile phone displays, so whether or not you wanna try your hand at building something on there is completely up to you!

Sadgrl's Layout Editor

sadgrl.online is where I gathered most of these no-code site builders! I highly recommend looking through the webmaster links for more website-building info.

This simple site builder is for use on Neocities, which is a website hosting service that you can start using for free. This is the closest thing to building a site that resembles the early internet days, but the sites you can make are also responsive to mobile devices! This can be a good place to start if this kind of thing is your jam and you have little to no coding experience.

Although I will say, even if it sounds daunting at first, learning how to code in HTML and CSS is one of the most liberating experiences that anyone can have, even if you don't come from a website scripting background. It's like cooking a meal for yourself. So if you want to take that route, then I encourage to you at least try it!

Most of these website builders I reviewed were largely done at a glance, so I'm certainly missing out on how deep they can go.

Oh, and of course as always, Free Palestine 🇵🇸

[sun4kiss]

Hihihihi this isn't a request, is like a question, how do you put different colors on the texts? I saw you have pretty colors and I just can't do it bc I just have the 7 predeterminated colors 😭😭😭

Okkk I'll try to teach in an easy way.

it took me a long time to learn because each site i visited said something different and it never worked. in the end, i had to seek help from my brother who graduated in IT😭

I don't know if it's possible to do this through the app because most of the time, I use the website to publish my works

the secret of this is html code.

step by step:

firstly find the color code you want here

now create a new post > configuration button in the top right corner > text editor > change rich text to html

then you will use this code:

<span style="color: #000000"><b>write your text here</b></span>

and... tada! :

memorabilia album of the year.

code that I used

<span style="color: #8B0000"><b>memorabilia album of the year.</b></span>

you can also make a gradient effect. to do this, you will have to change the color of each word or letter, depending on how you want it to look.

like this:

heeseung best all-rounder in kpop

code that i used

<span style="color: #ffefd5"><b>heeseung</b></span>

<span style="color: #ffe4b5"><b>best</b></span>

<span style="color: #ffe4b5"><b>all-rounder</b></span>

<span style="color: #EEE8AA"><b>in</b></span>

<span style="color: #EEE8AA"><b>kpop</b></span> </p>

notice that I added one word at a time and changed the colors in the code? In fact, I'm still learning how to mix colors for a gradient effect, this one didn't look so good but I just wanted to show you how to do it

I hope you understand, with time you'll get the hang of it

when I finally discovered how to change the colors, I spent a whole day just playing with it was so much fun😭

[tempural]

Hi!! I wanted to say that I loved reading about your journey of creating a personal website. I'm still unsure between Vercel and Netlify. I have a small question to ask. See, one of the reasons I want to make a website is to archive drawings and journal/sketchbook. Would you have any tips for creating an area on my website just for the diary/journal, which has tags, files for each entry, etc.?

Bello!

Really happy to hear about your interest in websites! I want everyone to make their own site so I don't have to log into social media and get instant tummyaches ♥

Vercel vs Netlify: I think I settled on Vercel for absolutely no reason whatsoever. I just made a site on Netlify, then tested on Vercel, and now I have like 5 websites on Vercel so I just kept using it LOL. I'm sure a more tech-savvy person would know the difference - I think they have certain integrations with specific programs.

Creating a diary or journal with tags:

There's a couple of different ways you can do that, with different levels of work needed.

you got me yapping again:

This sadgrl tutorial might be outdated and may or may not work, but explains the process better than I can.

Easiest: make a journal on Dreamwidth, or another blogging site (wordpress??) that allows easy tags and RSS feed, and embed that RSS feed onto your site.

This requires almost no HTML set-up, and the easiest to organize tags, but you don't truly have the data on your own site since it's just embedded.

When I snuck into a web design class at college, this was one of the methods that the professor used for a blog within a portfolio site LOL.

Shit like wordpress is what a LOT of ~professional~ sites do for their blog section. They code it separately from the main site haha. It's the most popular thing, but not necessarily the best. And wait til you read on what the CEO of wordpress has been having meltdowns about... he owns tumblr too!

It's made with a tutorial for Neocities if that's what you use.

Medium: Set up zonelets.

It will require some HTML and JS editing, but will help automate making headers/footers for each page of a blog.

I've never used it myself, but I see other people speak highly of it.

HARD FOR ME CUZ I'M A GORILLA: I believe a lot of professional web devs will slap your face with their coding cock until you use a static site generator (SSG) to make your site.

You will need some coding knowledge to set up the tagging system since it doesn't come with it enabled by default. But it's made explicitly to be an alternative to big Static Site Generators which are...

It requires some more intimidating knowledge, because it's a lot of scripts that turn files that are not HTML/CSS/JS into plain HTML.

Also you have to use the command line, and that doesn't come with buttons that tell you what you can do. You have to copy/paste all that shit or memorize the code to 'dev build astro' and it all looks silly.

I've used Eleventy, and now am using Astro. Other people use Hugo or Jekyll or some other stuff with crazy names like Glup Shitto. I hate all these sites cuz none of the words mean anything to me. This is a common theme for me and tech. I don't know what NODES or CONTENT or ISLANDS are!!!

I had the most success attempting to learn how to use a SSG by downloading a template and altering it with github + VScodium. Here's the template page for Astro. You click on a theme you like, and it takes you to its github page. (If you don't want to use evil Microsoft stuff sorry. Skip this entire section.) Follow the instructions on the page for "forking" the glup shitto. When it tells you to run commands, I run those commands through the terminal window in VScodium. These tutorials never tell you what these commands do cuz they assume you already know. Usually those commands automatically install the files you need onto your computer, and create the final files.

You can see my wip here for a "tag system" that SHOULD show members of a web listing haha but I don't know what I'm doing and I have a reading disorder AND don't know cumputer good.

THEORETICALLY this will be the simplest and easiest way to maintain tags and files, because after you set it up you just have to write the "content" of the blog page. And you don't have to set up the header/footer ever again. I see the vision, and potential, but I am not there yet when it takes me 5 hours a day to figure out what any of the words in the documentation mean and I don't want to ask an actual tech person cuz they will be like 'obviously just press the Blip on the Repository and then Suck My Ass in the command line".

(side note I haven't updated fujofans in like a year cuz I'm struggling with this part to make updating easier).

Con: the final HTML/CSS code is really ugly if it's "minified", and a lot of themes use """"""professional"""""" CSS libraries like Bootstrap and Tailwind that I honestly think are ugly cuz that's what every fuckin' tech website uses to style their pages and make them look Professional and Minimalist with stupid code like style="500-w dark-gray-balls D-cup-bra" on every single element. Even Toyhouse uses Bootstrap. Eugh!

But maybe you're smarter than me and can wrangle these things better!

That was really long. Woops. I hope you can slug through this wall of text and find something helpful. Feel free to email me if you have any more specific questions. I may or may not be helpful.

If someone else sees this and has better suggestions for making BLOGS, please chime in. I'm begging you.

[drill-teeth-art]

Hey there! I wanted to put together a post for people here in the USA to give you some tangible steps for supporting Palestine including links to resources for them.

If you're not registered to vote or you're not sure whether or not you are, you can go here to vote.org. You can check whether or not you're registered AND register on there. You have the right and power to vote, and you should use it!

Here you can find out who your state representatives are at house.gov using your zip code. This website will include a link to your representatives' website, and I highly recommend going there as well to see what their stances are, especially right now on Palestine. Their website should also include contact information. You should check your senators' sites and stances as well.

You should call your state representatives and senators and voice your support for Palestine.

You should condemn the violence against Palestinians perpetrated by Israel and state your disgust and anger with the USA allowing and supporting Israel in carrying out these atrocities.

You should specifically state you will not vote for candidates that will not support Palestine through legislation.

You can choose which companies you give your money to! Please check here for what brands BDS is encouraging consumers to boycott for supporting Israel. And participate in the boycott!

Here is a post providing a simple to do email campaign to voice your support for Palestine it only takes a minute.

Here are trusted organizations that you can donate to.

And importantly, please stay as informed as you can. Listen to activists. It is from multiple activists I follow and check their pages regularly that I learned these steps to making an impact. Voice your support for Palestine. Call your reps. Boycott brands. Keep up with the people who are informed and can inform you on your best course of action to support Palestine.

I greatly appreciate people adding additional resources to this post if they're so inclined and additional tips or criticism of my advice as well is welcome if there's something I missed or should change.

[gabrielleyueerrrrr]

What led to Showdown—a character analysis

Summary:

Chosen was the one who initiated the rampages after he and Dark escaped the PC.

Dark created the Virabot in an attempt to please Chosen.

I firmly believe that the names of the hollowheads shaped their personality to some extent. The name "The Chosen One" not only bestowed god- like powers upon the black hollowhead but also a instilled a sense of responsibility, strong self-esteem, and a drive to fight for what is right.

Upon his creation, he immediately rebelled against Alan, seeing the animator as "evil" for creating and torturing stick figures just for fun. Five years of enslavement didn’t wear down his spirit, the moment the slightest opportunity arose, he broke free from his shackles and unleashed his fury upon the PC.

But even when victory was within his grasp, with his tormentor's pawn, The Dark Lord, trembling powerlessly before him, he still chose mercy.

I believe his sense of responsibility and justice wouldn’t allow him to harm someone who was already defenseless, even if that person was his enemy.

I couldn't imagine someone with such a strong moral compass initiating or even agreeing to participate in rampages on the internet purely for the sake of destruction and vengeance. A more reasonable explanation is that Chosen initiated these attacks due to a warped sense of justice. The mistreatment by his creator, the only human he ever knew, might have led him to believe that all humans are tyrants who abuse and exploit stick figures. As "The Chosen One," he felt a responsibility to fight on behalf of his own kind, believing it was his duty to deliver well-deserved punishment upon humans.

But as for Dark, he had no interest in justice whatsoever, he went along with Chosen purely for the thrill of it. Contrary to "The Chosen One", the name "The Dark Lord" weakened his sense of morality and empathy(a sociopath, in a sense). This doesn’t mean he was incapable of learning to be good or sympathetic, though. Chosen simply didn’t realize Dark's moral deficiency until it was too late.

(Or perhaps Chosen was in denial? Dark was his best friend after all)

As time passed, Chosen became more aware of the complexity of mankind. He realized that not all humans were evil, some even formed positive connections with stick figures, like building websites where they could live and work. By attacking the internet and destroying these sites, he was inadvertently harming those he wanted to protect. This made him hesitant and forced him to rethink his actions.

But Dark, he didn't care. Humans, stick figures, animations, it's all the same to him. He enjoyed causing harm and destruction, because it was fun, because he couldn't see that it was wrong.

Imagine Dark laughing joyously as he hurled fireballs at the screaming, retreating crowd of stick figures and animations,

but when he turn around he saw Chosen's shocked, horrified expression, it was as if Chosen was looking at a monster, not his best friend.

Chosen could no longer ignore the fact that Dark was betraying the very ideals he had lived by in his whole life. It became painfully clear that the noble qualities embedded in his code which he so deeply valued were absent in his best friend.

They argued, definitely, fought, maybe. Their once impregnable friendship was cracking, threatening to collapse.

And it scared Dark. Dark didn't understand why Chosen was so angry at him, but he cared about their friendship, he cared about Chosen.

And he wanted to salvage their friendship, he wanted to make Chosen happy again.

So he came up with a plan. He would create a virus so powerful the world has never seen—a virus that would paralyse the internet once and for all. After all, mankind was evil, wasn't that what Chosen always told him? Dark would give humans what they deserve, just as Chosen had always wanted. And then, surely, they could be friends again.

That’s why he eagerly presented his virabots to Chosen, like a child showing off a prized drawing to their parents.

He was certain that Chosen would be impressed, that Chosen would share in the excitement for this grand scheme of destruction.

But instead, the black hollowhead was terrified. Having already lost his trust on Dark, he immediately jumped to the worst conclusion, that Dark was going to terrorise the world including the stick figure civilisation with his virus.

(But Dark's plan never involved harming stick figures. He knew Chosen was adamantly against the idea, so why would he risk their friendship by going against Chosen?)

Dark was understandably hurt and furious at Chosen's betrayal.

It was Chosen who had fuelled his love for destruction, who inspired him to create the virus in the first place. And now, Chosen had the audacity to demand him to stop? Even going so far as to attack him to protect the very humans Chosen had once hated so much?

Was their friendship truly worth less than the properties of evil humans?

As for Chosen, the destructive power of Dark's virabot was the final proof that Dark was an irredeemable villain down to his code. Consumed by a sense of justice, Chosen attacked without mercy.

And Dark, wounded and enraged, retaliated with everything he had.

[mogruith]

BG3 Photomode Tutorial #3: Otis_Inf Camera Tools

Chapter 0: Overview

Chapter 1: Script Extender Debug Console

Chapter 2: Scene Manipulation

Chapter 2.5: More Scene Manipulation

Chapter 3: Otis_Inf Camera Tools

Supplement: Mods and Resources

Instead of talking about ReShade, I'm going to talk about the awesome Otis_Inf BG3 Camera Tools. These will allow you to pause the game, move the camera around, and add some depth of field effects using ReShade and an addon.

If you want to know about ReShade and basically have a video version of what I'm going to cover, check this video here. This video is where I learned pretty much everything about these tools. If you like watching over reading, go for that!

What you need to use these tools:

ReShade - @moriarfer reported some issues with 6.4.1 (latest as of this post) and downgraded to 6.3.3 to resolve that issue. If you're worried, download from that 6.3.3 link (links to the ReShade site.) Either way, you should grab the "Addon" version for IGCS.

Otis_Inf Baldur's Gate III Photomode Tools v1.0.23 (latest as of this post) - It's behind a Patreon for $5.50 USD a month. Note that sometimes it breaks after a major update and Patch 8 is Soon (tm) so ... buyer beware.

IgcsConnector - note that when you install ReShade, you can select IgcsConnector as an addon when you go through the wizard. However, you can also download it from here: IGCS Connector - I personally use v2.5.1 but 2.5.2 should be fine if you're running ReShade 3.x. If you're running ReShade 4.x, go for 2.5.3. Scroll to the bottom to see your options.

Installing ReShade

For installing ReShade, I recommend that video, but the Wizard guides you through it pretty easily. If you don't know what shaders to get, stay tuned for another post on that. There is one configuration you may have to make if you've never got ReShade working in BG3 before, and that's the Depth settings.

Installing IGCS

The video also covers IGCS but truth be told, it's easy to install manually if you didn't do it with the ReShade Wizard. Download that zip for IGCS and extract it to your Baldur's Gate folder. If you installed ReShade with the wizard, it will likely have a structure like I have. If you didn't, it may be slightly different.

ReShade Depth Settings

When you run ReShade for the first time in BG3, you may need to configure the Depth settings. This is easy to do if you have the DisplayDepth shader installed. It should be installed by default, if I recall.

Toggle that on and check your settings: just make sure that the Reshade Depth Input is Reversed. You can check if it looks okay - a setup with characters in a foreground should look like this while DisplayDepth is toggled on:

Make sure to uncheck DisplayDepth when you're done so the game looks normal.

Camera Tools!

At last! The fun stuff!

There's no "installing" them. You extract archive and you have a standalone program that injects code to unlock the camera. As such, it may be flagged as a virus by certain virus scanners. Be assured, if you got it from the Patreon, it is safe.

For best results, run the tools (IGCSClient.exe) after you've started BG3 and at least loaded the start menu. And then press Inject DLL. Once you do that successfully, the button will change from "Inject DLL" to "Re-Hook XInput".

I personally use the keyboard/mouse, but it is possible to configure the buttons with a controller under "Gamepad button bindings". I will not be teaching you that, however.

Let's start with the essentials to take a single shot. I use the default keyboard settings so I'll be using those.

You can start a scene or just find a nice place or animation in the game you like and set up a shot. Once you find a shot you like, press 0 on the NumPad to freeze time.

I'm going to have my Tav, Coranzan, hug his sister, Z'ress so I'll pause it mid-animation so I can take as many shots as I like from as many angles as I like.

I've frozen time and the default camera shows this, which isn't particularly interesting to me.

Here's some default controls for your reference:

TL;DR:

8456 on NumPad is WASD

7 and 9 on NumPad is Up/Down

1 and 3 on NumPad Rotate Left/Right

2 on Numpad resets rotation

Up/Down/Left/Right arrows on Keyboard Rotate the Camera

NumPad + and - Increases and Decreases FoV

NumPad 0 Pauses/Unpauses

Delete on Keyboard Removes the HUD

So I let's press Insert to unlock the camera and used Up/Down/Left/Right arrows and 8/4/5/6 on NumPad to move the camera to their side.

This is okay, let's work with this. I would like them to be a bigger focus in the shot. So I'm going to Increase the FoV with + on the NumPad until I get what I like. I'll have to adjust with a Arrow Keys and 8/4/5/6 NumPad as I do that.

Alright this is okay. Let's make the backdrop nice and soft. By default you need to open ReShade using Home. By default you should get something like this, which may vary depending on your settings - don't worry about that too much for now. For now got ahead and click on the Addons Tab and then click Start depth-of-field session.

Depending on the settings, your game might look really blurry - don't worry, that's normal:

Most of the settings I do not regularly change, so if you want to copy the numbers as a starting point and slowly modify them, you totally can. But this will get very long if I get into each of the settings. So here's my "quick and dirty" depth of field settings. Some settings like Blur Type may drastically increase the time that it takes to render a shot, as a heads up.

Let's focus on a couple numbers for now:

Max bokeh size: This is basically the amount of "blur" you want to add to distant objects. If you increase the number, the double-images get further apart. If they're VERY part apart, the background will be EXTREMELY blurry.

Focus delta x: This controls the plane where the image maintains focus. If you increase the number, the foreground characters/objects will slowly come into focus. If you go too far, they will lose focus again. So we need a tool to help us with that to ensure details stay focused: The magnifier.

Magnifier: Check Show Magnifier and adjust the location numbers to change its left/right, up/down values. Pick something to focus on like an eye or some other tiny detail. Now adjust the magnification factor to zoom in on that detail.

I know Coran's tattoo pretty well so I'm going to get these two points from his tattoo to line up:

So I just need to modify the Focus Delta X to line them up like so:

Now that we've done that, we can see that their faces are nice and clear but there's double images for the fireflies and the like. These will become nice soft blurry bubbles when we render the shot.

So now you're going to want to click the Start Render button at the bottom of this section:

Once you click on that a bar should appear in the top left and the double-images should disappear. It should start blurring the background more as the meter increases.

And once it's done, you can simply press the ScreenShot key and it shoulder render a screenshot using ReShade. If I recall correctly, this will be the Baldur's Gate III executable folder, but if you click the Settings tab, you can change it.

The resulting screenshot should be nice and soft in the background and focused in the foreground with perhaps a bit of smoothing on features like hair:

Before rendering:

After rendering:

Some other options I'll go over briefly:

Hot sampling: This gives you the ability to resize the window beyond what you monitor can see for extremely high resolution shots. I generally don't do this unless I want to do a detail shot like an extreme closeup or some mark/scar or something.

Configuration: If it's taking you WAY too long to move the camera because you increased the FoV to zoom way in, slide the options in the left column around, it really helps.

Image Adjustments: check Higher LODs for distant objects to have better rendering.

And that covers most of the tools. I may add another couple supplementary posts after this of some mods that I use and the shaders that I use in ReShade.

But for now, I believe I have at least briefly covered the major points, but it could be that I've glossed over some details. If you're struggling, please let me know.

Thanks for reading! Please send me any questions and I'll be happy to help in the comments, DMs, Discord, or whatever you need!

[dominiqueramseyart]

Do you have any tips on going about making a website for your art/yourself

Think about your site layout Research the website layout you want to fit your art the best first, above anything!

I had to make this seperate blog because my currently portfolio site does not best fit my art needs, but I also can't up and delete it. So now I am paying for 2 seperate websites.

Domain name and coding If you don't already, I recommend learning basic coding (html/CSS) so you can have full control over your site. Squarespace (my portfolio site) is ok but im limited on what I can do with it. Im currently learning how to do HTML myself.

It will cost money on top of paying for the site hosting, but get an official domain for your site. Be sure that this domain name is easy enough to spell and represents you in some way (your name, art subject, etc.

Accessibility Take accessibility into consideration when creating your site. Such as using a max of 3 different fonts, have colors contrast each other, use alt text where you can, and have your font be dyslexic friendly.

The dyslexic friendly font is typically the less aesthetic fonts, but at least your audience will be able to read it lol.

[anodymalion]

ok I am in fact using this as an excuse to make a long post about this thank you thank you asjksdjfaljdf

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Interpreting Yuri as asexual is my very very favorite type of headcanon, which is one that 1. is compellingly coded in the source material (even if that wasn't the creator's intent), 2. is thematically relevant to what the piece of media is Trying To Do as a whole, and 3. just means a lot to me, personally, because I said so.

Coded in the source material

Yuri’s short program is “eros”, aka desire (you can interpret what “eros” means in various ways, but YOI itself explicitly refers to sexual love, at least in the English translations). Yuri struggles with this. Hard. He can’t come up with an answer when asked what eros means to him. His big revelatory moment about desire is that it’s how he feels about wanting to eat his favorite food (omg… boy). Even as the season goes on and the way he views the Eros program changes, the program doesn’t ever really embody the idea of eros as sexuality or romance (which was how the other characters expect him to interpret it) but rather as a desire to keep Victor in his life.

Like look. I’m obviously not going to say that the creator intended any kind of ace subtext to be there. I kind of doubt it was her intent. But goddamn is the subtext there.

2. Thematic relevance

The central theme throughout YOI is “love”, and especially loving people in a way that inspires you both to be your best selves: Yuri learning that the people in his life truly love and support him; Victor finding someone who makes him feel joy about skating again.

Like, Yuri’s whole skating theme for the Grand Prix is literally about him exploring what love looks like to him, even when it takes a form that other people don’t totally understand. Viewing all this through a lens of him being ace is really compelling. It adds depth to the idea of learning how to express the way you feel love even when it looks different than what other people expect. I think it’s a really delicious layer that adds even more nuance to what the show is getting at.

Besides, it’s an interesting way of viewing the criticism of the show that occurred for it not being 100% explicit about them being a couple (aka people getting mad because the kiss in ep 7 is blocked by Victor’s arm lmaooo). Like, ok, did you see the ending scene of ep 9? Did you see ep 10??? They definitely, definitely love each other, in whatever way that means for them. Their relationship takes a form that’s pretty different than the other way people in the show are going about romantic relationships, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real for them. That is very much in line with the main themes of the show.

3. Means a lot to me

In the final scene of the penultimate episode, Yuri tells Victor that they should end their coaching relationship after the Grand Prix ends. This is because he thinks he’s holding Victor back, that Victor would be happier being free to go back to skating on his own instead of being Yuri’s coach. When I watched this (and, I’ll be honest, this is completely me projecting here) I REALLY interpreted this as an ace thing. I think it’s pretty easy to internalize the idea when you’re asexual that you just won’t be… enough, for other people. In my case I ended up a strong impulse to self-sabotage relationships because I would rather be the one to end things than to let someone else tell me that who I am as a person is fundamentally lacking. Yuri destroying a connection he desperately wants because he thinks there’s something about him that is holding Victor back from a life he’d be truly happy with? Oh yeah. I can fucking relate to that.

Also: YOI came out in 2016, which was the absolute peak of hostility to ace people I was seeing on this site. It was bad here. At the same time Tumblr was going wild over this show. Everyone was watching it. Seeing a whole site of people absolutely adore a character I very deeply in my heart believed to be ace? Extremely vindicating.

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In conclusion Yuri is asexual because it is fun and interesting that way, and also because of this: