#but I do. but I also do not have the bandwidth to run yet ANOTHER server I don't think??

[backslashdelta]

.

[discodeerdiary]

There's a good reason why I try not to argue publicly with anyone under 18, and it's not that I think they're inherently stupid, it's not that I think their brains are "underdeveloped", it's not that I think they can "do no wrong", it's that I never know how much freedom they actually have to think freely, or how many of their opinions are actually their own. Of course, under-18s *can be* capable of thinking for themselves and developing their own opinions, but (here in the US at least) law and culture put a lot of roadblocks on their ability to do so.

Of course parents and teachers cannot actually control the inner thoughts of the children they wield power over, but they can restrict the information that they have access to, can punish them for saying the wrong things, can cut them off from healthy diverse social groups, and can convince the child their thoughts are being monitored through religion, psychology, and other appeals to higher authority.

Thus if a random teenager says some headass shit in my mentions I have no way of knowing if these are opinions they arrived at on their own, or if they are dogmas forced on them by the people holding food and shelter over their head. If it's the latter, there's nothing to be gained from a public confrontation: people are generally unwilling to change their opinions in a direction that threatens their social support system, and they are especially unwilling to do so at the behest of an internet stranger who cannot offer alternative forms of support. If a teen is genuinely curious about my opinion (that is *if they consent* to a discussion of disagreements) and if I have the mental bandwidth for a potentially emotionally loaded conversation, yeah I'll have it, but I'm not gonna maintain any illusions about my ability to change their mind until they can find a way to live independently.

This is also why my leniency toward the not-yet-adult tends to also extend to the recently-adult. Coming up with a system of beliefs that you're actually willing to stand behind? Shit takes time, and I'm not necessarily gonna expect it of a 20-year-old who may, for all I know, have been living under conditions of near-absolute control up until their 18th birthday. Sure they may be opening their mind in college, or college may be their parents way of keeping them too occupied with busywork to develop new opinions, as they continue to hold financial support over their head. It's around their mid-twenties that I'm willing to go full gloves-off antagonistic with strangers, knowing that they've had a few years of legal and social adulthood under their belt, and that even if they're still financially dependent on their parents it's a different sort of dependence, one where they're given default legal permission to run away from home.

A lot of people are deeply uncomfortable with this line of thinking because if you look too far into the factors that influence young people's thoughts, you eventually have to start asking yourself which forces of dependency are influencing your own beliefs and opinions. Yeah, as an independent adult you may have the option to quit your job, divorce your spouse, ditch your friends, move to another country, but realistically how many of these can you accomplish at the same time? How many do you even want to? And how are all of these forces *in aggregate* setting the acceptable limits of what you're allowed to think and feel? It can be upsetting to think of yourself this way, it can be easier to think of yourself as a true free thinker and children as mindless automatons, but I urge you to think of mentally coercive environments as a continuum rather than a binary. The point is not to free yourself from all influence, but to gain the ability to see yourself as an influenced mind, and to have compassion for those dealing with all the bullshit you don't have to anymore.

[guardiangeologist]

Luigi's Uncharacteristically Large and also maybe Haunted House (3DS Edition): A Highly Professional Review

The entire time I've had this blog, I haven't really been sure what to use it for. I've settled on spewing my unscripted thoughts on whatever Game of the Week I've played most recently because, quite frankly, where else are they gonna go? I love my girlfriend, but these words are destined for a wider platform. I must expand my horizons. So here I am, talking about cartoon ghosts and green vacuum-wielding Italian men on the internet.

Now, let me tell you, this green man and his stupid house have been in control of my entire brain like some fucked up Italian Ratatouille for at least 10 years. I was a Luigi's Mansion Kid. What do I mean by that? I mean I roleplayed Luigi's Mansion on the school playground when I was in the 3rd grade. With the other Luigi's Mansion Kids. So it's safe to say I have some experience when it comes to this game. At times, he goes dormant. He waits patiently for another hyperfixation to pass. However, just when I least expect it, he returns from the grave (almost like a ghost?) to stage a military occupation of my frontal lobe to last the next few months.

So, there's my history. I ended up finally picking up the 3DS version of this game just before the eShop shut down (rest in piss) for shits and giggles, and only just got around to playing it this week while laying in bed with a migraine. (maybe not the smartest decision?) I mean, to start with, why was this game released for the 3DS? It came out in October 2018, at which point we were already an entire year post-Switch. I mean, I guess it would be fine, but it's just so obvious that being on the 3DS holds this game back in so many different areas (which I will get to, be patient!) and it's seriously a tragedy it hasn't been ported to Switch yet. Why put together such an amazing remake, and then bottleneck it with lackluster hardware and release it on a nearly out of service console?

In terms of positive changes? LOADS of QoL stuff. I might even go as far as to call this the definitive version of the game in spite of the few drawbacks it does present. Some examples include:

Re-fighting portrait ghosts: NO MORE RESETS!!! (Ok still some resets for speedy spirits because there's no way in hell I'm staying in the blackout for longer than I have to but that's just part of The Experience)

You can go back to the Lab from the Mansion by exiting through the front door. Finally, Luigi has learned how to open doors!

The tougher post-game Hidden Mansion, originally exclusive to the PAL version, has finally been made available to us worthless money-grubbing Americans! (Minus the disorienting flipped rooms, which I found pretty disappointing but some people will probably celebrate.) You can even get platinum ghost portraits from the Hidden Mansion which I have yet to obtain all of because jesus christ it is not easy to defeat a ghost with 150 health in a single attempt.

And now, the ghostly elephant in the room: co-op. I did try it, with my little brother as my Gooigi guinea pig. It's...I mean...honestly, it's not great. If you want to play LM1 with a friend, I can honestly recommend a ROM hack of the GameCube original more than I can recommend Nintendo's official multiplayer, which is pretty lame. For one, nothing is scaled up difficulty-wise to account for the extra player, so most battles in the game become trivial with the addition of a second experienced player (not my little brother.) But secondly, and most importantly:

the LAG.

DEAR GOD THE LAG.

I can testify that our internet is fine. The internet is not the issue, and even if it were, it shouldn't take any more bandwidth to play this game than it takes for two 3DS systems that are within 3 feet of each other and 10 feet from a router to communicate with each other. Yet, the game did not once run at full speed on either screen the entire time we played. Additionally, my brother complained several times that he couldn't even move his character. Luigi's Mansion with two players SHOULD be a chaotic mess, but adding the piddly framerate on top of it makes the game nearly unplayable.

That being said, the co-op is a disappointment, but it was never necessary for the game to be a satisfying package overall, it's better than having nothing. Though, as is typical, the work of fans definitely triumphs over Nintendo's official product in this department.

Oh, and they still didn't fix the oversight which causes you to lose the second gold diamond if you die after collecting it because the game prompts you to save while it's still on the ground... No A-Rank for me, I guess.

Mm, yes, the controls, yeah, those exist. This is one of those spots where I feel this game could have easily benefitted from just being developed for the Switch. Instead of forcing a dual-stick game onto a dying handheld with a single circle pad, maybe we could've, like, released it for the dual-stick console/handheld that was already out and had a perfectly established user base? They tried to substitute the c-stick with the gray alien nipple- or uhh..."circle pad pro"...that comes pre-installed on the New Nintendo 3DS, but it does not work well. The nub just isn't responsive enough to substitute for an entire stick, and if you want it to be a real circle pad, you have to buy an external attachment. Not to mention the nub isn't even available on every 3DS model! So like, yeah, I understand they made an honest attempt to work around the controller issues, but a better workaround would've been to just...not curse this game to irrelevancy by trapping it on a dying console.

All of that said, I spent all week playing this game, so they did something right. Curse my brain worms.

11/10 will buy this game and its sequels again every time Nintendo re-releases them.

[thecoziestbean]

20 Questions for Fic Writers

Thank you for the tag @iamstartraveller776 !

1. How many works do you have on AO3? 11

2. What's your total AO3 word count? 127,389

3. What fandoms do you write for? LOTR: The Rings of Power, Baldur's Gate 3, and The Night Circus

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

run through the forest (settle before the sun): you get more than you bargained for when you stumble upon a little cottage after getting lost in the Wood [BG3, Halsin/Reader, dark fairy tale au]

The Venus of Valinor: Galadriel has her work cut out for her covering up that her family's art collection is fake. When too much interest threatens to expose her secret, she enlists rakish thief Halbrand's help. [LOTR: TROP, Haladriel, modern-ish art heist au]

meet me at the edge: Nobody talks much about the Noldor family anymore. Like saying any of their names aloud will bring their misfortune down upon the speaker: a lesson to be learned, a warning to be issued, a curse to be conjured. [LOTR: TROP, Haladriel, prairie gothic horror au]

sharp as a razor, sweet as honeysuckle: The fic where Galadriel's a professional barrel racer on the rodeo circuit, Hal's a washed up bull rider running a honky tonk, and they're both idiots in love. [LOTR: TROP, Haladriel, modern rodeo au]

My Way or the Highway: Workplace rivals Galadriel and Halbrand are sent on a business trip to meet with a reclusive client. The trip does not go according to plan. [LOTR: TROP, Haladriel, modern roadtrip au]

5. Do you respond to comments? I try to! I'm not always prompt, and sometimes I don't have the bandwidth. But I really really really appreciate every one I get, and I hoard them like a weird little dragon.

6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending? I don't really do angsty endings, but I guess Missed Connections? There's a good chance I'm going to expand on that one this year, but where it stands now I'd say it's angsty.

7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending? I guess run through the forest? That's the one that probably comes closest to a HEA ending. But I'm also partial to the ending of sharp as a razor.

8. Do you get hate on fics? Once, on a 100 word drabble. It was a bizarre experience.

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind? Yessss. I tend to write the E variety, and it often has an... energetic quality to it, we'll say. But I like smut that reveals something about the characters, either to themselves or to each other or just to the reader.

10. Do you write crossovers? What’s the craziest one you’ve written? Nope. Not really something I'm super interested in doing, either.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen? Not that I'm aware of.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated? No, but that would be very cool.

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before? Not yet...

14. What’s your all time favorite ship? I feel like I shouldn't say Haladriel because it's too obvious, but I'm also astounded that I'm still here and the brainrot has somehow only gotten worse.

15. What’s a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will? Oof, I really hope I finish all my WIPs. I do have a Haladriel Western AU that I've been working on for a year (?) now, though, that feels like it'll never be done. (Different from meet me and sharp as a razor if anyone's wondering, and yes, I realize that means I had/have 3 western/western adjacent au's. Stop looking at me like that.)

16. What are your writing strengths? I think I'm pretty good at scene setting and atmosphere. And creating a clear sense of space through description and action/movement.

17. What are your writing weaknesses? I struggle with articulating the emotional pay off in big scenes. And endings! Endings are rough! Let me just stew in the atmosphere for 40k with no end in sight.

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic? I've used a little Quenya and Sindarin here and there, but I'm not comfortable enough with any other languages to use them extensively in fic.

19. First fandom you wrote for? Rings of Power is the first fandom I've ever really finished or shared anything in. I dabbled a bit in some other fandoms years ago, but nothing ever saw the light of day. I'll forever be grateful to this fandom for getting me writing for fun again.

20. Favorite fic you’ve written? Ooo, that's hard. They've all been my favorite at one point or another. Right now, I'd have to say A Lust for Light, the fic I wrote for the most recent Haladriel Exchange is top of the list. I'm so so so proud of how that one turned out.

No pressure tagging: @nocaptainonthisship @lisenberry @liminal-zone @conundrumoftime @wyrd-syster @myrsinemezzo @the-sweet-hibiscus @klynnvakarian @jhalya @stitchingatthecircuitboard @hazelmaines and anyone else you wants to play!

[kyliafanfiction]

When Fallout 76 first got mentioned, and the whole 'you can launch nukes' aspect of the game was announced, etc, people were critical about it. And for some good reasons. But they also bitched about the lore logic of it, and like - that's silly? Video Games are always going to have a certain degree of Gameplay and Story Segregation, for one, and for another, MMOs are especially going to, especially when it comes to PvP type stuff and late endgame content, which the nukes were.

But there was also the contention that the nukes, and the fact that Appalachia isn't really mentioned in Fallouts 3 and 4, meant that obviously Appalachia was going to become a super irradiated hellscape by the time of Fallout 3, at least.

And I understand that argument, but also - not necessarily? Like, that's not a necessary explanation as to where Appalachia is, for Fallouts 3 and 4? Lots of places didn't get mentioned in both games, after all. It's clear that trade and travel between regions, while a thing, is limited. And frankly, given how hard life is, not a lot of people have a lot of mental bandwidth or reason to care about distant regions.

Obviously, the real answer is "the writers hadn't thought of it yet" which is always a valid answer? Serialized... anything is always going to run into that problem, you just have to work with it. Books, shows, movies, games, etc - sometimes, the writers just Didn't Think Of It Before™. Now, good writers will try to provide some explanation, where needed, but 'It just didn't come up' is also acceptable, in many cases.

For Fallout 4, well, Appalachia isn't exactly close to the Commonwealth, so that's why it never comes up? Like, sure, you'd think it would be mentioned, but... it's fine that it wasn't. Or at least mostly fine?

The Argument does have more traction for Fallout 3, since the Capital Wasteland is closer to Appalachia, but equally... it's still not needed? It's eminently believable that Appalachia could be doing mostly fine, even thriving, but the area around the DC ruins isn't. Like, sure, Appalachia probably has problems, but even if a state emerged in the region and got expansionistic, why would they expand into the Capital Wasteland? it's an absolute shit show of a place. Irradiated to hell and back, overrun by super mutants, and what exactly is the draw there? Expanding is expensive, especially in the Fallout Wasteland, so there' has to be a resource incentive to go there.

And the Capital Wasteland, during the game, doesn't really have it. Not on the scale of large states. Unless you know that Liberty Prime is under the Pentagon, anyway, or you're more desperate, or you're concerned about the symbolism of owning the ruins of DC why go there?

Like, even the major settlements of the Capital Wasteland are pretty recent, at least as large hubs - Megaton's wall wasn't built until 2241, and while there were people going back possibly decades more (Manya Vargas's grandfather was purportedly a founder, and she's apparently old in 2277), that still could only be sixty, seventy, eighty years. A 'Generation' is like 20-30 years, or something. Especially given the poor health, low life expectancy and how much the hard living of the wasteland might age someone, it really doesn't have to be that long. And Megaton's hardly worth invading for.

Tenpenny Tower was established by Mr. Tenpenny in his lifetime, and while again, he's old, he also wasn't like, a kid when it did it. Had to be established enough to have the resources to come and build it and all, after all.

Rivet City wasn't a thing until 2239.

So civilization, such as it is, at least beyond subsistence little communities scraping by, is probably not that old, in the Capital Wasteland? And it's not like a lot of people lived there in the short term after the bombs dropped, given how blasted the place was. Heck, in 76, we find out some people are coming from the Capital Wasteland to Appalachia! They literally called the Capital Wasteland "Hell on Earth" so there probably weren't a ton of people for a while in the region.

Appalachia could be doing just fine, chilling, doing their own thing and not really interacting with the Wasteland. There could be some trade happening, those caravans have to get their goods from somewhere outside the wasteland. There's just not a lot of reason to assume that Appalachia absolutely would be interacting with the Capital Wasteland, enough for it to be relevant, or something that would naturally come up in convo with the Lone Wanderer.

Yes, yes, it's 100% possible that Appalachia is a nuked out hellscape by 2277. Or that it's dealing with it's own problems, or that it's overrun by monsters or whatever, or just... not interested. Maybe it's not thriving, but it's still a going concern. But there's no real reason that it has to be that there's nothing there, by the 'present day' of Fallouts 3 and 4.

[omo-queer]

if this is too far, I apologise and just ignore this ask, but I just find it so impressive that your able to keep edging yourself. It just kinda shows how strong you are when you can go so long without getting off and it's going to be so worth it when all the weeks are up and you finally get that release. I've tried edging myself but I can't do it, like everytime I maybe last once before I just can't restrain myself and just the neediness. Which makes me all the more impressed by how good you are at denying yourself, I might have to try harder next time. :)

- 🦊

it's definitely not too far! thank you for sending this in!

i definitely haven't always been this good at edging myself. as soon as i understood the idea of orgasm denial, it was really appealing to me, maybe literally my favorite kink. but when i was less experienced with it, i would struggle just to edge, go to sleep, and then not immediately get myself off when i woke up.

but a big thing about me is that i will make self-control as much as i need to if i want something bad enough. and funny enough, not getting off is something i want pretty damn bad. so with practice i did my first week, and eventually i made it a whole month. that was a while ago, and then i took a break from doing denial longer than 72h just bc i wasn't feeling it—i had a lot of other stuff going on and i just didn't have the time or mental bandwidth to be like. so horny i start to shake a little twice or three times a day.

but then i got back on board with it a couple months ago when i started this blog, and i figured i would try out letting tumblr notes decide when i get to come, which turned out to be 1) way hotter and 2) even more motivation not to go over. it turns out your body can do some incredible things when you don't have a choice in the matter... i do sort of wish i knew someone in person who i could have this sort of dynamic with, because i think that might be even hotter still.

i don't really have sex dreams and i haven't ruined yet so it's been a really high intensity period of absolutely no release... so i can't exactly say it's easy, but it is surprising to me just how doable it feels to just keep edging.

another consideration is (and idk if anyone else thinks this way. lmk if you do!) when i'm denying myself it's almost like my body is the submissive entity and my mind is dominating it? i rationally know that my brain and my body are one thing, but it's sort of the dominance of my conscious mind over all the pathetic needy stuff my body tries to do to go over the edge. maybe that's weird, but it seems to work for me pretty well. i think this is a big part of why i don't get much subbier when i deny myself—if someone else were denying me, i could be submissive to them about it, but i'm basically just denying myself. and in that scene i'm at least as dominant as i am submissive.

there was a blog on here a long time ago, i think it was significantly pre-purge, where the person running it would deny her followers but she also did long-term self-denial. and she never framed her own denial as submissive, even though everyone she kept denied was very submissive to her about theirs. some part of me wants to be like she was—knowing what it's like to be denied helps better get into the heads of submissives who themselves are denied.

anyway! big thanks for the ask, it was a good one... if you do deny yourself, let me know how it goes! especially let me know if you're ever edging to my posts. maybe i could even help push you a little bit further than you've gone before, if that's something you're interested in.

[razieltwelve]

Conversation (Final Effect)

Courage was the artificial intelligence at the heart of the Imperial dreadnought Unwavering Courage. Given the size of his crew and the many systems he presided over, he had no shortage of tasks to complete. Of course, he had been designed with processing power and bandwidth to spare.

As a result, he had no problems whatsoever in maintaining a conversation with his captain.

“Another message from Jade?” Courage asked.

His captain, Carrick, glanced away from the message toward the holographic projector. It was a courtesy of sorts. Courage was the ship, but the holographic projector gave Carrick somewhere to look rather than just aimlessly letting his eyes wander while they talked. “I’m pretty sure you know exactly what’s in the message, Courage.”

The artificial intelligence chuckled. “I do scan all incoming and outgoing messages for security purposes, but there is a certain degree of... mental separation involved. Besides, I think it’s more polite to ask. If nothing else, it maintains the polite fiction that I don’t know exactly what everyone on this ship is doing.”

Carrick grinned. “I imagine that would be aggravating at times.”

“Oh, yes,” Courage replied. “You’d be amazed by the things people do.” He paused. “I could, for example, tell you exactly how many people are currently engaged in sexual intercourse, but it’s probably better if you don’t know.”

“As long as nobody is violating regulations,” Carrick said. “I’ll let people’s private business stay private.” He cleared his throat. “But, yes, I did get another message from Jade. You can display it if you like.”

The holographic projector activated, and a little girl appeared. She was covered in paint and was proudly holding up a painting she’d made.

“Ah.” Courage created an image of an old man stroking a very bushy beard. “I see she has been working on her art.”

“She recently discovered painting, so she has been doing her best to mimic some of her favourite paintings.” Carrick smiled warmly. “I can’t say her attempts have been particularly successful, but it’s the effort that counts. I’m just happy she’s enjoying herself.” He paused. “You know, Courage, she’s going to want to meet you.”

“Ah.” They were due to spend several months in dock, so the ship could receive some upgrades. It would also give Courage a chance to have a proper team of Dia-Farron trawl through his systems to make sure all was well. “So she hasn’t realised I’m an artificial intelligence yet?”

Carrick shook his head. “She is convinced that you’re actually my loyal second-in-command who just so happens to never be around when I send a picture.”

“I did give you a picture to send her.”

“It was a picture of the doors leading into your core chamber,” Carrick replied. “I don’t think she’s quite old enough to get the joke.”

“True.” Courage hummed thoughtfully. “Well, if you bring her aboard, I could always talk to her. I do have a number of bodies I could puppet, you know.”

Courage did indeed have a multitude of bodies he could puppet. Some were so realistic it was difficult to tell them apart from a human or a Faunus whilst others were clearly designed for combat or maintenance. Personally, he didn’t usually bother with using a physical avatar. Some artificial intelligences enjoyed it, but he preferred to go without one. It was just the way he was.

“I’ll try to explain,” Carrick said. “We could call you the friendly ghost who helps run the ship.”

“That... is a surprisingly decent description, all things considered.” Courage created several comical ghosts using the holographic projector. “You do have artificial intelligences at home to help run things, so you could draw the comparison.”

Carrick shrugged. “That’s like comparing a blast furnace to a toaster. Don’t get me wrong, the artificial intelligences we’ve got at home are certainly very helpful. But they’re not complex artificial intelligences like you. They don’t have a soul, and they’ve got nowhere near your processing power.” He paused. “Jade does know a synthetic... and you’re not all that different from a synthetic who has a ship for a body.”

“Hmm... not a bad idea, actually.” Courage paused. “Ah. We might have to cut this conversation short. I’m being hailed.”

“Oh?”

“It’s a distress signal from a merchant fleet. They've sighted Grimm and are running. They don’t think they’ve been spotted, but they’re requesting help.”

“I see.” Carrick got up and stretched. “Sound the call then and tell the rest of the battle group to prepare to assist. It’s been too quiet around here the last few years, so this might be the start of something big.”

X     X     X

Author’s Notes

There is essentially nothing that occurs on a ship that the ship’s artificial intelligence isn’t aware of, at least for artificial intelligences of the kind used on Imperial capital ships. It’s actually not unusual for these artificial intelligences to maintain countless conversations as once since it’s commonplace for members of the crew to talk with them since they’re always around.

For example, a crewman might discuss potential places to take someone on a date at their next stop, or they might just want to talk about their day. The processing power of an artificial intelligence is so immense that the only time you’ll see that sort of idle chitchat stop is during combat where all non-essential processes are put aside in favour of combat-related processes.

[poopraven]

This post is going to be about surgery, but I'll be light on detail.

So last week I had major surgery. It was planned, and should be life-changing once I'm recovered from it. It's a follow up from the first surgery back in May, and there may be two more after this.

At the moment, I ache. That's to be expected. I am, after all, covered in bruising, and painkillers can only do so much. I'm in compression to minimise the swelling, but compressing bruising is obviously not comfortable.

It'll pass. It did last time, and it will again.

What I'm finding hard this time around are the psychological effects.

I spent the run-up to this surgery crying. About anything. On the night before the hospital admission I was considering cancelling the whole thing, which would lose me a lot of money. It made no sense: I want these surgeries; I need these surgeries. What the hell, brain?

I decided to allow the process to take over. Just turn up at the hospital, get admitted, and sit back to let the machinery kick in. Blood tests, covid tests, consultations with surgeons, anaesthetists, and nurses, just let it all happen, and have it fill up all my bandwidth so that I don't have time to cry about random things.

It worked. I'm here, now, the other side, aching but so glad that I didn't cancel. And as I left the hospital yesterday, one of the nurses hugged me, and I burst into tears.

I think this is something obvious, and yet it hadn't occurred to me. Of course life-changing surgery is going to have a massive psychological impact! Of course if I don't deal with that it's going to mug me when I least expect it!

If I wrote a character who was going through all of this, of course I'd explore the psychological impact!

So why hadn't I realised that I would have some kind of emotional response to it?

(The answer, of course, is probably the ADHD. Or the autism. Or that I'm a numpty).

I chatted for ages with another patient who is also going through the emotional wringer for the same surgery, and I honestly sat there and reassured her that of course it's overwhelming, we're literally fighting to get our bodies back from the disease which has taken over our whole lives, and I still managed to not apply my words to myself.

I'm great at fictional emotions, not so great at my own.

So this is me realising that I'll need to chat to a therapist about this before I proceed to the third surgery. And you may be thinking "Well, of course!" but it's necessary to point out that I do have the emotional intelligence of a slug.

Be kind to yourselves, whatever you're going through. Even if you did it to yourself. Even if it's something you have wanted your whole life. It's okay to feel weird about finally achieving your dreams, because the thing with dreams is they seem so unattainable for so long that I think we put them in the "nice to have, but can't ever become reality" box. Dragging them out and having them become our new reality?

It's a lot.

I'm okay, I'm doing great physically, but I clearly have to work through a few things before I start chasing the dream again.

Take care!

[hydrus]

Version 503

windows

Qt5 zip

Qt6 zip

Qt6 exe

macOS

Qt5 app

Qt6 app

linux

Qt5 tar.gz

Qt6 tar.gz

I had a good week improving how the program works behind the scenes. The build is more reliable, and it is now easy to run the program from source in Windows.

reliability

tl;dr: The program breaks less now and in the future.

Just as I was hotfixing a fresh boot problem last week, in the intervening time yet another boot problem arrived! We've been hit by several of these in the past couple of months, and I hate causing people this stress, so I decided to put some time into the way the official release is put together. I really hope this will not happen as much in future.

This is mostly technical, but the requirements.txts that prep the program environment are simpler, laid out for easier reading and maintenance, and have frozen version numbers for important libraries. I also put time into the build script itself, doing some cleanup and anti-deprecation work. The issues with PySide6 and dateutil are fixed.

I want the program to be more stable going forward when I click 'publish'. It has been duct-tape-and-a-prayer for too long. Thank you to those who report problems, and please keep them coming if and when this new system fails. I want to keep improving things here, especially too as more users run from source.

running from source

Absent any more issues, I expect this to be the last week I put out a Qt5 build. The Qt6 build is stable with no giant outstanding problems. Users on Windows 7 (and some similarly old Linux and macOS versions) cannot run Qt6, so they will need an alternate solution.

It is now easy to run the program from source in Windows. I have written several batch files to make it simple, no technical knowledge required beyond the ability to open a zip file, and the help has a brand new full walkthrough. If you want to run Qt5, the way to do so is equally simple and clearly labelled. Updating, too, is very similar to how you already update with the Windows extract zip.

https://hydrusnetwork.github.io/hydrus/running_from_source.html

The process is also simpler and clearer for advanced users who want to use 'git', 'venv', and 'pip' manually. If you have been running hydrus from your system python, you might want to check out the help to learn how to set up a venv--it is really easy these days, and you can save yourself a real headache.

I'm obviously interested in reports if any of this fails for you; or if there is anything you find confusing. There is more work to do here, and once we have a workflow people are happy with, I would appreciate if some advanced Linux and macOS users can translate my new .bat files roughly to .command and .sh (I just don't have the familiarity/expertise in these platforms to do this well), so we have easy 'running from source' support for all platforms.

full list

misc:

fixed show/hiding the main gui splitters after a regression in v502. also, keyboard focus after these events should now be less jank

thanks to a user, the Deviant Art parser we rolled back to recently now gets video support. I also added artist tag parsing like the api parser used to do

if you use the internal client database backup system, it now says in the menu when it was last run. this menu doesn't update often, so I put a bit of buffer in where it says 'did one recently'. let me know if the numbers here are ever confusing

fixed a bug where the database menu was not immediately updating the first time you set a backup location

if an apng has sub-millisecond frame durations (seems to be jitter-apngs that were created oddly), these are now each rounded up to 1ms. any apngs that previously appeared to have 0 duration now have borked-tiny but valid duration and will now import ok

the client now catches 529 error responses from servers (service is overloaded) and treats them like a 429/509 bandwidth problem, waiting for a bit before retrying. more work may be needed here

the new popup toaster should restore from minimised better

fixed a subtle bug where trashing and untrashing a file when searching the special 'all my files' domain would temporarily sort that file at the front/end of sorting by 'import time'

added 'dateutil present' to _help->about_ and reordered all the entries for readability

brushed up the network job response-bytes-size counting logic a little more

cleaned up the EVT_ICONIZE event processing wx/Qt patch

.

running from source is now easy on Windows:

as I expect to drop Qt5 support in the builds next week, we need an easy way for Windows 7 and other older-OS users to run from source. I am by no means an expert at this, but I have written some easy-setup scripts that can get you running the client in Windows from nothing in a few minutes with no python experience

the help is updated to reflect this, with more pointers to 'running from source', and that page now has a new guide that takes you through it all in simple steps

there's a client-user.bat you can edit to add your own launch parameters, and a setup_help.bat to build the help too

all the requirements.txts across the program have had a full pass. all are now similarly formatted for easy future editing. it is now simple to select whether you want Qt5 or Qt6, and seeing the various differences between the documents is now obvious

the .gitignore has been updated to not stomp over your venv, mpv/ffmpeg/sqlite, or client-user.bat

feedback on how this works and how to make it better would be appreciated, and once we are happy with the workflow, I will invite Linux and macOS users to generate equivalent .sh and .command scripts so we are multiplatform-easy

.

build stuff:

_this is all wizard nonsense, so you can ignore it. I am mostly just noting it here for my records. tl;dr: I fixed more boot problems, now and in the future_

just when I was getting on top of the latest boot problems, we had another one last week, caused by yet another external library that updated unusually, this time just a day after the normal release. it struck some users who run from source (such as AUR), and the macOS hotfix I put out on saturday. it turns out PySide6 6.4.0 is not yet supported by qtpy. since these big libraries' bleeding edge versions are common problems, I have updated all the requirements.txts across the program to set specific versions for qtpy, PySide2/PySide6, opencv-python-headless, requests, python-mpv, and setuptools (issue #1254)

updated all the requirements.txts with 'python-dateutil', which has spotty default support and whose absence broke some/all of the macOS and Docker deployments last week

added failsafe code in case python-dateutil is not available

pylzma is no longer in the main requirements.txt. it doesn't have a wheel (and hence needs compiler tech to pip install), and it is only useful for some weird flash files. UPDATE: with the blessed assistance of stackexchange, I rewrote the 'decompress lzma-compressed flash file' routine to re-munge the flash header into a proper lzma header and use the python default 'lzma' library, so 'pylzma' is no longer needed and removed from all requirements.txts

updated most of the actions in the build script to use updated node16 versions. node12 just started getting deprecation warnings. there is more work to do

replaced the node12 pip installer action with a manual command on the reworked requirements.txts

replaced most of the build script's uses of 'set-output', which just started getting deprecation warnings. there is more work to do

next week

I did not have time to do the sidecar import/export improvement, so I'll try again next week. I'd love to have 'neighbouring .txt file' support for URLs and .json/.xml, but let's see what I can manage.

Thanks everyone!

[pinerbureau]

Neutrino messaging

Whether this will go down in history alongside Alexander Graham Bell's first message, “Mr Watson, come here, I want to see you,” remains to be seen. Research that produced the world’s first message sent using tiny neutrino particles a project led in part by North Carolina State University engineers has been named among Physics World magazines top 10 breakthroughs for 2012. Because the Neutrino kernel messaging services copy a message directly from the address space of one thread to another without intermediate buffering, the message-delivery performance approaches the memory bandwidth of the underlying hardware. By modulating the pulses of protons the group was able to send a message in binary that, when translated, read “neutrino”. They are detected roughly 1km away by researchers who, in their day jobs, work on a neutrino collaboration called MINERvA. The neutrinos themselves are created by smashing bunches of protons into a target made of graphite. A pulse of neutrinos (small, elusive subatomic particles with no electric charge) corresponds to the digit “1” while no pulse corresponds to “0”. Naturally, their neutrinophone is digital. Born from violent astrophysical events like exploding stars and. To answer such naysayers a group of physicists at Fermilab have just submitted a paper to Modern Physics Letters A in which they describe how they have built themselves a neutrino-powered telephone. What is a NeutrinoAnd Why Do They Matter Neutrinos are teeny, tiny, nearly massless particles that travel at near lightspeeds. text messaging, commercial location and deployable wireless communications. But some people question its practical usefulness. Off-Board Navigation Service on QNX Neutrino Realtime Operating System. Eisenberg, meanwhile, contends with tummy trouble, for Vincent’s burrowing sets off rounds of doubtless symbolic intestinal distress.PARTICLE physics is all very well for addressing trivial matters like “why are we here?” (see article). Salma Hayek, as the ruthless CEO the pair aim to undercut, has her lustrous locks dipped in grey paint and offset with NHS specs. Skarsgård wasn’t alone in spending long hours in hair and makeup puzzling over this script. This is related to the question of how neutrinos can oscillate though the lepton flavors have differing masses (also examined in 'Neutrino Oscillations and Conservation of Momentum'). To this end, he has recruited his nervy coder cousin Anton, played – in the first of many bizarre choices here – by Alexander Skarsgård beneath a bald pate. Jesse Eisenberg plays Vincent, an ambitious day trader pumping his resources into digging a tunnel between Kansas and New York, a scheme designed to tap stock market data a millisecond faster, and thus turn him a sizeable profit. The portal can access those files and use them to remember the users data, such as their chosen settings (screen view, interface language, etc.), or their login data. It’s the kind of verbose corporate parable David Mamet would sit down to write after a heavy night on the sauce. strings of text saved by a browser on the users device. Because their messaging is so simple, and they make the purchasing. Today (via Emanuel Derman’s twitter feed), I learn of a promising new source of funding. Yet Canadian writer-director Kim Nguyen’s sketchy question mark of a film proves so left-field it risks seeming esoteric or – with its technical dialogue on the matter of “neutrino messaging” – openly baffling. Every second, about 30 trillion neutrinos pass through your brain without impacting. Recently US plans for the LBNE next-generation neutrino experiment have run into trouble finding room in projected HEP budgets. with a multi-messaging astronomy project that combines traditional astronomy with. P art of me wants to cut this enigmatic drama about fibre optic cable-laying some slack for trying to disprove the notion there are no longer any truly original concepts in North American cinema. A new study has found that neutrinos and high-energy cosmic rays.

[themusicview]

We woke up one morning and fell a little further down - a Godspeed You! Black Emperor retrospective - Pt. 8: G-d's Pee at State's End

For being as large a band as they are, Godspeed's latest album snuck up on me, to the point where I was unaware it existed until it was out.

I realize that this is not entirely their fault. This came out in 2021, and I was still shaking off the dust of the pandemic that came in and wiped away basically my entire life. This was the first album of theirs that I had not gone to a record store to buy. How could I? The stores were all closed.

What better way to first experience an album about the end.

In many ways, this album is the home run to Luciferian Tower's bunt. It is a further fleshing out of the concepts found on that album, but with a new layer of desperation and anger that can only come from seeing how the worst parts of our humanity express themselves in a time of crisis.

But in the middle of all of this, something interesting began to happen. For this entire series I have mentioned that Godspeed feels like music for the apocalypse, for the final end of the world. That end, for the first time in the band's career, feels like it could be literally any day. As they put it,

*we fired up the shortwave radios again, for the first time in a long time. *and found that many things had changed. *the apocalypse pastors were still there, but yelling END TIMES NOW where they once yelled "end times soon". *and the transmission-detritus of automated militaries takes up more bandwidth now, *so that a lot of frequencies are just pulses of rising white static, *digital codexes announcing the status of various watching and killing machines. *and the ham-radio dads talk to each other all night long. *about their dying wives and what they ate for lunch and what they'll do with their guns when antifa comes.*

It's difficult to not feel like we've gone over the cliff in many ways. To call it the end times might be a bit hyperbolic, but, as an elder Gen Z-er, writing this in the cab of a truck, making not enough money, in a broken democracy, in a country sliding towards fascism, on a hunk of rock, in a cold, uncaring void, it's not a difficult leap to make. This album captures that angst perfectly, but, for the first time, also introduces a little bit of hope into the Godspeed canon, and not in a backhanded or false way, but in a genuine heartrending way.

It doesn't start out that way, though. A Military Alphabet (Five Eyes All Blind)(4521.0kHz 4109.09kHz)/(Job's Lament / First Of The Last Glaciers / Where We Break How We Shine)(Rockets for Mary) opens the album with, as the title suggests, military radio chatter. The war has come, frankly it never left. It's yet another Middle Eastern melody, the dying scream of the country and culture being bombed quite literally back to the Stone Age. This one sounds as though it is played on an electric violin, more angry than sad. It’s appropriate, for the scream of righteous fury at a world that has gone cold and mean. Godspeed have been exploring militaristic vibes in their music ever since their return, and that theme is only intensified here. As they said, end times now not end times coming. Yes, it’s the Godspeed classic formula, the same formula that we’ve seen throughout this entire series, but dammit it’s a formula for a reason. It just works. Its a similar build up and come down to their earlier material, thoughts of Yanqui and LYSF come to mind, but what’s interesting is what happens after the track ends. Rockets for Mary, the final section, is a recording of someone walking through a grassy field while explosions go off in the distance, sounding less like massive booms than small pops. It’s the demand that you don’t forget that this music has a point to it. For the first time, Godspeed directly comments, not in their literature, but in their music. The following track is revelation.

Fire at Static Valley is an interlude track, but different than the tracks that Godspeed usually puts in this role. Usually Godspeed employs drones in the role of interlude tracks. Not here. This track is one long build, with a melody that slowly burrows its way inside you. If you’ve ever played the game Spec Ops: The Line, then you will be familiar with tracks like this. It’s the soundtrack to smoking desert sands, pockmarked with shells from a war that never ends, because it’s not supposed to. The nightmare of Orwell made manifest; America has always been at war with Iraq. It’s a portentous piece. A piece that seems to look at the carnage of the past two years, and grimly say, “I told you so.” They did tell us, they’ve been telling us since 1997, and yet, we did not listen. It’s too late.

”Government Came" (9980.0kHz 3617.1kHz 4521.0kHz) / Cliffs Gaze / Cliffs' Gaze At Empty Waters' Rise / Ashes To Sea Or Nearer To Thee begins the back half of this album with, in this case, Ham radio chatter. This time, it’s a doomsday prepper, talking about something with the government. “Government came and killed a couple of them” he says. Frankly, given the current state of the world, it’s all the government seems to be doing. The statement is underpinned by an ominous drone. It’s perfect accompaniment to these times. Everybody’s fighting, everybody’s angry, nobody really knows why.

The drone eventually backs off and the bass takes prominence. In some ways, it’s fitting. The melody from the first part, specifically Job’s Lament, returns. This time sounding roughed up, stained by war and blood. Godspeed once again swings the buildup, the track escalating in a way that should be familiar to anybody who is aware of the band at all. Part of the reason I mention that this album is a return to form is the way in which it is structured. It is closer to pre-hiatus Godspeed than we’ve seen from their entire reunion discography. This is the first time I feel like there is a genuine arc to their music since maybe Lift Your Skinny Fists. It’s surprising that it took this long for the band to return to this sound, but then again, for this band to confound us is nothing new. Eventually, a more hopeful melody enters in to the track before the entire thing descends into noise, a final conflict of sorts.

An ascending major scale announces the fact that we’ve made it out the other side. For the first time post-hiatus, Godspeed presents us with a genuine vision of real hope. The idea that all of our fighting is not in vain, that improvement and a better world is still possible. It is incredibly comforting to hear and see. The build accelerates towards the end, getting louder in the way that post-rock tracks tend to do, before it explodes into scintillating sparkles, underpinned by church bells. This feels like the final victory, for the first time in Godspeed’s discography, we’ve finally made it into the light of day.

The vinyl version of this track ends in a locked groove. On f#a#, it was clear enough what this was here for, to represent the infinity in the album’s title. This time, it’s not so clear cut. Is this the idea that conflict is permanent? That we are doomed to keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again? Or is this the permanence of the better world we build from the ashes, the glorious state of being that will carry the human race to the end? I ask, I do not know.

Our Side Has To Win (For D.H.) is the final track on this album, and feels like a coda. Despite everything that previous sentence implies, it may be my favorite Godspeed closer ever. I listened to this track on repeat when the album first came out. It feels like a track from a different band, a kinder band, a band that took more from Sigur Ros than Swans. The beauty is unparalleled in the band’s entire discography. It’s a parting promise of hope for people leaving the fantasy world this album creates. It says that maybe, in this world too, the arc will close and the story will end. It dares to hope that maybe, here too, things can be some kind of ok. Someday. Maybe.

That’s what this album is, in a way. Hope for the future despite the darkness. These times have felt like a moment in history where anything could happen, the people are tired and want a change. It’s up to us now how those dice fall. We may be losing at the moment, but we will turn around, and we will win. All we need to do is trust our fellow man, and we can create a glorious new world.

Normally, this is where this series would have ended. But something happened as I was writing this part that threw the entire edifice of this project into flux. The Godspeed You! Black Emperor fandom has gotten its never ever. See you in part -1.

[mvnvgedmischief]

unremarkable days.

summary: sirius black is trying to be a good man, a good brother, a good person. Sirius has a steady job designing book covers for a publishing house, a flat he never leaves, and a traumatized brother who was just removed from the custody of his parents. All in all, it's wildly unremarkable.

chapter:  4/?

characters: sirius black, regulus black, wolfstar, background marauders

tags: tw: canon compliant abuse, child abuse, social services, abuse

words: 3. 8 k

read it on ao3 here

read the last chapter here

Sirius knew that work was going to be high stress all day. He felt sick to his stomach, thinking about the way he would continuously have to talk to people, when all he wanted was some peace. He wanted downtime. Time when he didn’t have to think about how he needed his paycheck to put food on the table, clothes on his brother’s back, pay bills to keep his lights on, wifi for homework. Regulus occupied his thoughts at all times, protecting him was Sirius’s only priority these days. He didn’t have time for anything else. Not his friends, not his interests, not music. Nothing could come between his focus and his brother’s wellbeing, because if it did, Sirius would never forgive himself. The consequences were too dire. So instead, he just wished for downtime that wouldn’t come, and prayed for the weekend to approach even faster. 

The weekend, when he could finally sleep again, albeit not well. The weekend, when he had the time to take a breath, even if it was only brief. Because his weekends were also spent finding ways to better equip his apartment for his younger brother, going to long grocery runs so Regulus had lunch to take to school, meal prepping all of the things he couldn’t bring himself to eat for dinner. He was definitely tired of all of the ways his mind was spiraling out, he didn’t have the time. He didn’t fault Regulus for it, it wasn’t the teen's presence in his life that was causing all this stress. It really was his own fault. A bit of crying at that first hearing had given Walburga and Orion the satisfaction of a victory over him at that first hearing, and they seemed to crave more of that chaos. They wanted to watch their children suffer, and this was how they chose to do that. So instead he spiraled in the privacy of his own home, because he could practically hear the words they burned into his mind whenever he saw them, and feel the ache of old beatings. 

But it was only Thursday, and that meant he still had to do this all day, and  then get berated by the rest of the team for not attending their weekly bonding happy hour. If he was lucky,  no  one would ask him to go. He knew he should be less terrified of them asking, most of the people on his team were his friends. There was simply the question of Remus, and Sirius didn’t have the time to be thinking about him in the first place. 

He didn’t have time to think about  the way his hair curled just the right way to fall into his eyes when he slept, or the way his caramel freckles made him look sunkist. He didn’t have time to think about the  pink scars that ran down Remus’s face or how they got there. He definitely didn;’t have time to think of the comfort  of his hand combing through Sirius’s own mop of unruly curls. So instead, he needs to  put  all of that out  of his mind. It wasn’t going to help him do well at work. It wasn’t going to solve his problems. He didn’t have the  time for this, nor did he have the emotional bandwidth. Perhaps that was why Sirius was conveniently avoiding the idea that he had asked Remus on a date. With some luck, Remus would think he was just an asshole who ghosted him. That was definitely complicated by the fact that they worked together, that he couldn’t just disappear. He wanted to, he really did, because there was simply no time. 

He set up his deliverables as though he had made tons of them, because his employment in this company  rode on it. Just two months ago, he was pegged to be promoted within the next two cycles, and now he could barely hold on to his sanity enough to handle his workload. He was so fucking tired, and he had so much on his plate. He needed to mentally prepare himself for the long day of meetings ahead of him. He had no true motivation to do his job right now, all he knew was that his exhaustion was no excuse. He knew that his boss, Alice, was giving him a whole lot of leeway right now. She was probably doing more than she should to help him. Being a mentor on the senior design team didn’t mean she needed to keep tabs on his personal life and pick up his slack. 

“Sirius–” 

When Sirius focused back into the meeting he was calling into, it occurred to him that they’re talking to him. So he did what he always did, blamed it on a shoddy connection. 

“Oh, sorry, can you repeat that? My audio cut out.” 

“Remus was saying that some of  the poems could probably use illustrations, and he was wondering if you had any ideas on which ones needed it.” 

“Thanks, Peter.” Sirius was glad that he knew the people on this team, that Peter and James were as close to him as anyone could be. Because otherwise, he’d probably be fucked. 

“So I was looking through them, and I was thinking Bite, Magick, and Love I could probably use larger scale illustrations. But at the same time, we don’t want to crowd the book. How attached are you to the current order or page arrangement?” 

It felt too close, but he was lucky that he had at least read the titles of some of the poems in the first half of the book. Sirius knew Remus didn’t actually know what his level of involvement was. He thought it was just doodles, but Sirius would be responsible for presenting everything from kearning and font choice within the pages, to illustration and cover art to the design team. He was integral to the success of this book as a product, and he  needed to start acting like it. 

“I’m pretty attached.” Remus sounded cold to Sirius, and he wondered what exactly he had done wrong in this meeting. And yet, he didn’t have time to think on it. He needed to keep things moving, keep getting valuable information out of the author. Hook up be damned, Sirius needed this book to actually get off the ground. 

 “Okay, well we should get a meeting on the calender to discuss. What poems and what scale of illustrations you want–” 

“Shouldn’t you be deciding what the illustrations look like and the logistics of those. Isn’t that what you  get paid for?” Remus really wasn’t making this easy on Sirius. But he had dealt with bigger demons and divas then whatever this attitude was. So he put on a light and airy smile, one they’d never know didn’t reach his eyes over the low quality webcam and nodded. 

“If you’d like to take a hands off approach with the design work, that can absolutely be arranged. But in the case of a fledgling project with a new author, the design team, myself included, really hope to prioritize your artistic license so that we can get a better sense of your vision for your literature, should Quill move forward with other publications in the future.  We can provide a completely in-house service, with as much input as you feel necessary during the design process, and deliver collateral towards the end of the project when final edits are done, if you would prefer, Mister Lupin.” 

Sirius practically wanted to scream. He needed Remus to stop fucking with his job, with his livelihood. He couldn’t lose this project. He needed all of the billable hours he could get if he was going to justify the overtime he needed in order to provide for his brother. This was ridiculous. But his clinical and polite answer must have thrown Remus, because he didn’t get much more attitude out of him. The back and forth had ended. So instead, Sirius pulled up his deliverables for the week, which included new iterations for the covers, and twelve illustrations for the three poems he had mentioned. 

He noticed the way Remus looked at his drawings, like he was pained by whatever his thoughts were, and Sirius wants to scream that he’s under no obligation to think that they’re good. But then he remembers that Remus seemed to be nitpicking on purpose, based on his critique of the design system itself. Sirius didn’t have the time to deal with that level of petty, just because he hadn’t been answering. He was too busy. He had too much on his plate. So instead he continues his presentation. 

“I don’t like any of these. Maybe you should start over.” Remus sounded vindictive, even mean. Like he was doing this out of spite.  Sirius could feel his heart drop in that moment. He didn’t want to start over. He didn’t have the time. 

“What do you not like about them?” Sirius is trying to salvage his work while he can. 

“The vibe is off.”

“Oh, is there something specific that throws it off or...” Sirius trailed off, wondering what exactly he needed to change. 

“No, it’s the whole thing. All of them are just off.” 

Sirius needed to think quick on his feet. He didn’t have the time to start from scratch, so he pulled up his original thumbnails that he had discussed with Remus. 

“These are the original sketches we discussed. I moved forward with the ones we talked about. I’m happy to rework those sketches,” no, he wasn’t. “But if there’s another sketch that you think would fit your vision better, please let me know.” He felt like he was pleading with Remus not to hate his artwork. He’d be a liar if he said it wasn’t a blow to his self esteem to hear that everything that he did was bad. 

“No, I would suggest you start over.” 

Sirius nodded, his mind immediately whirring with ways he could start over and re-design this project. He really didn’t want to do it. He didn’t want to do hundreds of thumbnails to get set on thirty, only to be destroyed in a meeting again. Especially when Remus seemed so excited about all of his illustrations before the meetings. It felt like too much. He didn’t have the energy for this kind of behavior. 

Luckily, Marlene directed the conversation away from Sirius’s work. The rest of the call went on without a hitch, like the only person who’s work Remus had a problem with was Sirius’s. He knew that it was more likely for Remus to have a problem with him, because design work was usually something an artist thought of as easy; however, this felt calculated and cold. If Sirius had been avoiding Remus before, it definitely wasn’t about to get better. So instead, he listened to the end of the meeting, and started the project all over again. He could do this. It was an unremarkable critique. It didn’t matter.

[uglymanchronicles]

Ugly Man Chronicles Reignition Book 2 Chapter 2: My Breakfast With Evan

Just a couple dudes getting to know each other.

“If you must know,” Evan sighed, spearing a glistening sausage on the end of a flimsy plastic fork, “my jackass older sister thought it would be hilarious to give me a cupcake she'd baked with about a dozen powdered viagra for my fifteenth birthday. I wound up passing out eventually. Burst a lot of blood vessels. Damaged the erectile tissue beyond usefulness.”

Titus froze mid-coffee-sip. “Seriously? What a bitch!”

“Buddy, you don't know the half of it.”

“So... no signs of life down there?”

“Nothing for twelve years.”

“I think I would literally kill myself.”

“It's not so bad, I guess. At least I don't have to drain the blood out of it any more.”

“Eugh! Fuck! Did not need to hear that!”

“Well, maybe you shouldn't ask questions you don't want the answer to.”

“Do you get, like, blue balls all the time, then?”

“That's basically my ground state of being.”

Titus whistled flatly, avoiding looking Evan in the eye. He settled for staring at the table. There wasn't a lot of Evan's face that he felt comfortable looking at; every part seemed to at least be adjacent to some unpleasantry or another. About the only safe area was his right eye, which, as luck would have it, was directly opposite Titus's 'good' eye. Titus rallied and met Evan's gaze again. “Alright, your turn.”

They'd agreed on a sort of mutual interview process, taking turns asking questions to suss out what the other was capable or if he was worth having around. Evan took a bite out of the sausage and chewed thoughtfully for a moment.

“Who's Moreno?”

Titus hissed through his teeth. “A real piece of shit.”

“I'm going to need more than that.”

“I'm getting to it. He's basically, like... a freelance henchman? Like, sort of a mercenary criminal. Sells his services to the highest bidder.”

“And why's he matter?”

“That's another question.”

“No, it is not,” Evan said, quiet and serious. “Do not argue with me in bad faith, Titus. I have very little patience for it in the best of times.”

Titus regarded him for a long moment. The man across from him was wider than the table they sat at. His muscles were so pronounced in some points that Titus could tell when he was about to move by the way they bulged and contracted. Yet he gave the impression that he was constantly trying to pull himself inward, to make himself smaller. He spoke quietly and with a simple formality, but only hours before Titus had watched him single-handedly beat down some of the nastiest people he'd met in the past month.

Hmm.

“Fine. Moreno matters because I'm after the guy he's working for. You see, Moreno isn't just a normal scumbag. He works for people who need nasty things done. Not like regular nasty, either. How much do you actually know about magic?”

“I've got some... notes. So far I'm not able to find a lot of coherent rules. It mostly seems like it relies on things that nobody would normally do.”

Titus snapped his fingers and pointed at Evan. “Hit it right on the head. Rituals, reagents, that kind of thing... the reason—well, one of the reasons—magic doesn't just happen all the time by accident is that it's all weird little things. A lot of the more heavy magic relies on some pretty elaborate and obtuse shit to get it going.”

Evan momentarily thought back to the Book of Fate and his ritual in the woods. “So Moreno does these things for people?”

“Yeah. Thing is, though...” Titus stopped raising a forkful of eggs halfway to his mouth and set it down again, as if he'd momentarily lost his appetite. “The people who use his services generally practice some pretty vile magic. Real depraved shit. And to empower depraved magic, you need depraved rituals. Moreno is the guy you go to when...”

“I think I get it,” Evan interjected, since Titus seemed to be struggling with deciding whether to continue. “Your turn.”

Titus tapped his fingers on the table for a moment, then looked Evan in the eye. “How smart are you?”

The scars on Evan's face squirmed around as he actually smirked. “What kind of question is that?”

“Hey, we agreed no 'whys'.”

“Alright, alright. Well, there's really no objective metric for it, but... I have Master's degrees in computer science and theoretical physics, Bachelor's in those in addition to mathematics and electrical engineering, and associate's degrees and certificates in everything from EMT training to ballet. I should have my doctorate in physics, but...” he said, with a bitterness that Titus made a note of, then changed gears. “Oh, and I also speak Mandarin, Spanish, Japanese, French, and Arabic pretty fluently. I also know ASL. I can get by in German and Russian, too. I don't know if any of that is what you meant but--”

“Jesus, I get it,” Titus muttered, rubbing the side of his head. “How the fuck do you make money?”

“Software consulting, mostly. I specialize in security and processing efficiency. People pay me to break into their systems and then patch the holes, or to make their code run quicker or make their programs smaller. I've got a few patents I've licensed that bring in most of my income nowadays, though.”

“Anything I would have heard of?”

“If you've used a computer made in the last four years it probably has something I wrote integrated somewhere into it. I also helped develop a protein-sequencing program that helped develop a vaccine for this nasty SARS variant that broke out in China last year. They say if they hadn’t nipped it in the bud it could’ve spread worldwide and we’d be looking at millions of deaths by now.”

Titus scrunched up his face. “Oh yeah, just say that like it’s no big deal.”

“I’m just glad it turned out not to be one. What I'd really like to do is get my compression algorithm out there, but if I do that, somebody's going to try to hoard it all for themselves.”

“Are you talking to yourself or me?”

“Look, I... a few years ago I figured out a way to compress memory down by a exponential factor of six with zero loss. All it takes is a couple software plugins that don't take up much room themselves. Essentially, I could make a gigabyte fit in a kilobyte with very little trouble, now that the math's figured out.”

“Holy fuck, that's insane! Why haven't I heard anything about this?”

“Mainly because I don't tell people. If I put it up on the market, some ISP would buy it and bury it. If you make information smaller, you make it faster. Can you imagine what it'd do to internet access if dial-up and barebones cellular networks suddenly had the bandwidth of fiber optics? It would... maybe not revolutionize our society, but it would level a lot of playing fields. Bring a lot of underdeveloped areas of the world—hell, this country—up to modern levels with no extra cost. The telecomms would crash and burn so hard. But I don't have the means to get it out there without going through someone else. Yet,” Evan added. “So I basically work watered-down versions of the compressor into the software I make. Nothing that can be duplicated, and nowhere near its full potential, but enough to get me hailed as some kind of genius and pay the bills.”

“So why aren't you on your own private island or something somewhere instead of puttering around God's Ashtray in a shitty old Bug?”

“Hey, the Beetle is not shitty,” Evan said, defensively. “And I'm just waiting for the AC in my RV to get fixed or I'd be driving that.”

“Oh hot damn! Now that's the way to live!”

“Not the one I'd choose voluntarily, but it could be worse.”

“How come you're doing it, then?”

“I think it's my turn to ask,” Evan said, mildly.

“Fine,” Titus said grumpily, crossing his arms.

“How do you make money?”

“That's easy. I'm basically a freelance bailbondsman. I just roam around, drop my advertising around bars and courthouses.”

“You get many clients that way?” Evan asked, cocking his remaining eyebrow.

“Oh, you'd be amazed how desperate people can get,” Titus said, shrugging. “Of course, they're usually not the most responsible people, so when they bounce, I track 'em down myself, drag ‘em back to jail, get the money back. My eye usually makes it super easy. Sometimes they don't even see me before I get the cuffs on 'em.”

“Why did you feel the need to rob a bunch of drug dealers, then? The thrill of it?”

“I had a pressing need for a large amount of cash that my normal work doesn't bring in. That got me enough to hold it off for a while. My turn.”

Evan waved down a waitress for a refill of his coffee, trying not to take it personally when she gasped upon seeing his face. “Go ahead…”

“No, no, hang on.” Titus waved a hand dismissively. “I want to try something. Take your hair out of the ponytail.”

“What? Why?”

“Humor me.”

Evan groaned and reached back, removing his hair tie. After shaking his head, his hair fell over his face, obscuring everything but his nose and mouth. Titus pursed his lips and regarded him seriously for a moment.

“Can you see?”

“Yeah, I guess. Well enough to not walk into things, I think, and I could probably read if I had to.”

Titus snapped his fingers. “Good. Go with that from now on.”

“Why?”

“Because now you don’t look like God’s mistake. Now you look like a big, dumb-but-lovable goon. Like Jack Black would voice you in a cartoon.”

“And that’s a good thing?”

“Do you like seeing people contemplating their own mortality and the general cruel absurdity of the tragic farce that is human existence when they get a glimpse of your face?”

Evan felt his cheeks burn and was actually grateful his hair was covering most of his face. “…not particularly, no.”

“Then there you go. You’re welcome. Okay, question time. Uh… how did you get your powers?”

“Which one?”

“Oh, now who’s arguing in bad faith? Fucking all of them, you thick-lipped gargoyle.”

Evan had the feeling he hit a sore spot. Titus's easy-going, jocular tone had bled away from him, leaving behind the hard-edged razor-blade of a man that had ambushed him the night before. He decided not to belabor the point.

“I don't know why I can rege—why I heal so quickly. No, I'm serious, as far as I know, it just started happening sometime in the past few months. I can't remember. Don't look at me like that, I'll get to that in a minute. When I was younger I recovered from a lot of injuries a lot quicker than the doctors thought I would, so maybe it's something I was born with and it just got stronger recently for some reason.”

Evan took a sip of coffee, mainly to buy a few seconds to think of how much to explain for the next part.

“The ability to shut off powers... that's part of, well, I guess you'd call it a magic ritual, because I don't know what else to call it. I found a weird old book that said it contained the key to making someone an instrument of universal justice, or something of the sort. Since then I can see... I guess they're souls? Maybe? I can sort of move mine and when I run it into someone else's it seems like I can shut off their powers. Or... take them entirely, if they're dying.”

“Horseshit!” Titus scoffed. “That's... that's like meta-magic. I don't even know if that's real.”

“No, seriously! I don't think it's just magic powers, I think it... 'normalizes' things.” He briefly recounted his encounter with the pain monster.

“Are you kidding me? That...” Titus took off his hat and ran his hand through his hair, exhaling slowly and loudly. “Look, I don't know much, but the fact that you even ran into something like that, let alone survived... those odds are astronomical. And you say you negated not just its powers, but its whole form?”

“Yeah. Once I... reached into it, like I did with you—oh don't make that face. Grow up—I kind of disrupted what made it... different, I guess? Like I cut it off from its special qualities. Like it was...”

“Disjuncted,” Titus cut in.

“Yeah, that's a good word for it. Like the old Mordenkainen spell?”

“Fucking nerd.”

“Eat my ass. Anyway, after I killed it, I was able to reach into its... soul? Animating force? Aura? I don't know what to call it. I was able to grab something and pull it out and it just got pulled into me.”

“Not aura.”

“What?”

“Aura's a different thing,” Titus said, dismissively. “So what did you get from doing that?”

“I.. I feel pain differently. I don't flinch or get adrenaline rushes from injuries that don't actually impede my ability to function. I think I have a better sense of what is actually dangerous to my body now. It still hurts, but I don't react to pain like people normally do. It's like...hmm.” Evan drummed his fingers on the table. “Do you know anything about video games? Fighting games, specifically?”

“I used to fuck around on an old Alpha 3rd Strike cabinet when I was a kid. Why?”

“Do you know what 'super armor' is?”

“Isn't that where a move can't get stopped by being hit when you're doing it?”

“Right. I'm kind of like that now. Pain doesn't interrupt me.”

“Fucking nerd.”

Evan's fist involuntarily clenched. “I'm trying to put this in terms you can understand, you stupid reprobate. My experience with your judgment thus far hasn't given me much faith in your intellect.”

Titus burst out laughing. “So he does know how to banter! I thought you might be one of those Rainman types.”

“Oh sure, call it 'banter' to try to excuse the fact that you've been insulting me for the past half hour. Do you say you're ‘just joking’ when people get mad at you for saying stupid shit, too?”

“C'mon, lighten up! We're partners now! Tell me more about this soul thing. I still think you're full of shit.”

Evan sighed through his nose, then held up his left hand, forming his fingers into a circle and peering through them.

“Yours is... a sort of cross between a sea green and an oil slick. The tendrils of it keep reaching out and snapping back, going all over the place. It seems to keep expanding and contracting. It's almost flickering, like... it's indecisive. Very chaotic. The tendrils that aren't snapping around seem to be kept pretty close to your body, wrapping around you like... I can't tell if it's protective or restrictive.”

Titus's expression slowly became serious. “What does that mean?”

“I don't know. I have a lot of theories, but nothing solid to go on. I'm not sure if it's allegorical or a literal representation of a person's... power, maybe? Yours definitely looks a lot different than most people's.”

“I don't believe this for a second. Let me see.”

“How would I do tha—hey!”

Titus grabbed Evan's wrist and held his hand up to his eye. “Ho-lee...”

He pulled back from Evan's hand, staring at him. Then he looked around the room, mouth slack as he took in the diner's other occupants.

“Huh. Did you know it keeps working until you blink?” He said after a moment, a faraway tone to his voice.

“I didn't even know other people could do it,” Evan said, awe in his voice. “Hey, wow, you're right!”

“Jesus, yours is, like, really blue. It looks like... a bunch of steel cables. It's weird, I felt like I both could and couldn't see the edges of it...”

“I can kind of move it, but I'm not sure if I can do anything with it beyond interfering with people's powers. It's like learning to use a muscle you didn't know you had.”

“Huh.” Titus was again silent for a long moment. “Your turn.”

“Can you do anything else supernatural? Besides your time-eye?”

“Don't call it that, it sounds stupid. And... sorta. I seem to have whatever innate talent you need to actually do magic, but it's not like it's easy to find instructions. Most of the people I know who can use it just dabble with half-broken magic items—wands, amulets, charms,” he pulled the silence charm out from under his coat and bounced it at the end of its chain. “I guess I'm sort of a dabbler. I know a few tricks, I can use a lot of magic tools, I can sense magic pretty well, I can dowse... Most of the time I really never have to use anything besides the eye, though.”

“Is the eye all-or-nothing?”

“Yeah. It's not nearly as useful as you'd think, but any edge is an edge.”

“When I turned off your power and it was coming back, though, you started speeding up—or, I guess, everything else was slowing down? You were moving faster, one way or the other. You were able to touch me, and those punches hurt.”

“Huh, yeah, you're right.”

“Do you think there's a way you could learn to only partially activate it?”

“That'd be great, wouldn't it? Thing is, just using it is a huge strain, and that time spend outside of time adds up. Going by normal calendar time I'm only 26.”

“Fuck, I'm 27!” Evan laughed.

“Yeah, well, I'd rather be prematurely gray than what you've got going on. My turn. Uh... huh, I can't really think of anything else. Uh... are you gay?”

“Are you fucking serious?”

“No, but the question still counts.”

“I'm bi,” Evan mumbled, crossing his arms across his prodigious chest. “Not that it matters. And before you ask, no, you are not my type. We're done talking about this.”

“Huh. You ever sucked--”

“We. Are. Done. Talking about this.”

“Fine, God. Go.”

Evan mentally circled back to an earlier question he felt hadn't been properly answered. “Why are you after Moreno?”

To Evan's surprise, Titus didn't hesitate. “I'm actually after his current boss. He's just the best lead I have to go on.” He took a deep breath, then started talking with a rushed, deadpan pace, as if he was eager to get the words out as quickly as possible so they wouldn't be in his mouth very long.

“Moreno is working for a guy only known as the Soultaker. He has an innate supernatural ability to pull a person's soul out of their body. When that happens, the person just... shuts down, usually. No motive force behind them. Eventually they just die of dehydration, usually. I've seen some people so set in routine that they keep going without a soul, but... it's not really life.

“It seems like the extraction process takes a while, so he can't just walk past you on the street and pickpocket your entire essence. So he needs people rounded up for him, held until he can do his nasty juju. So that's where a degenerate like Moreno comes in.

“So when he pulls out a soul, it, well, it looks like this.”

Titus pulled a battered, faded Crown Royale bag out of his jacket. It bulged strangely and made a quiet clacking when he set it on the table. He pulled out what looked like a large marble, or maybe a dull pearl, and handed it to Evan.

Evan brushed his hair out of his eyes and peered into the milky depths of the sphere. After a few moments of staring, the murky clouds inside the thing seemed to clear and a face floated to the surface. A black man, maybe in his late 40s, going thin on top. His eyes were closed and he appeared to be sleeping, but his expression had a look of discomfort to it, as if he was having a bad dream.

“Jesus Christ,” Evan whispered, “I've seen this guy... Martell Calloway? I saw some news article about how his family found him tied up in his apartment and completely comatose! But he didn't have any injuries beyond being a black eye... so he's dead?”

“Life support,” Titus said, taking Mr. Calloway's soul back from Evan's unresisting fingers, “technically, he's one of the lucky ones. They found his body before it wasted away to nothing, and I was able to intercept his soul before it got to a buyer.”

“Why would someone buy something like this? What use is it? Can you fix him?”

“A human soul is a damn near exhaustible arcane battery,” Titus said gravely. In the split second between sentences, Evan noticed something—after he'd put the bag back into his jacket, Titus surreptitiously touched a pocket on the other side of his jacket, as if he was making sure something was still there.

“If you know what you're doing, you can power a lot of magic using a soul. And you can reuse them as long as you don't overdo it. If you know what you're doing, you can wring all but the last drops of essence out of a soul and let it heal or recover or whatever, and it'll eventually be back to full strength. Very resilient things,” Titus continued. “I don't think they're conscious in there, but... anyway, it's supposed to be really hard to extract a soul. But this guy was born with or spontaneously developed or somehow figured out a shortcut to the whole process. So the market is getting flooded with torture-batteries and ECUs are getting flooded with vegetables. And families are winding up with loved ones who are as good as dead, without having any idea why this happened to them. Dozens of them have been taken off life support in the past few months. Half these souls have no body to return to. And no, I can't fix it. At least not yet,” he sighed again. “I was hoping once I found him, I could somehow get the secret out of him or force him to put them back, or... maybe I thought if I killed him it'd reverse the effect. He needs killing, either way.”

Titus's eye widened as a thought struck him and he looked Evan in the eye for the first time since he'd started the story. Evan realized what he was thinking and looked down at the tattoo on his left arm, flexing his fingers.

“If you can take people's powers after they die...”

“...then we can save these people.”

Titus put a hand over his mouth and for a moment Evan thought he saw his eye well up.

“I'm in,” Evan said, a sense of righteous purpose welling in his heart. “I don't really know what the universe wants, but I doubt... I know it's not this. We'll find him, we'll stop him, and we'll save as many of these people as we can.”

“...thanks,” Titus mumbled behind his hand. He swallowed hard, then seemed to come back to himself. “We're back to square one, though.”

“You said you could dowse? Like, for real?”

“Yes, for real. I can find things and people with the pendulum method. It's handy for tracking down bounties.”

“Why don't you dowse Moreno?”

“Why didn't I think of that?!” Titus said incredulously, smacking his forehead. “Because he's warded. He's not magic himself, but he's collected enough gear through his career that my normal methods don't work.”

Evan rubbed his chin. “What if we used an abnormal method?”

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

An hour later, they were in the RV. Titus was poring over the collection of Evan's notes and the strange papers he'd bought from Delmann's shop. Evan was very carefully slicing a strip of skin from his own ankle up all the way up his leg. The Guiding Light—the Finder's Follysat on the table between them, filled with fresh blood.

“Even if this works, he's going to know we're coming,” Titus muttered, engrossed in the pages. “Remember what I said?”

“That's why we're not going to look for him,” Evan said, adjusting his grip on the potato peeler. “I don't know how we'd even write his name. Can you read that, by the way?”

“Kind of. This is... most of this is written in, like, arcane pidgin. Who compiled these notes?”

“I did, I think.”

“You think?”

“Oh yeah, I forgot to clarify on that. Apparently a couple months ago, before the ritual, I drilled a hole in my own brain to erase some kind of very dangerous memory.”

“You what.”

“That's not a metaphor or anything. Really did it. I could show you the video.”

“I'll pass. So you don't remember where this came from?” Titus shook the Book of Fate at him.

“Nope.”

“Jesus shit, do you have any idea--”

“How reckless that was? Yeah, yeah, I'm still here and I'm the answer to your fuckin' prayers, aren't I?” Evan gave a whoop as the peeling skin reached his thigh. “Got it this time!” he said cheerfully, snipping the flesh-ribbon off with scissors.

“God, that's so fucking gross. Anyway, you haven't explained how we're going to use that thing to find Moreno.”

“We don't set it to look for him. We look for somewhere he's been. Maybe the last place he slept. Do you think you can describe him well enough in that language for it to work?”

Titus looked like he might actually be impressed, but he hid it well. “Yeah, probably.”

“Good. I've got a dictionary I've put together on that tablet next to you, but I'm not sure how accurate it is. Maybe it'll help?”

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

Two hours later, they had it.

Find where a man born between the 27th and 28th north parallels during a new moon under the sign of capricorn with black hair and green eyes who has killed at least 10 people slept in the past week.

They really had to squeeze the letters in, but when Evan put a flame to the wick, it sprung to life, wavered for a moment, and then pointed east. Both men cheered. Evan threw Titus the keys.

“Drive! Drive north until I tell you otherwise!”

While Titus started the engine, Evan spread a map of the United States on the table in front of the lamp, then produced a protractor and a notebook from a drawer. “Okay, you bastard... let's see where you've been hiding...”

It took three days—one spent driving north, one spent driving back to where they'd started, and one spent driving south. While Titus drove, Evan made meticulous notes of the flame's direction, marking angles on the map. Finally he threw the pencil down triumphantly.

“He's in Salt Lake City.”

“Well, that narrows it down a little, I guess. So what, do we just go there and hope this thing points us in the right direction?”

“Too slow,” Evan called, stepping back into what used to be his bedroom and sitting at his computer. “Now I work my magic.”

After parking, Titus walked back to look over Evan's shoulder. The half-dozen monitors on the wall were flickering between rapidly-changing pictures of faces and what appeared to be CCTV footage.

“What is this?”

“This,” Evan said with dramatic pride, “is Blaccat. Facial recognition algorithms that the CIA wishesit had. I actually started working on it years ago before I thought about the implications of it, but I shelved it. I figured since I may be needing to, uh...”

“Be Batman?”

“...yeah...that I should get back to work on it. Right now it's comparing faces to the description you gave me and cycling through every damn security camera in the city looking for it.”

“How illegal is this?”

“Soooooo illegal.”

“Oh, hey, can you get into police department records?”

“Does the Pope shit in the woods?”

“See if you can get into the Las Vegas mugshots from... February 2019. Run your face-recognition thingy there.”

“Alright.... and... is that our boy?”

A handsome Latino man in his early 30s with shoulder-length jet-black hair and piercing green eyes stared at them from over a booking clipboard.

“That's him,” Titus breathed.

“Perfect! Now I just have to feed that into... wow.” Evan made a gesture and a black and white video popped up on the biggest monitor. The man in the mugshot was walking along the street, flanked by a short stocky man in bandanna and a lanky man with the ugliest white-boy dreads Evan had ever seen.

“That's him! Where is that? When is that?”

Evan grinned up at Titus. “That's live. I can track him and put us at the nearest intersection.”

Titus smiled, eye overbright, and began breathing heavily through his nose. “We got him.”

Evan met his eye and nodded. “Let's get him.”

[redshoesnblueskies]

free PillowFort invites - would you like one? what is PF? glad you asked!

Do you know about PillowFort?  Did you find yourself nodding (nay, weeping) about the post I reblogged yesterday about how the tumblr platform sucks for community building?  The one with the quote, “When Authors stopped being friends and turned into content providers, new fandom members never learned to care.” from  zoinomiko?  PILLOWFORT MAY BE EXACTLY RIGHT FOR YOU.  Lemme explain!

Pillowfort is like the best of the LJ/DW platform and the best of the tumblr platform, if all of tumblr had most of x-kit installed (snort).  (forgive me if this list is long but that’s because PF is fucking amazing - I can’t help it!)

Such as:

following:  you can follow others, they can follow you. your feed will be an endless scroll, like here.

reblogs - you like a post, reblog jand it will show up on your PF blog to all of your followers, just like here.

HOWEVER - if you are the original post creator, you control it. Forever.

if you are the post author/creator, you can delete it at any time - and it will be deleted everywhere. (god haven’t you wished you could do this for some of your tumblr posts where reblogs have content you despise but are now permanently out in the world???)

to reiterate: if you made a post, you are in complete control as to its existence - it never ends up reblogged out of your control, because it’s never embedded on someone elses’ blog as new content, even though it’s visible in the PF feeds of those who reblog from you.

you can tag posts when you reblog them, just like here

you can comment on posts (whether you reblog them or not)

as a commenter, you can delete your own comment at any time.

the comment structure is NESTED - like a well constructed forum or DW or LJ.  If someone responds to you, it shows up indented under your comment. If someone comments on the original post, it shows up as not indented.  Just as you’d expect.

if you’ve only ever been on tumblr you have no idea how much this creates relationships and real community.  That post that I reblogged yesterday that talked about how “When Authors stopped being friends and turned into content providers, new fandom members never learned to care.” - THAT is what a forum designed for real discussion in a comprehensible visual format creates.

As the post creator, you can delete anyone’s comments.  You are in charge of the vibe on your own original post.  

this creates self-selected community involvement - if you’re a jerk, nice people will un-friend your blog and just leave it alone.  If you foster happy healthy vibes, people will appear and join and comment.

  This fosters a huge golden-rule environment that made some blogs a huge happy success on LJ/DW where mean people were banned and kind people were welcomed and celebrated; and some mean toxic successes - where healthy people went somewhere nicer.  I‘m not even gonna bold that.  Because fuck that dynamic on the entire internet.

you can create original posts your followers can read/see on their feeds

you can make these available to all without restrictions

OR you can make them any of these options:

un-rebloggable

un-commentable

marked/categorized as NSFW to help others screen

or visible only to mutuals

(a feature whereby we can create our own curated ‘friend groups’ is promised. remember, this is entirely new code they’re creating. features are being requested and implemented as fast as they can roll them out in a functional way)

Incidentally, if you have a problem, the staff is actually real humans who really respond to you! Shocking, isn’t it?

there are communities you can join or create - have a particular fandom or RL interest?  find or create a community - search by tags!

There are different post types to choose from:

text

picture

video (currently only youtube, but that will expand)

link (shows a preview of the website you’re linking to, just like here) (incidentally, this will embed an instagram photo or video and the video will play - yes!)

audio (currently soundcloud only, that will expand)

You can send private mail to another member (and mail you write does not vanish into the ether, it remains as part of the conversation chain when you click on it.  kinda clunky, but getting there!)

you can choose to receive messages from anyone, noone, or only your mutuals

You can blacklist content based on key-word

You can filter as well

You can block users (god bless the block button anywhere on the internet)

You can check notifications

you can instantly sort ‘replies’ from ‘likes & reblogs’

There are avatars (do they support animation yet? I’m not sure?)

there aren’t themes yet (give the poor coders time!), but you can change your PF’s color scheme to whatever you like

You can deactivate your account - make in vanish, but without deleting it. handy if you just wanna go away, but not lose all your content - and not have your content be visible while you’re gone

You can delete you account (of course)

You have three invites a week you can give away free!  Though PF needs the $5 life-long one-time registration fee to keep the lights on, this is a way to help someone who’d love to be a member, but hasn’t got the cash :) 

If you want to join PF and cannot afford the one-time $5 fee (which is paying for server & bandwidth ), I am happy to give away my 3 invites a week to any friends on here - where ‘friend’ equals ‘nice people who’ve been nice on here!’  Just DM me, and I’ll give you one :)  Please pay them if you can afford to though!

Pillowfort is a great design for fandom, it’s not owned by some big corporate entity - it’s run by fans.  Remember what that feels like?  Dreamwidth?  AO3?  Like that.  Real humans, who will really respond to you.

I really really want to see Pillowfort become a successful platform - COME JOIN US!  WE’RE HAVING GREAT FUN AND MAKING REAL RELATIONSHIPS :)

PF members - feel free to chime in about any awesomeness I forgot to include!  [any haters, eff off]

Everyone keep in mind, Pillowfort is a brand new platform being created from scratch - updates roll out regularly (if they break anything, staff is all over it and its fixed quickly), requested features are being implemented all the time (and seldom break things - how weird), and Real Humans Such As Yourself are doing all of this, without whopping paychecks [any paychecks] and without being owned by some corporation.  (Incidentally, they could use your donation - whether one time or subscription, amount is your choice)

If ‘being nice to fellow fans because they are friends, not simply faceless content creators’ is an unfamiliar concept...please feel free to try it out when discussing PF on this post :D

.

ETA!!!

in her HUGELY THOROUGH pifo info post, @lavender-sprinkles​  also pointed people toward ‘a completely interaction-free Google form” where you can find free invites!!  

The PILLOWFORT INVITE KEY EXCHANGE PROJECT - ‘Itching to join Pillowfort, but can't swing the $5 fee? Fear not! All you have to do is fill out this form and we will connect you with a PiFo user who has a spare key meant just for you! Absolutely FREE! Then just sit back and patiently wait for it to arrive.‘

DUDE. IT COULD NOT BE EASIER TO GET A FREE ACCOUNT - AWESOME!

[ignitesthestxrs]

i apoligze for this in advance but idk who else to ask. so i’m attracted to women like 92% of the time but i’ve been dating a guy for a few months now. it’s not super serious yet but i still find myself feeling sad about never having had a gf/worrying i never will and just feeling like a bad queer. i KNOW that it’s terribly biphobic of me to think that if i a femme enby date a cis dude i’m not queer enough. but i also cant get past it no matter how many times i look at these ugly brain thoughts

first of all: you never have to apologise for sending me stuff like this. it is a known facet of my tumblr, and while i know i am hardly around at all, i do periodically check my inbox and am never angry or annoyed or any other negative emotion to see people reaching out for help/advice. i don’t always have the mental bandwidth to respond, but i am only ever glad that people still consider this a safe place to reach out to.

there are a couple of things i want to address here! in no particular order:

you are not a future teller or a psychic, no matter how much your worries and anxieties insist that they know what is coming. the fact that you are in a relationship with a man in this moment has no bearing on what relationships you may find yourself in, in the future. the fact that the person you are dating currently identifies as a man is no guarantee that they will always identify that way, even! you could be with them for the next couple of weeks or for the rest of your life and there are a million permutations in between and around those two options.

what i’m saying is - obsessing over things you might not do in the future because of things you are doing now is a game that nobody wins. you have no guarantees of what the future is going to hold - you can make decisions now based on what you want and/or expect the future to hold, but stressing about the path not taken means that you’re going to spend all your time straining to see that path and like, walk into a big boulder in the path you’re actually on or something. currently, you’re not even stressing about the fork in the road that you came across. you’re on a single path, and you’re worrying about a path you haven’t come across yet, which may or may not diverge from the path that you’re on, or might be in a different forest entirely and and and- at some point you gotta love the path you’re on and take in the scenery, my darling.

which, incidentally - this path? not incompatible with queerness. and i know you know this, but feeling it can be! so hard! so i am here to remind and reassure you that - queerness is not an action. the nature of identity is not things that you do, it is the person that you are. you do not cease to be non-binary because your outfit changes - your fashion choices are simply a way of expressing your non-binary-ness, and they are not the only way, and if you are not using fashion to express your enbyness then that doesn’t make you not enby. you don’t stop being enby when there is no one there to look at you and make external judgements about your gender, and you do not stop being queer because you are a femme-adjacent person dating a cis dude.

queerness is a thing that you are. you can take actions that express that queerness more clearly to outside observation, but outside observation does not change the fact of your queerness. i will not deny that it can make it easier to participate in community, because community is in part made up of particular signs that individuals recognise in each other and gravitate towards - but who you date is only one such sign. i’m a lesbian who hasn’t dated anyone for over half a decade - am i less queer because i have not hooked up with a chick in that time? i am not. if i fuck a dude am i less of a lesbian? idk man that depends on how i feel about fucking a dude. am i romantically and sexually attracted to the dude, or was his dick just inside me? what if he just uses his fingers? i feel like i could feasibly have sex with a cis man out of sheer curiosity and still be a lesbian, sure, but what if there’s a single man that just perfectly meets me where i am despite my overwhelming preference and interest in women? what if that man is trans? what does that mEAN? at which point do we stop dissecting identity and carving lines into each other?

queerness is a useful umbrella term to cover those people who exist out of heternormativity - cismen attracted to ciswomen, ciswomen attracted to cismen, exclusively. the second the spokes of that umbrella start poking you instead of protecting you from the rain, it has ceased to do its job. identity is useful in that it helps us understand ourselves and it helps us find community in other people, but there are no perfect words that encapsulate the whole of our individual experience, and there are no individual experiences that perfectly match up with another person’s individual experience, even if we use the same word/s to describe ourselves.

you can’t be biphobic at your own experiences. it’s not biphobic to look at the way you have identified previously/up to a certain point, to recognise a difference in your current behaviour, and feel weird or discomforted by this difference. it’s not biphobic to need some time to figure shit out - who you want to be, how you want to identify, what outfit fits you best. i think identity works best as a conversation with yourself - i think we should all be checking in on ourselves to make sure that the way are living is expressing the way we are being. this urge to build walls of definable identity is a protective instinct meant to save us and gather us together from the very real threats of a heteronormative society, but it can also mean we get trapped in a place that no longer suit us.

some practical advice - if the idea of never dating a girl stresses you out that much, i’d take a break from dating this dude, because it sounds like you have some work to do in terms of figuring out what experiences you want to have in life. but only you can decide where that stress line fractures, you know? but if you read this post and you sit with it for a bit and you find that the experience of dating this man is still making you miserable, it’s okay to take some time away from it. you don’t deserve misery.

that being said - like, you’ve only been dating him a few weeks? it’s cool to just envision this relationship in terms of weeks. you truly don’t have to stretch the current experience you are having out to cover the rest of your life in one daunting ‘what if’. so long as everyone involved in a relationship is clear with the terms of engagement, go forth and short term yourself some fuckin joy.

i stress, i beg, do not deny yourself the pleasure of a joyful experience with another human soul now because you are worried about what this means about other people’s perception of some amorphous identity. you are queer. you are a femme-enby person largely attracted to woman, but dating a man. you are queer, you are enough, you don’t need to question that anymore. i think that the last year, last four years, last lifetime has more than proven that life is, frankly, too fucking short. seize your joy and run with it. whether that means dating this man or take a pause to breathe and reflect, or whatever else! you’ll still be queer.

be kind to yourself my love i wish you well <3

[foodfantasies]

Here for You (Brownie x Reader, Fluff)

You could always count on Brownie to be there for you — your loyal Food Soul eagerly anticipated your every need. But when a particularly bad day leaves you in a funk, Brownie’s distress pushes him to try to comfort you in a way more emotional than strictly practical.

SFW, super fluffy fluff. No gendered pronouns used when referring to the reader.

- - - - - -

For you, it had been one of those days where absolutely nothing went right.

Brownie could tell something was wrong from the moment you came home. Ever the aspiring butler, he had made a great effort to come to understand not only your preferences and habits, but also your facial expressions and body language. The alarming sound of the front door slamming had coaxed him out from his tasks in the kitchen. You were never one for noisy entrances, making it his first clue that you were unhappy. If that hadn’t been enough to tip him off, however, your expression certainly would have done it.

He wrung his hands together anxiously as he observed your mouth set in a grim line; no smile or happy greeting from you today. Yes, something had definitely gone wrong.

“Master Attendant,” he said in his usual polite, earnest manner. “Welcome home.”

All the formality in the world couldn’t conceal the lilt of concern in his voice. You groaned, slinging your bag onto the floor and running a hand over your hair.

“Brownie, today was terrible,” you sighed, barely glancing at him as you plopped down on the sofa.

A pang of worry spurred him into action.

“Are you hurt, Master Attendant?” he asked, hastening to your side. Your expression softened.

“No, I’m not hurt,” you answered, hoping to allay his fears. You didn’t have the bandwidth left to console him much further on this front. He’d just have to trust you.

He could see in your eyes you were telling the truth. This meant the bad things brought about by the day were not physical in nature, at least. He sat gingerly beside you, his knees together, his back rod-straight.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he inquired. You chuckled dryly.

“No, not really,” you answered. “Not yet, anyways. I’d prefer to forget about it for now. I just want to relax and spend time with my best friend.” You glanced at him with a warm, weary smile.

A blush bloomed in his cheeks immediately, and he stood up and hurried back to the kitchen, stammering something under his breath about “making some tea.”

You gazed up at the ceiling, a little smile threatening to spread into a much wider one despite your foul mood. Brownie had been your Food Soul for years now, and though he never would shake that formal demeanor of his, the two of you were as close as could be. He was so darned cute. It was hard to stay upset about anything with him scurrying around the house and shooting shy little glances your way when he thought you weren’t looking.

“Tea’s ready, Master Attendant!”

Brownie’s voice shook you from your daydream. You turned your eyes away from the ceiling and down to where he stood before you, tea tray in hand, two steaming tea cups perched atop it.

“Thank you, Brownie, this is exactly what I needed,” said, sighing as you took your tea.

Inwardly glowing with pride at your words, he resumed his place perched at your side. He watched as you gently blew steam from the liquid’s surface, searching your face for further signs of discontentment. Yes, there was still a crease between your brows, a line of tightness in your jaw - you still weren’t completely relaxed.

“Master Attendant,” he began hesitantly, “Is there… is there anything else I can do to help? I’d like to make the day better for you, if I can…”

You turned your head to look at him, suddenly a little shy yourself. While you loved and respected him immensely, his incessant formality sometimes left you feeling somewhat… well, lonely. But there was no way you could tell him that.

“Thank you, Brownie,” you said, “It’s okay. I’m sure I’ll feel much better once I finish my tea.”

He tilted his head ever-so-slightly, and you could have laughed, then — little Brownie, so incredibly observant. He never missed a thing.

He took another look at your worried expression and steeled his resolve. He shifted closer to you on the sofa and, a little awkwardly, leaned his head on your shoulder.

“I… I want to be here for you always, Master Attendant,” Brownie said softly. “I wish I could set everything right for you.”

You had never heard or felt him express fondness for you so openly. Seizing this rare opportunity you wrapped an arm around him and hugged him close, turning your head and burying your nose in his hair. You breathed deeply of his sweet, dusty scent; like that of cocoa powder, gentle and comforting.

“Oh, Brownie,” you sighed happily. “This is so nice.”

“This— this helps?” he stammered, his nerves getting the better of him. In truth, he really liked being so close to you, but whether or not he acted like this again was entirely dependent on whether or not it made you happy.

“It helps more than I can even say,” you said, squeezing him tight. You settled back into the cushions behind you, drawing the both of you into a more comfortable reclining position. Were you just imagining things, or did you feel him snuggle up to you a little?

“Be careful,” you giggled, gently mussing up his soft hair with one hand. “You’ll spoil me, and I’ll start asking for cuddles like this all the time!”

That wouldn’t be so bad, Brownie thought, his cheeks warming with a blush yet again.

Before now he’d always swept aside any chance to admit to himself the truth of his feelings for you, instead dismissing them as dutiful loyalty to his Attendant. But with his head on your chest and your arms around him, closer than you’d ever been before, he felt nervous butterflies fluttering in his stomach and couldn’t deny the racing of his heart.

Maybe someday he’d know what to do with these feelings. But for now, he was content to simply lay here with you, nestled in the warmth of peace and friendship.

“Let’s just stay here together, then,” he said shyly, “I… I’m so happy I can help you, Master Attendant.”

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