#i finally feel like i got some decent graphs

[lettucefather]

fuck rstudio i will kiss excel on the lips

[queeoretician]

Initial thoughts on The Unwanted Guest below the cut:

Well, damn. There sure is a lot going on here, and I'm all about it.

Front and centre is the concept of the permeability of the soul, and there's so damn much to chew on around that. Then we have Dulcie! Dulcie! She and Pal finally get to talk, both dead but still kicking! She would have liked Gideon! And we get more direct insight into Ianthe's psychology, which is a nasty little treat.

The first place my mind went was to Paul - if Pal and Cam were already experiencing memory transference, then maybe they saw some kind of soul merger as inevitable, and that was another push towards doing it intentionally, doing it right. But writing it down now I'm less sure of that inference. And the fact that Pal and Dulcie got to talk, really talk, was both wonderful and all the more bittersweet if (I'm assuming) Pal's and Cam's individual souls no longer exist to reunite with Dulcie in Alecto. I have to say, when I first read Nona I didn't really get why people found the birth of Paul to be so sad, but I've come around on it since then. (I should write more about that sometime...)

Regarding the permeability of Ianthe's soul, one thing that occurred to me is that her genderfuckery vibes over the past two books are probably not Ianthe Tridentarius's identity, but a new thing formed of the (imbalanced) gestalt that is Ianthe Naberius. I really hope Alecto gives us more on gender and lyctorhood and soul permeability! I imagine this is all the more jarring for Ianthe with how she's so deeply anchored to her relationship with Corona, to find her ego boundaries to be permeable in relation to Babs. I firmly believe her shell-shocked reaction to the birth of Paul was at least in part her thinking "oh shit, did I eat the wrong person?" If she had wanted this kind of erosion of self with anyone (and I'm not sure she did), it would have been Corona. Having it happen with Babs by accident is a real slap in the face.

Which brings me back to my wild theory for Alecto - Corona will (at least try to) pull a Paul with Judith, and Ianthe will utterly lose her shit. This story really underscored just how little Ianthe understands her sister, which we already saw some of in the embassy scene. Sure, Corona isn't the flawless sword hand that Babs was, but in BoE she's shown herself to be a canny operator and a decent fighter, which Ianthe is steadfastly in denial of. At the end of the day I believe the story of Ianthe will be of someone who loved without understanding, who put her love up on a pedestal and at the same time belittled her as someone both more and less than she actually was.

Another thing that I latched onto was the argument about whether lyctors' cavaliers' souls provide a truly perpetual source of energy or not. Ianthe was pretty adamant that they do, but that honestly came across as arrogance or bravado. There's a strong parallel between lyctoral power and nuclear power, and all kinds of nuclear activity eventually reach a point past which they no longer emit appreciable energy, so I feel confident in saying that lyctoral power also diminishes over a long enough timespan. I'm less sure of whether this will come up in Alecto, though - I would be quite surprised if we saw a 100,000-year timeskip (but if we did that could be super fucking interesting).

Back to more direct applications of soul permeability, I have to imagine there's been some exchange of something between Jod and Alecto, at least before he locked her in the Tomb. That could go in all kinds of interesting directions that I haven't yet had a chance to contemplate adequately.

Speaking of Alecto, the John chapters of Nona seem like a pretty clear case of transference between her and Harrow. I wonder - were those happening concurrently with the Nona chapters? If so, it would make for a nice symmetry between Harrow and Alecto/Nona.

Either way, we've got a gross messy soul transference hookup graph with Gideon<-->Harrow<-->Alecto<-->John (gross) - I'm dying to know more about what this means for each of them (especially with Tazmuir's "if Gideon's soul is a happy meal" line from this interview).

So as usual, Aaaaaaa there's so much to chew on and so much more I want to know and I can't wait for Alecto aaaaaa...

[theold-ultraviolence]

hey bestie,

pls don't - seriously - worry it ain't a problem. and I wholly understand that y'all have lives outside of here and important things to do. as for the whole end of semester thingy, I ain't going to lie: I feel it deeply as I have gone through a zombie since february and right now I have finally finished my exams but my mind is just error 404.

(also bestie, I DID END UP listening TODAY to some songs of the new album - not everything because I am a bit sleepy from not sleeping much last night due to... you guessed it... anxiety, BUT I DID MAKE A SILLY LITTLE GRAPH THINGY WITH MY OPINIONS AND THOUGHTS ON THE SONG AND I SHALL SEND IT TO YOUR DMS) (hoping it won't sound creepy).

oh in all truth, I think that oftentimes men are capable of doing stuff - like if you don't know, there's always a silly tutorial to watch ugh -, they just don't want to do stuff and hence relegate it to women, feigning incompetence.

like today we had a few dudes coming for works at our uni apartment and the mess they left... like I get that it isn't their thing to clean up stuff and that they need to come tomorrow to paint the walls so they had no need to clean up as it'd get dirty, but they could have at least flushed the freaking toilette or maybe just dusted the toilette seat, since it was a mess of dust and I had to.

or another thing (can you tell I hate work being done while I am over?) is that we had this dude coming to check on the heater and he left all his dirty tissues and rags in the kitchen sink, although my roommate had brought to him a bin to put them I ugh... men and the tale of weaponized incompetence.

ok over onto my beef with house works being done, but YEAH men get so much for so little shit. like everybody is always amazed that my dad cooks for us, instead of my mom. and like... maybe he just likes cooking... which isn't inherently a woman's activities, although according to many 'women belong in the kitchen'... I just am amazed whenever men think that simply being human decent being brings them to be utterly gods.

(also your friend's boyfriend's story cracks me up because dude... there are literally canned soups that you just have to microwave... I... it isn't that difficult. and google is free.).

also we have a problem with feminicides as well, alongside a whole culture that tends to protect abusers (TW SA: like you have no idea of how many sa cases got pushed back because of stupid reasons, like e.g.: a girl leaving the door open to her assailant I ugh...).

so yeah, I'd love to be out at night and feel comfortable in my own skin and not have to worry about whether I'd come back home. I know many of my friends are really chill, but I don't know... my anxiety gets the best of me and past 9 p.m. I have to be in my bed. safe and sound.

(also I am truly sorry if these messages seem so heated, I don't - TRULY - know why, aside from feminine rage filling me wholly whenever such topics are brought up).

NO BESTIE, I GOTCHA WHOLLY ABOUT THE TRIPS AND WE HAVE THE SAME MENTALITY!

I didn't want to get too much into it, as I didn't want to use as free therapy, but my therapist literally told me that - no matter whether they are positive or negative - changes are truly exhausting and I felt every inch of that exhaustion.

also I do INDEED struggle a whole lot with things out of my own control as I ... might have... a few... control issues and I do hate being caught unprepared (especially from the food side of things, because it isn't a funny experience, although I know it might seem relatively stupid and of limited importance). but yeah, changes and huge sudden things aren't ever good and I do hope to maybe go back there TO MY OWN TERMS or at least with different expectations and a bit less control onto myself. I certainly have a far better experience underneath my belt.

(still, I have to admit that one of the funniest things was that one of the first conferences was to be had in a former asylum, and the fact was that it wasn't that ... bad. like it wasn't any way creepy if anything, it seemed like some place straight up of a fairytale or a summer villa).

also pls... bestie, don't worry about the fics. I, again, totally understand that y'all have lives and busy stuff to do. they aren't going to certainly run away so pls take all the time you need, although I can't wait to know what you'll think about them!

(but no pressure!).

no no, bestie, I GOTCHA! (are we the same person but in different fonts?) I also dread starting new TV series and I casually rewatch all the three same ones that I love and I now know by heart. mostly because I - EITHER - finish a series in a whole week or I start it, pause it and never get back to it. but yeah, starting new fics asks for a whole level of energy that I am not sure I have in this period, so I wholly understand yah.

(still, I shall check out 'dickensian' because from what I heard it seemed pretty cool).

also yeah... I think that the pacing does a whole lot about my liking for a book as well, and just by trying to read the plot of 'the blind assassin' it did seem like a whole lot to take in.

also can you believe I never read anything by stephen king?

it's mostly because I am a scaredy cat but I have always been curious about 'gerald's game' and also 'the salem lot' seems very interesting (you got me at the 'vampires'), so do let me know how you like it!

and oh gods, I hope you'll enjoy 'mexican gothic' and pls feel free to always chat me onto that as I truly love it! also I have been liking 'lady chatterley's lover' so far, although I haven't read all that much mostly because of uni stuff.

still, I can't believe how ... rowdy and audacious this novel was. like I know that it had some trouble being published for the explicit scenes but the whole ideology and themes behind it were definitely far more scandalous than I thought.

also, another thing is that the beginning there's this discussion about the fact that being intimate with somebody lessens the emotional love they feel for such somebody and I couldn't help but think that it's very similar to a concept expressed in a poem by catullus (a latin poet), where he says the infamous 'odi et amo' (I hate and I love you). which can be taken as both the typical antithetic view on love BUT ALSO, about the author's lessened emotional interest in a pure relationship with his lover and heightened favor for a sexual relationships. it's a whole interesting concept, I am a sucker of and when I read a similar reasoning in 'lady chatterley's lover' I was definitely giggling like the idiotic academic I am.

oh oh, I gotcha: I feel like joe was my last summer's obsession, ewan my autumn and winter's one and he keeps on being the one of spring, although during this summer, who knows which actor might I get attached to? (jack o'connel is growing onto me bestie). they certainly need to be british if I want the royal mail to send them.

(and yeah, like ewan is the babiest of my favorite actors, leave that man alone! haven't you seen the sweaty and oily glow of eternal youthood).

oh oh, I am glad you found both the series and although it might seem difficult, roman dialect isn't that terrible (although they have some strange ways for example: 'tagliarsi' - which is generally translated as 'cutting yourself' - means around rome 'having fun'. why? I don't know. it's super funny because there are so many different ways to say something, like to skip school it can be: 'fare bigia', 'fare filone', 'marinare la scuola' based on where you live in italy).

also I hope that you get back to your courses, but also give yourself some credit: you are learning a whole new - complex - language, while handling a life. not all people can do that and you can absolutely take a break from it.

and if you ever want to send me silly messages in italian, I am all for it! if anything your italian might be better than my own...

with this being said, I am off to doing a bit of stuff and then I hope that tonight I'll get a bit to myself to continue finally reading 'lady chatterley's lover' (I have reached to where clifford has asked her to have a baby, I am quite at the beginning as I have told you but hey...).

pls take all the time that you need to answer this and I hope you get to relax and enjoy life and most importantly daydream all you want about eddie and sorceress! reader.

have a lovely day!

-🌗

Error 404 is SO RIGHT, BESTIE! tbh I'm still feeling like that! some things came up that I need to do but I seriously don't have any more brain capacity at the moment because my brain is already in vacation mode, and thinking about my trip next week, but most importantly ON DANNY ELFMAN MODE! because I FINALLY GOT MY VISA, so it's super confirmed that I'm gonna see the goth grandpa! (although you already know this, but I feel the need to sneak this into all my conversations recently, so, apologies kdflkgjdjh) also, LOVED your graph thingy!! (another thing you know by now, but I really did) Anyway, onto my reply!

"they just don't want to do stuff and hence relegate it to women, feigning incompetence." Absolutely. And it freaking sucks to hear that you had to experience that because another thing I absolutely hate next to an incompetent man is people who simply do not respect your space. And this goes for people in general. My mom likes to invite her friends/colleagues to our apartment sometimes, and we only have two bathrooms, one that's my mom's that's inside her room, and the other in the hallway, which is mine, but because it's in the hallway, when we have visitors, that's the one they use. And I always have my things in order and spotless and when the visitors come UGHHHHHHHHHHH JUST, DROPLETS OF WATER EVERYWHERE, THEY USE UP ALL THE TOILET PAPER, THE HAND TOWEL IS JUST THROWN OVER THE SINK, JUST, A MESS! A MESS! And it's awful!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! makes me wanna chew through the drywall when I go check my bathroom after they're gone, so I totally understand.

And also this whole rant about men feigning incompetence reminds me of my uncles (all of them, but especially the one that lives with my grandparents). Idk if I've mentioned it to you before, but part of the reason why my brain has been mush this year is that my grandma has been sick and requires 24/7 care because of brain damage. And my uncle literally lives in that house and STILL my grandpa had to hire a nurse (and a very important detail is that my grandpa, at 80 years old, STILL WORKS because of necessity, so hiring extra help puts a dent in his income) to be with them because this fucking man can't, for the life of him, lift a finger and help my grandpa take care of my grandma. Like, men will have egos so freaking big that they can't see past their own noses and put their comfort aside to help one another, it's way easier to feign incompetence. Anyway, long ass rant!! in conclusion: men that aren't fictional fucking SUCK. Which also ties into our respective problems with feminicides. Absolutely, we have the same culture here, that protects abusers. And the horror stories you hear about how women were treated are just awful to think about, and terrifying because you have this lingering fear that, you never know if it could happen to you, so you can't just freely walk around alone in the streets. Because we've both shared that we wanna get out of our countries, I truly hope it's something that can happen to us because, Idk if you feel like this too, but I feel like I'm missing out on so much stuff and my life is just slipping by because I can't do so many stuff because of my countries limitations. I hate feeling that way. It dawns on me that I'm gonna be 30 in a couple of years (and I know that by no means 30 is the end-all of your life), but I feel like I've missed out on life so much because of this.

Also PS. Never be sorry about heated messages, lmao!! I love that we can talk about silly AND serious things! And also, the thing about the food doesn't sound silly at all! Especially if it alters how you feel significantly. I feel so fed up and annoyed about things that maybe other people find insignificant and ridiculous but it's like, they're important TO ME and them being altered because of things out of my control affects ME. My mom is always on my case because of these sort of thing. I'll have meltdowns over things she finds absurd but it's like: you have a plan, or a predicted outcome, and when that outcome is altered, it's kinda like !!! your whole world shifts, I suppose. Like with my visa. They specifically told me: you'll be able to pick it up between 2-3 weeks. AND WE WERE ONTO THE FOURTH and I wasn't hearing from the consulate at all! In fact, the page where you can check the status of your application was probably malfunctioning because every time I logged in, it said 'your search did not return any data'. I was starting to panic because what if the application never came through? what if the visas are ready but because the data isn't showing, I won't know when to pick them up? and I had heard horror stories of that process taking up to 3 to 5 months, and I was already thinking that that was gonna be my case, so goodbye Danny Elfman and goodbye A7X. My mom was absolutely chill about it meanwhile I was losing it, because in my mind I already had a time frame set, and not only was I looking forward to seeing those shows to make up for my horrible year, but I'd have to resell the tickets and that was gonna be a whole mess to get into because I don't know many people that are into them, so I was thinking that I was going to lose my money if the visas didn't come in time. Anyway, yet another long ass rant!

OK BUT BESTIE I AM SO INTRIGUED ABOUT THE ASYLUM AND IT NOT BEING CREEPY, LIKE???? OUT OF A FAIRYTALE!?? I'M WHEEZING! How is that possible!???? I am so intrigued!

About The Blind Assasin, yeah it was A LOT and at the very beginning as well. It started very mystery/plot heavy in the first part, and then it shifts the pov in the second part and that's where the pace kinda slows down for me. Which, I get that's the intended effect because it's being told from the point of view of an old woman, but, just personally, that shift from super plot-heavy and intrigue, to the lady describing her day, kinda threw me off a little bit. And I don't doubt the intrigue and mystery will resume, but I'd rather just start another story because I know this will take me a while to finish, and I kinda wanna just read more books in general. I used to read so much when I was in high school and now I'm lucky if I finish (1) non-work related book a year. I'm really liking Salem's Lot!! BUT if you're new to Stephen King, I'd definitely recommend 'The Mist' which is super short, and not that scary in my opinion, so it would help to get a feel of his narrative style with a shorter story and see how you like it! The first book I read of his was 'Misery' because I'd seen the movie, and the book? omg. I wouldn't say that one's that scary either. It's more of a thriller. So those are the ones I'd recommend! From him, I also love 'Pet Sematary'. I think I might have liked that one more than Misery but that one is scarier.

ALSO!!!!!!!! I'M LOVING THE PARALELL YOU MAKE WITH 'LADY CHATTERLEY' And also love that you're enjoying it so far!!! AHH!! YES! I also was not expecting how rowdy it would be. For its time, I was expecting something a little bit tamer and like, classical? idk what word I'm looking for. But certainly not this. I was also very surprised to learn that D.H. Lawrence wasn't, in fact, gay, because of the way he speaks about the way men view pleasure, in a sort of, condemning and critical way? I was like, there's no way a MAN wrote this. No way. And also the way the sex scenes are described is so raw but honest, and the slow build of the relationship between Mellors and Connie is just something that the movie got totally wrong and that it glossed over completely. The movie stripped away all the grit from the novel!

When you say Joe was your summer obsession and Ewan autumn and winter? YES. PRECISELY THIS. And maybe this is why I'm slowly coming back to Joe because he just feels like a summer kind of love? Bestie you just put that sooo beautiful sdlkfgjslkdjg. Eddie sure feels like the summer kind of love, with the sun and the sea and the music blasting outdoors and going to concerts, while Ewan + Aemond feels like coziness and warm drinks and blankets as you curl up together to enjoy a calm evening. I'm sounding corny as hell, but hey.

Also let me be the down to fully push you into the Jack O'Connell love bestie. You need to see SAS Rogue Heroes, and also maybe when you finish reading Lady Chatterley you can see the movie with him as Mellors because, OH DEAR. OHHH DEAR. I didn't like the adaptation but him as Mellors? yes please. Absolutely (although I did picture Ewan as Mellors while reading the book because of the character being from Derby, oops). That was of course before knowing Jack, and also knowing he's from Derby too sdkjfklkjldfkgj.

The bit about the dialects reminds me that I saw a map the other day about all the different ways you can say (idk remember what word it was) throughout Italy and I was like.....no way.........how am I supposed to remember that!? But I guess it just seems intimidating as someone who's starting out! I'm sure if I was to dissect all the different types of ways you can say one thing in Spanish it would be difficult too! also, there are variations you can find in the Spanish from Spain, South America, and North America. This reminds me! that I found out why Lupo was transformed into Lobo when they both come from the same root! but I wanna drop that in a message in your own profile along with other thingies I wanna say/show you before I go on my trip next week! heheh. But also, thank you for that, bestie! I feel bad because I paid for those courses, but I literally can't bring my brain to focus on those right now, or even on fics. Like I physically cannot bring myself to focus on something or write, even if I want to. It's been tough! which is why it means a lot to me that you put up with my Italian inquiries and just generally, that you keep me company with your messages! :')

Good luck with your thesis bestie! and as always, I hope that you find time in between studies to indulge and relax. Again, glad to know you're enjoying Lady Chatterley's lover, and I can't wait to hear your thoughts as you read! Sending you a big hug and lots of love! x

[haik-choo]

oikawa realizing he’s in love.

a/n: this is a 1k present for @karasunology​​​​ !!! i’m so proud of you and here is your special post for your milestone! sorry this lowkey sucks i -- 

[OIKAWA REALIZING HE’S IN LOVE WITH YOU]

-oikawa

The first time he notices his eyes naturally drift to you, it’s in the middle of math class

The teacher is droning on and on about asymptotes on graphs, and Oikawa is bored out of his mind. Everyone is, even the person’s head in front of him keeps lulling back and forth, nearly asleep

It takes everything in Oikawa to not pull out his notebook and write new plays for volleyball or take out his phone and watch videos 

He tries watching the clock, but it got too boring, he tries fidgeting with his fingers, but it’s not helping, he’s even tried actually listening to the teacher, but he almost fell asleep

He’s honestly contemplating just taking a quick nap -- when he hears something. Its the movement of pen on paper, quick scratchy noises. When he looks around for the source of the sound, it’s you in the seat next to him, drawing random little faces where you should be taking notes

And he can’t stop staring.

There’s nothing incredibly special about you -- you blend in quite easily. You don’t talk much in class, you don’t really hang around loud people either. He almost doesn’t even recognize you as his classmate -- he feels like he’s never seen you before.

But he just can’t stop looking. Maybe it’s the way your hands curl around your pencil in such an elegant way, maybe it’s the way you quickly flick your eyes to the teacher and back to your paper to make sure he isn’t looking at you, maybe it’s the way you let out a little sigh before erasing your little drawings to go back to note taking

Whatever makes him keep staring, he doesn’t care. All he wants is to get your name. Do you play any sports, volleyball maybe? Do you like volleyball? Would you go to his games? Do you want to be a volleyball manager? Do you know who he is? Would you care? 

He’s seen you around before, though. Mostly talking with your friends, not really caring or paying attention to anyone. He’s seen you talk with the teacher after class and deliver papers with a smile, but other than that, he doesn’t really even know who you are. Not even your name. God -- what type of classmate is he? Has he been caught up in volleyball that badly? 

Why are you making him think about this? 

Suddenly, the bell rings for lunch, and Oikawa’s thoughts are cut off. He shakes his head slightly, watching as you get up from your seat and stretch before heading out the class door. 

-

It’s been three days since then, and fuck, Oikawa can’t focus on anything. The volleyball misses his intended spot every serve, and every time he wonders if you’d think he was lame if you were there

Oikawa has no idea why he’s acting like this, as if girls aren’t all over him all the time. He should be used to the opposite sex -- but you, for some reason, are different. There’s something about you that draws him in, and part of him wants to run as far away from you as possible, and the other wants you to pull him even closer 

He doesn’t realize this until he’s walking down the empty hallway after school, on his way to talk with a teacher. 

He’s minding his own business, a slight hum in his throat as his mind traverses elsewhere

And then he hears it -- a laugh ringing through the hallways. He doesn’t know whose it is, but for some reason his stomach lurches and he can tell it’s your’s. 

His thoughts are confirmed when he looks down at the end of the corridor and sees you typing something on your phone, giggling while shaking your head

Oikawa doesn’t know why he does, but he hides from you. He gasps and dips into the nearest classroom, pressing his back against the wall next to the door

He stays there, silent and still, until your giggles pass him and grow more and more quiet; then there’s nothing around him but silence

Oikawa can hear feel his heart hammering against his rib cage; it feels the same way it does whenever he’s played a hard game. The breathlessness, the clammy hands, the speeding heart rate. Slowly, he lifts a hand to his chest and presses it against where his heart is.

And time stills; he’s left in an empty classroom with a hand against his thrashing heart, face flushed and mind racing about why you make him feel like this, and what ‘this’ even is 

-

It’s a Wednesday afternoon when he realizes what he’s feeling.

He’s finally started to be able to hit good service aces again, all he needs to do it take some extra time to clear his mind from images of you, your laugh, your smile -- and done! He can finally hit a decent ball.

It’s individual practice, everyone is doing their own thing, working on their weak points, when he hears the metal gym doors open. He doesn’t pay any mind to them at first, because it’s probably just one of his teammates going out to get some fresh air.

But then he hears your voice.

And the ball he was just about to set slams right in his face. 

He doesn’t have time to glare at his laughing team members, because his eyes automatically search for you. They eventually find you at the front of the gym, softly smiling as you hand a stack of papers to Iwaizumi.

The same feeling rushes back into him, spreading throughout his veins just as fast, possibly even faster, as last time. 

The deafening pounding of his heart in his ears, the flush he can feel spreading on his face, the anxiety of not wanting your eyes on him, but also the sadness of you not paying attention to him

God -- he’s acting just like his fangirls do when he fails to give each and every one of them attention. 

Wait...he’s acting like his fangirls do...to you? 

He feels his eyes widen. 

And it hits him.

He’s feels the same way about you as he felt when he set his first serve. The tingling in his hands, the rapid heartbeat, the halted breath -- the need to feel it over and over again until the end of time. 

The smile you throw him when you notice his stares as you talk to Iwaizumi only further proves his suspicions, because it causes his heart to erupt in a frenzy. 

Shit. He thinks.

Because now that you’ve given him a smile, he wants another one. Now that you’ve given him a taste of this feeling, he only wants it from you. 

Unknowingly, he raises a hand up to his chest. And then he knows: 

He’s in love with you. 

Oikawa’s in love with you. 

[sully-999]

Mickey and the Gallaghers Part 2

This might be the lowest point of his life he thinks. Even on the lowest points of his alcoholism and all the shit with college and Helene he was only really fucking up his own life.

But now, shit was different. He had 3 (potentially 4) people that depended on him. He had no job, no stable income, and no potential leads to other opportunities.

They had decided not to sell the house to Shelby and to wait for another bigger offer to come in. The Gallagher house had survived and been their shelter their entire lives. Lip was sure it would continue to be, but now they had less furniture, fewer appliances, and worst of all no fucking hot water.

He was at a loss. Desperation filled every cell of his body. Even if he worked on this stupid delivery job all day he couldn’t front the expenses to repair the pipes or the water heater.

Lip was a hustler. He knew what he could do to come up with the money. Less than legal ways to do it. But after the whole Born Free debacle, he had sworn to Tami that he wouldn’t do anything that could potentially affect them. Regardless, things were still too hot with the police still sniffing around.

He knew Ian and even Carl could lend him some money but he couldn’t find a fiber in his body that made him want to ask them. He was supposed to be the big brother, the protector. How the fuck did it all come to this?

He was so involved in his thoughts that he didn’t hear the footsteps climbing up the porch stairs. With his head on his palms, he only saw the combat boots and thought it was Ian but when he looked up he saw instead his brother-in-law looking at him with an inquisitive face.

“Hey man, what’s up?” “Ian sent me to pick up some shit he left in the room.” “Oh ok” “He’s at fucking Yoga class or some shit” “Wow in true west side fashion”

They stayed in awkward silence for a while. Lip and Mickey had known each other for years. They had done some crazy things when they were younger and normally had a decent relationship. After the fight, things got better but sometimes they still had awkward moments.

“Sooo, I’m going in” “Yeah yeah go ahead”

Mickey knew Lip was going through a hard time. Not only had he shared with Ian all that was pestering him, but Mickey could just see it. Lip’s cocky attitude and know-it-all fuckery were toned down and he was often quieter, observant. The years of the college boy in the Ivy?... What was it?.. Ivory? Ivory Tower were long gone and Lip was back to being full south side trying to make ends meet.

Mickey entered the house and couldn’t find anyone inside. The kitchen was still a mess and it seemed like Lip attempted to work on the pipes while still trying to paint and do touch-ups around the first floor. He picked up the stuff Ian had asked for and since no one was there he made his way back to the door. He heard Lip on the phone trying to get a quote for the repairs so he just waved and kept walking.

As Mickey drove back to the apartment he couldn’t get the image of Lip with his head in his hands sitting on the porch. He was alone since Tami and Fred were still at her dad’s and he looked plain miserable. He remembered the brilliant guy that tutored Ian when he wanted to go to West Point. The one with the bright future when all the other Gallagher siblings seemed screwed for life. The one that acted like a punk but always gave his all for his family.

Family. He shouldn’t give a fuck but Mickey feels restless.  

He knew that if Ian offered him the money he wouldn’t accept it, even miserable Phillip was too fucking proud for that. Ian had told Mickey that he offered his share of the house if it sold and Lip had said no.

As Mickey entered the new apartment he didn’t feel like he could sit down. He walked around, cleaned up, turned the TV on trying to occupy his mind. Instead, he thought about Fred, about Tami, about Liam. His mind took him to think about Yevgeny and all the scams they did to put food on the table at the Milkovich house.

He went back to the bedroom rushing. He entered the walk-in closet and stretched to find a dark blue carton box. He grabbed a piece of paper and wrote down an amount of money and an “I O U” below it. Here he was, again. This time he would tell Ian...eventually.

Last time had been too complicated. There were so many little things that Mickey had almost lost track of where all the money had gone. Liam’s new graphing calculator, Franny’s after-school clubs, Tami’s last bill from the hospital, Carl’s required duty belt, the anniversary party.

He picked up his phone and dialed one of his contacts. “Hey, I have a job for you…”

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

Lip was coming back home from making deliveries and upon opening the door he was faced with 2 guys cleaning up debris from the floor.

“Who the fuck are you?” he said startled. The 2 men looked at Lip and started speaking Spanish explaining something Lip couldn’t understand. Finally, they pointed at the water heater and one of them opened the kitchen faucet. As warm water started coming out a confused expression grew on Lip’s face. The men finished up cleaning and waved goodbye to Lip. He was dumbstruck.

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

Ian and Mickey were making dinner when Ian’s phone rang. Mickey could only hear Ian’s responses to the call but he automatically knew who was calling.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about...They were just randomly inside the house?... I would have told you asshole!... Maybe Debbie?”

As Ian continued his conversation, Mickey kept chopping the beloved tomatoes from the garden.

“That’s awesome though, do you guys need help moving Tami and Fred back in? Ok, let me know what you find out. Bye.”

“Lip says someone came to fix the pipes and reconnected the gas so they finally have hot water.”

“Mhm,” Mickey was trying his hardest to avoid meeting his husband's eyes. He could lie his way from any situation but he couldn’t, for the life of him, lie to Ian.

Ian eyed him suspiciously “Do you know anything about this?”

Mickey ignored him but Ian knew something was up. He kept probing him until he broke.

“You can’t say anything to him Red” “Why?” “Because he would be embarrassed and would try to pay us back. You had offered him money before and he refused but he needed help Ian.” “Why didn’t you tell ME anything then?” “Cause you couldn’t have kept the secret and Lip would have stopped us!”

Ian knew he had a point...“Where did you get the money?” he asked next. “...” “Mickey…” “The honeymoon fund man. I’m sorry I know we promised to talk to one another and have a mutual understanding and all that shit but Ian...family is family” He said harshly. After a moment Ian smiled and kissed him sweetly. “Family is family” he repeated grinning.

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

They hosted the next family dinner at the Gallagher house. As the kids played games and Debbie and Ian helped Tami to set the table Lip approached Mickey giving him a beer.

The two men kept looking at the kids and relaxed in comfortable silence. “I’m glad you’re part of our family Mickey”

Mickey nodded without facing him and without saying a word cheered his beer to Lip’s pop. 

He was too.

[hermannsthumb]

Could you please write #43 grandparents/neighbors one?

43. we’re having our family meal at my grandparents’ house this year so fingers crossed your parents still live next door and you grew up to be even hotter

from winter writing prompts here

oh god this one got so long. sorry everyone! thank you to @k-sci-janitor for the alien bit because it was so fucking funny

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

Holidays have gotten a little weird to manage since Newt transformed into a fully-fledged adult with an apartment and a job and stuff, so while he hasn’t made it to the big Geiszler celebration in Germany every December since starting college out of elementary school, he still tries to make a point of dropping by his dad’s for dinner and a movie or something to fill his holiday quota. It’s fine by him; he loves his family, but they’re definitely overwhelming, and trying to submit final grades and work on syllabuses for the next semester all while distant relatives ruffle his hair and ask him when he’s going to hit his growth spurt is not his idea of a relaxing time. It’s a constant point of contention between him and his dad. This year more than most, apparently.

“Your grandmother misses you!” he tells Newt sadly over their Chinese takeout. “She calls me every week to ask how you are, and why you never visit with them. Every week.” He waves a fork at Newt. “You’re breaking her heart.”

“I’m in the lab, like, twenty-four-seven, dad,” Newt sighs. It’s a well-rehearsed conversation at this point, but it doesn’t get any less tiresome. Especially because he knows his dad is lying about the phone call thing—Newt is a great grandson and texts his grandmother plenty, thank you very much, he would know if he was breaking her heart. “I’m working straight through winter break this year. Seriously.”

“That’s what you did last year,” Newt’s dad says. “And the year before that…” Newt turns the volume up on the TV to cut his dad off before he can segue into the next part of his argument, which is (usually) that Newt needs to work on his personal life, maybe settle down, produce some grandkids of his own. Or at least adopt a cat. Also well-rehearsed.

He’s not sure why he says what he does next—maybe in a desperate attempt to distract his dad further. Maybe because of the sudden onslaught of childhood memories the mention of his grandparents’ house brought on. “Hey, do you remember that boy who used to live next door to grandma?” he says. “He had the weird haircut and always dressed kind of funny?” Old-fashioned, and a little too formal for the sort of things that little kids tend to do, climbing trees or playing in the mud—sweatervests and polished loafers and starched-white knee-highs.

Newt’s dad blinks at him. Newt half expects him to declare that Newt is nuts, and that he has no idea what he’s talking about, like this is one of those horror stories where the childhood friend turns out to be some ghost who died fifty years prior. The clothing would match up, he guesses. But he smiles in recognition a moment later. “You mean the Gottlieb boy?” he says.

“Gottlieb,” Newt echoes. It sounds familiar enough. “Hermann, I think. When I’d stay with grandma for the summer we would play together every day. I wonder what he’s doing now.” Hermann was a smart guy, a real geek like Newt; he used to carry a graphing calculator around in his pocket and build the most goddamn pristine model spacecrafts Newt had ever seen. Hermann’s dad shipped him off to a prestigious boarding school the last summer Newt spent there, when they were around twelve or so. Newt started at MIT not long after. “Dude’s probably designing rocket ships by now or something.”

“You could ask him yourself if you came with me,” Newt’s dad laughs. “The Gottliebs never moved away, and their children actually visit. I’m sure your Hermann visits, too.”

“Ha,” Newt says. “Yeah.”

It’s snowing by the time Newt and his dad finish their movie, and Newt (fearing his dad’s driving even in ideal conditions) declines the offer of a lift home to trudge his way through it to his T stop instead. It’s nice to have the chance to be alone with his thoughts, anyway, because he can’t seem to get funny little Hermann Gottlieb out of his head. What is he doing now?

A quick Facebook search on the train produces a few Hermann Gottliebs, but none of them promising—none of them have the brown eyes or strangely angular face (devoid of any baby fat even that young) Newt remembers, none of them are from the right German countryside, none of them went to a preppy English boarding school. Google (utilizing the information Newt does have) is a little more rewarding, and by the time Newt presses the button to request his stop, he’s scrounged up a decent amount of info: Hermann Gottlieb has a doctorate in astrophysics, Hermann Gottlieb publishes papers at a slightly terrifying rate, and Hermann Gottlieb turned out kinda hot.

As Newt stares down at a slightly grainy current photograph of his old friend—haircut and clothing unchanged, a cane in hand, some round librarian glasses perched on the end of his nose, wide mouth twisted into a scowl—he suddenly recalls another thing about Hermann Gottlieb: the summer Hermann was sent away to boarding school was the summer that Hermann kissed Newt goodbye, shyly and tearfully, under the shade of the tall maple tree in his yard. It was the last time Newt ever saw Hermann. It was Newt’s first kiss.

“Oh, boy,” Newt says.

He texts his dad when he gets back to his apartment. When do we leave?

Newt feels like the belle of the fucking ball when he steps into his grandparents’ house a week later, snow dusting his shoulders, small suitcase clenched in his hand. His cheeks are kissed; his scarf and hat and leather jacket are brushed off and tossed onto a coat rack; his hair is in parts smoothed down (too messy!) and ruffled (too flat!); he’s hugged more times than he has been in the entire last year, probably. “Still playing around with bugs in the dirt, eh, Newt?” his grandfather booms, tucking Newt into the crook of his arm with enough force to knock Newt’s glasses off.

“Actually,” Newt squeaks, scrambling for both what he remembers of his very rusty German, and his glasses before they can hit the ground, “entomology isn’t really my main focus at—”

“Newt’s studying jellyfish now,” Newt’s dad declares proudly. “He went on a diving expedition this July.”

“Diving? How exciting,” Newt’s grandmother says.

“Yeah,” Newt says. He pushes his glasses back on. “Yeah, it was fascinating, I was lucky to get the funding for it. You wouldn’t believe the sorts of—”

“Isn’t that dangerous?” Newt’s cousin says.

“My little Newt’s a daredevil!” Newt’s dad says.

“It’s not that dangerous,” Newt says. “As long as you’re—”

“What happened to that nice man your father said you were dating?” Newt’s grandfather says. “With the, the what was it, the poetry? The poet? We thought you’d bring him!”

Newt flushes. Trust his dad to talk up some random guy Newt dated in March like it was a long-term affair and not an elongated one-night stand that fizzled out after three weeks. Though maybe that one’s on Newt—it’s not like he mentioned the one-night stand part to his dad, after all. He definitely didn’t mention that the guy ended it with a poem, too. “We broke up,” he says, weakly. He wriggles out from the throng of the crowd. “Look, it’s so great seeing you all, but I’m actually, like, really tired, soooooo…?”

“Oh, of course you are,” Newt’s grandmother says. She pats his head. “What a long flight you must have had! We’ll send someone up for you for dinner—you can have your old guest room.”

“Cool,” Newt says.

He scurries up the stairs.

The guest room he slept in during those summers is almost exactly the way he remembers it, but a little dustier—the floral quilt on the bed, his grandma’s sewing table crammed into the corner, the bookcase stocked with a weird combination of kid’s books and illustrated encyclopedias that Newt used to pore over for hours as a kid, often with Hermann. Newt draws back the embroidered curtains and peers out the window at the Gottliebs’ snow-capped house next door. Hermann’s window was directly across from his. It still is, technically, though the curtains (these navy blue and embroidered with little constellations) are pulled tight, and Newt has a feeling that Hermann hasn’t set foot in his old room in well over a decade. Two decades, probably.

He remembers the one summer he showed Hermann how to make a soup can telephone, and they managed to string it all the way across between their windows before discovering it kinda didn’t work as well as Newt said it would. He remembers when Hermann’s dad banned him from the Gottlieb house for tracking water all over their front hallway after he and Hermann went wading in the creek, but it was really Hermann who did it, because he forgot to take his shoes off and they got soaked, and Newt just took the fall for it so Hermann wouldn’t get in trouble. And when Hermann asked Newt to play astronaut with him, and Newt insisted on being an alien and mimed the chestburster scene from Alien, and Hermann freaked out so bad he fell in a mud puddle and got grounded for ruining his clothing, and Newt got grounded for that and for watching Alien when he wasn’t supposed to, and they spent the following few days staring sadly out across at each other before Newt’s grandma finally got tired of his moping and sent him to work weeding the garden. He remembers knotting a little friendship bracelet for Hermann out of embroidery thread he found in his grandmother’s sewing basket and Hermann vowing to keep it until he died.

Newt’s half of the soup can phone is still on the windowsill, though the string snapped and crumbled apart years ago. He picks at the peeling Chicken Noodle label, so distracted that he almost doesn’t notice the light suddenly seeping through at the edges of Hermann’s curtains, or the way they’re pushed open—almost.

Hermann—real, live, adult Hermann, botched haircut and round glasses and all—stares out at Newt with a shocked expression on his face. Newt drops the can with a clatter.

Then he waves.

“Hey, Grandma?” Newt says, poking his head into the kitchen. Tonight’s dinner is a massive pot of soup boiling away on the stovetop, dessert a mountain of cookies and tiny pastries on serving platters on the counters. Newt hasn’t had food that looked this good since he moved out, to be honest. The intersection of Newt’s sad lack of cooking skills and his attempts at vegetarianism means he eats a lot of boxed mac-and-cheese and frozen Vegetable Lovers’ pizzas. “Are you—?"

“Oh, Newt!” Newt’s grandmother says. She sets down her wooden spoon. “Are you feeling rested, then?”

“Yeah,” Newt says. “Grandma, I was wondering, could I—uh—maybe run some food over to the Gottliebs? To be…neighborly? We just have so much, and—”

“That’s a wonderful idea,” Newt’s grandmother says. “They keep to themselves, mostly, but I can’t imagine they’d turn it down. You might even see your little friend again! What was his name? You were so fond of him.”

“Hermann,” Newt says, quickly shoving cookies into a red-lid plastic container. “Thanks, Grandma.”

He tucks the tupperware under his arm and nearly wipes out on the icy front path he runs to the Gottliebs’ so fast. Before he can so much as catch his breath and knock, their door swings open; Hermann, dressed in a tacky Hannukah sweater, arches an eyebrow at him. “I saw you sprint over here like a bloody madman,” he says, in blessed English. He must’ve remembered how shitty Newt’s German was when they were kids. “Hello, Newton. What’s so terribly important?”

His voice got deeper—expected—and he swapped out his German accent for an English one somewhere along the way. Probably at his stuffy boarding school. He also got taller—he’s got a few inches on Newt now, but Newt admits that’s not exactly hard. God, he’s even hotter in person. “Uh,” Newt says. Why is he here? Oh, right. He thrusts out the tupperware. “I brought some cookies over for you?”

Hermann peers down at the offering over his glasses. His forehead wrinkles. “How considerate,” he says. He pulls an olive-green parka on and steps out onto the porch, tugging the door shut behind him. He taps at a peeling porch swing with the end of his cane. “Just leave them there. Would you like to take a walk?”

It’s freezing, and snowing, but for some reason, a walk sounds like the best idea in the world right now. “Yes, please,” Newt says, and chucks the cookies onto the swing.

“I must say,” Hermann says, after their meandering walk around the Gottliebs’ yard takes them to the old maple tree. The branches are bare, but thick, and shield them from most of the falling snow. Hermann’s breath puffs out white in front of his angular face. The last time I stood here, Newt thinks, he kissed me. “I really did not expect to see you.”

“I didn’t expect to see you, either,” Newt admits. “From what I remember, you and your family weren’t—uh—well, very close. I didn’t think you’d be coming back to share in the holiday cheer with them, is what I mean.”

The corner of Hermann’s mouth twitches up. “That’s certainly one way of describing it. Yes, I suppose you’re right—my father is a bit of a bastard, isn’t he?” Newt laughs awkwardly, unsure whether to agree or attempt to weakly the defend a guy who openly hated him for being a bad influence on Hermann most of his childhood; he’s grateful when Hermann continues and saves him the choice. “This is the first year I’ve come home in a long while. My brother’s just had a daughter, you see, and I thought I should start getting used to playing uncle.”

“Oh, congrats,” Newt says. Hermann shrugs, and Newt has the distinct feeling that this is Hermann’s older brother, who used to dissemble Hermann’s telescope and hide the pieces around the house when Hermann annoyed him, and tattled on Newt and Hermann to Hermann’s parents the one time Newt snuck in to see Hermann after he got banned. He always made Newt thankful that he was an only child. “Same here, actually. Not the uncle thing—I mean I haven’t visited since I was in college. Too busy.”

“I know,” Hermann says, and then adds teasingly (in a way that makes color flood Newt’s cheeks and his heart beat just a little faster), “I’ve looked you up online. Er—quite a bit recently, in fact. I was curious. You’ve made quite the name for yourself, haven’t you, Dr. Geiszler?”

“I,” Newt squeaks, and then coughs. “I mean, I guess? I like…science.”

“I oughtn’t be surprised,” Hermann says. “You were always giving me bugs, and salamanders, and funny little frogs—”

Newt liked bugs, and salamanders, and frogs, but he liked Hermann more, and the gifts had a lot more to do with the latter than the former, because what kid wouldn’t want bugs or salamanders or frogs, right? Not that Hermann ever appreciated them—especially not the worms Newt would pluck from the sidewalks after rainstorms. He thinks he got grounded for that one, too, because his grandma wouldn’t believe that he really wasn’t trying to terrorize the poor Gottlieb boy. “And what about you?” Newt says. He pokes his elbow into Hermann’s side. “Dr. Gottlieb? Guess those model rockets paid off.”

(“No, Newton,” Hermann would snap at him on the rare occasions he would allow Newt to watch him piece one together, “the glue hasn’t dried yet. You have to be patient, or else it’ll fall apart.”)

“Not yet,” Hermann says, “but I hope soon.”

Hermann smiles at him. A snowflake catches in his eyelashes—his long, pretty, dark eyelashes. “Do you remember when you kissed me here?” Newt blurts out.

“It’s hardly the sort of thing I’d forget,” Hermann says. He reaches out and tucks a piece of Newt’s hair up into his hat. “I like your tattoos—I saw the photographs on your social media accounts. They suit you.” Newt wonders if this means Hermann saw the shirtless selfie he posted on Instagram. “I’m also pleased to see you’ve gotten your braces removed. It wasn’t a very pleasant experience last time.”

Then he leans in and kisses Newt. Again, technically. It’s so light and brief Newt hardly believes it even happened. Their glasses clack together, and when Hermann pulls away, he straightens out Newt’s.

“I confess,” Hermann says, “that I’m wholly pleased to see how you’ve turned out. I hope that wasn’t too forward of me. I’ve been thinking about doing it all night.”

“Jeez, dude,” Newt says, blinking at him, his head swimming just a little. Hermann looks smug. “Not, uh, not too forward. So. Uh. You wanna get dinner or something this week and catch up?”

Hermann snorts, and nods.

[coffeeshoptalkks]

nct 127 kibbe types

key: (D) dramatic, (SD) soft dramatic, (FN) flamboyant natural, (N) natural, (SN) soft natural, (DC) dramatic classic, (C) classic, (SC) soft classic, (FG) flamboyant gamine, (G) gamine, (SG) soft gamine, (TR) theatrical romantic, (R) romantic

the boyss ! ! ! 

taeil: SG? little unsure about this one... i considered R but his limbs are longer than an Rs would be but i would probably say he has a R essence as flowier fabrics like this look good on him

relatively large head in comparison to body

isnt delicate the way a TR would be

also TR lines don’t look great on him

im so sorry i always use ten for TR but like, TRs are freaking hard to type and hes non ambiguous so whoops

you can really see the contrast here

i feel like they always style him as a FG? and he just doesn’t have the yang to handle it 

think all the hair colors, excess excess amount of details that ty wears a lot

johnny: SD - sliGht C undertone 

long and lanky ass balloon man

thats all i got... jk. kinda

not a D, too much yin.

i’ve seen FN but really, hes not frame dominant, just looks tallish with a little squish in him

handles details decently well - oversized isn’t the best look

the reason i said a tiny c essence/undertone is because i prefer him in more minimalist SD clothing, more detail does start to look a little ridiculous (i promise i mean that in the nicest way possible lol, don’t come for my entp ass)

the classic comes in cause he looks PHENOMENAL in traditionally classic lines with a little umph and also looser classic lines (the yin in SD)

i needed to include this masterpiece

taeyong: FG. ah yes, the debate about ty... some argue D but he just doesn’t have the vertical line

(sitting somewhere btween D and FG, but FG fits better)

obviously a yang type

but you immediately remove any sort of natural and SD cause he isn’t wide and he isn’t squishy

doesn’t have the vertical line for a D, even from a lower angle you don’t look at him and go “yes, hes really tall” and thats what Ds are really about

it doesn’t matter how tall someone actually is, its how tall they appear to be, and taeyong just looks his height

think about how well ty carries every concept

thats a FG thing. (i can’t find the exact quote but a staff member said that its really interesting to style ty because u can put so many elements on him without it overpowering him

yuta: FG. if taeyong is a FG then so is Yuta

somewhere on the spectrum between FG and D but has to be put in FG just cause a dramatic’s first and foremost trait is vertical line

my next guess would be SD but really he doesnt have enough yin in him, hes all sharp

but because hes sitting somewhere in between he’s not gonna carry as much detail as a “purer(?)” FG

hes 100% yang based but doesn’t have the vertical line of a pure D

this looks phenomenal

he looks like a friggin anime character excUse me sir

i’m fine no i’m not

doyoung (dongyoung): SD. i’ve seen DC, and i do get the argument, but he isn’t as sharp as a DC would be.

you take a look at this and he just isn’t sharp in the way that seonghwa or vernon are

hes definitely a yang type but hes got an undercurrent of yin 

how do i explain this

SDs actually have a lot more yin than DCs despite them being placed closer to dramatic in a lot of graphs. (you know the ones i’m talking about)

even if you could make an argument for vertical line (as i think doyoung has a moderate to long one)

kai (a DC/C) is over 180 and yes he has a vertical line, but he has more yang than doyoung - hes just more boxy and has less yin

when i’m having trouble typing an idol i start looking really heavily at outfits and how they suit each style

doyoung just doesn’t make classic suits pop in the way a DC would

he looks restricted and needs a little extra yin detail to match 

the neck scarf with the draping absolutely ties this look together and he absolutely rocks it

he just doesn’t give me DC vibes and i really do think that SD fits him better

jaehyun: SC. leaning on pure classic with some sort of yin essence

okay, ngl i had problems with this one

I saw somewhere (probably reddit lmao) that jaehyun has a SD head on a not SD body... and i couldn’t agree more

my first instinct was to go to SD but really, he doesn’t have the vertical line and details don’t feel right

idk if its just how he’s styled but i really can’t find an era where i lOve what jaehyun is in

i genuinely think he’s just a larger boned SC with some SD mixed in with a weird combo of essences

a good example of a SC ish look is this where you can see the moderate vertical line (despite being 5′11/180)

it might be my personal bias coming in but i really do like him in more minimal and somewhat looser clothing opposed to him drowning in details

this confuses me cause it feels like it should work but it doesn’t...

this looks awesome this is pretty darn decent but i still feel like something is missing 

i compared jae’s vertical line to the SC poster boy joshua (svt 5th from the left) and kai (DC/C) and felt they josh’s was pretty similar but really, i wouldn’t rule out any of the classics or SD

idk if its just how he’s styled but i really can’t find an era where i lOve what jaehyun is in

tldr: big boned SC and thats as close as i’m gonna get lol

mark: FG. pretty self explanatory lol

leaning yang but obviously not a natural or (S) dramatic or classic

leaves you with FG

very sharp facial features

sharp sharp sharp

and a decent vertical line (looks his height ish)

rocks pretty much every hair color on the planet

if you asked me to nail down an essence i wouldn’t be able to hes just a FG lol

jungwoo: FN. classic essence

heres my problem with jungwoo... like jaehyun his type gets really ambiguous cause of essences not matching his actual body type (classic essence, FN type in this case)

because really, hes just too tall to be a DC,

too box like for SD

and his skin is much too yin to be a pure D (he is very squish, a true D - wonwoo svt is taught and yang through and through)

and once you rule out DC cause of height you’re kinda left with??

but his vertical line is just too prominent to be a DC, but hes not as shoulder heavy as most FNs and just?

*insert clown face*

a DC wouldn’t carry an oversized outfit like this

i actually like him in stuff like this, if not a little less oversized, he just looks so cozy

this gets close-ish but he looks a tad bit constricted

the reason i finally just gave in to FN is cause its as close as i think i can get. SD and D aren’t right, hes not a SN or pure N (jun svt) and in this pic (and others) you can kinda start to see that he IS actually more frame dominant than you first expect. (think like yanan pentagon, - minus the shoulders - super long limbs, lanky but still relatively squarish)

so FN it is

tldr: FN with a classic essence cause really thats (imo) the closest and best option you have and confused kpop fan 

haechan (donghyuck): G. right now i would put him in pure G but he might hit FG at some point in the future cause he isn’t 21 in international age and his type is still settling

boom vs resonance

okay its not that different but i sWEar hes picked up more yang somewhere

not a SG because his isn’t absolutely massive in comparison to the rest of his body 

chenle i’m looking at you (fifth from the left)

moderate to short-ish vertical line

sharp jawline vs squish face but he doesn’t have the sharp yang of a FG (mark)

just still got some squish on him 

[thecrenellations]

“Warmed by the sun and cooled by the sea breeze, she was busy with her thoughts.”

“All I wanted to do was lie in the dry prickly grass with my feet in a ditch forever. I could be a convenient sort of milemarker, I thought. Get to the thief and you know you are halfway to Methana. Wherever Methana might be.”

“his thoughts circled like birds that couldn’t find a perch”

“[my thoughts] churned against one another like waves in a storm”

“Relius was left behind in the quiet room, considering a new philosophy”

“It seemed like hours that he sat on the small stool by the bed, lost in his thoughts -- or whatever he had in his head that approximated thoughts.”

“Who knows but that you will get up to find that the world has inverted itself yet again?”

on finishing Return of the Thief:

HELLO I finished rott ... several days ago, now, and I am just stopping by to say that it was a LOT, and I look forward to seeing what everyone has been thinking, feeling, and drawing ... once I’ve taken a little more time away to wrap my head around it. I hope everyone has been having the reading and discussing experience that’s right for them. I’ve been thinking of all of you/all of us this week!

I don’t really know what this post is; the first time I tried writing the note above, it turned into a ton of book-adjacent feelings, so I’ll stick some of that down below, if anyone feels like reading me being introspectively lachrymose (it’s way more about me than it is about the book).

I also drew these two moments, one we saw and one we didn’t:

L: “I saw Kamet approach Teleus, who’d propped himself against a crenellated wall.” Big shoutout to the CRENELLATIONS in this final scene! Also to Kamet’s thoughtfulness :,)

R: “I’ve arranged for them to both be in the garden at the same time, entirely alone. We’ll see which one leaves alive.” wtf Gen

......

So, so, so, I finished rott, and ... wow. It’s a lot to take in, and it was definitely the most intense reading experience of my life (mentally/emotionally and also physically, in terms of heart rate/ability to sleep and otherwise function this week, oops). It’s interesting - I’d been thinking a lot about how this would be my first and only time reading a qt book just as it came out, with everyone else, since I was suspiciously fortunate and ended up with advance copies of the last two. I’d had a month or more with both ACoK and TaT before being able to jump into discussions, and I hadn’t realized until finishing this book how that might be necessary for me. I’d though I’d be eager to return to Sounis (which I still think is great for centralized, detailed conversations) and dip my toe into Discord (which sounds very fun all around), and of course to find out what everyone thought here! Turns out I am NOT ready … even though I took notes, read much slower than that one guy’s amended army speed calculations, and got to holler along with an indispensable friend who started reading at the same time, I still need some time to attempt to wrap my head around everything this book contained.

I have problems with perfectionism and weird expectations for myself in my relationship with these books – from the moment mwt announced rott, I focused on not feeling “ready” for it to happen so quickly – I wouldn’t be able to reread the existing series infinite times, or finally read Vorkosigan and Lymond and all of Rosemary Sutcliff, or reread Dalemark. Or make the art I wanted, or be truly part of Sounis again, or move forward enough that my own life didn’t feel exactly the same as in spring 2017, just more stuck. The book is out, and while I am still a bit stuck, I am different than I was in 2017 in lots of ways, even if it’s not as obvious a difference as between 2010 and 2017. A small one is my engagement with the fandom and people here! I’m pretty sure I used to just be a series of posts occasionally floating by (a decent thing to be, don’t get me wrong), and I often wonder what I seem like as a person for those who just know me here, but now I occasionally make stuff and talk to people (and even got to meet one through a coincidence that still amazes me)!

So while I’ve made some progress letting go of some of those feelings of never being ready, it’s possible that this is part of where I’m coming from now. If I NEVER COME BACK TO TUMBLR, I will certainly have fallen into that trap, but I do think I’ll be back soon. I know that these books aren’t something a reader can ever perfectly understand, especially alone, and I know they’ve been so deeply meaningful and formative because of my interactions with others and exposure to how they experience the stories and characters. (This means YOU!) The last few months have been particularly amazing, with all the rereads and anticipation. I am so grateful for that, and a new book coming out is only the beginning… of course.

Nearly 450 pages of new qt just did a number on me, and I need to take it in for a bit, reread, fill up my Mitt notebook, and make some “so, so, so” graphs (and maybe update that Valentine’s Day post) to COPE! But I am genuinely looking forward to catching up soon, and I’m truly wishing everyone the reading/discussing experience they need right now! About the book itself, I will say: so much of it made me really, really happy, and there were a few things that I truly NEVER expected to see. Some of it made me sad, mostly in a good way, because mwt writes like she does. Some of it made my heart pound even harder as I read sentence by sentence, eyes creeping down the page with my bookmark blocking what came next. And before I started the book, I got to sit with it for a few hours in a quiet park on a gently breezy and sunny day … I’ll never be the perfect reader, but that felt right.

This totally turned into a Formal Letter of Absence, as if my presence here is vital or something, but if this isn’t an occasion to toss out some emotions for all to see, what is? And it’s also possible that typing all this up has helped me work through a lot of these feelings and I’ll be back tomorrow, lol.

You read this far, here are two hasty doodles of Sophos and a horse he has an awful lot in common with, and Pheris under the table, observing some embroidered ~foreshadowing~ with his wonderful eye for detail.

<3

[thisisallthehattersfault]

Write With Me - From Concept to Finished Draft. Part 1

Spinaraki week is next month. I’ve never taken part in a Ship or Character week before because I write very slow and have a hard time getting solid fic ideas, much less polishing and finishing them. However, my goal for this year is to get more writing done, and learn writing habits that will help me get over the early hurdles I really struggle with -- namely, coming up with ideas in the first place, and then turning those ideas into solid concepts I can then plot into a full story.

What’s that? The thing I just said I struggle with is The Entire Act Of Writing? And what about it?? Get off my back.

Anyway. The first prompt for Spinaraki week is Chase/Perspective/Space. Let’s do this.

If you’re a better writer or a more creative person than I am -- or maybe just feeling particularly inspired by any of the above words -- you might already have an idea kicking around in your head. I do not. Obviously that’s a problem, because I can’t write a story I don’t have any ideas for.

This isn’t the first time I’ve run into similar issues, where I’ll have a very sparse or vague concept (in this case, a set of three one-word prompts) that I want to turn into a plot, somehow. I’m sure there are plenty of ways to stretch those ideas into shape, but the method I’m trying today is a Mind Map.

A Mind Map, for those of you who are unfamiliar, is a brainstorming tool that lets you sort of… graph out concepts, thoughts, scenarios -- any kind of vague or jumbled information -- in a way that’s both organized enough to be actually useful and, if you’re lucky, gives you the opportunity to flesh out those vague concepts into less vague, more concrete ideas. It’s basically a stream-of-consciousness turned study tool, mapping out your brain’s natural jumps and getting them onto paper where you can more easily wrangle them into shape.

I’m gonna go down the line for each of these words and make maps for them, keeping Spinaraki in mind, and hopefully I’ll have at least one decent fic idea by the time I’m done.

Here’s my first pass for the “Chase” prompt. I started by asking the obvious question -- who’s chasing who, and why? I came up with four main possibilities.

The boys are chasing an abstract goal. What immediately came to mind was the destruction of society and the broken horizon Spinner thought was so beautiful, but they could also be… chasing redemption? Peace? A new goal in the wake of all the AFO bullshit?

The boys are being chased by some enemy. The obvious suspects are the heroes/law enforcement, someone from the MLA or Overhaul’s group who aren’t happy with what they’ve done, or maybe AFO himself?

The boys are chasing each other. Maybe one has been taken or abducted somehow, and the other has to rescue him? Maybe it’s a playful game of cat and mouse? Mario Kart?

The boys are chasing an enemy. Naturally my brain went right to the MLA and Overhaul arcs, and how Shigaraki tends to go his most apeshit when one of his league members is harmed.

None of these are very thorough concepts, but they do give me a more solid foundation to build off of. With these basic ideas established, I’m gonna do some more brainstorming to try and get more solid ideas for the four concepts I came up with. This is legit stream of consciousness. I’m gonna write down everything I can think of and see what comes up.

With this second pass, I’ve fleshed these ideas out more. By now I have a couple actual ideas brewing -- I want a Spinner-centric fic that follows him both literally and figuratively running away from his identity as an unwanted, weak mutant lizard, and that chase for purpose becoming a more specific chase for Shigaraki. I like the idea of the boys mutually saving each other, and Spinner getting a chance to do something really badass and terrifying to destroy someone who hurt Shigaraki. I like the idea that Shigaraki spends most of the fic trying to get Spinner’s romantic attention, and Spinner full-on does not notice because Shiggy is bad at flirting and Spinner is bad at thinking anybody would ever flirt with him.

That’s not a bad starting point, actually. I have a general map for how the action would rise, with Spinner rescuing Shigaraki and Shigaraki finally just kissing Spinner as the climax.  The details -- who they’re fighting/chasing/running from, where the rest of the league is, when and where this takes place -- can all be figured out later.

Because I now have an idea for the kind of fic I want to write, I’m not gonna bother making proper maps for Space/Perspective, but I am gonna try to pull some inspiration from them by using them like thought prompts and asking some questions.

What are their perspectives on themselves, each other, the world at large, their respective mentors and inspirations? How do they impact each others’ perspective? What changes, what overlaps? How do they each feel about personal space, or the lack thereof? Neither of these boys got touched much growing up. What was their relationships with their bedrooms back at home? How do they feel not having private space to call their own? Thinking about Spinner the Hikikomori has me thinking about Futaba from Persona 5. I wonder if he felt like she did, that he’d die alone in his bedroom. I just hurt my own feelings. I wanna move on.

Okay. I’ve got a general concept and some themes/ideas I want to touch on. Now I have to solidify it into an actual premise. I’m gonna put my Spotify on shuffle and close my eyes and make AMVs in my head until inspiration strikes. See you guys next time.

[spaceskam]

prompt #1 - first kiss [ao3]

Liz Ortecho typically didn’t mind Michael Guerin.

Out of all the boys in her STEM classes (and there were too many) he was basically the only one who didn’t make her want to scream every time she left. They even were in a study group together that was basically all the people who fell into minority boxes in someway, deciding that sticking together would be the best way to survive it. For awhile, she had struggled to understand how the white boy had found himself in that group, but she learned relatively quickly that he was proudly bisexual and it suddenly made a little more sense.

What didn’t make sense was why the hell she found him so goddamn hot.

He wasn’t annoying in the sense that he was racist or misogynistic like a scary amount of boys majoring in the field were, but he was annoying in the normal way. Like when he leaned too far into her personal space to look at her notes or shed his hair everywhere he went or laughed so loud that it was deafening or had no idea how to talk in a cohesive manner to actually help anyone understand things. But he was gorgeous and he was smart and Liz was annoyed a little more each day at how she wasn’t annoyed.

Now he sat on her dorm room floor, his legs splayed out and his head tilted back against her dresser. His lips were pursed as he blew out random breaths in a rhythmic fashion and tapped his pencil against his notebook, moving his head side to side in tandem. 

“You’re supposed to be trying to help me understand this goddamn problem, not drumming,” she complained. She couldn’t quite remember the sequence of events that led to her welcoming him into her room alone, but he was here and she couldn’t help but be distracted by it.

“It’s easy, Liz. You already know what a vector is on a two-dimensional graph, it’s basically the same thing. Just, like, perpendicular to the tangent plane, find the normal vector then you find the equation of the tangent plane at that point,” he said. Liz felt like he was purposely trying to give her a headache.

“What the hell is a tangent plane, again?”

He stopped drumming.

“Okay, now I know you need a break ‘cause you know what a tangent plane is,” Michael said, shifting his textbook off his lap. He looked up to her with that all too charming smile and batted his eyelashes. Maybe a one-on-one study session was a really, really bad idea. 

“I don’t need a break, I need to understand this shit.”

“Come on, take a break,” he urged, “We could go get coffee or go get something to eat or, if you feeling spunky, we can vandalize the car of that professor who took one look at your last name and suggested you change your major to something a little easier.”

Liz huffed, “Which one?”

“Dealer’s choice.”

She smiled and he smiled right back, licking his lips and tapping against the ground again. Liz couldn’t help but shake her head and try to look back at her homework. But Michael was making noise and, when she looked over at him, he had climbed to his feet and was stomping on the ground.

“Foot’s asleep,” he said simply. She rolled her eyes, but she didn’t look away as he stretched. Her eyes went to the space where his shirt rose, his arms stretching towards the ceiling. Was the world playing some weird joke on her? She’d already admitted she found him attractive, wasn’t that enough?

“I need to focus.”

“Nope, you need a break,” Michael insisted, “Tell me what you need and I’ll make it happen.”

Liz’s eyes continued to linger on his torso and his arms. By the time they got back to his face, he had a confused smile paired with furrowed eyebrows.

“Are... are you checking me out?” he asked, sputtering a laugh. Liz felt her cheeks burn red and she snapped her eyes back to her homework. “I mean, it’s okay if you are. I get it. I check me out too.”

A startled laugh forced its way out of her and she turned her head back to him. He still had that charming smile on, not at all phased by catching her red-handed. 

“Sorry,” she offered, but she wasn’t quite sure she meant it. By the way he smiled, she figured he didn’t mind.

Suddenly, she was remembering her thought process as to why she thought getting him alone with a bed right there was a good idea.

“I mean, hey, if you’ve got some other idea on what we could do to take a break, I’m open to suggestion,” Michael said, “I told you, tell me what you need and I’ll make it happen.”

Liz very distinctly noticed that he hadn’t taken a step closer despite his suggestive tone. She noticed the non-threatening way he stood and the way his face was still as kind as ever. She felt safe with him. If she asked him to stop or to leave, she was confident he would listen and not get angry about it.

“Let’s go get coffee,” Liz told him, more as a test than anything else. As safe as she felt with him, she still wanted to make sure he wasn’t a dick. He tilted his head to the side for a second, seeming to be manually removing the ideas she’d put into his head before his smile got wide again and he nodded.

“Yeah, let’s go. I got this new thing the other day with, like, honey in it and I think you’ll like it,” Michael told her, already heading to the door and pulling his phone out of his pocket, “I typed the name in my notes ‘cause I knew I would forget.”

She let him get a few steps there before she reached out and grabbed his elbow, tugging him backwards. Michael spun and waited for her to explain, his eyes big and curious.

“Let’s go back to the option that’ll involve actually taking my mind off it,” she stated, her eyes scanning over his face, “If you want to.”

“Hey, college is about casual sex. I think. I don’t know, there’s probably a double standard,” he said. Liz smiled and shook her head.

“College is about learning, but everyone needs a stress reliever,” she said, taking a deep breath as she raked her eyes over him, “And you’re hot.”

Michael laughed, “So are you.” 

“So, if we do this, it’s not gonna be weird, right?” she clarified, her hands hovering over his chest. Her mind was full of equations and tangent planes and chaos and previous experiments had confirmed that sex was a good way to clear that chaos. “Like we can still be friends, no weirdness?”

“No weirdness, still friends. Casual,” he confirmed.

“And you want to, right? You’re not just doing this because I--”

“Liz, do you wanna write up a contract for me to sign? ‘Cause I will,” Michael told her, “I consent to whatever you wanna do to me, just, if it’s weird, warn me.”

“Cool, I consent too,” Liz agreed, wasting little time as she grabbed his shoulders and pulled him into a kiss.

It took a moment to adjust, but his lips were soft and he was at least a decent enough kisser. Her hands instantly went to the hem of the shirt he was wearing and she started pulling it off, Michael pulled away to quickly rip it off and she got a him a ‘not bad’ look that resulting in him laughing that too-loud laugh.

Liz grabbed him by the belt, though, and tugged him with her as she backed up against her desk. She hopped up to sit on it and he nodded in approval, coming back down for a kiss. This time was better and less awkward-first-kiss-esque.

His fingers curled around the bend of her knees and pulled their hips together. She slid her hand into his soft hair, holding him to her. And it worked.

And, for once, her mind finally fucking cleared.

[hoodoo12]

Familial Ties (And How to Break Them) 1/?

Based on a rp that the witty and talented @turtlepated and I did over several months.  NSFW, Beetlejuice/OC f!character, actual plot, world building, Latin, other demons, violence, smut.  Enjoy!  ~

Pate sighed, shifting the heavy sealed plastic box in her arms as she padded down the dimly lit hallway. It was long after closing time at the archives, but her boss had wheedled her into staying late to assess some new arrivals. She shouldered open the swinging door into a restoration office, depositing her load on a sterile work bench and gathering up supplies: pen and notebook, cotton gloves to protect the delicate velum pages, the assorted cleaning tools, and laying them neatly at her station before opening the box. Inside were half a dozen leather bound volumes, purchased by her boss on a recent trip to Europe. She lifted them out one by one and looked them over, judging that most were in decent enough shape to be worth salvaging.

One, she noted with a puzzled frown, appeared to be in the worst condition of the lot. And strangest of all, there was a thick metal clasp complete with an ancient padlock holding the book shut.

She set the padlocked tome aside and quickly made notations and catalogued the other books, banal volumes of religious writings for the most part, and in good enough shape not to require much attention from her. Finally she was left with only the poorly locked book, taking it gently in her gloved hands and turning it around to get a better look. From what she could tell at a cursory inspection of the cracked and worm-eaten spine, it appeared to be a collection of astronomical dissertations.

She tried the lock, tugging on it as sharply as she dared with the state of the book.

⁂

Out of the ether, a deep thrumming startled him. It was almost too faint to be felt at first, but it grew in intensity.

"There's something I never expected to feel again," Beetlejuice thought, shaking his head of the literal cobwebs.

⁂

The rusty lock refused to give, and Pate gave it one more frustrated rattle against the metal loop. She had just decided to simply discard the thing into the shelf of other moldering texts when, with no warning, the centuries-old binding ripped free and the entire block slid right out of the leather coverings. Heart leaping into her throat, Pate just managed to catch it before it hit the ground, cradling the bundle of loose leaves against her chest as she set the now empty cover back on the bench.

"Shit, Paul's gonna kill me," she grumbled.

⁂

A minor jolt went through him, like someone had run their warm, living fingers down his spine. It was just a fleeting touch, but he grinned.

⁂

Sighing harshly, Pate lay the block on the table and examined the most recent damage with a twinge of guilt. The backing and both end papers had completely torn away from the block, still hanging on the cover. She frowned at the exposed title page, wrinkled by long-dried water, the ink faded and difficult to make out. It took a few minutes to discern the title stamped into the parchment, but as best as she could tell the book was entitled "Ens entium collectio infernalia". Since her forte was restoring old books and not reading or translating them, she turned to Google.

"Being a collection of entities most infernal," she read aloud from her phone screen. But wasn't this a book about astronomy?  

Frowning in thought, Pate pulled the text block closer and began leafing through the pages. They came away stiff, some sticking together after who knew how much time spent with the book tightly shut and locked. She carefully separated pages from one another, eyes roving writing that she could not read. Instead of star charts or graphs, there were woodcut illustrations of monstrous creatures, hand-drawn sigils in iron gall ink that had browned with age.

"What the hell...?" Pate murmured to herself, flipping the block closed and reaching for the empty boards that once held it all together.

Something caught her eye on the back cover, where the pastedown ripped harshly when the block detached from the spine. There appeared to be another page tucked under the end paper.

Peeling away the pastedown, Pate took hold of the folded corner of parchment and gently tugged it free, not wanting to risk ripping it before she got a look at it. It was folded several times over, so she pushed the text block and cover across the workbench to have room to lay it down and open it out. Going slowly, the parchment crinkling like dead leaves each time she touched it, Pate carefully unfolded the bit of parchment to reveal a page. It looked different to the simple black and white woodblock illustrations in the book; this was in color, and appeared to have been rendered by hand. It depicted a male figure dressed in a strange black and white striped tunic and leggings. On his face was a devilish grin, a peculiar pointed tongue protruding from between his leering lips. The unkempt hair on his head had been colored green, and he appeared to be holding some sort of bizarre black and white snake with two heads? Pate's eyes narrowed as she leaned closer to inspect it, though it was hardly the strangest medieval illumination she'd ever seen. Next to the grinning, green haired person in his striped garments were a few lines of slightly smeared text.

⁂

Beetlejuice shivered. That was closer. That was closer.

⁂

Pate squinted harder at the splotchy lines of ink, trying to make sense of it or at least figure out what language it was written in. One thing she was certain of: this page had been torn from a completely different book that the one she found it in. It was much older, smaller than the pages of the rest of the text block. And why had someone gone to the trouble of hiding it? Whoever had written... whatever was written next to the strange illumination had very shaky handwriting, which didn't make it any easier to decipher.

"Bhet el.... What's that last thing there?" She thumbed through the internet browser on her phone, comparing text to find a match. "Bhet, el, juz? Is that it?"

⁂

"Oh, shit," he groaned. This was happening? Out of nowhere, this was happening?!

⁂

Sitting back in her chair, Pate took the torn-out page and held it at arms' length, pondering the three peculiar syllables and wondering why they sounded familiar.

"Bhet el juz…." she murmured. It does sound different, taking a shorter pause between. It was on the tip of her tongue, teasing at the outermost edge of recognition.

⁂

 Oh fuck

Electricity flooded him, making him jitter. It had to be a joke, couldn't be true; he rocked on the balls of his feet, which helped release some nervous energy and also shifted his involuntarily hard-on to a more comfortable position behind his fly.

⁂

Sighing tiredly, Pate laid the page back on the workbench and looked at the time on her phone. Had she really spent an hour and a half picking apart the enigma of the locked book? And what had she really learned? Snorting softly through her nose, Pate wheeled the chair forward to prop her elbows atop the bench, resting her chin in her hand and regarding the striped tongue snaking out of the figure's mouth.

"Bheteljuz, what's your deal, huh?" she asked no one.

At least the dirt on his pants would hide the wet spot if he came right here and now. Like a grappling hook had been driven into his gut, he was pulled through the ether to whomever called him.

When he landed, bent knees and feeling better than he'd had in forever, he threw his arms out and shouted, "Suus 'showtime!"

There was a breather here, of course, surrounded by dusty books.

"Quis es?" he asked excitedly, eager to meet this woman who so thoughtfully released him. "Gratias tibi! Gratias tibi tam! Fortuna, suus 'sit bonum, de iterum.Quis es tibi nomen?"

Pate frowned at a sudden, short lived gust of wind that ruffled the torn out page and whipped loose tendrils of hair around her face, but before she had time to wonder at it a sudden voice made her yelp and spin in her chair so fast that she nearly tipped right over.

Standing before her was quite possibly the strangest looking person she'd ever seen:  a man dressed in a rather shabby and grimy looking black-and-white-striped suit, a tangled rat's nest of verdant green hair on his head and a broad, toothy grin on his face. She blinked stupidly, sure that she must be seeing things.

"Who... who are you?" she asked, pausing to clear her throat when the question came out a tad squeaky. "How'd you get in here?"

Beetlejuice shook his head.

"ENGLISH," he crowed, like he'd solved a mystery. "I saw the books and thought some goddamn alchemist had called me up again, but the fluorescent lights should've given it away."

He took a parody breath, like this air was fresh and clean, and gave his best grin to the breather. The one that he hoped didn't look too much like he wanted to take a bite out of someone.

"What's your name, beautiful?"

Completely taken aback, Pate answered without even thinking,

"My name . . .? I'm Pate, but . . . who--?"

She cut herself off, answering her own question even as she asked it, glancing from the illumination on the orphaned page to the man standing before her and making the connection.

"This is . . . is this you?" she asked, holding it up to show him.

He grabbed it out of her hand for a closer look, breaking into a wider grin.

"Oh yeah, baby, that's me! Good thing someone beautiful and smart called me up! So. What's your pleasure? Who do I have to kill?"

Pate's eyebrows shot up, her mouth falling open.

"Kill?" she squeaked. "No! Nobody! What? Called you? How?"

Questions spun through her mind too fast for her tongue to keep up and she leaned against the bench, tenting her fingers together and pressing them to her face as she breathed deeply.

"Ooookay, this is obviously some sort of . . . stress-induced hallucination."

His brow wrinkled.

"Nobody ever wants me to kill anybody," he groused. "Hey. Hey. Pate? Sweetie, you don't look so good. Almost as pale as me! Why don'tcha sit down, m'kay? Don't need a smart one like you falling over and injuring that big brain of yours."

He stepped up to take her elbow, and really fought down the urge to give her a peek at his brain and its resident maggots, to demonstrate the worst that could happen.

Pate peeked out from behind her hands enough to see him take a step closer, one hand extending towards her in an admittedly non-threatening way but she couldn't contain the tiny frightened gasp that escaped her as she backed a step away, bumping into her chair and sending it skittering across the linoleum floor.

"That's . . . ahem . . . i's fine, I'm fine," she said, making an effort to keep her voice conversationally polite even while her mind was screaming, overwrought and uncomprehending of what was happening. "Now you said I called you? How, exactly?"

Beetlejuice frowned. "Come on, beaut. I said you were smart! You picked up my flyer. Where was it?" He spied the destroyed book and picked some of it up. "Oh! Ens entium collectio infernalia". Good old Deitrich Fuchs. Herr Fucks had to hide this book so the church didn't know it was about demons."

He chuckled. "Herr Fuchs," he repeated, like a 12-year-old boy. Then he shook himself and got back to the question at hand.

"You read my flyer--such a sweet voice, like a nightingale!--and here I am, the Netherworld's leading, and only, bio-exorcist, at your service. Don't confuse me for a genie, though. Those guys think they're so great, what with that fucking Disney movie making them out to be fun and funky playmates, but a couple of things. One, they stink. Cooped up in a lamp? Come one. Two. They're cranky assholes, because you guessed it: they're stuck in lamps. Three? They can't show you the same kind of good time that I can, baby. If you catch my drift. And I think you do."

He clicked his tongue and winked.

"So if I'm not killing anyone, is that what you're after? I can most certainly accommodate you there too. There's usually this other guy that gets called more than me, but you've obviously got better taste calling me instead."

There was definitely a tension headache working its way into her temples as Pate blinked dumbly at the onslaught of words, only half of which her brain managed to process and understand. His flyer? Had he hidden the page in the book himself? But if that were the case . . . Like a lightbulb switching on, it suddenly clicked. That word! Bhetlejuz! She couldn't explain how, not even to herself, but somehow or another saying it out loud had brought him here! But from where?

Before a new flood of questions had time to wash over her, his innuendo filtered into her consciousness and she stiffened, mortified to feel warmth in her face that she hoped the overhead fluorescence would bleach out before he noticed. Clearing her throat, she made a valiant effort to steer the conversation back to a more . . .  professional topic.

"Wait, are you saying you actually knew the author? But that would make you . . . " She did the math in her head, guestimating the age of the tome itself. "Almost five hundred years old?"

He didn't miss the color that rose in her cheeks.

"Now you're looking a little flushed, sugar," he remarked, and sidled closer again, even though she'd rebuffed him before. His voice dropped. "It looks good on you. I'd be interested in seeing if that pretty blush shows up anywhere else . . ."

He cleared his throat and twisted his hips just a tad; it'd been a while since he'd been near, well, anyone, and having a raging boner wouldn't endear him to her! She didn't look like she'd appreciate a femur as a joke at the moment, either. He switched topics, for her sake.

"Let's table that and revisit it later, okay? Your question about Herr . . . Fuchs? Christ that guy should've changed his name. Nice guy. Nervous. Well, he would've been tortured and probably drawn and quartered, so I guess he had reason to me. But yeah! Well, I'm more like six hundred-ish, but what's a century or two?"

Her blush only deepened when he called her out because of course he'd noticed.... She tensed at the close proximity and the blatant flirting, but she still had questions.

"This book," she said, turning to the side to heft the flayed text block into her hands. "Did you say it was about demons? How did Fuchs know about them?"

Pate ignored the snicker at the author's name. "Did you help him write it?" Her curiosity was getting the better of her now, replacing the fear and the uncertainty of this whole strange turn of events.

"How the Fuchs indeed," he chortled. Her query sobered him up a little bit, however. "I'm not at huge liberty to divulge past summoner's requests. Well, mainly I don't want to. I will say that now that I think about it, Fuchs might have earned that surname fair and square. Foolin' around with a demon--even one as handsome as myself--would also earn you a stake in the middle of a bonfire, if you know what I mean."

Despite herself, Pate couldn't help but chuckle at the idea of a demon abiding by a client confidentiality clause. This whole ordeal was simply too surreal, part of her still wondered if she wasn't dreaming.

"I suppose that's understandable," she conceded.

The sound of voices filtering down the hall interrupted her chain of thought. Someone was coming! But who'd be here at this time of night? Pate fumbled for her phone and checked the time.

"Holy shit! It's almost 7! The first shift is coming in!" She turned, looking from the dismantled tome to the demon leaning against the work bench.

"Oh . . . were you doing something naughty down here you don't want them to find?" Beetlejuice asked. Then something occurred to him. "Wait! It's me, isn't it!"

"Well, not to be blunt, but yes! Can you... I dunno, hide or something?" she asked, scooping up the flier and the sad remnants of the demon bestiary.

"Why would I want to hide this prime specimen of demonhood?" he retorted, offended. Seeing the panic on her face, however, he downgraded his response. "Don't worry that pretty little head of yours, sugar. I can be discreet."

Pate rolled her eyes at his bravado, sliding the text block carefully back into its cover and stashing the whole thing in her bag. It was unlikely to be missed, but it wasn't something she wanted to leave lying around. And, if she were honest with herself, she was fascinated by it and unable to resist the temptation of taking it home for a closer look.

Bheteljuz, which she assumed now must be his name, was nowhere in sight when she next looked but she got the distinct impression that he hadn't gone far.

The first shift crew came in then, surprised to see her still in the office but not enough to raise alarm bells. Gripping the strap of her shoulder bag protectively in both hands, Pate did her best to play it cool and bid them all goodnight, exiting the parking lot with a stolen 15th century book of demonology and an invisible demon? ghost? man? at her heels.

 tbc

[incandescent-eden]

31 Days of Horror: Distort (1)

My story from yesterday for the first day of @witch-kid-writer ‘s 31 days of horror! (The prompts are really cool, I highly recommend checking them out!)

Total word count: 1653

TW / CW for: body horror, graphic descriptions of bodily horror sounds, moments of unreality, graphic descriptions of panic attacks, fatphobia mention

---

Imogen Gong was a quiet person. She had good grades, full AP classes and honors society in high school, got a partial scholarship to get into a decent college, practiced piano and violin and Chinese - the perfect image of what she was expected to be. Her parents were so pleased with how far their daughter had gotten.

For her part, Imogen wasn’t going to contradict them. Yes, I’m going to a great school, she told aunties who would cluck and congratulate her. Thank you, I’m really excited, I worked really hard. She would muster up the most emotion she can, tried to bend fatigue into pride, tried to twist empty, meaningless compliments into some amount of self-esteem.

And, as she should have prepared for, but didn’t expect, she crashed hard. Sure, her grades were still average, but the compliments dried out, and her sleep schedule became less of a schedule and more of a metronome bouncing back and forth between never sleeping and sleeping through classes, with panic attacks set as the notes. Quarter note equals sixty-six, repeat five times a day, her old piano teacher’s voice echoed in her head when her chest was tight and her muscles clenched involuntarily, and air was scarce.

If only she could play her panicked breathing as an instrument and her heart as a drum, and play a one person symphony orchestra, so she could become famous and rich and drop out entirely.

As it stood, she dropped her theory of computation class her third year of college and, in an effort to avoid having any eight am classes, re-enrolled the second semester that year in Professor Tenner’s class.

Professor Leonard Tenner was a curious man, in the way that he was absolutely, bizarrely average. He wore rectangle glasses and an ill-fitting suit every day he taught, and boyish white cheeks and balding brown hair. He spoke with a mild voice, with an accent that was painfully American, but just standard enough that his dialect gave no indication as to where in the United States he was actually from.

Imogen sat slumped in the second row.

“So suppose, I have this graph. The shortest path, then…” Professor Tenner would say with a small smile, as he drew the graph in faded whiteboard markers on a grayed out whiteboard, filling in circular nodes.

Professor Tenner looked up from the board for a second, his light eyes boring into Imogen. “Is everyone following along alright?” he asked with a mild smile.

The words that crawled from his mouth twitched and writhed, as though laughing, curling into themselves and over and into the students’ ears.

“I hope you’re all getting this information,” Professor Tenner continued. He traced the edges between the graph nodes, added number weights full of circular two’s and eight’s.

Each graph had different colors, pallid red and green and purple and blue graphs full of crossed, curving lines. The flat, gray whiteboard was stretched and distorted with the graphs scrambling over every inch.

“The shortest path, then…” said Professor Tenner, again and again and again, pacing from one end of the classroom to the other.

“The shortest path, then…” All the while, the graphs continued to twist.

Imogen’s pencil shook. He was going too fast; she couldn’t possibly write down the question that quickly.

“This will be on the exam, so make sure you know it,” said Professor Tenner. Imogen’s intestines twisted, as cross as the garish graphs that stared mockingly back at her with their incomprehensible paths of varying lengths. She hadn’t realized exams were coming on so soon.

The shortest path. The shortest path was...

“Oh, would you look at the time?” Professor Tenner said, at last. “I’ll see you all in class next week. Remember, the homework is due on Tuesday, and my office hours are Thursday from three to five!” His voice could barely be heard over the rush of students packing up to leave.

Imogen silently packed her things and went back to her room.

“Everything alright?” Cathy, her roommate, asked, when Imogen entered. Cathy was already seated at her desk, her psychology textbook cracked open, glasses smudged.

“Just tired,” Imogen replied, collapsing on her bed. The mattress was stiff. Her stuffed rabbit, Floppy, teetered precariously on the edge of the unlofted bed, moments away from falling to the cold tile floor covered in shed hair.

“I feel that,” Cathy said, highlighting a passage of her notes. “I’ve been studying my ass off for this exam.”

“I’m sure you’ll do great,” Imogen said, crawling under her blankets. The twisting in her torso would not go away. “I’m going to take a nap. Stayed up til four last night trying to do Tenner’s homework.”

“God,” muttered Cathy piteously.

Imogen made a noncommittal sound in agreement, curled into a ball to try and stop the cramping.

When she awoke, it was dark, and Cathy was gone. Probably at dinner or in the library. She checked her phone: notifications from Twitter, an email from her stats professor reminding everyone to bring a pen to class, and a grading notification from Tenner’s class. With a frown, Imogen checked the grade notification. The soft blue glow of the screen was cold, despite the thick blankets in which Imogen wrapped herself.

Her skin prickled with heat and ice simultaneously, staring at the impossibly curved score that danced on the screen as her hand shook.

Taking a small breath, Imogen locked her phone, throwing herself back into darkness. The twisting in her intestines worsened.

She was vaguely aware of Floppy lying on the dirty floor, but Imogen was too numb to poke her hand out of the blankets that swallowed her and rescue the stuffed rabbit. The world was spinning.

Imogen closed her eyes. Willed the spiraling graphs to disappear. Begged the curved, bloated, distorted score from her last homework to have been wrong, to stop glaring at her from behind shut eyelids.

Her breathing started to get faster. Quarter note equals forty, then fifty, then sixty six. In out, in out, in out, gasping and gasping and gasping, and suddenly it’s not her piano teacher’s voice she hears, but Professor Tenner’s.

“The shortest path, then…”

Imogen flipped on her light, shaking as she stumbled out of bed. The world itself wasn’t moving, not logically, but the straight path to the bathroom turned into a twisted maze, spinning around her with every wobbly step.

The bright fluorescent lights of the bathroom washed everything out as Imogen leaned on the counter, hovering over the sink. In, out, in out, the breaths came, faster and faster, but then - finally! - slowing down. Her skin was a pale green in the bathroom mirror, the same green as Professor Tenner’s markers.

Faded, weak, a shadow of the bright green the marker once must have been. And used to draw twisting graphs, twisting and twisting like Imogen’s intestines.

Imogen watched her eyes in the mirror, watched as the dark brown shifted from hopeless to glaring. If she could just stop cramping, she could start to do something.

To her surprise, her organs complied. The pain went away immediately.

Imogen blinked. Pinched herself.

Watched with glee as the skin gave way, stretched and curled around her fingers as she twisted. Laughed, even.

This had to be a joke. She tugged at her fingers, her thumbs, her palms.

Pop.

Pop.

Pop.

She had always struggled to play tenths on the piano, but no more.

Gazing in the mirror incredulously, Imogen pulled at her cheeks, watched as her lips curled into a smile.

She could get taller, she realized, stretching herself by several inches. Crack, crack, pop, went her spine. Her face slid into a wider smile even as her cheeks flattened. Mom had always wanted her to be taller, thinner. Now she could be.

For a second, her smile lingered, until the homework score flashed in front of her eyes once more.

The twisting in her intestines returned.

Will as she might, Imogen could not erase the pain this time. She grabbed her abdomen. Hugged it tight. Watched as her skin turned from sickly to pink from the blood rushing, twisting with her own hands this time. Twisting and twisting and twisting until the pain went away.

She kept twisting, desperately trying to erase the smooth curves of the number that flashed in her mind. Stretched her limbs outward at sharp angles, as far away from smooth curves as she could get. Pinched and pulled, faster and faster, copying the graphs Professor Tenner had scribbled on the board. Twisted her joints until they were the half-filled curlicues of her professor’s handwriting, and pinched her skin until it was the faint purple and green and red and blue of the markers.

Ignored the sounds of popping and crunching and squelching.

Imogen smiled to herself. There was no one else to smile to - she couldn’t even see where her mouth was in the mirror.

The shortest path was clear in her mind, now, an obvious path from elbow to lung to pelvis. Imogen kept shifting, rearranging, distorting herself until she had created each graph configuration of Tenner’s questions and several more.

Shortest path, longest path, minimum spanning tree, and so on. All of them were clear now.

A new number flashed before her eyes, the score she would get on this exam if the answers came as easily as they did now.

She could challenge herself more, get harder and harder questions right. Add more paths, more nodes, more edges, more cycles. Her breathing picked up again, this time from excitement - quarter note equals fifty five.

The sprawling, spiraling skin and the cracking and clacking of bones as they connected to form a new graph were barely even noticeable now. Imogen solved the shortest path from her knee to her skull, faster than before.

The shortest path, then… echoed Professor Tenner’s voice in Imogen’s mind, again and again.

[blandacheadcanons]

Let’s talk about AC: Odyssey

Overall, the game was a 7/10. I liked it, primarily because it’s shiny new content and because i get to play as a woman for the whole game (and Kassandra hnngggnng) but there were some issues which, for me, undercut the emotion of the whole thing, especially the ending.

spoilers and bitching below, proceed at your own risk

An ADHD dream and nightmare

in general, the way i played Black Flag, Origins, and Odyssey was tantamount to “Okay, gotta go to - squirrel!”

Now, that problem (not really much of a problem but y’know) starts with me. I have ADHD, so I’m already prone to being unfocused in my game play. But it doesn’t help that the map is littered with side missions, collectibles, and shiny things.

That, on it’s own, is not much of an issue. So it’s a bloated game; that just means there’s more to love. and I do love this game. however, the overwhelming amount of side missions and the fact that you’re practically required to play them in order to level up enough, means that the game loses its focus.

in Black Flag, this was somewhat remedied by the fact you’re never really under-leveled, so much as under-prepared. In Origins, it was offset by the intensely emotional story and clear motivations. In Odyssey, neither of those things were present.

Breaking the game

Throughout its life as a series, Assassin’s Creed has done something few other games have done: justified the fact that it’s a video game. We, the player, play as Desmond/Layla/whomever, who is playing through the memories of the historical character. The Animus can essentially take a puzzle and build the edges and group the pieces by color, but it still needs a human to put the pieces in place. the puzzle - the memory - itself cannot be changed.

Now, in Odyssey, there is no more justification. Yes, I’m talking about the choice mechanic.

This aspect of the game just... breaks everything we know about the series. the way the animus works. the way we play the game. the lore went from decently put together to flat out incoherent.

I love Kassandra. and I love that she’s the canon character. but if female leads for some reason come at the cost of consistent story-telling, i’ll take the consistent lore.

Way too big

traveling takes for-fucking-ever. Look, Ubisoft, I know people loved the naval portions of your games. but that’s not an excuse to make everything fucking HUGE and spread out over a dozen islands. If you must have such a huge game, give us fast travel to an island right away. restrict it however else you like, but for FUCKS SAKE.

Clash of the Titans (and the original premise for this series)

from AC1 to AC: Black Flag, each game has been defined by its historical setting. It was the Crusade Game, the Renaissance Game, the Victorian Game...

Origins began to lay the framework for a more mythology-based portion of the series.

Well, Origins walked so that Odyssey could fly by it on a motorcycle. Throughout the game, i wasn’t about the historical figures i would meet. I was wondering where and how the mythology would be making an appearance.

On its own, this is not a bad thing. It also makes sense, given that Ubisoft seems to be shifting to the Isu for plot in the wake of Juno’s death.

It is, however, still rather jarring. It also doesn’t look like we’ll be getting more of the historical thing because AC: Ragnorak is looking like the next game.

I love mythology as much as the next person, but...I don’t even know what to say.

The Ending

the aforementioned lack of focus and emotional intensity led to a...lackluster ending. I went for the best ending where Kassandra saves Alexios and the family is reunited.

Alexios’s heel-face turn seemed so sudden. Like he’s furious up until he touches Leonidas’s spear, and he suddenly sees the light? I’m not saying that it can’t happen, but in a game brimming with mythology and magic, this was the thing that strained my suspension of disbelief.

And this was right after Kleon shot him in the back, too. but is it ever brought up? is his faith in the cult shaken by the fact that one of his “family” just tried to kill him? does Kassandra use it as evidence that the cult is using him?

nope. not once. not even a little bit.

And these are just some nitpicks, but for me, both Alexios’s subpar voice acting and Kassandra’s quiver disappearing (idk if that was a common thing or just my game) undercut the emotion of the scene.

cutscenes are not the time for errors like this, people!

too short

As much as I complain about a bloated game, the main storyline was way too short. If you play only the main story line, you’ll probably have uncovered about half the map. maybe less. Why do i care about the map? I don’t. But i do care about an underdeveloped story.

Maybe there was more plot that ended up on the cutting room floor, but ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether the game was slashed to ribbons or wasn’t there in the first place. We got a game that was too short.

The lack of length also exacerbates the tone problem. Had we had a longer story with more Deimos/PC interaction where cracks appear in Deimos’s armor, and he maybe even does something uncharacteristically charitable (out of more than pure shock), i could then buy his behavior on Taygetos as a last-ditch effort to maintain his self image in the face of his shifting world view.

If we’d had cutscenes like Syndicate where we could see a few moments from Alexios’s perspective, I could understand how that world view shifts and how the cult treats him.

but instead, we get an exponential graph of Alexios’s development. and it’s a damn shame.

Loss of Identity

for every AC game, there’s a million video essays laying out the problems with it. And in every one of those essays, there’s a line to the effect of “this game doesn’t feel like an Assassin’s Creed game.”

Previously, i was always of the school of thought that were was no “feel” of an AC game. the nature of the games is to change, in big ways and small ways, between games. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

But now, if you had me play this game and then AC1 and told me they were in the same series, i would never fucking believe you. The already thin common threads between games has been completely broken, even more so by going back in time. Origins had a similar problem, but it at least referenced the rest of the series with the hidden blade and the establishment of the Assassin Order. the only things “Assassin’s Creed” about Odyssey are the Isu and the title.

Other Nitpicks

Layla does not get out of the Animus nearly enough. I know most people hate the modern day line, but i like the break from all the historical action.

not calling Deimos Alexios/Kassandra in the subtitles. I know it was probably easier on the devs but just imagine the feels if the name changed when Deimos was being more vulnerable/letting his compassion show.

Kassandra can full-on see Atlantis and a Sphinx and still be amazed by every mythological creature that crosses her path.

people move way too much in dialogue cutscenes

animation and cgi are becoming so real that it’s creepy again

i appreciate the move to Actual Eagle’s Vision, but leave it in these games. I don’t want to get to the middle ages and be seeing out of a raven within a century of Atair’s Color Coding Eagle Vision. That’s not how evolution works.

While cool, the introduction of literally magical armor and weapons further proves that this isn’t a historical series anymore.

There is barely a stealth mechanic in this game, and when it’s used, it’s just used to pick people off before we’re noticed, not to avoid being noticed.

in a world where there are mercenaries and those mercenaries have to kill each other either for money or just to move up in rankings, mercenaries killing each other should not be illegal. if i try to fight one more mercenary and end up getting killed by the swarm of soldiers that just pony up out of no where, i swear to God...

why are soldiers acting as cops anyway doesn’t Athens have real, actual cops or equivalent

I think Ubisoft finally remembered they were rated M in Origins and Odyssey but it honestly just makes it harder to play around my parents

That’s as much as i can think of off the top of my head if i can think of more i’ll add it

[cindylouwho-2]

RECENT NEWS, RESOURCES & STUDIES, August 19, 2020

Welcome to my latest summary of recent ecommerce news, resources & studies including search, analytics, content marketing, social media & Etsy! This covers articles, podcasts, videos and infographics I came across since the late July report, although some may be older than that.

Please note I am taking the next week off, starting tomorrow (Aug. 19), so I might be a little slow in replying to any comments. 

TOP NEWS & ARTICLES 

USPS has become the focus of investigations due to reported mail slowdowns. Some small businesses who rely on USPS to deliver are suffering. “The longer the policy has been in effect, the worse the backlog gets.” As of today (August 18), the postmaster says they will rollback the changes until after the election in November. This is a rapidly-moving story in part due to the push for voting by mail, and should concern anyone who ships to US customers using regular mail (as opposed to couriers). Meanwhile, they plan to temporarily raise commercial rates during the holiday shopping season, but retail rates will not change. 

Ecommerce sales are still up year over year. "Before Covid-19 hit the US in March, e-commerce made up roughly 12% of retail sales in the country. That figure grew as states issued shelter-in-place orders that shut stores and kept shoppers at home, creating tailwinds for a company like Amazon. But even as states have begun to reopen, e-commerce has remained elevated, according to Bank of America data."..."The Economist used Google search traffic for hints of how lifestyles are changing and found users are still searching terms related to cooking, crafts, and exercise above pre-pandemic rates. There has been a noticeable spike in interest around such products as gardening supplies, baking flour, and Crocs." The UK is still seeing a good increase despite the ease in reduction in lockdown restrictions. The growth is slowing a bit in the US, though. 

Half of US small businesses fail in the first year (and other stats on small business). 

It’s been second quarter report season, covering company performance from April to June 2020.  Here are results for major companies involved in ecommerce in some way (comparisons are year-over-year):

Amazon US: sales up 40%

eBay: sales up 26%

Etsy: sales up $146% [click the link to read my summary]

Facebook: revenue up 11%

Google: revenue down 2%

PayPal: revenue up 22%

Pinterest: revenue up 4%; active users up 39%

Shopify: revenue up 97%

Walmart [2nd quarter ran May to July]: ecommerce sales up 97%, same-store sales up 9.3%

ETSY NEWS 

Admin are now posting a monthly update thread, in case you fear you have missed anything. This is how they chose to announce that non-seller accounts can no longer post in the forum. Since those account owners can still read the forum, that doesn’t mean you can call out your customers now. 

Sadly, there wasn’t much media coverage of Etsy’s nearly-annual billing screw up, but this one did get some attention. 

Etsy continues to get good media coverage for masks, including masks for your dolls. They also apparently got a decent slice of Google ranking for various pandemic-related searches in May [scroll down to the “Protection and Prevention” section]. 

However, Etsy is getting some bad press (along with Amazon), for allowing QAnon merchandise, because “the FBI has warned of the movement's potential to incite domestic terrorism.” Etsy replied to a request for comment saying that “that product listings associated with certain movements are allowed as long as they don't violate the company's seller or prohibited items policies, which ban items that promote hate or that could incite violence. The company said it is continually reviewing items on the site and could remove items in the future if they're found to violate Etsy's policies.”

More search trends on Etsy, this time kids’ items. I love how they think tie-dye was a ‘90s thing and not a ‘60-70s thing LOL. “a 318% increase in searches for kids tie-dye items...71% increase in searches for dinosaur wall art or decor*, and a 37% increase in searches for school of fish items….we’ve seen kid-friendly crafts spike in popularity, with searches for DIY kits for kids up 336%.”

Also, the holiday trends guide is out. “With the holidays approaching, and most shopping happening online, more shoppers will be looking for your help to make the season feel special.” The report is lengthy, covering Halloween to New Year’s, and most listing categories, while pointing out the possible pandemic changes to the usual trends. There is also an accompanying podcast with transcript. 

Speaking of the holiday season, here are Etsy’s tips for shops. Note that it is a bit late, as businesses need to have their holiday items posted no later than July if they want to be eligible for most fall media coverage. Almost every point refers to an Etsy tool or feature, some of them costing you money, so use this as a very broad guideline & be careful to read between the lines. 

They are still rolling out Etsy Payments to more countries: Morocco & Israel are the most recent. Note that Etsy Payments is not yet compulsory in these new countries. 

Etsy Ads once again has graphs. Do you find them useful? (I haven’t run ads at all this year, so I can’t check.)

Sendle is the latest shipping company to have a label integration with Etsy shops. 

Etsy asked US sellers to lobby their reps for more support for small business and other initiatives in the pandemic aid package.

SEO: GOOGLE & OTHER SEARCH ENGINES 

Google has stated that content on tabs is indexed and contributes to ranking as if it were on the page instead, but yet another test demonstrates that tabs may limit you. 

Due to the pandemic, Google has delayed finalizing mobile-first indexing until March 2021. (They originally announced it would be finished this September.) That means you have more time to update your website’s mobile version, ideally with responsive design. 

Site speed does matter to SEO, and Google is now asking some searchers how fast certain sites loaded for them. 

User comments on your products, blog posts and website can help you improve your SEO. The article suggests ways of getting that feedback, and ways to use it. [I’ve even had buyers give me new keywords to describe my items, in their messages and reviews.]

Getting links back to your site is important to SEO, but don’t annoy people while doing it. [sort of humour & sort of a rant, but does give some useful background on why backlinks matter.] Internal links also matter. 

There are some special tricks for food/recipe SEO, including structured data and even a WordPress plugin. 

Another WordPress plugin: submit any new or updated pages to Bing to be automatically re/indexed.

Do your keyword research before setting up your website’s sections and sub-sections, as they should serve the buyer experience, not your perception of it. Same with choosing which pages link to each other. 

SEOs are still trying to work out what happened with recent Google algorithm changes. Search Engine Journal claims that the May update was at least in part about demoting sites that had out-of-date or inaccurate information, so they suggest getting rid of the bad content on your site, or at least updating it. “Content pruning” has some advocates, but I wouldn’t worry about investing tons of time in this unless you have tons of time to spend. Just get rid of the blog posts that were wildly wrong, and the out-of-date filler. If you have a lot of sold out products, redirect those to relevant active pages. 

Meanwhile, a “glitch” on August 10 led people to think there was a massive Google algorithm update happening, but it all got fixed in less than a day. 

If you are behind on Google search news, here is a 7 minute video [with time stamped subtopics & resources links listed below], direct from Google. 

(CONTENT) MARKETING & SOCIAL MEDIA (includes blogging & emails) 

It’s tough to get started in social media if you don’t know the terminology, so here’s a list of the basic definitions you can consult if you get lost when reading.  

Don’t know how to blog? There are formulas you can use; here are eight options, nicely laid out, with downloadable templates. Don’t forget to figure out what your audience wants to read. And make sure you avoid these common blogging mistakes. 

If you have an email list but do not know how to take advantage of all the bells & whistles the companies (MailChimp, Constant Contact etc.) offer you, here are 4 ways to segment your lists. You can then send different offers or newsletters to different segments. 

You can optimize your social posts for people with visual impairments; excellent tips here. 

By the time you read this, the TikTok mess will likely have changed again, but here is an article on Trump’s order to prohibit US companies from doing business with TikTok owner ByteDance if the platform is not sold by September 15. 

Instagram has released its TikTok challenger, Reels, in more countries. 

Instagram is now offering a fundraising option, although it is a slow launch with some beta testing in the US, UK & Ireland to start. 

Here are step-by-step instructions on setting up your “Shop on Instagram.”

Pinterest says that searches around self-care & wellness have spiked during the pandemic lockdowns. “Pinterest has recently seen the highest searches ever around mental wellness ideas including meditation (+44%), gratitude (+60%) and positivity (+42%) that jumped from February to May….Pinterest says that searches for ‘starting a new business’ are up 35% on average, as are searches for ‘future life goals’ (2x), ‘life bucket list’ (+65%), ‘family goals future’ (+30%) and ‘future house goals’ (+78%).” There were also some searches clearly about spending more time at home: “Productive morning routine (up 6x), Exercise routine at home (up 12x), Self care night routine (up 7x)”

LinkedIn has a new algorithm; here’s how to make it work for you. [Many of these tips also apply to social media in general.]

Spotify is now doing “video podcasts”. Apparently a lot of their podcasters already did a video version of the Spotify podcasts, but had to publish it elsewhere up until now. 

Twitter now admits it is considering offering subscriptions to shore up its revenue numbers. “Shares of Twitter rose 4% in early trading Thursday following the earnings results....Twitter's growth plans are under close scrutiny as many advertisers pull back due to the pandemic. On Thursday, Twitter reported second-quarter ad revenues of $562 million, a 23% decrease compared to the same quarter a year ago. The company has also been hit by advertisers participating in an ad boycott of social media, linked to the nationwide racial justice protests.” Also, the recent hack is not helping them. 

That said, it is still possible to market using Twitter, and here are some of the basics. 

YouTube is no longer sending email updates when a channel you follow posts new content. 

ONLINE ADVERTISING (SEARCH ENGINES, SOCIAL MEDIA, & OTHERS) 

Ad spend has increased again as lockdowns end, in some cases beating last year by a decent margin. 

The Buy on Google program is ending its commission fees. Participants will also be able to integrate their PayPal and/or Shopify payment options. As often is the case, they are starting with the US first, but plan on rolling it out to more countries in the future. There are more details here, and a review here (with some of the drawbacks). 

Google Product Ads are now showing the item’s “material” on the listing card (before you click). If you are doing your own feed for your website, you may have the ability to add the attributes needed for the details to show up.  

If you find Google Ads too expensive, consider buying search ads on Bing. 

eBay is experimenting with showing ads mixed in with unpaid listings; placement would depend on the same algorithm. 

Here’s a new guide to Facebook Ads [videos & text]

STATS, DATA, OTHER TRACKING 

Bing has launched a new version of Webmaster Tools. 

There are ways to reduce the amount of traffic that Google Analytics designates as “direct traffic”; here are 15 of them. 

Currently in closed beta testing, the Google Search Console now has an “Insights” function, just like Google Analytics. I’ve found the GA one useful for telling me things I don’t always look at, so crossing my fingers that they release this to everyone soon. 

 ECOMMERCE NEWS, IDEAS, TRENDS 

Shopify helped many businesses stay open during pandemic lockdowns, giving it the boost to start competing with the likes of Amazon in ecommerce. “Shopify merchants that had previously or entirely relied on brick-and-mortar sales would later report they were able revive nearly 95% of that revenue online.”

eBay started rolling out its Managed Payments system to more sellers worldwide on July 20th. Things seem to be going slowly, with some confusion. 

But eBay is also having a 25th anniversary party for sellers on September 25th; don’t forget to register. 

Walmart is still delaying its new subscription model to challenge Amazon Prime, Walmart+. 

Amazon in the UK has launched a “Face mask store” part of the website. I haven’t seen this on other versions of Amazon. They’ve also increased some fees for some UK sellers, based on the new UK digital tax. And they are launching a site & presence in Sweden. 

The Competition Bureau of Canada has launched an investigation of Amazon’s treatment of third-party sellers. “The bureau is asking any person or business that has conducted sales via Amazon.ca to contact them if they have any insights into the issues it is investigating.“

Amazon Prime Day has been postponed to later dates this year, starting with India on August 6-7. The remaining countries will apparently be announced soon. 

If you use WooCommerce, here are a bunch of free plugins, with brief descriptions. 

BUSINESS & CONSUMER STUDIES, STATS & REPORTS; SOCIOLOGY & PSYCHOLOGY, CUSTOMER SERVICE 

Buyers do not all make purchase decisions the same way; Google uses its massive collection of data and some new studies to provide some examples. “Worldwide, search interest for “best” has far outpaced search interest for “cheap.”

It’s cheaper to keep repeat buyers than it is to find new ones; here are 16 ways to do that. One of my favourites is ““proactively providing information on how to avoid problems or get more out of your product” creates a 32% average lift to repurchase or recommend.”

It seems that researchers can never produce enough marketing guides on Gen Z and millennials. 

MISCELLANEOUS (including humour) 

I see a lot of new sellers, and some older sellers, confused about the idea of a business plan. HubSpot not only explains them, but also provides a downloadable template. 

If you are thinking of changing careers, or just want to add skills to better run your current business, Google has many different courses, some of which they offer for free. 

There are ways you can increase your productivity without (usually) working more hours. “A study published by John Pencavel of Standford University found that how much employees get done takes a sharp drop after 50 hours of work in a week, and even more drastically after 55 hours. The study found that employees working 70 hours per week actually produce nothing more in those extra 15 hours...taking a power nap in the middle of the day can help you process new information and even learn new skills.”

[victorluvsalice]

Valentine’s Day is the perfect day to finally finish up that ship meme from @kalidels that I’ve been meaning to do for ages, right? ^^; Yeaaah. . .well, better late and on an appropriately-themed day than never. I had a lot of fun filling this out, and can totally recommend it for anyone who wants to do something neat for one of their own OTPs.

A little more explanation for the various sections beyond the cut:

Love Languages -- While I think they’d use all five, and I was tempted to circle “Physical Touch” for the sole reason of “an Alice who likes you will let you touch her,” the category title is “MAIN” love languages, and those are the ones that immediately came to mind when thinking about them and how they might express love. Alice would want to spend time around her paramour, rather than just be on her own; Victor likes giving (and receiving) little gifts; and they both like to demonstrate how much they love the other person via doing things for them. It’s a pretty decent dynamic.

Checkboxes: I think most of these are self explanatory, though Victor got “confesses first” because, thinking about my fics, he’s usually the first one to say he’s in love with Alice -- even if it’s not always to Alice. XD And yes, I do usually picture Alice as the Big Spoon -- I like the image of them cuddling in that manner. :) The purple ones are the ones where I couldn’t decide on one or the other, or considered it a tie for other reasons (text on image is included in quotations):

Initiated First Kiss -- “Could go either way!” As aptly demonstrated by Alice initiating in “Secundus,” but Victor initiating in “Remembering You”

More Experienced -- “I don’t think either is ‘more experienced’ -- their lives are too different to properly judge” Mostly because I couldn’t figure out who would be more experienced generally -- Victor lived a reasonably sheltered life as the son of the richest man in a tiny village, buuut Alice spent a good chunk of her life catatonic in an asylum. Kind of a draw. (And if we’re talking sexually -- yeah, they’re both on an even keel, given Alice is gray-ace and Victor very repressed.)

Normally Cooks -- “Alice cooks, Victor bakes” Based entirely on my headcanon that Victor would like baking things for people. XD But yeah, they work together in the kitchen, with Alice being more skilled with making proper meals and Victor treats. :p

Graphs: These were a bit tricky, but I’m satisfied with the placement of Victor and Alice in each. As for each in turn --

Pet Names -- They feel more like something Victor would use than Alice, and he’d stick to stuff like “darling” and “love” -- Alice, when she does use them, sometimes likes to get a little sillier

Jealousy -- They both enjoy spending some time alone, so I put them both on the “needs space” side. As for actually getting jealous, it’s not likely for either, but it’s more likely for Alice than Victor -- Victor’s more likely to fall into self-loathing and wondering how he could measure up.

Expressing Affection -- I don’t see either as full-on PDA all day every day, especially when we’re in the canonical Victorian era for both -- they’re both more on the reserved side, unless they’re alone. I also put them both in the “words” section because, while I personally like imagining them cuddling, using their words is probably more canonical for them. (And, again, something they’re more likely to do in public.)

Attachment -- I put Alice just across the line into independent because she can and does get on fine alone -- but I think she would get nervous about losing someone she loved after what happened to her family. Victor’s definitely more prone to the separation anxiety, though. But they’re both pretty protective of the other.

Songs: Okay, I have a whole freaking tag of songs I love for them as a couple, so why these particular three? Well. . .

“All The Way 4 You” by Poets of the Fall -- one of my favorite Valicey songs in general, which always gives me some incredible Valice feels whenever I listen to it. Shoo-in for the top slot.

“Lights Down Low” by MAX -- the semi-official Valice wedding song! Ever since I found out the artist proposed to his girlfriend with this song, and then did a music video with their wedding video to it, it’s been permanently linked with Victor and Alice getting married in my mind.

“Me!” by Taylor Swift and Brendon Urie -- I love the music video for this song, and it gives me fun bouncy Valice vibes -- not to mention the mental image of Victor holding an umbrella over him and Alice while rainbow rain pours down around them, which I adore. :)

[doctorocsid]

THE MAKING OF PHOENIX WRIGHT’S SECOND DAY OFF

Or: The Immense Struggle of Trying to Make Decent Content

A good year and a half. That’s how much time passed between me starting Phoenix Wright’s Second Day Off and me uploading it to YouTube. What a hell of a load off my back that was. If you couldn’t tell, making this video was a bit of an undertaking, to say the least. And by “undertaking” I mean “an exercise in pure agony”. So, I figured I’d do a bit of a writeup here so I can get across to you the absolute hell of an experience making this video was.

PART 1: THE INITIAL PLANNING STAGES

The original “Phoenix Wright’s Day Off” was released in February 2018 to, though not a lot of views, a generally very positive response. Despite its janky animation, people seemed to enjoy it for its complete ridiculousness, comedic timing, and overly-choreographed fighting. Not to mention literally being the only Ace Attorney-themed Garry’s Mod video ever made that actually uses the Ace Attorney characters. (I’m still the only person to ever do that as of the time of writing. Woohoo.)

Given the positive reception and the fact that I literally ended the video with a “To Be Continued”, I was ready as I could ever be to start work on a sequel. The first one only took me a couple weeks to make, so surely a sequel wouldn’t take much longer, right?

Oh, how wrong I was. Still, I started planning out exactly how things would go. Throwing around ideas in my head. I needed it to be bigger and better than the original, of course. How was I gonna do that? Well, my initial plan was, uh, misguided, to say the least. What I wanted to do at first was create the sequel entirely in Source Filmmaker, along with giving it a darker, more serious tone to contrast the ridiculous slapstick of the first. Not a great idea for a sequel to a video that mainly relied on throwing ragdolls around for comedy.

https://streamable.com/taxrn

The original intro for PW2DO, based off the intro for “Fargo”. A lot less cool-looking than the final intro I made. (Even though I intended the video to be made in SFM, I made the intro in Gmod solely because I could just film myself driving the car instead of having to animate it manually.)

The final intro was done in a not too difficult fashion - the characters were animated in Garry’s Mod on top of greenscreens, which I then imported into Premiere and changed to solid colors. Added some extra video effects I found in places. Set it to an instrumental of Propane Nightmares. I’m proud of how it turned out, mostly. I won’t deny after I introduced the characters I didn’t exactly know what else to do with it, so I just filled it with some random actiony shots I thought might look cool. Incidentally, this was the only part of the final video that was made in Premiere - the rest of it was just edited together in Vegas Pro. Which crashed many times during editing. Fun.

PART 2: THE PAINS OF INDECISION (AND ALSO SOURCE FILMMAKER)

Nonetheless, I got to work, despite not actually knowing how to use Source Filmmaker. “I’ll figure it out as I go along,” I figured. And over time, more or less, I managed to figure it out. Sort of. And by “figure it out” I mean “become subject to the true hell that is SFM”.

Let me give you some quick background here. SFM has two main editors for animation: The “motion editor”, and the “graph editor”. The motion editor uses a relatively easy-to-understand method of animating: you select an object you want to animate (a prop, weapon, ragdoll, etc), select the span of time in which you want the thing to move to its new destination, and then you move it to the new destination. Sounds simplistic, but can be used extensively to create good-looking animation. (I myself used this method for the bar fight in PW2DO.) The graph editor on the other hand, is much more involved, depending on the tried-and-true method of using keyframes for animation. Some people prefer this one because it allows you to directly edit and fine-tune each little animation curve to your liking. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUXnpk8xDLg

This unfinished PW2DO prototype was animated entirely with the graph editor in SFM.

Really, you can use either one for animating, whichever suits you best. For me, personally, the graph editor feels like something designed in the seventh circle of hell specifically to torture me. Why does adding a new keyframe screw up all my preexisting animation? Why does adding a new keyframe make the ragdoll’s bones stretch out to infinity? Those are just a couple questions I shouted at my computer screen while trying to figure it out.

Eventually, I just gave up. I came to terms both with the fact that I wasn’t satisfied with what I was making, and with the fact that trying to use SFM’s graph editor to animate was making me want to julienne my keyboard. (I hadn’t figured out, or really even considered the motion editor at the time.) “Screw it,” I said to myself. “I’ll do in Gmod, like the last one.”

PART 3: OH RIGHT, GMOD SUCKS TOO

The first PWDO was relatively simple to make, at least compared to the second one. There were two main tools I used: Stop Motion Helper (a tool for animating stuff within Gmod itself without the need for actual stop motion or whatnot), and the classic technique of “throw stuff around in front of the camera”. I had little to no experience doing 3D animation when making it, but it worked out anyway. It let me practice some camera framing stuff, too. All I was really doing for most of it was animating the characters moving along with the camera. But for the second video, I desperately wanted to up the ante. I wanted it to be cooler. More edgy. More cinematic. Turns out, there’s one main reason that proved difficult for me. And that’s that Garry’s Mod kinda sucks for long-term animation.

Here’s the difference between animating in SFM and animating in GMod. SFM is made for animation. GMod isn’t. So, if you want animating in GMod to be anything less than horrendously tedious, you need some addons to help you. Stop Motion Helper is a neat little addon that lets you animate stuff in Garry’s Mod with the “tweening” type of animation. Simply put, you pose something in point A, make a keyframe, move it to point B, and then make another keyframe. Stop Motion Helper will then automatically animate it moving between the two points. Thus, instead of the stop motion method where you have to pose every individual frame, you technically only have to pose the beginning and end. Not that it looks very good if you only do that. Of course, like any kind of animation, it’s still something that requires a lot of effort if you don’t want it to look cheap and robotic. But it works. Sort of.

Doesn’t work too well with vehicles, though.

There were a multitude of small limitations and annoyances, however, that proved to be annoying to deal with in GMod nonetheless.

FIRST PROBLEM: Because GMod isn’t made specifically for animation, resuming a project within it is kind of a hellish endeavor at times. Unlike Source Filmmaker where you can just open a project file and everything remains the same, Garry’s Mod’s saving tool doesn’t save a lot of the addon-related data when you create a save file of whatever scenario you’ve made. That includes stop motion helper animation. While SMH does have its own support for saving animations, you have to save every single animation as its own separate file. Take the scene in PW2DO, for instance, where Phoenix shoots those cops to get the security footage.

https://streamable.com/2ikd1

There are seven moving parts in this scene - Phoenix, the picture frame, both cops, the gun, the shampoo bottle, and the camera. Note how many of these are moving in each camera shot along with how many shots there are (ignoring after the cop goes out the window, because that’s not done with SMH). That’s ten shots, if you didn’t want to count. If I wanted to save this whole scene for potential later tweaking, I’d have to make a save file for the session along with saving the animation data for all ten shots - that’s ten separate animation files for this one scene - and then I would have to manually reapply the animation to each individual moving element. 

On top of that, not everything can be saved at all just by sheer concept. The muzzle flash, for instance. While the flash graphic over the gun was added in post, the actual light emanating from it was something I had to do in-game, and it’s not something you can animate with SMH. Therefore, I had to play the animation in GMod, and then specifically time me hitting a button on my keyboard to make the flash happen at just the right point. That’s just one workaround in a program that, when animating in it, is like 80% workarounds.

But nothing about Garry’s Mod frustrated me quite as much as the final fight scene.

PART 4: THE BAR FIGHT

The final fight scene of PW2DO was the one thing that kept me from releasing the video sooner. Seriously, out of that year and a half or so, I’d say only a month or so was spent working on the GMod portions of the video. The rest was just that stupid, godforsaken fight scene. (And mostly procrastinating on making it.) Allow me to try and outline to you what I went through doing this.

Now, the fight scene went through three specific incarnations. They were all based around Maya and Athena tracking down Phoenix and beating the crap out of him, it just differed on two basic things: the location, and the fight music. The first idea I had was them fighting Phoenix in an alleyway while ABBA’s “Waterloo” played in the background. (i know that sounds silly but i swear i couldve made it work) That one didn’t get beyond planning stages - I’d kinda choreographed some of it in my head, I know Phoenix was supposed to get a crowbar at some point, but it didn’t get any farther than that.

The second incarnation was much more well-developed. The way I figured it was as such: Phoenix, after retrieving the security footage from his office, would go on the run and get on a bus. However, when he got on the bus, it’d be revealed that Athena was driving it, and Phoenix would fight Maya as they went down the road. (No comment on how Maya and Athena got a bus.) This was gonna be set to “Let’s Go Crazy” by Prince, inspired by the opening car chase scene from Kingsman: The Golden Circle. (Meh movie, neat fight scenes.) Eventually they’d crash the bus, all go flying out the window, and then Phoenix would get arrested by the cops as he did in the final video. Sounds neat, right? So, what stopped me from doing this?

jesus christ so many things

Everything wrong with this concept centered around one particular problem. I absolutely could not, for the life of me, figure out how to animate a fight scene in a bus that was moving down the road. In SFM that might’ve been possible, but in Garry’s Mod? Good luck with that one. I practically tore my hair out trying to come up with a single working solution to this. Allow me to present to you the various ideas I had and why they all failed miserably.

IDEA 1: Animate the bus moving and the characters moving in it at the same time

This was the fastest-thrown-out idea because the complexity of something like this was just too much for Gmod and an animation addon. What’s that? You want to be able to stay with the scene as it animates? No, that’s basically impossible to do. It’s not like SFM where you could just attach yourself and a camera to the moving vehicle and animate from there. It just wasn’t feasible.

IDEA 2: Create moving textures and place them outside the windows to give the illusion of movement

This one went out the window too, unfortunately, as rotating the camera to any degree kinda just seriously killed the illusion. I could’ve done the scene without the cool cinematic fighting camera movements, but… is it really Phoenix Wright’s Day Off without those?

IDEA 3: Create a 3d video of going down the street in GMOD and paste it onto a greenscreen outside the bus, and animate it rotating properly in Premiere

I don’t blame you if you don’t understand what the hell I’m talking about. See, miraculously enough, there is actually an addon for GMod that allows you to record 360 degree videos within it - and after a decent amount of finicking around with it, I actually managed to make one that seemed to work fine. It was from this point I actually set out and started making the scene - I got about ten seconds in, mostly comprised of driving shots, a neat easter egg with Homestar Runner (not something i’d do nowadays tbh) and a single shot of Phoenix beating on Maya. I was all set to get going.

And then Premiere just refused to work with the 360 video. Don’t get me wrong, I was able to animate it rotating and stuff, but it wouldn’t let me do this at the same time as the normal 2D video that was meant to be pasted on top of it. It frankly just. Wouldn’t let me. And after a lot of struggling, I just. Gave up. That ten seconds of video, trashed.

https://streamable.com/4omnep

I did manage to re-piece it together from the old files on my drive, though. With mostly missing sound effects.

So, that was scrapped. I wasn’t doing the bus fight. What, then, would work out better than a fight scene based off the first fight scene of Golden Circle? Apparently, my mind decided that would be the last fight scene of Golden Circle. Cool.

Thankfully, things went a lot smoother there, but it wasn’t without hiccups. Now, if you’ve seen Phoenix Wright’s Second Day Off - I don’t know why you’re reading this if you haven’t - there’s a chance you might’ve found the music choice for the bar fight scene a bit odd. If you’re not aware, it’s a cover of the 1986 Cameo song “Word Up”, by a German country band called The Bosshoss. This is the song they used in the movie so you’re not allowed to question me on this.

Given how western-y the song sounds, though, I had to at least make the context fit. Despite that, I couldn’t really find any GMod maps that had a good enough bar interior for a while - and I really wanted it to be a bar fight. Bar fights are cool. Thankfully, I did eventually manage to find one. This one, in particular: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=806759276&searchtext=

Yes, that’s a My Little Pony based map. I worked with what I had, okay? That was the least of the issues, anyway. By this point I’d had enough of trying to animate with GMod, and as such I’d decided to move back to SFM, but that caused a whole new issue. This map wasn’t made for SFM. And opening it in SFM just. Crashed. I won’t go super into detail of how I fixed this, but essentially I had to download a program called BSPSource so I could decompile the map, re-open it in Hammer, and export it to properly work with SFM.

Still left me with some annoying issues though, as you can see. Not too difficult fixes, though - The first one I just covered up with another corkboard, and the second thing was fixed by typing mat_specular 0 in console. Was a bit annoying that I had to do that every time I reopened SFM, but whatever. It was working, at least. (that’s something you’ll think to yourself a lot if you ever get into using SFM.)

 Anyway, things went pretty okay from this point on. You know, aside from me proceeding to barely ever work on the thing for like a year and a half. I didn’t have many hardships during it other than my own procrastination, so instead take a look at some of the funny tricks I pulled to get this scene to go the way I wanted.

https://gfycat.com/OldfashionedForkedFlatcoatretriever

Engineer telekinetically swooces his shotgun back to himself.

https://gfycat.com/SleepyShadowyLadybird

I had to make Phoenix hover over Engie to let his arms reach him without his legs obscuring the camera.

https://gfycat.com/AptHomelyGoral

The rope was way too short to reach the soldier, so I had to have Phoenix basically throw the rope in order to reach his gun. I also forgot to detach the rope from his hand afterward, so it kinda gets flung around with it off-camera.

https://gfycat.com/AgonizingScrawnyAbalone

Phoenix apparently decided for himself he wanted to go out the window.

Aside from all that, though, things finally went okay. Eventually. I managed to finish up the animation, add some extra ending stuff in GMod, and do a neat credits sequence to David Bowie music. All in all, it went okay.

And that’s it. After all that waiting, I finally managed to put an 8 minute video out from one and a half years of it not being finished. It was quite a load off my mind, for sure, and to this day it stands as my proudest video. It’s silly, has its down moments, but I can at least confidently say it’s the best Ace Attorney gmod video. If only because there is basically no competition.

So, what’s in store next? Not much of anything as far as I feel right now. I could make a third one, one day - I did envision it as a trilogy - but although I do have some ideas for it, I still have zero motivation to actually make it. So who knows. We’ll see how it goes. Maybe Phoenix Wright will escape from prison one day.

So, this was the experience of making Phoenix Wright’s Second Day Off. I hope this gave you something of an idea on how agonizing this video was to make, and totally means you should go and share it everywhere to get me more views because I DESERVE it after the hell I went through.

Seriously, though, thanks for reading, and may this post serve as a warning if you ever decide to do Garry’s Mod or SFM videos. Not a warning against it, mind you, you can make some totally cool stuff. Just be prepared to suffer a bit in the process.