#i was working at a printing place a month ago and a lot of people where printing this paintings of angels

[mustarddoods]

Look into his angel Eyes

One look and you're hypnotized

[archangeldyke-all]

Omg

Sev and reader introducing little fucker to Silco after she’s born?? My heart🥹

GAWDDDDD

men and minors dni

silco's always been better with children than with adults. they make more sense to him. children are up front, they say what they mean, they don't lie. they're simple. they're easy to please. a card trick, a coin pulled from behind their ear-- that's all it takes to get a kid smiling and laughing and squealing.

so, when silco finds out that his best friend is expecting: he's thrilled.

i've mentioned this before, but silco actually makes himself the godfather of your kid. obviously; you guys were going to ask him to be the godfather anyways, but you were going to ask after the baby was born.

silco showed up on your doorstep when you were five months pregnant, a box of diapers on his hip, a cardboard box with a crib printed on it propped up on the wall beside him.

"silco? it's saturday, do you and sev have a weekend meeting?" you ask, worried. silco chuckles and walks into your house like he owns it.

"no, dear, i'm here to begin my godfatherly duties. sevika told me you haven't gotten a crib for the nursery yet, and it's never too early to start a stock of diapers." he says, handing you the box of diapers and starting to drag the boxed crib inside after him.

he's a huge help during the pregnancy, surprisingly. he's always letting sevika take time off-- to go to all your appointments with you and to help you once the baby comes.

during your pregnancy, he stops by your house once or twice a week, sometimes after work with sevika, sometimes on his own; always with a new toy or onesie for the baby, and a bottle of whiskey for sev, and takeout from whatever place you're craving for you.

silco's always been the closest thing sevika has to family, you've always been happy to welcome him into your life and home. but, you've never really seen the two bond.

they're both stand-offish people, they communicate in their own telepathic language, developed over years spent working and living together. but, when they talk about the baby, they both glow.

one of your fondest memories from your pregnancy was watching sevika show silco the sonogram of your little girl. it was the first time you'd seen the two of them hug. it was the first time you'd seen silco cry. he'd even wrapped you up into a tight hug, kissing your head and then awkwardly patting your belly.

he's one of the only people you let meet little fucker when she's still a newborn.

you and sevika are paranoid, first-time parents. you're also both huge homebodies. you have no desire to drag your weeks old daughter around town and show her off to all your germ covered family and friends.

but, your best friend, your family, and silco-- they're different.

silco's there at the hospital when you're in labor. he and sevika share a cigar in the parking lot when little fucker's safely delivered. he meets the baby then, cooing down at the bundle of blankets in your arms; but mostly, he's just there to check in on your and sev.

then, about a month into her life, you invite silco over to formally meet his god daughter for the first time.

you dress little fucker in one of the outfits silco'd picked out for her months ago, and you watch in fascination as the stoic man bursts into tears for a second time when he takes his god daughter in his arms for the first time.

sevika just laughs, and wraps her arm around her best friend.

"she looks just like you." silco sniffles, his eyes quickly flashing between sevika's face and your daughter's, comparing their features.

"tell me about it. i carried the little shit around for nine months, and she decides to come out lookin' like sev instead." you pout from the couch. sevika giggles and kisses your scalp.

silco chuckles through his tears, and then presses a gentle kiss to little fucker's head. "she's beautiful." he whispers.

you smile and nod, and sevika chokes on her tears beside you.

"yeah, she is." you whisper.

once a week, from the day she's born, silco will come over and take little fucker out for an afternoon.

sometimes he takes her for a stroll, sometimes he takes her to his place, sometimes he takes her along to run errands with him. it doesn't matter. he just gives you and sevika a few hours, every week, to just... relax. you're pretty sure it's the only thing that kept you sane for the first year of motherhood.

little fucker loves her uncle silco. he spoils her to no end, and he's not scared of you or sevika, so he'll blatantly disobey your rules in your own home to make your daughter smile. plus, he's not the one that has to deal with the sugar rush that comes two hours after he shovels candy in your daughter's mouth.

when she starts talking, little fucker calls silco 'unky silly.' he blushes every time she says it, but can't find the heart to try to correct his god daughter.

their favorite place to go is the aquarium. silco likes the sharks, little fucker likes alligators. they can spend the entire day there, just pointing at the animals and fish to one another.

i think little fucker's born when jinx is like 7, so it's the perfect age for jinx to absolutely adore her baby cousin.

jinx is the youngest of her siblings, so she never got to have someone look up to her. but little fucker worships the ground jinx walks on, and it's a huge boost to her self esteem. (it also makes her behave better, at least when she's in front of your daughter. she wants to be a good example.)

when jinx isn't in school or with her siblings, she's always accompanying silco on his little fucker dates. you can count on your daughter being returned from silco's house with at least three braids in her head.

you get all of jinx's baby clothes as hand me downs for little fucker, which only makes jinx all the more convinced that little fucker is actually just her baby.

sure, you and sevika made the kid, but it was just a gift for jinx, right?

it's hard for you to deny that accusation when you watch the two play, all the older kids wrestling in the back yard while jinx, ekko, and little fucker all arrange their teddy bears and action figures in seated positions for a tea party, jinx patiently waiting for little fucker to pick out the perfect hat for her to wear.

this isn't to say her older cousins don't love her. mylo, claggor and vi are constantly flinging her around, giving her piggy backs and tossing her in the air and giving you mini heart attacks. it's just that her and jinx have a special bond.

but, as much as she adores jinx, she will always hug her unky silly first.

taglist!

@fyeahnix @lavendersgirl @half-of-a-gay @thesevi0lentdelights @sexysapphicshopowner

@shimtarofstupidity @chuucanchuucan @badbye666 @femme-historian @lia-winther

@ellsss @sevikaspillowprincess @emiliabby @sevikasbeloved @hellorai

@glass-apothecary @macaroni676 @artinvain @realgreeniebeanie @k3n-dyll

@sevsdollette @ellieslob @xayn-xd @keikuahh @maneskinwh0re

@raphaellearp @iamastar

[secretgamergirl]

How a Computer Works - Part 1 (Components)

I am about to teach you on a real fundamental, connecting up electronic components level, how a computer actually works. Before I get into the meat of this though (you can just skip down below the fold if you don't care), here's the reasons I'm sitting doing so in this format:

Like a decade or two ago, companies Facebook pushed this whole "pivot to video" idea on the whole internet with some completely faked data, convincing everyone that everything had to be a video, and we need to start pushing back against that. Especially for stuff like complex explanations of things or instructions, it's much more efficient to just explain things clearly in text, maybe with some visual aids, so people can easily search, scan, and skip around between sections. It's also a hell of a lot easier to host things long term, and you can even print out a text based explainer and not need a computer to read it, keep it on a desk, highlight it, etc.

People are so clueless about how computers actually work that they start really thinking like it's all magical. Even programmers. Aside from how proper knowledge lets you get more out of them, this leads to people spouting off total nonsense about "teaching sand to think" or "everything is just 1s and 0s" or "this 'AI' a con artist who was trying to sell me NFTs a month ago probably really is an amazing creative thinking machine that can do everything he says!"

We used to have this cultural value going where it was expected that if you owned something and used it day to day, you'd have enough basic knowledge of how it worked that if it stopped working you could open it up, see what was wrong, and maybe fix it on your own, or maybe even put one together again from scratch, and that's obviously worth bringing back.

I'm personally working on a totally bonkers DIY project and I'd like to hype up like-minded people for when it gets farther along.

So all that said, have a standard reminder that I am completely reliant on Patreon donations to survive, keep updating this blog, and ideally start getting some PCBs and chips and a nice oscilloscope to get that mystery project off the ground.

Electricity probably doesn't work like how you were taught (and my explanation shouldn't be trusted too far either).

I remember, growing up, hearing all sorts of things about electricity having this sort of magical ability to always find the shortest possible path to where it needs to get, flowing like water, and a bunch of other things that are kind of useful for explaining how a Faraday cage or a lightning rod works, and not conflicting with how simple electronics will have a battery and then a single line of wire going through like a switch and a light bulb or whatever back to the other end of the battery.

If you had this idea drilled into your head hard enough, you might end up thinking that if we have a wire hooked to the negative end of a battery stretching off to the east, and another wire stretching off to the east from the positive end, and we bridge between the two in several places with an LED or something soldered to both ends, only the westernmost one is going to light up, because hey, the shortest path is the one that turns off as quickly as possible to connect to the other side, right? Well turns out no, all three are going to light up, because that "shortest path" thing is a total misunderstanding.

Here's how it actually works, roughly. If you took basic high school chemistry, you learned about how the periodic table is set up, right? A given atom, normally, has whatever number of protons in the core, and the same number of electrons, whipping all over around it, being attracted to those protons but repelled by each other, and there's particular counts of electrons which are super chill with that arrangement so we put those elements in the same column as each other, and then as you count up from those, you get the elements between those either have some electrons that don't fit all tight packed in the tight orbit and just kinda hang out all wide and lonely and "want to" buddy up with another atom that has more room, up to the half full column that can kinda go either way, then as we approach the next happy number they "want to" have a little more company to get right to that cozy tight packed number, and when you have "extra" electrons and "missing" electrons other atoms kinda cozy up and share so they hit those good noble gas counts.

I'm sure real experts want to scream at me for both that and this, but this is basically how electricity works. You have a big pile of something at the "positive" end that's "missing electrons" (for the above reason or maybe actually ionized so they really aren't there), and a "negative" end that's got spares. Then you make wires out of stuff from those middle of the road elements that have awkward electron counts and don't mind buddying up (and also high melting points and some other handy qualities) and you hook those in there. And the electron clouds on all the atoms in the wire get kinda pulled towards the positive side because there's more room over there, but if they full on leave their nucleus needs more electron pals, so yeah neighbors get pulled over, and the whole wire connected to the positive bit ends up with a positive charge to it, and the whole wire on the negative bit is negatively charged, and so yeah, anywhere you bridge the gap between the two, the electrons are pretty stoked about balancing out these two big awkward compromises and they'll start conga lining over to balance things out, and while they're at it they'll light up lights or shake speakers or spin motors or activate electromagnets or whatever other rad things you've worked out how to make happen with a live electric current.

Insulators, Resistors, Waves, and Capacitors

Oh and we typically surround these wires made of things that are super happy about sharing electrons around with materials that are very much "I'm good, thanks," but this isn't an all or nothing system and there's stuff you can connect between the positive and negative ends of things that still pass the current along, but only so much so fast. We use those to make resistors, and those are handy because sometimes you don't want to put all the juice you have through something because it would damage it, and having a resistor anywhere along a path you're putting current through puts a cap on that flow, and also sometimes you might want a wire connected to positive or negative with a really strong resistor so it'll have SOME sort of default charge, but if we get a free(r) flowing connection attached to that wire somewhere else that opens sometimes, screw that little trickle going one way, we're leaning everyone the other way for now.

The other thing with electricity is is that the flow here isn't a basic yes/no thing. How enthusiastically those electrons are getting pulled depends on the difference in charge at the positive and negative ends, and also if you're running super long wires then even if they conduct real good, having all that space to spread along is going to kinda slow things to a trickle, AND the whole thing is kinda going to have some inherent bounciness to it both because we're dealing with electrons whipping and spinning all over and because, since it's a property that's actually useful for a lot of things we do with electricity, the power coming out of the wall has this intentional wobbly nature because we've actually got this ridiculous spinny thing going on that's constantly flip flopping which prong of the socket is positive and which is negative and point is we get these sine waves of strength by default, and they kinda flop over if we're going really far.

Of course there's also a lot of times when you really want to not have your current flow flickering on and off all the time, but hey fortunately one of the first neat little electronic components we ever worked out are capacitors... and look, I'm going to be straight with you. I don't really get capacitors, but the basic idea is you've got two wires that go to big wide plates, and between those you have something that doesn't conduct the electricity normally, but they're so close the electromagnetic fields are like vibing, and then if you disconnect them from the flow they were almost conducting and/or they get charged to their limit, they just can't deal with being so charged up and they'll bridge their own gap and let it out. So basically you give them electricity to hold onto for a bit then pass along, and various sizes of them are super handy if you want to have a delay between throwing a switch and having things start doing their thing, or keeping stuff going after you break a connection, or you make a little branching path where one branch connects all regular and the other goes through a capacitor, and the electricity which is coming in in little pulses effectively comes out as a relatively steady stream because every time it'd cut out the capacity lets its charge go.

We don't just have switches, we have potentiometers.

OK, so... all of the above is just sort of about having a current and maybe worrying about how strong it is, but other than explaining how you can just kinda have main power rails running all over, and just hook stuff across them all willy-nilly rather than being forced to put everything in one big line, but still, all you can do with that is turn the whole thing on and off by breaking the circuit. Incidentally, switches, buttons, keys, and anything else you use to control the behavior of any electronic device really are just physically touching loose wires together or pulling them apart... well wait no, not all, this is a good bit to know.

None of this is actually pass/fail, really, there's wave amplitudes and how big a difference we have between the all. So when you have like, a volume knob, that's a potentiometer, which is a simple little thing where you've got your wire, it's going through a resistor, and then we have another wire we're scraping back and forth along the resistor, using a knob, usually, and the idea is the current only has to go through X percent of the resistor to get to the wire you're moving, which proportionately reduces the resistance. So you have like a 20 volt current, you've got a resistor that'll drop that down to 5 or so, but then you move this other wire down along and you've got this whole dynamic range and you can fine tune it to 15 or 10 or whatever coming down that wire. And what's nice about this again, what's actually coming down the wire is this wobbily wave of current, it's not really just "on" or "off, and as you add resistance, the wobble stays the same, it's just the peaks and valleys get closer to being just flat. Which is great if you're making, say, a knob to control volume, or brightness, or anything you want variable intensity in really.

Hey hey, it's a relay!

Again, a lot of the earliest stuff people did with electronics was really dependent on that analog wobbly waveform angle. Particularly for reproducing sound, and particularly the signals of a telegraph. Those had to travel down wires for absurd distances, and as previously stated, when you do that the signal is going to eventually decay to nothing. But then someone came up with this really basic idea where every so often along those super long wires, you set something up that takes the old signal and uses it to start a new one. They called them relays, because you know, it's like a relay race.

If you know how an electromagnet works (something about the field generated when you coil a bunch of copper wire around an iron core and run an electric current through it), a relay is super simple. You've got an electromagnet in the first circuit you're running, presumably right by where it's going to hit the big charged endpoint, and that magnetically pulls a tab of metal that's acting as a switch on a new circuit. As long as you've got enough juice left to activate the magnet, you slam that switch and voom you've got all the voltage you can generate on the new line.

Relays don't get used too much in other stuff, being unpopular at the time for not being all analog and wobbily (slamming that switch back and forth IS going to be a very binary on or off sorta thing), and they make this loud clacking noise that's actually just super cool to hear in devices that do use them (pinball machines are one of the main surviving use cases I believe) but could be annoying in some cases. What's also neat is that they're a logical AND gate. That is, if you have current flowing into the magnet, AND you have current flowing into the new wire up to the switch, you have it flowing out through the far side of the switch, but if either of those isn't true, nothing happens. Logic gates, to get ahead of myself a bit, are kinda the whole thing with computers, but we still need the rest of them. So for these purposes, relays re only neat if it's the most power and space efficient AND gate you have access to.

Oh and come to think of it, there's no reason we need to have that magnet closing the circuit when it's doing its thing. We could have it closed by default and yank it open by the magnet. Hey, now we're inverting whatever we're getting on the first wire! Neat!

Relay computers clack too loud! Gimme vacuum tubes!

So... let's take a look at the other main thing people used electricity for before coming up with the whole computer thing, our old friend the light bulb! Now I already touched a bit on the whole wacky alternating current thing, and I think this is actually one of the cases that eventually lead to it being adopted so widely, but the earliest light bulbs tended to just use normal direct current, where again, you've got the positive end and the negative end, and we just take a little filament of whatever we have handy that glows when you run enough of a current through it, and we put that in a big glass bulb and pump out all the air we can, because if we don't, the oxygen in there is probably going to change that from glowing a bit to straight up catching on fire and burning immediately.

But, we have a new weird little problem, because of the physics behind that glowing. Making something hot, on a molecular level, is just kinda adding energy to the system so everything jitters around more violently, and if you get something hot enough that it glows, you're getting it all twitchy enough for tinier particles to just fly the hell off it. Specifically photons, that's the light bit, but also hey, remember, electrons are just kinda free moving and whipping all over looking for their naked proton pals... and hey, inside this big glass bulb, we've got that other end of the wire with the more positive charge to it. Why bother wandering up this whole coily filament when we're in a vacuum and there's nothing to get in the way if we just leap straight over that gap? So... they do that, and they're coming in fast and on elliptical approaches and all, so a bunch of electrons overshoot and smack into the glass on the far side, and now one side of every light bulb is getting all gross and burnt from that and turning all brown and we can't have that.

So again, part of the fix is we switched to alternating current so it's at least splitting those wild jumps up to either side, but before that, someone tried to solve this by just... kinda putting a backboard in there. Stick a big metal plate on the end of another wire in the bulb connected to a positive charge, and now OK, all those maverick electrons smack into here and aren't messing up the glass, but also hey, this is a neat little thing. Those electrons are making that hop because they're all hot and bothered. If we're not heating up the plate they're jumping to, and there's no real reason we'd want to, then if we had a negative signal over on that side... nothing would happen. Electrons aren't getting all antsy and jumping back.

So now we have a diode! The name comes because we have two (di-) electrodes (-ode) we care about in the bulb (we're just kind of ignoring the negative one), and it's a one way street for our circuit. That's useful for a lot of stuff, like not having electricity flow backwards through complex systems and mess things up, converting AC to DC (when it flips, current won't flow through the diode so we lop off the bottom of the wave, and hey, we can do that thing with capacitors to release their current during those cutoffs, and if we're clever we can get a pretty steady high).

More electrodes! More electrodes!

So a bit after someone worked out this whole vacuum tube diode thing, someone went hey, what if it was a triode? So, let's stick another electrode in there, and this one just kinda curves around in the middle, just kinda making a grate or a mesh grid, between our hot always flowing filament and that catch plate we're keeping positively charged when it's doing stuff. Well this works in a neat way. If there's a negative charge on it, it's going to be pushing back on those electrons jumping over, and if there's a positive charge on it, it's going to help pull those electrons over (it's all thin, so they're going to shoot right past it, especially if there's way more of a positive charge over on the plate... and here's the super cool part- This is an analog thing. If we have a relatively big negative charge, it's going to repel everything, if it's a relatively big positive, it's going to pull a ton across, if it's right in the middle, it's like it wasn't even in there, and you can have tiny charges for all the gradients in between.

We don't need a huge charge for any of this though, because we're just helping or hindering the big jump from the high voltage stuff, and huh, weren't we doing this whole weak current controlling a strong current thing before with the relay? We were! And this is doing the same thing! Except now we're doing it all analog style, not slapping switch with a magnet, and we can make those wavy currents peak higher or lower and cool, now we can have phone lines boost over long distances too, and make volume knobs, and all that good stuff.

The relay version of this had that cool trick though where you could flip the output. Can we still flip the output? We sure can, we just need some other toys in the mix. See we keep talking about positive charges and negative charges at the ends of our circuits, but these are relative things. I mentioned way back when how you can use resistors to throttle how much of a current we've got, so you can run two wires to that grid in the triode. One connects to a negative charge and the other positive, with resistors on both those lines, and a switch that can break the connection on the positive end. If the positive is disconnected, we've got a negative charge on the grid, since it's all we've got, but if we connect it, and the resistor to the negative end really limits flow, we're positive in the section the grid's in. And over on the side with the collecting plate, we branch off with another resistor setup so the negative charge on that side is normally the only viable connection for a positive, but when we flip the grid to positive, we're jumping across the gap in the vacuum tube, and that's a big open flow so we'll just take those electrons instead of the ones that have to squeeze through a tight resistor to get there.

That explanation is probably a bit hard to follow because I'm over here trying to explain it based on how the electrons are actually getting pulled around. In the world of electronics everyone decided to just pretend the flow is going the other way because it makes stuff easier to follow. So pretend we have magical positrons that go the other way and if they have nothing better to do they go down the path where we have all the fun stuff further down the circuit lighting lights and all that even though it's a tight squeeze through a resistor, because there's a yucky double negative in the triode and that's worse, but we have the switch rigged up to make that a nice positive go signal to the resistance free promised land with a bonus booster to cut across, so we're just gonna go that way when the grid signal's connected.

Oh and you can make other sorts of logic circuits or double up on them in a single tube if you add more grids and such, which we did for a while, but not really relevant these days.

Cool history lesson but I know there's no relays or vacuum tubes in my computer.

Right, so the above things are how we used to make computers, but they were super bulky, and you'd have to deal with how relays are super loud and kinda slow, and vacuum tubes need a big power draw and get hot. What we use instead of either of those these days are transistors. See after spending a good number of years working out all this circuit flow stuff with vacuum tubes we eventually focused on how the real important thing in all of this is how with the right materials you can make a little juncture where current flows between a positive and negative charge if a third wire going in there is also positively charged, but if it's negatively charged we're pulling over. And turns out there is a WAY more efficient way of doing that if you take a chunk of good ol' middle of the electron road silicon, and just kinda lightly paint the side of it with just the tiniest amount of positive leaning and negative leaning elements on the sides.

Really transistors don't require understanding anything new past the large number of topics already covered here, they're just more compact about it. Positive leaning bit, negative leaning bit, wildcard in the middle, like a vacuum tube. Based on the concepts of pulling electrons around from chemistry, like a circuit in general. The control wire in the middle kinda works in just a pass-fail sort of way, like a relay. They're just really nice compared to the older alternatives because they don't make noise or have moving parts to wear down, you don't have to run enough current through them for metal to start glowing and the whole room to heat up, and you can make them small. Absurdly small. Like... need an electron microscope to see them small.

And of course you can also make an inverter super tiny like that, and a diode (while you're at it you can use special materials or phosphors to make them light emitting, go LEDs!) and resistors can get pretty damn small if you just use less of a more resistant material, capacitors I think have a limit to how tiny you can get, practically, but yeah, you now know enough of the basic fundamentals of how computers work to throw some logic gates together. We've covered how a relay, triode, or transistor function as an AND gate. An OR gate is super easy, you just stick diodes on two wires so you don't have messy backflow then connect them together and lead off there. If you can get your head around wiring up an inverter (AKA NOT), hey, stick one after an AND to get a NAND, or an OR to get a NOR. You can work out XOR and XNOR from there right? Just build 4 NANDs, pass input A into gates 1 and 2, B into 2 and 3, 2's output into 1 and 3, 1 and 3's output into 4 for a XOR, use NORs instead for a XNOR. That's all of them right? So now just build a ton of those and arrange them into a computer. It's all logic and math from there.

Oh right. It's... an absurd amount of logic and math, and I can only fit so many words in a blog post. So we'll have to go all...

CONTINUED IN PART 2!

Meanwhile, again, if you can spare some cash I'd really appreciate it.

[bengiyo]

The Trainee: Being An Adult Doesn’t Make You Inherently Functional

I watched episode 10 of The Trainee yesterday morning and had a great time with it. I’ve skimmed some of the…mixed…reactions to the Ba-Mhee storyline, and will get to those later (spoiler: I don’t think it’s inherently bad for her to go back to Tae). However, I want to get into this point that Jane made about how everyone in the company is dealing with some sort of screw up in their lives, and reflect on the internship as a whole.

Despite my investment in queer stories, I am primarily focused on this show as a workplace drama about a bunch of young people learning about their potential careers. Like @doublel27 I am glad that we’ve seen Ryan and Ba-Mhee find conviction in themselves over the course of this show. 

I know I was going to love this episode from the beginning when Jane went to see Ryan at home, and didn’t out him to his dad at all. Forever in love with Jane for presuming nothing and waiting for Ryan to take the lead. Later, I loved Jane noticing that the print shop has a similar workflow to the production house. This ties together Ryan’s recognition that he actually loves being a support player in his life. It’s what we all noticed about his role in the family business over two months ago, and it’s actually lovely to see Ryan recognize for himself that he does have some skills, and he does want to be proud of the work he does on a regular basis. I’m still hoping we return to Jane’s comments about letting go of his dreams, but I’m happy with where they are. 

I’ve loved seeing Pie blossom into a reliable team member that others go to when they need things, and I love seeing her not panic over small mistakes anymore. We got great comedy out of her tripping and spilling those papers all over the place, and the part I love the most is that Pie didn’t have a panic over it. It’s a simple thing that happens, and it was great that we didn’t have to worry about Pie. 

What we did have to worry about was Jane embarrassing himself. I’m glad @biochemjess pointed out how perfectly comedic Jane detailing everyone else’s shortcomings right as he and Ryan almost get caught flirting at work. 

As for Tae, I actually like that we see him struggling, especially since it’s been one week since he and Ba-Mhee broke up. I liked how he has been clearly working on rebuilding his independence and self-reliance since the breakup. He is feeding himself, he’s clean, and he’s completing his tasks as work. However, he’s heartbroken. It’s good that he tried to stay useful, and accepted the help of others when he was struggling. I also just really love the way Sea has played this character.

Following up the reveal that Jo is the head of the company, and that he and Pah have a lot in common, with Pah taking the lead to help Tae makes complete and total sense. It’s also clear he’s the one who’s probably doing the best at this internship thing. He’s made connections with almost everyone at the company, and quickly rallied everyone to put on a performance to help Tae attempt to reconcile with Ba-Mhee. At no point during that sequence did I doubt that everyone at that company was extra enough to participate. 

So, let’s talk about the big drama around Ba-Mhee choosing Tae. I have commented for weeks that I thought Judy was lacking in interiority for her to be a proper romantic lead. Though I liked seeing Ba-Mhee recognize that neither Judy nor Tae fit her, I agree with @peachblossomdrama that she doesn’t seem like she’s totally ready for long-term conflict management in her relationships. Still, like @burnsuncomet pointed out, they’re in their early 20s, and dealing with the first big stressor in their relationship. It’s not that surprising that Ba-Mhee would go back to the person she loves, and who she knows loves her. 

Like @lurkingshan, I was so relieved when Tae revealed that he hadn’t forgotten their anniversary and had made plans. Ba-Mhee has consistently assumed that Tae didn’t like her anymore because he was focused on his internship. I don’t think she did a great job of communicating her needs to him, and I don’t think he deserved to be cheated on for it (particularly because he hasn’t been the one pursuing a separate relationship). @neuroticbookworm did a great job covering the arc of what has gone on with Ba-Mhee, and I am with @twig-tea on recognizing that he needed to figure out how to exist independent of Ba-Mhee, that she has a right to choose who she wants to be with (including Judy), and assuring her that he will be present in the relationship in ways that are more accessible to her.

I will also say, for all the angst that’s being leveled against Tae, that boy has not once complained about Ba-Mhee to anyone, even when she was literally breaking hard drives at work to try to smother him. Meanwhile, Ba-Mhee is chatting with Pie and Judy almost daily about what Tae is and isn’t doing right. On top of that, the show was clear that Ba-Mhee is still going to be figuring out the newfound queerness she found in herself, and I think it’s important that on the “god forbid women do anything” age of the internet that we acknowledge that it’s okay for a bisexual woman to choose to stay with the boyfriend she loves and continue to work through that relationship (@waitmyturtles). I don’t think it’s baiting from the show to explore this, and I continue to lament that GMMTV has let us down so consistently on doing a solid GL plot that for so many folks this resolution is going to feel like a letdown and a betrayal (even though I don’t think the show set up any false expectations about this). I like Ba-Mhee’s arc of learning that she is good at things, and she can and should choose things for herself independent of her relationship. I also love that she learned from Judy’s behavior that being smothered by your lover isn’t a great experience! Whether she chooses to be with anyone in the future, this is a truly important thing for her to learn.

We are watching an office drama that contains romances in them. I love the way this show has the interns growing from their three-month experience in this company, and I’m excited to see how Jane (and hopefully Judy) are changed by this experience. With two episodes left, I’m curious to see if Jane will face his issues with Nine and giving up on being a director. I’m curious if we’ll see Judy talk to Jane about what happened with her and Ba-Mhee, because the fact that we’ve gotten zero interiority from Judy about dating her intern has bugged me. I’m hoping that the high school connection between Judy and Jane will pull through. 

I’m so glad that OffGun continue to work together, and I’m so happy they decided to take on a drama that doesn’t center a romance between them as the driving force of the narrative. Putting them in a show where you learn that being an adult is a perpetual project is probably my favorite thing from them ever.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The art of Daniel Danger

[Image ID: Daniel Danger's art print, 'To all who home to this happy place,' depicting a ruined Disneyland castle in a post-apocalyptic landscape with a statue of Walt and Mickey in the rubble.]

There’s this behavioral economics study that completely changed the way i thought about art, teaching, and critique: it’s a 1993 study called “Introspecting about Reasons can Reduce Post-Choice Satisfaction” by Timothy D Wilson, Douglas J Lisle, Jonathan Schooler, Sara Hodges, Kristen Klaaren and Suzanne LaFleur:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240281868_Introspecting_about_Reasons_can_Reduce_Post-Choice_Satisfaction

The experimenters asked subjects to preference-rank some art posters; half the posters were cute cartoony posters, and the other half were fine art posters. One group of subjects assigned a simple numeric rank to the posters, and the other had to rank them and explain their ranking. Once they were done, they got to keep their posters.

There was a stark difference in the two groups’ preferences: the group that had to explain their choices picked the cartoony images, while the group that basically got to point at their favorite and say, “Ooh, I like that!” chose the fine art posters.

Then, months later, the experimenters followed up and asked the subjects what they’d done with the poster they got to take home. The ones who’d had to explain their choices and had brought home cartoony images had thrown those posters away. The ones who didn’t have to explain what they liked about their choice, who’d chosen fine art, had hung them up at home and kept them there.

The implication is that it’s hard to explain what makes art good, and the better art is, the harder it is to put your finger on what makes it so good. More: the obvious, easy-to-articulate virtues of art are the less important virtues. Art’s virtues are easy to spot and hard to explain.

The reason this stuck with me is that I learned to be a writer through writing workshops where we would go around in a circle and explain what we liked and didn’t like about someone’s story, and suggest ways to make it better. I started as a teenager in workshops organized by Judith Merril in Toronto, then through my high-school workshop (which Judy had actually founded a decade-plus earlier through a writer in the schools grant), and then at the Clarion workshop in 1992. I went on to teach many of these workshops: Clarion, Clarion West and Viable Paradise.

So I’ve spent a lot of time trying to explain what was and wasn’t good about other peoples’ art (and my own!), and how to make it better. There’s a kind of checklist to help with this: when a story is falling short in some way, writers roll out these “rules” for what makes for good and bad prose. There are a bunch of these rulesets (think of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style), including some genre-specific ones like the Turkey City Lexicon:

https://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/18/turkey-city-lexicon-a-primer-for-sf-workshops/

A few years ago, I was teaching on the Writing Excuses cruise and a student said something like, “Hey, I know all these rules for writing good stories, but I keep reading these stories I really like and they break the rules. When can I break the rules?”

There’s a stock answer a writing teacher is supposed to give here: “Well, first you have to master the rules, then you can break them. You can’t improvise a jazz solo without first learning your scales.”

But in that moment, I thought back to the study with the posters and I had a revelation. These weren’t “rules” at all — they were just things that are hard and therefore easy to screw up. No one really knows why a story isn’t working, but they absolutely know when it doesn’t, and so, like the experimental subject called upon to explain their preferences, they reach for simple answers: “there’s too much exposition,” or “you don’t foreshadow the ending enough.”

There are lots of amazing stories that are full of exposition (readers of mine will not be shocked to learn I hold this view). There are lots of twist endings that are incredible — and not despite coming out of left field, but because of it.

The thing is, if you can’t say what’s wrong, but you know something is wrong, it’s perfectly reasonable to say, “Well, why don’t you try to replace or polish the things that are hardest to do right. Whatever it is that isn’t working here, chances are it’s the thing that’s hardest to make work”:

https://locusmag.com/2020/05/cory-doctorow-rules-for-writers/

But if I could change one thing about how we talk about writing and its “rules,” it would be to draw this distinction, characterizing certain literary feats as easier to screw up than others, having the humility to admit that we just don’t know what’s wrong with a story, and then helping the writer create probabilistically ranked lists of the things they could tinker with to try and improve their execution.

Which is all a very, very long-winded way to explain why I bought a giant, gorgeous art-print at Comic-Con this weekend, even though I have nowhere to hang it and had sworn I would absolutely not buy any art at the con.

I was walking the floor, peeking into booths, when I happened on Daniel Danger’s booth (#5034, if you’re at the con today), and I was just fuckin’ poleaxed by his work.

http://www.tinymediaempire.com/

[Image ID: Daniel Danger’s ‘It stopped being about the panic,’ depicting a ruined mansion interwoven with the skeletal branches of a tree, with a weeping statue and two human figures]

Now, see above. I can’t tell you why I loved this work so much (and that’s OK!), but boy oh boy did it speak to me. I just kind of stood there with my mouth open, slowly moving from print to print, admiring works like “It stopped being about the panic.”

https://tinymediaempire.myshopify.com/products/2022-sdcc-it-stopped-being-about-the-panic-v4

[Image ID: Daniel Danger’s ‘headlight in the path of,’ depicting a ruined mall with a pair of stags standing at the top of the escalator.]

On the surface, this is moody, post-apocalyptic stuff, heavily influenced by classic monster/haunter tropes, but it’s shot through with hope and renewal and the sense of something beautiful growing out of the ashes of something that has toppled. There’s real “(Nothing But) Flowers” energy in “Headlight in the path of”:

https://tinymediaempire.myshopify.com/products/sdcc2023-headlight-in-the-path-of-v2

[Image ID: Daniel Danger’s ‘We are no longer able to protect you,’ depicting a ruined factory with a coming-apart sign reading ‘We can no longer protect you forever,’ and a statue of a sword-bearing angel.]

Danger isn’t just a

very

talented artist, he’s also an

extremely

talented craftsman. As a recovering pre-press geek, I was (nearly) as impressed by the wild use of spot color and foils as I was by the art, like in “We are no longer able to protect you”:

https://tinymediaempire.myshopify.com/products/sdcc-2022-we-can-no-longer-protect-you-forever-v3

[Image  ID: Daniel Danger’s ‘made of smoke and chains,’ depicting a ruined landscape with a pair of derelict subway trains at the foot of a hill on whose peak is a rotting mansion. A pair of human figures, holding hands, are approaching the mansion.]

Danger himself calls this work “weird sad hyper-detailed artwork of dreamy buildings of ghosts and trees,” which is a very apt description of this work, as you can see in “Made of smoke and chains”:

https://tinymediaempire.myshopify.com/products/made-of-smoke-and-chains-mist-preorder

So I looked at this stuff and sternly reminded myself that there was no way I was going to buy any art at the con. Then I walked away. I got about two aisles over when I realized I had to go back and ask permission to take some pictures so I could put a little link to Danger in my blog’s linkdump, which he graciously permitted:

https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=interestingness-desc&safe_search=1&tags=danieldanger&min_taken_date=1687478400&max_taken_date=1690156799&view_all=1

[Image ID: Daniel Danger’s art print, ‘To all who home to this happy place,’ depicting a ruined Disneyland castle in a post-apocalyptic landscape with a statue of Walt and Mickey in the rubble.]

But then I got all the way ass over to the other ass end of the convention center and I realized I had to go back and buy one of these prints. Which I did, “To all who come to this happy place,” because fuckin’ wow:

https://tinymediaempire.myshopify.com/products/sdcc2023-this-happy-place-v6-foil

This was unequivocally the best thing I saw at this year’s SDCC, but I also got some very good news while there, namely, that Emil Ferris’s long, long-awaited My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Vol 2 is finally on the schedule from Fantagraphics:

https://www.fantagraphics.com/collections/emil-ferris/products/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-book-two

It’s coming out in April, which gives you plenty of time to read volume one, which I called, “a haunting diary of a young girl as a dazzling graphic novel”:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/06/20/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-a-haunting-diary-of-a-young-girl-as-a-dazzling-graphic-novel/

If you are or were a monster kid or a haunter, this is your goddamned must-read of the summer. It’s a fully queered, stunning memoir for anyone whose erotic imagination intersected with Famous Monsters of Filmland.

(Also, if you’re that kind of person and you’re in the region, you should know about Midsummer Scream, a giant haunter show in Long Beach; I’ll be there on Sunday, July 30, for a panel about the Ghost Post, the legendary Haunted Mansion puzzle-boxes I helped make:

https://midsummerscream.org/

Now Favorite Thing book two was the best news, but the best experience was watching Felicia Day get her Inkpot Award and give a moving speech:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkpot_Award

And then learning that Raina Telgemeier also got an Inkpot; I love Raina’s work so much:

https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/04/ghosts-raina-telgemeiers-upbeat-tale-of-death-assimilation-and-cystic-fibrosis/

[Image ID: A photo of me with Chuck Tingle, who wears a pink bag over his head on which he has written ‘Love is Real.’]

To cap yesterday off, I also ran into @ChuckTingle, which is as fine a capstone to a successful con as anyone could ask for:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53065500076/in/dateposted/

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/23/but-i-know-what-i-like/#daniel-danger

[takemehomefromnarnia]

10 years of Rainbow Direction!

Exactly 10 years ago a girl named Danny printed out this rainbow poster and took it to the first concert of One Direction's Where We Are tour:

Anniversaries are always a bit arbitrary, and Rainbow Direction's was always a hard one to pin down.

This blog is just a day or two short of celebrating 11 years and without it Rainbow Direction would have never existed, because the people who were at the start of it would never have met, but its purpose and setup were entirely different and RD was still far from being developed.

The suggestions that eventually took form in "Project Rainbow Direction" were first submitted to the blog in late 2013. The first brainstorm between Kat, Li and Ellis about it, and further strategy talks with Ed and Molly took place in the early months of 2014. The project was announced in February. Haven and Red submitted their winning poster designs in March. Amy developed a logo and opened a merch store for us in early April.

While we've often referred to that midnight brainstorm on a cold January day as the origin of rainbow direction, that was only its conception. We don't even have a record of which date it was. We could also have chosen any of the more pin-downable dates: announcing the project, announcing the poster contest winners, opening the store. But really, all that Rainbow Direction was at those moments, was an idea, a plan, the hope that we had that it was within our, the fandom's power, to change something for the better for the LGBTQIA+ fans in it.

For months all of us, and especially Li, had worked tirelessly to encourage people to sign up and commit to bringing a rainbow poster to a show.

And then the big moment was there. First day of tour. The moment of truth. Would the people we'd encouraged actually have the courage to take a rainbow to a show, and stick it up in the air? Would it matter to people? Would it actually change something?

10 years on, we know that it did. So much more than we could ever have imagined.

But that was was anything but self-evident at the time. We had no idea. We nervously monitored the wwa tag and the blogs of those who had signed up, and then, after a few days, finally this report appeared. Danny from Bogota shared the first Rainbow Direction fan report.

I think if you'd ask any of us who were here at the time, they'd remember fondly how knowing that someone had actually done it, something happened in the real world, and if one person had done it, more would, how that sparked a fire in our hearts. A ball of warm feelings, not quite the same feeling as before. Before, there had been buzz and excitement and drive, but this, this felt different. Hope. A sense of the personal strength, and collective power, that could come from this if we could make it grow. It took a lot of hard work from a lot of people who committed themselves tirelessly to the campaign, but grow it did.

Thanks to Danny. Thanks to all of you who at some point or other, crafted something rainbow at home, took a rainbow to a show, put a rainbow on your blog, showed that you believed in your own power to change something, and showed the LGBTQI+ people in the fandom that they mattered, and that you cared.

It has been quite the roller coaster ride. As the coordinating group, we've had many ups and downs, and by now, for most of us, our attention has been drawn away from the fandom by our real lives and new pursuits. But regularly, when one of us checks in and sees the rainbows at one of the boys' shows, we share, revel, and sit amazed at how this thing, that once took so much effort on our part to get one, two, three people per show signed up, has grown into a regular staple, with people spontaneously taking it upon themselves to organize for entire venues to light up in a coordinated rainbow pattern, to design new posters and rainbow outfits, or to hand out hundreds of mini rainbow flags in the audience. This community has taken it up as its collective responsibility - let's get those rainbows out. How beautiful is that?! You are all so so amazing.

Thank you, you beautiful people, for becoming a part of this, for making it your own, for making it better, for carrying it forward, into the future.

So long!

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

AITA for not comforting a child after her science project didn't work?

( 💞💥 to find)

Okay this was a while ago but I still think about it sometimes and I'm genuinely unsure of if I did the right thinh.

So I (15F at the time) was a part of a science league thing facilitated by my school. Basically, you would meet after school once a week to study/work on projects, and then go to a competition in the spring against other schools. There were a bunch of different categories and activities but they were primarily separated into ones you had to study for (and would then take a test on) or build for (like a wheeled vehicle or a model plane, which would be graded). It was really fun and low-key compared to the sports programs at my school, so I liked it a lot.

A friend of mine, who we'll call S (15F) was also in the science league. We did a lot of study based competitions together, and usually placed in the competitions. During our third year, her youngest sister, M (12ish), joined the league. She was a really sweet and smart kid, and she was interested in trying a building based event. You needed two people to enter an event, so I volunteered to build a marble rollercoaster with her. M also grouped up with a girl in her grade for another building project (I think it was a plane).

Because M was doing two building events (which were predictably a lot more time consuming than the study events) and the school musical, we agreed I would create the plans for the rollercoaster and get the materials together. Now, each building events came with a printed copy of parameters and optional features that could get us bonus points. I decided on attempting for three bonus features (two jumps and a loop). Between designing on paper, adapting for the parameters, measuring out the track lengths, and gathering materials (that of which I had to switch out half way through), the whole process took me about four months to complete, and that was just the planning. We were getting pretty close to the competition date when we started to actually assemble the damn thing (at this point she had finished up her other stuff and was able to help me more consistently), and we were having a lot of issues with getting the track pieces to fit together. As I remember it, the problem came from having to fold the track over a bunch of times so it would stay in the 30cm-somethingish width parameter. The Thursday before the competition (which was in Saturday), M volunteered to take the coaster home and finish it there. I was honestly so relieved when she said this, because I knew through S that her dad was really handy, and like mini trebuchets and stuff for fun.

Flash forward to the event, when we're boarding the bus going to the school hosting the competition. She gets on with a cardboard box, and excitedly shows me a marble rollercoaster that is absolutely not what she left with at all. For reference, the original plan for the coaster was made of pvc pipe, which I spent around three weeks measuring out and cutting with a band saw in the shop room. This rollercoaster was two pieces of plywood with tinfoil tracks that you leaned against the cardboard box she was carrying it in. She hadn't included any of the extra features I had implemented to get us extra points. While I was shocked and admittedly pretty pissed I didn't say anything because she was a) a kid and b) I assumed that there was probably some issue that had arisen in testing that necessitated the changes. When we went to impound she struggled a lot with setting it up and the three pieces weren't attached with anything and were literally just leaning against each other. At this point it was also visually obvious that the width want way beyond 30 cms, and when the judges came around to measure, it turned out that it was above the allotted height too. M was looking really nervous about now, so I assured her that most of the time, the marbles don't even make it down the coaster tracks, and as long as our marble makes it to the end we should be able to place. Except, when it came time to release our marble, it moved for about three seconds before getting stuck in the tinfoil. We were allowed to try two more times, and it got stuck in the same place each time.

M was very visibly upset, and looking back I think she was on the verge of tears. It can't really remember what I said; I know I didn't say anything malicious or accusatory, though. Honestly, I think I might have just stood there in silence, because I was honestly really fucking angry that she ditched my design for no apparent reason and didn't bother to check any of the available rules or even test her design. But I don't think that anger justified leaving a little kid without support when she was upset.

tldr: When I was a teenager I didn't comfort my friends little sister after our marble rollercoaster didn't work because she had ditched the design I had made for one that broke parameters.

[ladysarai]

@inception30daychallenge, Day 31: A letter to Inception fandom.

Dear Inception Fandom,

Friends, I am Old. I have been around the block and back again. I am old enough to have read fanfic on the computers in the school library and printed out fics for my friends because they did not have computers at home. I read fanfic on dial up. I cut my teeth on fanfic on FF.Net, on AngelFire websites, and on AOL Message Boards.

I say this ONLY because I want you all to know How Long I have been in Fannish Spaces, and how many fandoms I have been involved in, so that you can believe me when I say: I have NEVER encountered a fandom like this one.

If you look at my AO3, you'll see that most of my posted fics are dated prior to 2010. I spent most of my 30s not being particularly fannish. I didn't post fics. Once LJ made the move to DW, I lost track of fandoms and friends (and never really grasped Tumblr, tbh), and whatever writing I did, I kept to myself. I thought I had lost the ability to get fannishly obsessive over a piece of fiction. There are a lot of Real Life reasons for this--jobs, health, family crap, mental health, selling my home and building a new one, working in healthcare during COVID... And I was put on a medication a few years ago that, it turns out, basically induced depression, but I didn't realize it until February of this year, when I stopped taking it.

It was like a switch was thrown in my brain, and I suddenly wanted to read fanfic and create again! It was great! And one day I was rereading old fics by a favorite author and thought "what else did they write?" and saw they had Inception fics. I thought "huh. That was a fun movie. It provided the premise for the very best RP game I've ever been involved in. Why not?"

As they say, the rest is history. I fell down the rabbit hole of Inception fanfics, discovered an obsession with Arthur/Eames, and dragged my bestie @nutterzoi down with me. I swear that in April, I watched that movie basically every other day for the entire month. And then we started writing fics. I have now posted FOUR Inception fanfics since the middle of June. With Zoe, I'm working on a Big Bang and on several other fics. We literally have a gdoc of ideas for fics because otherwise we will forget them all.

This is all great, Sara, but what about the fandom? Guys. Friends. Zoe and I have been writing fanfic together basically nonstop since before Y2k. We have not posted any of our fanfic since prior to 2010. UNTIL NOW. And the reason I am happy to write and post fanfic? For other people to see and read?? Is because of YOU, the fandom.

This movie is 14 years old, but the fandom is alive and active. Arthur and Eames have about 3 minutes of screen time together, but over 8,000 fics on AO3! @inceptiversary came along just as I was finding my footing here on Tumblr, and MAN, the things everyone has come up with for @inception30daychallenge just blow my mind! The creativity, attention to details, impressive meta and gorgeous fanart and graphics are incredible. Maybe some of the reasons this fandom is so calm and comforting is that I missed the early growing pains, but it is FUN to come into a well established fandom with so much to read and see!

But even more than that... this fandom is KIND, and WELCOMING. I point out again that I am Old. I have reached the point in my life that I do not want to spend time around people or spaces that are not comfortable, especially online, which is where I go for my escapism and fun. Every single person I have interacted with in the Inception fandom has been friendly and encouraging. I hope you all know just how rare this is for both a fandom and for an online space. THANK YOU for being so wonderful. In more ways than one, you have restored my faith in fandoms and fannish spaces, and in my place in them. I certainly hope you're all okay with being stuck with me, because I do not see myself going anywhere.

Thank you for giving back a part of myself that I thought was lost and gone forever.

Love,

Sara

[gotham-ruaidh]

Little Bit Better Than I Used To Be

Catch up: Chapter 1 (Starry Eyes) || Chapter 2 (Save Our Souls) || Chapter 3 (Dancing On Glass)|| Chapter 4 (Merry-Go-Round)|| Backstage (1) || Backstage (2) || Chapter 5 (Danger)|| Backstage (3) || Chapter 6A (Love Walked In) || Chapter 6B (Without You) || Backstage (4) || Chapter 7 (Stick To Your Guns) || Chapter 8 (Time For Change) || Backstage (5) || Chapter 9 (Take Me To The Top) || Backstage (6) || Chapter 10 (Home Sweet Home) || Backstage (7) || Chapter 11a (Nightrain) || Chapter 11b (Nothing Else Matters) || Chapter 12a (Handle With Care) || Chapter 12b (I’m So Tired of Being Lonely) || Chapter 13a (Angel) || Chapter 13b (She’s My Addiction) || Chapter 13c (Patience) ||| Also posted at AO3

Chapter 14A: Where Do We Go Now?

Soundtrack: “Sweet Child O' Mine,” Guns N' Roses, 1987 [click here to listen]

She's got eyes of the bluest skies As if they thought of rain I'd hate to look into those eyes and see an ounce of pain Her hair reminds me of a warm safe place Where as a child I'd hide And pray for the thunder and the rain to quietly pass me by...

Philadelphia || June 1988

Claire pushed her chair back a bit from the desk. Raised her arms. Stretched. Breathed deeply.

Reading for the eighth time the words she’d finally tapped out on the Selectric this morning, after days of rolling them around in her head.

Chief Physician

Boston Medical Center

To Whom It May Concern,

As you may be aware, I am a trauma surgeon at BMC. Twelve months ago I was placed on administrative leave by the BMC, and my medical license was suspended, pending the resolution of BMC’s internal investigation into my conduct. The investigation started by looking into a near-fatal error I committed during a surgery, and then quickly discovered that I had not only been forging prescriptions and stealing painkillers for quite some time, but also developed a severe addition to those painkillers.

As you may also be aware, I did not contest the actions taken by BMC. Subsequently I enrolled in an intensive drug rehabilitation program in North Carolina. I am happy to share that I am almost twelve months clean, having completed the program last December and successfully maintained my sobriety since then.

I have previously communicated to the Board, on several occasions, my sincere regret for what I did and my remorse for the incredible lapse of professional judgment and ethical standards I demonstrated. I repeat those regrets to you now.

Which is, in part, why I am writing you today. I wish to understand what else is required of me to return to work, in any capacity, at BMC.

Making amends for wrongs was something that Claire and Geillis had talked about a lot, during her time at The Ridge. Yes, doing that was a formal part of any 12 Step program.

But it was more than just saying sorry – it required the addict to recognize the wrongs.

To own them. To understand why they had happened, and the impact they had had on others.

Because nothing sounded more inadequate in the English language than the two words, I’m sorry.

But words matter. And this attitude shift was a crucial step on any addict’s road to recovery.

Making amends was something that Claire and Jamie had talked a lot about, too. She had seen him make amends many times, in their short time together – and quite often during their last few weeks on the road, as they traveled city to city for Print’s acoustic tour and Jamie came into contact with many people who had last seen him drunk/rude/high/demanding/hung over/acting like a total asshole during the last (disastrous) tour in ���86.

He made it a point to really talk to each person, to apologize for specific things he remembered doing. No matter if it was the venue manager, or the catering guy, or the lighting guy, or the security guard. I was a dick when I was drunk. I said terrible things. I hurt you. I’m sorry.

Two weeks ago in Chicago, he couldn’t sleep after a fucking incredible show at the old Chicago Theater. The adrenaline buzz after the show so much better than any pills or bourbon or groupie could have given him. He had tossed and turned for hours, until finally, quietly slipping out of their bed and perching in the easy chair in their suite at the Palmer House, watching Claire shift restlessly under the covers without him.

But of course, she knew when something was wrong. She woke, and turned to face him, easing up on one elbow. Watching him back. Giving him space.

When he finally spoke, it was just above a raspy whisper.

“How can you be here, Claire, when all you do is hear me talk about how awful I was to so many people?”

Her heart did break a little bit. “Because I never knew that version of you, Jamie. What I care about is who you are now.”

He sighed, breath ragged. “This shit is so fucking hard.”

“I know, baby.” Somehow she was standing beside him, and blindly he buried his face into the warm skin of her belly. She threaded her fingers in his hair, held him close as his pulse spiked.

“Deep breaths, Jamie. Focus on me. I’m here.”

He had had several panic attacks during the tour. Which could be chalked up to anything – the stress of changing hotels every day, the crush of fans and press that clustered around their tour bus when they arrived in a new city, the women who pulled down their tops in the front row at every concert, the Jack Daniels bottles and little baggies of powder left in his dressing room before the show in Wilkes-Barre.

But instead of smashing to pieces all alone, she sheltered him. He knew when to ask for help. And always found her just in time to crash against her, shaking and crying in bathroom stalls and green rooms and even once on the deserted tour bus. And each time she was so grateful for the psych rotation she’d done in med school that prepared her to help him.

But that didn’t make it any easier.

“Breathe in, Jamie. Think about how much I love you.”

He drew in a deep, sobbing breath.

“That’s right. Now exhale. I’m never going to leave you.”

He exhaled, shoulders shuddering.

“And inhale, Jamie. We can get hamburgers for breakfast again, if you want.”

He inhaled, and she felt a faint smile against her belly.

“That’s right. And out. Think about how amazing our wedding night will be.”

He exhaled. Gently bit the soft, soft skin above her bellybutton. She shivered, and smiled.

“Good. Center on me. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”

She counted along with him – twenty four more deep breaths. Caressing his forehead, and kissing his hair, and loving him and loving him and loving him.

Finally when he had calmed down, she crawled back into bed, and he held her so close against him. Kissing her forehead. Whispering endless words of love.

“If I ever fuck up with you, Claire, know I’ll always own it.”

She kissed his eyebrows. “The same for me, Jamie. I’d rather be mad at you than not have you.”

He had said the same words to her this morning. A promise he never tired of repeating. Murmured against her hair when he bent over to kiss her in the bed, body thrumming with energy.

Colum had booked a studio here in Philadelphia for the day, so that the band could lay down recordings of the acoustic tracks they’d played to dozens of sold-out crowds during the tour. With the incredible press from the tour – thanks in no small part to Geordie Ash’s profile in Rolling Stone – and bootlegs in wide circulation, it was time. And for once, the band agreed with the label.

She would join him later, of course. But today she needed the time to herself, to finally write and then mail the letter to Boston.

All because of Jamie.

“You can’t stay in a state of limbo forever, Claire,” he had said one night, meeting her eyes in the bathroom mirror as he gently brushed her shower-wet hair. “And I know we still don’t know where we’ll live when we’re married. But you have the right to know.”

She had sighed, jamming her hands in the deep pockets of the hotel bathrobe. “I don’t want to go back to that life.”

He had set down the hairbrush they shared, slipping his hands into the pockets, pulling her close against him. “I know. But you can’t have that door hanging open, Claire. Whether you open it or close it, you know I support you. But you’re not doing yourself any favors by not knowing.”

She had nodded, and pursed her lips. Smiling just a little as he kissed the shell of her ear.

She blinked, and turned back to the typewriter.

I have been traveling for the past few weeks, and won’t be back to Boston for at least the next month. Although I may not be immediately reachable by mail or telephone, I’m enclosing the contact information for someone who can get any letter or other message to me.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Dr. Claire Beauchamp

She gently pulled the paper from the typewriter roll. Signed her name. Took a deep breath. Began to address the envelope.

[laundrybiscuits]

Hawkins all lit up for Christmas is like something out of a postcard. It’s been a warm winter, which means big fat snowflakes piling up in fluffy drifts all over town, and string lights have been going up along every street and building to make the whole town look like a gingerbread fantasy.

Steve remembers it feeling a lot more magical when he was a kid, back when he didn’t have to shovel his car out of the drive or worry about winter tires. They don’t salt the back ways early enough in Hawkins, so on days like this, it always takes him longer to drive to work, going slow and cautious down the main roads, trapped in the Hawkins version of a traffic jam as everyone else does the exact same thing as him.

When he finally gets to the print shop, Donna McCorkle’s waving enthusiastically at him from the parking lot.

“Steven, honey! I’m so glad to see you out and about. I heard—” she leans in and whispers in a way that might actually be more conspicuous than yelling at the top of her lungs. “I heard about you and Laura. Sweetie, I’m so sorry, we all really thought you two would be taking a little stroll down the aisle by spring.”

“Thanks, Mrs. McCorkle,” Steve says. “I’m okay, honest. Just wasn’t meant to be, I guess.”

Jerry nods in greeting as Steve gets in and hangs up his winter coat. “Heya, Harrington. You’re six minutes late.”

“Sorry, boss,” grunts Steve, scraping off his boots.

“S’fine. Considering the circumstances and all. Just don’t get too hung up on her, eh, son? Can’t let some woman get you down. That’s no way for a man to live.”

“Right,” Steve says. “I’m okay, honest. Wasn’t meant to be.”

He shoves his lunch in the minifridge and heads out to his desk to check his messages.

———

He gets beers with Hopper after work. As soon as he slides into the booth, Hop raises a knowing eyebrow and snorts. “Folks around town been up your ass about the thing with Laura today?”

Steve groans. “Don’t even know how it got around so fast. We broke it off just yesterday, and I sure as hell didn’t tell anyone.”

Hopper nudges a bowl of peanuts his way. “Ah, you know how Hawkins is. People just want to see you doing well, kid.”

“People just need to mind their own damn business.”

Hopper’s face creases into a wry smile. The lines around his eyes seem to be getting deeper by the week. “They go a little overboard, sure. But come on, it’s nice knowing people care, ain’t it?”

“Sure.” Steve takes a long gulp of beer. “Nice.”

———

“I’m just—tired, Robbie,” he sighs into the phone. “Feels like I can’t walk down the street without running into someone trying to talk to me about the breakup.”

“It’s been coming for a while though, right? I mean, you’ve been talking about how you weren’t sure about her for a while. Like, actually way too long. Like this definitely should’ve happened six months ago.”

“I know, I know. But we were together for over a year, and it was…I dunno, nice. Easy. Felt like the thing to do. People are gonna start back up asking why I’m not married yet, ‘cause everyone else around here seems to be.”

Robin’s laugh crackles down the line, tinny and familiar. He presses the receiver tight against his face like it’ll bring Robin closer.

“Miss the hell out of you, Buckley. Can’t wait until you get back for Christmas.”

“Actually…” Even through the shitty line, he can tell Robin sounds a little nervous. “I was thinking. Well, me and Eddie were thinking. My folks aren’t going to be in Hawkins this year, they’re visiting my aunts in Vermont, and…we’ve got some friends here who are planning to just stay in the city for the holidays. So. What would you think, hypothetically, about coming here instead of me going there? It could be fun! You’ve only visited like twice, and you haven’t visited at all since I moved in with Eddie. You should come see our place, it’s pretty great.”

It’s true, he hasn’t made the trip out for a while. Robin and Eddie had been talking about moving in together for years, and last spring they’d finally found a place they liked. Steve had offered to drive up and help them move in, but their move-in date was Laura’s cousin’s wedding weekend, so that hadn’t worked out. And then it had just been easy to let his summer and fall get away from him, and just see Robin when she came back to Hawkins, because Eddie never comes back to Hawkins at all if he can help it.

Steve’s not avoiding Eddie. Of course he's not. There’s no reason for him to avoid Eddie, because the thing about Eddie is that there’s not a thing. There’s never been a thing.

But the lack-of-thing, the space where a thing could maybe have been, is something that’s followed Steve around for the last six years or so whether he likes it or not.

It’s not like he thinks about it every day, or anything like that. It’s just that—there was a moment, maybe, back in ‘87. He’d been smoking with Eddie outside in the miserable freeze of February. The grimy slush around them had been half-liquid in a way that was going to be trouble in the morning, after it'd had a chance to freeze over.

“If I asked,” Eddie had said, eyes fixed on the distant gray skies. “Would you come with me?”

Steve hadn’t had an answer, then. He’d thought he’d known, by that point, all the different ways he could be afraid, so it took him a second to recognize the feeling clawing its way up his ribcage and quickening his pulse. His tongue had felt thick and useless in his mouth.

Eddie’d just nodded once in a matter-of-fact way, and crushed his cigarette butt beneath the scuffed toe of his boot. “Don’t worry your pretty head about it, Harrington. I won’t ask.”

And then a week later he’d been gone. So it’s not like there was anything at all, not ever.

“Steve?” Robin’s voice is still kind of nervous. “What do you think? We’d both really love to see you.”

“Okay,” says Steve. “Sure. I’ll visit you guys for Christmas. Why the hell not?”

(continued here)

[twosides--samecoin]

How do you get your screen caps ??? they’re literally so amazing and perfect and I love them so much 😭

Hey gamer, thanks for the ask~

Prob a good place to mention that I take free screenshot commissions in Fallout 4! Free! Send me a poseprompt/NPC and in my downtime between fic chapters I'll see what I can do! You can browse my photos on my archive with this tag -> Fallout Screenshots. I can pose pretty much any NPC/animal. Long rambly post so there's more below the cut.

I was a film photographer before I ever was artful about game screenshots. I came up in the Ansel Adams school of thought. His whole thing was he'd hike up to a mountain with a large format camera on a heavy tripod. He'd see the resulting image in his "mind's eye" and imagine each and every problem possible he'd have to contend with in the creative process to get there. He was the most low-key, soft-spoken batshit crazy control freak artist who made each photo look easy. You'd never guess at the amount of time and work and travel it took him to take one photo. Even his simplest works make people feel ant-small compared to the arresting grandness of the American landscape's most boring viscera. I have several books of his and four of the official/authorized prints, and I bring AA up because I'm kinda insane in the same ways when it comes to screenshots. In my books, it should never be just an image, it should be the most elevated version of the image you can make given your current skill and tools available at that present moment. My Yeehawgust 2024 entry, Rocky Mountain High, is an example of that. A five image composite stitched in post processing with set and lighting design including hand-placed trees and custom terraforming of a map in Creation Kit.

The easy answer is Photo Mode. I have a 400ish-entry mod list that is built around taking photos, but Photo Mode is really the key because it allows you to rotate the camera and pause game time with a user interface instead of relying on console. I approach screenshots the same as my film cameras.

My simplest game -> upload pipeline are my candid portraits. I will notice the way light creates shadow on an object or a character will be doing something interesting and then I bring up Photo Mode to capture it. I then load the image in Clip Studio and adjust using correction layers; normally levels/saturation/brightness and contrast set to lowish opacity, a sharpness action then a crop and that's it.

My more complex game -> upload pipelines can be as "easy" as posing characters (mine often begin with premade anims/poses but the end result is almost always a custom-tweaked pose; I'm considering releasing a pose mod of my custom work) or as complex as set and lighting design. Sometimes that's as easy as using the settlement builder. Sometimes that's as complex as fixing up a model in Blender/Nifskope, or opening up Creation Kit and making custom tweaks to the world map because the way I need it to look doesn't exist in mods/vanilla. Depending on what I am trying to accomplish, it can take me several days to create a staged scene. Work on Chapter 15 screenshots started two months ago because I knew I would need a lot of time to test and iterate.

Uhhh what else? Most photos take between 10-30 test photos before I get it right. I also use 4k-8k textures; Jack, Livvie and RJ all have unique clothes and bodyslide presets. Shit gets weird when I forget and put RJ in clothes meant for Mr. Bowling Ball Deltoids himself, Jack. I manipulate game time and weather with console. I dislike most ENB and in my arrogance I believe there's almost nothing ENB can do for a still image that I can't achieve in post-processing.

I could go on for hours about taking photos so I will stop here! Thanks for the ask!

[yikesharringrove]

He doesn’t know why, but he’s laying down.

It’s the first thing he realizes. A stupid thing to notice, but just one minute ago, he was standing behind the counter at Family Video, and now he’s laying down.

His eyes are heavy, and it feels like it takes a huge amount of effort just to open them.

He’s in a fucking hospital.

He knows from the stupid white color of the stupid drop ceiling tiles. From the stupid annoying beeping of the stupid heart monitor. From the stupid scratchy gown he’s wearing instead of his sweater.

He heard a muttered curse next to him, and slowly lolled his head over to look.

Hopper was sitting next to his bed, his hat balanced on his knee, looking grumpily at the crossword printed on the back of The Hawkins Post. Steve wanted to laugh at the image, the chief of police swearing as he scribbled out something.

“How the fuck am I supposed to know that? Nobody knows what the fuck that is.”

“Blame Nancy,” Steve croaked. His head throbbed and he closed his eyes again. “She convinced them to add that. Said sales would go up.”

There was a rustling of paper.

“Smart girl,” Hopper said. He paused for a moment, and Steve felt like he needed someone to come and crowbar his eyes open or they would stay closed forever.

“You collapsed. Scared the shit out of your girlfriend, and everyone else at the video store.”

“Not my girlfriend,” Steve mumbled.

So that makes sense, why he was at work one second, and in a lousy bed at Hawkins General the next.

“You didn’t hit your head. Hargrove caught you before you went all the way down.”

Jesus, Billy’s reflexes really are something else. Steve’s gonna need to thank him for that. The last fucking thing he needs is another concussion. Maybe, to show his gratitude, he’ll suck Billy’s-

“I’m here because we need to talk about what the doctors found in your system.”

Steve’s mind went blank, and his eyes flew open.

Hopper was looking at him, his face an unfamiliar mix of sad, and angry, and fucking, disappointed.

Steve felt like he could vomit.

“They ran your blood. Routine E.R. shit, I’m told. But they found some, some substances that shouldn’t be there.”

Steve swallowed down the lump in his throat.

He knew the guilt was written all over his face.

“How long?”

“Since the summer.” He couldn’t look at Hop in the face. Not while he admitted this shit.

He was fucking stupid to think he wouldn’t be caught.

It’s a miracle Robin hasn’t walked in on him doing bumps in the bathroom at work, or Billy hasn’t found his stash tucked between the mattress and the box spring.

Hopper sighed.

“I know we all went through a lot last summer. With your friend getting trapped in the Upside Down, and you getting captured-”

“Tortured. I got tortured.”

Hopper sighed again.

“Getting coked up isn’t going to help anything.”

“What is this? Fucking Family Ties?”

He felt Hopper’s glare more than he actually saw it.

“It’s stupid-”

“You just don’t get it! Okay?” He really didn’t mean to yell, his head just fucking hurts and he’s so fucking stupid.

“Oh yeah,” Hopper snarked. “I fucking forgot. You’re the only person in the goddamn world that’s ever dealt with fucking drug addiction. So sorry.”

“I’m not addicted!” Lie.

“I don’t fucking believe you.”

Steve glared at Hopper.

“So, what? You’re here to arrest me?”

“No. I’m here to talk some fucking sense into you.” He shifted in his chair, the newspaper slid off his lap and fell on the floor. “You’re around those kids all the time. You fucking drive them around. You have been endangering their lives for months. And why? Because you can’t handle the trauma? We all have trauma. You think your friend Hargrove is totally fine after being stuck in that place? After realizing some fucked up doppelgänger was killing people? You think your girlfriend is totally fine after being tortured by the Russians too?”

“I don’t do it when I have to drive the kids, Hop I swear.” That, was the truth. “Okay, the other stuff, I get your point, but I need you to know, I wouldn’t hurt the kids like that, I-” the heart monitor was speeding up, getting louder in Steve’s panic. “You have to believe me, I’ve never driven them high.”

“Okay, okay. I believe you.” Hopper sighed again. “Just, why?”

Steve gulped.

“The Russians, they drugged us. They said it would make us tell them the truth. And I don’t know what it was, but fuck. It felt good. I couldn’t feel the pain, and I wasn’t scared, and I just. I didn’t know how to stop being scared.”

It was embarrassing.

Admitting that he’s been scared shitless ever since that first demogorgon dropped through the Byers’ ceiling.

Admitting he’s been doing lines of coke to keep himself from spiraling into inconsolable panic.

“I did some at a party, and it was the closest I felt to that feeling.”

Not technically true. He and Billy did some together last August, and it was like the fearlessness washed over Steve in warm waves.

But he can’t throw Billy under the bus like that.

And if Billy ever found out, that one night of drug experimentation between lovers turned into a full-on addiction, he’d never forgive himself.

There was a pause.

“Have you been snorting or shooting?”

“Snorting.”

“Okay,” Hopper stood up, stretching his arms above his head and placing his hat back on. “I’m going to tell your friends what’s going on. Not the kids, just Hargrove and Buckley. Joyce, too. Then, when you get out of here, you and I are going to clean out any stashes you’ve got. And we’re all going to be watching you like a fucking hawk.”

“Wait,” Steve croaked, his heart rate jumping up again, the beeping speeding up. “Don’t tell Billy.” Hopper shot Steve a look that said really? “Let me tell him. He needs to hear it from me.”

Hopper paused, on hand on the doorknob.

“Did he get you hooked? Is he on it too?”

“No! Nothing like that. Please? He’ll be upset unless I tell him.”

Hopper gave him a look that was a little too searching to be comfortable.

“Okay. Okay, kid. I’ll send him in. But he’ll know what’s going on one way or another. Don’t make me tell him that you’ve lied. Don’t think he’d appreciate it.”

He left the room without another word, leaving Steve to stew in his shame.

He’s such an idiot.

Why did he ever think he could get away with this and not one person would notice?

Even if they didn’t know he was regularly doing cocaine, Billy and Robin already knew something was up. They kept asking him if he was okay, coming over for impromptu sleepover parties. It was nice, he loves them both, but it was only a matter of time before the penny dropped.

It’s just embarrassing. That a routine blood test exposed the amount of uppers in his system. Exposed how little he’s dealing.

He rolled over, waiting for Billy to come into the room and blame himself for Steve’s stupidity. He didn’t want that.

Billy didn’t have a drug problem. He thought it’d be fun for them to get a little high and do stuff together. And it was! It was so fun, and they’d talked about doing it again.

Steve can kiss that idea goodbye.

He wouldn’t be surprised if Billy started following him into the bathroom to make sure he wasn’t doing anything he shouldn’t be.

It’s sweet, that his boyfriend cares so much about him that he would, hypothetically at least, do that.

But Billy’s got enough on his plate, and if Steve knows anything about him, it’s that he blames himself for shit just as much as Steve does.

He focused on the steady beeping of the heart monitor. Still elevated, his nerves for the coming conversation getting the best of him.

His head was pounding in a way that said it was time for his next fix.

He squeezed his eyes closed, willing away the need thrumming under his skin.

“So, you finally gonna tell me why you’ve been actin’ all squirrelly lately?”

[neyswxrld]

memories

Bad Batch Family (no pairing(except Phee and Tech))

summary: Omega makes her brothers a present that is full of their favorite memories.

warnings: none, it's just fluff

word count: ~1250

advent calendar masterlist

a/n: this is the twenty fourth fic for my advent calendar! i hope you enjoy! merry christmas to everyone who is celebrating today already!

i also found this lovely piece of art by @blazedeclipse of omega playing with her camera a few weeks ago, and it was so cute and somewhat fitting that i have to show it to everyone!

It's been a few months since they were finally able to settle down on the quiet and peaceful island. The stress from the war and its aftermath has slowly disappeared. At first, Omega's brothers were a little lost. Nobody knew what to do, now that they finally had time for themselves, without any missions or shady jobs to gain a handful of credits.

It took a while for all of them to gain a foothold and live their new lives. Wrecker managed to help the people where he could and became a valued member of Pabu's society. He also discovered his passion for cooking and was making the best meals for them.

Tech finally had time to reinforce his relationship with Phee and had fun with teaching people different things about everything.

While trying to get accustomed to this new place and people, Hunter slowly but surely let his walls fall and laid down his role as the strong leader. He became the best father figure Omega could have ever imagined.

But Echo and Crosshair didn't manage that well at first. While Echo was restless and antsy, trying to be useful in every way, Crosshair had a very hard time. He was sad, and angry, and at the same time his guilt was eating him up alive.

It took both of them a lot of time to finally adjust to their new lives.

And Omega? She was just happy. She finally had the family she ever wanted. She lived with her brothers in a small house. She could visit her friends whenever she wanted. She simply felt good. She wasn't scared or troubled anymore. Just happy.

Months passed by and she collected countless memories and experiences. Memories, she never wanted to forget.

Because of that, she had begged Tech countless times to make her goggles just like his, so she also could record everything.

The Problem was, that she didn't need any glasses. Her eyes worked perfectly fine. So Tech decided to make a small device that had the same functions as his goggles and gave it to her about a year ago.

Since that moment, she took the small holo-recoder with her everywhere she went.

She took pictures of the sea and the nature, of animals, of her and Lyana, of Wrecker and how he proudly holds up a new meal he made, Tech and Phee laughing, Hunter when he was sleeping on the hammock in the garden, Crosshair scowling at Hunter, Echo smiling shyly and of herself.

With the time, she collected picture over picture. Some of them, she had printed out and put them on her wall.

But she wanted to share those pictures and memories. It just was right on time, when Phee was talking about some festivities called Christmas and about traditions. Watching holo movies, eating cookies, meeting with loved ones, and presents.

She immediately knew what she wanted to give her brothers for this special day.

On the same day, she sat down and decided so make a photo album for them. Over the next few weeks, she planned, printed more pictures, glued them in a small empty book she bought from the market and decorated every page in its own style.

Hunter even got a little worried because she was in her room so much and didn't let anyone of them in. But well, it should be a surprise, right? 

After about three weeks of hard work, she finally finishes the album and proudly holds the thick book to her chest. Christmas was going to be amazing.

When the said holiday finally comes around, she already wakes up with the biggest smile on her lips. For a small second, she is scared that maybe her brothers won't like her present, but as soon as her eyes fly to the finished photo album, all her worries fade away. They will love it as much as she loves it!

The whole day is like Phee described it already. They watch classic Christmas movies in the afternoon and eat some of the baked goods she brought around.

After some time, Wrecker gets up to start cooking. Here and there, one of them helps him and after about two hours they eat dinner.

She's a little bit absent. Her mind is mostly occupied with the photo album. When Hunter notices and asks if she's okay, she just nods, too tense to speak. She doesn't notice how Echo and Hunter exchange a quick, concerned glance, seriously worried by now.

The rest of the meal is relatively quiet and everyone is savoring the unbelievably delicious food on their plate. When all of them are done, they clean up the table and the kitchen together.

When they're finally finished, Omega decides that now is the right time.

"I have something for you," she says, her voice thin and shaky.

Before anyone can say a thing, Omega runs up to her room, grabs the wrapped book and soon after, she is standing next to her brothers again.

"A gift?" Wrecker asks excited when he sees the colorful paper.

All the attention lies on her now. Everyone is watching her as she comes closer and places it on the table.

"Yes, I- I- thought... That maybe you'll like it," she nods, sliding it towards them.

While the others are a little unsure and don't know what to say at first, Wrecker is all excited. He grabs the present and before anyone can protest, he already rips the paper away, gasping as he gets a good look at what's inside.

"A book?" he questions, looking over at her.

"A photo album," she corrects, but nods.

Wrecker's eyes get big.

"I thought... Well, Phee talked about Christmas gifts and I wanted to give you something back because you care for me so much. I care too. And... this is a small thank you for everything you do for me," she says quietly, looking around all of them.

All of them look a bit confused at first, before understanding settles in their eyes. When she finishes, she feels proud of herself and when she interprets Hunter's face right, he is too.

"Come over here," Echo is the first one to break the silence. When she reaches him, he lays his arms around her.

"Thank you so much, Omega. This is very kind of you," he tells her, stroking through her short hair.

All of them say their thanks in their own way. Whether it's a silent nod and a pat on her shoulder by Crosshair, the red glint on Tech's face as she tells him that the pictures are taken with his holo-recorder or Wrecker's bear hug. Hunter is the last one that pulls her close.

"Thank you," he whispers in her hair, before pulling her down on a chair next to him. "Let's give it a look on the inside!"

Said and done.

In the next hour, they're sitting huddled together at the dinner table and look at all the different pictures.

They laugh, and smile and retell different stories they remember when they see pictures.

Phee went to clean the last few dishes as soon as Omega came around with the present. When she finishes, she quietly sits down with them, enjoying their conversations. She keeps in the background, not wanting to disturb their family moment. They still have too less of them, in her opinion, and seeing all of them so happy and careless warms her heart.

TAGLIST:

@isthereanechoinhere96 @trixie2023 @freesia-writes

[inkabelledesigns]

I know I'm posting a day late here, but Happy Birthday Bendy! February 10th, 2024 marks the 7 year anniversary of when Bendy and the Ink Machine came out. And boy, has it been a wild ride. Normally I would reserve this for my Bendy sideblog, @angelofthepage , but I'm posting it here because this is where I started years ago, and I want some of those people who don't see that blog to have a chance to see this. Because you guys are a part of this story.

In about three months, seven years ago, I was in finals hell, working through my process book for my packaging design class in one of the dorm lounges while my roommate had taken the room for herself again. And the only thing keeping me sane was putting Can't Be Erased and Build Our Machine on loop as I worked. BATIM only had two chapters out, and I didn't know everything about it, but I was so intrigued by what its deal was. I took one look at Sammy Lawrence and I wanted to know everything about him. Something about this barely started game, the idea of your characters coming to life to kill you, it thrilled me, intrigued me. It was something I was really afraid of, being so attached to my characters and putting so much of my identity in my art. And while the story isn't really all that much about cartoons themselves being alive, it gave me something else that ended up changing my life.

Over that summer, I would become obsessed, and for the first time in years, I let myself be a fangirl again. And maybe one day I'll pull up the timeline and tell you how it all went down. But right now, after all the celebrating of yesterday, I just wanna take a moment to appreciate the last seven years. All the people I've met, all the friends I've made. All the experiences we've had together, big and small. Some have been incredibly close, and others have been people I still smile about whenever I see them on my feed, even if we're not all doing stuff in the same fandom anymore. There's some people I've fallen out of touch with that I likely won't ever see again that I miss. There's some I'll be lucky if I never see again. There's the official voice actors for Dark Revival, which I've had the pleasure of working with on community things here in the fandom. I regularly moderate their livestreams (or Lovestreams as we call them) where they sign prints and interact with us fans (and sometimes I'm tech support, once an ink machine technician, always an ink machine technician xD). I'm honored to call a lot of them my friends, we've had some truly wonderful conversations. I've spent a lot of time in a variety of servers, trying to uplift people and make for a positive fandom experience for everyone, fans old and new. Sometimes it lands me in interesting places, like helping out over on the Inky News channel. The host, Brandon, invited me over to guest star on his anniversary stream yesterday, and in the past I've been fortunate enough to showcase my art on two of his interviews, one with Dave Rivas and one with Adrienne Kress. Sometimes it lands me on fun projects, like working on a fan game, and for the first time it's not as a voice actor! I'm a writer. I've had my work uplifted in turn too, meeting people who value me for me and also cheer me on when I try new things (sometimes entirely new mediums like doll customizing). I got my first helpful constructive critique in this fandom, and it was something I ASKED for. That is a huge personal milestone! I have a really complex and twisty set of feelings about critique, and finally, I feel better, because someone helped me start to unravel that just by being themselves and being thoughtful. It's inspired me to want to be better in how I handle critique and problem solving with others.

I spent so much of my life putting my self worth in other people's hands. I thought I would never be good enough to have friends who didn't treat me like garbage. I thought I'd never be a good artist in any sense of the word either. But I was wrong. I've grown. I'm valued, I'm wanted. I don't have to hide parts of myself to be desirable. Sometimes being the silly, goofy, fangirl that is Kat is enough. My art is enough, my ideas are enough, my flavor is tasty, and I am a goddamn treat. And after so many years of not knowing that, I'm glad I finally do. And it's all because of the people. It wasn't ever that my flavor was bad, it's that I hadn't found people with a taste for it yet. Bendy's greatest gift was giving me a fresh start, a chance to meet new people, good people, and for that, I'm forever grateful. Even though things have changed, I'm glad I met each and every one of you, you all taught me something valuable along the way, and I think about those experiences we shared often.

I won't lie to you, I've been rather frustrated with Bendy lately. And I think a lot of it has to do with the games not truly having grown with me. At some point our paths deviated, and there are elements of what's come and what's coming that are getting away from what really enticed me about the very first entry, the things I valued most in it. But in some ways, analyzing that has led me to figure out what made that first game so special. It was human. It was a character focused game, and each of the characters, while vague, gave us just enough about themselves that we could feel for them, get invested, imagine, maybe even sympathize. Everyone is a tragedy, but they're all different flavors of tragedy. And it was seeing people explore that, seeing people write these characters in ways that were so human, that really built a connection. For some people, Bendy is another indie horror experience. For others, it's something to indulge in that hits hard on a personal level. In many ways, it attracts a lot of us who feel like misfits. It's many things. But to me, the magic was in the people. The people in this universe, and the people in its real world community.

It has solidified my belief that people should play with fiction however they want, no matter how far it deviates from the canon, no matter how weird it is. Go be interpretive, go tell your story, go be free to make what speaks to you! (All I ask is that you're thoughtful about tagging it so people can make smart choices about engaging with it.) All stories are worth telling. Even if no one gets into it, having told it makes a difference.

Whether you're someone who's been there from the beginning, or someone that's new to Bendy, I hope you're all having fun. Whether you've finished exploring the world or you've just begun, I hope you've found something valuable. Thank you, for coming along for the ride. Here's to many more fun experiences and stories, be they official or be they in the fandom. Happy Bendyversary!

[bambamramfan]

A fun read, even if you don't entirely agree with the thesis. Full of delightfully illustrated examples. I'd rate it 75% correct.

I'd add examples of what it used to be like going to used bookstores looking for that one out of print book, vs searching amazon now. Or what I previously wrote about World of Warcraft optimization.

For the other 25%, well...

Sam Kriss wrote a while ago about the death of hipsters.

The hipster was an information-sorting algorithm: its job was to always have good taste. The hipster listened to bands you’d never heard of. The hipster drank beers brewed by Paraguayan Jesuits in the 1750s. The hipster thought Tarkovsky was for posers, and the only truly great late-Soviet filmmaker was Ali Khamraev. The hipster bought all his toilet paper from a small-batch paper factory in Abkhazia that included small fragments of tree bark in the pulp. The hipster swam deep into the vastness of human data, and always surfaced with pearls. Through its powers of snobbery and disdain, the hipster could effortlessly filter out what was good.

Almost any economist will tell you, that information gathering is just a different sort of price people pay for products. They can pay $300 up front for a good experience, or they can spend hours scouring and networking to find a similar quality experience for $100. If they find these two bundles equivalent, then that information gathering labor was worth $200 to them.

The difference is, when the naive consumer just pays *someone gets those extra $200*, whereas if the information gathering is labor (big if), then that extra labor doesn't actually pay anyone, and the world is just $200 of effort worse off. So, cetera paribus, it's better if everyone knows all the good places and at least the local industry is reaping the surplus.

So this is the death knell of hipsters, as all the information they had to seek out is accessible by everyone and just goes into rents for the producers.

...

Except we know from experience, it doesn't *really* work like that. For one, a lot of us ENJOY the hipster information gathering experience. It's a fun activity in moderation, and we even develop an identity for having a personal research base to use as a resource. How do you calculate the labor surplus lost if you're having fun? Well, I'm sure the economists can find some way to.

The other problem is that Freddie is only talking about a certain class of hipsters. The same ones Sam refers to in his essay. You can look at it as a sort of pyramid.

Top: quasi-autistic savants who are on Discords talking about secret places, or going out and mapping territories themselves.

Middle: hipsters who casually seek out new things they heard about and report back in indy magazine columns.

Bottom: the great mass who do one google search and flock to whatever they are told "the best deal" is.

(Now it's more complex than that. To be honest these three are probably only the top 25% of people, and the real base of the pyramid has no idea what any of this is about. And there's networks and lines of communication between the different layers. But you get the idea.)

For a while in the 90's and 00's, being a hipster became easier, and maybe that middle layer grew a bit in both directions. And then in the 10's the process Freddie describes ramped up, and so the value of just being a middle-tier hipster shrunk again.

But there are still a lot of secrets out there. You just have to be a much more dedicated information gatherer. Being in the top tier - which in travel might be as simple as driving places instead of flying to them IME - will still find you things where no one else is there.

This month I'm going to visit the cement factory where they filmed scifi movies like the Crowe and Super Mario Bros, and I expect to be the only one there.

[bullet-prooflove]

The Convention-Part One: Inked - Hank Loza x Reader

Tagging: @im-just-a-mississippi-girl @librarian1002 @words-and-seeds @elizabeththebat @broiderie @thanossexual

Hank always attends the San Diego tattoo convention. It’s a weekend event hosted at the Convention Centre, with a couple of nights stay over at the Hilton next door. He usually heads up early on the Thursday for set up and comes home on the Monday. It’s a long few days. The show usually opens at 11am but he’s always early, making sure everything he needs is ready and working and it closes out at 11pm. Usually he grabs drinks with a couple of the other artists afterwards.

It's the fifth year he’s been working alongside Nina in his booth. The Padre crowd, the other artists call them because of where they hail from. They may have separate studios but the two of them have been collaborating since he took her on as an apprentice seven years ago. This is her first time entering one of the competitions, which is a crime because her work with watercolour pieces is phenomenal. He’ll be surprised if she doesn’t rank in the top three.

Just the fact she’s participating will raise her profile exponentially. He’s been urging her to for years, but she’s always been self-conscious about her work, especially around so many other skilled artists. It’s only in the last year that that has changed, and Hank thinks that’s because of her relationship with Creeper. He’s watched her confidence soar since she’d taken up with the club’s Road Captain. They’re good for each other, he sees them laugh a lot more these days and it warms something inside of him. Both are patient and resilient, each one has struggled with their own demons in the past and come off better for it. He knew the instant he introduced them outside the community centre that they would be a good match.

Hank glances at his schedule on the wall before he dips his rotary tattoo pen into the black ink cup. It’s almost end of day on Friday and he has a three hour slot booked in after he’s finished shading the anchor he’s tattooing onto Bishop’s chest. He rarely takes walk-ins anymore, he did in his first couple of years but he prefers the structure of a schedule, it’s easier for him to book onto some of the seminars he wants to attend, or for prep. They still have to use the Artist’s Area when they print of their stencils and transfers, and it can be a pain in the ass if there’s a backlog. He prefers to get his shit organised on a client-by-client basis, so he knows what he’s doing with each one. When he takes that step away from the booth to collect the next stencil it gives him the time to recalibrate and attune his focus.

It’s when he wipes away the excess ink from the tattoo just over Bishop’s heart that he senses your presence. He hears the slight creak of the chair behind him as you sit down and glances over his shoulder to see you sitting there, putting away the camera you use for photographing the event back into it's case. It’s an expensive bit of kit and he always lets you stash it behind the table at the front of the booth when he’s inking you.

Both Nina and him are using Nestor as their assistant today, the other man is thorough and quick, something they need when they have to turn things around quickly. Out of the two Prospects, Bottles is the more personable which is why he’s on front of house. His amiable persona sets people at ease and draws them in, both his and Nina’s diaries are filling up months in advance and Hank has to admit, it’s thanks to Bottles.

You mouth the word ‘hi’ when your eyes meet, and he finds himself smiling before he turns back to Bishop to work on the last part of the shading. Bishop registers the change in his expression, his gaze straying over Hank’s shoulder.

“She’s pretty.” Bishop murmurs, his tone low enough so only the two of them can hear it over the buzz of the tattoo gun.

“I know.” Hank says as he places his palm on the other man’s chest and adds a darker shade of ink to the curvature of the anchor. “She gets prettier ever year.”

He’s never told Bishop or any of the guys about you. This is their first year attending the convention and they have their sights set on other things. Nestor’s already booked in with Nina for one of her later slots, he’s been taken with her watercolour work for a while and is getting a rose inked onto the space underneath his collarbone. His is one of the pieces she intends to showcase at the competition later on. Bottles has his eye on a couple of seminars, there’s some taster sessions in piercing he’s interested in. Creeper’s here for Nina and Bishop as a model for Hank’s compeition entry.

Only Nina has some knowledge of what Hank gets up to once the shows over and he knows that girl keeps her confidences even with Creeper.

This thing between the two of you started four years ago when you slipped into one of his rare free slots, he hasn’t looked back since. He’s done all of the work on your body, from the Medusa tattoo on your left bicep to the Grecian vase featuring one of the muses on your right forearm. He did the laurel wreath on your wrist last year after you’d won an award for your photography collection ‘The Ancient Art’ – documenting different tattoo methods throughout the world. Some of the practices such as Handtapping dated back over 2000 years ago and the work you were showcasing was truly stunning. He’s looked it up online after you mentioned it and he was completely blown away.

“They call her the Tattoo Journalist.” Hank tells Bishop as he sets down the tattoo pen and uses the alcohol pad to wipe away the excess ink. “She does a lot of traveling to different countries documenting art forms, covering events like this and interviewing different artists. We catch up once a year.”

He bundles the wipe up in his gloved hand before tossing it in the trash.  

“I bet you do.” Bishop remarks, his gaze returning to you as Bottles hands you the electronic tablet so that you can sign the consent form.

Hank says nothing. He doesn’t want to discuss his relationship with you, the fact it’s started to get more complicated over the past year. It started off as casual sex, the two of you sharing a couple of drinks before participating in some mind blowing sex at the end of each day. Once the weekend was over you’d go back to your life and he’d go back to his. It happened again the following year and then the next. It became the thing he looked forward to when he attended the conventions, seeing you again.

You never stayed the night, preferring to slip out of his sheets and return to your own room, he would catch glimpses of you throughout the day, just in passing before you met in the bar and went back to his room. It was last year that everything had seemed to change. He’d fallen asleep in the immediate aftermath on the Sunday night and woken up Monday morning to find your number propped up on the hotel nightstand.

The two of you had spent the past twelve months intermittently texting back and forth. Sometimes it was sexts, memories of nights locked away in the Hilton hotel room. He’d called you once and you’d gotten off to the sound of his voice in a hotel room in Argentina. However, most times it was just normal stuff, pictures of random stuff you’d come across in your travels, questions like what the hell is gelato and is it any different from ice cream? How his mom was doing after her fall.

All of these seem like indicators that you could potentially be interested in more but he’s not sure whether to broach that topic because the past few years you’ve had a really good thing and he’s terrified of ruining it.

“You’re done.” He tells Bishop as he sticks the cellophane over the small tattoo and uses medical tape to hold it in place. “I need you back there for 7pm for the Judging.”

Bishop grunts his response before he picks up his shirt from the coat hook Hank had installed during the setup of the booth and pulls it on over his shoulders. Hank rolls his stool backwards, allowing Nestor space to clean down as he peels off his black latex gloves and throws them into the trash.

“Hey.” He says as he raises to his feet, ignoring the twinge in his lower back from sitting in the same position for too long.

“Hank.” You say with that sunny smile of yours and he feels all of that apprehension melt away as you lean in, lips brushing over his cheek.

You smell like daisies, a fresh subtle scent that clings to your skin. It takes everything in him not to kiss you right there and then, in front of everyone. He wishes he could fuck off the rest of the day and take you back to the hotel, spend the entire weekend worshipping you with his lips and tongue.

 Instead, he pulls away and drinks in the sight of you instead. You’re wearing a white t shirt with black shorts and tights with Doc Martins, your favourite pair with the roses up the side, an acid washed denim jacket thrown over the top. Compared to some of the sights he’s seen today, you look practically conservative.

“You just get in?” He asks you, his fingers trailing over the lanyard until he reaches the laminated press pass.  

“A few hours ago.” You tell him, before tilting your head towards your camera case. “Jay Reno paid me to do some exclusive shots of his booth, so I had to get them squared off before I could come over, you know he’s a complete diva.”

He does know. He’d seen Jay lose his shit when he’d hired a marketing assistant last year who posted something he didn’t like on social media. There was nothing wrong with the post according to Nina, Jay just didn’t like the way the light caught him. It didn’t warrant the reaction that he had.

Nestor clears his throat indicating he’s done with the reset and Hank jerks his head towards the chair indicating for you to take a seat. You comply before rolling up the t shirt sleeve on your right arm, so it sits above your shoulder cap. Nestor hands him the tablet and Hank shows you the design once more.

It’s an epitaph to the Hades and Persephone myth. An ornate frame surrounded by roses and daisies. There’s an anatomical heart in the centre, two hands, one skeletal and one feminine reaching for it. The outlining alone will take three hours, you’ll have to come back for the shading, but Hank doesn’t have a problem with that.

“You still in love?” He asks you.

His heart skips a beat when you look him dead in the eye and say “Yes.”

Love Hank? Don’t miss any of his stories by joining the taglist here.

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