can i just word vomit for a min...
there was a point in late 2023 where i felt like i overstayed my welcome on simblr and i planned on just wrapping frozen pines up as quickly as possible and moving on. continuing to write when it's clear that the audience for it is dwindling felt so embarrassing that i almost didn't even want to put effort into it anymore, because i was afraid it just looked pathetic (obligatory disclaimer: no one made me feel this way, you're all so lovely, it's just the nature of seeing a community change over 7 years). writing already feels very personal to me and it's becoming increasingly harder for me to put my work out there (again, for reasons unrelated to simblr and entirely related to mental illness 🤙🏻). i know my story is so long that it deters new readers, and so sporadic that it makes old readers drop off with time. this has really been bothering me lately because i don't know what i can do to fix it. i don't think there IS anything i can do.
but. okay. don't make fun of me for saying this. dan and phil returning to youtube kinda changed my mindset? they may be pulling a fraction of the views they got in their peak, but they're happier than they've ever been and they're working on things they actually want to do, not things they think will be particularly popular. seeing that has made me realize that it is possible to keep finding joy in a community that has largely moved on without you. obviously my little blog is nowhere near the same scale, so this feels kind of silly, but i've been thinking about all the things i used to do on simblr that were never fun for me, i mainly did them because i knew they would get notes or because i felt like i had to do it. making cc, lookbooks, sim requests, reshade help (oh my god the reshade help), lot downloads, etc. they DID get notes, but i can't imagine spending my time doing any of that stuff ever again tbh.
on top of that, it makes me sad to scroll through my dash and realize that i don't recognize most of the people i see anymore. i still talk to some wonderful people here who i consider friends and that's invaluable to me (💖), but the broader community aspect is something i no longer feel a part of. and believe me, i know i'm at fault here because it's not like i'm going out of my way to talk to new people or participate in trends like i used to. i don't blame anyone except the passage of time!!
frozen pines, and simblr by extension, played such a gigantic part in my life when i needed it the most. and that's not to say that i don't still care about it, because i absolutely do, but it's a different kind of feeling. i've always promised that i would give frozen pines a satisfying conclusion rather than silently abandoning it someday, and though i do intend to keep that promise, i know it's possible that i might never get there. but i don't want to let my own insecurities get in the way of something i really enjoy doing. writing is an intrinsic piece of me that i'll never quit doing, but sharing my writing on tumblr is something that can't (and shouldn't) last forever. i know that. but i'm going to enjoy it to the fullest while we're all still here together 💞
to anyone who's still reading my silly story after all these years (especially those of you who still check in on my blog even though you're not on simblr anymore): thank you thank you thank you THANK YOUUU. you don't have to change a single thing about what you're doing. this is not me fishing for compliments or putting down an ultimatum, this is just me trying to make sense of my feelings.
but with all this being said, i've decided to quit simblr and start my own exclusive streaming service for $60 a year, i hope you'll all support me as i increase my production value 😌
(just kidding. ily. okay that's all)
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I gotta say, I am seriously fucking concerned with the amount of people here who seem to wholeheartedly believe that the correct answer to the genocide against Palestine is ANOTHER genocide except the other way around. Please stand back for 2 minutes and seriously think about whether you think it’s ever a helpful or just cause to advocate for the deaths of millions of people, especially when plenty of said people are Jews whose families fled there after barely surviving the Holocaust because hardly anywhere else would treat them like human beings or accept them at all since the antisemitism that allowed the Holocaust to happen was not solely in Germany and didn’t magically disappear after the war ended.
Look. The situation is simple when you boil it down to this: Israel is bombing and starving Palestinians like fish in a barrel and doesn’t want to allow aid to Gaza, which consists of a population of over 50% children. Israel allowed the Nakba and displacement of Palestinians for decades and tries to hide it from public view. This is genocide. The Israeli government is at fault for this. Israel holds the power here because they have the power to bomb and starve millions of people and force them out of their homes, and Palestine certainly does not. It’s an utterly horrific, inhumane thing to do with no excuses for it and it needs to stop. This is the simple part that is glaringly obvious for everyone to see and it’s almost laughable for anyone to deny it.
Okay. You’ve successfully identified the main problem and the “bad guy,” if you want to put it in childish simplistic terms. So the question now is: what next? Say Israel agrees to an immediate ceasefire. What do you, impassioned activist on the internet, propose should be done to solve this situation after that? What should be done to free the Israeli hostages? Do you think the UK and the US, two of the most powerful countries in the world who actively help Israel commit its atrocities against Palestine, will ever do anything to help the Palestinians once Israel loses its power, even if better governments are eventually elected? How should the Palestinian land be claimed back? Where should all the Israeli citizens go? Should they all be forced out to Europe and America, even if that isn’t where they originate from, where the already-rife antisemitism has spiked even further since October 7th and Jews who live thousands of miles from Israel and have nothing to do with Israel’s actions face horrific hate crimes every day? Do Israeli children deserve that? Who’s going to pay for their travel and accommodation? Or, should they all be allowed to stay there and live side by side with the Palestinians? Do you think most Palestinians would be happy to remain neighbours with the citizens of the country that has oppressed them so fiercely for over 75 years, even if said citizens didn’t partake in it or in fact opposed it? What about the 20% of Israeli citizens who are Arab or Palestinian? Do you hold the same opinion of foreign settlers in Israel as you do its citizens whom have made a home there for many generations? How do you discern between settlers and “real” Israelis? Do you see any difference between them at all? Why? And what should be done about Hamas, the group that openly calls for the genocide of all Jews around the world and commits war crimes against Israeli citizens? How much of the history behind Israel’s occupation of Palestine are you aware of? Do you think the British government should be held accountable for splitting Palestine in the first place? How would you go about that? Would it be fair to punish the British people for their government’s actions when British citizens didn’t vote for it? How does that compare to your view of Israel and its citizens, and why?
I am absolutely NOT asking trick questions here or trying to “gotcha!” anyone. I am asking these questions precisely BECAUSE they are extremely difficult to answer, with several of them contradicting each other, and they are meant to get an emotional reaction out of you. I certainly don’t know what the “correct” answers to most of those questions are, and that’s exactly my point: there is no simple answer to a problem that has been going on for decades with such a wide, complex history. Historians and political experts who know all the facts and have studied this shit for years don’t know the answer and it’s honestly insulting to all the people suffering to log on every day and see so many people go “actually 😌 I, a random 20-30 something year old on the internet who isn’t even touched by what’s happening in Palestine, have figured it out before everyone else! Just delete an entire country and all its citizens off the map 😊 This is a moral thing to suggest! And if you disagree with me you’re promoting Zionism/terrorism 😘” There are no simple answers and if you think there is one — and especially if you think that answer is to kick citizens out of the country their family has lived in for generations — then you are both wilfully ignorant and evidently fuelled more by hatred than an actual desire for peace and an end to death and oppression and I don’t believe there is a crumb of sincerity in your activism.
Am I naive enough to think that fighting against oppression and occupation is always going to be peaceful? Obviously not. But you’ve got to think about where and when said violence is actually going to be beneficial, and where and when it’s violence purely for the sake of violence, which is NEVER justified. You can’t advocate for human rights and then turn around and say “oh, but not for you.” EVERYONE deserves food and water. EVERYONE deserves shelter. EVERYONE deserves to receive treatment for sickness or injury. NOBODY deserves cruel and unusual punishment or torture. And EVERYONE deserves to be alive. Those are essential human rights that should never, ever be denied wherever it is possible to give them, and disagreeing with that reflects extremely poorly on you and your principles. Think about what narrative you are pushing when you claim an entire people “deserves” bad things. The constant dehumanisation I see happening in online activism (and far too often in real life too) is actually terrifying and if you want to do some real good in the world, I need everyone reading this to examine their potential internal prejudices, even the ones you don’t think you have, and think about who exactly you’re helping when you express thoughts that perpetuate them, and who you may be harming in the process.
Anyway, now that I’ve gotten that out of the way…
Here are some useful resources if you want to make a difference and help people:
Standing Together (an Israeli movement advocating for ceasefire and peace between Israelis and Palestinians)
Zochrot (an Instagram page that seeks to educate the public about the Nakba)
Parents’ Circle (an organisation run by relatives of Israelis and Palestinians killed in the conflict who advocate for peace)
Operation Olive Branch (a Google Doc of Palestinian families seeking evacuation)
Mesarvot Network (an Instagram page run by young Israelis seeking to refuse the IDF draft and end military violence committed by both Hamas and the IDF)
Other Gaza aid organisations to donate to
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Junicrane/Starstruck Ramble
I will not be brief, all under the cut
To clear some things right off the bat:
No corpse, no proof with Juniper. Obligatory this is set in a canon where he's alive and adjacent to the agency in some way.
Reggie & Juniper are just gay to me, but I don't mind any interpretation of their sexuality
The games are set in 1967/68 to me (based on a couple bits in game) which is before it was legal to be gay in America at least (1971), which is relevant to how I interpret canon as being somewhat grounded in reality, despite unrealistic elements.
This is just an insane amount of headcanons/elements of and AU all culminated into one post. I will talk about some headcanons like they're just facts because they are established in my head, and it saves me over explaining literally everything, however I will explain some parts a little bit for clarity.
Alright. Actual beginning of the ramble:
Juniper is a character to me who had gotten so lost in his job as an actor and a social presence that in the end his whole life revolved around that 'role'. Because of this, by the time he's put into the situation where he's around the Agency, he basically knows nothing about himself, though he doesn't realise at first. Furthermore, what little identity he had has changed in so many ways. He's no longer a beloved famous actor in the prominence of public light, he's legally dead and he tarnished his career just before he was supposed to die, with the bonus of that making him lose the majority of his estate. From that, he also has horrific facial scarring from the electrical burns from literally having his face fried. I believe a friend of mine made a post about this a while ago (I also think they were the first to think it up also), but, to me, Juniper has a permanent trimmer in his right arm (aka his dominant hand) from the electrical current and it is messing with his nervous system.
All in all, he's not doing great, but he's too proud to admit that he's not doing great, because if anything, what's left of his ego is all he has as a defense since he's deep in unfamiliar water.
Before ending up around the agency (I have multiple interpretations of this, so I'm just going to bring it up generally), he'd never actually seen Reggie, and his only impression of him is a single voicemail, which was his only reference he had to later impersonate him. Juniper probably has very little feelings other than the ones he projects onto him because of Phoenix and that, at the very least, he's physically attracted to Reggie to some degree (that's like the beginning of how everything else would tumble into place in this sort of interpretation at least).
And on Crane's side? His feelings towards Juniper are probably very intense and muddled. On the one hand, he adores musical theatre, and that's his now ex-favourite actor. The thought of just casually being around him blows the bit of fanboy in him away at first because THAT'S the GUY, plus the inklings of a celebrity crush which still poke at him. And then there's the rational side of him, which knows Juniper has committed absolute atrocities on the side of Zoraxis, and hates him for that. Then there's how much Juniper comes off as an asshole at first because he refuses to cooperate with anything the Agency tried to put in place. He finds Juniper endlessly frustrating, and yet he's stuck working with him since, afterall, he's the one who knows the Agency's history with Juniper the best. I imagine him acting a lot like how he does IEYTD 1 around Juniper.
At this point, I'm just describing the pitch for a romcom.
I think the start of their relationship with one another largely started with Juniper trying to wind Crane up. It was a way of getting his attention, and I don't think Juniper knows why he's so dead set on that at first, because I don't think he realises he has a crush on 'this grump' at first. (I think that's actually the fun part about these two, because it's almost like a role reversal of the celebrity crush dynamic. This ex-big name actor has a TERRIBLE crush on an average joe and it is KILLING HIM.) But of course the Agency keeps them together because Juniper is at least conversing with Crane, so it's a start.
Through one way or another, they actually get talking casually, at least mildly at first. It takes Juniper a long time to fully deconstruct the wall he's built, and the thing is, Crane isn't the one trying to deconstruct it, at least at first, because yeah, Juniper realises if he wants Reggie to actually like him in any way, he can't keep winding him up. So they talk. Small talk at first, something rhythmic and almost easy to keep to a script. And over time that turns into actual conversations. Genuine ones in which Reggie rips out the occasional one of his jokes which Juniper is endlessly endeared about. The way he smiles just before he makes them, like he wants to chuckle at what he's about to say before he says it. That's probably when Juniper realised that he does have some vague crush on him, and that it wasn't going away.
This is what kickstarts John I can't-buy-you-things-to-impress-you-so-acts-of-service-it-is Juniper to do little things for him. It mostly starts off as him trying to make Reggie his tea how he likes it. However, the nerve damage in his arm makes that hard, as the weight of the kettle and trying to pour is hard all of a sudden. And he refuses to accept that, so he tries for a very long while. Long enough that Crane would go to investigate what was going on. And when he does see Juniper leaning over a cup with the kettle as he uneasily tries to pour it, and when Crane asks Juniper responds so matter-of-fact that his intention is nothing but genuine. And it catches Reggie off guard because Juniper hadn't done anything like that up to that point, and his very apparent vulnerability is so clearly on show.
It shifts something between them.
From that point on, conversations are longer, more familiar. Both of their attitudes soften, and Reggie makes more jokes. Juniper learns how to better use his left hand while strengthening his right back to a point where it could be used again. Slowly, they're both spending time with one another not because they have to, but just because they can. Little bits at first, not too far outside what they already were doing, but those little bits turned into long bits to a point where the other person's company was genuinely desirable.
As time passes, Juniper probably realises that he doesn't genuinely know much about himself or what hobbies he's into, because he never really had the time when he got big, and his home life in his youth wasn't bad, but it wasn't picturesque. I think Reggie would pick up on it, and absolutely try to introduce him to some things he's into. Some things stick, other things don't (corn husking very much stays Reggie's passion, and John will go with him sometimes because it's him, but it's not something he strongly cares for). Crane introduces him to a lot of music, and it's something that becomes a staple between them, with tracks they listen to more than others (tragically, I know relatively little about 60s music so I couldn't really say what). Occasionally they dance, never anything intense, think slow dancing, but the closeness is nice.
Through all of it, Juniper is battling the worst crush of his life, and he can't stand it, because I think he struggles to read people since he doesn't have anything like a script or a director to refer back to, so he has no idea if Reggie likes him back or if he's just desperate for that to be true. I think because of that any sort of confession between them would be incredibly raw, not only because of the time they live in making it hard for them to be truthful about how they love, but because it's a complete show of Juniper who's worked to be this better person. I don't exactly know how that would go, mainly because I don't have one set version of their dynamic, this post is just a generalisation of main consistent points.
Reggie does like him back, because he's gotten used to Juniper being just this guy, not a figure in the public eye, not a Zoraxis lackey, and not any sort of Agency operative (despite being under their care to some degree). He's someone he genuinely cares for, because they've given one another the time of day to learn one another, and I think because Reggie was a field agent, he was a lot better at reading Juniper than Juniper was at reading him. Eventually Juniper's company becomes something he could see around him for the rest of his life, and I think he accepts that he likes Juniper a lot more gracefully.
I think any affection directed at Juniper would at first be met with him feeling a little muddled. Reggie was a very physically affectionate person when he could be, and sure the initial flirting with one another came with the occasional little touches, but everything now was so deeply intentional. I also don't think Juniper would almost ever get over the novelty of being able to kiss him, or many other gestures, because it made the fact that they were together so very real, and it was great. I do think it comes easier to Reggie, and it's a big way of showing how much he cares, so it's important for Juniper to try and show it back because he knows how much it means to the other.
I like the idea of them eventually living with one another, too. I think Juniper would have always had a quiet little daydream of sorts where he does just live a domestic quiet life, and he can with Reggie (well, as close as they can get between the Agency and Zoraxis always being at odds), and he loves that, and he loves him, and it's immense.
I think they cook for one another a lot, it helps Juniper work on his dexterity in a controlled environment, which means a lot because it's a huge point of insecurity (that and his scars). He does improve, and Crane is proud of that and shows it and it's great. I also think they'd probably cook together too, because they can deal with being in the kitchen together and they work well with one another. It's probably a good way for them to unwind because over time they can do it in relative silence.
As I said before, I also think music is a staple in their household, and that Reggie listens to things on vinyl almost all of the time because he likes the background noise. Sometimes Juniper will catch him chuntering along to the music which he finds endlessly endearing. I wouldn't put it past his dramatic ass to also join in to fluster Reggie, but I also don't think Reggie would mind that terribly because Juniper has listened to the music enough to know the lyrics, and that's huge to him.
I don't think they are without rough patches, no relationship is, but I think the good part about them is that they're willing to talk about it (... eventually). They're used to long conversations, and while they're often less fun conversations, they're needed and they know that, and it works out.
Alright. I think I'm done for now. I haven't mentioned everything, but this definitely got the worst of it out of my system. If you ever want to hear any specific thoughts my ask box is open but other than that, behold my general dynamic for these two which has been festering in my head for years. I think they're great
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