#i've been running out of youtube videos for weeks already so that's not anything

[arcaneyouth]

i finished making chapter 7 of my comic and immediately my entire routine went to shambles cause i don't know what to do with myself anymore. girlies i'm so bored

[adriswrld]

Retirement » Jay White ⁰¹

plot: jay white finds out abt reader's potential retirement at wrestlekingdom 17

trope: friends to lovers / he fell first, but she fell harder

pairings: wrestler reader x jay white / reader x (platonic) bullet club

a/n: he's hubby your honor 🤝 reader used to be in bullet club when kenny was leader btw! atp, y'all should just expect to see my oc azalea playing the best friend 😭

THIS WILL HAVE TWO PARTS!! THIS IS PART ONE!

"How's your neck feeling?" Sean, Y/N's personal camera man had asked after turning on the camera and filming. As she and her best friend who is also a WWE wrestler shared a YouTube channel, they were filming an episode of Y/N experience for WrestleKingdom 17. "Well, my neck is literally killin' me so I hope that doesn't effect my match later cause if it does the blame could go on Kairi and I don't want that obviously. People tend to blame the opponent if the champion has a bad match." Y/N shrugged, picking up her phone to check the time.

"I'm gonna get freshened up and then we will be leaving soon to pick up Azalea from the airport. I showered last night so don't even try to say anything." Y/N said, pointing at the camera before Sean switched it off. "I'll be waiting in the lobby, Y/N." Sean said, heading to the door and Y/N gave a nod with a tired smile. Y/N rubbed her neck with a tired groan, still hating that retirement was in the rear view for her. But if she wanted to preserve her neck, she had no choice.

Two hours later, Y/N was standing in the airport with Sean, Mercedes and Trinity as they waited for Pamela (Bayley) and Azalea to arrive. "Are you okay? You keep rubbing your neck?" Mercedes asked in a concerned tone.

"Oh yeah I'm fine, just a bit sore." Y/N lied, glancing at Sean who already knew the truth but understood why she was keeping it a secret. Before anything else could be said, they noticed Pamela and Azalea jog over to them after grabbing their luggage. Azalea grinned and pulled Y/N into a hug, Sean getting it all on video. "I am running completely on energy drinks right now so I'm little jittery," she said.

"Oh it's alright, Iz." Y/N reassured and Azalea pulled away to greet Mercedes and Trinity. Pam smiled and pulled Y/N into a hug, "It's so good to see you again. How are you doing?" Pam asked, pulling away gently, almost as if she was trying to be careful with Y/N and that made Y/N think Izzy might have told her about her neck issues.

"I'm doing alright, thank you for asking. Just a bit exhausted but I'll be okay." Y/N said, giving Pam a reassuring smile. "I'm so sorry I won't be able to join you all, I've got lots of things I've got to do today, I really wish I could join all though. Maybe tomorrow I can join you," Y/N spoke as they had all been discussing where to eat.

"It's okay, Y/N, we understand. We'll be alright," Azalea reassured and the three women plus Sean nodded in agreement with her. "All right. Just be careful, and have fun," Y/N said, hugging Izzy goodbye before gesturing for Sean to come on with her.

"It's probably just me but am I the only one noticing how much her moods changed? Like, she's not as happy and cheerful like she's always been, plus she keeps rubbing her neck like somethings wrong," Mercedes spoke as they walked towards the exit together. Azalea sighed and stopped everyone, causing them to all turn to look at her. "Don't tell anyone this but, ever since she broke her neck, she hasn't exactly fully recovered yet," Izzy explained.

"But the doctors said she was cleared?" Trinity added in confusion.

"She was, but a few weeks ago she started getting really bad neck pain so we went to the doctors and they said something was wrong. They said she was cleared but when she started wrestling it appeared that she didn't fully heal. It's actually extremely dangerous for her to still be wrestling. It's kinda like what happened with Paige's neck. It's why she was so urgent on dropping the title to you." Pam, Mercedes and Trinity were all to shocked and concerned to even speak.

"Does that mean she's retiring?" Pam questioned.

"Look, I'm not saying that she's retiring, but it's definitely in the near future for her. She obviously doesn't want to, but it's what's best for her health." Azalea corrected with a small shrug. She was the last person who wanted Y/N to retire but Y/N's health was more important than that. At least she got to say she had the greatest match of her career with her best friend.

"That does explain why she hasn't been in the happiest of moods," Mercedes mumbled sadly.

》* 。 • ˚ ˚ ˛ ˚ ˛ • 。* 。° 。* 。 • ˚《

"I called my very good friend Okada to help me out for my match yesterday but I just got off the phone with him and unfortunately he couldn't make it. But, as we are already here, I figured why not just train with Sean," Y/N said and Sean smiled. "It's gonna be a pain but I could use the training," Sean agreed and Y/N chuckled and nodded in agreement.

"It's supposed to be closed as of now but I was given a key a long time ago in case I ever needed it. So, let's go inside." Y/N smiled as she unlocked the doors and entered the building. As they walked in it appeared the lights were already on so someone must've already been there. "Oh it looks like someone's already here," Y/N said quietly.

They could hear voices and Y/N couldn't help but find those very familiar. She could pick out El Phantasmo and Jay White's voice anywhere. "I knew I heard my boys," Y/N grinned as the two men both turned to look at her, immediately growing smiles once they saw her. "No way, is it the one and only Bullet Club Princess?" ELP aka Riley grinned and slid out of the ring, walking towards Y/N with open arms.

"Aye, former BC Princess. Not anymore." Y/N playfully corrected as she ran into his open arms. "Oh come on, you'll always be the BC Princess." Riley playfully nudged her once they pulled away and he shook Sean's hand with a polite grin.

Jay sat on the ring, a small smirk tugged at the corner of his lips as he watched Y/N walk towards him. "Still a cocky lil shit, aren't you? Not gonna come and greet me like a gentleman?" Y/N joked, getting Jay to crack a small laugh as he jumped down and let Y/N bring him into a small hug. "Nice to see you again, princess." Jay mumbled into her hair causing her to mentally freak out but she held her usual chill composure.

"Mmm, nice to see you too, Jamie." Y/N pulled away and Jay threw her arm around her, pulling her into his side like it was a normal interaction. "You know you can still call me Jay, right?" Jay raised his brows, still obviously confused on why she used his real name. "Nah, I like Jamie," Y/N winked, flashing a smile, he shook his head in amusement and didn't argue with that.

"So, what are you guys doing here anyways?" Riley questioned, choosing not to tease Jay for his crush on Y/N.

"I originally was suppose to train with Okada this morning to prepare for my match but he got busy so he had cancel. Figured I'd just train with Sean," Y/N informed, crossing her arms over her chest. Sean nodded, confirming her statement as he held the camera. "You can join us then, Riley was helping me train for my match with Okada anyways." Jay offered, Riley also agreeing with him.

"Sounds good." Y/N accepted.

Sean and Riley trained in one ring as Jay and Y/N were training together in the other ring. Riley was helping Sean improve in his wrestling so that was a huge help for him. "I haven't figured out how I wanted the match to finish, you know? All I know is that I really want to pay a tribute to Kenny and Azalea in the match, but I already figured that out," Y/N said to Jay as they discussed how she wanted her match to go with Kairi Sane.

Jay licked the front of his teeth, wondering if Y/N was still involved with Kenny. "Oh, uh are you and Kenny still, ya know?" Y/N's eyes widened slightly, knowing where he was going with that and immediately shook her head. "Definitely not, we ended things in like early 2019. We're still extremely good friends though, he's always been one of my biggest supporters." Y/N pursed her lips, silently wondering why Jay asked about Kenny. "Why?" She questioned.

"Just wondering," Jay shrugged it off but Y/N was still a bit suspicious.

"Well, we should continue now, I want to be at the dome early," Y/N said, getting back on track. "Yeah of course." Y/N stood up from sitting on the middle rope, "Can I borrow the blade runner?"

"I'm not sure, you technically never joined my bullet club," Jay pursed his lips sarcastically and Y/N hit his shoulder playfully with a laugh. "You turned on Kenny, how could I possibly join your club without it seeming like I'm betraying him?" Y/N pointed out as she circled him.

"Easy. You could've just chose me. I would've treat you better anyways." Jay said, adding a little truth to his words. Y/N glanced down in thought, thinking into what he said.

"All right, let's get back to it."

》* 。 • ˚ ˚ ˛ ˚ ˛ • 。* 。° 。* 。 • ˚《

"Oh my god, your hair looks so beautiful, what the fuck," Y/N spoke as she entered the room Mercedes was in. "You like it?" Mercedes smiled, pulling Y/N into a side hug but being careful with her neck. "I love it. It looks amazing on you. It's like you burning the blue hair, putting that in your past and opening a new chapter as Mercedes, yeah?" Y/N asked. "Dude you got it perfectly. Yes, that's exactly what it means."

"I'm gonna get goin' but you call me if you need anything sweets." Y/N said, patting Mercedes's shoulder. "I will, thank you."

Y/N walked out of the room with her suitcase, going towards her personal locker room to drop her suitcase and bags off. "All right, now we are going to go search for the lovely Azalea who I'm sure is around here somewhere. She said she was by the ring since we last texted." Alice spoke, her hands tucked into her pockets of her joggers as Sean followed her with the camera.

"It's so amazing being here again. All the memories I've had here is just so surreal to me. It's gonna really hurt when I perform here for the last time. I'm just glad it's gonna be against Kairi. She's one of my greatest friends." Y/N and Sean both walked down to the ring, immediately did she spot Azalea talking with surprisingly, Jay White. She knew they never even met each other so that was kinda a shock to her seeing them in a deep conversation.

As Y/N walked up to them, Jay turned to look at her, "Why didn't you tell me you're retiring?"

Y/N blinked, being caught off guard with the sudden question. Y/N looked at Azalea with accusing eyes, "I'm sorry babe, but he was asking me why you always looked like you were in pain when you trained. He's really convincing, I'm sorry." Azalea frowned, suddenly feeling bad for telling Jay what was going on when Y/N trusted her with that information.

Y/N sighed, running a hand down her face exhaustion. "I'm not retiring, okay? We don't even know that for sure. Doctors just said that my wrestling days are limited if it keeps getting worse," Y/N explained. "Then why are you wrestling tonight if you know it can end your career? Are you insane, Y/N? Just drop the title before you permanently damage your neck." Jay argued, not understanding why she wasn't listening to everyone's warnings.

"I can't!" Y/N snapped, then taking a few breaths to calm herself down before she got even more upset and said something she might regret. "This is my legacy, Jay. This is my story and if I'm gonna go out, it's gonna be on my terms. Whether it ends tonight or next month, it's on my terms. You can hate me for it all you want, but it's my decision. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go see my friends cause it might be a while before we see each other again." Y/N plastered on a fake smile and walked past them to go find Okada.

Jay ran a hand down his hair, frustrated but also hurt that Y/N wasn't at least making an effort to preserve her career. "You're in love with her, aren't you?" Izzy tilted her head curiously, making Jay immediately turn to look at her. "Where did you get that idea from?" Jay scoffed in denial.

"Oh I don't know, maybe the fact that you seem to care about her more than you're letting on. And, I've watched her old YouTube videos of her backstage with the Bullet Club and I couldn't help but notice everytime she was with Kenny, you always held that jealous glint in your eyes. She even told me how you tried to convince her to join your bullet club. It was so insanely obvious. You're kinda lucky she's a little oblivious." Azalea smiled sarcastically as Jay rolled his eyes.

"Fine, maybe you're right. But, don't tell her, I plan on telling her myself, tonight." Jay stuck out his hand so they could shake on it, it took her a moment to think before ultimately shaking his hand in agreement.

》* 。 • ˚ ˚ ˛ ˚ ˛ • 。* 。° 。* 。 • ˚《

Y/N paced back and forth nervously, her title strapped around her waist as she watched the TV where Kairi Sane was making her entrance. "You can do this, just go out there, don't fall, don't be stiff, show everyone why you're the best. Do what you do best, win, wrestle and entertain." Y/N spoke to herself, trying her hardest to motivate herself but she was failing miserably, growing more anxious by the second.

"Hey, Y/N. Are you okay?" Jay walked up to them and Sean took it as a sign to let the two talk alone.

"Do I honestly look okay?" Y/N deadpanned then frowned, not liking when she came off as rude. "I'm sorry, that was rude. I'm just freaking out, or panicking or something, I don't know," Y/N rambled, breathing heavily, she leaned on the wall behind her.

"Shit, okay I was gonna do this later," Jay mumbled to himself before placing his hands on her shoulders and her hands went up to his arms. "What are you?-" Jay cut her off, pressing his lips gently against hers, in the process, distracting her from all her previous thoughts. Y/N practically melted into the kiss, immediately placing her hands on his, she kissed back. Hearing her music begin to play, they both pulled away and before she could get a word out, one of the workers dragged her away and up the stairs.

"What happened to waiting till after the show?" Jay jumped slighly hearing Azalea's voice, turning around he noticed her leaning against the wall with crossed arms. "I was trying to calm her down," Jay defended.

"Dude, you realized that literally could destroy her entire focus on the match? You better hope nothing bad happens, if it does, I'm kicking your ass," Azalea stated before walking off to go watch the match with Trinity and Pamela in the stands where they couldn't be caught on any cameras as it went against hers and Pam's contracts with the WWE.

"Shit," Jay muttered, running a hand down his hair.

》* 。 • ˚ ˚ ˛ ˚ ˛ • 。* 。° 。* 。 • ˚《

Y/N took a deep breath, trying to get a breath in as she just superplexed Kairi off the top rope and immediately performed a Blade Runner after. The match was almost over and it was one hell of a match. Kairi was killing it and some even thought she might actually just pull a win over the champion. But, Y/N wasn't gonna let that happen. She had to admit, the kiss was a little distracting. It was just so sudden and unexpected. She didn't even think Jay was single after seeing those rumors about him with a new girlfriend.

Y/N crawled over to Kairi, attempting a cover but Kairi kicked out at two. "Fuck! Just give up!" Y/N leaned against the ropes, running a hand over her hair in frustration.

Kairi stood up tiredly and immediately ran and knee'd Y/N before she could block it. She dragged Y/N to the turnbuckles and began to climb up the rope. The crowd automatically assumed it was over for Y/N the minute Kairi hit the insane elbow. But, as Kairi performed it, Y/N got her knees up at the last second. Kairi groaned and Y/N stood up and jumped onto the top rope, performing her finisher, the Royalty Deathdrop. It was basically a backflip off the top rope into a DDT.

She hit it perfectly. "ONE..TWO..THREE!" Y/N grinned and tiredly crawled to the bottom rope, attempting to pull herself up as they announced her name as the winner. The official handed her the title and raised her hand before she immediately collapsed back onto the mat, barely able to hold herself up. Her body was battered and bruised so it was surprising that she wasn't even unconscious.

Kairi stood up and immediately went towards Y/N, extending her hand in respect towards her competitor. The crowd watched in anticipation, waiting to see if Y/N would accept her hand. Y/N hesitantly took Kairi's hand and the crowd applaused. Kairi pulled the taller woman up and raised her hand, showing a sign of respect for the retaining champion.

All until Y/N's hand dropped, the music hit. The music of Mercedes Moné.

The crowd cheered, obviously most knowing who she was. Y/N sat down on the middle turnbuckle, watching as Mercedes ascended down the entrance ramp. Kairi stood near Y/N as they watched Mercedes enter the ring. A whole new look on her, she was almost unrecognizable if you seen her as Sasha Banks in WWE. This was an entirely different woman and she wasn't here to play games. She was here to make history, money and win championships.

Kairi looked at Y/N silently asking if she wanted her to stay. Y/N shook her head, waving her off and Kairi stepped out of the ring, letting Y/N handle her business. Y/N stepped up, not liking the disrespect of Mercedes. She didn't have to say anything, she just raised her IWGP Women's Championship right in the face of Mercedes, not backing down to her.

Mercedes stuck her hand out, Y/N looking at it in suspicion. She took it hesitantly and Mercedes smiled as they shook hands. A show of respect. Y/N went to pull her hand away but Mercedes held it tightly so she couldn't let go. She pulled Y/N in, making her drop the title and performed what looked to be a gory bomb only it was straight into a DDT. Y/N groaned as she hit the mat, selling it perfectly so it made Mercedes look like a huge threat.

Mercedes walked over to the title and slowly picked it up, then dropped it onto Y/N's barely conscious body. "Give me a mic," Mercedes stuck her hand out, leaning between the ropes, they quickly handed her a microphone and she slowly made her way back to Y/N.

"Y/N, awee, congratulations on making history tonight, once again. I also know a thing or two about making history," Mercedes grinned, the crowd cheering for her. "I am here, in New Japan and Stardom to make some more. Allow me to introduce myself. I'm the standard. The conversation. The blueprint, and the CEO of this women's division."

Mercedes kneeled down next to Y/N's body, the champion not even attempting to get up or open her eyes. "So Y/N-San, enjoy your IWGP Women's Championship while you can. Because at Battle in the Valley at San José. Imma leave you bankrupt bitch. And you can bank on Moné." Mercedes took the championship and lifted it up, throwing the mic to the side as her music played.

Y/N rolled out of the ring once Mercedes made her way out. She grabbed her championship and let one of the officials help her walk to the back. She held an ice pack against her neck, as Azalea rushed up towards her and Sean obviously shortly behind with the camera. "I need to lay down," Y/N spoke, letting Azalea help her walk towards her locker room rather than run to do the press conference. They could hold it back a few minutes for Y/N like they always did.

"I love you, but you need to chill out with these extreme matches. If this next one is your last, don't hurt yourself worse trying to prove yourself. You had thousands of people watching you tonight, I'm pretty damn sure they know you're the best." Azalea said, handing the title to Sean for him to hold it until they got to the room.

"I know, I'm sorry. I'll take it down a notch next time. Sean, you can turn off the camera, I don't wanna film right now." Y/N leaned her head on Azalea's shoulder in exhaustion, not seeing that Jay was standing outside her locker room door. But, Azalea and Sean noticed him.

"I'm gonna go get the ice, lots of ice," Sean excused himself, leaving Azalea to deal with that by herself.

"I need to unlock the door so I need you to hold yourself up for a few seconds, okay?" Azalea slowly moved Y/N's arm from her shoulder and instead of Y/N supporting herself, Jay immediately went to hold her up. Y/N looked at him and sighed, watching tiredly as Azalea hurriedly unlocked the door to the locker room.

"You're probably gonna need a cat scan," Azalea mumbled, opening the door and Jay helped Y/N inside. Azalea switched on the lights as Jay helped Y/N lay down on the couch. "After the amount of neck bumps she took, I'm surprised she didn't break it," Jay added. Azalea pursed her lips, agreeing with him and Y/N tiredly hit his shoulder. "Don't be an ass. I had to make it look like it was killing me," Y/N muttered.

"I'm pretty sure it was killing you considering you can barely stand on your own," Azalea deadpanned.

Y/N rolled her eyes and moved the ice pack from her neck to her forehead. "The match looked good though, yeah?" Despite her current situation, she still loved wrestling and absolutely loved being out there in front of an audience. Nothing could ever take away her love and passion for the sport. Retirement or not. She would always appreciate it.

"You never had one bad match and it hasn't changed yet," Jay spoke before Azalea could respond to her friend. As Y/N went to say something, the door opened and in walked Sean with the ice packs and Mercedes. "Got the ice, and a visitor," Sean tossed the ice to Izzy who caught it with ease before he grabbed the camera and turned it back on.

"Hey, I didn't see you backstage so I got worried. And I noticed you could barely walk so I wanted to come check on you." Mercedes kneeled down next to the couch as Jay moved out of the way for her. Y/N sat up slowly, still trying to control her breathing. "You didn't have to, but I appreciate it. How are you feeling?" Y/N smiled, taking Mercedes's hands in her own.

"I feel like I'm on top of the world. This is all I've ever wanted and honestly, I'm still processing it all. In a way, I finally feel free, ya know?" Mercedes smiled as she spoke, still running on adrenaline from her debut. It completely took her mind off the fact that she was possibly gonna be the one to retire Y/N at Battle in the Valley.

"I understand completely. I'm literally so proud of you, I could cry. You deserve to live your dream, you deserve all of this. Don't let anyone tell you different. You belong here." Y/N stated, being filled with nothing but joy for Mercedes. She couldn't have been more proud of her.

Mercedes smiled, feeling a tear fall that Y/N wiped away. "Thank you so much. For everything." Mercedes said, blinking away her tears.

"You don't have to thank me. Just show me who Mercedes Moné is, and that's all I need." Mercedes chuckled and nodded, being gentle as she hugged Y/N. "I can't wait to beat you," Mercedes teased, pulling away with a smirk.

"All right, don't get all cocky now." Y/N scoffed lightly in a joking manner.

Mercedes snickered and stood back up, now turning her attention to Jay as Y/N leaned forward for Azalea to press the ice against her bag. "I don't think we've met yet. I'm Mercedes, it's nice to meet you," Mercedes smiled humbly as she stuck out her hand.

"Jay, it's nice to meet you as well. I've heard great things," Jay shook her hand gently with a warm smile.

"Well, I should get going. Imma let you rest and we'll meet up tomorrow?" Mercedes said towards Y/N. "Sure thing," Y/N nodded. Mercedes and Azalea shared a hug before she exited the locker room.

"You two have five minutes, then you need to do the conference and we can go back to the hotel or finish watching the show. I'm sure you don't wanna miss Kenny and Will's match." Azalea said before grabbing Sean and exiting the room to let the two discuss the elephant in the room.

Y/N cleared her throat, and patted her hand on the couch, telling Jay to sit down. His sigh was barely heard as he took a seat next to the woman he'd been in love with since their first interaction. "I'm sorry I kissed you. I definitely shouldn't have done that without your consent, that was extremely out of line," he began, causing Y/N to turn her body towards him, groaning at the pain in the process. She had never been so sore in her life. That was another reminder that she had to hang up the boots sooner than later.

"I'm not mad that you kissed me, Jamie." Y/N cut him off, using her left hand to move his face to look at her. "You're not?" Jay feigned confusion, being so sure that she was upset with him. After all, she hadn't spoken to him until Azalea left, which kinda forced them to have to talk.

"No. I'm mad that you didn't do it sooner," Y/N said, catching Jay off guard completely. Jay blinked, not sure if he heard that right or if his mind was playing games on him. "I can't tell if you're serious or not. Can you repeat that again?" He asked, being serious but not at the same time.

Y/N chuckled but stopped when she felt the pain in her stomach. "Look, I've always liked you, from the minute we met. But I wasn't in love with you," Jay's face fell hearing that but she placed her hand on his, silently telling him to keep listening. "I was so obsessed with thinking Kenny was the one for me because I genuinely never experienced love before him. I told myself so many times that he was the person I've always wanted when in reality, he wasn't at all."

"Then when we broke up and a month later I came back to Japan, you and I met up and I finally realized what was in front of my face the entire time. You always cared about me, and checked in after every match and that's something nobody else even bothered to do. You treated me exactly like I thought Kenny would. And I'm so sorry for realizing that way too late. I've always loved you, and when I found out you had a girlfriend, it was too late to tell you that I was in love with you."

Y/N wiped a tear that fell from her cheek, never being a fan of crying even if it was a happy tear. Jay furrowed his brows in confusion, processing what she just said, "I'm sorry, did you say girlfriend?" He questioned.

"Yeah, why? There was reports on Twitter that you had some secret girlfriend or whatever," Y/N shrugged. Jay couldn't help but chuckle, making Y/N raise her brows, not knowing if she should be mad or not. "Y/N, those were fake. That girl I was with was not my girlfriend. Riley and Will tricked me into going out with her. They said it was a guys night and when I show up, they're not even there and she just got caught in the middle of their jokes so I felt bad and just had dinner with her anyways. I don't even remember her name." Jay said, sighing when he realized he could've had Y/N much sooner.

"Oh." Was all she could say.

Jay noted her embarrassment and gave a squeeze to her hand, "I really wish I could go back in time and tell you how much I loved you way sooner. I could've had you this whole time."

"Well, there's no need to wait anymore," Y/N spoke softly, hoping he got the hint. Jay leaned closer towards her, careful with her body as of how sore she definitely was. "Can I kiss you, Y/N?" Y/N smiled and nodded, "Of course you can, Jay," letting him press his lips softly against hers. The kiss wasn't rushed like the first one. It was perfect. It was...everything.

Jay pulled away with a cheesy smile, "You called me Jay," he pointed out. Y/N rolled her eyes and playfully pushed him back, "Shut up, Jamie," she scoffed. Jay grinned and pulled her onto his lap, mumbling small sorrys when she winced. "I love you, Y/N," he spoke softly.

"I love you too, Jamie," Y/N pressed a small peck to his lips.

[t3mp4cheololo]

Alina Afanaskina diary(English)

maybe it`s not her diary, idk, but also...

Post from 2.08 11:49 Moscow time

02.08 If you're reading this, then I'm already dead (or I've been detained)

How you fucked me up, you fuckers. I'm writing this in tears, I hate school and everything related to it. I would fucking shoot you all

I'm not a terrorist, and I'm not even a school girl, I just want to kill a couple of nasty people who ruined my life and it wouldn't hurt to shoot myself.

13.08 Right now I'm looking at Dad`s weapon and I want to shoot myself…

14.08 The holidays would rather be over (for the first time I want this), I think I will surprise them on the first of September <3

20.08 Dasha, along with her dumb friends, grins at me, fucking came into MY room and also with her friends and dares to laughing over me ☠️ ☠️ ☠️ ☠️ ☠️ The only thing that comforts me is the fact that I'm going to shoot her.

31.08 Tomorrow I will kill those who have been killing my psyche throughout my life, but I feel so calm every day is the same as it always will be.. idk what will happen

01.09 I HAVE ALREADY TAKEN THE KEY, I HAVE ALREADY OPENED THE SAFE, BUT THERE IS NO GUN, IT LOOKS LIKE IT IS IN THE GARAGE

Fuck it, they were just lucky.

Now I've come home from school and I'm happy, but I could have killed them all…

04.09 This shit begins, today I went to the blackboard to take books and the stupid whore Nastya gave me the ugliest and torn books (on purpose), she is laughing and the whole class is there too, MMMMM HOW FUNNY

07.09 I'm sitting in Columbine chats and threw a splint on a bomb, can I use it too? There's a shorter guy saying "today with the permission of Allah" ahhahaha

I FOUND A CHANNEL THERE 700 RECIPES FOR DIFFERENT EXPLOSIVES AHAH CAN BLOW THEM UP?!?! hmm, maybe it's not for nothing that my father left a weapon in the garage, after all, natural selection, fate

11.09 Congratulations to Ilnaz, Dylan on his birthday, I wish you health and happiness

30.09 Oh, I forgot about this diary, I haven't been writing anything for a long time. Well, I'll say that things have not changed in any way, the creatures torment my psyche as soon as possible, I'm hz, I'm afraid to do shooting and suicide. But I really want to

14.10 Nothing interesting, as always, day after day with bullying. Even at home, a fucked-up father and a fucked-up sister fuck brains

15.10 Oh, I found the mining manual of the school hmmm interesting

there was a link here

There's only one drawback, I don't know how to make bombs.

And what he tells me, I don't fucking understand, I couldn't learn chemistry properly, what do you think because of whom?)))

16.10 Fuck, I don't even know how to shoot normally, I've never been taught that. But it seems to me that it's easy, like I'm watching videos on YouTube right now, I've already learned how to reload a gun.

11.11 I want to kill more and more, fucking so many months have passed and I still haven't killed them. God, I don't even have time to run this fucking note channel, I live in fear all the time. ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE HATES ME. But now they'll love me.

29.11 Bitch, I can't anymore, it's fucked up!!

01.12 I have lost any sense of waiting when I grow up. I can't stand their antics anymore. And I won't. I don't know when I'm going to kill them, damn it, I'd like to do it sooner

02.12 Anyway, next week I will definitely shoot them

06.12 I forgot to write, but I'll go tomorrow, the weapon is still at home. It's just not profitable for me to go to the garage. And then dad will take him away again, most likely somewhere. I'm just burned out already.

07.12 :(

Post from 7.12 This message is set on a timer for 12/07/23:50. (I hope by that time they will know that there was a shooting)

Started writing this 02.12 | 20:59.

If you are reading this message, it means you somehow found out about my channel.

(I hope the channel won’t be deleted by then.. Or I hope they won’t find this old phone, because I want to help someone with my life story)

Although who knows, perhaps no one will ever know about the existence of this channel.

And I will remain to rot in the grave and no one will even remember me and my story.

In short, yes, things suck! My father hits me sometimes. My sister, excuse me, is sucking him off or something, or how can I explain that it’s just me that everyone at home hates… Well, even at school they bully, although no, the fucking creatures, brainless classmates, are “just joking.”

Their “roffles” are not funny at all and not without insult, as the teacher said when my classmates scratched me “accidentally” with a pen cap until they bled <> I don’t remember what she said there.

I wish everyone who hates me to go through what I went through. I first started cutting myself at the age of 8, AT EIGHT YEARS OLD!! When all the children live a happy life, I cry and pray for death. I've changed, I don't cut myself so much anymore, rarely very much. Now I hate not myself, but everyone around me. You are pathetic creatures who don’t even notice the problem under your nose (me).

Therefore, I hope that I will kill everyone I wanted, namely: father, Dasha, Nastya, Kirill, Anton, Masha, Sasha, Vanya, Artyom and maybe Yegor. Well, it would be nice for myself too))) I don’t want to go to prison, and I don’t want to live at all.

I think that at the beginning of the night I’ll quietly kill Dasha and dad and steal the weapon… then I’ll go to hell (school), go into my class and shoot them at the beginning, and then I’ll go look for other creatures who also managed to ruin my life.

Although I’m not sure that I’ll be able to kill them, I’m afraid to pierce a human body with a sharp object, I’m not some kind of sick maniac, I’m out of despair, as it were…

I believe that this is how we need to fight bullying, because other methods imposed by teachers and society do not work at all.

“don’t pay attention to them”, “tell them you’re not happy”🤡🤡

If they systematically bully you, fucking kill them. They ruined your life, you must do it, because they will multiply and more people will suffer. And perhaps many more people will die. It is better to immediately kill these socially rotting creatures and commit suicide than to commit only suicide. DO YOU UNDERSTAND???

What can I recommend to people who read this when “fighting” bullying:

Well, you need to understand and be aware of what you are going to, in order to kill people you need to know about the consequences and about past killers. Therefore, go to YouTube, Wikipedia and watch videos about Columbine, school shooting, revenge, etc. watch how to shoot, how to reload. If there are no weapons and there won’t be any in the future for some reason, kill or blow up the offenders. You can also watch how to cut on YouTube, although this does not require any special skills. By the way, I came up with an idea, I’ll take my dad’s knife with me just in case, in case they take my weapon away, I’ll cut something then, but I don’t know, I’ll think about it again.. I repeat, this is scary for me. It's scary to feel your insides with a knife. It's actually much better to shoot.

To blow up the same thing, look on YouTube for lessons on how to make explosives, only you need to know chemistry, I don’t know huh, so I’ll do without a bomb (this is really difficult for me).

In general, my life was not the best, and if there had been an opportunity, I would have been born again (only in a normal family) and would have lived normally.

I realized that it was better not to say anything than to say some kind of bullshit and then for months to hear quotes of my words with the antics of my classmates.

By the way, I am a kind person, I love animals and nature, because they are not people. They can't hurt me. The only people I feel comfortable with are cats <3

I don’t deserve to die, I’m very sorry that I’m taking this step. But understand, it was necessary.

If you want to try to understand me, watch the movie "Class", I am very similar to the main characters.

Oh, I feel so good that I spoke out. I hope that someone will hear and understand me, but fortunately I will already be in a coffin, I don’t give a fuck.

Sorry.

(there may be grammatical mistakes here)

[sturniolotrip-samandcolby-lover]

Matt sturniolo -little bean

Warnings -swearing,mention of abortion, mention of sex , vomiting use of y/n, arguing .Small age gap (matt 20 and reader 22) silent treatment

Angst/fluff Matt

Author note -thinking of making this into a series so let me know what you all think

Part 1

Word count-2k

I brush the hair out of my face ,as I wake up to a empty house.The house was full of silence as my boyfriend Matt and his triplets brother had left the house already for some business meetings taking place at the ware house.I look at the clock on my phone 10:47am shit thats late for me and im still shattered i dont even feel like ive slept at all. Im awoken from my sleepy daze by my stomach rumbled ,I get up brush my hair quickly and head to the kitchen to get something to eat .

I raid the fridge and cupboards in search for something to eat , I decide to have chopped up lettuce,pickled gherkins and some jolly ranchers .I finish my breakfast and head to the couch to watch some TV ,as I sit down I see a note that's been left on the coffee table it said 'hey baby me Chris and nick have got a few more meetings today then what we thought might be abit later home will bring back some late lunch with us .Matt xxxx'. A smile is present on my face the whole time I read his quick note with my cheeks blushed , Matt's smallest actions can still have a massive effect on me even after being together for over a year now .

I flick through the channels as nothing can satisfy me , I decided to open the YouTube app and put some Sam and Colby on specifically the conjuring from last year's hell week .I'm half way through the video when all of a sudden I feel so nauseous I can feel it building in my stomach like a tornado swirling around inside of me , it starts of slow and the next thing I know I'm running to the nearest bathroom thankfully it's matt and i shared one .I throw the toilet seats up and fall to my knees and close my eyes as the first bit of vomit comes rushing up my throat and out of my mouth .I sit there for the next hour bringing up whats left of this mornings breakfast and last nights dinner.

After minutes of waiting for the sickness to come back .I decided to stand up and reach for my toothbrush and paste ,as I brush my teeth I start to think of anything that could of gave me a bug or if there was a stomach bug going around .After minutes I've came to know conclusion of my sickness when it hits me .....shit Matt and I are usually careful if we don't use a condom we pull out or we get the morning after pill but a while ago I joined the triplets on their 6 million subscribers video .During the night having all the huts to ourselves Matt and I decided to get the hut as far from nick and Chris as possible .It safe to say there was some very animalistic behaviour going on in our tent that night , in the heat of the moment no condom or pull out was used and I could exactly get plan b pill from the gift shop so we just left it and thought well it's not going to happen .

I decide that before I start to get myself worked up in a panic , I'll go to the shop and do a test before the boys get back .Once I feel like I won't be sick again I go and throw some leggings and a jumper on leaving my top to go bra-less as I'm reminded of some achiness in them .I throw some crocs on and grab my car keys as i head out .

*Arrives back from shop*

I walk back into the house and I'm thankful that it's still silent meaning I'm the only one here .This is my first ever pregnancy scare so I'm not expert , I end up buying 7 different tests and some mints to settle my stomach and yet some more gherkins.I wonder around the kitchen with my hands full of tests in search of a cup or container as i dont feel like peeing 6 different times .I decided to keep one unused so i can do it again with matt incase he doesn't believe me .After finding a disposable cup I drink 3 cups of water and walk around the house doing some cleaning while I wait for the water to hit my bladder .I feel a urge to pee and walk to the bathroom, I position the disposable cup where it's supposed to be and let me bladder do it's job I open all the tests and when I'm finished place the 6 sticks into the cup .I start pacing the bathroom but decided that wouldn't be the best thing to do in this situation .So I make my way to the kitchen and put a kettle on figuring that a hot drink may help my nerves while killing the time awaiting the tests.I walk back to the bathroom once then minutes are up and as I pull all the tests out I stand in shock as they all say the same ....I'm pregnant.

Fuck fuck fuck is the only word that is running in my head , what am I going to do ,what am I going to say , what's Matt going to say his career is at its prime right now what will a baby do with this .Fuck their triplets , twins run on my side of the family what if there's more then one baby in there .I hold onto one of the tests in my shaky hands as I pace the bathroom.After minutes of walking around the small white tiled room I decided to hide all the tests and put them in a draw in Matt and my bedroom and I decide to text matt.

Y/n: hey babe was just wondering do you know how long you're gonna be xx

My phone pings instantly telling me that most likely it woul be Matt had texted me back

Matt:yeah not long just grabbing some maccies won't be long everything okay at home ? Xx

Y/n: yeah just got something to talk to you about xx

I avoid my phone until he gets back .I'm startled as I hear the door fling open and just one set of foot steps ."y/n?" I hear his familiar voice Matt is calling after me ."in the living room" I shout back to him .Seconds later he appears looking as perfect as usual "where's Chris and nick?" I ask him "they was fucking around when we was supposed to be signing cards for merch getting sent out so they went back to the warehouse to do their signing , Laura is gonna drop them off later tho .What's this thing you wanna talk about?" I pause with words moving rapidly around my head trying to think of the right way to tell him that I'm now pregnant with his child .I decide that no words are the right words so I take him by the hand and lead him to the bathroom.

His body stills while his eyes move over what the tests all say .The room is silent , too silent."Matt says something " I say breaking the silence ."when did it happen" he says still not taking his eyes off the tests "at the safari , in the hut that night" I respond back to him "fuck" he mutters to himself as he storms out the door .I stand there in silence as my eyes well up with tears.I hear the jingle of Matt's car keys and the door slamming telling me that Matt had left again and gone in his car .I walk into the living room now numb with emotions my hand rests on my lower stomach now knowing that through the layers of skin and muscle is our baby ,my baby the size smaller then a bean in this moment I know that I've got to keep this baby wether Matt wants it or not .

Minutes pass and my nauseous feeling comes over me again as I run to the bathroom again.I spend all the best part of an hour again with my head in the toilet when I stand up again feeling weak at my knees I brush my teeth for the 3rd time today trying to get rid of the vile aftertaste left in my throat .I hear the door go again but i hear 3 set of footsteps this time ,and voices nick ,Chris and matts voice ."what are you gonna do bro?" I hear Chris ask Matt "I don't know"he responds "well you and y/n have gotta talk this out Matt you can't just leave her in the bathroom like you did last time " I hear nick snap at the boys .

"Y/n" I hear nick call out me ."I'm on the bathroom just about to come out" I shout back as I walk into the kitchen .Matt's angry stare softens as he seen my face , I'm now pale and clammy with my skin layered in a thin amount of sweat ."congratulations" Chris says breaking the tension in the room "thank you" I say with a half smile ."so I think you two have gotta talk about this" nick states ."I'm not getting rid of it" I say quickly that being the only thing I'm sure of right now ."I wasn't even going to suggest that" Matt says with anger in his voice .Nick ,places his hand up to Matt in a urge to shush him "calm Matt" he says to him."is it mine ?"matt asks me looking me in the eye "are you fucking kidding me" i say in the exact tone that matt has.Nick and chris take this as a hint and both excuse themselves to different rooms "yeah I'm being real" he says raising his voice , it being full with anger ."you're the only person I've slept with matt you know that" i say to him storming off into our shared room .

*Few hours later*

I hear a knock at the bedroom door hoping that it's Matt ."come in" I shout sounding optimistic.The door opens and nick strides in with a sorry smile on his face "so that was intense" he says as he sits down next to me on the bed "yeah" i agree with him ."so i dont know if this is the right thing to say but im really glad your'e keeping the baby" he says nudging my arm ."yeah i am too , i just hope that matt feels the same " i say smiling properly for the first time today ."alright its getting late so I'll leave you to sleep i heard creating a baby can be tiring "he says with a small laugh.

Just as nick leaves the room Matt enters it , he ignores me acting as if I'm not in the room as he goes to the wardrobe grabbing some spare pillows and duvet he walks back out of the room as I sit in bed listening to him getting comfortable on the sofa .I think to myself how much of a long night I'm in for I can never sleep properly when I'm not with Matt and even worse knowing that he's mad at me .As the thoughts come to my head added with the extra hormones that pregnancy has brought on my eyes start to fill with tears when they fall down my face .I have so many questions running over my head thinking how I'm going to bring up a baby by myself although nicks previous words bring some form of comfort to me .As the clock strike 4 am and im still wide awake and emotional i decide to head to the bathroom and take a calming bath .Im thankful that both nick and chris's rooms are on different levels as I run the tab the sound of water echos through the room .I rid of my clothes and get into the bath now full of bubbles I close my eyes in attempt to relax.

Suddenly my nauseousness creeps up on me again , who ever called morning sickness 'morning' has never experienced this cus it seems to be all throughout the day already .I jump up from the bath with my wet hair sticking to my body as I move quickly to the toilet I throw the lid up and sit on the floor as bile begins to leave my body .I startled as a soft towel is wrapped around my body ,I look up to see Matt crouching next to me with his eyes full of tears himself .His hand rubs circles on my back as I start gagging again ."let it out baby it's okay" he whispers I release bile 3 more times as I pull back and rest my head on Matt's shoulder as he pushes my hair out of my face ."come on let's go to bed and talk " he says so quietly careful not to wake his two brothers up .He stands up and picks me up bridal style still with the towel wrapped around me .He carries me to our bed and uses his foot to close the door as he places me gently on the bed .He goes to our wardrobe and fetches me some shorts and one of his tops , he helps me get dressed as my body is weak from the vomiting.Once I'm dressed I lay in bed as Matt walks over to the other side of the bed and jumps in to bed with me .I sit waiting for him to speak "y/n im sorry for what i said and done earlier i know that you would never cheat on me and id never ask you to get rid of it .Whatever you choose ill support you .Im sorry ive treated you like that when you needed me the most ..." I cut his speech off with a kiss "I know , I know babe and we're going to be fine I want to keep this baby tho" I say to him looking him in his eyes "we're going to be a mommy and daddy" he says to me smiling ."we best tell our parents" I say to him before falling asleep in his arms .

[coolgreatwebsite]

Happy 1 Million Views to the Video That Broke Me

This is a repost of something I wrote over on my Cohost, but I figured a year later it should also probably live on the domain I pay money to have. Better late than never!

This is the most successful piece of content I have ever created. At one million views it is the thing I've made that people have seen the most. It is the thing that the most people have seen my name attached to. And it's total trash.

It's 2017 and we're a week or so out from the release of Sonic Mania, a game that I'm, at that point, pretty damn excited for. A kindly poster from the Something Awful forums (that I have known from many forums previous) poses a challenge: be the first to beat his short kaizo Sonic the Hedgehog 2 ROM hack and he'll gift you a copy of Sonic Mania on Steam when it comes out.

I was already getting the game on PS4 but I figured whatever, everyone else seems to be having trouble with it, I'm bored, I got nothing better to do, I'll give it a shot. I load up KEGA Fusion, start a low bitrate and resolution OBS recording because it'll probably take a few hours and who cares it's a forum contest verification video, and get to work. A hour and half-ish goes by and I'm finished with the hack. I upload the video to YouTube, post it in the thread, win my free copy of Sonic Mania, and that's the end of the story. Thanks for reading.

Except of course it's not the end of the story. A few months after I got done thoroughly enjoying Sonic Mania, I realized that I'd been getting a weird amount of new subscriber emails from YouTube. I decided to actually look at my metrics and noticed a uh, highly localized spike of activity. Give you one guess on which video (hint: it's the one this post is about). "The Algorithm" had suddenly taken it and was running away with it at lightning speed.

In the timespan between posting the video and this spike, YouTube had announced they were drastically raising the bar on the metrics you needed to hit to have your channel monetized. I was by no means a large YouTuber at the time, but I was meeting the old requirements for monetization just fine. I wasn't anywhere near meeting the new requirements until now and this video was blowing the hell up for whatever reason, so I decided to do what any good opportunist would do and made it an unwatchable experience.

I set the ad frequency on that thing to the maximum that it'd let me. I forget exactly how frequent that was but it was something absurd like an ad every 5 minutes. Maybe even more than that. I figured I'd either get rich or maybe it would make people stop watching and leaving the worst comments in the world. Seriously the comments on this thing are their own nightmare, a bizarre soup of people ascribing meaning to nothing, trying to suss out emotions where there are none, saying complete gibberish, I'd need an entire second post to unpack whatever the hell is going on there.

Well, I wouldn't quite say I got rich. The money you get off what most people would conventionally call a popular YouTube video is just not much in the grand scheme of things. But holy shit they didn't stop watching. If anything they were watching more. Why didn't they stop watching? This video was less than nothing. It was an ordeal to watch all the way through. Why were they doing this? Why was the algorithm showing this to everyone? Why this and not one of the things I put effort into or something that was at least meant to be entertaining at all? I didn't have the answers and I still don't.

Before this I personally wasn't lamenting the possibility of losing monetization on my channel as up until this point I had made around $40 total on YouTube in the decade or so I'd had a channel. But I had been spending a lot that time watching friends with channels around the size of mine who were actively hustling to, and unfortunately failing to, meet the new hurdle. They were putting out some really good shit. Way better than my stuff, frankly. And here I was getting launched to the finish line by... a throwaway, blurry, hour and a half long, commentary-free, save state abusing playthrough of a crummy Sonic ROM hack? That I had made as a means to a completely separate end?? That got promoted by a computer program for seemingly no reason???

It felt shitty. One of the friends I mentioned in that last paragraph was my longtime friend Fotts who was in the middle of getting their (sadly now dormant) series TAS Force off the ground. They were constantly tweeting about the ordeal of trying to meet the new monetization requirements and it was a damn shame because they were putting in a ton of effort and it was great. The kind of thing I'd watch even if I wasn't friends with anyone on it. It was a million times funnier than anything I was doing, and the complete opposite of my shitty contest video. If there was any justice in this world the views I was getting on this dumpster fire would be going to them. But as it turns out, there is no justice online.

I recalled a conversation I had with them a few years back while they, I, and a group of about 7 or so other friends were all wandering around an Orlando Wal-Mart wearing identical black t-shirts that read "MARVEL CAN SUCK MY COCK" in big block letters (long story). They had actually kind of gone through this sort of thing before. See, they're the uploader and one of the voices of this video you may or may not have seen with 6.5+ million views on it.

They lamented to me many of the laments I was currently lamenting. "This was just a stupid throwaway thing", "why is this so much more popular than the stuff I put effort into", "it's just me making PaRappa the Rapper say the word 'Chinese' over and over". Ok maybe that last one was a bit more specific to them. Anyway, I responded with (and I admit a lot of the reason I felt this way was because I thought and still think the video is funny) something along the lines of "you can't pick what hits for people, it might have been throwaway but at the end of the day you posted it because you thought it was at least a little bit funny, try and focus on the fact that you have a popular video at all rather than the fact it's not one of the videos you're particularly proud of".

But yeah damn turns out that advice is easier said than done when it happens to you, and it's even harder done when it happens to a factually not entertaining video. One you could have uploaded as unlisted and achieved your intended result with. The runaway success of this thing genuinely broke me on this whole "Internet" deal.

I should stress I mean this in a good way. I realized that it's not so much that you can't pick what hits for people, it's that you physically cannot pick what gets put in front of people. The people cannot pick what hits for them. A computer does. You can try and promote and affect what gets seen in your own small sphere of influence, but ultimately we are, on YouTube and on all of our social platforms, at the mercy of a black box of computer programs that I'm not even sure the people who created them understand anymore. I'd obviously known this on some level prior to this video existing, but bearing witness to it all happening firsthand to this video in particular was another thing entirely. Anything prior that I had achieved marginally similar success with (there were a couple that had broken 100k) was meant to be entertaining. It was meant for people to watch and go "I liked that", not for one guy on a forum to see and go "good work solving my maze Superman". I could classify the success as "neat, people liked that one" in my brain. This defied classification.

The only logical conclusion was that it truly didn't matter what I uploaded. It's all decided by a random machine picking things at random to serve random amounts of people, and the people click on it and watch it simply because it is there. You can poke at the machine, prod at the machine, try to guess what the machine likes, try to iterate on something the machine has previously demonstrated that it likes. It's all an effort to get the machine to put it in front of the people who will click it because it is there. That's what all the bigger capital-C Content Creators do. From the high level stuff of "what kind of things do I upload" to the low level minutia of "how many curse words can I say in the first minute", making it Big On Line in any capacity is about trying to appease an unknowable mechanical entity and nothing else. It's either that or you're "old money" in a sense, established before this all became the case.

And again, the bigger names do this. Entire companies do this. If I were "smart" I would have pivoted my entire YouTube channel to nothing but hour and a half long commentary-free bullshit hard ROM hack playthroughs. Maybe another one would hit like this did. But for the life of me I could not and cannot think of anything more soul crushing.

I wouldn't say I had aspirations to be a Big Time YouTube Man, but at that time I would have maybe liked to be a Moderate Size YouTube Man. Or a moderate size Twitch man. Someone who had people watching but was still able to have fun with it and do his own thing. This newfound realization that it was truly a random lottery, even beyond the random lottery that most of human life is, that becoming any size bigger than Small Time was literally decided by an actual factual random number generator, freed me from the desire to do anything that I didn't want to do. If actively chasing success on these modern, algorithmically-driven platforms, actively going after "Kaizo Sonic 2 Full Run" numbers, meant putting aside the things I like and reinventing myself and the things I do down to the minute details in order to appease a literal ghost beyond anyone's understanding or control that changes what it's looking for on a whim, then I did not want to do that. I did not want to keep a timer for when I could talk normal, I did not want to announce my streams on Twitter with the link in a separate reply one day, in an embedded image the next, and in my display name the next. If there is absolutely one thing I do not want to do in my life, it's dance for a robot.

But the most freeing thing about realizing this is that it also meant if I just kept doing stuff I liked, maybe, someday, I could get lucky enough to where the unknowable internet robot would push that in front of a million or so people. In the grand scheme of things it's about an equal chance of that happening on something I like and am proud of versus something I made in a desperate cloying attempt to placate an algorithm.

Anyway damn this got long and rambly sorry about that lol. This was initially meant to just be a little toast to the 5 year-ish anniversary of me fully becoming an Internet nihilist. Remember folks, it's meaningless to chase success in an algorithm dominated landscape. In the words of a certain extremely Normal-type man, "real life isn't all just being true to yourself", but I reject the notion that the Internet is not or should not be, in spite of the legion of ghouls and freaks at the top of the chain actively trying to make that the case every day.

Be true to yourself. Do what you love, make what you love, post what you love, and maybe if you're lucky a computer somewhere will decide it's your turn, because that's the single deciding factor in all of this. In the mean time, you'll end up slowly and naturally surrounding yourself with cool people who get you, if only a little bit. At least that's what's happened for me so far. I've been pretty alright with it.

[luci-in-trenchcoats]

Happy anniversary!

I'm hoping for some advice. I just feel so lost and bored with my life. I'm almost 32. I've had the same job (accountant/payroll specialist for an accounting firm) for almost 10 years. I spend so much of my time just sitting at my desk with no work to do, so I've been watching shows on my phone and coming on this hell-site to pass the time. I feel like life is just so negative and pointless. Everything has some kind of draw-back. I really wish someone could tell me what I'm supposed to be doing in my life. I get bored pretty easily. I need multiple things going at a time. Even watching a tv show, I almost always have my phone, computer or tablet going too, doing something. I've been asking myself the same question for over a decade: what do I want? I still have no freaking clue.

I feel like I'm caught in a circle. I don't have many friends because I don't go out much and when I do go anywhere I feel like I have nothing to contribute to conversations because 90% of my life is watching tv. I've never been on a date. I've been on a couple dating websites, but only ugly (sorry, but it's true) and creepy guys have sent me messages. I don't know. That probably doesn't really tell you anything to give advice on, but I typed it out, so I'll still send it.

Hey there! Fellow single 31 year old here that also works in the finance world! I definitely go through phases my self of why haven’t you accomplished this yet, you should be happier because xyz, etc. This is gonna sound really dumb but getting out of that mindset comes down to two things for me.

First thing is what are my goals? I’m not talking the stereotypical ones of get married, have kids, a house, yada yada. Is there anywhere you want to travel to someday? See a musician in concert? Try a new restaurant? Learn to play an instrument? Bake a cake from scratch? Run a 5K? The big goals are great. But so are the little ones. I have sooo many little goals in life and they give me things to strive for or look forward to a week from now and twenty years from now. Life gets a little bleak when you stop allowing yourself to have those things in mind. The little stuff is something you can work on today and see real results. For me goals give me excitement and sometimes my goal is to binge watch a show over the weekend and there’s nothing wrong with that! And if you feel like watching TV is all you do well you know what? Expand on that! Maybe make that a hobby by trying to do a reaction video on YouTube. Learn how to edit, how to share, etc. That’s just one super simple way of making a new goal from something you already do. Just try to get out of your comfort zone a smidge and good things can happen.

And maybe as you try those little things you’ll find you need more stimulation during the day because a toxic work environment can wreck havoc on your personal life too. Maybe it’s time for a career change even.

The second thing, and this one takes serious effort to change is…

Stop being mean to yourself. You are ONLY 31. You got a loooot of life ahead of you. Life does not happen on a timetable and there is no such thing as being “too late” to do things. Honestly you could be 80 years old and I’d say the same thing. You don’t need a man to make you happy. You can make you happy and if a guy comes along, great, that’s a bonus but you right now are just as valid as every other person out there. People with houses, kids, spouses, the people always bragging about their lives, they don’t have that shit figured out anymore than you or I do. We’re all just going with it. I’m not sure if any of this is helpful or not but I hope maybe something stood out for you! 🧡

[golbrocklovely]

Twitter is trying to cancel SnC yet again I see.

If I were SnC I would literally just delete all my twitter profiles except for their channels twitter which I'd then use ONLY for promoting when new videos drop. Just so the twitter fans can learn that they aren't as important as they seem to think they are because those boys are nearly at 12 million subscribers on youtube, twitter is but a mere handful of that subscriber count so it really wouldn't matter if they all decided to stop watching.

(plus the video they're all angry at is actually performing very well, it's already at 2M views on just day 2 of releasing. This suggests a lot of the fandom may not share twitters opinions...)

i don't see snc deleting their twitters, but i do see them continuing to not use them and just letting them sit dormant bc that side of the fandom is too dramatic.

i've said my peace on this 100 times over, but i don't mind saying it again bc it keeps happening and no one over there is getting it lol

not that i'm telling them either since most of them i have blocked or they have me blocked lmao

that side of the fandom has cried wolf one too many times and now expects snc to still listen to them. and look, back in 2020/21, maybe that would have happened. bc twitter held a lot more stock back then. but not anymore. they thought they could call out snc for every little thing and expect them to always listen and for all of the fandom to agree. and reality is that just won't fly anymore.

were there genuine reasons to call them out before in the past (and even now)? sure. i'm not here to argue that. but what i am saying is once everyone jumped over the line in the sand and started getting mean and calling them out for nonsense things, idk what you expected to happen.

it's one thing to complain about content and what's going on in it or that it's taking too long to get new content out. it's another thing to bitch about their gfs and say they shouldn't date them, or in general to bring up personal shit.

where our input starts and ends is content related, and that's it. anyone that thinks they have a say in what snc do in their own personal lives are delulu. it doesn't matter if you believe you have their best interest in mind, your input is unwanted. that's just reality.

also i think a lot of ppl on twitter think they speak for everyone in the fandom but they fail to realize that this fandom has 12 mil ppl in it (roughly). even if one of the louder fans on there has a 1000 followers, that's not even 1% of the entire fandom. that's not even .01%. that's how little the amount of ppl you speak for.

my thing is, all of this complaining and drama started in january, around colby's bday, when the pics of them with the girls leaked. and since then, this fandom and that side in particular hasn't shut up since. and look, obviously not everything is about the girls and not everyone is even complaining about the girls. i'm not trying to cast wide nets here and assume. but… be honest: yall have been complaining for WEEKS about a variety of things, ranging from them having gfs that might be clout chasers to snc not talking about a genocide, and somehow…….. i'm supposed to take any of that seriously??? snc are supposed to take that seriously??? those are two VERY different things, no?

but hey, you wanna be upset at snc for whatever reason, be my guest. i'm not here to stop you. do whatever you want. but at what point do you just accept that snc aren't gonna meet your demands and thus your only option is to leave?? just curious. and are you okay with the fact that just bc you leave doesn't mean anyone is gonna miss you, including snc? harsh reality is snc don't know who you are, and that's not bc you don't deserve to be known - they just realistically don't know you, and you leaving isn't gonna do anything.

but if you aren't enjoying your time here, leave. it's better in the long run to pay attention to something that actually brings you happiness rather than stick around and be miserable.

[lovestruckaphrodite]

Hey! I got a req, so I do a req

@smexyanimepotatosstuff here you go luv, hope you enjoy it!

~~1st person pov~~

⏳payback⏳

it's been two weeks and 4 days. 18 fucking days in total since I helped Eraser Head.

~flashback kinda thing~

It all began on a seemingly ordinary afternoon when i was going about my daily routine. As i walked down the busy streets of Musutafu, i noticed a commotion up ahead. Curiosity piqued, i quickened my pace and soon found myself at the scene of a crime, the villain known as timekeeper running away, laughing.

Eraser Head was already engaged in battle with Timekeeper when i arrived. his stoic demeanor and seemingly calm actions were evident as he tried to neutralize Timekeeper's powers.

As i watched the intense struggle unfold, a surge of adrenaline coursed through my veins. i couldn't stand idly when it was obvious that he didn't know how to defeat him! With a newfound sense of purpose, i approached Eraser Head cautiously but confidently.

"Excuse me," i called out, catching Eraser Head's attention amidst the chaos. "I think I might be able to help."

Eraser Head turned to face me, his expression a mix of surprise and curiosity, tho that was hardly noticeable through his deadpan expression. "How could you possibly assist me?" he asked, skepticism evident in his voice, tho he kept it quite monotone.

i took a deep breath, gathering my thoughts before responding.

'do i really want to do this?'

"I've been studying Timekeeper's abilities for quite some time now. I believe I have a theory on how to counteract his powers."

Eraser Head's interest was piqued. He motioned for me to continue, and i explained my theory in detail. i proposed that by disrupting the frequency at which Timekeeper manipulated time, we could potentially weaken his control over it. a simple high-frequency video on youtube, like a dog whistle would work

He listened intently, weighing the possibilities. Despite his initial doubts, he recognized the potential value of my theory.

"thank fuck,'

With no other viable options at hand, he decided to put his trust in me, knowing it might just ruin this, or finish this.

"Alright," He said, "Let's give it a try."

Together, me and Eraser Head formulated a plan of attack. While Eraser Head engaged Timekeeper in combat, I positioned myself behind a trash bin out of sight, getting ready to start the audio. The tension in the air was palpable as we executed their plan(almost flawlessly.)

As the phone emitted its disruptive frequency, Timekeeper's control over time began to waver. His movements became sluggish and erratic, allowing Eraser Head to seize the advantage. With a swift and decisive strike, Eraser Head incapacitated Timekeeper, rendering him powerless.

The battle was won, thanks to my help. Eraser Head turned to me with gratitude in his eyes, tho at the time i couldn't really see it through his deadpan smile.

"I couldn't have done it without you," he admitted, a hint of admiration in his voice. "ill pay you back soon."

~~okay back to reality~~

he said he would pay me back, yet here the fuck we are, more than a week later

honestly, i should have left him to deal with that fucker himself, rather then risk my life to help him

i sip my coffe on the couch, thinking of how dumb that really was. i could have done nothing, but no, i had to go and play hero

knock knock knock

i dont think anyone was coming over, nobody has texted me recently or anything

hesitantly, i go to look through the peephole

there, at my fucking doorstep, stoop nonother than himself, Eraserhead

'Speak of the fucking devil himself'

i open the door

"hello Eraserhead, come to pay me back?" i say with a glare looking at him.

he stands there with a deadpan look on his face. hes wearing a full black outfit, with the exception of a silver bracelet on his left wrist. is hair is up, and it really looks like he doesn't want to be here

"yeah, i guess. you should be grateful you didn't die, i shouldn't have to pay you back for your reckless actions" he says, monotone

"those 'reckless actions' saved you from a battle you couldn't win on your own. you could have died without me. you, should be grateful i helped you.'' i say with a scoff

hes seriously acting like im in the wrong here? you are the one who waited two fucking weeks to come here, and now you act like its my fault and that i did something that wasnt right?

"yes, and i thank you for that, which is why, im asking you for dinner," he says monotonously

my world stopped. like froze. what in the actual fuck just happened?

"uhm- im sorry, what?''i say, purely confused

why? why is he giving me attitude on minute and then fucking asking me out the next?

"go to dinner with me. as a thank you" he says nonchalantly

"okay okay, wait. so, you, Eraserhead, are asking me out?" i say, looking at him

"well, not necessarily, unless you want it to be like that," he says with a shrug

"huh. wow, uhm okay..." i say "When?" i say, sighing softly

"whenever you want, im free tonight," he says with a shrug

god this is so soon, too soon, if im being frank

"okay. okay, wow. pick me up at 7, tonight. ill be ready then"i say, running a hand through my hair

"alright, where something nice yeah?" he says, waving bye before walking away

i wave back, closing my door behind him

holy fuck.

that was fast. to fast. way too fast.

how did this even fucking happen?

one minute hes lecturing me for saving his ass, next hes fucking asking me out?

i check my phone

2:19

i have roughly four and a half hours until our date

is it even really a date?

no, its not. its just a dinner. with a S rank pro hero. whose life i basically saved

wow, alright

you got this [name]

its not like its new to you. just a dinner. with a hero who has most likely been with like alot of other girls.

but wait no its not like that. nope

no way he would ask me out like that. he's a hero, he probably has standards higher than the Tokyo Skytree for fucks sake. hes a very expressive man. dull, yes, but expressive. if he wanted me, (which he doesnt) he would say so. right?

~~timeskip bc its been 4 FUCKING HOURS IM SO TIRED OF THIS~~

it is currently 6:43 and im not even done getting ready.

my god this is bad

i finish getting ready as fast as possible. no im serious, i think i broke a record.

(you pick what your wearing lovelies)

i hear the doorbell ring, and i run downstairs faster then fucking sonic, opening the door and stumbling slightly

"woah there, hi" he says, grabbing me slightly so i dont fall

"hi. sorry bout that, heh"i say, standing upright again

"its fine, shall we?" he says, handing his hand out for me to take

i nod, smiling softly, taking his hand in yours, walking to his car

as we drive, the beginning was sorta awkward, but it evened out, talking and laughing he drives us

we get to the restaurant (you pick, idrc, could be Dennys if you want tbh) and get seated, ordering our food (we got the same thing as him, jus to save time ig)

talking about his job, or his cats, or my job, and my pet(s). turns out, hes not as bad as i thought. he talked about his students and his cats. maybe one day ill get to meet them

"huh, never thought i would actually enjoy hanging out with you" i say, laughing slightly, taking a bite of my meal

"i know, crazy right? That im an interesting person" he says with a small chuckle, us both finishing our meals soon after, leaving the restaurant, and starting the drive back home

he drops me off at the door of my house, smiling softly

"thank you, Eraserhead. i had fun" i say sheepishly, looking own. suddenly the floor is looking really nice

"please, call me Aizawa, and i did aswell" he says, smiling softly, looking down

"do you think that maybe...i could have your number?" i ask, looking down. yeah, thats a real nice floor...

"yeah. of course" i say, and we exchange numbers

"again, thank you Aizawa, ill see you next time i suppose," i say, leaning in and giving him a soft kiss on the cheek, before turning away and going inside the house, flopping on the couch, all giddy like

outside the now closed door, he brings a hand to his cheek in which you kissed, before turning and walking back to his car

okay holy fuck im done. i know this is bad, and kida rushed, but this thing took me 4 fucking hours. sorry it seems so rushed, im having massive writers block and i am going to jump fr/j anywyas, hope you enjoyed ig.

[amewinterswriting]

Fun Facts About Me Tag

Tagged by @ahordeofwasps - thanks, friend!

I'll leave this one as an OPEN tag because I'm not sure how many people have done this one already. So do it if you want, and have fun!

A scent you love:

Vanilla. I'm actually allergic to an ingredient in a lot of scents and perfumes so I have to be super careful about any kind of artificial scents, including but not limited to air fresheners, deodorant, body sprays, bathing products, makeup, laundry detergent, washing up liquid, scented toilet paper, scented sanitary products, scented bin bags... (I didn't even know you could get scented bin bags, that last one drove me crazy trying to work out what was setting me off). I've narrowed down that MOST perfumes/scented products from LUSH and The Body Shop are the cheapest safest thing I can use (I have also worked out that very expensive perfumes from Penhaligons or Channel don't set me off either but I'm also not made of money) The Body Shop does a very nice pure vanilla perfume that is my go to daily scent but any blend that has vanilla in is always nice. Very comforting and warm.

What's something you're looking forward to this week?

Getting any little snatches of relaxation I can now that Christmas (silly season) has started. Even if that means napping while @red-pen-ally plays chill farming games.

What's a book you're currently reading?

Unmasking Autism by Dr Devon Price. I really recommend it for fellow neurospicy folks, especially late diagnosed/high-masking folk, but it could also be a good resource for people with autistic friends or family who just want to know more about the neurotype from the perspective of people who are autistic. The book covers a lot of ground, from simply coming to terms with being autistic to exploring what life could look like if you unmask in some aspects of life and how to start going about it.

What's a game you're currently playing?

Cultist Simulator. It's a roguelike card-based narrative game where you start with nothing (except maybe a desire for some occult power) and have to create and build a cult to amass power, resources and dedicate yourself towards whatever desire you have. But you will have to manage problems such as dread, fascination, running out of money, sickness and pesky meddlers who will turn you in to the authorities for your dream crimes. And possibly all those bodies stuffed inside your cupboard. If you enjoy the narrative style of Fallen London, you'll like this.

What's the most recent movie you watched?

I realised I really don't watch many movies these days. Not really through a concentrated effort, I just never seem to find the time. However, I did recently learn that @red-pen-ally has never seen The Neverending Story, so I am definitely going to parcel out some time to traumatise her share this lovely childhood memory with her.

Are you watching anything on TV or listening to any shows?

Actively, no. The Great British Bakeoff is often on in the house, but I've not been following it super closely. If we tend to watch anything, it's usually odd videos on YouTube.

Favourite season?

Autumn. Cozy season, lots of comfy clothes, not too hot, not freezing cold, cocoa is always socially acceptable, pumpkin spice is in everything and Christmas treats start to become available.

What's something you've learned recently?

Not really learnt but had this one confirmed with science: autistic people aren't any worse at communicating effectively than allistic people (despite medical model of disability often labeling it as a communication-based disorder). Autistic people can usually communicate with autistic people just fine. Often, they can communicate with allistic people well enough, too, though this can often be very taxing as they have to translate the communication on their end. Allistic people, on the other hand, often fail to communicate effectively even with other allistic people, due to preferring less direct language and more euphemisms or talking around the subject. They also tend to draw conclusions and react based on perceived data instead of actual data. Which is wild when they label autistic folk as the one with the communication difficulty.

Have you had any water lately?

Coffee has water in it, that totally counts, right? Right?

[popculturebuffet]

This Duckburg Life Review: A decent batch of tales to hold onto.

I'm back all you happy people! Yes after a week's vacation to recharge and to pack up my room for an eventual move, i'm back, renewed and ready to get back in the game. And I decided to start with some unfinished business.

See about a year ago I did a sales drive and for each bit commissioned, you got to pick some stuff for me to review. Kev was the only one who kicked in and thus choose the Hazbin Hotel Pilot and This Duckburg Life. The first one was done back in October, alongside the helluva boss pilot in whaat was SUPPOSED to be a lead in to that series getting reviewed, but switching to a full season review and the finale of said season getting delayed constantly meant that still hasn't happened. Next pride, I promise.

As for why it's taken a year, I've kept TDL on the schedule.. but I kept having to delay it any time my blog hit delays to etiher get work I was being paid for out, or things that were time senstive. It was the easiest thing to keep pushing back, and for that I am sorry Kevin. So after Kev made me realize how much i'd been putting this off, I decided to shift the schedule slightly so I could make SURE to get this one done first and finally off my back. Granted it was one of MANY things I need to someday get to, but out of them it was the most pressing and with this it's finally done.

So for those who forgot this happened, This Duckburg Life was a podcast released on Disney XD's youtube channel and the Disney Now app. The podcast is Huey's own podcast of the same name, brodcast on Duckburg Public Radio and parodying the popular NPR radio show This American Life. I know nothing about TAL and not a ton about NPR other than it shows up in media a lot and Doonesbury's Mark Slackmeyer works there

So I really can't answer how good a parody this podcast is. What I can say is that it's a great piece of spinoff media. It's what i'd hope for from the comics: Smaller stories that still fully fit the feel of the show, but fit more into the cracks of things. Instead of you know.. this

I'm impressed this exists at all as Disney normally dosen't put in any extra effort for their Disney Channel shows, boldly assuming only kids watch them. Especially stupid here as this show got frequent interviews with entertainment weekly to hype up episodes. They rarely give their shows anything but web shorts, MAYBE a book if their very lucky, or in recent years the chibi tiny tales shorts.. which is getting a full series because god is punishing me for my hubris. I knew remaking christ the redeemer in my backyard but it's a shirtless keith david would haunt me, I just wasn't clear how.

This honestly feels like a test run, to see if more podcasts by Disney could happen. The short answer is

And the long answer is given there hasn't been any since then.. see above hard no. It was a noble attempt but while I don't mind the idea of an audio drama podcast starring these characters, there are a few obstacles in the way that are evidenced by this Duckburg life. The first is this: it's not on any podcast platforms. While i'm a guy who prefers Video Podcasts, and watches The Dead Meat Podcast and OSW Review religiously (Provided in the formers case i've actually seen the film or don't care about seeing the film), as my attention span scans better to formats where I can chonk up watching something if it's an hour long or so given both my job and my attention span (which is harder to do with podcasts when you don't have spotify and have to sit at a computer for them), so the format was fine with me.. but for the average listener they likely want to just.. listen to ducks anywhere and as far as I can tell TDL isn't on any non-video platforms. It's weridly just on Youtube, Disney Now and now Disney+. It makes access easy, but it also makes it hard to go with you and while the episodes are only 15 minutes long it basically means you have to go out of your way to just listen to it. So already Disney kind of missed the whole point and popularity of podcasts.

The other is that it requires money to do right. To this projects credit disney clearly invested some decent Voice Acting coin into it. For starters out of the main cast, ONLY Paget Brewster is absent. Why

She's just absent for whatever reason, my guess being Disney not offering her enough , bad timing or Disney purposfully asking the writers to not use Della to keep costs down. I don't know. It is a shame, though it thankfully dosen't hamper the series. At most it's just weird to here the characters not mention her.

As said though everyone else is here. The kids and launchpad get the most screentime, each appearing in about two episodes and one set of commericals for an episode, with launchpad only getting a commerical during the episode full of them. The exceptions are Huey, whose in every episode as host and the main star here, as he should be, and Louie who for whatever reason shows up the most, getting two commerical running gags, and being at the center of three episodes. Maybe it's because they knew Bobby Monihan would live forever, I dunno.

Scrooge gets a little less, only getting a starring roll in the fourth episode and cameos in the first two, but it's understandable given David Tennant probably gets paid the most out of the main cast, so Disney likely still wanted Scrooge.. but didn't want to spend more money than they wanted to. It works fine without him and as always David is a treat. Toks likewise is absent, with beakley ONLY showing up for a brief cameo in the second episode for whatever reason> Maybe they also didn't offer her the money she deserved like Paget. Maybe she just didn't want to do it. Again...

They do make up for it as supporting cast wise they get back a MASSIVE chunk of the supporting cast: Eric Bauza, Character Actress Margo Martindale, Josh Brener, Dean Jim Rash, Susanne Blaksee, Kari Whalgreen and of course, last but certainly not least, Keith Motherfucking Fergeuson as FLINTHEART GLOMGOLD!

So they got a fairly stacked supporting cast. Sadly no LIbe Bearer or Kimiko Glenn, so no Violet or Lena and thus no Huelet or Weblena content

Once again.... I have no idea why their absent, likely space or money issues. Point is even without my adopted daughters.. the cast is stilll shockingly packed and gets back to my earlier point: They likely wanted to put as much money as possible into this, and thus need to pay the voice actors the raits theyd id fir series. So while it was a decent concept it likely didn't pull the numbers to get another season nor ones for other series. But for this project they didn't cheap out for the most part, and got everyone they could back and many of them show up multiple times, mostly Keith Ferguson (who also played randy and johnny.. who knew?), Jim Rash and John Brenner.

So a combiation of poor platforming and budget mean this is a weird, one of a kind oddity in Disney's history... and I love that kind of thing. But being weird and one of a kind, while great dosen't mean quality. I mean Dan Akroyd only directed one movie but it's one where he plays a judge in heavy age makeup whose chin is designed to look like a penis, who rules over a tiny collapsed town with an iron fits and the help of his nephew played by John candy who basically kidnap Chevy Chase and Demi moore for speeding and wants to mruder them for the same and who has a giant murder carnival ride to do so, mutant grandchildren, and a room full of doll parts and gets visited by digital underground. You can say it's unique, you can say I need to review it as every deep dive into the movie i've seen has shown it to be thorughly intresting as it is crazy. But you can't really say it's GOOD? Being intresting dosen't mean being good, or even so bad it's good.

Thankfully... this series IS pretty good. The voice acting is quality as always from this series, and the writing is 100% spot on, helped by the fact the writers room includes Megan Gonzalez, who was a story assitant on the show and Benjamin Siemon who came up with stories. Both aren't what you'd call promient parts of tehs how but both did great. They wer eaided by Ben Acker, who does the thrilling adventure hour podcast and was likely brought on to get it into the podcast format and Danny Siegel who.. i'm not sure why he's here honestly. This is his only ducktales credit. But they did a great job and the show feels great as a result. The audio is crisp and the stories mostly well suited for the format: Smaller stories that possibly COULD'VE been episodes had we had more series, but still fit nicely into continuity in some vauge place and area joy to listen to.

My only real complaints are with the first episode, which we'll get to in a moment, and the visual representation. The drawings for each episode are gorgeous, as you'll see in a moment. It's clear the crew worked hard on them and they make a great poster. The problem is this is the ONLY image. They don't cycle the various images in the main image, and as such it's reptitive to watch even if your like me and play a bunch of Cowabunga Collection while you watch. Again the reason those video podcasts work better is because they have more: James and Chelsea have both the video of themselves and intercuts from the film being discussed, if possible, and OSW has footage from whatever PPV or Film's being reveiwed, animated segments nad other stuff. There's something to keep your eyes busy while your brain enjoys the content.

The other is that due to the images having to represent the entire episode it SPOILS parts and sometimes ruins the momentum of gags. Starting us off the first episode is based entirely on Launchpad's answering machine with it left up in the air why he isnt calling the kids back. Turns out he was a sleepy boy.. which is shown ON THE IMAGE FOR THE EPISODE.

It's right there! The rest of it is vauge enough it dosen't spoil any context, so it works. It wrecks the flow of the entire episode knowing this answer and makes the joke not land. That and other problems. There's some slight ones with the naratron 3000 (revealing it turns evil which while not a shock for gyro'ss thing is still about halfway into the episode) and that Louie didn't remotley check who he sold ad space too

They still hurt the episodes SLIGHTLY but both are the kind of plot turn you'd expect given the show, so it dosen't hurt them as much. And to the show's credit the next ep and the final ones don't really spoil anything, with the final one even having a misdirect.

Episode 5 though.. is a mystery. It's easily my faviorite of the episodes .. but it makes it somewhat obvious whose behind it given the suspects it shows are Flinty (with the whole gimmick being it isn't him this time), a beagle boy we never met till this episode, and ... the waddle yacht.. representing Mark Beaks. Who conspciously shows up early on. I mean I get it's more about HOW and WHY he framed Glomgold but still, make it a bit less obvious for those less observent or steeeped int his kind of mystery kay? Not everyone has watched a thousand hours of scooby doo, I get that, but even those who hadn't it's fairly obvious.

Finally for general stuff before we get to each, fairly self contained episode, we have Donald. Donald dosen't actually play a part in the any of the episodes and only reads the bumpers. To be fair, Tony again probably cost a lot, and while you know... paying him for more than this was an option, it's not a bad gag in concept, having Donald read the credits and be even more hard to listen to than ususal. It's fun enough and they even throw in a runner where Donald reacts consittently whenever Tony's own credit shows up. I missed most of these as while this gag is fine on an episoidc basis, it's understandably grating after the first few times when your binging them all at once, so I ended up usually skipping it. As I said it's good in concept, in pratice having Tony PURPOSFULLY play up the grating nature of donald's voice , something i'm normally fine with as a Donald Duck super fan, to be annoying was .. a choice.

So with that we've come to the episodes themselves. How do they stack up? Well.. hold on to your tails

Adventure Calls

I"m not one to take the side door, so i'll just come right up front and knock. This is the worst episode of the show. It's part of why I didn't watch the show as it came out as trying this episode really didn't grab me. That ended up being mistake as the show got better, but it was a mistake on whoever decided to put this episode first.

The reason dear reader.. is the gimmick. The entire episode is Huey playing back messages Louie and Dewey left on Launchpad's answering machine after needing a ride from Funzos, only to esclaate itno ab eagle boy kidnapping, a magical gauntlet resembling another certain Disney ip whisking them to tibet, warrior monks (possibly the same ones that raised Gabby, food for thought) and a wormtaur that's half man half worm.

This should all be very intresting but it's hampered by the format: we only hear about these things afterword and for laughs.. btu they just aren't that strange or epic enough. Yes our heroes getting whisked off to a monstary by a glove that reutrns to the owners after three thefts is intresting, as is a wormtaur, long may he reign, but this is a series where we've traveled into an emo tween's dreams, keith david as a horse wearing scrooge's head is a recurring extra, fought a shark made of money, had a jack and the beanstalk style adventure be simply the INCITING INCIDENT for an episode instead of anything of consequence, and Flintheart Glomgold.. just flintheart glomgold.

This stuff would make a fine adventure btu as "weird crap that happens as a joke".. it's just not weird ENOUGH. The show proper excels at weird crap that happens for a joke, and can sometimes even craft that into a heartbreaking well thought out story, like turning scrooge' shilarious weird vendetta against santa into a heartbreaking tale of two men driven apart by being very diffrent people with very diffrent goals.

So having all this relayed back to us.. just dose'nt work. The beeping of the answering machine is also REALLY annoying after the first few times and wouldv'e been better done being cell phone messages. You know same premise just update it a tad. Launchpad has a phone.. he goes through 10 a week but he defintely has one.

The other issue is this premise.. makes no sense whatsoever. See it banks on the boys calling launchpad over and over for help. Calling him the first time makes sense: Dewey wants his buddy to see his triumph..a nd then Louie likely dosen't want to get Dewey in trouble for getting thrown out of funzos, so they call Launchpad whose less liable to INTENTIONALLY rat them out or scold them.

But by the time their kidnapped by a beagle boy rideshare it makes no sense. Ther'es no mention of any handwaves like pride or anything their just calling Launchpad.. when they have Scrooge, Della, Donald and Beakley all in their phones and all far more capable of rescuing them from kidnapiing, tibetan monks or the blank white void where John Oliver filmed a season and a half of television. Like even just objectively it makes more sense to call Della to fly them as she's their mom, and while Launchpad is loveable as all hell.. she's the better pilot nad would likely bring whoever else was around. I get Dellas not in this series but like.. you can still mention her. All this could be handwaved as they coudln't reach any of them in time, they lost their numbers, Louie lost his phone and Dewey put all his contacts in as dewey, a sea monster at it with some ice cream. But instead we just get them calling the worst avaliable option so we have a plot.

The only saving grace of the episode is the commerical bumpers. Each episode has three commericals by a character promoting a new buisness... usually as it goes down hill and collapses due to their hubris. In this case it's your girl Webby, who runs a mytical creature petting zoo.. because of course Webby would have a hoard of smuggled creatures and think letting other children pet them would go well. Naturally this fails and naturally donald gets injured in his one non bumper apperance in the entire series. Still comedy gold. This episode.. is comedy copper someone left out in the rain.

Narratron 3000

As I said th efirst episode is the worst and this is where they pick up considerably. The premise is simple: Huey has Gyro as his guest (who naturally can't really tell Huey apart and is only there because he needs his ego fed once a day or it will run amok and conquer the land and gentry), Gyro tests out his new invention, a mind reading helmet, said helmet decides to eat huey's brain so she can take his body.

And gyro has to choose between saving his lab and a child's life. Suprisingly the child surives. The episode is half fun gags as everyone else tries out the helmet as Beakely in her only apperance is annoyed it reveals she's a spy.. which I figured at this point was like, on her driver's lisence or something. She's as bad at keeping a secret idetntity as fenton. Launchpad forgets to breathe and scrooge of course has even more money than we thought and Gyro wants some dammit. My faviorite was of course Glomgold, which reveals he secretly idolizes scrooge and built his life after him because ti's the only way he can feel good about himself> It's a nice bit of character depth that while clearly there in hindsight I never considered.

The other half is said brain eating near chld murder, which is fun, tense and of course ends with Gyro promoting the helmet anyway with predictable results. All in all a vast sstep up

Dewey's turn for this episode and he's naturally promoting himself, wanting a big movie roll and offering Louie as his stunt double. These adds are easily the higlight of the podcast as a whole. While the content itself is really good after the first ep, the various adds are just pure comedy and simply the character used distlled into three short gags. and it makes what the next episode is a bout entirely unsuprising.

Louie Sells Out

This is my second faviorite and has the simplist premise of the 7 episodes: Louie , still having regressed from the end of season 2 as is standard for season 3, when this likely takes place, decides to sell all Huey's broadcast space for his episode on the Duckburg Bark Beetle to whoever drives a dumptruck full of money up to the manor. He's not made of stone after all.

So the episode is Huey futiley trying to do an episode while Louie is a dick , mocking the episodes boring nature forgetting this is public radio and promising he has high standards

He does not so the episode is just a ton of fun one and done adds as opposed to the three part ones seen in other eps. This is clearly the ones they thought of , realized coudln't fill an episode and decided to put here. They are all PURE gold. We have funzos bragging that it disinfects the ballpit once a month, Randy and Johnny selling automans, of course, and Mark Beaks trying to get people to submit their inventions to him.. so he can take them. The sad part is I could see people falling for this. We also get the beagle boys promising a totally regit robberty testing service and of course my faviorite is my boy flinty, whose add for "DNA and Scrooge".. is a blatant attempt to steal scrooge's finger prints to frame him for crimes, so blatant in fact he can't resist belting it out and laughing maniacally before forgetting he hasn't done the first part yet. God I missed this man. All in all an outright classic it's only issue being Louie being obnoxious, and that's more an issue of the franchise at that point rather than thsi specific episode. Wish he'd got his compuance but the episodes funny enough I dont' care that he didn't

Ghost Library

Despite a throughly uncreative title, this episode is pure funa nd sums up a lot of what I love about this series: fresh ideas, creative settings and our heroes being creative in getting out of them, wether it's derring doo or just plain turnign the trap back on itself. Which granted also sums up why I love JoJo's Bizzare Adventure but frankly the series are both also generational sagas, incredibly weird and have been around a while so.. yeah what i'm saying is have Joesph and Scrooge meet god damn you! Also you know both rule and share some dna so .. yeah. Seroiusly though think about it Shonen Jump and Disney. Think. About. It.

Anyways the setting here is intresting: A ghost libary that contains books that were never written, the works of the greatest writers of all time.. which of course the writers coudln't reissit giving fun puns, too many to list as one gag is just Quackfaster, whose at the studio with Huey as his expert on the topic (With the audio from a recent expedition by Scrooge, Launchpad, Dewey and Webby), listing off various puns on authors for two minutes, which feels like either Susan improvising or the writers just deciding to put EVERY idea they had into two mintues and hoping we'll enjoy it while Huey slowly looses his patience. I mean it worked, I was nothing but entertained, but I also made a keith david butter sculpture of two keith david's doing the pottery scene from ghost that was eaten by a cat. I'm not anyone's target demographic.

Scrooge is here for a map HE dreamt up in a book though, but the kicker is they have to be quite vewy quite.. their hunting books. Which I do a lot but it's not in a ghost library haunted by Bird Magellian where if you talk your banished and if you stay past the 15 minute time limit, your trapped there for a hundred years. I just go to Half Price books or have Kevin mail me a box of books out of the blue that i'll be reviewing next year. you know normal things that happen to everyone.

Naturally Launchpad is just there to get thrown out, Dewey goes next after some voices irritate him into yelling, and in a nice twist as I thought he'd be the last one standing SCROOGE goes. And how Webby gets out alive and with the map is clever. She dosen't know where it is... but since the library manifests any book you think of she simply thinks up a directory to tell her, then when caught by Magiellain simply yells to get thrown out. IT's clever fun stuff... as is the end twist: Turns otu the map .. is of the Money Bin. Scrooge's greatest treasures are the ones he already has. He just didn't want to risk anyone else getting it. Granted he'll be long dead by the next time this happens, but the bin, and his legacy will outlive him so fair enough. No sense having webby have to deal with that headache. Good stuff.

The Framing of Flintheart Glomgold

Look i've been doing ducktales work for pretty much the full length of this blog. I've made it clear to the point Kev sent me some Glomgold themed mickey mouse ears that will be proudly displayed at my next home. I didn't ask for them but I do appricate the fact someone not only made these but that I have them.

Point is I love flintheart glomgold, so it's not a huge suprise for anyone who've been reading this blog a while and for those new... I absolutely love this version of the character> His over the top insane idocy is just my kind of comedy, Keith Ferguson does him well and it's a solid reinvention of the character: Since they really DIDN'T need him as scrooge's deathly serious evil counterpart, he works better as his boofonish wannabe nemisis who weirdly sculpted his life around him, has an obession with sharks, says a plan wasn't him because it was only two steps and actually worked, and is obessed with telling everyone he's scottish despite being south african. He is a delight. So an episode about Huey, easily my faviorite of the kids with Webby a close second, trying to investigate a crime that he swears he didn't commit.. I mean how could I say no.

It helps that Glomgold and Huey have barely interacted. They only ever talked in "McMystery at McDuckMcManor" and that was with a lot of other characters around. This one allows the two to actively play off each other and allows Huey to be the straight man to the deranged hurrican of a person whose turned to him for help. The fact Glomgold sought out Huey SPECIFICALLY for whatever reason only makes it funnier. It implies Glomgold KNOWS who Huey is, that he had a podcast and that he's smart. So he either remembered him from the Birthday Party or he somehow retained something in his head that isn't related to revenge on Scrooge, sharks, explosives or being scottish. And you could say "Well he's scrooge's nephew of course he does".. .but he never seems to really know them indivdiually just that their related to scrooge. So the fact the one he remembers is not the one he met first, nor the one that bested him, but the one he has had barely any interaction with... it's transcendent.

Huey at first dosen't buy it on the grounds that.. ti's glomgold. Attacking scrooge's waterpark with a bunch of leapord sharks SOUnds LIKE Glomgold, to the point his trial takes all of two minutes. It also leads to a great gag "This is a kangaroo court!" "No this is a duck court. The Kangaroo Court is down the hall"

Okay no wi'm just.. picturing the entire cast of Night Court as Kangaroos. That.. that's my headcanon now. That in this universe their all kangaroos. Your welcome. Is.. is anyone in my audience even going to know what Night Court is? I mean.. i'm even suprised I do, I just caught it on tv land.

Night Court aside, it's a fun mystery as Huey tries to unpack it as he realizes some things, like Glomgold doing app check ins don't add up. And given Mark Beaks shows up shortly into the episode to claim his check ins can't be faked, which Huey weirdly buys despite personally hating the guy and having been outright kidnapped by him, something brought up not too episodes. Only real weakness here. We also finds out Glomgold's shark guy is a girl, Sandra who Runs Sandra's Discount Sharks. I'm shocked Glomgold has anyone who likes him, even if she also thinks he's knida nuts which.. he is so fair point, but still it's kinda nice. She also cracks the case as Huey almost gives up after finding out someone used Glomgold's own gig app, made for getting henchman or doing crimes in general as you'd expect.. only to find out the sharks from Sandra's weren't the ones used and SHOCKER it's beaks. Also there's a beagle boy in there. I don't know why.

The solution is intresting though as Beaks did it because Glomgold's app was SHOCKINGLY popular. Whoever he stole it from must be proud. So this was all a scheme.. a scheme which mark gets arrested for because he was being recorded the whole time, and Glomgold.. gets re-arrested after trying his actual scheme of making sharks into butlers, having them get hired bys crooge and have htem betray him years down the line because he always goes for the obvious. Easily the best of the bunch and that's not exactly an easy thing to pull off.

Out To Lunch

This one is decent and the premise is simple: We follow launchpad on a usual day as Huey leaves a recorder on the dash to record it for his podcast. This quickly turns from Launchpad running into stop signs.. to a rom com. I mean it comes off that way at least. There's even a meet cute where Launchapd barges into the guys drivethrough, a sushi place that ook over for launchapds burtio place he's been going to since he was 13, which explains a LOT yet only gives me MORE questions about this version of his family. It's there he meets a nice guy played by Sam "Pull On My Motherfucking Beads" Rigel, also named Sam who gladly helps launchpad move on by making him sushi burtios and other fusion cusiine, with Launchpad suggesting he open his own restraunt and that he dosen't need a building. Sam disappears, so Launchpad goes looking for his lost boyfriend by going to every drivethrough.. while Sam was following him in his new food truck.. thankfully Launchpad stops before he goes into the ocean. Which somehow isn't my joke.

Seriously this whole thing is as gay as it is a rom com and I freaking love it. Flawless. no notes. Decent commerical bit about Louie's chef, kitten cleaning and old lady retreiving the kitten services. ONTO THE FINALE

Beagle Day

OUr grand finale... isn't all that grand. As the last piece of Ducktales narrative media released , for now, and the last piece of this universe till the book.. it's a bit of a let down. As the last episode of this series with far less expectations.. it's still not all that spiffy, and probably should've been placed a bit higher on the episode order.

It's not a bad episode, but not an amazing one. This one focuses on the Beagle Boys, as they stole some stuff Louie was selling for quick cash including Scrooge's Top Hat.. which he keeps the Deed to Duckburg, aka their primary goal when dealing with scrooge in. It DOES make sense as he also kept Magica quite literally close to the chest. He's the thing people are least likely to go after unless their stupid or Glomgold, which may seem like the same thing but Glomgold's level of stupidity, arrogance and determination is beyond most mortal beings.

This ep also kinda underlines why depsite the show tryign to make them a thing in season 1 the Beagles dropped off to cameos and apperances with other foes afterwords. Their not bad, they got a decent mythology, with this episode adding an annual day they celebrate Pappy taking over the town.. but at the end of the day their just thugs in domino masks. They were NEVER a threat to scrooge and are only a threat to the kids when it's a large crowd of them. It works for the comics because they reguarly raid the bin and are often used as muscle. But here they aren't really needed by any of the villians. Just for example Flintheart post ppilot usually works alone, magica has magic, Beaks has tech and for one episode Gandra, Lunaris is seperate from earth and FOWL would find them too out in the open. Character Actress Margo Martindale is FANTASTIC as ma, no question. She always is. She just got stuck with a character who really isn't necessary in the long run.

So this episode is just okay as Webby and Louie sneak in. The twist at the end that Huey's beagle expert is just a beagle boy in disguise is great, as is Webby clearly pummeling him off screen after he stries to start his own podcast.. but it's really just overal la forgetable part of a pretty solid series. While it starts and ends bumpily, this series is enjoyable, funa nd well worth a listen.

Also the last episode had one of the best bumper gags with Beaks holding Waddle Fest. You can guess both what it's parodying and how well that goes.

So sadly it's time to depart these characters again. I'll naturally see them again and again, I do plan to recap the entire series at some point, but it was nice to come back to my roots for a spell. Thanks for reading, consdier joining my patreon and you can let go of your tails now.

[alsgrid]

All the things I've learned trying to run a blog in the 2020s

In the middle of 2020, during the lockdown, I had an idea. I was going to start reviewing video games! More specifically, I was going to start review all the games that no one was talking about, the niche and weird and forgotten ones. And since I didn't have any of the skills required for Youtube, I was going to do it the old fashioned way, I was gonna start a blog!

What started out as just a hobby born out of boredom quickly became something a bit more involved. Soon enough, I was spending all my free time looking for games to review and playing them. And it was fun, for a while. But the more time I put into it, the more I realized why the blogging landscape, and internet content in general is in the state that it is.

The amount of effort I put into my articles was pretty much inversely proportional to how much attention they got. The most views I've ever gotten, by far, were on an article I wrote in a couple of hours, that happened to be on a timely subject. It was fairly angry and alarmist, which isn't my usual style, and not something that I'm particularly proud of. And it overshadowed every other piece of content I've ever written for my blog.

I could spend an entire week doing a well written, high effort review, or I could churn out 2 or 3 of these in an afternoon and rake in the views. It was never tempting for me, as I didn't care really care about making money, or even covering my expenses, but it was certainly discouraging to see that my potential audience was far more interested in the latter.

I kept doing what I wanted to do for a while, but I was already resigned to the fact that what I was writing was mostly for myself. Maybe I wasn't all that good at self advertising, maybe the theme I chose for my blog wasn't all that interesting, or perhaps I just wasn't skilled enough to make it work. Whatever the case, my brief dalliance with success was very short lived.

To cut a long story short, I ran into some financial difficulties this year, and decided it was a good time to put the blog on hold for now. I lost my old domain anyway, and I haven't written anything new for it in months, so it seems as good a time as any. I might come back to it if things change, or I might start something else entirely. Until then, I'm gonna keep writing my sci-fi story, maybe start doing some TV recaps again, but nothing too big.

To not end things on such a sour note, I'm gonna leave with with the last article I'm gonna publish(for now) for Fine Aged Gaming. It's an article I've written and re-written a bunch of times, and one I've never been confident enough to publish. It's a tad more pretentious and ambitious than what I usually write, but I think it turned out pretty interesting:

Video Games Should Stop Trying to be Art-And Start Embracing the Fact That They Already Are

[megan-loves-surveys]

#20.

If I could choose what decade I was born in, I’d choose… The 80's is fine.

The first thing I’d do after winning the lottery is… Sit back for a bit and consider how to spend it without going crazy and losing it all.

The videos that always make me laugh are… Mock The Week, I rewatch them all the time and they're always funny even if I've seen them like 10 times already.

A trend I really love is… Not sure.

One of my most original costumes was… I've never really dressed up for anything.

Between sunrises and sunsets, I prefer… Sunsets.

If for one day I could be invisible or fly, I’d choose to… Fly.

My perfect pizza looks like… Hawaiian.

I wish I had hair like… Mercedes Mone, especially when she had her long blue or purple hair. Absolute perfection <3

If I could be feared by all or loved by all, I’d choose to be… Loved I guess lol.

Once in my life, I’d like to cut my hair like… I don't want to cut my hair.

My feelings about coconut flavour are… Love it! The texture sucks, but the flavour is yummy.

One of my favorite writers is… Rachel Caine. RIP.

My favorite mode of transportation is… Car.

One of my favorite singers is… Ayumi Hamasaki.

When I go to a new restaurant and have no idea what to order I… Look at the menu and then just order fish & chips or pasta LOL.

What’s a favorite hobby of yours? Reading Wiki articles, especially about geography.

I think a good source of therapy is… Depends.

A friend who I can always be myself around is… My boyfriend if he counts.

A friend who always makes me laugh is… Ngawari.

Something helpful to lose weight is… A balance of eating healthy and working out. And the occasional splurge cos if you don't, you'll go insane.

In the shower, I like to sing… Sometimes.

The furthest I’ve ever traveled is… The UK. Literally on the opposite side of the world, takes 24 hours to get there.

The best car I’ve ever owned is… I've never had a car.

A party I had so much fun at was… David's birthday dinner.

A fear of mine is… Spiders.

My favorite season is… Summer.

If you knew me well, you’d gift me… Converse, Spotify or Steam giftcards or anything Pokémon related.

Between movies and TV, which would you prefer? TV.

A new year’s resolution I haven’t been able to accomplish yet is… I only had one and it was to keep going to the gym.

The image that best reflects my personality is… Too lazy to find one lol.

Who do you know who makes the best French toast? I don't really like French toast.

What was the last thing you ate that had cheese on it? I had mac & cheese last night.

What is your favourite pizza parlour? Pizza Hut.

Name three things you like about winter. My birthday, cute clothes and wearing Converse all the time xD

Is winter your favourite season? It's my least favourite, it sucks.

Do you know anyone whose favourite season is winter, and if yes, who? Probably.

What is the most frustrating thing that’s happened to you recently? I was on reception at work and the computer died on me - usually it's quiet and I wouldn't even get anybody coming into the office while I got it back up and running (the reception computer is old and crappy, I've been trying to convince my boss to get a new one lol). But of course this time, 4 people came in while I was trying to figure out why the computer died. I had to tell them I couldn't do anything - they were understanding except this woman who got mad at me and literally stood there tapping her foot. She was so annoying, I was more frustrated with her than the computer lol.

Are you happy today? Yeah, today was good.

Who is someone you’ve been enjoying watching on YouTube recently? I watched literally all of Matt Rose's videos last week, lol. He's so hilarious, check him out.

What’s your favorite song at the moment? Girls Aloud - Disco Bunny

Are your hands dry right now? Not particularly.

Do you own pajamas with llamas on them? No. But now I kinda want to xD

Would you ever wear hot pink cat-eye glasses? No.

What is something you’ve been undecided about recently, if anything? When I should get my hair done again - the purple in my hair still looks good, but the roots are growing out lmao.

How often do you use the toaster? Maybe once a week.

Have you ever made a dreamcatcher? No.

If applicable, what color boombox did you have as a kid? I had a stereo, it was silver lol.

Would you rather dress up as a zombie or a unicorn for Halloween? Unicorn.

Who was the last of your friends to have a baby? I think... Jennifer?

What’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve heard lately? Oh, I dunno.

Can you see snow out your window right now? It doesn't snow where I live.

What are three of your favorite things to do when it snows? -

Have you ever contemplated shaving your head, and if so, why? Hell no.

What types of cancer are in your family? None. Thank god.

What color socks are you wearing? None.

Which cartoon character looks the most like you? None, lol.

Which family member did you get your height from? Both sides, cos I'm short and both of my parents are too. It's funny though cos my Uncle on my Mum's side is over 6 foot, but my Mum is 5'4" lol.

Do you believe in the supernatural? No.

What color looks the worst on you? Pink tbh.

What year were you born? 1987.

Do you own a pair of plaid pants? Yes.

Which TV channel did you watch the most as a kid? TV2.

Who is your favorite cousin? Patrick, he was always cool and nice to me.

Do you prefer black tea, herbal tea, or green tea? I don't like tea.

What do you think of hypnosis? Do you believe in it? I think it's kinda cool even if it's not really real.

What’s your favorite fast food restaurant? KFC. I could eat that shit all the time LOL.

What would a Lisa Frank version of you look like? No idea.

If you had to choose a country to live in besides your own, which country would you choose? UK. Or maybe Australia, next door to home.

What’s the most dangerous thing that’s happened to you recently? Recently? Um... hmm.

What color ink did the last pen you wrote with have? Blue.

Have you ever had a friend with the same name as you? Yes, a few actually. Spelt the same, cos there's lots of different spellings.

Do you think you look better with long hair or short hair? Longer.

What are three things you are thankful for? Jon Moxley, my boyfriend and music.

What did the last mask you wore look like? It was likely my Mox mask, it's orange and black and has Mox's skull logo on it.

Did you wear a mask today? No, I haven't worn one since 2022!

Have you ever ridden in an ambulance? Yes.

Do you ever find youtube’s video recommendations annoying? Yeah, especially when they recommend shit I already watched.

Which did you have first: Myspace or Facebook? I never had Myspace, so Facebook.

What color was your nursery when you were a baby? No clue.

Do you prefer canoeing or kayaking? Never done either.

When was the last time you went kayaking? -

Do you have anyone you can trust? Yes.

What color is/was the last carpet you sat on? Dark blue.

Do you have a rug in your room? I do, it's super soft, I love standing on it for no reason xD

What was the name of the first college dorm you lived in? -

When is the next time you will take a shower/bath? Which one will you take? Tomorrow, probably, after work.

Are you currently waiting on someone to do something for you/to you? Only to talk to David about the IPW show, but it's not till Saturday so I have time still.

As a child, did you ever get the chance to go to Disney World/ Disneyland? No. I live in New Zealand, nowhere near them lol.

What state do you live in? What’s the best aspect about this state? -

Are you someone who is really committed to politics in your area/ country? Politics is boring, the only time I pay attention is when it's election time.

When was the last time you were on a boat? Where did you travel on it? Lemme think... it was definitely in the USA, probably going to the Statue of Liberty haha.

Are you planning on going anywhere with someone, sometime today? Nowhere exciting, I just walked to the takeaways with my Mum earlier.

Does your family ever have any kind of weird traditions in your house? Depends what you consider weird.

When is the next time you will attend a family reunion? Where will it be? I won't, lol.

Do you have any friends who act like they don’t know you in public? No. Pretty shitty of friends to do that.

Do you like cereal? What would you consider your favorite kind of cereal? Love it! My fave is Sultana Bran prob.

Do you find your school to be loaded with hot guys or not so much? -

If you have siblings, have they moved out or do they still live with you? I'm an only child.

Do you ever actually like going to Wal-Mart or is it regularly boring? We don't have it in NZ.

Do you know anyone who has or has had any kind of mental illness/ disorder? Oh definitely.

[theghostpinesmusic]

Alright, so this is my last Euro tour write-up, from the last show of Euro tour! I've had a lot of fun doing these jam write-ups over the last few weeks, which kind of surprised me at first, to be honest. Once I share my thoughts on a few of the jams from December's Goosemas run, I'll probably keep doing these, but do less of them (at least until the band starts touring again). Maybe I'll pick some favorites from earlier in 2023? Maybe I'll pick some favorites from shows I've personally attended? If anyone has a request, send it! I can't guarantee I'll get to it, but it would be fun to have audience participation.

Some relevant history: way, way back in the day, I had a Phish show review blog where my stated mission was to listen to and review every show of "Phish 3.0" (basically every show they've played since 2009). I wrote reviews in the blog from 2013 until 2018, and covered most shows up through the band's 2017 summer tour. It was a lot of listening and writing about one band. Maybe obviously in retrospect, what ended up happening was that the constant hyperfocus on Phish and essentially listening specifically to rate each show relative to the others ruined the music for me. I'd been seeing as many Phish shows as I could afford from 2009 through 2016, but by 2017 the music all sounded same-y to me (hint: it wasn't), and so I only saw one run apiece in 2017 and 2018 and then didn't really listen to anything from the band again until 2021. Nowadays, I'm enjoying the band that was my lodestar musical obsession for fifteen years of my life in moderation, but for a long time there I'd sabotaged my own enjoyment through hyperfixation and an insistence on comparing every song and show to every other song and show.

Long story short, for a guy who was born way too late too the Grateful Dead in their prime and slightly too late to see Phish in their prime, over the last four years Goose has become the band I was actually born at the right time for (if that makes sense). As such, I've always been really careful to not "burn out" on them by listening too much, by writing too much about them, and/or by endlessly comparing songs, shows, jams, etc. I was a little worried when I started writing these posts that I was taking the first step down a counterproductive path, but so far, like I said above, it's been fun. I've been trying to approach particular jams instead of entire shows or tours, and to write focused not on the question of "Is this good or not?" but instead on the question "What do I like about this?".

I think that might be a good change to make in areas of my life outside of my Goose fandom, too, but I digress...

Anyway, today's jam/video is a two-parter because that's how the person who posted this video on YouTube chose to do it (in case you didn't figure this out yet, I don't post the videos to YouTube myself, I just find them and write about them). It's a bit like the "The Whales"/"Butter Rum" Thekla post I already did, except this time around the jam comes out of the first song ("Hungersite" while it's the second (and third?) songs that are almost entirely composed rather than improvised.

So, "Hungersite" first. This tune is probably the closest thing Goose has had so far to a radio "hit." They even made a live-action, Office Space-themed video for it, like it's the 90s! It is a catchy-ass song, but it's also chock full of the weird, abstract lyrics and (post)modernist imagery that Rick likes to write so much (and that I like to hear so much).

"Hungersite" has been a jam vehicle for the band basically since it was introduced (2/26/22 first time played), but I feel like it started getting really out there frequently in 2023. The version from the Capitol Theater run in March was an early introduction to the (in my opinion) new tier of improvisation the band discovered this past year, and pretty much every version for the rest of the year that wasn't played at a festival show (fourteen in all!) was incredible in its own way.

I'd say this London version is actually one of my least favorite "Hungersite"s from this year, actually, and that's saying something considering how good it is. Maybe I'll cover some of the others some other time...

Now that I've done such a good job of selling the London "Hungersite," let's get into it!

While I won't wax poetically at length about the song proper here, I particularly love Jeff and Trevor's contributions to the composed parts. All the parts are well thought-out and it really feels like a great indie rock song that stands just fine on its own without a jam.

At the 3:45 mark, the song has a neat, built-in, very Phish-y guitar peak that I (and most people in the crowd on any given night) always look forward to, though now it's hard for me to hear it without thinking of Trey playing it at Radio City.

We return to the chorus one last time after this (love Peter on the organ here!), and then we get a reprise of the song's main riff at 5:25 that leads into the jam proper 5:55.

I might be hearing things here, but in this version it sounds like Rick changes the key of the jam right away, rather than staying in the song's key for any length of time. Regardless, the rhythm section drives things here initially, while it feels like Rick and Peter are both kind of circling each other, feeling things out.

Rick asserts himself a bit more starting at 7:30, and if you listen enough to actually hear Trevor (obligatory mix complaint!) you can hear him and Rick playing off each other here.

Right as things are starting (to me) to sound a little rote, Ben shifts up the beat to something more driving, and that pushes everyone to reconfigure a bit. Some tasteful shredding from Rick ensues. I love the blues riffing at 10:15 in particular.

Rick backs off at 11:05, and we quiet things down a bit. Peter jumping over to the clav over this driving beat is a perfect move, sending the whole jam into a much murkier space. I love how the lighting changes here to suit the sound, too.

The wall of sound that Peter is kicking up between his clav playing and his synths really starts to take center stage around 13:30. I feel like a lot of the jams I write about here feature Rick front and center (and, to a degree, that's because most of Goose's jams do feature him front and center), but I think this is a great example of how he can play rhythm and/or add effects to someone else taking the lead (Peter here, but Trevor too at other times). In fact, a lot of my favorite Goose jamming tends to have Rick in this "support" role, mostly because he's really good at it, but also because it usually means that they're heading somewhere weird and new.

Somewhere around 15:00, this jam turns into a full-band collaboration on a level that all of the best jams do, and then the shit that Rick starts playing at 16:00 just melts my brain and I die.

Okay, I'm being a little hyperbolic here, but this is what I often refer to in my setlist notes as "that baroque shit" and I am fully a sucker for it.

He returns to this riff a few more times (a la the Manchester "Thatch"), and the rest of the band rides the absolute groove they have going into the ground in the meantime. You know it's a good jam when the back-of-the-house camera is visibly shaking up and down.

Rick hits the riff one more time at 20:16 and then it's full steam ahead to an absolutely enormous peak. Unlike a lot of the other jams I've covered recently, "Hungersite" jams tend not to return to/reprise the song proper at the end, so we just crash to a triumphant halt at 21:10 and softly transition out of the noise and reverb into "Seekers On The Ridge Part One."

I don't want this post to get obnoxiously long, but I want to write a short thing about "Seekers." If you don't already know, Goose has a whole pile of songs that contribute to a larger mythology/legendarium (think Phish's Gamehenge, but less goofy). Of the ones I can think of off the top of my head, most of the songs that fit into this sub-oeuvre tend to be more prog-rock-style in their composition, and the lyrics vague, mysterious, and more than a little Joseph-Campbell-esque. I don't write about most of these tunes because, with the notable exception of "Elmeg The Wise" (which I'm sure I'll get to someday), they aren't typically songs that get jammed out. That said, "Seekers" is included in this video, and it's one of my favorite non-jammed things the band plays regularly, so I thought I'd share.

There are two "parts" to the song, and they have almost always been played back-to-back, though they've been separated on a few particularly memorable occasions. There's no long-form improvisation in either part, so everything you're hearing (except for the occasional, brief solo) is entirely composed. I don't have much else to say other than that if you've come this far in reading, you should give the rest of the video a listen!

I absolutely love the chorus to the first part. Peter's piano chords and Trevor's bassline just make it absolutely epic-sounding, especially in person. In fact, I'm tempted to say that Trevor is the MVP of the "Seekers" songs in general. I also never get sick of hearing the transition between the two parts (happens here at 27:30). Peter's Vibe tone at the beginning of the second part (similar to what he plays on "Red Bird") really makes it work.

Rick takes one solo during "Seekers," at in this version it's at 29:55. Sometimes this solo is kind of muted and sometimes he just rips it, presumably depending on his mood. This time, he chooses violence.

And that's all I'm writing about (for now, at least) from Euro tour. It feels like a nice, contemplative note to go out on. Next time, it's Goosemas: In Space!

[tiny-tigers]

✨ Omg belgian chalamet noooo - somehow even worse because his baby face makes him look even younger than 24?! 😳

Instead of thinking about Dec as a 'jacky thing' maybe make it a friendship/English thing - you'll be back here with your girls! You can explore Leicester a bit more, get some cute xmas decs, I'm sure there will be xmas markets of some kind by then! ❄️🎁🎄🍷

New projects are good! I think making one of those projects a fitness goal would help your mental health so much! It's done wonders for me! I personally like lifting weights and I'm slowly getting back into my running - but a friend of mine recently recommended a YouTuber called 'grow with jo' who does these free aerobics videos lasting anywhere from 15-75 mins long and omg they are addictive! She is an actual angel and I am hooked - they get you properly sweating but don't actually kill you? 😆

I'd start doing 3-4 of those a week - all completely free - and you will feel the difference in no time! 💖

It is true that 'this too shall pass' covers both sadness and happiness, but instead of dwelling on the happiness ending, just focus on how good it is when you have it, and how it will always come back around again.

[I apologise if anything I say doesn't help or resonate - but I am quite happy by nature so I don't find myself dwelling on the bad times too much because I know they're only fleeting]

What am I scared of? Well I'm a massive over thinker and have talked myself out of so many things over the years - I've also been a bit of a perfectionist my whole life so have been reluctant to start things as I know I wouldn't be great at it straight away and that bothers me - which is ridiculous I know. But I'm working on both! Going to start throwing myself into things even if I'm scared or worried about not getting it right first time...!

I can still totally seeing you living in the UK one day, even if its not right now! Maybe look into museum/gallery/archive work in London anyway? Until then I would maybe focus on what you're already good at! Your drawing for example - have you ever thought about setting up a separate insta page for your art? People get massive followings from that now and go on to sell copies of their work on Etsy etc.? And if you don't fancy that then you could set up a 'sporting' YouTube account - I've seen your edits, they're really very good. You could earn ad revenue from that?? [you'd have to maybe make videos of players/teams you're not in love with but you could do that! 😜]

Whatever it is you end up doing - it needs to be for YOU! No plans with Jacky in the back of your mind. Do what is best for Amelie. The second you start prioritising yourself and focusing only on you, doors will magically open up for you.

💖💖💖 sending so much love 💖💖💖

*2024 is YOUR year*

P.S apologies for the length of this 👀 and for going all therapist on your ass 😆😭🙈

Speaking of which, I need your advice because in 2 weeks I'm invited to my ex-job christmas party (sounds weird). He will be there and idk if I should go.... It feels awkward on so many levels, I loved them and maybe it will be seen badly not to got and less connexions for future works but???? Idk I'm lost

very much aware he shouldn't be my priority and yet again I'm planning on watching 31 match...

We should do some missions and challenges when I'm abroad if you are ok to give me some ideas

like idk eat something new , talk to one stranger... Those kinds of challenges to make this trip more unusual without any plans but only surprises so no deceptions.

___

ah well forget it now I guess.....

:/

and I cannot live in England without visa and they are impossible to get.

[spaceageloveblog]

Life's too short.

Woke up early for my Sunday morning run, 5:30a. First long run of my 12-week half-marathon training program. The next 10 Sundays will all be longer.

Make coffee, use the bathroom, weigh-in. Somehow I'm 5 lb. heavier than I was on the first of the month. Darn. I have been overdoing it on the cheese. On the other hand, on that particular day I weighed in pre-lunch after sweating in the sun. So maybe it's not that bad.

Do Wordle, do Connections, coffee is ready. Lounge on the family room sectional, sipping coffee. Start to go through the rest of my normal routines. Already made my running playlist last night, a few songs from my favorite The xx album, then the entire Romy album which I listened to for the first time on Friday, then "Gosh" by Jamie xx. 59 minutes, perfect length for a 6-mile training run.

Open my computer, update my tracking sheet, only thing left to track is sleep. Mark "1" because I had to wake up in the middle of the night to pee. Blame it on the late dinner. Didn't finish until 9p, I like to finish by 8p at the latest, preferably earlier.

Ate dinner late yesterday due to a miscommunication we had. Asked her if she wanted to go out. There was food in the fridge for the kids, and they'd be happy to spend the evening at home playing video games and watching YouTube. She couldn't think of anything she wanted. We went back and forth for a while, and it seemed to me she was on the precipice of accepting one of my restaurant ideas but always stopped short.

And then for the next 2 hours there was a series of phone calls she made or received, I don't know for sure. I halfheartedly tried to get her attention but no success. Finally at 8p she was free and figured I'd already ate. I said I was waiting for her. She asked why. I'm like, would you have just eaten dinner without me on Saturday while I was on the phone?

She said fine, let's go out. We got in the car. Started to drive. Want do you want? Not that hungry she said, maybe she won't eat. Huh? How about the Greek place, I said. Sure, she said. We started to have an actual conversation about her work stuff. Feels normal. It's been a normal Saturday, things are fine. Pull into a parking spot. Are you just going to get takeout she asks, can I just wait in the car? I'm like, what? I don't want takeout that bad. Let's go somewhere else. She doesn't want to go anywhere she concedes.

In fairness to her, I've been obnoxious about dinner recently because we haven't been drinking alcohol. That is, I've been making every dinner out into a referendum on drinking. Analyzing, complaining, etc. So she admitted she wasn't really interested in having dinner with me lately. I drove us home, heated up some leftovers for myself and we didn't talk the rest of the night.

Watching YouTube while sipping my coffee in the morning, trying to wake up and prepare myself to run. Figured I should get off the couch around 6:30 or 6:45 to beat the mid-September Central Florida heat, but it was just before 7 and I was still watching Sopranos clips. She woke up and poured herself a cup of coffee. Great, I thought, I'm going to get up right when she sits down and she'll think I'm avoiding her, which I'm not. But instead she avoided me by taking her coffee and sitting outside.

So I did get up. Brushed my teeth, washed my face, got my running gear on, opened the slider to the back patio slightly, told her I was going to run, love ya. Love ya too.

A few miles in, Romy transported me to another place. The sound of her new album reminded me of Ibiza. Simpler times. Happier times. Well, now that I think about it, I remember we fought there too. I think it was about me staying out too late the first night and ruining the first beach day. But I wasn't thinking about that on my run. Just the warm sun, the cold Mediterranean water, the dance clubs, the music.

Romy sings to presumably her partner about not needing to be so strong. It makes me want to communicate more clearly that although I seem like I have it all together, I don't. But I need to be strong for her and the kids. I want to believe she'd welcome me being vulnerable with her, but that doesn't always go so well. Usually it's in money conversations that I express vulnerability. But I think she interprets it as accusations and she feels guilty about her spending. Maybe if I was vulnerable about life and happiness it'd go better?

Romy sings about advice she receives to enjoy your life. That what's our life has been missing, joy. Too much of a slog lately. I come back from my run inspired to talk to her. After I get out of the shower I sit next to her in silence as she watches Say Yes to the Dress and I reread my notes on the Courage to be Disliked. After a few minutes she gets up, turns off the TV and leaves the room. I keep reading. All problems are interpersonal problems, discard other people's tasks, seek community feeling.

I decide to to tell her I'll join her and dad at BW3 to watch football after church. They had planned to go watch the Bengals. That's another sore subject. It's annoying she cheers for the Bengals. But maybe I should chill out and accept it. I mean, I should have a long time ago. The Steelers will be on TV too, and we could all watch the games. I could drink beer again, life's too short.

But my conversation doesn't go like it did in my head. She says I probably shouldn't go because she's going to watch the Bengals and it's a bar. And I sort of dropped it.

We drive separately to church because our daughter needs dropped off at a friend's after. So I leave 15 minutes early with my oldest son to practice his driving in the elementary school parking lot that's on the way to the church. My son and I get to church first. She shows up a few minutes later in a Bengals T-shirt and earrings.

Church opens with a testimonial about joy. I start to reflect about how have I arrived at a place in my life where I will be spending Sunday morning with my family at church, but then skip watching football and drinking beer. That would be the opposite of joy. I want my life to be the new Romy album not the new Spanish Love Songs album.

So I rehearse a redo of the conversation I had earlier with her. I will listen and hopefully end up in a place where I say I'll drop our daughter off then meet everyone else at BW3. But it doesn't go that way. My oldest says he's so excited for B-Dubs. He'll ride with me. I say I'm taking our daughter to her friend's. He said that's OK. I say I might not be going to B-Dubs. I ask her if the boys will ride with her. She says whatever. They do. My daughter and I go our separate way. Conversation was over before it started.

I drop my daughter off. Think for a moment of just going to B Dubs, ordering a beer and sitting at the table with them. But I chicken out. Decide I'll grab myself a healthy lunch at Bolay then go Publix to get stuff to cook for dinner tonight and tomorrow. Might as well do something useful while I've gotten myself into this quagmire.

In line at Bolay, after the sweet potato noodles and kale salad are already in my bowl, and I am waiting to give them my vegetable selections, she texts me and asks me if I'm coming and need a seat. I said no thanks, I will get lunch on my own. She said she missed me. I said I missed her too.

Listening to Ryen Russillo's podcast driving from Bolay to Publix. He's recounting his trip to Europe last month--Barcelona and Ibiza--coincidental timing to my thoughts from the Romy album. I am picturing myself doing this solo traveling. Lots of eating dinner at the bar. It sounds fun but I'd want a drink. It was at this precise moment that I locked in on life being too short, and not drinking was creating more problems in my life than drinking was.

I have stopped looking forward to things. Not just tangible things like a dinner out or a weekend away, but also hypothetical things, like I couldn't picture a hypothetical trip to Mallorca without relaxing at the end of the evening with a nice meal with a nice drink. So much of life is just our internal thoughts and daydreams, and I am having a hard time envisioning future good times because I picture myself actively avoiding drinking, ruining the good times. Even when I drive by hole-in-the-wall local restaurants, thinking maybe we should explore that place, then I picture ordering ice water and the fun thought goes away. Life's too short, I should let myself have a drink every once in a while.

Maybe I will fail by reintroducing alcohol due to my all or nothing personality. That is, I say I want to be able to drink when situationally relevant, but that leads to 3 beers at home on a Tuesday. But I have to try, because I am being a miserable person. And I can watch all the online content creators that gave up drinking and they're probably right, but they replaced it with other things in life. I would like to replace it with hiking and biking and kayaking. But she is not interested in that. She is interested in date nights on Park Ave and weekends at the beach and vacations in Europe. And I'm interested in those things too. But she is OK with those things without alcohol, and I am interested in those things if I can have a couple beers with dinner.

She texts me again and ask where I am. I tell her Publix, getting something to grill for dinner. She says OK. I tell her maybe I will stop by for the second half if the Steelers can score a few points, per the ESPN app on my phone, they're down 20-0 at this point. I add "lol" to the end of my text message response. Steelers snag a TD right before the end of the first half on my way home. I drop the groceries off and head to B-Dubs to watch the second half.

By time I arrive, the second half has already started and the Steelers have already given up another TD. She's in a booth, with her dad and stepmom all in Bengals gear. My boys are there too. Youngest playing on his phone, oldest engaged with the Steelers game but frustrated in lighthearted way. The Bengals aren't playing well either. They'd end up losing by 21, the Steelers by 23. Before that, while her stepmom wondering aloud if she should complain to the waitress about the $2 upcharge for celery that she wasn't aware of, and I introduce her to the concept of "charge it to the game" which I don't think she understands.

While they still talking about the bill, I get up, head to the bar and order a Heineken draft. I come back to the table and say "life's too short" probably more under my breath than actually out loud, and drink the beer.

[letrashbag]

I woke up at like 5:30-6 this morning and then I spent 2 hours cleaning my whole house, which is so therapeutic I cannot even, but now its like 10 o'clock and I have nothing to do.

Anybody else ever get that feeling of something just like itching in your skin so you have to do something, but the second you try doing anything it just gets so much worse. I am barely holding it together right now, actively typing this.

I can't watch youtube videos (short dumb videos aren't engaging enough and long serious videos are too engaging), I can't listen to a podcast (I need something to do physically with my body and the thought of listening to something while doing something else sounds like actual torture right now), I can't draw (I need to be listening to something and again the idea of having more than one thing take my attention sounds miserable), doom scrolling is out (I already reached my end point for tumblr and going down any other rabbit holes will only last a couple of minutes before I'll reach the point of wanting to tear my hair out), there's nothing I can clean or organize that will take enough effort to engage me but still be quick enough that I'll feel a sense of accomplishment for, I can't read an online comic because the words are so small and my eyes hurt, I can't read my webtoons because it's been a while since I've read anything and the idea of having to catch up sounds exhausting, any shows or movies I could watch are either too new and would take emotional effort to get invested in or are too familiar and won't be stimulating enough.

Basically I'm gonna die.

There are literally a million things I could be doing, and the idea of doing any of them sounds absolutely miserable. But I'm barely staving off the rising pressure by typing this out and I know the second I stop it'll creep up and I'll die.

Maybe I could go running? Except then I'd have to change clothes and my exercise clothes are disgusting. I can't do laundry cause my family's dryer is broken, so I can't wash my clothes yet. I also can't wash my towel so I can't take a shower.

Ugh, my hair is so disgusting right now. I have it all tied up in a weird way so that I don't rip it out of my scalp. I can't wait until I can shave my head, then I won't have to worry about this.

So I can't do my self care activities, and I can't accomplish a task that is very important to my everyday functions, and that's breaking me brain.

Noted.

Maybe when I rant like this I'll figure out what makes me feel this way.

I'm so tired, I want to take a nap, but I know I won't be able to fall asleep. I want to clean some more, but there isn't anything for me to do really. Especially since I have family members out and about getting in the way. UUUUUUUUuuuuuuuuuuugggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

It's fine.

I'm fine.

I'm doing great.

I'm losing my mind.

Maybe I should write poetry? I haven't done that in a while. But it sounds too involved. I already drew a bunch of angsty stuff after the fight with my mom. We're both just ignoring it by the way. I'm avoiding her as much as I can without making it obvious, and neither of us are addressing it. I only have one more week and then I'm gone. I'm so excited to leave.

Okay, I think this is it.

My brain is giving up on me.

I knew this wouldn't last forever, but it lasted for a bit, and for that I am grateful.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Okay, I'm done.