#it just looks a bit shit to have a bunch of unrelated art in the same post

[54bpm]

Begging the artists joining the platform to not post all their art in the same posts in dumps, give them each their own post and put them in the queue. They will perform SO much better that way.

[ohnoitstbskyen]

what;s your thoughts on ionia if you have any? from a design perspective? I personally feel like ionia lacks design coherency, and kind of forces a bunch of unrelated design elements into what is suppose to be a single nation.

I feel pretty mixed. The concept art and conceptual ideas behind Ionia's aesthetics are genuinely beautiful - if you check the Universe page for the art, you'll find some visual absolute bangers.

One of the major ideas of Ionia is the idea that people live in symbiotic harmony with nature by way of magic and spirit magic, and one of the very clever ways this is reflected is that Ionian buildings are not built by felling trees, but by asking trees to arrange themselves into structures that buildings can be built around, in return for the occupants nourishing and honouring the tree that shelters them, which is a super cool idea and genuinely comes across in a lot of the region's concept art:

And the artists at Riot explored some genuinely incredibly creative visual ideas for the aesthetics of the region that draw from various fantasy aesthetics without feeling like it's merely regurgitating lesser imitations of Chinese, Korean or Japanese fantasy. Like, it does at least try to imagine and synthesize something novel out of its influences, mixing stark rocky environments with impossibly vibrant nature colors to create the sense of a dreamlike, shifting landscape, something that makes sense in a region defined by a living environment animated by magic. Plants and rocks flow into one another and merge, rock formations sprout like trees, the boundaries between land and life blur.

Unfortunately, outside of the concept art, Ionia really is just treated as Magic Asia: The Region. China, Korea and Japan, with sometimes a bit of south and south-east Asia conglomerated in there, it's all just mushed together into one homogenate; and that rankles a bit in a game that devotes four entire regions to various flavors and time periods of Europe Shit.™

And that's where your complaint comes from, I think. Ionia is a big soup of pan-Asian fantasy tropes all packed into a single compressed region, where none of them really have enough room to define themselves, and it leads to a lot of incoherency. Wukong is drawn straight out of Wuxia, and he runs around alongside a Batteries Not Included minor Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle villain-looking cyber samurai in Master Yi, a samurai-ninja in Shen, a Korean kumiho in Ahri, a fantasy Yakuza in Sett and random spirit creatures like Treebeard On Weed Ivern and Disney Princess Bambi in Lillia. It's messy.

It could be genuinely brilliant, I think, if Riot committed more to inventing their own mythology and aesthetic here, rather than merely reproduce pop-culture tropes and archetypes, but we're 150 champions deep in this now and I don't think there's much chance they'll pivot at this point.

[weonbullshit]

Here comes the writer's rant!

Y'all, the writer's block is BLOCKING. I have a chapter ready, but I haven't posted it because I can't figure out a middle part so I can get where I wanna go. I tried to write a little bit of 'WWH' to get a feel for Rescue Bots again, but nothing's coming. And my art looked like I took a fat shit on the paper!

The only thing I managed to write were a bunch of unrelated one shots that won't be shared here, and I crocheted a big granny square using some scrap yarn.

But I want to get to the cool parts of my story! I just don't have any idea what to do? Could anybody hash out some ideas with me or something?

It's also stressing me out because I want to finish the fic, make a final version and and convert it to my own novel series. I want it to be my debut, but I'm not sure that's gonna happen.

Or maybe I'm getting too far ahead of myself. What I really need to focus on is not failing my midterms. 😬 I can't be a freshman three semesters in a row guys, but it ain't looking too good.

[rainworldvent]

unrelated to the other anon that complained about the rw official discord, but even as an inactive user of that place, i have very similar and very fucking Livid complaints about the discord but more in-depth.

first: the separation of dlc and vanilla content. i understand it for the sake of organization but at this point why not just fucking merge the two, it’s clearly much more of a hassle to keep up than is worth. the new downpour role, imo, is only going to cause issues because discord community features aren’t all that straightforward (and iirc don’t fully work on some devices? might be mistaken on that) to some people — and the staff are GOING to have even more issues directing people to the role selection area.

second: apparently the reasoning behind the ban of all caterators and the very mention of catboys is because people commenting on art can’t control their fucking dicks? imo, that feels more like blaming the artist than the viewer than anything else, if the viewer associates even stuff that has innocent intent with suggestive — NOT NSFW — work. (can we also talk about the harassment against the artist of that? i don’t have a solid source for it but i’ve heard it’s pretty severe.)

third: bit of a smaller point, but i genuinely feel like the discord harbors underage users with how concerned the staff are about controlling the server. i may be looking too deep into it, however. regardless, almost every single ban reason i’ve seen is fucking ridiculous. i heard of an incident where a bunch of rain escape users were banned from maincord because of ALLEGED nsfw behavior from someone in rain escape, but i’ll have to investigate that a little myself at some point

fourth: this part is a bit more personal, but i fucking hate how concerned people are about spoilers. you shouldn’t be in a game’s discord if you haven’t played the goddamn game. this is why forums need to make a comeback. (besides i don’t get the worry about spoilers when one of the roles is called “ascended”…)

tl;dr the place is just like… horribly run and desperately needs improvements. or, alternatively, go the preferable route and dissolve all game discords. bring back forums. holy shit. this would solve everyone’s problems

📰

[thedreadvampy]

idk man sometimes I'm just so so so so angry that I was so consistently treated as a sexual object as a teenager (by people my own age and by adult men) and so consistently judged in terms of my looks and performed sexual availability and now that's affected. everything. about how I see myself and how I expect to be seen. and I find it so difficult to believe or understand that people might like me as a human person. or that it's possible for people to find me attractive AND unrelatedly like me for my personality or ways of thinking or interests and not just. like me instrumentally.

like sometimes my partners or my friends will compliment my looks or something I do for them and even though I KNOW VERY WELL that they like ME the HUMAN PERSON for NON-INSTRUMENTAL REASONS there's always a little gremlin in my brain that's like see? this is the reason they like you. because you are sexually appealing or because you're useful. those are the valuable things.

like lately my partners have been very effusive about my looks. and they are correct I am extremely hot and pretty and cool. I also feel p good about how I look lately. it's just weird that my brain is like ah. you are pretty. solved the mystery. that means that's the only reason people like you.

no brain that's stupid. that's not what that means. it's not an either/or situation a person can be attractive AND useful AND likeable for many other entirely unrelated reasons. the fact that my partner likes that I look great in fishnets doesn't. undermine or counter the fact that they like that I make stupid jokes about Tim Curry and give impassioned monologues about art criticism. the fact that my friend appreciates that I make time to check in on them when they're ill doesn't mean they don't like me for my extended Roger Hallam bits. I don't know why my brain thinks I have to pick a singular reason. I like other people for a billion different reasons. but I can only conceptualise myself as a one dimensional character in other people's lives and I resent that a bunch. fuck you, people who made me feel that way. fuck you for making me feel like a prop in someone's misogynistic-ass understanding of themself. fuck you for spending like a decade of my life encouraging me to think the only way someone could find me attractive or valuable was by ignoring every part of me that wasn't about them. it is taking SO MUCH WORK to let people love me properly and to not feel terrified of people I care about finding me beautiful or attractive or useful because that would mean I'd have to be ONLY those things for them to love me. that's just not true.

idk I can't sleep and my therapist is sick this week so my brain is whirring. but twice this week my partners have made a comment about finding me sexy and I've caught myself reacting by trying to shut down every other part of myself. because if they find me sexy it MUST mean that all they want from me is Be Sexy. and that's not just untrue it's also wildly unfair on them, people who I KNOW aren't that shallow and are interested in me as a messy weirdo who is their friend as well as a Sexy Lady. like they don't want me to shut down all the Insufficiently Sexy Personality Traits! they did not ask for that! I think my partners are beautiful and sexy and I ALSO think they're fun and weird and interesting and complicated and emotionally important and those things. aren't in conflict with each other AT ALL. so I genuinely don't know why my brain thinks they can't possibly coexist when it comes to me.

but on some level it's like. somebody acknowledges that they find me sexy or useful and the paranoid bit of me is like AHA. I KNEW IT. THAT'S WHAT THIS WAS ALWAYS ABOUT THE REST IS LIES.

bc tbh when I was like. 14-20 let's be honest that was the case the majority of the time. like my experience is that people will pretend to be your friend for months or years and then turn around and pull the ACTUALLY I HAVE CONCEPTUALISED YOU AS MY DREAM GIRLFRIEND shit and if you refuse to be sexually available or useful then the friendship. was never real. and that's been so much the majority of my friendships and relationships through very formative years and now it's just SCARY like if someone expresses that type of attraction I'm like AHA THE MASK IS OFF THE TRUE MOTIVES REVEALED.

even though I know. I KNOW. that this isn't true and I have real friendships and real relationships now.

(also btw you know the most frustrating part is like. I'm not even that hot. like I'm for sure a smokeshow for a very specific set of tastes (gay) and I'm p confident about how I look like. big titties pretty face great skin cool aesthetic. solid 8. but I'm not exactly startlingly oh my god how are you real beautiful. I'm normal person pretty. and yet somehow. for like a solid decade of my life it feels like 90% of relationships I had were built around my looks and value as a sexual object. that's lame as fuck that's not even top 10 in Things That Are Cool About Me I don't think. but when very explicitly the things that were valued about you in your formative years were sex appeal and capacity for emotional load bearing it's really hard. To genuinely actually believe the other stuff matters or is anything other than something people tolerate to get to the good stuff (sexy big titty goth gf who will let you unload your feelings on her and be your 3am shoulder to cry on))

the point is its very bad for your long term self esteem or ability to accept extremely good and normal compliments (like 'i, the person you're fucking, find you beautiful and attractive and like having sex with you') to be a manic pixie dream girl for all of your formative years. don't let them do it to you 😘

[vtori73]

Unrelated to biphobia for once lol but I do think there should be some in-between opinion on the recent discourse about AI art spotting guides and such. Sure some of them are being too lenient and broad with these guides that can cause people falsely accuse artists of using AI art BUT I also do think the artists (specifically newbies) are being just a wee bit sensitive and assuming some of these guides are talking about them when in actuality these guides don't actually apply to them majority of the time.

What do I mean by this? Well, what I mean is it's not too hard most of the time to tell when someone is a newbie making art vs AI art the reason people HAVE to make guides about AI art to begin with is because it deceptively looks more skilled then it is but in actuality its not and just copying the art it was fed. I'm sorry but that doesn't apply to newbies, and anyone who thinks so is lying, trolling, doing so in bad faith or just REALLY ignorant. Your skill level is not on par with actually being mistaken for AI art that has been trained on professional, skillful art, which is fine, you're a newbie, that's kind of what it means to be a newbie!

I think the problem with these guides mainly is some are being WAY too broad and not being detailed enough about what they mean which is bound to happen on places like Twitter or social media in general since a short amount of words is usually the key to better engagement.

One thing that I do find helpful with spotting ai sometimes is hair. Look for hair that connects to nothing, that comes out of spots that don't make sense, like jewelry or even hair that has a weird pattern or falls/flows unnaturally, this last one might be more useful if you have an eye for art or have skills to spot this kind of thing though. Another is backgrounds/landscapes, AI art can become easy to spot if you have some understanding of perspective and basics of shadows, form, light direction etc.

One tell also that doesn't have to do with just the art itself is random gaps in skill level or styles changes between posts they make sharing their art, not gaps in time necessarily but it can be. Also a big tell is if they've dabbled in stuff like this before like nfts and such or support it, look at who they follow and such and probably become much easier to tell what side they are on.

Can some of this stuff I mention just be a stylistic choice? Sure, but a big part of this that spot ai guides don't mention is context is also an important factor for telling something is AI art. Maybe someone wants to go for punk/grungy dirty, sloppy look and wanted to have a character whose hair goes through there jewelry & such which would and should make sense for the character, the art direction, and the art piece as a whole but if it's ai it's usually just a random detail that's on a piece that looks generic (because it's going off of a bunch of art that was stolen to train it) making it easier to spot it's not a personal choice but one that the program did because it can't actually make art it just literally copies shit.

[maratsbathtub]

8 14 18 for history asks?

Ok, so, don’t mind me, I’m just gonna reply to these questions not in order! Because I say so.

14. Why you are interested in history ( a silly question, eh?) ?

Alright, so. Jesker Lore™ time. My mom’s a historian, specifically, she studied mostly Ancient Mesopotamia (the Acadians are sus chicos. She’s obsessed with them, and a few other details I’m not going to mention because I low key fear accidentally translating a term wrong or misremembering something and her spirit coming over to hit me with a rolled up newspaper.). So I grew up with her telling me stories and helping me with my history homework. I don’t really remember history classes, except for the last few years of my life, in my head it’s always mom explaining me why things happened the way they did. When one day I started rambling about frenchmen and guillotines, she instantly started forwarding me articles and eventually started getting me books from her second hand bookstore (which is one of the reasons why I have… let me count… 36 books? On Frev? More or less.) So we can blame her for why I’m like this about Marat and Simonne Evrard.

And my interest of Spanish history is born more on my need to understand why my family ended the way it did and a bunch of other unrelated stuff that are way too personal.

8. What is the last thing you have read/ listened/ spoke with historical reference?

If Tumblr doesn’t count (which I don’t count it as), I have been reading on art history lately, because of my delusions of making it into art school next year. The book I was reading was an inherited one, and I planed to only read that one and then delve into what interested me most. But then I saw that the Mesopotamian art was only granted a page and a bit of content, and I just. Nope. That is insulting both to my mother and the Mesopotamians. So I asked mom for some extra material and now I’m reading about the topic! I’m a very slow reader though.

18. Look at the clock and assume the numbers are forming historical year ( 17;58 would be 1758) What was / is / will be the world that year? Any event happened then or will happen?

As of writing this, it’s 16:06. … Well I have no idea what the fuck was going on France then, it’s too early for my area of interest. As of Mesopotamia, it’s kinda, eh, no longer around? Spain, well, we have Felipe Tercero. We had a few Felipes in a row, so forgive me for having to check what the fuck this one did. I think the only thing he did in 1606 was change the placement of the court. And I don’t know if he expelled the moriscos before or after that. The Duque de Lerma was there fucking shit up as his valido. So yeah, not a lot of interesting stuff? We get a war just a bit later, but that isn’t interesting either, just depressing. At least it’s not Fernando Séptimo. Fuck that guy, god I hate him so muchhhhh.

[shinesurge]

It’s That Time Again

More webcomic recs! (The first batch is here.)

Thank you for your submissions! I’d like to mention that all of these comics are queer and anybody who gives a shit about my opinion is probably also queer so like, all that shit goes without saying even if it’s not explicitly listed in the blurb from the authors. anyway let’s get right to it.

Brainchild By RelaxMammal

Brainchild is a story about paranormal phenomena, bad first impressions, wide-scale conspiracies, a whole bunch of mutants, and everything else your senior year of college can possibly throw at you.  It is written and drawn by Suzanne Geary and updates on Sundays.

Brainchild’s equivalent rating is “TV-14” to “TV-MA” for profanity, drug and paraphernalia references, potentially violent/frightening imagery, and sexually suggestive scenarios. (Think “Adult Swim.”) Now imagine a scary voice telling you “VIEWER DISCRETION ADVISED.”

Real nice dialogue, the art style and monster designs are super fun, and the plot is just starting to get rolling where the archive stops so now’s a great time to hop on I think!

https://brainchild.suzannegeary.com/

Into the Midnight City By cancan-jpg

Wyatt Finch has been a vampire for three months, and he’s just moved to The Midnight City - a town of ghosts and ghouls and magicians of all sorts! Together with Archibald Hawthorne (a soft-spoken gentleman detective) and Circe (an eccentric scientist witch), they solve magical misdeeds of all kinds, in a story about friendship, finding your destiny, and occasionally stopping for tea!

This one’s SO cute lmao. If you’re into Job Satisfaction you’ll probably like this one too, it’s more Pastel Victorian rather than Elegant Goth and significantly more saturday morning cartoon flavored.

https://intothemidnightcity.tumblr.com/

Ask the Ether By Mechandra

Ask the Ether  is a slice-of-life comic primarily focused on three witches: Sable,  Dax, and Meisha. Their stories center around their individual journeys  to hone their magic, as well as balancing the struggles of being a young  adult in a major metropolitan area. They all share common threads of  having a difficult family background, being people of color deprived of  their culture, and struggling to find an individual voice with their own witchcraft. All of the characters are LGBTQIA+.

This one’s a bit experimental compared to the others but honestly I loved it because I feel like it’s a good example of what a webcomic ought to be? One Weird Artist making things on their own terms, you can really feel the fingerprints on it. Starts out as more of a strip, keep reading for bigger stories! Stellar dialogue, really fun and dynamic art, also funny in a genuine sort of way that’s kind of rare in comics.

https://www.asktheether.com/

and now for a segment called Baby Comics With Archives Too Small To Make A Call About That I Think You Should Follow Anyway

Red Sky at Morning By Seaside-Cave

After a capture gone wrong leaves their fates quite literally entangled, a pirate captain and a mermaid must traverse a vibrant and diverse world to find answers – though the hardest challenge might be putting up with each other.

Red Sky at Morning is a queer story about fish puns, self-discovery, and proving your place in the world.

Can’t talk about the comic rn obviously BUT I will say I followed this artist instantly after I saw this unrelated short comic they made, for reasons that are probably obvious if you’ve been here for more than five minutes lmao. Really looking forward to getting my teeth in this one!

https://redskyatmorningcomic.tumblr.com/

There You Ain’t! By Garagoose

When a powerful relic goes missing in the wild west of Bouquet, bounty hunters Grey and Blajo, along with saloon owner Posie and wanted outlaw Eustace, find themselves swept into a struggle to keep it from falling into the wrong hands.

Using movie ratings as a reference, I’d rate this comic somewhere around the PG end of a PG-13 rating, for various events of gun and magic-related violence, a bit of foul language, and mild body horror later on.

listen, i’ve been following garagoose since the fuckin dacademy days and i gotta say i’m just psyched they’re finally making a comic hehe

https://thereyouaint.com/

Honorable Mention that doesn’t really need the advertisement is the comics on Skelehime because I read them and they kicked my ass.

also mine! read my goddamn comic

Kidd Commander

It’s a world at the mercy of uncaring gods, and Phineas Kidd is a heretic with a chip on her shoulder and enough fury to outshine a supernova. Armed only with aggressive enthusiasm (and an explosive left hook), Phineas sets out to gather up a merry crew and travel to Kairos Crossing to catch the sun, an urban legend that has tempted countless dreamers to a bloody end.

Kidd Commander is a romantic comic that’s mostly concerned with ambitious characters doing cool anime stuff while being subjected to trauma and dealing with said trauma! Rated T for lots of (cartoon) violence and swearing, and a good deal of irreverence for topics some folks might prefer to leave revered. If any of that sounds like it might make you uncomfortable this comic may not be suitable for you!

http://kiddcommander.com/

If you’d like a comic (yours or otherwise) to end up in one of these, send me an ask or whatever and I’ll add it to my list of stuff to check out! The only requirements I have are I’d prefer for it to be a bit lesser known and it needs to be accessible in places other than tapas or webtoon because I am physically and emotionally incapable of engaging with either of those sites lmao. Happy reading!

[nerves-nebula]

Hi going through you art tag and Im seeing the "home hunter au" and Im seeing bits and pieces so I'm wondering if you could explain it for me please?

i mean all the posts about it are tagged "home hunter au" Still it's kinda disorganized, and there's a lot of "home hunter block party" stuff that’s kind of unrelated gunking up the tag now, so yeah sure I'll do a quick summary.

Home Hunter AU: This AU takes place some time after Eclipse lake. The basics are that Hunter pisses off Belos really badly and has to run away, obtaining an injury during the fight. So, typical stuff for a runaway AU. The main point of mine though is that I don’t think Hunter is close enough to the owl house crew to want to like, stay at their place. To me it seems more likely that he’d strike out on his own. I think he’d have trouble trusting them, and even if he did trust them, the idea that he has to rely on someone for food and shelter and all that stuff, after having JUST been run out of his previous home, is terrifying.

I also use this AU to explore a lot of Hunters unresolved trauma, conflicting feelings (mostly about Belos, the nature of his friendships with the owl house crew, and his issues with self worth), and meandering personal goals. He planned to return to Belos, but after being unable to find anything good enough to give Belos to warrant his return he instead decided to research wild magic, telling himself he’d return once he figured it all out and had some ideas for curing Belos’ curse. After a while though, and a lot of conversations with Luz and Eda and Amity and the others, he kind of doesn’t want to return anymore. And though he doesn’t say it out loud, he kind of hopes Belos has forgotten about him. But that’s conflicting, because he desperately wants Belos to need and love him. That’s how it is with your abusers sometimes, though.

Anyway, Belos is looking for him, and mostly just wants to have his nephew “safe” under his control again, but we’ll get to that later haha

oh yeah and Hunter is definitely trans too, just cause I feel like it. But I haven’t really addressed that yet in like, a comic or anything.

Home Hunter Block Party: this is really just me having fun and goofing around. almost entirely pencil sketches. Mostly just people asking me to draw funny shit. It’s not really related to the main AU other than that Hunter lives in the woods due to the same situation, but none of the stuff that happens in the block party universe is part of the main Home Hunter AU.

There’s a lot of other stuff that happens in the AU, but it’s all over a bunch of posts and comics, so, I’d encourage you to just search through the tag chronologically to make sense of it. 

Hope his helped and wasn’t too wordy or difficult to understand. I’m not really proof reading it, it’s too long and I have homework I should get to lmao.

[queenlua]

hey, i started following you recently and ur bio says ur a hacker? any tips on where to start? hacking seems like a v cool/fun way to learn more abt coding and cybersecurity/infrastructure and i'd like to explore it but there's so much on the internet and like, i'm not trying to get into anything illegal. thanks!

huh, an interesting question, ty!

i can give more tailored advice if you hit me up on chat with more specifics on your background/interests.

given what you've written here, though, i'll just assume you don't have any immediate professional aspirations (e.g. you just want to learn some things, and you aren't necessarily trying to get A Cyber Security Job TM within the next three months or w/e), and that you don't know much about any specific programming/computering domain yet.

(stuff under cut because long)

first i'd probably just try to pick some interesting problem that you think you can solve with tech. this doesn't need to be a "hacking" project at first; i was just messing around with computers for ages before i did anything involving security/exploitation.

if you don't already know how to program, you should ideally pick a problem you can solve via programming. for instance: i learned a lot back in the 2000s, when play-by-post forum RPGs were in vogue.  see, i'd already been messing around, building my own personal sites, first just with HTML & CSS, and later on with Javascript and PHP.   and i knew the forum software everyone used (InvisionPowerBoard) was written in PHP.  so when one of the admins at my RPG complained that they'd like the ability to set multiple profile pictures, i was like, "hey i'm good at programming, want me to create a mod to do that," and then i just... did. so then they asked me to program more features, and i got all the sexy nerd cred for being Forum Mod Queen, and it was a good time, i learned a lot.

(i also got to be the person who was frantically IMed at 2am because wtf the forum is down and there's an inscrutable error, what do??? basically sysadmining! also, much less sexy! still, i learned a lot!)

the key thing is that it's gotta be a problem that's interesting to you: as much as i love making dorky sites in PHP, half the fun was seeing other people using my stuff, and i think the era of forum-based RPGs has passed. but maybe you can apply some programming talents to something that you are interested in—maybe you want to make a silly Chrome extension to make people laugh, a la Cloud to Butt, or maybe you'd like to make a program that converts pixel art into cross-stitching patterns, maybe you want to just make a cool adventure game on those annoying graphing calculators they make you use in class, or make a script for some online game you play, or make something silly with Arduino (i once made a trash can that rolled toward me when i clapped my hands; it was fun, and way easier than you'd think!), whatever.

i know a lot of hacker-types who got their start doing ROM hacking for video games—replacing the character art or animations or whatever in old NES games. that's probably more relevant than the PHP websites, at least, and is probably a solid place to get started; in my experience those communities tend to be reasonably friendly to questions. pick a small thing you want to do & ask how to do it.

also, a somewhat unconventional path, but—once i knew how to program a bit of Python, i started doing goofy junk, like, "hey can i implemented NamedTuple from scratch,” which tends to lead to Python metaprogramming, which leads to surprising shit like "oh, stack frames are literally just Python objects and you can manually edit them in the interpreter to do deliberately horrendous/silly things, my god this language allows too much reflection and i'm having too much fun"... since Python is a lot of folks' first language these days, i thought i'd point that out, since i think this is a pretty accessible start to thinking about How Programs Actually Work under the hood. allison kaptur has some specific recommendations on how to poke around, if you wanna go that route.

it's reasonably likely you'll end up doing something "hackery" in the natural course of just working on stuff. for instance, while i was working on the IPB forum software mods, i became distressed to learn that everyone was using an INSECURE version of the software! no one was patching their shit!! i yelled at the admins about it, and they were like "well we haven't been hacked yet so it's not a problem," so i uh, decided to demonstrate a proof of concept? i downloaded some sketchy perl script, kicked it until it worked, logged in as the admins, and shitposted a bit before i logged out, y'know, to prove my point.

(they responded by banning me for two weeks, and did not patch their software. which, y'know, rip to them; they got hacked by an unrelated Turkish group two months later, and those dudes just straight-up deleted the whole website. i was a merciful god by comparison!)

anyway, even though downloading a perl script and just pointing it at a website isn't really "hacking" (it's the literal definition of script kiddie, heh)—the point is i was just experimenting a lot and trying a lot of stuff, which meant i was getting comfortable with thinking of software as not just some immutable relic, but something you can touch and prod in unexpected ways.

this dovetails into the next thing, which is like, just learn a lot of stuff. a boring conventional computer science degree will teach you a lot (provided you take it seriously and actually try to learn shit); alternatively, just taking the same classes as a boring conventional computer science degree, via edX or whatever free online thingy, will also teach you a lot. ("contributing to open source" also teaches you a lot but... hngh... is a whole can of worms; send a follow-up ask if you want that rant.)

here's where i should note that "hacking" is an impossibly broad category: the kind of person who knows how to fuck with website authentication tokens is very different than someone who writes a fuzzer, who is often quite different than someone who looks at the bug a fuzzer produces and actually writes a program that can exploit that bug... so what you focus on depends on what you're interested in. i imagine classes with names like "compilers," "operating systems," and "networking" will teach you a lot. but, like, idk, all knowledge is god-breathed and good for teaching. hell, i hear some universities these days have actual computer security classes? that's probably a good thing to look at, just to get a sense of what's out there, if you already know how to program.

also be comfortable with not knowing everything, but also, learn as you go. the bulk of my security knowledge came when i got kinda airdropped into a work team that basically hired me entirely on "potential" (lmao), and uh, prior to joining i only had the faintest idea what a hypervisor was? or the whole protection ring concept? or ioctls or sandboxing or threat models or, fuck, anything? i mostly just pestered people with like 800 questions and slowly built up a knowledge base, and remember being surprised & delighted when i went to a security conference a year later and could follow most of the talks, and when i wound up at a bar with a guy on the xbox security team and we compared our security models a bunch, and so on.  there wasn't a magic moment when i "got it", i was just like, "okay huh this dude says he found a ring-0 exploit... what does that mean... okay i think i got that... why is that a big deal though... better ask somebody.." (also: reading an occasional dead tree book is a good idea. i owe my firstborn to Robert Love's Linux Kernel Development, as outdated as it is, and also O'Reilly's kookaburra book gave me a great overview of web programming back in the day, etc.  you can learn a lot by just clicking around random blogs, but you’ll often end up with a lot of random little facts and no good mental scaffolding for holding it together; often, a decent book will give you that scaffolding.)

(also, it's pretty useful if you can find a knowledgable someone to pepper with random questions as you go. finding someone who will actively mentor you is tricky, but most working computery folks are happy to tell you things like "what you're doing is actually impossible, here's why," or "here's a tutorial someone told me was good for learning how to write a linux kernel module," or "here's my vague understanding of this concept you know nothing about," or "here's how you automate something to click on a link on a webpage," which tends to be handier than just google on its own.)

if you're reading this and you're like "ok cool but where's the part where i'm handed a computer and i gotta break in while going all hacker typer”—that's not the bulk of the work, alas! like, for sure, we do have fun pranking each other by trying dumb ways of stealing each other's passwords or whatever (once i stuck a keylogger in a dude's keyboard, fun times). but a lot of my security jobs have involved stuff like, "stare at this disassembly a long fuckin' time to figure out how the program pointer got all fucked up," or, "write a fuzzer that feeds a lot of randomized input to some C++ program, watch the program crash because C++ is a horrible language for writing software, go fix all the bugs," or "think Really Hard TM about all the settings and doohickeys this OS/GPU/whatever has, think about all the awful things someone could do with it, threat model and sandbox accordingly." occasionally i have done cool proof-of-concept hacks but honestly writing exploits can kinda be tedious, lol, so like, i'm only doing that if it's the only way i can get people to believe that Yes This Is Actually A Problem, Fix Your Code

"lua that's cool and all but i wanted, like, actual links and recommendations and stuff" okay, fair. here's some ideas:

microcorruption: very fun embedded security CTF; teaches you everything you need to know as you're doing it.

cryptopals crypto challenges: very fun little programming exercises that teach you a lot of fundamental cryptography concepts as you're going along! you can do these even as a bit of a n00b; i did them in Python for the lulz

the binary bomb lab is hilariously copied by, like, so many CS programs, lol, but for good reason. it's accessible and fun and is the first time most people get to feel like a real hacker! (requires you know a bit of C beforehand)

ctftime is a good way to see when new CTFs ("capture the flag"s; security-focused competitions) are coming up. or, sometimes CTFs post their source code, so you can continue trying them after the CTF is over. i liked Stripe's CTFs when they were going, because they focused on "web stuff", and "web stuff" was all i really knew at the time. if you're more interested in staring at disassembly, there's CTFs focused on that sort of thing too.

azeria has good ARM assembly & exploitation tutorials

also, like, lots of good talks out there; just watching defcon/cansecwest/etc talks until something piques your interest is very fun. i'd die on a battlefield for any of Christopher Domas's talks, but he assumes a lot of specific x86/OS knowledge, lol, so maybe don’t start with that. oh, Julia Evans's blog is honestly probably pretty good for just learning a lot of stuff and really beginner-friendly?

oh and wrt legality... idk, i haven't addressed it here since it hasn't come up in my own work much, tbh. if you're just getting started you're kind of unlikely to Break The Law without, y'know, realizing maybe you're doing something a bit gray-area? and you can cross that bridge when you come to it? Real Hacking TM is way more of a pain-in-the-ass than doing CTFs and such, and you'll learn way more with the latter, so who cares lol just do the fun thing

[clamityganon]

Reggie Looks At: Donna Troy’s Suit

SO I’ve been many things back before my muscles got royally messed up— I’ve flip-flopped around a bunch of different sports. My credentials for fighting people lie at; about half a year of bojutsu (which is bo staff fighting), a year of karate, and two years of muay thai. Now that I’ve proven my expertise, let’s hop straight into the analysis of this suit:

Head: The jaw, temples, and nose are popular targets so I can 100% see some sort of head protection on her. You don’t want something that’ll obstruct your vision or hearing though, so beware of exactly what type of headgear to give her. Right now I’m thinking of something similar to the headgear from Nicola Scott’s Nightwing suit, but a lot more sleek. It might not look the prettiest on Donna, but her face will thank her for it.

Shoulders: Oh. My. God. Shoulder protection is so important. Injuring your shoulder will fuck you over and not in a good way. My shoulders still click from an injury (unrelated to martial arts) I had five years ago and they bother me a lot. And I know me saying that might make you go “well shit, maybe DC should give her some nice good shoulder protection” BUT BUT BUT; bulky shoulder pads are awful for a martial artist. You need to be able to move your shoulders a lot while fighting (punch punch), so if you want to give her proper protection please make sure it’s slim and that it lets her move her shoulders around with ease.

Arms: I’m personally not a big fan of her metal armbands. I just get this restricted feeling while looking at them. I’m literally punching the air while typing this, trying to imagine the metal cuffs around my arms and… just no. I’ll compare the cuffs to a piece traditional muay thai wear; pra jiad. The pra jiad is a piece of cloth tied around your arm about where Donna’s cuffs are on her arms. They’re made by someone close to the fighter like a family member and you wear them during competitions for good luck (mine is a lovely shade of blue). Since pra jiad is made of cloth, it doesn’t even feel like it’s there when you’re wearing it. However, since Donna’s cuffs are made of metal, it seems like unnecessary weight. It’ll probably dig into your arms while moving around. Moving on down to elbows. In muay thai, the elbow strike is the most dangerous move. The elbow is the strongest point in the body, and Donna would be a fool of a martial artist if she didn’t use her elbows in a fight. So, some sort of elbow pads or protection there would be nice— because shattering your elbow does not seem like a nice feeling for anyone, especially a martial artist. Moving on further down to the forearms. I like how she has the cuffs on her forearms. I know blocking with the forearms looks like this super badass and easy thing to do, but it hurts like a bitch when the other person’s not pulling their punches. Again, since they’re made of metal it’s a little overkill to me… but good on her for having them. Lastly on the arms (sorta) are her hands. I’m personally a fan of brass knuckles, but that teeters more towards being a weapon than a costume piece. I’d say maybe this full-body cover type of spandex suit with a bit of something hard attached securely on the outside of the fingers so she can hurt people more with a punch. Or maybe not. Hands don’t really require too much protection and Donna Troy can throw a tank with her bare hands so I think she’ll be fine sans a brass knuckles-esque hand guard. So for her arms overall? Lightweight armor and spandex covering the entire length of her arms would be good. It’ll prevent chafing against the roughness of protective straps.

Torso: Now I… really don’t like that V neck. While fighting you’re twisting your core from side to side, and in muay thai you rotate your hips a lot so I kinda get why there’s no armor there. But having your chest unsupported while moving around that? That’s really not it. I need her in a sports bra of some sorts, thanks. And it might just be me, but the material looks tight around her body over there? That’s something you really don’t want while sparring someone (trust me. I’ve ripped my own share of tees that were tight around the shoulders. You get thrown off your rhythm). Going down to her hips, I don’t really see the point of that sash. It’s kinda this nice aesthetic thing, but it doesn’t really do anything? I guess if you want to keep it, you can keep it? In muay thai you move your hips with every jab. Every punch. Every kick. You use your hips a lot so if Donna’s fighting style leans towards that sort of technique, it would be more logical to get rid of it if it restricts mobility.

Legs: Moving down to her thighs; nothing, which is good. I don’t really want to suggest adding any armor here because imagining sparring with something on/around my thighs makes me feel uncomfortable. They do a lot of work and they don’t need anything on them. Going down to the knees; kneepads are a must. Knee injuries don’t fuck around. I’ve been saying “lightweight and not bulky” for this entire analysis, but I’ll say it again. Down at the shins; In muay thai and just kicking in general, you use your shins a lot so I want to see some form of shin guards on Donna.

Feet: I’m going to say it right now: NO HIGH HEELS. I can’t stress how terrible it is to fight in high heels. You’ve got less grounding, which is CRITICAL for fighting. All you’ve got supporting you is the front half of your foot, and your heel. It’s so easy to break a heel if you stomp on the ground hard enough. It’s also a lot harder on your knees, which opens up the depressing trapdoor of future chronic knee pain. IF YOU GIVE A SUPERHERO OR SUPERVILLAIN HIGH HEELS, YOU ARE AN IDIOT. CASE CLOSED. Getting that out of the way, I think I can speak for all martial artists when I say that I like to have good footing on whatever surface I’m sparring on. If you’re off balance you’re dead, simple as that. You really don’t want anything unnecessarily bulky because when you kick it should be quick and easy. Having something heavy will slow you down more, and if you’re slow you’re dead. You want something lightweight that hugs your foot well and lets you rotate your ankles as freely as possible. Everyone in studios go barefoot, but since Donna’s out and about all around the world she’d probably use something like a nice lightweight sneaker with a good tread at the bottom. So no boots. Get rid of that boot fantasy, Donna Troy should be wearing some sleek Nike running shoes.

And lastly, reasons for why I did this whole thing: If anyone’s wondering why I’m going out of my zone of incorrect quotes and gen fics, I’d like to say that this meta is mainly for @woahjaybird after she read @river-bottom-nightmare‘s meta on Dick Grayson’s suit (which was super informative, highly recommend reading it). Kita (river) said she wasn’t comfortable with analyzing Donna’s suit because she wasn’t a martial artist, so I decided to step up to the challenge as a thank-you for something Ris (jaybird) wrote for me.

tags: @catxsnow @screennamealreadyused @pricetagofficial @subtleappreciation

[diyunho]

The Joker x Reader - “Trapped” Part 5

Almost one year ago, someone tried to kill The Joker in a speeding car and Y/N pushed him out of the way, getting hit instead. With a fractured skull and broken bones, she was out of business for 6 months; when she finally recovered, The Queen of Gotham wasn’t the same anymore. Trapped inside her own mind and exhibiting severe cognitive impairment, Y/N’s life switched upside down without any hope of ever returning to normal.

Part 1    Part 2    Part 3    Part 4

4 Months Pregnant

“I need customized stickers that say Baby On Board for my purple Lamborghini and the other cars I drive,” The Joker growls at his own idea whilst sharing it with the person fulfilling his wacko trades: Franco Rossi, the leader of best underground supply chain in Gotham.

“When would you like them ready Mister J? After Y/N gives birth?”

“Nope! Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?...” Franco hesitantly inquiries about the sudden emergency since he can’t understand why The King of Gotham demands them so fast.

The Joker hates explaining yet certain people are obtuse thus they necessitate enlightenment.

“Y/N’s pregnant: when she gets in a car, the baby is also. Baby on board! Hello??” the father-to-be loses his temper.

Who can argue with The Joker’s logic? Nobody. It sort of makes sense anyway.

“Of course, Mister J. I’ll have them ready. If you drop by after 6pm, I’ll have your guns ready too.”

“Perfect!” the Joker hangs up among the ruckus coming from the office near the kitchen: sounds of shattered objects and yelling alert Richard aka Panda you’re at it again. He nonchalantly passes by in order to deliver the items to The Clown.  

“Your drinks Mister J,” he gives one cup with Starbucks caramel latte to his boss and the other is placed on the table. Why does your boyfriend require 2 identical containers? It won’t take long to solve the mystery.

“Are the lids glued?”

Strange question but there’s a purpose in it.

“Yes sir. How is she doing?”

“She’s hormonal: breaking things makes her feel better which reminds me we have to hoard porcelain objects for her to wreck. NO glass!”

“Sure, I’ll tell the crew,” Richard leaves the kitchen while texting Frost. “Hulk needs more to smash,” he types the code name they gave you in the last weeks although The King knows about it: J’s the one that came up with it.

“Hey Pumpkin,” you are greeted as soon as you pop up from the office. “How’d it go?” he scrolls down on his phone and takes a sip of hot liquid.

“Ugghh!” a frustrated Y/N swings the yellow teddy bear The Joker stole for her on their first date, hitting his hand in the process. The drink flies near the fridge and splatters on the floor with minimal damage: only a tiny puddle instead of a disaster, that’s why the lids are glued.

Safety measure for The Queen’s unpredictability.

J grabs his reserve cup of coffee, paying attention now hence he dodges your renewed attack and keeps his coffee intact.

That’s why his drinks have the lids glued, in case you catch him off guard the second time it will result in negligible destruction.

It happened before.

“I don’t think so Princess,” The Joker strong grip on the container calms you a bit because you won’t be able to win this round. “Are you hungry?”

“No,” you pout and sit in his lap.

“I bet the baby is,” the secret weapon is unleashed: J discovered such a gem by accident and it works like a charm. How can Y/N say “no” if the baby is involved? She can’t.

A plate filled with a bunch of your favorite breakfast food is placed in front of you and strangely enough you’re instantly hungry.

“Extra bacon,” he purrs. “Plus chocolate dip and honey mustard for your pickled cherries. I added peanut butter olives as a bonus.”

In your defense, you’ve been having weird cravings lately.

You place the toy on the chair nearby and start eating, ogling a Joker texting back and forth with his business partners. He chews the morsel you just offered and shivers: waffle dipped in clam juice is disgusting. Maybe he should look at the food you shove in his mouth.

“Gross,” J washes the terrible taste with coffee and gets a kiss for encouragement, yet he’s aware of the connotations. Another kiss confirms it.

Let’s put it this way: besides the hormonal episodes and food demands, The Queen has had a fresh type of craving recently - The Joker kind.

More than usually.

That’s why he has to clear it up.

“I’m flattered for being the center of attention; we gotta keep in mind that contrary to the popular belief, I don’t have unlimited stamina, Pumpkin.”

You nod in agreement and unbutton his pants, then unzip them also.

“Y/N, pay attention!” J insists since you don’t give a damn about his woes. “Think about it as a two way street: The Joker Street and I Want To Break Things Street. Are you with me so far?” he double checks.

Why is he yapping so much??! I guess you should make an effort to comprehend: he’s even doodling patterns on his phone to emphasize the speech.

“When you get hormonal, Princess, let’s try and walk on the I Want To Break Things Street instead of The Joker Street, hm? The Joker Street is sometimes closed for repairs until further announcement.”

OK, OK, this is a lecture. Something about a Joker Street, he seems upset he doesn’t have one…?... Right?...

If you were him, you would be pissed Gotham didn’t name a street in your honor when you’re so important for the town.

Another peck on his neck, then your lips go down his collar bone.

“You’re not paying attention, are you?” J mutters when it’s clear his shirt won’t remain on his body for too long.

“I am,” you defend yourself.

“Oh yeah? What did I say then?”

“Ummm…” you try to piece together words among estrogen taking over. “No Joker Street?...”

“Bingo, that’s it Princess! No Joker Street, correct! Choose the other street, yes?”

This time he kisses you, excited his idea was well received when in fact, both parties are referring to unrelated concepts.

“Wait,” J dodges your touch, “Richard is calling.”

Because he’s on the phone ignoring Y/N, she is ensuring a nice surprise for later; concentrating to the maximum to avoid misspelling, the following message is sent to Franco Rossi from her cell:

“Make a landmark sign that says Joker Street.”

The King’s conversation is prolonged more than anticipated until he discerns you’re not wiggling: you feel asleep, softly snoring on his shoulder and he definitely can’t afford to wake you up.

The doctors said your body is trying to cope with the pregnancy the best way it can: if you doze off at random hours it means you ran out of fuel and you should rest. After cheating death and surviving the accident, the future mother is at high risk of serious complications which is why each day could lead to unforeseen problems.

The Joker rises from the chair holding you in his arms and after a few steps he realizes it’s difficult to walk: thanks to his unbuttoned and unzipped pants, they keep sliding lower and lower. There’s no way he will make it upstairs so maybe the sofa in the living room is the best option. He almost trips thus he begins to drag his feet on the carpet, the pants at knee level now.

“I’m reduced to a piece of meat,” J grumbles, finally making it to the couch and placing Y/N on it so she can have her power nap.

*************

6:02pm

You accompanied The King to a meeting with Seraphim, the best hacker/strategist J uses: they’ve been plotting for a while concerning D.A. Kevin Winchester. The politician is becoming a huge pain in the butt for Gotham’s underworld and something must be done; either annihilation or blackmail, it truly doesn’t matter since he’s bad for business. Due to a total lack of interest in the subject, you are exploring the surroundings quite angry The Joker dragged you here.

Luckily there’s stuff to do.

Bam! you punch the fragile glass sculpture and it splinters into a million pieces on the lavish marble floor.

Seraphim jumps at the noise, immediately recognizing his beloved possession:

“That’s…,” he gulps, appalled. “That’s a Vitriol!”

Yup, the one and only Degas Vitriol, the latest sensation taking the art universe by storm.

“She’s hormonal,” J sneers. “She breaks shit!”

“That’s valued at 150,000 dollars!” the hacker breaths in much needed oxygen regarding the atrocity unfolding at his hideout.

“So??!!” your boyfriend sucks on his teeth, irritated. “Serves you right for buying that asshole’s artsy fartsy crap!”

The Joker actually has 4 Vitriol masterpieces at the mansion yet you were strictly forbidden to destroy them, alas he gave you the office for your rampages.

You continue your exploration as they talk about God knows what until you perceive an alarming detail: Seraphim is literally screaming having a gun pointed at J.

You sneak behind him then in a split second you strike the pistol out of his hand and your fist lands on his temple with such brutality it knocks him out unconscious.

“What the hell are you doing, Y/N???” The Clown hisses at your erratic behavior.

“Hm?”

“What are you doing??!!!” he repeats, annoyed.

“S-saving  you…,” you stutter, confused on why J is mad. “He was yelling and…mmm, had a gun,” you wince in pain because your knuckles hurt from the impact.

“The guy’s half deaf and sometimes he raises his voice without noticing, or did you forget??!! Now I have to wait until he comes to his senses and that’s a waste of my time, Y/N!!! Seraphim wasn’t threatening me, he was showing me his newest collectible!!! I suppose someone with half a brain can’t acknowledge the mess they’ve created!!!”

A lot of accusations thrown your way still… the last sentence brings tears in your eyes.

“I…” you bite your lower lip. “…I don’t have half of brain…”

“Wanna bet??” The Joker bites more instead of leveling with your logic: you though he was in danger and took action. If it was a real emergency, yes, you would have been the hero; it’s not and apparently he can’t appreciate your fast intervention in these circumstances.

“Y-you’re stupid…” you whisper, frustrated. “You don’t understand anything…”

Here it is -- the cataclysmic event of the century: someone called The Joker stupid. He’s beyond outraged with nothing better to utter besides a very childish:

“You’re stupid!”

Y/N turns around and stomps out of the house leaving a trail of destruction outside: she slaps the bottled water out of The Shark’s hand, kicks Panda’s shin and snatches Frost’s donut basically inhaling the sweet treat.

“I want to go h-home!!” you shout and enter the first vehicle you see, slamming the door so hard the window on the passenger side cracks.

“Jesus…” Jonny mumbles and being the sensible man that he is you are offered the whole box of pastries he purchased for his family. He can acquire more, but there’s no way in hell he wants to endure Y/N in the state she’s in.

Gotta keep Hulk calm somehow…

**************

3 Hours Afterwards

You sulk when The Joker strolls in the master bathroom frantically searching the cabinets.

“Did you see my shaver?” he asks.

“Hm?”

“Did you see my shaver?”

“I…I wouldn’t know. I only have half a brain,” the surprisingly eloquent phrase queues J his woman is holding a grudge for his earlier statement. Why wouldn’t she? He was a complete jerk.

At least you didn’t catch on to the obvious: The King of Gotham doesn’t own a shaver; hair just grows on his head.  

He glimpses at Y/N soaking in the bathtub with a kid’s book in her left hand and the right hand fingers sunk into a bowl filled with ice placed at the edge of the Jacuzzi. The Joker leans over and switches your book since it’s upside down.

You huff at the unwanted help and stare at the pictures expecting he’ll look for his shaver and disappear.

You’re not that fortunate today.

“Imagine my surprise when I drove the main alley and detected a sign that says The Joker Street,” he brings up the topic.

Franco Rossi was super-efficient …sadly you ordered the item before J ran his mouth at the hacker’s place, otherwise you wouldn’t care he wants a street with his name.

“You said no… no Joker Street,” you stammer. “Now you have one,” the bitter tone makes him roll his eyes: Y/N’s brain got what it could from his monologue, he should have known better than to make it complicated.

“Excellent…” The King starts rubbing your tummy, “… precisely what I was aiming for. I’m washing the baby, not you!” he underlines when you move farther from him.

You scrunch your face displeased but let him do it because it’s for the baby.

“I know what you’re doing,” Y/N gives him a cold gaze. “U-using the baby… I’m not stupid!”

Busted, The Joker thinks. The schemer in him won’t accept defeat though.

“I didn’t say you were.”

“Yes you did!”

“You said it first!!!” he reckons, antagonized. “Therefore two stupid people put together gotta make up for a smart one!!’

“I… I don’t wanna make out…” you frown at his suggestion.

The Joker sighs, deciding not to correct the trajectory of your judgement; it sure sounds like an opportunity.

“Why not?”

“I’m tired and…and I h-hate you,” your heavy eyelids close.

“Both viable reasons, even if I have to admit you striking Seraphim like that got me quite worked up. He’s no small fry! I had to wait for one hour for him to recover; you got a mean punch, woman! The more I reflect on it, the hornier I get. Which reminds me, Pumpkin: guess what?... … … I’m hormonal too.”

No answer, Pumpkin’s out.

“Of course nobody gives a damn if I’m hormonal!” he complaints while grabbing you from the bathtub. You cling to him for a few moments prior to drifting back into your dreams.

“Thanks for getting me all wet,” J snarls at the cruel reality of having his favorite Prada suit ruined.

“You…you’re welcome…” his Queen replies in her sleep, somehow her mind clutching to reality amidst pure relaxation.

This is what two hormonal individuals are reduced to: one’s dozing off, the other is suffering in silence, although being the proud owner of the tiniest road in Gotham compensates for the mishap.

It’s a two way street.

 Also read: Masterlist

You can also follow me on Ao3 and Wattpad under the same blog name: DiYunho. 

[slightlybiased]

Hello, I love your blog! I wanted to ask what the safest way to scan older books/manga is. I ordered some old bunko Eroica novels but I'm afraid of damaging them. Biting my nails enough while they're in transit. Thanks!

Thank you! I love the Eroica bunko covers, they are fantastic. I re-bought the volumes in bunko for Emperor’s Waltz just to have a few.

I’ve got a weirdly long and indepth answer for you! I’m going to put this behind a cut, and I’m going to reply publicly, which I hope you don’t mind.

Bunkobon are super-great, because they usually collect more chapters than regular tankoubon volumes, and at a lower price.  There are some caveats to scanning them, but mostly you just want to be vigilant about how tight or loose the book is when you open it - the harder the book is to open, the more likely you are to damage it.  Bunko tend to be good about this, but sometimes you run across volumes which have bad glue, or lost the storage lottery.

I don’t have my Eroica volumes handy, so Der Freischutz is standing in.  The one in the center is a bunko volume, compared in size to the Seven Seas tankoubon on the right and an oddball deluxe edition of Der Freischutz on the left. Bunko are tiny, which can sometimes be difficult to work with depending on the art.

I just reviewed a bunch of binding BS at work, so I’m thinking about it, and this is probably a little more detail than you’re looking for.  But!  Here’s a comparison for the binding used on all three, with the bunko in the center again.  The oddball deluxe edition happens to be a hardcover, which is bound into signatures and stitched, and also very thin.  This is the kind of book which is wonderful to scan.  It’s extremely difficult to damage, and since it’s thin, you can mash it as flat as you need.  Manga volumes almost never come out in hardcover (though there are many exceptions), but artbooks do. The other two have glued binding, which is harder to scan if you want to keep the book intact and also get nice clear scans.

The bunko in the center is the thickest. I like bunko paper better than the pulp paper used in tankoubon (like the one on the right). Bunko paper is thinner, so it’s not absolutely massive for being 300-400 pages. You may get some art bleedthrough because of the thin paper, but it’s not terrible in this one. Bunko also tend to have nice loose binding that makes them easy to read, and lets them take a lot of abuse from scanning if the glue is good. The binding on my copy is very flexible, and doesn’t feel tight or creaky when I open it. It’s also a printing from 2008, so it’s still fairly current.  I’m going to be moderately rough with it when I scan.

The one on the right, the Seven Seas tankouban, has a pretty bad glue job with bubbling. That’s not unusual, but can indicate the glue is bad in the whole book, and not just the edge. The printing I have is from 1979, so it is quite old. Having said that, the book still feels pretty flexible, and isn’t creaky or stiff when I open it. It’s probably okay to open flat enough to scan, but I’d be picking images away from the gutter and at the edge of the page, so I wouldn’t have to press on the spine. I’d probably also only be comfortable scanning it a couple times. I might crease the spine even from gentle treatment, and I may also crack the glue and break the binding.

Here’s an example of the size difference between the pages in the bunko and deluxe version of Der Freischutz, which I’m now realizing isn’t great without the bottom of the image (it was hard to take one-handed). This makes it easy to see the difference in the gutter of the book - you can see the art creeps in pretty close to the spine on the bunko, which is going to make it a little harder to scan cleanly.

Unrelated - that deluxe edition has great paper. Still so bright after all these years! Most manga over 5-ish years old is going to be yellowed due to the cheap paper, so that’s to be expected when you start digging into the older stuff. Artbooks will do this too, though those usually start going after the twenty-year mark.

One last look at the deluxe edition. I used the lid of the scanner to flatten it, and pressed as hard as I could.  The gutter in the center can easily be cropped out, if I want to use the whole page or sections of it, and doesn’t interfere with any of the art.

The same pages in the bunko. I’m using the edge of my scanner bed along the top edge of the pages to keep the book straight, so you can see it’s getting close to the art and words. For larger books, I usually use the fore-edge of the cover to keep the book straight, which give the art a little more room to breathe. My scanner setup makes that a lot harder with small books, and it’s harder still with a small paperback that’s very thick, but I’d recommend that. You can also see along the bottom that I wasn’t quite successful in keeping the whole thing straight the first try - that’s also harder with small books, but after the first few scans, you usually get the feel for how best to line it up.

When I scanned this one, I did not use the lid of the scanner, and instead pressed my thumb into the center of the spine in what I would call a “comfortable” amount of pressure. This part’s hard to describe!  Here, I’m pressing hard enough that I’m optimistic about not creasing the spine, but hopeful that I’ll get a clear enough scan to use.  The gutter shadow on this is pretty extreme, and depending on what you’re trying to get, possibly a no-go.  If this was something I was posting here, I might grab the Klaus panels on the center of the left-hand page, cropping out the one closest to the gutter. It’s a shame to lose the first one from that sequence, but I’d possibly be damaging the book to do better.  I could also use the landscape panels at the top of the right page, and crop them in a bit to get rid of the gutter blur at the edges.

This is a second scan with me pressing as hard as I can on the center of the spine with my palm.  I will never do this with a paperback, because I’m always going to crease the spine, and I am also very likely to break the binding and cause the pages to fall out. But one or two creases in the spine is cosmetic, and usually easy to cover with the book jacket.  If I’m doing this 20-30 times per book though, the cover will start to pull away from the binding and I’ll wind up with a pile of loose pages.

In this case, I was curious about how much pressure the bunko binding would take, and I was only doing the one scan, so I went for it!  The book falls open to this page now, but the spine didn’t crease, and the pages don’t feel loose, so this book is very robust.

The book is thick enough that I’m still going to get that obvious gutter shadow, but I’d be okay with posting most any crop from this page to this site.

The gutter is still obvious in the Klaus panels, but it’s not... terrible, and the text is still fairly clear. If you were inclined, you could probably wipe it clean after scanning. It’s not straight though, which would drive me crazy, and would probably leave me to cropping only the left-hand panel to make it less obvious.

Shit!

The crooked scans are a Me problem, because my image editor is 20 years old and isn’t precise enough to rotate them well. The smaller the book/image, the more obvious it is when the scan isn’t Perfectly Straight. But you can see above that it’s less obvious in the context of the whole-page scan, or with certain types of crops.

One more caveat about art in the gutter - you get much less clear scans if the artist “bleeds” art into the spine of the book, especially with double-page illustrations. Aoike doesn’t do this a lot, so I don’t have an example for you, but you’ll see it some in the (formerly color) chapter title pages. There’s some art that bleeds into the spine of the bunko (unlike the neat panels on the pages above), but it’s pretty rare, and Aoike doesn’t really use double-page illustration in her chapters. I was going to post an example from Moto Hagio’s Heart of Thomas, but Hagio doesn’t do it either, or at least not in that work. The better example is early 90s CLAMP, especially X. There’s not a good way to snag that kind of thing without really damaging the book, but again, it shouldn’t come up much with Eroica.

[agoddamn]

I'm interested in how Fates does different storytelling from other games in the series and how a mystery writer influences it. I'm not a big fan of Fates hate and I love how the character designs inform the characters so much...but I struggle to like the story of Fates itself. I'm admittedly someone who plays super casual. I like doing as many supports in games to get character interactions/backstories, which is hard to do in Nohr storyline. I had a hard time getting past the whole (1/2)

“If we tell anyone Garon is an evil fake, we’ll die” Like that feels like weak writing. Which isn’t fair to hold against all of Fates, but really put me out of the story. I want to like Fates, but things keep pushing me against it. Is there a way I should approach it differently? (2/2)

The first thing I wanna say is that sometimes a story isn't for you and there's nothing at all wrong with that. There's nothing necessarily wrong with either you or the piece of media you're trying to get into if it just doesn't click with you.

I think it's important to look at Fates as a character-driven story, first and foremost. You ever watch, I dunno, Power Rangers or something? I'm not saying that Fates is Saban-level storytelling, but it's something where your attention is on what the characters are going through moreso than the details of how every gadget works.

Mystery writers tend to dispense only the details you absolutely need to tell the story. Even your red herrings should mean something, not be wasted space. Clues are disguised as basic elements you're supposed to overlook, so spewing loads of irrelevant information at the reader just isn't...artful, for lack of a better word. You want your readers to be making sensible deductions, not drowning under unrelated noise. 

So, because Fates is a character-driven story, a lot of the setting is informed by implication; the writer isn't going to hand you a list of Nohr's resources, but he expects you to notice that only Nohr uses heavy armor. He expects you to notice that the Nohrsibs are used to lying to their father to protect themselves and realize the nightmare of their family life without having to say "Garon is abusive".

It's also possibly relevant--though this is totally me spitballing--that Japan, as both a culture and language, is really into being oblique. You are literally encouraged to drop subjects and objects from sentences because the listener should know what you're talking about by context. Look at haiku--purposely limited amounts of information communicating almost entirely through symbolism and intertextuality.

Or the story about the translator who said that it wasn't appropriate to translate "I love you" to Japanese because it's too direct, and instead "the moon is beautiful" should be used. It communicates the sentiment through contextual clues (you are supposed to imagine lovers walking together on a moonlit night), which is much more appropriate to Japanese. So this might also partly be a Japanese storytelling thing that comes across much more strongly in Fates than other games because Kibayashi is much more dyed in literary experience.

Third is that Fates has a genuinely bad localization, like, Christ. You take a character-driven game and remove ⅔ of the character dialog? Yeah, that's gonna fuck some things up! 

There were also "localization choices" to make several elements of the game more consumable that also tore up the character drama. They downplayed the trauma of the Nohrsibs by rewriting Xander as a friendly, relatable big brother, which fundamentally ruins the tension of the Nohr family because Marx is supposed to be faintly scary.

The Nohrsibs are fundamentally abused children, and Marx, as the oldest, is the one most mired in his inability to confront that. He's the guy who's told in chapter 2 to execute his younger sibling and just goes "welp...guess I gotta". You are supposed to be worried throughout the game that he's going to side with Garon when the chips go down. But this makes him sound like a pussy, I guess, so they added a bunch of lines where early/midgame/support Xander explicitly says he wants to rebel against Garon--which confuses the shit out of the emotional arc of Conquest.

This is partly why the "we can't tell anyone about Garon because reasons" thing sounds so cheap to you. To be clear, I also find the crystal-of-plot-revealing-you-can-only-use-once pretty damn lame, but the underlying emotional tension there is supposed to be "we genuinely don't know if Marx or any of the other siblings will side with us against Garon". But you can't have that when Xander has already been established as a nice big bro who totally wants to take out Garon.

On the Hoshido side, they "edited" out mentions of explicit systemic sexism, I guess because sexism bad? But that sexism informs the bitter tragedy of "Queen Hinoka" and other female characters, where the English rewrite of "Hinoka had already decided that if Ryouma died she would pass up the throne" makes her sound selfish and lazy (not to mention callous, like you already were planning what you'd do if your brother died? Yeesh).

And in general a lot of jokes/purposely goofy lines were added, which is another thing that dilutes the character-driven moments.

Finally I do freely admit that it's a game with writing issues. It relies on plot devices like the Rainbow Sage or whatever's in Aqua's pockets too much, the kids are non-canon, and the earlygame is a bit too fast. These aren't dealbreakers for me, but they might be for you, and there's not really anything to do about that except suggesting you approach from a different angle.

So I guess my recommendations are these: try to think of it first and foremost as a character-driven story, a playground for these characters to express themselves and show emotion; check out some supports you don't have the energy to grind out on YouTube (all the royal ones are extremely good, and most of the C-A ones are great); and try looking up some of the translations of cut lines, which can sometimes give you a much more rounded understanding of a character. The fan translations tend to be on the dry side because they're being written by normal people without any kind of overseeing editor, so cut them a little slack for that, too.

[seekingthestars]

sarah watches the untamed: liveblogging adventures, part twenty seven episodes 46 + 47

(aka: wen ning and fairy are the real mvps here.)

alright y’all it’s been a week but now i’m snuggled up under a bunch of blankets with Emotional Support WangjiBun and WuxianBun and i am READY FOR THIS LET’S GOOO

episode 46:

“who could be worse than him!?!” ahhh have they finally decided there’s someone they hate more than wwx XD

oh god his son i forgot he’d had a son for a minute oh gross gross gross

poor little jin ling over here ;; 

look i still hate clan leader yao, he will always irritate me

me and wwx have the same thoughts, it’s amazing how quickly these people will turn on someone lol i mean Dimples deserves it after being being A Whole Evil, but STILL

I’M ACTUALLY CACKLING, TWO HOURS AGO THEY WANTED TO KILL WWX AND NOW THEY’RE LIKE “HEY BUDDY :D YOU SHOULD HELP :D” LIKE COME ON -.-

ugh i love all the little lotus lanterns all over Lotus Pier, they’re so pretty ;;;;

wangji going into the ancestral hall with wuxian, he is good boy ;~~;

“after all, you two are sworn brothers.” ;AAAAAAAAA;

lan zhan about to smack jiang cheng

jiang cheng is hurting MY feelings, buddy no ;;

“Let him go.” WANGJI I LOVE YOU that was v attractive

WUXIAN ;AAAA;

WEN NING ;AAAA;

oh SHIT OH MY GOD WHAT

WUXIAN GAVE JIANG CHENG HIS GOLDEN CORE. THAT WAS ALL THE RESEARCH. IT WAS WEN QING. EVERYTHING MAKES SO MUCH SENSE BUT ALSO NOW EVERYTHING HURTS EVEN MORE

JIANG CHENG HE GAVE UP SO MUCH FOR YOU AND THEN YOU JUST HATE HIM I’M SAD :(

(bless this teeny extra peek we get of cape outfit) (wen ning is so sweet being so proud of his sister and calling her the best doctor of their section of the wen clan, also him in this entire sequence makes me ;; <3 wen ning is goodest boy ever)

WANGJI CRYING, JIANG CHENG CRYING, I’M CRYING, EVERYONE CRYING

WEN NING THANKING WANGJI FOR TAKING CARE OF YUAN, i’m so emotional

flashback to wangji finding yuan hiding in the burial mounds y’all i am legit so emotional

okay look wen ning is literally the best boy, wangji’s like “you didn’t tell him?” and he’s just, in his sweet little soft voice, “he’s happy now. i don’t want him to be less happy.” PLEASE. WHO COULD EVER HATE HIM. HE IS A SWEET SWEET BABY

OH MY GOD WUXIAN HAD TO BE AWAKE THE WHOLE TIME

weeps that explains why he looked so hurt when he was captured by wen chao, i remember thinking he looked really sick THAT’S WHY OH MY GOD BABY ;A;

TWO NIGHTS AND ONE DAY. WEEPING.

i’m squishing WuxianBun so much ;;

(unrelated but everything about lotus pier is so pretty, even the random lake looks lovely, sighs i love lotus pier)

YANLI ;AAAAA;

NOW WUXIAN IS CRYING when will this show stop making me so emotional, the answer is probably never

Wangji picking the lotus seed pod and handing it to wuxian and saying “Only today” bc he knows everything that’s been going on now and knows how upset wuxian must be and he’s going to let him have this little bit of home for today and oh my god FEELINGS

omg they ate so many XDDD

ohhhh sparkly golden butterfly PRETTY

guangyao (look i am TRYING to use his new name, i am MAKING AN EFFORT) came to lotus pier/yunmeng??? ohhhh boy

and we’re off to yunping city!

POOR NING BEING BULLIED but he’s so CUTE 

i love sparkly butterfly magic it’s v v pretty

look i know it’s midnight but it’s been a moderately rough week and i don’t have anything going on tomorrow and despite the fact that this show makes me emotional it also makes me SO HAPPY so ONWARD

episode 47

oh my god wait a minute is wuxian trying to play matchmaker for wen ning bc i’m about to lose my mind laughing if that’s what’s happening right now

“he needs to make some friends at least! i think sizhui is the perfect candidate!!” I ALMOST MADE THE DUMBEST NOISE OH MY GOD WUXIAN OH MY GOD I’M DYING OF COURSE THEY WOULD BE FJEWAOIFA FAMILY

wangji being like “oh crap quick dodge the statement, turn and run” XDD

wen ning looks so SAD being told he should stay behind in the inn, omg actual baby wen ning

hmm guangyao why you out here buying temples

monk seems suspicious

the wonder trio back at it again, breaking in places, solving mysteries

ohhhh no spoopy smoke, that can’t be good

FAIRY. JIN LING MUST BE HERE

THERE HE IIIIIS

XICHEN? what are YOU doing here, buddy

excuse you, misters with the bows, you better freaking not shoot jin ling

JIN LING WHY ARE YOU CLIMBING THE WALL PLS BUDDY

wuxian being a great uncle and saving him but also COVER IS BLOWN

THE DIMPLES OF BETRAYAL ARE IN FULL FORCE TONIGHT

i audibly gasped at the shot of the wire cutting into wuxian’s throat NO

jin ling didn’t get away :(((((((

“Chase and kill it” DON’T YOU FREAKING DARE KILL FAIRY, YOU HAVE FOR SURE GONE TOO FAR GUANGYAO

Dimples is just SO EVIL feaiwofjawo;fewa god zzj plays such a GOOD evil villian 

jin ling sitting a little behind xichen and clinging to his dad’s sword ;;;; like his dad’s sword is his security blanket and if he has it, he feels a little better ;;

i think the jin clan must teach a class in the art of the Sleeve Swish bc Zixuan did it, Jin Ling’s done it, Meng Yao’s out here sleeve swishing away

HUAISANG?!?!? MY BB

ughhhhh go away su she

“Why do you know the Lan principals so well?!” “I transcribed it so many times, I memorized it.....” “WHY THOUGH.” “it was my punishment.” “SHAME ON YOU.”  FJEWIOFJEW HAHAHAHAHA

“Or else you will be pissed off by me.” I LAUGHED OUT LOUD GOD I LOVE WUXIAN SO MUCH

wangji has the freaking fastest reaction times, those reflexes

JIANG CHENG BURSTING IN LIKE THE MOST MAJESTIC ANGRY GRAPE

AND FAIRY!!!! Jin Ling looks so happy Fairy’s back T___T <3

Wangji’s -__- face as he holds up his sleeve for Wuxian to hide behind and Wuxian cheering on Fairy to bite Su She IT’S ADORABLE AND I LOVE IT

jiang cheng ain’t here to play around, y’all

god that SMIRK foejawif meng yao your dimples truly overflow with evil :(

jiang cheng ;;;

that delighted evil grin omg what iiiiiis iiiiiiiit

okay i guess i should stop and go to bed since it’s 1:45 but!!!! only three episodes left, this is insane!!!!!

[retrauxpunk]

Rain, I ask you: ALL the quarantine asks!

Animated character that was your gay awakening? not really an ‘awakening’ so much as a ‘hint’, but Azula from Avatar: the Last Airbender ... yep

Grilled cheese or PB&J? GRILLED CHEESE

What show/YouTube video(s) do you put on in the background when you when you don’t have anything to watch but you want something on? I don’t really experience this mood, but my go-to watch is the vlogbrothers YouTube channel

Your go-to bar order, if you drink? if it’s a low-key/work outing, lager or cider (esp the ones with non-apple fruits too); if it’s getting more serious (lol) or with closer friends or a more celebratory mood: vodka with sparkling apple juice

What’s your favorite pair of shoes that you own? these Doc Martens that are white with red hearts got ’em with my first ever full time design job paycheck. i did not take care of them well so they’re super scuffed/beat-up and very much not Perfectly White ... but they’re still comfy as heck, i still love the design, and they’ve lasted 3 years so far, let’s see how much longer we can make it ... also i think they’re a limited edition so i likely won’t get my hands on any replacements...

Top three cuisines? my cheap-ass answer would be, like: East Asian, South-East Asian, Western European ... but my non-shit answer is... Japanese, Chinese, Italian (ftr i’m not a seafood fan ... i just love the ramen and non-seafood stuff that japan makes hehe)

What was your first word as a child (that wasn’t a variation of “Mom” or “Dad”)? i have no clue

What’s a job that you’ve had that people might be surprised to find out you’ve had? cold-calling strangers to ask them to do market research phone surveys (y)

Look up. What’s directly across from you? the kitchen

Do you own any signed books/memorabilia in general? i have a messenger bag that i got signed by Jeph Jacques of the Questionable Content webcomic that i once adored ... and I think my boyfriend has gifted me a signed Matthew Reilly hardcover.

Preferred way to spend a rainy day? curled up indoors wearing something cosy, reading and eating something delicious. playing animal crossing lol. aaaaand listening to music, a good podcast, watching stand-up comedy, drawing, getting intoxicated...

What do you get on your bagels? What WOULD you get if you had access to anything you wanted? occasionally the standard smoked salmon and cream cheese, but i slightly prefer the meat to be, like, prosciutto

Brunch or midnight snacks? ehh fuck it, both???? both!!

Favorite mug you own easter limited edition waitrose mug, squat and round and yellow, painted/shaped like a very round chick. a Borb,,,,

What coffee drink would you describe yourself as? i actually thought about this and, uh, peppermint mocha. not for everyone, slightly weird, never fitting in with the regulars/being a default, but???? obviously awesome?? also: about 65% on the mainstream/hipster scale

Pick a song lyric to describe your current mood (and drop the name and artist!) The Wombats is the artist. lyrics are either ��Let's dance to Joy Division / and celebrate the irony / Everything is going wrong, / but we're so happy” from Let’s Dance to Joy Division or “the edge of nowhere’s such a beautiful place” from Emoticons

Fruity or herbal teas? herbal but i agree with @queenofslime, black tea is the best

What’s that one TV show that you’re a little bit embarrassed to watch but you still like nonetheless? ...do i experience embarrassment about what i like to watch on TV? i don’t know if i do, because i watch relatively few shows ... and have relatively little shame? maybe???

That book you were forced to read for class but actually ended up enjoying? ftr i wasn’t bitter about this before reading, i had no preconceived biases against, and i was pretty open to liking it -- The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

Do you match your socks? if they’re of a really nice design then yes always, if they’re of a more standard/generic design then ... not necessarily

Have you ever been horseback riding? yes a few times ... on the last time which was like five years ago ... the lady said i was a natural and asked if i’d ridden much before, which was. flattering. and yes this is a Brag.

What was your “phase” when you were younger? (i.e., Mythology Nerd, Horse Girl, Space Geek, etc) didn’t have much of a hardcore phase but i was pretty much always into fantasy ... oh wait yeah i did! i had a spy phase :)

Have you ever been to jail? to closed-down ones, yep

What’s your opinion on Lazy Susan’s (the spinning tray in the middle of tables)? pretty great idea unequivocably, right?

Puzzles? i tend to enjoy riddles/lateral thinking puzzles, i am impartial about jigsaw puzzles. i enjoy escape rooms.

You can only have one juice for the rest of your life, what is it? apple ... but elderflower if i’m feeling reckless (y)

What section do you immediately head for when you walk into a bookstore? young adult ... or stationery

What’s one thing you’re trying to learn/relearn in your downtime right now? Russian language :( it’s going не так хорошо

Who’s your go-to musical artist when you’re feeling upbeat? not sure if i have a go-to artist so much as go-to playlists i’ve made but some good ones are The Wombats and Bastille 

Where could someone find you in a museum? mammals/birds in natural history

What’s that one outfit in your closet you never get the chance to wear but want to? i swear i was talking about this recently but i clean the fuck forgot what it was ... oh yeah, i have this short-sleeved black minidress festooned with silver buckles/buttons and also featuring decorative suspenders ... which, yes, does make me look like a sexy military officer,,, anyway it’s pretty badass and somehow it hasn’t occurred to me till now that i can just wear that every day now if i want? ftw i do get the chance to wear it, it’s just a little bit Extra so i get self-conscious. i’ve worn it a few times though. including to work. because fuck it, right? i didn’t become a graphic designer to be shy about sometimes looking like a prototypical emo/scene kid-turned-adult??? (ftr i was never an actual emo/scene kid. i lacked the requisite guts, commitment of feeling, and permissive parents.)

Rainbows, stars, or sunset colored clouds? sunset-coloured clouds :)

If you could own any non-traditional pet (dogs, cats, fish, rodents, etc), what would it be? how about a shapeshifting feathered dragon that could range from, like, two thirds of a foot long (20cm) to sit on your shoulder, to ... the size of a massive draft horse? (but longer and thinner)

Do you have more art on your walls or more photographs? photos, though if i didn’t live with a partner, it might be art

You have to get one meme tattooed on your body, what meme is it and where does it go? i’ve already got a meme tattooed on my body ... a private meme i have with my boyfriend, one on each leg (left: outer side, just above knee; right: outside, a few inches above the ankle)

Pick a superhero sidekick to hang out with ?????? is this a sidekick to a known superhero, or a superhero to act as your sidekick? also i don’t know? who are the standard heroes? i’m not up to date on this.

Lakes, rivers, or oceans? rivers or oceans

Favorite mid-2000s song i can’t decide a favourite, it’s too stressful, but one that i like is Rob Thomas’s Little Wonders

How do you dress when you’re home alone? either a t-shirt and PJ pants, or a dress (usually short-sleeved/sleeveless minidress)

Where do you sit in the living room (we all have a preferred spot, and you know it)? on either side of the couch haha

Knives or swords? BOTH but ok swords.

A song you didn’t think you’d enjoy but ended up loving hmmmmm like all of Linkin Park’s first three albums with some exceptions? hahahah

Pick an old-school Disney Channel Original Movie i don’t think i.....know any????

Are you a “Quote that relates to the photos” caption-er, an “explanation of where I took the photos” caption-er, or a no caption kinda person when you post pictures online? explanation, though on instagram quite often the photo and caption are unrelated

Name a classic Vine there’s only one thing worse than a rapist...

What’s the freezer food that you stock up on when you go to the grocery store? dumplings! as in the gyoza type.

How do you top your ice cream? that ‘magic’ chocolate sauce that hardens into chocolate. that stuff. i watched those ads all childhood long but my parents were immigrants and therefore very thrifty so we NEVER bought it iirc and then in my adulthood i got it a bunch of times. but now i live in the uk and can’t find it. and forgot it existed. and have never seen it anywhere.

Do you like Jello? the kind that’s served on a plate as a dessert? meh. the kind that are found in asian grocery stores as individual fruit-flavoured serves in little plastic cups? YES 

What’s something that you don’t have a picture of that you wish you did? future stock prices? LOL ... or i’m gonna go with @queenofslime‘s answer again -- how others see me. it’s a great answer.

How are you at climbing trees? not............ good. i mean, i like climbing, but i have absolutely terrible upper body strength. i did bouldering for a couple months but only stuck to the first like... three out of nine difficulty levels.