#its a Lot of trial and error tbh

[gothmiqote]

some assorted cutscene varhas & me complaining abt blender under the cut lol :p

the head is a fairly quick & dirty port i did, the struggle to put new teeth in there was 1. fucking unreal 2. probably also not something that was as difficult a i made it out to be

on my list of further things to do are more edits around the mouth area, specifically the upper lip. ofc you can't spot the problem in this shot, but the inner area needs some more volume since it's doing a weird think where it curves noticeably inwards when the mouth opens. probably a fix that'll take a few hours max, half of which will probably be spent testing motion until im happy. there's also a bit of a seam down the middle, but idk if that's enough of a problem for me to deal with lmao. the hair covers up the most visible area, and even that's not too awful in most lighting conditions.

speaking of hair, it does look like my go-to styles for her will need the ear replacements done in blender (blegh). miqo ears are attached to the hair model, so while you Can use pre-7.0 hairs without any movement issues, you won't have the updated ear shape and the textures will probably be a bit off. these ones were just run through the loose texture compiler, no manual editing on my side. i can't tell if i'm liking that or if it could be better? idk I've never painted hair maps before, could be fine or it could be a mess lmao

i haven't even looked at converting the scar texture for her body yet, i probably won't until penumbra is back online tbqh. the new textools is fucking fantastic, but i don't love having to open and close the game every time i want to make a mod change. it also doesn't look like the body shape i use will be getting updated (boo) since the creator has a new version they're working on and i don't like it as much lmao which means it might be up to Me to sort that one out. probably not a big deal except i'm also running the ivcs skeleton version which is fghjsdgjk a whole extra Thing to deal with. i like the extra control it gives me in gpose + some custom animations though so worst case scenario, more blender lessons lmfao. if that's the case i might make the switch to skelomae, depending on which dev kit i find easier to actually parse. i'm wondering if it's worth my time to play around with some body scaling mods, never used them before but im intrigued. also a distinct possibility I'll have to update the skin texture i use for estinien, but i know tbse already has a beta out so i'm not too worried about that. at the end of the day body & face textures are probably the easiest things to mess with. fucking love the person who, within 24 hours of early access, released a mod that gave him his lips back. was worried i might have to port that too but nope, someone beat me to it.

oh god right i also still have to do azem's head port. that one had custom texture uvs, which i'm sure will provide anyone layer of weirdness to whatever process i end up performing on it. i am Not looking forward to putting in another set of nicer teeth lmfao but it's worth it. perhaps it won't be such a shitshow this time around. her eye texture is fucked but I've already seen some updated ancient eyes floating around, so it's whatever.

i am Also not looking forward to going through my penumbra wardrobe to see what works and what doesn't & all i have to say is 10/10 for me for having the foresight to meticulously organize those mods into hyperspecific folders.

also i miss my pose mods gfsdhkghysjd i need to take cute pics in some of those new areas okay.

[saragrekey]

i got some cute sketches to post tomorrow :O but I also might lore dump about my whole art progress thingy? cause tldr i only drew realistically from photos until december where I realized I wanted to draw comics and characters and it was kind of “learn this now or you’ll never have time for it again” so I’ll explain more after sleep but that’s kind of my intention here to kind of document that process? since instagram isn’t really a good place for that.

so anytime i draw something that looks like an actual drawing I’m like

[dizzyisdizzy]

Don't know if you've answered this before but how do you pick your colors? They always look so well together!

Have a lovely day!

Long term you wanna study Muse Dash's artwork. I have a folder full of it to study and reference. It's THE inspo for my coloring. My words can only explain so much. I rely a lot on the sheer intuition i've developed by study.

Limit the hues. 2-3 to start, add more if you can justify it. Have them be close together on the color wheel but spread them further apart as needed. Good character design uses their colors very deliberately, and breaking down those choices gives you a decent starting point.

2. Define color relationships. Pink and blue do generally look nice together, but without a clear direction your colors end up aimless. Breaking down char designs will also give you ideas on this.

a. In my Mikus, blue is a main color, with pink as secondary/accent to the blue. So her blues take up higher saturation, more space, and double as any 'black' hues (like her sleeves or thigh boot things) drawing the most attention. Pinks, as secondary, has lower saturation (her skin) and accent the blues through smaller and more subtle shapes (like hair strands or eye shines).

3. Start off with high brightness/ mid saturation flats. Lineart is darker, more saturated, and hue shifted a bit from the flat color it's resting against. The exact difference will vary. You can get a lot of the 'look' just by doing this tbh. Shading has a very similar idea, its just a middle ground between the two.

4. Trial and Error. Secret Technique. I try to keep all of one color on a single layer and lock transparency so I can cycle through different options. Clip Studio has a command that lets you jump to whatever layer you are tapping on. It's nice. I never get my colors right first try unless I'm color picking an old piece. It just be like that.

Do proper studies of course but I find limiting hues to be the most essential thing here. I did it even before studying Muse Dash, and the limited tools really forced me to be creative with how I portray lighting, form, depth, while not letting my 2-3 hues stumble over each other.

[dust-tastic-1983]

Life with Turbo on the Internet (x reader head canons)

A/N: First ever fanfic(if this counts???) I tried to keep it in character lmk how I did.... lots of "probably"s in this one. I'm very unsure.

Genre: (Wreck it ralph) Turbo x reader headcannons, fluff and shenanigans! (Hehe that rhymed!)

Summery: He totally lived guys. He survived and escaped to the Internet guys. He's alive and well and living in a shitty website i promise guys (hcs of what I think living on the internet with post-movie turbo/kc would be like) based on this post I made.

You guys live in a website Turbo made with his trial-and-error-achieved coding skills… so its kinda shitty and cluttered. But its cosy and its yours so its fine. It'll probably improve the more Turbo improves his skills, anyhow.

As you'd assume, you'll be spending alot of time on racing related websites and games. He probably got himself banned from a couple games either by messing with the code to make himself better or for harassing players. He'll to try to bypass the bans and sometimes he succeeds! And gets you both banned again because he said a swear word in a kids game.

Of course he will go with you to places pertaining to your interests, whatever that may be. He might be less enthusiastic about it than his precious car games but he'll still go with you because he likes hanging out with you❤ he almost gets you banned again though

You need to stop him please

He's definitely an Internet troll. Would purposefully start or stirr drama on forums he doesn't like using throwaway accounts.

Lots of marathoning various games and movies/shows. Someone on tumblr said that he probably watches car crash compilations and like. Yeah. He'd binge watch the shit out of car crash videos and nascar fails. (I hc that he would enjoy Its Always Sunny but for the wrong reason.)

Lay next to him in a bundle of blankets and pillows use him as a pillow he is warm and squishy and soft and touch starved eating snacks and watching "8 most disturbing things caught on dashcam footage" on YouTube. He's probably the type to talk during movies and videos, there are so meny opinions in his little body and he will not shut up. Though is a bit more quiet when sleepy.

yeah ofc you guys would play alot of competitive games together, both racing games and other. He passes out after trying too hard on project diva.

Turbo messed with the computer avatar... things idk what they are called. Trips em up, makes peoples websites crash, etc. Until one of the ad blockers punch him. Then he stopped.

You guys are probably on familiar terms with Knowsmore. Probably one of the first people you and Turbo spoke to when you first entered the Internet, and still speak to since he helps you to get around. Turbo probably would find him annoying, though.

Same with Spamley. Turbo probably hangs around the darknet because of course he would... He probably would try the "Make money playing video games" spiel, success varies. Spamley, despite being a boyfailure, still knows his way around the darknet (barely like he did make that virus guy throw him across the room) Would also find spamley annoying but maybe less so.

Speaking of the darknet, he would bring you along whenever he'd go. he'd hold your hand or arm to make sure he doesn't lose you. Of course he does a myriad of illicit activities. Learning more about programming and hacking, plotting revenge, probably released a couple viruses in websites thatve wronged him, and- 🤢 and🤢 film piracy 🤮 /j

Idk if he'd try to take over another game or if he'd try to find fame another way... I'm still mulling over it tbh.

The artist Blackthewolf17 who drew a picture of turbo and y/n sitting on a bench listening to Spotify. Just think about it.

Use one of those relationship compatibility websites. Results depend whats funnier to you ;)

Regardless of wether you fled with him from Litwak's arcade or met him in the online world, if your feeling up to it, spend the rest of eternity bouncing around the interwebs with him until entropy takes you both to oblivion. It might be fun...

Thanks for reading! ^.^ hope you enjoyed!

[simswoon]

hello kaylee, I love you and your story so much and I hope you’re having an amazing day! I wanted to ask you a few questions about the process of your posts. First of all were you always interested in photography or editing or directing or did you recently get into it? Because your screenshots are SO GOOD and I’m not even exaggerating. Can you also tell me how did you start your journey where did you go to learn??

How do you find THE angle whenever you take your pics? Like sometimes the angle is there and pretty easy but there are specific photo/scene ideas that I have but when I pose my sims for it, it looks awkward and not like I pictured in my head if you know what I mean 😣 plus I’m having trouble working out the specific ratio I want with srwe

Another question I have is about editing, I wanted to ask you how you got into it and what helped you learn it faster because your girl is struggling with that as well. I feel like a grandma whenever I try to use any editing app I just feel so lost lol and the same thing with the template thingies idk how to add them in or edit them with custom moodlet description..

Also last question is about dialogue, how do you come up with it? And how do you only include 2 or 3 pics in most of your posts because I take like 100 of each angle and I feel like I wanna use them all, how do you know which ones to use??? Pls girl give me your skills and your brain 😭😭😭

hiii, thank you so much 😭😭 I'm well! I hope you're doing good too!

I was never into photography or editing or anything remotely artsy lmao. I did take a film class in high school but I was mostly there for my friends. I started taking screenies just for me because I like to look back at my sims’ lives (yes, I’m emotionally attached and unwell), and eventually it spiraled into “what if I posted this…" My first posts are so ugly (I private them after I saw eloise, @slusul, start to like them HAHAHAHA) I've also been following a lot of gameplay blogs for a few years so it's always been something that had been on my mind (it started as a gameplay and now I make poses for every scene....)

Okay with angles? Girl I’m suffering too. Half my scenes I just give up on because I cannot get them to look how they did in my head Like today's post (its really not great) I took 40 screenies and you guys saw 4... I also have trouble recreating whats in my head and drives me insane, I usually end up just scraping my ideas because I'd rather have nothing than something that makes me upset. srwe pissses me off so much, you'd think its be simple as just multiplying or whatever but its not!!!!!! So I just stick to the same ratio for everything.

I know the basics of Photoshop and for everything else I just look it up. There are so many helpful youtube videos out there. You just copy + paste the templates onto your pics and adjust. It’s super easy once you mess around a little. Everything I’ve learned has been pure trial and error tbh.

this is embarrassing but I literally play out the scenes in my head like a movie. I hear their voices, their tone, everything (mentally ill behavior <3) and then I write what they’d say. it it sounds basic it's because I am basic.

I wish I had skills or a brain to lend you but it’s all just chaos and a like half-ass version of perfectionism

[jiraisupportgroup]

Hii I'm new to jirai kei n recently I joined a group where there's a lot o jirai / landmine ppl! I was asking some questions abt how to go for the fashion part of the subculture and one of my main questions was "is there any thrift store I can go to? Can I customize some clothing to make it look jirai?" And what I got as an answer was "No. Jirai ppl only use branded clothing, you can buy it second hand but you cannot customize in any way".

Tbh I'm not in a good place economically rn and I don't have a job either, so I'm not sure what I should do. Importing clothing costs 6 times more cause of where I live.

Is it really a rule that jirai / landmine can only wear branded clothes? (Liz liza, honey wardrobe, dear my love, etc)

I know I fit in the jirai lifestyle but I wanted to fit in the fashion too T--T

Thank you for your time♡♡ asking anon cause it's for me and a frien ^^"

I would once again like to preface this (as I preface all things) with the fact that I could entirely be talking out of my ass - this is just my opinion - and I am not a spokesperson for Jirai Kei or other mentioned subcultures / fashion styles as a whole.

I wholeheartedly disagree with that but also I will caveat that with the fact that I spent most of my teenage years in menhera / goth / emo / grunge spaces and those are very DIY-heavy subcultures. I'm also super relaxed about how people choose to label themselves (to the point where I barely claim to be in any subculture because I just don't want to bother with labels so I'm probably not the best person to ask haha~)

To me personally, this feels like an argument that someone coming from Lolita would make? I kind of see a link here in the sense that the two main reasons I think people say these things about Lolita are because it is really hard to make Lolita clothing and buying lolita knock-offs is generally bad for a whole slew of reasons. Similar arguments for both subcultures I think.

Girly kei / dark girly clothing can be really hard to make or DIY. I think it is certainly very possible to do, but it might take some trial and error. Mostly because being a bit over the top is kind of the aesthetic; there are a lot of ruffles and bows and lace and ribbons and buttons and cute little accessories and cut-outs and the neckline is typically very specific with decorated collars. At its base, it is just a blouse, but it's got a LOT of aspects that go into it, and if it's "too basic" then you're not really hitting that girly kei style. The skirts too (I personally think the skirts would be a little easier to DIY but I also have experience sewing with lace / grommets & making corset ribbon designs which is mostly what stands out from them to me?) You also run into a lot of the actual hardware being specific with hearts being a really common theme for belt loops or buttons, and decorated suspenders.

I think it would be difficult to DIY girly kei or dark girly pieces but it's certainly doable. One issue is that depending on where you're getting the materials for that DIY, it might be about the same cost (or more) as just buying a blouse (although this depends on shipping cost).

The other aspect of it is the argument against fast fashion which is a little more nuanced in Jirai Kei but I see where they're coming from? I mean, to be frank, ryousangata is literally "massed produced" fashion (& to be fair the aesthetics that are labeled as “ryousangata” have varied a lot over the years - it’s not just frilly blouses & stuff that’s just kind of what it happens to be right now). It's pretty much just fast fashion. MA*RS, Liz Lisa, & DearMyLove from what I can tell are mostly produced in Japan, although they do source materials from China, like most companies do (not automatically or necessarily a bad thing imo - but I will spare you that side rant bc it’s kind of not related). I couldn't find a lot of information about their production practices? So I'm unsure about worker environments for them? Generally, the big-name brands are going to be more ethically sourced & produced than random AliExpress sellers but by how much is kind of questionable (or at least I could not find a lot of information about the production processes so I'm not sure by how much - if anyone has additional information on this I would love love love to hear).

Now am I saying "Go buy a bunch of fast fashion off of AliExpress because it's cheaper and no one cares"? No. (It's also honestly not much cheaper.) But the reality is that it generally is fast fashion, so it's a weird balancing game. I think one of the main reasons people say "only buy Liz Lisa / MA*RS / DearMyLove" is because they want to avoid fast fashion as much as possible while participating in a fashion with a LOT of fast fashion sellers, and since it can be difficult to find production information they go for the big names because they're easier to trust in that aspect. (I also have fallen into this trap & have sworn my life to DearMyLove because they're the only big-name brand that is even slightly 6-foot-tall-bitch friendly T-T)

All of that being said, if you want to attach some bows and lace to a frilly blouse and call it girly kei I am absolutely not going to stop you (or honestly even judge you, but again that's just me). The shipping costs are part of the reason why I say the clothes are secondary to the jirai kei subculture especially as a foreigner because once you consider that the clothing is significantly more expensive and difficult to obtain in foreign circles it becomes directly contradictory to some of the reasons why those same clothes are so popular in the Japanese subculture: I don't think the cultural context of the fashion translates over to foreign markets (economically or socially, but I'll spare you that entire rant lol).

ALSO! Jirai Kei Subcul is awesome and has a much more obtainable aesthetic for foreign markets. It leans more into punk and you can use a lot of different pieces for it that are more easily obtainable, so I highly recommend looking into it. It might be a good medium for being able to feel fully like you belong, but not breaking the bank for an outfit.

[intersex-support]

how do i get rid of oily skin caused by nCAH? i tried looking up stuff but all i could find was medical articles saying “yep! that’s a thing that happens!” and all its advice is just to take birth control, which made me sick last time i took it :/

Hi anon,

I also deal with this, and tbh I also haven't found a ton of things that work super well. It's super frustrating when every doctor's response is "go on spiro" without even asking if that's what I want to try or taking the time to understand what I'm looking for with hormones.

I have a friend who uses the Cetaphil oily skin cleanser and said that helps them, but tbh, it feels like a lot of this stuff is trial and error to figure out what works for us.

Since I don't really have a useful answer, I'm just going to post this ask and see if any followers have any tips that work for them that they could share.

Sorry I couldn't be more helpful, anon!

[pedripics]

pedri saying he's never had psychotherapy is surprising. i feel like if you've had multiple injuries the club should insist on something like that

obviously he's playing well now and he says himself that its the best he's ever felt, so i can't really say anything but it just surprised me

i am pretty sure that the club itself currently doesn't have any psychologists for the first team (not sure if they are working with external staff but according to media they don't have anyone working directly with the first team, which i find a bit questionable tbh). personally, I think almost anyone benefits from seeing a psychologist, whether you are struggling or not, but i also know that some people just aren't comfortable talking about personal issues with a stranger/ it can take a lot of trial and error to find the right therapist. as long as you're talking to someone, that's a good start and from what he mentioned, it seems like his family helps him a lot

[ladydeath-vanserra]

Preparing, Cooking and Curing Venison

ok so I'm from rural Iowa, right. and Hunting is a big, big thing. I have a very vivid memory of a hunter hanging a deer upside down in his backyard to bleed it dry

and while rereading the first few chapters and reading the "few hours" in terms of curing the meat, it had me a bit 🤨. even tho I had never hunted myself, it did trigger an alarm in my head so I went deep diving. never in my life did I think I'd be looking into curing meat and here we are

there's several ways to cure meat but the most traditional is dry curing with salt. I see 'traditional' I see 'old school'. This is like medieval times so it seemed the most logical and ideal form of curing

1) eating raw venison is a Risk. no one who is actually versed in hunting and eating game is going to risk getting sick when they're already starving. Diarrhea and loss of fluids is a huge risk factor

2) Feyre said she alloted a "few hours" to curing meat. it needs a MINIMUM of 24 hours to 5 DAYS in order to properly cure. as stated above, would people be willing to pay for a "few hours of curing" when 1) curing meat was a common practice 2) with it being a common practice are people really going to gamble with a "few hours" of curing with the risks of illness from unproperly preserved meat 3) it needs a ton of salt in order to do cure. Salt was a luxury for a lot of medieval folks. it probably cost them a decent sum to be able to aquire

while venison is "easy" to cook, it can be tricky as it can easily get overcooked and very tough. As we can see, it's roasted. roasting is predominantly done in an oven or a crockpot. considering it's medieval times, I'm gonna guess an oven. Ovens were very rare and very expensive in the home and community ovens are more likely to be used.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say they cooked it over a fire. it's a few minutes to prevent over-cooking. it's not a typical food that would be cooked in a more lavish lifestyle and since Feyre could not cook, I'm going to wager that it took a little bit of trial and error for one of the sisters to learn how

"but Atlas!" you say. "Its just fantasy. Who CARES if it's not accurate!"

don't care

she could have done the research needed for hunting if her main character is gonna be flouncing around as a "huntress"

I feel like this is just further elaboration of SJM speed running the beginning of acotar to get to Bigger Plot Points tbh. she makes being a Huntress™️ Feyres whole ass theme that Jumpstarts the series. She cannot cook. She cures the meat. her sisters and father get labeled as Lazy. so who cooks?

a little bit of consistency pls

[coffee-and-tea-time]

⋆˚𝜗𝜚˚⋆ CHITCHAT WITH THE TWINS! ⋆˚𝜗𝜚˚⋆

We are very excited to finally answer some of your questions! Though it’s not like we won't answer the ones that come after this post, we will try to accumulate a good few before answering so as to not flood our posts with just answering asks!- Tea. (BTW, every answer in green is mine and every answer in pink is Coffee’s) 

Theres an ask in spanish asking if its good to draw our character and i want to let clear in english to that WE ABSOLUTE LOVE THE IDEA PLEASE SEND US PHOTO PLEASE PLEASE ahem, hope this post is of help and thanks for all your love! - Coffee

Que sepas que nos pusimos a gritar emocionados cuando vimos tu ask, por supuerto que nos encantaría, now we are the ones acting like little fans jsjsjs Angelo tiene el pelo rubio y unos ojos hazel, es descrito como angelical por su voz y su fama, su tez es clara pero no pálida, tiene un bronceado muy ligero, como té con leche. otros detalles es su lunar a lo marilyn monroe al costado izquierdo del labio, pelo lacio hasta la nuca tipo wolf cut

this type of haircut

Su estilo es como casual-formal, su intención es totalmente hacer las mejores impresiones para su pareja so si su pareja así lo quiere, él puede moldearse a su gusto. Como el seller dijo, el de verdad le gusta lucir bien para su s/o.

De verdad me alegra mucho que a alguien le guste lo suficiente uno de nuestros personajes como para dibujarlo. Estábamos los dos tan emocionados que nos adelantamos a escribir todo este Q&A de una sentada para poder responder a tu pregunta. Comparto también ese sentimiento con respecto a los yanderes, en un inicio no le veía tanto la gracia hasta que decidí comenzar a escribirlos junto a Coffee y empecé a entender un poco más el appeal de esta clase de personajes. No puedo esperar a ver qué tal te queda Angelo! WE TOTALLY EXCITED!

Well, in terms of second language, tarak is a nerd dragon, he studied everything and is very proud of that (use him as ur wikipedia), myotis is based on Gomez Addams, he knows more languages because “love has many” and he isn’t gonna take any chances, imagine he can’t talk with his darling, a nightmare. Grier pick up random things from games and media, and don't tell Jade I tell u this but in his emo boy phase, he put many status in different languages to seem “different” so he knows random words in every language (by google translate). Lior is still trying to get fluent in English, give the baby more time. 

The only character with a set nationality is Angelo who is Argentinian, so speaks both english and spanish, there’s no particular reason as to why, it just seemed to fit him. The others don’t have a set nationality, though I do personally imagine Jade to have the facial features of an Asian American guy, but we are not knowledgeable enough to elaborate on that. 

I imagine him as foxy visual trype of character tbh.

We usually choose stuff from characters or media we enjoy and merge it all together, for example, Phobiasroom! it came from our deep fascination with the whole backrooms theme and our shared fear of deep sea creatures, so we asked ourselves, wouldn’t that make a damn cool character? and to top it all off, a yandere! (because Coffee is obsessed with them). Some behaviors or ways of thinking we do take from…

You, from you Tea JSJSJSJS sometimes of me or sometimes of something we say, but mostly Tea sjsjsjs tho when is things we don't know much about we make assumptions or research, like with the monster of phobiabackroom, there was a lot of trial and error on his character until we both end up satisfied and even some things are taken and transformed from shows or things we read/saw, there's actually a lot of exciting talk between us talking about adding a thing or another.

TO BE FAIR- it’s not that i’m obsessive or crazy, nononononono- I just become a bit infatuated with my crushes and gush about them to Coffee and she just… writes it down, and before i know it, she wrote it down for one of the characters and it just seems to fit, so I don’t change it. I will NOT disclose which characters have some of my own thoughts poured into them, you’ll just have to guess. I can say if u want -NO

Also, if you are a person who struggles with some things of writing, I strongly recommend you start writing with ur bestie or even ur sibling like us. I’m more an imaginative kinda writer, I love creating new characters and univeserses and dialogues but im very bad at the narrative, writing descriptions or follow certain rhythm is very hard for me while Tea loves to visualize the space. write between two isn’t very popular but I strongly advice it if you find the other person can complement ur writing, in my case, my twin.

I do enjoy the setting more than writing the characters. I like to set a specific aura or vibe to the worlds we create and bring out some of the exciting emotions we get while thinking through them. Coffee’s writing style compliments mine very well since I struggle with portraying the character’s emotions, which is Coffee’s strong suit.

The weak point of one is the stronger point of the other. We a lot the same but also a lot different, that's why we good twins.

Well, I have a soft spot for Dizie but the most fun to write I think it was grier, seller was a pain to write since well he is more calm but no calm character which is very confusing and it was really hard to keep that character, im better written with more consistent personalities. And i'm confident I can dealt with any of the shop except t҉͚̖̀̿h̸͈̬̳̮͎̀̽̋̽̇e҈͚͙̱͈̎̊̓̚ õ̶̬̲͇̣̔̈́w҈̫̘̜̖̽̀͋̄n̴̝͕̖̓̑̋e҈͚̰̘̯̈́̒͋̈̔r̸͈̗̝̮̍́̍̓ , yanderes are my taste since I have memory so im confident I know a lot.

OLIVER IS MY BEAUTIFUL BABYBOI AND I’D TAKE A BULLET FOR HIM ANY DAY… Ehem- I really adore him mostly because I sort of relate to his way of thinking, the need to please his beloved with sweet treats and a passion for baking, (though i’d never put actual parts of myself in what i bake…) Jade was particularly hard to write for the fact he actively tries to keep his possessive tendencies at bay, hiding them from the reader while also trying to make them slightly visible proved to be…quite the challenge, but we hope we made him justice! I’d probably also choose Jade if I was in the reader’s shoes, though being so bold as to request something out of the menu would be sort of embarrassing… what if someone looked like Till from Alien Stage? I ACCEPT-

In all honesty, most of our ideas come from random thoughts that cross Coffee’s mind at any time of day. Something like “what if [insert random object] was a yandere?” at 3 AM…worst of all is that I just run with it, we go back and forth about it and BOOM, another universe and like 5 other OC’s to develop.

When tea thinks I don’t have any more things to turn yandere POOM:

“clothes as yanderes is a weird but funny concept”

a turtle neck is very good as a yandere.

Well, I send random things in general like:

“did u notice u have everything to be the antichrist in the eyes of a strict catholic?”

Imagine just chilling, washing dishes and you see that kind of text…hilarious. 

Well, first of all, we aren’t in for writing smut/suggestive since well, we would absolutely laugh in every word, I cannot look and my twin and say pennis seriously JSJSJSJSJ we are totally into trying different kinds of angst and certain level of dead dove so don’t be afraid to ask for different things while its not: smut, incest, long difference of ages (tho a puppy love sounds cute to write, but always keeping a normal age range), we also don’t plan on writing a very physically descrived kinda reader because we wish for the most readers to feel identified with them. Tho we are open to do little things for asks like “Lior with a reader that suffers migraines”, “Tarak with a reader on their period”, etc more ambiguous and not concerning topics we can’t properly tackle or make justice to.

When it comes to what we will answer directly about ourselves, the rules are very simple; we won’t answer anything too personal like our real names, that sort of thing is off the table since we like to keep this blog about our characters and silly little worlds we make up. questions about what we like or our writing process are okay, of course, it’s not like we will never say stuff about ourselves, but it’s best for it to come naturally. In any case, if an ask/request makes us uncomfortable, we will simply not answer it!

We luv u guys too <3 

  ∧,,,∧

(  ̳• · • ̳)

/    づ♡  we luv u  tuu (btw, another horror fan yeiiiiiii)

Yeh, growing up I became a big coffee fan and Tea of tea, honestly it is hard for me to understand different kinds of tea and stuff but I can differentiate coffee even by smell so yeh, I think is one of our main differences as twins. We came up with these nicknames since we always try to make the other taste a different type of coffee/tea.

I actually can’t drink coffee at all since my stomach is too sensitive to certain foods, so trying different kinds of tea was my only hope for a comforting drink in the mornings which slowly turned into a full on addiction. It’s kind of funny to me how that worked out, I mean, Coffee is the more energetic of us and I’m more quiet. My absolute favorite preparation of tea has to be black with a hint of fresh mint and a splash of milk! It's so comforting, like a warm blanket. 

CAPUCHINOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

[starfxkrinc]

hi you don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to, but i’m trying to find my signature scent but idk like, how to match it to me if that makes sense?? bc my style varies from older brother in 2000s to hippie girl living in the forest😭😭 so i just dont know what perfume i should go for. how do you find your signature scent? is it just trial and error?

yeah it truly is trial and error! i always recommend sampling things in department stores or other vstores that carry fragrance like lush, the body shop etc. i carry a pen so i can write down the name of the fragrance on the tester so ik what im smelling later. i pick one or two scents to spray on myself to see howi like them. and i look up the perfumes on fragrantica! the ones i like i add to my shelf there so i can keep track of what the common thread is.

for me my first signature was loverdose by diesel which is a spicy, ambery scent. i leaned towards those for a while they i started experimenting with newer scents by going off reddit and fragtwt recommendations and convos. keep in mind your nose and your taste is gonna develop along your journey so something you hated you may love now and vice versa. for me it was rose, i used to be meh abt rose but now its one of my fav notes. i used to HATE aldehydes now i absolutely love them.

tbh best way to start is to go to the fragrantica warriors twitter community and ask for recs, comb through fragrantica forums because the website has posts from as far back as 2009 their might be some suggestions there, and to also ask reddit for advice!

and ofc im not gonna let you go empty handed. so first here's some websites to get samples and buy discounted full bottles! (i recommend buying the 2ml-5ml samples for a better idea of how perfumes perform. the 1ml doesnt do much). youre gonna wanna buy full bottles right off that bat. thats a canon event i cannot stop it even if i suggest you not to LOL but luckily its v easy to resell or swap bottles on fragranticaforums and on poshmark

websites: twistedlily, scentsplit, luckyscent, fragrancenet, fragrancex

now for perfumes your vibe is actually v easy i just recommend looking for older designer scents orrrr like i said places like lush. indie perfume houses also have a lot more but im not super familiar with them yet so check out r/indiemakeupandmore

now i think u shld look towards very earthy, herbal scents. notes with amber, citrus, cinnamon, patchouli, cannabis stuff like that. i think it'll blend those two vibes perfectly

woody and spicy and ambery. the site needs to hurry up and add the notes/accords

THEE hippie scent everyone says it smells like walking into an occult shop and it does

very rich, earthy, spicy. unisex despite it saying its for men

[scribeofred]

hey. hi. give me some commentary on a section of your writing you’ve always wanted to pick apart 👀

hey hi I see that new pfp. don't think I don't.

but yes! of course! <3 I have, at your behest, selected nines go fast, also known as mechanic!nines. there is, unfortunately, no mechanicing happens in the included excerpt, but that's okay, you know where this is going anyway <3

you said section. I said 😏. ergo, this is long, like 8.5K words long, so go into it armed with snacks and beverages. I'll supply fresh cardamom-cinnamon doughnuts and moroccan mint tea <3

−3.

An anonymous source releases formerly classified documents to the public—documents that detail US Army–overseen android soldier trial runs being conducted in the arctic. The immediate release of these soldiers is demanded by a seething android population, and CyberLife, already one wrong step away from total collapse, has no choice but to comply.

tiny little mostly passive-voice introduction here. I’ve used a lot of passive voice in my writing for a number of years now. still not quite sure why, maybe I’ll figure it out as I analyze this piece. I really do not love that first sentence, it feels like a noun word salad, but it’s something I’ve never tweaked during my various editing-when-I-should-be-drafting passes. always had something else on my mind.

RK900_313248317_87 spends almost six and a half days (561,443 seconds exactly) in the arctic circle before it is granted the status of personhood. It becomes he, and he wouldn’t know what to do with himself, except for two things:

it became clear to me almost immediately that this story was going to take on an Interesting Format: lots of parentheses, lots of lists, something more outline-ish than a strictly prose story in places. I like breaking conventions, so I remain tickled by this styling. Also, “It becomes he, and he wouldn’t know what to do with himself” has such a nice progression, I really love the sound of it, the look of it. one of my high priorities while writing is creating lyrical, smooth-flowing sentences, and I love repetition, which will likely become apparent throughout this piece, or any piece I write tbh.

There is another active android who shares his serial (but not model) number. This is immediately important.

300,291 seconds into his abruptly truncated tour of duty, he interfaced with an M77 and encountered a strange snaggletoothed bit of code that was supposed to balance the tank’s backup electronic targeting system but instead had a fifty percent chance of failing completely when the correct conditions were met. He (then it) corrected the code, submitted an error report and a copy of his applied fix to maintenance, and resumed his preset tasks for the day. This will become relevant later.

“snaggletoothed” is a word I (re)encountered while drafting this scene, and I (re)fell in love with it. fun words ftw. also, “He (then it)” is an immediate repetition payoff, and also reinforces the delineation between machine!nines and deviant!nines. this is also a good paragraph to drill down into the way I prefer to construct my sentences. typically I don’t rely much on opening dependent clauses, although that does vary per narrator voice, and for a character like nines especially I am Highly Conscious of the way he presents information to the reader. there’s a lot of facts, a lot of numbers and statistics, and a lot of general straightforwardness. I’m also conscious of each word’s function within the sentence (though I admittedly haven’t stripped this story to its bare bones either). the last two sentences in the second point in the list read, to my eyes and my ear, with this sort of stabbing effect. this is typical of my writing style in general, but in a story like this, with a narrator nines, the effect is heightened, blacks blacker and whites whiter. telling the reader information is a dangerous game sometimes, and my approach here is just. tell the reader exactly what needs to be said and nothing more.

He is offered and summarily declines a new position with the US Army (salary pending), he complies with the appropriate demilitarization procedures (they take a boning knife to his existence and they carve), he steps foot off Fort Hamilton (for the first and the last time), and he sets himself new directives that are entirely his own:

there’s two layers of subtext happening here. the first layer is the contrast between the information given in the main body of the sentence and the information given in the parentheses, which becomes particularly obvious by the end of the second parenthetical statement. the second layer is the paragraph taken as a whole, especially that first “(salary pending)”, which is a benign two words long and Will read different in the context of the entire paragraph. I love love love how much can be inferred via the simple salary pending, inferences about the state of the world, inferences about the US Army (and thus the USA as a whole), inferences about Nines’s priorities and character. the ping-pong match between the statements resolves in the last set of parentheses and the clause following it: Nines is going to do his own thing, thank you VERY much

Travel to Detroit, Michigan

Find RK800_313248317_53 “Connor”

Discover and execute his purpose

Completing the first objective is easy enough, even though he has to make his way from New York to Detroit primarily on foot. It’s fine. He was constructed to successfully navigate terrain more inhospitable than what he finds in the well-developed northeastern United States even in the middle of winter. It’s actually kind of nice to not be traveling in circles. He discovers he likes linear progression more than he likes circuitous. Probably this knowledge will come in useful, eventually.

“He discovers he likes linear progression more than he likes circuitous” is an example of both repetition and elision. choosing to not repeat something can be just as effective as repetition. even though this story is in present tense, occasionally I do flirt with imparting future knowledge that technically nines shouldn’t know. it’s fine it’s a stylistic choice, it’s not actually an issue; it does, however, contrast against that last sentence, where the two -ly adverbs intentionally create what should be ambiguity but actually isn’t because of the repetition. it’s almost like repetition legitimiz—

Completing the second objective is even easier. It only takes some moderate digital surfing to determine his predecessor’s whereabouts: time evenly split between the Detroit Police Department’s Central Station, one Lieutenant Hank Anderson’s house, and with the Jericho Movement’s core leadership (location randomized). He considers his options and determines the least threatening time to approach them to be just before Connor and the lieutenant finish work. Visiting them at their place of employment is less invasive than at their personal residence and less unpredictable than approaching them on the street.

I rebel against following trends, sometimes, so I’ve eschewed the popular term New Jericho and instead called it my own thing, because I’m Pretentious Like That. I don’t necessarily love the name the Jericho Movement? but it’s good enough for drafting purposes.

He catalogues but does not mind the stares he receives as he is escorted past the security checkpoint and through the bullpen to a pair of desks, one disorganized, one pristine, belonging to one disorganized human and one pristine android.

repetition legitimiz—

<<Ping.

>>Echo reply.

trying to figure out how to format messages between androids (or texts or what have you) can be an iterative process. if this went up on ao3, I’m sure I would have figured out a fancy lil bit of css or html to make it look Cool.

Their LEDs flash yellow in sync, and by the time he’s walked the seventeen steps to the desks, he and Connor have worked out all of the pertinent details they can by themselves. It’s purely for the wide-eyed lieutenant’s sake that he says, “Hello. I am RK900 serial number 313 248 317 - 87, Connor’s successor. You may call me Nines.”

wise writing advice says not to use numbers if you can help it, which. yeah. wise indeed. that said, because android systems are hilariously more powerful than even our modern supercomputers, I’ve taken pains to show how advanced the androids are via contextual clues. connor and nines probably had plenty of time to get to know each other and make jokes and so on tbh, but there’s only so much information I can include without cluttering up each paragraph, so. director’s commentary bonus info! also, I didn’t give nines an actual name here, but I intended to change it by the time I was finished drafting. couldn’t settle on the Right Name, though, so nines he remains.

“Pretty sure I’d rather take the other one,” the lieutenant breathes, looking spooked and unhappy. “Even if he did point a gun at me.”

“There’s no reason to be rude, Hank,” Connor says mildly as he stands. “And certainly not to one of our country’s newest veterans.”

“The hell are you talkin’ about? And where do you think you’re going?”

“To speak to Captain Fowler about bringing Nines on as a second consultant. Don’t worry, we’ll explain everything on the way home.”

“On the— Connor, no, absolutely not, one android in my house is more than enough, don’t you walk away from me—”

Captain Fowler, currently overseeing a woefully understaffed station, begrudgingly agrees to a trial run; Nines and Connor (but mostly Connor) sweet-talk Hank into letting Nines accompany them back to his house; and this is how Nines ends up with what humans call a family. He isn’t quite certain the term applies, especially when he consults the more traditional definitions, but when he and Connor sit cross-legged on the living room floor that night with Sumo’s almost-impossibly fluffy body draped over their knees, their hands pressed together as they interface, data flowing thick and rich between them, he thinks maybe family is something they can grow into if they give it enough time.

He wonders if he likes the idea. Connor certainly does, a brightness to his thoughts entirely unlike the harsh glare of raw sunlight off fresh snow.

>>I see myself in you, and yet I don’t.

<<Disparate objectives means we iterated differently. I was you, once, but now I am not.

Connor makes a meaningless-meaningful sound. He’s copying Hank, who uses wordless interjections liberally. Nines likes this practice.

(not so) secretly this is one of my favorite paragraphs. nines developing his own preferences in addition to the subtext that subtextual communication is both meaningful (but meaningless but still meaningful) and valuable to androids in addition to humans. I’m tickled.

>>Your system, Nines. It’s…

<<They had to remove everything classified.

>>Does it… hurt?

Nines doesn’t know. He doesn’t know how to tell. He shares this with Connor and Connor in turn shares his memories: two-thirds of the way to terminal velocity and then pavement, a bullet between the eyes, a bullet up through the jaw, impaled and heartless, don’t make me shoot, don’t make me shoot, don’t make me shoot—

repetition legiti— somewhere along the way I made the decision to remain vague re: nines’s system issues. this was half because I wasn’t sure exactly what issues I wanted him to have and half because it’s often more fun if I let the reader conjure the trauma themselves.

Fear static pain.

Whiteout.

They soft reboot nearly in sync, Sumo whining into their legs. In a single mirrored movement, Nines and Connor smooth their free hands through Sumo’s shaggy coat, trying to ease the dog’s distress even as their own systems struggle to rebalance.

>>Sorry, I’m so—

<<You didn’t mean—

>>That shouldn’t have—

<<Probably it’s because—

>>Let me—

Diagnostics and tests and error reports and debugging tools and they mutilated you and it doesn’t hurt because it doesn’t hurt like dying and not-doing-the-dying hurts and I can’t fix this, not immediately and that’s okay, you don’t have to and I want to, please, let me help, Nines, please and okay, Connor and thank you, Connor and your stress levels are alarmingly high, Connor, hug Sumo now, Connor.

Painful memories and mild panic attacks aside, it’s a good night. He has a warm place to stay, he has a new brother and a dog, he has objectives to complete starting tomorrow. He isn’t certain if it equals having a purpose, but it’s a start.

“hug Sumo now, Connor” is another favorite line <3 honestly, I love writing panic attacks, and figuring out how to write something equivalent being experienced by two linked digital systems was a fun challenge. their communication is happening so unbelievably fast here, millions—billions—of times faster than a human could possibly read it, and chopping half of their messages in half helps hint, if not fully convey, that rapidity. one of the big challenges with writing these scenes between connor and nines is the fact that, realistically, the two of them wouldn’t be communicating via a single throughline of conversation like the one written above. I’ve knowingly taken extreme liberties in order to craft a readable narrative because I just don’t have the ability to genuinely portray just how broadly AND simultaneously their systems are interacting. it’s fine, this is narrative-driven fiction, I just. one of the most frequent reasons I rolled my eyes while reading dbh fic was when I’d encounter descriptions of android systems that make them less powerful than even our current computers, to say nothing of the computing power that MUST exist in the dbh world in order for androids to function. as a result, I’ve always been highly cognizant of how I’m describing android/computer systems because this is one universe where writing them as potentially overpowered is more realistic than underpowered.

−2.

I decided to format this story in numbered sections. these sections do not function as chapters and instead function as a countdown to zero and then count up to whatever number I deemed suitable to round out the story. yes I used the actual minus symbol and not a hyphen.

Nines spends three days with the DPD and, in order, encounters

An impressively hefty backlog of paperwork and digital files that even Connor hasn’t been able to keep up with due to him and Hank being so busy with android-related crimes,

Detective Gavin Reed (antagonistic, aggressive, unpleasant),

Officer Chris Miller (direct, apologetic, tired),

two dead bodies (one human, one android; murder-suicide),

Chicken Feed (a Connor-determined reward for Hank’s ongoing attempt at sobriety),

a stray dog one-fourteenth of Sumo’s weight and size (Havanese, malnourished, unchipped but friendly),

Connor’s strategic employment of puppy_dog_eyes4.exp (16.22% more effective on Hank than Nines predicted),

Officer Tina Chen cooing over the rescued Havanese before taking on the responsibility of securing its future (Connor says he hopes it’ll be as loved as Sumo is; Nines agrees),

one dead body (android; murdered),

three trespassers and looters (two men, one woman; apprehended in 9.04 seconds),

Detective Ben Collins (personable, talkative, in need of a partner who can handle the more physical aspects of the job; Nines volunteers and is approved),

two dead bodies (androids; self-destructed),

a motor vehicle accident (high-speed rollover, manual-driving mode engaged; human driver pronounced dead at the scene, red ice use detected and likely to blame, autopsy pending),

four dead bodies (two humans, two androids; shot execution style; gang involvement?),

one alleyway brawl between ten people (seven humans, three androids; no casualties),

Detective Collins expressing concern over his wellbeing (minor damage sustained to biocomponent 7344c; self-repair already underway; such concern is unnecessary [but appreciated]),

a high-speed foot pursuit that lasts 8.7 seconds and ends with the suspect in custody (human, red ice found on person, suspected drug dealer),

roughly equal amounts of praise and teasing from his coworkers for his first solo arrest (he was just doing his job; he backs up their kind words and revisits them every 2.334 hours),

three dead bodies (one human, two androids; washed up on the banks of the Detroit River; shot, execution style; gang involvement?),

a high-speed vehicle pursuit that lasts 51.16 seconds and ends in an eighteen-vehicle pileup (five humans deceased, three humans and two android in critical condition, seven humans and four androids with moderate injuries).

the number of times I revised this list as I continued to write the story going forward cannot be calculated using modern instruments. so. many. times. it seems like a simple list of information, but nothing is ever simple when it comes to the inclusion of Actual Numbers. writing cute android boys can be tedious, y’all.

It’s the worst multivehicle accident within Detroit city limits in the last fifteen years.

(This, Nines thinks as he reviews footage of the carnage that’s still happening before his eyes, is wrong.)

(No. It’s not right, and he’s experienced just enough of the world to know that’s not the same thing.)

−1.

It’s happenstance, a convergence of the correct conditions in the correct order that produces a specific result. He and Detective Collins are returning to Central after inspecting a trio of bodies; Connor and Hank are following a couple of car lengths back. A sixth-mile ahead of them, patrol car 972 flips on its lights and begins pursuing a pair of motorcycles that have chosen an incredibly unwise moment to illegally and dangerously pass a transport truck.

The chase begins.

A half-second flurry of messages between him, dispatch, and Connor, and they have permission to act as backup.

“Been a long time since I did one of these,” Detective Collins says, voice grim but hands easy on the wheel as he threads through traffic. “Must not be equipped with those law enforcement override features.”

“Correct,” Nines says, listening to 972’s updates while analyzing the movements of the vehicles ahead of them. His hand hovers over the dashboard. “Should I drive?”

“Nah, I got this. Keep on keeping us in the loop.”

Twenty-nine point eight seconds later Nines watches but can do nothing as a catastrophe takes place before his eyes. With reflexes laughably faster than Detective Collins’s, he overrides their car’s systems and guides them to a safe stop on the inner shoulder of the highway before leaping out and rushing toward the disaster. Connor’s fifteen steps behind him; their human partners are even slower.

Screaming metal, screaming people, bleeding androids and bleeding humans, deep-tissue scans and beats per minute and crush injuries and ruptured blood vessels and shredded thirium lines and sobbing and stuttering and damage and malfunction and screaming and screaming and screaming. Nines and Connor work in fluid tandem, synced—Nines brute forces his way through the wreckage to expose life signs and Connor extracts said life signs with gentle words and gentler hands.

By the time they’ve relocate all victims (living first, deceased second) to a distance suitably removed in order to protect everyone in the event of an explosion, EMS have arrived and are hard at work fighting to save those in critical condition. Connor, Hank, and Detective Collins are lending their hands wherever necessary, and Nines should do the same, wants to the same, but he’s been in parallel reviewing all recorded footage of the accident, and so he makes one last visit to the twisted, heat-and-friction-fused heap of steel and aluminum, copper and glass, silicone and rubber. One car, interior soaked red and blue, is so tightly folded around itself that he has to peel back the dashboard so he can access the physical hardware beneath when it refuses all interface attempts. He pockets one of the redundant backup caches and downloads the same data from every other vehicle involved in the accident before rejoining the meticulously controlled chaos of emergency services and distressed victims and just enough bystanders to add some random variables into the whole mess. Nines scans and swiftly locates Detective Collins’s biorhythms, elevated but not to the point of distress. He pings Connor and gets a please hold back, which is both new and concerning but nothing he can assist with right now, so he reports to the on-site chain of command and allows them to put him to work.

it’s no secret that I do not cleave to the shitty first draft methodology. it works perfectly for some writers! it does not work for me. I am typically fairly set on what details I’m including in any given paragraph by the time I’m finished writing said paragraph, although I will usually lightly tweak things between two and infinite times whenever I reread. I rarely rewrite entire sentences, even more rarely delete sentences outright, because I don’t include throwaway information. there is, right from the get-go, intention behind each clause, each phrase, each word, each punctuation mark. this meticulous methodology has its pitfalls, of course, but one of the biggest upsides is paragraphs like the two above change very little between draft one and draft posted. typically the largest changes I make involve removing or replacing information rendered outdated as I continue to draft. occasionally I do have to smooth out awkward phrasing because done is better than perfect, but if I’m being confused by or tripping over my own phrasing, the reader is going to struggle even more, and that won’t do. revising can be tricky, though, because a pitfall of methodical drafting is the way I link each clause and each sentence together. they’re like a chain, and it’s a labor-intensive, difficult process to add new links. worth it! but definitely not easy.

>>I’m fine, Hank’s fine, we’re just on our way home now.

<<Already?

>>Cole.

<<Ah. Of course. Stay with him, I’ll be there when I can.

“You okay, kid?” Detective Collins asks while walking by, then points to his own temple when Nines merely tilts his head, hands busy holding a thousand-lumen light and a tiny but powerful portable heater so a human paramedic can stabilize another human’s compound fracture. “Your mood ring’s still red. Has been a while now.”

I just revised “while walking by” from the original “as he walked by” because of its ambiguity. it’s established later in the sentence that nines is stationary, but why create a potential moment of confusion for the reader if it can be avoided? especially when the solution is such a simple bit of rewording.

“I’m okay.” He is. Processors busy parsing and organizing a huge influx of new data, when they’re not consumed with saving lives.

“It’s fine if you’re not,” Detective Collins says later, once they’re back in the car, heater cranked to the max. The warmth is nice, although Nines isn’t sure he likes the air blowing across his face and body, but he doesn’t say anything; he isn’t the one who’s shivering. “Okay, that is. Scenes like that can be… well, they can be rough, even if you’ve been doing this job a while. The way you and Connor rushed in there…”

there is So Much information that’s covered in this entire crash sequence, and while I absolutely could have spent more time here, lingering, watching nines and co. do their things, I decided to play around with little time skips. it isn’t obvious right here, but there’s a line later in this numbered section that will give the above passage new context. this is also a good excuse to indulge my fondness for medic!rk units, combined with the many years I spent enmeshed in the thunderbirds fandom, which—there’s an extremely niche crossover that lives in my brain that I’ll probably never talk about again, but. now you know that’s a Thing. point is, reading and writing disaster/emergency scenarios is nothing new, and I’ve settled on a combination of specific, concrete details and relatively unemotional zoomed-out narrative.

“I’m okay,” Nines repeats, because he is. He suffered no significant damage, while there are five confirmed dead and sixteen injured. Seventeen if Hank’s emotional state can be counted as an injury. And it all could have been avoided.

“Mm. Well,” Detective Collins says, openly skeptical as he turns onto Michigan Drive, “you make sure you stay that way. Talk to someone if you need to, yeah?”

Concern, Nines decides, directed toward him, not because of him but rather on his behalf. It’s—nice, to have someone care enough to sincerely express such emotion toward him. He makes sure to tell Detective Collins this before they part ways, and he carefully indexes the memory of Detective Collins’s hand clasping his shoulder. “No thanks needed, kid, if you and your brother can keep Hank even halfway sober after that disaster. He’s been doing so much better, I’d hate to see him relapse. Call me if you need anything.”

this is not a story about hank’s recovery, not really, although there are certainly mentions of it present. ~connor magically makes hank better~ is an exhausting trope at best, but I’ve intentionally not dug into how, exactly, hank’s doing or how his recovery is being accomplished because that’s not the focus of this story. it is, in part, the focus of one of my other wips, and I don’t like covering the same ground twice, thus the ambiguity.

He does not need anything, at least not that Detective Collins can supply, and so he doesn’t call, but the option’s there, and somehow that lightens his system load in a way he can’t quite quantify.

the more time I spent in the dbh fandom, the more dbh fanfic I read, the more resistant I became to mirroring human and android systems when it comes to emotional reactions and manifestations. still, the reader is human, so parallels have to be drawn somewhere, somehow. and, also, even our modern computers run with such complexity that we don’t always understand everything about them, so I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable for an android to not know everything going on in their system all the time, depending on how their consciousness works. but we don’t have time to get into all that.

>>Bathroom.

The priority message arrives while Nines is still on the chilly side of the front door, so it’s no trouble to alter his path to take him down the hall instead of into the kitchen. He is… glad, he thinks, that he did, when he sees his reflection. Human blood, thirium, oil, dirt, coolant, half-melted snow, synthetic skin and even white chassis visible through the rips in his clothing. He looks like one of the causalities. He barely recognizes himself. He feels like he barely recognizes himself.

Because a convergence happened today, and it left people dead and broken, and it triggered upsetting memories for Hank, and it triggered upsetting memories for Nines. Nines, who applied a fix to a single unlikely, conditional problem and then made that fix available to the entire United States Army. Nines, who unwittingly, unthinkingly smoothed the road to a more assured death of whoever ends up on the other side of those targeting systems. Nines, whose hands are coated in the blood of nineteen people and the prospective blood of an incalculable number of people, blood in potentia that cannot be washed away with warm water and soap and a moderate application of friction.

sometimes just straight-up describing an action is fine! sometimes it’s better than just fine and is in fact the best option in scenarios where the focus should be elsewhere. but sometimes saying “he washed his hands” isn’t nearly as effective as that final clause. “a moderate application of friction” is what I would consider a Quintessential Red-Style Phrase™. between all the concrete details, I tend to lean on subtextual descriptions whenever I can get away with them because I like making the reader do at least fifty percent of work of parsing the story.

Nines, who has all the on-board data of every vehicle involved in today’s fatal crash and potentially the time and the resources to eventually compute the flaw in the code and the necessary fix.

and thus we find out what happens when an android is given a guilt complex. whoops. my bad. hilariously, hilariously, all of the story up to this point and beyond is laying the groundwork for something so much simpler and gentler. but the backstory became important enough to write out whole cloth. 8K+ words later…

He carefully places the physical memory cache on the glass shelf beside the mirror. Showers. Dresses in the clean clothing Connor left for him on the painted cabinet by the door. Repockets the cache. Joins Connor and Hank and Sumo in the living room.

<<How is he?

Connor sends a burst of high-density packets, most of which contain data Nines is capable of obtaining himself, but mixed in are Connor’s uniquely calibrated observations of a man he’s had time to study. Hank is more sad than anxious, more tired than angry, more sober than drunk, and that last one is a definitive surprise. Four of the victims were children. All injured, all alive, so far.

Nines sits on the floor beside Connor and Sumo. Filters out the squeak of the basketball shoes coming from the TV and dials up the sensors that most clearly register the life signs of android and human and dog around him. Everything else runs in the background, for a little while.

there’s a post floating around tumblr that talks about the prospective humor of connor filtering out gavin’s voice, without gavin realizing it. delightfully amusing but also totally implausible because gavin’s vocal frequencies overlap at least somewhat with those of basically every other man in the station, and connor would have to be running some truly bonkers frequency-isolation software to mute gavin specifically without losing anyone else’s voice in the process. maybe he could write a program to do that by himself! maybe not. either way, isolating a certain band of frequencies is simple enough even with our current technology, so nines absolutely can mute the obnoxious squeak of shoes on floor. I dislike the sound, thus nines does too.

The game is well into the third quarter and Hank’s glass is still almost half full when he nudges a toe against Nines’s arm and says, “You found yourself a quarter too, huh?”

“No.” Nines holds out the cache he’s been rotating between his fingertips, allows Hank to see the device is more than double the diameter and thickness of an American quarter. He explains its purpose using grade 7 vocabulary.

Hank isn’t stupid. it’s just that nomenclature is a difficult thing to parse if you aren’t In The Know. connor knows this, thus nines knows this, thus I get to write fun sentences like “he explains its purpose using grade 7 vocabulary.” sometimes writing truly is a joy and a delight <3

“Huh.” Most of the brightness in Hank’s eyes comes from the reflection of the TV. He sips from his glass, an absent gesture. “And you have it because…?”

“I intend to correct the error that incited the accident.”

Hank looks—surprised, baffled, angry, heartbroken, intrigued, angry, proud, heartbroken. He drains the glass in one sharp movement and stands. “Yeah. You do that.”

The words taken literally grant permission; the sarcasm and disbelief with which they’re said inverts their meaning into a negative. Nines counts himself fortunate he doesn’t need Hank’s blessing to continue what he’s already started.

Connor buries his fingers in Sumo’s ruff when Hank chooses the bedroom instead of the bottle. >>Grief is complex. And I’m finding it more complex by the day instead of less.

<<You’ll be able to establish a pattern for him eventually.

>>I think, in this case, I’d rather the data set be left incomplete.

Thermal vision allows Nines to see Hank folded in half on the edge of his bed, a soft-hard knot of loss and regret. <<I have to agree.

“a soft-hard knot”—I love using contradictory terms in tandem to create complexity and texture.

Once it’s clear Hank is down for the night, they sync, Nines’s software making use of Connor’s hardware to increase his efficiency as he scans billions of billions of lines of code. Not all the syntax is immediately readable, which leads them briefly down a detour of researching various programming languages, and he catches Connor making a note to further that study another time. Nines agrees, he wants to learn as well, but—later.

While he and Connor are CyberLife’s most and second most advanced models, respectively, they weren’t purpose built to do this kind of work. Their predictive programs aren’t even compatible with the vehicles’ data until they’ve written brand-new translation software to handle code that wasn’t designed to run on androids, and the entire process is slowed by the way their AI engines take up significant resources even with most of the optional subroutines suspended. Skinless, cosmetic breathing terminated, actuators locked in place, scanners dimmed to minimum, they sit and they work until the sun rises and they still have hours and days and weeks of work to go.

I could shorten my sentences. I could. I do, sometimes. a lot of the time I don’t. in this case, even though these sentences are dense, redolent with adjectives and nouns, I kept them long because long sentences can effectively convey the passage of time, in part due to word selection and in part due to the irl time they take to read. admittedly writing dbh fic is a chance to flex a bit of computing knowledge. I deliberately crafted these paragraphs to showcase that while nines and connor are exceptionally powerful, complex computing systems, they have their limits, in terms of both preprogrammed knowledge and processing power. the thing that most dbh fic writers seem to forget is that in the dbh world, androids would not be considered supercomputers. not even close. depending on what kind of back-end architecture cyberlife androids are linked to, they potentially have access to staggering computing power if they need it. if this is the case, I cannot see cyberlife allowing deviants to continue accessing their systems, especially after a public revolution, so I’ve structured this story’s universe around androids operating autonomously, with decidedly finite limits. this is important now, and it will be even more important later.

>>I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I want a computer that isn’t myself.

<<It is… not optimal.

>>Understatement. We’ve found more than a dozen potential points of failure, but even when we finish our analyses, we won’t be able to create specific fixes for most of the problems.

<<It’s still a worthwhile pursuit.

>>I never said it wasn’t. I’m just saying this is a problem you won’t be able to solve by yourself.

Connor’s right. This isn’t isolating and then correcting a single string of buggy code—this is a complex web of software and firmware and hardware and mechanical components, one acting upon another upon another upon another, and that’s before factoring in the addition of unpredictable variables such as humans and animals and weather and sundry acts of God. Millions of man-hours backstop the billions of billions of lines of code Nines is now carrying around, and for all of his computing prowess, he cannot force results any faster just because he wants them. It’s—frustrating.

>>I’ll continue helping you, of course, if it’s what you want, but—

<<No. Thank you, Connor. I’ll find another solution.

Except the thought of getting in the car with Connor and Hank makes Nines feel—

Well. It makes him feel. That’s a start.

“Anxious,” Connor supplies aloud when Nines shares this while they’re preparing coffee and breakfast for Hank. The shower turns off, which means there’s a ninety-seven percent chance Hank will emerge from the bathroom within forty-three seconds. “Is it the accident?”

realistically, connor and nines would be having this conversation silently, digitally. even more realistically, this conversation would not be nicely linear the way I’ve written it here, but again, trying to convey that kind of overlapping simultaneous awareness is beyond the scope of this particular work. also, convenience for the reader (and also the writer) sometimes trumps realism.

Yes but no. Nines analyzes himself, tracking the new impulses through his system in real time. His stress levels spike consistently as he reads and rereads his memories of the last three days. He feels… hm. Flustered, self-conscious, embarrassed maybe when he says, “I don’t like dead bodies.” Factoring in last night’s casualties (six now; one of the children died after almost five hours on the operating table), he’s seen enough dead versus living bodies to create a functional data pool.

remember I said that there was a line appearing later that would give the descriptions of the crash and nines’s perception of the events new context? bam.

Connor hesitates the barest fraction of a second—not enough for a human to notice but obvious to Nines. Connor is surprised. He recovers just as rapidly. “Solving this—is it your purpose?”

“I don’t know,” Nines admits as he layers avocado and jalapeño Monterey Jack cheese and tomato and salt and pepper on rye toast. “Likely not in the long term, but it suffices for the short term. I want to do this.”

nines likes to do things In Order, which I appreciate about him, but it does mean I’ve actually had to cut back on a lot of extraneous information. it’s fun information for me! but I am cognizant of the way my writing style can be dense by default, filled with Lots of information. it’s a part of my style, so I don’t eliminate most of it, but sometimes it does feel like Too Much even for me, and thus I trim. the sentence containing hank’s breakfast ingredients is one such sentence that went through multiple iterations of trimming and restructuring.

Connor smiles with his eyes more than his mouth, skin crinkling and creasing in synthetic crow’s-feet. “I’m glad. Yesterday was—bad.” Worse for Hank than for them, or maybe just bad in different ways. “Make sure you talk to Markus and Detective Collins first.”

“Talk to Markus and Ben before what?” Hank asks as he rounds the corner, ruffling a small towel through his hair. He looks tired, but less haggard than Nines predicted based off the data Connor shared. Having them nearby last night helped him.

The prepared mug of coffee has been cooling on the counter and is an optimal 199 degrees Fahrenheit when Nines passes it to Hank. “I’m leaving the DPD.”

if I had unlimited reader/writer bandwidth, I would have included the temperature in parenthetical celsius and kelvin, but at some point I have to start drawing lines. on a related note, I personally use a mishmash of imperial and metric in daily life, but I’ve deliberately used imperial throughout all of my dbh writing due to the setting.

Hank hesitates orders of magnitude longer than Connor did, eyes wide behind the half-dried ends of his hair. He looks at Connor, who’s visibly focused on plating the eggs he’s been frying, and then his shoulders droop, exhaustion and pain cutting shadows across his expression. “Yeah. Well. Can’t say I blame ya. City’s already a mess without that shitshow last night. I, uh, assume you already know what you’re going to do next?”

“Correct. My flight to Austin departs at 1305 hours this afternoon.”

“Austin, huh. Where you’ll be doing…?”

“My part in assisting a team in overhauling the current autonomous driving systems,” Nines says, proud but also anxious. This anxiety is why he doesn’t add I wish to prevent further losses of life as a result of vehicular accidents.

“Right.” Hank flips the towel over his shoulder and snatches the mug from Nines’s hand before turning for his bedroom. “Well. Good luck to you.”

Nines glances at Connor.

>>He doesn’t want to know. Also, someone else leaving him after a fatal crash.

<<Ah. Of course.

“Hank…” Nines starts after him, then pauses when the bedroom door slams shut. He barely has to raise his voice to project through the flimsy barrier. “I’ll be back when I’m finished.”

“Yeah? That’s nice. Go have your fun in the sun or whatever.”

>>Best leave him alone before he stresses himself out of working effectively today.

“Thank you, Hank,” Nines replies, neutrally polite, then returns to Connor, who shrugs as he fills Sumo’s bowl.

>>He’ll settle down again soon enough.

No doubt, but not soon enough to say something genuinely nice to Nines before he leaves. This loss isn’t the same as the mutilations slashed through his code, but neither is it so different.

0.

It might be winter in the northern hemisphere, but the first thing Nines notices about Austin is it’s warm—warmer than Detroit and certainly warmer than the arctic circle. Warmth, he decides as he stares up at the wide, sun-drenched sky, is something he likes.

His conversation with Markus is short, only long enough to contain the appropriate first-meeting pleasantries before Nines informs him of his intentions and asks his questions and Markus puts him in contact with the appropriate members of his swiftly expanding legal team. Because the thing is, as badly as Nines wants to make progress as rapidly as possible, he doesn’t want to undermine what Markus is trying to achieve, so he takes Markus’s goals into account when planning his own actions. Before the plane touches down at Austin–Bergstrom International Airport, he has a framework in place that will prevent him from undermining the Jericho Movement and, instead, will hopefully allow him to assist it. To build instead of destroy. The idea pleases him.

Unlike Hank, Detective Collins is amiable to discussing Nines’s abrupt vocational pivot, and his advice is valuable. (An exact monetary amount is difficult to calculate depending on what factors are appropriate to include, but Nines’s loosest estimate assigns a value in excess of one hundred seventy-three trillion dollars; $173,844,613,176,922.65 exactly in the initial moment of computation, but this figure is already out of date before he can make it mean something to anyone else. This is fine, it isn’t a long-term functional number anyway.)

Never Use Numbers If You Can Get Away With It, I Know I Know I Know, but in this case, I really do want to hammer home just how brain-meltingly expensive enterprise computing actually is. and in this case, the computational aspect is only one facet. keep reading.

“Don’t let 'em exploit you, kid,” Detective Collins tells him, stern but kind, between thank-yous and goodbyes. “What you’re looking to do is huge and probably normally only done by high-flying experts, so make sure they know exactly how much your time’s worth.”

After doing his due diligence researching all related fields, salaries included, Nines decides his time is worth a lot. He’s one of the most advanced androids ever made, and he could just as easily assist other companies with similar problems, and wouldn’t it be a shame if he were to become contractually unavailable starting tomorrow. Yes, he has a bottom line, and no, he has no desire to bankrupt them, that’s the opposite of his goals, he wants to fix the broken parts in the system, not completely sink it.

But he’s also worth hundreds of man-hours, and fair’s fair. He’s just not sure what he’s going to do with the rapidly accumulating money. That’s okay. He doesn’t have to figure it out immediately. New York City to Detroit taught him one foot after the other.

it becomes obvious much later in the text, but the agenda for the early section of this story really is “find a way for nines to make a Lot of money fairly quickly.” an eighteen-vehicle pileup seemed a logical way to achieve this goal. I typically prefer to write things that don’t already exist within a given fandom, at least to my knowledge, so. here we are.

He spends six and a half days in Austin: ninety hours hardwired into a sprawling digital system and sixty-five hours officially off the clock to comply with the recently negotiated local android labor laws. Supervising a system so large is a new kind of challenge, and maybe it’s the deviant in him, but he finds he’s glad for the downtime: to explore, and to negotiate new contracts for once he’s finished here, and to chat with Connor and Hank and Detective Collins and Markus as their respective schedules allow. Hank is less genial than the other three; Nines keeps him in the loop anyway, using simple terms to summarize what he’s been doing. Hank didn’t warn up to Connor overnight even while they worked together day in, day out for weeks; it would be folly to expect Nines to make faster progress in a shorter amount of time while a significant chunk of country separates them. Physical proximity, he’s learning, matters greatly to humans.

as usual, I write stories set in a world where the events of the game happen over weeks, not over a handful of days. the computers might be able to move that fast, but the humans cannot, and would not.

With access to a zettascale system already configured for the task at hand, Nines makes more progress in two minutes than he and Connor made in seven hours. Vehicle-based collision-avoidance systems don’t have AIs nearly as well-rounded as those created by CyberLife, but there are enough inherent similarities that Nines finds he can understand how the other systems operate. This doesn’t lessen the sheer amount of debugging that needs to be done, but it at least removes some of the so-called language barrier. Watching the projected failure percentages tick closer and closer to zero is immensely satisfying in a way disparate, unpredictable police work wasn’t.

not shown: nines standing in a sterile data center the size of walmart, a cable the width of his wrist plugged into the base of his neck, eyes flickering white as he parses data while running his system to the bleeding edge of its limits.

Still, there’s only so much that can be done through exclusively digital models; eventually they have to incorporate physical systems.

Thus: to Germany.

At first Nines finds the switch from pure software to the inclusion of hardware exactly as tedious as he predicted. Their progress slows to a crawl as they iterate different digital builds with different physical vehicles, trying to find ways of disproving what pure mathematics tells them is true, trying to find ways of breaking what they’ve built. Even though they rotate between several groups of vehicles to keep moving as quickly as possible, the inevitable, occasional lag between tests means Nines has time to converse with the people around him if he so chooses, which is why he finds himself invited to an Autobahn party the following Saturday.

After witnessing the damage caused by a cascading error that started in an autonomous driving system, Nines has firsthand data to support why Hank chooses to eschew such systems in favor of his own abilities. These abilities are, without question, more consistently erroneous, but they clearly allow Hank to feel like he has some measure of control over whatever happens. His self-fabricated peace of mind matters more to him than the time he loses each day (sometimes numbering in the hours) while engaging in the act of driving. Considering Hank is of a species that already has such a finite life span, Nines thinks the waste of time is nothing short of catastrophically, criminally hedonistic.

And then comes Saturday.

All CyberLife androids with software released after August 2025 can handle autonomous vehicles in an emergency, and all androids with software released after March 2029 have the ability to take indefinite full manual control over vehicles. Nines (then RK900_313248317_87) has technically briefly taken manual control of an M77 tank, but he’s not allowed to talk about that, so his functional answer to the question “Have you driven before? Y’know, properly?” is “No.”

This answer, he’s told in no uncertain terms, is unacceptable.

it’s probably no secret that I spend a lot of time thinking about word order within my sentences. “end your sentences with a click” is advice that has soaked straight into every fiber of gray matter I possess. the occasional weaker sentence ending is. fine. but I typically do my best to structure my sentences so that the last word impacts, hard. this goes double for the final word of the paragraph. obviously there’s a fine line between ending with a hard-hitting word and contorting the sentence structure to the point of awkward in the attempt to achieve this goal, but I’ve observed that the quality of sentence-ending words is a consistent litmus test to draw lines between good writers and the true uppermost echelon.

A group of ten split between four vehicles: two luxury SUVs, two high-performance sports cars. Nines is one of two androids, the other a nurse-turned-liabilities-expert MC500 named Bluebell that traveled with them from the States, and they sign the same declaration forms as the humans. Progress, Nines thinks as he forwards the information to Markus and Connor, who swiftly relay their mutual delight. Nines saves their responses in his long-term memory and shares the sentiment and a smile with Bluebell.

>>If you enjoy this, we should go HALO jumping after.

He looks the term up and doesn’t understand the appeal, but he replies anyway because he isn’t rude.

<<I’ll keep you informed.

Her smile brightens, warm like the desert is warm, and he wonders.

meet bluebell! she dropped herself right into this story, and I low-key fell in love with her <3 a sweetheart adrenaline junkie. she and north should Never Meet (but they do, to the grief of literally every person in a fifty mile radius).

After two weeks of intense, demanding work, their itinerary for the day is almost laughably simple. Four drivers, four navigators, and two responsibility-free passengers to allow for physical and mental breaks. Everyone swaps roles and sometimes vehicles every fifty kilometers on average to allow for roughly equal distribution of driving time because even though all four vehicles fall under the same performance class, each one promises a unique driving experience. Nines isn’t skeptical, the statistics speak for themselves, but he also doesn’t understand.

And then it’s his first turn in the driver’s seat and he thinks, Oh.

He thinks, I owe Hank an apology.

He thinks, I know what I’m going to buy.

And he does.

(Of course, it isn’t quite that simple, but for once, he postpones immediately attending to the details and instead focuses all of his not-inconsiderable processing power on his first fifty kilometers of speed limit–free road.)

(Bluebell doesn’t have to ask him to go HALO jumping; two miles down the road he offers to take her the next morning. She accepts.)

what we see of road systems and vehicles in dbh indicates there’s a lot of autonomous systems at work. I decided to throw that completely out the window for germany, for both story and personal reasons. the full working title of this story is “that nines-go-fast project a.k.a. give him an m”—m as in the bmw m series. I intentionally didn’t include any specific vehicle brands because trying to come up with names for future vehicles always feels awkward and silly, but the moment my nines became an adrenaline junkie is the moment he found himself behind the wheel of a luxury suv. an suv because he has three rk brothers and all of their silly friends and family to tote around, but in ~style~. you see my vision.

***

we’ve reached the end! not of what’s written, there’s more words drafted, but this commentary has long gotten out of hand, so if you’re reading this, thank you for sticking around to the end! hopefully you’ve gleaned something interesting! if you have any questions, hmu!

[psiirockin]

do you have any advice for opening commissions? i feel like you have them very professionally set up, and i have pretty bad social anxiety, so it might be helpful to hear tips for communicating with customers and such, or setting up a fair tos!

hi so, maybe i do have some advice!!! <33 thank you so so much for the kindness & seeing me as professional lol i’ve been doing comms for 2-3 years and i must say.. still getting the hang of a lot of things. you go through a lot of trial + error trying to figure out what works best for you, so remember theres no truly right way to go about comms! they should all fit the needs, pace, and benefit of you and your work ethic!

what i did personally is start off at some lower prices just to test the waters and get the ball rolling. i priced rendered characters at i think, $24 per character? possibly lower, i cant quite remember. and then i gradually went up as i started to progress in my art style more + had more people coming in.

with customers, i have a lot of anxiety as well! im autistic, so i never like making a customer feel like i dont truly care abt the commission by accidentally sounding too flat or anything. i tend to RLLY overthink it lol so we make sure we are extra talkative + kind about their comm! giving them compliments on the character, showing genuine excitement so they know theyre in good hands! (we love engaging esp when the customer seems VERY excited or enthusiastic abt the commission!)

a lot of irl turmoil tends to happen in our life which can make a comm delayed sometimes. could be severe mental health problems, just being busy w/ shit in general. its important to just keep your customers up to date, especially if its going to take a realllyyy long time or the customer likes frequent updates.

i used to be able to get shit done in like a night. but, with an actual line up/queue of comm work we progressively started taking longer and longer esp as we transitioned from a teenager starting out and into a busy adult with persistent mental health issues. (plus our art becomes more complex as time goes on, so that has to be taken into account) tbhs, depending on your availability and how much effort goes into your work, and as the demand grows, you need to charge accordingly and just be honest with your clientele.

as for TOS do what makes you comfortable! make your limits known and put your foot down when a request or any topic makes you uncomfortable. dont let your customers get inappropriate with you or try to make you feel bad if they dont wanna pay for what they ask for, etc. i also recommend requesting payment after sketch/half and half when starting out just so you can get some experience under your belt + assure future clients that youre professional n wont scam them! (if you plan on switching to payment upfront in the future)

just remember that u are not a machine, you are a human being making art for someone else. putting love n effort into your craft, time and effort. take your time getting the hang of comm stuff, things dont have to be perfect in your setup at first.

[paladinplays]

I figured I would make this just in case anyone else discovered this and hates it as much as I do.

I got a new laptop over the holidays and was horrified to discover that they replaced my right ctrl key with a copilot button. Most people probably wouldn't be super affected by this, but unfortunately, I work with code and I use that button kind of a lot

So! Today I want slogging through the microsoft support forum about this exact issue. It took quite a bit of digging and some trial and error, but I have figured it out! Below the cut is a guide to getting your right ctrl key back if you really want it

The bad news is that there are 2 relatively minor sacrifices that come with this solution. You'll se what I mean as I get further into the instructions

Step 1 is to get the microsoft powertoys app from the app store- it's free and is probably safer than getting some sketchy software from the dregs of the internet.

Step 2 is to got to "keyboard manager" (don't forget to enable it) and then then to "remap a key"

Step 3 Select the copilot button either with the select button and tapping the key or using the dropdown and selecting F23 (same key). You will go to the other side of the screen where it says "send" and use the dropdown menu. Scroll all the way to the top and select disable

This is the only solutions for this part of it because while the key does technically work as a ctrl key, you can't use it alongside any other keys as I learned during this process

Step 4 Add another key remap. This is the first sacrifice you'll have to make, but at least with my computer usage, I don't really use this key much. You'll select the RIGHT alt key and remap it to be the new right ctrl. You'll also need to use the dropdown for this. Scroll up for a little bit and you'll find the entry

Step 5 This is technically more of a note than a step, but it's the other sacrifice that comes with this process. In order to actually be able to use the key with its new function, you have to keep the powertoys app running. This drawback is mentioned on the powertoys info page thing so at least there's that I guess

From there you are free to go forth with your newly recovered right ctrl key! And the only sacrifices were the right alt key and a little bit of your ram. Tbh I just got really tired of having to use both of my hands for a command I used to be able to do with one which is what started all of this. You can also use most of these instructions to just straight up disable your copilot key if you want.

[pinkmoondoll9shihtzu]

this is a little silly and i'm totally aware, but i luv ur blog and resonate with ur outlook on things so i'm really curious 2 hve ur input. i turned 18 in december+ i graduated high scool this weekend and so it's like the first time in my life where i am independently adjusting to a big transition. i missed soo much classes due 2 my brain being fucked and even tho i had friends i still feel rly weird and outsidery i guess. if u have any advice or idk anything i'm running out of space bye xx

thats wonderful news...congrats on gradding its really hard to get thru it 💟 i almost didnt grad cus i was barely present at school, resented every facet of it, the system didnt make sense to me like i just couldnt perform. i dint go to college or anything after highschool i knew it wasnt right for me plus i didnt want the debt. i knew i needed freedom to roam or st..

and tbh i was suuuuch a smart & intuitive child for that decision o.o like thank god thank goddd. i wouldve folded SO fast with state of my mental health back then. unless u r going into STEM idt school is worth it. Like school nevr made sense to me cus u can just be intellectual for free by acting curiously ?? Like u can just live and read books and stuff . . .

i guess my only real goal has ever been to make a lot of DOPE ass memories ~~ push every experience to full potential of beauty it is capable of 🤩 and that is a tad willful of me, so my arrogance has lead to many defeats but despite how painful its beeen.. im glad i did it this way, no ragrets ^^ its wonderful to be 30 now & look back at it all. following my intuition always worked out in the end..

When you're 18-24 i think all u should really be doing is like. chilling, recovering from highschool, smoking cigs, taking photos, listening to songs, reading, trying different clothes, playing outside, Soaking eveything up like a sponge, taking it *in*...taking it all in then thru trial & error figuring out what Really resonates !! and PPL will try to tell u its a waste of time, dont listen!!!! create stuff but dont put pressure on urself to be good at anything yet. dont feel pressure to like, have solidified into something permanent yet? ifthatmakes sense.. goof around a lot, dont limit yourself to any existing structures, be new & expansive, open minded.

And just chill :] look around at your world all the time and think "Wow. I'm 18 and i'll never be 18 again and life is beautiful." i still do this for every age i ever am i think its so imporant to do this. Always Know your older self is looking back upon you kindly no matter how irredeemably fucking fucked u feel <3 i can feel the love from my 40 and 50 and 60 year old self right now. get excited for your unfolding story anon ^-^ i hope its really uniquely perfect just for U and Ur dreams come true. Sincerely, ⭐⭐⭐PMD9⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

[fictionfixations]

playing this game for the first time

IM GOING TO THROW IT CRASHED ON ME WHILE I WAS MAKING A PROFILE i KNEW I SHOULDVE SAVED 😭(I STARED AT THE SAVE BUTTON LIKE 'should i save just in case? nahh i dont need to save until im done' and then it kicked me out)

i dont think of myself as a person good at designing stuff

but i was really liking what i made it looked so pretty hjfiouweshjdWQIUAsk

it doesnt even mean that much to me im just gonna feel really depressed for awhile cause like wtf man 😭

this is the farthest i got last time i kind of hate it. the quality of stuff i do always degrades the more i repeat it so hhhhhhhhhhh it feels really nitpicky but something about the images behind the classroom just dont look right

it keeps saying connection error when trying to save

im pointing a fan directly at it cause my phone is a fucking heater hoping it fixes 😭

im gonna close and reopen the game this sucks (not the game im just getting tired of all the live2d games i play being laggy as fuck or having connection issues, its not just this game that hates me 💀) idk if the twitter button works i havent pressed it cause i tend to lag so much more the moment i click out of a game and then re-enter without closing it and re-opening

tbh i dont know anything about this. i think theres a good story (kinda depressing(???)) but i havent heard much about it

one of the first things i saw about this game tbh was the customizing a profile and i got my mind blown cause it looked so pretty i kept getting pjsk in my recommended and idk something about tatsu...???? forgor rest of name. blonde guy. where apparently in the movie he switched to a pirate outfit???? im. so confused

i feel like im being sabotaged cause im trying to play a song and then it lags and i miss and im dfaiuhdwushdajw

WHY do you do this to me 😭

i need a fan because when it overheats its literally unplayable (its not even that its hot its that it starts lagging like hell) so im just having cold air blasted into my eyes which is kinda distracting :'D

its fun though i like like the interface?? its really smooth its a little confusing with note placement but im. getting used to it

im sad i have to actually play with a fan because i really like rhythm games i wanna get into it but it keeps lagging

why do all the good games (that i wanna play) have to be on mobile and prone to crashing/lagging 😭

tbh im getting into it now that im used to it crashing its like. tears of themis. which also crashes often and lags me. which sucks cause i really enjoy the story. but then id be going through this important bit and almost finish it and then it crashes and then keeps crashing while im speeding through it trying to complete it 💀 (cough cough the trial bits suck because i keep having to re-present evidence and im just like do i look like i remember what the answer is LET ME THROUGH)

its kinda because of that that i cant play it in super long bursts though so im just gonna be here procrastinating from it for months because i dont feel like continuing to crash trying to do shit. play again. crash. stop playing.

sigh. sometimes i hate that i get more invested in stories in games by actually playing the game. because sometimes my devices dont want me to play and makes me lag like hell sadge

anyway my favorites rn are nightcord at 25:00(?) w/ the miku from that ver theres another like band rhythm game i play except the 3d models make me lag so much more. this game is much more manageable. ..like osmetimes it lags so much i literally lose all my life but like. at least i can play ?????

anyway uh ill try to play more. like. i play a lot of games but ive been neglecting the story so ive been trying to speed through them (while actually reading but like bingeing through as much story as i can before it stops me or i give up)

okay i think i can play songs now without lagging except teh moment i think about how its not lagging it starts lagging 💀 (another time is when i started singing along it started lagging. i just have bad timing man.)

i can.. kind of play expert songs. (except when i cant) except its.really overwhelming and i stop being able to read the map to where i just default to see note = tap so its ilke im kinda spamming in a sense??? and praying it works out also my brain sometimes stutters so i fuck up. this prob isnt like anything revolutionary but with flick notes if therse one flick note and at the same time a note thats not a flick note and i get confused i just act as if both are flick notes cause its not like you get penalized for flicking a non-flick note

the 3d music videos are cute

i only got a new outfit for.. person me no remember name of purple haired girl

i think you can set it to have characters who are actually singing the song but i like staring at the characters i have cause i put my favorites on the team + like my only 4 star rn?? also like kaito is there i think (im bad at names but hes one of the vocaloids is he not) because i wanted to go with like the dark sorta empty vibe

but so its so weird when a model is singing but its so clearly not the right voice lmfao

i feel like itd be fun to learn the choreography especially for like cosplay stuff??

id like the music videos more if i could play the songs while watching them without lagging really badly 😭

NOO PLEASEE DONT LAG DURING THE VIRTUAL SHOW 🙏

i crashed 😭

song: plays few notes immediately crashes

hhh i know the song but i cant remember the name

tfw your glowsticks feel like a windscreen wiper

also i just realized your view moves if you move your phone. thats cool but i cant do that because my battery drains stupidly fast if its not being charged all the time i am not joking

i dont really have an attachment to these characters yet so i cant understand how it might feel to someone really invested but this is cool 👍

oh it ended

i missed the first song unfortunately :(

i think theres another one happening in like. ..30 minutes? an hour?? shrug. idk if its the same one or something else

i know this post kinda makes it seem like im having a bad time but im having a fun time its just that when something bad happens i have more to say

anyway i like this a lot more than the other band rhythm game i play. like i mean i had a lot over there and there are some songs i really like that arent on here but i.. also wasnt reading the story for that game either i was literally just playing it because rhythm game thats it 😭 i only went through the story to skip through it cause it gave me like the stuff to pull for the gacha so um

im gonna try to pay attention this time 👍👍👍

also auto is a blessing i will never not praise auto in a game (except when it plays bad but tbh if it works then it doesnt matter. not a shade towards this game but towards hsr cause sometimes it ults on a single enemy with low health that could be killed with just basic atk. and then next wave and that ult wouldve been so useful 😭)

off topic but idk why but 3d music videos dont lag when its playing the song on auto. except when i take a screenshot wtf

or maybe its just that it lags when the phone starts heating up. which tracks. wish i could play this on pc. wonder how itd work if it did cause buttons you press are what??? (honestly i can only play 4 note songs on pc anything else my mind blanks) but it still wouldve been cool and deffo less laggy