#letter code

[knickknackgalore]

39 Clues card 001

Secret: Surveillance Camera

[puzzlenation]

Let's Talk Puzzle Codes!

Puzzly information is concealed in all sorts of ways. Rephrasings, anagrams, riddles, puns… these are all ways to challenge solvers by hiding information in plain sight. But puzzle codes are one of the most prominent techniques… and one of the most ways to do so. Codes in puzzles come in all shapes and sizes. And if you’re venturing beyond the confines of crossword-style puzzling, you’re bound…

[sunsburns]

clark kent, who just loves to stare at you (18+)

he just thinks you’re so pretty. a view worth risking everything for.

and you think he’s pretty too—especially like this. his lashes flutter, eyes lidded but never closing, even as they well up, clouded with heat and desperation. his brows knit together, a deep crease forming between them, like he’s struggling to make sense of the pleasure, to keep himself tethered when all he really wants is to fall apart for you. his lips part on soft, shuddering moans, the kind he doesn’t bother holding back, doesn’t want to—he wants you to hear him, to know exactly what you’re doing to him.

his fingers thread into your hair, holding you there, tugging just a little whenever you take him deeper. you can feel the tension in his grip, the barely-there restraint as he fights the urge to pull you down, to chase the wet heat of your mouth. and then—

he whimpers.

a grown man, six-foot-whatever, broad and powerful in every sense of the word, whimpers at the sight of you gagging around his cock. and fuck, it makes something in you tighten, makes heat pool low in your stomach. you let him slip from your mouth, just enough to catch your breath, and watch how his eyes go wide, unfocused, his chest rising and falling like he’s forgetting how to breathe. you press a kiss to the flushed, sensitive tip, slow and deliberate, and he shudders—actually shudders—his grip tightening in your hair.

your lips trail down, tracing every thick vein along his length, your tongue flicking out to taste him before you work your way back up. never breaking eye contact. never letting him look away.

shit, you’re so pretty like this. he doesn’t want to look away.

and you don’t want him to, either. but you do love those fleeting moments when the pleasure overtakes him—when his head tips back suddenly, baring the length of his neck and throat, every muscle tensing under his flushed skin. you see the mess of bruises you’d left there, dark and blooming against his fair complexion. his jaw clenches, stomach going tight as his hips jerk forward, uncontrolled, needy.

yeah, you love to see him like that. that split-second loss of control before he drags his head back down again, like he physically can’t stand not looking at you.

there’s a tear slipping down his cheek now, his glasses fogged and slipping down his nose. his bottom lip trembles, wet and kiss-swollen, and then he’s muttering your name, voice thick with devotion and wrecked with pleasure. soft, sweet nothings spill from his mouth, each one punctuated by a moan, a whimper, a stuttered plea—

and then, breathless, ruined, he warns you he’s close.

[flowerytale]

Nikos Kazantzakis, from a letter to Andonis Anemoyannis, 1902

[melonjelart]

Working on Hermitcraft charity stream stickers for donation hehe >;) Wanted to give you guys a sneak peek, but there are definitely more coming! These will be released along with the Misadventures sticker sheet at the same time. The goal is May because my June is super crazy, but I couldn’t help but share some of them with you guys!

Here is a link to my kofi for when they do eventually go up, though I’ll let you know when that happens! -> Kofi Shop

[nimudae]

[Heart Scales AU] First Contact 🧜‍♂️👒🧙‍♂️🐯

Happy mermay! Starting my first AU comic a year after the original sketch, I'll do my best to see this casual urban fantasy story through 💪

[Ko-fi]

[thimblings]

viago "fashion police" de riva

[felassan]

Now in the BioWare Gear Store: Garrus Companion Bundle

It includes a never-before-seen love letter from Garrus etched on the inside of the box lid.

[link/source] [letters from ME & DA loved ones compilation]

You can get 20% off in the BioWare Gear Store until July 21st using my latest discount code ARROW. (code is valid for 60 days). After that date check back here for a new code.

✧d(•̀ v•̀ )~~♪

[psychicpinenut]

i sincerely hope we get a flashback of how mark started out at lumon as everything he's ever mentioned suggests that he was the same as helly until they beat him into submission

[humbuns]

For pride requests, like, Shu has something going on. Something dysphoria, maybe ace too but maybe he moves past repulsion once he figures out the gender thing, I don't know, what's your read?

oh i 100% agree, i have always seen shu being a little uncomfortable with their existence because it reminds them that they are a little too human (in his heart and in his mind) so it will probably take them a while to realize anything in some form without layers and layers of deflections but they're getting there (this is the sole reason why i like to see shu as a gem slowly being polished, they were always brilliant but it takes time to see it and accept it yourself)

[cluepoke]

Your Average, Normal Protagonists

[aroaceleovaldez]

What is the PR disaster in question that made Rick announce TSATS? I wasn’t active in the online fandom at that point

Of course! This was awhile ago so it figures people don't remember it/aren't familiar:

Basically a couple years back (2020) the fandom had some posts circulate discussing the ways different characters in the Riordanverse were written poorly or offensively. There was a masterpost that went around tumblr but the two major points people were particularly focusing on were Piper and Samirah (particularly because Piper had featured prominently again in Trials of Apollo recently and the third MCGA book had further emphasized and discussed Samirah being Muslim, since it was supposed to take place during Ramadan). Basically each had multiple posts breaking down the ways they were depicted incorrectly or offensively. The entire fandom for a little bit was VERY intensely discussing this (and it's around this time the "RR crit" tag got very popularized on tumblr - it did exist before, but suddenly was being used VERY frequently - cause it was that wide-spread - though the discussion took over basically every side of Riordaverse social media on different platforms). People really wanted Rick to respond to these criticisms, so he did!

He made two blog posts, one about Piper and one about Samirah. He has since deleted both so the links are to archived versions. The short version: he essentially tried to justify his poor research and double-down that he hadn't written them offensively, actually, people were just being mean to him. The fandom, of course, reacted poorly to this.

[Further elaborated events under the cut since this got a bit lengthy]

(Fun fact, this all happened within a month or so of the time i posted an open letter on aphobic tropes in the Riordanverse that Rick replied to, and then he immediately followed with announcing that Reyna was intended to be ace-coded [which cause a LOT of fandom debate] before Rick dipped for a couple of weeks, and then came back to post the blog posts in response to Piper and Sam stuff. So I like to jokingly refer to this as "The time I imploded the fandom/drove Rick off of twitter." Twas I that set the house ablaze.)

Rick fully left social media after this and the LT Musical social media manager became Rick's social media manager for the time being.

So this all happened June/July of 2020. Tower of Nero would end up being published in October of 2020 and a few months after that Rick would state that he was done with the series and wouldn't be writing any more series installments involving Percy, and also that he wouldn't be writing a Nico quest following Tower of Nero as it "wasn't his place to" and encouraged the community to write their own versions of Nico's story.

The community continued to circulate the tumblr posts and discuss the topics of Rick's offensive character depictions, and this is also where we see the dramatic shift in how the fandom depicts Piper in fanwork (though in most cases it is admittedly not an improvement 😬) because of all this discussion. This is also around the time when the fandom brought Viria under scrutiny claiming that she was whitewashing Piper as part of the same discussions, through the justification that she was drawing Annabeth as having tan skin (which she does canonically), and if Annabeth has tanner skin then Piper then that's whitewashing Piper? Except they were using completely separate images of not fully rendered Piper art versus Annabeth in dramatic lighting, so it's all very awkward and poor logic, and did actually get kind of racist. A lot of people were calling it "Tannabeth Blackchase" (yeah, i know) or similar and a common sentiment you'd see repeated is "Don't draw Annabeth as having darker skin than Piper, because that's offensive/racist/whitewashing." (Note: it was not phrased "don't draw Piper as having lighter skin than Annabeth" - we also won't get into certain offensive depictions of Native Americans, but I digress). But yeah, the Annabeth stuff in all that did not age well at all.

Anyways, in October of 2021 however Rick would announce that he was co-writing The Sun And The Star - with a lot of heavy emphasis on how Mark Oshiro works as a sensitivity reader, and some false advertising from the official social media that Mark Oshiro was the first time a non-Riordan author would be collaborating on the series (disregarding the ghostwriters completely). One of the big criticisms in the breaking down of issues in Rick's writing was his lack of ever seeking a sensitivity reader, and fans claiming that a sensitivity reader could solve a lot of the problems. This was basically Rick's "look! I totally listened!!!!" (though it did little to actually improve things, based on the book) and in TSATS as well Piper gets a large cameo at the end where the text very directly addresses a lot of points made in criticism of Rick's writing of her.

We also then of course got the CoTG trilogy later, explicitly stated to be for advertising purposes for the show.

So basically, short version: Rick came under scrutiny for a lot of offensive writing within the span of two months, made some bad blog posts doubling down about it, left social media. TOA ends. Rick says he wasn't going to continue the series/write what would become TSATS. Community celebrates the end of of the franchise but also continues to discuss Rick's poor writing and the blog posts at length. Rick suddenly announces TSATS and Mark Oshiro's involvement. Everybody gets distracted from being mad. Show announcement stuff also happens and the discussions peter out.

[flowerytale]

Franz Kafka, from Letters to Felice

[definitelynotshouting]

You have synesthesia?? How does that work for you? Is this how you manage to use the word “meat” in a way that makes me go “holy shit that’s good and cool i need to read that sentence four more times” instead of “ew”?????

I do!!! Letters, numbers, and words all have colours and sometimes visual textures for me-- and while numbers and letters on their own are generally only a single colour (7 is a bright, grassy green!!! while "K" is a pale peachy pink, for example :] ), when i put them into words they often take on entirely new colours, some of which even bleed into each other like watercolour paints. Ironically, its why i use the UK spelling of "colour" in the first place-- the "u" turns what looks like a dull, desaturated blue into a smeared blue-and-purple that i find really pretty to look at :]] so when i say i like to paint with words, i kinda mean that literally 😂😂😂😂😂

But yeah, i'd imagine thats why my writing is Like That™ to some degree-- a lot of what im doing behind the scenes involves matching the colours and visual textures of a given word with all of the others in order to evoke a particular vibe or image in my writing. There are a lot of layers to how i write, but this is probably the one that takes both the most time AND is the one i happen to talk about the least WKDJWKSJEJ

[knight-arts]

Prowl

Part of an oc thing I’ll post one day but I’m really proud of it so I’m posting this now

[nenoname]

Details in Stan's letter that still haunt me

(how long will I continue thinking about a two page letter that's technically not even that long because Stan's handwriting is fricking large? .....you don't need to worry about that.)

The bro code only shows up in the Lost Journal pages, and to me Stan's message feels like it purposely echoes Ford's "miss you" in the college photo (and for some reason the message doesn't appear in the website version of the photo?) ....or alternatively Stan simply noticed how distressed Ford was about this entire thing and wanted to support him in a way so he can be sappy but without the kids knowing, or both!

Stan's claim about the Oregon lottery contradicts what the Lost Legends website said about Tate McGucket's ability to predict the winning numbers!! ...but also breaking into the Lottery HQ is definitely a very Stan thing to do and it's not the first time small gags have been retconned

Despite spending most of his letter nonchalantly destroying him, the taunt about ripping a dollar bill in half is the only part where Stan is directly responding to Bill. Maybe it's the two of them having similar ways of thinking but it's rather specific considering Bill taunts the reader about it...

And after Bill spends an entire book calling Ford Sixer despite normally using a pretty wide range of nicknames for him, Stan then spends his letter mainly referring to Ford as Sixer, even though post-Weirdmageddon he tends to use a mix of nicknames. And it's not like he'd gotten to see Bill himself for long, let alone see him steal that childhood nickname (that is only used twice in the actual show btw!). Did Ford tell him what happened or...?

With all this and the website's "still on your mind" message, what I'm getting at is my tinfoil hat theory of Stan somehow seeing some of the pages the irl readers saw, even when it should be personalised to the specific reader, and he's been lying about it for some reason. Considering that the book flat out doesn't make an attempt at convincing Soos, I find it a stretch that whatever Bill was telling Stan via the book was an attempt to convince him either.

Wouldn't be the first time Stan's skimmed through a book and lied about what it meant to him.

(...Now I kinda wanna see a story about the family reading their versions of the book and making fun of it while Stan is improvising every single one of his pages and blatantly ignoring Bill's attempts to mock and taunt him)

But also I'm fascinated by the letters that only showed up on the website (aka the Soos+Wendy+McGucket+Pacifica ones). I'm assuming that Mabel had stuck them on after Stan's letter... but they were basically eaten by the book itself because seeing Stan's letter kick-started Bill's breakdown which takes up the rest of the book