#like if you see a blog with that format and clearly obviously not a person just that format check their posts at least

[venacoeurva]

What is with those random accounts like [insert a few random words here]-blog just popping up flooded with machine fabricated images. Are they the new spam bots, because if so they've finally found a spam bot more annoying than the p[]rn ones: silicon valley type machine learning bros...

[secretgamergirl]

How a Computer Works - Part 1 (Components)

I am about to teach you on a real fundamental, connecting up electronic components level, how a computer actually works. Before I get into the meat of this though (you can just skip down below the fold if you don't care), here's the reasons I'm sitting doing so in this format:

Like a decade or two ago, companies Facebook pushed this whole "pivot to video" idea on the whole internet with some completely faked data, convincing everyone that everything had to be a video, and we need to start pushing back against that. Especially for stuff like complex explanations of things or instructions, it's much more efficient to just explain things clearly in text, maybe with some visual aids, so people can easily search, scan, and skip around between sections. It's also a hell of a lot easier to host things long term, and you can even print out a text based explainer and not need a computer to read it, keep it on a desk, highlight it, etc.

People are so clueless about how computers actually work that they start really thinking like it's all magical. Even programmers. Aside from how proper knowledge lets you get more out of them, this leads to people spouting off total nonsense about "teaching sand to think" or "everything is just 1s and 0s" or "this 'AI' a con artist who was trying to sell me NFTs a month ago probably really is an amazing creative thinking machine that can do everything he says!"

We used to have this cultural value going where it was expected that if you owned something and used it day to day, you'd have enough basic knowledge of how it worked that if it stopped working you could open it up, see what was wrong, and maybe fix it on your own, or maybe even put one together again from scratch, and that's obviously worth bringing back.

I'm personally working on a totally bonkers DIY project and I'd like to hype up like-minded people for when it gets farther along.

So all that said, have a standard reminder that I am completely reliant on Patreon donations to survive, keep updating this blog, and ideally start getting some PCBs and chips and a nice oscilloscope to get that mystery project off the ground.

Electricity probably doesn't work like how you were taught (and my explanation shouldn't be trusted too far either).

I remember, growing up, hearing all sorts of things about electricity having this sort of magical ability to always find the shortest possible path to where it needs to get, flowing like water, and a bunch of other things that are kind of useful for explaining how a Faraday cage or a lightning rod works, and not conflicting with how simple electronics will have a battery and then a single line of wire going through like a switch and a light bulb or whatever back to the other end of the battery.

If you had this idea drilled into your head hard enough, you might end up thinking that if we have a wire hooked to the negative end of a battery stretching off to the east, and another wire stretching off to the east from the positive end, and we bridge between the two in several places with an LED or something soldered to both ends, only the westernmost one is going to light up, because hey, the shortest path is the one that turns off as quickly as possible to connect to the other side, right? Well turns out no, all three are going to light up, because that "shortest path" thing is a total misunderstanding.

Here's how it actually works, roughly. If you took basic high school chemistry, you learned about how the periodic table is set up, right? A given atom, normally, has whatever number of protons in the core, and the same number of electrons, whipping all over around it, being attracted to those protons but repelled by each other, and there's particular counts of electrons which are super chill with that arrangement so we put those elements in the same column as each other, and then as you count up from those, you get the elements between those either have some electrons that don't fit all tight packed in the tight orbit and just kinda hang out all wide and lonely and "want to" buddy up with another atom that has more room, up to the half full column that can kinda go either way, then as we approach the next happy number they "want to" have a little more company to get right to that cozy tight packed number, and when you have "extra" electrons and "missing" electrons other atoms kinda cozy up and share so they hit those good noble gas counts.

I'm sure real experts want to scream at me for both that and this, but this is basically how electricity works. You have a big pile of something at the "positive" end that's "missing electrons" (for the above reason or maybe actually ionized so they really aren't there), and a "negative" end that's got spares. Then you make wires out of stuff from those middle of the road elements that have awkward electron counts and don't mind buddying up (and also high melting points and some other handy qualities) and you hook those in there. And the electron clouds on all the atoms in the wire get kinda pulled towards the positive side because there's more room over there, but if they full on leave their nucleus needs more electron pals, so yeah neighbors get pulled over, and the whole wire connected to the positive bit ends up with a positive charge to it, and the whole wire on the negative bit is negatively charged, and so yeah, anywhere you bridge the gap between the two, the electrons are pretty stoked about balancing out these two big awkward compromises and they'll start conga lining over to balance things out, and while they're at it they'll light up lights or shake speakers or spin motors or activate electromagnets or whatever other rad things you've worked out how to make happen with a live electric current.

Insulators, Resistors, Waves, and Capacitors

Oh and we typically surround these wires made of things that are super happy about sharing electrons around with materials that are very much "I'm good, thanks," but this isn't an all or nothing system and there's stuff you can connect between the positive and negative ends of things that still pass the current along, but only so much so fast. We use those to make resistors, and those are handy because sometimes you don't want to put all the juice you have through something because it would damage it, and having a resistor anywhere along a path you're putting current through puts a cap on that flow, and also sometimes you might want a wire connected to positive or negative with a really strong resistor so it'll have SOME sort of default charge, but if we get a free(r) flowing connection attached to that wire somewhere else that opens sometimes, screw that little trickle going one way, we're leaning everyone the other way for now.

The other thing with electricity is is that the flow here isn't a basic yes/no thing. How enthusiastically those electrons are getting pulled depends on the difference in charge at the positive and negative ends, and also if you're running super long wires then even if they conduct real good, having all that space to spread along is going to kinda slow things to a trickle, AND the whole thing is kinda going to have some inherent bounciness to it both because we're dealing with electrons whipping and spinning all over and because, since it's a property that's actually useful for a lot of things we do with electricity, the power coming out of the wall has this intentional wobbly nature because we've actually got this ridiculous spinny thing going on that's constantly flip flopping which prong of the socket is positive and which is negative and point is we get these sine waves of strength by default, and they kinda flop over if we're going really far.

Of course there's also a lot of times when you really want to not have your current flow flickering on and off all the time, but hey fortunately one of the first neat little electronic components we ever worked out are capacitors... and look, I'm going to be straight with you. I don't really get capacitors, but the basic idea is you've got two wires that go to big wide plates, and between those you have something that doesn't conduct the electricity normally, but they're so close the electromagnetic fields are like vibing, and then if you disconnect them from the flow they were almost conducting and/or they get charged to their limit, they just can't deal with being so charged up and they'll bridge their own gap and let it out. So basically you give them electricity to hold onto for a bit then pass along, and various sizes of them are super handy if you want to have a delay between throwing a switch and having things start doing their thing, or keeping stuff going after you break a connection, or you make a little branching path where one branch connects all regular and the other goes through a capacitor, and the electricity which is coming in in little pulses effectively comes out as a relatively steady stream because every time it'd cut out the capacity lets its charge go.

We don't just have switches, we have potentiometers.

OK, so... all of the above is just sort of about having a current and maybe worrying about how strong it is, but other than explaining how you can just kinda have main power rails running all over, and just hook stuff across them all willy-nilly rather than being forced to put everything in one big line, but still, all you can do with that is turn the whole thing on and off by breaking the circuit. Incidentally, switches, buttons, keys, and anything else you use to control the behavior of any electronic device really are just physically touching loose wires together or pulling them apart... well wait no, not all, this is a good bit to know.

None of this is actually pass/fail, really, there's wave amplitudes and how big a difference we have between the all. So when you have like, a volume knob, that's a potentiometer, which is a simple little thing where you've got your wire, it's going through a resistor, and then we have another wire we're scraping back and forth along the resistor, using a knob, usually, and the idea is the current only has to go through X percent of the resistor to get to the wire you're moving, which proportionately reduces the resistance. So you have like a 20 volt current, you've got a resistor that'll drop that down to 5 or so, but then you move this other wire down along and you've got this whole dynamic range and you can fine tune it to 15 or 10 or whatever coming down that wire. And what's nice about this again, what's actually coming down the wire is this wobbily wave of current, it's not really just "on" or "off, and as you add resistance, the wobble stays the same, it's just the peaks and valleys get closer to being just flat. Which is great if you're making, say, a knob to control volume, or brightness, or anything you want variable intensity in really.

Hey hey, it's a relay!

Again, a lot of the earliest stuff people did with electronics was really dependent on that analog wobbly waveform angle. Particularly for reproducing sound, and particularly the signals of a telegraph. Those had to travel down wires for absurd distances, and as previously stated, when you do that the signal is going to eventually decay to nothing. But then someone came up with this really basic idea where every so often along those super long wires, you set something up that takes the old signal and uses it to start a new one. They called them relays, because you know, it's like a relay race.

If you know how an electromagnet works (something about the field generated when you coil a bunch of copper wire around an iron core and run an electric current through it), a relay is super simple. You've got an electromagnet in the first circuit you're running, presumably right by where it's going to hit the big charged endpoint, and that magnetically pulls a tab of metal that's acting as a switch on a new circuit. As long as you've got enough juice left to activate the magnet, you slam that switch and voom you've got all the voltage you can generate on the new line.

Relays don't get used too much in other stuff, being unpopular at the time for not being all analog and wobbily (slamming that switch back and forth IS going to be a very binary on or off sorta thing), and they make this loud clacking noise that's actually just super cool to hear in devices that do use them (pinball machines are one of the main surviving use cases I believe) but could be annoying in some cases. What's also neat is that they're a logical AND gate. That is, if you have current flowing into the magnet, AND you have current flowing into the new wire up to the switch, you have it flowing out through the far side of the switch, but if either of those isn't true, nothing happens. Logic gates, to get ahead of myself a bit, are kinda the whole thing with computers, but we still need the rest of them. So for these purposes, relays re only neat if it's the most power and space efficient AND gate you have access to.

Oh and come to think of it, there's no reason we need to have that magnet closing the circuit when it's doing its thing. We could have it closed by default and yank it open by the magnet. Hey, now we're inverting whatever we're getting on the first wire! Neat!

Relay computers clack too loud! Gimme vacuum tubes!

So... let's take a look at the other main thing people used electricity for before coming up with the whole computer thing, our old friend the light bulb! Now I already touched a bit on the whole wacky alternating current thing, and I think this is actually one of the cases that eventually lead to it being adopted so widely, but the earliest light bulbs tended to just use normal direct current, where again, you've got the positive end and the negative end, and we just take a little filament of whatever we have handy that glows when you run enough of a current through it, and we put that in a big glass bulb and pump out all the air we can, because if we don't, the oxygen in there is probably going to change that from glowing a bit to straight up catching on fire and burning immediately.

But, we have a new weird little problem, because of the physics behind that glowing. Making something hot, on a molecular level, is just kinda adding energy to the system so everything jitters around more violently, and if you get something hot enough that it glows, you're getting it all twitchy enough for tinier particles to just fly the hell off it. Specifically photons, that's the light bit, but also hey, remember, electrons are just kinda free moving and whipping all over looking for their naked proton pals... and hey, inside this big glass bulb, we've got that other end of the wire with the more positive charge to it. Why bother wandering up this whole coily filament when we're in a vacuum and there's nothing to get in the way if we just leap straight over that gap? So... they do that, and they're coming in fast and on elliptical approaches and all, so a bunch of electrons overshoot and smack into the glass on the far side, and now one side of every light bulb is getting all gross and burnt from that and turning all brown and we can't have that.

So again, part of the fix is we switched to alternating current so it's at least splitting those wild jumps up to either side, but before that, someone tried to solve this by just... kinda putting a backboard in there. Stick a big metal plate on the end of another wire in the bulb connected to a positive charge, and now OK, all those maverick electrons smack into here and aren't messing up the glass, but also hey, this is a neat little thing. Those electrons are making that hop because they're all hot and bothered. If we're not heating up the plate they're jumping to, and there's no real reason we'd want to, then if we had a negative signal over on that side... nothing would happen. Electrons aren't getting all antsy and jumping back.

So now we have a diode! The name comes because we have two (di-) electrodes (-ode) we care about in the bulb (we're just kind of ignoring the negative one), and it's a one way street for our circuit. That's useful for a lot of stuff, like not having electricity flow backwards through complex systems and mess things up, converting AC to DC (when it flips, current won't flow through the diode so we lop off the bottom of the wave, and hey, we can do that thing with capacitors to release their current during those cutoffs, and if we're clever we can get a pretty steady high).

More electrodes! More electrodes!

So a bit after someone worked out this whole vacuum tube diode thing, someone went hey, what if it was a triode? So, let's stick another electrode in there, and this one just kinda curves around in the middle, just kinda making a grate or a mesh grid, between our hot always flowing filament and that catch plate we're keeping positively charged when it's doing stuff. Well this works in a neat way. If there's a negative charge on it, it's going to be pushing back on those electrons jumping over, and if there's a positive charge on it, it's going to help pull those electrons over (it's all thin, so they're going to shoot right past it, especially if there's way more of a positive charge over on the plate... and here's the super cool part- This is an analog thing. If we have a relatively big negative charge, it's going to repel everything, if it's a relatively big positive, it's going to pull a ton across, if it's right in the middle, it's like it wasn't even in there, and you can have tiny charges for all the gradients in between.

We don't need a huge charge for any of this though, because we're just helping or hindering the big jump from the high voltage stuff, and huh, weren't we doing this whole weak current controlling a strong current thing before with the relay? We were! And this is doing the same thing! Except now we're doing it all analog style, not slapping switch with a magnet, and we can make those wavy currents peak higher or lower and cool, now we can have phone lines boost over long distances too, and make volume knobs, and all that good stuff.

The relay version of this had that cool trick though where you could flip the output. Can we still flip the output? We sure can, we just need some other toys in the mix. See we keep talking about positive charges and negative charges at the ends of our circuits, but these are relative things. I mentioned way back when how you can use resistors to throttle how much of a current we've got, so you can run two wires to that grid in the triode. One connects to a negative charge and the other positive, with resistors on both those lines, and a switch that can break the connection on the positive end. If the positive is disconnected, we've got a negative charge on the grid, since it's all we've got, but if we connect it, and the resistor to the negative end really limits flow, we're positive in the section the grid's in. And over on the side with the collecting plate, we branch off with another resistor setup so the negative charge on that side is normally the only viable connection for a positive, but when we flip the grid to positive, we're jumping across the gap in the vacuum tube, and that's a big open flow so we'll just take those electrons instead of the ones that have to squeeze through a tight resistor to get there.

That explanation is probably a bit hard to follow because I'm over here trying to explain it based on how the electrons are actually getting pulled around. In the world of electronics everyone decided to just pretend the flow is going the other way because it makes stuff easier to follow. So pretend we have magical positrons that go the other way and if they have nothing better to do they go down the path where we have all the fun stuff further down the circuit lighting lights and all that even though it's a tight squeeze through a resistor, because there's a yucky double negative in the triode and that's worse, but we have the switch rigged up to make that a nice positive go signal to the resistance free promised land with a bonus booster to cut across, so we're just gonna go that way when the grid signal's connected.

Oh and you can make other sorts of logic circuits or double up on them in a single tube if you add more grids and such, which we did for a while, but not really relevant these days.

Cool history lesson but I know there's no relays or vacuum tubes in my computer.

Right, so the above things are how we used to make computers, but they were super bulky, and you'd have to deal with how relays are super loud and kinda slow, and vacuum tubes need a big power draw and get hot. What we use instead of either of those these days are transistors. See after spending a good number of years working out all this circuit flow stuff with vacuum tubes we eventually focused on how the real important thing in all of this is how with the right materials you can make a little juncture where current flows between a positive and negative charge if a third wire going in there is also positively charged, but if it's negatively charged we're pulling over. And turns out there is a WAY more efficient way of doing that if you take a chunk of good ol' middle of the electron road silicon, and just kinda lightly paint the side of it with just the tiniest amount of positive leaning and negative leaning elements on the sides.

Really transistors don't require understanding anything new past the large number of topics already covered here, they're just more compact about it. Positive leaning bit, negative leaning bit, wildcard in the middle, like a vacuum tube. Based on the concepts of pulling electrons around from chemistry, like a circuit in general. The control wire in the middle kinda works in just a pass-fail sort of way, like a relay. They're just really nice compared to the older alternatives because they don't make noise or have moving parts to wear down, you don't have to run enough current through them for metal to start glowing and the whole room to heat up, and you can make them small. Absurdly small. Like... need an electron microscope to see them small.

And of course you can also make an inverter super tiny like that, and a diode (while you're at it you can use special materials or phosphors to make them light emitting, go LEDs!) and resistors can get pretty damn small if you just use less of a more resistant material, capacitors I think have a limit to how tiny you can get, practically, but yeah, you now know enough of the basic fundamentals of how computers work to throw some logic gates together. We've covered how a relay, triode, or transistor function as an AND gate. An OR gate is super easy, you just stick diodes on two wires so you don't have messy backflow then connect them together and lead off there. If you can get your head around wiring up an inverter (AKA NOT), hey, stick one after an AND to get a NAND, or an OR to get a NOR. You can work out XOR and XNOR from there right? Just build 4 NANDs, pass input A into gates 1 and 2, B into 2 and 3, 2's output into 1 and 3, 1 and 3's output into 4 for a XOR, use NORs instead for a XNOR. That's all of them right? So now just build a ton of those and arrange them into a computer. It's all logic and math from there.

Oh right. It's... an absurd amount of logic and math, and I can only fit so many words in a blog post. So we'll have to go all...

CONTINUED IN PART 2!

Meanwhile, again, if you can spare some cash I'd really appreciate it.

[glitterincandles]

hi hi!!!! i love your blog smmm!!! if you're still accepting requests, i was wondering if you could do allan (smiling friends) x talkative/very social! reader headcanons? :3

do you think he'd be jealous because his crush/partner has a large social circle or he'd just go along with it?

hii! i'm sorry it took so long for me to respond to this (college stresses me out soo bad) but i finally have enough free time! also i made the formatting quite strange i hope it doesn't ruin anything

allan x talkative/very social! reader :･ﾟ✧:･.☽˚｡･ﾟ✧:･.:

socially

allan definitely leans more towards the jealous side at first

since he's dating you/committed to you, there's a high percent chance that he's completely devoted to you and will do a lot to maintain your relationship even if it means bailing on his coworkers

if he sees you interacting with other people or friends normally, it's fine

^ the least he'll do is lean in and stalk the conversation just to make sure he doesn't hear what he doesn't wanna hear

^^ it is not in a toxic way thankfully he just wants to make sure you aren't being flirty or sharing an embarrassing story about him (becausehe'sinsecure) (and awfully suspicious abt others)

and he doesn't really trust people who are too social/talkative and out there so this relationship would be a learning experience for him

later on after observing the people you're talking to long enough, he develops the habit of randomly jumping into your conversations with people if he doesn't like what he is hearing

person a: hey actually i think nirvana is lame

allan, out of nowhere, for no damn reason: aCTually i think nirvana is kewll and maybe if u had a brain u would think the same thINg

any flirtatious comment said by others also gets shut down. immediately.

^ this doesn't usually apply to compliments besides those that are like very clearly and very obviously attempts to flirt

^^ "ur hair smells soooo good" gtfo

as time goes on and as he learns more and more about your large social circle, his jealous tendencies will definitely diminish for the better

he'll learn to appreciate that you are able to connect with so many different people at once and have a soft spot for it since he really isn't the type to be that way

he'll definitely loosen up more and may even willingly tag along to any event you want to go to with them

^ it'll definitely take a while though

talkative..ly

as for the talkative side of his partner, he'll definitely get great pleasure out of you just talking about anything (more than most would expect)

he isn't much of a talker in general so he appreciates listening to someone who's passionate and always has something to say (especially you) (very specifically made an exception just for you)

he'll let you go on for hours and he'll reply when he has wiggle room too, even if his tone sounds a little hostile, he still enjoys chatting with you

i genuinely don't think he'll hate it at all i think he'll find it pretty cute tbh

•☽──── ✧⋆⋅☆⋅⋆✧ ────☾•

[clangenrising]

I find the deep obsession with Razor a little concerning tbh... I'm glad to know I'm not the only one. I think it's partially bc that person is clearly very young. It reminds me quite a lot of when I was younger and obsessed with creepypastas and got into very dangerous circles because of it. Circles that did very deep damage to my psyche. Especially with just how realistically horrible Razor is, including other anons talking about how they've been in similar situations... It's just worrying in a way I struggle to verbalize.

As for the patreon, I think a lot of people including myself would be happy to just support your work. Maybe small sketches or writing snippets for higher tiers? Whatever you're comfortable with obviously. I'm not really sure what else tbh as wips would be spoilerly. Character cameos wouldn't work either considering just how in depth you are with your other clans. Not a bad thing lol I love the other clans!

That's actually a very good point. In my attempt not to shut down someone having fun, I didn't consider that the way they were talking about Razor might be upsetting to people who have expressed that he reminds them a lot of people they actually knew. I'll definitely try to be careful of that in the future.

While it's totally fine if you enjoy Razor as a character and see him as your poor little meow meow or what have you, I'm going to ask that from here on out any appreciation of him sent to my Ask box be done with consideration for people who may find him disturbing in a very personal manner. Thank you guys in advance.

In regards to Patreon, I really appreciate that. I agree that I don't think character cameos would work. Maybe if i Drew more rather than wrote but with the format as it is and the amount of care and detail I put into it, I don't think that's viable long term.

I had been considering things like a monthly stream where I would draw for the group which might be spoilery but would be totally voluntary. Or I was considering posting like, a paragraph out of context for every piece, like a teaser? I've had friends I've made through this blog who enjoy seeing that kind of thing but I'm not sure if the larger fan base would like it.

[dyradoodles]

Hiiiiii! 💕 I was just wondering….. what are your preferences for Zack & Seph? Do you ship ‘em, is it up to circumstance, does the age matter to you/do you consider their age and their gap? Why not even throw in how you fell in love with Zack & Seph to begin with? Do you have sources?? MLA format for Zack’s fandom page???

*plops down on floor*

Details plz! ❤️

Ah yes hello person that I definitely do not know, who definitely didn't see me say I could write an essay about this very subject on discord LMFAO

I'll put the actual essay under a cut for people who don't want to scroll through my Many Feelings about these two lol As a TLDR to your questions:

Yes I ship them, but also Yes it's up to circumstance! Yes I consider their canon ages/the age gap (which most visibly manifests in me only drawing them platonically if I'm drawing Zack as a Second/with the puppy hair, or writing a fic taking place during CC)! I was actually into Aeriseph first and stumbled into ZackSeph fics, and realized it was a similar dynamic, but with someone who spent time with Seph canonically before he went bananas! All of this was before CC came out and I've been loving these characters for 20+ years!

To borrow a phrase (from crylin iirc), honestly, I like just seeing them standing next to each other, romantic or no LMAO <3

NOW, FOR THE ESSAY.

So to expand on what I said earlier, I think it's obvious from my blog and ZS server that I ship these two LMAO That said, the way I ship them is based heavily on the era of fandom before CC was a thing. I got into FF7 around 2002 (possibly earlier, I just don't have the dates on drawings that old), five years before CC came out. At the time, we knew next to nothing about Zack beyond the very short clips of him in OG. So, fandom did what fandom does best, and tried to fill in the blanks!

Some of the efforts to figure out who Zack was went all the way down to his name, because it's Zakkusu in Japanese. So you'll see him as Zax, too - There were heated debates on whether to use Zack or Zax. And no last name! Fandom had to come up with surnames themselves. We also didn't have much of a reference beyond his polygon model, which seemed to have darker skin and, (as many fics described it) violet eyes. It was also assumed that, since he was a First who worked closely with Sephiroth, he was probably around Sephiroth's age. You likely already see where I'm going with this, laying all that out lol The Zack I draw and write is very much based on that time period, and if I'm honest, that's the character I really ship with Seph. I still joke in my fics sometimes that Zack's last name might be Donovan or Darklighter, etc., which are old fandom surnames!

Now, obviously CC came out and threw all this on its head, because we finally got a whole GAME about this (important!) minor character. I have many beefs with CC's writing and Square's insistence that so many of their characters need to be child prodigies (they can't ALL be prodigies, Square!!!). With Zack going from an assumed early 20s to suddenly being 16, and all the craziness of CC's plot, the way I approached the ship changed as well.

This is where I would firmly say my stance is: I don't think Seph had any interest in Zack romantically, in CC. Because that's a kid lmao If I'm engaging with the Compilation as a whole, I definitely lean way more into the mentor/mentee relationship for the two of them. As a personal rule, I only draw them platonically if Zack's got the puppy hair, because that was the most obvious visual cue I could think of that could draw that line between Zack's teen years vs. adult. If Seph managed to not go insane, then yeah, later in life I could still see them getting together! But clearly that's already AU territory lmfao

Ultimately, what I like best about Zack & Seph is how they treat each other (while Seph is still sane lol). That goes for platonically and romantically. Zack is so genuine and kind, and treats Seph the way he always wanted to be treated - like he's human. He can joke around with Seph in a way most people simply can't. Meanwhile, Seph treats Zack's feelings with respect, even during the times he's laughing at Zack for being ridiculous. He's also honest with Zack. He answers truthfully when Zack asks what's wrong, and it's clear that it's because he knows Zack is not a threat; Zack will take Seph's feelings seriously, too. I can enjoy the drama of the trauma and heartbreak that comes with Sephiroth's descent into villainy, but my favorite stuff definitely involves a lot of Nibelheim fix-it fics lol

Despite all the changes CC made to Zack and his relationship to Sephiroth (RIP Second in Command Zax Donovan/Darklighter/Knightblade, my beloved), their actual dynamic with regard to how they treat each other stayed, miraculously, intact. That's the real reason they're still my favorite characters, and how my enjoyment of FF7 has remained as strong as it is after literal decades. Square can retcon as many things as they want in the Compilation, but they'll never stop me from making art and fic of the characters I grew up with. Unless I get a C&D for some reason LMFAO Until then, I'll keep enjoying my AUs (and if anything, I have even more reason to enjoy them now that AUs themselves are canon - you bet your ass I'll be in the AUs where ONLY OG happened and I can ignore everything else LOL)

Thank you for the questions!! It was fun to get all my thoughts written down in one huge chunk, as opposed to my typical disjointed ramblings to my friends. Hopefully it was an interesting read!

Sources:

Fanlore. “Zack Fair.” The Organization for Transformative Works, 2 Jan. 2023, fanlore.org/wiki/Zack_Fair.

Doodles, Dyra. "Way Too Much Fandom Lurking." Dyra's Childhood to Adulthood, Copious Amounts of Fanfiction, 3 Apr. 2024

[the-cat-and-the-birdie]

Do you support proshippers, cause if so then 😬.

People generally do not take this as an answer but I do want to say it because some people do care.

But I don't. Because I do not support either side and assigning me to either side does not reflect my views.

I actively oppose the conversation and the way is formatted and I intentionally do not engage.

I am neither a ProShipper or an Antishipper. And describing me as either would be describing me wrong. Why?

Because it's not a cut and dry issue.

It's not like Pro-life and Pro-choice where the question is simply 'Should abortion be legal'?

The shipping argument is asking if a RANGE of topics ranging from abusive relationships or negative depictions of mental illness to literal CP are okay - all under one question.

Asking me this is like asking "Hey do you support people that age up Damien Wayne in fics *cough*(and also people who write horribly dangerous things like graphic sexual assault for their own dark amusement..those people too)*cough*"

Like...the question to begin with is flawed.

With a question formatted like that - there is absolutely no way to have a healthier clear conversation that makes sense or accurately displays anyone's views.

The conversation itself is to vague and too broad to offer any type of fruitful conversation whatsoever. And I stand on that.

Like, I'd say at least half of the takes I see from either side I think are wrong, ridiculous, or based on vague arguments that just don't make sense.

I'm Not a Pro-Shipper cause there is some weird shit out there I'm not attaching myself to. Because some people out there are deranged, and malicious, and this is the internet.

I'm NOT an Anti-Shipper because there are a LOT of fucked up things that do wind up in media that tell a specific story - and there's also shit in the conversation that just doesn't fucking matter.

If you're writing about a character who went through CSA and your goal is to show a story about someone who lives with that trauma? Great. I'm for that so long as you do your research and do it respectfully

If you're writing out the SCENES???? AT LENGTH?? Go somewhere. Preferably a jail cell but somewhere that's not here.

If you're aging up a character and headcanon-ing what they'd be like in the future for shipping purposes - or you're shipping characters with no in-universe confirmed age. I couldn't care less.

If I don't wanna read it, I won't support it. I won't give it kudos or views. It's got nothing to do with me.

If you're writing things that are openly racist or openly sexualizing a character you are clearly writing as a child - absolutely fucking not. Anime men I'm looking at you.

And if you write black characters involved in raceplay count your mfing days.

It's not a cut and dry issue, so to ask me to define myself in one word on a topic of dozens of different genres isn't going to give you a clear picture of my views.

You are more likely to get a more clearer answer if you ask me about that specific genre and topic.

I am vocally and clearly on neither side and opposed to a conversation that is narrow and often ends in miscommunication.

There's always going to be a Pro-Shipper or Anti-Shipper out there that I deeply disagree with.

I refuse to engage and support a conversation that lumps together very serious issues with very asinine things and then expects me to answer in one word at threat of harassment (not you in specific, but very realistically in general).

I am a person of complex opinions. You see my blog. You really expect me of all people to be able to describe myself in one word?

Maybe in the terms of "Pro-Life" vs Pro-Choice (I'm Pro-Choice obviously) But in this conversation I cannot do it. I am very firmly neither.

I hope that answer your question, and since I feel like this should be said - especially with the fandom we're in - I'm happy to answer your question.

Like I said, a lot of people just won't take this as an answer. And that's fine. But I said what I said.

If you engage in this conversation and you think I agree you, you're wrong. If you engage and you think I disagree with you, you're wrong. Cause I am simply sitting here in silence, writing my silly little analysis and looking pretty, and will continue to do so.

Now if you'll excuse me, there's a photo of Hobie that I need to stare at.

Bye.

[aprofessionalwithoutstandards]

what do you think of. it its pyeo

I've been asked this a couple times - obviously, I have nothing against it/its Pyro and even if I did I cannot dictate what other people do. However, also obviously if u read my blog, I clearly use they/them for Pyro. If I wanted to use other pronouns for them, I would use them. You shouldn't need to ask how I, a random guy online, feel about a headcanon that you have! I know pronoun hcs can be very personal to people which is why I'm so delicate about it, it almost feels rude to say "that's not how I see them, it's not a headcanon I have" in response to an ask like this. Idk I get a lot of asks in a similar format and I never know quite how to answer them. These are my thoughts but they shouldn't influence yours I guess lol

[impeccablebackside]

is there a pairing you could imagine which you haven't written about on here before? preferably involving teazer, but everything's welcome...

That is a fair question anon, but unfortunately I cannot think of any additional pairings that I have not talked about on this blog to some capacity or even in passing. There are obviously ones that have been mentioned but not really focused upon, like Cass / Alonzo or Bomba / Tugger, but otherwise there are no pairings that I have withheld.

I am a fairly boring person sexual-wise, and the thing that is by far the most important facet to any physical relationship is the love between characters that guides lust. It is what crates a passion and conncetion between two people that makes sex so much more rewarding. I have difficulties putting two (or more) characters together in a sexual manner simply for the novelty or fun of it. That also applies to expanding any of the 'established' relationship pairings and inviting others in who would subjectively not fit with the chemistry. You would probably figure that a NSFW blog would just have anyone and everyone fucking just because, but not me (unfortunately for you / others).

There needs to be a little more of a basis for the relationship beyond one of strict lust for me to consider it, which I fully realize is a touch extreme and admittedly pretty hypocritical. Who has not seen someone before that they have absolutely no connection with, but would still want to fuck? Very few people I would think. I know I have seen more than enough people in my life that I would smash on the spot no question. It really is an innate part of the animalistic brain to satisfy our horny needs and wants, undoubtedly tracing back since the formation of simple forms of life.

Anyway, there is absolutely nothing wrong having any given set of characters fuck it out just because it is hot or is a good idea, just to clarify. No matter the backing, from a purely physical attraction or even out of curiosity, fucking for fucking's sake is never a bad premise. There are always good thoughts to be had with that, it is just that those sort of relationships do not appeal to me personally as much in relation to this blog. There is just something I cannot properly enjoy about more causal fucking between (what could be interpreted as) random characters in the junkyard. It diminishes the fun if I have to question how two characters end up fucking if I cannot subjectively see it happening naturally. When it seems forced, it simply loses my interest very quickly. Maybe it is due to there being only a certain amount of characters to choose from that limits my thinking. Though, I do suppose I am a prude or just narrow minded in the end anon, and clearly a bit contradictory too. In the most hypocritical way, I would be down to fuck any of the eight queens I talk about (and more than enough people in real life), causally or not.

This is all meant as an open discussion of sorts, so please do not find it discouraging at all anon. Whatever you want to chat about I am here for. I have had my eyes figuratively opened to new ideas and thoughts before on here.

Reagardless, I do applaud your sincerely strong devotion to Rumple anon. I do love her dearly as well, and she is what initially drew me into thirst thoughts about the characters. Seeing Jo as Rumple in the 98 film awakened things in me that have not waned at all since. Perhaps it is weird to admit seeing something like that and thinking quite quickly, 'Oh wow, I want to fuck her', but here we are. It is not even about how the hot the actual actors are either, as that ultimately never (ever) hurts. The personalities / qualities of the characters are what makes them so attractive, but I do think that it is not necessarily random circumstance that certain actors are casted as certain characters. That is why we can have dozens of different actors from all across the world that all look different, yet they all end up being hot as any given character.

Rumple is fucking hot, and she is such a great character to explore, hence why a lot of my fics have featured her. The sexual versatility and openness she possesses in my mind drives a lot of thoughts and influences if that is not abundantly clear. The way I imagine her nature and her body makes her such a prime candidate for attention, and anyone who is her sexual partner would not disagree with that.

I would certainly welcome hearing about a pairing you have thoughts about anon, so do not hold back at all if you want to share. Does not matter if it is one I have talked about or not. Even if you were to share your own thoughts about Rumple, I know I would appreciate it. Aside from more Rumple content at the minimum, I am genuinely interested in the perspective and thoughts of others.

[0thsense]

5/27/2023

Welp it's been about a month since I've returned from Korea. I've decided (for now) to not follow a consistent format for these posts and just write however I feel like for that day. For today I just wanna snapshot how im feeling. Yesterday I went on a hike with Carter and Martin which was nice since I havent talked to Carter in a while. He might move away soon and so might Martin, which makes me sad. I've thought about it for a while but I need to make new friends if both of them leave. I guess I should build up the willpower to go to church with Austin. I also saw James recently, maybe I can be closer with him.. but he will always have a different core group of friends.

What really triggered me to write a blog today was the fact that at this point in my life any attempt to derive self-worth from any external or even *internal factors is unstable/failing. by internal I mean things like my own capabilities or value props to society. Clearly from an outside perspective my value is in question, being unemployed for like 2.5 years now. From an internal perspective I also feel worthless a lot of the time because of my inability to work towards any of the goals I set for myself. So where then can I derive any sense of self-worth? I think it's not viable to live life thinking that I'm worthless. So I guess I have to try to believe that I and by extension everyone has innate self worth, regardless of their value to anyone else. Sounds suspiciously close to christianity lol. so yea I just have to believe it. My current desperate line of reasoning for it is that everybody has a story and everybody's story is beautiful. The implication of this is that you have to even believe people like serial killers are not exempt from having this innate value. I remember reading about Albert Fish and his quote "I don't even know why I'm here". Obviously an extreme example but the world isn't built for everyone. Some people are a good fit for today's society and others like me struggle some more. It is an easy way of thinking to judge people's worth in the context of today's society, and for many people thinking like that is perfectly functional. Probably they look down at least subconsciously at copers like me and just think we are weak for not being able to succeed in the current world parameters. For me it just brings sadness, and I'd rather think that everyone's human story is beautiful.

I remember that I used to derive self-worth just by knowing that I'm smart. taking IQ tests was therapeutic seeing the high number affirm myself. more and more though as I realized IQ is only one of a long string of coefficients in the formula of your productive worth, and as I realized some of my other coefficients are sorely lacking, and I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to change them, this store of self-worth eroded. wow that sentence was terribly constructed but it is what it is.

Not related but I want to clarify that my self-worth idea is one step further than the surface level online advice, which is to not base your self-worth on what others think of you. The normal idea is that you should have a stable idea of your own self, for example let's say you believe that you are good-looking, then if someone insults you and says you're ugly you will not be too affected by it. But what if your stable idea of your own self is both accurate and also not very worthy. For an extreme example what if you know that you're an ugly stupid mean person who brings no value to society? Then you must believe in the innate value that all humans have, and believe that you are worth just as much as anybody else in this sense. Otherwise how can you live a viable life?

I guess for some quick updates I still go to the gym though I need to go more regularly, and I'm trying my best to do things like going out on hikes, etc. I'm not as depressed as I was earlier this year though it's still tough sometimes. I tell myself I will move if nothing changes in a year, and that really scares me. I'm deathly scared of moving and just failing at a normal job. Then I'll feel like all my doors are truly closed. Pray for me if that happens. Writing this wasn't as therapeutic as I thought it would be. I wonder why. Maybe this reflection of myself is too dull. I am struggling deeply to really believe in my own self-worth. If I can't do this step then it feels doomed. I will have to try to find self-worth in the conventional fashion which I've been failing at for so long.

[true-blue-megamind]

FAN THEORY... UM... SATURDAY – Megamind’s Guide to Defending Your City

Okay, yes, I know, I’m keeping the tradition of being late with these posts. So sue me. Go ahead. The joke’s on you because I’m pursuing a graduate degree and I’m perpetually scrapped! HA!

And yes, in case you’re wondering, there will still be some information concerning the 2010 Megamind film. SPOILER WARNING!

This week we’re changing things up a bit. In celebration of the upcoming series Megamind’s Guide to Defending Your City, I’ve asked fellow fans what they expect or hope to see, as well as researching some of the previous projects of the producers involved. Very little is known for certain, but the program is scheduled to appear on the Peacock streaming service and rumored to have a release date sometime in 2023 or 2024. (Those are, however, only rumors.) Everything in this post is, of course, all entirely unofficial, and is intended only to outline a few of the fandom’s dearest wishes along with some reasonable possibilities. If nothing else, it should be interesting.

Before we begin, however, it might be best to lay a little groundwork. In case there’s anyone who hasn’t been leaping off the walls and scream-singing anthems of celebration since DreamWorks’ announcement last month, let me review what little solid information we do have. According to Deadline, Megamind’s Guide to Defending Your City will follow our favorite blue alien’s transformation from supervillain to Defender of Metro City, and will likely be formatted, at least in part, like a vlog. (Am I the only one feeling slight Doctor Horrible’s Sing-a-Long Blog vibes? Although I trust there will be fewer musical numbers and a far happier ending.) This is because, while his brainbots film, Megamind will be “training on the job” as he learns to be a hero, thus becoming “the world’s first superhero influencer.”

Some fans are less than thrilled by the premise, but others are strongly in favor of it. Personally, I feel the concept has significant merit—it certainly seems like something the blue man would do—as well as great possibilities for comedic moments. It’s easy to imagine a scene similar to the unused post-credits storyboard—in which Megamind rescues a woman from muggers with the help of Roxanne piloting a giant mech that, unfortunately, accidentally takes out power lines and a water tower—immediately cutting to a vlog entry featuring the alien genius making some remark such as: “Aaaand that did not go well.” But I digress. The point is that, other than the aforementioned release information, that’s all we know for certain about the series thus far. Now, without further ado, let’s get into the fan theories!

The MegaRox Ship Had Better Not Sink!

This is a big one, and perhaps the most obvious. People adore the blue hero’s relationship with Roxanne Ritchi, and many fans fully expect her to appear in the new streaming show as Megamind’s girlfriend. (ThatFilthyAnimalmentioned on Tumblr that he expects we may see Roxanne knowingly kissing her blue boyfriend.) It’s not an unfounded supposition. The two have obviously formed a romantic bond by the end of the movie. Near the beginning of the film, we see the then-supervillain worrying over his appearance and clearly trying to impress his abductee. What’s more, this has the feeling of an ongoing situation. Obviously, Megamind loved Roxanne from afar for a prolonged time; probably years given that he’s estimated to have been a Bad Guy for around two decades and that the whole kidnapping routine has become commonplace for Miss Ritchi. After steadfastly adoring the reporter for so long while refusing to pressure her, then risking his life to save her from Titan, it is highly unlikely that Megamindwould ever wish to end their relationship.

Then there are the Bad Blue Brilliant comics to consider. Although generally viewed as only pseudo-canonical, they do possess some relevance. For the most part, these short graphic narratives take place after the alien super-genius’ switch to heroism, and it appears that his relationship with KMCP’s top female reporter is very much en force. In “Mega-Mutt” Roxanne mentions that she and Megamind had a date at the library planned, so clearly they are a couple. The episode entitled “A Sidekick’s Sidekick” takes it one step further, with Megamind and his girlfriend announcing a shared shopping trip for some décor to “spruce up the Lair,” something the blue hero refers to as a “time-honored tradition.” There is only one common reason, in US culture at least, that might prompt a man to invite his lover to help him redecorate. It’s likely that these two are not only dating but also living together—a fact that, in turn, indicates a serious romantic attachment.

However you look at it, Megamind and Roxanne’s relationship is firmly established, and nearly all fans agree it would be tragic to see them separate. After all, the blue man not only called his love interest his “reason to win,” but was also clearly prompted by her to become a hero in the first place. This is hardly surprising as she seems to have been the first human, with the possible exception of a few inmates during his childhood, to accept Megamind as a person rather than “other.” Roxanne is the catalyst that made Megamind a better man, and losing her would almost certainly devastate him. Seriously, DreamWorks, don’t go breaking our hearts!

The Doom Syndicate Might Just Show Up

While discussing what might appear in the new series with other Megamind aficionados on The Evil Lair Discord, Ejga-Ostjamentioned a couple of good points. The first is that it seems reasonable to expect the Doom Syndicate might appear in Megamind’s Guide to Defending Your City. After all, why invent new adversaries when perfectly serviceable ones already exist?

What am I talking about? Those familiar with the unused movie storyboards or the Megamind video games will already be aware that the blue man wasn’t the only supervillain in Metro City, although he does appear to have been the top-ranked. The others are roughly united in a conglomeration called the Doom Syndicate which was originally intended to appear in the 2010 film but was eventually cut out as the side narratives would have rendered the existing plot too long and complex. The Villains Fandom Wiki states that they appear to be a parody of other evil cabals appearing in comic books, especially DC’s Legion of Doom.

According to Fandom.com, several known characters from this group did, however, show up in the video games. Megamind: Ultimate Showdown featuredPsycho-Delic, a villain who produces drugged or poisoned vapors with various effects, Hot Flash, an aging vixen with fire-based abilities, and Destruction Worker, who is essentially part man and part machine. Megamind: Mega Team Unite included more villains from the organization: Conductor, who gathers and controls electrical charges much like DC’s Livewire, and Judge Sludge, who appears to have been a corrupt judicial bureaucrat before somehow transforming into a toxic blob man. Many also wonder if we might see Lady Doppler, a fan favorite from The Art of Megamind who boasts the ability to control weather. It seems likely that some or all of these characters may make appearances in the new series, but it’s equally plausible that we could see some new Bad Guys as well. It should also be noted that Richard von Busack’s book The Art of Megamindfeatures a range of other supervillains as well, ranging from interesting to frankly absurd, so there are additional existing ideas that the new program’s creators could draw from.

Villain concepts from The Art of Megamind

Please, Please Do It Right!

The other aforementioned point that Ejga-Ostja offered was discussed in various ways by a number of fans as well, and that is, quite simply, that we all hope every possible aspect of this series is given the love and effort a Megamind sequel richly deserves. This includes everything from the content and quality to the treatment of animators. Yes, I know that sounds like a lot, but this is important to so many people who have waited eagerly for Megamind to finally appear on screen again.

To begin with, LiterallyZia expressed a desire that, despite their work being intended as children’s programming, the creators will also keep their existing fans in mind.

“I hope they realize that the main audience who saw the movie twelve years ago are all twelve years older; it can still definitely be a family show with deeper themes and discussions.”

They’re not wrong, and presenting child-friendly entertainment that nonetheless deals with serious concepts and social issues would be on-brand for Megamind. (Feel free to read previous posts such as Megamind and Masculinity, What’s Hidden in the Animation, The Warden, and Megamind and Identity if you’d like to learn more about that.) The simple fact is that many audience members who watched the original film back in 2010 were between ten and fifteen years old at the time, making them adults in their twenties now. Indeed, some fans are even older, having taken younger family members to the cinema or chosen to watch an animated feature on a lark only to find themselves unexpectedly impressed with the film. Even someone who first became enthused with the blue villain-turned-hero at an earlier age, say five or six, will be in their late teens or even early twenties by the time the series premier.

If the talent involved in producing Megamind’s Guide to Defending Your City is any indication, Zia and other fans may get their wish. The writers of the original movie screenplay, Alan Schoolcraft and Brent Simons, will work as the executive producers on the series. They’ll be joined by Eric Fogel, who created Celebrity Death Match as well as directing several episodes of Daria, and J.D. Ryznar, who has been involved with productions like Drunk History and Hot Streets. A good balance between the deeper contexts and adult humor found in these productions with the child-friendly standards of DreamWorks Animation should, theoretically, result in excellent entertainment. And that balance seems likely. Of the four mentioned above, three have worked with DreamWorks in the past.

Alan Schoolcraft and Brent Simons at the Megamind movie premier

That’s a good thing because balancing family entertainment with somewhat more mature topics is important to many Megamind fans. Ejga-Ostja seconded this view, stating that many of the series’ new viewers are likely to be older children who “will roll with things made for an older audience even if they don't entirely follow heavier themes.” She also expressed her interest in the overall quality of the series as well as the fair treatment of those involved, however.

According to Game Rant, there is a recent movement, #NewDeal4Animation, which seeks to gain public understanding and support for the issues faced by animators under New Media contracts. Because streaming services aren’t legally bound by the same rules as more traditional media, they can (and too often do) pay their talent less. Furthermore, there are no bonuses for programs being renewed for multiple seasons as they are often created all at once and then broken up. Ejga-Ostja said that she hopes “DreamWorks is taking this to heart” and that they and Peacock will ensure fair treatment and wages. Several other members of the aforementioned Discord were quick to agree.

Of course, like many others, Ejga-Ostjaalso hopes there will be a lot of care and attention lavished on this new series. After all, Megamind fans have been actively campaigning, not to mention practically begging, for this sequel for over a decade. This is something very many of us are extremely passionate—and excited—about, and we’re happy to be patient if it results in the highest possible quality of content.

“We've waited eleven years, we can wait longer if it means the employees are treated better, not being rushed, and the show gets more love and effort put into it.”

Mega Mysteries Could Be a Thing

Another fan theory concerning Megamind’s Guide to Defending Your City is that, along with fighting crime and battling supervillains, we may see the blue man solving a few mysteries. This is based not only on his enormous intellect—Sherlock Holmes, eat your heart out—but also on some of those involved in the upcoming show. Although far from certain, and of course only supposition, the idea is not entirely without foundation.

As I’ve said, J.D. Ryznar previously worked on Hot Streets, an Adult Swim animated program that featured an FBI agent investigating supernatural occurrences and misdeeds along with his rather eclectic companions. It’s important to note that Ryznar was a voice actor on that project, but even so, some fans wonder if he might not bring that experience to the new series. And it’s possible that’s not the only reason to speculate on the possibility of Megamind’s Guideinvolving some elements of detection. Eric Fogel created the late-nineties animated series The Head, in which an average human inadvertently forms a symbiotic bond with an alien who is “on the trail of an enemy from his planet.” Although not exactly a mystery, the narrative features this pair, along with a secretive group of others possessing unusual abilities, trying to discover the dangerous extraterrestrial’s whereabouts and plots before they can destroy Earth, imbuing this production with elements of both the detective and superhero genres.

It’s not that much of a stretch to imagine some elements of mystery in the upcoming show. Many agree that it would, after all, make sense for the Blue Defender to use his massive intellect in solving cases. (If you’ve read How Smart is Megamind, you already know that his IQ may be around 350.) Our favorite alien hero may not have superpowers, but he is a super-genius, and some fans speculate that we may see him playing to those strengths by solving crimes as well as engineering brilliant heroic inventions.

What Else Do Fans Think We Might See?

There’s some debate about how competent Megamind will be portrayed in his earliest days as a hero. A Megamind’s Guide to Defending Your City Bingo sheet on ThatFilthyAnimal’s Tumblr page suggests that the blue man may initially be fairly bad at his new position, but at the same time evidence from the Metro City scene of Trollhunters: Rise of the Guardians—which shows clean streets, people comfortably walking around at night without fear of crime, and copious new technology including a state-of-the-art public transportation system—indicates that he may actually be an excellent Defender. Time will tell, but personally, I believe it’s most probable we’ll see a combination of both.

Beyond that, a large number of fans hope that Megamind will still be wearing blue and black. This seems likely as he returned to his old uniform, thus embracing his own brand of heroism, at the end of Button of Doom. Furthermore, in the previously mentioned Trollhunters movie, Metro City is covered in the alien super-genius’ signature colors. That’s not the only part of his old villainous attire that fans hope he keeps, however. Filthy mentioned on Twitter that he’d like to see Megamind wearing eyeliner once more, and I have to agree. The Goth style looks good on him.

Then, of course, there is the widespread fan theory that Megamind—possibly Roxanne as well—is bisexual. Naturally, being a family program, there are definite limits to how much sexuality of any kind we can expect to see in the show. However, the same-sex parents recently featured in Toy Story 4 and DreamWorks’ positive response to a particular piece of fanart make this seem much more plausible. At any rate, it would certainly please a great many fans to see this aspect of the blue man’s character made official.

There are a great many other suppositions concerning possible elements of this upcoming production, of course, but those are a few of the prevalent ones being discussed. One thing is absolutely certain, however: after eleven years of waiting, the Megamind fandom is completely thrilled that some kind of sequel is finally in the works. We are all looking forward to this new program with bated breath.

[allegra-writes]

ATTENTION: PEDO ALLERT

There is a new blog around here that is trying to pretend to be a young girl writing about Peter Parker, making people in the fandom deeply uncomfortable and raising a few allerts as she posted her first fic: a story, in first person, about and older woman grooming Peter Parker.

Now, we won't even get into the horrible editing, formatting or even narrative style, I just wanted to point out at a few of the red flags:

Reader says she is only 2 years older than Peter, but she reads as a much much older person. I suspect the "age gap" (the tag is obviously miss used here, but she tagged it that way, bear with me) was made so small as an attempt to rest importance to the matter, as kind of a "it's just two years, that's not a real gap, that's not so bad". But like I said, this woman reads like a middle age character.

The fic includes all the typical lures for young girls/people: jabs at the blonde popular girls, which preys on the potential readers insecurities and sense of belonging, fancy car/stuff that can impress a teen, for heaven's sake, THE READER LITERALLY OFFERS PETER CANDY TO MAKE HIM FEEL COMFORTABLE IM NOT EVEN KIDDING

Peter is clearly reticent (at least at first, I tried but I couldn't get myself to finish the whole thing and considering the stuff I usually read and write that's saying something), and the fic should have been clearly tagged as dub/non-con but it wasn't.

There is a line implying the reader had sexual encounters with her own brother when he was younger than Peter, and once again, the proper warning, incest, wasn't tagged.

When questioned about her work, this person replied that it's just a fic and our media consumption is our own responsibility, and while I could get behind this, I can't in this case, since NOTHING IS PROPERLY TAGGED.

The URL of this blog is @ blackladycristal in case anyone wants to block this person, which I strongly encourage if you would prefer to avoid any contact with this suspicious blog or see this person's fics in the Peter Parker tag, since blocking the tags for those warnings won't do any good as this person doesn't uses them.

And remember, if something, anything about any blog, from an interaction to its contents, original or otherwise, ever makes you uncomfortable, no matter how long you been following, not matter if it's a mutual, hit the block button. You don't owe anybody on the internet anything.

Your safety always comes first.

[levisgirll]

Hey ~ I really love ur blog! U just bring a soft side of Levi that's so cute. Could u do a hc/scenario of how would Levi look after his crush during expeditions, please?

𝐓𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐟𝐮𝐥 𝐥𝐨𝐯𝐞 (𝐋𝐞𝐯𝐢 𝐀𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐱 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫)

→ Text: Hello there anon! Thank you for your message and request <3 I really love this idea and I would be glad to write this out for you! Sorry this took awhile but I hope you see this and you enjoy it <3 also thank you for letting me know! that was my aim, and I really love soft Levi cause I believe this side of him will show when he is around his crush or with his s/o  🥺 ♡♡♡

Synopsis: Ever since you started going to expeditions, Levi has been quite different and showed a different side of him which not only surprised Y/N but himself too. He has become more considerate, attentive, sympathetic (during the nights before an expedition) and rather straightforward whenever he wanted to be serious with you and say his point (might come out as harsh or him being concerned). He started doing this all since he was secretly looking after Y/N, who is his crush! So, find out how he does that!

cute fluff, aot world, random headcanons scenario/imagine ♡ —

First thing you notice when you have started to go on expeditions is that Levi has been keeping his eyes on you. Always watching you, and focuses every detail on you especially out of everyone in the scouts. So, expect all eyes on you from him!

You found it first a bit odd how it was just you, and whenever you try and go near him or talk to Levi while he is staring at you. He would hesitate, and just walk away, trying to avoid you if you wanted to have a conversation.

That's cause, he knows himself really well that he will start stuttering. And, that's also when Levi noticed that Y/N is actually his crush. He did not want to admit it though to himself, he was also confused with how he felt towards you. It was an odd feeling and hard for him to control.

But, one day during an expedition, you fell from a tree branch as the hook from your ODM gear was fractured and causing you not to be balanced. Levi froze, and he felt like the whole world stopped when he saw your body, on the ground, how your head was bleeding, and when he tried to go near you and call you out while holding your body, you were unconscious. He thought he lost his chance, his sunshine and source of happiness. Losing his chance to spend more time with you, show you that he really did love you even though you seemed to never know. And that was when he knew that you were the person he loved and cherished.

As soon as you went back to the walls and Levi taking you to the infirmary, he waited by your side the whole time. Wishing you would wake up sooner, but he has patience, to wait for the person he loved.

Once you were awake, he quickly got up, and you were shocked how none other than Captain Levi, who you really looked up to and liked a lot, was right by your side! 

“Hey, You okay?” Was the first thing he said after breaking the silence between the both of you. How you both gave each other glances that filled with love, and how he stared at your beautiful eyes that sparkled. He missed seeing your face, your eyes that finally opened and your expressions. “Y-Yea, Just a bit dizzy.”

“Idiot, why are you so careless? You should have checked your ODM gear. What a reckless move, brat.” He said while looking away, avoiding his eye contact with you now. If someone else heard that, it would have seem like he was being strict with you. But, after Y/N hearing his words, their eyes would widen and be quite surprised at how Levi said this to them. His tone had a bit of concern and worry for Y/N instead and even though the words were a bit harsh, he won’t mean it in that way and he would only say this to someone he would care a lot and cherish. This left Y/N a blushing mess and felt their heart speaking a beat, how someone, especially Levi, cared for them and noticing them. 

Levi does not ever want to see you again in the infirmary, being hurt, and bandaged up, so he now promised to himself that he would look after Y/N during expeditions especially.

If Y/N somehow twisted their ankle, or their leg/knee would hurt. Expect Levi to actually pick you up or giving you his arm and shoulder for support for standing and walking. He would do these small things and offer his help to you quickly if he saw you struggle. He would later on lecture you how you should have asked his help. “Brat, I told you to ask for my help if you ever got hurt didn’t I? So, Why.” Levi said after helping you sitting you down on a bench, and looking at you for an answer. ‘Easier said than done.’ You would think and blush a bit, you always seemed to held back whenever you though of asking Levi for help. That’s cause, you felt quite shy and nervous whenever approaching the great strong captain solider that everyone talks about! “Hey. From now on, come to me for help. Alright?” He would say after giving you a pat on your shoulder. Even thought he liked you a lot, he actually really cared for you and would actually be happy if you did end up asking for his help, that would boost his ego and he would literally do it right away.

Whenever the scouts took breaks as they moved forward in the formations during an expedition. Levi would look for you, for Y/N only, and when he finds them, he would go on and telling them if they made sure they were alright and reminding them if they had their things. He would also ask if they were feeling alright and if they were too afraid after seeing so many titans. Levi would reassure them that he would be there by their side to support them and whenever Y/N heard that, it would be heartwarming, and this made them move on with their mission.

Whenever Y/N was shaken up after seeing a titan eating their comrades, or their comrades dying before their eyes, or experiencing something unpleasant. Levi would notice that quickly and he would observe how it would make Y/N feel shocked and upset, unable to think calmly and clearly. Levi would approach his crush and comfort them that things would be fine. And, Levi would definitely then allow their crush (who they are the only people who can do that) to hug him as they leave their face in his shoulder, and if they needed to cry, he would be there for that too and comfort you in his own way hugging you back tightly and ruffling their hair to calm them down. Levi would be glad how they survived and they are now alive, around his arms finally.

Levi would offer them water during the expedition usually, he wants to make sure their crush is hydrated and that also he would pack you up with some goods and snacks. “Tch, just take them.” He would say as you hesitantly accepted his kind offer. Levi would literally spend 30 minutes getting all the necessary things you would need and pack them up for you. He gives you things filled with love and care.

And, if you did happen one day running out of snacks to eat, he would offer you his snacks and make sure you eat it all before he leaves. 

His crush would apologize and feel real bad if they messed up on something during a mission, such as incorrectly shooting the wrong signal flare or not shooting it on time whenever they were under stress or nervous during a situation. But, Levi would actually be chill and calm about it and say, “Oi, Don't worry about it. It’s alright.” He would say as he ruffed their hair, and everyone there would be shocked cause if it were a different person he would go mad.

At the beginning, he would would try and tell you not to come to the expeditions that seemed too risky and leave it to him, but obviously he knows that you would no and you would then say to him, “I can’t help it, I want to come and be by your side and help out.” And that, left Levi being a blushing mess. He admired your confidence, and how you were willing to do this all for him and that made him feel loved. He then would reassure you that he would be protecting you throughout the mission. “I want to protect you.” and when you questioned why only you, he would go silent and leave the scene, making you wonder.

Levi would definitely have an aid kit ready with him, whenever he saw you injured or needed some bandages, expect him to have that ready for you, and even do it for you himself. He would do it and his excuse would be that he would do a better job on patching you up, but you knew he just wanted to help you and he actually would be worried if the injury was deep or serious.

If you had a small cut on your finger or the palm of your hand, Levi would make sure to also patch that up for you. If you insisted saying you could do it yourself or saying that it was not a big deal, he would then say to you in a caring tone but having his serious stoic expression, “Your hand. Now.” You resist and give in while holding out your hand to him. After he puts a bandage on it, he would gently hold your hand with both of his hands and then say, “Please, be careful.” In such a low tone, and if you have missed that, you would probably not have heard it.

And, after an expedition one day, when you went to his office to give him some tea you have prepared. He was silent, and Levi was pretty down when you saw him. When he noticed your presence, his expression then would go soft and quickly get up, hugging you, and this would shock you because Levi would never do something like that suddenly. But, that evening after that expedition, he was really emotional and he just wanted to hold what was dear to him, which was you. Y/N.  “I wish I didn’t feel like this every time you leave my side.” He would utter in a sad tone, and you would be there caressing his back and also the back of his head, caressing his undercut which would make him relax and give out a soft sigh.

And before expeditions, Levi becomes a bit clingy and needy in nights a day before, and he would show some affection towards Y/N. Such as slightly holding and caressing your hand, trying to feel your warmth as much as possible to keep him calm, your presence meant the world to him and he loved every bit of time you spent with him. “Hey, promise me you won’t do anything stupid?” He would ask you a lot of questions too and you would have to be there, reassuring him that you wouldn't leave his side and hold his hand back firmly, meaning every word you say to him which will make him feel relieved, how he knows you won’t leave him and sacrifice yourself.

Whenever the scouts are ready to leave and get outside the walls to start the expedition, Levi would check all your gear if they were functioning, and in a good condition, and makes sure your gas is filled up too. 

Levi would also take care of your horse and make sure it was strong and stable enough to help you throughout the journey. If you somehow lost your horse, he would give you his horse instead (and he would only do that to someone he really trusts and cherishes) and he would just use his ODM gear. “I’ll meet you ahead, alright?” He would say and proceed ahead, making sure there is no titan in sight and if there was, he would kill it. He was on his full protective mode every time you were in missions with him.

If you were in a different part of the formation, he would ask someone in that formation you were at, and tell them to update them about Y/N and order them to protect and support Y/N.

Levi would often get side-tracked, thinking of you quite a lot and more than usual, and Erwin would pick that up and say with a smirk, “Don’t worry, they will be fine Levi. Believe in them.” Erwin would say randomly and that would make Levi shocked, thinking how the hell did he even know he was thinking of Y/N.

Overall, the man is the only one out there in the expedition who is ready to risk his life, support you and help you in anyway he can and with his power and strength he would be your guard, and secretly also admire you from afar during expeditions and think how he wants to be near you and just hold your hand.

[fabricated-misslieness]

Just found your blog and I gotta say, I love your writing style!! Anyhoo, as for a request, Suga (haikyuu) gets a surprise visit for his boyfriend during practice and he(reader) meets the team for the first time

Sugawara Kōshi x male reader

You’re my first request, yuku! I wasn’t sure if you wanted a oneshot format or headcanon format but they’re almost the same and headcanons are more fun in my opinion, so headcanons it is.

Requested: Yes

Headcanons of the Karasuno vbc meeting Suga’s boyfriend

You wanted to surprise Kōshi today.

Kōshi always talked about his volleyball team and he talked about them like they were part of his family. You’ve met his parents, so why not meet his second family?

You opened the door and called out for your sweet boyfriend, “Kōshi-babe!”

The sound of volleyballs being hit immediately stopped and volleyballs hitting the floor followed.

The reactions definitely varied between members.

“Kou-”

“-shi”

“Babe?!”

The three loudest idiots exclaimed.

You laughed, still at the entrance.

Before either you or your boyfriend got to even walk towards each other, Nishinoya and Tanaka circled around your silver-haired beauty, trying to intimidate you.

They might or might not have thought you were a playboy and were trying to protect the mother crow.

You’re as handsome as a playboy, anyway.

“Guys, relax.” Suga put his hands on Tanaka and Nishinoya’s shoulders, effectively making them stop circling around him. “He’s just my boyfriend.”

Daichi and Asahi were stunned. You were usually there at Suga’s house whenever they came over to either hang out or do a group project.

They thought you were the neighbor, seeing as you were always there but you’d always leave a bit after they came.

But to think you were his boyfriend?

They didn’t even know Sugawara swung that way!

Some of them were still processing the fact that you called Suga by his first name and that you also called him babe but when they heard Suga say that, they shot up.

Mainly Kageyama, Hinata, Yams and Yachi.

The softer two of the group blushed slightly when they heard that.

The energetic bunch ran over to you and began shouting questions.

“When did you start dating?!” Tanaka asked.

“Have you kissed yet?!” Hinata asked.

“HAVE YOU GUYS HAD SEX?” Nishinoya screamed.

Kōshi’s face exploded the shade of tomato red while you flushed a soft pink. You rubbed the back of your neck, trying to wave all the questions off, mainly the one about doing ‘it’.

You pushed past them and sort of hid behind your boyfriend, which didn’t work all that well.

Tsukishima was just laughing in the background.

If he could have popcorn right now, he would.

The rowdy bunch rushed over to the both of you again.

Sugawara glanced at Daichi with pleading eyes.

Daichi obliged, shouting, “GUYS!” Hinata squeaked while Tanaka and Nishinoya shrunk, they all stopped screaming out questions.

“Thank you, Daichi.”

“No problem.”

This would be way harder than meeting Kōshi’s parents.

You hesitantly slid to stand next to Kōshi, bowing. “(y/n) (l/n), nice to meet you!”

Kōshi grabbed your hand and squeezed it to give you a bit of confidence.

The rest of the team introduced themselves and after that, came the questions.

“How long have you been dating?” Tanaka asked, much calmer now.

“2 years.” You replied.

“Suga.” Asahi put a hand on Suga’s shoulder. His face was basically:

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Asahi and Daichi prided themselves in being Sugawara’s best friends, and although you didn’t exactly keep your relationship a secret, he didn’t want to endure the questions.

Kōshi wanted to tell them one by one but today, you surprised him by coming to his practice, which means you have to endure the questions all at once.

“I-it never came up..” Suga sweat-dropped.

“Have you kissed yet?” Hinata asked, he was bubbly and excited, but that was his usual personality. His cuteness lightened your mood.

“Duh.” Tsukishima said.

“Shut up, Saltyshima!” Hinata exclaimed. “So have you?” He turned back to the two of you.

“Yeah, uh, obviously.” You replied.

“Have you guys had--” Nishinoya was interrupted with a mom glare coming from Sugawara. “Too personal.” He said.

“Ahem.” Everybody turned to coach Ukai when he ‘coughed’ a bit too loudly, clearly calling for your attention.

“Ah, sorry for interrupting practice.” You bowed to Ukai, who waved you off.

“It’s alright, just, let us finish practice and then you can continue with the questions.” You nodded, moving to sit on a bench.

Practice followed with Hinata, Tanaka and Nishinoya showing off for you.

All in all, the team was accepting and very nice. Tsukishima didn’t want to give you any kind of sarcastic comment, knowing he’d get a big lecture from the team parents if he did.

At the end of the night you were both feeling happy, you waved goodbye to the team and then walked off with Kōshi towards his house, where you planned on also having a surprise sleepover.

Kōshi suddenly slapped you lightly in the back of the head.

“Itee, Kōshi, what was that for?”

“You could’ve told me! I wanted to tell them one by one, but instead, you come and we get bombarded with all the questions at once. You--”

“I love you, Kōshi.”

Suga sighed, pecking you on the lips. “I love you too.

[my-computer-tuition]

Copywriting Pro Tips for More Conversions

Copywriting Pro Tips for More Conversions ..... or

Copywriting : A few Tips to help You Sell More Product

Tips to Sell more

Make your Conversions go through the roof

My Secret Zoom Method for Escalating Your Sales 1000X overnight

Write Copy like a Master and have a queue of Clients at your Door

I came up with these five different titles in just a few seconds, there are of course infinite numbers of ways to say the same thing…. but which one will actually SELL? Copywriting If ever there was a skill in demand, it is copywriting. It is everywhere

Blog posts

Sales Pages

Landing Pages

Ads Online

Ads on TV

Ads on the Radio

Billboards

Emails

If you can learn the art of persuading a prospect to buy, you will have a great skill, even a career. Good copywriters cost a fortune to hire. Every Marketer needs good persuasive copy to get sales. This article is a description of some of the more common methods of selling and some of the things to consider before you lay out your copy. Good copywriting is however not something you can attain, by simply reading an article or two or by buying a course. It takes practice. Follow the main points in this introductory article and try writing your first Ad or post. Most people’s first attempts are rubbish so don’t worry too much. In later articles in this series, I will expand on some of the main components such as Headlines, USP and Hook and you will see how to improve your piece to make it work. If you get to the point where your copy is working well and your sales are rocketing, you will have a marketable skill in huge demand. There are big differences in the copy used in Blog Posts, Sales pages, Emails and all the others in the above list. The way you would word a blog post for example would be greatly different to an Ad. Also don’t mix up presentation with Copy. Strictly speaking, a copywriter deals only with words that sell, not the format of the presentation, although on occasions it might be prudent to point out obvious problems, for instance, if the webpage designer puts your copy onto a background which obscures or makes reading your copy difficult, then obviously the copy will not do its job.

Copywriting BasicsHere are a few major points which should be considered, before you publish.What you say in your copy depends on the prospects position in the buying cycle. If he is totally unaware of the problem or solution, your text needs to bring these to his attention, whereas if you have sent him several emails outlining the problem the solution and your product to solve the problem – then your text has a much more narrow focusWhat’s in it for ME : Your copy should focus on benefits for the client like  time saving, cost saving,  NOT the sellers features like dimensions, quality, tech, company history etc.Who is your Client: be sure to compose a customer Avatar, know who you are selling to, age sex, demographic, wants, needs, pain, or problem. Selling tech to a young tech savvy guy is going to be totally different to a computer phobic 60+ year old.

The Buying Cycle:

What level of product/service AWARENESS does your reader have? If the page you are composing is a landing page, you need to know the content or Ad that sent them here. The Headline and copy for someone Unaware of the product, is going to be vastly different from the copy aimed at those Fully Aware of the problem/pain/product

Levels of Awareness:

Unaware

Aware of Problem but Not Aware of your Product

Solution Aware

Product Aware

Unaware:

They don’t even know that they have the problem that you are selling the solution for. They need indoctrination. Introduce the problem. Diagnose the problem. The Ad that they clicked will have had a wide scope, they may have found your content on a blog post describing the problem or telling a story on Facebook.

Aware of Problem but Not Aware of your Product: Empathise and concentrate on Pain, Solution and Benefits

Solution Aware:

Here you can use social proof, previous customer feedback or reviews. Also, introduce what is special and unique about YOUR solution

Product Aware: They know all about your product (and its competitors) may also be on a list receiving your emails. All you need to do is re-present (if possible) a new improved offer OR maybe introduce some scarcity like “this month only” or “last 100” What you say in your copy depends on the prospect's position in the buying cycle. If he is totally unaware of the problem or solution, your text needs to bring these to his attention, whereas if you have sent him several 'educational' emails outlining the problem or the solution and your product to solve the problem – then your text has a much more narrow focus

The Headline

This is such an important part of the Sales letter/blog post that I leave it until the post is complete before composing it.  The Hook ( below ) will give you the main components of your headline. SEO is important for Blog posts – but not necessarily your job if you are just the copywriter.

The Headline is what readers see in search results so it must grab attention, but not appear spammy. If I had titled this post “How to 10X your Sales with my Secret Zoom Generator Method” you would suspect it to be a scam, so don’t go overboard

What is your USP

State it clearly, concisely and with brevity. Who are you helping. With What Problem to Achieve what benefit through which Unique Solution

Show the prospect that you understand their pain/problem. Create Trust, empathy. Speak to the person directly and use the appropriate language for that niche eg. For Doctors – their ‘customers’ are patients, For retail – ‘customers’, For legal businesses it would be ‘Client’

Tell a Story or Educate the reader

Introduce the solution, avoid hyperbole, tell a story, must be believable. Or try an educational method, set out the steps to take to solve the problem but – Leave out sufficient details to make them unable to succeed without YOUR proprietary method

Tell them WHAT to do, but not HOW to do it

Tell them the 5 things that this product is NOT

eg. Competitor products have fillers but ours is pure, Our product is not diluted, Ours protects against xyz, Ours has no abc which is filtered out

Describe some methods to do X, but not the best way

Tell them the mistakes that lead to problems or

What NOT to do when trying to do X

In each case you explain the details, establishing your credibility and expertise. What Benefits does your solution have over others?

List and expand on the benefits and list the features. The features create the logical reason to buy. The benefits will create the ALL IMPORTANT emotional reason to buy

Create a HOOK – an idea which grabs attention and persuades the reader to find out more

If testimonials or user feedback / reviews are available use them

How to Stop procrastination

The last bit of buyer resistance is Procrastination. You simply need a reason they should buy NOW, eg. you can use ‘scarcity’

Price Scarcity – the price will rise soon

Premium Scarcity – the bonuses only available for limited time

Quantity – only limited number left

Offer Scarcity – the cart will close soon Note: Don’t always use scarcity it can look spammy. You can just get the prospect to imagine how it feels to have your product X completed, installed.OR you can show how NOT doing X is not an option because – market conditions are moving OR all your competitors are all doing X.CTA – Call to ACTION. Be clear, give precise instructions on how to go forward. Be sure there is only one possible action on the page – leave off the navigation menu and sidebar or any other distractions. You can however use two ( or more ) buy buttons – going to the same Check-Out page, it may be prudent to include one above the fold and one  right at the bottom of the page ( where almost all readers expect it to be )

Simplify your text if possible Scan over your page when it is complete and if it is possible to remove anything that can be misunderstood. Remove anything that you can say in simpler terms, then do so. To be accepted by the widest audience, it should be written with quite a young reading age in mind.

Checkout my original article https://my-computer-tuition.co.uk/copywriting-pro-tips-for-more-conversions/     which will be updated with more on USPs , hooks and Choosing a title

[femenaces]

In both a scientific and personal mindset, I have a lot of questions, so I might return here and there because I’d like to understand how your brain process works. I hope you don’t mind if I ask you a few genuine, not intended to be pointed, questions:

• Are you aware of the current anti-trans bills in the US, and other countries, that would put trans people at risk? Do you or do you not support them?

• Do you approve of and support formal conversion therapy for trans individuals, and, on that note, do you support parents (particularly of AFAB trans people) who’s reactions to coming out may be physically violent and/or cause emotional damage (such as turning emotionally abusive, believing them to be traitors, forcing them to become overly feminine, cutting out any support systems that accept the social change, and so on)

• Other than your own personal experiences, and other radfem blogs, do you have any scientific or historical articles/journals to back your claims, both against trans people, and against the idea of things such as, say, women wearing heels which you seem avidly against (or, more specifically for the heels, women feeling empowered by wearing heels).

• Lastly; do you have any anthropological knowledge/ideas on gender. By this I’m not necessarily talking about trans individuals, or third genders seen in different cultures, but also women, what is means to be a women, and so on within other cultures.

Thank you.

I am typing this on my phone in bed so I’m sorry if the formatting is fucked up

1) I am not aware of every single bill, no, but I have a general idea. I don’t support anything that would endanger transgender individuals. However I don’t think the following things (main topics of “anti-trans” bills) constitute endangering trans individuals:

-separating sports by biological sex. I feel for transgender people who want to compete athletically, because there is no easy solution to this. On one hand, male and female skeletons and muscle building capabilities are markedly different. I have had courses on biological and forensic anthropology and this is fact. This effects individuals’ sports performance. You can see this if you google sports records for men vs. women and observe the difference. As such, it would not be fair to put a transgender woman into a women’s competition. However, conversely, HRT does affect things like muscle building, so it wouldn’t be fair to have a trans woman on HRT compete with males that are not on HRT, or have a trans man compete with females not on HRT, etc. I’m not sure there’s an easy solution to this issue and the only option I can see is creating separate categories for trans athletes, even though that is obviously not ideal. Anyway, bills barring biological male trans women from competing in women’s sports and vice versa do not endanger the individuals in any tangible way.

-preventing children under 18 from starting hormone therapy or undergoing surgery. The aim of this is actually to protect the health of these individuals due to the fact that puberty blockers and HRT have adverse medical effects that are not yet fully understood. After a person turns 18, though, they should be free make any decision they feel is right for them.

Those are the main issues I’m aware of right now after scanning this page: https://freedomforallamericans.org/legislative-tracker/anti-transgender-legislation/ . If you have a specific bill you’d like me to look at, send me a link.

2) This is where the difference in our definitions of conversion therapy gets tricky. I would support therapy for dysphoric individuals that aims to work on non-medical ways to deal with dysphoria, & I think this option should always be explored first due to the health effects of HRT and risks of surgery. Do you consider this conversion therapy?

If we’re talking therapy that aims to make GNC people conform to traditional notions of gender based on their biological sex (eg. you’re a girl, you have to learn to wear dresses. You’re a boy, you can’t play with dolls) or tries to force someone to use pronouns they aren’t comfortable with, then I think that is conversion therapy and I absolutely do not support it. Along the same line, I obviously don’t support parents who mistreat their children for being GNC or identifying as trans because that’s abuse.

3) I don’t know what you mean when you say claims against trans people. Dysphoria clearly exists and for some people medical transition is the best option. For my claim that male and female are real things, I honestly don’t think I need a study or research paper to support that claim. Intersex individuals exist but do not prove that sex isn’t real. With just the skull and pelvis, you can identify the sex of an individual with somewhere around 95-99% accuracy from what I remember off the class notes I took a few weeks ago in my forensic anthropology class. I’m typing this from my phone in bed rn bc it’s 3am but I’m sure you can google this if you doubt me, here’s one paper to start you off: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0379073816300202

As for the claim against wearing heels, again it seems fairly self explanatory that walking around in strangely shaped objects will not do good things to your feet and muscles and skeleton, but if you really want a study then here’s a couple I found with a quick google search: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0169814101000385

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C34&q=effects+of+wearing+high+heels&oq=effects+of+wearing#d=gs_qabs&u=%23p%3DermElc9Li4gJ

Why do I not think it’s empowering for women to wear shoes that give them health issues and are hard to move in? I don’t know how to explain that to you. A concrete example of how it actively DISEMPOWERS women is my experience having to walk home from work at the end of the day in an area where men follow and harass me. I quickly realized that wearing heels would not allow me to run if I needed to.

4) this is an especially funny question because I am one class away from graduating with a degree in anthropology. I have studied so many cultures from around the world and that is actually part of what made me a radical feminist. Cross culturally, it is astonishing to see how almost every culture displays prominent oppression of women, and, you guessed it, this oppression is sex based and starts the moment a female infant is born and recognized as female.

[natsubeatsrock]

So, I’ve been watching Sword Art Online: Abridged Parody, and...

I don’t think it’s terribly controversial to say that SAO Abridged has become the gold standard for what a good abridged series can do. While Team Four Star took 3 legendary IPs, Final Fantasy VII, Hellsing Ultimate, Dragon Ball Z are all generally considered to be fairly decent as stories. As much as people complain about DBZ’s random power ups, it’s not as if it was incoherent. Things make a decent amount of sense and that was the worst of the bunch.

Sword Art Online is notoriously problematic. No doubt I’m not the first person to say that. Plenty of people have said as much all over Tumblr and Youtube. In abridging SAO, Something Witty Entertainment managed to improve on what happened originally.

Now, I want to do something incredibly nerdy. (As if I haven’t done nerdy things on this blog before.) One of my favorite things about SAO Abridged is its insane sense of connections between episodes. Things are referenced that don’t matter until much later and jokes are often built on previous events long before the present episode. Two of the big plot points of the current arc are built on information we learned in a few previous episodes. I want to argue that episode 2 is the most important episode of the first arc because of its connections to every other episode in the arc.

To start, the narrator in the cold open connects this episode to the one before it by saying that a number of players died after being idiots. Notably some jumped into fire. If you remember, Klein struggled to kill a pig and named his avatar Ballsdeep69. In episode 2, this is shown in this episode in that players haven’t read the manual compiled by beta testers.

Though, it’s not as if that;s  the only reason they’d fail. In episode 3, the leader of the Black Cats took some of the tutorial NPCs from missions. Kayaba blames this as a factor in people failing miserably in the season finale. But we’ll get to him soon enough.

The intro plays and we’re in a meeting of players who are trying to beat a boss. The idea is that people will strategize to beat a boss by working together. This doesn’t pan out well throughout the series. Kirito is able to tank hits from seven lower level players in episode 4. In episode 5, the meeting to beat Sheeptar happens after 7 people. When they go after the meeting, 5 more died.

Now Kibaou makes his only appearance in the series. I don’t want to make too many “this character makes their debut here” connections. Asuna and Tiffany make their debut and are important characters in this series, but I’m not talking about them in this way. Kibaou is minor enough that I can mention him here. His stupid entrance makes his takeover of the Aincrad Liberation Front in episode 10 seem like a negative statement about them more than a positive one for him.

Though, episode 8 shows a bit of their incompetence on their own. While Corbax thinks his strategy of “group up and hit it till it dies” is revolutionary, it’s about as revolutionary as he is Hispanic. The strategy’s true origin is episode 2, as an alternative to Kirito’s “final solution”. That doesn’t work well and Kibaou starts to take power as a result of Corvax dying.

We then get Asuna’s troubles with menus. She’s not the only one with these issues, considering we learn Yoko has issues with the menu in episode 6. However, this is one of many clever ways to hint at Asuna’s ineptitude with the game early on. While she’s shown to have a lot of innate skill in this episode, that’s despite her inexperience. For all the changes made from the original, this was best shown in both versions by Asuna using her real name as her avatar name in the final episode of the arc.

Something I didn’t pick up on right away was that the setup for Laughing Coffin comes from episode 2. One player receives messages he believed to be from Jesus. At the end of the fight, he gets the command to kill them all and the end card is preluded with a creepy version of “Jesus Loves Me”. They come up in episodes 6 and 9. In episode 4, it comes up that other groups like Titan’s Hand have come up.

But the big thing that you see from this episode is a theme that runs through the first arc of this show. Kirito sees this game as an alternative to the real world. It would be easiest to make this the only real connection to this episode, but that would be lazy. (Clearly, this was written before I realized how crazy this “one post a day” idea was.)

Kirito mentions that he has power he didn’t in the real world in episode 1. While that may have felt like a throwaway line at the time. In episode 2, he uses that power to tell off the idiots around him, just like he wishes he could have done in real life. And to be honest, he might not be right about being able to solo the boss, but he’s definitely better than most everyone else in the boss room. Asuna might be on par with him skillwise, but he has more experience than her.

I almost called this section of connections “Kirito is better than those around him.” While he’s not the strongest player in SAO, as we end up learning, he’s certainly better than most of the people he’s playing alongside. This ego serves as fuel for tagging with Silica in episode 4 under the supposed threat of Laughing Coffin. It’s why we get the formation of “The Kirito is Always Right Foundation” in episodes 5 and 6. It’s why he challenges Heathcliff in episodes 9 and 11.

But something happens.

In episode 3, he unwittingly joins a guild because he’s such an amazing player. However, that wasn’t enough to save his guild mates from dying. Sadly, he had just decided to open up to people and the ordeal closed him off to people and even emotions according to episode 4. In episodes 4, 5, 7, and 8 we get the sense that this event had a serious emotional impact on him.

However, through these events he learns to open up to people more. Going on missions and teaming up with othes, he starts to open up to people. This obviously leads to a relationship with Asuna and Yui original. As stupid as he still feels the people around him are, he still has respect for him.

In episode 2, he tells the people, “Shoot for the stars. It will make it more fun when I kick you back into the dirt.” In episode 8, we see a change in his epic rant, which happens to be my favorite moment in the series. On humans he says, “They are without question a complete write-off as a species. And how dare you make me care about them!” And when Kayaba goes on a similar rant to Kirito’s after his identity is revealed, Kirito plays defense for them, lukewarm as it is.

And wouldn’t you know? Kirito is told that he could have served as a leader and inspiration to the people in SAO because he is better than so many of them. Sure, Kayaba bring the idea up that same episode and a few episodes earlier in trying to recruit him for the Knights of the Blood Oath. However, the idea first came up in episode 2.