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[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

i vote that next year instead of reading Dracula we do a Jeeves & Wooster Book Club. those two never got the rabid tumblr shipping fandom they deserved (disqualified for the sheer technicality of being published a century too soon). we must correct this injustice

[cellgatinbo]

(having a devastatingly bad day, generally feel like absolute shit, feeling a headache approaching) you know exactly what'll fix all this. max volume vocaloid blasting from my speakers 👍

[danielnelsen]

update: peach is doing very well!! she's eating and sleeping normally (sleeping more than normal, really, but that's to be expected)!! after 3 days of not sleeping and a few changes in painkillers, she finally just napped for an hr then, after another day, slept through the whole night (and most of the next day). she's started following all her usual routines again and is very keen to eat! still on some painkillers, but they're not having any horrific side effects anymore

now that im not staying up to keep an eye on her all night (while also dealing with upgrading my computer and my phone and also my sister preparing to go overseas and the dogs barking and howling constantly due to all of the above), i finally got some decent sleep too and slept for about 14 hrs. so today ive got that weird shakiness that i get from sleeping too much, but hey it's better than the whole of the last week

[motoroil-recs]

KINFESSION Is it valid that I have many fictionkins or kintypes? Around 50+? I always feel invalid but I wholeheartedly believe these identities are all me in a different universe. Is that odd?

🏎️‼️

[bereft-of-frogs]

I wrote a longer and more overwrought version of this post when I was slightly drunker (yay distillery book club) but the shorter, more sober-clarity version is: it's so ridiculous that about 50% of my current fandom experience is based on things that are now 25 years old (thanks for the reminder, lucasfilm) and yet I'm terrified of being left behind because I 'can't move on' from something that is now barely 5 years old

you could probably attempt to make some sort of sweeping statement about this, like the lifespan of media now versus the early 00s, but what it's really about is my own issues with abandonment which is affecting both my ability to move on (I really struggle with the 'crew breaks up between installment thing', always have) and also the general fear of behind left behind, rather than any real trends in fandom as a whole

ok I think that's enough for superb owl sunday

[fallout-drabbles-n-stuff]

She has no eyes !!!!!!!!! what did i do

Put it back homie

[softquietsteadylove]

Thenamesh receptionist AU: Gil is sick and Thena takes care of him :)

Thanks for your amazing prompts and fics! Love them all and love you too 😁❤️

Thena looks up when another coughing fit breaks the silence. She looks at the doors to the office behind her desk. She's been working here for a few months now, and she might even dare to say that she's gotten to know her boss a little bit, by now.

Everyone always asks if she knows what she's doing, or why she works for the company, let alone as a personal receptionist to the CEO. But she always says that she likes living in Korea, she likes the change in jobs from what she did back home at the museum. And she likes him--Gilgamesh.

He's nice, even though people keep warning her that he's some kind of monster. Certainly, he might seem scary on the outside. He's a mountain of a man, and she can see how his scowl might come off as intimidating.

But he's also nice--kind of sweet, really. He never says as much, but she knows that he's done things like make a note of which restaurants are her favourite to order lunch from, or ordering her a car service home when it's late and he doesn't want her to walk alone.

Thena pokes her head into his office, bringing in a tray with some barley tea as well as a few papers that need signing. She keeps it to herself when she sees the cold medicine on his desk and catches him while he's wiping his nose.

"Thanks," he mumbles as she places them down in front of him. He turns in his chair.

His eyes are bloodshot, the tip of his nose is red from agitation, and he even looks faintly flushed, surely from a fever. He's wearing a business suit, like usual, but he has his suit jacket on. And his sleeves aren't rolled up to the elbows (both an indication that he's cold).

Thena makes note of all of these things in her head as she watches him scribble out his name on everything.

"You okay?"

Thena looks up, not just at the question, but how he asks it in English. They speak in English often, since he spent some time in his youth in America. Something he has apparently not told a single other soul, since people are shocked whenever they hear the boss is fluent in it. "Sorry?"

"Are you okay?" he repeats, setting aside the last paper and picking up his tea. He takes one sip and winces as he swallows it. His throat is sore. "You seem kinda...distracted."

"Sorry," she says softly, attempting to smile at him. She can see on his face that he doesn't really believe her, but doesn't want to - or maybe know how to - ask further. "You still have a meeting at 4 today with Jasmine bank."

"Right." He sighs just a little, and his shoulders sink visibly.

Thena taps her fingers against the tea tray in her hands, "I can...cancel it, if you wanted to reschedule."

"No, no, I've been putting it off for too long already," Gilgamesh grumbles, folding his arms around himself. He really is cold. "Although, maybe..."

"Maybe?" Thena prompts him, eager to do anything that might help him in his current state.

He looks at her, the scary-boss face gone and just Gilgamesh's almost-cute face in place of it. "Maybe...they could do 3 instead of 4?"

Thena does her best to contain her smile, "I'll call them."

"Thank you," he gives her an exceedingly rare smile. Their eyes meet and something in his face changes, "Thena."

She nods and turns; sometimes she gets a shiver when he says her name. She doesn't really know what that means, but she still thinks she would rather keep it to herself.

She returns to her desk, already picking up the phone and dialing the number and extension for the representative with whom Gilgamesh deals. She exchanges pleasantries with him and asks if they can move their meeting ahead in the day, due to an unforeseen opening.

He asks how far forward. She asks for his earliest opening possible. He offers just after lunch, 1:30 at the latest. She thanks him for his consideration and his time.

She hangs up the phone, clicking around on her screen and scrolling through her options. This...might be a bad idea.

Gilgamesh sneezes into another tissue and tosses it away when Thena re-enters his office. He tugs at his jacket, which is now even buttoned up.

Thena lingers by the door, turning up the thermostat for the room, despite his usually strict rules about it. "They asked if you could do after lunch. The rest of your day is technically free, so I figured-"

"Great!" He's so visibly, clearly elated. Obviously it's the only reason he's here in the office today. His smile is so nice, she briefly wonders what she could do to see it more often. He clears his throat and settles into his seat again more quietly. "Order whatever you want, I'll be-"

"Actually," Thena starts, and then pauses almost immediately. Is this a bad idea? It's definitely not the best idea. Yes, Gilgamesh is nice, but she's also already overstepped today (and lied to him about it). Maybe this is nosy of her. Maybe he'll tell her to mind her own business.

"What?" he prompts her, looking genuinely curious, if a little worried.

Thena steps into the room, clasping a bag in her hands. She walks over to his desk, hoping she doesn't look foolish as she sets the delivery down in front of him. "I, um, noticed you seem...under the weather."

"Oh."

She steps back, increasingly aware of her increasingly warm cheeks. "I know you love sundubu jjigae, and I've had it from a place around the corner from me more times than I can count. I thought the soup might be good f-"

"Thena."

Her shoulders draw up automatically, just a little. She looks up at him, half expecting for him to tell her that this isn't the kind of thing for which he hired her.

But he's got that smile on again. Although maybe it isn't as bright, but it's so soft, and so warm. She feels like she's being hugged just by witnessing it. He clutches the bag to him as if she's given him a very personal gift. "Thank you for thinking of me."

Thena clasps her hands in front of her, at a loss as to what else to do with them. She offers him a smile, feeling much more bashful than she did a moment ago. "I-I'm sure you could go home after your meeting, if you so desired."

He chuckles as he unpacks the soup and various sides. His eyes light up when he sees the rice she ordered as extra. She knows that he likes to stir it into the soup. "You're spoiling me."

Thena is already turning as she mutters out, "ordering your lunch is part of my job, actually."

It is. Although maybe feeling nervous and embarrassed about it isn't usually part of it. And maybe she doesn't necessarily have to know all his favourite dishes to get from the different restaurants they patron. And maybe it's not part of her job to turn the heat up for him yet again on her way out and back to her desk.

She's just...being a good employee.

[agdab]

almost got crushed to death at work today

[greatlordfluffernutter]

Full disclosure before I knew what "boymodding" meant I thought it was a cool nerdy term for early-transition trans girls talking about the first steps they're making in their transition because "boymodding" sounds like "modding a boy" like you're taking a "boy" and installing a bunch of girl plugins and addons to enhance the experience until you ship of theseus your copy of skyrim into harvest moon and have become Girl™️. Like your first time wearing lipstick or a skirt in public would be boymodding or getting voice therapy or starting E. Turns out I was completely wrong but I still have the permanent image in my brain of a trans person picking out mods from nexus and refining their modlist until they're fully happy with their own body.

[roseinthestars457]

Can someone explain to me why my controller board stopped working out of the blue. Please I just ordered this as a replacement and I’ve already failed this class once

[palms-upturned]

.

[siixkiing]

“HAHA, YES!! Another delivery arrived, come to Daddy you peachy crunchy goodness!!”

[elisamaza]

Pizza delivery drivers of Reddit, what are some of the craziest reasons people have ended up on the “no delivery list”?

gameryamen

I worked for a pizza place that was near a very large software company. Deliveries to the neighborhoods or offices where all the tech workers lived was usually pretty awesome because they'd tip rather well. But there was one apartment that started to become a concern for us drivers. The man ordering was always polite, always paid, always tipped $4, and he would have been a perfect customer. He'd order breadsticks and a salad twice a week, and sometimes he'd include a bottle of root beer. Except when he opened his door, you could see an alarming amount of our breadsticks boxes stacked everywhere inside. Not like a few on the counter and a couple by the trash, stacks and stacks of them. Even worse, it was only our boxes in there. He wasn't just ordering from us often, we were the only place he was getting food outside of work. Now, I've worked in some of those tech offices myself, I know that there's enough decent food options just hanging out in the break rooms that this guy was probably not malnourished, but the way his living space was a shrine of greasy cardboard was a clear sign that this guy didn't have a healthy relationship with our food. Our manager was a really cool dude though, and he heard the drivers joking about the boxes and asked a couple of us "Is this like a messy guy or a guy who needs help?" We agreed it was probably the latter. So on his day off, the manager went to the guys apartment with an envelope that had gift cards for several other restaurants that delivered in that area and chatted with him. Manager found out that the guy was an immigrant on a Visa who was struggling to find American food he liked, and too socially awkward to ask anyone. So he talked with him through a few menus and helped him with some recommendations. Then he helped the guy load all the old boxes into his truck to take to the dump, in exchange for a promise not to order from us more than once a week. For a little while, the manager had a note on the calendar showing the last time the guy had ordered, and a couple times he had to hold his ground and refuse the guy's order. But after that chat, I never saw the stacks of boxes again, and the guy would boast about the different meals he'd had.

what the fuck dude, this is so sweet.

[givemaycoffee]

Thinking about how hiring people to load your furniture + boxes into a moving van deprives loved ones of an opportunity to spend an afternoon loving you.

[inbabylontheywept]

i once accidentally dated someone for a few months. its very difficult to explain how this happened, but the gist is that i thought we were hanging out, and she thought we were on dates, and it was just a very painfully highschool thing.

she was a little bit confused that i hadnt tried to pull any moves, at all, even a little. like, didnt even try holding hands because, and i cannot emphasize this enough, i did not know we were dating.

so, halloween rolled around, and she thought, you know, why wait for destiny, when you can grab it? so she hit me with a clue by four.

babylon, she said. babylon. my mom's gonna be out of town on halloween, and im gonna have the house to myself, and it's going to be kind of lonely. would you like to come to my house and watch scary movies with me?

you know, kind of a netflix and chill thing. except, and i cannot emphasize this enough, i did not know we were dating. also autism. so i took it at face value and said: oh! yeah! thatd be fun! and she thought she got her point across, but she didnt and it was a mess.

skip forward to halloween: my family has a block party every year, right? and at that point i was too old to really trick or treat, but we still wore costumes for our role in the block party, which in my case, was handing out cotton candy. so i took the first shift, and my costume was this homemade abomination minion thing. i had full yellow body paint, and goggles, and a bald cap, and overalls. the kids who saw it were like, uh, hm. overly realistic minion. and adults were like, oh, some kind of hills have eyes hillbilly with jaundice. very scary.

(it was not my best costume.)

my little brother swapped me out for second shift, and i was getting ready to change out to head to her house when i was like: no, she'll get a real kick out of this. this is one of the worst things i have ever worn. so i kept it on and just brought a change of clothes thinking i could shower real quick and change at her place after she saw my nightmare getup.

so i left after that, got there, knocked on her door, and she said come on in. so i went in, and there was this very long hall with an abrupt right turn into her living room where the tv was, and i went down the hall, and i made the turn, and my field of view went from beige drywal to her, on the couch, naked. naked in the paint me like one of your french girls pose. super naked.

i panicked. this was my first time seeing a real person like, full on sex naked,which is a totally different beast from other kinds of naked. you see one kind of naked and you think yeah, im ready for all the kinds of naked, but you arent. i wasnt at least. i really wasn't.

so my brain crashed to BIOS. she also crashed to BIOS, but for different reasons. of all the ways this could have turned me, having me show up in yellow body paint and overalls was pretty pretty low down the list.

so we sat there a while, and you know, she wasn't getting any less naked, which really wasn't helping me get my brain sorted out. it really wasnt much of a surprise when she got her bearings first and started asking questions.

"babylon," she said. "babylon. what are you wearing?"

and i was like, kind of rebooted, but i was nowhere near full functionality, so symbolic language wasnt loaded in yet. i had nothing running but my trusty autism.exe, so i said

"overalls"

and she looked at me like i was the dumbest person in the entire world, and i looked at her like she was the first naked person i had seen in real life who got naked specifically for me, and my upper level cognitive process went: "listen man, we are not going to get our shit together as long as 80% of your brain power is devoted to not blinking. you gotta get out of here."

and if id communicated that, maybe things would have been less of a mess, but instead i just kind of turned around and walked back to my car. i figured i could drive a few loops around the block, get my brain in order, and figure out what the hell we were gonna do.

the only thing i had said to her since arriving was, again, overalls.

first loop around, i was like: oh god fucking damnit. oh shit. oh shit. shes gonna get like, an eating disorder from this. oh no.

second loop around i was like: oh NOOOOO oh WHAT THE FUCK oh SWEET JESUS PLEASE. i dont wanna go back man. i just wanna bury this and forget about it. please. please. let this bitter cup pass from my lips.

and after my third loop, i went and i knocked on her door again.

she answered it this time, and i counted my lucky stars that she'd changed into some pajamas. she was all teary eyed which was the saddest thing ever, and we sat down in her kitchen and talked. it was pretty bad - i figured out we'd been dating, and she figured out that trying to jump from home plate to 3rd base is considered ballsy in baseball, least of all dating. no real winners there. and i can remember after all that, we sat there a bit a bit longer, just steadying ourselves, and i was like "well, im actually really glad we figured that out. guess i'll see you at school tomorow' and she said "WAIT. wait."

"lets watch shrek 2."

so we did and it was horrible. we did not look at each other. we did not say a word. we just sat in stony silence, while shrek 2 played in the background, and when it was done we shook hands. i think we might have been able to salvage that as a friendship if it hadnt been for shrek. as it was she turned white as a sheet and ran away every time she even got a glimpse of me at school, and that summer she moved to a new state to live with her dad. all her friends said she moved just so she wouldn't have to go to school with me anymore, and i dont actually think they were lying.

every time i hear relationship counselors talk about how important communication is, and i'm tempted to roll my eyes, i look back and go, alright. alright. theres probably some poor bastard, somewhere in the world, who doesnt even know that hes married.

and god help him when he figures it out.

other bad dating story here.

[sirfrogsworth]

Remember this joke?

Well, I am going to do something similar only with photography. This is a photo someone took for an Amazon review of their Clinique products.

Honestly, it is not a terrible photo. They did some staging. They have an interesting background. All of the labels are legible. It is properly exposed. This would be a perfectly acceptable product photo for an Etsy page.

I've been taking these advanced photography courses in preparation for whenever I am able to create a new studio in the house. And my teacher is a photography badass. I just watched a 6 hour class on how to recreate a professional Clinique ad. And at first glance it looks deceptively simple. It's just some skin care products being splashed with a little water.

Which is why I wanted you to see an average person for reference.

This is what Karl Taylor came up with.

And I don't think I've learned so much about photography in one tutorial before.

Product photography is just loads and loads of problem solving. You have to light the chrome caps with a gradient. Which requires giant diffusion scrims.

Those big white panels are literally only there for the two chrome caps.

You need a pure white background, but you can't let light spill all over the studio, so you put up giant black light blockers.

And you have to add another light just for the orange bottle on the right.

Oh, and if you want the bottles to glow, well, you have to hide a silver reflector behind them.

But you still want the edges of the bottles to be darker so they have some contrast. So you add some black tape to the sides.

And in order for the reflective labels to have bold black lettering, you have to reflect black cards into them.

Ack! Karl's beautiful bald head is showing up in the chrome caps! He must put on the naughty blanket.

And once you get every aspect of every bottle perfectly lit, you finally get to yeet some water at it all.

I don't love product photography because I have a weird obsession to help greedy corporations make their wares look more beautiful. I love it because it is a complicated and challenging new puzzle every time. Every product is a different shape and requires a different technique to make it look its best.

I don't know if I will be able to live up to Karl's standards.

This is about the level I was at in 2017 before I quit photography.

I have so much more knowledge in my brain now. I'm really hoping I can surpass that.