#nearly through my twitter backlog

[wyntonyang]

More old misc. deltarune art. Noelle’s outfit is from an old anime and Kris’s is from an 80s movie, let me know if you can guess either one.

I didn’t want to wait till next October, so here’s the Halloween special

It’s interesting to see how Kris looks more and more realistic over time. I’ve had people theorize on what art style they’re supposed to be in (like how everyone else is muppets, Arthur, etc), but they’re just how I normally draw real people.

They’ve recently taken a more Oz illustration sort of look though.

[suddenlybambi]

as long as you stay here [5] ♥ kyle broflovski

pairing : kyle broflovski x reader

college AU - 18+

tags : strangers to friends to lovers, slow burn, fluff, angst, alcohol, afab reader, she/her pronouns, eventual smut

words : 2.6k

chapter 5

previous | next | alaysh masterlist

a/n - hnngghhh i wasn't going to post a chapter every day because i wanted to have a backlog of chapters just in case but i love seeing y'all react to alaysh and i have 0 self control so... chapter 5 baybeee

Y/N was halfway through her 8-hour shift by the time she managed to stop for a break to check her phone again without Jay spotting her and dragging her back out to the front of the diner. Anxiety had been eating her up, wondering if Kyle had messaged her back and how he had reacted to it. She wasn’t sure if she was relieved or more nervous when she saw that she had a notification from him. Trying not to overthink it more than she already had been, which was nearly impossible as she had greatly overthought it, she opened the message.

kyle 📗 : Hey! No worries!

kyle 📗 : I completely get it. I still grab Stan’s hand to cross the road because I used to do that for my little brother 😅

Just like that, all of Y/N’s nerves that had been building up for 4 hours dissipated in an instant. Kyle didn’t think she was a complete weirdo. Or, at least, he didn’t openly say it to her, which was good enough. Most people thought of her as a little weird anyway.

y/n 💕 : thank god 😭

y/n 💕 : Wendy does that to me, but she’s an only child so she has no excuse!

y/n 💕 : really sorry for the late response, work has been chaos - I can’t wait to get out of here

Y/N didn’t expect Kyle to respond instantly, but she was happy he did, as it gave her something to do on her 5-minute break besides scroll Twitter until she got annoyed at some piss-poor take and close it again, only to open it a second later and repeat the process.

kyle 📗 : What time do you finish?

y/n 💕 : not until 10pm so I have another 4 hours

kyle 📗 : Is Bebe going to pick you up?

y/n 💕 : nah, I usually walk it - its only 20 minutes

y/n 💕 : or I get an Uber if its raining but I try not to do that too often as they can get pricey at that time

kyle 📗 : I don’t want to sound rude, but isn’t that area known for being a bit dangerous at night?

y/n 💕 : I guess it’s not great, but it could be worse?

y/n 💕 : only two homicides in the past year!

y/n 💕 : I have my pepper spray and a mean high-kick!

kyle 📗 : I’ll come and get you at 10pm to take you home.

kyle 📗 : to your house that is

kyle 📗 : not mine

kyle 📗 : sorry that came out wrong

kyle 📗 : You can come back to mine if you want, but I figured you’d rather go back to yours.

Y/N couldn’t stop herself from giggling at her phone as Kyle’s texts came through in the space of seconds. He texted so formally until he was panicking, and then the punctuation and capitalised letters were dropped.

y/n 💕 : that would be great, thank you, but I don’t want you staying up late on account of me

y/n 💕 : gotten this far without being the third homicide 😅

kyle 📗 : My first lecture isn’t until 11am tomorrow, so I don’t need to be up early.

kyle 📗 : I don’t usually get to sleep until late anyway.

y/n 💕 : I have to get back to serving customers before my boss catches me

y/n 💕 : thank you so much, I really owe you one! I’ll see you later

The rest of Y/N’s shift seemed to pass by a lot faster than the first half, aside from one incident with a very disgruntled man who had to eventually be kicked out by Doris.

“I’ll finish cleaning that, hun,” Doris grabbed the cloth from Y/N’s hands and pointed over at the window. “Your boyfriend is outside waiting for you. Has been for five minutes.” Y/N’s head perked up as she saw Kyle’s car.

“He’s not my-” She started to protest, but Doris waved her hands dismissively.

“Yeah, yeah!” She scoffed, gently pushing Y/N towards the breakroom so she could grab her bag. “Jay packed up two lots of food for you earlier. Don’t forget to grab it on your way out.”

“How did you know he’d be picking me up?” Y/N asked once she had grabbed her bag and the two take-out boxes full of fries.

“You’ve had that dopey smile on your face all evening,” Doris shook her head as though it were perfectly obvious. “Don’t keep him waiting then.” She quite literally pushed Y/N out of the door, locking it behind her so she couldn’t get back in and complain about it. With a roll of her eyes, she made her way over to where Kyle was leaning against his car, looking at his phone.

“Hey, stranger,” She laughed, catching his attention. He looked up and smiled as he saw her. The flickering light that barely illuminated the car park caused his red hair to almost glow. “Long time no see!”

“You’ve changed so much, I almost didn’t recognise you!” Kyle played along with the joke, opening the door for Y/N. She was warmed by the polite action.

“Ah, yes,” She chuckled once he’d gotten into the driver’s seat. “That would be the grease, sweat, and humidity causing my hair to defy gravity.” 

“Ha! Mine doesn’t need any of that!” Kyle gestured at his curly red hair, running a hand through it to make it stick up. Y/N watched as it stuck in the same position when he moved his hand away. “What have you got?” He nodded over at the two boxes of take-out in her hands while trying to smooth his hair back into a presentable shape.

“What have we got?” She corrected, passing him one of the boxes. “Probably just fries. Nowhere near as good as the ones from the place Kenny works, but they hit the spot after being on your feet for 8 hours,” She opened her box to confirm that, yes, it was just full of fries. “You don’t have to eat them if you don’t want them. Doris insisted on me bringing them for you.”

“And here I was thinking you had done it out of the kindness of your heart,” Kyle teased, his smile betraying his seriousness. “I’m actually starving. I forgot to stop to eat after taking Stan and Wendy home. I just shut myself in my room all evening so they couldn’t complain to me about how hungover they were and ask me to do things for them.”

“Cheers!” Y/N held up one of the fries, Kyle did the same, and they tapped them together, eating them in unison.

“Oh… wow…” He looked down at the box of fries, eating a couple more. “These are…”

“Terrible, right?” She laughed, eating her own at an alarming rate.

“Yeah… Why can’t I stop eating them?”

“Because they are the best worst fries you’ll ever have!”

“So, how was work?” Kyle asked.

“It was pretty average,” Y/N shrugged. “Except for this one asshole of a customer.”

“What happened?”

“Okay, so,” She shuffled to get herself comfortable before she started giving the rundown of the situation. “I asked him what he wanted, and he said ‘egg’. That’s it, nothing else, just ‘egg’. So I was like, cool, sure, how do you want your egg? And he said ‘normal’.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Exactly! So obviously, I asked him what he meant by that, and he said ‘normal egg’ again, and I was trying to explain to him that just repeating the words wouldn’t make me understand them, but he kept on insisting that he just wanted ‘normal egg with absolutely nothing else’.”

“So what did you do?”

“I went to the kitchen and got an uncooked egg and just placed it in front of him.”

“How did he react?”

“He lost it! Doris wanted to kick him out there and then, but I couldn’t let him leave without knowing what the fuck ‘normal egg’ was to him. I was asking him to describe it, and he just kept on repeating that he wanted ‘normal egg’ until, eventually, he pointed at another guy’s plate and said that, obviously, that’s what he meant. Guess what he wanted.”

“Oh no… what did he want?”

“An omelette! You know, that thing where the egg is just one part of it, and you add a bunch of other shit to it? And he looked at me like I was stupid because I didn’t understand that a ‘normal egg with absolutely nothing else’ clearly meant that he wanted an omelette with ham, chicken, cheese, and pepper!”

“Did he get his omelette in the end?” Kyle was laughing as the story went on, seeming to be genuinely interested in it. It made a nice change from when Bebe would pretend to listen to Y/N’s work stories so she could have a turn talking about what she did in her day. 

“Made him wait 20 minutes thinking he’ll get his stupid ‘normal egg’ until Doris kicked him out,” Y/N snorted at the memory of how furious the man looked, announcing he would be leaving a terrible review of the place. “I’m just glad he didn’t wait to jump me outside after my shift.”

“Has that ever happened?” Kyle’s smile dropped in a split second, suddenly incredibly concerned. “Has someone tried to attack you after work?”

“Once!” She admitted. “But it was just some scrawny drunk asshole who could barely stand, let alone throw a punch. He fell over after one swing, and I kicked him in the balls for good measure.”

“Send me your work schedule,” He requested, tapping his phone, which had been resting on the dashboard.

“Why?” Y/N laughed softly. “What are you going to do? Are you gonna escort me to and from work each shift to make sure I stay out of trouble?”

“Yes,” She had been joking, but Kyle seemed very serious.

“It’s not a big deal, really,” She sighed. “I’ve been working this job since I moved here. Incidents like that are few and far between.”

“If you won’t tell me, I’ll just ask Bebe and Wendy for it,” He shrugged. “You shouldn’t have to risk being jumped by a pissed-off customer while walking home late at night.” Y/N could sense that she wasn’t going to win this fight.

“Yes, sir,” She sighed dramatically, not noticing how red Kyle’s face turned at the title. She patted his thigh. “Come on, are you gonna take me home, or were you planning on sitting in your car together all night?”

Sitting in her lecture with nothing but pure fury in her eyes, Y/N pulled her phone out and opened up her messages.

y/n 💕 : did you forget that I sit behind you?

y/n 💕 : those chips have a label with my name on it

y/n 💕 : this is an english class and you can’t even read

y/n 💕 : explain yourself

clyde 🕹 : i thought the label was a joke lol 😅

y/n 💕 : you’re the fucking joke here

clyde 🕹 : i’ll buy you some more chill out 🙄

y/n 💕 : this is strike two

clyde 🕹 : what?

clyde 🕹 : what was strike 1?

y/n 💕 : walking around the apartment naked

y/n 💕 : which you have done four times so you’re lucky I’m only counting it as one

clyde 🕹 : do you want the chips back?

y/n 💕 : after your grubby hands have been in the packet rubbing against them?

y/n 💕 : hard pass dude

Clyde turned his head to look at Y/N as she sat behind him in the lecture. She flipped him the middle finger, and he rolled his eyes. Over the two and a half weeks that Clyde had been living in the apartment, the two had developed a relationship akin to siblings, where they would bicker one second, and then it was like everything was fine, and they had never argued the next. Y/N had even surprised herself by willingly spending time with him on multiple occasions when she didn’t have to. 

“Are we getting food after this?” Y/N bent down to ask him as their lecture finished and the other students started to pack up.

“You won’t take the chips because my hands have touched them, but you still expect me to drive you around?” Clyde scoffed at her, leaning back in his seat so his head rested against the back of the desk Y/N had been working on. “Don’t you have a shift at the diner?” 

“Shitttt,” She groaned, closing her eyes in disappointment. “Can you drop me off at home, please? I don’t have my uniform.”

“Sorry, babe, I’ve got plans with Craig, Tweek, and Tolkien,” He shrugged, giving her a half-hearted empathetic smile. Y/N had gotten to know the other people from South Park during Clyde’s stay at the apartment. She got along with them decently well, but no one compared to how close she had become with Kyle. They studied together almost every day, and he had insisted on following through with his plans to take her to and from work on days when she didn’t have any other transport so she wouldn’t have to walk it.

“Gross, never call me babe again.”

“But Bebe calls you babe?”

“I like Bebe.”

“Wow, I’m definitely not giving you a ride now.”

“You weren’t going to anyway, dickwad!” Y/N was distracted when her phone buzzed in her pocket. Clyde took this as an opportunity to escape while she wasn’t looking, but she threw up another middle finger as she caught him slinking away from the corner of her eye.

kyle 📗 : Do you need a ride today?

y/n 💕 : your timing is perfect as always! 🥰

y/n 💕 : yes please! I completely forgot I had work today so I need to grab my uniform from home if thats okay with you?

kyle 📗 : Of course 😊

kyle 📗 : Be there in two minutes, I’m just around the corner.

True to his word, Kyle was there within two minutes, almost exactly on the dot. Y/N felt guilty about how much he had been driving her around in the two and a half weeks that they had known one another, but he was always the one to offer.

“Before I forget, your apron is in the trunk,” Kyle gestured behind him while Y/N climbed into the passenger’s seat. “You left it in here the other day. I managed to get that one stain out.”

“You cleaned it for me?” She grinned at him, securing her seatbelt. “That stain has been there for a month. How did you get it out?” The stain had come from a customer knocking a bottle of ketchup over and accidentally dropping their bag on it; it splattered everywhere. Jay had to get it off the ceiling. She didn’t know what was in the ketchup, but it looked like watered-down blood splattered on her apron after scrubbing it for an hour straight.

“My mom used to make me help with the washing whenever I was in trouble,” He chuckled a little uncomfortably. “I was in trouble a lot, so I got really good at it.”

“Wow! What a little rebel! Who knew?” She teased, drumming her fingers against the dashboard as Kyle started driving. 

“Yeah, well, the guys would always drag me into their schemes. Someone had to be the voice of reason.”

“You’ll have to teach me your cleaning secrets. I have some shirts with some pesky stains that I haven’t been able to get out with anything.”

“Bring them to me, and I’ll sort them,” Kyle smiled as he caught a glimpse of Y/N’s grin out of the corner of his eye. It had been so easy to grow attached to her. He couldn’t remember what he did all day without her. 

a/n - let me know if you would like to be on the taglist for this fic

current taglist - @n0tangeliccc @solana-central @charqing-qing @eiizabeth-torres @hand-writxen @audiliah @cosmicbroenies @himoutolikesjojo

[elsjobproject]

So that anon got me thinking.. When did they change job quests...

Let me explain.

I started this project back in January of 2020, with Richter's quest line being the very first thing in my records.

Back then, I noticed something terrible about most of the job quests I was recording...

They all... Sort of looked like this. Looking into my backlog, where I also started recording Laby and Ain- they're completely different. Compare that with Lofty: Executor's first job quest.

Now I wasn't sure what exactly was happening... But I knew this wasn't really right? But I didn't know what to do about it.

I don't know when they changed into this format, but I DO know when they changed everything... Either back or to something completely new.

...I first thought it was

The first one I recorded that wasn't any new job or character was Blazing Heart and it looks like this

Granted, this was in September of 2022, so I definitely don't have exact dates when things changed, but either way it was a step in the right direction. Such an amazing one in fact that I...

Promptly forgot about the issue I experienced all of 2020 and that combined with how many 4th jobs I recorded up until that point excitedly began trying to play every single class I could like a madman in an effort to archive things.

...

Then I opened this blog in late 2022, confident that I was nearly done with my archival efforts.

.................

So if you ever wonder why things seem recorded so last minute, just know I DID have this things recorded, and usually plan to release the original recordings, but uh. They changed everything up on me. Whoops.

With the videos on each individual job class coming out, I'm sure they're most likely not going to be changing job quests again- unless they decided to do 4th jobs. Which... I mean I guess that's basically masterclass, and I wouldn't really want them to do anyway since that adds extra workload onto me.

So.

When did they exactly change job quests?

...

Now. An issue with this is I don't speak Korean, and was not around during 2020 Korean Elsword, so I guess this kind of ends here. I can't really tell what they were doing during then. This could be an NA exclusive issue

Now I wish I could say "I have a job quest from 2020 KR server that helps prove this may not be the case"

But although that would be nice, it wouldn't matter because I only recorded the Furious Blade 5/5 quest when someone else was doing the Jump event in 2020 very legally on their own account and barring translation differences, it is virtually the same as the 2022 version. And of COURSE I didn't record the other job quests because it was a JUMP EVENT and they let you speed through job quests........

Here it is, legally obtained of course, if you would like to fact check

(Furious Blade's Job quest, for reference)

Anyway so if it isn't an NA exclusive issue, we have no way of telling, unless someone who was using the European server or very legally using the KR server has anything from 2020 to back this up.

But, for now. Looking through the GM blog on Elsword, it's tempting to say that these are the only patch notes. But.

There was an elsword tumblr. One I can no longer find, but there was one. I suppose it doesn't particularly matter, but I promise you that tumblr had more detailed patch notes. Then they most likely moved their focus to twitter and decided to start doing patch notes on their official blog from then onward.

I had a lot of theories on when exactly it changed but I think when it did was during the dungeon revamp that happened due to Laby and Noah's dungeons being uniquely fast in EXP gain.

My evidence is that all of the current job quests align with those changed dungeons. Let's compare Lofty: Executor, because if the icon wasn't Tyrannus, it would be Richter;

(04/27/2020)

(10/31/2022)

This is a 2 year gap in between these recordings, so it's kind of a stretch and they could have just as easily been changed with 4th path release, to match up with the job questline videos... However, it's easier to have a script in advanced and put them in a game 1 month before you release the first of the 4th paths than it is to put them in just as each individual 4th path is coming out.

If there was any time to change job quests, it would have been then.

If anyone recorded job quests from 2021 during this update to corroborate, that would be fantastic.

Again, the only instance I think they would maybe change job quests is to perhaps suit areas for individual characters, but I sort of doubt that's going to happen any time soon.

...

I both want and don't want that to happen.

Thank you to everyone whose read this far in, if you have any information or addendums, I will reblog them. This project was made specifically to archive job quests, after all, and even if the history of Elsword seems kind of short (it's been 15 years), I would prefer it to be recorded and readily available.

[adultswim2021]

The Venture Bros. #20: “Twenty Years to Midnight” | August 6, 2006 – 10:30PM | S02E05

In this episode: Brock stumbles on a box of old shit. Among the items is a video left behind of the senior Dr. Jonas Venture relaying a message to his son with instructions for assembling an important device. It will involve Team Venture going to several locations to secure various parts for this machine. Thank god it's not season one, because this'll require a lotta new backgrounds, baby!

I don't call this one a favorite, but I do think it's really good and has a lot of things going for it. The design of the episode is fairly elegant; it has the plot of a very solid sci-fi adventure film (quietly ignoring that the ending is basically a parody of Contact). The second act has a few strong funny scenes that barely have anything to do with the story. Jonas Jr. and the ghost Pirate from season one (whom we learn is now working for Jonas Jr.) visit a drug-addled Jonny Quest who is living in some kind of underwater pod. Hank and Dean visit Colonel Gentleman who is apparently passed away in his bed. They read his diary that's filled with nonsense.

I'm just observing where the episode COULD be stronger, which is not necessarily the same as complaining. Actually it's exactly the same as complaining. I just don't want to get yelled at. These scenes are funny but I always remembered them separate from this episode. This episode has a strong story and those scenes are fun detours, but it’d be nice if those characters had more bearing on the plot and not just there as a goofy obstacle. They're mostly just stuff happening, driven by the location of a macguffin. I actually found myself saying “oh! So THIS is the episode where this scene comes from!”.

I still consider these scenes a net positive for the episode. It's just imperfect in my eyes because this could be a very good standalone adventure and a gateway episode for new viewers, except for the fact that it does wind up being a bit of a previous-episode-reference fest. This episode directly references events from “Ghosts of the Sargasso” and the third act is a sequel to “Ice Station Impossible”. This could actually have the opposite effect; further intriguing people into visiting the backlog of the series. There WAS a season one DVD for sale.

Actually... now that you mention it: that might be what happened to ME. No shit! I actually remember sort-of half-watching this episode. I was a “person who did not watch Venture Bros.” mostly because of the bad pilot episode and the lukewarm first regular series episode. I did have a positive experience watching the first Burger King Have It Your Way marathon, which included a small handful of season one Venture Bros. episodes. I do credit that night for helping thaw the freeze-out I was perpetrating on my now-beloved brothers.

I remember half-watching this episode, and hearing Stephen Colbert's voice, and thinking “wow, Stephen Colbert is on this show sometimes? I should probably watch it?” (NOTE TO YOUNGER READERS: Before Stephen Colbert did limpdick lib comedy for CBS he was a highly-respected subversive comedy writer and performer that none of us knew was a Christian). Even though I remember having this thought about this episode, I still considered this the “try before you buy” phase.

Somebody else already made this point, which is why I'm tacking it onto the end of my write-up: The scene where Hank and Dean discover Colonel Gentleman dead (or is he?) and go through his stuff, they leaf through his journal and find a bunch of inane lists, like “TOYS HE WISHES HE HAD AS A KID”, “GOOD NAMES FOR AN IMAGINARY FRIEND” and “HOLLYWOOD ACTRESSES THAT COULD USE A GOOD PUNCH IN THE MOUTH”. The very smart point, which I nearly passed off as my own until I remembered somebody on twitter did already, is that this is basically what clickbait articles are now. That guy was ironically presaging the future of the internet. It somehow wasn't badly writing up cartoons for a tumblr blog that nobody reads.

Oh! Also: the Jonny Quest scene was maybe the last explicit reference to the Ventureverse and the Questiverse being one-and-the-same. They kept this character but only refered to him as “Action Jonny” after this, I’m pretty sure. Remember when I promised to watch every episode of Jonny Quest in preparation for this? Whatever happened to that idea? I wonder.

EPHEMERA CORNER:

Ed's Burger King "Have It Your Way" Lineup (August 5, 2006)

Speaking of the Burger King “Have It Your Way” marathon! This happened! It was all anime. The end! Nothing else to say! Bye bye Ed!

[battle-of-alberta]

Updates

Hi gang, just dropping in to let you know where I’m at with the blog for the rest of the year.

I’m going to be booking a trip to stay with family over Christmas in BC so I will be travelling in a couple weeks - I should have a tablet to use and art supplies in storage over there as well as a backlog of about 35 asks give or take to work on, so we will see how that goes.

I’ve had to return my library books but I did get through a fair bit of them - unfortunately they didn’t add very much to the municipalities I really needed more info on. Good exercise nonetheless. I certainly have enough material to make a very basic introduction to the history, I just need to think about how exactly I’d like to do that.

Oh and hello new followers! If you are an expat from Twitter, just a friendly reminder to change your icon from default and put some actual human person content on your blog or I will most likely end up blocking you. I get a lot of spam including bots, but on this blog particularly I get businesses/advertisers that are based in Edmonton or Calgary that see that I post about Alberta, so I tend to use that block button quite liberally. This is a blog about silly comics and not a business, news source, community hub or anything like that and i strongly Resent being advertised to. (Contrary to the name, this is also not a hockey blog and I don’t follow hockey nearly as much as is socially acceptable in this place, my apologies)

[chrisstapley]

So I guess I'm back here again

This account is nearly ten years old but I don't think I've ever actually used it for more than like a week or two total, lol. I joined one day years and years ago, forgot about it, then came back in 2018 with the intention of actually sticking around, but that happened to be like the same month that they banned all porn, and I decided to leave when they did. As twitter got worse and worse I kept telling myself I'd be back here in a heartbeat the exact second they reversed the porn ban.

That still hasn't happened, and it doesn't seem like it's ever going to, and while I'm still angry with tumblr for wiping out all that art and displacing all those artists, twitter has become completely unbearable to use, so, against all odds, tumblr has come out on top as the most attractive option for me, in terms of, like... the "big" social media sites. (cohost is my current Posting Destination of choice but apparently I can't shake the desire to also be in a more "mainstream" place)

So I guess I'm here now! Again!

Not sure how active I'll be here but one thing I DO like about this website is I can just toss my posts into a queue and forget about it, so I guess look forward to a daily art post or two for like the next couple months or however long it'll take to work through the backlog lol

[ackerfics]

slow dance with you — mikasa ackerman

— goth!mikasa ackerman x soft!female reader (modern au)

— warnings: slight mention of alcohol, pure rotten fluff

— summary:  after gaining some courage from the drinks she had in the party and from the advice she got from her friends, mikasa is ready to become your girlfriend.

— word count: 3.9k

— author’s notes: i would like to thank the anon who gave me some ideas for goth!mikasa, you are so amazing !! thank you for the small headcanons. and since we’re on the topic of writing abt goth!mikasa, i couldn’t help but pair her up with a classic soft girl who likes to wear pink at every time of the day. this dynamic is based on marceline and princess bubblegum so i hope you enjoy !!

p.s. the reader will have dyed hair here, if this is not your cup of tea, just let this fly by your dash.

listen to this while reading.

“She dyed her hair pink,” came a dazed yet mesmerized tone.

“You’re staring at her again.”

Mikasa jumped on her seat at Eren’s nonchalant observation. She whipped her head to her best friend, his attention directed on his laptop, hands flying across the keyboard as he typed out the next few words in his essay. Noticing the incredulous look the black-haired girl was shooting him, Eren rose an eyebrow before rolling his eyes. Mikasa huffed, crossing her eyes with a subtle hue of red on her cheeks, complimenting her dark lipstick. “I am not staring,” she mumbled. “Shut up, Eren.” She looked away from her subject of interest but continued shooting small glances.

Eren sighed, running his hand through his hair. He was always one of the witnesses of his best friend slash sister being meek around her crush. At first, he was teasing her because not going to lie, Mikasa’s crush is a pretty person but as their years in college made them juniors, Eren will be the reckless idiot that he is (courtesy of Armin) and set Mikasa up. But he liked to live his life out first — Mikasa will probably curse him with that spellbook she bought from the antique bookshop they encountered in their little exploration back when they were first-years. “Mikasa, why don’t you take the chance and confess to her? It’s not going to be the end of the world.”

“If she rejects me? What then?”

“Then that’s the next problem that you will have to face.” The brown-haired boy turned back to his essay. He stared at his laptop screen blankly before spewing out curses. “Now, I forgot what to write next! Damn it.” He picked up his iced coffee and drank from the metal straw as his life depended on it.

Mikasa rolled her eyes at her best friend’s first statement. “Gee, thanks for the advice. It was very much appreciated.”

“Glad to be of help.”

There was a thud on their table that made the two look up from their respective activities. Eren had a scowl on his face because for the nth time this day, he was interrupted from finishing his essay (for fuck’s sake, he doesn’t want to fail Ackerman’s class). Mikasa blinked from scrolling through her crush’s Twitter account (the last post she wrote was about how Levi Ackerman, Mikasa’s relative and everyone’s Anthropology professor) and fixed her attention on their blonde friend, Armin. He looked too bright after a round of morning classes, something that Eren doesn’t comprehend. The blue-eyed young man has always been the rational and genius third of their little group. There wasn’t a time where Armin’s advice got a situation to erupt in flames. It was either the situation became an inferno instead (Eren) or nobody had the guts to do it (Mikasa).

“Hey, guys!” Armin greeted, arranging his side of the table, meticulously placing each component of his lunch in front of him. “How were your morning classes?”

“Shit,” Eren spat out.

“Of course, it is.”

“They were alright,” Mikasa shrugged.

“Figured.” Armin glanced at his friend’s sides of the table, nodding at Mikasa’s balanced lunch while blankly staring at Eren’s laptop. The device should’ve been a good tray of lunch. “I thought you were eating lunch, Eren? That’s what you said in your text.”

“Can’t,” the brown-haired boy huffed. He gestured at his iced coffee without taking his eyes off the laptop. “I guess, this counts as my lunch.”

“When’s that essay due?”

“In about,” Eren looked at the time on his laptop, “three hours. Ackerman is my first period later. That fucking terror professor has no mercy when it comes to this. Can he just piss off for once? Mikasa, do you even tell him to get laid? Because I think that would solve his attitude. I swear to God, he’s getting more pissed every damn day.”

“Wow, I guess getting my short, grumpy, middle-aged uncle to start his sex life will be a nice conversation starter,” Mikasa drawled, half-lidded, bored eyes reading every tweet her crush has posted for the entire week. Mikasa couldn’t help but smile at one post about a new movie her crush just watched, saying that it was now a new favorite. She was tempted to give a heart on every single post but that would it weird because they never followed each other despite the small interactions they shared in between classes. With a sigh, she looked up, only to be met with Eren’s unamused stare. Raising an eyebrow, she asked, “What? Do you think that would work, Eren? Levi is probably a virgin his whole life and will continue his record until he’s all shriveled up.” Eren blanched at the image. “Just finish your homework and stop complaining.”

“I’m trying!”

“You’re not trying hard enough, that’s for sure. If you just started that essay the day he assigned it to your class, you would have finished it way before the deadline.”

Eren pointed at Mikasa with narrowed eyes. “Don’t even go there, Mikasa. I have a life aside from being a sleep-deprived college student.”

“I mean, she’s got a point, Eren.” Armin immediately rose his hands in defense when Eren shifted his glare from the black-haired young woman to him. “You always tend to procrastinate in the most impeccable timing that we sometimes have to remind you of your backlogs. And now, here you are, doing things last minute when you could’ve prevented the rush by doing it immediately.”

“Thanks for slapping the reality to my face, you two,” Eren dryly replied, going back to his essay for the final time. “And by the way, Armin, give Mikasa some solid advice that she will finally follow because she’s making googly eyes at Miss Pretty two tables from us a couple of minutes before you arrived. You know, the love of her life?”

Armin roamed his eyes in the lunch hall and sure enough, there was Mikasa’s goddess sitting with her group of friends. There was that brown-haired girl that was dubbed as the Potato Girl for eating mashed potatoes during Ackerman’s class (the professor told the class his rules of no eating or going out of the room while he’s discussing the moment the girl took a spoonful of her snack). A young man with a buzz cut snorting at what the brown-haired girl said. Armin remembered sharing a class with him. He never got the chance to introduce himself because the young man was sleeping throughout the lecture. There was usually a fourth person in the little group but it seems like he was running late or already in his class. That person was Eren’s sworn frenemy, the reason for that relationship was unknown to this day.

The three people at the table all stood up, the brown-haired girl and the taller young man leading the way. Armin instantly had an idea.

“Hey, [Name]!”

Mikasa nearly had whiplash from turning her head to Armin. “Armin?!” she hissed under her breath, face becoming hotter when you looked at their table, a bright smile lighting up your face. You called your friends, telling them to go on ahead without you, to which they nodded before walking towards the trio’s table. Her brain wasn’t processing the moment you lifted a hand to wave at whoever you were smiling at. Mikasa wished it was her. “Fuck,” she whispered, registering how cute you look. You donned a salmon pink plaid sundress and a white cardigan, matching with the bubblegum pink locks you let down. Her heart was hammering a thousand miles per second and there was no hope of stopping it.

“Hi, Armin,” you replied, stopping a few feet from Mikasa, who looked away from you to fix her wide-eyed stare on her empty plate.

“I was just going to ask if you already have a partner in our Molecular Biology lab?” The blue-eyed young man then turned to Mikasa and Eren. “I’m in the same class as her this year.”

“As if calling her here wasn’t that obvious,” Eren murmured, still typing out his essay.

“I don’t need your dry remarks right now, Eren, don’t want to ruin the atmosphere. So, [Name], you have a partner?”

You shook your head. “I think not. It would be great if we could be partners though. I need a break from the people I’ve been partnered with throughout college.”

He gave you a sympathetic smile. It was true, though. Most of the grouping during your first years of college were all set up by the teachers so the students really had no say on the matter at hand. Even Armin was exposed to a variety of students, most of them being too slacking to participate or too overbearing with their suggestions that they have no plans of doing. He nodded with a smile, “I’ll be sending an email to Professor Zoe about this and we’re done.” He glanced behind you, noticing that your two friends weren’t there anymore. “I’m sorry for holding you up. I’m pretty sure you have a class after lunch. See you around?”

You waved him off. “It’s fine, I told them to go ahead since Sasha has a class scheduled right after lunch and Connie had to nap in his dorm. And I don’t have any class the whole afternoon, except for an online session so yeah, see you around, Armin.” You acknowledge Eren with a nod, to which he responded with a cool expression (as if his mind wasn’t a mess from the cramming), and gave a soft smile to Mikasa, “Bye, Mikasa.” And you were off to your dorm, leaving behind two amused men and an awestruck Mikasa.

The black-haired young woman was hyperventilating the moment you disappeared from the lunch hall, hands clenched on top of her black shorts. She regretted wearing a thin, long-sleeved striped sweater under her black shirt because it was so fucking hot after that encounter. Her entire body was vibrating with too many emotions all at once, short-circuiting until she became a heap of flustered mess in front of her best friends. “Oh, my God,” she muttered like a prayer. She definitely needed one after seeing you all pretty in pink. It was too much for her soul because you two are a perfect match this time. Her grommet belt and choker were not helping because she couldn’t fucking breathe.

“Mikasa, breathe,” Armin reminded beside her. “Yeah, that’s it.”

Once she regained her composure, Mikasa realized she probably looked like a gaping fish. “Oh, my God! I’m so sure that this time, she thinks I’m weird. My name is the only one she mentioned aside from Armin which is saying something because she’s classmates with him. But why did she say goodbye to me? Oh, my God, she’s giving me so many butterflies right now.”

“Your gay is showing,” Eren pointed out calmly.

“Eren, not the time,” Armin murmured, hovering his hands over Mikasa’s back.

“Just wanted to alleviate the tense atmosphere. No need to get so worked up.”

“But, Mikasa, your feelings for her are showing.”

Eren clapped his hands, pointing a finger at Armin. “That, my friend, is a genius observation.”

Ignoring the green-eyed man, Armin continued, “I think it’s time you confess to her. Three years is a pretty long time pining for a person. In the end, her knowing your feelings will be inevitable. That is if you have no plans in letting her know.”

“Of course, I want her to know,” Mikasa murmured, fiddling with the sleeves of her striped long-sleeves.

“I heard that there’s a party this Saturday in Reiner’s frat,” Eren told them, meeting both of his friends’ eyes over the top of his laptop screen. “We’re in the same football team with Jean. The horseface is a friend of your girl,” he nodded at Mikasa, who erupted in a sputter of her crush not being her girl, “okay, not your girl — yet. As I was saying, [Name] is good friends with Jean and if Jean is there, Miss Pretty in Pink will be, too. That’s your chance to ask her out, Mikasa.” He met the blinking gray eyes of his best friend. “The question is, are you up for that?”

-

“You were staring at her so hard at lunch again.”

You looked up from your book to acknowledge Sasha entering your dorm room after a whole afternoon of packed lectures. The brown-haired young woman was so tired that she immediately plopped on top of her bed on the other side of the room. At first, you didn’t register what she said because you were preoccupied with your book. You chose to indulge the night in a good book because it has been a long time since you’ve done that. With furrowed eyebrows, you asked, “Can you repeat what you said, Sasha?”

Sasha tilted her head to look at you with one eye uncovered by her duvet. Her hair fluttered after puffing out a breath of disbelief. “Oh, don’t pretend that you have no idea, Miss Pretty in Pink.”

“That’s because I didn’t catch what you said,” you replied, gesturing at your novel. “And what’s with that Miss Pretty in Pink nickname? Did some of the students around campus started that?”

“Sort of,” Sasha hummed. She sat up from her bed and took out her phone from her backpack lying on the floor. You watched the whole time she stretched her arm without changing her position on her bed. With her phone in hand, she opened her Twitter account. “Actually, a friend of mine tweeted it, wait, I’m just going to scroll through my Likes tab to find her tweet. Oh, here it is.” Sasha showed you her screen, patiently waiting for you to take the device from her hand to get a closer look. Her hopeful smile turned into a small pout when you made no moves in doing so. “Take my phone and see for yourself.”

You sighed, following her pleas. “It’s probably just someone from the volleyball team. You know how some of them never stopped following me around campus. Can’t they take the hint that they’re not my type?”

“This person is much better than those himbo simps following you around. She’s an amazing person behind that shy exterior of hers.”

You only hummed, blankly staring at your roommate’s phone before your eyes widened in realization. Your eyes skimmed over and over again at the handle, mkackerman, beside the display picture of a short-haired girl in pigtails. It was the girl that managed to capture your attention during your first year at Eldia University. The girl with an air of mystique that the stars are jealous of. You always admired her from afar, appreciating her style each day. But your admiration was getting replaced with something more at the five words she tweeted. 

You’re so pretty in pink.

Roses bloomed in your cheeks, complimenting your pink hair the longer you gawked at her short post. 

“What?” you breathed out after a full minute of silence.

“Mm-hmm,” Sasha hummed with a smug smile. “And who dyed her hair pink impulsively last weekend?” She intentionally looked at you with sharp eyes, her smile turning into a smirk full of mischief. In actuality, Sasha knew of Mikasa’s crush on you since they were acquainted with each other. It was an embarrassing first meeting between the two, with Sasha latching on a random person’s arm in the station and it turned out to be Mikasa. The two became great friends after that, well, after Mikasa lowered her guard down, leaving her pocket knife safely tucked underneath her checkered skirt. It was Sasha who managed to make Mikasa confess of her undying love for you, the former squealing her heart out in the library. (They were kicked out after that.) 

“I don’t know,” you denied. “There could be a couple of people in the campus who thought that spontaneously dyeing their hair pink is an awesome idea.” You threw your hands in the air, giving back Sasha her phone right after.

“Trust me. Mikasa doesn’t have any interest in any other girl other than a special someone I know.”

You chose to ignore her, turning back on the discarded book on top of your covers. The words flew around your mind, aggravating you until you placed the novel on your lap. A defeated sigh came out of your lips. “Okay, let’s go out for some dinner.” You stretched, switching your pajama bottoms for a pair of loose jeans, and leaving your button-down pajama top on. The people in public will never know your top is a part of a pajama set. As you ducked down to roll the bottom of your jeans, you hear Sasha’s bed shuffling. Sitting up, you regarded her with an inquisitive raise of an eyebrow. “Spill it.”

“Oh, alright. Jean told me to bring you to a party.”

You stood up, patting your lap of imaginary dust, placing your things and book inside your tote bag. “Tell him no. I have a written exam coming up and I don’t want to fail one of my majors. He can manage without one person in our friendship group.”

Sasha huffed, mimicking your actions. “This will be the last time!”

“You said that the previous party you pulled me to.” You narrowed your eyes at her. “I couldn’t get up for a whole day because of that party. Don’t forget your wallet.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Sasha threw her wallet in her small bag, throwing the strap over her shoulder. “I promise that this will be the last time, I’ll even call Connie for the witness of my pact!” She placed a heartfelt palm over her chest, lifting her chin a little in the air. “I solemnly swear I am … keeping my promise.”

“You hesitated.”

The brown-haired girl giggled sheepishly, scratching the back of her neck. “It’s kind of hard not to continue the quote from Harry Potter. You can’t blame me for that!”

“I’ll think about it, okay?”

“You better because Mikasa will be there.”

You blinked at her statement. “What does this have to do with her?”

Your roommate looped her arm with yours, pulling you in the direction of the elevators. “Because,” it sounded like she was talking to a child, “you were staring at her earlier during lunch period. I understand that because Mikasa looks so good every second of the day but there was something different about the way you’re staring at her.” She tapped her finger on her chin. “Let me see, there’s some pizzaz there.”

“The pizzaz you’re talking about is me admiring her make-up — nothing more.”

“Whatever you say,” came Sasha’s sing-song voice. “I will be the first one who will say ‘I told you so’ to your face when you two start dating.”

-

The night of the party was not as bizarre as you thought.

Sure, there were people having shots in the living room but there weren’t any extreme scenarios lying around unlike some of the parties Connie and Jean went to. It was mostly catching up with old friends or making connections with strangers by ranting about the education system of your university. All in all, it was a fun night, yet here you are, holding your cup of beer with two hands as you craned your neck to get a glimpse of Sasha. Your roommate disappeared as you turned to get a shot, leaving a confused you behind. To think you specifically asked Sasha to be by your side throughout the night. You cursed in your head, you being reliant on the presence of others surfacing. Your stress made you tip your head back, downing your drink in a go.

Without anything to do, you leaned back on the wall. Mind hazy, eyes glassy, you searched the living room for a spunky brown-haired girl that you were supposed to be buddies with. Instead of Sasha, you met gazes with a girl with stars for her eyes. She was equally mesmerized as she was staring straight at you. Everything became silent as your heartbeat resonated with hers. She was beautiful in her all-black outfit — a leather pencil skirt over fishnet stockings, cropped tank top, and combat boots. The two of you are contrasting with one another; her lipstick so dark whilst yours shone a pretty coral, her hair framing her face in a midnight pixie cut whilst yours were in pink waves cascading down, her entire appearance blending in the background whilst you were a beacon with your coordinating soft outfit. 

God damn it, Sasha was right.

You are definitely falling in love with Mikasa Ackerman.

Mikasa who you saw reading tarot cards of her blonde friend. Mikasa who you bumped into during the opening ceremony two years ago. Mikasa who you discovered to have an affinity for electric guitars when you stumbled in one of the auditoriums, her department’s band having an audition. Mikasa who never meets your gaze because you make her nervous at how effortless you carry yourself. 

But tonight, she never looked away from you, her eyes having an adoring yet determined shine.

She stopped in front of you, mere inches separating you two. You looked up at her, her combat boots making her taller than she already is. You saw her eyes flick to your lips, your breath hitching at the thought of having her dark lipstick on any part of your body. With a careful tilt of her head, Mikasa ducked her head a little to fully meet your eyes face to face. “I saw you’re alone,” her voice is still soft-spoken as if she was afraid that she was scaring you. It might be because of the liquid and verbal courage she got from drinking and listening to her best friends because Mikasa had no plans of letting you go tonight. “I thought you needed company.”

A breath came out of your lips, your proximity making Mikasa feel it. “Uhm, if it’s you, I don’t see why not?”

A large smile brightened Mikasa’s face before it dimmed as she lowered her gaze to your lips once more. “I’ve been waiting three years for this.”

Maybe your mind was too hazy with alcohol or it could be because you accepted your feelings for the black-haired girl, so you whispered, lips brushing against hers in the most addicting way possible, “Just kiss me, Mikasa.”

Her lips softly moved against yours in a slow dance, the inches separating you disappearing as Mikasa wrapped an arm around your waist. You lift a hand to cup her jaw, tilting your head to deepen the kiss and to brush your tongue with hers. You felt her shiver, biting your lower lip to make you open up more, with your whimpers tingling her hearing. Mikasa pulled away, trailing firm kisses on the skin where your shoulder meets your neck. Seeing the black kiss mark on your skin, she smiled and placed fluttering kisses on your neck up to your cheek. Opening your eyes, the silver grays in front of you have never been so beautiful. You returned the favor of placing kiss marks. You stood on your tiptoes, feeling Mikasa’s hand steadying you, and left a coral pink mark on the corner of her mouth. 

Mikasa dipped her head, placing her lips close to your ear.

“I want to slow dance with you,” she sung to your ear. “I know all the other boys are tough and smooth and I got the blues. I want to slow dance with you.” Mikasa hid a small smile at your flustered expression. “So can I be your vampire queen, Bonnie?”

The moment you said yes, there was a shout in the crowds. “Hell yeah, your plan worked, Eren, Armin!”

You and Mikasa stared at each other with wide eyes before laughing. 

“Let’s go ditch this party.”

“Thought you’d never ask, Bonnie.”

[chierafied]

20 Questions: Writer’s Edition!

Thanks so much for the tag, @blitheringmcgonagall​ and @the-dream-team​! 💙💙💙 I was really hoping to get to do this one lol

***

How many works do you have on AO3

300 (though I’ve yet to post 8 fics from my backlog there)

What’s your total AO3 word count?

1 281 330

How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

Three. SessKag (Inuyasha), Jily (Harry Potter) and IchiRuki (Bleach)

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

If I did the REAL top 5 fics by Kudos it would be all SessKag and my answers overall are very SessKag heavy as is so I went with top 2 SessKag, top 2 Jily and top 1 IchiRuki instead.

1. Life After Loss

This was not the happily ever after Kagome had always dreamt about. This could not be happening to her, not after everything they had gone through... She never knew that her whole world could screech to a complete halt in a blink of an eye.

SessKag, M, Chapter Fic, 98k words

2. Stranger Than Fiction

The books have been all the craze recently, boasting an epic adventure set in the chaos of Sengoku Jidai. Kagome has steered clear from them; she has spent quite enough time dwelling in the past as is. However, when her roommate and a die-hard fan  of the book series laments the latest plot twist, Kagome realises that the accursed books might be hitting even closer to home than she ever suspected. 

SessKag, T, One Shot, 913 words

3. #Jily

Twitter seemed awash with the hashtag Jily. Lily blinked at in confusion, until she realised it was one of those silly couple monikers people had  bestowed on her and Potter. …Though there was a small dissenting crowd following a tweet from Potter’s bandmate Sirius Black: Jily? Hah! More like LAMES. 

Jily, G, One Shot, 2,991 words

4. Much Tweeting About Crushing

James has a hopeless crush on his neighbour and tweets about it, which is fine. Until Evans follows him. 

Jily, T, One Shot, 3,050 words

5. Miscalculation

Rukia planted her elbows on the table and steepled her fingers. “I want my brother to think we’re dating so I can get him off my back.” Ichigo scoffed at her. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.” 

IchiRuki, T, Two Shot, 1,820 words

Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

Yes and no? 😅 For a long time I had a policy that I’d reply to comments if I had something more to say than just “thanks”.

Nowadays I reply to nearly every comment I get on AO3. I feel if the people bother to take the time to comment, the least I can do is thank them and I’ve made some friends in the comment section along the years too. But all that said... since I went on my hiatus I haven’t really been replying to my comments on Dokuga much, the clunky reply system there makes it feel like a big hassle which makes it feel draining. 😅

What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

Hmm, Probably either Foil (SK) or Vagary (SK)?

... And I just realised Vagary is another one I never posted on AO3 argh when will the backlog end???

What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

Probably Life After Loss, all things considered. 💙

Do you write crossovers? If so what is the craziest one you’ve written?

I’ve never written proper crossover, i.e. characters from different series interacting but I’ve written crossover fusions i.e. charas from series 1 in the setting of series 2, such as Disney AUs etc.

The craziest one would be probably the SessKag Star Wars AU because I’m not a Star Wars fan and know very little of it but it was requested so... 🙈

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

I got Anon hate at one point from an anti-shipper on my IchiRuki fic on FFnet, it was wild. 🤣

And maybe not as far as hate but the notorious plot twist on Chain of Love (SK) was very much criticised to the point where even years later when I got a comment notification for Chain I would inwardly flinch. 😅

Do you write smut? If so what kind?

I don’t.

I have written and will write a sex scene if the story requires it (most recently in Do I Remind You Of Somewhere You Wanna Be, SK). But they are never explicit in nature, I’m not naming genitals or anything lol. The thing is, if I have to write sex I want to keep it... tasteful, for the lack of a better word. So a term like smut, with connotation to dirtiness would never apply to my writing.

(Back in the day, because I don’t write explicit scenes I did not consider my sex scenes “lemons” either. Which is why I’m still cackling about the fact that Chain once won the 1st place award for a best lemon scene.)

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Yes, I have. Chain was posted on Wattpad without my knowledge or permission. It is wild having to file a DMCA over a fanfic. 😂

Have you ever had a fic translated?

I have! Some of my SessKag one shots have been translated to Spanish, I believe!

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

I’ve tried, with a close IRL friend of mine, but as our attempts never got very far I wouldn’t say I really have. 😅

What’s your all time favorite ship?

Oof, that’s a tough one. Maybe IchiRuki?

What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

Probably the Bodyguard AU (JL) and the Shotgun AU (JL)? I love both of these stories a lot but I’m very much in the beginning with them and both are ideas I’ve had for years yet have never really been able to actively work on?

What are your writing strengths?

Hmm. I feel my writing style leans towards short and simple so it’s easily approachable? I think I’m pretty good with dialogue. Sometimes, I can do a lot with very few words. And I think I’m fairly good at slipping in little details or giving a sense of backstory, even if it’s a short one shot?

What are your writing weaknesses?

I suffer from a perpetual lack of motivation that I try to combat with having a writing routine. I’m slow to update because unless I’m inspired which never happens or am on a deadline crunch I am perfectly comfortable just adding 300-500 words to my WIP and calling it a day. I loathe editing so I rarely do much else than a cursory proofread before posting.

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

My initial thought is why? 😂 I mean I guess I don’t mind but I feel using another language in the fic should be justified and done in moderation. Personally, I probably wouldn’t write dialogue in another language.

What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Okay so the first fic I ever actually wrote/published was a 2nd gen arranged marriage fic for The Belgariad and The Malloreon, my favourite book series growing up. The fic, which fizzled out after 2 or so chapters, was deleted years ago lol

SessKag came second. 😉

What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

*vaguely gestures at the 300+ fics* It’s pretty much impossible to choose among my children but if you put a gun to my head I’ll say Life After Loss.

Tagging: @drosselmeyerwrites @mythicamagic @sagemcmae @stormielikeweather @wbficaholic

[newstfionline]

Monday, May 10, 2021

Higher Prices Leave Consumers Feeling the Pinch (WSJ) Americans accustomed to years of low inflation are beginning to pay sharply higher prices for goods and services as the economy strains to rev back up and the pandemic wanes. Price tags on consumer goods from processed meat to dishwashing products have risen by double-digit percentages from a year ago, according to NielsenIQ. Some consumers are feeling stretched. Costs are rising at every step in the production of many goods. Prices for oil, crops and other commodities have shot up this year. Trucking companies are paying scarce drivers more to take those materials to factories and construction sites. As a result, companies are charging more for foods and consumer products including foil wraps and disposable cups. And consumers are therefore paying more.

As US reopens, campuses tighten restrictions for virus (AP) About a year into mask mandates, nasal swabs and remote classes, the atmosphere turned tense at the University of Vermont as the school cracked down on rules for social distancing and face coverings amid a spike in student COVID-19 cases. Students were handed hundreds of citations for violations like standing in another student’s doorway or walking maskless to a hallway restroom, igniting a student-led petition that blasted “strict and inhumane living conditions.” “You start to feel suffocated like I’m afraid to leave my room,” freshman Patrick Welsh said in an interview on campus. Even as restrictions relax across much of the United States, colleges and universities have taken new steps to police campus life as the virus spreads through students who are among the last adults to get access to vaccines. Administrators say they’ve needed to act urgently to avoid risking an early end to the semester or sending infected students home and spreading COVID-19. In recent weeks, the University of Michigan punished hundreds of students for missing mandatory virus testing by deactivating their access cards to nonresidential buildings, and Cornell University announced that students would lose access to campus Wi-Fi, course materials and facilities for missing virus tests. The University of Chicago locked down residence halls for seven days and shifted classes online after finding more than 50 cases in a matter of days.

Pandemic gives boost as more states move to digital IDs (AP) The card that millions of people use to prove their identity to everyone from police officers to liquor store owners may soon be a thing of the past as a growing number of states develop digital driver’s licenses. With the advent of digital wallets and boarding passes, people are relying more on their phones to prove their identity. At least five states have implemented a mobile driver’s license program. Three others—Utah, Iowa and Florida—intend to launch programs by next year, with more expected to follow suit. Mobile licenses will give people more privacy by allowing them to decide what personal information they share, state officials say. The licenses offer privacy control options that allow people to verify their age when purchasing alcohol or renting a car, while hiding other personal information like their address. Having a mobile driver’s license will allow people to update their license information remotely without having to go to a state’s Department of Motor Vehicles or waiting for a new card in the mail, said Lee Howell, state relations manager at the American Automobile Association. Industry leaders say safeguards will prevent anyone’s information from being stolen, but some critics argue that having so much personal data on a phone is too risky.

Why an Estimated 100,000 Americans Abroad Face Passport Problems (NYT) About 9 million U.S. citizens currently live abroad, and as the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel finally appears, immigration lawyers estimate more than 100,000 can’t get travel documents to return to the United States. Despite the State Department making headway on a massive backlog of passport applications in the early months of the pandemic, many consulates and embassies abroad, plagued by COVID-19 restrictions and staffing reductions, remain closed for all but emergency services. Travel is restarting, but for American expats who had a baby abroad in the past year or saw their passport expire during the pandemic, elusive appointments for documents are keeping them grounded. “It’s a real mess,” said Jennifer Minear, an immigration attorney and the president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “It’s a giant, multilayered onion of a problem and the reduction of staff as a result of COVID at the consular posts has really thrown the State Department for a loop.” Michael Wildes, the managing partner of the law firm Wildes & Weinberg, PC, which specializes in immigration law, estimates that the number of stranded Americans abroad is in the hundreds of thousands.

Scotland’s pro-independence leader promises another bid to break from U.K. after election boost (Washington Post) First Minister Nicola Sturgeon promised Saturday to push ahead with another Scotland independence referendum after her party gained a strong showing in Scottish Parliament elections, setting up a potential clash with Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Sturgeon said that an independence referendum was the “will of the country,,” with her Scottish National Party and pro-independence allies taking a majority of the 129 seats after all the votes were counted. That will probably boost calls to redo a 2014 independence referendum, which could lead to the crackup of the United Kingdom under the strains of Brexit and its deep divisions.

‘Freedom’ fiestas: Spaniards celebrate end of COVID curfew (Reuters) Exhilarated Spaniards danced in streets, chanted “freedom” and partied on beaches overnight as a COVID-19 curfew ended across most of the nation. In scenes akin to New Year’s Eve celebrations, hundreds of mainly young people gathered in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol square to applaud the clock striking midnight while in Barcelona revellers headed to the beach with drinks in hand. Police in Barcelona had the strange task of moving people on after the last curfew began at 10 p.m., only to let them back at midnight when it ended for good.

Putin reviews Russian military might as tensions with West soar (Reuters) President Vladimir Putin reviewed Russia’s traditional World War Two victory parade on Sunday, a patriotic display of raw military power that this year coincides with soaring tensions with the West. The parade on Moscow’s Red Square commemorating the 76th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two featured over 12,000 troops and more than 190 pieces of military hardware, including intercontinental ballistic missile launchers, and a fly-past by nearly 80 military aircraft under cloudy skies. This year’s parade precedes parliamentary elections in September and comes at a time when Moscow’s relations with the West are acutely strained over issues ranging from the conflict in Ukraine to the fate of jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny.

Death toll soars to 50 in school bombing in Afghan capital (AP) The death toll in a horrific bombing at a girls’ school in the Afghan capital has soared to 50, many of them pupils between 11 and 15 years old, the Interior Ministry said Sunday. The number of wounded in Saturday’s attack has also climbed to more than 100, said Interior Ministry spokesman Tariq Arian. Three explosions outside the school entrance struck as students were leaving for the day, he said. The blasts occurred in a mostly Shiite neighborhood in the west of the capital.

China says most rocket debris burned up during reentry (AP) China’s space agency said a core segment of its biggest rocket reentered Earth’s atmosphere above the Maldives in the Indian Ocean and that most of it burned up early Sunday. Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, who tracked the tumbling rocket part, said on Twitter, “An ocean reentry was always statistically the most likely. It appears China won its gamble.” People in Jordan, Oman and Saudi Arabia reported sightings of the Chinese rocket debris on social media, with scores of users posting footage of the debris piercing the early dawn skies over the Middle East.

Palestinians fear loss of family homes as evictions loom (AP) When Samira Dajani’s family moved into their first real home in 1956 after years as refugees, her father planted trees in the garden, naming them for each of his six children. Today, two towering pines named for Mousa and Daoud stand watch over the entrance to the garden where they all played as children. She and her husband, empty nesters with grown children of their own, may have to leave it all behind on Aug. 1. That’s when Israel is set to forcibly evict them following a decades-long legal battle waged by ideological Jewish settlers against them and their neighbors. The Dajanis are one of several Palestinian families facing imminent eviction in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of east Jerusalem. It also highlights an array of discriminatory polices that rights groups say are aimed at pushing Palestinians out of Jerusalem to preserve its Jewish majority. The Israeli rights group B’Tselem and the New York-based Human Rights Watch both pointed to such policies as an example of what they say has become an apartheid regime. Settler groups say the land was owned by Jews prior to the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation. Israeli law allows Jews to reclaim such lands but bars Palestinians from recovering property they lost in the same war, even if they still reside in areas controlled by Israel. Israeli rights groups say other families are also vulnerable, estimating that more than 1,000 Palestinians are at risk of being evicted.

[cosplayinamerica]

Since I’m basically a photographer who runs an IG theme page (CosplayAmerica), I grew curious about other IG theme pages and I thought it be interesting to interview them so introducing the first interview, Cosplay of Color !

What’s the origin story of CosplayofColor IG page?

Simple enough it started out as a branch page to Cosplay.and.Comics years ago who is probably one of the only share pages I noticed that shared Black cosplayers. However it quickly grew and had about 20k compared to the other branch pages that were.

Since it grew into its own beast, I felt it was important that the page do more since posting was so inconsistent and diversity is needed in this community. So in October last year ,my group of friends & I took over the page as it's new main admins and changed how we were gonna use it.

We decided to open it up to more ethnicities. We've featured Black, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, Indigenous, Asian, and Pacific Islanders. We also stuck to a formula that's helped us be consistently showcasing new faces into the community while spreading awareness and speaking on the importance of diversity.

What’s been the best part of running this IG theme page?

Honestly, seeing so many new faces that we otherwise would never even notice. Being able to give them the spotlight regardless of follower count, years cosplaying, body size, or even skill level.

What’s been the worst part of running this IG theme page?

We get sooooo many feature requests. Back in October it was just me configuring everything and making the schedules, answering all the unanswered DM's, following as many new cosplayers as I can find.

It's all very overwhelming which is why I brought my friends in to give me a hand to help take some of the load off. And sadly a lot of people are impatient and want to be featured right then and there despite the fact we already have a backlog of features  to get through as is. We've also had a few non-POC cosplayers get mad that we won't feature them on there which is always annoying but it is what it is.

How do cosplayers submit to be featured ?  Email, hashtag or some other method ? How long does it take to be featured?

A bit of both actually. I knew a lot of Black cosplayers and knew where to find them. So at first I was just posting them to give me time to find new faces and figure out a good schedule. We don't do it through emails but we accept features via tagging us in photos and DM's on our Instagram, which now is A LOT more under control than when I first took the page over

Truth be told the answer is simple, WE DO THE WORK!! A lot of share pages just share people with thousands of followers continuously. Can't tell you how many share pages I see share the same people over and over. I remember one page sharing Jessica Nigri like once a week for a month, I love her but others should get the chance 

So we look through hashtags, photos, posts, and our own suggested list. Also #29DaysofBlackCosplay was a huge help in finding so many new faces. We are constantly looking through them, at least 3 times a week now since we aren't low on features. So we try to space out our post features. So if we posted a cosplayer on say the 1st of June we wouldn't feature them again till the next month at the earliest. But we try to showcase new faces whenever we can.

Is there anything you like to add that wasn’t covered ?

Just this. Recently the amount of support we have been receiving has been phenomenal. We jumped up nearly double our follower count in under a month. We want to see more non POC cosplayers supporting Black and POC cosplayers. We wanna see more cons have POC guests, artists, and panelists at their cons. To be honest, it shouldn't be hard since there are so many talented non problematic cosplayers we have seen and featured on our page.

We need to have more diverse rosters of cosplayers as guests, all treated equally. It shouldn't be hard. Blerdcon & Dreamcon are like the only cons I see have black guests and hopefully more cons will do so. I would honestly love to see an all Black or even all POC cosplay guest roster at a con. I think that would be awesome.

And lastly, share pages need to do better at who they share. Because it irks me when I see them comment on our page about how amazing a cosplayer looks but will BARELY feature Black cosplayers.We have unfollowed soooooooo many share pages who do that.

We mainly want the community to do better. And be more welcoming to Black and POC cosplayers. Cause that's what a community is supposed to do.

Cosplay of Color IG

Cosplay of Color Twitter

[nickburn]

Things I Enjoyed in 2020 Despite Everything

Seasons Greetings! This year has felt like an eternity for so many reasons, and before it’s over, I’d like to take a look back on the distractions that got me through it. Along the way, I’ll occasionally point out where I was emotionally at the time and whether I got into a particular thing before or after the pandemic hit in mid March. I hope you enjoy this little retrospective of some of my experience during one of the worst years of human history!

Games & Mods

Might & Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven

When I was making my 2020 resolutions list late last year, one of my goals was to play more old games in my backlog and not buy many new games this year. That goal largely went on hold, because, well, I sought out enjoyment wherever I could find it instead of forcing myself to play one thing or another. But before Covid, I was really enjoying my new playthrough of M&M6. I’d made attempts at it before, but it was really GrayFace’s mod that made the game click for me. Modern features like quick saves and mouselook make the game much more accessible, and I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to try an old-school RPG. It’s a great stepping stone into a mostly-dead genre. I’m hoping to get back to it soon. I just jumped ship to simpler ventures like Doom Eternal after the pandemic hit and haven’t looked back since.

Pathologic 2

I learned about the Pathologic series late last year and have since become a little obsessed with it. Hbomberguy’s lengthy video essay on the original game really intrigued me and lead me to trying the sequel/remake in April via Xbox Game Pass. In a weird way, it was cathartic to be a doctor in an even more dire situation than our current one and still see signs of the townsfolk trying to help each other deal with a supernatural plague and little help from their local government. The game helped me express a lot of what I was feeling at the time, when I was still getting used to working from home and wondering just how long this could go on for. I’ve gone back to it recently, and I’m hoping to finish it someday, if I can find a way to stop dying. Above all, Pathologic 2 teaches you how to make choices in no-win scenarios with little information or resources and still persevere, despite the world going to Hell around you. And that’s maybe the most important thing to practice at the moment.

Overwatch

I’ve continued to look forward to weekly Overwatch nights with my friends every Thursday, and it’s really important to have something like that right now. Even if it’s just a new episode of a show airing, a new video from a favorite YouTuber, or a regular Zoom call with coworkers, it helps so much to have something to anticipate from week to week and month to month. Otherwise, it’s really easy to feel like nothing’s going on besides the entropic deterioration of the universe. Overwatch itself helps with this, because it’s such a positive, bright, and optimistic game, as only Blizzard can create. And it’s improved a ton in the past couple of years, in a lot of ways. If you haven’t played in a while, hop in and check out all the new content with your friends; I think you’ll have a great time. It’s looking more and more like Overwatch 2 is right around the corner, and I’m very much looking forward to it.

Go

I learned how to play Go after watching a documentary released this year about  AlphaGo, the computer that beat the Go world champion, and I have a huge appreciation for the game now. I think it’s even more beautiful than chess, though even more insidious to learn. If you haven’t played before, start with a 9x9 board, teach yourself the basics, and try playing with another beginner friend. I guarantee you’ll be amazed at the amount of strategy and imagination that a game ostensibly about placing black and white stones on a grid can inspire. Go’s one of several new hobbies I’ve picked up this year, and those new hobbies have really helped me pass the time in a way that feels productive as well as take my mind off whatever depressing news just got blasted across Twitter.

Doom 64

Doom Eternal was fine, but Doom 64′s where my heart lies. The PC port on Steam is great, allowing everyone to easily play the game with mouse and keyboard. Its levels are tight and colorful, often asking the player to backtrack multiple times through the same areas to unlock new ones and take on whatever new twists await down each darkened corridor. It’s a surprisingly fresh experience. Unlike many modern Doom mods that strive to be sprawling marathons, 64′s levels are short but memorable, and the game is a great entry point to the series for newcomers because of that. Retro FPS’s continue to inspire and entertain me, and Doom 64 is one of my new favorites.

Golf With Your Friends

I’m not usually that into party games, but Golf With Your Friends strikes the right balance between casual tone and skill-based gameplay. The maps are vibrant and devious, the different modes are creative and often hilarious, and the pacing is near-perfect. If you’ve got a squad itching to play something together for a few nights, I guarantee you’ll have a lot of laughs trying to knock an opponent off the course or turning them into an acorn just as they’re about to attempt a nasty jump.

Quake 1 Mods

I probably sound like a broken record by now to a lot of you, but I won’t rest until I get more people into retro FPS’s. The outdated graphics and simple gameplay can be off-putting at first, but it doesn’t take long at all to get hooked after you’ve played the likes of excellent mods like Ancient Aliens for Doom 2 or Arcane Dimensions for Quake 1. And it’s only getting better, with this year marking probably the best year for Quake releases ever. The industry even seems to be taking notice again, with many talented mappers getting picked up for highly-anticipated, professional indie projects like Graven and Prodeus. And while the marketing around the retro FPS renaissance as the second coming of “boomer shooters” should be much maligned, the actual craft involved in making mods and brand new games in the genre has never been stronger. I even contributed four levels to the cause this year, but you’ll have to play them yourself to decide if they’re any good: https://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/?filtered=burnham.

Streets of Rage 4

I had not tried Steam Remote Play before this year, but it works surprisingly well if you have a decent internet connection. Because of Remote Play, I was able to complete Streets of Rage 4 with my friends, and it was very close to the experiences I had as a kid playing brawlers like Turtles in Time on the Super Nintendo. The game is just hard enough to make you sweat during the boss fights but just easy enough that the average group of gamers can complete it in a night or two, which is ideal for adults with not a lot of free time.

Hard Lads

Hard Lads is a pure delight of a game by Robert Yang about the beauty of a viral video from 2015 called “British lads hit each other with chair,” which is even more ridiculous than it sounds. It made me smile and laugh for a good half hour, and I think it’ll do the same for you.

Commander MtG

The Commander format for Magic: the Gathering is one of my favorite things, and in 2020, I dug into it more than any other year. More so even than playing or watching it being played, I created decklists for hours and hours, dreaming up new, creative strategies for winning games or just surprising my imaginary opponents. I sincerely believe this little ritual of finding a new legendary creature to build around and spending a few days crafting a brew for it got me through the majority of this summer. I didn’t have a lot of creative energy this year, but I was able to channel the little I did have into this hobby. Especially during the longer, more frustrating or depressing days at work when I had nothing else to do or just needed a break, I could often dive back into card databases and lose myself in the process of picking exactly the cards that best expressed what I wanted to do for any given deck. And it’s nice to know I can always fall back on that.

Yu-Gi-Oh!

I played a lot of Yu-Gi-Oh! growing up but never had the cards or the skill to be particularly good at it. I just knew I enjoyed the game and the 4Kids show, but I quickly them behind when I got to high school. Fast forward to 2020, and the game and franchise have evolved substantially, not always for the better. But I do find it so intriguing, with a skeptical kind of adoration. It’s not nearly as well-supported as Magic, but what it does have are gigantic anime monsters on tiny cards with enough lines of text to make your head spin. And it’s so interesting to me that a franchise like that can continue to thrive alongside more elegant games like the Pokemon TCG and Hearthstone. And the further I’ve delved into how the game has changed since I stopped playing, the more invested I’ve become, going so far as to start buying cards again and looking into possible decks I might enjoy playing. An unequivocal win for Yu-Gi-Oh! is Speed Duel, which seeks to bring old players back to the game with a watered-down, nostalgia-laden format with fewer mechanics and a much smaller card pool. So if all you want to do is pit a Blue Eyes White Dragon against a Dark Magician, that’s 100% still there for you, but the competitive scene is still alive, well, and astoundingly complicated. And I think that’s kind of beautiful.

Black Mesa

I wasn’t expecting to have the tech to play Half Life: Alyx this year, so Black Mesa seemed like the next best thing. And it really is a love letter to the first game, even if it’s far from perfect. I even prefer the original, but I did very much enjoy my time with this modern reimagining. If you’ve never played a Half Life game before, I think it’s a great place to start.

VR via the Oculus Quest

Around halfway through this year, I started to get really stir crazy and yeah, pretty depressed. It seemed like I’d be stuck in the same boring cycle forever, and I know for a lot of people, it still feels like that. So VR seemed like the perfect escape from this dubious reality where you can’t even take a safe vacation trip anymore. And you know, I think it works really well for that purpose. The Oculus Quest is especially effective, doing away with cords or cables so you have as much freedom as you have free real estate in your home. I don’t have a lot of space in my studio apartment, but I have enough to see the potential of the medium, which is completely worth it. Next gen consoles are neat and all, but I’ve got my heart set on picking up the Quest 2 as soon as possible.

* Beat Saber

I was most looking forward to trying Beat Saber on the Quest, and I was not disappointed. You’d think rhythm games had reached their peak with Rock Band and DDR, but the genre keeps on giving with gems like this. It’s hard to convey if you’ve never tried it, but the game succeeds so well in getting your entire body into the rhythm of whatever song you’re slashing through.

* Half Life: Alyx

Again, I really did not expect to be able to experience this game as intended this year, and I still don’t think I really have. The Oculus Link for the Quest is admittedly a little janky, and my PC barely meets the minimum specs to even run the game. And yet, despite that, Alyx is one of my top three games of 2020 and maybe one of my all-time favorites. Even as I was losing frames and feeling the game struggle to keep up with all the AI Combine soldiers running around, I was still having a blast. For me, it is one of the best reasons to seek out and own VR and a pinnacle of game design in its own right.

Hades

For me, Hades has mostly been similar to every other Supergiant Game that I’ve played: fun and well-polished but ultimately not engaging enough to play for very long. And there’s always this sheen of trying to be too clever with their dialogue, narration, and music that rubs me the wrong way. But Hades is certainly their best game, and I can’t deny the effect it’s had on people, much like Bastion’s reception back in 2011. And I’m really hoping Hades gets more people into roguelikes, as a more accessible and story-driven approach to the genre. Timing-wise, I wish it hadn’t come out around the same time as Spelunky, because I think it did make some people choose one over the other, when the best choice is to play both and realize they’re going for very different experiences. The precise, unforgiving, arcade-like style of Spelunky isn’t fun for everyone, though, and Hades is thankfully there to fill in that gap. I’m really glad I found more time to play it this year at least to succeed on one escape attempt; it’s a fun game to think about in a game design context. And I do think the game has a lot of merit and is doing some clever things with difficulty that the studio likely could not have honed nearly so well without the help of Early Access. The most impressive part of the game to me is not the story or the music or the combat but the massive amount of contextual dialogue they somehow found time to program, write, and record at a consistently high level. All of this is just to say, Hades is obviously one of the best games of the year, and you should play it if you have any interest in it at all.

Spelunky 2

I’ve spoken a lot about this game on Twitter, so I’m not going to rehash much of that here. For me, it’s been a journey of over 1,000 attempts to learn the intricacies and secrets of a deep and demanding game that’s been as frustrating as it’s been rewarding. But it remains a constant source of learning and discovery as well as mastery and pride for me, and I still have hopes of reaching the Cosmic Ocean and getting all the trophies someday. It’s been a joy to watch other Spelunky players too, even as some fair worse than me and others fair far better. And the Daily challenge keeps me coming back, because seeing my name high up on the leaderboard just makes me feel so damn good (or at least I’ll get a good laugh out of a hilarious death). At its heart, Spelunky is a community endeavor, and I think it succeeds at that better than almost any other game this side of Dark Souls. I think it is my Game of the Year or at least tied with Alyx, I really can’t decide. If you don’t think you’d enjoy it, all I’ll say is, the frustration and difficulty are integral to the experience of discovery and surprise, and your brain is better at video games than you think.

Chess

Okay, yes, I watched and enjoyed The Queen’s Gambit, but I think 2020 had already primed people to get into chess this year regardless. Like Yu-Gi-Oh!, chess was a childhood pastime of mine that I really enjoyed and then quickly left behind as I discovered things like music and the internet. If I had to assign a theme to my 2020, it would be rediscovering old hobbies to remind myself how good life actually is. And now I’m more committed to chess than I ever was before. I’m watching international masters and grand masters on YouTube (as well as the incomparable Northernlion), I’m playing regularly on Chess.com, and I’m even paying for lessons and probably my own theory books soon. Like most fighting games, chess is a complicated form of dueling a single opponent with zero randomness, so mistakes are always on you. And modern chess platforms offer extremely good analysis tools, showing you exactly how, when, and why you screwed up so you can do better next time. Like Hearthstone, it’s a quick, addicting, tense, and rewarding way to train your brain and have fun. And it seems more popular now than ever, in part due to a certain Netflix original TV show...

TV

The Queen’s Gambit

I think a lot of people want to be Beth Harmon, even if they know they shouldn’t. It must feel so good to be the best at something and know you’re the best, even while under the influence of certain substances. It’s what makes characters like Dr. Gregory House so fun to watch, though you’d never want to work with the guy. For me, anyway, I always wanted to be a prodigy at something, and what little success I’ve had made The Queen’s Gambit very relatable to me. More so, it’s easy to relate to growing up in a conservative environment with few real friends and fewer outlets of expression, only to realize you’ve finally found your thing, and that no one can take it from you. That’s mostly what I’m going to take from The Queen’s Gambit anyway, more than chess or the Cold War commentary or the problematic relationships Beth has with her cadre of rivals/boyfriends. The show gets a strong recommendation from me for fans of chess as well as lovers of optimistic coming-of-age stories.

March Comes in Like a Lion

Similarly, March Comes in Like a Lion features a protagonist who is scarily close to a version of myself from like eight years ago. My best friend has been urging me to watch this show for years, and I’m still only a few episodes in. But I love how it portrays a young person who’s moved to a big city away from home for the first time, with nothing more than some meager possessions and the hopes of becoming the best in the world at something. And Rei is not confident in himself or outgoing at all, he’s extremely depressed despite pursuing his dreams and trying to distance himself from his somewhat toxic family. It’s a great reminder that the smallest kindnesses can often change our entire perspective on the world, and that even the people that seem the most well-equipped to handle life often still need help. I’ve been very fortunate to have people like that despite mistakes I’ve made, and I hope to be that person for others too.

Umbrella Academy

I’m pretty burnt out on superheroes, but UA put a good enough spin on them that they felt brand new. The show is rough in places, but it’s surprising in some really clever ways. And the comics are some of the wildest stories I’ve ever read, like Hitchhiker’s Guide meets Watchmen.

HunterXHunter

I binged about 100 of the 148 episodes of HxH this year, which I recognize is not a significant number in the wider world of long-running shounen anime, but it’s quite an undertaking for me to finish a show of this length. The series goes places I never expected and made me care so strongly for characters I thought I’d hate at first. It’s the smartest and most endearing show about a band of misfits going on crazy adventures and punching people for the good of the world that you’re likely to find.

Hannibal

This is the rare show that’s simultaneously comforting and nightmare-inducing if watched for extended periods. I can remember nights after binging a few episodes where I couldn’t get many of the disturbing images out of my head. Fair to say, Hannibal is not for the faint of heart, nor is it without some low points. But for those who enjoy gory thrillers or gritty detective dramas, it’s a must-watch. 

Yu-Gi-Oh! Original Series, English Sub

You can probably imagine my surprise as I discovered this year that the Japanese version of the Yu-Gi-Oh! anime is not only much better than the 4Kids version we got in the States, but it’s actually a decent show. The plot makes much more sense, it’s more interesting, the stakes are higher, the voices are better, and overall it’s just more enjoyable to watch. I don’t know if I’ll stick with it long enough to finish it this time, but this is definitely the way I’d do it and would recommend to others.

Fargo Season 4

It’s a miracle we even got another season of Fargo this year, let alone on time and of the same high quality as the first two seasons. It has a great setting, cast, and conflict. I love Chris Rock, and it was so cool to see him act so well in such a serious role. There’s a Wizard of Oz homage episode that is nearly flawless. And the post-credits scene at the end of the season is just the cherry on top. If you haven’t checked out Fargo by now, you are really missing out on some of the most interesting stuff happening in TV. I can’t wait to see what Noah Hawley does with the Alien franchise.

Movies

Cats

I had to include this one because it was the last full movie I saw in theaters before the pandemic hit. I technically went to Sonic too, but my friends and I walked out after about 30 minutes. The less said about that movie, the better. Cats, though, is a strange and curious beast (pun intended), adapting an already unruly animal (pun intended) to the big screen and yowling to be recognized (pun intended). But for every awkward or embarrassing scene, there’s one of pure joy and magic, like the extended ballet sequence or Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat. The film knows exactly what it is and leans into it hard, like a familiar yet slightly insane feline begging to be stroked, which I imagine is exactly what fans of the musical wanted.

Children of Men

There’s not much I can say about this film that probably hasn’t been said better elsewhere. I was intrigued to watch it when I learned it was one of my friend’s favorite movies. And I have to say, it’s really profound in a prescient way. Clive Owen gives one of the best performances I’ve ever seen. You should watch it, but only when you feel like taking a severe hit to the feels.

Basic Instinct

Vertigo is probably still my favorite film, so when I learned this year that Paul Verhoeven made a bloody, sex romp homage film to it in the 90s with Michael Douglas starring, I simply had to watch it. And you know, it’s not bad. It’s nowhere near as good as Vertigo, and you can see the ending coming a mile away. But what it does have is the immaculate Sharon Stone, who you cannot take your eyes off for the entire movie. And the movie knows it, making her look as alluring and suggestive as her character is to the detective investigating her. You could do worse than to watch it, just don’t expect any of Hitchcock’s subtlety or looming dread to seep into the final product.

Books

Dune

I finally finished Dune this year, and I can genuinely say it lives up to the hype. It’s not the easiest book to get through, but it’s by no means one of the most difficult either. I’m still bummed that the new film was delayed, but it might give me time to read the rest of the original book series.

The Fifth Season

Another fantastic piece of fiction, I cannot recommend this book enough. N.K. Jemisin is one of the best living authors of our time. If you want an original setting with a brilliant magic system and complex, compelling characters, look no further.

Video Content

Northernlion

I’ve been a fan of NL for years, though I’ve never been that into The Binding of Isaac. He just has a charismatic intelligence to him that sets him apart from most “Let’s Play” YouTubers to me, and he’s very funny to boot. I guess I’d say he seems a lot like me or the person I could picture myself being if I were a professional video content creator. So I was really excited for NL’s series of Spelunky 2 videos, and I still watch them every day, months later. And now he’s teaching me how to get better at chess, being a good 600 ELO higher than myself at the moment. His sarcastic and improv-laden banter have withstood the test of years and gave me some much-needed comfort and laughter in 2020. Somehow, the man even found a way to keep up his prolific output this year while raising his firstborn child. There are those who said it couldn’t be done...

The Command Zone - Game Knights

Josh Lee Kwai and the rest of the crew at The Command Zone continue to put out some of the most well-produced tabletop gameplay videos on the internet. It’s perhaps no surprise, seeing as how Lee Kwai created trailers for such blockbuster films as Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World and Jimmy Wong had a supporting role in the live action remake of Disney’s Mulan. But the crew around the two hosts are just as important and talented, and it’s clear that they all share the same singular vision for the channel’s future. They’ve carefully crafted a team of expert editors, animators, cosplayers, and voice actors to deliver one delightful video after the next at a consistently high level. If you’re into Magic: the Gathering at all, you simply need to watch Game Knights.

Cimoooooooo

I found Alex Cimo’s channel shortly after the algorithm learned I was interested in Yu-Gi-Oh! again, and at first, I was less than impressed with him. But it’s clear to me now that he not only loves what he does, he’s an expert Yu-Gi-Oh! player and analyst. Plus, he’s very good at explaining some of the more complex concepts in the game in a way that newcomers can understand. I’ve watched every new episode of The Progression Series and The History of Yu-Gi-Oh! so far, and they’re the best way I’ve found to learn how the game developed and changed over the last 20 years.

Team APS

This is another great Yu-Gi-Oh! channel, focusing more on skits, gimmick videos, and casual games rather than analytical or theoretical content. Mostly, they seem like a really great group of friends that just have a blast playing Yu-Gi-Oh! together, and their love for the game makes me want to play more too.

Tolarian Community College

Somehow, a community college English professor’s channel went from a quirky little deckbox review platform to the most popular Magic: the Gathering channel on YouTube in only a few years. But it’s easy to see why when Brian clearly loves what he’s doing more than most people ever will. He’s not only a fantastic reviewer and MtG scholar, he’s one of the most outspoken voices for positive change in the community and the game. Is he too hard on the Magic team at Wizards of the Coast? Perhaps, but without his measured and well-reasoned takes on all things Magic, I think we’d be much worse off.

IRL

Cooking

Even I get tired of eating the same things every day, so I’ve taken it upon myself to learn how to make more dishes, mostly out of sheer boredom. And I know I’m not alone in that, but I have to say it’s been a rewarding and fun adventure. It’s really surprising what you can throw together with a decent recipe and a little creativity in a modest kitchen when you decide to break away from the microwave for once.

Chinchillin’

Like many people, I felt that I needed a pet to survive this year, and I’ve always wanted a chinchilla. So I took a risk and bought one from a seller on KSL a few months ago, and my life has definitely changed for the better. No longer simply alone with my thoughts all day, I have a furry little companion to commune and bond with. And it’s more difficult to find time to feel sorry for myself when a basically helpless tiny creature depends on me for almost everything. Not to say it’s been a perfect experience however, people don’t say chins are difficult to care for for nothing. And I have learned more about them than perhaps I ever cared to know before, but that’s only made them more interesting to me as a result. Overall, I would recommend them as pets, just be prepared to give them a lot more time and attention than you would to say, a fish or a hamster. I’ve seen the commitment compared to that of a large dog, and I think that’s fair, though chins seem far more difficult to train and are far less cuddly. Basically, imagine a fluffy, super fast squirrel that can jump half your height, shed its fur at will if grabbed too tightly, that sleeps all day and bathes in dust, and that cannot get wet or too hot or eat 99% of human foods without serious complications. And they get lonely, and they all have their own surprisingly distinct personalities, some shy and mischievous, others bright and social, and everything in between. But I’m glad to be part of my little buddy’s life and hope to make it a long and enjoyable one for him. Part of why I wanted a chinchilla so badly is they typically live between 10-20 years, much longer than the average rodent or even many cats and dogs. And they’re sadly endangered in the wild, poached for their incredibly soft fur, which is why I believe it’s critical that we care for and learn more about them now. And above all, I adore my chinchilla’s antics, even when he continually tries to dig up and eat the paper bedding below his cage when I’ve provided perfectly edible hay and pellets for him in much easier to reach locations.

And that’s all, folks...

If you’ve read this far, know that I really appreciate it and hope you learned something new about yourself, art, or the world. And please do let me know what’s kept you going the most this year too, as I suspect I’ll still be searching for new distractions next year, even after I’m able to get a Covid vaccine injection. As Red Green would say, we’re all in this together, and I’m pullin’ for ya. <3

[joealwyndaily]

Joe Alwyn recently met his childhood hero. The 28-year-old was attending the Academy's annual Governors Awards for the first time, where a who's who of Hollywood had gathered to schmooze with Oscar voters and watch this year's honorees receive honorary awards. The hobnobbing eventually led Alwyn to cross paths with none other than Zorro himself, Antonio Banderas.

"It took everything in me not to challenge him into a sword fight," Alwyn admitted.

Banderas, of course, starred as the masked vigilante in 1998's The Mask of Zorro and its sequel. "I was such a huge fan of Zorro growing up," Alwyn grinned. "That's one of the reasons why I probably ended up acting somehow. I literally just shook his hand and said, 'Hi!'" As it were, Banderas is in the awards season shuffle with Pain and Glory, while Alwyn was out in support of his new film, Harriet.

"There was no competitive element, obviously," he said. Still, the Governors Awards serve as the first pit stop for any potential Oscars contender. "You're sitting there watching these four amazing legends being honored for the most amazing backlog of work, someone like David Lynch and Geena Davis. And then you run into people that you have grown up watching."

Now, Alwyn is the one being watched. After studying at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, as actors such as Sir Laurence Olivier and Andrew Garfield did before him, a then-unknown Alwyn was cast as the lead of Ang Lee's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk in 2015. "That was the strangest experience when it ended," Alwyn said.

"Because it was such a surreal, full-on experience: Going to a country I'd never been to before, being on a film set -- which I'd never been in front of a camera before -- with a group of people who I'd grown up watching, it was the most intense experience I'd had, ever. And then suddenly--" He snaps his fingers. "It's ended. And you are back in London and everyone's still over there and you're back to walking the dog and it's raining and you're trying to compute what's just happened. It was very surreal."

When I met up with Alwyn after the Governors Awards, he greeted me at the door to shake my hand and promptly offered to get me a water. "Or Coke? Or coffee?" he asked, surveying the spread of beverages. All of which is to say, he's polite. And humble, too, whether it be over compliments of his wardrobe -- a peacoat over a cerulean sweater, khaki joggers and great boots ("Thank you! They're not mine!") -- or the trajectory of his career.

If Alwyn's unlikely start feels nearly impossible to match, he followed Billy Lynn with a run of meaningful supporting roles, which were only possible because Lee took a chance on him. "Every opportunity since is because of that," he said, arm draped over the back of the chair. "I owe him everything."

"I felt very lucky to work with someone like him for the first time, and I thought, if I can, I want to keep trying to work with really interesting, great directors and not just jump into something that's a big role or big for the sake of it," he explained. "Trying to find parts in really interesting projects and build that way rather than just blindly jump."

That thinking led to a truly breakthrough year in 2018, with Alwyn appearing in Operation Finale, as the Nazi son of Ben Kingsley's Adolph Eichmann, in The Favourite, as the airhead paramour to Emma Stone, in Boy Erased, as a troubled love interest for Lucas Hedges, and in Mary Queen of Scots, as hand to Margot Robbie's Queen Elizabeth.

All the while he was gaining recognition for his acting, there was another angle of interest about Alwyn, casting him into the public spotlight for his personal life as the longtime boyfriend of Taylor Swift. How, then, was he able to reconcile the two?

"I just don't really engage with anything that I don't want to engage with," he said. "And so if there's any kind of extra noise about things that I'm not so interested in, I'll just turn it off. And so it just disappears, to a degree."

Currently, he's engaged with his return to theaters in director Kasi Lemmons' soulful Harriet Tubman biopic. Harriet is the first time the abolitionist and activist's story has been adapted into a proper biopic, and Alwyn acknowledged that, before being sent the script, "I ignorantly didn't really know much about Harriet. Growing up in the U.K., she's not part of the curriculum. I'd heard of her name, I'd seen the iconic older image of her, but I didn't know really who she was or what she did and what she achieved."

Cynthia Erivo plays the titular role, with Alwyn co-starring as Gideon Brodess, the son of Tubman's enslaver. The Brodess family is a matter of historical record, though Gideon exists somewhere between composite character and fictitious creation. That posed a challenge for Alwyn as he began the process of finding his way into Gideon.

"It was tricky. I mean, he's obviously a horrible person," he said. "And a horrible family. And they stood for something that is impossible to connect with today. For any good human being, it's impossible. The idea of slavery is repulsive and abhorrent, and so trying to find a way in is hard."

Instead, Alwyn searched for any relatable human qualities he could latch onto. Harriet posits that Araminta "Minty" Ross -- the child who would grow to become Harriet Tubman -- and Gideon Brodess would have been born around the same time, and Gideon might have even considered Minty a friend during their childhood. "Then, suddenly, a line would have been drawn and he would've been taught to hate or told to hate," Alwyn explained.

Their ties are further knotted when Gideon's father dies and he becomes Harriet's enslaver. "Whatever feeling it is he has for her that we touch on throughout the film -- whether it's love that's buried there, or whatever it is -- I don't think there was a language to understand that for himself. So I tried to hold onto some kind of confusion as a human being. Or to an obligation and loyalty to a family, even if that family is completely horrible."

He had the fortune of navigating it all alongside Erivo, with whom he shares the majority of his scenes. Erivo signed on to the project before anyone else and had spent years with it, in addition to the research and physical training she did before filming. Ahead of production, Alwyn and Erivo met with their director for a week's worth of rehearsals, during which they walked through the duo's most difficult scenes.

"It wasn't the kind of film where it would have been helpful to play mind games and go and sit in the corner and not talk to each other," he chuckled. "Because of the nature of it, you want to be in a safe space with each other and give each other a kind of understanding and a reassurance and permission to do whatever you need to do in order to service the scene, service the story in the way that we're trying to tell it."

And that story, he decided, was not strictly about a historical figure and what she was able to achieve in her lifetime. Harriet speaks to what has come to pass, now as much as ever: "If you're scrolling through Twitter or you go on the news, you're inundated with stories of division and prejudice and racism and families being torn apart," he said. "That's something that the film touches on, and Harriet is -- as much as any figure I can think of -- someone who fought and overcame those hurdles and is a shining light against all of those things."

With Harriet playing in theaters, Alwyn's next projects are already lined up: He's playing Bob Cratchit in FX's dark reimagining of the Charles Dickens classic, A Christmas Carol, opposite Guy Pearce's Ebenezer Scrooge. Then there is an adaptation of Jojo Moyes' best-selling novel, The Last Letter From Your Lover. And then? "I'd love to do a big war movie," he grinned. "Like a World War movie or something. That'd be cool."

And there are more awards season events ahead, too -- the Governors Awards being only the beginning of the race to the Oscars -- which means future opportunities to proclaim his love of Zorro. Alwyn didn't do it the first time. "I was just like, 'Hello!'" But it's bound to happen sooner or later." As I leave the hotel that day, who should stroll past me inside but Antonio Banderas himself? Perhaps it will be sooner.

[whitewingedcrow]

Yes yes yes yes yes! I’ve missed your content so much!(no pressure to post of course, it’s your blog and I respect that. You’re just great)

Anon you’re so kind, I’m so sorry that I’ve been so absent from tumblr these days! I’m very much still creating art, sometimes it can be found over at my twitter (kstormcrowart) but it’s also sometimes just hidden in the ether haha. Most recent project has been a monstrous 47-page comic collaboration with @animeshen-art and I’ll post that here as well as trying to slowly work through the very large backlog of things I’ve done in the last... nearly two years, so hopefully there’ll be some stuff you enjoy! This is seriously so nice, I appreciate you taking the time to send this so much!

[publishinggoblin]

How to Run a Kickstarter pt 6

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7

Yesterday I covered the final steps you have to take on their website before you can submit your project to be ready for launch. So today... we do it.

                            LAUNCHING YOUR PROJECT

Make Sure People Know: By now, you should have been sharing the project preview link around a bunch. You can see on the project preview page itself how many people have actually hit the “Notify me on Launch” button. Note that while that number might even look big-- big enough to fund you day one-- it is tricky.

It’s not that people are liars. It’s not that they actually hate the project. It’s just that hitting a button that says “notify me” is so much less of a commitment than actually going and pledging your money. It’s like when people say “Oh my gosh this design is awesome, if it was on a shirt I’d buy it!” It’s a throwaway motion of support, meant to make you feel good and loved and seen. It’s almost always done with love. That being said, you will probably have a 20-30% conversion rate of people ACTUALLY backing it from that notify number. Don’t be discouraged. This is normal.

Pick a Good Time: Do not launch at 1 AM. Do not launch at 11 PM. Consider your time zones a bit if you think most of your backers will be international, but otherwise try for sometime in the late morning or around noon. People are active on the internet during lunch time, and shortly after work, around 5 or 6pm. Also consider the date while you’re doing it. A Kickstarter around Christmas sounds nice, but then you consider that you won’t actually get the item to them until AFTER Christmas, and it doesn’t sound as nice of a time. Last I looked, October is one of the best months, but otherwise you should feel free to launch almost whenever. I’d just avoid November/December/January, personally.

When You Launch, POST EVERYWHERE: Have a twitter? A tumblr? A facebook? A reddit? Post on your own wall, make a tweet, tumble a tumbl, then find communities on reddit, on facebook, groups on pillowfort, all your discords-- wherever you are. Make sure everyone you have any connection to knows you launched.

Then do it again. You should be doing it around noon, around 5/6pm, and again in the morning the next day. Rinse and repeat. Some people might see the multiple posts and be annoyed, but most people won’t see any, or will just happen upon one of them. You’re less annoying than you think.

This is different for groups, circles, or reddits you are not a regularly active member of, or who have rules of any kind. BE MINDFUL! If you break their rules spam posting, you will lose that avenue entirely for sharing your post in.

                   AFTER LAUNCHING YOUR PROJECT

Your Work Has Just Begun: Reach out to online blogs, websites, review places for your product type, and begin pitching your project to them immediately. If they can do a story with a link to your campaign, perfect. For most of the bigger ones, this is actually something to do BEFORE launching, as they have a backlog of articles. Try to line it up to match your launch if you can, and make sure they have your project preview link, as that will go to your project once it’s live.

Day 1 is the most important. As noted before, it creates the standard for how visible your project will be on their site, since their algorithm cares about unique backer count per day. So the more people you get day 1, the more visible you are day 2, and the more likely you get more people just perusing which feeds into the cycle. Make day 1 count. Be active. Post a lot.

You will want to post once a day or so on your various social media about the state of your campaign, how much money you are away from the goal (or how many backers, ie “We need just 10 more people to make our goal, are you one of those 10?”), or from the next stretch goal.

Then there’s all the management to do.

Following the Numbers: Do not watch a pot. It won’t boil. But do feel free to check in from time to time to see how the pot is doing. Basically? Check in hourly on the first day to see how the money/backer count is going. After that, you can check a few times a day, but don’t make it overly habitual. You will burn out and begin to over worry. 

Cancellations: You will have people pledge, only to later cancel, sometimes the same day! Unless you get a ton of them all at once, you didn’t do anything wrong. It always happens. People realize they want that money for something else, won’t have that money when they need it, or just couldn’t afford it in the first place. It’s okay, don’t take it personally. 

Post Updates: I prefer to post one update at the end of the first 24 hours, when we meet the base funding goal (and each stretch goal), and otherwise once a week. Some campaigns update each day. This is up to you, but make sure you are posting some. If you post none, it looks like a dead campaign with no one watching it. Do be mindful that each one you post sends an email out to backers, so don’t spam, and avoid doing multiple a day if you can help it. 

If you are getting lots of questions in comments or direct messages, answer them in updates as well as replying to those comments and messages.

Comments and Messages: Kill them with kindness. Some people say shitty things, and you need to just smile through it. Mostly you’ll get compliments in comments. Reply to them! Show them you are engaged. Same with messages.

Note that you will get lots of messages from people claiming their can boost your numbers if you sign up with them. Report it for spam and never, ever reply. They have basically all been shown to be scams. 

The Lull: After the first few days, or the first week, the campaign tends to stagnate a bit. You keep getting more people or money, but way less than before. This is normal. It will pick up again near the end. You can afford to be a little more lax in posting about it at this period to give people a cool down from your constant marketing. 

Keep it Fresh: If you have stretch goals, now is the time to really bust them out and show what they are. Change your marketing to be about what else can be unlocked. If your campaign is struggling to hit its mark halfway through, now is the time to include an extra incentive or two. Find things that are price-negligible or free to include-- such as your signature on every copy, a PDF for everyone of something else you made, or an extra digital copy. 

That Final Week: If the first few days are the most important, the final few are equally so. You will often see almost as many people or as much money, as you begin to ramp up your promotion again and as people who favorited the project will get notifications in the final 48 hours by email that the project is nearly ended, and now is the time to back.

It’s okay to become annoying during this time. Post a ton. It’s almost over, so people won’t have to live through it for too long.

Then it ends. If you were successful, congratulations! If you weren’t-- that’s okay! Take a look at the numbers, what happened? Was it a lackluster first day? Then next time, you need to capture more people’s attention before launch. Build up a following, and try again later.

If you realize you set the goal too high? You can always relaunch with a lower goal that’s more attainable, and let people from this campaign know.

In either case, ABSOLUTELY POST AN UPDATE WHEN IT ENDS.

Tomorrow, we talk about what to do AFTER the Kickstarter ends.

[televisedbirdwatching]

Day 29 of the Lane County Jail Hunger Strike

Today, July 19th, pre-trial detainees at Lane County Jail in Eugene, Oregon entered their fifth week of hunger strike. The strikers demands are written here.

From here: https://twitter.com/eughungerstrike

In the fifth week of hunger strike, internal organs begin to fail. Beyond this week, Hunger striker Bryan MacDonald may require dialysis for the rest of his life. [1]

40 days ago on June 9th, Lane County Jail detainees Bryan MacDonald, Scott Novascone, and Thomas Retallick Jr. filed a lawsuit against Oregon Governor Kate Brown and Lane County Jail Administrators, claiming that the Jail’s handling of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic had endangered their lives and infringed on their constitutional rights. When Oregon courts shut down operations due to covid, a backlog of court cases built up, meaning that pretrial detainees like MacDonald have no scheduled trial date, contrary to their constitutionally-guaranteed right to a fair and speedy trial.[2]

In addition, detainees are no longer allowed private-in person meetings with attorneys. Instead, meetings with attorneys are conducted through plexiglass or over the phone. Jail administrators have also disallowed passing papers back and forth between a client and their legal representative. Under these conditions, MacDonald and the other plaintiffs argue there is no way for their legal representatives to provide a standard level of service. Under these conditions, corrections officers could easily overhear or surveil conversations directly pertaining to a lawsuit against them. Under these conditions, there is little hope MacDonald and the other detainees could receive a fair trial. [3]

In the fourth week of a hunger strike, the body becomes so starved of essential nutrients that it can no longer regulate psychological experiences. Accounts from hunger strikers are varied but many include hearing and vision loss, aggressive and impulsive behavior. Breathing itself becomes a chore.

Photo from KCBY 11 Coos Bay, featuring a quote from Bryan MacDonald: “I’m not a lawyer. I’m not a paralegal. i’m just an inmate with a couple of books. With a mission. Trying to protect us and effect some change.”

It’s worth mentioning again that MacDonald, Novascone, and Retallick are all pre-trial detainees, meaning that they have not yet been tried or convicted of a crime. Detainees accused of crimes are offered the opportunity for bail; but if they cannot afford it, may attempt to secure the 10% fee typically required for a bail bond. If they cannot afford this, they are held in jail as pre-trial detainees. Recent investigations revealed that as many as two-thirds of the populations of county jails are being held pre-trial, and are therefore being detained without having been charged of a crime. [4] Only a financial barrier prevents them from sheltering-in-place at home until their court date. 

In April, the Oregon Department of Corrections issued a report claiming that 5,800 inmates- about 40% of the incarcerated population of Oregon- would have to be released in order to allow for social distancing in Oregon Correctional facilities. The ODOC also presented Governor Brown with a list of 3,244 specific inmates who could be considered for early release, based on criteria such as their age, crimes, percent of sentence served, and existing health conditions. Governor Brown said no. [5]

In the third week of a hunger strike, the striker’s bodies would have lost a significant portion of muscle mass. Left with no other source of glucose after fats and muscles had been depleted, the body begins to break down its own internal organs for sustenance.

Data from the New York Times showing the top 10 Coronavirus outbreak ‘clusters.’

The Lane County Hunger Strikers are right to be worried about their safety during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The New York Times’ coronavirus data reveals that of the worst ten “clusters” of coronavirus cases, all of them are prisons. [6] They report “In American jails and prisons, more than 100,000 people have been infected and at least 763 inmates and correctional officers have died.” 

In nearby Eastern Oregon, the Snake River Correctional Facility has 141 confirmed cases of coronavirus: 120 within the inmate population and 21 within corrections staff. Oregon Public Broadcasting reports that “nearly 400 inmates and prison staff statewide have contracted the virus since the pandemic began,” including one inmate who died of coronavirus in May. [7,8] Many people imagine prisons as containing a static population of people. This is not true. As people are brought in, released, and taken to court facilities, the possibility for coronavirus transmission between the prison environment and outside communities is high.

On June 3rd, Sgt. Carrie Carver at the Lane County Jail admitted that a coronavirus-positive arrestee had been present in the jail. [9] On July 17th, a second positive case was confirmed. [10] For MacDonald, the presence of coronavirus in prisons is not just an interesting, if predictable, statistic. It represents clear and present danger.

In the second week of a hunger strike, the body begins to source glucose from its muscles, having depleted most available fats. Weight loss occurs rapidly. Walking up stairs becomes intense labor. Standing up can be an effort.

Lane County Jail spokesperson Carrie Carver maintains that jail protocol allows for proper social distancing. MacDonald and the other inmates disagree: “I sit at a metal table and eat my dinner three feet across from another person,” said MacDonald. “At this point you have to take your mask off to eat and the person across from me could very well be a complete stranger who just came out of quarantine.” What’s more, ‘quarantine’ in the Lane County Jail is only seven days, not the widely-accepted 14-days. [11] When Retallick was interviewed via phone for an article in the Eugene Weekly, he told the reporter that as he spoke, he was seated 1.5 feet from another inmate using the neighboring phone. [12] “When they file us into a courtroom, we move six feet apart from the judge, then they cram us into an elevator,” he continued.

MacDonald is representing himself in his upcoming trial, in addition to the lawsuit he’s brought against the state. KLCC reported that he and other detainees are gathering evidence and continue to log instances where correctional officers and medical staff aren’t wearing proper PPE. “I see a mask on an officer maybe once a day,” said MacDonald. The list they are compiling is 10 pages long, and growing. [13]

On June 21st, inmates began a hunger strike. In the first week of a hunger strike, the stomach contracts and flattens, creating hunger pangs. The body’s self-preservation system kicks into overdrive, sending hormonal distress signals to the brain, sounding the alarm that starvation is beginning.

Photo from KCBY 11 Coos Bay, featuring an inmate who wrote “My Heros” as a message to protesters who have showed up in solidarity with the hunger strikers and to encourage the Lane County jail to meet their demands.

On June 12th, Governor Kate Brown commuted the sentences of 61 adult inmates who were “medically vulnerable” and met certain good-behavior criteria [14]. The spokesperson for the Oregon Justice Research Center, Alice Lundell, said: “While [release] is beneficial for these 61 people, the release of so few people will do almost nothing to increase the ability of incarcerated people to stay physically distant from one another.” Lundell also mentioned that current covid testing rates inside corrections facilities are at only 5%. 

Erin Grady, representing the Lane County Mutual Aid Network at a rally in solidarity with the hunger strikers, said “the purpose of the lawsuit and the hunger strike is to force the facility to follow proper COVID-19 precautions and protocols. These are not ridiculous demands.”

These are truly not ridiculous demands. 

How you can help:

1) Resources for form letters and more can be found on this twitter set up for the strike: https://twitter.com/eughungerstrike

2) Wherever you’re reading this from, remember that this situation is not unique- what’s going on in your area?

[vyraxhaalas]

Hello, my old Tumblr blog. Haven’t used you in a while. But Twitter is getting increasingly difficult to look at with the way my mental state’s been lately, and I want to write about something that I definitely would not be able to fit within 280 characters.

I’m quiet and Tired™ almost all the time anyway, so I don’t know how obvious it’s been, but something pretty traumatic happened to me in November. I’m still getting hit with aftershocks and probably will be for a while.

The gist: I was in my first car accident in November, it affected me deeply, and things haven’t yet been sorted out.

I don’t expect anyone to read the ten-thousand-character write-up I spent this morning getting out of my head, but if you want to, here it is:

So.

It's mid-November. Daylight hours are short now, so I've been habitually leaving work as early as possible so I can avoid rush-hour freeway traffic in the dark. But I can't do that today. A bunch of work has gotten piled up—I don't know how; other people were supposed to be handling some of the stuff, but it didn't get handled—and it needs to get done today. So I stay an hour overtime to make sure we meet our deadlines. It's dark when I leave, and it's started to rain. This will be the first night this year, actually, in which I’ve had to drive home in the dark.

My usual route home involves getting on I-405 and then almost immediately getting off it again to get onto WA-520. Soon after my lane joins WA-520, it turns into an HOV lane. I'm a single driver; I need to get out of the lane. And I don't have very long to do it before the HOV lane starts and I could be fined for being in it.

Changing lanes is the worst part of driving. Doing it in the dark, in the rain, during rush hour, and on a freeway is about the worst it gets. I turn on my blinker before I even move to leave my lane, and I leave it on while I check and double-check and triple-check that the lane I'm trying to get into is clear. It looks clear. I start to change lanes. I take half a second to check my blind spot one last time as I make the transition. I look back out in front of me and realize traffic is suddenly at a dead stop. I slam on my brakes. I am not fast enough.

At 5:52 p.m. on November 19, 2019, I lose the ability to say I'm a driver who's never been involved in a car accident as the front of my '05 Celica—my baby, my life-blood—slams into the back of a 2019 Volkswagen Atlas.

It's dark and it's raining and I'm in the middle of a freeway and cars are still moving by on both sides of me. The Atlas makes it to the shoulder. My car won't move. It's dark and it's raining and I'm in the middle of a freeway and cars are still moving by on both sides of me and my car will not move. I stumble through a 911 call, and then I just have to sit there in the middle of a freeway and hope I don't end up causing more accidents behind me, which could potentially involve someone rear-ending me.

Every moment feels like an eternity, so I don't know how long it actually took for the highway truck to show up to assist. All I remember, really, is how I didn't have power steering anymore and how crushing it felt that my car needed to be pushed off the road and how scared I was of how much damage it would take for the engine to be knocked out like it was.

The police report says the officer arrived at 6:10 p.m., less than twenty minutes after the collision. I'm not sure I believe it. The officer arrives, and she's decent enough as she explains that I'm by default at fault in this case and that I'm getting served with a ticket. It's hard to tell if the tiny bit of sympathy was real or just a practiced response to dealing with a woman who's clearly shaken and has obviously been crying, but I appreciate it. I don't appreciate that the law says someone must be ticketed. I'm notorious for bothering family members by leaving “too much” space between me and the vehicle in front of me, so despite the officer's gentle delivery, getting a ticket for “following too close” still feels like a kick in the teeth on top of the evisceration that is the knowledge of the state of my car.

Since I don't have a dashcam to figure out what actually went wrong and I drive a Hot Wheels car that you would look at and guess is never driven below the speed limit, I assume everyone else involved—the officer, the other driver, everyone who had to deal with my dead car blocking a freeway lane for a few minutes—believes that I'm a reckless idiot.

The officer calls a tow truck for me, and soon she and the Atlas are gone. It's just me then, sitting in my dead car on the shoulder of WA-520 while other cars zip by at freeway speeds less then ten feet away. I fill the time by being on the phone with family members who were probably five or ten minutes away half an hour ago, but now I won't be home until sometime around 8:00. The tow-truck guy is really pleasant, though. I appreciate that (and how he tries to give me a discount for, I guess, also being pleasant to deal with; his boss doesn't allow it, but it was still a nice gesture), so I make sure to give him a big tip. He says I bought him dinner, and I hope I did.

I take the next day off work, both because I'm still rattled as hell and because I need to get my car on the path to being drivable again. I send pictures to my insurance, and they estimate at around $3,000, which is fine, because I have collision insurance. My cost will only be my max deductible of $1,000, and then my car will be fixed, and everything will be okay again. I have a phone conversation with a guy from my insurance who gets blindsided by how much of my claim I've already handled, reading off parts of his script that involve things I already did and then laughing and apologizing as he realizes that. He says that he hears about accidents of the sort I described happening all the time and agrees it's unfortunate but unavoidable that I was declared at fault.

I'm feeling a little bit better about things at this point. The view to having my car back seems clear. I just need to find a trustworthy collision-repair shop. I get a recommendation from my mechanic, and we get my car dropped off with the recommended shop. They say they have a backlog and won't be able to start until the end of December, but I'd rather wait than get a bad repair, so that's fine. They also say that they might be able to start taking a look at it earlier if some time opens up before then.

Around 10:00 a.m. on December 17 (which, funnily enough, is the third Tuesday of the month, just like the day of the accident), I pull out my phone while I'm at work. I don't even remember why at this point. I'm distracted away from whatever I was going to do by a notification that I have a missed called from my insurance. I think, “Oh, maybe the shop has been able to get started earlier than expected.” I get up from my desk and get into one of the noise-insulated booths strewn around the office that people can use to make phone calls. As I open up my missed calls, I see that the caller ID is not listed as just the name of my insurance, as it was on the notification. It's listed as “State Farm Total Loss.”

So now my mental state is completely shot. While I'm at work. At 10:00 a.m. I have to play phone tag and try very hard not to cry throughout my work day. At the end of that day, all I know is that State Farm will pay out about $5,000, but the total repair estimate is now “over $10,000.” I don't have any idea by how much, so I spend most of my day being terrified that it'll be not just “over” $10,000 but way over. I'm amazed I didn't go cry in a bathroom for fifteen minutes. (Instead I did that in the driver's seat of the truck I'm borrowing from a family member immediately after parking in the driveway at home.)

I call the repair shop after I manage to stop crying and get out of the truck. The final estimate is around $11,000. I tell them to go ahead with repairs. I think about how lucky I am that I have the ability to drop about $6,000 on car repairs. I think about how guilty I feel about how “privileged” I am to be able to drop $6,000 on car repairs. I remember how I was told soon after the accident by family members and a guy at the repair shop that I probably would have avoided the accident entirely had I reacted half a second faster, and I think about how bitter that tastes.

Things seem settled once again until I open some mail on the last day of my holiday break and discover that when a car is declared totaled by insurance, the state of Washington treats the car as if it's been destroyed, regardless of whether you repair it or not. Not only has my car's registration been canceled but so has its title. I'll have to redo the entire process of titling and registering my car before I can drive it again. It would have been nice if State Farm had warned me this was coming. I'm so tired.

On top of it all, it feels stupid to be so attached to a car, as if by virtue of it being an inanimate object I'm not “allowed” to be as attached to it as people get to a beloved longtime pet. Sometimes I feel like a bad person for wanting to drive a car at all, because of all the bad things associated with the American lifestyle of everyone owning and driving cars. But I'm a thousand-percent serious when I say that I was stuck crying for, like, fifteen minutes this morning, nearly two months after the accident, just because I was looking over the paperwork associated with things I still need to handle in regards to getting my car back.

Having to read the words “total loss” again. Know that my car currently is illegal to drive even if it were repaired. “Please see the enclosed notice of options available to you regarding the Insurance Destroyed Vehicle.” Looking at my car's title and thinking about having to write “TOTALED” along with the “date of loss” across it before I “surrender” it for “destruction.”

I feel stupid even posting this, because I expect people to read it and go “That's all? It's just a car. And you're wasting money fixing it—money you're lucky to have when a lot of people don't.”

But I've had this car nearly half my life. It saw me through the hardest times I've ever had. It is freedom, autonomy, escape mechanism, comfort zone. I've had breakdowns in grocery-store parking lots in this car. It's, like, a third of who am I. I feel like part of my soul has been missing since the evening of November 19, 2019, and I have been constantly two negative thoughts away from crying since then. I’m able to drive the stretch of road the accident occurred on, but rarely without at least feeling the urge to tear up. Hell, I can’t even drive the truck I’m borrowing without the experience being depressing simply because it’s not my car.

I don’t know how to end this off, because there’s no pretty pink bow to wrap it all up in yet. Things seem like they’ll turn out okay in the end, but it’s not the end yet, so who knows. I’ll just have to get through it, whatever happens. So, there you go, I guess. That's what's been going on with me lately.