#obviously all of these are available on the internet archive

[barzfrommarz]

pspspsps c!wilbur fans

So there used to be this game/visual novel about c!wilburs limbo created sometime in 2022 that used to be on itch.io until I think sometime in 2023 it was taken down and is no longer available to download

BUT FEAR NOT. I have had the files for the game on my computer ever since 2022 and ive uploaded them to a google drive for anyone to download and play

Its a shame that a good piece of fanart is gone off of the internet but im glad ive been able to preserve it for you all. I didn't even know the game was deleted until yesterday when I saw a reblog from @anon-h3art

(disclaimer: if the original creator of Limbo wants me to take down the files I gladly will)

I hope you can also experience this amazing piece of fanwork for yourself since I always find myself going back and playing it every few months to see all of the endings it has

If not there are a few youtube videos on it just search up "Limbo dsmp game/visual novel" that you can watch to see it for yourself

Also just a message to anyone who has ever made a piece of fanwork for anything and has uploaded it, PLEASEEE don't delete it. Please preserve it on behalf of all the fans who will stick around even when the fandom dies. Archive it if you dont want your name attached to it anymore just please please please don't delete it bc someone out there is going to be looking for it one day (Obviously /nf but I think its a good message since the only reason lost media exists is bc of ppl not preserving things properly/deleting them and this very well could've been a form of lost media one day)

[thisbluespirit]

How To Find Your (British Actor) Blorbo On The Radio: A Brief Guide

(Disclaimer: British, because the main tool I'm using is the BBC's Genome.)

If you want more of your fave actor, or you love full-cast drama podcasts/audios (and audiobooks/NF content too) here's a guide on how to get your hands on BBC Radio broadcasts.

The BBC have a great free resource called Genome, which has all the Radio Times listings from 1922 to the present day (plus some of the actual articles), and it's searchable. Up until its arrival, it was really hard to do that, so \o/

Not all actors do radio and not everything you find will be obtainable, but it's always worth a try! It's especially likely for actor-blorbos who do other audio work, or theatre (theatre tends not to pay so well, and radio is a handy extra thing that can be more easily slotted in between performances than TV/film.)

Go to Genome, and put your blorbo's name into the search box:

Press search, which will bring back a bunch of results from both radio and TV listings from 1922 up to the current year:

2. Filter down to "radio only" on the sidebar to avoid scrolling through all the TV. At the top of the page you can change the display order to First broadcast (or Availability, if you want it only to bring things currently available to stream on the BBC website), among other options.

I can also cut down on extraneous results by selecting a date range that only covers when my guy was active.

I scroll down until I find something that looks interesting, in this case a proper audio drama, called The Hornblower Story. It's from 1980 and is an adaptation of a well known book. The details give me enough info to search the wider internet, and see if I get lucky...

3. Search the internet and listen to your blorbo act in radio drama!

There are several ways to obtain radio drama online. If you use streaming sites like Audible and Spotify, it may be there, although usually only if it's had a commercial release.

The BBC still broadcast old programmes on the radio, so it might be currently available on their website to stream - and unlike TV, you can listen to BBC Radio anywhere in the world! (If you are in the UK, you can also download and use the BBC Sounds app.) The Genome will usually provide a link for you to go straight there, if that's the case.

However, obviously, most BBC Radio from past decades is not available commercially or being broadcast by the BBC now and some doesn't exist in the archives, or was never recorded (as with TV), but as methods of recording audio at home have been widely available since the 1950s and 60s, there are loads of off-air recordings of radio made by listeners/collectors, and some have freely shared their copies online. Some are in closed forums etc., but three good sites to try first are YouTube, RadioEchoes & the Internet Archive.

I usually start with a Google search - e.g. '"Title" radio' or radio bbc and if that doesn't give me anything add on first "Radio Echoes" and then "Internet archive" to the search.

And I'm in luck! Radio Echoes appear to have the adaptation I'm after. I need to check the broadcast dates to see if they match up & then I can stream or download for free - and hear my blorbo play a stern Admiral for 5 minutes or less, hurrah!

Clicking on the links takes you to a screen where you can press play to stream or right click on the play bar to download the mp3 file to your device. (Click the "Save audio as..." option).

These are archive off-air recordings, so the quality can vary, especially for older programmes.

4. Rinse and repeat with each new likely Genome discovery.

If you find a copy of what you're looking for on the Internet Archive instead, you'll get up a page with a play bar (like the one above), with episodes listed plus details (to varying degrees) below. If you want to stream, just click play and enjoy. If you want to download it, then click on the MP3 files line on the right-hand sidebar, which will then give you an "X no of files" button to click and you can download them to keep.

(You can download all the files, but I usually cut straight to the chase and just nab the MP3s.)

Sometimes the BBC have released a commercial audiobook. In those cases, if you already use audio/music streaming subscription sites like Audible or Spotify, you should be able to find it there.

If you don't, or you want to buy a download, I've found the best option (weirdly!) (for UK users, at any rate) is to get the audiobook up at Penguin Books, which links to various paid subscription streaming and download options, so you can find the best one for you (and you know it's been recced by a hopefully reputable source.)

Last year, I wanted to buy Vivat Rex, the BBC's landmark dramatisation of all the English history plays rolled into one giant starry-cast Jacobean audio serial, and successfully used this route. (I'm very old by internet terms and still like listening via MP3 files on my MP3 player, as long as it survives.)

Pretty much the only affordable download option I've found so far I got courtesy of Penguin's links to Hive. (But this may be a UK only option.)

If what you're looking for seems likely to exist even if you can't find it by any of these methods - keep trying! New things are being added daily to all these websites, and the BBC cycle round old shows all the time.

And if you want to go deeper, there are closed forums etc. for radio enthusiasts where you need to make an account, but you may then be able to torrent or download an even wider variety of things.

Of course, whether or not your blorbo has been in anything good or any radio at all will depend on them, but I hope this guide will help enable you to find out!

YouTube, Radio Echoes, the Internet Archive and Old Time Radio all have radio from other countries too. So while the BBC Genome can't help you with anywhere outside the UK, the other links here can be good places to look around and browse for things you might be interested in.

You can of course use the same methods to search for things like a favourite author, or particular plays, to see if the BBC have done any radio adaptations - BBC Radio have done heaps of things that have never been adapted on screen, so it's always worth a look for anything you'd be into.

Radio Echoes is browsable as well as searchable, and while Internet Archive is a bit less so, there are some excellent collections you can look through, like the Saturday Night Theatre collection, and the BBC Radio Shows listings.

[brf-rumortrackinganon]

I respect that you don't cover minor children but I am interested if you can find out anything about the Sussex merching Archie. I feels this reflects more on the parents than the innocent child.

September 25, 2019 was the "Arch meets Archie" engagement in South Africa. This was the first real look anyone had of the baby. Fashion label H&M posted Archie's photo on their website with the jumper he was wearing. Almost immediately it was removed bc apparently the UK Advertising Standards Authority will not allow merching of royal children.

I am skeptical that H&M would do this without the parents permission. CP Victoria wears their clothes frequently and they never use her for ads. Perhaps Sunshine Sachs arranged this behind the BRFs back? I bet they could have gotten $500K. This entire incident has been scrubbed from the internet but plenty of articles remain detailing what he wore. Harry merched Dior at the coronation and MM is selling stress patches. I wouldn't put it past them to sell their kid. Apologies if you have already covered this.

Well, my computer blue-screen-of-death'd mid-answer so...shit and I don't feel like rewriting everything.

But essentially, yes. Meghan did try to merch Archie. The one H&M ad is the only sell she could make.

And we know she tried to merch Archie because she tried to sell his baby pictures to a magazine but, obviously, no takers. The proof:

Her PR was dropping hints left and right about it, including how much she was looking for.

She played the "you can only see parts of the baby and not his face" game that all celebs play when they want a People payday for their baby. We didn't get a clear photo of Archie's face until the christening.

The controversy around the rules Meghan and Harry issued to their Windsor neighbors reek of someone who was worried about neighbors selling photos of their kid (and missing out on a payday) than protecting his privacy.

We also know that Meghan was trying to sell/merch Lili too when she was born. We did get similar PR hinting that the opportunity was available and what kind of price Meghan wanted for it and of course, no takers there either since we didn't see her face until her 1st birthday in pictures taken at Frogmore for the Platinum Jubilee. I think Meghan thought that if she made it look like they were back in the royal fold, she'd have an easier time selling Lili's photo but, again, didn't work.

My gut feeling is that she'll try to merch the kids again when they're a little older, especially Lili. Charlotte is 9 now and growing out of cute kiddie clothing. Meghan might try to launch Lili as the next fashionable toddler princess. (But it goes without saying that it won't work because Charlotte entering pre-teen years and being too big for Amaia Kids means a lot of parents are waiting to see what she wears next/how Kate dresses her as an older kid because, let's admit it, girls' fashion these days is...complicated.)

Edit: Archived link for the "too big for Amaia Kids" article

[alpaca-clouds]

How to make the DnD Lore more accessible

I talked on Christmas about how Wizards of the Coast and generally Hasbro are mismanaging Dungeons & Dragons. And I want to go a bit more into one of the things I brought up in that blog. Which is: The inaccessibility of the Dungeons & Dragons lore, or specifically the Forgotten Realms Lore, which technically is the main lore for the game.

To sum up, what I said in that long essay once again:

While more and more people are playing DnD, a lot of them are playing it with original worlds. In of itself that is not really a bad thing, but the reason why so many opt for original worlds is. Because one of the main reasons is that the DnD Lore is very, very inaccessible. Sure, there are several wikis out there of varying quality. But even with the good wikis, there is just the fact that not all pages are of equal quality and there is just a lot of stuff that is just stubs.

Meanwhile the official stuff is fairly useless. Sure, there are quite a few books that give you some great lore - but actually finding the book for the lore that you are looking for is pretty much impossible without once again relying on Wikis. And of course, depending on the age of some of the sources, they might also just not generally be available unless someone uploaded them to the internet archive.

And yeah, sure, Ed Greenwood is a walking encyclopedia on his world - and will answer questions on Twitter. But...

Look, here is the thing: WotC wants to make money with this. So, excuse me for saying this, but... They should put some more effort into making this accessible. Just put some people down there that make a comprehensive write up off the lore.

Or to put it differently: Make a comprehensive Wiki on DnDBeyond.

See, here is the thing. When right now I wanna find out something about, let's say, Tymora, I can totally search for it on DnDBeyond.

But then the results look like this:

So, basically it just lists me source books in which Tymora is mentioned. Which does not necessarily tell me, how much I can actually gleam about Tymora and the worship of Tymora from each sourcebook. And if I click on one of the links, this is what I get:

Which, you might notice, tells me literally nothing about Tymora.

Now, I absolutely get that WotC needs to sell all those books and all of that. But... To keep it like that makes the entire Lore and background of the world completely inaccessible.

This goes double, of course, because each of the books does not necessarily give you a comprehensive writeup of who the goddess actually is or what her timeline is.

And this goes basically for everything. There is barely any information that they make actually accessible.

So, how could WotC actually fix this?

Well, simple: Make their own Wiki - and then use the Wiki as a jump-off point to sell your stuff. It does not have to be the most comprehensive thing ever, but give a general overview of the most important stuff: A timeline and a general idea of the major events (like the Time of Troubles, the Spellplague and the Second Sundering), an overview of the pantheon, an overview of the different cities, and some major characters (like Xanathar, Dagult Neverember and so on).

Because here is the thing: When you do not have a hook, you will not get people to actually buy your books.

To keep with my example: Let's say you are a person who has just gotten into DnD. Maybe because of an Actual Play Podcast, maybe because you liked the movie, or maybe because you just come off Baldur's Gate 3. And now you want to get into playing DnD and would like to do something with that world. So, you google "Play DnD" and get obviously the official side as a first result (with Roll20 coming in second).

But... You basically get not at all a primer on the world and the different settings you can have in it. Nothing.

The "story" thingie basically just also has links to "Buy" pages. No way to properly get a good hook into the story of DnD.

Again, all on its own it is not a big issue that people make their own worlds. You could argue that it is technically a good thing, because it allows people to be more creative. But there are two things you also have to keep in mind.

New players really do have a bigger hurdle to overcome when they want to start playing - because either getting into the lore or creating their own lore does pose a challenge to start with.

More people playing in the official game world, does create a bigger feeling of community, as people work on some connected lore.

WotC wants to sell those books, which does really not work, when you do not give a good hook for them.

People are just more likely to buy a book on details of a world, if they are already kinda familiar with the book - and if they know what they are actually looking for.

This... really isn't that hard or complicated.

So, what I would do is the following:

Create an official timeline (especially as there are contradictions in the timeline as off now).

Create an official encyclopedia featuring major locations, people, religions and the general pantheon.

Use those official encyclopedia pages to link to books and adventures working with that kinda stuff to sell them.

Maybe also create some fairly short official one shots to start with. Let's just say three or four of them. Offer them for free and very clearly available on the official website. (Even with all faults I see in how Catalyst handles Shadowrun, this is something they do very well.)

Also... Just maybe create some more official content like short stories, some good content on youtube... the likes of that. Heck, create an official Actual Play that is actually set in Toril!

Is that all going to cost some money? Yeah, it is. But I would argue that this would do the game good. While there are no official numbers some fan-made polls suggest that actually most people play without any official material. Meaning the game itself right now is super accessible - but only a few people are actually interested in the official stuff. And if WotC wants to make money... Well, they need to get people interested in the official stuff.

And that is of course without going into how the shoot themselves in the foot by trying to change the open game license and what not.

To put it differently: Right now DnD is actually super popular. So popular in fact that you could argue it is pretty much mainstream. And they... just fail to make proper money off it, because they are just too dumb to understand how to actually use it in their advantage.

[moreaulover]

Some law of talos facts and info off the top of my head (by someone who's very hyper fixated and wants people to know more about it!!!!)

Apparently some people just didn't know that law of talos was an oc tournament 😭??? I thought that was basic info but I guess not! I'm not counting it being a tournament as a fact but more people not knowing (also some people didn't know unknown person had comics for before and after each animation??? There's literally YouTube videos with both idk what to tell you guys 💀)

Unknown persons entries are the most popular, but the 5th animation is non canon! The canon ending was by the winner Blacklillian but it's currently lost media :( there's a description of it on the lost media page, a few meantions of plot points on the tv tropes (example)

An ask + drawing related to what happened to Karl after on unknown person's tumblr (unknownpsn) we can also gather a tiny bit from the winner announcement post comments, the main point I've noticed is people talking about their disappointment in the lack of action and badly done Karl but praising the more satisfying ending. There was also apparently an epilogue by Blacklillian but that is also currently lost :(

Blacklillians entrees (along with the majority of others) are lost media! Some info can be gathered/interpreted from the lost media page and the tv tropes page (both linked at the bottom along with the intro/winner post for the contest and the wiki) A few entries are up although it's few and far between but I do encourage you to look for them on competitors' deviant art pages (I'll edit this and add list who's is up in a little while) here's a chart of the tournament though!

Here's chimbley's reference page which is the only known piece for his portion at the moment (please lmk if more has been found) *update you can buy the official chimbley archive on the artist Iris Jay's patreon for just 5 dollars :3 !!!!!

Chimbley's creator does have Twitter+tumblr but no longer makes content for him so savor what we have. We do know from the tv tropes page that chimbley was more flight than fight and all his competitors were disqualified rather than beaten in a combat (makes me giggle really hard ngl 😭)

Climber and Karl (and Rachel + Clarice obviously) are both part of the unreleased.... comic? Series? (Whatever it was going to be!) Called Castle of nations by unknown person (ofc)! There's not a ton known about it as the actual media was never released/finished and unknown person stopped posting in 2016 but there's lots asks + content on his tumblr if you want to look into it some

Karl was not going to wish for Rachel back despite common misconception! According to unknown person he was actually going to wish for an unlimited power supply to escape the amusement park permanently

There's a silly joke cosplay video called "law of talos chimbley vs Karl live action" that's available on the internet archive but someone uploaded the whole thing on tik tok (linked here) chimbley does a heel click at 8:22 i feel it's important everyone see it.

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRgK62j8/

People have also been uploading the voice actors singing various Christmas songs in character I haven't seen them all but I know Karl's video (What's this- the nightmare before Christmas) is pretty available and a clip of Chimbley's (little drummer boy) as also recently been uploaded. I think I saw Steffi's at one point but I don't remember it like at all sorry (EDJT I FOUND IT GUYS I'LL LINK IT BECAUSE IT'S HARDER TO FIND THAN THE OTHER TWO I MENTIONED)

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRgw7FhS/

Speaking of Steffi!!!!! She stars in her very own webcomic "Kiwi Blitz"!!! I'll link it here :3

That's all I can think of for rn I'll make another post if I get more info on the lost media or if I think/learn anything else!!! Here are the links to the law of talos intro/winner post, lost media page, wiki, and TV tropes!!! Once again I encourage you to look through them if you haven't!!!

[kunosoura]

obviously I fully support extensive archiving and full access of all media so on an ideological basis I'm with the internet archive 100%. but like some of the shit they do kinda dumb if this is a safe space to be honest. like you can find whole ass movies nowhere near becoming public domain and not even using that 1 to 1 loophole just fully available to stream. seems like risky business innit

[kleio-with-a-k]

A (very basic, incomplete) timeline of the history of fanfiction

Got into fan studies like a month ago, and learning about how fanfiction has changed is definitely my favorite part. I should note that there were works you could classify as fanfiction as early as the eighteenth century, but I'm more interested in the evolution of modern fanfiction.

Beginning of fanfiction as we know it

1960s - 1970s - Women writing Star Trek fanzines basically invent fanfiction, and also the idea of having sex, which no one had thought to do before. Everyone say thank you women. The fandom term "slash" originates from early Kirk/Spock fanfiction. (Kirk SLASH Spock.)

1981 - Several women (because yes, they were also women) receive cease and desist letters from Maureen Garrett, director of the Official Star Wars Fan Club saying that "X-rated" fanfiction is strictly prohibited and that "the word has come down from George Lucas, himself, that STAR WARS pornography is unquestionably unacceptable." This managed to mostly deter people from writing Star Wars smut (until the Internet), an example of what Mel Stanfill calls successful "domestication" of a fanbase.

Fanfiction goes online

1990s - early 2000s - Fanfiction moves online. It is no longer necessary (or preferable) to create fanzines that are sent out to a mailing list - or traded at cons. Obviously people still make physical copies of zines and are still attending cons, but the internet makes available a plethora of free fan-made content. It also becomes harder (although as we shall see, not impossible) for companies to control what types of fanfiction get passed around.

Anne Rice and fair use (and why companies can basically do whatever they want)

2000 - Anne Rice, author of Interview With The Vampire, posts a message on her website stating that she disallows all fanfiction of her works. Several fanfiction writers receive cease and desist letters. The following year, fanfiction.net scrubs all fanfiction of her works from their site.

What Rice did would probably not have stood up to legal scrutiny, but that doesn't really matter. Fair use doesn't really mean shit because companies FREQUENTLY use language that exceeds their actual legal authority as a scare tactic. People don't know what constitutes fair use and even if they did, sites like YouTube (or like fanfiction.net) tend to side with the companies and IP owners. That means that a lot of what gets taken down is fair use but is stuff the IP owner finds objectionable, a la 1980s Lucasfilm. (See Mel Stanfill's Exploiting Fandom, chap. 4 for more about this)

Early mainstreaming of fanfiction: "And when everyone's a nerd...no one will be."

2006 - The infamous Harry Potter fanfiction "My Immortal" is posted on fanfiction.net. I originally thought about putting this here to be funny and cause you kind of have to, but I actually think the widespread ridicule it received is probably indicative of the fact that fanfiction was still seen as something weird and niche. (Yes, I'm aware this is not the only reason it's funny.)

2008 - Iron Man, the first movie of what would become the Marvel Cinematic Universe, hits theaters. I've seen people cite the MCU as the sole reason for the mainstreaming of nerd/geek culture. I think I have to agree, and with the mainstreaming of nerd/geek culture comes the mainstreaming of fanfiction.

2011 - Fifty Shades of Grey is published. The author, E. L. James, is open about the fact that her story started as Twilight fanfiction. This is one of the first (THE first?) books with mainstream success that is essentially published fanfiction.

Fanfiction goes mainstream?

2015ish to present: Is it weird to read or write fanfiction anymore? It doesn't really feel like it. The transformative works website Archive of Our Own has seen a steady increase in the number of visitors to the site every year since the 2010s. (And a lot of people, not just the weirdos, at least have some idea of what AO3 is.) It is no longer as taboo to turn your fanfiction into a published book. Which is remarkable, because as late as 2019, Mel Stanfill (to whom I owe my life) talks about how the ways in which women engage in fandom (fanfiction) are not profitable or career-advancing like the stuff male fans do (video game modding, amateur filmmaking). To me, it looks like that has changed. The fanfiction-turned-books that I've seen get the most snide laughs are After by Anna Todd (2014) and The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood (2021). But secure the bag regardless, ladies. We love to see a girlboss winning.

Further Reading (because obviously you're as invested as I am):

Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry by Suzanne Scott

Exploiting Fandom: How the Media Industry Seeks to Manipulate Fans by Mel Stanfill

Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth by Camille Bacon-Smith

The Fan Fiction Studies Reader ed. Karen Hellokson and Kristina Busse

Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet ed. Karen Hellokson and Kristina Busse

[shroud-of-empire]

Review: So Speaks the Heart by Joyce Carlow

I had low expectations going in, and yet this was still somehow worse than I anticipated!

So Speaks the Heart—published in 1997, and currently available for free through the Internet Archive—was brought to my attention by @suburbanbeatnik last week, and the cover looked so absurd that I immediately knew I had to read it. And I tried. I really tried. But I ultimately ended up DNF'ing it around the halfway mark when the lead characters abruptly died, then reincarnated centuries later as different people in sixteenth-century France.

It technically makes more sense in context, but, like, barely.

The premise

So: The plot of this book revolves around "immortals"—vaguely supernatural beings who reincarnate every few centuries to steer historically important figures towards their destinies. Aside from possessing the ability to reincarnate, immortals are also beautiful, intelligent, infallible, and psychic, frequently receiving premonitions from the future, as well as insights into other people's minds. In some ways, they're like an unholy hybrid of stereotypical romance vampires and high-fantasy elves—their powers are as unclear as they are expansive, and their inherent beauty and goodness means that they can do no wrong. Our protagonists, a physician named Leandra and a charioteer named Alexander, are a pair of Immortals who were born in the sixth-century Byzantine Empire to steer Justinian and Theodora towards their fates as Emperor and Empress of Rome.

I'll admit at this point that I disliked this premise from the start. It's very Great Man History™, except the "great men" are random nobodies with vague, unattainable powers, pushing people around like chess pieces for reasons that are unclear to everyone involved. The magically-perfect, always-right nature of the Immortals also makes them dull characters to read, and blaming every historical event on Immortal meddling only serves to reduce the agency of the few humans in the story—the end result is a book where everyone is underdeveloped and boring. The Immortals don't need character development, because they were born perfect, and the humans don't get character development, because the Immortals do everything for them. I do think the concept of star-crossed lovers dying over and over again only to find each other in new lifetimes could have been done well, but it was wasted here, shackled to all of this weird baggage.

The characters

Leandra and Alexander obviously compose the "main" couple, but Justinian and Theodora also soak up a lot of page time, serving as the secondary, human protagonists to their perfect, Immortal friends. Leandra is the Immortal "assigned" to Theodora, like the most irritating kind of guardian angel, and Alexander is similarly "assigned" to Justinian, so all four of them come as a set. Every single one of these characters is terrible.

Leandra gets the most focus out of anyone, and consequentially, she is the absolute worst. She's the type of protagonist who can be generously described as an "escapist character"—again, because of her Immortal status, she's automatically right about everything, she receives special insights that nobody else understands, and she's beautiful beyond words (and way prettier than Theodora, obviously). She's also a virgin, which makes her even more special; while every other woman in the Hippodrome sells her body for fun, Leandra never gives into the temptation. (For what it's worth, the author doesn't harp on this as much as I expected, but it does come up more than once, and it's used as yet another metric by which to compare Leandra and Theodora—Leandra being superior, naturally.) Leandra also has medical training, by which I mean that she magically understands complex microbiological concepts that were not discovered until the Scientific Revolution. Not only does she believe in germ theory, she also understands what bacteria are, and how antibiotics work. How does she know these things? Because she's special. It's beyond aggravating—especially because the author has an incomplete understanding of what penicillin does, and as a result, Leandra does, too. Leandra spends half of the story spouting total nonsense, but the narrative treats it as correct, and any character who questions her is depicted as an idiot.

Outside of her interest in medicine, Leandra really has no personality. Her only goal in life is to get Theodora where she needs to be, so she spends most of the story just kind of orbiting Theodora like a satellite. This isn't even a conscious goal, though—Leandra has no idea what she's actually steering Theodora towards. Most of the time, her suggestions to Theodora are based on vague feelings and indecipherable prophecy dreams. It's the blind leading the blind—Leandra gives Theodora advice based on nothing, and Theodora follows that advice based on nothing, and they're both headed towards an end goal that neither of them understand. Everything they do is guided by feelings and instincts that they have zero control over. It's boring to read, and Leandra's sheer perfection, combined with her lack of agency, made me want to tear my hair out.

The male lead, Alexander, is not much better—his main character traits are “liking Leandra” and “being handsome,” and that’s about it. He actually begins the story as a nervous virgin, but then he buys a night with Theodora and, apparently, a personality transplant, and he’s a completely different person by the time he and Leandra actually get together. (Specifically, he transforms into a generic, stereotypical, pushy “bodice ripper” love interest, but the “bodice ripper” elements feel halfhearted, probably because he was nothing like that for the entire first half of the book). Theoretically, Alexander is meant to guide Justinian the way Leandra guides Theodora, but he doesn't seem to share Leandra's medical knowledge or psychic dreams, so it's unclear what Justinian is actually getting out of their friendship. Actually, it's unclear why any of these characters like each other at all, because, again, their friendships and romances are entirely determined by "fate." Why does Justinian hang out with Alexander? Fate. Why do Alexander and Leandra fall in love? You guessed it: because it's meant to be. Everything is insta-love or insta-friendship, with no relationship-building at all.

Aside from the two leads, Justinian and Theodora are the only other characters of note, and they're both... well, kind of stupid. Again, because their decisions are largely driven by Immortal meddling, they don’t get to make many choices of their own, and whatever choices they do make independently of the Immortals are shown to be incorrect. (For example, Theodora leaves with Hecebolus despite Leandra’s protests, which results in both Theodora and Leandra nearly dying.) Theodora at least gets a couple of cool scenes—she wins the Blues’ favor by somehow taming a snake (?!), and she does get (a truncated version of) her Nika speech. Justinian, though, barely does anything. Their romance, which serves as the B-plot to Leandra’s A-plot, is hardly even a romance—like every other relationship in this book, it’s underdeveloped insta-love driven by “fate.”

Oh, and finally, something else I felt the need to mention: Justinian and Theodora seem to have no friends or advisors outside of Alexander and Leandra. Belisarius, Antonina, Narses, Theodora’s Monophysite allies, Justinian’s sister and cousins and nephews, etc, are all totally absent from the story. Theodora’s sisters do appear once, but they vanish after their introductory chapter and are never seen again. I understand sidelining less important characters for the sake of keeping things concise, but it struck me as strange that so many people were casually cut from the narrative. I guess the author figured Justinian and Theodora would never talk to Alexander or Leandra if they had literally any other options.

The sex scenes

There are a lot of sex scenes in this book, which isn't necessarily problematic—I'm not a puritan. Unfortunately, the sex scenes are weird as hell. They're all cloaked in bizarre, convoluted metaphors, which is to be expected, but they're also odd in other ways:

The phrase "moist depths" is used more than once.

There's a lot of "moistness" and "dampness" at pretty much every turn, actually, and it gives off real un-sexy bog energy.

The word "pleasure" appears 8 times in rapid succession in the same sex scene. Other words that appear too often: "undulating," "pulsating," "throbbing," and "nipples." (Do I understand why these are used in sex scenes? Yes. Is it a lot of repetition that could have been worded differently? Also yes.)

Justinian and Theodora love each other so much that a "miracle" occurs when they have sex: Theodora is "incarnated anew," becoming "like a virgin again."

Leandra's guardian is a fellow Immortal who once had sex with Zenobia, and he fantasizes about having sex with her again as he lays dying, which makes for some weird tonal dissonance.

An evil Immortal named Cyril is depicted as an agent of the Empress Euphemia, and they are obviously having an affair with each other, and you can tell it's an evil affair because they do weird shit in bed.

Alexander calls Leandra "my little virgin" as a nickname.

Alexander verbally calls Leandra's breasts "pink-tipped mounds." Like, it's not a metaphor that the narrator uses; he says this out loud to her. It's not even part of a longer sentence. He's trying to seduce her, and the only thing that comes out of his mouth is fucking "pink tipped mounds" and that's it.

"He sucked strongly, like a hungry child" <- NOT A METAPHOR YOU SHOULD USE DURING A SEX SCENE.

"She excreted warm, wet moisteners to ease his passage" <- ALSO BAD, FOR DIFFERENT REASONS. "EXCRETED" IS THE WRONG WORD TO USE HERE.

The plague

About 90% of the plot of this story revolves around the plague, and plague is my specialty, so I'm about to go off here. (Feel free to skip this if you do not care about plague.)

So, Leandra is a physician. She receives medical training at some Byzantine school early on in the story—women, obviously, did not get to become physicians very often in the Byzantine Empire, but again, Leandra is special—and she is then appointed as Justinian and Theodora's Official Royal Court Doctor. Because Leandra is Immortal and Not Like The Other Scientists, she immediately figures out germ theory, basic immunology, antibiotics, and a host of other extremely complicated concepts. How does she figure this stuff out? Not from experimentation using the scientific method, or anything else that follows any kind of logic. Instead, she just gets flashes of insight, which she assumes are true, and then everybody operates as if her unproven theories are obviously correct. Why does she believe that disease is caused by microorganisms invading human tissue? Because She Just Does. Why does she know that inflammation is an immune response to injury or infection? Because She Just Does. Nobody questions her beliefs at all, even though they completely contradict the theories of seminal figures like Hippocrates and Galen, and they're based on such little evidence that nobody has any reason to trust her. She's not seeing microorganisms under microscopes—she doesn't know what a microscope is. She's just saying random shit that happens to be true for reasons nobody in the setting understands.

It's difficult to put into words why I find this so irritating, but I think a huge part of it is that it plays into an idea I really hate—namely, that the people of the past were stupid and unobservant, and that science is easy enough that they could've solved all of their problems with a few basic thought experiments. Leandra criticizes the people around her for having dumb, incorrect theories about medicine—but these people have no reason to think that their theories are wrong. Miasmic theory is a perfectly rational thing to believe in if you don't have microscopes, and you've never heard of a bacterium, but you have noticed that people who live in smelly, unsanitary conditions seem to get sick and die more often. Blaming "bad air" isn't stupid if that's all you have to go on! Germ theory isn't obvious if you can't see the germs! But Leandra knows better, because She Just Does, so everyone who disagrees with her is evil or stupid, and all of the good guys think she's the best doctor on Earth. It's infuriating, partially because it plays into the popular image of early medieval people being dumb and zealous (Leandra claims that Roman medicine was superior to Christian medicine, as if Roman medicine gels with modern germ theory at all?), partially because it makes Leandra all the more obnoxious, and partially because it misrepresents the history of microbiology and epidemiology in a way that I do not like.

Because Leandra discovering germ theory hundreds of years too early isn't special enough, she also goes on to discover penicillin (not named as such, but obviously penicillin), and I also hated this subplot. It plays out exactly like Alexander Fleming's 1928 experiments—Leandra leaves a bunch of cultures out on a lab bench, and finds them contaminated by mold when she returns, then she notices that the mold has seemingly prevented the growth of the infectious bacteria. She then puts this mold to use, and everyone acts like she invented a miracle cure. There are about eleven billion problems with this, but this review is long enough, so I'll just list a couple of them:

The most obvious issue here is that penicillin is fucking hard to isolate and use as a medication. Fleming did his first experiments with penicillium molds in the late 1920s, but pencillin wasn't deployed as a drug until the 1940s because it was so difficult to extract. Seriously, read the Wikipedia page on the isolation of penicillin. It took over a decade and cost a shitload of money, and that was with the technology of the early 20th century. You cannot take raw penicillium mold and cram it into people's wounds and expect it to cure them of plague. That is not how this works. (In fact, various ancient cultures were aware that certain fungi could prevent infections from worsening, but they couldn't identify or isolate the actual antibiotic compounds, which limited their use.)

Leandra somehow understands that she shouldn't feed her patients liquid penicillin, because their stomach acid might degrade the drug and prevent it from working, so she decides she needs to introduce penicillin into their bloodstreams. How does she accomplish this? By cutting people's buboes open and cramming them full of mold! And this is portrayed as the correct course of action, and a reliable way of getting medications into the blood.

Leandra's mold-shoved-into-buboes treatment has a 100% cure rate, and all of her patients survive. For reference, plague has a 13% fatality rate today if treated with IV antibiotics. It is an extremely dangerous disease. So either the author dramatically underestimated how lethal plague actually is, or we are meant to believe that Leandra's cure is more effective than modern medicine.

The author completely ignores pneumatic and septicemic plague—everyone who gets sick gets bubonic plague, period. I get that buboes and fleas are the first things that come to mind for most people when they think of plague, but if you're going to build your entire plot around your protagonist's inexplicable knowledge of Yersinia pestis, maybe consider its other presentations?

Relatedly, the author also ignores that plague can be spread from person-to-person, as well as through other means. Leandra seems to believe that flea bites are the only route of plague transmission, and this is presented as right. Leandra spends a lot of time handling infected tissues in her laboratory, getting up close and personal with infected patients, and having sex with her infected husband, and she never worries about getting sick herself, because plague is transmitted by fleas. She does die young, but only because an evil rival doctor stabs her out of envy—not because she's spent the past six months breathing nothing but aerosolized plague.

Other inaccuracies

Obviously, a lot of the science is wrong, but so is the history. The timeline is all muddled—plague hits Europe and becomes endemic before Justinian even rises to power, and then it spirals into a pandemic at some point before the Nika riots. Theodora is infected with plague (although she's cured by the mold), while Justinian remains healthy. The Hagia Sophia in its current form exists before the Nika riots even happen. Justinain doesn't start work on his law code until after Theodora gets the plague. You get the picture. Everything happens out of order, on a condensed timeline, so that Leandra and Alexander can experience the best Byzantium has to offer before they die young and reincarnate in sixteenth-century France. (I know less about France than I do about Byzantium, but for what it's worth, I suspect the French setting is also filled with research errors.)

The ending

I gave up on this book at some point after Leandra's first death, but I did skim the French part until I got to the ending, and I discovered that the scene on the cover—the picture of Leandra and Alexander riding a pegasus to the sky—does literally happen in the final paragraph. Nostradamus actually witnesses them flying into outer space as he's charting the movement of the stars.

For what it's worth, I think both Leandra and Alexander are anthropomorphic constellations at this point, if that makes it any better.

Final verdict

This book is insane. I've read a fair amount of wacky Byzantine romances, but this one is on another level. The premise alone is bonkers, the characters are all horrible, the sex scenes are absurd, and the science and the history are both so wrong that I don't even understand how we got to this point. I majored in microbiology, and I minored in medical humanities, so I know a fair amount about the history of infectious disease research, and this book feels like it was designed specifically to torment me. When I got to the penicillin subplot, I said "noooooo" to myself, out loud, like some kind of madwoman. This book has driven me to the brink of insanity. There weren't even any fucking birds in it.

10/10, would write a scathing review of again.

[lucss21a]

The Blue Pages: Yellow Pages for the Old Web

Go there now!

Overview

Hello there again! As you know, this site directory is now turned into it's own very site. Why? Because that's more cooler and somehow intuitive.

As I explain on the title, The Blue Pages serves as an old web counterpart to Yellow Pages, an item from the bygone era of traditional telephone where you open the book to find local businesses and services in your are to call in.

The Blue Pages serves as a much niche complement to both the White and Yellow Pages, instead of either providing a residential directory or a directory for local businesses, it's a directory of old web (and sometimes modern web) sites or platforms that you could visit or use nowadays.

But wait, isn't this Google?

Yes... and no. Yes, we are listing websites to search for just like Google, and no because I will do things differently.

See, even during it's 25 year old lifespan as a big tech company, Google slowly is becoming an advertising powerhouse and not only just only search engines. Google, Bing and other modern search engines rely too much on the algorithms, which is horribly being abused by mostly spammy websites, AI generated bullcrap and more than more often than not, Reddit is added to suffixes of most tech related search queries.

The Blue Pages differs by mimicking real life yellow pages. While yellow pages sites exists, it mimics the directories for something like hotels, so I decided to go with the same style as the physical yellow pages.

In this layout, while it is only alphabetical and categorized, it doesn't rely on algorithms, as it is already relevant to a particular audience. Much of the listings on the page are included by me or from submissions I saw on Mastodon, Discord or SpaceHey.

But how do I use it?

Easy! Go to the Blue Pages site, choose a category, and find which website do you want to visit!

How about putting my own site or my friend's?

Submit them to me! I'll review it myself and would put it there within days! You can send submissions on Mastodon, Discord, SpaceHey or Email, but I can\'t guarantee that I could read it immediately.

What if I put ads on it?

You can! But it's purely limited. I don't allow heavy use of JavaScript, server-side scripting or malicious code injected in the ad. Please send your code to me on a pastebin or in Codepen, as well as where to put it.

Available types

Inline - Put your ad as a listing only! Only uses text.

Single column - Occupy a single column.

Multi-column - More columns, more fun!

All columns - More^2 columns, more fun!

Why do this?

Because search engines are designed with a broader audience and this only aims an obviously smaller one.

It's cool and much more elaborate than a list only with descriptions.

Because I can.

To have something from the physical world to the digital, literally.

And, I could procrastinate for longer periods.

So what now?

The Blue Pages is open source, in fact I made it a specification so everyone could use it.

I wanted everyone to embrace it, and adapt it for their communities. The Blue Pages will connect sites together as the directory is relevant to your niche interests, but without the invasive stuff in it.

If you are wondering about the old site directory, then it would be archived but unlinked except for the sitemap.

By this, I hope that you could reflect onto what the internet was in ye olden days, and also to have fun browsing.

With the Blue Pages, you can Let Your Fingers Walk on Water. Quite literally. Yes, we literally downgraded from actual search engines but, do you even mind that? You are in your own anyways, so why not check out the directory.

As for those curious, you can see the directory here.

And as always, see you next time!

[jjcattt]

ok first of all @saltwater-martinis i am happy to announce that tmp is NOT a scam and it is in fact available right now on any podcast service. just scroll to the bottom of tma and you can find the first 2 episodes.

SECOND OF ALL THANK YOU FOR THE OPPORTUNITY TO INFODUMP ABOUT MY TMP THEORIES. spoilers and one million paragraphs below the cut btw

ok so the aforementioned gay people in computer. tmp follows the ending of tma, where tldl jmart doomed yaoi, martin has to kill jon to essentially reset the timeline and make it so that the apocalypse didn't happen. tmp takes place in said timeline, a reality where the magnus institute burned down in the 90s.

tmp primarily follows a new cast of characters, but references to tma are dotted all around the two episodes. In episode 1 we are introduced to the OIAR, essentially our surrogate archives for the series.

the OIAR uses a proprietary computer system to comb the internet for supernatural encounters, which are looked over by humans and categorized.

This is the important part: occasionally the system 'glitches' and the text is read aloud instead of simply displayed. And the text to speech voices the system uses sound very familiar.

According to the character Alice, there are three tts voices the system uses. She has named them Chester, Norris, and Augustus. So far we've only heard Chester and Norris, but it's pretty obvious who'll play Augustus.

Here's the gist of the theory: Chester and Norris are, respectively, Jon and Martin.

How do we know this? Well, obviously, they're played by the same VAs doing the same voices, but that's not the only connection. So far Chester and Norris have only read one 'statement' (they aren't called that in tmp but whatevs) each. What exactly were these statements?

'Chester' (Jon) reads a statement about the magnus institute.

'Norris' (Martin) reads a statement about the loss of a loved one.

in addition, anyone who knows anything about text to speech knows the way they talk is. definitely too human to come from any computer, let alone one running fucking windows NT.

I theorize that jmart's 'souls', if you will, somehow survived the timeline reset. With their significant connections to the institute, and especially to the archives and statements, their 'souls' inhabited the closest thing to an archive. another database of supernatural incidents. the OIAR's database of supernatural incidents.

and voice 3, Augustus? well, Augustus was the name of a roman emperor, most notable for being the son of Julius Caesar. Who is the most important character in tma with a position of significant power? Jonah fucking Magnus.

also note that Augustus was the son of the most famous roman emperor. The tts voice could very easily have been named Julius, or even something less obvious but still related to historical political power, like Charles, Mark, or Alexander. But Augustus? This name makes more sense when you check the credits of TMP. The character Gwen is credited as Gwen Bouchard. As in Elias Bouchard. The person who Jonah Magnus hijacked the body of in the 90s.

I believe Gwen is likely the daughter, or perhaps younger sister (if you, understandably, dislike the idea of jonah magnus reproducing), of Elias, as hinted by the name of the tts being someone related to an emperor, and her relation to him likely fuels her stated drive to climb the ranks in the OIAR.

In Conclusion:

[strawwritesfic]

Steve Rogers x Reader: Ice

Summary: Only Steve can make being better than you at everything romantic instead of aggravating.

Rating/Tags: All (Fluff; winter-themed; ice-skating; post-Winter Soldier; pre-Age of Ultron; referenced Natasha & Steve & Sam; established Steve/Reader)

Challenge: “160 Collective Drabbles” challenge by BobaPop on Lunaescence Archives.

Tag List: @imaginesfire​

Ice

Captain Steve Rogers was, without a doubt, the best boyfriend you had ever had in your entire life. He was kind, surprisingly attentive for a man forever being called out on duty, and never once did he make you feel bad for the things you couldn’t do, which were quite many in comparison to a superhero. One of the few downsides to dating him was that you didn’t get to see him for long stretches of time. This wasn’t all bad, though, as it meant you had to make the most of the time you did have with him.

He was leaving again before Christmas–something about Russia and that being the only time Natasha would be available to go with him and Sam in the next few months--not that you felt threatened by a completely gorgeous superspy spending months alone with your boyfriend of a year or anything like that. All the same, you figured it would be good to leave him with something to remember you by. When you offered to let him choose the activity, however, you neglected to remember that Steve, being Steve, would pick something completely innocent…like ice-skating.

Damn Captain America. Damn him and the airship he flew in on. He immediately took to the ice, doing leaps and spins that earned him even more tourist attention than usual. 

You, on the other hand, had never been ice-skating , as a New Yorker or no. Your skates slipped out from beneath you so fast that your butt nearly collided with the ice. It was only your quick grab for the nearby wall that saved you, seeing as Steve was too preoccupied to help.

On his second lap around the rink, it must have dawned on him that you weren’t nearby. You saw him head in your direction, his eyes roving across the seats outside. When he did spot you still flopping helplessly around like a landed fish by the entrance, he came to a complete stop.

“Do you need help?” he asked.

Unfortunately, by then you had drawn the attention of a crowd of children. They peered through the glass separating the stands and the rink with great interesting, tittering every so often at your expense.

“No!” If you could have let go of the wall, you would have slapped his reaching hand away. Why did Steve have to be so good at everything? It wasn’t fair!

“[Name].” 

He cocked his head to one side. For about a minute, you refused to look at him. You knew what you would see: His soft look of concern that bordered just at the edge of pity. Obviously Steve was too nice to actually feel pity for you, but you still saw it there whether you wanted to or not.

The children grew rowdier until you heard one say, “Does anyone have their phone? I bet we’d get Internet famous with this!”

You pushed away from the wall without thinking, and you pushed hard. Suddenly you sailed backwards. Several people behind you let out cries as you nearly crashed into them. Somehow, you’d managed to get yourself more embarrassed than you’d been to begin with. Screwing up your eyes, you concentrated enough to wrench one of your legs up–only to immediately begin falling forward.

There went your nice teeth. And your nose. And probably most of your brain cells. The ice got closer and closer, seemingly slow as a snail and fast as a cheetah at the same time. You squeezed your eyes shut to avoid seeing the moment of impact.

It never came. One second you were whooshing downward; the next, something had arrested your motion. You opened your eyes to see the slick ground only a few inches away from your nose.

“Ah!” 

You shot up, started slipping back toward the door, and were caught yet again. A pair of large hands gently steadied your shoulders. When your head snapped around to see who it was, you found–of course, and you didn’t know if this was more mortifying or less–Steve looking down at you.

“Are you okay?” he asked. 

Despite the cold, your cheeks felt terribly warm. You took a deep breath and then–very carefully–stood. Your skates did not collapse beneath you. Risking actual steps was asking too much, but by wiggling around a bit, you managed to get yourself drifting in the other direction. 

Steve watched for a few seconds, looking confused and a little hurt. Soon he was after you again. “[Name]? What’s wrong?”

You hated when he took that tone with you. It just reminded you of a puppy whose tail you had accidentally stepped on. Steve hadn’t meant anything by his actions. He was just being himself–and you loved him that way.

“Why do you have to be so good at everything?” you demanded.

Steve snorted. “Everything?”

Even twisting toward him didn’t get you to stop. Steve seemed to read your mind and smoothly pulled you to a halt in front of him. When you found yourself lost for words (you had never meant to say that aloud), he lifted his eyebrows and repeated himself:

“Everything?”

“Yes, everything!” You threw your hands into the air. He looked slightly startled at this development. “You’re all strong and courageous and smart and you can even ice-skate.”

“You’re good at things, too.”

“Like what?”

“Like,” he grabbed your hand and started to guide you around the bend, “board games and picking new restaurants and speed reading.”

Was it the fact that you were skating on ice and having to worry about Steve accidentally slamming you into a wall that was making your heart hurt, or your supposed talents? 

“Big deal,” you said. “I’ll bet Natasha is better at cooler things than that.”

Steve chuckled, causing you to turn wildly toward him. This did not deter him at all; he simply lifted you before you could crash into his skates and settled you easily onto your blades at his other side. Some of the people watching clapped. 

“I like normal a lot better than cool. The things you’re good at are the things I like. Sure, Natasha could probably kill someone better than you, but frankly I’m not terribly into that.”

The heat in your cheeks only grew. He was silent for another lap around the rink. At least the usual group of Captain America-worshiping reporters wasn’t there to see this event. They already spent too much time gleefully writing articles about Steve breaking up with you in favor of practically any other person on the face of the planet (although Natasha was definitely a fan-favorite). You were too boring, they said. But from the sound of things, that was just what Steve liked about you. You couldn’t decide whether to be flattered or annoyed.

“Besides,” Steve interrupted your thoughts. 

You looked up at him to see him grinning at you. 

“I’m only good at ice-skating because I did it all the time as a kid. Bucky used to take me out, and I’d practice. I could teach you, if you like.”

Hm. Continue to look like a loser in public to prove a point, or let the best boyfriend you’d ever have look a little superior some more? A tough choice. In the end, however, it didn’t take you much time to make it. 

“You can teach me,” you said, “but only if you agree to play Monopoly with me tonight.”

“Deal.” He let go of your hand just in time to let you glide over to the wall again. “I’ve been meaning to practice that, too. Just don’t throw the boot at my head if I start winning this time.”

“Only if you actually teach me well enough to get me back to the exit,” you shot back. 

Steve smiled and stretched out one of his hands, apparently in the hopes that you would skate toward it. It took a bit of nerve, but after a while, you worked up enough courage to get yourself away from the wall. Maybe one day, you'd find something to be better at than Steve. Maybe it would even be ice skating.

[cyle]

Hi, in regards to the public api, will 3rd party apps be affected in any way by upcoming changes ? The one I use - multitab Tumblr - is primarily for mass media browsing, so when I click on the "via" blog username attached to a post , it takes me straight to the blog, instead of the previous reblog.

This is obviously unrelated to what anyone is saying about viewing parent reblogs, since that's for conversations, reading previous tags and removed comments. My use case is just for the sake of finding blogs that act as human driven curated collections of media interconnected by this "via" feature. So empty reblogs are incredibly useful to me. But I'm worried they'll get pushed under the rug if this whole system gets redesigned and plastered across the public api.

To make it clear, the user being able to traverse the entire stretch of the via chain isn't important for this particular use case. Simply one via per post - the blog which this post was reblogged from, the blog directly before. So the entire via chain still needs to exist for any via to exist - but it doesn't need to be readily available to traverse by tapping the via. Essentially, if the via acts as it currently does in multitab Tumblr, and the android app I believe - ie tapping it takes me to the via blog of the post I'm viewing, as opposed to the via reblog of the post I'm viewing - that would be perfect.

Maybe I'm asking all this a little too early since I'm still not fully sure how this new post redesign will work. But multitab Tumblr seems to have adopted all the new post and reblog interface redesigns that the default Tumblr app has employed so far. Reblogs are no longer displayed as stacked and indented username lists with lines like they used to be in the old school tumblr textpost screenshots that float around the internet. So the posts have already had a redesign from their original design. and I'm not sure if this new design will be steamrolled over the current one over there too, through API changes. I'm not sure if the multitab Tumblr developers chose to change it, or if they had no choice because the api changed.

Closing thoughts: if Tumblr does end up looking and acting like twitter, that's fine because I like twitter and its many clones, I think it's kinda nicely coded and I like the modularity of posts and threads and how everything links together to facilitate conversation. And it's intuitive, which is why it's popular. However, Tumblr is and always has been the best site for human driven content curation in my opinion, because of the via blog being easily accessible in every post that is a reblog. So by all means , make it flashy and modern and twitter-like, but please don't remove the via blog, at least keep it in the public api.

Tumblr has a media focus, an archive view, pagination by date and post count through the API.... All these things which separate it from twitter in that its focus isn't entirely on conversations, but also media and curation and mass browsing. Essentially Tumblr = twitter + are.na + magic (the via). Please keep it that way. It's such a sweetspot between all these things. And this new post redesign could make it even better if only the via stays.

I suppose it's a niche ask? But a lot of people I'm sure find new blogs they like through clicking on the via instead of the source. I really think it makes tumblr what it is for people. Some blogs are so interconnected and I can see that they've clearly used the via to find a new blog to reblog from, again and again. It just makes everything so interconnected. Thank you times a million. I hope everything is as clear as possible hence the lengthy ask.

hey, yeah, there are no planned changes with the public API. if anything, myself and others on staff are continuously campaigning to open it up more and more, it's just difficult to prioritize that among the many things we have to do. i agree with basically everything you've said here!

"Tumblr = twitter + are.na + magic" is a fun way to put it.

[thisbluespirit]

@kirby-of-aragon I need to watch this series

If you want to watch Wish Me Luck, it does seem to be fairly available at the moment, if you use streaming services. It's also out on DVD in R1 & 2 and you may be able to find copies. It looks, at the moment, depending on where you are in the world, as if it's on Amazon Prime, Tubi, Freevee & Plex, and Apple TV.

It is a drama about WWII SOE operatives in Occupied France, though, so while that era of Brit TV series rarely show graphic details, it obviously deals with a lot of things relating to that and characters get caught, interrogated, tortured and shot, amongst other things. It's old now, but still very good & was based on memoirs of an actual female SOE operative. (Well, s1-2 is; s3 is based more on a specific historical event, so it has a bit of different feel.)

Someone also has most of the episodes up here on YT, if none of the above works for you.

(Jeremy Northam plays a supporting character, but a fairly major one across S1 and most of S2. He's not in S3.)

If you don't mind 1980s WWII dramas where all your faves die and things, Jeremy was also in another 6 part serial about WWII fighter pilots around the same time. (I haven't giffed that or screencapped it because my computer doesn't believe the DVD is real, but he's one of the pilots and is in all 6 episodes - although again, with WWII warnings, this time mainly for the fact that the life expectency for fighter pilots at the time it was set was non-existent.) Like Wish Me Luck, it was based on the memoirs of someone who lived it & is pretty great & very watchable. Just prepare for a lot of death!!

This seems to be less available for streaming but all six eps seem to be up at the Internet Archive and on YT.

Have fun! <3 (For a depressing but compelling WWII definition of fun!)

[cafalla]

4Kids Flyer (2005) & Planet Lunch (1999) Scans

I've got a short post for today, but it's a cool one (to me, at least)!

I've been scanning and uploading tons of vintage stickers I found at the Goodwill Bins, as well as a couple of random items like vintage Valentine's Day cards and this 4Kids TV flyer!

I can still feel little me's exhaustion from waking up early on a Saturday morning to watch 4Kids TV. My favorites to watch were Pokémon Advance, Yu-Gi-Oh, Mew Mew Power, Winx Club, Kirby: Right Back At Ya, and Static Shock.

Anyways, despite my work scanning and uploading to the Internet Archive, I haven't felt much like talking about anything I've found. All the items are cool (obviously, or else I wouldn't have picked them up), but nothing has inspired me to sit and write a post about it.

However, I figured this Planet Lunch booklet deserved a little spotlight.

The prizes inside this issue were available from January 1, 1999 until May 16, 1999.

The items could be purchased/redeemed with "ploids" that you could collect from Frito-Lay snack packages. Ploids were little tabs you would cut out of the packaging and collect. Once you collected a certain amount of ploids, you could mail them in and get prizes.

Remember box tops? I'm more familiar with those personally, but it's all the same kind of idea.

This catalog isn't very large, it's more of a little booklet than anything. The product photos in it are soo nostalgic though. Being a kid in the 90s and early 2000s was so much fun! I still love the futuristic aesthetic. Lots of bright colors, especially green!

I'm amused by how perfectly placed and polished their snacks all are. I wonder if it was all actually fake food?

And here are the product pages to go with them that show the amount of ploids needed for each item.

I feel like they just don't make cool little gadgets like these for kids anymore.

But I'm not a kid or a parent, so maybe they do?

I think if I was to order two items from this catalog, I'd want the inflatable chair and the glow in the dark stars.

I was never able to have the glow in the dark stars because my parents were afraid they'd ruin the walls - which to be fair, they probably would've. And the inflatable chair is the perfect Nickelodeon slime green. It looks like jello and I love it!

The little Chester Cheetah bean bag plushie is also super cute. I'd put him on my monitor like in the product photo, though monitors nowadays are a lot more slim...maybe I'd have to settle for placing him next to the monitor lol

As always, you can view higher quality scans of the whole catalog (and the other items I mentioned but didn't share here) on my Internet Archive account.

Thanks for stopping by!

[foodfightnovelization]

Foodfight! The Junior Novelization High Quality Scans

Hey everyone! I'm updating this blog once again to let you all know I finally scanned Foodfight! The Junior Novelization and uploaded it to archive.org, so that it's available in the highest quality possible. I know when I originally wrote this blog, I just posted pictures taken using a low quality camera phone, and those were the "scans" I initally uploaded to the Internet Archive as well, but honestly I was just overexcited- I mean, how often does it happen that you wind up owning the world's only copy of a book? I wanted to share it with the world as soon as possible, and at the time I didn't have access to a scanner to do that as professionally as I wanted to.

But now that I DO, I felt like I owed it to myself and everyone else to archive it properly. If something's worth doing, it's worth doing to the best of your ability, right? And as the sole owner of this obscure novelization of a below-average children's movie, I want it to be preserved forever, like a fly trapped in amber.

Here's a brief snippet of what the scan looks like- I chose Chapter 3 because it's the scene introducing Mr Clipboard, which is by far the most well-known part of the movie, but obviously if you want to see the whole thing you can just follow the link at the top of the post!

The scans look great! I'm really happy with how they came out, and feel like I've finally done my duty to archive this novelization as best as I possibly can. I'll update the blog again in the near future with an interview I did with a cast member, alongside some other tidbits once I have enough for a really great post. (I'm hoping to get the Deluxe Sound Storybook sometime soon so I can talk about that too, but it's EXPENSIVE). So for now, it's Tiffany Amber signing off again. Don't forget to check out my Foodfight! fangame on itch.io!

[thescrapbookingscientist]

Bimonthly Media Roundup

-Hatoful Boyfriend (Video Game) - Hatoful finale and wow what an ending it was. I really have to applaud this game on turning a silly bonkers premise into a genuinely unnerving psychological horror while actually having interesting characters and emotional moments. I wouldn't say I connected enough with any of them to buy merch or anything but they had more depth than I was expecting from dating sim characters (and birds at that) with exiting little twists. The true ending was the culmination of all the routes and somehow delivered the most impactful story line of all, with a sort of fucked up but true case of "yeah minus the birds thing this is kinda how humans react to sudden and unexpected political shifts huh?". I'd definitely recommend giving it a playthrough/watch, it may seem a little slow at first but boy is it an experience.

-Face Off (TV) - Seasons 4 and 5 are on Netflix so I've been putting this on as background noise while I work. Really fun to see the neat challenges and designs, especially as I like to think how I would approach them myself (though more from a drawing/writing standpoint than crafting obviously). Too bad the whole show isn't available, I haven't found an archived set of all the designs and challenges online so I feel like I'm missing out on some fun ones.

-Suzume (Movie) - Okay so I had typed a whole big review on this out that glitched and did not save. I don't want to type it again so short version is that I respect the animation and themes or equating grief over the loss of a person with the loss of a location and community, but didn't really vibe with the lack of character or tension in the story. Also I feel bad for the little gremlin cat and think he deserved way better, justice for that cat that twink guy should've stayed a chair.

- Campfire Cooking (Manga) - A quick reread of the whole manga when I just wanted a self-indulgent relaxing cooking series. It's still very wholesome, though I will say that I think this is one of the rare ones where the anime is better than the manga due to the visuals really enhancing the appetizing meals and cute mannerisms of the familiars. Season 2 will be coming out soon which I am now fully prepared for, bring me the tiny dragon and loser elf.

- Six of Crows (Books) - Left without internet I was forced to listen to the pre-downloaded audio books I had bought months ago. It's actually pretty interesting so far, I do love heist stories, but I don't feel like talking about it until I'm farther in.

- The Apothecary Diaries (Anime) - I'm too tired to talk about how incredible this was right now but believe me it's really really good. I love MaoMao, this setting is amazing, the characterization of everyone is grounded enough to feel like unique people while leaving room for silly comedy, and the mysteries and twists are so compelling that I could barely stop watching. Highly recommend, might even rewatch it again soon.

- Dungeon Meshi (Anime) - Y'all weren't kidding about those lesbians huh? Good for them, Good for them.

- One Piece (Anime) - Arrived in Wano, the new art style is charming and so are Otama and Okiku.

- Genshin Impact (Video Game) - Making my way through Sumeru.

Listening To: How Did You Love by Shinedown, Give Up Your Dreams from The School of Rock, Everything Goes On by Porter Robinson, All the Boys by Panic! At The Disco, Willow by Taylor Swift, Rose Colored Boy by Paramore, Her Diamonds by Rob Thomas, Stray Italian Greyhound by Vienna Teng, Hey I Don't Work Here by Tom Cardy, Pierrot by Kei, and Can't Catch Me Now cover by Annapantsu