#so that's what I'm going with

[ncfan-1]

Thinking about Ingrid and how she went from having probably the longest hair of any female character in the game to having really short, close-cropped hair, and for some reason the thought that enters my head is “Hmm, do you, too, have the depressingly widespread generational trauma of mothers being unpleasantly weird and controlling about their daughters’ hair?”

[new-eyes-extra-colors]

8, 23, 35 for any/all of your choice

[oc asks]

8. do they have a nickname? who gave it to them? if it's not derived from their real name, what's the story behind it?

Nora gets called Nor or doll by Nick only. Piper calls her Blue, Deacon and Mac call her boss, and she gets called ma'am a lot by various parties.

Ace is a nickname, specifically after the ace of hearts card tucked into the brim of their hat. They also go by Aces, Courier Six, or Sixes.

Scout probably gets called "big guy" occasionally. He is in fact a big guy.

May gets called by her last name (Maple) a lot. Brendan calls her Maple Syrup at least once. You know, because she's sweet.

23. how would you describe their voice? can they sing?

Nora's a gravelly alto. She can't sing.

Ace splits the difference between an alto and a tenor, and has a very pleasant singing voice. They like to show off their singing skills, too.

Scout has a syrinx instead of a larynx so his speaking voice sounds like a bird mimicking human speech--kind of throaty. He can whistle and mimic a wide variety of sounds and others' voices very well, so yeah, he can probably sing too.

May's a soprano, high pitched and quiet. She can sing decently well, but is too embarrassed to do it in front of other people.

35. do they ever return home?

Nora may return to Arizona briefly before heading on to New Vegas; I haven't decided yet. I'm still not sure she comes back to Boston from Far Harbor. (Certain people would argue that Acadia is her home.) So, maybe, maybe not.

Ace never recovers their memory and never returns to the life they had before being shot. As far as they're concerned, [NAME REDACTED] died in the Goodsprings cemetery when Benny shot him. Ace started living when they woke up at Doc Mitchell's, so you could argue they don't have a home to return to. The Strip eventually fills that void. So, yes, in a manner of speaking.

Scout never returns to the colony in Chicago he left. He does help forge a new community in the Commonwealth, so he makes his own home in a way. But ultimately, no.

May returns to Littleroot long enough to grab her stuff, but no longer. But she was born in Blackthorn, and has lived in Goldenrod and Olivine, so where home is is debatable. I'd say no, not in any way that matters. That being said there's no place like Hoenn--

[candescentkpop]

The artworks of Do Not Touch

Misamo: Do Not Touch

Misamo Part 2 / ?

[wispisstillverybored67]

Lotus gives me femboy vibes.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Must be a Sugondese joke.

[podcastwizard]

this will not be a bridgerton blog but for the foreseeable future i will not be thinking about anything other than bridgerton

(original post @romanceyourdemons)

[lazylittledragon]

if i had a nickel for every au spawned from twitter that i SWORE i was going to be normal about

[nyaslashthreat]

shout out to when i told my dad about goncharov and he figured out it was fake because i told him "1973 martin scorsese film with robert de niro" and he said that wasn't possible because the godfather came out in 1972 and the godfather part II came out in 1974 and they wouldn't have had time to make a movie in between. a perfectly good jest, foiled by this man's weird and vast knowledge set

[dogin8]

[ID: Two screenshots from Queering the Map, taken in Kottayam, Kerala. In the first screenshot there is a map pin that says “Surely, I can’t be the only one!”. In the second screenshot, a second map pin, very close to the first one, says, “No you are not.” The screenshots are from the Tiktok account @/ahecksis. End ID]

[xan-from-space]

Senshi is probably the most fandomized character in Dungeon Meshi, and while I don't exactly mind it, I do think he has more depth than that. I find all his little quirks and idiosyncrasies to be fascinating; he's very stubborn and set in his ways about things that seemingly don't matter, he thinks about things that other people don't, he has a deeply set value system that informs everything he does. He cares A Lot, like, this man cares So Much. That's the kind of person you have to be to drop everything to help a random group of adventurers save one woman. But because he feels so strongly about things, he can also be surprisingly immature at times (although he's also the character most likely to admit he was wrong about something). I think part of that is because he's lived in the dungeon on his own so long that he's not used to working with other people. He will extend empathy and friendship to almost anyone, but he does things his own way, and he doesn’t always feel the need to explain his way of thinking because again, he's usually on his own. He's both incredibly wise and kind of childish in ways that seem contradictory at first, but make more and more sense the more we learn about him. Major kudos to Ryoko Kui's writing and pacing to make that transition so seamless and have all those details from his backstory click into place perfectly. And on a wider thematic level, Senshi is kind of a perfect counterpart to characters like Thistle (or any other dungeon lord). Senshi understands the dungeon in ways that even its creator doesn't. Although everyone is scrambling to take control of the dungeon, Senshi is the one who actually takes care of it. He's the one who thinks about things like nutrition and proper sleep and the ecosystem, all those things that it's easy to ignore when you get swept up by the grandeur of it all. He's the most important character to have present in a story that explores life and death and hunger. His constant, invisible presence holds everything together.

[inkskinned]

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

[catsharky]

Presenting: King Sidon, his wife Queen Yona and his boyfriend Link.

Yona is very supportive of everything except Sidon forgetting his ceremony cues.

(I had an atrocious week and TotK has been coming in clutch for keeping me sane.)

[mewvore]

the most criminaly annoying thing rich people do is buy stupid bullshit food because it makes them look rich to the people around them. Oh wow you spent $1000 whole dollars on a gourmet gold leaf burger? Just go to a random diner and get a regular cheese burger and leave the sever a $100 tip if you want to feel that same level of overwhelming satisfaction with your oppulance you obnoxious dickhead at least then the waiter can make rent and you provided some good to society instead of eating gold like a dipshit

[fonulyn]

since I've seen it talked about in several places recently:

if you are going to do a whump- or kink- or ANY-tober or other similar challenges please please please don't post them as one fic with 31 chapters unless it actually is one coherent fic. if they're 31 completely separate fics or ficlets then please just make a collection for them or just post them as separate fics. it doesn't matter if they're only 100 words or if you think they're too small or insignificant to post alone, they're not.

and why this?

because if you post all 31 of them in one fic the tagging is absolutely useless. if I look for things to read on ao3 I'm gonna look at the tags, and if the tags include something that's a dealbreaker for me, i won't even click on the fic. I might not even SEE the fic because I've filtered out the nope-tag! so I'm gonna lose out on reading 30 perfectly nice fics because of one fic that my nope-tag applied to.

ao3 is about archiving. it's about clear tagging and being informative. there is nothing informative about it if the tags in the fic apply to random chapters while others have nothing to do with it. it makes so much more sense to have each work as an individual fic with its own individual tags and warnings, so readers can make informed choices.

of course, you do you. I can't police what other people decide to do. but personally, I find it incredibly frustrating to weed through 31 chapters to find the ones I actually want to read. so I don't. I automatically scroll past all works posted like that. and I know some others do, too.

there is absolutely no shame in posting short things on ao3. there is no minimum word count. no one is going to look at you funny if you post a small ficlet on its own, I promise. it's just going to make some readers very happy when they can actually find the things they want to read.

so, please. at least consider the upsides of posting each work as their own fic.

signed, one very frustrated fandom grandma.

[asterwild]

PENGUINS. all of them!

(not precisely to scale, but close)

[egophiliac]

queen of diamonds, upright + reversed 💎

I've redone this like eighty times, I have to just be done with it now and stop staring at all my mistakes oh no 🫠