#still in the mud

[magpies-gold]

I attempted to order a couple of shirts and tarot card packs from Welcome to Night Vale because yes, I’ve gotten back on that bullshit again - I’m back up to 2016 and listening to it on my walks to work, which functions about as well as a cup of coffee to wake me up, let me tell you.

In hindsight, I should have known that box would be cursed. It’s Night Vale.

If you enjoy long tumbles down several flights of stairs, read on.

It started innocently enough. I ordered and remembered during checkout that oh yeah. I’m going to Spokane at the end of the month. And I’m in Canada. There’s a good chance it’ll be a little slow to get here and the arrival time might be while I’m away. Okee doke. Work address it is. DHL eCommerce usually turns into Canada Post and Canada Post does a daily delivery to our front door, where my whole department is located. If it looks like it’ll happen during my vacation, I’ll just tell my co-workers to watch for it. Easy pease.

Time passes. My box clambers across the US to the border.

Hurdle Number One: You owe duty fees! announces my tracking app. Check your email to pay. :D This is in the morning on my way to work, less than a week out from my trip.

I do. No email. I check junk, I refresh, I squint at time stamps. I scour their page for links. I think “Don’t they usually either send a letter after delivery or just demand cash at the door?” But this has all the indications that I have to pay now or it’ll be sent back. Exception. Held for payment. I am stupid and obsess over this while walking to work, listening to Night Vale with half an ear and having to rewind Cecil because my brain is occupied. I nearly get run over by a bicycle and it’s coincidentally ridden by a co-worker. He comments that I look especially unhinged today. He’s right. I keep plugging away trying to solve the labyrinthine maze that is DHL’s customer service department.

My tracking number doesn’t work in any of the Help Me boxes. The chat bot doesn’t know what a duty fee is. It finally barfs out a phone number. That’ll work. I pray it’s not a robot on the other end and continue to work.

While waiting for the kettle to heat up on my break I take a quick spin outside with my phone to call customer service.

To my briefly pleasant surprise, the wait on hold is less than five minutes and it is, in fact, a pleasant human voice on the other end. The conversation is quick “Didn’t get the email.” “Junk mail?” “Nope, nothing.” “You can wait until it’s delivered by Canada Post and pay then.” “This really looks like it’s being held, though…” “It should still go through but otherwise I have an email for you.” “You can’t like… transfer me?” “No. Just email and they’ll resend the instructions.”

Labyrinthine!

An ambulance blares by. I wince. I also have no pen. Uh. Speaker phone, apologies for the traffic noises, and frantic tapping into my Notes app while cursing autocorrect. The email is cryptic and long but I get it written down. Thanks, g’bye.

For the record, once I sent the email, things went smoothly. It worked. They resent the email, I paid the whopping $12, and then my tracking updated to say it would continue on to me. Whew. Good. I await the Canada Post tracking number.

Hurdle Number Two: This is where the package started mutating, I’m sure. A Canada Post tracking number appears!

…. and then an Intelcom tracking number appears.

And then my DHL original tracking number duplicates itself saying it’s being sent back to the states? But the original one is still on its way to me… How did my box become at least three boxes?

I blink a few times and just… track them all to see what’s going to happen.

At this point I’ve got to leave for Spokane so I just ask my co-workers to keep an eye out and I leave it up to the fates.

Canada Post never budged. Nothing happened. The duplicate DHL package did move, and eventually returned all the way back to the sender. I don’t know what that was to this day. The Intelcom package identified itself as coming my way with a little email and a link to add delivery instructions and so I thought “You. You are the real one. Found you.” I know Intelcom delivers on weekends and I don’t want to inconvenience anyone and this has started to get to where I don’t want to leave any details up to chance, and so in every instruction box I can find, I note that it’s a business address, give the hours, and the times we’re open. Please deliver to reception. On weekdays. Please.

I once again give it up to the fates and enjoy my weekend.

Hurdle Number Four: Intelcom is Jared, age 19, who never learned how to read. On Sunday morning, the final day of Mysterium, on what is a long weekend in Canada because of Canada Day on the 1st, I get a happy little email.

Package delivered!

….

How.

I open the email. I scroll down. There’s a photo. Of my box.

On the lawn.

Outside an obvious office, smack dab in the middle of a three day weekend, beside a street that harbours half the city’s traffic.

A safe location, they say.

A safe location.

The same way that a toddler on the train tracks is in a safe location. Certainly!

And I am in another country.

I make a noise that startled all thee cats in our friend’s house.

My co-workers are heroes. I thankfully have my supervisor’s cell number and she actually checks her phone, unlike me. She knew about the box. I send her the photo and just “Those absolute MAD LADS. Heeeeeeelp!”

By sheer luck another co-worker was not out of town on that glorious warm weekend and was able to swing by and rescue my box.

I enjoy the last day of the convention with a slight eye twitch.

Finally … I get home. I go back to work. I retrieve my hard earned box. Finally! I don’t open it at work. I carry it home. Whatever. It’s in my hands now and I’m going to enjoy opening it. I go the long way to meet my boyfriend at his work and then we go back to our abode.

We talk about the box adventure. We laugh about it. We both decide that Friday would be a good day to wear our new shirts. It’s going to be great.

At home we plunk it down. Tim gets a knife. He opens it.

He blinks.

What?

Um, he says.

Oh no.

And I look over his shoulder…. and I don’t see shirts. Or cards. I see…

Sleep masks. Sleep masks in fancy plastic boxes all neatly tucked together. They’ve got a sea creature on ‘em.

My box has mutated into someone’s fuckin’ Manta Sleep order. My box has escaped. My box has fled and framed an innocent bystander for its crimes. We got the wrong man, boys!

And I swear I can just about hear Cecil narrating this whole thing if I listen really, really hard.

It’s a three part tragedy. One of the shirts I wanted is out of print now. I contacted support and they offered me my pick of any others in its place, which was nice. Thank you Lucid John, that is quite a name. I paid customs fees and probably will again on box two, but such is the way.

And I think I lost a part of my soul there. Maybe that’s what was in the mystery third tracking number.

Basically if anyone in the world finds where the fuck my Night Vale shit went, could you send it home? I’ll trade you some sleep masks.

They’ve got a sea creature on ‘em.

And be careful when ordering from Night Vale.

[lgbtlunaverse]

Nothing will dispell the "the curtains were just blue" myth faster than writing something yourself, because the amount of pretentious symbolism i am putting in my silly little fanfics is ridiculous. I mean SO much with these words, literally every single one of them. This fic has twenty five typos and zero correct uses of punctuation but if there's curtains you bet your ass I put thought into what colour they were.

[collophora]

"Let's fix this drawing" *redraw the whole thing*

[rodatirhaalo]

I think my favorite little parallel between Ascended vs Spawn Astarion has to be this little, probably even unintentional, detail in the epilogue:

Mr Vampire Ascendant, when confronted about freedom, asking the pc if they'd prefer sleeping in the dirt over "living" in his prescribed decadence.

Meanwhile, if left as a spawn Astarion is like

*Passes several chairs, rugs, a pile of pillows, and two log benches to plant his pretty little ass in the dirt*

"THIS DIRT'S THE BEST! I LOVE DIRT!!"

[greykolla-art]

have you ever shared your comic making process? im super interested in seeing how you go about everything from start to finish!

[mud-muffin]

Ninja turtles 🐢 as ninja teens 🥷

(Tried my best to keep it in style with the original art-style, and to keep to their assigned shapes!)

[beneathsilverstars]

been thinking about the differences between SASASAP and ISAT lately. because looking just at ISAT and the two hats ending, you'd think loop went through the exact same house as our siffrin, but looking at SASASAP, it's different. it's mixed up. it's obviously a condensed prototype.

but. that doesn't have to mean it's a different universe entirely.

maybe that's just what happens after a thousand loops.

the house warped in act 5. siffrin lost their shit and the house got changed and corrupted, far past its baseline king uncanniness. so it wouldn't be too out-of-the-question for it to be able to warp in more subtle ways as well, due to a more subtle breakdown.

like a jpeg uploaded and downloaded a thousand times, siffrin changed, and the loops changed. over a thousand loops of efficiency, the house got more efficient. rooms combining. items moving. data compressing. and of course, run in a changed house, the script changed as well. it did so slowly, one bit at a time, over a thousand loops of zoned-out half-listening – and by the time siffrin would have noticed each difference, they were already used to it. (and in the moments that they did look at a room that was less familiar than it should be and realize that they had no idea where to find the key, well. that's just classic siffrin, isn't it.)

through sheer repetition, siffrin was corrupted, and the loops and the house along with them. all purpose lost, all signals distorted, until finally they couldn't recognize the meaning in any of it. it was all noise and despair.

so they made a wish. and the loop restarted. not just a reboot, but something more complete.

the data was backed up onto a star – a guide, a warning, a reference – and the loops were factory reset. and for the first time in a thousand loops, siffrin woke up to a clear mind and the crisp sound of birdsong.

[thecraftgremlin]

I think there should be a horse girl movie where our plucky protagonist takes on the ~*problem horse*~ at the ranch but instead of being wild and untamable the horse is just really stupid.

[dvnieldraws]

ur honor i care them

[vaugarde]

im abt to rb a post on this anyways but tbh i dont know how you can finish isat and go “siffrin wasnt punished enough”.

the fella has killed themselves several times, what more do you want from him?

[uncanny-tranny]

It's very funny being like... a stereotypically (as in, straight masc) masculine queer person. Like it's frustrating because I would love to have cute moments where I share tips with a trans woman or maybe help somebody in that kind of way, but like... why should she or anybody else listen to me when I only got my third pair of jeans recently? 😭

[natjennie]

i want to explain my mental illnesses to robin and have him like nod and grunt along while i talk and then hum really sagely and give some beautiful touching life advice like "brain not bad just.. different. I've seen a lot of people. we all different. world would be big boring if everyone was the same. you just better at some things and worse at other things. that why we all work together, help each other. sometimes you fight mammoth and sometimes you stay in cave with babies. it all come out in the wash."

[jess-the-vampire]

Did you ever get around to what happens in watching and dreaming for Arofam?

maxchatt200: I don’t mean like comic wise I meant like have you made any plans regarding watching and dreaming?

Yes and no, I have some ideas I definitely want to do but there are still kinks I need to work out to make things make sense.

Cause there are also things that I logically can't do the same way, given where the characters are in comparison. Like hunter can't be killed by belos for example, because that would make no sense in this context, so if i were to say, do titan hunter, i would need a completely different reason for him to exist.

So parts of it are ready and parts are still bring developed I'd say atm. I think I'm finally getting somewhere with it though that I have a rough idea of where to go with it.

Some of those ideas have already been put out there.

[snzinite]

good news, @messysneezer--my girlfriend @aphrosnziac agreed with you and decided she had to draw Mud/rock according to my headcanon! look at it! it's beautiful! thanks again to her. she doesn't have a blog right now but i'll go back and tag her when she gets around to making one UPDATE: she's here!!! tagged up above. go follow her!!

there's actually more than just her, but i'll leave the rest for her to upload when she gets around to it. until then, enjoy the preview :]

[cerullos]

watching my favorite lesbian tragedy

[sergle]

have you ever thought about making a cicadas skirt?

LITERALLY THAT IS SOMETHING I'VE BEEN THINKING ABT!!!!!