#using reaction gifs is not native to this site

[gingerlee-holds]

okay so uhm- i know nobody was really asking for this heh- but idk i hate feeling like this story is unfinished so- remember the Fernsby Journals? ,,,yeah so i wrote the final piece to that lmao- im sorry gang this is purely for my enjoyment alone and i just wanted to get this silly story finished lmao so here enjoy xD

to those unfamiliar, The Fernsby Journals is a world of my own creation, it was made as an afterthought a year ago but it turned into a story and idk heres the ending lol

March 23rd, 1745.

Read the first one here! Read the previous one here!

Words: 1766 Pairing: Ler!Clara, Lee!Eren Warnings: None! Lots of fluff though (literally hahahahahahaha-)

"Are... are you sure this is the way?" I asked over my shoulder.

"Absolutely, Eren!" She poked the middle of my spine, making me jump. For the past ten days, it seemed she couldn't get enough of my pathetic reactions to her poking and squeezing, and I had had just about enough of her... unprofessional behavior!

"Mr. Fernsby! Please, Clara, I have a degree." I rubbed my back, glaring over my shoulder the best I could.

"This is a fact of which I'm well aware, Eren! If you'll remember, I was with you as well! I have the same degree you do." Clara hummed a tune she heard a week prior. 

We had been walking for perhaps a quarter-hour by this point, and needless to say, I was a tad winded. We approached the base of a large hill covered in bright green grass, and I sat on the gentle slope to regain my breath. Clara opted to continue walking for a bit, just to peer over the crest, and then she came back down to sit by my side.

I sighed and got back on the subject. "Now, if you knew where the featherflakes were, why did it take you so thunderingly long to take me here? It's not like we spent the time productively!" 

"Ah! But don't you remember, we had that study session, Eren!" Clara wiggled a finger in my ear, causing me to jump up with a squeak. I straightened my coat and huffed.

"When we were supposed to be looking for historical sources, I seem to recall you first eating all the biscuits I had prepared for us and then spending the rest of the hour tick- ahem... distracting me from the task at hand!" I turned to walk up the hill, wanting nothing more than to be finished with this nonsense.

"It was tickly tea time! I told you!" She sent another poke to my back, and I jumped again.

I whirled around and jabbed an accosting finger into her breastbone. "Listen here, you-!" However, I could not finish my statement as Clara took me by both shoulders with an affectionate smirk and gave me a gentle push. With a yelp, I began tumbling down the other side of the hill, yelling expletives the entire descent. 

When I finally rolled to a stop, I lay on the floor of the valley for a minute, groaning as the dizzy feeling wore away. "Are you alright, Eren?" I heard Clara call down from the hill.

I extended a shaky hand to begin pushing myself up. "Yes, I'm- f-fihihihine-!" I gasped with shock as I felt a tingling feeling in my palm. My head shot up to look around me, and I beheld a vast white plain extending for kilometers out of sight. I slowly reached my knees to gaze over this veritable sea of featherflakes.

"Welcome," Clara called from behind me, "to the Field of Feathers!" She laughed at my face when I turned to her, seeing her slowly walk down the hill toward me. "First recorded in 486 when the Romans occupied this part of Britain, the native tribes used this to their great advantage, turning out an entire legion of soldiers into squealing schoolchildren!" 

"How did-?" I started to ask, but she paid me no mind as she continued teaching me about this place. 

"Then, of course, when the Normans invaded in 1066, this field was the site of what was to be the greatest battle these isles had seen until then. Neither side knew this place existed, so both armies had to call a hasty - and giggly - retreat!"

I rubbed my head, stunned. How had all of this information eluded me? "I don't-"

"You certainly must know of the War of the Roses, Eren! Studied your history at university, I know. It was here, at the Field of Feathers, where the Lancasters forced a surrender from the House of York by so shrewdly pushing their enemy back into this field, where they were quickly tickle-tickle-tickled into submission!" Clara sat on the slope in front of me, smiling at me all the while. A blush darkened my face, and I looked down to avoid her gaze. "Then, a few centuries later, an adorable little scholar named Eren Fernsby became so enraptured by the idea of being tickled by the Field of Feathers that he somehow avoided all history of them in his textbooks. His library was filled with historical mentions of this place, but it seemed like he pretended not to see all these, to give him an excuse to visit the field for himself."

My head shot up, pale as a sheet. "I- You-"

She extended her hand, keeping her pointer finger out to keep my chin up toward her. "Many things you are, Eren. A scholar, a pedant, a stubborn little boy. Regardless, you have never been an actor."

I could feel my face heat up, red like a Lancaster rose. Whining softly, I felt my body relax into the grass beneath me. She had me all figured out.

"Now, Eren, if you please," she chuckled, reaching up to grip the back of my collar and turning me around to face the Field of Feathers. I felt my coat loosen as she undid my buttons, leaving me only my undershirt to defend myself with.

"Wait, wait, Clara, hold on," I pleaded, wriggling in her grasp a bit. 

Clara leaned in to whisper in my ear. "Study to your heart's content, little scholar~!" With that, I was unceremoniously heaved forward into the field, my disturbance causing the field to erupt in featherflakes. I didn't even get the chance to gain my composure before it was swiftly broken again, as I felt swarms of featherflakes rushing into my clothing. 

"N-NohoHoHOHOHO! CLAHAHAHARAAHAHA!!" I laughed, rolling around to stop the invading fiends, only succeeding in disrupting more featherflakes to join their companions. "MEHEHEHERCYHYHYHY!"

"Mercy?" Clara rested her chin on her palm as she watched me writhe on the grass before her. "Why are you asking me for mercy, you silly boy? I'm not doing anything to you~! You should be begging those featherflakes for mercy, and you will have to beg because you've so inconsiderately disturbed their peaceful spring day~!"

"DAHAHAHAHAHAMN YOUHUHUHUHU!" I squealed, unable to bring myself to my feet. The more I thrashed about, the more flakes I turned into the air, which only made me thrash harder! Somehow, I hadn't felt my shoes being tugged off my feet, and when I felt a few flakes finding their way into my socks, I well and truly shrieked to the heavens above. 

"Sohoho dramatic~!" Clara giggled, standing up. She cautiously approached the edge of the field, reaching her hand out for me to grab. "C'mere, cutie."

I rolled onto my stomach and began to crawl towards her, trying with every fiber of my being to ignore the hundreds of flakes filling the inside of my shirt. "IHIHI- IHIHI CAHAHAN'T REHEHEHEACH!! IT'S TOOHOOHOO MUHUHUHUHUCH!!" I cackled.

Clara rolled her eyes affectionately. "My goodness, you're ticklish. Whatever would have become of you if I weren't here to save you? Laughed yourself to death, I reckon." She reached out further. "C'mon, I'm right here. Take my hand."

I raised my hand to take hers before squealing in surprise at the feeling of featherflakes flying down my sleeve into my underarm. I shrieked and curled in on myself. "THIHIHIHIS-! IHIHIS HEHEHELLISH!" 

"Hm, then why are you enjoying yourself so much? Nobody can have a bad time when they have a big adorable smile plastered over their face~!" 

Looking up, I saw her hand, closer, within reach. I reached up to take it with a monumental effort, yet I missed it. Through my mirthful tears, I couldn't see her smile or that she had moved her hand back at the last second. "CLOHOHOHOHOSHEHEHEHERRR!!!!" I squealed.

"I'm as close as I can get, Eren! Come on, you can grab, lovebug~!" She called to me, and I tried grabbing her hand again, only to miss and end up with more flakes in my sleeve. I collapsed onto the grass and rolled onto my back, holding myself around my stomach.

"HEHEHEHEHEHEHEHELP MEHEHEHEHEEEE!!!" I cackled at the clouds above.

I heard a fond sigh. "You really are helpless when you're being tickled. Guess I gotta do everything around here~," Clara purred. Suddenly, I felt her hand grabbing the back of my collar again, and with a single tug, I was safely back on the slope. "There, you baby, you're safe."

"BuHuhuhUhuut-!!" The feeling of the flakes hadn't gone away. The villains were still trapped in my clothing! 

"Ah, I see the problem. Here, let me help you out there~!" With that, I felt her hands diving into my shirt, picking around for flakes... and scribbling!

"NOHOHO!! CLAHAHARAAHAHAA!!!" I threw my head back onto the grass, kicking my legs as her strong arms worked around in my shirt. 

"What~? I'm helping you, Eren! Stay still. You're only going to make the tickly-tickly-tickles worse for you~!" She giggled beside me, throwing away all pretense of helpfulness as she scribbled over my belly button.

My eyes bulged out of my face, and I lunged upward. "NOHOHOT THEHEHEHERE! PLEHEHEHEHEASEE, CLAHAHAHHAARAHAHA!!!" 

"Oh, good heavens, you're a mess!" Clara tittered. Her scribbling slowed to gently rubbing with one hand, using her other to pick around to get the flakes out. "Just a bit of tickling, and you're absolutely helpless. Tsk, tsk..." 

I whined as she gently took all the flakes out, continuing to rub my stomach. My laughter slowly wound down to giggling and then to a ragged breathing. I was sprawled out on the slope of the hill, and Clara beside me lay down, not stopping her belly rubs. Before us, the flakes settled back down to the valley floor, and the sunset in the distance painted the Field of Feathers in a cheery, dare I say, tickle-me-pink. The warmth was getting to me.

"You look tired, dear~," she whispered. I didn't have the energy to reply as my eyelids drooped. "I suppose I'll have to carry you back home after this..." 

She said something else, but I didn't get a chance to hear it. For the life of me, I swear it sounded something like 'I love you,' but perhaps it was simply my weary delusions. I awoke the following day in bed, spooned by my sweet Clara. I didn't mind it as much. Writing down my observations could wait. I went back to sleep, a little closer to her this time. 

[princesscolumbia]

Pride Month 2024 - Day 6

I got so caught up in getting a chapter of Code of Ethics posted I almost forgot today's Pride Month entry!

So I'm delaying the Tumblr post for the new chapter until tomorrow so I can do this tonight.

And for today's Gender™️-fueled entry...welcome to the Omegaverse! 😈

Sunset Shimmer has the misfortune to stumble onto a human world that mirrors her home to an uncanny degree, save for one thing; it exists in The Omegaverse. These humans developed traits commonly associated with wolves. Alphas become the leaders and find mates with Omegas, Betas are the majority of the population. When Sunset Shimmer transited to this world, she did so via a magical portal that "rewrote" her base form, but there's a catch: Where any human to transit into this universe by a similar method, their own mythologies and histories usually include werewolves and the magic could pattern the visitor after the visitor's native Archana-canid Sapiens. Equestria has no such being in its history or legends. But there is one intelligent species in Equestria that is quite common and has the traits in its biology, social structure, and power dynamic to match the human world. Sunset must navigate an unfamiliar world in a strange body that seems to be betraying her at every turn, and Celestia must deal with challenges never before faced by an Alpha to keep her pack members and the secret to Sunset's unique nature hidden from the world. Because Sunset Shimmer is not an ordinary Alpha, she's a…Deviation

I cannot say my first exposure to the Omegaverse was in 2022 when I found my first Ranma 1/2 Omegaverse fic. I didn't, in fact, even know that it was an Omegaverse fic. I just saw a Ranma 1/2 fic whose premise was unknown enough to me that I might have actually found a Ranmafic I couldn't guess the plot and dialog for (long story). And upon being captivated by this creation I checked the tags to see if I could find other stuff that fell into the same category...and saw #omegaverse in the tags.

And now, a re-enactment of my reaction: "Wait, THAT'S what 'Omegaverse' means?!?!"

See, I'd been seeing the tags floating around various spaces online but didn't know what it meant, what it indicated, and legit thought it was just another franchise I hadn't heard of and didn't have the bandwidth or spoons to look up. Knock me over with a feather when I found out it was an entire meta-fandom all its own (like furries) and it was all about the Gender and was fertile soil for ALL SORTS OF COOL WORLD BUILDING!

Plus it means I giggle like a teenager hearing the number '69' when I hear the word 'knot.'

It's also the first fic I started experimenting with the custom CSS (called "work skins" by AO3) that let me do some cool stuff like this:

The same fic on FiMFiction (which had, once upon a time, been my preferred publication destination for my fics...but it's MLP-only, so I can't really post my Ranma or She-ra stuff there) doesn't look nearly as good:

That said, if you prefer the FiMFiction site for reasons that have nothing to do with fic formatting, by all means check the work out there using this link:

[ausetkmt]

The Atlantic: The GIF Is on Its Deathbed

About 40 percent of my first full-time job was dedicated to making GIFs—a skill I had professed to have during the interview process, and that turned out to be much harder than I thought. It took trial and error to figure out how to make sure the colors weren’t too weird, the frame rate too fast, the file too big.

This was 2015, and GIFs had to be smaller than 1 megabyte before you could upload them to most social platforms. Fiddling with them was worthwhile, because GIFs were very important. You had to have them! They were the visual style that the audience craved. Not only did I make dozens a day for the website I worked for, but I often made extras for co-workers who requested them for their personal use. (I was eager to please!)

GIFs—particularly “reaction GIFs,” such as Michael Jackson chomping on popcorn and Mariah Carey muttering “I don’t know her”—were a lingua franca of the internet and significant enough culturally that in 2014, the Museum of the Moving Image in New York even put on an exhibit of reaction GIFs (titled “Moving Image as Gesture”). “This is the file format of the internet generation,” Tumblr’s then-head of creative strategy, David Hayes, told Mashable in 2016, while more than 23 million GIF-based posts were being uploaded to the site he worked for each day. As the GIF’s star rose, GIF-searching features were added to Facebook, Twitter, and iMessage, making it even easier to find a GIF to express whatever emotion you wanted to convey without words.

And that was the turning point. These search features surfaced the same GIFs over and over, and the popular reaction GIFs got worn into the ground. They started to look dated, corny, and cheap. “GIFs Are for Boomers Now, Sorry,” Vice’s Amelia Tait argued in January. As older adults became familiar with GIFs through the new, accessible libraries attached to essentially every app, GIFs became “embarrassing.” (Tait specifically cites the GIF of Leonardo DiCaprio raising a toast in 2013’s The Great Gatsby, and I agree—it is viscerally humiliating to be reminded of that movie.) The future is dark for GIFs, Tait suggested: “Will they soon disappear forever, like Homer Simpson backing up into a hedge?”

Much, too, has been made of Meta’s acquisition of the GIF search engine Giphy, which regulators in the U.K. have attempted to block. Giphy pushed back by roasting themselves. “GIPHY has no proven revenue stream (of any significance),” the company’s lawyers wrote in a filing with the Competition and Markets Authority. No company other than Meta is interested in buying it—they know because they specifically asked Adobe, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Snap, and Twitter, and they all said no. “Further, there are indications of an overall decline in GIF use,” the filing continues. Without providing any specific figures, they highlight a “drop in total GIF uploads,” a growing disdain for GIFs among social-media users, and “younger users in particular describing GIFs as ‘for boomers’ and ‘cringe.’”

What I would like to suggest is that the situation is even worse than it appears. Not only are reaction GIFs “cringe” to some people, but the entire GIF medium is under serious existential threat.

GIFs are old and arguably outdated. They’ve been around since the days of CompuServe’s bulletin-board system, and they first thrived during the garish heyday of GeoCities, a moment in history that is preserved by the Internet Archive on a page called, appropriately, GifCities.

Read: The battle for the soul of the web

GIFs—as a file format, not as a category of thing you could use to express an opinion without formulating one—were special. “This was an art form that was native to the internet,” Matt Semke, a GIF artist who works under the name Cats Will Eat You, told me. “Videos existed in other places; paintings, photos existed in other places. GIFs just didn’t exist anywhere until the internet.” And they were beloved because of the seamless animated loop, which was not possible with any other file format. Because of their unwieldiness and antiquation, today, many GIFs are converted to MP4 video files, which look good and make life easier but do not loop perfectly. There is always a tiny hiccup when the video has to restart, making them inferior.

For people like Semke, 2007 was the year to be alive. Tumblr debuted and quickly became the home of digital art and fandom, which meant it became the home of GIFs. Originally, users were stuck with the traditional 1-megabyte limit, with a low resolution of 500-by-500 pixels. This may sound annoying, but actually, it was great. Semke recalls that it was “a cool challenge for artists to try to crunch their art down into a file that was so restrictive—the challenge in itself was part of the art.”

But even with the restrictions, optimizing so many animated images became expensive for Tumblr. It needed a way to crunch them down. So the company approached Eddie Kohler, a Harvard computer scientist, in 2013 to help with its GIF-resizing process. This resulted in a platform that was uniquely well-suited to serving its millions of GIF-hungry users an endless feed of GIFs, which is precisely what it has continued doing to the present day.

Tumblr is now a rarity for displaying GIFs at all. Most popular sites—including Twitter and Imgur—convert GIF uploads and serve the animations as MP4 videos. As Kohler explained to me, video compression has improved so much over the years that many video files are much smaller than GIF image files. He pulled a GIF from a movie and a graphic-art GIF to show me the difference. The GIF from the movie was nearly 4.5 megabytes, and the MP4 translation of it was about 20 times smaller, at less than .23 megabytes. “MP4 is the right choice for this kind of image,” he said. “Much smaller, very similar visual effect.”

But not everyone lives their life in pursuit of expediency. For some, GIFs are an art form; therefore, detail matters, and pain is expected. Kohler noted that an image tailored to this format might demand “pixel perfection for its effect,” which makes compression a trickier business. We looked at an example of graphic art where the GIF version was about 5.4 megabytes and the MP4 was about 4.8 megabytes. “MP4 is blurring some of the pixel perfection,” he pointed out, “and MP4 isn’t even that much smaller.” Even so, artists must follow their audience, and much of the digital-art scene has moved from Tumblr to Instagram for greater visibility. Instagram allows only video uploads, and a GIF artist’s page there will appear as a grid with “Play” buttons all over it. A Tumblr archive of GIFs is a living thing, playing over and over. “That’s probably why I’m still on Tumblr,” Cat Frazier, the artist behind Animated Text, told me. Although she has more than 100,000 followers on Instagram, it’s not the same: “If I could just upload GIFs everywhere and not reformat them, I would.”

Read: How the snowflakes won

Tragically, even Tumblr’s commitment to the GIF is now in question. In 2015, it appeared to be unwavering: “The format is woefully outdated, and this begets massive, low quality animated images,” a post on Tumblr’s engineering blog read. “However, as the true ‘home of the gif,’ Tumblr isn’t ever giving up on your gif files!” This summer, though, even Tumblr started “experimenting with serving GIFs as MP4 videos” to a “small subset” of users, with the aim of making GIFs load faster. (Company blog posts discussing the change did advise artists that they could opt out of this conversion by adding a single transparent pixel to the first frame of their GIFs, breaking the conversion and thwarting the process.)

So could it really be the end for the ol’ GIF? Tumblr sees nowhere near the number of posts of any kind that it did six years ago, and not to be crass, but there are constantly rumors that it is itself at death’s door. GIFs are “cringe” in part because they are too easy to make and find—they have been totally devalued by the public. And they are being replaced—Frazier noted that people communicate with other kinds of moving images now, such as TikTok clips with text over them and super-short Twitter videos that add humor by incorporating sound.

But I think there will always be, at least, a handful of masochists who want to struggle to make a GIF and struggle again to post it somewhere—all because they are devoted to the perfect animated loop, and because they think there is something spiritually important about contorting themselves to create it. “[Igor] Stravinsky has a quote about constraints,” Kohler told me. Then he read the whole thing aloud: “The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.”

[towritecomicsonherarms]

The Conqueror (1956 film)

IMDB 3.6/10

The casting of John Wayne as Genghis Khan is generally considered one of the worst casting decisions of all time.   

Many of the Mongol extras were played by local Navajo Indians. They did not wear any makeup.  

John Wayne regretted playing Temujin so much that he visibly shuddered whenever anyone mentioned the film's name. He once remarked that the moral of the film was "not to make an ass of yourself trying to play parts you're not suited for."   

AND FINALLY

Eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes backed the film financially. He paid to ship 60 tons of soil to Hollywood for retakes, unaware it was radioactive. He later paid $12 million for every existing copy because of guilt after many cast and crew were diagnosed with cancer.

The film is sometimes called "An RKO Radioactive Picture". It was filmed near an active nuclear test site in Utah, where eleven tests had reportedly been carried out in the year before the production landed there. Not surprisingly, the set was contaminated by nuclear fallout, but producer Howard Hughes and the local population had been reassured by the Atomic Energy Commission that the area was completely safe. Photographs exist of John Wayne holding a Geiger counter that reportedly made so much noise that he simply thought it was broken. After location shooting, Hughes had tons of contaminated soil transported back to Hollywood in order to match interior shooting done there. Over the next thirty years, 91 of the 220 cast and crew members had developed a form of cancer. Forty-six had died, including John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Pedro Armendáriz (who shot himself soon after learning he had terminal cancer), Agnes Moorehead, John Hoyt and director Dick Powell. Lee Van Cleef had throat cancer, but died of a heart attack. The count did not include several hundred local Native Americans who played extras, or relatives of the cast and crew who visited the set, including John Wayne's son Michael Wayne. A "People" article quoted the reaction of a scientist from the Pentagon's Defense Nuclear Agency to the news, "Please, God, don't let us have killed John Wayne".