#what exactly is web development?

[missjessefantastico]

who's surprised? nobody!

[jaylver]

WEBS OF HURT — S.JY

synopsis: Falling for your best friend wasn't on your check list for high school. As if that wasn't enough to break your heart, his odd behaviour only added fuel to the fire along with a new crush of his. Who knew that odd behaviour would soon turn into a secret truth that you'd discover after his valiant effort of hiding.

pairings: spiderman!jake x afab!reader

genre: best friends to lovers, unrequited love, miscommunications, spiderman au, angst, romance, fluff

warning(s): profanities, mentions of alcohol, party, violence, injury

wc: 10k

a/n: tried something new! a little birthday gift from me <3 please leave a feedback and reblogs are greatly appreciated! muah xx

masterlist | © jaylver all rights reserved.

Falling in love with your guy best friend was probably the worst thing ever to experience when it came to girlhood.

High school should be fun, right? Being a teenager should be fun, right? Well, that wasn't exactly the case when you found yourself feeling more than just a mere liking towards Jake Sim, the guy best friend you mentioned and was entirely, love sickeningly, in love with. 

Jake Sim was the first guy you actually built a solid friendship with. It first started when he sat beside you in calculus, then you realised you had more classes with him and a friendship eventually developed when you started acknowledging each other. One class together soon turned into years spent with one another. You knew his family and he knew yours. Nothing could ever break the bond between you and him.

You just couldn't help but notice a slight change in him after the death of his uncle, Ben. At first, you figured it might've been grief, trying your best to offer your utmost support. But as months flew by, the oddness persisted. He would disappear in between classes, sometimes standing you up at places you were at together and returning a little scathed, making it up to you by promising for a redo hang out. All of that was weird. Let's not get started on the fact he caught your stuff falling way too many times, even when his head was faced away, his hand would reach out first. In his words, he called it his 'spidey sense', whatever that meant.

However, you never doubted him. He was still the best friend you had, even if he had some tweaks to him. You never once questioned him or brought up your suspicions, but this time, you couldn't help yourself from bombarding him with questions when he broke the news to you.

"I think I have a crush," Jake announced the moment he was in your presence, sounding a little out of breath considering he made a run to the cafeteria. The tray of food was untouched, quite unlike him since he always dug into his food first.

"You 'think'?" You hummed, ignoring the mixed feelings you had blaring loudly. 

"Okay, I know I have a crush," he has yet to start eating, just staring expectantly at you, eyebrows furrowed at the nonchalant and dismissiveness in your tone. 

"You're being for real?" You finally turned your head to meet his eyes, placing your fork down. 

"I am! I think it's kinda crazy," his eyes twinkled, something quite rare but only you knew, like a comet in the sky. 

"Who is it?"

"Gwen,"

"Gwen? Gwen Stacy?" You swallowed back a frown that was itching to make its way to your lips, masking it with your best shot of shock instead of disappointment. Of course it was the golden girl, what a cliche plot.

He nodded, a small smile rested on his face as he started digging into his food. "We … talked? Talked about some science things, about Oscorp, about the things she's working on. Oh yeah, she said there's this party on Saturday and wondered if I wanted to go, I said I wanted to bring a friend and she's cool with it,"

"I assume I'm that friend, then?" You poked at your food, suddenly losing your appetite as the conversation progressed.

"No, it's Carlos—of course it's you, dumbass," he flicked at your forehead, earning a firm scowl from you. "You're my best friend, my only ever, I'd be insane to think otherwise,"

You chewed at your lips, not because you were contemplating whether you should or shouldn't go, but it was mainly due to the word 'best friend' that got your attention. There goes your hope down the drain. First, being told your best friend who you have a crush on already has his eyes on someone else, then, getting friendzoned by that same exact guy, all in one shot. It's brutal out here.

"So what do you say?" Jake's voice broke the momentary silence, noticing your dazed expression. You snapped out of it almost immediately.

"I'll go,"

"Really?"

"Do you want me to say no instead …?" You raised an eyebrow, watching him scrambling at your words.

"N–no! I'm just shocked and very glad you agreed to come," he managed a laugh, which turned into a smile. 

"Am I going to get ditched that night because you want to get your dick wet?"

Jake scrunched his face up in a look of disgust. "Can you not? I don't need you to say that. And no, I'm not going to ditch you,"

"I'm holding you to it."

Jake shot you a wink, earning a figuratively loud eye roll from you. His laughter filled your ears, and though you managed a smile, you found yourself feeling the opposite internally. You knew you shouldn't feel this way, it's not like you were even in a relationship with him in the first place. But God, why did it hurt so bad?

Who told you friends to lovers was cool when it was unrequited and one sided all along.

"You know, you look good either way,"

Jake Sim was sitting on the edge of your bed watching you put on makeup and getting ready. It was a few hours before the party and Jake had turned up looking nervous, wearing that lucky graphic tee of his that you recognised quickly. Your teasing definitely didn't make him smile, and you soon realised that the crush he had was actually serious.

You glanced at him, raising an eyebrow despite feeling the giddiness from the effects of his nonchalant words. He has to stop that. "Are you trying to butter me up to get me to move quicker?"

"Whaaat? No way. You genuinely look good whether or not you have makeup on, seriously," he was genuine, you could tell, but you knew him better than anything. It was quite a fatal flaw.

"Give me ten minutes to finish the other eye then we can leave."

At that, Jake sighed in relief and fell back onto your bed, kicking his legs patiently. He couldn't stop talking about the party and the people who'd be there, but honestly, you could tell he was just trying to not bring up Gwen at any given moment. Knowing that, you wished the mascara wand would just poke into your eye, maybe it'd hurt less compared to how your heart felt.

"Does my shirt look lame—"

"Dude, shut up," just before you and Jake entered the house, he was asking for another reassurance. First, it was his hair, then his shoes, and every other piece of clothing, leaving his shirt for last. It took everything in you to not punch him along the way there. "I swear, no one will care. If anything, isn't that your lucky shirt?"

"It is my lucky shirt. But whether or not that lucky shirt looks good, that's the case," he glanced down at his graphic shirt, a picture of a rock band from the 2000s staring back at him.

"Trust me, if it's ugly, I would've asked you to change, now shut up and get your ass in there before I leave you here," you huffed and continued walking, hearing him mutter something before catching up with you. 

Upon entering the house, you figured it was as underwhelming as you expected. The smell of sweat and flavoured smoke filled the air, high school students lingered around as the music blasted. You should've probably stayed home.

"So, you got your pick up lines ready?" You thrusted a cup of fruit punch into his hands, tilting your head in question. 

Jake rolled his eyes. "I'm afraid Google has failed me on that one," he looked around the room, shoulders tense.

"Calm down, big guy. You're acting like you're being hunted down. She's not that scary," you patted his shoulders as he took a swig out of his cup.

"Not scary? Says the one without a crush,"

How ironic.

You brushed it off, finding yourself taking a big gulp as well. He was oblivious and you were just stupid. Stupidly in love with your best friend who has his eyes set on another girl. Perfect.

"I think I see her," you followed his line of sight, spotting a blonde in the midst of the crowd almost immediately. She made her way through, parting the mass with a certain grace to her aura. 

Jake looked back at you, a mix of conflict written in his features. You read him well, too well. You offered a smile. "Go, go talk to her. Just text me when you're leaving, okay? You said you're not going to ditch me,"

"I won't," he laughed, but there was a certainty in his tone. 

"Then go, what are you waiting for? I'm expecting a whole loads of information by the end of the night," you gave him a slight push, but you could see the small reluctance he had. "Go!" Off he went into the crowds and gravitated towards her. 

You couldn't bear to witness it all, watching him leaning down as she laughed into his ear. The feeling of bitter jealously coursed through your veins, it was evil, so evil, but you couldn't help it. At the end, you had to remind yourself, he wasn't yours in the first place. He wasn't yours to lose.

Turning your back to them, you sat alone in a stranger's kitchen and fought off the temptation of getting drunk. Instead, you indulged in the leftover pizzas left on the counter, letting a random girl join you and overshare secrets. Wallowing in self pity was probably not what you had in store for the night.

Almost as fast as you had arrived, it was already past midnight in a blink of an eye. You realised your curfew was around the corner and it was time to signal Jake to leave too. Glancing at your phone, you were surprised to see zero messages from your best friend. Weird.

You stepped out of the kitchen and into the living room, seeing a bunch of people passed out at the oddest spots, only a few still awake. One of them was surprisingly Gwen, the goody two shoes you had in mind was actually staying up past your curfew. You heaved a distressed yet exasperated sigh, walking towards her. 

"Hey, Gwen," you hoped she remembered you, considering you were in the same Chemistry class as her.

"Oh, hey. Y/N, right?" She flashed you a sweet smile, and it was painful to know how likeable and nice she was. You couldn't even bring yourself to hate her. 

"Right. Sorry for interrupting, but have you seen Jake around? The last time I saw him was with you," you unknowingly chewed on your bottom lip anxiously, taking the frown on her lips as a bad sign.

"He left," that was the least expected thing you anticipated as a response.

"He … left?" You repeated incredulously, almost as if she hadn't made it clear enough for you.

"Yeah, he suddenly said he needed to leave … in the middle of our conversation. An emergency or something. Kinda weird but kinda cute," she laughed, but you were holding back a disdainful scowl, reserved for both Jake and her, but most specifically Jake Sim. "Why? Were you with him?"

You bit back an immediate reply. As much as you wanted to say 'yes', you didn't want to blow off his chance either. "No, just … checking. He said he was coming tonight,"

"Oh, I see," 

"Yeah," you nodded rather stiffly and awkwardly. "I'll get going now, thanks,"

"See ya, Y/N. Until our next class," she gave you a salute, a melodious laugh escaping her lips.

You couldn't resist a smile either, saluting her back. There was a charm to her that affected people, it was understandable that Jake was charmed, but you hated to know that, and you did not want to understand it. For now, he was dead to you, just like how he has left you to yourself in the middle of a party at midnight. Was he Cinderella? Glad to know you weren't the only one who he pulled the disappearing act on. 

Clutching onto your jacket tight, you cursed every cuss words there were under your breath, all of which were dedicated to Jake. He had the audacity to leave without even leaving you a text, and that got you walking home in the dangerous night of New York City. Thanks a fucking lot. To say you were seething was an understatement.

You hated the streets of New York especially at night. To prove your hatred further, you just had to be at threat of an armed robbery there and then. 

"Hey! You there!" A dark figure approached from a distance, pointing at you. Oh God. "Got some money on you?" This couldn't be happening. 

"N–no," you said quietly, backing up quickly. His footsteps thundered loudly against the pavement, seemingly getting closer. 

"Don't lie, I see that purse on you,"

"I'm a broke high school student, leave me alone!" Was it sad to say that you were yelling the brutal truth to him?

"I don't care. Give me your purse—" his threat almost had you running in the opposite direction, but his sentence was never finished. Instead, a sharp unfamiliar noise shot through the silence, and a second figure in the distance appeared. That wasn't his partner, right?

Panic coursed through you, and yelling out was most likely the worst idea you had in ages. "Hello?" 

Silence. 

"Hello? Can I leave now?" 

"Yeah, you can," the figure walked under the lamp post, revealing himself. 

Spiderman? 

Clad in red and a mask over his head, he stepped towards you ever so casually, whereas you stood there absolutely stunned to even move. It wasn't an everyday occurance where you could personally meet the hero in flesh. The media might've painted him as some criminal, but to you and many other citizens, you knew that wasn't the truth.

"Spiderman," you greeted, anxiety lowered knowing you weren't getting robbed now. "Thanks for—that," you waved in the direction of where the man originally was.

"No worries," you noticed his voice seemed familiar, but before you could think more about it, he spoke with a sudden deeper octave. "It's—uh—not safe out here. What are you doing here anyway?"

"Well, for starters, my friend left me at a party that we were supposed to leave together without telling me, and now I'm walking home alone, until I almost got robbed," it was clear that anger and bitterness laced your voice, a deep frown etched on your face as you told Spiderman your concerns.

"Sorry," his voice became lighter, somehow sincere, which made you tilt your head in question. "I–I mean, sorry that he did that to you," he cleared his throat, straightening his spine and returning back to that deep voice. 

"I don't know what's up with him. He could've left me a text," 

He muttered something inaudible under his breath, then turned his focus back on you. "I'm sure he's very sorry, and maybe he's got a reason too. Try hearing him out,"

"I will. I always do. I'm just hurt, it's complicated," 

"What? What do you mean complicated?"

You shrugged, hugging your purse close to your chest. "It's nothing. I don't think Spiderman will be interested in my matters with my best friend. I'll leave you to your hero stuff and head home now. Thanks for saving me and the 20 dollars in my wallet,"

"Well—I—wait," before you could fully turn around and leave, his hand landed on your shoulder, stopping you in your tracks. "Let me walk you home. It's not safe,"

"Wouldn't it be weird if I turned up at my apartment lobby with Spiderman?" You crossed your arm, making quite a fair point. 

"You're right. What about I give you a swing?"

"What?"

Swinging around New York City was definitely an unforgettable but scary experience. You clung onto Spiderman, screaming like a madwoman as he had his arm wrapped around your waist. The touch was as familiar as his voice, hard to put a finger on but almost feeling like you've known him for years. 

You were about to point out your apartment but he had already beat you to it, not even needing you to tell you which floor or window it was, landing on the fire escape right in front of your bedroom window. That just further proved your familiarity towards him. 

He pulled your window open, signalling you to head in, but you were stuck staring at him, both in shock from the swing and the way he knew your place. 

"How did you—"

"Bye! Goodnight!"

You watched as he avoided your question and shot a web out to swing to some other building, leaving you stunned. How were you going to recover from this?

10/10 experience. Spiderman might just be your casual crush to get away from the thoughts of Jake. 

'BREAKING NEWS: bank robbery in downtown last night caused a chaotic and frantic disturbance, luckily, Spiderman was there to save the day and catch the robbers before anything major happened. Is he really as bad as they make him to be?'

The news of Spiderman saving a bank from a robbery right before your personal near robbery experience had you amused. The videos of him beating up the robbers and using his webs to tie them up were going viral all over the internet, even people in school were talking about it.

You were standing at your locker, digging for some textbooks before class started when Jake Sim himself appeared beside you. His presence was announced before he even spoke, but you didn't bother to spare him a glance.

"Y/N, I'm so so sorry about last night," he was heaving in breaths, as if he had ran across the school to find you, maybe he did.

"Oh, were you?" You clicked your tongue, suddenly finding the random piece of paper in your locker fascinating. 

"I am. Seriously, Y/N. I know I'm an asshole for that, I'm sorry for not texting you earlier and letting you know—"

"Jake, this isn't the first time you bailed on me," you cut him off, slamming your locker door close and turning to face him. The bruise beside his right eye caught your attention, and suddenly, your anger seemed to have sizzled away. "What the hell happened to your eye?"

It has become a common practice by now apparently. Jake disappearing and turning up with some kind of injury. Like always, he just brushed you off. "It's nothing, don't worry. It's not about me, it's about you. I fucked up this time and I know it, I'm sorry. An emergency with Aunt May came up a–and I had to go home early, I was too caught up in the moment to let you know. I'm sorry, really,"

You considered his apology for a moment. He was sincere, you knew that, but there was a certain dishonesty to his explanation. However, you didn't want to press on further either. "I understand. You probably always have a reason, it's just that I hate it when you disappear on me without telling me. I almost got robbed last night!"

It took him almost a few seconds to register, then another few more to compute a reaction. "What? Are you okay?"

"I'm standing here, aren't I? Spiderman saved my ass," 

"Spiderman?"

"Yeah, Spiderman. That guy who swings around New York. He saved me from some guy that was about rob me, because someone over here decided to leave early,"

"I'm sorry, okay? I'm just glad you're alright," 

"Well, thank fuck I am," you crossed your arms, staring pointedly at Jake. 

He dug something out of his backpack, a paper bag of some sort materialized in his hand. "I got you some of your favourite cookies and donuts. As a form of apology,"

You took the bag from him, glancing between him and it. "You can't just buy your way into an apology,"

"You accepted it, you took the bag," 

You rolled your eyes, unable to bite back. "Whatever," you reached in for a cookie and started walking away from your locker, hearing Jake scurrying to join your side.

"So, we're cool?"

You took a brief glance at him, taking a bite out of your cookie. "We are,"

Jake wasn't fully convinced, however. He knew you and your patterns, and he definitely knew which tricks to pull to make it better. "How about I treat you to some Chinese food tonight?"

That piqued your interest, an eyebrow raised at his question. "The one downtown?"

"That one,"

"You sure know how to get on my good side, Sim," you nudged his side, falling into one of his tricks once again. "Too well,"

"I know my ways to get to your heart, don't underestimate me," he said in a lighthearted tone, but God, you wished he would actually find his way into your heart. "Anyway, how was—uh—Spiderman, last night? Excusing your near robbery experience," he winced at the last part, though in reality, the accident hadn't shaken you as much as he had thought.

"He was nice! A little awkward but I kinda get it. He swung me back to my place, which was weird because he knew which window and level it was," you pursed your lips in deep thought, failed to realise the widened eyes from Jake and the panic that filled them.

"M–maybe, it was a wild guess," he said shakily.

"Wild guess? Don't bullshit me, Sim. A smart guy like you would know it's hard to do so," you waved him off, continuing to venture into your theories.

"Maybe he has some kind of sixth sense," he laughed rather stiffly, earning a suspicious narrowed stare from you. 

"Okay, big head, quit acting so weird. Let's just get calculus over with and then stop by that ice cream place after school, what do you say?" 

Jake's shoulders visibly relaxed, a sense of relief overtook his features. What was that about? "Sure. My treat,"

"God, Sim, you have to stop treating me or else I'll fall in love with you," you joked, even as it came out lighthearted, it was filled with a painful truth that you kept as a secret.

"Then fall in love with me."

You froze, almost unblinking. Something so intimate yet controversial had left his lips like it was nothing. It was probably nothing to him, maybe a mere joke even, considering how he let out a small laugh and smiled at your reaction. You tried to pretend it was nothing, but it wasn't nothing, not to you. 

For a second, you wished you weren't already in love with Jake.

Trying to be happy for your best friend shouldn't be hard, but why were you struggling with it so much?

First, you were literally in love with him. Yes, you've come to the conclusion that you 'L' word him, the big 'L'. Seeing him list out the things Gwen likes and hates reminded you of yourself knowing him equally that much too, which only pained you more than it reassured you. Second, he has been hanging out with her more. Not that you were completely friendless and have no one to hang with, but Jake was Jake, he was your best friend, and losing your best friend was the worst thing to happen. 

You didn't lose him, no, but it felt like you had. He barely made time for you, being caught up with Gwen, dates and school work, how could he not manage to squeeze you in there? You've always made time for him no matter what the occasion was, so knowing he didn't do the same for you just had you dying internally. 

It was a quiet evening in New York. The sun had just set and you were walking home from grabbing an early dinner alone. This time around, you were smarter than the previous round. Armed with pepper spray and a pocket knife, you prayed on a shooting star that an unfortunate incident would never ever happen once more. 

You were practically in your own world to even realise or hear footsteps approaching you from behind. By the time you did, your fight or flight mode was activated, almost throwing out a punch, just to freeze upon figuring out who it actually was. Spiderman.

"Walking home alone?" He kept up with your pace as you recovered from a momentary fright.

"Stalking me?" You wondered how he even spotted you in the first place. In the big city of New York, he's coincidentally strolling down the same street as you? As if. "Scared me, you know? Thought it was another round of getting robbed,"

"I'd be there to fight them off if that happens," he said with utmost confidence that it had you laughing a little, shaking your head in disbelief. Why did he remind you of Jake? It's a sign you should stop thinking so much about him.

"Really? I kinda doubt it. Unless you're keeping an eye on me or something, stalker," you teased him, egging him on further. 

"I'm not stalking you," his tone gave away the withering confidence of his. You smiled, feeling his lingering gaze on your face. Maybe it was just your mind that's overthinking, but his mannerisms reminded you too much of your best friend. It was in the way he walked, talked and how he normally did this thing where he walked with you and cast glances at you from time to time. Every little detail that you wished you couldn't list out was a part of the city's hero. 

He cleared his throat, straightening his back, trying to rebuild that confidence he originally carried. "So … how are things between you and your friend?"

"The one that stood me up at the party?"

He choked a little, but regardless, he nodded his head. "Y–yeah,"

You couldn't hold in a sigh from escaping your lips. Just thinking about Jake had you huffing in frustration. Spiderman picked up on it, shifting slightly beside you. "I guess not … good? Haven't seen him much and he hasn't been bothering to hang out with me anymore. I mean, I get he's making moves but why can't he just manage a little time for me? Maybe I'm too selfish but—" he's not mine anyway. You bite your tongue, holding back what you really wanted to say. 

The hero beside you was silent for a bit, as if walking on eggshells and picking the best words to say. "I think he'd come around," he said slowly, "he'd say a couple of sorrys, and you should tell him what's on your mind. Let him know. He'll understand," 

You chewed on your bottom lips, considering the possibilities, but totally also not expecting to get advice from the Spiderman like it was some counselling session. "I know he'll listen. He always does. But I don't want anything to change between us,"

"Nothing will change," he said with a kind of certainty that even you didn't doubt. How did he know? Who was he to judge? You didn't say anything, but just nodded. You knew Jake wasn't the type to argue nor take your words lightly, but you shudder at the thought of a confrontation, not that it was your first with him, but it felt much more emotional this time.

"I hope so. I miss him—oh, my place is around the corner, I can manage myself," you stopped before a turn around the corner, Spiderman following suit. 

Standing before him only increased your curiosity about his identity. Who was he? He was hiding under a mask that shielded his face, but something about him seemed less foreign than expected. 

"O–oh, then I guess I should get away too. Swing around the city and see whose ass to beat," he laughed awkwardly, a hand automatically reaching for the back of his neck, just like something Jake would do too. You shook that thought away. "Goodnight … stranger,"

"It's Y/N," you didn't hesitate to tell him your name, he saved your life, a little information about yourself wouldn't hurt despite him being a total stranger still. "Goodnight, spider boy."

You turned around the corner, leaving the hero standing there, bewildered and helpless. It was hard to ignore the pit in your stomach that carved deeper and deeper. He reminded you too much of your best friend, and strangely, that was probably the reason why you felt gradually attached to him, a stranger that resembled the ghost of a guy you liked but couldn't have. 

The space of your apartment was dark and soulless once you stepped into it. Your parents worked late as always, meaning you were alone most of the time, and this was one of them. Maybe it was the atmosphere and the countless wishful thinking, but a sense of despair knocked on the door of your heart. 

By the end of the night, you laid awake in bed thinking about what Spiderman had said. Nothing will change. That was exactly what you wished for too, that your dynamic with Jake was never to change, but how was that to happen when he's got a girl around? Eventually, you're not just going to lose the guy you loved, but your best friend as a whole.

Your train wreck of thoughts were interrupted the moment you heard a knock on your window. That knock turned into a tune that you knew too well. Sitting up straight in bed, you spotted the figure standing by your window out on the fire escape. Jake. 

At this point, you weren't even going to figure out how he got up this high on the fire escape. It was one too many times of him avoiding your question and you ended up dropping the matter too. Yet, curiosity itched your mind. 

Unamused at the fact that he turned up at possibly the wrong timing, you dragged your legs over to the window, meeting his bashful gaze. He offered a crooked grin, but your narrowed eyes only shot it back into a frown.

"Explain to me why you're here? It's midnight, Aunt May would be worried about you," your window was opened now, but you stood in the way before he could climb through, an interrogative look of yours stared at him accusingly.

"I told her I'd be over at yours," he answered cheekily. "Just like the old times, eh?"

Judging from your unbudging stance and eyes practically shooting lazers, Jake knew he had struck a nerve that have been left untreated for far too long. He sighed a defeated breath, squeezing through forcefully and dropping his backpack onto the ground. 

"I know," he didn't need to say much, yet he conveyed more than needed. "I've been a shitty best friend,"

It was your turn to sigh. You shook your head, averted your gaze to the ground and stepped aside, giving him more space. "You know a 'sorry' alone won't cut it this time,"

He followed your every movement, joining you to sit on the edge of your bed, a small space in between separated you and him. "I know. But I really am sorry, Y/N. I mean it,"

"I just want you to be honest with me, Jake. I know you're busy, I know you're trying to get the girl of your dreams or whatever, good for you, but it feels like you've forgotten about me or something,"

"I didn't forget about you. How could I ever?"

"Well, then stop acting like it! A text would suffice," you stood up, back facing him just so you could hide your face from him and the tears welling up in your eyes. 

"Y/N," he grabbed a hold of your wrist, cold fingers wrapped around your skin, his touch ever so gentle. "I'm sorry. I know I fucked up … many times, and a single 'sorry' wouldn't make up all the hurt I caused you, b–but there's a reason why,"

"What is it then?" You whirled around to face him, the dark of the room casted a shadow over his face, bringing out the fatigue and injury on his delicate features. "What the fuck, Jake? Are you hurt again?"

"It's nothing,"

"You said it's nothing every time you turned up hurt, and I never ask many questions, but Jake, it feels like you're hiding something from me," your hand reached up for his face, hovering over the bruises and mild cuts on his lips and skin. "I don't know you anymore,"

Jake moved his face away a little, grabbing that hand of yours which hovered over his face, lacing his fingers into yours, the rough surface of skin contrasting your soft touch. "I–I wish I could tell you what it is right now, Y/N, I really do, but it's not the right time. I need you to trust me, I need you to believe me, I don't want to hurt you,"

There was a moment of silence where you stood before him, hands intertwined with his, your hurtful gaze scanning his every feature that you knew too well. Jake never lied to you, you knew that, but why couldn't you fully trust him this time? There was a sense of truth and lie hidden behind his words, but you knew one thing, he was genuine. Yet, it wasn't enough. 

"Let me make it up to you. There's this carnival in the city tomorrow night, you and I, hang out, what do you say?" He tried offering a smile, which eventually turned uncertain. "We can spend the entire day together. Just you and me,"

"No bailing on me this time?"

"Promise,"

"You do?"

He held up your interlocked hands, then intertwined your's and his pinky fingers together, something you and him always did when it came to serious promises despite the childishness to the whole pinky promises thing. "Promise," he repeated. 

"I believe you, Jake. I always do, and I just don't want you to get yourself in danger, whatever it is that you're doing. Whenever you turn up bruised and beaten, I–I just feel helpless, and you push me away every time,"

"I'm sorry," he whispered, taking your interlocked hands and placing them on his chest, near to where his heart resided. "I promise to tell you the truth soon. I just need to be ready,"

"When you're ready," you gave his hand an affirming squeeze, a reassuring smile creeping up onto your lips. "Do you want to stay over?"

"I didn't turn up with a packed bag for nothing," he laughed, the air lightening up much more compared to earlier. "I'll sleep on the ground like always,"

Once you were done manoeuvring and setting up the sleeping bag for Jake, you were finally in bed for the second time that night, except now, you had Jake sleeping on the ground beside your bed. It wasn't a rare occasion having him sleep over, just maybe this time it was a tad bit more awkward given the situation you had earlier. 

"Jake," you spoke into the darkness, your eyes trained on that one spot on your ceiling. 

He hummed back in response. 

"Nothing has changed between us, right?"

A beat of silence, the whirring of your A/C was what remained. Then, he spoke. "No. Nothing's ever going to change. Nothing will change," 

It sounded familiar, the way he said it and the enunciation he had in every word. You shook it off, given the late night and a mushy brain, you didn't give it a second thought. 

"I'm glad. Goodnight, Jake."

"Goodnight."

Despite the reassurance from Jake, you descended into sleep with a pit in your gut. You could barely sleep with him next to you, thinking you could find a cure to every trouble that existed between you and him to fix it all. How could he say there'd be no changes when there's a bigger crack forming on your heart?

The next morning was like any other whenever Jake stayed over. An empty kitchen that allowed you to make some simple breakfast and after, you bid Jake goodbye for the moment before meeting him later on that day. 

Upon stepping into your room, you spotted a black lump sitting under the window. It was Jake's backpack. He was already long gone from your apartment by then. 

You advanced towards his backpack, held it up to move it somewhere else, but it only caused the contents inside to spill out. Knowing how clumsy Jake always was, you figured his backpack had been unzipped the entire time.

You glanced at the pile of mess littered on your floor, a clump of red catching your eyes amongst the rest. Curiosity got the best of you despite knowing you shouldn't pry, but the moment your fingers made contact with it, the question marks in your head increased by tenfold.

Spandex material. You pinched it at first, feeling the material against your skin, then you finally got the guts to hold it up entirely, revealing something far beyond expectations. 

Spiderman suit?

Was it a fake one? Jake could've always bought it from Amazon. You held it closer for inspection, noticing how it was worn out, slight tears on the bottoms. It couldn't be a fake, something in you knew. The dried blood stains on some spots gave it away. 

Everything made sense to you now. Jake being secretive, hiding the truth from you every time you asked, turning up hurt and disappearing at random times just for the news to report Spiderman's appearance after. All of them were finally connected in your head, and revelations about his suspiciousness were known by you.

It hit you. Jake was spiderman. Your best friend was that vigilante swinging around the city saving people and fighting crimes. He was the one who walked and swung you home. He always knew.

You let out a breath of disbelief, knees feeling weak and head spinning. How were you to shoulder the truth after this? Pretend like nothing's wrong when everything is wrong and weird. It was practically impossible to patch up the existing crack that continued to worsen. 

Shoving Jake's belongings back into the bag, you shouldered it and made your way to his place. Your mind was in a haze, the thought of him being Spiderman was hard to wrap around. Sometimes ignorance was genuinely bliss, you wished this was one of those times. 

You didn't know if it was a good or bad thing that Jake wasn't home when you turned up at his door, meeting a confused looking Aunt May instead. Apparently, Jake went out in search of his backpack that was currently in your hands, so you had no choice but to call him and wait for him to be back. 

How could you not have spotted it sooner? Now that you're in his bedroom for possibly the millionth time, everything seems clearer. The map of the city stuck on his wall which had random scribbles and locations circled in red marker ink stood out to you, the box of medicine and ointments sat on his bedside table that you frequently ignored. All the signs were presented before your eyes without your knowledge.

"Hey, sorry for keeping you waiting," Jake closed his bedroom door after almost half an hour of waiting for his appearance. His hair was dishevelled, clearly panicked and alarmed. 

"No, it's okay, we're supposed to meet up anyway," you sat up from lying on his bed, nodding at the backpack sitting on his desk. "Got your baby back,"

"Oh my God," he crossed the room with big steps and had zero hesitation when it came to unzipping it to check his belongings. "Did I leave it at your place?"

"You did," 

"Thought I left it out there somewhere," he murmured under his breath, then zipped the bag up. You knew why he was so secretive, and it made even more sense why he always brought it around. 

Jake most likely felt your wandering eyes on him judging from the way he spun around and shielded his bag from view, trying to divert your attention away. "Want to watch a movie?"

How could you possibly say no? That sly prick.

You didn't indulge in his suspicious behaviour further now that you were aware of his secret, though you pretended not to. He did say he would reveal it to you soon, but that 'soon' was quite unknown. At this point, you didn't know who was going to be the first one to reveal it. Either you or him.

You spent half of the day binging on movies, ate an early dinner and then walked to the carnival together. Along the way there, you couldn't stop yourself from taking quick glances at Jake. The street lights illuminated his features under the darkening sky, the loud chatter of the crowd drowned out and it was only him in your world. Even as he asked you questions, you blindly nodded to most of them. 

How could you not fall for him? He bought you drinks without question, won you prizes at those booths, held your hand as you walked through the crowds. It was as if Jake Sim himself was blind enough to not know what he was doing to you. 

"Enjoying the night?" Jake threw his arm around your shoulder ever so casually that it had you holding your breath for a minute.

"You won me a big bear, of course I am," you held onto the stuffed toy tightly, grinning at the memory of Jake winning during his first try. 

"What's next? Wanna stop by that art and craft booth then we go on the ferris wheel?" Jake definitely did know his way into your heart.

"Sounds good," 

You thought the night would eventually end with peace and quiet, but before it could even end, it had been ruined beyond belief. 

The big screen suddenly flashed to a news reporter, the background looking chaotic and people were fleeing. It was live news, the whole thing was happening as you breathed. You and Jake stood rooted, staring at the big screen just like many others did, listening in on the broadcast.

'Just in, a monstrous creature was seen terrorizing and climbing along the Oscorp building. It was spotted not long ago, but now it has disappeared into the building, its whereabouts unknown. Workers of Oscorp have fled the building, but not all of them, some were said to be present in the building until now.'

You glanced at Jake, a sinking feeling in your gut. It was a sour thought knowing he's about to get himself in danger yet again, but having him bailing once more cut deeper than a falling knife. As a human, you wanted him to save lives and the city. However, you were also his best friend, and you hated to be selfish, but you just wanted him to be there without having to leave every single moment.

The conflict in your eyes matched Jake's, who was evidently struggling with himself. You tried to mask it, yet hurt and sadness was hard to ignore or hide. 

"Oscorp … Gwen," the faint hush of a murmur was audible under his breath, causing you to cock your head at him.

"What?" 

"I–I, Y/N, I have an emergency," he removed his arm around you, the hold on his backpack strap tightened. 

"Jake," to scream at him? Let him leave? All of the above? You struggled with your emotions as you tried to understand and empathise, you always did, but couldn't you just have him this one time?

"I'm sorry …" his voice was weak, he knew how much pain and hurt he caused you, and retreating away from your disappointed face wasn't going to solve anything, just the problem downtown, but not the cracks that were forming right now.

"I know, Jake," you shouted when he was a distance away from you. He turned around, eyes widened and pupils blown, a mix of confusion and surprise painted his features. "I know about you,"

He was breathless, he didn't know what to say, so he didn't say anything. He left without a trace, and once again, you were left alone to fend for yourself. You wanted to understand, you do, but it was hard. 

You glanced at the big screen for one last time, uttering a silent curse under your breath, and decided to head to where the scene was. Crazy? Stupid? You were everything described. That was probably why you and Jake were best friends. 

Taking the cab was one of the stupidest decisions you made, and that excluded the part where you're literally bringing yourself to danger. Thanks to whatever that was terrorising the Oscorp building, the traffic was heavier than usual, so you had no choice but to run on foot. It was the most running you ever did all year.

You wondered if it was a good idea to even be there. Answer: no. The police cars were everywhere, all of which were stationed with police that were armed with rifles. A helicopter circled the building, several broadcasting stations and their reporters were present too. It was a mess. 

"What's happening here?" You were practically out of breath, panting, as you asked a random bystander there. 

"Some freakish lizard creature. I think Spiderman swung into the building to save the remaining victims. They were all rescued but Spiderman's still fighting in there,"

"You saw him? Spiderman?"

"I did! Red suit, white webs, he was so heroic when he crashed through the glass panels," 

"That's the one," you said unnervingly, disliking the uncertainty of it all. Jake was putting himself in danger and you could do nothing about it. How long did this go on for? You were left in the dark for far too long.

Soon, which almost felt like forever, you saw a speck of red escaping from the gap in the building with somebody in hand. You held your breath out of anxiety, heart thumping, listening in on all the noises and reports coming from everywhere around you.

"There he is! Spiderman!" A reporter appeared next to you, absolutely transfixed with the superhero slinging through the dark sky and eventually landing in the distance. "He has the last hostage in hand! A girl!" 

A girl?

You pushed past the crowd, trying to get a closer look at Spiderman and the entire scene before you. There he was, speaking to the police, but there was somebody else too. Gwen Stacy. 

An overwhelming feeling crashed down on you like a heavy weight of boulders falling from the sky. Confusion, hurt, heartbreak, altogether they penetrated you harder than you could manage to breathe. One step, two step, you took many steps back before turning away and hailing for a cab home. 

He wasn't yours, and he wasn't yours to lose either.

Returning home to an empty apartment was nothing new, except it did hit differently this time. Your heart was empty, mind in a haze, it was as if your narrator had drawn swirls over your head. You wished things had turned out in another way. You and Jake, how you found out about his secret, him hiding his secret. If only all of them had another ending than what you had in the present.

You sat slumped over in bed, the desk lamp was the only thing that provided light for the darkness in your room. The shadow looming over your window went unnoticed by you. That was until a series of knocks sounded and you jumped out of bed in alert, finding it strange how there was nothing once your eyes trained on your window.

Well, there goes your future. 

You stepped a little closer. Just then, the window was jerked open by some unseen force, a red cladded face peeking his head into frame. Spiderman, or more accurately, Jake, was standing on your fire escape again. 

He dropped his backpack onto your bedroom floor, letting himself in wordlessly. You stared at him, not knowing whether to speak first or let him be the one to do it. After all, he had left you hanging, it's the least he could do.

Jake pulled off the mask from his head, revealing a rather beat up face and messy, dishevelled hair that was coated with sweat. "You knew?"

His voice was tired, but the confusion and hurt punctuated through his words. He inched close to you, but you took a step back, unable to meet his gaze.

"Well, it wasn't a long time," you muttered. "Just today, actually … coincidentally,"

"How?" 

"Your backpack. I swear I didn't look through it, it was unzipped and when I picked it up, everything spilled out. Your suit revealed it all," you chewed at your bottom lip, Jake's eyes boring into yours, the prickling feeling of anxiety crawled all over your skin. "I didn't want to find out this way either,"

"I'm sorry for not telling you earlier. I wanted to, trust me, you're one of the closest people I have in my life. But I just didn't know when or how to break it to you. I wanted to protect you, to keep you safe," he was equally guilty for hiding it for a long time, but you understood the reason behind it. Being a hero comes with a great responsibility, that was what movies taught you anyway. 

"Jake, I know, and it's okay, but I just wish to be selfish for a little. I want you to be here with me, to be there for me a–and be my best friend for a minute," you felt yourself losing the will to speak as seconds passed by. "I feel like I'm losing you,"

"You're not. I'm here," he pressed his palm against his heart, stepping closer until he was barely a few inches away. "Always,"

"I don't want to lose you, Jake," your voice wavered, a clear sheen of tears glazed your eyes. "I'm in love with you," your words came out in a whisper, a hushed confession that spilled with no warning, coming from the deepest, darkest pits of your heart. Even then, you couldn't believe you had actually said it, stilling in place and blinking in shock. 

Jake's breath hitched, his movements frozen. You wondered about the possible scenarios you were about to face, ones that you thought of whenever you had the urge to spill your love confession.  All of them certainly didn't prepare you for what was happening next.

"I'm sorry," shock turned into instant panic. Your hands shot out to create a small distance between you and him. "Ignore what I just said. Sorry if I made you uncomfortable—"

Jake didn't say much, and in a swift motion, he grabbed a hold of your hand, pulled you into him. One hand holding your wrist, the other cupping your face to tilt your head and his lips met yours.

You could barely register it. The weight of his mouth against yours created a mass of fireworks in both your head and stomach. The shock evaporated from your body and relief took its spot. You melted against his touch, leaning your body closer to his. 

Jake kissed you like no man could have ever done. He left a part of himself, imprinted his every unspoken word into a deep and passionate kiss. You wondered if this was what it felt like being loved by him.

Forever was what you wished for when it came to kissing him. Yet, it eventually came to an end just like every one of your favourite movies. This time, however, you weren't disappointed, you were glad. 

"Don't apologise. Y/N, I'm in love with you too," his hand on your cheek remained, the dim light managed to bring out the sparks in his pupils. It was your turn to be confused. Didn't he have a crush?  "I know what you're thinking. Gwen—" it's freaky how he always knew, "—I was kinda dumb, to be honest. I was always in love with you but it took me years and a girl to only realise that,

"She was nothing like you. The more I got to know her, the more I thought of you. I wasn't trying to like her, I was trying to find a piece of you in her. Being the coward that I am, I ran away from facing the thought of liking you, I didn't want to ruin our friendship. So, I kept on entertaining the thoughts of liking Gwen instead, but none of it was real. You're the one who's constantly taking up space in my mind, in my heart,"

The fireworks from earlier exploded ten folds in your mind. You couldn't believe you were experiencing every passing moment listening to Jake's confession. He felt the same way as you did for him. He has had the same pining for you like the same way you had for him. Years, years of unspoken romantic love for one another that both were too scared to touch upon. 

Jake took your shell shocked silence as an opportunity to continue on. "I'm sorry for standing you up all the time. I'm sorry for hiding the truth from you. I'm sorry for avoiding you. I'm sorry for not realising it sooner. But I love you, Y/N. You're my best friend, more than anything, you're the only person I want to have occupying my mind all the Goddamn time,"

"Jake," your hand travelled to place itself onto his which rested on your face. "I love you too," you laced your hand into his, the intimacy that would've been seen platonic days ago was now something more than that. You and him both felt the shift, it was apparent. 

"I don't care that you're Spiderman," you continued, not once breaking eye contact with him, letting him stare into yours as you did the same. "You're Jake to me, you forever will be, and that's all that matters,"

Jake's delicate features melted into a smile. His pretty smile that had you swooning was on display like a trophy, influencing you enough to crack a small grin too. He looped an arm around your waist, dipping you slightly and pressing a haste kiss on your lips, then your cheeks. 

"I guess I can now say I've swung into your heart," he teasingly sent a wink flying at you, to which you responded with an eye roll. Some things never changed, but his ego definitely was inflated now.

"Shut up before I kick you out," you threw a light punch at his shoulder, which he dodged almost unsuccessfully. "Come on, let's patch you up then we can go to bed," you patted his shoulder, walking towards your bathroom. 

"Demanding," he whistled under his breath, picking up his discarded mask from the floor. 

"Don't make me add a black eye to your face,"

"But you like my pretty face,"

"You want to test it out?"

"Okay, okay. I'm coming."

The night eventually ended with Jake being patched up and sleeping on your bed instead of his usual spot on the ground. These little changes was what you anticipated most, but other than that, it was safe to say nothing would be changing when it came to your and Jake's relationship. If anything, it was about to be stronger. 

So what if he was Spiderman? At least you knew Spiderman was yours, and he had indeed swung into your heart.

Dating your best friend who had a secret identity was fun. 

You got to discuss maths in school and listen to his adventures after. Not to mention, he would swing you around New York City at times once the clock striked past midnight. No other girl was going to get a date like this. Ten out of ten, you may add. 

With the fun came the terror. You do fear for Jake's safety almost every time he's out, and it has become a routine to patch him up till the point where you had to restock your emergency kit. This time was like no other when Jake appeared through the window soundlessly in his Spiderman suit.

"Hey," he was breathless, tumbling over the window still. 

You jumped, not even realising his appearance. "What the hell? Jake? Oh my God," you got up right away to support his tired body, but he ended up sliding down onto the ground anyway.

"Are you injured anywhere? Bleeding?" You checked for his body, trying to spot any obvious cuts, making yourself comfortable in the space between his legs. 

"No," his hand reached for the end of his mask, pulling it up halfway only to reveal his lips. "Can I get a kiss?"

"Are you serious?"

"I am dead serious," 

You rolled your eyes, leaning down to press a kiss on his lips that eventually widened into a satisfied smile. You gently slapped his face, eliciting a sweet laugh from him and with a tug of his hand, he fully removed the mask from his head, revealing his pretty face that you missed.

"I got something for you," his hand reached out to brush your hair away from your face, his touch ever so gentle when it came to you. He dug something out of his bag, pulling out a fresh bouquet of flowers. "Ta-da," 

"Flowers?" You accepted the bouquet from him, noticing all of your favourite flowers in it. He remembered, even the littlest details about you, he remembered them all.

"I got them on the way here," you raised an eyebrow at him. He threw his hands up in defence. "Hey, I didn't steal them. I actually paid for them. They gave me a discount too because I was in my suit,"

You resisted a smile. "You're unbelievable,"

"Unbelievably cute? Romantic? Handsome?" He leaned in closer to you, noses close enough to brush against one another. 

"Go away," you squeezed his cheek, and he just let you do so without any fight. You threw your arms around his neck, hugging him briefly. "I like them,"

"What about me?"

"I like you too,"

 "But I like you more," 

You threw your head back laughing, a simple sound which was enough to have Jake's heart racing. "We're not making this into a competition, stupid. Now, go shower or else you're not sleeping on my bed,"

"But—"

"Nope. Shower or get exiled,"

"Fine," he dragged his body up sluggishly, looking almost like a puppy being forced to his dismay: the shower. "You're not joining me?"

"Don't make me chase you out." you threw a pillow at him that he skillfully dodged. Damn his spider senses. His laughter echoed around your bedroom until he disappeared into the bathroom, the sound of it gave comfort to you and your beating heart.

Things might've changed a little in different aspects, but you knew nothing could change you or Jake altogether. He was your best friend and lover no matter what he was. Spiderman or loverboy, he was everything to you. All you knew was that he was going to be by your side no matter what, protecting your heart alongside the city. 

( © jaylver all rights reserved. do NOT copy, plagiarise or edit my work and repost whatsoever. once discovered will be exposed and blacklisted. )

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[valeriehalla]

I have gotten a lot of messages saying that they really love the presentation of CURSE/KISS/CUTE. Often the commenter in question can’t say what exactly it is about the formatting that they appreciate, but that it just reads well and looks good. Well!!! Allow me to bare my wealth of secret knowledge for you once and for all:

I sorta just did some research into book typography...?

Here’s something you should know about web development, alright: typography on the web is really, really bad. The tools we have at our disposal—HTML and CSS—are incredibly powerful, but they are set up to fight you every step of the way towards Good Typography. When you know what you’re looking for, you can fix all the common issues quickly and easily. But it’s not easy to know what to look for, because

problematic typography is overwhelmingly the norm on the web, and

good typography is invisible.

Here’s a screenshot from CURSE/KISS/CUTE episode 0:

Now, I don’t want this post to come across as prescriptive. It is not my intention to tell you, “This is what good typography looks like, so follow my lead exactly.” I made a lot of choices with the typography of my web novel: many of those choices would not make sense in other contexts. What I want to convey to you is what those choices are, so that you will know they’re available to be made.

I mentioned that the web “fights you” when it comes to good typography. What do I mean by that? Well, check this out:

This is how that passage of text renders “by default.” In other words, this is how a web browser would render that text without any input from me about what styles to apply. It kind of sucks ass! But it also looks pretty familiar, right? This is not that far off from how a lot of websites—even websites full of prose (looking at you, AO3)—render text.

I think the most illustrative thing to do here would be to walk you through my thought process and show you, step by step, what decisions I made to turn this unstyled text into the styled version you see in the novel.

So, first things first:

1. We have got to shrink that text column.

Computer monitors... are wide. They are wider than they are tall. They are so wide, and they have so many pixels. This means you can fit a lot of characters on them. If you wanted, you could just have a wall of characters from the left side of the screen all the way to the right side. Talk about efficient!!

You should never, ever, ever do this.

This is one choice that I actually will make a prescriptive statement about, because it’s supported by quite a lot of research: fairly narrow text columns are more legible. Specifically, research seems to support the idea that a width in the range of 50 to 70 characters per line is the most comfortable for people to read*. Every font is different, so it takes a little doing to turn that “characters” figure into a pixel measurement; I went with 512 CSS pixels for the maximum width of my text column:

Isn’t that just so much nicer to read already?

*A commenter reminds me that I’d be remiss not to point out that the research on column width legibility isn’t completely conclusive. You do want to limit the width of your text columns, but going over the 70 character-per-line recommendation isn’t necessarily the end of the world, and you might have good reasons to do so. I did not: as mentioned, one of my goals was to mimic book-style typography, and books by nature have fairly restrained column widths, on account of they’re books.

2. Picking a font.

I’m not going to give you the blow-by-blow on how I decided what font to use. The short story is that I asked some designers, and one of the recommendations I got was the free font Crimson Pro, which I took a liking to immediately:

It’s just an all-around attractive serif font, but one thing I really like about it for use in a novel is its highly-visible quotation marks. They’re just kinda jumbo! They’re real big! Easy to see! In a novel, those things aren’t just ornamentation. It makes a great deal of practical sense for them to stand out just a bit. It also has a fairly large x-height, unlike a lot of the more traditional options, which is good for legibility on a computer screen.

3. Adjusting the line-height

Web browsers default to a line-height of about 1.2em, which, as you can probably tell, is quite cramped. If you go and Google “optimal line height for legibility”, you’ll get a number of results right off the bat suggesting 1.5em. Sounds good! Let’s do that:

Well... hmm. That’s definitely an improvement, but between you and me, it actually looks a bit too spacey to my eyes. I wonder why?

I’ll cut to the chase: the 1.5em recommendation makes some assumptions about the font you’re using. In Arial, the letter “A” is about 0.6em tall; in Crimson Pro, it’s about 0.5em. That means that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to spacing your lines, because different fonts have different amounts of empty space baked in. How annoying!

Let me tell you something about the kind of nerd I am. When I had this realization, I grabbed some books off my shelf and pulled out a literal micrometer. I started measuring the line-heights against various font features to see if there were any patterns I could spot in professional typesetting. Here’s what I found:

Almost every book on my shelf spaces lines such that the distance between one baseline and the next is about three times the x-height. How cool is that? I clapped my hands like a seal when I put this together.

Adjusting the line-height to match what I observed in the wild gives us this:

It’s a subtle difference, but to my eyes it feels just right. It’s almost like magic!

4. Paragraph spacing...

Let’s address the elephant in the room. Probably the most controversial choice I made with CURSE/KISS/CUTE’s typography was to opt for book-style paragraph indentation rather than web-style paragraph spacing—like so:

I did this for a few reasons:

It’s what I’m used to. I’ve read a lot of books, and this is just the way that books are formatted. I think for something aspiring to the title of “novel”, there’s value in making it look the way a reader probably expects a novel to look.

A novel has a lot of paragraph breaks in it. A paragraph in, say, an encyclopedia entry might go on for half a page or more; whereas it is unusual for a paragraph in a modern work of narrative prose to run for more than a handful of sentences, especially in any scene with dialogue. Because paragraph breaks are so common, spacing between paragraphs in a novel results in a lot of wasted space. Also, subjectively speaking, the additional space seems to me to lend an undue amount of weight to paragraph breaks. I’m just starting a new thought; there’s no need for a 21-gun salute, you know?

Having said that, here are some good reasons you might decide not to do paragraph indentation anyway:

Doing it right requires a bit of extra legwork. Notice how the very first paragraph in the image above has no indentation. That’s because it’s the start of a new section, and the first paragraph in a section traditionally goes unindented. This is an easy detail to miss, and it can be difficult to wrangle CSS into doing it for you automatically.

Web users don’t expect it. For the first decade of the web’s existence, there was no good way to do paragraph indentation; by the time CSS rolled around and made it easy, paragraph spacing had already become the norm. And while CURSE/KISS/CUTE may be a novel, it is also, specifically, a web novel!

But it’s my house and I get to make the rules, so I went with indentation. Incidentally, there seems to be a dire lack of research into the question of whether indentation or spacing is more legible for readers—but the data that does exist appears inconclusive at best. So, the choice really does come down to vibes.

5. The tragedy of justification.

You’ll note that one way in which I did not make my web novel look like a paper novel is the text alignment. It’s un-justified: the right margin is ripsaw-ragged.

This is because it is not possible to justify text on the web.

Oh, you can try. Look right here: there’s a CSS property for it and everything. Just turn on “text-align: justify” and...

Nightmare! The interword spacing on that first line is almost as wide as the indentation!

Reader, I’m afraid that your web browser is simply too dumb. That’s not the browser’s fault: robust algorithms for justifying text without creating these distractingly huge gaps between words have existed for many decades, and modern computers are powerful enough to run them in real time with little performance impact. It’s just, uh—nobody has ever bothered to implement them into web browsers. It is the damnedest thing.

I tried, I really did. You can mitigate this problem a bit if you enable automatic hyphenation, but browsers are unfortunately also kind of dumb at hyphenating. Firefox, for example, will refuse to hyphenate any word containing a capital letter, so any sentence with a lot of proper nouns in it is a lost cause. I tried manually inserting soft hyphens with a text preprocessor I wrote myself, but still these overjustified lines plagued me: when the text column narrows, for example on a phone, even hyphens can’t save you. The line-breaking algorithm is simply too naïve to optimize for well-justified text, and that’s not something you can fix as a web developer.

As a result, my heavy-hearted recommendation is to never use text justification. It’s just too distracting.

6. And then some extra stuff just for me

I added drop-caps because it looks neat and I made the ellipses spacier because I think it looks good when it, uh, when they are spacier. I think that looks pretty good that’s just my opinion though.

That’s all! Hope you learned something bye!!!

[monsterfuckerconfessions]

Consider: driders that lay eggs. The eggs are in constant development with their hormonal cycle and need to be laid every few weeks, as the body doesn't reabsorb them. But... they need to be laid in a warm, suitable cavity, and she can't just whip out her ovipositor and squeeze a few into her hand. So, one day a scientist captures a drider to study her and ties her up, preventing her from fufilling her natural desires. She's already terribly close to her egg-laying phase, but the days go by and she remains tied up. More and more eggs develop until she needs to lay, but unfortunately, the scientist is unaware of this so the laying phase passes and the drider remains eggbound. Weeks go by and her broodpouch is tighter and tighter, with the eggs making her stomach bulge. The scientist thinks she's pregnant and gives her more nutrients for the baby, but this only makes her body develop more eggs. Eventually, she's so bloated, having missed three whole egg cycles and desperately needs to lay. Not to mention the extra nutrients has made her body overproduce eggs, thinking that she was storing them for multiple mates. The restraints have been weakening over time - the scientist has been fiddling with them and they've been looser and looser with each passing week. On the day of her fourth egg-laying phase, the restraints are so loose she can slip her hands free. She gets free and crawls onto the cieling, waiting for the unsuspecting scientist to enter the room. None the wiser, the scientist steps in and shuts the door, and the drider pounces, webbing her to the floor and tearing her pants down her hips, only to find a lack of panties and a lubed dildo shoves in the scientists greedy cunt.

Realizing the scientist knew exactly what she was doing, the drider replaces the dildo with her ovipositor, shoving the thick phallus as deep as it could go as the scientist was forced to stretch to accommodate it. She doesn't even give the scientist time to adjust, just starting to pound into the wet cunt like its her first egg-laying phase, desperate to lay. The scientist is begging for her not to stop, unashamed as she's pinned to her own floor, filled with her ovipositor. Suddenly, the drider gets a brilliant idea and flips the scientist over, bending her in two so she can shove her phallus down the scientist's throat and the ovipositor up her ass, making the tight muscle stretch around her thick appendage as the scientist screams and moans around her phallus. The drider holds the scientist by the middle and fucks herself in and out of both holes, using the floor as leverage and feeling her barbs inflate, pushing against the plush, wet walls as the scientist's cut juice dribbles against the first egg knot at the base of the drider's ovipositor. With her barbs in place, the drider pulls the scientist forward until her nose is pressed against chitin, and her ass is forced to accommodate the egg-knot. The egg slowly slips from the drider's ovipositor, pushing inside to bury deep in the scientist's gut. The egg stretches the scientist's belly, the size of a tennis ball, pushing against taunt skin. The scientist sobs and swallows around the phallus, trying to beg for mercy, now knowing her mistake, but it is too late. Finally finding release, a rapid wave of eggs rushes from the drider, swelling the scientist until her stomach is taught and aching.

The scientist sobs in relief when she thinks it is over, only for the phallus to start pumping fertilization fluid down her throat. Her pitiful stomach balloons at the sudden influx of fluid, trying to force it up and out, but the barbs in her throat prevent it from getting out and force the stomach to take the consequences of the scientist's actions. When the drider stops cuming, the scientist starts to relax, thinking that she's done, until another wave of eggs squishes out and the scientist realizes that she's more than just trapped - each egg-laying phase missed was another wave of eggs and cum. Eggs swell her stomach as they're fertilized by the massive amount of cum, making the scientist's head swim until finally the drider is satisfied.

.

[lowpolynpixelated]

Bloodborne PSX One of the best fanworks on the web

Though the PS4 boasted and still boasts an impressive library of releases, for many (myself included) the system served to be bought for initially one purpose, to be the Bloodborne Machine. Most of the people in my life who had a PS4 during its generation either bought one exclusively to play Fromsoftware’s Nightmare Hunting Adventure or had initially got one solely to play the game and ended up getting more games afterward. It’s a phenomenon the game industry sees time and time again, with previous generations having swathes of fans buying entire consoles for one or two games. As far as games go though, Bloodborne is at the very least worth the price of entry. At the time, it was heralded as Fromsoftware’s most cutting-edge and impressive game to date. A gorgeous gothic world filled with creatures ripped straight out of H.P Lovecraft’s nightmares, a haunting soundtrack showcasing beautifully composed choral scores and a combat system that incentivized aggression and speed to achieve brutal and bloody efficiency. It’s no wonder then why Bloodborne still has such a large following behind it. Fans of Fromsoftware have hoped for a sequel or PC port year after year to largely disappointing results. But where the community shines is in its fanworks. 

From fanart, comics, music, animations, and even fan-made video game spinoffs, the game has been shown a monumental amount of love since its debut in 2015. One of these fanworks was released back in 2022 and has since become one of the most famous pieces of fan-made content surrounding the game, this of course, being BloodbornePSX by LWMedia. An incredibly impressive feat of coding and art direction, the game serves as a “Demake” of Bloodborne’s first Yharnam segment, made to look like and play as if it were made on the very first PlayStation console. With some custom-made areas and an entirely unique boss to boot the perfectly paced experience is both a treat to fans who have been orbiting the game since its earliest days and new fans looking for the best and brightest fanworks to interact with. 

The game has since gone on to be covered by a variety of news outlets all over the web, along with its creator receiving much-deserved attention for her efforts. One Lilith Walther (AKA b0tster on social media) holds the title of developer for the project. A long-time video game enthusiast and FromSoftware fan herself, she’s had quite an impact on the community I’m sure she’s very proud to be a part of. Later in the article, we’ve got an interview with Lilith herself about both Bloodborne PSX and her current project, “Bloodborne Kart”, but first, let’s talk a bit more in-depth about BBPSX.

(Official launch trailer for Bloodborne PSX, uploaded January 31, 2022 by LWMedia on Youtube)

Bloodborne PSX:

So, what exactly is Bloodborne PSX? To start, let’s answer what precisely a “Demake” is first. Demakes often have the goal of remaking the likeness of a game either stylistically, mechanically, or both, as if it was developed on retro/outdated hardware. Famous examples of Demakes include “The Mummy Demastered” developed by Wayforward as a sort of tie-in to the 2017 film “The Mummy” in the stylings of a 16-bit run and gun adventure against armies of the undead, and “Pixel Force Halo” by Eric Ruth games which take the prolific XBOX franchise and shrinks it down to a Mega Man-esque platformer reminiscent of the NES’ 8-bit days. Demakes are intensely attractive looking, not only into the past of video games and their developments but just how creative developers can be with games that they love and appreciate. Bloodborne PSX hits as hard as a Demake can in my opinion, blending masterfully recreated graphics with perfectly clunky early PSX gameplay quirks that go above and beyond to make the game not only LOOK like it belongs on the nearly 30-year-old console but feel right at home on it as well.

(A screenshot depicting the player character “The Hunter” facing off against two fearsome Werewolf enemies. Screenshot sourced from the Bloodborne PSX Official itch.io page)

Gameplay:

Starting off with the masterfully recreated clunk in the gameplay, Bloodborne PSX “shows its age” by hearkening back to a time when being seamless just wasn’t an option. Much like adventure action games of the past (and much UNLIKE its modern inspiration), you’ll be cycling through your inventory delightfully more than you’d expect. Equipping keys, checking items, and even the trademark weapon transformations are all done through the wonderfully nostalgic menu and inventory screens. Taking one of the foundational parts of Bloodborne’s combat system and making it such a more encumbering mechanic is nothing short of sheer genius when it comes to ways to really make you feel like it’s 1994 again. On top of this, the Hunter’s movement itself has been made reminiscent of classic action titles. Somehow, both stiff enough to feel dated and fluid enough to make combat that same rush of bestial fun found in the original, it goes a long way towards the total immersion into that retro vibe the game sets out to give the player. Anyone who grew up with Fromsoftware’s earlier titles like Armored Core and the King’s Field series will be very familiar with this unique brand of “well-tuned clunk”.

(A delightfully dated looking diagram showing off the controller layout for Bloodborne PSX’s controls. Image sourced from the Bloodborne PSX Official itch.io page)

Graphics:

Speaking of old Fromsoftware games, though, let’s talk about the absolutely bit-crushingly beautiful graphical work on display. As I’m sure you’ve seen from the videos and screenshots included in the article, BBPSX’s art style and direction are nothing short of perfect for what it aims to be. While playing, I couldn’t help but notice every little detail (or lack thereof) in the environments meant to emulate the experience of a game made on 30-year-old hardware. Low render distances, chunky textures, blocky polygonal models, just the right amount of texture warp, it all blends together to create an atmosphere that I can 100% picture being shown off on the back of a jewel CD case with a T for Teen rating slapped into the lower corner. While playing, something rather specific that called out to me was the new way enemy names and health bars were displayed in the bottom right corner of the screen while fighting. As a big fan of the King’s Field games, this small detail went (probably too much of) a long way toward my love of how everything’s meant to feel older. Other games trying to match the more specific feel of King’s Field, like “Lunacid” created by KIRA LLC, also include this delightful little detail, a personal favorite for sure. 

(A screenshot depicting the second phase of Father Gascoigne’s boss fight, showing off the game’s perfectly retro art style. Image sourced from the Bloodborne PSX Official itch.io page)

Sound design/Soundtrack:

But where would a game be without its sound and score? No need to fear, however, because Bloodborne PSX comes complete with a chunky soundscape that will make you want to check and see if your TV is set to channel 3. A haunting set of tracks played by fittingly digital-sounding MIDIs ran through filters to sound just as crackly as you remember backs up crunchy sounds of spilling blood with low-poly weaponry. Original sounds from Bloodborne have been used for an authentic sounding experience, but have also been given the CRT speaker treatment and sound like something you remember playing on Halloween 20 years ago. If you watched the launch trailer featured above then you know exactly what I’m talking about. The Cleric Beast’s trademark screech and Gascoine’s signature howl after his beastly transformation have never sounded so beautifully dated, and I’m here for every bit of it. Even the horrific boss themes we know and love from the original Bloodborne have been brought through this portal to the past. One of my favourite tracks, the Cleric Beast boss theme, might just sound even better when played on a 16-bit sound chip. It really cannot be understated just how much weight the sound design of the game is pulling. In my opinion, the only thing missing is that sweet sweet PSX startup sound before the game starts crackling through the speakers of a TV in the computer room.

(The Bloodborne PSX rendition of the Cleric Beast’s boss theme. Created by and uploaded to Youtube by The Noble Demon on March 20, 2021)

Interview with the developer:

Before writing this article, I had the absolute pleasure and privilege of talking with Lilith Walther about some developmental notes and personal feelings about inspirations and challenges that can come with the daunting task of being a developer. Below are the nine (initially ten, but unfortunately, a bit of the interview was lost due to my recording software bugging out) questions I posed to Miss Lilith, along with her answers transcribed directly from the interview. 

I’d like to start this section of the article by saying Lilith was an absolute joy to talk to. During the interview, I really felt like she and I shared some common ground on some topics regarding how media can have an impact on you and what sorts of things come with video games as an art form. After some minor technical difficulties (and by that, I mean my video drivers crashed), I started off with something simple. The first question posited was: “What got you into video games initially?” Lilith’s response was as follows: “When I was a kid, the family member of a friend had a SNES lying around. I turned it on and didn’t really understand. I was a guy on top of a pyramid, I walked down the pyramid, and some big ogre killed me. Later I learned that was A Link to the past.” and after a brief laugh continued, “A couple years later my parents got a Nintendo 64 with Mario64 and Ocarina of Time and that was it. Never put the controller down since then.” 

She then went on to describe what precisely about Nintendo’s first foray into 3D Zelda had hooked her. “I’ve heard this story so many times. It’s like you’re not even playing the game. You’re just in the world hanging out in Kokiri forest collecting rupees to get the Deku shield, and the game expects you to! It was just, ‘run around this world and explore,’ and that really hooked me.” I couldn’t agree more with her statement about her experience. Not just with a game as prolific as Ocarina of Time but many experiences from older console generations that could be considered “the first of their kind”, or at the very least some of the earliest. Lilith also described her first experience with a PlayStation console, stating: “Later on I got a PS2 which played PS1 games. I didn’t end up getting a PS1 until around the PS3 era, so I guess I’m a poser. I remember my sister bringing home Final Fantasy 9 when it was a relatively new game. If it wasn’t my first PS1 game it was definitely my first Final Fantasy game. Of course I went back and played 8 and 7 afterwards.” A solid answer to a simple question. 

The second question I asked was one starting to move toward the topic of Bloodborne PSX and its namesake/inspiration. Or at least the family of systems it was released on: “What PlayStation console was your favorite and why?” Lilith’s answer surprised me a bit. Not because I disagreed, quite the opposite, actually. But with such a big inspiration for her work being games from the PSX-PS2 generations, what followed was a pleasant bit of insight into one of her favourite eras of gaming, to quote: “I can give you two answers here.” To which I assured her she was more than welcome to, but she was set on having something definitive. “No no I’m only going to give you one answer. I can give you the correct answer that I don’t want to admit, but it was the PlayStation 3. It’s so embarrassing but I genuinely was hooked into the marketing of the whole ‘The cell processor is the smartest thing in the world’ and all that. It really seemed like the future of gaming and I was all about it. I think I owned an XBOX360 before but I did eventually get it and really enjoyed it. It took a couple years for some of the best games to come out but I really did.” A few examples she cited as being some of her most memorable experiences on the console were Uncharted 2, Journey, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and Warhawk. All games I’ve seen on several top 5 and top 10 lists throughout my life within the gaming space. A delightful show of affection for a generation personally very dear to me as well, in which she ended the segment by declaring “Hell yeag”, a bit of a catchphrase she’s coined online.

Getting into the topic proper, my third question was one about her personal relationship with Bloodborne: “How did Bloodborne impact/appeal to your interests?” A question that received perhaps my favourite answer of the whole interview. From her response: ”Oh that’s a big one. Going to the opposite end of the poser spectrum, I was a Fromsoftware fan before it was cool. One of the games I played religiously on my PS2 was Armored Core.” A statement which made more sense than perhaps anything else said during my time with her. “Then later in the PS3 era everyone was talking about Dark Souls, this was when I was in college. I finally caved and got it and saw the Fromsoftware logo and thought ‘Oh it’s the Armored Core people!’ I played and beat it, really enjoyed my time with it. I skipped Dark Souls 2 because everyone told me to hate it, I still need to go back to that one.” 

It’s something I would recommend anyone who hasn’t played Dark Souls 2 to go and do. “Then Bloodborne came out and I thought ‘Alright this is the new one, gotta play this one’ and I was a huge fan of all the gothic stuff in the aesthetic. And how do I explain this, I do really like Bloodborne. I like the design, and the mechanical suite of gameplay, as a video-gamey video game it’s very good.” The tone shifted here to something a bit more personal. “But as well, I was playing it at a specific time in my life. I came out in 2019, I know Bloodborne came out in 2015 but I was obviously just playing it non-stop. It was just one of my ‘coming out games’, you know?” For those who maybe don’t understand the statement there, “coming out” is a very common term used within the Queer community to describe the experience of revealing your identity to those around you. Whether it be to family, friends, or co-workers, almost every queer person has some sort of coming out story to tell. Lilith is speaking in reference to her coming out as a trans woman. She elaborated: “Obviously I can only speak for myself, but I just feel like when you make a decision like that, that part of my life just ended up seared into my brain, you know? Bloodborne was there, so now it’s just a part of me. And it definitely influenced some things about me. It was there because I was working on Bloodborne PSX at the time, but it had an impact on something I’ve heard a lot of other Trans people describe.” She went on to describe the concept of “Coming out a second time” as sort of “finding yourself more within your identity” and becoming more affirmed in it. She described both Bloodborne and her development on Bloodborne PSX influencing large parts of her life, a good example being how she dresses and presents. As a trans woman myself, this answer delighted me to no end. I, for one, can absolutely 100% relate to the notion of media you experience during such a radical turning point in your life sticking with you. There are plenty of games, shows, music, and books that I still hold very near and dear to me because, as Lilith stated, they were there. All the right things at the right time.

Halfway through our questions, we’ve finally arrived at one pertaining specifically to the development of Bloodborne PSX: “What are some unique challenges you’ve faced developing a game meant to look/play like something made on retro hardware?”

Lilith answers: “So there’s two things, two big things. One is rolling back all of the quality of life improvements we’ve gotten over the years in gaming. Not automatically using keys is always my go-to example.” Something as well I mentioned in my short talk about the game’s gloriously dated feeling gameplay above. “That was definitely very very intentional. Because it’s not just the graphics, right? It was the design sensibilities of the 90s. Bringing that to the surface was very challenging but very fun. Another big part was, since it was one of the first 3D consoles, I wanted to recreate the hype around the fact that ‘ITS IN 3D NOW!’ So if you go into your inventory you’ll see all the objects rendered in beautiful 3D while they slowly spin as you scroll through them.” This is a feature I very much miss seeing in modern video games. 

She continued, “I think the biggest one was the weapon changes. Bloodborne’s whole thing was the weapon transformations. Like, you could seamlessly change your weapons and work them into your combo and do a bunch of crazy stuff, and I kind of said ‘that needs to go immediately.’ So now you have to pause and go to your weapon and press L1 to transform it, that was extremely intentional. So once I had those three big things down it all just sort of fell into place. Like the clunky UI and the janky controls. You need jank and clunk, and I think that’s why Fromsoft games scale down so nicely, because they are jank and clunk.” 

A point I couldn’t agree with more. Despite all the modern streamlining and improvements to gameplay, Fromsoft’s ever-growing catalog of impressive experiences still contains some of that old-school video game stiffness we’ve (hopefully) come to appreciate. She went on to make a point I was very excited to share here in the article, “It was just a lot of trying to nail the feel of the games and not just the look, right? Like I’m not trying to recreate a screenshot; I’m trying to recreate the feeling of playing this weird game that’s barely holding together because the devs didn’t know what they were doing.” In my humble opinion, something she did an excellent job with. 

Fifth on the list was a question relating to her current project, Bloodborne Kart, a concept initially drawn from a popular meme shared around social media sites like Tumblr when the buzz of a Bloodborne sequel was keeping the talking spaces around Fromsoft alight: “Anything to say about the development of Bloodborne Kart or its inspiration?”

Lilith answers: “So first off Bloodborne Kart is less trying to be a simulation of a PS1 game and more just an indie game. It’s not trying to be a PS1 game, I just want it to be a fun kart racer first. Starting off of course is Mario Kart 64, that’s the one I played back in the day. But I looked at other games like Crash Team Racing and Diddy Kong Racing, but also stuff like Twisted Metal of course. I always used those as a template to sort of look at for design stuff like ‘how did they handle what happens to racers after player 1 crosses the finish line.” The next portion of her answer was initially a bit confusing but comes across better when you consider certain elements present in BBK’s battle mode. “And also Halo, like for the battle mode. I had to do a battle mode and it kind of just bubbled to the surface. Split Screen with my sister was such a big part of my childhood. Thinking about Halo multiplayer while I was making the battle mode stuff.” 

Her answer to the previous question began to dip into the topic of our sixth question: “Are there any unique challenges or enjoyable creative points that go into making something like Bloodborne Kart?”

As she continued from her previous answer: “One of the biggest quirks of the battle mode I had to figure out was how to tell what team you were on at a glance, and that came back to Halo again. I started thinking about how you could tell in that game and it hit me that the arms of your suit change to the color of whatever team you’re on. It was just something I never even thought of because it’s so seamless. So that gave me the idea to change the kart colours, and that’s the most recent example of me pulling directly from Halo. It’s wild how a small change like that can turn your game from something unplayable to something fun.” I would agree. Tons of small details and things you don’t think about go into making seamless multiplayer experiences. Some of which we take for granted nowadays. She then made a point about one of the most challenging aspects of BBK’s development, “The most challenging thing was definitely the Kart AI. AI is just my worst skill when it comes to game development among the massive array of skills you need to make a game. It’s really hard to find examples of people coding kart driving AI, You know? You need to make a biped walk around you can find a million tutorials online but if you need to make something drive a kart, not really. I was really on my own there. A lot of the examples out there are very simulation oriented. Like cars using suspension and whatnot, but I’m making a kart racer. So I started simple, I put a navpoint down and if it needs to turn left, turn left, if it needs to turn right, turn right. And I just kept adding features from there.”

Moving onto our last three questions, we started to get a little more personal. Question seven being: “What’s your favorite part of Bloodborne Kart so far?”

Her answer was concise in what she was excited about most, quote: “The boss fights.” Short and sweet but she did elaborate. “Translating a big part of Bloodborne is the boss fights. So I made a short linear campaign which is basically AI battles and races strung together. Some of those stages are just boss fights which are unique to the rest of the game. When you make a video game you sit down and you make all your different modes of interactions, and then you make a multi-hour experience mixing and matching all those different modes in more complicated ways. I think the most interesting part is when that style tends to fall away and it ends up building something entirely unique to that experience.” An example she gave was the infamous “Eventide Island” in Breath of the wild, it being a unique experience where the game’s usual modes of interaction are stripped or limited, forcing you into a more structured experience that ends up being a majorly positive one. “That’s what the boss fights are in Bloodborne Kart. They do multiple game mechanics like a chase that ends in a battle mode. Like Father Gascoine’s fight where he chases you, and after you blow up his kart he turns into a beast and picks up a minigun.” That sounds absolutely incredible. It’s very easy to see why she’d pick the boss fights as her favorite element when they’re clearly intended to be such unique and memorable experiences. 

Our last two questions veer away from the topics of development proper and focus more on our dear dev’s personal thoughts on the matter. Question eight posits: “What’s your personal favorite part of being a game developer?”

After some thought, she gave a very impassioned talk about something she considers to be the best part of the experience: “When people who aren’t game developers think about game development they think of things like ‘oh well you just get to play video games all day and have fun’ but it’s not! Except for the 2% that is, and it’s near the end of development. When all the pieces fall into place and you start actually ‘making the game.’ Game development, especially solo, you’re so zoomed in on specific parts. Because you’re not making a game you’re programming software that’s what making a game is. You spend months working on different systems and then you actually sit down and make a level, and you hit play and it you go ‘Oh my god, I just made a game’. That part is what sustains me. It’s magical. That’s the best part when it comes to true appreciation of the craft aside from the reception.” An answer that I don’t think I could’ve put better if I tried. 

My last question is one that I consider to be the question when it comes to interviewing anyone who works on video games. Perhaps a bit basic, but heartfelt nonetheless: “Anything to say to anyone aspiring to be a game developer?”

Lilith’s answer: “Yes. Just do it. For real. This is what I did and it always felt wrong until I looked at more established devs echoing the sentiment. You cannot plan a game before you’ve started making one. The example I always bring up is the team behind Deus Ex wrote a 500 page design document for the game and almost immediately threw it out when they started development. Just start! You’re going to have unanswered questions and I think that trips people up. Don’t start with your magnum opus idea, start with something simple and achievable. I feel like a lot of people set out with the goal of making a triple-A game, and that’s good! But it can’t be your first game. Game development is creating art, just like any other form of art, and it’s like saying ‘my first drawing is going to be the Mona Lisa’ and it just doesn’t work like that. You need practice and development, and it’s difficult to see that because games take so long and so much, so it’s definitely seen as a bigger undertaking. But it’s still art. You’re still making mistakes and learning from them for your first project. Your next game will be better. View your career as a game developer as a series of games you want to make, and not just one big game.” A perfect response to an otherwise unassuming question. 

Lilith’s passion and love for video games were reflected very clearly in every response she gave during my time with her. Her dedication and appreciation for the art form can be seen in every pixel of Bloodborne PSX, as well as the development logs and test builds of Bloodborne Kart. I really do think that the way she answered my final question speaks volumes to the type of attitude someone should take up when endeavoring to make art as intensive as a video game. Whether it’s fanwork of a game that’s important to you or an entirely new concept, do it. 

(developer of Bloodborne PSX Lilith Walther, image provided by Lilith Walther via Twitter)

Closing:

If you’d like to check out the positively phenomenal experience that is Bloodborne PSX  I’ve included a link to the official itch.io page below the article, as well as a link to the official LWMedia Youtube page where you can check out Lilith’s dev logs, test videos, and animations about her work and other art. Thank you so much for reading, and another very special thank you to Lilith for setting aside some of her time to talk to me about this article. Now get out there and cleanse those foul streets!

Links:

Bloodborne PSX official itch.io page: https://b0tster.itch.io/bbpsx

LWMedia Official Youtube page: https://www.youtube.com/@b0tster

Lilith Walther Twitter page: https://twitter.com/b0tster

[prokopetz]

One of the fun things about web development these days is that nothing is self-contained anymore and there are so many layers of middleware talking to middleware talking to middleware that even "turning it off and back on again" has become an expert-level troubleshooting step because identifying exactly what needs to be turned off and back on again is a process in itself. I've been on multiple calls today alone where the resolution to a tech support issue has been "we restarted the XYZ", and the response from the client's own developers, who presumably set the stupid thing up in the first place, has been "we have an XYZ?"

[demigodsanswer]

Can you make a Percabeth realization moment post Tartarus where they realize how far their recovery has comes?

Like a small moment that makes then realize the pit didn’t consume them, and it won’t be what defines their life?

Heart warming or angsty, could really use a good overcoming trauma piece.

This isn't exactly that, but it was the first thing I thought of

~

As far as Annabeth could tell, the idea of "facing your fears" was total horseshit. She'd tangled the mother of all spiders in her own web once, and Annabeth still had to hide behind the couch when they got to the Shelob scene in Return of the King.

She'd found some ways of navigating it -- that is, some ways of killing spiders on her own. If she acted fast to stomp on it, or whack it with something, she could usually handle it. It also helped her to take off her glasses, so their little buggy bodies were less creepy. But she still usually had to leave the corpses for Percy to clean. She's trained Boo, their cat, to hunt and eat the bugs for her, but she was old now, too old to get most of them.

The last thing Annabeth wanted to do was give this fear to her kids before any spiders had even come after them. Annabeth didn't think they were after her kids yet. So far, the family only seemed to find the normal number of house spiders, and the spiders never seemed all that interested in her babies.

So when she saw a spider she couldn't muster up the courage to kill, she tried to bottle her fears, hold her voice steady like the warrior she was, and call out to Percy: "There's a situation," and he would come take care of it.

Annabeth stood behind Nella, looking at both of them in her bathroom mirror, with Nella standing on a stool to make her taller. Annabeth brushed through Nella's hair, trying to be gentle around snags. Nella usually didn't like people touching or playing with her hair, but she requested two dutch braids today before Karate class. Thankfully, she had inherited Sally's straight brown hair, the only kid without a mess of curls to maintain. As long as Percy or Annabeth could get a comb through it once or twice a day, everything was okay.

"Ow," Nella complained as Annabeth tugged on her hair a little too tight.

"Sorry baby," Annabeth said, loosening her grip and kissing the spot that hurt. "Is that better?"

Nella nodded a little, and Annabeth tried to move her hands with her daughter's head so she didn't end up pulling her own hair.

"What else do we want to do today?" They were going over her goals for karate today. Nella asked to start after Sophia earned her yellow belt. They signed her up, even though Annnabeth expected Nella to hate it. But the discipline and consistency of karate class actually seemed to help her anxieties, and was helping her develop more social skills before starting first grade in the fall.

"I wanna work on my kicks," Nella said.

"That sounds like a good goal," Annabeth told her. Most of Nella's goals involved not crying when she lost a spar, but they'd gone through those already.

Annabeth was about to start going through their affirmations, when a black spider, big enough that she could see every leg, walked across their white bathroom counter.

Annabeth froze, and tried to keep her anxiety off her face, as she started, "Percy, there's a situation --"

"It's just a little guy," Nella said, reaching out and letting the spider crawl into her hands. Annabeth cringed involuntarily, and dropped the half-finished braid from her hands. It unraveled as Nella cupped the spider in her hand and started walking towards Percy and Annabeth's bedroom window.

Nella started chatting about how spiders were good for the environment and ate mosquitos. Percy opened the bedroom door just as Nella reached up and dropped the little guy in their flower box.

"Nella got it," Annabeth said, dumbfounded.

"Oh," Percy said. "She killed it?"

"She carried it outside."

"That's my girl!" Percy said, high-fiving Nella's now spider-free hands. "Let's get that hair finished so we can go," Percy said.

Nella stepped back up onto the stool and waited for Annabeth to keep going.

"Why don't you like bugs?" Nella asked her.

And here Annabeth had thought she'd been doing such a good job hiding her fears.

She couldn't begin to explain the spiders, the running away, Arachne, the Mark of Athena all right now. The girls knew about the gods, but so much of their parents' past was a mystery. Annabeth wanted to keep it that way as long as she could.

"Sometimes people just are afraid of things, even if they can't really hurt them," Annabeth said. "You know how you don't like loud noises, and get scared when fire trucks go by?" Nella nodded as Annabeth tied the end of her braid. "It's like that.

"Well, I'm not afraid of the bugs, so I'll get the bugs for you." Nella looked proud, confident even, not her usual shy, nervousness.

Annabeth wrapped her arms around her and gave her a kiss on the cheek. "Thank you, sweetie. You're so brave, and I love you so much."

"Come on ladies, the karate train is leaving!" Percy said, stepping back into their room, Nella's bag in hand. Annabeth was staying home with the babies while Nella, Sophia, and Percy went to kick things (well, Percy wouldn't do any kicking, hopefully).

Nella ran from the room, yelling for her older sister, telling her all about how she caught another spider.

Another? Annabeth thought. Were they following her? If they were going to come after any of her kids, Nella made the most sense. She seemed the most like Annabeth, observant, careful, with hardly any water powers besides breathing underwater and staying dry. She'd turned six in March. She was about that age. Did Annabeth just not know? Had she not noticed? Had Nella tried to tell her --

"Are you okay?" Percy asked, his hand on her face.

Annabeth floated back to reality. "Another spider?" was all she managed to say.

Percy squeezed her hand. "She hunts for them at the park. All kinds of bugs. Digs for worms too. I think her classroom has a book on bugs that she likes. Don't worry," Percy said, "she finds them before they find her."

Annabeth exhaled, her mind emerging slowly from the pit of a thought spiral. "Huh, I wouldn't have guessed."

"She's brave," Percy promised. Annabeth rarely worried about Sophia. She had all of her dad's powers with Annabeth control freak attitude. She'd be running Camp by the time she was 15. Not the Athena cabin. The whole damn place. But Nella was sensitive, quiet, and easily overwhelmed. Percy kissed her gently, pulling her out again. "Like her mom." He added.

Annabeth pulled him in for a hug without saying anything.

"I love you," Percy said.

"I love you too," she mumbled back into his shoulder.

"Daddy, that karate train is leaving!" Sophia yelled stomping into their room, before making a blegh noise at catching her parents embracing.

Percy pulled away from her, kissed her again to Sophia's disgust, and headed towards the door.

"Nella's a weirdo," Sophia said.

"Be nice," Percy warned.

Annabeth kissed her girls goodbye at the door, wished them a happy time at karate, and then sat on the couch to watch Bluey with Olivia while Rosie kept snoozing. She was a good sleeper. She'd gotten an award at daycare and everything.

"Finally some peace and quiet," Olivia said in her small voice. Annabeth laughed. She'd never heard Olivia say that, but she knew Olivia had heard her say that.

"Yeah, are the crazy ones finally gone?" Annabeth asked.

"Be nice," Olivia warned, and Annabeth just laughed again. Olivia smiled, and Annabeth was sure that she knew she'd made a very good joke.

A new episode started and Olivia stood up to dance along. Annabeth stood up too, taking her daughter's hands to dance with her.

They were okay, she thought. They were all going to be okay.

[imheretofuckspiders]

tma - fears but they're desserts

saw a post about jane prentiss but instead she has gummy worms and wanted to expand upon that

the buried - almost inedibly rich chocolate cake. you're struggling through your slice. your vocal cords feel as if they've become clogged with mucus, sponge drying the inside of your throat. you can't swallow. you can't breathe.

the corruption - gummy worms as aforementioned. everything is covered in a mixture of citric acid and sugar. you thought you could keep it contained to the bag but the gritty substance has somehow scattered all over you and your carpet. the ants are coming.

the dark - what is in this mousse. there's bits in it, oddly chunky bits that feel somewhat overcooked yet slimy in texture. you eat out of politeness, fearing what the next bite will hold.

the desolation - you didn't spread the meringue thick enough on your baked alaska, and now the ice cream's melted and the cake's burnt and the carpet is on fire. nice job.

the end - there's too much molasses in these cookies. it's the wrong molasses too, it tastes faintly of black olives. they're charred and sickly, but you feel bad for the little old lady offering them so you take one anyway.

the eye - this is- wait- how the fuck are you meant to eat this? did it necessarily have to be plated on a miniature clothesline? it takes up half the table and holds exactly four tiny cakes pegged to the thing. it has a stupid name like 'big daddy's chocolate surprise' that you had to say out loud in front of your date.

the flesh - i'm sorry there's WHAT in this chocolate pudding? sure, you can put it in savoury dishes and cook it, but in chocolate pudding?

the hunt - it's easter you little shits go find your damn eggs

the lonely - freezer burned name brand ice cream straight out of the tub. you're eating it with corn chips. best served while crying about how no one will ever love you.

the slaughter - ow. ow. owwww. don't fuck with sugar glass unless you're prepared to fuck with sugar glass. tanghulu looks easy on youtube, but the sugar has to be heated to 150 celcius. also, it's possible to cut your mouth on the shards. just an overall painful treat.

the spiral - you are surrounded with trays and trays of failed macarons. when they develop feet, they crack. some are sunken in the middle. some became stuck to the sheet. your eyes are teary. your hands are aching. your ears are still filled with the whirr of an upright mixer, and you can only smell sugar, egg and the smoke from when the mixer overheated. you will die cursing the french.

the stranger - there's something about your mum's pineapple tarts that you just can't get right. no matter what you do, they'll never taste like hers.

the vast - improbably large sundae. you didn't think it would be this big when you ordered it. even sharing with your friends you can only get about halfway through. it terrifies you in its enormity.

the web - you can't stop eating this tiramisu. you made it for some reason, maybe to ration over a while, maybe for a party, but that doesn't matter now. it's somehow so light and airy despite being mostly cream, and you'll be having just one more bite for a while to come.

[thecozycat]

🧡 Tuesday Tips #2 🧡

What Are RSS and Atom Feeds?

The Small Web movement is about reclaiming personal control over the internet, moving away from the corporate, ad-driven platforms that dominate the online space today. One of the biggest advantages of using RSS or Atom is that you can follow nearly any type of content from all over the web—blogs, news websites, YouTube channels, podcasts, even academic journals! As long as the site provides an RSS or Atom feed (which many still do), you can add it to your reader and automatically get updates when new content is published. You have full control over the flow of information, making it possible to keep up with your favorite creators and websites without being tracked or bombarded by irrelevant content suggestions (Facebook, I’m looking at you).

RSS and Atom feeds are a perfect fit for curating personal content feeds in this movement. You can even follow your friends across the small web as well! It’s like having your own personal news feed of all your friends, except there’s no corporation deciding when, how, or if you’ll even see their posts. You curate your own personalized feed, and using either RSS or Atom ensures that no algorithms can ever manipulate what you see.

So what exactly are RSS and Atom feeds? Both RSS and Atom are web feed formats used to publish updates from websites. They allow you to subscribe to blogs, news sites, podcasts, or any site with frequent updates so you can get all the latest content in one place, typically through an RSS reader.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication): One of the oldest and most popular formats for delivering content updates to users. Websites publish RSS feeds in XML format, which feed readers then display for you.

Atom: A more recent alternative to RSS, designed to address some limitations of the original RSS format. Atom feeds use XML like RSS but have a different structure and were developed to offer more features and flexibility.

Both formats serve the same purpose: they help you get content updates automatically.

Can Your RSS Reader Read Atom Feeds?

The good news is that most modern RSS readers support both RSS and Atom formats. This means you don’t have to worry about whether a website offers an RSS or Atom feed—most readers will be able to handle both seamlessly. 

RSS & Atom Feeds vs. Big Tech Social Media News Feeds

Most social media platforms do not display posts in chronological order. Instead, they use algorithms to determine what content to show you based on your behavior—what you click on, like, or share. These algorithms analyze vast amounts of data and prioritize content that’s most likely to keep you engaged for as long as possible. This manipulation works to increase user engagement and, ultimately, profit for these companies, but it also has a profound impact on what we see and believe. Here are a few examples:

Echo Chambers and Polarization Algorithms tend to show us more of what we already like and agree with. Over time, this creates echo chambers—digital spaces where we are surrounded by similar viewpoints. When people only see content that aligns with their own opinions, it reinforces their beliefs and prevents exposure to different perspectives. This phenomenon can fuel political polarization, as users become more entrenched in their viewpoints, leading to heightened social division.

Amplification of Emotional and Sensational Content Algorithms are designed to promote content that triggers emotional responses, particularly outrage or fear, as these emotions tend to generate more engagement. This is why sensationalized news and emotionally charged political content often appear at the top of feeds. For example, Facebook’s own internal studies, revealed in the 2021 Facebook Papers, showed that its algorithm was amplifying divisive, angry content because it kept users engaged longer. This is particularly harmful when it comes to false narratives, as these stories are more likely to be shared when they evoke strong emotional reactions, leading to widespread public deception.

Surveillance and Data Harvesting Another corrupt aspect of Big Tech’s manipulation is the way these companies harvest vast amounts of user data to further refine their algorithms and maximize ad revenue. Companies track every click, scroll, and interaction to build a detailed profile of each user. This information is sold to advertisers or used to tailor the content in your news feed to keep you hooked. Beyond mere advertising, this data can be used for more insidious purposes, such as political manipulation. More broadly, Big Tech can shape the course of social movements by giving disproportionate visibility to certain voices or downranking others. This power can be used both to promote grassroots campaigns, but also to suppress dissenting voices.

Surveillance Capitalism This term describes how Big Tech companies monetize personal data by surveilling users and creating predictive models of human behavior. By using data harvested from news feed interactions, tech companies can sell detailed user profiles to advertisers, who use these insights to target individuals with precision ads. This economic model, built on constant surveillance, makes it nearly impossible for users to avoid being tracked online. Surveillance capitalism turns user behavior into a commodity, violating privacy in the pursuit of profit. Worse yet, this behavior-modifying system can be used to influence not just what we buy, but how we think and act.

The “Filter Bubble” Effect The term “filter bubble,” refers to the personalization algorithms used by Big Tech to show you only content that aligns with your previous preferences. This isolation of information creates a self-reinforcing loop where users are insulated from viewpoints that challenge their assumptions. This leads to a distorted reality in which everything we see online confirms our existing beliefs, regardless of whether those beliefs are factual. For instance, someone interested in a certain political ideology will be fed more and more content supporting that viewpoint, while dissenting or critical information is filtered out, creating an illusion that everyone shares the same perspective.

RSS & Atom feeds offer a stark contrast to Big Tech news feeds in several key ways:

No algorithms.

No tracking.

No targeting.

No data harvesting.

No distractions.

You’re in full control the content you consume without external corporate influences and manipulation.

RSS and Atom feeds allow you to escape the grasp of these algorithms, trackers, data harvesting, as well as corporate and political agendas. When you use an RSS reader, no one is tracking what you’re reading or recommending content to you based on targeting you and your activity. You can browse in peace, knowing you’re not being manipulated by a hidden algorithm. Using RSS and Atom feeds gives you complete control over the content you consume. Instead of relying on a platform to decide what’s relevant or interesting to you, RSS and Atom empower you to curate your own digital experience. Isn’t that great? You can subscribe to as many or as few feeds as you like, organize them into categories, and stay informed on your own terms to the content and people that matter to you most.

TIP: As you subscribe to multiple RSS feeds, organization becomes key. Most RSS readers allow you to categorize feeds, grouping them by topic or priority. For example, you might have separate folders for news, tech blogs, personal interest websites, or even specific topics like web development. Organizing your feeds ensures that you never miss important updates while keeping your content stream manageable.

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

Choose Your RSS Feed Reader

Browser Extensions:

If you’re looking for a list of user-friendly, privacy-focused, fully free and actively updated open-source RSS feed readers for (primarily) Firefox and Chrome-based browsers, you’ve come to the right place. Let’s dive right in! ........................................................................... FEEDBRO Feedbro is an RSS feed reader that is compatible with both Firefox and Chrome browsers. It offers a user-friendly interface and has features such as feed filtering, sorting, and a built-in search engine. > Get it for Firefox > Get it for Chrome > Get it on Microsoft Edge ........................................................................... SMART RSS Smart RSS allows you to follow new posts on your favorite websites exposing RSS and Atom feeds in a three pane view, providing background loading of new articles and allowing you to organize sources into folders. > Get it for Firefox > Get it for Chrome ...........................................................................

Android & IOS Apps:

Mobile apps are notorious for tracking and harvesting user data, possibly even moreso than pc given the modern smart phone’s ability to record audio, video, and keep track of your location in real time. Here is a list of free, open source, privacy-focused RSS feed reader apps for both Android and iOS so you can enjoy your favorite RSS feeds on the go. ........................................................................... FEEDER Feeder is a fully free/libre feed reader. It supports all common feed formats, including JSONFeed. It doesn’t track you. It doesn’t require any setup. It doesn’t even need you to create an account! Just setup your feeds, or import them from your old reader via OPML, then get on with syncing and reading. > Get Feeder on Google Play (Android) > Get Feeder on F-Droid (Android) ........................................................................... Flym News Reader While no longer being updated, Flym News Reader is still an excellent news reader for Android. Flym News Reader is a simple, modern, totally free (no ads) and opensource project which keeps you inform by fetching your websites/blogs and displaying them in a mobile-optimized way. > Get Flym on Google Play (Android) > Get Flym on F-Droid (Android) ........................................................................... Fiery Feeds Fiery Feeds is a powerful and highly customisable feed reader and read-it-later client that syncs with most services. It features article view modes, feed management, flexible layouts, smart views, color themes, and more! While I wasn’t able to uncover if it was open source, the developer does have a good privacy-respecting policy here. It’s one of the better alternatives for IOS. > Get Fiery Feeds for IOS ...........................................................................

Other PC Software:

So, it looks like you’re on the hunt for the perfect RSS feed reader. Luckily, there are a ton of great open-source options out there that are user-friendly, privacy-focused, free, and actively updated. Let’s dive in! ........................................................................... QuiteRSS First up, we have QuiteRSS. This RSS feed reader is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, making it a great option for those who use multiple operating systems. The interface is simple and intuitive, with a clean layout that’s easy to navigate. To add a new feed, simply click on the “Add Feed” button and enter the URL of the feed you want to subscribe to. You can learn more about their features here. Pros: • QuiteRSS is lightweight and doesn’t use up a lot of system resources. • Available for multiple operating systems. (Windows, Mac, and Linux) Cons: • Some users have reported issues with syncing across devices. > Download QuiteRSS ........................................................................... FEEDREADER For those who want a simple, no-frills RSS feed reader, there’s FeedReader. This reader is available for Windows and Linux. The interface is clean and easy to use, with a basic layout that won’t overwhelm users with too many options. Pros: • FeedReader has a built-in browser, making it easy to view articles without leaving the app. • Available for multiple operating systems. (Windows and Linux) Cons: • Some users have reported issues with syncing across devices. > Download FeedReader ........................................................................... Tiny Tiny RSS Another great option for those who want a privacy-focused RSS feed reader is Tiny Tiny RSS. This reader is self-hosted, which means you’ll need to have your own server to run it on. However, this also means that you have complete control over your data and can ensure your privacy. Adding a new feed is as simple as clicking on the “Add Feed” button and entering the URL. Pros: • Tiny Tiny RSS supports plugins, allowing you to customize it to your needs. Cons: • Setting up a self-hosted RSS feed reader can be daunting for users who are inexperienced with self-hosting their own servers. Best avoid Tiny Tiny RSS if you are unfamiliar with this process. > Tiny Tiny RSS Installation Guide ........................................................................... Feedly Last but not least, we have Feedly. This RSS feed reader is available for Android, iOS, and web, with a paid version available for those who want even more features. Feedly is known for its clean, modern interface that’s easy to navigate. Pros: • Feedly integrates with a ton of other apps and services, making it easy to save articles to read later or share them on social media. Cons: • Some users have reported issues with the free version being limited in features. > Sign Up For Feedly ...........................................................................

Getting RSS feed URLS

In order to subscribe to a website’s RSS feed and add it to your feed reader, you will first need to get the RSS URL (aka link or web address) to the feed you want to follow.There are a few ways to do this, so if you’re totally new to RSS, let’s start with the easiest way first.

First, you’ll need to know what website or blog you want to subscribe to. If you’re not sure, try searching for it in Google.

Once you’re on the website or blog, look for the orange RSS feed icon. It looks like this: Sometimes it’s located in the top right corner of the page, or at the bottom of the page.

Click on the RSS feed icon. This will take you to a page with a lot of code on it. Don’t worry, you don’t need to understand any of this code!

Look at the address bar in your web browser. This is the URL for the RSS feed. Copy this URL.

If you’ve chosen an RSS Reader from the options previously discussed, open your RSS reader. This could be an app on your smartphone, browser extension, or a website or program on your computer.

In your RSS reader, look for an option to add a new feed. This option might be called “Add Subscription” or “Add Feed”.

Paste the URL for the RSS feed into the field provided in your RSS reader. Then click “Add” or “Subscribe”.

Congratulations! You’ve successfully subscribed to an RSS feed. Now you’ll be able to read new articles from this website or blog as soon as they’re published.

What if there is no RSS feed icon on a website I want to follow?

Unfortunately while many websites are RSS compatible, many websites do not offer RSS directly as a subscription option (ex. Youtube, certain blogs, etc). In this circumstance, it gets a little trickier if you aren’t very tech savvy. Have no fear! I will walk you through the process.

The easiest solution if you are not tech savvy is to use the Get RSS Feed URL extension below for your web browser. This extension will automatically grab the rss feed of the page you’re currently visiting (if it has an rss feed available), and then you can simply copy and paste it from your extension to your reader if your RSS reader is on PC. If your RSS reader is on mobile, however, you can use your PC to create a list of all the feed URLs you want to follow, email the list to yourself, and the copy/paste each url from your list by accessing your email from mobile.

> Get RSS Feed URL for Firefox > Get RSS Feed URL for Chrome

If you are a bit tech savvy, however, there is a more straightforward way to get RSS URLs that is much faster.

If you are on PC, check the source code: If you can’t find the RSS icon, you can check the source code of the website. Right-click on the website and select “View Page Source” or “Inspect Element”. Look for the “” tag with the type “application/rss+xml”. The URL located in the “href” attribute is the RSS feed link. Copy and paste the link into your preferred RSS reader.

One other thing you can try is experiment with adding each of the following to the end of the URL of the page you want to follow: /feed /feeds /rss /rss.xml /atom.xml .atom In most cases where an RSS feed is available, adding one of these options to the end of the page’s URL will bring up the page’s RSS feed. This method is hit or miss but always worth a try as it often comes up successful.

For example, if you wanted to subscribe to my status updates (located at https://status.cafe/users/thecozycat) you would add https://status.cafe/users/thecozycat.atom into your RSS feed reader. Or if you wanted to subscribe to my website activity feed (located at https://smallweb.thecozy.cat/activity/feed/), you would add https://smallweb.thecozy.cat/activity/feed/ into your Feeder app. Now, you’re probably asking, how do you know which one is the right one? You will need to test each of the six options in your web browser by trying each of those options at the end of the url you want to add to your feed. If it’s wrong, you’ll likely get an error page. If it’s right, you’ll see a page with code on it OR your browser may prompt you to download the feed file. That’s how you know you’ve got the right one.

How to Make a Website RSS-Compatible

If you’re building a website and want to offer RSS feeds:

WordPress: By default, WordPress generates an RSS feed at yourwebsite.com/feed. You can also customize it using plugins like RSS Post Importer.

Static Site Generators: Static site generators like Jekyll and Hugo support RSS feeds natively, allowing you to create them automatically as part of your build process.

Custom Websites: For custom sites that don’t offer automatic RSS or Atom feed functionality, you can create an XML file that complies with RSS or Atom feed standards, which includes your website’s content updates.

The RSS feed is essentially an XML file that contains metadata about your website’s posts and updates. This file is structured in a specific format so that RSS readers can interpret and display your content.

Example of a Basic RSS File:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> <rss version="2.0"> <channel> <title>Your Website Title</title> <link>https://yourwebsite.com</link> <description>Your website description goes here</description> <item> <title>Post 1 Title</title> <link>https://yourwebsite.com/post-1</link> <description>Summary of your post goes here</description> <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 2024 12:00:00 GMT</pubDate> </item> <!-- Repeat the <item> block for each new post --> </channel> </rss>

Step 2: Modify the Feed for Your Site

Replace the text between the , , and tags with details about your site.

Each tag within the block corresponds to a single blog post or update. Add or remove these as necessary.

Ensure the reflects the correct format as shown in the example above.

Step 3: Save and Upload Once you’ve created your RSS file, save it as rss.xml (or another name you prefer, like feed.xml). Upload this file to the root directory of your website so that users can access it via https://yourwebsite.com/rss.xml.

Making Your Feed Public

Now that your RSS file is live, you’ll want to let people know they can subscribe. Add a link to the RSS feed URL on your website, usually in the header, sidebar, or footer (though, you can place it wherever you like). Many sites use an orange RSS icon, which is easily recognizable.

Keep It Updated

Since this is a static feed, you’ll need to manually add new posts to the RSS file as you create them. Simply update the feed XML file with new <item> blocks whenever you add new content, then re-upload the file.

Big Tech and RSS/Atom Restrictions

RSS and Atom are incredibly useful, though you’re probably wondering: if it’s so great, why aren’t more people aware and using it? Personally, and this is just my belief due to what I’ve witnessed with big tech censorship over the years; it is by design that it is not often spoken about anymore. Big tech (and/or “big brother”) companies want everyone to stay stuck in their own information silos, because it is much easier for them to control narratives and the information you consume there, as well as have more control over your private data for their own capitalistic gains. Those who control the flow of information ultimately control the minds of the masses, and that control can make them a heck of a lot of money.

Unfortunately it is big tech websites such as Facebook that block people’s access to retrieving RSS/Atom feeds from their websites, because if they allowed you access to their RSS/Atom feeds from outside of their website, then they wouldn’t be able to contain you to their controlled information silos, track you, or profit off of you using your data. It’s against their own best interests to allow you this freedom, as keeping you contained to their walled gardens allows them to continue their data harvesting monopolies. So that is probably the biggest downside about RSS and Atom feeds when it comes to big tech social media platforms, is that if the information you care most about comes from your loved ones whom are contained within the walled gardens of these big tech social platforms, you won’t be able to retrieve RSS/Atom to create feeds from your friends there.

Not all social platforms are like this, however. You will just have to experiment with retrieving the feeds from different platforms to discover which big tech platforms have blocked RSS access and which ones haven’t.

Conclusion

I think that covers all the bases! The reason for this article, while a bit lengthy, I feel it is important to teach those who may not be tech-savvy in simple terms that are easy to understand.  I think it is important for everyone to know how to use RSS and Atom, and create their own feeds independent of Big Tech social media platforms. Especially in this day and age where Big Tech has so much control and grasp on the information we consume and our private data is so heavily abused, there has never been a better time to start using RSS and Atom feeds. Aside from TheCozy.Cat being my own personal space, I also want it to double as my personal contribution to helping folks break free from their relationships with corrupt corporate entities.

If you have any questions or suggestions to add to this post that could make it even better, leave me a comment letting me know! As I receive feedback, I will make adjustments accordingly to make this article as simple as possible for those who are just getting started with RSS/Atom feeds.

And as always, if you found all this information useful, be sure to bookmark this page so you can easily find it again. Consider sharing it with your friends as well so they too can discover how to curate their own RSS and Atom feeds!

This post was originally shared from my small web blog here.

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[fangweaver2099]

𝐅 𝐀 𝐖 𝐍 𝐓 𝐄 𝐄 𝐓 𝐇 - Prologue pt 2

MINORS DNI 18+ FIC

You’ve always liked the idea of having a dominant partner - BDSM was something you’ve read about, watched videos about.

Something you made Pinterest boards and aesthetic tumblr posts about when you were 18 and curious, the idea always sounded nice, but you’ve never done it in practice, not really. Sure you bought fuzzy handcuffs at a gag gift store once, but that didn’t really count.

You’re still a virgin.

You’ve always had that chronically awkward, workaholic type of vibe that made typical dating near impossible at worst and frustrating at best. Normal dating apps have proven fruitless and agitating. So poor curious little you talked yourself into making a fetlife account. You weren’t looking for true love, but at least you could get laid.

DM Request from: 10:13 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Hello, Fawn.”

College was for new experiences after all.

CW: BDSM heavy/centric fic. Safe, Sane & Consensual. Miguel is your professor, but you both don't know that. Age Gap (Y/N is 23, Miguel is mid 30's)

TAG: @slut4oscarissac23

PART 1 - PART 3

It’s been a week since you met Web. You’ve gotten into the routine he provided after you confirmed he expected you to start instantly. Thankfully, your summer job is walkable and makes the whole hour of exercise he’d demanded - so it isn’t much of a change in routine.

 He isn’t pleased that your idea of meals is usually whatever frozen nuggets you have in the fridge or whatever you and your roommates decide to swing by to, but there’s only so much you can do on a college budget, and he begrudgingly accepts that fact after some discussion. 

You wake with a groan, still entangled in your gray duvet. You had opted for a daybed for your tiny room and it means you often sleep with your nose touching the wall and your limbs curled close to you, fetal position. 

For a long moment, you consider heading back to bed. Your hands search down your body and across your bed for the phone. You pull the damn thing out from under your hip and flip it over in your hand. 

Web asks you to download something called ‘Telegram’ - it doesn’t log pictures or anything for that matter, according to him. You find you even have a few contacts saved that used it. You discover your cousin is a furry, but you aren’t going to tell him that. 

Web’s icon is what you’d expect, really - a red web. His number is fake - surprising to exactly nobody. He was clearly more tech savvy than you. When you had visualized an ideal dominant - Web checked too many boxes. At first you considered ghosting him, anxiety ate you up.

But you also crave his attention - maybe you’re more lonely than you thought. You find yourself waiting for his messages and bouncing at the attention. You’ve developed a habit of staying up too late waiting to see if he’ll pop back online again. 

So you click open your phone, ignoring Facebook, Instagram, whatever, and click open the small blue icon to Telegram. 

 9:13 AM - WebRigger2099 - “Good Morning.”  

“ I slept in… Sorry. Just saw this. Morning. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:15 PM

 1:19 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Slept in until 1pm? Up late?”  

“ Roommates were loud, so I watched netflix. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:19 PM

 1:19 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Maybe when summer is over you’ll be able to get proper sleep at my place.”  

“ That sounds nice. We’ll have to see. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:19 PM

 1:20 PM - WebRigger2099 - “I can set up a dog bed at the foot of mine. I’d make sure you were comfortable, but you’d have to wake me to go to the bathroom. The leash would keep you bound to bed.”  

“ And here I thought we’d snuggle. :p ” - Fawnteeth - 1:20 PM

 1:20 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Yes, but you have to earn the bed for sleeping at night. Incentives keep you from growing complacent.”  

“ You really do know what you’re doing. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:21 PM

“ Any free time today? ” - Fawnteeth - 1:21 PM

1:21 PM - WebRigger2099 - “I work from home during the summer and practically make my own hours. It’s a quiet day.”  

“ Can I ask what you do? ” - Fawnteeth - 1:21 PM

1:21 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Yes, but I won’t answer.”  

“ Mysterious. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:22 PM

 1:22 PM - WebRigger2099 - “If you guess correct you might earn a treat, pup.”  

“ How many tries do I get? ” - Fawnteeth - 1:22 PM

1:22 PM - WebRigger2099 - “We’ll say three.”  

“ Banker? ” - Fawnteeth - 1:22 PM

1:22 PM - WebRigger2099 - “No. Every time you get it incorrect, you’ll answer a question of mine, how’s that sound?”  

“ That's not very fair. :c ” - Fawnteeth - 1:23 PM

1:23 PM - WebRigger2099 - “I never said it would be.”  

“ Fine. Ask away. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:23 PM

1:23 PM - WebRigger2099 - “When was the last time you touched yourself, Fawn?”  

“ Oh. These kind of questions. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:23 PM

1:23 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Is that a complaint I hear?”  

“ No. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:23 PM

1:23 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Well?”  

“ The night after we spoke the first time. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:23 PM

1:23 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Good girl. Excited you, did I?”  

“ Yes, sir. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:24 PM

1:24 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Good girl. You remembered the rule. No ‘maybe’s, only ‘yes’ or ‘no’.”  

“ I’m trying my best. It’s not like it’s fun being a brat at the start. I gotta learn your buttons. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:24 PM

1:24 PM - WebRigger2099 - “You must be a glutton for punishment. Did you see the cane marks I left on some of the girls in my photo album?”  

“ I did. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:24 PM

 1:24 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Did it excite you, Fawn?”  

You huff, rolling onto your other side on the bed.

“ ...Yes. When do I get to guess again? >:c ” - Fawnteeth - 1:24 PM

1:24 PM - WebRigger2099 - “I never said you couldn’t. You’re just answering free questions.”  

“ Mean. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:24 PM

 1:24 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Exceptionally. You have to earn ‘nice’.”  

“ I don’t know why I find you so charming. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:24 PM

“ Librarian? ” - Fawnteeth - 1:24 PM

1:24 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Wrong. And many submissives find comfort in pain and punishment.”  

“ you seem like the librarian type. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:25 PM

1:25 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Because you think I’d spank you with a ruler if you made too much noise?”  

“ I don’t think a ruler would hurt very much. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:25 PM

1:25 PM  - WebRigger2099 - “You haven’t had one break on your skin then. I’ve left bruises with them before.”  

“ I sure haven’t. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:25 PM

1:25 PM - WebRigger2099 - “I’ll have to bring one someday, then. And a crop. Anything else you’d like me to mark you with?”  

“ Let me think about it. ” - Fawnteeth -  1:25 PM

“ Personal trainer? You have the body for it. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:25 PM

1:25 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Isn’t that what I’m doing to you? It doesn’t pay very well, but I don’t have any complaints about the benefits so far.”  

“ I mean. I guess? You haven’t asked me to work out, plus I hear the right clients means you could make bank. So you are a personal trainer? ” - Fawnteeth - 1:26 PM

1:26 PM - WebRigger2099 - “I did tell you to exercise an hour a day. Did you forget?”  

“ Not completely. I walk. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:26 PM

1:26 PM - WebRigger2099 - “No, I’m not a personal trainer. Ready for my last two questions?”  

“ Yes. :c I thought I was right… ” - Fawnteeth - 1:26 PM

1:26 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Afraid not.”  

1:26 PM - WebRigger2099 - “When you masturbated the night we first spoke, what did you imagine?”  

“ A bit of what you could look like. Putting myself into one of your photos. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:27 PM

1:27 PM  - WebRigger2099 - “Do you like the idea of me showing you off for everyone to see? Your face covered of course, like the rest.”  

“ I sure don’t mind the idea. Do most girls say no? I see you haven’t taken any photos in like 7 years. ” - Fawnteeth - 11:27 PM

1:27 PM - WebRigger2099 - “I’ve been busy. Started again recently.”  

“ Ohhh. I see. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:27 PM

1:27 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Would you like to practice?”  

“ Practice? ” - Fawnteeth - 1:27 PM

1:27 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Posing for my photos.”  

“ Can I see you too? ” - Fawnteeth - 1:27 PM

1:27 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Fair is fair.”  

“ Your profile pic leaves most to the imagination. Well. Below the belt, I guess. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:27 PM

1:27 PM - WebRigger2099 - “That’s what you want to see, is it? You’ll need to earn it.”  

“ Call me curious. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:27 PM

1:27 PM - WebRigger2099 - “You’ll need to follow my instructions for posing, Fawn. Listening?”  

“ Yes. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:28 PM

1:28 PM - WebRigger2099 - “You’ll take a picture of every step to prove you’re following along. Understood?”  

“ Okay. Let me lock my door. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:28 PM

You need a gameplan. Checking for your roommates, you pop your head out of your door, listening hard. You can hear your roommate Kore’s music - some pop medley that she’s sewing to. Good. 

You don’t hear anyone else, so everybody else must be out. You… try not to think about what Taylor or Aurora could be up to.

Sticking your head back in, you close the door. moving to click the lock shut. You check the door, only for it to open with the slightest tug. Glancing at the lock, you frown, flicking it on and off to see no little ‘lock’ mechanism come out. 

Shit… You fucking hate your landlord. 

You glance around your room - you are not doing this with your door unlocked. You grew up with half a dozen siblings and strict parents - you know how to improvise. Grabbing the circular chair piled with clothes, you push it to the door and force the metal under your door knob. Hands on your hips, you nod at the handiwork.

Good enough. 

Snatching up your phone, you frown, kicking away most of your discarded clothes and random papers.You really need to clean your room, but you decide you’d do it later.

Right now, you have other priorities. 

Said priority seems to know just when you sit down, the telegram notification lighting up your screen as if you’ve summoned him by pure thought alone. Think of the devil…

1:46 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Having trouble?”  

“ No. All good now. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:46 PM

1:46 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Get a marker.”  

You frown, then glance at your backpack. You trot over and search through it, tossing a few pens and your pencil case in frustration.

In the end you find a single purple sharpie. 

You click open your phone.

“ Does the color matter? ” - Fawnteeth - 1:46 PM

1:46 PM - WebRigger2099 - “No. It just needs to be visible on your skin.”  

“ Kay. Got it then. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:46 PM

1:46 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Take your clothes off. Bra and panties can stay on.”  

You glance up at your phone and stare at yourself in the mirror.

 Your hair is a bit of a mess - that’s fine. 

You glance at your sleep shirt, it’s old and the hem is frayed on the sleeves, the little bunny screen printed onto it is mostly faded. You knew you weren’t wearing a bra, so you glanced around your room till you spotted one laying limply on the floor. Tossing off your top and discarding it wherever it landed. 

Pulling the bra on, you take a deep breath, glancing at yourself again in the mirror. You feel yourself hesitating. You’ve taken nudes before, what about this makes it different? 

Web makes it different. Him telling you to take these for him makes it different. You slip off your shorts and realize you’re wet. Your cheeks burn with embarrassment. 

Still, your phone is in your hand again, you flick it open and type away. 

“Kay.” - Fawnteeth - 1:50 PM

1:50 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Where is my proof, Fawn? I told you to take pictures. Are you trying to get punished?”  

You bite your lip.

“ No. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:50 PM

You need your face mask - the one you wore in all your photos is easy to find. You wrap the thing around your nose and mouth. You know you’re going to crop out your face anyway, but it makes you feel better. 

Like you’re pretending to be someone else. You supposed you aren’t you anymore - you’re Fawn. Fawn doesn’t struggle with nudes. Fawn takes great nudes. 

You glance at yourself in the mirror. You end up trying a few poses, trying to not put emphasis on your long legs or stomach rolls. You settle on your knees  - back slightly arched, one hand splayed on your thigh. Not too lewd.

You snap the photo, shifting your body a bit as you take another. The routine continues a few more times before you pause to look at the photos. 

You decide the second one is the best. You move to crop as much of the background out as you can, including your face. Wisps of your hair remain around your neck but that’s fine. Whatever. Good enough.

You hesitate for a moment, finger lingering on the send button.

What if he doesn’t like it? What if he decides he doesn’t like you? You cringe at the thought. You send the photo and close your phone instantly. 

[photo] - Fawnteeth - 1:55 PM

You hear it ping and slowly click the screen back on.

1:52 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Good girl. Has anyone told you you’re beautiful today, Fawn?”  

You blush.

“ Now someone has. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:52 PM

1:52 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Write it on yourself. We wouldn’t want you to forget if I’m busy and can’t tell you tomorrow morning.”  

“ Okay. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:55 PM

You take a deep breath, grabbing the purple sharpie from beside your knee. Biting down on the cap, you frown, glancing over the expanse of skin thoughtfully. 

How the hell do you write backwards…. You’ll flip the image before you send it.

It’s embarrassing how long you pause, you stare at the pen and your skin. You come to the sad realization this is the first time a man has called you beautiful like… ever. 

You’re smart enough to realize he’s trying to build you up. God, he knows what he’s doing, doesn’t he?

You settle with scribbling the world carefully onto your right thigh. You don’t use the mirror for the photo this time, taking it directly.  

[photo] - Fawnteeth - 1:55 PM

1:55 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Again.”  

You consider asking him where. After considering for a moment, you scribble ‘beautiful’ on your other thigh. It’s not huge and written towards your knee, but it’s readable. 

[photo] - Fawnteeth - 1:56 PM

1:56 PM  - WebRigger2099 - “Keep going.”  

You wonder where - not your thighs again you decide. After some effort you manage to scribble it carefully above your panty waistband, crawling from your hip and across your stomach. 

This time you have to use the mirror. You settle back into that kneeling pose and take a few shots.

You pick the favorite, flipping it so the text can actually be read. You crop it again, cutting off your shoulders and part of your arm. 

[photo]  - Fawnteeth - 1:57 PM

1:57 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Good. That’s enough.”  

“ Here I expected something lewd. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:57 PM

 1:57 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Now pull your panties to the side and show me your pussy.”  

Your cunt throbs, making your thighs snap together. He isn’t even talking, it it’s words on a fucking screen . It’s unfair how effortlessly arousing Web is. 

You could say no. You don’t think he’d be upset if you said no. He had spoken a dozen times over about consent in the past week, reaffirming to you that if you thought it was too much that you were welcome to say so. All it took was you typing yellow or red. 

You don’t.

“ Mkay. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:58 PM

You end up sitting back on your ass, legs apart. You see the dark mark on your panties in between your legs. You almost shutter pulling the cloth aside. You feel your slickness on your fingers and wipe it away with your inner thigh. 

You see yourself through your phone, legs spread and the hints of the words written on your thighs make you freeze. 

You settle with closing your eyes to take the picture. You don’t crop it this time - but your face is still missing from the shot regardless. Just a hint of the black cloth over your chin. Your face is warm both from your cheeks and your breath now. 

You click send and wait patiently for his reply.

[photo] - Fawnteeth - 1:58 PM

 It comes instantly.

1:58 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Now shove the marker inside.”  

Your eyes widen.

1:58 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Take a picture so I can see all the writing and the marker inside you.”  

You grab the top of the marker and cap it, flipping it in your fingers.

“ I’ll try. ” - Fawnteeth - 1:59 PM

The marker is cold. You cringe as you press it against your overheated pussy, flinching as you run it along your opening. After a deep breath you slip it into your opening. You couldn’t exactly feel it - it was more like your fingers.

You’ve never bought a toy, knowing your roommates would rip the package open to see what you ordered, nosy as they are, and it’s not like you could order it to your childhood home. There are some things even you know better than to do. 

Slowly, you kneel again, your hips up in the air as you see the small white and purple thing in between your thighs. 

The last time you took a nude was before college. You chickened out of sending it to your boyfriend at the time. Now you’re just thankful you never got to second base with him. 

You take the picture, eyes closed again. Like that somehow made what you were doing more modest and less slutty. 

Is it slutty? It’s not like you’re sending it to anyone but Web. But also… who is Web?

[photo] - Fawnteeth - 2:02 PM

2:03 PM - WebRigger2099 - “ Good girl. I’m posting this as an album on my page for everyone to see. I’ll blur the background for your privacy, and you already have your mask on.”

“ I thought this was supposed to be practice? :’c ” - Fawnteeth - 2:03 PM

You slip the marker from yourself and put your panties back on correctly. You cringe at the cold wetness. 

 2:03 PM - WebRigger2099 - “I find it best to practice by doing.”  

“ I guess that makes sense. It’s the first time I’ve sent that to anyone on here. Can you keep the one with my crotch in it private? ” - Fawnteeth - 2:03 PM

2:03 PM - WebRigger2099 - “You did good. Lighting and the perfect background are nice, but it's not realistic. Not everyone has perfectly angled windows and lamps to make shots. This is raw. Vulnerable. And yes, I can keep those two private.”  

“ Thanks. My room is kinda a mess… You’re nice, Web. ” - Fawnteeth - 2:03 PM

 2:03 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Just respectful, and not that much. You have low bars, Fawn. Careful someone doesn’t take advantage of them.”  

“ You haven’t. ” - Fawnteeth - 2:03 PM

2:03 PM - WebRigger2099 - “You just shoved a marker up your cunt for me without even questioning it.”  

“ I think you’d be fine if I had said no. When do I get to see it? ” - Fawnteeth - 2:04 PM

2:04 PM - WebRigger2099 - “I suppose you earned it.”

His hands are huge, his chest is broad and clearly the same guy in the photo… and…

Your eyes widen at his dick. The sweatpants bulge in his profile pic is a fucking beast. You had asked him how long it was before, shyly, and he said eight inches. Sheepishly, you told yourself you’d fetch a ruler to see what that would be like in person. 

You’d been too nervous to follow through.

He’s wide, too, his log-like member swollen with arousal. The dark brown skin fades to a milder tan as your eyes finally leave his bulge, trailing up the muscular torso. You swear you see a bead of sweat running down his abs, but you realize that it's yours .

You’re sweating, forehead moist, wiping away the rest with a glide of the back of your hand.

Like all the pictures he had of himself in his gallery, the picture cuts off at the beginning of his neck. This one also cuts off near the knees at the bottom.

“ Jesus christ. ” - Fawnteeth - 2:07 PM

“ Did I do that?. ” - Fawnteeth - 2:07 PM

2:07 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Would you be proud of yourself if you did?”  

“ I’d feel special. ” - Fawnteeth - 2:07 PM

2:08 PM - WebRigger2099 - “You’re special, Fawn. Do you know what I would do if you were in front of me right now?”  

You sink on your thighs as his words. ‘You’re special’ makes you almost tear up. You’re absolutely charmed by him.

Slowly, you lay on the floor, hovering your phone above your face. It’s hard not to grin, chewing your lip red as you think over your reply.

“ No, can you tell me? ” - Fawnteeth - 2:08 PM 

You feel accomplished at that. You’re being so smooth and cool. 

You wait patiently, crossing your legs and bouncing one of them in the air.

He doesn’t reply. You feel sweat gathering at the back of your neck. You move from lounging casually to sat cross legged before your mirror. You debate sending another message. 

You do not send another message - that would make you look desperate, and you are definitely not desperate. That has to be a massive turnoff anyways - after all, he knows what he’s doing, he’s incredibly attractive and hung. He’s probably so sure of himself. Pestering him would just annoy him. 

It isn’t even five minutes you wait before you decide to do anything but stare at your phone. You change into loose pajama pants and toss your shamefully wet panties into the laundry hamper. 

You’re halfway through cleaning your room when you hear it. 

Your phone pings and, embarrassingly, you drop the bra you were holding to rush for your bed. Feeling like a kid on christmas, your fingers shake as you punch in your passcode and pull up the notification. 

2:15 PM  - WebRigger2099 - “I’m sorry. I have to go for a few hours.”  

Your stomach sinks. You think you might be sick.

“ Oh. Okay. ” - Fawnteeth - 2:15 PM

2:15 PM - WebRigger2099 - “I can message you again tonight after 8.”  

“ I’ll hold you to that. ” - Fawnteeth - 2:15 PM

Okay. It isn’t your fault, right? Something’s very clearly up with his life. 

Frowning, you force yourself take a deep breath to calm yourself.

You investigate his picture, his bedroom is neat and simple. It’s clearly not a hotel room - it’s got some personal cozy touches and you can see some brick outside the window behind his shoulder. The sheets are messy and the blankets are mismatched. He’s probably just some normal guy, maybe he works in an office and just likes his body.

And… bondage. 

Y’know - average weird secret pervert things. Hopefully he isn’t married . You didn’t see a ring on either of his hands or even an indent from one he might have taken off for the photos. 

Your eyes eventually drift to the marker discarded on your floor, the end still slick. If he was some kind of weird pervert, what does that just make you?

You look down at your stomach and the small ‘beautiful’ written carefully on it. You need to take a shower and get this off.

You sneak through the house with a change of clothes and your nice shampoo you don’t share with anyone. Your house has one bathroom with a half decent shower, technically being a 2 ½ bath house. 

You don’t like the other bathroom that Kore and Babette mostly use. It only has a bathtub - the shower head doesn’t work. 

You hop in the shower and are horrified at your discovery. It’s not coming off. The writing doesn’t come off with the dove soap or Aurora’s washing puff. Not even scratching it with your nails does anything but vaguely fade it. 

Great. 

You try your best to not freak out. You’ll dress like it’s winter until you can wash it off your skin. You should have asked Web if you should use a sharpie. 

You wash your hair and dry off the best you can. Thankfully, your loose shorts and loose t-shirt hide the marks as long as you don't let the shorts ride up your thighs too much. 

You return to your room and move your chair back into its place. You don’t have work today and you can hear the movement that told you one of your roomies had just gotten home.

Your stomach growls. 

You’re hungry - three meals, you remind yourself, Web always somewhere close to the front of your mind. Technically this would your first meal, you did just wake up and… fuck. Anxiously, you tug down your pajama shorts. Lesson learned, that shit doesn’t come off in the shower. You make a note to ask Web for a marker to get that does wash off. 

You find yourself questioning why some random faceless man on the internet is the motivation you have to take care of yourself. Shaking away the thought, you explore the tiny freezer stuffed with mostly frozen chicken nuggets. You frown, debating ordering takeout again. You settle on boiling noodles and smothering them in pesto and salt. 

You head out to the living room - the room is eternally cluttered like the rest of your college house. The ceiling light doesn’t work, so you and your roomies had hung fairy lights everywhere. The drapes are pulled back to let light in - the lesbian flag with markiplier’s face on it in full display to the whole neighborhood. Four couches meant you had plenty of space to sit, falling in the far corner from the only other person in the room - Aurora.

The bubbly blonde is chomping away at her food, phone propped up on the stained coffee table as some sort of video plays. You eat while listening to something about a person named ‘illuminaughty’. 

Aurora looked up from her bowl of fruit loops from the couch, she smiled through a mouthful, cheeks as stuffed as a chipmunk. "Mornin'!" she grinned, never one for table manners.

She wiped her mouth with the back of her arm, "You slept in late." 

Her eyes looked you up and down, a perfectly tweezed eyebrow raising to look at your leg. "Were you drawing on yourself?"

You looked down, a purple "L" in sharpie just barely poking out of your shorts. You feel a chill go down your spine. You are fucking mortified. 

"Uh...yeah," you say quickly, your brain scrambling for a moment to make up some lie. You couldn't just confess that you'd written on yourself and shoved the marker up your pussy just because a man you didn't even know the name of told you too. "Got bored last night, y'know."

Aurora shrugs, thankfully dropping the subject as she turns her attention back to her bowl of sugar cereal.

You promptly get, desperately pretending that she didn’t notice your sexy leg writing, and power walk to your bedroom. It takes effort to not slam the door. 

You stay in your room for the rest of the day because you sure as fuck aren’t hanging around your roomies now. Aurora would question you again - it’s Aurora, and you can’t exactly explain away wearing long pants in June.

So you break out your laptop and watch Delicious in Dungeon. You always have a habit of marathoning random shows on Netflix and it passes the time better than staring at the wall, waiting for Web to message you. 

You got popcorn as a snack, maybe you’d eat weird monster food too. Senshi does make it look delicious. You chuckle, realizing the name matches.

Hours passed and the sun is barely setting before you consider taking a nap.

 8:00 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Hello Fawn.”  

You sit up and snatch your phone up at the ping.

“ Hey. Everything good? ” - Fawnteeth - 8:00 PM

 8:00 PM - WebRigger2099 - “It’s fine, just a sudden schedule change. Things moved up quicker than I expected, but I should be done for the night.”  

“ Okay. Well… You never answered my question, Web. ” - Fawnteeth - 8:01 PM

“ Also. How do I get sharpie off my skin. ” - Fawnteeth - 8:01 PM

 8:01 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Oh Fawn…”  

“ I thought I could scrub it off, if I’m honest. I figured… you.. might… know… ” - Fawnteeth - 8:02 PM

8:02 PM - WebRigger2099 - “I do, but maybe I should let you keep it on until it fades normally. A lesson to be more careful. Better this than something more serious.”  

“ I should have figured as much. ” - Fawnteeth - 8:02 PM

8:03 PM - WebRigger2099 - “I’m just glad you didn’t shove it deeper. You can’t put things inside without a flare, it’ll get stuck. I didn’t realize I needed to explain things like that to you, but I know better now.”  

“ I know that. ” - Fawnteeth - 8:03 PM

8:03 PM - WebRigger2099 - “But not that permanent markers are hard to remove.”  

“ Yes. ” - Fawnteeth - 8:03 PM

8:03 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Fawn you are delightfully foolish.”  

“ I’m glad you enjoy my suffering. ” - Fawnteeth - 8:03 PM

8:03 PM - WebRigger2099 - “I enjoy your happiness too.”  

“ You’re good with words. ” - Fawnteeth - 8:03 PM

8:03 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Better with my hands, but you’ll learn that later.”  

“ I’ll make sure to keep that in mind. ” - Fawnteeth - 8:04 PM

“ Well. Now that I’ve made myself a fool, I hope I haven’t turned you off. ” - Fawnteeth - 8:04 PM

8:04 PM - WebRigger2099 - “Hardly. I believe we left off before at ‘what I would do to you if I was there’.”  

“ Thank you for mentioning it so.. I didn’t have to bring it up again. I’m still quite curious. ” - Fawnteeth - 8:04 PM

 8:04 PM - WebRigger2099 - “You remember the picture I sent you?”  

“ I do. ” - Fawnteeth - 8:04 PM

 8:04 PM - WebRigger2099 - “I want you to order something. I’ll pay, naturally, but I figure it would be more comfortable if I didn’t know your address so quickly.”  

“ Yeah. I think that would take some time. A toy? ” - Fawnteeth - 8:04 PM

 8:05 PM - WebRigger2099 - “I have a list. Run away with the money and you won’t hear my answer.”  

“ I won’t. But are you sure you want to invest anything in me yet? ” - Fawnteeth - 8:05 PM

 8:05 PM - WebRigger2099 - “You’ve invested at least 3 days in me with that marker.”

“ True enough. ” - Fawnteeth - 8:05 PM

 8:06 PM - WebRigger2099 - “I’m comfortable financially. This isn’t the hit it might be for a girl your age. You’ve earned some nice things.”  

“ Oh. I see. Thank you. ” - Fawnteeth - 8:06 PM

 8:06 PM - WebRigger2099 - “No using them without my permission, understood?”  

“ Understood, sir. ” - Fawnteeth - 8:06 PM

He sends you the link to an adult website. Your cheeks flush as your screen is filled with all sorts of sex toys and other lewd imagery. Your eyes flicker to your door for a moment, anxiety simmering low in your belly as the thought of someone walking into your room and seeing what you were looking at flashes through your mind. You bite your lip, feeling like a nervous teenager under your father’s roof once again.

You notice that the cart has been pre filled with a number of items: A 6 inch silicone dildo; a Lovense egg vibrator; nipple clamps; a rabbit vibrator; a bottle of water-based lube; and a set of black lingerie that matches your face mask.

Your eyes linger on the cart total. That’s more than your paycheck .

“ You sure? ” - Fawnteeth - 8:09 PM

 8:09 PM - WebRigger2099 - “If I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t have sent you the link. There is a gift card code: HGJ-8734-KHW. It’ll cover the expenses and leave a little extra for you to browse and select one or two items that catch your interest.”  

“ Okay. Thank you. ” - Fawnteeth - 8:09 PM

 8:10 PM - WebRigger2099 - “You’re welcome, Fawn. I take care of my pets.”  

[sebstanaddict]

Code Daddy Supreme

Sebastian Stan x Reader Unhinged One Shot

Summary : Sebastian is reader's adorkable, chaotic yet cute boyfriend. One day when reader is struggling to fix broken code in her web application project, Sebastian offered to help but instead of helping he is making things worse.. or is he..?

A/N: This is just something I wrote out of a fever dream while being in a sleep deprived, stress induced state as I try to finish my web application project (yes, I don't just write fanfics, I write code full time XD) . It's based on my life as a web developer so excuse me if I include some codes here. But I promise they're human readable ;) Seb here is a funny, adorkable, chaotic mess of a boyfriend but we love him anyway ;) Enjoy and please vote and comment, I would really appreciate it. Thank you!

Warning: none at all, just an all out funny, unhinged and ridiculous story, somewhat like a sitcom XD

Word count: 944 words

Read more Sebastian and Bucky one shots here

---

It was supposed to be a quiet Sunday. Y/N was curled up on the couch, tackling a web development project that was due the next day. She was in the zone—until, of course, the code rebelled.  

“WHY?!” she shouted at her laptop, yanking her headphones off. “Why won’t you just WORK?”  

From the other room, Sebastian burst in wearing pajama pants, no shirt, and wielding a spatula like a sword. “Who dares disturb my pancake zen?”  

“This stupid project!” Y/N growled, gesturing wildly at her laptop. “Every time I try to fix one thing, another error pops up! It’s like Whack-a-Mole, but with coding and existential dread!”  

Sebastian leaned casually against the couch. “Want me to fix it?”  

She blinked at him. “No.”  

“Yes.”  

“No, Seb. The last time you ‘helped,’ my laptop shut down and played a MIDI version of “Highway to Hell” on repeat.”  

“And did it sound amazing?” he asked, grinning.  

“That’s not the point!”  

But it was too late—Sebastian had already plopped down beside her, cracking his knuckles with the bravado of someone who doesn’t know what an IDE is but thinks they could totally rebuild Google.  

“Alright,” he said. “Time for me to hack the planet.”  

Y/N groaned. “Seb, no..”  

“Seb, YES!”

He grabbed her laptop and began typing with the unhinged enthusiasm of a mad scientist who’d just discovered how to turn broccoli into candy. His first move? Replacing all her variable names with things like `CaptainFixThis`, `ErrorWho?`, and `TotallyNotABug`.  

“Sebastian,” she said, rubbing her temples. “What are you doing?”  

“Rebranding,” he said, as if it were obvious.  

“You can’t just rename everything and hope for the best!”  

“Oh, can’t I?” he shot back, now aggressively typing.  

He added emojis to every line of code:  

```  

function saveTheDay() { 💪🔥  

    console.log("Sebastian is here to fix it! 😎✨");  

    return true;  

}  

```  

“SEBASTIAN. WHY ARE THERE EMOJIS IN MY CODE?”  

“Because the code needs to feel appreciated,” he said, completely serious, adding even more lines:

```

// You’re doing amazing, sweetie  

function runCode() {  

    console.log("You’re the best, code! You can do it!");  

}  

```

“Seb, stop typing compliments!” Y/N shrieked.

“This is important!” he shouted back. “The code needs to feel supported!”

She couldn’t help but facepalm.

At one point, he opened a separate file titled `BackupPlan` and wrote this:  

```  

if (everythingFails) {  

    summonTheAvengers();  

}  

```  

“Seb, that’s not even real code!”  

“It is now,” he said, smirking like he’d just reinvented the wheel.  

He then proceeded to write what he called "the ultimate fix." : 

```  

while(true) {  

    console.log("Just vibe and it’ll work.");  

    everythingIsFine = true;  

}  

```  

“That’s an infinite loop!” Y/N screeched.  

“Exactly,” he said. “Infinite solutions for infinite problems.”  

She lunged for the laptop, but he was too quick. He held the laptop above his head while somehow still typing.

“SEBASTIAN, GIVE IT BACK!”  

“NOT UNTIL I FINISH!” he yelled, putting the laptop on his lap and turned his back on her. “TRUST THE CHAOS!”  

“I definitely do NOT trust the chaos!” she protested as she peeked over his shoulder, trying to see what he was doing all the while her stomach was filled with dread.

Then came the pièce de résistance. He opened Google, typed “how to fix broken code,” ignored all the actual solutions, and clicked on a forum post titled: “Sacrifice to the Debugging Gods.”

“Uh… what are you doing?” she asked nervously.  

“Something foolproof,” he said, grabbing a nearby candle.  

“Seb, no—”  

But he was already chanting nonsense in a deep, dramatic voice. “O GREAT SPIRIT OF JAVASCRIPT.. I OFFER THIS SACRED WAX STICK IN EXCHANGE FOR YOUR MERCY!”  

Before she could stop him, he blew out the candle, slammed her laptop shut, and whispered, “It is done.”  

“Sebastian, I SWEAR TO—”  

“Wait for it.”  

With a flourish, he reopened the laptop and hit “run.”

And then… everything broke.  

Her once-polished website now looked like a clown vomited onto a computer screen. Bright neon colors, text bouncing like a screensaver from the ‘90s, and a random image of Sebastian flexing in a Captain America hoodie plastered across the footer.  

“What…What the actual.. WHAT DID YOU DO?!”  

“Relax,” he said, unbothered. “This is just step one.”  

“Step one of what?!”  

“Recalibrating the space-time continuum,” he said, completely deadpan.  

At that exact moment, her apartment lights flickered, her phone started playing the “Avengers” theme unprompted, and—somehow—her toaster beeped, despite not being plugged in.  

“Sebastian,” she whispered, wide-eyed, “I think you actually broke reality.”  

He looked smug. “Told you I was good.”  

Before she could yell, her laptop chimed cheerfully. The browser opened, and her website was… perfect. No bugs, no errors. Everything worked.  

She stared at the screen. Then at Sebastian. Then back at the screen. “HOW?!”  

He shrugged, grabbing the spatula again. “Sometimes, babe, you just have to trust the chaos.”  

“But—Seb—this makes NO SENSE!”  

“Neither does Bucky surviving a fall off a mountain, but here we are,” he said, kissing her forehead. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to finish my pancakes. You’re welcome.”  

She sat there, frozen, as her laptop hummed happily like nothing had happened. The lights stopped flickering, the toaster went silent, and the “Avengers” theme faded into nothingness.  

She stared after him, still holding the now-functional laptop. “I live with an actual lunatic.”  

From the kitchen, Sebastian’s voice rang out. “You live with a genius! Love you!”  

For the rest of the day, she tried to figure out Sebastian’s chaotic “fix.” Meanwhile, he strutted around the apartment wearing sunglasses and calling himself “Code Daddy Supreme.”  

The kicker? She later discovered the reason the code worked was because Sebastian had accidentally deleted an entire block of problematic logic while trying to format a smiley face.  

As for the weird flickering of lights, the “Avengers” theme playing from her phone and the beep from her toaster? Well, not everything can be explained and she thought maybe, just maybe, Sebastian really did recalibrate the space-time continuum.

[magnuspanoptes]

Came across your blog and fell in love with your takes on arguably the most important dynamic in tma (like it made me miss them and actually start a relisten after like never finding the energy to after the finale years back). Do you happen to write any fics or have any fic recs?

RAHHH thank you!! this is exactly what i'm hoping to achieve every time i post yet another one of my delusional comparatives 🙂‍↕️

and i don't write fics but i do have recs!

I'd suffer all if you'd tell me, by RavenXavier is definitive S4 silence of the lambs / red dragon prison visit fic. to me.

Death Be Not Proud, by Startless - is another prison visit fic, but it's an AU where jon chose to die in his coma and woke up as an avatar of the end.

Pinned in vain desire, by statuscrows is about jon slowly developing compulsion which causes problems for elias :) they probably write the most in-character elias. he's not nice, but he's fond of jon. i recommend, like, every single one of their je fics. nobody writes beholding powers quite like them, almost every fic is based around an aspect of the beholding. Skeptic is an AU where jon finds gertrude's tape on the first day of the job. statuscrows always writes jon with his early seasons abrasiveness and mean streak intact, which is really all i want from jon's characterisation. i don't want nice jon, take that awayyy; Ritual misery is set immediately after 160 and is doing more interesting things with the web than all of S5 put together; From his prospect high - jonathan sims learns to See; Quenched in darkness you shall see - this is noncon and dead dove. read the tags! reccing this because ritual voyeurism to please the beholding is a real and true concept.

Perchance to Dream, by parva_dae and once upon a dream, by indelibleangel - are dream fics, inspired by MAG 120. first one is a snippet of elias poking around in jon's head and worsening his fear and paranoia. he would do that ^_^ and in the second one they talk. and kiss.

and lilies, by kototyph - i read two chapters while it was still ongoing but it's finished now and i haven't gotten around to it yet, but from what i remember this had, like, revolutionary elias characterisation. he's a disaster. a very well put together, beautiful disaster.

also these two one shots they wrote for jonelias week which i liked very much :3

something different crosses the threshold, by aguntoaknifefight - amnesia. classic.

a heavenly madness, by roundthedecay - this is one of the very few, proper gothic fics with these two. there's a cursed oil painting. jon's having his life ruined by said cursed painting. and jonah/elias gets a proper gothic villain treatment.

Worn to Shadows, by Ash_Rabbit, which somewhat satisfies my bluebeard itch, but it's an AU with no institute.

everything Candentia has ever written, basically. they write entity horror really well, and i think almost every one of their je fics are squarely in the horror genre, which i appreciate very much. i'm here for the horror. and you have to check out Beholding's Own if only for the jonah chapters. it doesn't have that older mentor shaping the younger in their own image dynamic because this an AU in which they're childhood friends. but it's so good. it's so good!! the georgian jonah chapters are exquisite. the tone, voice, word choice, atmosphere, general everything. also, some serious wuthering heights stuff happening between these two. like, they get it. they get it! they've also written a bluebeard (and cupid & psyche) adjacent fic - darkly, which is a fairy tale au. and Where Hope and Reason Part is tagged dead dove for the detailed descriptions of eye gore. which is my thing. we need more of that.

Professional Distance - takes place during the birthday tape, has an excellent elias voice. he's evil. and enamoured by jon. and evil.

a glass essay, by fairbanks is jonpeter and only tangentially lonelyeyes and jonelias, but it's one of the most gorgeously written fics i've had the pleasure of reading. excellent isolation narrative and has symbolism which pays off in an unexpectedly perfect way. and as a guy who does not care about peter lukas or any ships involving him in the slightest. well. this got to me.

Scenes from an Epicenter, by NeverwinterThistle which is set during S3 and the first je fic i recall reading. the bit where elias takes jon home after distortion helen drops him in his office is canon to me <3

Dark Square Bishop, by Blissymbolics, exactly what it says on the tin. homoerotic chess match at the end of the world.

[thollandsgirl2013]

𝐒𝐞𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐭 𝐈𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬

Parings → Peter Parker x Reader

Warnings → fluff, angst, fear

Summary → You have powers and Peter finds out about it.

2012 – New York City

The afternoon sun shone brightly as you giggled from the swing, your dad gently pushing you higher. Your mom stood a few feet away, capturing the moment with her camera. These park visits were your favorite—just you, your parents, and the simple joys of laughter.

But then the sky tore open.

At first, you stared, wide-eyed, mesmerized by the swirling colors and the vastness above. But the terror on your parents' faces snapped you back to reality. Your dad's voice quivered as he called your name, urging you off the swing. People screamed, chaos spreading like wildfire as they rushed out of the park.

You ran, clutching your mom's hand, weaving through the panic, dodging debris as buildings crumbled around you. Fire and smoke filled the air. Your family ducked under a slab of fallen concrete, trying to shield themselves. And then, there he was—Loki, his scepter glowing ominously.

In the confusion, you felt the impact before you saw it—a blue beam from the scepter striking you directly. Pain didn’t come; instead, everything went black. The last thing you heard was your parents screaming your name.

---

That was a long time ago, but that moment still haunts you. Now you know the truth: the blue beam was from the Tesseract. It didn’t hurt you. Instead, your body absorbed its power, transforming you. Invisibility, telekinesis, teleportation—just like Violet Parr from The Incredibles.

You often considered using these powers for good, but your parents were adamant that you remain hidden. They were overprotective, terrified that if anyone found out, you'd be taken away, experimented on. Your dad, a scientist, knew too well what could happen. So you lived quietly, blending in, always cautious.

---

It was another frantic morning for Peter Parker. He sprinted through the halls, skidding to a stop outside the classroom. Stupid robbers, he thought. Stopping a robbery before school wasn't exactly how he'd wanted to start his sophomore year.

He pushed open the door. The teacher was already mid-introduction.

"I'm so sorry I'm late," Peter panted, offering an apologetic smile.

The teacher raised an eyebrow but waved it off. "First class, so I'll let it slide. But don't make it a habit."

Peter exhaled in relief and scanned the room, spotting an empty seat next to you. He slid into the chair, but as soon as he did, his Spidey sense tingled. There was something... different. Not dangerous, just... odd.

He glanced over at you, his curiosity piqued. You noticed his stare and shifted uncomfortably.

"Can I help you?" You asked, breaking the silence. "I'm Y/n, by the way."

Peter blinked, snapping out of his daze. "I-I um, I'm Parker, I mean, P-Peter Parker." He fumbled through his introduction.

You chuckled softly. "Nice to meet you, Peter Parker. You don’t have to be so nervous. I don’t bite." You smiled, and Peter felt his face heat up. She seems nice, he thought. But that strange feeling still lingered.

---

Over the next few days, you and Peter started hanging out more, often with his best friend Ned. They were both so sweet, and soon, you found yourself developing a crush on Peter. Little did you know, Peter felt the same, though something was still nagging him—his instincts telling him there was more to you.

---

It was a sunny Sunday afternoon, and you were waiting outside the theater for Peter. As usual, he was late. Glancing around, you noticed a commotion nearby. Without thinking, you rushed toward it.

The Rhino was rampaging through the streets, smashing cars and sending people into a frenzy. Spider-Man was already on the scene, swinging between buildings, taking civilians to safety and also trying to web Rhino up. But Rhino was too strong, and even Spider-Man was struggling.

You ducked into a nearby alley, your heart pounding. You had to help. Concentrating, you turned invisible and slipped into the chaos. Using your telekinesis, you lifted chunks of debris, hurling them at Rhino. It was enough to throw him off balance, giving Spider-Man the chance to knock him down and web him up.

When you saw everything was clear you went back into the alley. You made a purple circle to teleport back. Just as you were about to teleport back to the theater, a familiar voice stopped you in your tracks.

"Holy shit!"

Your heart dropped. You turned slowly, expecting to meet Peter's worried gaze, "I-I'm so sorry you had to find out like—" you stammered. But instead, you were faced with Spider-Man, his white eyes wide in surprise.

"Wha—SPIDER-MAN! Oh my God, please don't tell anyone about me. Please, I didn’t hurt anyone, I promise! I just wanted to help." You nearly cried out in fear—fear that he would report you to the authorities, who would take you away from your parents to experiment on you.

Spider-Man took a step forward, raising his hands. "Hey, hey, it’s okay. I won’t tell anyone. I know how it feels to be different."

"Thank you. But... how can I trust you?" You asked hesitantly. Spider-Man tilted his head slightly to the side, as if in thought. He seemed to be debating with himself before he sighed. "I have an idea. Come with me." He took a step toward you, and you instinctively stepped back. "Hey, it's okay. I'm not going to hurt you. Do you trust me?" His voice soft.

Do you trust him? Your parents always told you not to trust strangers, but this is Spider-Man. Spider-Man isn’t a stranger, right? Hesitantly, you nodded your head.

Suddenly, Spider-Man yanked you toward him, shooting a web somewhere above before jumping with you in his arms. You let out a startled yelp, clinging to him for dear life.

He landed with a soft thud, and you quickly opened your eyes, jumping away from him as soon as your feet hit the ground.

"Are you crazy?! What is wrong with you?" You yelled, your voice high-pitched with panic.

He chuckled, which only made you angrier.

"This isn't funny!"

You noticed you're at a rooftop. "Why are we here? Are you going to murder me or something?" You asked, eyeing him curiously.

Spider-Man let out a small chuckle. "No, Y/n. You're adorable when you're mad."

"H-How do you know my name?"

He sighed, fiddling with his gloved fingers. "I know you have powers, so it's only fair you know who I am."

You were puzzled by his words, but before you could stop him, he pulled off his mask. You gasped. The sweet, shy, introverted boy with the warm brown eyes—Peter Parker—was Spider-Man. You didn’t know what to say.

"Hey, Y/n," Peter said softly, giving you a shy wave.

"Peter." You said softly.

He scratched the back of his neck. "Yeah… surprise?"

"Y-You're Spider-Man. Holy shit! That’s why your voice sounded familiar."

"Why didn’t you tell me about your powers?" Peter asked gently, just curious.

"I didn’t want you to think I’m a freak," you said quietly. "Why didn’t you tell me?"

"Same reason, I guess. But also, I wanted to protect the people I care about."

"You care about me?"

"Yeah," Peter admitted, blushing.

You leaned in and kissed his cheek. "Maybe, the movie we were supposed to watch today… we can make it a date?" You asked shyly.

"That would be great," Peter smiled, his eyes lighting up.

‎∗ ࣪ ˖༺ 𓆩☆𓆪 ༻˖ ࣪ ∗

[eye-may]

A Post Where I Clumsily Trundle Through An Incoherent Web Of Thoughts On The Discrepancies Between OLC (Wayne Sleep) Mistoffelees and OBC (Timothy Scott) Mistoffelees, Specifically Regarding Their Vocal Tracks

I sit in a ✨rapt contemplation✨ of how much I do and don't think Mistoffelees should sing, based on the interpretation of the character I have scrunged together after two months' worth of obsessing over the subject, trying to make sense of the expansive history, and all the variations, of CATS. It doesn't help that, as far as I can tell, the most enigmatic (read: inconsistent as fuck, affectionately) fixture on the franchise is its own Conjuring Cat.

Read below the cut if you're at all interested in me trying to transliterate my thoughts! I promise you it will be confusing. ❤️

The gentle, vaguely mysterious way Mistoffelees sings "Have you been an alumnus of heaven or hell?" in the OLC recording is actually so beautiful and so personal to me. I could rationalize ad infinitum why it just makes sense for the inexplicably magical cat to have this line, but suffice to say: it just works. And of all the London-based productions in which I've heard this specific arrangement, my favorite delivery of that line still belongs to Sleep. His airy, almost pensive (?) inflection stands out so much from the rest of the cast, in a way that I think really befits the character.

Then he goes on to sing Jenny's number, again, with such conspicuous gentleness and sweetness. Everything he sings sounds almost like a lullaby, a trapping that works well for a song about a cat that lazes about and sleeps all day. it's a stark contrast to Munkustrap's operatic, romantic grandiosity. to say nothing of the fact that the Mr. Mistoffelees instrumental motif is what LEADS UP to the first line of that song; in my opinion, that's a vestigial indication of the original intention to have Mistoffelees narrate this part of the show.

When it's time for Old Deutoronomy to arrive, Mistoffelees opens up the lyrical announcement, again, with a voice that is soporific, melodic, gentle, sweet. He sounds youthful and unassuming, and yet is clearly a member of the tribe who is knowledgeable of its hierarchy and its history, and one who is so intimately trusted that its leadership bequeaths him the responsibility of making introductions, of musically guiding all and sundry through various beats and developments. I've heard others refer to this version of Mistoffelees as something of an 'assistant' to Munkustrap (shout out to this post, which singularly kept me from going insane while I tried to write this), a righthand cat as it were. I think later on, the closest we have to such an entity is Alonzo, the Secondary Protector; but this, in my opinion, is an incomparable archetype. Wayne Sleep's Mistoffelees is (I think) the most physically diminunitive version of the character there has ever been in a professional production. (Maybe except for Dane Wagner, whose actual height I cannot find anywhere on the internet, so jury's out). He doesn't cut the figure, per se, of a trusty backup during a violent altercation. Rather, his position on the community ladder is attributed to his acuity, which he conveys in his lilting, unaffected explanations. There's not exactly a pretense of showmanship, and Mistoffelees doesn't seem to come off esteemed as an entertainer. Rather, he's a member of the tribe who, although he's small and sweet-sounding...proverbially missable in a crowd...there's something about him that gives the rest of the tribe the impression that he's worth listening to. As much as, even, the tall and dignified Munkustrap, or the barely-hinged Rum Tum Tugger.

This Mistoffelees, despite all that, is not above casual comingling. He's not sanctimonious or high-flown...at least not if his adorably repulsed line delivery during Tugger's number is anything to go on.

I feel like when the roles were changed for Broadway (something something contracts something something principals), and Mistoffelees's narration was shuffled to the Mungoteazer number, the beat of Mistoffelees mistakenly attempting to lead the song and then getting chastised by Munkustrap was a cheeky nod to the original arrangement. In a metacontextual way, we DO expect Mistoffelees to sing Jenny's song. Even if you're not familiar with the OLC version, his motif still cues him in for it. Subsequently, it became his motif teasing his cue...only for him (and the audience) to realize that he was mistaken.

Obviously I have no way of knowing if that beat was, in fact, acted out in the original Broadway production with Timothy Scott (I suspect that it was not, and that Valentin Baraian was the trailblazer in the original Vienna run, and Lindsay Chambers's seemingly de-aged Mistoffelees in the early 90s further cemented the Woobie-fied awkward version of the character) but either way, this makes it so that the audience is acquainted with Munkustrap as a revered narrator, thitherto without much of an impression either way of how Mistoffelees is regarded by the rest of the cats.

In taking on the Puppet Show sequence, Mistoffelees's air of leadership and wisdom is abated, and filled in with an image of an eccentric showman. This isn't the least bolstered by Timothy Scott's cryptoid make-up, and his express desire to play Mistoffelees as bombastic and fascinating, rather than cute. His animation of piles of trash into dirigible puppets is the most ostentatious foreshadowing of his magic that there has ever been in any replica version; therefore, rather than the audience feeling as though Mistoffelees should be listened to, and that he's an unassuming and affable guide...they're given the impression that they should be mystified. Scott's Mistoffelees is replete with showmanship and grandiosity, in a more literal and traditional sense than Munkustrap or Tugger. He introduces himself before Tugger ever gets a chance to, resoundingly clapping himself on the back for his aptitude as a magician (the greatest magicians have something to learn...etc). In my opinion, this doesn't come off as egoism so much as it does a collateral feature of trained stage presence. He has bits. He's a professional.

Too much of a professional, even, to tease Tugger during the latter's number. I suppose the "bore" line is sung by Munkustrap and Alonzo at least, like it usually is in Broadway-based adaptions. In some productions, I think, Mistoffelees joins them for the delivery to form a trio. But, again, no way for me to know whether that's the case with Scott. I assume that he isn't just because it seems like his version of Mistoffelees is a touch too turgid to be bothered with Tugger at all.

The way he BANGS out Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer in the OBC recording...his voice and inflection so dynamic, using his magic to bolster his showmanship, to entertain, to be a storyteller...it feels very proper for the self-proclaimed magician to present his abilities with such aplomb. (He sings with equally stratospheric energy during Invitation, which Wayne Sleep did not sing in the OL version...and I almost feel like it's too high-energy and playful a tune for the 'gentle guiding' version of the character). He has none of Wayne Sleep's timidity. He is no longer gentle. He's hyper, florid, dynamic, and loud, singing in an unhesitating, playful baritone that takes on a growl during his most dramatic deliveries. Wayne Sleep's and Timothy Scott's versions of Mistoffelees seem almost incomparable.

I think about the characterization of Mistoffelees as vague and aloof, and, you would think there was nobody shyer. I could see that, yes, with Wayne Sleep's Mistoffelees; while he's seemingly comfortable with being the center of attention amid his group of friends, and while he's all too happy to come in clutch very flashily during the eleventh hour, he still gives the impression of softness that one could construe as timidity. He's able and willing to assist Munkustrap, to elucidate in front of a group, to be heard and seen, but it's not too difficult to imagine him reverting to a state of unassuming quietness in any other contexts. It may just be me, but I feel that two "Presto!"'s during his number are almost formative, or at least uncharacteristic and something you'd only hear in such an extenuating context. It's like watching the peaceful, wise mentor abruptly kick ass when the hour is nigh. Is Wayne Sleep...Trojan Horse Mistoffelees...?

Anyway. Timothy Scottfelees, on the other hand, is more difficult to brand as a supposedly avoidant and coy character. He can be aloof, maybe, if the magnitude of his specialness ends up making him truly peerless. But this is the version of the character often called the "consummate showman," and an evidently eager one at that. After dynamically spinning the Mungoteazer yarn, he then goes on to sing about himself for part of his own number, ironically delivering lyrics that are antithetical to the idea of their own subject conveying them. (This is partly why it's fucking stupid that Mistoffelees sings his entire ass own song in the 2019 movie but that's neither here nor there).

But I get it, again, with the contracts and the him needing to sing two songs to have a principal contract blah blah blah blah. I guess the director didn't want him to sing Gumbie Cat and Mungoteazer. I wonder why, if they had him perform the latter to get around casting two additional actors for the mischief twins (and instead had the psychic twins dress up as garbage), that they couldn't simply have him sing Old Deutoronomy like the OLC Mistoffelees did. Instead they initiated the tradition of having Tugger and Munkustrap duet it, when Tugger didn't need that extra singing credit to fit the criteria for a principal contract because he already sings his own number and also Mistoffelees's number. I know it makes sense for Tugger and Munk to be singing it if you subscribe, as seemingly most do, to the interpretation that the two of them are Deutoronomy's sons. But I don't think Mistoffelees's original part precludes that implication. I think it would be neat, even, for the three of them so sing it.

Tangentially, I cannot figure out why John Chester (OLC George) is credited in the studio recording for Old Deutoronomy. When I listen to it, it just sounds like Mistoffelees and Munkustrap alternating, and then the ensemble, and then Brian Blessed (Deut) singing his part. Maybe George is the one to escort him? (Weird that he would be given a track credit for that). Or maybe his voice sounds remarkably similar to either Sleep's or Shankley's and I'm just not able to discern when he is, in fact, singing.

I got all into these mental gymnastics because lately I've been bouncing between the two eras, trying to make sense of the directorial adjustments, and also trying to decide the implications for Mistoffelees's character and which tracks I prefer for him. Incidentally, it's wild to me how inconsistent and evolved the Mistoffelees character is in the grand scheme of CATS. He has a plethora of roles, personalities, and tracking variations the extent to which no other character compares. All of the cats have been interpreted and played differently, of course, depending on the company and the direction. But it seems to me like Mistoffelees is far and away the most varied.

All right. So these are my (barely) conclusive thoughts, formatted handily to mimic the inane back-and-forth constantly beleaguring my internal monologue. Buckle up for some unsolicited, worthless opinions!

Should Mistoffelees sing "The Pied Piper's Assistant," (Broadway), or "Have you been an alumnus of Heaven and Hell"? - The latter! No matter the character's vibe! The inexplicably magical and visually demon-coded character should have this line. It just ✨makes sense.✨

Gumbie Cat - I have grown rather fond, after listening to Wayne Sleep's version, of the idea that Mistoffelees sings this number. That is, however, in no small part due to how well Sleep's lullaby-ish voice works for the tune --- better than, I think, the deeper and more powerful registers you typically hear from Munkustraps. That being said, Mistoffelees singing this demystified him pretty quickly, and arguably ages him up just because you're given the impression that he's privy to, and comfortable with, the tribe's alumni, and furthermore is in a position to express his opinions this way. So all that being said, while I enjoy Wayne Sleep singing Gumbie, in the alternative blip of spacetime where I direct CATS, I'd go the typical route of having Munk sing it.

I think it may be interesting, though, to see a version where Munkustrap and Mistoffelees duet it; and this could be done in a way similar to the Munk/Misto combination for OLC Old Deutoronomy, but in a way where you don't get the impression that Mistoffelees is a peer to Munkustrap. The Broadway Revival seemed to restore bits of the OLC's impressing upon the idea that Mistoffelees is something of an Assistant Director to Munkustrap, just not by singing. (It's stuff like helping her out of her coat, pushing the mop off the stage, moving things around, etc). I really like the idea of Mistoffelees being an adolescent hopeful, sort of shadowing Munkustrap, bottomlessly eager to be helpful, and perhaps even being set up to lead the tribe one day.

All that, granted...I also do like the beat of him getting embarrassed. I could do without it, but I like how it contributes to the interpretation of the character as young and sometimes awkward. God I don't know. o(-<

"The Rum Tum Tugger is a TERRIBLE BORE!" - Mistoffelees should absolutely be the one to have this line. Primarily because it adds that extra vitriolic and playful layer to the supposed relationship between the two characters. And it is also, I think, funny to suggest that Mistoffelees, of all cats, is the one who is not impressed by such prurient behavior, because we see later that he's objectively more impressive and worthy of adulation. (Tugger would agree with me). I honestly think that part of the reason Terrence Mann had so little to contribute to the expansive "Tuggoffelees" discourse is because Mistoffelees wasn't the one to deliver this line in the OBC version. And, secondarily, I prefer a Mistoffelees that isn't peerless, and isn't immune to kiddish ribbing. I have my opinions about how this line should be delivered but that's frankly a whole other post.

Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer - I think we need the OBC version of this somewhere in the CATS ether, but modified. I agree with this post that is does create an issue where the foreshadowing of his magic is too conspicuous, to the point that it knocks the grandiosity of his Hero Moment down a notch when it's time for his big number. I war with this, however, because I love the idea of Mistoffelees using his magic to be an entertainer and a storyteller. I'd love to figure out some kind of synergistic version where Mistoffelees presents the legend of Mungoteazer in song, incorporating his magic, in a way that doesn't preclude the actual existence/presence of Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer. I saw a post floating around recently proffering the possibility of the three of them singing it as a trio...I'm a huge supporter of that idea.

Given currently extant versions of the song, I'd forego the puppet show and have the titular characters sing it, in keeping with the tradition.

So now I'm going right ahead and taking away Mistoffelees's expositions after all that. 😩 Let's continue.

Invitation - He should sing it. I don't feel super strongly about this one, but I simply like it better when Mistoffelees sings it versus Munkustrap. Even when we have the quieter, more kiddish versions of Mistoffelees, it doesn't disrupt those elements of his character. It feels like an exciting moment for an inchoate showman. It also seems to give him a "reason" to burst onto the stage amidst an orchestral explosion and pull Victoria into a step.

Old Deutoronomy - Mistoffelees can and should sing at least that first part that Wayne Sleep sings, and maybe the first chorus with both Munkustrap and Tugger. I have the impression already that the three of them form a trifecta of Jellicles who are specially favored by Old Deutoronomy. However...I also think Mistoffelees (rather than Skimble) should be the one to escort Deutoronomy to the stage...so I'd have him sing the first bit, then get signaled by Munkustrap to leave, and then the rest of the song is left to Tugger and Munk, and then of course the ensemble. Perhaps continuing to forego the verse about flatulence.

And then, finally:

Mr. Mistoffelees - Tugger should be the one singing the entire song, full stop. I feel very strongly about this because I want there to be as much emphasis as possible on the astronomical estimation Tugger, in spite of his apparent egoism, has of Mistoffelees. It's also silly, to me, when a character sings about himself being quiet and shy. I do need him, however, to say "Presto!" which, as far as I can tell, he pretty much always does. Timothy Scott is something of an outlier unless we're talking about the Mutestoffeli.

I end this diatribe...not much more resolute than when I began. Obviously this hemming and hawing did not even really touch the Mute Mistoffelees phenomenon and all my feelings about that. I guess all I'll say in conclusion is that I love all versions of Mistoffelees, and I love that his evolutions, interpretations, eras, and iterations are so different and so dynamic. I love that so many amazing performers have been able to have so much fun and creative freedom with the character over the years.

I just want yall to know that up to this very moment I keep looking shit up and re-reading posts and wiki pages and I'm only getting infinitely more confused about which Mistoffeli did what thing which way at whatever time, so I'm going to give my brain a break before it liquifies. <3

[sharptoothed-gaze]

Damn I just finished reading the entire statement from the ex-Qsmp web developer and HOLY SHIT WHAT THE FUCK.

As someone who has fucked around with coding and web design, the conditions that worker had to endure were simply unacceptable.

3 Hours as a deadline for anything relating to coding and design (especially as your first assignment) is almost hard for me to comprehend. It’s so incredibly last minute, and it sounds absolutely anxiety inducing.

In the field of coding, if you fuck up one thing even if everything else is right, whatever you’re working on will simply cease to function. It’s a job that involves a lot of time and effort and it requires you to get things right or else it will all collapse.

I mostly do more superficial design because coding pains me, but I cannot imagine getting less than a 1 day notice before a deadline. And I have always considered /that/ incredibly last minute and a sign of horrible planning and coordination. The fact that I consider a 1 day deadline sucky, should tell you exactly how I feel about a 3 hour deadline.

OH ALSO $5 AN HOUR WHEN YOURE WORKING 60 ON A SINGLE PROJECT WILL NEVER BE OKAY. I HAVE LITERALLY NEVER SEEN A DESIGN JOB AT ANY OFFICIAL CAPACITY PRICED LIKE THAT.

NOT FOR A JOB, NOT FOR AN INTERNSHIP, AND NOT EVEN FOR WHEN I EDITED MY COLLEGE NEWSPAPER.

To any artist that feels like they have to work so incredibly hard for so little:

Fuck that you’re worth more.

[writtenbyan-aries]

This will contain how I think coming into a poly relationship with Sam and Colby would go, just summarized.

This is purely fiction, not facts. Please don’t come at me if you think something doesn’t sound right. Thank you and enjoy.

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You’ve been friends since high school and developed a friendship that other people arce envious of.

“How long have you known Sam and Colby?” The interviewer asks as she looks over at you. You shrug, “I’ve known them since, soph- no.” You correct yourself smiling as the first time meeting replays into your head, “I’ve known them since freshman year of high school and they’re two of the greatest friends I’ve ever had.”

You crushed on them on and off throughout high school, but since you all were friends, you didn’t want to make it weird. You would just talk to your best friend about it, hoping to get over it as soon as you possible could.

“Do you like Sam, or do you like Colby?” You friend asks with a slight smirk. You shrug, “I love them both, obviously. Besides you, they’re my two closest friends.” You sigh, “Key word, being friends. I just don’t want to fuck it up and ruin my friendship with them, you know?”

Once high school ended, Sam and Colby’s channel grew big, and you grew with it. They made sure not to forget you, and that meant moving into a house with them.

“Here.” Colby walks up to you, taking your box from your arms, “I got it.” You smile up at him, “Thank you.” You bit your lip, watching him walk up the steps. You jump slightly when you feel Sam’s arm snake around your waist, “Well, honey. We’re home.”

The feelings you had for them in high school were coming back stronger. You started to really like Sam first, the way he made you smile. The way he made you feel. Everything just felt right with him, and when you were finally mustering up the courage to tell Sam, you were blindsided and left confused on what to do when the same feelings you had for Sam, popped up for Colby, too - and those too were strong.

You sat on the couch, chewing on your lip as you were trying to find the right words to put in to the tell all message you were planning on sending to Sam. As you stared at the cursor, watching it blink as your mind raced, Colby comes down the steps, “Hey, sweetheart. Have you seen my black sweatshirt?” You lock your phone and get up to walk over to the dryer, “I washed it for you.” He walks over, standing close to you, “Thank you, sweetheart.” He gives you a smile and brushes his hand against yours as he takes it, and all it took was one little word and you were hooked on him, exactly like you were hooked on Sam.

There was constant flirting. With them separately and even as a group and the longer you lived together, the more it really seemed like you were together. For a while, you just kind of went with it, but when you seen relationship rumors about either one of them floating around on the web, you’d get jealous.

“Wear something pretty for dinner tomorrow night. We’re going someplace fancy.” Colby smiles at you, giving you a wink before leaving the doorway of your room. You smiled at him, biting your lip as you felt all giddy inside. That was quickly ripped away when you scrolled down through twitter. Your eyes scanning over the multiple tweets replying to ‘So does Sam have a new gf because if so.. I need to know who she is’. You felt almost sick, mainly because you loved him at this point, and it was getting harder to conceal your feelings for not only him, but both.

After a few weeks of continuing to suppress your feelings, it only took one night and a few drinks with your best friend to finally comes to terms with what you wanted to do.

“I think..” you take the final shot of the night, putting the lime wedge between your teeth to bite before dropping it on the napkin, “..I’m just.. going to do it. I’m going to tell them.” You laugh slightly, looking up at your friend, “What should I do?” She rests her lime on the napkin and leans in, “I think you’ll be surprised by what you hear.” You give her a confused look, getting distracted by your phone lighting up. A text from Sam lets you know that they’re there to get you - Once you’re home, your friend goes up to your room and you walk over to the couch, Sam and Colby behind you. They make small talk with you, asking how your night went, etc. etc. You lean forward, mind still dizzy from the shots, “I have to tell you something and it might affect the way you look at me from here on out but I have to say it.” They stare at you, nodding to allow you to continue. You feel like you could puke, but it was from your nerves. You turn towards them, looking down before you take a deep breath, “I like you. Both of you. I don’t know how it happened, when it happened, but I do.” You look up at them and they both look at each other, smiling as they laugh slightly. Sam smirks, “Why do you think we brought you with us?”

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This is all I could think of, so I hope you enjoyed it!

I have a Sam one that I plan to do like my first Colby one, but if you have any ideas, let me know!

Likes and reblogs are greatly appreciated! 🖤