online communities are so strange because people slip away so easily. you can be on here for years, folding people you've never met into the fabric of your daily life, and then they disappear, leaving only ghost posts scattered across tumblr behind. or their blog stays dormant, for weeks, months, years, until you're only still following them because you remember that they love sunflowers or they were kind to you when they didn't have to be or the last thing they posted was sad and raw and you still worry about them sometimes.
and sometimes they come back when you least expect it, years later, even, and there's this sudden rush of relief like there you are, there you are, even though you barely knew each other.
there's a strange kind of love to it. i don't know you and i want to hold your hand across miles and time zones and oceans. i can still see the imprint of you in this community you left. you don't anyone will notice or care when you're gone, but we notice and we care and we wish you well.
i hope you're all okay out there. i hope the sun is shining on your face and you are breathing deeply. i miss you.
Oh, I guess I've been slacking on thinking of ideas for the monthly poll. Uh, well, I guess EVO Japan is coming up, and they announced a really unexpected collaboration with Sesame Street, and there's been this weird push to get Waffle House as a stage in Tekken 8 so... Besides the obvious choice of "Pete/Claire/Sara in Smash Bros",
so in the 100 years that passed between awl and ds the only changes to the valley were:
mines are full of women’s accessories/skincare and also full of evil little farm animals and copies of you now
the mines are also full of mayor thomas who now has the powers of teleportation and ball retrieval and might also be god
the whole town is descended from the awl guys… woah everyone in awl had really strong genes…. wait a minute that means…. all the married couples are….oh
hey more cryptids moved in!
also sprites have increased by more than three thousand percent. wait where did they
telephone (teleport purchases over the phone) shopping
the inn has actually vacant rooms (at the cost of tei’s DS counterpart’s existence RIP)
the harvest sprites have unionized and also started a casino
now there’s an elegant phantom thief with magic powers who targets the 1 rich lady and then like 3 bumfuck nowhere mom and pop businesses. “tonight i’ll steal the vegetables” or you could just like go to the grocery store
If you find it difficult (or annoying) to post on AO3, considering changing from the default HTML to the more familiar Rich Text. You can find these buttons at the top right of the box where you enter the text of your fic.
If you dislike the Rich Text format, or if you're having issues when you copy/paste from somewhere else such as Google Docs, then I have a post over here with a tool (and instructions) that will convert your fic into html for you so you can just copy/paste it in without any worries or additional effort.
Also, AO3 recommends that you don't write your story directly in that AO3 form because your work isn't saved until you hit the button at the bottom of the page. To avoid the risk of losing your work, consider writing your story somewhere else and copying it over into AO3.