#oh my god what the fuck is wrong with tumblr's tagging format now

[thewertsearch]

Asks compilation: 09/05

God ok that actually sounds like it would work really well. John would be a huge McElroy fan, wouldn’t he?

I just looked up the Washington accent to compare it to Griffin’s, and wow, my mental voice for John is completely different. I probably have all the wrong accents for these characters in my head, since I don’t have a clue which accent maps to which state. 

At least we’re all in the same boat about not knowing Jade’s accent - unless we learn where Grandpa grew up later on, since she’d probably have picked up his.

Brilliant! Yeah, no, I’ve been trying to nail down that font for ages.

Dammit, I just realized I could have inspected homestuck.com’s source >:(

It narrowly edges out Gen 4, for me. D/P/Pt were great, but Black and White were the games which really perfected the formula. I honestly don’t think they should have gone 3D, but whatcha gonna do?

Oh my god, of course there are. I’m going to rewatch that show some day and lose my mind, aren’t I?

Hey, thanks for the ask! 

I thought about this back when I was first starting the blog. I dunno, though. You’re really not missing much - my live reactions aren’t nearly as coherent as the writeups - mostly just a lot of ‘oh my god, what?’ moments. I write more articulately than I speak. Trust me on this. 

I’m honestly impressed you came up with something more headache inducing than the bogo algorithm, which for the uninitiated literally means ‘randomly shuffle a list until it’s sorted’. 

aw fuck we’re getting a bogo modus aren’t we

I like Bogleech’s writing, especially his creature design reviews, but I could never get more than a handful of pages into Awful Hospital. I respect his commitment to the stereotypically ‘gross’ organic aesthetic, but it kind of just squicks me out. Plus, I dunno. The premise is really dark, but the comic seems to be a full-on comedy. The dissonance just doesn’t really work for me. 

Still, though. Pokéween is some of my favorite writing on the web. Check out his stuff. 

I’ve never been super into horror. Mind you, I like having something to listen to when I’m out on a walk, and I’ve heard good things about the Magnus Archives, so maybe this is my opportunity to give it another chance?

No, yeah, we have a winner. Step aside, Broderick.

I have come to accept that Hussie is just really prone to making unintentional references. When Dave Strider is one of your primary characters, you probably can’t avoid constantly referencing pop culture - even, it seems, accidentality!

The Queen is dead! everything has gone to shit! Long live Jack the Ascended!  

Haha, I never considered that tumblr’s format does kind of resemble John and CG’s inverted conversations, in a way. When you reblog a connected pair of joke posts, you even have to make sure to reblog them backwards, or you’ll invert them! 

Ah, indie devs. Heads, they’re legends, tails, they’re assholes. 

I’ve never played it, but it’s been sitting in my steam library for months! If it’s anything like Celeste, I should have started playing it yesterday. Lore is pretty much the only thing Celeste is missing - not that it needs it. 

Those giant Underlings are nothing compared to what you see in Pipecorp. This is just another day in the office for Harold P. Egbert. 

Awesome! Yeah, I already see why the comic’s music is so popular. And considering we’ve got Toby ‘Leitmotifs’ Fox on the music team, these are all sure to return. 

So what, it’s like, Act 6: Act 1? We’re going to start recursing?

Don’t lie to me, guys. This comic is a fractal, isn’t it? It goes on forever, the sub-acts shrinking into the infinitesimal. 

I know not what awaits me. 

Six, right? Based on the above ask, there can’t be room for any more, unless they shrink dramatically after Act 6. 

I have no idea how many sub-acts there could be, though. Once you pop open that can of worms, you can’t easily close it. 

Done! From now on, all theoryposts will be tagged #theories!

Yeah, noted! I didn’t expect Homestuck to require the equivalent of waiting for the post-credits scene, but here we are?

In what sense? The Trollslum showed up pretty soon after Jade’s intro, and CG chimed in up not long after. The sense I always got was that Hussie improvised a lot of the comic, but maybe the trolls were a particularly spontaneous addition?

Liveblogging a liveblog! I can get behind that. Yeah, like I’ve alluded to before, I’d be having a very different experience with this comic if I wasn’t reading it in bite-sized chunks. 

Thank you!! I’m really trying to convey the same feelings that I’m getting while I’m reading this comic. I’m glad it’s working!

Honestly, my guessing technique is essentially just throwing theories at the wall to see what sticks. 

I usually have like, two or three explanations for a a given event in the comic, which means I can be eerily correct and ironically wrong about the same thing -  or ironically wrong twice over, as is probably more likely.

#asks #act 4 #full liveblog

[thebewilderer]

So someone sent an ask and I spent at least a good half fucking hour typing up a response, went to save it as a draft, and tumblr fucking ate it

summary of the ask was:

I think the issue is not that they actively seek out things to hate, but rather make people aware of the problems of said thing. Media has an effect on reality, people’s actions, and the environment What’s wrong with telling people that they shouldn’t enjoy certain media? What’s wrong with de-platforming people/franchises that are Problematic?

This is what I remember, feel free to resend it if there was more about it. I had a whole nice thing typed out and formatted, but I guess you’re just getting my frustrated-by-tumblr’s-bullshit version so, sorry about that I guess.

I think the issue is not that they actively seek out things to hate, but rather make people aware of the problems of said thing.

No. It’s not an issue of “making people aware of the problems”. this is blatantly false. I have a whole tag of people wishing me various gruesome deaths. I’ve got more in my mentions, and a lot of screenshots; I’ll post a collage of them at some point.

Media has an effect on reality, people’s actions, and the environment

Yeah yeah, we’ve heard the “media has an effect on reality” argument a thousand fucking times. End of the day, people are responsible for their own actions. Just as it’s not my fault for getting catcalled due to my dress, the author is not responsible for how readers interpret their writing. And the author is even less responsible for potential actions that readers may take in response to their writing. Wanting authors/artists to shoulder responsibility for people’s actions is so incredibly entitled.

(I swear to GOD if y’all bring up the Jaws stuff I’m going to lose it. Here’s a post about that. Read it. Maybe you’ll learn something.)

“What’s wrong with telling people not to enjoy media that’s Bad?”

So the other day, I had some guy tell me I need to put a warning on my darkfic telling people to not jerk off to it (no, I am not kidding). This would be an unacceptable course of action for a few reasons:

1) Gross Trying to control what strangers jerk off to is absolutely unacceptable, and reeks of the resurgence of purity culture. You absolutely cannot police the sexuality of other people. That is the basic tenant of purity culture, despite 

2) Ineffective Say I threw my morals on the ground and decided to demand what other people masturbate to. Why the fuck would they give a shit? If someone’s jerking off to something, some jackass on the internet saying “oh noooo, don’t do that :(” is absolutely not going to do anything. All that would happen is that I now feel a sense of moral superiority; it’s just ego-boosting, self-righteous bullshit.

3) Who cares? Some person I don’t know, jerking off, by themself, in the privacy of their own home, is literally not going to affect anything at all. Mind your business.

What’s wrong with de-platforming people/franchises that are Problematic?

Because y’all aren’t “de-platforming franchises”. Y’all are attacking and harassing small-time artists and authors because those are easier targets than fucking Disney or whatever.

Do I really need to go find the story of that one struggling artist who got death threats and doxxed and whatnot so fucking hard they were fired from their job??

Do I really need to go find the stories of the kids that wrote Problematic Fic and thus got suicide-baited and harassed so relentlessly they actually fucking killed themselves? And the people on your side who treated this as a victory?

Do I really need to go find the hundreds of screenshots of the people you’re defending saying that “CSA victims deserved what they got if this is what they’re writing” / “I wish your abusive parent/ex had killed you because then you wouldn’t write this” / “pity that cancer didn’t kill you before you drew this”

@antis-delete-your-blogs-pls-thx has an entire tag filled with y’all’s hypocritical bullshit, go check that out and then try n come back with your “we’re just trying to protect people.”

Sorry this post got so aggressive, but I can no longer take y’all’s arguments in good faith. Y’all’ve proven time and time again that you care more about the wellbeing of fictional characters than of real life actual living and alive human beings. And until that changes, none of your little “we’re trying to protect people” arguments hold any goddamn water.

#proship #shipping discourse #ih #rape mention #abuse mention #csa mention #suicide mention #mail #well technically not mail but it was supposed to be before tumblr fucked me #me being problematic probably #hope its ok i tagged u mouse #lmk if you want that part deleted

[willowcrowned]

Fic Writer Interview

I was tagged by @tessiete

Tagging: @mandaloriandy @outpastthemoat @phoenixyfriend

Remember to make a new post!

How many works do you have on AO3?

48, thirteen of which have been made anonymous.

What's your total AO3 word count?

260,698

How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

On Ao3? 12, including Star Wars (obvs), FMAB, Twilight, The Silmarillion, LOTR, Much Ado About Nothing, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Narnia, The Arcana, VLD (yes, I know), Buzzfeed Unsolved.

In my drafts folder? WAY more. (one day I'll finish you post-OoT Link character study... one day..)

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

Paternal Relations, Leap of Faith, (Arguable) Flirting, To Catch a Serial Killer, and Being an Investigation of Sorts into the Supernatural and the Supernaturally Stupid

Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

I do! Not all of them, because that's something I don't have the energy for. (Fic writers who do respond to all comments—I have the greatest admiration for you, and also how the hell do you do it.) I always respond if it's particularly thoughtful or insightful, and I'll usually respond if it's a joke. I don't bother for an emoji or an 'I liked it.'

What's the fic you've written with the angstiest ending?

Ehm... I don't really do angst. I do have something in my WIP folder that'll end pretty angstily if I ever get around to it. I think my anonymous Narnia or VLD fics? Maybe the anonymous Silmarillion one?

Do you write crossovers? If so what is the craziest one you've written?

Not as real fic. As not!fics on tumblr? Absolutely. I'm going to go with the fmab/TPM crossover, because that's the silliest one that comes to mind immediately.

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

I've only ever received "hate" once, and it was the funniest comment I've ever read (not intentionally, unfortunately for them), so I have it screenshotted for when I need a good laugh.

Do you write smut? If so what kind?

Yes, primarily pwp. I think that emotionally-driven smut that functions as a device for a character study is some of the best, most compelling smut out there. Unfortunately, my smut writing interests lie in a different direction—a hornier one.

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I know of, but now I feel like I should go check.

Have you ever had a fic translated?

Yes! Smoking_breath did a russian translation of Paternal Relations!

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Nope. I'm a bit of a control freak, and very particular about style to boot, so there's really only ben one time I've considered it and it was with someone who I was sharing a braincell with.

What's your all time favorite ship?

Oof. I don't really do OTPs, so I don't have an answer for this.

What's a WIP that you want to finish but don't think you ever will?

I hesitate to say never, because there's always a chance I'll come back to it, but I have a Princess Bride AU in my WIPs folder that's nearly done that I probably won't touch. (It needs major rewrites, but I do like the premise, which is that Buttercup decides to vent all her grief via grabbing a sword and whacking at things, so who knows.)

What are your writing strengths?

Dialogue and humor! I think I've got a really good hold on how to pace writing so that jokes land really well, and I think I'm also pretty good at figuring out where to put dialogue tags and such so a conversation proceeds with the pauses where I want them.

What are your writing weaknesses?

I really struggle with anything character driven. (For context, the last character-driven thing I tried stopped at 20k, but that 20k took me several hundred hours of writing time.) I don't know why that is, but I do know that writing something character-driven is like wrestling with a sugar-crazed five year old covered in oil, and whatever comes out inevitably needs major rewrites. I get a little better every time I try, though! Maybe in thirty years I'll actually be able to do it without giving myself a headache every time I open the doc.

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

Unless I know the language, I won't do it, and even then I think it can be really dicey. A lot of the time, a foreign language will take me out of the reading experience—not just because it can be hard to understand, but because the author has no idea how people actually use a second language. A really good example of that (and the one I see the most) is pet names.

Unless it makes sense within the context of the characters (e.x. two characters that share a heritage using a pet name from that heritage's language as a means of connecting to each other), I find pet names really take me out of it. I have never in my life been speaking English with someone and then called them a pet name in Hebrew (which, even though I'm not fluent, is the language that I've been called pet names in by my family and is the language I'd use for a pet name). When someone switches languages mid-sentence just to call someone a pet name in a language they don't know, it can read as a little... odd.

Foreign language use gets even dicier when I do speak the language and I can tell that the author doesn't. I've put down fics because they had no clue what they were doing with the Hebrew or the French. If your character is supposed to be fluent and they're making mistakes with gender, then I'm not going to be able to pay attention to the actual story and will instead be trying to format a comment in my head to tell you in the nicest way possible that your grammar is wrong.

So: I don't use it in my fics. I think it can be used to great effect when done right (see: insight into a character's relationship with their past, heritage, etc. (also for comedy, because there's nothing quite like "can you hand me the—the—fuck. The סוכר?" "the sugar?" "oh my god it's the same fucking word in english.")), but on the whole, I'm iffy about it.

What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Technically Avalon: Web of Magic, which I did in fourth grade with a friend. We didn't know what fanfiction was though, so I'm not sure if it counts.

What's your favorite fic you've written?

I'm quite fond of Smoke Raised with the Fume of Sighs right now, but more as something I'm enjoying writing than something I'd like reading. It's my first real foray into posting as I go, and it's the first time I've done chapetered fic in a while. It's also great fun, character-wise.

Other than that, I still very much enjoy Paternal Relations. It's got some fun lines.

#it is so weird to be tagged by a fic writer I've never talked to #good weird! good weird! #but I am continuously shocked that I'm not tossing my writing out into the void #what do you MEAN people read my writing now #what do you MEAN my little corner isn't as isolated as it used to be #anyways thanks for the tag #tag games

[happylittletrees3]

New Fics for the New Year!

*cracks knuckles*

Alright folks! I did this last year but it was in the notes for one of my fics. This is a better format so here we go! This is pretty much a list of any fics I found that I really enjoyed, and that you might to! Find something you’ll like in 2021! Which hopefully won’t be a trashfire!

Authors are tagged with their tumblr or a link to their AO3 account if I couldn’t find one for them and links for the fics themselves are in the titles. PLEASE check the tags on each story for warnings and ships if you are interested in reading them, know your limits!

Disclaimer, none of these stories are mine. 

Most of these are Harry Potter fics and I need to make the statement that JKR has decided to be a TERF and we don’t stan. We’ve taken the content from her and will not be returning it.

If your story is on this list and you would like it removed, or a link is incorrect, please tell me and I will not hesitate to fix these things. Same goes for if one of these creators have a tumblr, please let me know so I can tag properly and give credit where credit is due!

On with the show!

Harry Potter and the Welcome to the World of Grey by sobsicles

Oh my god this was a ride. Delves into what would have happened if Harry had killed Bellatrix after the battle at the Ministry in OOTP, its such a time.

A Shift in Perspective by @nobodyzhuman

Harry finds out Dumbledore has lied to him for a really long time and he’s on the wrong side of the war. After catching Harry Dumbledore turns him into a cat and sends him gift wrapped to the Dark Lord. Its so, so fucking good if you’re looking for a sympathetic dark side/death eaters story.

The Sun and The Moon by Silverlynings

Drarry soulmate AU that just hits different. Amazingly written and just a really good story? Hermione is the best person ever.

There Is COVID in Ba Sing Se by @koala-otter

Absolutely adorable modern Zukka AU where they move in together at the beginning of the pandemic. Quarantine AU is a thing now, fight me.

Ripple of Change Series by weirdsisters99

Sirius and Snape become unlikely friends and things spiral out of control. Now Snape's a mentor figure for a bunch of Hogwarts students who pretend they absolutely don’t know each other outside of his rooms and visits Sirius in prison. I’m not doing it justice so just go read it please.  

Shoulder Pillow by Music_dreamer_003

Muggle Drarry AU where Draco falls asleep on Harry on a plane. Adorable to the max and just a fluff masterpiece. 

Son of Thanos Universe by @essayofthoughts and Kiterou

Harry is kidnapped from Earth by aliens and is raised by Thanos. He eventually escapes and chills with Yondu, Peter, and the Ravengers, and after awhile makes his way back to Earth. Earth hasn’t forgoten him. It was a time and I love it so, so much. The worldbuilding is phenomenal and also shines a light on what HP cannon could have been without their golden boy. Read it.

Wizards IN SPACE by @esamastation

The Room of Requirement can, in fact, turn into a space ship. Magic teenagers plus a spaceship is not something I thought I needed but I did and you do to. Yoden has done a continuation of the story here that is unfinished but also highly recommended, its amazing.

Be Kind by juhele

I’m not usually one for Cedric/Harry but this. This is a masterpiece. Harry is pretty much a panicking Bisexual and Cedric is the number one. Like he’s just amazing. Boyfriend goals. 

Excuse Me, Do You Fucking Mind? by Nine_3quarters

Another modern Drarry AU but they have superpowers in this one. Draco is in drag. It’s just...everything you could ever want out of this AU and its wonderful

Family is a Purple Bus by @rowanmoonlight

Yet another one I didn’t think I needed but absolutely did. After leaving the Dursleys Harry gets a job on the Knight Bus and the family he deserves in its employees. Just...oh it’s wonderful, so fucking wonderful. 

How Like Home by @waitingondaisies

 Its a god-tier story, like everything by this author but this one. This one. Harry falls through the veil after Sirius and ends up in another universe where his parents are alive and well and Voldemort never existed. No war, no death. Just redemption and a new chance for Harry.

Independent Study by SomewheresSword

So this is now one of my favorite authors, because of not only this but their founders AU and another fic which is right under this one. Its just so fucking good? This story in particular is a Harry got expelled before fifth year AU and its amazing. He lives with Sirius (as he should) and definitely does not have a crush on George. Its great. 

Lily’s Boy by SomewheresSword

Deep sigh. Ok this one. This one. Wizengamot politics meets a taking-no-shit Harry and supportive heirs. Drarry just happened so that's been a plus and its just-look this author made me love Snape/Lupin and that, that my friends, is a feat. 

(Note: This may or may not be up. The author was having trouble with copyright and it was taken down briefly. As of last time I heard it hadn’t been reposted however if you ever see it again, READ IT. This note will be deleted if I see it again on AO3.)

Misticheskiy Institut by GhostIsReading 

Harry says fuck it and moves to Russia. That's literally what happens but it’s so fucking good. There's also a dash of creature inheritance but man I just love the worldbuilding of the Russian school and Magical World its just-gah its incredible.

Pieces Verse by @tulipscomeinallsortsofcolors

Tulip just has a habit of making me cry and I love it. This is the same author who did LAOFT (which I also recommend if you haven’t read it) and has yet again wowed us with their excellence. Pieces is a Sanders Sides soulmate AU. Prinxiety and Logicality were one shots but Dukeceit has received its own chunk and its an angst fest but so. Fucking. Good. 

The Way We Wind by @thesleepiesthufflepuff

*screams into pillow* LOOK IF YOU DIDN’T THINK HARRY OWNING A KNITTING SHOP COULD BE GOOD, IT IS AND YOU NEED TO KNOW THAT OK?!? Drarry is thrown in but god this is so wholesome?!? Even without it?!? I love it.

To The Dead by LadyoftheWoods

Look. Look. I’ve read a lot in my short, short life. Very few things have made me cry or come close to it when it comes to literature. This? This made me cry. Ghost Sanders Sides AU that's just...wonderful. Its so wholesome and beautiful and I expect any of you who read this and cried to tell me so we can cry about it together. Ok? Ok.

And that's the list for 2020! Obviously there are other fics that were amazing and this is all just my opinion but I hope you get a good story out of this post! Send me anything you think I’ll enjoy to! 

Heres to 2021 being better!

#long post #harry potter #drarry #cedric/harry #sanders sides #marvel #mcu #prinxiety #logicality #dukeceit #sanders sides ghost #aus #modern au #muggle au #knitting harry potter #harry potter knits #naga harry potter #russian magical world #pieces verse #wizards #IN SPACE #room of requirement #fanfiction #fanfiction recommendation #a lot of them #new fics for the new year 2021 #lets hope its...less on fire #atla #zukaa #its the only correct ship

[letmetellyouaboutmyfeels]

So, I tried to answer this ask, and then tumblr fucked up the formatting, so I had to take a screenshot of it and make it as this post instead. My apologies to @handlewithcharacter​, especially since she has been oh so patient in waiting forever for me to fill out this prompt. I hope it was worth the wait my dear.

It was Lucy’s idea.

The thing was, both of them needed a new start. Wyatt was fresh off the divorce from Jess, Lucy needed to get away from her mom, and it was less expensive to find a place together than to try and live alone.

The whole “we slept together once and don’t talk about it” thing was kind of awkward, sure, but they were making it work. It was better just to stay friends.

Which was why Wyatt spit his orange juice across the table when Lucy sat down next to him at breakfast and said, “we need to have a wedding.”

“We need to what.” Wyatt grabbed a towel to mop up the juice.

“Not a real wedding,” Lucy protested. “A fake one. We just send out the invitations.”

“If we send out the invitations, people will come. They’ll expect a wedding.” Lucy’d had some interesting ideas but she’d never gone full-on loony bin like this.

“Not if we only send out invitations to rich people.” Lucy pushed a list towards him. “Listen. Think about it. What do you do when you’re invited to a wedding that you can’t attend? You send a gift. Gifts like toasters and other household appliances. Appliances we need.”

...okay, she had a point. Some people might even just send money. “Are you sure about this?”

“Positive,” Lucy insisted. “What could possibly go wrong?”

_____________________________________________________

It was Jiya’s idea.

Jiya was technically Flynn’s secretary, but in reality she was so much more than that. After Lorena and Iris died, it was Jiya who picked up the pieces and kept Flynn going. She ran his professional life behind the scenes, tag-teaming with Stiv to make sure that all that Flynn had worked for didn’t crumble the same as he did.

It was thanks to her that the company was still running, honestly. It was thanks to her he hadn’t just laid down in the dirt to join his wife and child.

But being appreciative of Jiya, and trying to take some of her suggestions about being social again, did not equate to going to the wedding of two complete strangers.

“Absolutely not. I’m not crashing a wedding.”

“You can’t crash a wedding if you’ve been invited.”

Flynn waved the invitation in the air. “I don’t know this...” He looked at it again. “Lucy Preston or Wyatt Logan.”

“They know that,” Jiya pointed out, smirking. “Look, they’re having a wedding, right? And they’re right in the Bay Area surrounded by these jerkoff tech billionaires and millionaires who made their money off apps and whatever. So they probably figured, hey? Why not invite a few of those rich assholes? None of them will ever come, the invitation probably won’t get past their secretary, and the secretary will arrange to send a nice gift as a consolation for not being able to make it. Nobody’s going to double check whether their boss really knows these people. Who’d have the audacity to send a wedding invitation to someone they don’t know, right?”

Flynn had to admit, that was... a clever plan. He had to admire this Miss Preston and Mr. Logan for it. Moving in together, starting a life together, that was expensive and full of hidden costs. Tricking some people too rich to care into gifting them some household appliances or money? It was kind of genius.

And it would be kind of fun to surprise these people, kind of play their joke back on them. He’d still give a generous wedding gift, of course. But who said he couldn’t have some fun with this?

“...you know what, Jiya? You’re right.” He smiled - that smile that Jiya always said made him look like a mob boss. “Would you like to be my plus one?”

Jiya grinned. “Oh, as if I’d miss this.”

It would be fun - and what could possibly go wrong?

_____________________________________________________

“...he RSVP’d,” Lucy said faintly.

Wyatt stared at her. “Who did?”

He was in the middle of unwrapping the lovely gifts they’d gotten from several other millionaires on the list. So far they had a toaster, a printer, monogrammed pajamas, and a set of plates. Excellent.

“Garcia Flynn. You know, the security guy?”

Flynn, yeah, Wyatt remembered him. He’d created a security app with his best friend, based it off his extensive war record, his work with Interpol, and the NSA.

“Isn’t he the one who...”

“Lost his wife and daughter in that home invasion, yeah.” Lucy sounded sad.

It had been a horrible twist of cosmic irony.

“...wait.” The actual meaning of what Lucy had said caught up with him. “He RSVP’d? He’s coming?”

“He’s coming,” Lucy confirmed. “He’s bringing a friend.”

“To the wedding.”

“Yes.”

“That is not actually happening.”

“Yes.”

Wyatt stared at Lucy. Lucy stared back.

“...you know when I called you the Bonnie to my Clyde I was... joking about the whole causing trouble part, right?”

“Trust me,” Lucy replied, her voice a bit strangled, “I’m wishing I could smack my past self right about now.”

_____________________________________________________

Lucy had never been more grateful that her friends were all chaotic neutral gremlins who hated capitalism.

Jess, Rufus, Amy, Denise, and Michelle all leapt right into the wedding planning. Something small, nothing too fancy, basically a party except Michelle had sweet-talked her pastor into letting her borrow the church on a Saturday afternoon and they’d have the fake ceremony there first.

Michelle, as the only one who’d set foot in a church recently (Jess was half-convinced she’d catch fire the second she crossed the threshold), was going to pretend to be the pastor and conduct the ‘ceremony’.

Then they’d all retire to the backyard of Rufus’s friend-slash-boss-slash-father-figure’s place for the party. Mason was conveniently out of town at a science conference in England, and Rufus was house sitting.

It was all going to be perfectly manageable. So long as Mom didn’t find out about this stunt, anyway.

Lucy picked out her dress, something fun and simple, with a short, flared skirt so that she could easily dance in it, and a cute little hat-veil that was like the white version of the chic funeral hat that the wife who definitely killed her husband wore in the movies.

Wyatt was prepped (Jess, Rufus, and Lucy had all separately had to give him pep talks about breathing and not messing this up for them), Lucy looked fabulous, Mom was still in the dark, nothing could possibly go wrong...

“...oh my God, that’s Garcia Flynn!?” Amy hissed.

Lucy peered around her sister’s head and... oh holy fuck.

Six foot four of pure handsome was standing towards the back of the church in a well-cut navy suit. Next to him was a young woman who seemed to be around Amy’s age in a light purple dress that beautifully complimented her dark skin and brown eyes.

“Nobody said anything about him being sex on a stick, holy fuck,” Amy whispered.

Jess looked offended, then stared down at herself as if silently asking herself if she wasn’t sex on a stick.

Lucy had to agree with her sister, though. That man was... holy shit. She needed a tall glass of water.

The back door to the room opened and Wyatt and Rufus shoved inside. “Who the fuck is that woman with Flynn!?” Rufus whispered.

“His plus one,” Lucy answered. “Someone named Jiya Marri.”

“Fantastic, thank you, excuse me,” Rufus said, and pushed both Amy and Lucy out of the way. “Duty calls.”

“What duty!?”

“My duty of escorting that lovely woman to her seat, ‘scuse me.”

“Don’t use a Star Wars pickup line!” Lucy hissed after him. “Rufus! Rufus!”

They all watched as Rufus walked up to the two people, spoke with them for a moment - and then Flynn laughed while Jiya scowled.

“...he used the Star Wars pickup line,” Amy moaned.

Wyatt grabbed Lucy and hauled her to the side. “Watch the dress!” she warned him.

“Did you see him?”

“Of course I saw him!”

“But did you see him!?”

As far as Lucy knew, only she and Jess knew Wyatt was bi. He’d had several drunken benders, cry sessions, and breakdowns over it.

“Yes, Wyatt,” she sighed. “I noticed he’s a tree and I’m a squirrel. He’s a jackhammer, I’m a block of cement. He’s a Popsicle, and I’m a kid with a sugar addiction on a ninety degree summer day.”

“Please stop with the metaphors,” Wyatt groaned, screwing his face up. “Why do I still find you hot?”

“Because I’m a goddess. Wyatt.” She grabbed his arms and shook him. “What. Do we do.”

“I was going to ask you that! This was all your idea!”

“I won a wet t-shirt contest,” Jess said. “Twice. I’m sex on a stick.”

“That’s nice,” Amy said, not even looking at Jess. “C’mon, I think Rufus needs rescuing, Flynn’s just watching him dig himself a grave with Marri.”

She grabbed Jess by the wrist and dragged her out while Jess continued to look betrayed.

Lucy took several deep breaths. “Okay. Okay it’s fine. We’ll just... we’ll go through with it, it’s too late to back out now, and we’ll be polite, and... and...”

God she was going to have to meet the most handsome man she’d ever seen in her life and not flirt with him. She could cry.

“It’ll be fine,” she concluded.

Wyatt looked doubtful.

_____________________________________________________

Flynn had not expected the wedding to be so small. Then again, he wasn’t even technically supposed to be here, so.

There was just the pastor, her wife and their two children, the maid of honor (who was apparently the sister of the bride), the groom’s ex-wife (who was blatantly and hopelessly trying to get the maid of honor’s attention), and the groom’s friend, who was failing at flirting with Jiya.

They all seemed like very kind people, at least, and fiercely loyal to Lucy and Wyatt, the intended couple. They’ve been best friends for years, Amy, the sister, said. Though they’d never call themselves that, Jess, the ex-wife, added.

“This isn’t what I thought it would be,” Jiya admitted to him softly.

“Me neither.” He’d expected something big and fussy. He felt bad for crashing now.

The pastor, Michelle, asked for everyone to please be seated, and then the groom took his spot at the altar with her.

Huh. The guy, Wyatt Logan, was... huh. He glanced over at Flynn nervously, his cheeks going a little pink, and then glanced quickly down at this shoes, shifting his weight.

Oh. Flynn hadn’t been with anyone since he’d lost his family, but he knew what that look meant. And Wyatt Logan was exactly the kind of pretty that Flynn had a weak spot for.

Then the doors opened and the bride walked in.

Flynn’s jaw went slack.

Lucy Preston was stunning. Her wedding dress was a little casual, and her veil barely counted, but she looked like she’d stepped off a runway. The smirk on her face as she looked at everyone was making it hard for Flynn to breathe.

She caught him staring at her and winked, and Flynn wondered if God was punishing him for all the things he’d screamed when he’d lost Lorena and Iris because holy shit, the first two people he’d been attracted to since his wife were standing right in front of him and marrying each other.

“...you need a roof for that barn you’re raising, Boss?” Jiya murmured, playfully glancing down at his lap and then back up to his face.

Flynn knew he wasn’t raising a barn, or anything else, but he glared at her all the same.

Jiya stifled a laugh.

_____________________________________________________

“He’s still staring,” Wyatt whispered.

Lucy struggled not to glance over her shoulder. So far, the reception was going well. Denise worked in Homeland so apparently she and Flynn knew some of the same people and were getting along, Rufus had (with Jess’s help) managed to get a second chance with Jiya and was now making her laugh, and Amy was having fun playing DJ.

And Flynn kept staring at them.

“It’s just because we’re the couple who had the audacity to invite him to their six-person wedding,” Lucy murmured.

“N-no,” Wyatt replied. “I think I know what that woman in Jaws felt like.”

“As if you would object to being devoured by him.”

“I wouldn’t, but he thinks I’m married!”

Lucy bit her lip. “We never did talk about the time we...”

Wyatt blushed. “We agreed we were... better as... I know I hurt you. Going back to Jess. I fucked a lot of shit up.”

Lucy took his hand. “Look. We can keep just being friends. Or. We can split that six layer sundae. If you know what I mean.”

“Would he... he’s a millionaire, Lucy. We’re nobody.”

“He’s a millionaire who showed up to a random wedding, Wyatt. He’s lonely.”

“He’ll be appalled.”

“You’re the one who said he was Jaws. It’s San Francisco! Silicon Valley has sex parties, we are the least scandalous thing around here.”

Wyatt flushed, but squeezed her hand. “Okay.” He nodded. “Okay. What’s the worst that could happen, right?”

_____________________________________________________

Wyatt had never ached so much in his fucking life. Pun intended. Holy shit.

“I’m not moving for a week,” he moaned into the pillow.

Lucy laughed and Flynn (Garcia) lightly smacked his ass. “Lazy.”

Wyatt rolled over and grinned up at him. Flynn was handsome enough when he looked serious, but when he smiled it was like sunshine. “You like me anyway.”

“Do I, though?”

“Three days of sex suggests...” Lucy pointed out, trailing off with a wink.

“Talk about an unconventional honeymoon,” Flynn pointed out.

Wyatt froze, and he felt Lucy do the same.

“Um,” Lucy went pink. “About that.”

_____________________________________________________

“So nice to be invited to a real wedding this time,” Flynn noted as they took their seats.

“Oh my God,” Wyatt groaned.

“Shhh, you got us out of the deal, you can’t complain.” Lucy kissed his cheek.

He had, in fact, gotten the two of them out of it.

“I’m going to go find Jiya,” he told them, kissing Wyatt’s forehead and Lucy’s hair. He was the one giving her away.

As he stood up, he heard Amy say to Jess, “Wait, are you flirting with me?”

All of them groaned.

#mads answers things #mads writes stuff #timeless #timeless fanfic #garcyatt #garcyatt fanfic #handlewithcharacter

[ommsims]

story process challenge

i was tagged  by @xldkx​​ to do this challenge, created by @herpixels​​​ , like a month? a month and a half? ago and it’s been sitting half finished in my drafts for nearly as long. *sigh* (regardless, i love stuff like this so even if it takes me forever to get to it, i appreciate the tags! 💕). 

i decided to answer all the qs because it took me damn long enough to get to this, so i might as well put some extra elbow grease into it (plus it was fun!). btw it’s all going under a cut b/c it is long. i apologize in advance.

1. My Writing Process - used to be a hot damn mess. literally word docs strewn throughout my pc. However, I recently switched to using Onenote (it’s what i use to organize my d&d campaign notes) and hoo-boy is it so much nicer. this is how it’s set up and it’s honestly night and day. i can have a page with outlines, a page to organize & order screenshots, and a separate page for drafting text, and i can easily toggle though them without having to switch windows? a big thumbs up from me.

When it comes to actual writing- I used to write my drafts in novel format, which i enjoyed but it made “converting” them into tumblr posts time consuming and frustrating. I ended up scrapping most of the text in the process, retaining pretty much only the dialogue. 

Anyway, nowadays I write in more of a screenplay format: dialogue only + key scene information with the occasional note to self. 

I do keep a master “arcs” page with key events and each individual character’s arc from beginning to end and secondary “outline” pages with slightly more detailed outline for each leg of the project. No screencaps b/c spoilers galore! 

My typical work flow process for a scene goes: (1) brainstorm scene ideas, (2) take screenshots, (3) organize screenshots into a rough storyboard, (4) add 1st draft of text, (5) edit photos, (6) edit text, (7) upload to "drafts” here on tumblr, (8) let sit for a bit (9) take a final look at things/proofread and edit as needed. It may sound counterintuitive, but i find it much easier to write dialogue for a set of images rather than attempt to take images based on prewritten text. I feel more comfortable editing and tweaking tone and content in the text this way. Otherwise, I get frustrated when I “can’t” shoot a scene exactly as it appeared in my head.

2. How I build my scenes - A lot of what i do is rooted in gameplay, therefore my sets are usually (a) play-tested and (b) not super pretty. I’ve certainly improved at decorating & building over the years but more often than not I download lots off tumblr and the gallery because I don’t have the patience, aptitude, or time to build all of my own sets. That being said, I frequently gut builds only to build a number of completely unrelated mini sets inside to reduce the number of times i have to replace lots. I also keep a list of “important locations” and where certain characters live / will move to, to help keep this all straight as there aren’t nearly enough lots per neighborhood or even per world in this damn game...

my least favorite part of scene building is actually decorating. lol. Don’t get me wrong, I love clutter. I honestly do. but fuck me if i expect myself to spend hours meticulously decorating a set, spend another 3 hours toggling back and forth b/w BB & live modes adjusting things to get rid of the damn routing errors. (yeah, yeah, i know i could ignore them, they’re not important, especially in those scenarios where i’m using a set for screenshots and nothing else, but idk. it really grinds my gears.) and then have to replace the lot like a week later because there aren’t enough lots in the game. *sigh*

3. CC/Pose Making - i do not consider myself to be a cc creator nor a pose maker but i do dabble occasionally. And to be completely honest i’d much rather spend my time doing other stuff, so it’s not high on my list of priorities atm. plus there are so many talented cc creators in this community; i can usually get by with what’s already out there.

4. Getting in the zone - Honestly, I do a lot of brainstorming for plot & dialogue in the shower. I don’t have any particular playlists to get me “in the writing mood” but I do enjoy listening to music as I work. Either instrumental stuff or simply artists/songs I like. If something just so happens to “fit” a scene I’m working on, one i’ve got planned, or even just gives me vibes for a certain character or group, I add a quick note to the top of said scene’s draft. Most of the time I stick it in the recesses of my brain and add a quick link when I finally get to the point of posting the draft to tumblr. For whatever reason, when I have one of those “oh this song is perfect for X” moments it’s essentially ingrained in my mind for the rest of eternity. 

5. The screenshot folder - this will most likely give some of you out there major anxiety. but i swear it’s an organized chaos. :)

yep. 32.9gb of screenshots & related things... 

So with the raws from a single random scene selected, you can see i take roughly 10 screenshots per image posted. not terrible i guess but i’m working on it. Typically I take screenshots and once I’m done editing a scene I’ll move them from the general folder to a more specific project folder.

6. Captions - I’ll answer this in three parts:

for my townie story. not really. I prefer using the text box. I tend to write (& re-write) the dialogue for each one of these scenes several times over as I add more “scenes” into my drafts. It would be incredibly inefficient, time consuming, and would waste a lot more space on my pc to have to save .psds of each image just so i could edit dialogue when I decide: “oh hey maybe so and so needs to bring up X in this scene” and then change my mind an hour later.

for niko, noor, & co. I’m a text on image type gal here. don’t really know why, but it gives the project a different energy. ironically it makes it feel more laid-back to me. which i guess makes sense, it’s a much more light-hearted “story” than my townie project. which is, imo, very soapy haha.

for legacy stuff. all text goes below the images in the text box. reasoning: it’s gameplay, I don’t brainstorm, outline, or pre-write for this. I play the game, take screenshots, plug ‘em into my drafts and write some commentary / dialogue to go along with it.

7. Editing - i am a creature of habit and have not majorly changed my editing process in probably a year and a half (when I began using reshade and had to adjust my color correcting psd). it’s a super basic system:

drag & drop my “color correction” psd.

run actions in ps. (i made my own “all-in-one” actions to really streamline the process; i have different “actions sets” for my premades’ story and for other things that get posted to tumblr. even if no one else notices it, i like the little details that keep my projects separate and “identifiable”. 

voila. all set to upload.

sometimes i crop images, add “text effects”, or do more in depth editing (i.e. editing a phone screen or adding rain etc.) but overall i try and keep it simple for myself. 

8. Throwback - i posted an image of one of the first (but never posted) scenes I’d written for my townie project up above. but as for how would i redo a scene i’d already posted. well i’m currently re-doing my townie story so i guess i’ll just say you’ll see how it’s redone when i get to part 1! 😉

anyway, no tags because i’m so embarrassingly late to this party but if you hadn’t gotten around to this tag, wanted to do it but didn’t get a tag, or started it and left it to sit and now you’re thinking “oh god that was months ago should i even post this anymore?!?” consider yourself tagged by me and go ahead and post it for all to see!

#tag train #story process challenge #it's long. it's rambly. but that's me. #this one was a challenge! a challenge but fun.

[nirvhannahcornell]

Firstly I would like to mention this is NOT the real nirvhannahcornell, this is a burner account made to call out her questionable and horrible actions. The real nirvhannah is known now as “josiebelladonna” and can be found here: @josiebelladonna​. She changed her URL and didn’t save this one so I jumped on the golden opportunity. 

Some of you may be familiar with Hannah, you’ve probably seen her around on your dash, in the tags of your favorites. She’s there posting fanart and fanfiction, it seems all like harmless fun on the surface. But deep below there’s a grim fuckin reality, a reality no one is talking about. We’ve all sat back and watched her hellish meltdowns. Picking fights with her “fans” because they like her post opposed to reblogging them, getting in public squabbles with her friends over petty shit. We’ve sat back and stayed silent, but I’m not staying quiet any longer. I’ve tried sending her asks to explain herself and without fail every time she’s said tumblr fuckin “ate them” so the next best thing was a public callout. Let’s see the matrix glitch this shit.

The perfect place to begin with her fucking crimes have to be how she tries to push the idea that she’s mixed. I’m fully aware it’s fucked up to call someone’s race to attention like this, and I definitely wouldn’t be if she wasn’t completely faking and tossing racial slurs around like her lilywhite ass can claim them. To my knowledge and to the research I’ve done, Hannah isn’t mixed. Her dad and brother are fully white and so is she. She’s tried to claim having “african blood” and “native american blood” (of course she says I*dian but we’ll get into that later), but from what I’ve seen there is no “african blood”, I’m 100% sure she did a test on ancestry.com and saw she was .0000001% african american and decided to call herself mixed. The “native american blood” she claims to have is ALLEGEDLY from her great grandfather, but I’d take that fact with a grain of salt because she seems to be a compulsive liar.

(Note how her racist ass unabashedly says I*jun for everyone to see. But it’s okay guys, she’s 1/64th Native American!)

(Here she is claiming to be mixed race. Notice how she says “I*dian roots” and “African Blood”. That shit busted as fuck like what the fuck does she even…)

(Here’s some more posts claiming to have “black heritage” and then somehow making it about how Joey “talked about her” on a podcast. (I’ll get into that too (: )

This isn’t the first instance of her using racial slurs publicly for you me and god to see. We’re all looking and I wish I couldn’t see. Here’s a few examples. 

(“My I*jun boy” “I*jun orange” I literally cannot make this bullshit up.)

(“My I*dian beauty” “my favorite I*dian'' (she is also grungeandmetalfanfics btw!!))

She claims she can say these things, I guess because she’s .0000000004% Native American! Makes it a-OK! I guess because she has “African Blood” she can say the N-Word then? No? Oh well, she did it anyway! 

(Her argument, I’m guessing, is she can say I*jun because Joey (an actual Native American man) says it. Which makes no fucking sense because shes fucking white she can’t say it.)

If this wasn’t insane enough. As if it could possibly get even more horrible. She is overall just genuinely a bad person. If you ever supported her art with a like, you would know. Because apparently that shit peeves the fuck out of her. Even though you’re showing your support she loses her fucking mind when you don’t reblog anything she’s produced. (I don’t blame you it’s shit anyways) And then tries to guilt all of her followers into reblogging her shit. It’s manipulative and horrible. 

(this didn’t last of course she's too full of herself to stay away.) 

Note how she makes it seem like she was blessing us with her content. Did you know she existed before this? She plagues fandom tags with her shitty fanart and fanfiction thinking we should bow to her and be fucking blessed with her presence. Maybe we should, she claims to have a fond relationship with Chris Cornell!

Oh.. Wait…

(one of the 2 interactions she had with him, both pertaining to fanart she drew. He would do this often, respond to fans and their fanarts. This is nothing special)

(Her dad calling her out on her delusions) 

Don’t let her fool you. Her and Chris Cornell didn’t know each other, they weren’t friends. Chris had no clue who she was beyond the fanart she made for him. She’s literally so deep in this fantasy she’s insane enough to think she could’ve prevented Chris’ suicide. 

(She also believed ben shepherd was in love with her. She sent him a letter and he didn’t respond. Apparently he owed something to her because she opened up to him via letter and, as you would expect a famous person who definitely has someone who goes through their mail for them, he didn’t respond. I don’t know how in the FUCK she ever got the idea that he was in love with her. I don’t know what in the FUCK is wrong with her. She eventually got pissed because she found out he had a kid with his girlfriend? And apparently he was supposed to tell her? She’s fucking delusional look into that if you want, I don’t have enough time or evidence for that one, it’s certainly a lot.) 

A new installment in her delusions is the infamous Jasta Show feat. Joey Belladonna. It’s a 2+ hour long podcast where they mostly talk about the pandemic and what not, current events going on. Allegedly, in this podcast, Joey says Hannah’s name. 

I sat through the entire podcast (Joey says holy cow about 5 fucking times) and timestamped at 106:58 they start talking about Chris Cornell. To which Joey says “oh, we talked about him yesterday because some girl was drawing some stuff- she liked him a lot. and I thought about him too.” Nonspecific. Plain. There’s no fireworks or warmth or whatever the fuck. He mentions that and moves on. I’ve timestamped it for you all, the podcast is free to listen to, you can all listen to it yourself. (The Jasta Show 517 Joey Belladonna) Unless her name is “some girl” there was no name drop. 

(no one gave a shit because it wasn’t that big of a fucking deal “some girl”) 

Don’t let her fool you with her delusions. She also makes it seem like her and Krista (Joey’s wife) are friends when really Krista likes most all posts that are #joeybelladonna on Instagram. They aren’t close, they aren’t buddies or whatever the fuck. 

(Here’s that one shit she keeps talking about raw fucking format or some shit idk it’s a fucking side project Joey started that’s probably not even Joey messaging her they have 140 something followers I don’t even feel like getting into this dumbassery. Fucking clown.)

If you aren’t convinced enough in her insanity. Hannah has literally used Cliff’s accident as a plotpoint in her shitty fanfiction. Yes,that's right. She’s used Cliff Burton’s real life tragic accident as a plotpoint in a fanfiction with Joey and Lars. Not only did she do that, but she shoehorned Joey into the fucking accident. Like they’re all fictional characters. It’s fucking vile and insensitive. 

(The fucking post she linked was the infamous pic of Lars, James and Kirk after the accident)

In conclusion, Hannah is batshit crazy. She’s insane. She wants us to believe she’s mixed because she’s obsessed unhealthily with Joey Belladonna and wanting to look and be like him. She wants us to believe she’s friends with all of these musicians, that they’re in love with her. That they were close. None of this is true. She’s just a lying, rude, self centered, fucking psychotic bitch and if you know her I’d suggest staying away. 

Not even her fucking friend wants to be involved.

#nirvhannahcornell #josiebelladonna #grungeandmetalfanfics #badmotorartist

[eldritchsurveys]

929.

Do you ever actually enjoy going to "common" places like the supermarket, the post office, etc? If so, which of these "common" places do you typically enjoy visiting? >> I don’t think so. Most of these kinds of trips are predictable and tedious. I enjoy them more when I’m in an okay mood, but otherwise it’s just... work.

Have you ever made your own bumper sticker? If so, what did it say/portray? If you haven't made your own bumper sticker, what would you want it to say/portray if you did? >> I’ve never made a bumper sticker and I don’t want to make one.

How often do you "sort through" your Xanga subscriptions? Are you more of a person who often unsubscribes from people because you follow too many blogs or are you more of a person who does not often unsubscribe from people because you only follow certain blogs, usually only the ones that you really like? >> I don’t follow survey blogs on tumblr, typically, although I had to follow one recently because tumblr had stopped showing his posts in the tags (for me, anyway). Most everyone else I can find in the tags, so it’s fine.

Now often do you notice sexual references in songs that aren't necessarily direct, such as the emphasis that is put on "everybody knows I'm hung..." in Hot Chelle Ray's "Hung Up"? >> To be honest, it seems like most sexual references in songs nowadays are pretty goddamn overt. Like, WAP just came out...

If you do not smoke marijuana, how do you feel about the legalization of it? Maybe you are so sick of hearing about this that you do not even think about it enough to have an opinion? To guard against leaving anyone out, if you do smoke marijuana, how often do you smoke? >> The reason I don’t smoke it is because it causes adverse effects for me. I support its decriminalisation and I wish its legalisation didn’t immediately result in a fucking monopoly in this country but, you know, capitalism. Still, can you imagine telling someone from like 1980 that “Big Marijuana” was going to be a problem in 2020? It’d be like 12 Monkeys, immediate loony bin for you.

Do you currently live in one of the states that has legalized same-sex marriage? If so, which state are you in? Keep in mind, Delaware has recently joined this group! >> Well, it’s federally legal now.

In terms of the biggest news stories right now, how aware would you say that you are of what is going on in the world? You can judge this by your knowledge of the "Tebow Bill", the case of the Texas cheerleaders that were criticized for their religious banners, the guilty verdict that was handed to Jodi Arias on terms of the 1st degree murder of Travis Alexander, and the rescue of the missing girls in Cleveland who were held captive for a decade. >> (This survey is... uh, a few years old. In case you haven’t already noticed.) I’m relatively aware of the biggest news stories in the United States right now because they’re kind of everywhere (and also because I get daily emails from The Flip Side). Even people in other countries can’t avoid knowing about what’s going on in the US, unfortunately. Also, I should add that one of the biggest continuously-updating news points right now is a global pandemic, so, you know. Kind of hard not to know about that.

Obviously hypothetically speaking, your child is charged with a crime and could receive the death penalty punishment. Your child asks you not to testify for life in prison instead because he/she would rather die fairly soon rather than to live the rest of his/her life in prison. As a parent, do you think that you could obey their wishes in good conscience and not attempt to spare your child's life? >> If I couldn’t, I’d be really fucking disappointed in myself. I’m going to allow for the variable that I might feel differently about a child if I actually had one (since parents are always talking about how us childless people “just don’t get it”), but I really can’t see my values changing that much, and one of my values is respecting other people’s right to die.

Be honest, when you ask questions like "how are you?" do you actually expect a true, possibly elaborate, response or do you expect the typical "fine" or "okay" answer in which you are mostly just asking to be polite? Perhaps it depends on the situation? >> If I ask, it’s because I actually want to know what’s going on in the person’s life -- like, they’re a friend or something and we haven’t talked for a while. I don’t ask this out of obligation or weird social rules or anything.

Do you wash your hair every single day when you shower? Do you really believe that skipping a wash every now and then is better for the hair? >> First of all, I don’t shower every single day either. Also, I’m not white, so my hair texture demands more time between washing if I don’t want it to be dry and brittle.

Would you rather have long, damaged hair or short, healthy hair? In other words, which is more important to you, the length or the health of your hair? >> Who the fuck wants damaged hair? *thinks about all the white people with “dreadlocks”* Wait, never mind, don’t answer that.

Who was the last person in your life to have "car problems" and what happened? >> I mean, the only person really in my life is Sparrow and the last car problem she had was when she had that flat and tried to drive to Meijer on it and the whole fuckin thing just disintegrated, lmao. That was an Adventure.

When you text someone until you are about to go to sleep, do you usually send that person a goodnight/goodbye text, just reply to their message when you wake up, or does it vary? >> Depends on the nature of the conversation. If it’s really casual I’ll just let it taper off. If it’s more focused or serious, then I’ll warn them that it’s almost my bedtime so if they have anything pressing to add, add it now. Otherwise we can just pick it back up again in the morning (or let it end, whatever). ...This is also all hypothetical, since who the fuck am I texting.

What do you want the most right now? >> Nothing.

Are/were your parents/guardians more strict or easy going? >> Very strict.

How many items are currently in the recycling bin on your computer? >> Oh god. Like ~1100 files, because of that goddamn OneDrive fiasco a couple of months ago. I forgot to empty it, but I just emptied it now, so thanks for reminding me.

When was the last time you ate spaghetti? >> I don’t remember.

Does it bother you when surveys you've copied and pasted into an entry are formatted? For instance, the previous survey taker may have used Tahoma font in the entry or aligned the survey to the center. >> This isn’t a problem on tumblr. Usually the problem is that new!dashboard just jacks up formatting so when I copy from dash and paste into the editor, the spacing is all wrong. I solve that problem by copying from the permalink instead... which is an extra step and kind of annoying, but whatcha gonna do.

Do you actually find comedians with a style like Will Ferrell and Steve Carell funny or are they more annoying and moronic to you? >> Steve Carell can be funny sometimes, I guess. I don’t like most Will Ferrell movies. It’s just not my sense of humour, I’m not going to fucking insult it just because it’s not my thing.

#surveys #survey #random survey

[lewyn-martell]

rules: answer 21 questions and tag 21 people you want to know better

tagged by @laurels-things thanks! you seem like such a nice person!

i. nickname?

lui or simply lu

ii. zodiac sign?

scorpio

iii. height?

165 cm... I'm not sure if I'm below average height on my country, but I believe brazillian people are pretty short. I may be the shortest amongst the boys in my class but I'm the tallest amongst the girls (except one girl who is nearly 180cm i stg) and as a nonbinary person this is a good place to be, i think.

iv. hogwarts house?

hufflepuff :D

v. last thing I googled?

amongst or among — i was unsure if i was using the word correctly sjbshsbshsvs

vi. fav musicians?

THE BEATLES (all 4 of them, but john lennon speaks to my soul in ways i can't describe... the way he makes me feel is something out of this world)

david bowie

elton john

brendon urie from panic! at the disco

the boys from green day

aaand i have mad respect for some soundtrack musicians bc i eat these up constantly. i like ramin djwadi, michael giacchino, ennio morricone, danny elfman, jonny greenwood (yeah i know he's from radiohead but i haven't listened a lot of stuff from this band yet and his phantom thread compositions are SUCH A BOP), hans zimmer and i've been also listening to the score of the shape of water by alexandre desplat (i like him, but jonny greenwood was ROBBED) so maybe that'll be a future fave. also i love a lot of composers for disney animated musicals but if i start i won't ever shut up. but i love almost all of the disney soundtracks.

i would say some time ago whoever wrote the songs for the smiths which i believe includes morrisey, but i recently found out he is extremely right wing and i don't think i can still like someone with these kinds of inhumane views on people&society... i'm disappointed

vii. song stuck in your head?

currently bad boy (the beatles' cover of the song), john's vocals make my pulse speed up since the first verse

viii. following?

2234 nfbdjdbjdsbjshs but i think most of the people i followed years ago are no longer active, i must go through the list and try to do a spring cleaning or something

ix. followers?

408... and like half of these i gained only the last two months or something... and i don't know why shdbsjbshsbs maybe it's the beatles thing

x. do you get asks?

i don't, but that's ok because i don't know if i have a lot of interesting things to say... but if you wanna get something off your chest, go ahead, i love to listen to/read drama 👀

xi. amount of sleep?

tricky question because it constantly changes, sometimes i don't sleep at all bc i have to leave the house at 5h20 in the morning to go to uni and i stay awake until late and when i realize i have to go shower already dhsbshbshsvshs and then when i come back i sleep for like... 10 hours or smth or i don't bc i got stuff to do and i accumulate sleep and then there will be a day of the week i'll just shut down for 15 hours. mostly i try to go to bed around 23h and wake up around 4h45, so that makes it almost 6 hours .

xii. lucky number?

never noticed any particular number that favors me

xiii. what are you wearing?

t-shirt, shorts, it's hot as hell here

xiv. dream job?

don't have one, just want one that won't consume me so i have time to do stuff i'm actually interested in

xv. dream trip?

also don't have one

xvi. instruments?

flute, some percussion, some guitar, i wish i had actually studied music besides the basic stuff... i still wanna learn to properly play something and not just beat some bongos during carnival

xvii. languages?

portuguese, english, bit of spanish only cause of the similarities with portuguese and 4 years of classes in middle school...but still, can't speak or write, only read and listen

xviii. favorite songs?

oh my god... ok...

i was making this in list format but it got way too big... it's still big i'm sorry

the beatles: i want you (she's so heavy), strawberry fields forever, across the universe, oh! darling, and your bird can sing, tomorrow never knows, mother nature's son, yer blues, golden slumbers, i am the walrus, i me mine, long tall sally (little richard cover), you can't do that, what you're doing, ticket to ride, rain, eleanor rigby, happiness is a warm gun, i'm so tired, blue jay way, for you blue, in my life, anna go to him (cover).

david bowie: time, cygnet committee, unwashed and somewhat slightly dazed, tvc15, life on mars, young americans, queen bitch

panic! at the disco: that green gentleman, she had the world, build god then we'll talk, nearly witches, emperor's new clothes, bittersweet, nine in the afternoon, northern downpour, behind the sea, stall me, the piano knows something i don't know

green day: jesus of suburbia, brutal love, hitchin a ride, blood sex and booze, give me novacaine, whatsername, last night on earth

the smiths: this charming man, panic, how soon is now

elton john: goodbye yellow brick road, bennie and the jets, rocket man

queen: somebody to love, killer queen

strawberry swing - coldplay

welcome home - radical face

joão e maria - chico buarque

barbara rose - jonny greenwood

bachianas brasileiras no 5 - heitor villa-lobos

le festin - michael giacchino, camille

rains of castamere - ramin djwadi

unchained melody - a lot of versions from a lot of artists

another day - paul mccartney

meu erro - paralamas do sucesso

flor de lis - djavan

love the way you lie - rihanna&eminem

man! i feel like a woman - shania twain

xix. random fact?

well, it's not really a fact i think... i'm moving (again) but this time is to my father's house because my mum is moving to the south of the country... and i'm so fucking scared because we aren't close at all (i met him when i was 14) i mean, he seems nice enough, all of our interactions have been mostly pleasant but his wife (and probably he himself too) is a bit conservative in the brazillian traditional white family way (she's white cause she's a southern. i know yall think all latinos are poc,,,, but that's not true) but then again, that's something i had to live with all my life so i can handle casual homophobia and racism and sexism... but it will still be so weird cause i never been away from my mum too long (i'm... a momma's boy). i'm going next week i think, wish me luck.... (also he's got two dogs who won't leave me the fuck alone, i get out of the shower and they drool all over me, they know i'm a beta so they keep getting on top of me and since they're HUGE and i'm such a weakling i can't even get them off me and i can't scold them with a strong voice, i just can't do it... i mean, don't get me wrong i like them... but... they like me way too much and keep making me dirty.. i hate being dirty)

xx. aesthetic?

farm aesthetic..... idealistic farm aesthetic habshabaha like marie antoinette's pettit chateau. also the whole pretty odd aesthetic and strawberry swing by coldplay aesthetic

i'm tagging (probably less than 21 ppl) @zutaralesbian @ekscelsior @benstolemyhearty @lannistermartell @tyrionlannysters @avatars-legend @cerseiofhouselannister @falconsredwing @gendryayaya @glittering-snowfall @agirlandabeast @bugband @alittlebigpotato @vairemelde @charmeilon @jawn-lemon @antilennon @im-only-sweeping @ssimsass

i hope tumblr actually notifies you guys, i had problems with the last one...

#nfr #abt me #long post

[jennifermusingisms]

Hi Jennifer! I'm a multimuse blog trying to come up with an aesthetic way to format my tags. Do you have any lyric suggestions?

Alright, this got a bit longer than I thought it was because I wanted to talk tag aesthetic and then give you some lyrics but I did manage to get this up within two/three days after you sent this message. I have had a sinus headache for the past few days so I wasn’t in any real mood to listen to lyrics as it hurt my head but now that I am feeling a tad better, I can get down to this ask! Sorry, it took so long to get it done! I love helping people that want to do multi muses because I am a big fan of them and they can be a hard thing to do right and neat.

If you need more suggests, have questions about multimuse blogs or want tips on it or anything in general I can try to help you where I can!  Feel free to like or reblog this post if you find it helpful!

Aesthetic of tags (Something you didn’t really ask for my help with but going to give it anyway).  Fancy text generator one (Tip if you click on the decorate option you can get something fancy like  ★·.·´¯`·.·★ for in front of your tags.) and fancy text generator two.

With aesthetically pleasing tags, I honestly suggest a throwaway blog that you don’t mind the tags getting messed up on to check to make sure the special characters will work with Tumblr and show up. 

Now onto some lyrics. With this, I tend to watch fanvideos of characters (even if it is an oc, pick characters that remind you of your original character) and there tend to be some awesome songs that you can use for tags. Also, songs that you listen to often can work as well! 

Found you when your heart was broke

I used to be a little too reckless. 

Feeling so high but too far away to hold me

Just running from the demons in your mind

Put you right back on your feet

Living in a world so cold wasting away

Don’t know what’s going on. Don’t know what went wrong 

Something about you makes me feel like a dangerous woman

I’m so into you. I can barely breathe. 

All I want to do is all into you

A little less conversation and a little more touch my body

so baby lets keep this secret. A little scandalous but baby don’t let them see it.

I ain’t trying to push you but god damn I’m a mess

Anytime I’m alone. I can’t help thinking about you.

I’m so into you that all I want to do is fall in deep

Oh baby look what you started. the temperature is rising. 

Remember when you said there is no second chance?

That’s my lane. don’t wear it out though

So sue me for looking so pretty tonight wearing your favorite color under the lights

It is hard to see what you don’t want to see

feeling myself can’t be illegal

Pick up that jaw off the floor

Sue me for being good friends with your friends

What do you do when I’m not around?

Liar Liar words on fire

Didn’t want to come to your party anyway

You’re a fucking liar

Sold my soul to someone cold. Split me open centerfold.

You’re dead inside but how did you get that way? 

What do you do when I’m not around? 

Payback is a bad bitch but baby I’m the baddest 

Baby I’m sorry. I’m not sorry.

Being so bad got me feeling so good. Showing you up like I know that I could

Feeling inspired because the tables have turned

The grass is greener under me

I know how bad this must hurt seeing me like this but it gets worse

I don’t know why I do this every time. It’s only when I’m lonely

Please forgive me for the drink spilled on the floor

It’s time for me to take it. I’m the boss right now

What’s wrong with being confident? 

Forget the diamonds and pearls they just want a ring

You run your mouth all over town

Do Re Me Fi So fucking done with you

All the games you play. I ain’t no tic tack toe

Send the X and O’s on another note

You never had to buy yourself a drink

Tell me pretty lies. Look me in the face

You’ve been out all night. I don’t know where you’ve been

I’ve got hella feelings for you.

I act like I don’t fucking care because they ain’t even there

I’m only a fool for you

My girl don’t want me because of my dirty laundry 

I miss you pushing me close to the edge

I wish I knew what I had when I left

You set fire to my world and I couldn’t handle the heat

I want you to ruin my life. I want you to fuck my nights.

Six inch heels. she walked in the club like nobody’s business

God damn. She murdered everybody and I was her witness 

ONE and TWO tags of mine with some masterlists with quotes and lyric masterlists.  Also using quotes is an amazing thing to do when you want to make character tags! Pinterest has a bunch of quotes (I recommend starting a board of favorite quotes so you can go and pick ones for tags when you need them) but I also have a quote tag on my blog right HERE.

#rpt #RPh #rpa #Anonymous #❪Masterlist❫ #rpc #❪MyMasterlist❫ #❪MyGuide❫ #❪Answered❫

[allisonilluminated]

The Seven Sins of Fanfiction

Hey all,

This blog is primarily focused on helping newer writers (and maybe some older ones) improve their fanfiction and increase their views.  Since that’s the case, it’s important to understand exactly what not to do when you’re writing.

These are the worst things you can do while you’re writing.  I can guarantee everyone reading this post has done at least three of them, and probably all in some shape of form.  This is the sort of thing that makes you want to click away immediately, that you cringe at when it’s in the first paragraph or laugh at how bad it is.  These things that make you stop reading other stories, just think about it for a moment.  What if fewer people are reading your own work because you’re making the same mistakes?

Yeah.  If you want to improve, you gotta know what you’re doing wrong.  Number Seven is the least worst, then the list descends to Number One, the worst thing you can do in fanfiction.

Note: This is a subjective list.  There are people who disagree with some of these points (especially the non-grammar ones), so it’s important to remember that these are the things I find most degrading to the quality of the story being written.  As a writer, you have the creative liberty to write whatever you want.

#7 – Bad Romance

“Wo-o-o-o-o, o-o-o-o, o-o-ah, caught in a bad romance fanfiction but it’s the only 100k fic for my OTP so I’m like contractually obligated to read it.” - Lady Gaga, mostly

We’ve all been here.  You know that moment when two characters meet, then suddenly decide to kiss, and the next thing you know they’re screwing on the patio with some kinky ass BDSM shit.  What about those cringe fics where suddenly Harry is spouting some creepy possessive stuff like “my only” or “softest light of my life” to twelve year old Ginny.  You know what I’m talking about.

Good romance is an art.  It’s about flawed characters (later) coming together in a beautifully intimate way (later) to make something even more beautiful.  There is so much bad romance on FFN and AO3 that it just blows my mind.

Giving tips would take an entire post, so here’s a good article on the absolute basics you need to write a good romance: https://www.nownovel.com/blog/romance-writing-mistakes/

#6 – Bad Dialogue Tags

“No!” he howled.

“Yes,” she growled angrily.

She retorted snarkily, “Well, screw you.”

“Fuck you too,” he scowled sadly, before gratingly mumbling “I still love you though.”

Alternatively:

“No!” “Yes.”  “Well, screw you.”  “Fuck you too.  I still love you though.”

There’s a glorious word in this social construct we call English, and it’s “said.”  Use it.

You don’t need a fancy word for every tag.  You don’t need a fancy word for almost all tags.  Eighty percent of your tags should be said, exclaimed, and asked, and more of said than the others.  Maybe a whispered or a yelled for some flavor.

Adverbs are your enemies.  I struggle with this, but you should use them extremely sparingly.

On the flipside, if your reader doesn’t know who’s talking, your dialogue is meaningless to them.  Also, use line breaks every time there is a new speaker.

The trick is finding some happy medium between the two examples.  A handful of fancy tags, a lot of said, and if there are two people talking back and forth you don’t even need to tag every sentence.

#5 – Bad Messaging

I don’t want to put down an example for this one, because I think writers feel liberated to write some really awful shit in fanfiction because it’s “not a serious medium” or “it’s the internet, I have free speech.”  Let me say this right now:

Stories that make rape a positive thing are not okay.  Stories that portray suicide in a glorified light are not okay.  Stories that show slavery, or torture, or all of the other horrendous things human beings do to each other in a romanticized or glorified manner are not okay.

I don’t care if it’s your fetish.  I don’t care, it’s just not okay to write about these things in a positive light.  The only reason this is so high on this list is because these stories aren’t as common as the rest, and are mostly marked M/Explicit so you can avoid them.

#4 – Overdescription

Hi my name is Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way and I have long ebony black hair (that’s how I got my name) with purple streaks and red tips that reaches my mid-back and icy blue eyes like limpid tears and a lot of people tell me I look like Amy Lee (AN: if u don’t know who she is get da hell out of here!). [[I’m not related to Gerard Way but I wish I was because he’s a major fucking hottie. I’m a vampire but my teeth are straight and white. I have pale white skin. I’m also a witch, and I go to a magic school called Hogwarts in England where I’m in the seventh year (I’m seventeen). I’m a goth (in case you couldn’t tell) and I wear mostly black. I love Hot Topic and I buy all my clothes from there. For example today I was wearing a black corset with matching lace around it and a black leather miniskirt, pink fishnets and black combat boots. I was wearing black lipstick, white foundation, black eyeliner and red eye shadow – My Immortal

Oh boy.

Writers, let me introduce you to this wonderful thing called your profile.  Assuming you aren’t drowning in copypastas, this is the perfect place for your character descriptions.  Alternatively, have you heard of Tumblr? Literally, stick them anywhere except the middle of your story, and I can guarantee you the readers that actually care will find them if you mention them in your A/N.

Show, don’t tell is one of the fundamental principles of writing. When you’re describing a character, you probably don’t need more than three adjectives and a one sentence description of their outfit. Yes, that applies even if your character has a special non canon outfit.  If we must know, work the details into the story. Info-dumping description is telling, and is one of the worst world building and characterization mistakes you can make.  Period.

#3 – Epithets

The blond girl walked to the door, and started as a burly man opened it.  “May I help you?”

“Yes, I’m here to get a consultation,” the graying businessman said as he ran a hand through his oily hair.

The youthful therapist nodded as she shut the door behind him. Rummaging on her desk, she asked, “Why are you here?”

“Well,” said the jaded economist to the buxom woman.  “This author thinks they’re being clever by not giving out names, but they’re ruining this story.”

The best way to get someone to leave your story is epithets.  

Epithets do not create mystery.  Epithets are not a good substitute for proper nouns.  Epithets will not make a clever opening, or add variety to your dialogue.

Epithets will ruin your story, and should not be used.

They come in varying degrees of horror.

The noun.  You might be able to get away with saying just “the woman” or “the child” under certain circumstances. This is almost an excusable offence.

The noun with one adjective.  This is already unacceptable. If you though you were going to solve Sin #4 by doing this, you’re digging yourself an even deeper hole.

The noun with one modified adjective.  Because they can’t just be sexy, they have to be shockingly sexy.

The noun with multiple adjectives.  This is automatically overdescription on top of being a horrible thing to subject another person to.

The noun followed by a relative clause.  Because there’s always a way to make it worse.  “The girl who was now holding his hand” is absolutely disgusting, and so is “The girl that was sitting across from her” or especially “the girl she knew had a chocolate bar somewhere in her pocket.

The noun followed by a relative clause with adjectives.  Put it together and what have you got?

Compound Epithets.  Oh. My.  God.  This deserves its own sin.  Even if your character has blue hair, you should never ever ever call them a bluenette.  Ever.  Ever ever ever. AAAAAAAAH!

The author has made her point.

#2 – Bad Grammar

I find bad grammar extremely agitating, mostly because there are a lot of great tools and easy fixes to solve the problems.  Most word processors have a built in spell checker, and a lot of them check for grammar as well.  If you need an alternative, grammarly.com has a good free version that’ll catch a lot of mistakes.  Of course, proofreading your work before posting is always a great idea.  Here’s a quick list of some of the most common grammar issues you should be on the lookout for:

A new paragraph for a new idea.

A new paragraph for a new speaker.

Dialogue formatting

Periods

Commas

Run on sentences

Using line breaks

Spelling

Capitalizing starts of sentences

Capitalizing proper nouns

Choosing CONSISTENT capitalization for canon terms (Pokemon vs pokemon, for example)

Repeated words.

Sentence fragments

Tense

#1 – Bad Characterization

“What?” you’re probably asking yourself right now.  “How is bad characterization possibly worse than poor grammar?  Than epithets?”

Allow me to explain.

When an author writes a story, a good story, they are creating characters who act like people.  They have wants, needs, hates, motives, and a concept of who they are, even if they’re only fictional.  The author gives them life, spirit, a spark that keeps you reading and wanting to learn more about them.

That sense of identity is what makes them real to us.  Why you binge a show on Netflix, or read a novel in one night.  Reading is a connection with these characters on a deeper level than you might realize, and this connection brings them to life.

Take that away, and your story is dead.

Your gray OOC Gary Stu overpowered Ravenclaw Harry who grew up with Snape and has a goblin half brother AU is not a story about Harry Potter.  It’s a story about an OC named Harry Potter, and Harry loses any integrity he had as a character in Rowling’s books.

That’s why there are fics with horrible grammar and massive following, alongside fics with incredible grammar and sentence construction but no followings.  Unless you maintain a basic level of your character’s identity, the essence of what makes them empathetic, you’re not writing about that character.  This is the worst sin, because even with all of the others in play, if there is good characterization you can still create an incredible story.

Just by fixing these seven problems, your fic can instantly jump from bad/meh to incredible in the way people perceive it.  Hopefully this list can help you determine things to either go back and revise or work on for future chapters.  When have you committed one of the seven sins?  What other sins do people make all the time in their writings?

Thank you to all of the amazing people who have followed, Allie

Support Me:  Fanfiction.net - Archives of our Own 

#fanfic #fanfiction #seven sins #writing

[cassandraclare]

on the rights of women to own their own work. crummy crabapple speaks!

Yes, this stuff is still going on. I was hoping it would have ended after this, but it hasn’t, and being called a bitch whore murderer gets wearing fast when it’s based on nothing.

Look, frank talk about this stuff on Tumblr is often discouraged — when you have a small but pretty active group of “haters,” as happens nowadays to most successful creators, especially women, the general rule of thumb is not to talk to or about them. Blocking them on twitter excites them: it’s attention. Replying is pointless, explaining is deliberately misinterpreted, the truth is a lie, lies are truth, up is down, winning is losing. You can’t win in this situation, anyway: nobody can or does, everyone loses. The creators, the fandom, those caught in the middle (actors, etc.) Everyone.

This business about me killing Alec isn’t a rumor. It’s a lie. A purposeful lie told to make a point: that I am a bad person unworthy of my creations and that if I am a bad enough person, it’s okay to say they don’t belong to me, that I didn’t create them, that there is essentially no value in the act of creation, especially when it is done by a woman.

As we all know but mostly don’t talk about because If You Speak It They Will Come, there is a small group of anti-TMI-book fans who believe the books and the show are at war.  (They are not the show’s fans. They are something else entirely. I talk to perfectly nice show fans all the time: these are less people who love Shadowhunters than people dedicated to the idea that if they scream about it long enough, the show will cease being based on this particular book series: an ultimately doomed goal that nevertheless leaves them plenty of opportunities to annoy the rest of us.) Instead of being able to accept that art is partly subjective, they are in a constant battle for an imaginary moral high ground in which they are the keepers of a version of the Mortal Instruments that has been objectively purified of all problematic elements. 

The problem there being, of course, that there is no such thing as perfect, unproblematic media. Art comes from humans and humans are flawed. If you expect perfection you will be bitterly disappointed every single time: I’ve watched it happen over and over, as the this showrunner is a gift tag turns into the This showrunner is not a gift tag,  and many of those who last year spoke glowingly of wrapping Ed Decter, their unproblematic hero (who once said to me in wonder, “You really worked a miracle with Malec, you know, people care about them as if they were a normal couple”), in cotton wool and fuzzy socks, now refer to Todd Slavkin as “Toad.”* Plenty of articles about the problematic elements of Shadowhunters have now been written and plenty of posts posted. (If Ed hadn’t been fired, he might have stuck around long enough to get called Ediot; these things are, after all, just a matter of time. (i get called “Casserole”, seriously, I am not kidding you, you cannot make this shit up.) ) 

To clarify: I am definitely NOT saying that a (potentially problematic) work should remain uncriticized to spare the feelings of the creators because they are flawed humans like everyone else. Criticism is valid; criticism is useful; criticism is important. What I am talking about in this post is not criticism. Telling a creator that her creations should be taken away from her because she “doesn’t deserve them”: not criticism. Making up funny names and mean hashtags for creators you don’t like: obviously hilarious for some, but definitely not criticism. And to some extent everyone knows this – so if it’s important to you that a creator be denied the right to claim ownership of, and pride in, her own work, it has to be because she is not just problematic but corrupt, evil, and cruel. She has to be morally bankrupt such that removing her from the narrative of her own creation is a moral good.

And so the lie that I’m planning to kill Alec (framed within the true narrative that killing off LGBT+ characters is a serious fucking problem in media) is a natural development: because wouldn’t that be awful and mean the books were morally very bad and wrong and shouldn’t creators who create bad wrong things have their creations taken away from them? Which would be just another Misogyny Tuesday on the internet except for the fact that it’s exploiting the fears of a vulnerable group of people (LGBT+ fans for whom Alec means a lot, in whatever format -- fans who have seen over and over LGBT characters die for nothing, for shitty reasons, for straight people, on TV and in movies and in comics and in books and are therefore in a place to be incredibly hurt by it happening again), to score a point in what is basically a ship war. And that is really shitty.

And yes, it’s a ship war.

There was really a “salty casserole” joke in there begging to be made. Missed opportunity!

So, why am I salty, you might ask? There is this belief that I must be Upset With The Show because people care about Malec on it more than Clace: my friends, the field where I grow my fucks is barren on this topic. I made up both couples. I don’t care which one you ship more, especially in a format where their story is not being told by me and for all I know, the showrunners don’t even want you shipping Clace at the moment. They seem into Climon and oh God, I have bored myself with this tangent.

I invented Clace and Malec. I’m writing a trilogy about Malec because I love Malec and have a story in my head about them, despite being offered three times the money to write one about Clace, as they’re “more marketable.” I do not have a favorite. Maybe writing works that way for some people but I doubt it. I’ve always said I don’t ship in my own books, and that is precisely what I meant. 

Moving on: Are there things that have upset me about the show and the way it was developed? Yes — being told my mostly-female audience wasn’t a desirable one because they’re female; the fact that the female artist of color who created the runes has never been paid or credited for their use; being told Isabelle was “tits and ass”, being told Alec being gay was “a strike against his likeability”, contractual shit you will never know about because that stuff isn’t public — but for some reason I’m supposed to give a flying fuck about who ships what canon couple on the show? For viewers, as it should be, this is a TV show: for me this is part of my brand and has real-world consequences for my life. Unsurprisingly I care about those, not some imaginary ship war.

I was thrilled Shadowhunters won a GLAAD award for Magnus and Alec.  (I was thrilled when the movie of Mortal Instruments got a GLAAD award nomination for Magnus and Alec though there was so little of them in the movie, it served to really underline the paucity of LGBT+ storylines in major film and tv.) I congratulated Matt and Harry on twitter; the comments below mine are something of a primer in why female creators are fleeing the internet in greater and greater numbers.

https://twitter.com/cassieclare/status/848497330999369729

The message is overwhelmingly: “Shut up, bitch, how dare you open your mouth and remind us that this show exists because your books do, even though you didn’t actually say that but you see, we like to pretend you’re dead and it’s inconvenient when you speak.��� I’d imagine every one of those commenters would tell you they were a feminist, too. The idea that nothing is gained by shutting up women or denying that their intellectual property has worth or value is apparently one that seems good in the abstract, but falls at the first hurdle of but I don’t like her.

The abstract often does fail when it comes into conflict with the concrete. Being a feminist ally means being an ally even to women you don’t like, because being an ally only to people you like requires no effort and less thought. That doesn’t mean never criticizing women or their work. But it does require interrogating what’s going on in your own head. One of the most unpleasant haters I see on twitter, who viciously loathes me though we have never met, has read all my books; she has Malec in her username, and a quote from the books in her bio. She has Cassandra Jean’s art on her twitter page, and Valerie Freire’s rune designs in her text and background. That’s a lot of mental and artistic real estate devoted to the work of three women she refers to as 
“garbage trash.” (Though I think Cassandra Jean and Val are mostly garbage trash because they associate with me and should instead have waited ten years for the TV show to come along so they could draw pictures of it or something. I don’t really understand it: the cognitive dissonance that allows to you dedicate your life to “Malec” while crapping on the person who created both characters and their relationship is so enormous that I can only follow it so far and no farther. I understand thinking that the show version is better, but not whatever warped fantasy tells you that if the books had never been written the show (now called “Evilchasers” perhaps) would have heroically found a way to invent the  story of a gay demon-fighting warrior and his biracial warlock boyfriend anyway because that very specific story was floating around the ethereal planes waiting to be discovered by the psychic powers of Disney and it is only by great misfortune that I got to it first.) Point being: if your username is “Bubbles loves Malec” yet your twitter is dedicated to spewing venom at the person without whom the thing you love would not exist, it might be time to ask yourself some questions about cause and effect, and also, what that hate of yours is doing for you, psychologically speaking.

Look, I am going to get a lot of shit for this post, but whatever — the upside of being constantly screamed at for things you have not done (slut-shamed Isabelle, planned to murder Alec, thus contributing to the fucking awful homophobic trope of killing off gay characters, "stabbed the actors in the back”, promoted incest, poisoned the earth’s water supply) is that you no longer bother worrying about being screamed at for things you did do. I won’t do set visits or conventions since coming back from NY Comicon to stuff like this:  

I’m not going to comment on the specifics, save to say they represent a massive and almost hilarious (though probably deliberate) misinterpretation of literally everything that happened on that panel. (If the network didn’t want book fans there, asking me questions, they wouldn’t have brought me there. I was there to do promotion for the show by talking about the show and the books — I am the author, and what the literal fuck else do you think they brought me there to talk about? The history of Belgian cabinet-making? They don’t think attention paid to the books takes away from the show: only a small group of asshats think that, and it’s weird that the OP never paused to think that if they didn’t want me there talking about the books, they could simply NOT HAVE INVITED ME. Also did it seriously never occur to them that panelists are asked to speak at certain junctures or in reference to certain questions, or gestured at to do so, we don’t just randomly interject? Lord.

I will admit it was extreme of Harry not to leave me lying there on the floor or maybe drop a chair on my head while no one was looking. He should reconsider his choices.)

But that’s the thing: posts like this one are the reason I haven’t gone back to set, or gone to another convention, or promoted the show. Would you go to a convention if you knew people like this were going to be feet away from you in the audience? I’m a grown-up, I can take being called Crummy Crabapple (did the whole kindergarten class vote on that one or was it a decision by fiat…?) but the sheer hate that underpins the silliness of the post makes the idea of being near people who think like that fairly shuddery. 

I gathered a few such posts together to show to FF, and the network’s never blamed me for not wanting to go out and physically promote again. The sad part of all this is that mostly I pretend the show doesn’t exist because the downside of mentioning it is being screamed at for days by asshats (Let me be very specific what I mean by “asshats” = people who send threats, who use insulting gendered language, make anti-Semitic slurs, and repeatedly tell me I should not be allowed to own my own work — if this is not stuff you do, I’m not talking about you. Criticism of the books is fine and irrelevant.) 

We all know these asshats exist — and we are all sad about it: me, the network, the actors, the showrunners, because the net result of them existing is that I don’t talk about or promote the show, and that’s a loss for a show that could really use that outreach. Losing me, my online audience, my worldwide publishers, as potential promotional partners is bad, not good, for a show that these people theoretically love. Losing the book fans the show depended on as viewers, but who can’t stand the toxic atmosphere, is bad, not good, for the actors and writers they claim to support. Screaming “INCEST FREAK!” at every twelve year old who comes online and timidly asks when they will see Chairman Meow is not going to raise the show’s ratings. If someone is more interested in driving away the show’s potential audience because they regard them as moral degenerates than they are in getting it renewed, that’s their bliss to follow, but the reason I’m mentioning these people at all is 1) I’m disturbed by the narrative women shouldn’t be allowed to own their own work and 2) many many posts have now been made about what an awful place the Shadowhunters/TMI fandom is, and that sucks for everyone. Sadly, it doesn’t take that many people to ruin an online space.

The idea that the books and the show are at war for kibbles is a fannish one (most people, including my publisher, regard TV shows based on books as advertising for those books because from a book perspective that’s what they are) seems to come out of the fact that fans argue about which they like better, something that has happened since the dawn of adaptations. I remember it from when I was in the Harry Potter fandom: Alan Rickman understood Snape better than JKR, the movies gave Draco more depth, etc and so on. Looking back now I can see the irony of people with usernames like Lupinfan talking about how Lupin was sidelined in the books but not the movies, but distance gives infinite perspective, I suppose. If you like Malec better on the show: awesome. They still exist on the show because they were invented in the books. That statement will be interpreted as the height of arrogance, but it’s just flat fact. They matter in both formats to a lot of people. There will never be a hand of God that reaches down from the sky and declares either one better. It will always be a matter of taste and opinion. The fact that art is subjective is something we all have to live with.

This is what I mean about the “killing Alec” lie: it has become part of the justification for my unworthiness to claim to have anything to do with my own characters. Killing Alec would be a bad thing to do to Alec (and Magnus); thus I would be terribly maltreating Alec (and Magnus); thus I don’t deserve to have anything to do with Alec (or Magnus). Thus it is okay to tell me to get the fuck out – how dare I even open my bitch mouth to congratulate the actors playing my characters if I would do something so terrible to them, after all? And who cares if it’s a lie and no one can source it? (Come on now, be real — no one tried.)

Whether I deserve Alec and Magnus is somewhat beside the point: I invented them regardless, and there was a large and profoundly intense Malec fandom before the show ever aired, whose existence is in fact directly responsible for the fact that Malec are a thing on the show at all. (Initially, neither of them appeared or were even referred to in the pilot.) Reality doesn’t really intrude into the fantasy that Magnus and Alec and Isabelle and Jace descended, pre-created, from a sky cloud, though: the fan/creator ownership dichotomy has existed since before Arthur Conan Doyle was bullied into bringing Sherlock back from the dead. Fans and creators don’t always agree and creators aren’t always right. What they are, however, always, is creators.

(In case I had forgotten that I am not, in fact, a hot dude actor. ASTONISHING INFORMATION.) It is mysterious to interpret congratulating actors as taking “credit for Matt and Harry’s hard work”;  I neither need or want that anyway because I am not an actor; I am already credited on the show as the author of the source material, which is what I am. (I’ve won plenty of book awards but would be very puzzled to win, say, a Nobel prize for chemistry.) I congratulated the actors knowing I’d get a raft of shit for either doing so or not doing so: I chose to do so despite the inevitable annoyance factor because I like Matt and Harry; I wanted them hired; I like how much they love the characters, and I’ve always found them to be kind people who would loathe and despise the kind of tweets these folks are sending on their behalf.

Ironic, that.

But yeah, I also sent it because I’m proud of Malec. Deal with that. Women need to be allowed to be proud of their work sometimes without that being considered a deep evil. I don’t think the Magnus and Alec I created are perfect (by which I mean my writing of them, not their endearing flaws ;) but they represent years of work and love, and like any author would be, I’m thrilled to see the screen version of them acknowledged twice as something special. That’s very normal: for the GLAAD win, I got flowers from my publisher, congrats from the network and from my agents at CAA, because why wouldn’t you congratulate an author on something good happening to an adaptation of their books? The idea that when discussing an adaptation of their work, an author should reel back in terror screaming “I AM UNWORTHY TO BE MENTIONED IN THE SAME SENTENCES AS THE CHARACTERS I CREATED!” is so bizarre to most people that if you tried to explain to them that some women, not all women hahaha of course, but SOME WOMEN JUST DONT DESERVE TO BE ALLOWED TO TALK OR CLAIM THEY CAN “OWN” THINGS AMIRITE, they would back quietly away muttering that they had an important appointment to get their hedgehog dyed blue because they would literally think you were probably a serial killer.

This situation is not unique to these books, to me, or to this show: however, there is a special angle to this particular situation. Many commenters on all this have noted that the books are a female creation, the show a male one. Ed, Todd, Michael, Matt, McG, and Darren are all men, and in many ways, people find it much more comfortable, much easier, and much simpler to give uncritical admiration to men. They’re men, and therefore they have authority I don’t, and my continued existence as the author of the source material of Shadowhunters is seen as even more horrible because it makes it a girl thing, and “girl things” are less serious and less worthy. One of the things I often see the haters say is that the show is “older”; in fact the audience of the show is statistically younger than the book’s audience (I’ve seen the numbers) but I think it’s hard not to want to dismiss something so imbued with lady germs as being inherently inferior (and what’s more inferior than young women? It’s trendy to bash YA, which is seen as the province the young and the female – surely preferring men’s work makes you, you know, a more serious person? And surely if I had the sense God gave a weasel, I’d stop writing, give the book rights to some guy, and retire in shame? GO FORTH HARLOT AND WRITE YA NO MORE.)

Feminism does not mean you cannot criticize works by women. I’ve said that before, but I’m saying it again because it’s so easy to dismiss essays like this by saying “She’s hiding behind feminism and claiming we can’t criticize her because she’s a woman!” Nope. (Though it does mean you look for patterns. It’s kind of interesting there’s this small group of people who believe these characters/storylines really came alive when control of them was handed over to a series of ever-changing white middle-aged men. I mean, coincidence perhaps, but…?) I haven’t addressed criticism here really because it’s not the point: there is a huge gap between writing a bad review of a woman’s book and crusading for the idea that she shouldn’t be allowed to own her own intellectual property. Men taking away, literally taking away the money made from and authorship of women’s work is an ugly part of history (“Colette and [her husband] separated in 1906, although it was not until 1910 that the divorce became final. She had no access to the sizable earnings of the Claudine books [she had written]—the copyright belonged to him”) and it’s disturbing to see a group of primarily women argue that it should be repeated.

If the idea that a woman created Magnus and Alec, or any characters or world, is so horribly, terribly bothersome that you have to make up lies that, in your mind, render her unworthy of her own creation so that it’s all right to “take it from her” by discounting her role as a writer, her ownership of her own intellectual property, her right to exist as a person and to stand on the same stage at a convention as the “gem-like saint” male actors playing her characters —  maybe think about why?* What does screaming that I’d better not think Alec and Magnus have anything to do with me get you, really? Except the knowledge that if, one day, you write or create or draw something people love, you’ve helped create an environment in which it’s a veritable certainty you’ll get treated like you’re a piece of shit for doing it?

*And “bitch” is “bitch”, friends. It doesn’t matter what letters you take out, it’s still misogynist and still shitty. You know what you’re saying, and so does everyone else. Try asshat, really. I recommend it.

#shadowhunters #malec #cassandra clare #feminism

[wandermaximov-blog]

ultraviolet [Part 1]

Pairing: Peter Parker x Superhero!Female!Reader

Warnings: Bad description of violence because I’m not very good at it, cussing

Summary:  You are a superhero, struggling as any teenager would to balance school life with vigilante justice. When you meet Spiderman, he throws a wrench into your works, informing the government of your existence. You've worked so hard to stay off the radar - will you accept the government's offers, or will you remain a solitary figure?

A/N: Hey! It’s “isactuallyspiderman”/MJ from Quotev. I’m still working on figuring out Tumblr, so please forgive me if the whole formatting thing is wrong/messed up. <3 (gif originally posted by @bnsplmn, by the way)

                 New York City, New York. 

        A hotbed for alien attacks and superhero sightings. The world was being avenged from one side of the city and defended from the other. Surely, they didn't need more vigilantes running around with so many people protecting the state.

        But you sure as hell weren't going to Jersey.

        As you passed by a nearby alley, you heard a shout followed by a cry.

        Without a second thought, you made your way into the alley. Sounds of a struggle hit your ears - you cracked your knuckles, violet bolts of energy dancing across your fingers. 

     Your father was a psychologist, and a good one at that. If he knew his daughter spent her nights fighting small-time criminals, he's probably blow a gasket and try to shrink you. 

     Oh well. 

     At least you were making a difference. 

     Just a few buildings down, Spiderman heard a woman cry out. In a rush to get to find the source of the sound, he shot a web to sling toward the next building. 

     He miscalculated how high it was, and had to hastily let go of the web to avoid smashing into the side of a building. 

     Thank God for dumpsters. 

     He'd fallen into the alley where conflict was arising. From his position in the trash bin, Spiderman could barely see what was going on. A man yelping, a bright purple light, something colliding with the dumpster.

     With only a slight flail, Spiderman threw himself out of the dumpster. He immediately dodged, avoiding a punch thrown in his direction. Bewildered, he shot a web at the attacker. It was a girl, whose arm was promptly stuck to a wall.

     "Stay right there!" Spiderman demanded. 

     "You fucking asshole!" She shouted in response, her voice muffled by her mask. 

      "Now there's TWO of you?" A man groaned, drawing a knife from his jacket. (It matched the one he had in his other hand.) Spiderman's suit beeped, his A.I.'s voice commenting on the situation.

     "Peter, be careful. I scanned the man, he has a criminal record." 

     Spiderman - Peter - shot a web at the guy's feet. "Karen, what about the girl?" He asked, turning to face her.

     "What girl, Peter?" 

     She was gone, only leaving singed webbing in her place.

    Peter spun in a circle, trying to find any trace of the girl. 

     "Karen, did you get a chance to scan her?" He asked, climbing to a nearby roof to get a better vantage point. 

     "I tried, Peter."

     "Tried?"

     "She was wearing a mask. All I could see were her eyes, but they were glowing too bright for me to get any kind of retina scan."

     Peter rolled onto the roof. He stood, making his way to the edge. 

     "So, she's gone. And we have no idea where." Peter sighed. His phone chimed, bringing up various blogs and media posts. 

     "Karen?" Peter asked, flicking through the posts. "What is all of this?"

     Peter's eyes settled on a photo - the girl had a glowing shield drawn before her, blocking bullets in an apparent Bronx shoot out. 

     "I reverse image searched the photos I managed to take of the girl with social media posts. Geotags are always around the Bronx and Hell's Kitchen."

     Peter swallowed hard. 

     "What's she called?"

     "Ultraviolet."

---

     Peter had left the criminal and called the police instead. He couldn't stop thinking about Ultraviolet, the powers she had, and who she might be. She worked in dangerous places - nearly all of the photos Karen had shown him were geotagged in the bad parts of town.

She was dangerous. It was Peter's duty as a hero to stop her.

---

     You flopped onto your bed, rolling about until you had sufficiently wiggled out of your pants. You stood to change into pajamas, listening intently for your father's footsteps. He was a busy man, and wasn't often awake after ten P.M.

     You checked the time on your phone. 2 A.M. You were safe.

     You were tired, and had school in the morning. You couldn't shake the feeling that you'd seen that Spiderkid somewhere before tonight. With a huff, you slid your private laptop out from under your nightstand to do some research.

---

     You regretted staying up so late when you woke at six the following morning. You hadn't gotten to bed until nearly four-thirty - you'd been distracted from your research for about an hour. You started out on a video clip of the Spiderkid on YouTube, which led to other viral video clips, and before you knew it, you were watching obviously fake ghost sightings.

     You dressed in dark jeans and a striped top. It was the exact same thing you'd worn yesterday afternoon, but you didn't have the energy to grab clothes that weren't on your floor. 

     Mondays sucked.

     You grabbed your backpack and left your bedroom, entering the open living room in the large apartment you called your home. Your dad was awake already, sipping at his steaming coffee. 

     "Ow," He hissed, taking another sip. "Ow!"

You chuckled. "Stop drinking it if it's so hot." You snarked playfully as you grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge.

     "But I want to drink it." Dad whined in return. The two of you laughed. It was kind of sad, at least /you/ thought it was, that your dad was your best friend.

     Well, one of your two best friends. 

     "Are you meeting that boy again?" Dad asked. You rolled your eyes.

     "You know his name, he's been my best friend since eighth grade." 

     "I know. Are you meeting Peter for breakfast?" He asked. You nodded. "Yeah, he bought me lunch on Friday so I'm buying breakfast today."

     Dad hummed. 

     "Well, you should leave soon if you're going to meet him somewhere."

     You scoffed. "It's barely 6:15, he won't be up for another thirty minutes."

---

     Peter didn't wake up for another hour.

     He muttered child-friendly curses as he yanked on the same clothes he wore yesterday, ignoring the wrinkles plaguing his sweater.

     Mondays sucked. 

     Peter grabbed his backpack and his wallet, entering the living room. He crawled over the couch, flopping onto it as he was too lazy to walk around. 

     "I was wondering when you'd wake up." May spoke from the tiny kitchen.

     "My alarm didn't set," Peter rubbed his face with his sweater sleeves. "And I was supposed to meet (Y/N) early for breakfast."

     "She came by. She said she'd wait for you in the lobby, if you ever woke up."

     Peter groaned, rolling off the couch to head to the lobby. Hopefully (Y/N) hadn't left yet. "I'll see you later, Aunt May!" He hollered over his shoulder.

     You were still in the lobby. 

     "How long have you been here?" Peter asked, bumping shoulders with you as the both of you left the building. 

     "Only ten minutes. I took my time because you didn't send me a good morning Snap." You smirked.

     "Aw, fudge." Peter's shoulders slumped. 

     "What?"

     "I left my phone in the apartment."

---

The two of you stopped at a cafe and grabbed breakfast to go, eating as you walked and talking while you ate. 

     "So," Peter coughed, choking on his breakfast. "You didn't get much sleep either?" 

     You shook your head. "No, I had more research to do for my English assignment." You lied. 

     The school gates were still open, despite it being ten minutes past the tardy bell. 

     "Are you sure you're okay with being late?" Peter felt bad about making you late. 

     "Yeah. If they make a fuss about it, I'll send Dad after them. He'll therapy them until the tardy is gone."

     Peter chuckled.

     "Did you just use 'therapy' as a verb?"

     "Shut up, Parker."

     You both entered the school, unaware that you'd spent part of the night together. 

---

Additional A/N: This looks so weird on Tumblr! It’s also a fairly old chapter, and my writing has already improved so much since this that it’s almost cringy, haha. Seeing as this is my first post on here but I’m already on chapter 6 on Quotev, I’ll be posting ch. 1-5 tonight. If you see this and want to be on a tag list, send me a message and I’ll make a list for next time. <3

#fanfiction #fanfic #my writing #imagine #peter parker #spiderman #spider-man #tom holland #peter parker x reader #tom holland x reader #spiderman x reader #spider-man x reader #avengers #spiderman: homecoming #marvel #ultraviolet

[broketheyolk]

Inadequate

Wow, it’s been over a year since I’ve written in here. Well, some things have changed and a lot hasn’t. I just read my last post and it was pretty humorous for the state of mind I was in (which was pretty fucking depressed). Update: I was good for a while but now I’m back feeling depressed as fuck. I’ve gotten a new keyboard at least so now I can type a bit better than how I was with the last post from over a year ago. Since I just read my last entry I’ll try to keep the format the same so I can remember what I was doing or at least paint a picture if you’re a random person just reading this. It’s 3:07am on a Saturday night (technically Sunday morning). I was just kind of pissed off because I couldn’t figure out how to log into this blog since I thought it was tied in with my “regular” tumblr but after getting mad and getting kind of hot (literally, I was sweating) I figured out that this tumblr was under a different email. God, I’m such a genius. It’s July and it’s still warm at night so I have my fan in my window blowing cold air in so I won’t be all sweaty and gross while I’m trying to sleep. Ghost in the Shell is playing in the background on the tv. I’m listening to Spotify to Hello by Engelwood Radio but the station was kind of sucking so I had to just switch it to the song on repeat. I have a ton of thoughts going through my head and it’s hard to figure out what to write first.

I feel like shit. I’ve been depressed for the last two weeks. It isn’t as bad as when I had it last year, which was really the first time I’ve ever really been depressed and felt that way. I feel like I just have anxiety all the time. My sister, her kids and her stupid ass husband are moving back in which is going to be a shitty situation. They say they’re only going to be here for 6 or 7 months but god knows how long it will really take them to leave. That prompted one of the reasons for my anxiety/depression. I was looking to finally move out but with the stupid bills I have I can’t afford to get an apartment and they don’t even really have studios in  the area which I would be fine with. Not being able to afford to move out really fucked with my head. I’m 30 going on 31 now and I feel so fucking inadequate. I’m working at a job where my coworkers are in their early twenties and here I am 30 years old and I just feel like a piece of shit loser. I feel like I should have more to show for my age but then again I can’t really complain because I haven’t put in the work to earn a better living. Then there’s my job. I feel really complacent. I make an ok amount of money but at this point I need to make more so I can finally fully support myself. The thing is that if I don’t think about it I’m fine where I’m at grinding away. Unless, I think about it then I won’t want to do any better. Also, I’m still fat. I’ve made minimal effort in trying to lose weight and it just comes down to me being a lazy piece of shit.                                                    

Here’s the cherry on the top though, I met a girl. She came in while I was working and made a funny comment asking if I was the only person there, which caught me off guard but was a great ice breaker. We talked a lot and it was nice that we were the only ones in the store so I could really talk and listen to her. She told me about her family and I was enamored immediately with her. She is definitely my type. She’s just a cute white girl that’s pretty nerdy. We joked around a bit and I told her I would text her and we were going to be best friends. Braden saw some of it go down and he was like “wow, good job.” Like I’ve flirted with girls that have come in before but this was the first time I really trying to get at her. That was on a Saturday and I emailed her my usual conformation email but with added personal things. She replied back and it gave me butterflies. Actually, just thinking about the first time we met gives me butterflies. I text her on Monday telling her about getting her service turned on and she replied back with a “Finally!” and oh man my heart fluttered. It’s been a while since I’ve felt like this with a girl .The real last time was with her but I guess everyone except for me knew she just wanted attention so I finally had to fall back because I was just putting in all that time on something that wasn’t going to happen. Anyways, so we text back and forth and it’s kind of dry. Like I don’t know if she isn’t into texting but she usually takes forever to reply and it’s hard to keep the conversation going. I figure out she’s into anime and stuff so we find common ground in that. I threw out senpai forgive me and she liked that and probably got the first “lol” out of her. I remember we were texting pretty much throughout the whole 4th of July. I really wanted to see her but I was being a bitch and should have just went to the fort with her but I was hanging out with my family that didn’t care if I was there or not and with Steve and Kai since he was back from Arizona for like a day. So we keep texting and she tells me about a spot she likes going to called Quarterworld. It’s like Ground Kontrol/Wunderland. She said she likes to go alone and drink while she’s there. I poke and prod saying we should go but she says it’s her tradition to go alone and I don’t know if she’s being serious or not but for some reason I keep bringing it up and I don’t know if she wants me to leave it alone. Anyways we finally end up hanging out. We drive to Uwajimaya and just browse all the aisles and small talk about everything. I geek out a little on the gundams they have there but don’t buy any because I don’t want her to think I’m a super nerd and I don’t have the room on my shelf. We end up eating at that Korean spot Tony likes and the whole time from me picking her up and to the restaurant, she’s doing all of the talking. I saw some stuff here and there but I was just over thinking everything and was too nervous to talk. Thankfully, she was ok with talking and I honestly could just listen to her talk about anything. She told me stories of her old roommates and her old job and how crazy it made her. How she was drinking herself to sleep to cope with the stress from work. She told me about how she has a wedding she wants to go to in November but her significant ex’s will be there and it would be kind of weird because she told them to leave her and get with a different girl that was better and they ended up breaking up with her and doing so. That made me feel kind of weird. Also, how her old roommate that was schizophrenic called her the time lord because all the guys in the place had a crush on her and how she was controlling all of them because she knew that. That made me feel pretty weird too. Like is she the type of person to do that kind of thing? So we end dinner and I take her home. I couldn’t figure out if we were on a date or just hanging out but it was the ladder. On the way back she notices that I haven’t talked as much and tries making an effort to engage me in conversation but I’m still fucking nervous and I talk about my family and visiting Papa but it all comes in blurts. I drop her off and the whole time she was talking during dinner I was looking at her face and realizing how fucking attractive and pretty she really is. I pull up to her spot and she was like no one’s ever paid for me before and I was taken back like really? And she hops out to get her stuff out of the back seat and I was just looking back at her like well I guess no good night kiss so this definitely wasn’t a date.

Since then we’ve just been texting and I’ve been the one texting her first every day. I seriously cannot tell if she just wants to be friends or wants to see where this is going. Like I’m trying to hang out with her but she’s told me twice she’s blown her entertainment funds for the week which I don’t know is an excuse or she is really budgeting to the penny. Either way it’s been fucking with my head. All this anxiety and depression I feel is stemming from me being attracted and into her but not really receiving the same feelings back. Like with her even though it wasn’t going anywhere. She responded back with engaging conversations and told me good night, tagged me in memes, snapped each other and told me good night. With this new girl I don’t get any of that so I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong or she doesn’t care. It’s seriously fucking with my emotions. Like I am really into her and I don’t know what to do. There’s so much uncertainty around her and it just makes me internalize everything. Like would she show more interest if I was better looking? If was taller? If I weren’t fat? Am I boring? I’m over thinking it but I am having a lot of inadequacy issues. Like I’ll text her and sometimes she’ll reply right away and other times like hours later. I’m finding myself over thinking it a lot and getting all in my feelings. Like I just want to be loved and I feel like a deserve it. Her coupled with all the other shit going on has been giving me such bad anxiety and stress and everyone has noticed it. Everyone at work and even mama could tell I was stressed out. I’ll catch myself just feeling super anxious and being caught between what can I do to fix this or lie in fetal position. I haven’t had an appetite for a while because I’ve been stressed and when I think about it I don’t want to get fat because maybe she’ll like me more. These last couple days where I try to hit her up to no response I’ll find myself just thinking so much and getting depressed. The other night I needed to do something to get my mind off of it so I went to Quarterworld by myself and felt pretty good. I played a shit ton of marvel vs capcom and ate at the baowser next door after. It’s funny cause I texted her earlier that day with no response until hours later when I was Quarterworld by myself. Then I did the same shit the other day where I ended up by OHSU by a park and ended up walking Tilikum crossing and guess what? She finally replied to a text hours later. Like I texted her at noon then around 8 saying I wanted to hang out again and she said oops I fell asleep and I wanted to get ramen or do something cool and I took an hour to reply just cause I was walking around on the bridge and couldn’t think of anything to say. I respond like 40 min later and no response. I text her today 3 times and different times and no response until hours later saying she couldn’t because she blew her entertainment funds like night. So I asked her what she ended up doing and she was like refilling contact lenses. Like cool, you spend your entertainment money on contacts. I don’t know what to believe. I don’t know if my persistence is going against me or if she is just actually a bad texter. I seriously don’t know what to do. Should I keep trying to pursue her or is it a lost cause. I really want to get to know her and see where we can take things but I can’t force her to like me. This uncertainty just sucks and the feeling of being inadequate and unwanted is floating over me like a dark cloud. I wish the communication was better so I could figure out if this is a lost cause. I don’t care if she doesn’t have an entertainment budget I can pay for her. It’s not like I can be a sugar daddy but I feel like I could treat her well. Also, being my age and still feeling all these things fucking suck too, I don’t want to be old and alone.  

Well hopefully I’ll write more in here. I’ve had a lot of thoughts and feelings I’ve had to get off my chest. But if I don’t things will have worked out and I’ll be dating and if I do things won’t have worked out and I’ll be venting more. Peace out girl scout.

#feelings #inadequacy