#tumblr actually TRY to work correctly challenge
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So, I saw all the posts about the promos for this thing coming from the John Oliver side of Tumblr, and I wasn't really planning to watch it despite my general interest in John Oliver, because I just don't understand the appeal of watching people eat and/or make and/or talk about food. I've said before that I couldn't get into Off Menu, or something like Bake Off, because of triggers I have from my years of cutting weight for sports, which is true but doesn't even really apply in this case. One 30-minute video of eating wings isn't going to trigger me (I do eat and talk about food without a problem, it's just doing long deep dives into that bothers me). It's just not interesting to me. John Robins and Elis James have started this feature on their radio show called Tick of a Taste where they try something unusual (and usually challenging, in similar ways to hot wings) and then describe it, and it's the only part of their radio show where I kind of tune out. I just don't get the appeal of turning food into entertainment.
So I was going to give this one a miss, but then it actually aired and @lastweeksshirttonight alerted me to the fact that there's a bit of Edinburgh chat, and obviously I cannot skip potential Chocolate Milk Gang content. So I watched it, and was not disappointed.I don't know who that interviewer is, and I did not expect to like him, given that he's an American man who makes, I assume, a whole series based on filming celebrities eating spicy food. I'm vaguely aware of that sort of "content creator" genre of YouTube, and it doesn't sound like fun. But I have to admit, he conducted a surprisingly great interview for a man sitting across from some hot sauce bottles. Asked good questions, they were insightful and interesting and displayed an impressive level of knowledge about his subject.
At this point, I'd like to take a brief moment to use this video as an excuse to slag off Marc Maron:
Marc Maron interviewed John Oliver in 2012, an episode that I listened to because John was fascinating in it but Marc was absolutely insufferable, as he's been in all the WTF episodes I've heard (which I believe is four: John Oliver, Andy Zaltzman, Stewart Lee, and James Acaster). And this is far from the main reason why Marc was insufferable, in fact it was a tiny thing that didn't matter, but Marc was so weird about the differences between British and American English. He kept stopping John to ask for the definition of British words that might not be common in North America, but should be more than easy enough to work out from context, and Marc couldn't just do that, he had to stop and treat it like some weird exotic thing that John said the word "headteacher". At one point in the interview, John is talking about the place where he plays a game that some call football and others call soccer, and you can hear him say "the p-field". Clearly started to say "pitch" and then realized that this annoying interviewer would pick him up on that so he changed it to field. That's what I thought of when I saw the above video clip - a fun example of the opposite of that. Well done to the hot wings interviewer for not being like Marc Maron.
The hot wings interviewer still pronounces Edinburgh about as badly as Marc Maron does, but I'm starting to think I should be a bit careful about complaining when Americans do that, because I'm not 100% sure that I say it correctly. I know how it's supposed to sound, so I can tell when someone says it wrong. But I think it might just be a hard word to say in a North American accent, so it's possible that I also mess it up, and six months from now I'm going to be in Edinburgh and probably at some point saying that word out loud to people who will know how it's meant to be said, so I might want to start saying now that it's fine if you do it wrong. I don't do it as wrong as that guy does, though. I'm pretty sure the word "bro" doesn't come into it when I say it. I also say it better than Marc Maron does.
Anyway, that is not the main point of this post, the main point of this post is this:
How the fuck have I never heard that story before? This is my exact period of specialty - John Oliver in his Chocolate Milk Gang years - and I have gathered up all the references to it that I can possibly find, and yet I'd never heard him tell that one before. I'm so glad I watched the weird hot wings video, just for that. I wish he'd tell us who the other comedian was. I have several guesses.
You know, I hadn't really thought before about the fact that John Oliver would have done his own material at those Late 'n' Live gigs. I knew he ran around taking cows apart, and I knew other people did their actual sets, but I hadn't thought of the fact that at some point John would have been on stage by himself telling John Oliver jokes. I don't think the stage where they took the cow apart was really the place for early 00s-era John Oliver jokes. I'm not surprised it went badly.
John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman do have a long list of stories of gigs they've done that have gone very badly (one gig in particular, the stories of which I made into a compilation nearly two years ago now), and I know all comedians have stories like that, but it doesn't surprise me that Zoliver have more than most. 00s-era Zaltzman and Oliver, individually and together, were not club comedians. Or at least, they didn't have club material, but they were not yet quite famous enough to never do clubs. London has a much larger and more diverse comedy scene than we do around where I live, but still, I think I can use my local comedy club as some kind of basis for comparison. And if someone stood up at my local comedy club and started telling Zaltzman and Oliver jokes, they would be met with baffled silence at the absolute best. They might get stabbed.
What jokes was he telling at Late 'n' Live? Was he doing his Political Animal material? He had a bunch of political and topical stuff back then, but that's not all he did. John Oliver definitely had more mainstream material in his arsenal than Andy Zaltzman did, I guess he could have brought out his train story and the one about not eating peas as a kid. Though actually, even the peas story is basically a political joke. Was he doing the stuff about crying at sporting montages as early as that?
Actual recordings of the stand-up John Oliver did in Britain are rare, though I've managed to find a few. Most notably the one of him and Zaltzman doing their full 2004 Edinburgh show, in 2005, that got released on The Bugle in multiple pieces but I stitched them together into one file, and… I mean, you can't do that at Late 'n' Live. I know I haven't been there, but if you could do that at early 00s Late 'n' Live, then I have drastically misunderstood the nature of the event. You can't do that. You'll get stabbed.
The other source of information about early Oliver stand-up is reviews, which are worth reading because they're often quite funny. @lastweeksshirttonight, I can't remember if I've ever sent you the Steve Bennett review of his debut Edinburgh show, but I'm tagging you because if you haven't read it before then you definitely should. It's hilarious. I don't always agree with Steve Bennett's opinions or approach to the mechanics of the English language, but I have to admit: "John Oliver has based his debut Edinburgh show on death, a concept he can be no stranger to, given the lukewarm reception his obscure observations receive," is a sick burn.
Was John doing that at Late 'n' Live? You definitely can't do what was described in that review at Late 'n' Live. You probably shouldn't do that anywhere, really.
There are better reviews from the next few years, like these ones, which both basically boil down to: Zaltzman and Oliver are intelligent guys who write well and it's all very clever and even at times funny, but God, they're both really annoying. So annoying. It was funny but I didn't like them because they were annoying. Did he annoy the people at Late 'n' Live that way? Is that why the man wanted to stab him?
Steve seemed to like them better in 2005, but still, I don't think you can do that at Late 'n' Live. "Oliver and Zaltzman are at the vanguard of a new wave of satire taking vast global issues - fair trade, the apathy paralysing democracy, immigration - and trying to simplify them to expose their flaws, which suddenly seem so blindingly obvious when put in such clear terms." Yeah, John, obviously the guy threatened to stab you if you tried to do that to him when he was drunk at 1 AM. Obviously.
What did you do to them, John? And while we're at it, what did you do to the people of York that one time?
Anyway, the whole Hot Ones interview was pretty interesting, they touched a few times on that side of John Oliver that I find particularly enjoyable, as he discusses the way he really enjoys tension and doing fucked up things and getting in trouble, but also has a socio-political worldview that says venerating that stuff is bad, and this creates its own tension. It's something I've heard him talk about before, I've always enjoyed it, I wasn't expecting to hear it explored so much in a hot wings interview, but here we are. Thanks for the recommendations, John Oliver side of Tumblr.
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Hello!
I came across your post about the Blind Dates Original Character Fest, and I am really excited about the idea. I've never participated before, but I've read amazing works from previous years works.
I would love to join and contribute your amazing fest and be part of this creative community.
Could you please provide me with any additional details or steps I need to follow to participate? I want to make sure I'm following the guidelines correctly.
Thank you so much and I appreciate your time!
Hello, @jump-wings! We're thrilled you're thinking about participating this year.
This fest is designed to be low-stakes and informal. There is no actual sign up process to participate.
Using the method of your choice (random generator, dart board, tea leaves, plain old brainstorming, et cetera) find a name and character concept for a new-to-you original character and a scenario to introduce them in. Then, write a short (1000-2000 words) snippet that introduces them inside the fandom property of your choice. The idea is to provide a compelling moment that makes the reader want to know more about this person.
The guiding principle is to do something new, and possibly challenging, and to serve as writing practice. It can also be a low-stakes excuse to try out a new character in a fandom you don't usually work in in a small and manageable way.
You may publish your finished piece on the site of your choice and provide a link to the blind-dates-fest blog. If the post is here on Tumblr, tag us in it so we can see it! You can look through the tag #fest submission here on this blog to get an idea of how these posts are usually formatted. (And please, this fest is pro read-more. Please use one if you are publishing here on tumblr.)
On February 10th and throughout the Valentines Day Weekend, we will publish all of the submissions for you and your fellow participants to read and reblog.
I hope this answers your questions! A more formal FAQ post is in the works.
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I survived the
WIZARD RACE
Anyways I'm gonna talk about it now. no readmore because mobile tumblr is dumblr, sorry.
So, only slightly relevant to anything, but I did the entirety of the game during the school day. Started around 11:30, but I didn't find my first charm until about 12:45 (I had to go to an assembly then eat lunch)
Finding the charms was a pretty fun challenge, the only one I didn't get on my own was the heart (thanks for that one @wizardgoblin )
had to take another break after submitting the charms because I had to get back to school, by that time 3 people were already done. No big deal to me, all I wanted was top 13. So I do my work for that class and open Tumblr again to start phase 2.
This is a good point to say I love codes and cyphers, so I was very excited at the idea of the next part, only to metaphorically fall on my ass because I forgot that the actual question was on the main post about the game. Once I found that again I copied it onto a sheet of paper so I could write out the sounds as I figured them out. And so the teacher of my next class wouldn't flay and crucify and sous ve me for using my phone, but more so i could write my thoughts.
This bastard. (affectionate)
That symbol right there caused me the most trouble of everything, I thought for a moment I was going mad because I couldn't find anything like it in the sample text. But you know what? I think it's better that way. Made me think harder. I was kinda skipping around on words while translating, going for the easy words first then the words that I felt would be important. Decided I would hold off on this word and skipped back to the line above it to solve the big word up there. Catchphrase. And the last word was "Weekly". I realized then that this had to be "Wizard".
I'm glad that the "z" sound wasn't in the passage, it made me think harder about the puzzle, and that was fun in hindsight.
(please ignore the blatantly mistranslated word on the second row.)
Unfortunately I don't have timestamps for exactly when i entered the maze, but it was probably around 3:40, as I remember realizing school was about to be over, which meant I'd have to drive home before finishing if I didn't get through fast.
MAZE SPOILERS AHEAD. DO NOT READ IF YOU DON'T WANT TO HAVE IT RUINED FOR YOU. DO READ IF YOU'RE STUCK AND WANT TO PLACE. IM NOT YOU MOM.
On the first page of the maze there were three options to choose where to go. I translated the first option, If I recall correctly it was scoundrel. Did not want to deal with that, the second option I couldn't translate immediately, so I skipped to the third option. Merchant. Sounds safe enough, I should go there.
So I did.
Reading the options, and knowing I was at a merchant, I decided to barter, and got an item. Cool. Sick even. So I move on.
[something] [STRENGTH] [STEALTH]
Decided to go stealth, and remembering how the merchant went, I choose the stealth option. Made it out with a cool gem. Encountered the dragon. Decided I didn't want to give up the candle and tried using the gem. Back to the start. Same path with the merchant, chose the option i didn't translate for the monster, and decided to try and charm it. Sandwich aquired. Not a good offering, back to the start. Merchant and gem? Close but no. Finally, I decided to try and fight the monster. It worked, and the item visually matched what I got from the merchant much more that the other items, sure enough, it was a good enough offering, and I got to move on.
Last part of the maze. 14 options, one was correct, spotted it immediately. Escaped at 3:57 pm ctz, day one of the race.
Honestly, I thought the game was fun! The maze was slightly easier than the cypher, for better or for worse, but that also could have been on me by refusing to try the other routes at the start of the maze. I can't wait to see what future events have waiting for us! Thanks for hosting this @wizardweekly
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You are such a good artist I wish one day I'll be as good as you, any tips?
Also just started my career a few months ago well weeks ago are there any tips to gaining more friends and people that love your art?
waaa thank you so much !! i appreciate this a lot !! <33
this is quite a long post so please bear with mee . . . also this may be a bit all over the place because i just do whatever T^T
my first tip is to just keep practicing ! try to challenge yourself with stuff you want to improve on. i struggle the most with drawing hands, hence why in all the recent art i've posted all the poses have hands in them :') you'd find yourself discouraged sometimes, when you try to venture out of your usual drawing practice, because (1) it's difficult, and (2) it feels time-consuming – but never ever let that knock you off of the progress/goal you're working towards on ! you'll thank yourself in the future when you can finally draw anything you want with minimal struggles.
second tip is to use references ! it's ok to use references to practice how to draw a full body (and to familiarize yourself with how to proportion like how long should the arms be? how long should the neck be? did i place the legs correctly? is this perspective right?)
i've recently been taking my own reference pictures (for my traditional art which i haven't really posted...) since sometimes there aren't many reference pictures on the internet that encapsulates what i want ! it's actually quite fun to do, and can be another way to challenge yourself to draw difficult perspectives/angles. in terms of fanart, i base off of the picture that i want to draw ! like in my recent HAN drawing, that was actually based off of his recent picture from bubble !
i've also recently been trying "blocking" which is where i do a rough "paint" or coloring of a piece, kind of like mapping out how i want it to look like, then later on refining the details ! (u can do this as well if you want another challenge for urself!)
third tip is to watch drawing tutorials/draw with me's on youtube ! that's what i did growing up ! they inspired me a lot, and eventually led me to finding my own art style ^^
here are some of the artists i've watched/currently watching on youtube:
Jillee Arts
shuen_art
PearFleur
Fran Meneses
Jordan Clark
fourth tip in growing your community or finding people who love your art? welp i truly don't feel like i'm there yet ! but if you want to find people who have the same interest as you using hashtags can do a lot ! like for me, i'm trying to find people who are also fans of stray kids, hence the tags relating to the drawing (of any member) i made !
just always keep the tags accurate ! add a tag that describes your art, is it digital? is it traditional? did you use color pencils? did you use paint?
adding the tag "artists on tumblr" helps you find your fellow artists as well <3 you can also create your own art tag to help people browse through your art easily !
LASTLY, PLEASE HAVE FUN ! i find it's best to truly be interested in what you want to draw. it shouldn't feel like a chore, it should make you happy !! :))
i hope this long post helps, and i wish you the best on your art journey !!
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Me: I’ll try to be more active on tumblr
Also me: *disappears for 4 months*
Anyway, keeping up in social media has always been a challenge for me so, I1l give myself a break.
Ive been precticind quite a lot with oils recently. It was already something I wanted to do, but I was figuring out how to for a while.
the thing is, painting always scared me, when I was trying digital painting, It was always so overwhelming. I didn't really knew what to do, and I could do anything, there were no rules, no limitations and no easy process, at least not in my head.
But since I started oil painting, everything seems rigth, everything is starting to make sense. why the blocking, and why we aint the way we do, and how color works. Oh GOD! color is finally starting to make some sense to me!
I need paint, I need the need to mix it and pay attention to the saturation, and the pigments and the contrasts, I need to touch it, and to smell it and to feel the texture when it is dry. It is a whole different experience that the digital world can't provide. And a whole understandment that the digital can only replicate very poorly.
Recently I've realized how much of a megalomaniac I am and How my personal projects are always too complex for someone with no experience at anything and that's probably oneof the reasons it's so hard for me to finish anything. so I wanted to start this slowly. I wanted to paint one small object that I liked, so I picked Candles.
I also have bookbinding as a hobbie of mine, so I also bind a book just for studiyng painting. I used my very first painting of a candle I did during the pandemic when I was first trying out oils as a detail for the cover.
after that I started practicing painting just candles. Simple. with some notes to each just so I can orient myself
"paint the glowing around the candle before doing the flame"
"try blocking the whole candle in one color only"
but recently I got a commission from a friend, and I wanted to try and do it on oils. At first I tried doing it by observation alone. But I had many structural problems I should have solved in the drawing phase and the colours would not save it..
So I started over and decided to actually break the portrait apart and... you know... do things correctly...
I separated her face in more simple shapes and tried working out on a composition that would work better. after some editing on ClipStudio, I used Adobe color wheel to produce a pallete, which I used to guide me
This is the result so far... Although this is still the "ugly stage" I'm already pretty happy with it.
I just wanted to share my experience with painting so far. I don't know if other artists can relate, but painting seems less scary now that it is physical. I can touch it and bend it and it is actually pretty fun!
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Happy New Year! 3/3 (Tumblr Why)
Well it's a 3 parter, rip.
Part 1 || Part 2
Continuing with the biggest of my hobbies that really needs a billion photos to do it justice...
Will I wrap a car a year going forward? Probably not. But I did wrap my sister’s car. Despite this starting as a “we’ll just do something cool on the side!” this turned into wrapping literally the entire vehicle except for a little bit on the front bumper and where the faded red (it looks pinkish) paint is showing on the second photo toward the back of the car (the black wing tips are sitting on it). My sister and I are opposites when it comes to aesthetics. She’s always been comfortable standing out and being different, I’ve always wanted to fade into surrounding environment. Do Not Perceive Me. But because she’s like that she was down for me to just do whatever to her car, so I did. I’m super happy with the result!
When we started talking about it we were originally just going to do three colours along the side kind of ‘swooping’ into each other. Then when I was laying in bed I had the idea to make the ‘swoops’ into wings. I’m perpetually afraid that any thought I have as I’m falling asleep will vanish into the void so I found some crayons in my room (they were from a restaurant where you can draw on the tabletop) and a postcard and made the silliest little drawing so I wouldn’t forget. Three sets of wings reminded me of the “biblically accurate” meme and seraphim so I then decided I was going to rename her car Seraph and deem it a biblically accurate car.
It took longer than it should have. Her car is a year younger than mine but has rusted a lot more than mine has. The handles couldn’t be removed because the bolts inside the door had seized (thankfully the side mirrors didn’t have the same problem—though we did lose a nut down the inside of one of the doors and it took us hours to get it out) thankfully her handles were much easier to wrap than mine. And because I was making a design out of the vinyl instead of just making it all one colour that meant I had to take time to design it and make the pattern.
Plus I had to work around her schedule. Her car is not mine so I had to figure out when she could stop by or when I could come hijack her car. Then things kept breaking. At one point her hatch latch was just not functioning correctly, so I ordered a handle and we fixed it (which was also so much harder than it needed to be because of course more nuts were seized, we were out there with a rust-loosening compound and a hammer and a tine trying to convince this thing to let go—and it eventually did! But holy was it a nightmare.) And then there was the overall problem of rust on the car that I ground off as much of as I could so it wouldn’t bubble up under the wrap and make it look bad. And then of course a part needed to turn the car on broke and was backordered so the car sat, half wrapped, in the dealership parking lot for a month. And after sitting in the dealership parking lot for a month the alternator broke but the dealership thought it was the battery and replaced that, and when the alternator was still broken after replacing the battery we brought it to my mechanic who replaced the alternator for a third of the price the dealership wanted to.
I didn’t get a proper complimentary shot of the back to overlay properly (in my second photo the hatch is propped open a little so I can’t get it to line up with the “before” image but I think the colour difference on the red and the lack of scuffing on the bumper speaks pretty loudly even if it’s not perfectly lined up).
So despite starting this process in April we weren’t done until September. I think the actual wrapping part of the process overall went faster but it took a lot longer because this car threw new challenges at me that mine didn’t. I could definitely feel that I was a lot more familiar with how the vinyl works now, though. Thinking back to the first part of my car I did, the hood, it’s wild how far I’ve come. Practice does that, I guess, but it feels especially stark since that was just last year that I was trying to squeegee the vinyl onto the hood of my car one little bit at a time and making a mess of it. I did so many pieces of this one totally on my own and the parts that I got help for I was much better able to direct those helping me (the roof piece went on so clean, this is the fourth roof I’ve done, mine was a disaster, the second one I did was easy because it was 70% sunroof window, and the third one was also a disaster) so the roof going much easier despite being the largest one I’ve done I think is the biggest testament to how much I’ve learned and gotten better at this.
This car basically got ship-of-Theseus’d this summer (not actually, but with the comical amount of repairs it abruptly needed on top of the wrap it sure feels like it). I definitely did more on it than my sister originally agreed to or expected but it looks really good now and has some protection from new rust forming (but oh it is full of rust. Seraph is very, very rusty). Button’s still good though, there she is!
And I wrapped some pieces on the inside of my car. Which was dangerous because for the first few weeks I kept staring at them when I should have been looking at the road.
But it’s just so pretty. These pieces were mostly a nightmare to wrap so I’m very glad I was able to remove them from the inside of the car, trying to wrap them in place would have been almost impossible. Removing them was also mildly terrifying though—these have been inside this car exposed to heat and cold and UV for 16 years I was very worried they were going to break when I removed them and around some of the thinner sections there was a little cracking (like on the thin struts between the buttons) but overall I was pleasantly surprised with how well they came off!
I also did the hood and some fun detailing around the headlights on my not-actually-but-in-spirit-sister’s car (also a Honda fit) because the paint was doing some very strange things around the edges and I was worried about it rusting on her. Rainbow sparkly black is gorgeous and also subtle, the day we were working on it was sunny so we got a nice vid of her backing out just to see the difference between shade and sun and wow.
[The following comparisons were going to be a gif, but then tumblr refused to upload it, the impact is not the same but this is the sacrifice I am making to this post to get it done.]
After doing the silver-rainbow wing on my sister’s car and this black-rainbow on my not-sister’s car it makes me want to see a whole car done up like this (and it’s tempting to consider doing that to my car in the future, but I also really want to make her green, I still have years left with the current wrap though so I have loads of time to consider). And this hood was way easier to do than my sister’s last year (they have the same car) partly because I’ve had more experience and partly because the quality of the vinyl is better and we weren’t trying to put it on when it was cold out. (The hood from last year has started pulling itself apart since it’s gotten cold out which is a bummer, that’s what I get for going for a cheap but pretty wrap I suppose.)
And finally for the car-wrap section I did a little to my sister’s steering wheel to make it look fancy:
It’s not perfect, I was, once again (foolishly) doing this when it was way too cold out to be doing it but I figure I can just redo it in the spring/summer so it’s a good trial run. I like to imagine that any person who is way too emotionally invested in cars gets really mad seeing her vehicle. Just this economy, rusty, old vehicle with a wild wrap job and a bougie looking steering wheel. Does that terrible car mods tumblr still exist, I should see if Seraph makes the cut.
And that’s all I did for car wraps this year but you can bet I wrapped plenty of other stuff. I think in 2022 I had wrapped some of those Ikea shelf-inserts because for some reason they only make them in white despite selling the unit they make it for in several shades of brown and black as well as white and I had previously painted some inserts because my sister worked at a paint store so just had a bunch of paint. The paint wasn’t great, though, I don’t know why exactly but it was always kind of ‘tacky’, my 3DS charging stand resting on it would, when moved to dust, tear of itty bitty bits of paint so I realized I could wrap them after doing the wrap for my car last summer.
And then I got more inserts and wrapped those in January 2023.
So now they match all my black ikea shelving and have a little bit of sparkle for fun. And after wrapping her car my sister got me a cricut (I had been borrowing a friend’s previously) as a thank you. (If you haven’t encountered one it’s basically a printer that uses a blade instead of ink—you load in a pattern that it then cuts). This year was my first time using one and I love it. I used to get decals and stickers all the time on etsy and now I can make my own with better quality vinyl in more options because I know car vinyl exists so I’m not beholden to the overpriced, not great quality stuff available at craft stores.
So I bought, fixed, and then modded a used 3DS XL (because my hands were cramping on my original 3DS pretty badly). I think I’ve reblogged more than one post on this but if you happen to be reading this and have a 3DS I highly recommend modding it. This poor 3DS I got was full of some kind of brown soda syrup (gross) and the thumbstick was basically falling off and didn’t move easily (because of the dried soda syrup) and part of the housing is a little smashed. I cleaned it and fixed it and made it beautiful.
I was really bad at taking before and after pictures this year. I just sort’ve did stuff and almost every time after I finished (or be mostly done) I’d be like “I didn’t get a before picture…” but she was a very, very scuffed up blue 3DS XL. I really liked the boarder patterns a lot of Zelda merchandise and the original 3DS model’s special Zelda version had (I also have a Zelda journal that uses the ocarina and harp corner details), I had to modify it so that the cricut didn’t completely eat the design while trying to cut but I really like how it turned out. She’s super sparkly now. Part of me also likes the clean look of it before I put the decal on but not enough to go back to it.
With the power of the cricut I was also able to easily make a wrap for the inside of that 3DS. I want to make a new one because this one isn’t perfect so I’ll be doing that in the upcoming year but I do overall really like the effect. It’s funny, when I first got my switch I got a cut-wrap from dbrand for it now here I am years later with a much better understanding of all of this stuff and able to make my own. I could have reshelled this 3DS but I kind of like it keeping its history underneath some pretty stickers.
The colour here is the same one that’s on the fender of my sister’s car (I had some left over). This one:
Which works super well with the 3DS because the top is open at an angle so you’ll almost always get to see different colours in the wrap as long as it’s getting good light. (My plan is to change it to a colour in the same series but with more blue/green bias than yellow/red, this colour is gorgeous but I’m more of a green/blue person. I say that as if you won’t know this. If you’re bothering to read this far you probably know this. Nobody who has been to my space will be surprised by this my walls are green-screen green.)
I also gave my older 3DS a little bit of love. It’s had a reusable Majora’s Mask sticker on it since the Majora’s Mask 3DS remake came out and I figured I could make it look cooler:
Which I also think I need to redo. I put a clear vinyl over the decal on the 3DS XL because it was the primary one I was using and I was worried about the teeny tiny details getting caught on things and peeling. I didn’t bother with my lil purple 3DS because it wasn’t getting much use but, somehow, the little fiddly bits keep getting caught on stuff so I might need to redo that decal and put a clear protective vinyl on it, too. I’ll probably keep the colour the same though I like the effect of the purple matching the case at certain angles and then turning red at other angles.
I also wrapped some other people’s devices. I wrapped a friend’s PS4, my partner’s work laptop (to better represent their workplace instead of Dell), and Steph’s 3DS (which they had previously wrapped with some leftover wrap from Button and they did a great job, but Button’s colour isn’t super exciting on small surfaces which is a bummer because I have so much extra left). Steph’s 3DS looks great, though, I was trying to convince them to let me put the same decal I made for mine so they’d be inverted versions of each other:
Alas, for now they are happy with the black sparkles (which do look great on their own, a photo really doesn’t do it justice).
And because of my play-all-the-zeldas project (mentioned somewhere previously) I’ve decided for every Zelda game I finish I’m going to put a sticker on Button. I got one for Majora 3DS but by the time I finished OoT 3DS and MM N64 etc. it was too cold out so right now I only have one:
But that gives me all winter to design and make the others and then once it’s warm enough out I can just slap all of them on. So that’s not fully something of this past year as the bulk of it is going to show up in the future but it started this year and I look forward to seeing how it’s come along next year.
With the power of the cricut I was also able to pretty easily make “back-ups” of amiibos because using little coins is much easier than juggling a bunch of toys. Definitely exclusively back-ups. And I helped friends back-up their amiibos, too! And I made them all shiny and sparkly because why not! This was super satisfying to do and also nice to know I’ll never have to pay another person to help me back-up my amiibos ever again. :) Don’t come at me Nintendo these are definitely back-ups of purchased amiibos of which I have a gazillion.
These were just super satisfying to do even if the cricut sometimes scrunkled some because paper sticks way too well to even the least-adhesive cutting mat so I had to tap them down on a non-sticky mat.
And I think that’s about it for miscellaneous hobbies. I did some seasonal sticker designs for my mom’s business (I still haven’t done the New Year’s one, whoops, but I’m not being paid for this stuff so whatever). But I didn’t do anything else crazy or that was a huge time sink like all of the above.
The only other thing I want to mention is I did make a side-blog for media I finish. I haven’t started putting film on it, yet, I just started it with books and games. I’ve been meaning to finish setting it up and making it look nice but as per usual I have too many things going on and haven’t gotten to it so I may as well just plug it. It’s @aeori-b or aeori-b.tumblr.com. If you want to follow feel free, but it’s just a way for me to visually be able to see everything easily so I’m excited to have it to add to my New Years post for next year! It won’t be much more than just, photos of things I finish maybe with a sentence under it so don’t feel like you’ll be missing out on any hot takes or anything by not following. I’ve always really liked having the goodreads wall of books, its way easier to see everything I’ve read at a glance instead of just looking at titles on a list in excel. Here’s how the blog currently looks:
I haven’t done photography properly in years, and there is something very satisfying at making a little arrangement of things. One of those obviously isn’t a photo so for purely digital things I won’t be able to stretch that particular creative muscle but I really like it. So far I’ve just been really enjoying having a really small, fun little way to cap off my experience with something.
All right my word document is sitting at 23 pages I should move along.
I always like to do a little round up of the art I’ve gotten in a year so here’s that!
As per usual there is art from Steph, Vin, and Phantom in here (the top is mostly @refundtheticket, then @auyamx, then @mossrotts at the bottom). I am very blessed to have such cool friends who make and do so many cool things. There’s more art here than pictured but I’ve apparently received a lot of art this year?? Which is awesome but I can’t really fit it all into one little picture easily! Some of it is commission or requests but still!
Steph’s commissions are open, by the way, and can be found here. I think Phantom’s are too and his info can be found here.
And maybe this is weird to say but I’m really proud of all the art Vin has done this year! When they switched jobs they talked about how one of their former co-workers suddenly had more time and energy for pursuits like art and when I see a kind of drip-feed of art it doesn’t seem like a huge increase but when I’m looking back and seeing it all together it’s like… wow! Explosion of art! (Though it’s entirely possible that I’m just seeing more art because it relates to me, but still, very cool to look back and see!)
I mentioned RPs last year so the whole Vin section is our RP obsession for this year. The RPs with Vin took the unexpected jump back to the human-universe AU when two really unlikely characters hit it off in the God-world RP so now for the majority of the year we’ve been RPing how Vai and Bernie get along (with guest appearances from Lelia and Annie). It has been delightful.
I was going to make a section going over life-stuff but honestly I think I covered all the really interesting things from the year in all the hobby-stuff. 2023 had its frustrations but it also had so many good times, too. I’m becoming more powerful and I want to continue becoming more powerful in the future. Sometimes I wonder how things might be different if I had left the farm sooner. The longer I’m in a happier, more stable, and supportive environment and the more I just find myself doing things (that I never, ever would have on the farm—none of the hobbies I’ve done this year outside reading and gaming would I have done if I still lived there) the more I wonder where I would be and who I would be if I had left sooner. There’s not much point in dwelling on it, because that isn’t the universe I live in, but it is interesting how a garbage environment can really squash who you are and what you can do. I guess it’s on my mind because my not-sister is in almost the same situation I was, and is similarly unwilling to leave it that I was.
That said I have such a hard time with goals, I’ve never been good at them, even as a child I was adrift when it came to goals. In going through all of this I’m wondering if I should make my theme for the upcoming year some kind of ‘enjoy what you have’ thing. My desire to get into new hobbies is unending apparently, and I’m wondering if I should try to restrain myself this year. I really balk at the idea of restraining myself, if I feel like doing something shouldn’t I just… do it? These past few years have been very gratifying, though, I’ve done a lot of things I never thought I could do. Some of them I didn’t even realize were things you could do, to be fair, but there’s a kind of satisfaction and confidence I feel having taken up so many things, been good at them, and have had a lot to show for it.
I’ve built computers, modified devices, fixed consoles (large and small repairs) and some computers, wrapped cars (and shelves and smaller things), made a dice shelf, rigged LED lighting, set up floating shelves and plushie nets, learned excel/sheets, learned how to program rfid chips, learned how to use a cutting-printer and make decals… I don’t know, maybe I won’t be called to some other wild task this year but I have a feeling I will be. I genuinely don’t know if I should stifle that urge or not. I feel like I should because I keep making things and then feeling too ‘guilty’ to actually enjoy them.
As I continually joke (because I do think it’s funny): I built a gaming computer and have mostly played games my first computer ran in the 90s. I somehow still am not done Horizon Forbidden West and I have a back catalogue of games I’ve been meaning to get to (since Highschool). I have so many books in my tbr (some of them also going back to highschool). And on, and on. These have been “problems” for me for a long time (I think I have brought this up in literally every one of these New Year’s posts), and nobody says I have to do those things, but the fact that I keep thinking about it makes me think I should maybe take some kind of action on that front.
I feel like I need a good name for it but I think I will make my ‘theme’ for this year to be to focus on and enjoy the things I have. I need a good name or something to encompass it, I might even do it as a seasonal theme and check in with how I’m feeling about it in the spring. I want to keep it broad and if I really feel called or compelled to do something I don’t want to stifle myself but I do want to try prioritizing just spending time with the things I’ve got instead of rushing off to the next thing. And I think my usual goals of reading for a certain amount of time per day and getting in so many books in a year will come naturally of this theme.
Despite getting sick this year three whole times I think it was a good year overall! Things suck on a global and national level (which I’m not even going to begin to get into here because it’s a nightmare out there) but for me on a personal level it’s been a pretty good year. Or as good, I think, as it could have been all things considered.
I am hoping this upcoming year has good in store for all of us. Here is a branch absolutely covered in lichen I found a few weeks ago while shoveling snow. Gaze upon this lichen-covered branch and feel the strength to be as prosperous as these lichen infuse your soul. They will give you strength in the year to come.
My word document is 25 pages long if you read this far thank you! And if you made any sort of wrap-up or New Year’s or year-in-review or ‘top 5 things I liked in 2023’ or anything post please link me to it or tag me in it so I can see! I am, as ever, not really ‘on’ tumblr so I tend to miss this stuff.
And because tumblr is out to get me, personally, this is three parts, if you missed one go back:
Part 1 || Part 2
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A little late to the party but I'm in awe at your ability to shape the world and characters in "For all the right reasons". I love seeing how characters interact with each other outside of having sex.
Miyeon as your personal cockwamer 🥵. That's a fantasy I don't mind seeing more of. I love your dialogues between characters, it must be time consuming and sometimes challenging to come up with something that works. And your dialogues certainly do work, I feel more immersed in the story. The former teacher/student dynamic is certainly interesting.
"We could call it even" is also a great fic that really brings out all the emotions. I've read more than a couple of fics that has the "grow up and grow apart" scenario, your story does stand out for me. Even though Nayeon is not personally that high on my bias list, I've found myself attached to the Nayeon in your story. I still have to read "Hard to break the habit".😛
Glad to see you being a part of the community! Thanks for writing and sharing your stories on this platform (Even though Tumblr as a website/app kinda sucks😅, the only thing saving it are the interactions)
Hope to see you around!!!💖
writing dialogue (particularly the non-smut dialogue lmfao) is one of the most fun parts of writing for me. so i'm glad you like it!!! i like to read stories that are more "immersive" like you put it so i try to emulate that in my own works!
nayeon actually isn't even in my bias line in twice LOL but if i remember correctly i started writing her fic literally the day her solo dropped just because i really enjoyed the songs/mv and i thought she'd fit the concept well. i do love her though! i'm glad you got attached nonetheless :)
tysm for your asks!! i know some of my stories are kinda long and convoluted so it definitely makes me happy to get feedback and see if people are liking it!!! so thank you <33
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Hi there, I apologize if you’ve explained this already, but would you mind sharing a bit or linking to a post that talks about gshade vs reshade for TS4? Do you like gshade better, and are you using it exclusively now? I’m trying to decide what to do and if I should switch over. I came back to Tumblr to find lots of people talking about gshade, but I’m not sure where to start or even what happened exactly. Sounds like reshade stopped working correctly? Thank you!
Hey! I haven't talked about this at all so no worries :) I think the switch to gshade happened because certain versions of reshade broke with one of patches we got a few months ago. I've heard mixed reviews on that tho (some had issues, some didn't) so idk for sure. In terms of performance, the biggest difference I've noticed between the two is that gshade loads much quicker. It seems to be a tad bit lighter on my PC than reshade too, but not enough for me to actually take notice. Others say that it has much better performance for them tho, so I think it's safe to say that might be the general consensus in that department. My preset (the only one I use so I haven't tested any others) looks identical in both programs so no difference there. Gshade has its own interface that you can access directly from your PC that makes uninstalling and converting presets much simpler for those that find dealing with reshade challenging. The tutorial I used to install it is by @fierce-trait and you can find that here (it's super, super easy). When it came down to making the decision on whether to stick with gshade or go back to reshade, I chose gshade for one reason (that's super irrelevant to anything) and that's cause I LOVE the shutter sound you can enable when you take pics! Makes me feel like I'm using a real camera when I shoot my story lol!
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November Gamedev Progress
AHhhhhhh! Another month over!? I have no idea where it went :(
I hope you're all doing great!
(Cross posted from Patreon; https://www.patreon.com/posts/74059613 please go there if you want to see all the images without clickign, tumblr doesn’t like the size :’( )
Calander
Changed the total number of Months from 13 to 12, added Seasons which last 3 Months. Seasons have weighted Weather so more Snow in the last one (Winter?), more Rain in the second one! (Spring?). Trying to come up with some other Weather events that wont be too disruptive. It was really foggy a few days ago so now I wanna try and code that X'D
Saving/Loading
This is the big one, what I spent most of this month working on;
I've set up a Save/Load system! I'll slowly give all the different major objects their own part but currently I've got Trees/Grass/Rocks/some system stuff all being recreated correctly in a loaded world!
So in this gif I start a game, save (note the debug come up), quit to title (lacking a title XD), then start a new game; it's a different map!
Then I quit again and load the saved world! <3 <3 <3
Got the first batch of Buildings stored! Buildings that Craft Items and those that Convert them all set!
And also Benches and their tops work! This was an extra bit of challenge, since instead of just replacing a Bench with say the Distiller, I update it with a SubType, so I've added a check and a loop to the load code. If it creates a building with a SubType it will do a second go of the Creation code and it gets upgraded to a Distiller!
There's still more to do with the Save system, I've been taking it slow to ensure that I don't mess anything up. Saving the customisation of Buildings that are made out of multiple parts like Houses is gonna be a challenge. I have an idea of how to do it, it's just getting it to work will be a pain.
Also saving the ownership data, say for a Goblin and it's Home/Work, or a Pet and it's Nest. I can't save the object ID between games so I'll have to use the object type and it's coordinates.
LAST MINUTE ADDITION!
Got Buildings Saving their Carpets/Rugs, should be able to store the Wall/Floor colours and Building Part placements (like Beds) the same way! But I am tired, and hungry, so maybe for next months update? :S
Bugs
LOADS of little fixes here and there, such as;
Fixed a bug were Item shadow's were clipping underneath flooring and snow.
Snow and Flooring now use the -bbox_top so they have a lower depth priority, and I added an offset to Item's depth (forgot I had to add it to the bounce code!)
Fixed a bug where Dry Grass wouldn't be recreated when Loading a game.
Fixed a bug where Dry Grass wouldn't spawn on Beaches.
Fixed a bug where loading a game would make fully grown trees sprout a new one each time you loaded.
Fixed Tall Grass not spawning in Swamp Biomes.
Updated the Culling System to properly cull Buildings that are made out of multiple parts, previously it just didn't cull them. Now when the main part gets culled all the other parts get culled into a part list that later gets checked when the master is unculled. Getting this to work with the Save/Load system though is gonna be a PAIN!
Fixed a bug where Houses would move when you saved and loaded :S
Visuals
Set up Flooring to give you a slight visible y offset, so it's like you're actually standing on something higher!
[gif wont post] https://i.imgur.com/87neQlA.mp4
Makes it more distinctive to Paving!
OOoo! This is better!
[gif wont post] https://i.imgur.com/UOUdl8B.gif
Swapped the offset on Paving for one on Flooring, and adjusted the Depth on JUST Flooring, so now you can stand behind the raised floor! :D
Got Snow set up for working on Roofing, noticed some issues with my Roofing autotiling, so I think I need to remake that from scrap. :(
OK! Scrapped that Roofing because the thinner sections were giving me a massive headache trying to autotile. Made a much simpler one which was about all I could draw without tearing my hear out or the mouse out of the computer.
and it also works with snow!
https://i.imgur.com/xiVyvDM.mp4
Might need to adjust the height a bit more, so trees and the statue don't clip through?
Adjusted the offset for drawing roofing, and changed the Create/Destroy selector to more accurately show that you are over roofing, looks better to me.
I also extended the height of the extra bit of Roof drawn on lowest so it connects with Walls, I might change that and instead put it as part of the Wall itself so it's like the wall is taller?
Lighting
I keep messing with them, I think this is better? Did some rework with how darkness works and layered up all lights so there's three levels of brightness from each source.
https://i.imgur.com/wFejNV4.mp4
All in all not a bad months work!! XDXDXD
(apparently the feet should be here by the 4th?)
Thanks as always to my supporters and to you all reading this.
I hope you all had a great month, keep being awesome everyone!! <3 <3 <3
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Rant Rant Rant- Eddie Munon and the way Mainstream Audience suck the joy out of anything different and out of the 'norm'.
Hello dear readers. I just want to rant- no clue if this will be posted, I am procrastinating on doing my uni work and just want to talk about some things. Call this a rant or an informal essay if you will.
TLDR; big long essay on consumer and audience culture, a look at stranger things fans, and undeserved Eddie hate is the main bulk of this along with general media language, look into mainstream audiences and why they so quickly turned on Eddie and the fans, underserved bullying of fans, and a message to spread and focus on the positives.
I'm currently studying Film at university because it's a topic that genuinely interests me- though I'd far prefer to write for films or TV, and direct music videos or videos/films accompanied by music- and observing the discourse in and surrounding the Stranger Things fandom over tiktok and tumblr, and it has been... Interesting.
When I was still studying Media in A Levels, we learned about categorising different audience types: Primary, Secondary, Tertiary; based on class: A,B, C1, C2, D, E; and based on what type of consumer they are: Young and Rubican's definitions & categories:
The Aspirer- materialistic, acquisitive, driven by others' perception of them rather than their own perceptions and values. Core need for life is status
The Reformer- value their own independent judgement, most anti-materialistic, often perceived as intellectual and at the leading edge of society. Core need for life is enlightenment.
The Explorer- driven by a need for discovery, challenge and new frontier, first to try out new ideas and experiences. Core need for life is discovery
The Mainstream- live in a domestic world, require fundamental daily routine and subscribe to the idea of 'normal', respond to big, established brands (usually ones that are popular/made popular). Core need for life is security.
The Succeeder- possess self-confidence, strong goal orientation, tend to be organised, occupies positions of responsibility in society, seek reward and presitge from brands as that's what they think they deserve, seek out caring and protective brands. Core need is control.
The Resigned- Predominantly older people with constant unchanging values, past is nostalgic, respect institutions and enjoy tradition, brand choices are driven by safety and need for economy. Core need is to survive.
The Struggler- live in the moment, often seen by others as victims/loosers/wasters- aimless and disorganised with few resources apart from physical skill, rely on visual impact and physical sensations from brands. Core need is to escape.
(loose definitions, close enough to the original)
Fun fact: we actually looked at and analysed the first 10/20 minutes of Stranger Things season 1 at some point in Media so that was fun.
If you wanted to categorise Stranger Things audience (i would love to pull up some of my notes but I can't fucking find them and its making me sad) your Primary would be your fans of science fiction/ horror (likely Reformers or Succeeders, from A-D, people between 18-30) considering those are the main genres. The Secondary would be your older audiences (category E or B, Resigned, people in their 40's-50's) people who grew up in the 80's and receive gratification from noticing details from their childhoods. ((Note: I get these 2 mixed up, so they may be the other way around but you get my point))
Now the Teritary audience would be those who have a Netflix subscription and access to the internet where they find occasional discourse about the show (Explorers or, largely, Mainstream audiences- people from 15-early 30's) who only follow trends and are not familiar with the genre or setting.
Got all that mumbo jumbo? No? That's fine. Let me talk about Eddie Munson now.
With season 4 of Stranger Things being the largest, most popular of them all (look up any Netflix stats- if I remember correctly, season 3 had 300 mil. watchers and season 4 had 400 mil.), and most anticipated (announced in 2019, and released in '22), there came, in my opinion, an audience shift.
In my opinion, more watchers from the Mainstream audience type have begun watching the show, due to its increased popularity and advertisement on Netflix, bumping that Mainstream Tertiary audience up more. How do I know this? Observing fandom culture and social media.
I'm too lazy to conduct any form of study so I'll base this 'research' on memory. Season 4, Volume 1 premiers in May 2022 and is an instant hit. The introduction of Joseph Quinn as Eddie Munson perks people's interest and he instantly becomes a fan favourite character, with his charming personality and subversive characterisation- like certain viewers, Eddie's first scene had me uncertain, though seeing his kindness to Chrissy flipped that and I warmed up to him as the season went on.
The experiences of a mainstream audience- seeing a character who in no way belongs to their personal category and worldview- is jarring, and they immediately (consciously or unconsciously) stereotype him as someone they dislike, due to his non-conformative nature. Like many of you, I grew up integrated with Fandom culture and niche interests and experiences that mirrored this character. I could personally relate to Eddie as a person who was (likely) bullied or looked down upon because of my interest in literature, games, and my general misunderstanding and confusion of the mainstream audiences.
Another point I wanted to make is that Eddie is a character that fundamentally dislikes authority and the mainstream itself- shunning those who willingly fit into the moulds of society in the cafeteria- and he, himself, sitting outside it- being interested in Metal and DND. The mainstream audiences have their own views on those things- that metal music is just people screaming and being aggressive and violent, and DND is a lame nerdy game for kids. Eddie flips their views, and makes himself a likeable character to them.
The mainstream audience interest in Eddie was a product of 'Oh wow- that's different to what I'm used to! But instead of shunning it, I'm enamoured!' AT FIRST. Then it got bad.
I understand fandom culture; Mainstreamers do not. This confusion sparks anger and amusement and the need to critique anything that doesn't fit into their 'mainstream ideas' or their 'normal'. To a mainstream audience, liking, enjoying, and having discourse about the show is 'normal' behaviour. To me, or anyone with experience in fandom, fanfiction, headcannons, lip syncs, edits, fanart, roleplaying, etc. is the 'normal'. My point of writing any of this was because I found the "general" shift in people's opinions regarding Eddie- he went from a cool new addition to the cast to one of the most hated/cringey characters in almost the blink of an eye- strange, and somewhat hilarious.
The majority of mainstream audiences have likely never interacted with or been interested in Fandom culture (another fun fact: I had to learn about Jenkins Fandom theory in Media. I had to learn about fandoms. Hahaha. Jokes aside it was interesting- his definition is that it's a participatory culture: fans acting not only as consumers of the media but as producers and creators of creative media, or better named Prosumers). Very likely, they don't know it exists or have in the past made fun of such cultures and people in the past. Misinformation or having little to no experience leads to aggression. Seeing Eddie become popular amongst groups of people sharing his interests/personality/ or just enjoying the character was odd and strange to them, and in order to fit into their Mainstream ideals, they had to look down on the 'strange and unusual'.
Which really fucking sucks and is so awful. Like many, I loved Eddie's character. I have written fanfiction about him and continue to do so- this outpour of hate and negativity surrounding him and the fandom surrounding the character/ the entire show makes me feel wrong for liking him or enjoying the show. Almost like a dark cloud hovering over the light. It almost feels like you have to perform for the mainstreamers or anyone asking by saying 'I like Eddie but I'm not like one of those fans'. Ugh.
Those fans implying the 'cringe' fans. The ones who cosplay; the ones who lipsync to audios- fans being fans of a character. The hate they received for doing harmless things is awful and undeserved- and I'm eternally sorry if you have been subjected to or affected by it.
I remember after mainstreamers flipped and started hating on Eddie, how many people in the fandom were genuinely so disappointed. How many people would post on tumblr or make tiktoks saying "I'm afraid to wear my Hellfire shirt/express that I like Eddie/ express that I like Stranger Things incase people think I'm one of those fans/ in case I get made fun of", the replies full of people saying "I wear mine because I like Dustin/Mike/Gareth/Fred/Erica" along with more people agreeing and describing how they have been made fun of. The videos of people singing Master of Puppets dressed as Eddie that have been stitched and called 'cringe' and mocked. It's just so... Pathetic to sit there and call something so innocent that brings others so much fun and enjoyment cringe. Go do something else.
To some people, criticizing that which they do not understand brings them gratification. They bring others down for their own enjoyment- and if you do that, fuck you. None of those 'cringey' things are hurting you personally. Go focus on something else and not fans being fans and engaging in harmless fan behaviour.
On the flip side of this, let me also say that if you call yourself a 'fan' that then actively stalks or sexualises celebrities, invading their privacy in real life or online, (*cough cough* Joe Quinn) or sends death threats to any costars for whatever reason (*cough cough* Grace Van Dien) you are awful and how dare you call yourself a fan? You're not being respectful or recognising these people AS people. You're seeing them as marketable things and objects and that is disgusting.
If you, like me, are one of those people gripping onto this fixation with all your strength because nothing has bought you this much comfort/safety/enjoyment in a while, I'd like to tell you to try your best and ignore those who do not understand and refuse to do so. I'm aware a ranty essay about this and explanations and blah blah won't change anyone's minds. That's not my intention. It simply makes me sad to get made fun of for harmless things.
I find removing that negativity and not engaging with the negative discourse is a good step into keeping positive- you can block tags on tumblr and click not interested on any tiktok videos you don't want to see if you hold down on the video playing.
May, June and July were filled with some of the happiest memories I experienced this year. From writing my fanfiction to watching a show I have a lot of love and admiration for, to discover so much new, good music. I'd love to feel that happy again now.
Thanks,
Toothpaste.
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I feel like when it comes to leftism, I agree with just about every point you make (although there are some areas of politics that I honestly just don't know much about, so it's difficult for me to form an opinion on those things), but every time you talk about religion, it sounds like you have almost no idea what you're talking about. It also seems like you only bring up religious drama so you can be like "lol y'all mad" anytime anyone criticizes mormonism or challenges your views. The only reason I'm still following you is because you reblog a lot of nice furry art that I otherwise wouldn't see on my dash, but you're more and more on thin ice every time I see one of your posts or reblogs about religion. It you're going to talk about religion, maybe do some actual research and listen to others outside of your small circle of "progressive mormons." The majority of the lds church is full of conservative bigots, and pretending it's not is just going to cause more harm than good.
Hi. Thanks for your thoughts.
I presume this is in answer to my question about whether people like to hear my thoughts. You certainly have answered my question here, and I appreciate your honesty and candor. I hope it's okay that I use this as a place to address some of the points youve brought up, and my thoughts both on Mormonism, and religion in general. If you ever have more questions, always feel free to reach out to me through a DM. Though I can appear cantankerous and argumentative on my blog, in reality, I am always down for a chat, and I appreciate the opportunity to set aside differences and talk.
Ok, so let's get into it.
To be honest, I am a bit surprised that you think my leftist arguments are things you agree with, while my religious arguments you think I dont know what I am talking about, and am out to get peoples attention and get people upset. If anything, I feel the opposite is more usually true. If I recall correctly, most of the times I have been looking to rile peoples feathers with my takes was when I was posting leftist political shit, such as most recently when I brought the wrath of tankie tumblr upon me by saying I thought it was a shame they were the face of leftism on tumblr. When it comes to my religious takes, while I sometimes can be a bit cheeky, I try to be more careful and reserved (though this time that didnt work out: while I think a lot of the hate I am getting isnt warranted, I see why some of my wording got people upset). In fact, religion is more of my strong suit than politics, to be honest. And while, yes, I do get obnoxious and crass when people challenge me on my Mormonism a lot, that is less interesting to me than having dialogues with people about religious belonging and furthering productive discourse. In fact, right now I am working on a few essays in that vein that I hope to share soon, which I hope will show how deeply and carefully I do think about these things.
As to the points about me not talking about issues more broad than the circle of progressive Mormons that I interact with on tumblr, I both agree and disagree with you. On the one hand, I agree that there is more I can do to learn more about religions outside of Mormonism. I have been wanting for a while to study Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism, though not necessarily in that order. I never quite get around to it, to my shame. I do try to at least listen to voices outside of my religious bubble, though I could do more there. Everyone could, I think.
On the other hand, I disagree that I dont do enough to focus on the sins of my church. I am very aware of them, and have spoken out against them numerous times. I even try to associate and listen to former Mormons and people who have left (I need to do better here, in all honesty), and to speak out where I can against my church's bad policies.
And bad policies there are aplenty. Where to begin. We have a history of racism, sexism, imperialism, queerphobia, and more. In our history, we have committed atrocities, opposed gay marriage and the equal rights amendment, and more. People have criticised the missionary program for imperialism, and preying upon vulnerable people (fair criticisms, I think). The church has been a source of pain for far too long for far too many, and there is much that needs to be done to begin to right our wrongs. I do what I can to keep aware of that, and speak out where I can.
But at the end of the day, being Mormon isnt only about being ashamed of my churchs wrongs. It is about drawing closer to Christ, and helping my fellow Mormons do the same. It is about doing good where I can. This is what I try to do more than anything else with my religious sentiments I share on tumblr. It is not meant to ignore the wrongs my church, which are legion, but rather to help out people like me, queer Mormons who are looking for a place where they are heard, and where they can belong. I need to do more to that end, and I do get caught in the weeds of the internet sometimes. But I do try.
If at the end of the day, you decide that I am someone who is married to a bad church and wont stop standing up for them even though theyre awful, and I'm not doing enough to listen to others: that is your judgement to make. At the end of the day, as rational and impartial as I try to be, I am prone to be biased in favor of myself. Perhaps you see something in me that I am failing to see in myself. And at the end of the day, if I am a source of frustration or annoyance on your blog, you can always unfollow me, or block any tags that get you upset. I wont lie and say I wouldnt be hurt by that, but I would understand. But I hope that you can see that I am trying to listen, to learn, and to help where I can. I have a long way to go, and today has taught me that, and humbled me in some ways I didnt realize I needed. But if nothing else, I am trying to be better at this. I hope you can forgive me for that.
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Why Hello! It has been a minute, hasn't it :)
Hiya!!! I'm back.
You are probably wondering, err. who are you ? And back from where? We had no idea you were even around 🤪
Fair point, so let me start with a quick intro / refresher / update and then let me fly with this because I've been bursting to do this for over a year now but my old friend procrastinator keeps visiting.
I'm Lynette, middle aged (45 for another 2 months), tech entrepreneur, mother of 2 teenagers, part time lecturer and most recently a beauty influencer.
YES, you read correctly! Let me explain a bit more which will give you some insight into where I am even going with this blog (that I happened to start over 11 years ago...like how many Tumblr blogs do you see these days, proof that I am one of the OG's of blogging)
Q. So you are a Tech Entrepreneur ? When you started this blog, you just worked in IT or tech right?
A. That is correct. I've been in the tech industry for over 25 years now. About 8 years ago, the company I was at closed down and at the time, there just wasn't a role for me anywhere that got me excited. I had been with this company for over 3 years and cultivated an amazing role for myself as Head of Mobile Apps, Strategy and User Experience but it was more than just a role or a job - it was everything that I loved doing when I was away from my kids. So much so that blogging became a thing of the past.
So 8 years ago I decided if I can't find the role I want, I'll just start up a digital consultancy create it - which I did and I've been going for 8 years.
Starting your own tech company wasn't just working at a tech company anymore - i was and still am the sales person, support person, social media manager, head of PR, head of people, amongst actually creating cool app experiences.
Q. Great, but where does the lecturing fit in?
A. Working in the digital space and breaking boundaries in the app space got me somewhat noticed especially as I was one of the few women doing it, and a woman of colour too. I got approached by various tertiary institutions to product course content for their digital modules a year after I was on my own (yes I was facilitating online learning years before it become the new norm).
A year prior to the pandemic I did take up a contract position at a local university to drive and lead social innovation. It was a lovely thing to do from a personal perspective and to give back the knowledge I had gained over the years to help the youths of this country become employable.
Q. That sounds amazing and hectic, don't you also have kids of your own ? And where does the makeup and beauty stuff come in?
A. Yes i do have two kids and they are teens now, so not as dependent on me as they were when I started this blog. Parenting two teenagers in this modern world is interesting 🤨
The beauty stuff actually came in towards the end of year 1 of the pandemic, back in 2020 , around Black Friday. I remember the date well because it started a crazy makeup addiction. A few months after I decided that I will not buy anymore makeup until I learn how to use it properly. (another thing to fuel that addiction)
I attended numerous Zoom and Instagram live classes in the evenings learning from industry experts globally and challenging myself to create makeup looks and to wear colours I never dreamt of wearing.
At the same time I also decided to become my own skincare therapist (during lockdown those special spa and massage moments became extinct). I've always been passionate about skincare and good skincare practices, thanks to my mother but now with my new found knowledge of makeup, i found I really enjoyed merging those two worlds and getting to understand myself a-lot better and practicing self-care.
Q. Wow, from tech girl to beauty..... and the point of resurrecting this blog is....?
A. To share my love for beauty with everyone so that they can be inspired to try out something new too. Also to connect with people who also have a love for beauty.
I'm 45, I'm not exactly the what the beauty industry displays on their IG feeds but that doesn't stop me from loving taking care of my skin and now experimenting with colour on my face.
There is something empowering when you are able to look into a mirror and like the image you see, with or without makeup on and it took me a while to get to that place. I loved makeup before I took up makeup artistry as a hobby but I was certainly never comfortable wearing a bright red lipstick or glitter eyes. Also if there was an event, I never felt confident or wonderful about myself doing my own makeup, unless I got a pro to do it for me - which wasn't always possible.
I still love getting pros to do my makeup, but it's become a nice to have. Learning and perfecting my techniques daily, while also acquiring product knowledge has empowered me to be in complete control of my appearance and appreciate my beauty and flaws. Reaching this level of confidence has definitely made me better at handling whatever life throws at me. Of course life is never easy, but at least I can do it with a killer smokey-eye and a bold red lip now. ☺️
That's all folks! If you are still reading this, I adore you 😘
Join me daily, sometimes maybe twice or more as I talk and share about my passions which will include :
a bit of Glam - Makeup and all things of beauty to me at the moment
a bit of Geek - Hey, what do you expect, I am also in tech after all
a whole lot of Glow - When you passionate about what you do, your inner glow will always be there
Welcome back to MysTechBlog also known as Geek, Glam and Glow. 🤓💄
Here is my look of the day, which is 90sInspired.
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Section 12. 2 chapters, ending with chapter 5
I am reposting these first eighty-two chapters (in 22 sections) plus the prologue and the preface.
These posts will be the updated versions from my DeviantArt account, and since Tumblr may not display all the text correctly (it destroys anything I had in italics or underlined) I would still recommend reading everything there, on DeviantArt. They will also include internal links that navigate between the chapters on DeviantArt and will take the reader off Tumblr if clicked.
This came about because I noticed search engines were finding random sections of my book and displaying them along with some other people’s blog posts.
Okay, so that’s why I installed those internal links in each one… so that if anyone gets to a random section by way of a search engine and would like to read the story from the beginning, they can.
Only then did I realize that it wasn’t getting it’s search results from DeviantArt, but from old Tumblr.
There’s another problem at work here besides unrefined searches…
There is a new species of virus on the internet that likes to eat ancient Tumblr posts and barf them back up infested with adware - spyware - malware etc. The virus goes by names like TumGIR, TumBIG, TumPIK, or Tum(anything else but ‘blr’). The caps were added by me for emphasis so that maybe you can double check in case you’re not looking at an actual Tumblr post right now but one of these so-called “mirror” sites.
If you’re looking at this text through one of the counterfeit Tumblrs that I mentioned, then no link you click (assuming it even copies it with my links intact) will take you out; it will redirect you and show you all of the spam ads it wants to. So read carefully what url is showing on your browser right now.
If it is one of the untrustworthy ones I would suggest closing your browser window and doing whatever else you normally would in order to reset settings.
As far as my science fiction novel entitled “If And Only If,” the safest way to find it is by going to my Instagram:
@michelle.de.vandahlcourte
From there you can click on the link in my bio. It will take you to the beginning of the story on DeviantArt… the safe one! No malware.
P.S. None of this is Tumblr’s fault! It’s the malware/adware/spyware developers who are stealing people’s tumblr posts.
The actual content of this page appears below here👇
Section 12. 2 chapters, ending with chapter 58
↩️return to previous section, section 11
↩️↩️…and if you arrived here because of a search engine and you would like to read this story from the beginning, click here.
Brenda and Renaldo
I called her from Kyle but didn’t let her know that. I just told her I was driving as fast as I could and would try and make it home shortly after sunset. To my relief she’d said to slow it down and take my time; she was running late too.
As predicted, the purpose of her visit that night was absolutely what I’d thought it would be: she knew exactly what proper answers to give to the multiple challenge questions I asked – things that only Brenda and some very close friends would know. And not even phrased in the form of questions per se.
I had to play along with it now, before I could “give her back her phone.”
“Oh, I see you found a use for that top after all,” I motioned while feigning an interest in her outfit. “That’s the one you made as a sewing project for Ava two years ago, right? But by the time you got it all done her boobies had grown more and she couldn’t comfortably button it!”
“No, you’re way off,” she said in a way that made my skin crawl, “it was Cecilia I made it for!”
A one hundred percent correct answer to a thing that wasn’t supposed to sound like a question and answer exchange... and didn’t. One of a series of five such verbal interactions to which she responded in precisely the way she was expected to. That is, if you only paid attention to word choice.
The way she spoke reminded me of how my youngest brother had sounded the other night when my mom got after him for putting out the trash can when it was supposed to be a recycling can night. Sure, he responded. Okay, I’ll get up mom, and do it now – or words roughly to that effect. But he spoke them just like you’d think a person would after being awakened from a deep sleep to the sound of someone chattering away.
That was Brenda. She sounded like she was sleepwalking. Are sleepwalkers able to speak and answer questions? I should look it up. But groggy as hell, like she was about to fall asleep on her feet. There was more to it than that; her facial expression was off. At times it was almost as if someone had inserted electrical probes into her facial muscles and was trying to work her like a puppet.
To add to the creepiness, she saw that I had Suicide Squad paused right before Harley’s line about the voices: “that’s not what they really said.” Brenda thought that line was adorable. We were always talking about binge-watching DCEU someday. She mentioned our vague plans again and that we should do it soon and then went on to chat about Margot Robbie on Instagram from last month or something.
Her voice throughout this was utterly Normal Brenda. Then after a long pause I said “well...”
She nodded and said “oh yeah,” as in let’s-get-on-with-it. When the pre-programmed conversation resumed, for the remaining 2 challenge questions that didn’t really sound like questions? She was back to sleepy-voice Brenda. It worried the fuck outta me! Who in the hell was doing this to people’s minds? To her mind??
She got the phone from me, examining it briefly, and was of course unable to tell it apart from the original. So as far as she was concerned: mission accomplished. And back to regular fully-conscious Brenda voice.
Since she’d filled me in on the Wheeler phone situation also, back when she brought this one for me to look after – and it was understood that I knew about that one too – I asked her if she wouldn’t mind me driving her up to Austin. Or if she really wanted to take her car, we could switch off and tag-team on the driving. Though I couldn’t really explain to her what my concern was, it was easy enough to explain to myself internally: if she sounded that damned tired while talking, would she be alright to drive? It was dark already, and if these mind-scrambling goons who were traipdaising through her synapses with such little regard for damages they might be inflicting, were also making her tired... that was a potentially lethal combination. All because they were hellbent on making sure some damned comic book character got erased! The fact that I saw a woman nearly get killed by a car in Austin earlier in the afternoon might have had me on edge too.
She was cool with me coming along and was kind of excited about introducing me to Wheeler; something she once again communicated to me in her normal voice.
Wheeler and I had planned for this possibility: that Brenda might one day introduce us, and that we would agree to act like it was our first time meeting. Once he understood the logic of it, he was all for it. If Brenda became aware that we had already met somehow, for some inexplicable reason, her puzzlement or curiosity over this might also alert the mind-manipulators and cause them to go nosing around more deeply into my business. And since part of my business included backing up her files in a way that protects them from the Erasers... in other words, since it helped Brenda... he was on board for this little bit of subterfuge.
As we cruised through SoCo and passed her favorite costume shop that she loved as a kid, just after 10:15 that evening, I did briefly worry that this mind signal-pulse might have turned Wheeler into some kind of driveling idiot if they’d cranked up the power enough this time in order to make sure they finally got to Brenda. And if it did do that to him, would he be able to keep up the “we’ve never met before” pretense or would he slip up and go Fredo?
No problems. Fortunately his mom and dad were away on some week-long spiritualism and crystal meditation retreat, as I’d learned earlier. He was normal as far as I knew, gauging him by what I’d observed during our first two meetings. Wheeler and I exchanged nice-to-meet-yous and heard-a-lot-about-yous and Brenda was pleased to see that we were hitting it off nicely; once she was again back to being Normal Brenda, that is.
During their witty exchanges of only-Brenda-would-know factoids, she was doing that same sleepwalking, or rather “sleeptalking” thing. I could see the look of consternation take hold of his face as he no doubt worried in the same way I had 70 miles to the south during astronomical twilight.
As much of a relief as it was to have normal-voiced Brenda back, it was also good to see they hadn’t decided to “up the voltage” as Professor Hathaway had suggested. Wheeler had been very careful during all this, to absolutely not reacquaint himself with Stalko-Taco. Once he’d grasped what Brenda was trying to say was being done, the thought terrified him; the notion that someone or some things had been stomping around through his brain cells was mortifying to someone who had already taken and aced 6 college mathematics courses while still technically in high school! Like Hans Zarkov pleading with Ming’s interrogators!
Whatever he did worked – it armored him alright. Either that or the Erasers didn’t send out a worldwide pulse this time, but simply dispatched an agent, with a good old fashioned flashy thing, who just visited Brenda.
Wheeler filed Stalko-Taco in the category of some really gross YouTube vid that he might have started to watch, but then hit the back-button instead. Something he would have no interest whatsoever in watching. His strategy had paid off, in the form of an unassailed mind. When I carefully questioned him later, he remembered Brenda going on and on about some obscure creepypasta character, but had no desire to view any copy of it – whatever materials she might have had.
If they did send out another worldwide signal, it had most decidedly left him alone. Suffice to say he never watched or attempted to even examine the backup vlog vids that Brenda had placed on the phone that resided in his room for a few weeks. So technically he didn’t know that he had any Stalko-Taco related materials in his possession, in case they would have broadcast another “destroy everything you have about the Taco” signal. The idea had been sound.
I was kinda glad to be done with this phase of the chess game with whoever these people (or aliens) were. Now that they had made their next move, I could plot mine. The next night, on some property that my dad had invested in but never got to fully develop during his lifetime, I sealed myself in a homemade SCIF below ground level in a small tornado shelter that the previous owners wisely thought to dig and construct. It was a bit away from where we parked our camping trailer, so even without the soundproof walls I wouldn’t be disturbed by my brothers carrying on. Within the shelter, and within my SCIF, I climbed into still another layer of protection: my homemade human-sized Faraday cage. With a hand-crank generator that would charge USB devices, I at last watched Brenda’s videos. And with this act I quite possibly became the only person left on Earth to know the full true story of Stalko-Taco.
His Cerebral Phosphorescence
“Extraterrestrial intelligences, or aliens, don’t exist. Period,” declared the world’s third smartest human to his reflection in the hallway mirror at home before he left. In what little private time he had, Swifty had built his own polygraph: thermometers and / or thermocouples of course, and ohmmeters sensitive to variations in skin moisture, a pulse-ox, plus blood pressure monitoring, etc. Even a voice stress analyzer along with the software he would need in order to interpret the results. All of it had to be destroyed and disposed of long ago since he had passed the point in his career wherein he could not be found with these things. We wouldn’t want it to look like we were practicing to beat polygraph tests, he thought, smiling to himself.
He had the idea ever since the Cliaandians handed diGriz the egg at Glupost. It was unimportant now, as he’d long since mastered it. But a little rehearsal in front of the mirror sometimes helped. Honest old Swifty had been beating these things routinely since the late 80s. They were a joke to him now.
What wouldn’t be a joking matter would be if it became known that he was working on an E.T. angle on anything at all. Though not treasonous or a security threat, it could cause his career to go the way of the “Stargate Project” in a heartbeat. The official party line was no psychics, no paranormal shit, no E.T.’s… Nothing otherworldly whatsoever was allowed to exist. If there was a problem, you looked to this world for an answer, or you would answer to the budget decision makers.
Evidently, a majority of the voting public did not admit to belief in these things and wanted their elected officials to be “pragmatic” even though a majority of Americans in 2019 might not have trouble accepting alien-based theories. If they asked him privately (were such a ridiculous notion as “privacy” even possible) he would tell them the truth, and most people would be disappointed or just think he was a lying, high-ranking government official who was part of the “cover-up.” But reality was unfortunately bland. Edward Snowden was quite truthful about that.
All supposed incidents involving UFOs that the public has knowledge about were in fact governments of the world fucking with each other by way of experimental technologies; when caught – that is when evidence turned up at a “crash site” or other things that could expose them – they would rather have the people think they were lying about aliens than find out what they were really lying about.
In the old days, supposedly they’d even go so far as to plant dummy “alien” corpses at a crash site and allow video or film clips to be “leaked” of things like alien autopsies or whatever. They went out on a limb – taking a chance that people would be stupid enough to buy into it. But evidently it worked; it had also paid off big for everyone from Hollywood producers to bloggers and people who sold trinkets and t-shirts at Roswell.
Just like the moon landings: many people believed it was all a hoax because of the fake photos and some film clips. They’d rather have a huge fraction of the population believe it was fraudulent, than show them the real pictures. You know, the ones that clearly show the US placing nuclear devices on the moon in flagrant violation of the 1963 nuclear test ban treaty. Whenever someone at the NSA had doubts on this, Swifty’s response was always to tell them “Complete this sentence: Our government would never put nuclear missiles on the moon, because ___________.” That wiped the smiles off skeptical faces real quick.
Back to the conundrum of the moment:
“There is a possibility that a bunch of people higher up than I am in the government are simply yanking my chain,” I thought glancing at myself in the rearview mirror now. But that would require the existence of multiple government employees who are all more intelligent than I am. I decided a while back that I’d rather believe in the aliens; it’s more plausible.
But as I always remind myself, just to make sure I’m keeping my ego in check... it’s not just ego. I’ve always made certain that I can back up assumptions about being more intelligent than someone else with evidence. Most people provide me with copious amounts of evidence all by themselves.
As far as the physical type of data? The most convincing evidence I ever encountered was the Stalko-Taco teleportations. I called them the “burrito” teleportations at first since one of the cops claimed his police car had been vandalized by a giant burrito.
Shortly after that, emails out of Berkeley, Oakland, San Jose, San Francisco, Burlingame, etc. related a story of a giant taco that was very protective of its young hungry human friends. Nothing about shanghai-ing a bunch of cops. But since “Stalko Burrito” just didn’t have the same ring to it, I’ve since codenamed them the Stalko-Taco teleportations in my mental notes to myself... where they have had to remain exclusively. Regardless of whether people were hallucinating about the taco or not, the mysterious “teleportations” did occur. Retracing what happened, the first calls to police regarding naked people in the various cities actually started coming in only three minutes after all four of them simultaneously went radio silent.
No spacecraft in the world, even now 22 years later will get a person off the ground in San Francisco and on the ground in Greece in three minutes, and do it without showing up on any radar or other detection system.
What is more disturbing is the fact that there is either a second NSA within the NSA secretly keeping blinders on us, or that the aliens are somehow not only erasing memories but also re-programming minds with false memories. A little birdie told me that surprise random polygraph screenings would be today. That’s good, it will have me nice and relaxed before our meeting with the people from Mitternacht.
They were actually a pleasure to deal with compared to other private contractors. Although it was US government we could use a local German company for our European ___________ ___________ (thoughts redacted). I knew I could expect anyone representing Mitternacht Cryptosystems to not be a novice when it came to cryptanalysis and math in general. After an uneventful day at work, the polygraph test had not occurred as (un)scheduled. I couldn’t do anything about it, since I wasn’t supposed to know it was happening.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I couldn’t see who hit me, chloroformed me, tranq-darted me from behind, etc. Whatever they used on me had completely worn off by the time I’d been transported to my destination. There was a sense of “no time” or perhaps “wink time,” like I had just blinked and then appeared here. Warehouse. In a warehouse district I surmised from the limited view I had through the tiny, filthy window in the distance. I could see the plastic ties securing my knee joints and ankles to the chair legs; guessing the same kinds of things were binding my wrists behind the back of my chair. Efficient, I suppose my captors thought, but they had carelessly neglected the chair itself.
It was metal, true. But antiquated. It reminded me of a chair in an old office where my dad worked in the early 70s. It had welds that might possibly have been produced by human welders, who might very possibly have died of old age by now. No effort was made to bolt the chair to the floor or to anything else.
I had to act fast. Something wasn’t right about all this. Whoever abducted me from Camp Picket had to be a genius plus another thirty IQ points to get past all the NSA’s measures, but then keeping me here, unattended, with this kind of restraint? It was a plan worthy of the original Mission Impossible series, but then for some reason turned over to Beavis and Butthead.
I bounced.
And repeated.
I didn’t want to fall over, yet. After about the sixth impact I think, something cracked. Either a bolt came out or a welding joint snapped.
After rolling around on the floor for a bit and getting my bearings, I found that it was enough to get my hands in front of myself and free one leg. Although still tied together, I could easily use my hands to slip the wreckage of the chair off my other leg. I was now free to walk around the warehouse with my hands tied in front of me instead of behind me. It would’ve been too much to ask to find a box cutter or some kind a blade. It came in the form of an old fifty-five gallon drum trash barrel that looked like it had been used by homeless people to burn stuff. The rim where it wasn’t rusted away, included a jagged enough edge that it might work for what I had in mind.
After an eternity of dragging the plastic tie along the sharpest edge I could find, there was only a groove in the plastic to show for my efforts... and it was too late anyway as the sound of keys rattling in the door told me they were coming. Old fashioned sodium pentothal? Sodium amytal, pentothal morphine, scopolamine… There were a thousand things these idiots might try. And I would have resistance to none of them. The frustrated voice sounded deep and stupid as it mumbled something about fucking keys. Okay, so it was Butthead who had been entrusted with the keys.
While he messed around, confounded by the mechanism of a door lock, I took advantage of whatever little time I had to hide behind a disorderly mountain of discarded cardboard boxes. They looked old enough and dusty enough to probably be a real estate development for brown recluse spiders. I had no plans to roll around inside the damned things. Just a game of cat and mouse with Butthead, when he finally located the correct key. Instead of a spider, what I did find was a box cutter. Duh. 20/20 hindsight; of course it made sense to look around boxes for a box cutter. But it had been a calculated risk; if there hadn’t been one and I’d gone traipsing around looking, I might not even have a decent groove started.
The groove was a blessing as it kept the blade straight and just where I wanted it, preventing me from cutting my wrist. Still, my grip was weird and ineffective. So when I finally got the band to snap, the ancient rusty thing bounced safely to the floor. With enough noise of course to draw Butthead’s attention over to my box pile after he finally got the right key in a second earlier.
Bad.
I had hoped for a minute or so of confused gawking at my chair’s wreckage and looking around for me. Instead, he was loping over to my exact location behind the box fortress.
I had one thing that might work: a fire extinguisher from the wall. If I tried to engage him with the box cutter then our fighting skills would be pitted against each other and he would likely win. So I went with the more dishonorable tactic of pounding the base of the fire extinguisher into his forehead as soon as he came around the corner. Since I am not renowned for my strength, he merely staggered and held his hands over his head. Not a particularly imposing fellow; maybe a tad over six feet. But stoutly built, early/thirtyish, dark hair. Fortunately the dusty antique still had an adequate charge. It wasn’t CO₂ but something suitable for electrical fires and a yellow powder was blasted into his mouth as I squeezed the lever while he was opening it to scream from the forehead impact.
It caused him to choke as he fumbled for his Beretta 93R. Since he was momentarily blinded also, it was fairly simple for me to knock it out of his hand, bouncing it onto a piece of cardboard below. He reached his other hand instinctively for something on his other side under his jacket. I could just make out the details of a second shoulder holster rig. This time I swung the extinguisher sideways and whacked him in the back of his head. It was hard enough to break the handle off and drop him to the ground. Unconscious or dead. I didn’t care at this point. To paraphrase my childhood antihero a bit: “The novelty of this little situation had entirely worn off” and “I was in a skull-fracturing humor.”
Thankfully, the body of the extinguisher bounced into a different pile of cardboard instead of clanging noisily onto the cement floor. I got his machine pistols – the second one, also a 93R – supposedly unavailable to anyone but law-enforcement, and noted he had chambered a round in each already and carried them both with the safeties off.
Moron!
I don’t care how good he thinks he is, sooner or later something will go wrong; he’s an accident looking for a place to happen. I used one to cover him while I got his keys, and went through his pockets. No ID or wallet, but a phone. By “cover him” I mean I shoved a gun barrel into his gaping mouth and kept it there during the search. If he regained consciousness I didn’t want him pulling some Krav Maga shit and getting the gun from me. It was on “three round burst“ I noticed. I left it there. But since he stayed down, I removed the gun from his mouth and chose not to “finish my kill.”
Not that I had any sympathy for this scum who was undoubtedly a true enemy of the state, but my concern was that the report would likely cause Beavis to come running in to investigate. Whoever they were, even the dumbest of them would surely be curious about the gunfire. So, safeties on, mags out, rounds ejected and caught in my hand, I reinserted them in the magazines, and re-introduced the magazines. Butthead went with brass and teflon slugs, I noted, for both pistols.
The door on the far end – the exact opposite from where Butthead had entered – was the natural choice. It was unlocked. Unbolted. Not blocked in any way. My, but they certainly had a lot of faith in a decrepit old chair and some plastic riot ties.
My new problem, as I attempted to use the stars to navigate, was that there was something wrong with the stars… And the moon.
It was a waxing gibbous about two days away from being full on the night I was abducted from Camp Pickett, Virginia outside my office. At first glance, it had appeared to be in the exact same phase tonight and I must confess, I don’t recall what constellation it was in; I was a bit preoccupied with my alien conspiracies.
So either it’s still the same night, or it’s now a waning gibbous that’s two days past full? And sorry to say I couldn’t be sure just now what its direction of curvature had been when I glimpsed it. I was too preoccupied with running. I needed my right hand free, an unobstructed view of it, and some privacy. Some place away from the warehouses where I could see the horizon and tell which ways east and west were, would also help. But at the moment, I really needed to focus on running.
So I’ve either been gone four nights, or it’s only “later tonight.” But there’s another problem: the stars are telling me my latitude change. I can only guess my longitude change less accurately because that depends on the time – another version of the same problem ancient navigators had before John Harrison’s nautical chronometer.
My latitude has changed by a little over five-hundred nautical miles to the south – about seven and a half degrees... pausing for another second to avoid being seen by a distant driver, I also found out which ways east and west were from the different brightnesses of the horizons. I got the estimate of around three quarters of ten degrees using a trick with my fingers that I learned as a kid – adjusting my positioning for my now larger fingers – once I had a north horizon view and could see some familiar stars. The time is just after sunset here and I would say on the boundary between civil and nautical twilight. I’m almost certain it’s evening; it just feels too damned hot to be pre-dawn twilight. It’s possibly a tad on the civil-twilight side; It’s earlier than it was when I was walking to my car, judging by light levels alone. Had I moved one time zone to the west, as the light levels are implying? This would make it just after I left work in Virginia.
At last, a place where I could rest for a few milliseconds. Butthead’s phone was locked but the time and date confirmed that yes, in Virginia I would’ve just left work less than 15 minutes ago... if his timezone was central. Allowing time to wrangle my way out of the chair, mess with a jagged piece of metal and a box cutter, attack Butthead, steal weapons, useless keys and a phone from him, make my way out of the warehouse, and run here? That only left about 1 to 2 minutes to transport me.
If the moon is waning and Butthead’s phone was purposely set wrong, I’ve been gone ninety-six hours and regained consciousness roughly ninety-six hours and 1.5 minutes after being abducted.
But if it’s still waxing? And if everything else that I am reading is reliable and the time on Butthead‘s phone wasn’t deliberately faked? Then I regained consciousness only 1.5 minutes after being abducted.
I entered another area between two warehouses, both presenting nothing but solid walls with no windows whatsoever. About midway down the corridor I felt safe enough to briefly store my right hand Beretta in my belt at my waist. I got my right hand ready to do the backwards C / forward D tricks (the logic could be extended to gibbous moons also) and looked around for the actual moon. I know I could have just looked at it and thought things through without physically using my hand, but this was too important; absolute certainty was required and I worried I might screw it up. Then a clear view... as a cloud that had been obstructing it moved away. The backwards-or-forwards letter rule confirmed it. It’s only “later tonight” and not four days later.
The city could be Houston or New Orleans or maybe somewhere else in the south. All I was seeing were warehouses. Texas plates on almost all of the parked vehicles clued me in. An oil change sticker on a van gave an address on Stella Link. Houston then.
If everything I estimated was right? Then no aircraft or space vehicle could transport me from Blackstone to Houston in less than two minutes. But even if some experimental spacecraft existed? A spacecraft would have had to have been prepped and ready right there in the parking lot so that my unconscious body could be shoved into it. I think I would’ve noticed a vehicle like that.
So I’ve either been teleported here – beamed, like on Star Trek – or someone messed with the time and date setting on Butthead‘s phone because they wanted me to think I’ve been “beamed.” Well, that and saturating the cars on the streets of some warehouse district with Texas plates… and placing a blimp or some kind of hovercraft over me to project a fake moon image??
No. Butthead wasn’t planning to get clubbed unconscious or killed and surrender his phone and weapons. Nor did they intend to show me the moon and the stars outside. Or parked cars. I had been beamed.
Continue on to next section…
If And Only If
Copyright 2015
by Michelle Viviénne de Vandahlcourte
All rights reserved.
No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
First Edition. © December 16, 2015.
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hey not to start shit but since empires smp is a family friendly series and pixlriffs a family friendly creator and large portions of this fandom are minors do you really think its fair to put a post about an explicitly and exclusively nsfw thing in both of the main tags for that. like do whatever i guess but at 27 years of age do you really think putting that in a place where kids are almost definitely gonna see is fair.
In my experience, anytime someone says “hey, not to be [whatever], but…”, they are almost always trying to do that thing. And I fully recognize that you’ve probably come in here, Anon, to stoke a defensive reaction out of me in hopes to start some shit. I’ve been at work for 8.5hrs today and I’ve had my time to cool off, so you’re not gonna get an infuriated reaction or some kind of sassy response.
TLDR: I use tags the same way that I’ve used them for the nine years I’ve been on this site. Which is mostly to help me keep some level of organization in my own blog, as well as make sure that I’m tagging for things that people might want to blacklist. Every fandom seems to change how they do things, and I’m still trying to learn all the nuances of the fandoms I’m in on how to tag stuff. So if you have a tag for me to use instead, let me know and I’ll start adding it to my posts so that I can make sure that any person who doesn’t want to see that content can avoid it.
For the writing challenge I’m doing, the tag you can blacklist is “kinktober fic fest”. Or, if you really just can’t stand to see me and the content I put out, the block button is right there, and I highly recommend that you use it. Blacklisting tags is actually a function that works on this dear site of ours, as long as people continue to tag their things.
For the record, nothing of what I write about in regards to SMPs has ever been about the real person behind the screen. I don’t write RPF. Anything that I write is about whatever character that is being played, with maybe some slight tweaks to help tell the story better. Empires SMP, especially season 2, is incredibly bold with their pole dancing jokes, or calling people ‘daddy’ with emphasis on “sharing their hard wood”, because that stuff isn’t really for kids. But those jokes are often in family friendly material because it’s going to fly over the kids’ heads. None of my fics are for kids, so I tag things to the best of my ability in order to make that clear.
Do you really think it’s fair to come into a random person’s inbox to tell them that they need to sanitize and censor themself for some hypothetical children that might come across that post? I put everything that was actually explicit under a read more that, by default, you have to click to see the rest. Which is very much like opening a bag labeled “dead dove, do not eat” and being infuriated to find there’s a dead dove in the bag. I recognize that maybe a community label should have been applied to the post, but I didn’t feel like it was necessary since the post was literally only about how I was going to tackle that writing challenge.
You can be damn sure that any explicit fic I post on tumblr will be labeled correctly, to the best of my ability. Every bit of explicit stuff will be put under a read more, so you will have to click it to be able to view it.
And if some hypothetical children come across something that is very clearly labeled with the things they don’t want to see, and they’re still upset about it being in the main tag because I don’t know where else I’m supposed to put it, then, to be frank:
That’s not my problem.
Have a lovely day
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gonna be not doing this anonymously because I wanna get the notification bwihidhoqjojfoqhoxh
Uh, heya, it's been quite awhile, hasn't it? I haven't had like any time she says as she started reading a new manga as well lots of fanfics on A03 only a few days ago. Well not enough time to actually go and catch up on this, I've decided to try and do that in my summer holidays, which take over a month to come still too, 5 weeks to be precise. 1 week of that is work experience, one day meeting someone that will tell us about how he was in the DDR prison and then getting bought out by the BRD, then also 1 day going to an art museum with my class and I think that should be all, plus period that will make me unable to attend probably like 6 days again, sighs.
Well anyways, how have you been? And all the fabulous anons? How has writing gone? Are your projects going well?
Personally I've for June done an art challenge thing, 1 drawing per week. Had to postpone the next two drawings each by 3 days though because I need to study.
But hey! I at least improved in history! I got one of the better grades in my class, it feels like everyone is failing history tho tbh. I do not want my latin exam back tho. Write physics last Monday, this will decide if I fail this school year or not I'm pretty sure. Tomorrow I'll have an English exam but that's gonna be easy ngl, just gotta finish the last 3 sides of the book we have to read. math exam is next Tuesday, the topic is kinda easy, I think. And a lot more. We also will have to do presentations now in geography, in hopes that will save my geography grade too.
I have fallen in love with the manga "Mairimashita! Iruma-kun!" in hopes I wrote that correctly lol. It's really nice. Can only recommend. Did you like Lizzie's musical? Are you excited for season 2 this Saturday?
Hope you've a nice day/night/wherever you are! Before I leave here I'll show my drawings up to now for FairyTaleJune, first one was Light second one was Darkness!
-I wish you an awesome summer, Star the anonymous (well not so much rn) witch <3
Hi! It's been a while indeed, good to see you again!
It's been a bit quiet over here, but that's mostly on me. I should've probably realized that, with the raye I wqs trying to pump out stories, it wouldn’t last. And it didn't, I got a bit of a writing burn-out that I'm still slowly trying to crawl out of. My biggest problem is that I either write 4000 words per day for three months straight or I don't write anything at all, so trying to find a balance in there has been hard. Took a bit of a writing break, during which I binged all of Critical Role campaign three and I'm now fully caught up. Been doing some crocheting as well, nothing too big, taking it easy. No good news on the job hunting front, though - but hey, what can you do when people turn you down because "you'd be perfect for the job if your verbal communicative skills were better" (bad paraphrase)? I’m just gonna keep trying to find something.
As for the projects, I've decided that announcing what I'm gonna be working on stuff for accountability meant putting maybe a bit too much pressure on myself that resulted in stress as I progressively couldn't keep up, so I'm not doing that anymore. Wither AU is kept mostly alive by asks and I haven't updated Fear the Wither in months, and probably won't be in the near future because of empires season 2. Tabula rasa and the Caesar House are still actively being worked on, though I may not be doing tumblr posts for Caesar House anymore (should probably make that into a separate post...). I've shelved any other story ideas I've mentioned because I know me - I want to write all the stories and I simply don't have the time and I hate not being able to show you these stories, but I can't force myself to work on them. It wouldn't be fair to you to deliver a product my heart's not in anymore.
I have seen Lizzie’s musical, it was amazing, love it! Don't really have a favorite song yet, letting that simmer in the back of my mind a bit. And I'm very excited for empires season 2, I’m sure it’ll make me hyperfixate and resurrect this blog with random snippets. Can't wait to see where people will settle, with what theme they'll go and who the new twelfth member is. It's gonna be so much fun!
It’s been good talking to you, Star. good day/afternoon/night to you, too! Those drawings look great!
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The historic figures borrowed for OFMD were not good people, now what?
@land-shark-is-here and @thiefnessman
I wrote a response to that OFMD post that tumblr lovingly vanished into the abyss (and that post is apparently unrebloggable now??), so I’ll write it again and just tag y’all I guess. I agree no show, no matter how progressive, is above criticism and analysis. And I also get some people are going to find the borrowing of historic figures who were terrible to be uncomfy no matter what. No shade if it genuinely ruins the show for you to know the real Steve Bonnet was a slave owner.
I was trying to make a distinction between Hamilton and OFMD (which I should point out I haven’t actually seen, this is what I’ve garnered through dashboard osmosis) that I’m not sure correctly came across. Hamilton is a historical drama meant to actually reenact the founding of the US and the life of Alexander Hamilton. Genre conventions dictate you should view it as mostly truthful, with some exaggeration. So I do think it brushing over slavery and repainting of historic figures as abolitionists (among other exaggerations, untruths, and plain old framing) has more potential to be misleading and damaging. Whereas OFMD is a period piece romantic comedy. It’s genre conventions dictate that most historical features are props more than anything, and that it should be viewed as mostly fictional. So while both pieces of media are comparable in erasing context, I was trying to say OFMD is a lesser offender, since it should be more apparent to audiences that it is a constructed fictional narrative.
Again, no shade if the premise of borrowing actual historical figures who were bad people as a prop for a romantic comedy bothers you in any case. That’s totally understandable. But, and forgive me if this is straw-manning your argument, I don’t think that should mean the media is completely unconsumable for everyone. Because others will be willing to parse the story from the reality.
Also I did take issue with the article suggesting that the way to fix glossing over the slavery element was to canonically lampshade the plantation or give Bonnet an arc about it. Because yes, it did pretty much argue for this, lamenting both the absence of acknowledgement and that the director’s hadn’t "challenged themselves to a different choice”. I don’t think such a different choice, to make fictional, sympathetic Bonnet a slave owner too, would have worked under any circumstances other than an irrevocable transformation into an antagonist... which is not what anyone is watching the show to see.
Anyway if y’all have any other thoughts (or want to chide me for digging a deeper hole for myself without realizing) feel free to respond.
Article link for reference: https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/what-to-watch/ct-ent-our-flag-means-death-no-mention-of-slavery-review-20220407-grmr4dgqzjg7zo2hfushk7elqm-story.html
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