#<- gonna include that because of the tags. and the post

[olderthannetfic]

So I'm not gonna be sticking around on Bluesky after all, unfortunately. I never expected it to totally replace Xwitter as the "main" social media platform for the masses, but it would've been a nice little alternative in theory. Sadly, I've already seen a ton of people being banned from the platform for completely ridiculous reasons, up to and including: posting vanilla NSFW artwork, making vanilla NSFW text posts, posting gore/guro/horror artwork, posting art of loli/shota characters (not even porn, just regular SFW art of young-looking anime characters) and being mass flagged/reported by people. (And yes, people were tagging stuff that should have been tagged, like NSFW and blood/gore)

The mass reporting thing was an issue on Xwitter as well, but it seems that Bluesky's public block lists feature is helping to really galvanise and empower people to do it to more people, more often. And then there's another HUGE issue with Bluesky, as well: how topics work. They're user maintained and user moderated, so if someone goes power tripping (especially with a super general topic, like art) and wants to ban other people because they don't like them, they just can.

I have literally seen regular users getting banned by other regular users, and yeah I'm totally sure that antis and bigots won't abuse that kind of power at all. Bluesky is already full of internet cop types and has way too much censorship for my taste. At least Xwitter will let you post your own artwork without banning you for the egregious crime of showing your character's midriff.

--

[emberunderscore]

The Sun and the Night Sky is on hiatus!

Quick summary for those that wouldn't like that much reading. Sun/sky is going on hiatus for the sake of my own mental health. I don't know when it will be coming back as I don't know how my mental health is going to change in future. I'm still going to be writing and posting other fics on ao3, just not updating sun/sky but i'll probably still talk about/post art about the fic over here (but not everything will go on the fable smp tag so make sure to follow the tag for the fic if you wanna see updates) and any asks you guys send me i'd love to answer too - just don't ask me when the fic will be back <3

Thank you ♥

Anyways little bit longer rant below (warning for the bad mental healths stuff)

This fic was never supposed to be this long, and it was never intended to cover such heavy topics like it does today. But once I had opened that door it became a really good place for me to project all my struggles with dissociation and past bad relationships with food. But recently my mental health has deteriorated really badly and I had to stop writing more chapters for the fic, chapters 22 - 27 were all pre written so all i had to do was edit them and post them, which was easy enough. But chapter 28 was hardly written at all and 29 + 30 had a lot of extra stuff i had to write, which i managed by only writing small bits at a time and not including any scenes describing Icarus struggling with eating. and then yesterday I got diagnosed with an eating disorder. which is. scary to say the least. especially because i know how much writing this fic had an effect on causing it. i don't want to hate this fic, but at the moment i cannot deal with writing it or i will drive myself to abandon it. which is why chapter 29 + 30 got posted early because i really didn't want it hanging over me for another week.

I'm still gonna write and post fics, but sun/sky will not be updated until i feel secure in my mental state and get a little closer to recovery though i don't know how far away that will be, especially since I thought my mental state was secure before starting to write about those heavier topics but. it clearly wasn't as good as i thought it was. I'm also still going to talk about sun/sky, I have a few little bits to talk about and i'll probably end up doing some art when i inevitably start to miss it. I would also love to answer questions! So please please please always put stuff in my ask box to give me excuses to talk about the fic.

Only thing I will say is DO NOT ask me when sun/sky will be coming back, like previously mentioned i don't know as it entirely depends on my mental state and if you ask me when it'll be back it'll only make me feel pressured to recover faster which will probably make it take longer

I've said it before, thank you so much for all the love and support on this fic. There have been some moments where I've felt this fic and the people who are waiting to read it has been keeping me alive. So thank you for caring about this thing that i've created <33

[toothpastewolf]

How long have you been riding horses?

a little longer than a year now !! i feel like i've made a bit of progress, because i couldn't even post at the beginning and now i can do a posting trot pretty much no problem and a comfortable canter, which was way farther than i thought i would get when i started to be honest lmao

my trainer even wants me to show, i don't know if i'm ready for that or if i ever will be but she seems pretty set on it so i guess i'll see what happens ^^

[medicalunprofessional]

never change, man !

[whim-prone-pirate]

the reason i bring my identity up is to then make the point about the importance of queer characters in my life. you didn't need to ask, i told you! isn't that nice?

i never said that any of those things attributed to good storytelling, i said i understand about storytelling functions, meaning i am not at all shocked or surprised or saddened by how tommy was treated as a supporting character meant to provide buck steps in his queer journey.

i believe bucks queerness and their relationship were handled with the amount of grace necessary. again, this was a standard buck relationship (including the goofy break up reason), and bucktommy was given as much grace as bucktaylor or buckabby or whatever else!

my take is that i don't think tommy was supposed to be representation, buck is. and buck still is, they accomplished that goal.

i check the 911 insta pretty often, but that's the only social media i have that they're on. insta is notorious for removing mean comments so it's possible i didn't scroll far enough and/or don't get to the posts in time to see the death threats you're claiming.

in my opinion, their relationship was poorly paced, as is the rest of the show. pacing and time-and-place has NEVER been their strong suit. i am very sorry that this lack has gone towards ruining the end of something yall love, and i truly mean that.

my overall point is that diehard fans took things from the interviews that they were not meant to because they thought bucktommy was more special than bucks other relationships and nothing ever promised that. they handled it with grace by doing about as well as they usually do with writing the show and did not treat them differently on the basis of being mlm.

ps: you emphatically disagree with me, and i have to think that engaging in this conversation is not a happy time for you. that is why i bring up blocking tags of content you don't like. you can avoid this by taking preventative measures as i have.

i'm probably not gonna have much more to say after this or i feel i'd be reiterating everything i've already said but reply if you'd like obvs

and another thing people are discussing this like tommy was a main character with an arc. he was supporting at best even in his own relationship. i'm sorry to say it was not disrespectful to treat a supporting character like a supporting character. he's allowed to have an unceremonious exit. bucktommy existed for buck's story… not tommy's. i am ALL FOR loving and caring for character's who don't really have a story of their own (we're all huge fans of ravi and lucy and lena hello they are/were barely around!!!), i get how fun it is. but so many people are confusing their love for tommy and their headcanons for implication that he was ever supposed to stick around and develop outside of buck. he was never gonna be his own Guy you know.

[gh0st-4ss]

lover's quarrel

[rubberduckyrye]

I just saw some Kokichi hater in the tags bitching about Chapter 4 because of course they are

And they were so mad people ship OuGoku like bro don't come @ me just because you decided to maliciously misinterpret Kokichi and Gonta's plot and relationship

But the funnier part of that post?

They said "At least Byakuya and Nagito never tricked anyone into killing"

First of all: God damn it can you fuckers hate Kokichi without being ableist AF to Gonta I'm so fucking TIRED.

But second of all: NAGITO LITERALLY MANIPULATED TERUTERU INTO KILLING SOMEONE AND ADMITS IT LIKE WTF ARE YOU ON ABOUT??? And Byakuya may have not done that but he sure jerk around everyone in the trial for NO fucking reason in Chapter 2 to try and frame Genocider Syo!!!

Edit: NAGITO ALSO TRICKED CHIAKI INTO KILLING HIM TOO LIKE BRO.

This comparison is just bad!!! And malicious! I'm so tired of this ableist bullshit!!! BEGONE.

[buglaur]

[stardust-falling]

fandom psa; there is nothing whatsoever that is inherently "problematic" about shipping characters who are "found family."

Adoption is not found family. A blended family is not found family. A found family or chosen family is a group which, through circumstances or simply mutual affection, hold their relationship to one another with equal care and importance as family members ought to. It's not the same type of relationship.

It's not incest. It's not even pseudo-incest unless you want it to be. I personally don't care what people ship, but I'm absolutely tired of people misusing the term "found family" to just recreate the idea of a nuclear family and force those roles onto the entirety of a fandom. Sure, maybe characters who are found family may view themselves like siblings, or like a parent and child or aunt and niece, but they might also just see each other as friends-- and guess what? romantic partners too! That's technically the most widely-accepted form of found family/chosen family there is!

The whole point of found family/chosen family is to have the importance of "family" on relationships that lie outside the commonly-understood bounds of that relationship. Not to recreate the "mommy-daddy-daughter-son" dynamic with unrelated characters and use that headcanon or fanon dynamic to enforce your own morality or preferences on other fans.

[marlynnofmany]

Me: *squinting at notes* "What was my endgame here? How did I plan to wrap up the plot threads?"

My Notes: "These good guys stop those bad guys, there's peace for everybody, and the dangerous stuff is thrown into the sun. Whee!"

Me: "That is remarkably vague, Past Me."

[backslashdelta]

How To Gif: Glass Shatter Effect

By popular demand (ie, 7 people who voted in this poll), here is a tutorial on how to do the glass shatter effect I used to create the first gif in this set.

I use Photoshop CC 2015 (yes I know it's old) for my gifmaking, but you should be able to apply everything to newer versions of Photoshop. For this tutorial I'll be assuming you know the gifmaking basics, but if not, I would recommend this tutorial, which is the process I use to make gifs. Note that this particular process involves saving all of the frames, importing those frames into Photoshop, and then using an action to convert to a smart object.

Keep reading below the cut to learn how to do this effect!

Before I could start making this gif, I needed three things; the two scenes that I wanted to use, and a video of the glass shattering effect. I already knew the scenes I wanted, so then I took to YouTube to find a video which I can't for the life of me find again (edit: thanks to add1ctedt0you in the replies for linking this video!), but it looked like this:

Something like this is what you want. Ideally the green part would be entirely white, but as long as there are two clearly different colours you can usually work with it.

This looks a lot slower than the gif that I made, but that's not because of the frame rate - which is exactly the same above as in the final gif - it's just because there are extra frames in this slower one that I cut out. In the video I used, the glass shattering happened very slowly. I didn't want that, so I ended up skipping several frames when I loaded the frames into Photoshop before using my gifmaking action. I just did this by manually selecting one frame, skipping the next several before selecting another frame, and repeating this until I had selected 60 frames.

After using my gif action, I had a smart object of the glass shatter effect that looked like this:

That's a much better speed! It still wasn't quite where I needed it to be though. I needed this in black and white, so I slapped a hue/saturation adjustment on the smart object and set the saturation all the way down to -100.

Okay great, I could start putting the gif together now.

First, I made a copy of the glass shatter smart object, because I'll need that later. Then, I pulled in frames from the scene that I wanted to appear in the hole after the glass shatters, and I used those to create a new smart object with my gif action (we'll call it Scene-bg). I pulled Scene-bg into the same window as the glass shatter objects. Then I created a new smart object by combining one of the glass shatter objects with Scene-bg, which I did by selecting both layers right clicking, and selecting "Convert to Smart Object".

I renamed this smart object to Shatter-fg. I opened it by clicking on the little icon next to the layer name in the layers window here:

The most important thing here is that the shatter effect object should be the top layer, and I set the mode to "lighten". This will make sure that the lightest colour of either this layer and the layer behind it is displayed; that means that anywhere that's white in our shatter animation will still show up, but anywhere that's black we'll see what's in the layer(s) behind it.

Then I threw some adjustment layers between them to get the colouring I wanted. I used a curves layer, a hue/saturation layer, and I also added text with an outer glow layer effect. Here's what the layer order looked like and the settings I used for each layer:

After this process, Shatter-fg looked like this:

Okay nice, this is starting to look like something! I saved this and went back to the main file with the other glass shatter object.

I needed to invert that other glass shatter object. There's a weird quirk with the version of Photoshop that I use where it doesn't like it when I apply specifically an invert adjustment to a smart object (it appears correctly when editing, but not on export) so I did this by creating a new smart object which included a separate invert layer, but if you have a newer version of Photoshop you can probably just apply the invert adjustment directly. Just note that you'll need to do one of these options; it won't work if you add a separate adjustment layer in the main file, it needs to be applied specifically to the smart object (which we'll now be calling Shatter-bg). It looked like this after I inverted it:

Once that's done, I made sure Shatter-fg was the layer directly above Shatter-bg, and set the mode of Shatter-fg to "darken" and Shatter-bg to "lighten". Since Shatter-fg is set to darken, it will be visible only when it is darker than the layer behind it. By setting Shatter-bg to lighten, I've guaranteed that the layer behind it will always be lighter (ie, white) in the places we want Shatter-fg to be visible, and will be black otherwise. Once I update those settings, this is what the gif looked like:

This is all there is to the glass shatter effect itself. Next I pulled in frames from the second scene to fill in the black areas. This layer needed to go below both glass shatter layers, so that it only shows through where the black. Then I added adjustment layers and some text. I used curves, hue/saturation, and vibrance adjustment layers, and I also added the "archer" text below the glass shatter layers so that it would be hidden to reveal the "prey" text. The other text I added above all of the layers, since I wanted this to be visible all the time. Here is the layer order and all of the settings I used for each of the layers:

I also grouped Shatter-bg and Shatter-fg and shifted them on the timeline so there would be some time to see the background gif before the shatter effect starts.

And that's all! Then it''s just a matter of exporting the finished product:

This is the first gifmaking tutorial I've ever made, so I hope I was able to be reasonably coherent and helpful! I'd love to hear if you make anything by following these steps, or even if you just feel like you've learned something reading through this. And if you have any outstanding questions, feel free to reply or send me an ask and I'd be happy to answer!

[she-noel-on-my-s-til-i-lament]

Whenever I watch RTC with my one friend (you know the one (maybe)) in her dorm her roommate always says during some songs (fall fair, what the world needs, Noel's Lament) 'Omg, it's that tiktok musical!!!', and every time a little piece of me dies 😔

[quarks-pussy]

[Images description: Twelve pictures of Star Trek actors. The phrase "thank you for being both amazing actors and amazing people" is written across most of the images one word at a time, except for the two images in the middle. The middle images are of William Shatner, reading "not you!" and Robert Beltran, reading "or you for that matter". The actors in the other images are George Takei, René Auberjonois, DeForest Kelley, Gates McFadden, Wil Wheaton, Kate Mulgrew, Patrick Stewart, Siddig El Fadil (aka Alexander Siddig), Nichelle Nichols and Leonard Nimoy. End image description.]

Non exhaustive list of course. Many more such cases, in fact feel free to add

(insp)

[aquared]

ok here

my die troll concepr ughhhg punches wall

[batsplat]

Sepang 2006: After an exhausting race, Valentino Rossi brings a chair to the podium and sits down. Loris Capirossi joins him to sit on his lap.

[fireintheimpala]

why beatles why now

I'm exactly 3 weeks out today from incidentally pressing play on Peter Jackson's Beatles LOTR one ramblin' night and watching for maybe half an hour tops before before being so flooded. Flooded with the memories that in fact I knew every Beatles song back in the day--my first musical love as a teenager that I had just wandered off eventually from and forgotten. Flooded with the flash realization that every notion I'd had of the band AND their songs back then was highly restricted by my youth but also by the simplistic band mythologizing and lack of direct media of the 90's.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but surely I can't be the only one with this mind melting experience. How did you get here, blown away by the Beatles in year 2024?