#54 texts

[meidui]

tony turns 54 soon and steve finds him more attractive than ever 🥰

tony stopped making appointments with his colourist months ago and just lets his hair and beard be salt and pepper now because steve likes it

steve begs him to keep his reading glasses on during sex and tony obliges

sometimes tony forgets he isn't that young anymore but steve always remembers to get a pillow for his back

tony's pretty sure steve slipped up and called him daddy at some point last night which has never happened before but they haven't unpacked that yet

steve gets sappier and sappier the longer they've been together and he's recently made a habit of kissing the lines at the corners of tony's eyes and mouth

[ca-dmv-bot]

Customer: (not on record) DMV: TF THE FUCK Verdict: DENIED

[textsfromcybertron]

(+54): I’ll get the most aesthetic strap on, you’ll see

[hadesknockedupintheunderworld]

(Art by Natalie Fourdraine)

You know what you know what you know what?

Metonurge

[lesmiserabelles]

sophie goron and divine iweha | oh well from love in hate nation, 54 below

[vlasdygoth]

anonymous, c. 1981

[frankenfossil]

Oh! I nearly forgot, but can I ask the significance of this panel?

It comes directly after Dee explains that he can’t come and see her from the future whenever he wants. (Which is one of my favorite moments where Dee’s true eldritch horror leaks in to the story), so I assume it’s… sort of a metaphor? How Emily finds herself at the foot of something she realizes is much, much bigger than she contemplated before?

(Also, I just wanted to compliment you for this panel)

(The first time I saw it, I imagined Dee was showing her this on purpose, time traveling from sometime the same day to really show her what it would be like. An object lesson.

The second time I saw it, I started to wonder

Because Dee himself doesn’t really look aware of what is going on behind him.

And maybe, just maybe, this one moment in time has become the only moment that Dee allows himself to come back to to see Emily, the one moment where he can get lost in the crowd with every other time he came back to look. The one moment where he’s explaining why he can’t come back.

Just… Makes me sad, and I wanted to say thank you for that too, because I love these characters and the story they tell, the sweet and bitter.)

Oh!!!

(Quick test of my ability to find which chapter stuff happens in)

I love your reading of that Uluru panel!! I think I probably didn’t intend anything that deep with it; these time skip montage style chapters are pretty choppy and I’m usually trying to figure out a way to touch on all these brief scenes or moments that I don’t want to spend a whole chapter on for whatever reason, and arrange them in a way where the cuts aren’t too hideously abrupt. For visual reasons I try to contrast different locations and not put 2 dialogue heavy moments directly next to each other. Mood wise, I don’t really want to cut from something serious and angsty to something that’s a complete backflip on that. I also sometimes just feel like drawing a nice landscape and hope it achieves my aims on these fronts haha.

I think also here I was trying to move from that final sentence, “The present is more than enough”, to demonstrating them appreciating having that present together - being able to go do cool and enriching stuff, something not completely mundane but not completely fantastical either. (I mean... sightseeing within your own country is extremely normal, but going to Uluru from Melbourne... not a convenient day trip, since it’s 2000km; 25 hour solid driving, or you can fly in a few hours but I think you have to go via Sydney, so that makes it take at least twice as long I guess. Not that it's specified how long they're there for. I haven’t been myself but I’d love to one day...)

So, yeah!! More of a mechanical/compositional rationale than an intentional metaphor, but I think your reading makes complete sense and actually improves the page! (Sometimes I do intend visual metaphors... but sometimes they’re just happy accidents.)

And thanks for the compliment re the crowd of Dees!! I also love the moments I can lean into his eldritch qualities... they’re sadly few and far between but maybe that helps them be more surprising?? Definitely your first reading was what I intended, that he zigzagged back pretty quickly, probably even from within the conversation, but there is an inherent ambiguity to Dee’s time travelling where unless I take pains to spell it out, there really is no way to know when he’s come from. Even if he can be assumed to be taking every interaction chronologically, there’s no knowing how much time has passed for him between each visit. I don’t even know how to estimate how long his experience of time is, when he’s zigzagging back so densely all the time; even the number of living things on Earth any moment is an incomprehensibly mind-boggling number. That eldritch horror again!

Truth be told I hadn’t thought of him coming back to this moment and blending in with the crowd for the rest of the future ;_; but that’s so real... he could well be, the sad sack...

I had a different sillier thought from slightly misreading your question on first pass, which is that maybe he doesn’t originally know what’s going on behind him, but then later on as he’s just going about his business he goes “oh I know exactly how to punctuate that thing I said earlier!!!” and then does it as an afterthought. Oh to have the ability to add the things you wish you’d said to an earlier conversation 😂

[x-heesy]

𝙿𝚑𝚞𝚌𝚔 𝚈𝚎𝚊𝚑 𝙳𝚒𝚜𝚌𝚘 (𝙼𝚎𝚖𝚎𝚜) 🪩

𝚃𝚑𝚊𝚗𝚇 𝚖𝚢 𝚋𝚎𝚕𝚘𝚟𝚎𝚍 𝚂𝚘𝚞𝚕 & 𝙼𝚞𝚜𝚎 @freddie-xowie ❤️‍🔥✨

𝙳𝚘 𝚈𝚘𝚞 𝙵𝚎𝚎𝚕 𝚆𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝙸 𝙵𝚎𝚎𝚕 𝚋𝚢 𝚁𝚎𝚡 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝙳𝚘𝚐, 𝙹𝚊𝚖𝚒𝚎 𝙼𝚌𝙳𝚎𝚛𝚖𝚘𝚝𝚝

[goldenpinof]

we’re all doomed as an affirmation

[vanosslirious]

Kryoz: I kinda don't want to clean anything, I just like blowing stuff up more...

SMii7y: We're almost done!

Kryoz: I know, we're almost out of explosives too!

SMii7y: It's the worse part!~

[ca-dmv-bot]

Customer: FIRST INITIAL LAST NAME BIRTH YEAR DMV: DOPIE Verdict: DENIED

[leaguesbottombitch]

Now i'm not gonna say Riot knows how to balance well. Naafiri for a good three patches was sitting at a, what, 54% WR? But thats not my point, because no one was talking about that. Briar aint even out yet and people think the Olaf-Yi-Nocturne character is busted not for any specific numbers but because... when shes fed she can ult and the player can let go of the controls and let her Frenzy AA whoever they caught out alone (who has no real CC) with ult to death...? As if there aren't a million videos of other champions doing this?? 😭 Yall focusing on the wrong things and its gonna make riot nerf her in the wrong ways.

[cctinsleykin]

I published a poetry book!!!

[bluesey-182]

54 pages into this book for my bookclub and jesus christ is it bad. it's so bad. it's so fucking bad. unbearable. intolerable. im gonna pull a muscle with how much im having to flop my head back and roll my eyes in disbelief of how fucking cliche and poorly done everything is. someone give me a lighter so i can set this thing on fire

[textheslightlymorelimited]

I went to the Bone Doctor again.

The Hole is still there.

We dont know what it wants.

[mantisgodiveblog]

As someone who messes up names so much, I could only remember Loop’s name from “Your ally Loop! Here to help you with the loops!” And I think it every time I say the word ‘loop’ ever in any context now. Curse you Loop. In comparison about halfway through the game (in my case like a solid 25 hours) I still couldn’t reliably remember Isabeau’s name. (Also, if images cause problems you don’t have to put so many in! I’m guessing most people seeing the liveblog have seen nearly all the game already?)

Technically speaking, we don't have to put any images in at all, but we prefer this format for allowing us to more easily "open dialogue" with the game and also the existence of this liveblog has fully convinced one of our friends to get this game as well so that they can play alongside us. We like the visual element! Also gives us something to look back and reference, later down the line - our usual favorite RPG has an extremely accessible transcript of all of the text in the game that we usually reference back to whenever we need to reference a line of dialogue, but In Stars And Time... doesn't have that, we don't think.

We'd like to be able to look back and see what we've already done, and have a reliable way of seeing what happened, because by gods if our memory fails on us we don't want it to gaslight us into thinking that. Fuck. Isabeau mentioned a line that Mirabelle has, and have that shift our area of characterization for them.