#80 loops is... a lot.

[transingthoseformers]

Group Loop anon

They definitely started agreeing to be in this together, making promises to each other for when they're finally out of these mess.

But by the 80th Loop, they can't stand each other and are over all of this. Blaming each other for dying in stupid ways, or for causing one of the others to die. They almost stop trying and even just spent a Loop dicking around Detroit while it's still under attack from that roach monster from the first episode. Why bother? Everything's just gonna reset, so why not spend some time just going crazy and going stupid? Literally the only thing that keeps them going now is the hope of never even seeing each other again when this is finally over.

All the while, Prowl is watching as the friends he wished to live his life with are falling apart because of him.

I see!!

Interesting

Ouch

[heynhay]

will you break and take all the words from my mouth?

[dailyloopdeloop]

sifloop but specifically hes sucking their spiky face

DAY 80: suckig!

[ghostlightfic]

jokes on you guys ghostlight sequel was just my excuse to write a sickfic

[kn-1013]

i know i've been on my anti-modern AU propaganda lately and it's just because i've been delving deeper into the sally face ao3 tags and i just keep finding them over and over. it's frustrating because there are a lot of really interesting concepts out there that would fit really well and make for a genuinely really interesting story in the 90s, but they get thrown off because the author doesn't know enough about the 90s to write for that time period, so they make it into a modern au instead. there's nothing inherently wrong with that, and i think there's room for modern aus to be done well here, i even have my own half-serious modern au, but i do think you often lose part of what makes sally face special when you turn the story into any other kind of contemporary love story/horror story/etc where all the characters just have ~iphones~ and use ~snapchat~ and all these things.

like, the 90s was not some kind of alien planet, and a vast number of the problems that you're solving with smartphones can be worked around very easily with just a bit of research or thought. long distance walkie-talkies, pagers, and PDAs were all (though sometimes expensive) perfectly capable contemporary technologies for talking to people when you are not physically with them. in fact, a lot of the abbreviations and slang we use over text right now was developed by young people in the 90s using pagers to talk to their friends. PDAs were a bit more out there in the 90s than they were in the aughts, but it's still completely plausible for henry in particular to have one, considering he already owns a home computer, which was not at all ubiquitous in the 90s. considering the apparent financial limitations that he and sal live under (it's never stated explicitly, but i mean, they live at addison's, they can't be in a great financial situation) and how insanely expensive computers were back then, it's more than likely that henry's job requires a home computer of some sort, meaning that a PDA would probably be incredibly useful to him if he were away from it, because there's no way in hell he's getting himself a luggable or another kind of early laptop to bring with him, that would've been too expensive.

and that's ignoring the fact that so many situations where two characters are apart form each other but need to communicate could just be fixed by rewriting the plot so that they can meet in person. i know that's not what people wanna hear because rewriting sucks, but you can find a lot of reasons for characters to meet each other randomly or to have reasons to meet up later if you give it a bit of problem-solving. part of what makes the pre-smartphone era interesting to write for and so optimized for horror, and probably a big reason that gabry chose this time period for the story in the first place, is the level of disconnection between each character in the story BECAUSE they don't have things like smartphones. having to work around this technological limitation is part of the fun, because you get a very enjoyable push and pull of closeness vs. disconnection between each character.

this is great for alienating ash, the only one who doesn't live in the apartments (except for neil), and causing her internal conflict about her relationships with the rest of her friends, especially as the story progresses and they start discovering more shit about the cult, and her instincts are to call the cops because she's a lot more normal than her friends are. or, it's good for alienating travis, who also doesn't live there and is far more isolated than everyone else (more on that next), or for creating an unhealthy and codependent relationship between sal and larry, who, with the walkies, are the only two in the friend group who DO have semi-instant access to each other all the time--all of which are plot points i put into my writing.

and if that's not enough, think about the implications for travis's character in particular. his father is a preacher, and a huge talking point of christian extremists in the 90s was that things like television were evil and demonic in some way. they campaigned against these things heavily. with the kind of person that we know kenneth phelps to be and the way many technologies we take for granted today, including TVs, were still being adopted by older generations, it's not out of the question at all that travis doesn't own something like a TV or a VCR, putting him even more out of the loop with what other people his age are doing than he already would be, having approximately 0 friends. he doesn't know what DND is, and he doesn't know how to look it up because he's not familiar with computers or the internet, he just knows his dad thinks it's demonic, so he steers clear of it.

the intention of cult leaders like kenneth is to keep their victims as isolated as possible, and not owning a TV, VCR, home computer, etc, is a great way to keep travis and his sisters isolated and disconnected from their peers, and therefore more connected to the cult, and it's a lot easier to justify not owning these things in the 90s, where the story already takes place, than it is if you're writing a modern au. a modern au for this situation would require all kinds of technological workarounds to make sure that travis owned a phone but couldn't do anything his father didn't want him doing on it. he's the kind of father who would go through and monitor his kid's texts, he wouldn't just let travis have snapchat or whatever, but i digress.

i know i'm just doing my petty bitching and people can do whatever they want however they want to, but i really do feel like there's a huge piece of the story that is lost in turning the sally face story as it is into some kind of modern au, and it's pretty unfortunate to me that people seem to think that the 90s was such a primitive alien world of incomprehensible technology that they don't want to write for that time period at all. it's really not as terrifying as it seems, genuinely. a surface level understanding of the era's technologies would be straightforward enough for anyone who wasn't there to write something perfectly coherent, if lacking in specific cultural/technological details that nobody but me cares about because i have autism.

if you're a sally face fan reading this and you struggle with writing for the american 90s because you weren't there, go look up pagers (also called beepers) and PDAs (which are basically early pocket computers) and how they work. ask older family members if or how they used them. go look at the different kinds of home computers of the era from companies like packard-bell and IBM. learn what a pentium III is/was, or what it means to be X86 compatible. look at the history of the CD-ROM, and how when it was invented, it could contain so much data that consumers had absolutely no idea what to do with them until people started putting video games on them. go watch cathode ray dude, LGR or techmoan on youtube.

go learn things about this era, it's good for you and you will have a lot of fun, even if you're not like me, i promise, and your fanfiction will be better for it. please learn about this era. take my hand. we can go to beautiful places together.

[dullorangepulp]

fanfic readers/writers, i have an important question

Is it considered weird/cringey if writers mention real-life brands in their fics? especially if the source material used a fake name to represent the brand?

for example, a tv show called am in-universe soda brand "choco cola", but a fanfic about the tv show calls the SAME DRINK that the characters called choco cola now "coca cola".

(inspired by me reading a persona 5 fanfic where the gang calls it "disneyland" instead of the in-universe name of "destinyland" and it weirded me out a lil. i wanna see if others have the same problem)

[eggsistential-basket]

update: just applied my last dose of antibiotics! Right now my ear is a lot better than it was when I started and even before I punched it but also I haven't injured this ear this entire time so there's not really any way to know if it's actually better for good until I accidentally punch it again. Which who knows when that will happen. For now it is no longer bleeding oozing tender but it still stings a little sometimes and it is kinda swollen and itchy still. I'll just have to wait and see I guess

[headphonemouse]

Congrats on another loop around the sun! :>

:> omg is that a little bird beak thats so cute

Thank you! =^-^=

Is it a loop or is it a spiral because the sun is also moving so I'm pretty sure the earth goes in a sort of slanted spiral around it I'm not sure because a loop implies the beginning position is the same as the end position but even if they're not at the same coordinates in the grand scheme of things it's still the same position relative to the sun so that might be whats really important here

If you look at other examples of a loop (roller coaster, a knotted cord, freeway on/off-ramps), none of those have the start exactly the same as the beginning but we still call them loops but why is THIS a roller coaster loop and THAT a roller coaster spiral?

Is it the amount of rotations? Then why is a roller coaster with multiple rotations like this one still called a loop?

Maybe it's the orientation. The first one more or less just goes up then down with little side-to-side while the other one goes left-up-right-down

Then what about corkscrews? Twisters? The Good Ole Circle.

Considering planetary movement and all that junk, is any loop produced on Earth a true loop because with how fast we're moving all the time is it possible to ever reach the same point for a second time?

Now consider the narrative loop, the timeloop, Sisyphus and his spherical boulder, me having to go to work again tomorrow

[kneworder]

i have all these draft documents of half finished fics full of lines i love but that are so fundamentally flawed i can't figure out how to finish them and can't kill my darlings mercilessly enough to get past the roadblocks so i just reread them over and over and think damn this is kinda fire. wish it was anywhere near shareable.

[sudden-memory-loss]

spotify wrapped is so fucking funny when you don't use spotify. like, 'you listened to one genre', yeah bud, i guess i did. you're lucky I even did that

[catzy88]

Tears For Fears - Shout

(From the 1985 album Songs From The Big Chair)

[reasonsforhope]

No paywall version here.

"Two and a half years ago, when I was asked to help write the most authoritative report on climate change in the United States, I hesitated...

In the end, I said yes, but reluctantly. Frankly, I was sick of admonishing people about how bad things could get. Scientists have raised the alarm over and over again, and still the temperature rises. Extreme events like heat waves, floods and droughts are becoming more severe and frequent, exactly as we predicted they would. We were proved right. It didn’t seem to matter.

Our report, which was released on Tuesday, contains more dire warnings. There are plenty of new reasons for despair. Thanks to recent scientific advances, we can now link climate change to specific extreme weather disasters, and we have a better understanding of how the feedback loops in the climate system can make warming even worse. We can also now more confidently forecast catastrophic outcomes if global emissions continue on their current trajectory.

But to me, the most surprising new finding in the Fifth National Climate Assessment is this: There has been genuine progress, too.

I’m used to mind-boggling numbers, and there are many of them in this report. Human beings have put about 1.6 trillion tons of carbon in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution — more than the weight of every living thing on Earth combined. But as we wrote the report, I learned other, even more mind-boggling numbers. In the last decade, the cost of wind energy has declined by 70 percent and solar has declined 90 percent. Renewables now make up 80 percent of new electricity generation capacity. Our country’s greenhouse gas emissions are falling, even as our G.D.P. and population grow.

In the report, we were tasked with projecting future climate change. We showed what the United States would look like if the world warms by 2 degrees Celsius. It wasn’t a pretty picture: more heat waves, more uncomfortably hot nights, more downpours, more droughts. If greenhouse emissions continue to rise, we could reach that point in the next couple of decades. If they fall a little, maybe we can stave it off until the middle of the century. But our findings also offered a glimmer of hope: If emissions fall dramatically, as the report suggested they could, we may never reach 2 degrees Celsius at all.

For the first time in my career, I felt something strange: optimism.

And that simple realization was enough to convince me that releasing yet another climate report was worthwhile.

Something has changed in the United States, and not just the climate. State, local and tribal governments all around the country have begun to take action. Some politicians now actually campaign on climate change, instead of ignoring or lying about it. Congress passed federal climate legislation — something I’d long regarded as impossible — in 2022 as we turned in the first draft.

[Note: She's talking about the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Act, which despite the names were the two biggest climate packages passed in US history. And their passage in mid 2022 was a big turning point: that's when, for the first time in decades, a lot of scientists started looking at the numbers - esp the ones that would come from the IRA's funding - and said "Wait, holy shit, we have an actual chance."]

And while the report stresses the urgency of limiting warming to prevent terrible risks, it has a new message, too: We can do this. We now know how to make the dramatic emissions cuts we’d need to limit warming, and it’s very possible to do this in a way that’s sustainable, healthy and fair.

The conversation has moved on, and the role of scientists has changed. We’re not just warning of danger anymore. We’re showing the way to safety.

I was wrong about those previous reports: They did matter, after all. While climate scientists were warning the world of disaster, a small army of scientists, engineers, policymakers and others were getting to work. These first responders have helped move us toward our climate goals. Our warnings did their job.

To limit global warming, we need many more people to get on board... We need to reach those who haven’t yet been moved by our warnings. I’m not talking about the fossil fuel industry here; nor do I particularly care about winning over the small but noisy group of committed climate deniers. But I believe we can reach the many people whose eyes glaze over when they hear yet another dire warning or see another report like the one we just published.

The reason is that now, we have a better story to tell. The evidence is clear: Responding to climate change will not only create a better world for our children and grandchildren, but it will also make the world better for us right now.

Eliminating the sources of greenhouse gas emissions will make our air and water cleaner, our economy stronger and our quality of life better. It could save hundreds of thousands or even millions of lives across the country through air quality benefits alone. Using land more wisely can both limit climate change and protect biodiversity. Climate change most strongly affects communities that get a raw deal in our society: people with low incomes, people of color, children and the elderly. And climate action can be an opportunity to redress legacies of racism, neglect and injustice.

I could still tell you scary stories about a future ravaged by climate change, and they’d be true, at least on the trajectory we’re currently on. But it’s also true that we have a once-in-human-history chance not only to prevent the worst effects but also to make the world better right now. It would be a shame to squander this opportunity. So I don’t just want to talk about the problems anymore. I want to talk about the solutions. Consider this your last warning from me."

-via New York Times. Opinion essay by leading climate scientist Kate Marvel. November 18, 2023.

[sleeperagentclone]

I am too socially inept to deal with all the weird people my dad has collected over the years

[munch-mumbles]

kj post five hundred thousand lamenting the loss of my passion for drawing because its starting to feel like its never coming back

[thawthebeez]

a friend recommended i watch an anime called Skate-Leading Stars and in the first episode they've established a childhood rivalry with an absolute dick of an antagonist, gave us an orphaned protagonist who is the embodiment of the phrase "monkey see, monkey do,", snuck in some casual stalking and kidnapping amongst other illegal activities, created an entirely new sub-section of figure skating that is a combination of pairs, singles, and synchro, AND made the protag pull off a quad flip after YEARS of not skating without dying instantly. dear lord.

[lazycranberrydoodles]

I am now opening custom Ace Attorney sprite commissions!

I have 3 open slots.

Depending on how the initial slots go, I may or may not offer more. DMs also welcome.

>> Commission form! <<

Details

What exactly will you receive for $60?

Two 12fps looping .gif files in an Ace Attorney style, one talking and one idle, of the character of your choice from the waist up. They can be in pretty much any still position, but I get final say on whether something is too difficult or too complex. I will work to make the sprite as accurate as possible while adhering to the style.

What will you receive for $20?

Either a short 12fps animation of your character or another two looping gifs (talking and idling) in a different pose/emotion. An animation can be combined with talking. For example, this Wei Wuxian MDZS would be $80: $60 as a base price (standing still and talking) with $20 added for his hand gesture.

This set of Lan Wangji MDZSs would be $100: $60 (base price, neutral animation) + $20 (happy) + $20 (displeased).

What counts as a "slot"?

Art of one character, no matter how many pieces I was commissioned for.

For more examples of my Ace Attorney-style work, here is the masterpost for my MDZS x Ace Attorney crossover series, which I have been adding to for a while now. Here are Kabru, Miku, and Hela Vitrum (my most recent commission). They are a good example of the base commission -- a looped talking gif and a looped idle/blinking gif.

Policies (read this before filling out the form!)

I am not affiliated with objection.lol. The sprites *can* be used in the program to great success. However, I will not guide you through creating a case in objection.lol. There are a lot of tutorials available. I am selling animated illustrations of your character and nothing else.

I am not affiliated with Capcom or Ace Attorney. My work copies the style of original games. In many cases, I have referenced pre-existing animations or sprites.

Just in case, I'm limiting the max number of pieces for a single character to 3 poses and 1 animation ($120) (so I don't get bored drawing them over and over again). One person can commission me for multiple characters but they will count as different slots (i.e., you may commission the max amount of work for Blorbo Bingus ($120) and also commission two poses for Dworbo Dingus ($80) for a total of $200, counting as two slots).

It is my privilege to take or refuse commissions at my discretion.

Depending on demand, I may adopt a first-come first-served waitlist system, but I really can't know at this point.

Payment depends on the price of the commission, but in general I will not start the piece until I am paid via Paypal. Venmo is a secondary option. My prices are in USD.

Once I get started, I work quickly, so any changes should be requested at the sketch stage. I will work with you to get it right. Once I have started work a piece (once planning is finished) I will not give refunds. Finished piece(s) should be done within a month of finalization (you giving me the go-ahead to start).

Filling out the form does not mean I have accepted the commission, but it does mean that I will contact you in a routine way about it.

These commissions are intended for personal use. The pricing reflects that. Tell me if you wish to use a commission in a monetized way, as that will require renegotiation.

If you wish to communicate with me about commission work without filling out the form, my email is lazycranberrycomm@gmail.com. I am not planning to offer commissions other than Ace Attorney sprites at this time. I will reply within the week.

Communication via tumblr DMs, asks, or comments is welcome!