#AND YET. HERE WE ARE

[mosspodge]

fun fact: January of this year i set a dl6 meme to pop up as my wallpaper on December 28. Instead of doing that it decided it would be my wallpaper every 28th

every 28th i wake up and see this image and then change it back and then immediately forget. then it pops up the next month

[waywardwizzard]

"Just a quick sketch..." I whisper to myself, knowing full well that I have stuff to do. "It won't take long."

*2 hours later*

"Ow ow ow, my back."

[corishadowfang]

It's appreciate a dragon day, apparently, and I don't have time to do art or fics because. Time. And Energy. But for the past week or so I've had my Kingdom Hearts dragons AU on the mind...which wasn't supposed to be an AU AU, but just kind of a way to draw the characters since I'm not good at drawing people. But because I have no self-control, there's worldbuilding suddenly, and I really want to ramble about it, haha.

I really need to stress that this was originally just me thinking, "Hey, if I'm drawing them as dragons, wouldn't Scala have to look different, too? Since dragons would probably need different things than humans." And then it just. Spiraled.

I didn't know what to do with the Keyblades initially? I, uh. Wasn't sure if I wanted to go the "wielding Keyblades in the mouth," haha. Which kind of spiraled into, "What if the dragon thing just...replaces the Keyblades? Like, people become dragons, basically."

So the idea is kind of like...magic is still A Thing. Everyone can use it, with the right training, but the more you use magic, the more it changes you. (Yes, I've used this idea before, but shhh.) It very gradually changes your appearance, abilities, etc. Your magic gets stronger, but you become less and less human. Eventually, according to most people, you basically lose yourself to it and become a monster, so it's something of a controversial subject.

(The "become a monster" thing is only partially true. You can become a Heartless, but there are a lot of people who just become normal dragons, too. Unfortunately everyone just groups the two together.)

Anyone who used magic kind of like...filled a very weird niche in society where they weren't exactly accepted, but their abilities were still useful, so they were kind of both shunned and respected equally.

The Master of Masters and the Foretellers are the ones who really changed this; MoM went hardcore on the narrative that the "normal" transformation wasn't really monstrous at all, and painted the Foretellers very much as mythological heroes who could fight the actual monsters much more effectively than any normal person. Magic and dragons still made a lot of people wary, but it was tempered a bit, especially with kids.

SPEAKING OF--that's why a lot of kids ended up in Daybreak Town. Less pre-existing ideas on magic and dragons, so it's easier for them to see this as a good thing.

(And then MoM goes and ruins it with the whole "war" thing.)

Once you turn into a dragon, you can take human form again for short periods of time, but it's often uncomfortable, so Daybreak Town and Scala are both designed more with dragons in mind.

Daybreak Town was an abandoned human town that MoM and the Foretellers just repurposed, so while there are still buildings, they had to be modified a lot. The Clock Tower is an abandoned castle, haha.

Scala is basically a mountain range on the edge of the ocean! Or mountains on islands...? Uh. Something like that, haha. Lots of bare white rock and caves and stuff. I think the main island's a little more open, just because like...I like the idea of them wanting more "light" as a sort of symbolism thing.

Dragons are the only ones that can fly to other worlds without assistance! Their magic kind of protects them, basically, but they do actually have to fly. Lots of young dragons like to bring back trinkets from different worlds (which is generally how their hoards are formed, haha).

Uh, I only have loose ideas of how some characters would've actually gotten into this. Ven I think was basically born with an excessive amount of magic that he couldn't really control, so he turned really, really young, and there wasn't much he could do about it. Brain thought that the fear about magic was stupid and actively fostered his out of spite. Ephemer was super curious about the idea, and ended up digging deeper into things. Skuld and Lauriam I'm less certain on. (I could see Lauriam doing it as a way to help protect Strelitzia--maybe she was like Ven, and turned accidentally? And Skuld--honestly just could've done it because she was swept up in what MoM/the Foretellers said, haha.)

Aaaaand I'm looking at how much I've rambled and will spare your dashes, but uh. Yeah. Dragons!

[donovankinard]

hey hey hey im not a fan of trump (obviously) but!!!! nobody deserves to die at the hand of gun violence. nobody deserves to die at the hand of anyone else. nobody deserves to die on a public stage, nobody deserves to die at the hands of a political extremist. nobody deserves to be shot to death. not even the literal scum of the earth. nobody deserves to be murdered. and i cant believe that actually has to be said.

[evilkitten3]

the one thing that's worse than having people hate on your blorbo for incorrect reasons is when their reasoning is absolutely correct. like yeah she IS badly written, lacks development, and has a role in the story that unintentionally gives her moral failings the author didn't intend her to have.

unfortunately,

[stellamusing]

I was trying to write a scene about commissioning custom clothes and got so completely distracted by talking about the specific fabrics and how they affected the designs that it's suddenly the longest scene in the fic. Whoops.

[mistressemmedi]

The funniest thing is that the edited picture is the one without the vape, but honestly who cares if she smokes, lets worry more about the extremely problematic things she has liked and continues to like on her various social media and the amount of racists and zionists she follows

Yikes honestly I forgot about that 😬

That being said, I've had to do a massive clean-up of the accounts I follow because some of them turned out to be real weirdos.

Shoutout to the bakery that I followed 5ever until the owner turned out to be a MAGA loving, antivax and transphobe asshole.

[talentforlying]

i always figured if i got through life without adding any more bollocks to the world's sum total of bollocks . . . then i could hold me head high and say i wasn't part of it. now i've gone and done what all the self-righteous fat bastards are doing — taken our magness and dumped it where it isn't wanted. one more reason why i can't look at meself in the mirror in the mornin'.

it's fine, i'm fine, i'm normal about this.

[jennifersbod]

sad hours ✌🏻

[oscargender]

TODAY SUCKED 🎉🎉

In order, the maintenance people:

1. Sprayed green slime water all over the lab, including my lunch and jacket

2. Sucked down about 400 psi of one of my brand new NIST standards

3. FINALLY successfully cleaned all the green slime out of my manifold (<-said begrudgingly)

4. Backed water up into my vacuum pump and then left without changing the oil

[thunderlina]

In the wake of the TikTok ban and revival as a mouthpiece for fascist propaganda, as well as the downfall of Twitter and Facebook/Facebook-owned platforms to the same evils, I think now is a better time than ever to say LEARN HTML!!! FREE YOURSELVES FROM THE SHACKLES OF MAJOR SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS AND EMBRACE THE INDIE WEB!!!

You can host a website on Neocities for free as long as it's under 1GB (which is a LOT more than it sounds like let me tell you) but if that's not enough you can get 50GB of space (and a variety of other perks) for only $5 a month.

And if you can't/don't want to pay for the extra space, sites like File Garden and Catbox let you host files for free that you can easily link into NeoCities pages (I do this to host videos on mine!) (It also lets you share files NeoCities wouldn't let you upload for free anyways, this is how I upload the .zip files for my 3DS themes on my site.)

Don't know how to write HTML/CSS? No problem. W3schools is an invaluable resource with free lessons on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and a whole slew of other programming languages, both for web development and otherwise.

Want a more traditional social media experience? SpaceHey is a platform that mimics the experience of 2000s MySpace

Struggling to find independent web pages that cater to your interests via major search engines? I've got you covered. Marginalia and Wiby are search engines that specifically prioritize non-commercial content. Marginalia also has filters that let you search for more specific categories of website, like wikis, blogs, academia, forums, and vintage sites.

Maybe you wanna log off the modern internet landscape altogether and step back into the pre-social media web altogether, well, Protoweb lets you do just that. It's a proxy service for older browsers (or really just any browser that supports HTTP, but that's mostly old browsers now anyways) that lets you visit restored snapshots of vintage websites.

Protoweb has a lot of Geocities content archived, but if you're interested in that you can find even more old Geocities sites over on the Geocities Gallery

And really this is just general tip-of-the-iceberg stuff. If you dig a little deeper you can find loads more interesting stuff out there. The internet doesn't have to be a miserable place full of nothing but doomposting and targeted ads. The first step to making it less miserable is for YOU, yes YOU, to quit spending all your time on it looking at the handful of miserable websites big tech wants you to spend all your time on.

[suqqubus]

girl idek anymore. I just dont. yes this is about karaoke guy.

[o0kawaii0o]

RACER NAMI 🏁

[8pxl]

PSA: Tumblr/Wordpress is preparing to start selling our user data to Midjourney and OpenAI.

you have to MANUALLY opt out of it as well.

to opt out on desktop, click your blog ➡️ blog settings ➡️ scroll til you see visibility options and it’ll be the last option to toggle.

to opt out on mobile, click your blog ➡️ scroll then click visibility ➡️ toggle opt out option.

if you’ve already opted out of showing up in google searches, it’s preselected for you. if you don’t have the option available, update your app or close your browser/refresh a few times. important to note you also have to opt out for each blog you own separately, so if you’d like to prevent AI scraping your blog i’d really recommend taking the time to opt out. (source)

[egophiliac]

don't think I'm not still obsessing over 7-12

[chloesimaginationthings]

Was dissecting the SOTM trailer and apparently your monty is a mm member comic is now canon

ANOTHER WIN FOR MONTY ENJOYERS!!!

(Original comic)