#Did they have a UC version?

[blackbackedjackal]

Finally someone epse who loves halloween boris! Halloween Hissis are also a fave but I love the external skeleton+puppy-armadillo combo

Bori are so cute!! I played a lot of Hannah and the Ice Caves as a kid and I really liked Armin so I had a little yellow guy for a while till I found a Halloween Brush. I love a lot of the cross paints people do with them too!!

[bronanlynch]

in a world where there's more of an audience for zeta gundam yuri than the one we live in, where there are only 19 works on ao3 categorized as f/f in the zeta gundam tag, I bet there would be an incredible emma/reccoa good luck babe amv

[inthedayswhenlandswerefew]

Where Will All The Martyrs Go [Chapter 9: Some Days He Feels Like Dying]

A/N: Below are your guesses...let's see how you did!!! 🥰😘

Series summary: In the midst of the zombie apocalypse, both you and Aemond (and your respective travel companions) find yourselves headed for the West Coast. It’s the 2024 version of the Oregon Trail, but with less dysentery and more undead antagonists. Watch out for snakes! 😉🐍

Series warnings: Language, sexual content (18+ readers only), violence, bodily injury, med school Aemond, character deaths, nature, drinking, smoking, drugs, Adventures With Aegon™️, pregnancy and childbirth, the U.S. Navy, road trip vibes.

Series title is a lyric from: “Letterbomb” by Green Day.

Chapter title is a lyric from: “Extraordinary Girl” by Green Day.

Word count: 8.3k

💜 All my writing can be found HERE! 💜

Let me know if you’d like to be added to the taglist 🥰

Let’s go back to the beginning of the end of the world.

On the big-screen tv in the Liberty Center at Saratoga Springs, Wolf Blitzer is saying: “We are receiving confirmation of additional outbreaks of the so-called Florida Fever, the first cases of which here in the U.S. were reported in Miami a little over one week ago. Concern is now growing nationally, especially as the modes of transmission, symptoms, and treatment options remain unclear. Let’s go across the country to Natasha Chen for the latest information. Natasha?”

“Hi, Wolf. I’m here outside the UC San Diego Medical Center where early this morning, two individuals suspected to be suffering from the illness were admitted. I’ve been informed by hospital staff that both patients are currently in stable condition, but there is still so much confusion and conflicting information regarding this ‘Florida Fever,’ and of course that uncertainty is leading to fear, rumors, and honestly a bit of hysteria. Even how to refer to the sickness is controversial, with no official name having been decided upon by scientists. Cases in Australia are known as Ragepox, the U.K. has dubbed it the 21st Century Sweat after a mysterious disease from the 1500s, and Russia is calling it the Ukrainian Flu while Ukraine has opted for the Russian Red Rot, inspired by the skin lesions that some patients experience.”

“Can you tell us what we do know, Natasha? Are doctors classifying this illness as a virus, or as a bacterial infection more akin to tuberculosis or meningitis?”

“At this time, what I’m hearing is that doctors are fairly certain it’s a virus, as patients do not seem to respond to antibiotics when they’ve been explored as a potential treatment. But there’s truly very little information at this early stage, and I think we’re all being reminded of those first days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when no one really knew how to best to avoid contracting the virus or what the long-term effects would be both nationally and globally.”

“There are absolutely some similarities, Natasha, which I’m sure is contributing to the unease surrounding the situation. What precautions are doctors currently recommending?”

“Wolf, doctors are urging the public not to panic, and to exercise common sense measures like avoiding crowded spaces, sanitizing surfaces, and staying home if they’re feeling unwell. Suspected cases of the illness should be reported to primary physicians or local hospitals. Typical symptoms appear to include headaches, fever, gastrointestinal upset, skin discoloration and blistering, and unusual bleeding, as well as behavioral changes, particularly disorientation, aggression, and even violence in some patients…”

“That ain’t what it is,” Rio says. He jabs his index finger at the tv from where he sits on the couch beside you. “Snowflake wasn’t sick, he was dead. He was motherfucking dead, flatline, code blue, crossed the rainbow bridge, he was gone. He was dead and then he woke back up, and he wasn’t a person anymore. He was…something else.”

“Dumbass, people don’t come back from the dead,” Mike says from the ping pong table. People are milling around pretending to play pool, darts, chess, poker, Monopoly, Uno, Parcheesi, but really you’re all here for the same reason. You want to know what’s happening.

Rio turns to you. “Wasn’t Snowflake dead?”

“He definitely seemed dead,” you reply, knees tucked to your chest and still watching the tv. Wolf Blitzer’s voice is calm, but his pale blue eyes have a manic sort of light to them, too large and too rattled.

“Man, fuck Florida,” says Desmond, a utilitiesman born and raised Trenton, New Jersey. “Nothing but psychos and alligators. Saw them off of Georgia and just let them float away.”

“What was that?” Tyler replies combatively. He’s from a trailer park in Tallahassee.

“Ty, why do you care? You’d be fine. You’re already up here. You can stay.”

“They’re lying,” Rio mutters, meaning Wolf and Natasha on CNN. “When the corpsmen called the hospital, they said to be prepared to restrain Snowflake and that he might try to bite us. Why aren’t they warning people about that?!”

Kayleigh, a steelworker from Oklahoma City, looses a frenetic sort of laugh. “Because there’s no non-panic-inducing way to say: Hey, go buy some duct tape and bungee cords to tie up your loved ones, because they might try to fucking eat you.”

Rio doesn’t frown often, but he is now; he slips his phone out of the pocket of his camo pants and types out a WhatsApp message to Sophie. You only know her from photos and quick hellos via video chat, a sweet diminutive woman with white-blonde hair and blue eyes that seem to fill up half her face, as fragile as Rio is overwhelming. She likes baking and romance novels and elephants; whenever Rio finds elephant-themed souveners, he ships them home to Oregon for her, refrigerator magnets and wallets and scarves and snow globes. Sophie wears a lot of long flowing skirts and hand-knit sweaters, and offers strange suggestions when she and Rio discuss baby names: Sage, Fox, Laurel, Coral, Juniper, Karma, Rune, Otter. Otter?! Rio had exclaimed. Babe, if you name our kid Otter, even I’M gonna have to bully them.

“I’m telling Sophie to stay with my parents,” Rio says to you. “They’ve gotten super weird with all the off-the-grid stuff, but they have years’ worth of supplies and grow most of their own food now, and they’re thirty miles from the nearest town. And no one knows how to defend themselves like doomsday preppers.”

“Good idea,” you reply, watching the tv. Now Wolf Blitzer is talking about tornadoes in the Midwest, and you could almost believe the world is normal again.

A few days later all major social media platforms begin censoring content related to the so-called Florida Fever, and then the internet goes down completely, and then the power turns off and on and off again, and finally quits like a car driven to its last mile. The combat units are moved out of Saratoga Springs—never to be heard from again—and the construction projects paused indefinitely, and one of the master-at-arms that Rio is friends with (Rio has a lot of friends, surely you aren’t so remarkable) relays information that he shouldn’t: tales of planned missions, impossible plagues, overrun cities, innumerable deserters in every branch of the U.S. military.

“Hey,” Rio whispers, shaking you awake one night, moonlight streaming through the windows and the pops of distant gunfire you aren’t supposed to ask about. “If I leave, will you come with me?”

It’s a big commitment; it could be a lifetime. You fear he might just be trying not to hurt your feelings. “I don’t want to slow you down.”

“No, you don’t get it,” Rio says. “I’m not leaving without you. Are you going to Oregon by choice, or should I tie you up and throw you in the back of the Humvee?”

~~~~~~~~~~

It’s a young one, maybe a teenager, little buds for horns and only weighing a few hundred pounds. This is good; if it was any heavier, Cregan and Rio wouldn’t be able to drag it back to the ranch. You’re still in Red Desert, Wyoming, and the bison are grazing just off I-80, an asphalt artery that cuts through an endless steppe of sand-colored rocks and tall grass. They gaze lazily in your direction with bulbous dark eyes, perpetually chewing, not terribly intelligent. The Colt pistols of the men who found you at the RV had been loaded with 9mm bullets, the same caliber your Berettas take; there weren’t many, but enough to fill both of your clips, something that feels like winning the lottery. You are lying on the rocky, dusty soil and lining up the shot. If you miss, the herd will scatter, and you’ll watch dinner vanish beneath a blue sky—pale like Aemond’s eye, a weak shallow blue—and rough white scars of cirrostratus clouds.

“Feels kind of wrong to kill a baby,” you murmur. Daeron, Luke, Baela, Helaena, and Ice are back at the house. Aemond, Rio, Cregan, Rhaena, and Aegon are here on the ground with you; Aegon insisted upon being brought along, and Rio agreed to carry him. Aegon had never seen American bison outside of the Oregon Trail computer game, those pixelated brown blobs migrating across the screen no more material than unicorns or faeries or basilisks.

“If the baby didn’t want to get killed, it shouldn’t be made of steak,” Aegon points out. He’s on a lot of Vicodin, the only narcotic Aemond could find back in Ogallala, Nebraska.

“No pressure, Chips,” Rio says, chewing on a long blade of little bluestem grass. “If you miss we’re just going to have to eat each other like the Donner Party.”

Aegon wrinkles his nose in confusion. “The what?”

“She won’t miss,” Aemond says, and Rio snickers to himself and gives you a quick wink that no one else notices.

“I don’t think one 9mm bullet will do it,” Cregan mutters. “Cows got thick skulls, I figure bison are the same way. You’ll have to hit it a few times, and before it can take off and disappear on us.”

Aemond casts him a patronizing glance. “And you’ve killed a lot of cows?”

“Oh yeah. Worked in a slaughterhouse for a while before I got hired by the power company. Hated it, went home and could still smell the blood and brains on myself no matter how many times I showered. Couldn’t get out of there fast enough.”

Aemond looks like he regrets asking. Rhaena frowns worriedly at the bison. “Will they charge if someone shoots at them?”

Cregan shrugs. “Probably not.”

“Probably?!”

You squeeze the trigger five times in quick succession, hit the calf thrice, tiny puffs of scarlet mist that spring from its woolly head. It flops over as the rest of the herd jolts into a gallop, kicking up dust and fleeing across the steppe.

“Yes!” Rio booms as everyone applauds. “We’re in business! We’re having ribeyes tonight! Cregan, my good sir, I take mine medium rare.”

“You’re getting well done,” Aemond tells him. “Everyone is. Just in case the bison has parasites.”

Rio groans. “You’re ruining my life, man.” Then he and Cregan trot over to grab the baby bison, each of them taking one of its back hooves.

“So,” Aegon says dreamily. “Now that Rio is preoccupied, who would like to assist me in returning my disgusting, debilitated body to the ranch? Anyone? Anyone?”

Rhaena turns to you. “When we have more bullets, could you give me shooting lessons?”

“Sure,” you reply, a bit startled. “Really? You’re interested?”

“Well…” Rhaena hesitates. “Baela’s always been the brave one. At home, at school, when we were shopping, even when restaurants would mess up my order, Baela would do the talking and make sure I was alright…and I would literally hide behind her waiting for her to solve all my problems. And now…with the baby, with Jace…it’s been really different being the one to help her for a change, and I don’t think I’m very good at it yet. But Baela deserves to have people to lean on, just like I’ve always had her. And…when I stabbed that guy in the RV…I kind of liked it.” She titters nervously when she sees the shock on your face. “No, not like that! Not the killing part, or the gushing blood, that was all super gross. But the fact that I helped protect Baela and Luke? The fact that I wasn’t useless in that situation? That was a good feeling. Baela is clever, and she’s courageous and caring and funny, and she’s always been better than me at everything, and I never minded because she…she was like my own personal superhero, you know? But now I feel like I need to start learning how to do things myself so I can help her. Even if Baela is still better at everything, and probably always will be.”

Aegon grins toothily and pushes his neon green plastic sunglasses up the bridge of his nose. “I know how you feel. It’s pretty impossible to look heroic next to Aemond.”

“Stop,” Aemond says, but he’s smiling, and a bloom of bashful pink blood appears in his cheeks.

“You already took over the driving,” you tell Rhaena encouragingly. “That was a big help.”

“Yeah,” Rhaena replies, a bit pensive. “Let’s hope I can keep that going.” Between the gas Aemond found in Ogallala and what was siphoned from the would-be attackers’ GMC Yukon, you got enough fuel in the Tahoe to take it halfway across Wyoming; but now the gauge is not just at but venturing below the E, and it can’t have more than five or ten miles left. That might not even get you to the next ranch, let alone a proper town. You need a working vehicle. There are nearly a thousand miles between here and Odessa, Oregon.

Aegon is pawing at Aemond like a cat. “Come on, hero. Help me up.”

~~~~~~~~~~

“This is why we’re friends,” Rio tells you as he shovels forkfuls of bison steak into his mouth, juice dribbling down his chin. Cregan gutted the bison and butchered it, then you helped him cook the steaks—not very uniform in size and shape, yet no one is complaining—on a pan heated in the woodstove. You fed the fire with books you found in the house, mostly religious in nature. “You convince me not to commit suicide when we’re stranded on a transmission tower, you share your Cheddar Whales, you’re good at shooting things…”

“How did you two become friends?” Baela asks. You are all arranged around the dining room table; there are just enough chairs for everyone. Ice lies beneath it mauling on bison bones that Cregan set aside for her. The room is illuminated by flashlights. Baela looks great: in good spirits, glowing, alert, wearing a loose cotton dress that Helaena found in an upstairs closet for her. Baela napped most of the day, something she rarely allows herself to indulge in, and the benefits are evident.

Rio says nonchalantly: “I talked to everybody and she barely talked at all. So of course I had to investigate and figure out what that was about. Turns out she’s kind of cool. You know the Wheel of Fortune game at arcades where there’s like a hundred little lights in a circle you have to press the button when the one that says Spin Zone lights up? She’s a freak, she can hit it almost every time. Can’t sink a basketball or sing karaoke to save her life, but you know, we all have flaws.”

Aegon looks up from his map, which he is scrutinizing as he eats his bison steak. “Do you realize that if we could just stop at gas stations like back when everything was normal, we’d be in Odessa or the Bay Area in fifteen hours? Literally less than one day. Fucking unreal. And yet here we are trapped in yee-haw country, freaky giant animals, no civilization but Jesus billboards everywhere, hell on earth.” He holds up a palm. “No offense, Cregan. You’re okay.”

Cregan smiles mildly. “None taken, Fried Foot. You know you’re a little well done yourself these days.”

“That’s ableist,” Aegon replies.

“We’ll find gas tomorrow,” Aemond says. He sounds confident because he has to; he’s not allowed to panic, to give up. He’s seated at the head of the table like a patriarch. His steak is the smallest and the most ragged. He wouldn’t accept any of the others.

You ask Baela: “Have you decided what to name the baby?”

“Kind of.” She rests both hands on her belly, a globe like a full moon. Helaena glances over at Baela, frowning and preoccupied. “If it’s a boy, I’m going to name it after Jace. We had already picked out Theodore…and Teddy for short, isn’t that cute? But now…I’d want him to have that connection to his father. The baby won’t have any pictures of him, or videos, or memories, or papers he wrote in school, or ties or rings or cufflinks, or…anything. But he could have Jace’s name.”

The rest of you nod, eyes downcast and feeling terribly sorry for her. “I really like that idea,” Luke says quietly.

Now Baela is thinking, her gaze traveling around the room as she chews on a cube of streak. “I’m not sure what I’d call a girl. Maybe something naturey like Violet, Rosemary, Ivy, Indigo, Fern…”

“You should name it Otter,” you say, and you and Rio erupt into raucous laughter. Aemond smiles as he watches you.

Baela is grinning uncertainly, trying not to be insensitive. Perhaps people named their kids stuff like Otter where you came from. “Um, sorry, what?!”

“That was one of the baby names on Sophie’s list,” Rio clarifies. “I vetoed it. Or at least…I think she agreed to cross it off…? Oh my God, imagine I finally get to Odessa only to find out my firstborn child has been named Otter.”

“You’d have to turn right back around,” you say. “Total abandonment would be the only honorable choice. We’d have to start over someplace else. I’ve heard Texas is nice.”

Aegon snorts. “You can’t live in Texas. They don’t even have legal weed there.”

Rhaena squints at him. “I don’t really think that’s a concern anymore, Aegon.”

Aegon smacks his forehead theatrically. “Oh no, I forgot about the apocalypse again!”

“So Cregan,” Baela says. “You were planning to vote for Trump.”

Everyone at the table groans. “No politics,” Aemond says.

“They’re all dead now, so it doesn’t matter,” Rhaena adds. “Biden, Kamala, that insane Kennedy brain worm dude, Trump…”

Aegon says: “If I was a zombie, I wouldn’t eat Trump.”

“I just found that interesting,” Baela continues, looking at Cregan like she’s expecting him to explain himself. Rhaena and Luke exchange a nervous glance. Daeron reaches under the table to pet Ice; you can hear her tail thumping cheerfully against the hardwood floor.

“I was a Trump voter, yeah,” Cregan replies between bites of steak. Aemond is studying him uneasily, but Cregan’s baritone voice is calm. “That doesn’t mean I approved of a lot of the things he did and said. I’m not a monster, I don’t believe in mocking people or all that January 6th stuff. But he was good for the economy. Back when Trump was president, groceries were more affordable, and houses were cheaper, and more companies were hiring. If I had tried to move out of my parents’ place in 2023 instead of 2019, there’s no way I could have done it. And I really needed to get out of there. A lot of people feel that they don’t have the luxury of voting for the nicest candidate, or the candidate they agree with on social issues. Something abstract like climate change isn’t even on the radar. They have to vote for their basic necessities.”

You and Rio understand what he means, you’ve both met plenty of people with the same perspective; everybody else seems shellshocked.

“But I don’t want y’all to think that I’m…” Cregan looks around the table, his eyes catching—interestingly—on Helaena, who observes him with a fully present attentiveness that you’ve learned is rare for her. “You know, like a sexist or a racist or that I hate foreigners or anything. Because I’ve never felt that way, and now I’m very happy to have found you guys, and I respect the hell out of you. And I want to be allowed to stay.”

“You can stay, Cregan,” Helaena reassures him.

“Yeah,” Rio says. “Especially since we’d probably starve without you.”

Cregan beams, clearly grateful, and there are chuckles and the tension breaks; and Baela is placidly skating her palm over the arc of her belly, and now that you’ve eaten all you can, Rio is spearing the remaining chunks of your steak with his fork and gobbling them down. He doesn’t ask before he does this; he knows you don’t mind. You’ve never understood why he’s given you so much over the past nearly five years. You are eternally offering him atonement.

Suddenly, Baela asks you: “What would you name a baby girl?”

You have to think about this before you answer. “Well, if you’re looking for something related to plants…I had a friend when I was growing up named Briar, and I always thought that was pretty.”

“Briar,” Baela echoes, intrigued.

“It means bramble, like a thorny shrub where blackberries grow. I remember her telling me that her mama wanted it to be a reminder that people go through rough patches and that life gets hard sometimes, but you have to keep going, and eventually you’ll find your way out.”

“Briar,” Baela repeats. “Yeah, that’s kind of neat. I’ll add it to the list!”

“And you’d have the same first initial,” Rhaena says. “Baela and Briar. Isn’t that adorable?”

Baela smiles. “And a few Rs thrown in there too. For Rhaena.”

Rio turns to Aegon. “Hey Honey Bun, if you had to name your kid after a plant, what would you name it?”

Aegon says without hesitation: “Marijuana.”

Now it’s an hour later, and Aemond is examining Aegon’s burned leg on the living room floor, Helaena holding a flashlight and you and Rio standing by for moral support. Underneath the bandages is a wasteland of red, weeping flesh…and yet there are spots where the skin seems to be hardening into white islands of scar tissue. Rhaena and Luke are keeping watch by the windows, Baela is passed out in one of the bedrooms, Cregan is showing Daeron how to put his wavy blonde hair up in a man bun.

Aemond points to a blackish patch on the top of Aegon’s foot, only a few inches from his ankle. “I have to debride this part here,” he says like an apology.

Aegon is afraid to ask. “What does debride mean?”

“It means I have to cut it out.”

“Cut it?!”

“It’s getting infected. I have to remove it or it will spread to the rest of the foot and you could get sepsis. I might even have to amputate the whole leg.”

“Okay, cut the dead stuff off,” Aegon swiftly agrees.

Aemond doesn’t have any more injectable morphine. He gives Aegon as much Vicodin as he dares and then begins working, carving away layers of dark disease with his scalpel and scrubbing the area with disinfectant. Aegon clutches your hand, squeezing so hard it feels like your bones might crunch, shrapnel-like splinters of marrow-stained organic glass beneath your skin. Rio has Aegon’s pink Sony Walkman—once owned by Ava—and takes one earbud while giving Aegon the other. They sing along to Sean Paul songs together, laughing as tears stream down Aegon’s sunburned cheeks:

“Well, woman, the way the time cold, I wanna be keepin’ you warm

I got the right temperature fi shelter you from the storm

Oh Lord, gal, I got the right tactics to turn you on

And girl, I wanna be the papa, you can be the mom…”

Now you’re curled up in bed, your arms crossed over your belly as you struggle to fall asleep. Aemond comes to bed late now; each night he waits until Baela is sleeping and then teaches Rhaena about childbirth and recovery: what to expect, what could go wrong. She is a good student, borrowing Helaena’s spider notebook to take notes and asking detailed questions. She wants to know everything she can so she can help when Baela goes into labor.

At last, the bedroom door opens. Out in the living room you can hear Rio asking: “Do you have Wagon Wheel? I love that song.”

Aegon scoffs. “No, of course I don’t have Wagon Wheel. Shut up and listen to your Enrique Iglesias.”

“You are so racist, man…”

Aemond sees that you’re in agony, rummages around in his medical kit, and gives you an oval-shaped white pill to wash down with the can of orange Sunkist on the nightstand; Helaena found a case of it in the pantry. “Why didn’t you tell me it was this bad?”

“I didn’t want to take any Vicodin from Aegon or Baela. They’ll need it more than me.”

“Your pain is as real as anyone else’s.” Aemond’s weight shifts the mattress as he crawls into bed beside you, his arm settling protectively around your waist, his hand covering yours where it rests on your lower belly. “If the Tahoe runs out of gas, will you be okay to walk tomorrow?”

“Don’t worry about me. I had three periods during basic training, I honestly thought I might die. After that I can power through just about anything.”

“I’ve noticed.” You feel the soft smile on Aemond’s lips as he kisses your temple. “Do you want quiet, or do you want to talk?”

“Talking would be a nice distraction.”

Aemond wastes no time. “Do you like kids?”

“Well, since birth control doesn’t exist anymore, I’d hope everybody does.”

Again, he is smiling; you can hear it in his voice. “Okay, but do you intend to have your own?”

“Yeah, I always envisioned myself having kids. I wanted a normal family and figured I’d have to make one myself, DIY it, you know? I don’t think the plan has changed. Gotta repopulate the earth somehow.”

“I wouldn’t try to sway your decision one way or the other. It’s a burden you should only have to endure if you actively choose it. But if you want to have children one day, I’d help you.”

You giggle in the dim orange glow of a single flashlight. “How self-sacrificial.”

“No,” Aemond says, laughing. “Not like, the making them. I mean, I’d help with that too, that aspect would be fun. But I was talking about the delivery, and recovery, and taking care of a newborn. I don’t know everything, but I know a lot. I could help you get through it. So that’s an option I want you to be aware of, if…you know.” Now he pauses. “If you trust me.”

“I trust you.”

“Sometimes I don’t know if you should,” Aemond murmurs; or at least that’s what you think he says as you lose consciousness, plummeting into sleep as if falling from a great height.

~~~~~~~~~~

The Tahoe runs out of gas just east of Tipton—not a city, not a town, just a collection of service roads linking sprawling ranches to I-80, the only continuous route across southern Wyoming—and Rhaena guides the SUV as it coasts to a halt on the shoulder of the highway. You hike about a mile to the nearest ranch house: Luke carrying the siphoning hose and empty gas can in case you can find fuel, Rio carrying Aegon on his back, Baela walking slowly and with great effort, Ice panting as she lopes across the dusty earth. You can’t spot any cattle or horses behind the endless strings of barbed wire fencing. Perhaps they are in a different pasture, or escaped or were stolen, or died of thirst without being tended to, or were consumed by a wandering hoard of zombies, never sleeping and always hungry. The house at the end of the dirt driveway is modest, old, and painted white. The front door is open; the screen door bangs in the wind.

“Rock Springs is the next real town,” Aegon says when Rio drops him to the ground, reading his map.

“And how far is that?” Rio asks.

Aegon deflates. “About fifty miles.”

“Great,” Rhaena says. “What’s the plan, to fly there?”

“Yeah, start flapping your wings, little bird. You’re light enough, you can make it.”

“No car in the driveway,” you tell Aemond. “Nobody home, maybe?”

He’s scrutinizing the house, his blue eye narrow. “Maybe.”

A thought occurs to Aegon. “Do you think ranchers have golf clubs?” he asks hopefully.

“No,” Aemond snaps. Rio is now on the front porch and pounding the butt of his unloaded Remington shotgun against the doorframe to see if anyone appears. Daeron is nocking one of his makeshift arrows as he trots around the perimeter with his compound bow.

Luke, peering through his binoculars, points to a large cylindrical aluminum structure about a hundred yards from the house, by a small red barn. “What’s that thing?”

“It’s a grain bin,” Cregan says. “Full of feed for cattle.” Ice whimpers at his feet, and he twirls his axe in his large, calloused hands. “Are we clearing the house or not? Something’s in there.”

“We are,” Aemond answers tonelessly. “Luke, Rhaena, stay out here with Aegon and watch for trouble. Daeron, you too.”

“Got it.”

“Baela—”

“Can I go inside?” she asks. “Please, Aemond. I’m so sick of sitting around feeling useless and exhausted. I want to help. I want to do something, I’m going insane.”

“Fine,” Aemond agrees. “It should be an easy one.”

It is easy, but it’s not pleasant. The house smells like dark, sickening decay. In the living room are the skeletal remains of two bodies, both children judging by the size; the maroon-stained bones are notched with indents from gnashing teeth. Cregan shadows Helaena as she searches through closets and drawers. She takes no clothing—it would have absorbed the stench of death—but fills her burlap messenger bag with matches, lighters, batteries, pills. She gives you a bottle of Advil before you can ask her for it.

“Thanks,” you say, a bit startled, as you tuck it away in your backpack.

It is not until Ice leads you to the final room, the bedroom at the rear of the house, that you hear the familiar, blood-chilling hissing and moaning of a zombie. It is in the closet, and emerges one limb at a time: one arm and then another, one leg long like a spider’s, streaked with a thick soup of rotting organs that spills from a gaping hole in her belly like the mouth of a mineshaft. Something has happened to its other leg; it is missing, and the corpse that was once a thirties-something woman—a soccer mom, perhaps, with a minivan and propensity to make meatloaf and fish sticks—drags itself across the fawn-colored carpet towards you, slow and pathetic. Ice growls and barks. Rio raises his Remington.

“Wait,” Baela says. Her hammer is in her right hand. “Can I do it?”

“Of course, be my guest,” Rio says; though you can tell he’s slightly disappointed. He loves clubbing things.

Baela approaches the yowling zombie—jaws snapping, claws swiping—and grimaces down at it, this one of millions of monsters that ended the world, that killed Jace and stole all the rest of her life from her too, all those normal things she was supposed to have, all those strings of fate that the plague cut through like a razor and sent floating aimlessly out into the void of the universe. Then with a scream, Baela swings her hammer and a catastrophic impact crater appears in the side of the zombie’s skull, and it crumples to the floor, its mindless brains spilling out onto the carpet.

“Nothing good?” Aegon asks when you reappear in the driveway, popping a Vicodin into his mouth.

“No,” Aemond replies grimly. “No gas, no bullets, no food, nothing to drink.”

“I knew it would be lean pickings once we got out here,” Cregan says, and Aemond looks like he could kill him.

“Well, fortunately, Luke might have some good news for us,” Aegon says with a grin.

Aemond perks up. “Really? What?”

“I saw a truck out there,” Luke says, using his binoculars to gesture to the grain bin. “It’s parked between the barn and the grain thing, I can just see the very front of it sticking out. And if there’s a truck, there might be gas.”

Aemond ruffles Luke’s fluffy dark hair. “Good job, kid.” And Luke lights up like how cities used to look at night, back when the power was on: Washington D.C., Key West, Corpus Christi, Chinhae. Rio stoops down so Aegon can hop on his back, and all of you trek together across the field.

“Nothing,” Cregan announces as he squeezes the little pump on the siphoning hose after opening the gas cap of the ancient Chevy Silverado and threading the hose inside. “Not a drop.”

“Fucking fantastic,” Aegon sighs from where he’s slumped on the ground. His eyes are glazed; he’s pretty stoned. He gazes pitifully up at you; you pat his shoulder sympathetically. You and Rio have already checked the barn, dilapidated but perfectly devoid of zombies. The roof has caved in; one of the two front doors are missing. “What now?!”

“We can go back to the interstate and walk until we find the next ranch,” you say, looking absentmindedly at the grain bin. It’s much larger up close, and rusty in spots. A ladder runs up one side to allow access to the roof. Ice isn’t whining or nudging anyone’s hands, but she’s sniffing the air as if she’s detected something interesting, unfamiliar.

“Yeah,” Luke replies miserably. “We can walk another five or ten miles and then maybe find a safe place to spend the night.”

Rhaena shades her eyes as she peers up at the sky. “It’s past noon already. Maybe we should just stay here.”

Rio barks out a sardonic laugh. “In a house with no supplies and that reeks of dead people?”

“Cregan, go kill us something to eat,” Aegon commands.

He chuckles in his deep, gruff voice. “It’s Miss Chips who is good at the killing, I’m just the authority on butchering at the moment.”

Aemond is watching Ice, his forehead furrowed. “What’s she doing?”

Cregan whistles. “Hey, princess, you okay?” Ice ignores him, still sniffing, her grey ears straight up in the air. Then it appears from behind the barn: a tiny brown creature, a baby bear.

“Aww, it’s so fuzzy!” Aegon squeals, stretching his arm out to pet it. Rio yanks him away; everyone else is backing up towards the grain bin. A second bear cub has now arrived, padding clumsily along, large cartoonish eyes and a little pink tongue poking out from its muzzle.

“Don’t touch them!” Aemond shouts to everyone. “Get away from them! If there are cubs, there’s probably—”

And around the barn comes the mother, a grizzly bear of 400 pounds. She bares her teeth and snarls, saliva dripping in long gluey strings. Ice is barking viciously; Aegon is shrieking and scrambling onto Rio’s back.

“Baela!” Aemond says because she’s closest to him, urging her towards the ladder of the grain bin. She gets the idea and begins climbing. Then Aemond reaches for you. “Come on, you next!”

“Rhaena, go,” you say instead, and she clambers up the ladder after Baela. Cregan is brandishing his axe; Rio has his Remington in his hands, Aegon still clinging to his back like a baby opossum to its mother. Now Helaena is climbing up the ladder, and Daeron nocks an arrow. You whip one of your M9s out of its holster, aim for the bear’s head, and pull the trigger.

Your bullet hits its skull, Daeron’s arrow pierces its chest; and the mother bear does not die but roars and rises up onto her back feet—taller than Rio, taller than Cregan—and then drops back down and charges towards you and the grain bin. Cregan blocks the way, swinging his axe. The bear reluctantly pauses, testing him with swipes of her claws that he evades. Rio is just a few steps behind Cregan, waving his Remington around hostilely. Aegon is screaming and holding on for dear life.

“Don’t shoot!” Cregan yells. “9mm isn’t big enough, you’ll just make her more angry!”

Aemond finally gets a grip on your wrist and drags you to the ladder. You obey and climb until your feet are several rungs off the ground, then you turn to see what’s going on below. Aemond, Luke, and Daeron are at the bottom of the ladder, their backs to you. Cregan is still wielding his axe.

“Fuck off, Mama Bear!” he bellows, standing as tall as possible and swinging his axe above his head. Rio follows Cregan’s lead and holds his Remington aloft. Ice is barking; the baby bears are fleeing in terror. Aegon is sobbing hysterically and saying he’s going to die. “You don’t want us and we don’t want you! Go on! Go get your babies! I’ll put this blade right between your eyes if you don’t change your stupid mind right quick!”

The bear pounds the earth with her front feet and growls, a beastly subterranean rumble, but she seems to be losing her nerve. The rungs of the ladder creak and groan; you see rust like blood-hued moss around the bolts.

“Get out of here!” Cregan shouts. “Go, you hairy old bitch! Go back to your babies!”

The bear glances back to see her cubs vanish behind the barn. Her mouth is open and panting, spittle gleaming on her pointed teeth; her black eyes are uncertain. As you hold onto the ladder with one hand, you have your M9 aimed at the bear’s left eye, just in case. Aemond is watching Cregan; on his scarred face a sharp severity, fascination and resentment and fear.

“Go on,” Cregan says firmly. “Leave us alone. You belong in the mountains, not down here. Go eat something that’s already dead, a nice easy dinner. You don’t want us. We’ll fight you.”

The grizzly bear shakes her head—flopping ears, shaggy fur filthy with dust and pieces of grass—and whirls, lumbering off to find her cubs. When she rounds the barn, Cregan waits a few long, tense, silent minutes and then turns to the grain bin.

“Alright y’all, we oughta hurry up and leave. I don’t think she’ll come back, but she might.”

From the top of the ladder, approximately forty feet off the ground, Baela begins to laugh. “Did that really just happen?! That was insane! Cregan, buddy, you can vote for whoever you want to. You and I are cool forever.”

He smiles up at her, wincing in the bright afternoon light. “I’m very glad to hear it, ma’am.”

Rio sets Aegon down on the ground and stretches his back; it must be hurting him. Aemond is taking your hand and helping you off the ladder, and you are reminded of the transmission tower where he found you in Catawissa, Pennsylvania, one of those middle-of-nowhere places like Tipton, Wyoming. As Helaena climbs down, you go to Rio and—with as much force as you can manage—knead the small of his back with the heel of your hand like you know helps him.

“You okay?”

He sighs loudly, relieved. “Yeah, I’ll be fine. Oh, wow, that’s good. Harder…oh yeah…”

There is a snapping sound, metal squealing as it breaks, and by the time you turn to look she’s already falling: her cotton dress billowing around her, her arms wheeling helplessly. It happens too quickly for her to scream—for her to understand what is going on and what it means—but there is a stunned gasp and then she hits the ground, and you hear a muffled crunch of bone—skull?? spine??—and she is completely, unnaturally still as she lies on her back, no pain, no words, nothing.

“Baela!” Rhaena shrieks, and she rushes down the ladder and runs to her sister. You are all gathering around Baela, petrified to move her—to make it worse—but pleading for her to wake up, examining her with terrified eyes. Baela’s own eyes, dark and glassy and serene, are open only a sliver like obsidian crescent moons. Aemond is asking Helaena for a flashlight and then prying them wide, checking Baela’s pupils.

“There’s no reflex,” he says numbly.

“What does that mean?!” Rhaena cries. “Aemond? Aemond?!”

“She’s…she’s…” He’s in denial; he’s in shock. He’s feeling for a pulse on her carotid, he’s digging his fingernails into her forearm to try to get her to respond to pain.

“Aemond?” you say softly.

“She’s gone,” he tells you, like he doesn’t believe it, like he’s waiting to wake up.

“The baby,” Rhaena says. “Try to save the baby.” And then, when Aemond doesn’t immediately understand, she grabs his backpack and begins ripping it off so he can get the medical kit inside. “The baby, Aemond!”

Now he knows what he has to do. He pulls the scalpel out of his kit as Rhaena moves Baela’s sundress to expose her belly. She was wearing biker shorts beneath, lavender, cute, something you might have picked out in a store. In less than a minute they will be soaked with blood. Cregan leads Daeron away, and he’s telling him that they need to keep watch in case the grizzly bear returns, but you think it is an act of mercy more than anything else. Ice goes with them. Helaena, her face pale and grave, is shining the flashlight on Baela’s belly, just beneath her navel.

“Aegon?” Aemond says.

“What? What do you need?”

“I need people to help hold open the incision once I make it. I have to be able to see the amniotic sac so I can cut the membrane without harming the baby.”

“I get it, I’m here, I’ll help.”

Aemond presses the blade of the scalpel to Baela’s skin and draws a semicircle from the top of one hip to the other. There is blood, but it is slow-moving and thick and dark; it is the blood of a dead woman, not a living one. Immediately, Aegon hooks his fingers under layers of fat, skin, and muscle, and opens the wound as much as he can. You and Rio reach in too, and you do this without thinking, without allowing yourself to feel the horror of it until the work is done.

“I can’t see,” Aemond is murmuring. Rhaena gets another flashlight and helps Helaena illuminate the area. Luke is on his knees with both hands clamped over his mouth, his eyes glistening with dread and disbelief. Aemond is slicing, pausing to probe around with his fingers, cutting again. Then his arm plunges into Baela’s abdomen up to his elbow and, with some difficulty, pulls out the gore-covered baby by its feet, a girl, large and limp and silent.

Rhaena sobs, equal parts grief and joy, a smile appearing on her face. “Is she okay? Aemond? Is she…why isn’t she crying? Aemond?!”

Rio yanks off his shirt and uses it to wipe blood and gelatinous clumps away from the baby’s eyes, mouth, and nostrils. Then Aemond takes the shirt and wraps the baby in it, warming her, rubbing her lifeless little limbs. When she does not stir, Aemond lays her on the earth and begins CPR: compressions with two fingers on her tiny heart, two breaths down the airway she’s never used. There are no sounds except his efforts. There is no crying when the baby wakes, because she never does.

Enough, you are thinking, as if from very far away: an island in the Indian Ocean, the Appalachian mountains in eastern Kentucky. Enough, enough, enough.

Aemond stops trying to revive the baby. He picks her up and holds her against him, and no one says anything. There is only the barrenness of the Wyoming steppe, an anemic blue sky, tall dry grass that bows in the breeze, black vultures that are landing atop the barn and the grain bin.

Aegon jolts out of his paralysis and reaches for his brother with bloodied hands. “Aemond, hey, Aemond, listen to me, it wasn’t your fault. Okay? Are you listening? Aemond, man, you did everything you could. You gave them a chance. You didn’t give up.”

But Aemond doesn’t respond; he only kneels there beside Baela’s butchered body, her dead baby girl in his arms.

~~~~~~~~~~

“Alys?” he calls, seeing that she never came back to bed. He is lying on his stomach, tangled in red sheets damp with sweat. It’s hot, too hot, and there is no humming of the air conditioning. When Aemond picks up his iPhone from the nightstand, it’s still plugged in but only at 87% battery. The power must have gone out.

He gets up, rubs the damp skin by his temple—headache, dehydration—and lifts open the nearest window. It’s odd: there is shouting, distant and indistinct, like the sound of a carnival or a concert. There are car alarms too, and sirens, and horns blaring, all too far away for him to see. It must be because of the power outage, traffic signals thrown into chaos, neighbors relaying the latest information back and forth. That’s the only logical explanation.

“Alys?” Aemond says again, groggy but with increasing curiosity, concern, guilt.

She started to feel sick last night, a pulsing in her skull and chills and powerful nausea. The possibility of it being the so-called Florida Fever barely registered in his mind. Alys gets migraines, and tofu is a migraine trigger, and he took her to a Thai restaurant (maybe he should have known better) and the curry Alys ordered ended up having tofu in it, and by the time she paid the check (as Alys always did) she was swallowing an Imitrex from the box in her snakeskin purse. She said she was going to lie down in the guest bedroom for a while so she wouldn’t wake him if she spent the next few hours dashing to and from the bathroom, a likely outcome, and if he was honest with himself about it, Aemond would admit he was relieved.

He shuffles to the bedroom door—black boxers, bare feet, century-old hardwood floors—and opens it. Now he can hear thudding, like someone tenderizing meat with a mallet. “Alys? Baby, you feeling okay?” There is no answer, only that rhythmic hammering. He realizes that it is coming from the guest bedroom, a door at the end of a long hallway still fuzzy through his half-awake eyes.

It had never felt right, but it had felt good: good in the body when she touched him, good in the soul when she told him he did something right. But lately—especially here, in the vast creaking historic house she shares with her husband and her children, who are presently sailing in Cape Cod—Aemond cannot shake the feeling that this entanglement is a surrender rather than an aspiration, something he fell into and now rests at the bottom of like a swimming pool or the sea, the cold weight of it threatening to pour into his lungs and drown him.

“Alys?” Aemond says, now with profound and inexplicable dread. Outside an ambulance or police car zooms by, sirens blaring. The pounding on the door of the guest bedroom grows faster.

I want to go home, Aemond thinks suddenly. At home, in the Federal-style townhouse his parents rented for him (Criston picked it out, a safe and quiet neighborhood in Beacon Hill, and Viserys paid), Daeron is visiting from California and watching golf tournaments with Aegon on the living room couch, pretending to be interested when Aegon describes the different types of clubs. Helaena, pursuing an Entomology PhD, is researching the Mediterranean mantis, clicking around on her MacBook Pro from the garden in the backyard. Jace and Luke live there too, and so Baela and Rhaena have all but officially moved in, keeping their apartment in Seaport only to have somewhere to retreat to when the Targaryen chaos becomes too much…and so the baby can have its own room. Baela bought a crib, a changing table, a rocking chair, a dresser, and about a million unisex onesies, mostly space-themed. Baela is studying Aeronautics and Astronautics, after all. Maybe one day she’ll work for NASA and fly rockets to the moon.

The door is rattling on its hinges. Aemond’s hand closes around the knob. On the other side is something terrible, and he knows this. But he cannot just leave her. Aemond is not someone who abandons people; he is not someone who turns away from responsibilities.

He opens the door of the guest bedroom, and immediately she is staggering towards him, limp dripping hair and naked like she was interrupted mid-shower: blood bubbling from her gaping mouth and the whites of teeth peeking through the crimson, necrotic skin hanging in strips from her fingers, eyes misty like steam on a mirror.

“Alys, stop! Alys! What’s wrong with you?!”

She’s alive but she’s dead. She’s yowling and clawing at him, but her flesh is the rotting swampland of a corpse. He’s pushing her away; his palms sink into her, places he once noticed and then fantasized about and then at last—euphorically, ashamedly—touched, held, borrowed but never kept. She’s trying to bite him. She’s trying to kill him. None of this is possible, and yet it’s true.

Aemond flings her away, and the woman who was once Alys stumbles backwards and down the staircase, sick wet thumps all the way to the ground floor, bones splitting through dissolving grey skin, organs sloshing around until they spill out. He can hear her still hissing, flailing, trying to get up again.

Without thinking—slipping seamlessly into what he learned during his psych rotation is called automatic action—Aemond races down the steps and grabs her by the skull, cracks it against the antique hardwood floor she once extoled the value of as he fucked her on it: shipped east from Oregon and laid in 1912, the year the Titanic sank. When she lurches up to try to bite him, he slams her head against the floor again and again until she is still.

Then Aemond kneels there alone for a long time, sirens shrieking outside, far-off strangers screaming for help, putrid black blood clotting on his hands.

[simbury]

How I got my Sims 2 game working on my new Windows 11 laptop, step by step.

OKAY. Gadies and Lentlemen.

I have seen plenty of these around, but I wanted to share my process!

So I bought an MSI creator laptop. The specs are as follows:

CPU: 13th gen Intel i7-13700H

RAM: 16 GB DDR5

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 laptop GPU

Step One: Fresh install. I used the EA App to install the UC version on my new laptop.

Step Two: Download and install RPC launcher. This will automatically apply the 4gb patch. Run as administrator, but not in any kind of compatibility which renders the 4gb patch useless.

Step Three: Download and install Graphics Rule Maker. I used all of the recommended settings, aside from texture memory which I set at 2048 mb for reasons that will become clear later.

Step Four: Memory allocation fix (empty standby list). Explanation here.

Step Five: Setting virtual memory. I used instructions from this post at MTS - My virtual memory paging file is now minimum of 25000 and maximum of 30000. You'll need to adjust to your system's own specs.

Step Six: In game settings. Shadows Off. Neighbours Off. Lighting Medium. RPC Settings. Apply 4GB patch. Automatically Clean Cache. Lot Imposters Optimized. Sim/Object Shadows Classic. I also have lot view ocean reflections ticked.

If your game works like this with no flashing and crashing, awesome. Mine did not. I firstly tried several different texture memory sizes, but they had 0 impact.

I believe the next step is only for NVIDIA cards, but may be wrong.

Step Seven: DXVK. The most recent version from, here. There are plenty of instructions on how to install out there. But make sure you install the 32bit version. I have these two following lines in my DXVK.conf file (and do make sure it is saved as a conf file, NOT a txt or similar).

d3d9.maxAvailableMemory=2048

d3d9.presentInterval=0

The first line corresponds to the texture memory mentioned earlier. DXVK installs won't recognise more than that and having it higher can cause crashes apparently. The second line... No idea what it does but it was mentioned in several guides and reddit posts.

I don't know if the newer versions of DXVK allow fullscreen mode as the older ones did not, but I play in borderless mode anyway which works.

I also delete my thumbnails folder every so often.

I hope this helps someone, this silly old game can be cantankerous but I was determined to get it running again!

[followthebluebell]

what were q's issues? i tried to search your blog but tumblr is tumblr

Oh, that's because I never really went public with the extent of his problems. I didn't want to deal with the potential 'just euth him' comments, especially since I genuinely don't think a compassionate euthanasia would have been wrong.

Anyway, his butthole didn't work.

That's the short version.

I'm gonna put a more full history under the cut because it's really gross. Like fair warning. There's a lot of discussion of this cat's butthole, poop, and health issues. If you just want to keep imagining him as a cute little fluffball, maybe go look at his pictures instead.

Specifically, his anal sphincter didn't seem to function. His anus was just open and loose. Whatever was wrong with him ALSO seemed to affect his scrotum. Cats tend to hold their testicles pretty high and tight but his were super loose. I'm genuinely not sure if there's an actual connection there, but it was weird enough that it made its way into my notes about him.

He also had loose stools so he was just kinda constantly dribbling all over himself, whoever was holding him, his bedding, the floor--- you get the idea. He required frequent baths: he'd get a bath at the start of my shift and at the end, at the very least. Most nights had an evening bath as well. That way, he could at least stay somewhat free of excrement. This was terrible for his skin, of course; that's an excessive number of baths. It was just one of those damned if you do, damned if you don't situations. Considering the alternative was letting him sit in his own waste, we decided that baths were better.

He also wasn't gaining any weight. He wasn't taking in ANY nutrition from his food at all. Whatever went into him seemed to come right back out within a few hours. He was being tube fed for two weeks; he didn't seem capable of eating without grinding his teeth terribly. I genuinely wasn't sure how much sensation he even HAD in his anus until I caught him on camera squatting in a box.

That gave me hope more than anything else did. It at least told me he had nerve endings back there. It was just the sphincter or maybe the last inch or so of his intestine that seemed defective. Since he was such a sweet kitten otherwise, we decided to give him a chance to grow. The plan was to get him to UC Davis or a similar teaching hospital in the hope that they could extend his good intestine and sort of construct an artificial sphincter.

And then he just got over it. I picked him up to give him his morning bath and his butthole was just SLIGHTLY puckered. Over the next few days, I took a series of the grossest pictures in my fucking life and confirmed that his sphincter was sphincting. He started eating voraciously on his own. He started growing. He also stopped tooth grinding-- again, I don't know if this is significant, but it's another thing that made it into my notes.

I have no idea what happened, but I'm glad he's healthy. He just needed time to grow into his butthole or something.

[adobe-outdesign]

have you done a Grarrl review yet?

The Grarrl is a t-rex, and...well, that's pretty much it. It has all of the standard t-rex features: sharp teeth, reptilian eyes, and small arms. They're fine, but it doesn't feel like there's a whole lot with the base color that really makes them stand out outside of just having a lot of teeth compared to other Neopets (Poogle and Jetsam not withstanding).

I feel like part of the issue is that the Grarrl's body is completely solid in color by default, with no patterns or markings to break it up. Given their prehistoric status, I feel like stripes or speckles would've made sense; just something to break up the body and give them a tad more flavor. As is, all we have are the teeth and the green eyes with red pupils (which tend to be consistent across most, but not all, colors).

Beyond that, the base colors are alright, though for some reason the blue barely has any shading and the yellow is this off-putting dirty "mustard" color.

While the Grarrl's design has always been plain, I do think customization did them extremely dirty. Instead of being allowed to keep a more vicious expression, the Grarrl was instead saddled with an awkward smile that makes them look like they're posing for school picture day. In contrast, the old Grarrl's art gives them a big open mouth and allows them an angrier expression, which both looks much more natural and gives them a lot more personality.

Favorite Colors:

Maraquan: One of the only Grarrl pets that wasn't saddled with an awkward smile post-conversion, the Maraquan Grarrl is one of the best-looking Grarrls out there. Making a t-rex into a shark for the aquatic color works perfectly as a concept, and the execution's really nice; adding a very neat-looking ridged back fin and horizontal tail that sharks don't usually have, and fixing the plainness of the default Grarrl design by adding in a mottled white underbelly with small teal accents.

Neither version is terrible, though the UC/styled design is the better one—the fins aren't being forced into a fist, the colors aren't as over-saturated, and the tail fin shape looks a lot better (it's supposed to have a hook-like shape, not have a random spike coming off of it).

Halloween: Not only is a vampire a good choice for something with sharp teeth, but I really like the colors here; a very light minty body is contrasted with black and red accents, which makes it look both pale but also provides nice contrast without being too monotone. The cape also adds just the right amount of detail without being overly busy or detailed. The expression and mouth on the converted version, while still not as good as the old art, does look a bit more endearing and less awkward than usual, and I really wish they had used that mouth shape for the default Grarrl.

As of writing, there's only a "spooky" style instead of an actual nostaligic style that matches the old art, but reguardless it does look very nice. I like the pose and expression a lot, it brings back the black clasp (which was made blue for some reason during conversion), and I like the addition of the claws on the feet. Only complaint is that I wish they had given it darker eye bags, which were present both on the original art and the converted art.

Faerie: The faerie Grarrl having feathers is interesting, because feathered wings are usually restricted to avian Neopets; but then again dinosaurs are birds, so this is actually pretty clever. The orange, pink, and yellow palette looks nice, and I really like the speckled markings here and the addition of horns and dragon-like whiskers.

Unsurprisingly the UC/styled art is better, though I will say the converted has slightly better wings; I can't quite figure out the perspective on the original art. That said, the original art's head shade and expression look 10x better so you know, pick your poison.

[writingtraumaforever]

Uncontrolled Chaos: Chapter 27

Notes: I want to just say I have the best dedicated readers ever. I was worried after having such a consistent posting schedule with this story and me disappearing a few days that people would be upset. And while a few were, the majority have been nothing but supportive and kind and sending me well wishes during my grief period. I miss my pet so much, but you guys make me feel a lot less alone in that. Thank you all so much, and thank you for supporting me.

Summary: Rouge goes for the emerald at GUN. Knuckles and Shadow chat.

UC Masterpost!

Link to my AO3!

Start:

“You seriously trust her??” Knuckles sighs as he crouches down on a hills a few miles from GUN Headquarters, overlooking the facility Rouge is currently robbing as he rests an arm on his knee and keeps an eye out for anything suspicious. 

“I do,” Shadow says simply in response, standing beside Knuckles with his arms crossed, “Though, I can’t say she returns the sentiment.”

“Yeah? Well.. her and our Shadow don’t really have the most colorful history,” Knuckles replies with a shrug.

“How come?” Shadow asks, eyes looking down at the red echidna crouched next to him. It’s one thing for him and Rouge to simply not know one another in this world, but for her to actively be intimidated by him.. that’s different. Something happened. Something with the Black Arms.

Shadow can’t help but be curious when it comes to Doom..

“Sonic wouldn’t like me saying,” Knuckles answers once again, Shadow rolling his eyes at the response he’s already heard before.

“Who says Sonic even has to know you said anything??” Shadow replies.

“I don’t like talking about it either, if I’m honest,” Knuckles sighs with a frown, “It was.. a pretty dark time for all of us. But Rouge definitely saw the brunt of it given she was already working with GUN at the time.”

“So it was when the Black Arms invaded,” Shadow concludes.

“Yeah,” Knuckles gruffs out, “And I don’t think Rouge had signed up for all that shit when she signed up for GUN.”

“Did I hurt her??” Shadow asks quietly, eyes watching Knuckles with quiet concern in them, “..The other version of myself.. did I hurt her..?”

Knuckles pauses a long time, seeming to ponder how he should answer that question. What all he should say. What he should leave out.

“…I don’t know..,” he answers quietly, and Shadow can’t tell it's honest. Not avoidance.

“What do you know??” Shadow asks just as quiet, suddenly unsure he wants to know the answer as much as he thought he did.

“I know our Shadow didn’t have mercy on anyone working for or with GUN..”

Shadow’s eyes flash down at Knuckles’ fists at that.. how they’re clenched tight. How his back is suddenly flexed with tension..

He lifts his crimson eyes back to the GUN facility, staring at it and recalling how shocked Sonic had been that Shadow worked with GUN in his world..

How their Shadow would never work with GUN..

Sonic… Sonic worked with GUN during the invasion..

“Did I hurt him??” Shadow asks, careful not to allow any emotion to leak into his words despite his reluctance.

Sometimes ignorance is bliss..

Shadow has never been one to choose bliss.

“Yes,” Knuckles answers simply, gravel in his voice and he leaves the rest for the imagination. It’s obvious he won’t go into detail. Shadow doesn’t even have to ask to know this. He won’t push it further.. for now.

What he does know is his chest feels legitimate and hollow pain at the thought of what he may have done to anyone.. let alone that blue hedgehog.. under Black Doom’s control.

“I have the emerald in possession,” Rouge’s voice comes through the communicator she left behind for them, Shadow holding it in his hand and lifting it to look at it as he responds.

“Roger that. We’re at the rendezvous. Alert us if there’s trouble.”

“There won’t be trouble,” her voice comes back cockily, “I’m a pro.”

Shadow huffs a bit at this, Knuckles smirking to himself.

“Just be careful,” Shadow says simply, not getting a reply from her. He’s guessing she’s likely shut it off for now, needing to be stealthy from here on.

They wait quietly on the hill for a long moment, Shadow sighing with his arms crossed over his chest as he keeps his gaze on the facility.

But his mind goes to the blue hedgehog..

He seemed so torn about letting Shadow get involved with GUN without him. He’s shocked he didn’t have to fight the hero to get him on the plane. 

He hopes he isn’t too worried..

An explosion gets their attentions, Shadow’s eyes widening at the smoke coming from the GUN lab wing. Knuckles is on his feet in no time, his own eyes wide and looking very much worried.

“What the hell was that?!”

“I’m hoping a diversion,” Shadow responds with a frown, a little worried himself now.

“Hoping???” Knuckles’ eyes dart to Shadow, “What if they caught her?? Or if she’s hurt?! What if—“

“She’s quite capable on her own,” Shadow assures, though he has his doubts since he’s never actually seen this Rouge at work.

“You don’t know that! She could need help!! We need to get in there and—“

“I didn’t realize you cared so much,” a voice comes from behind them, both of them spinning around to find Rouge landing a few feet away with a bag around her shoulder.

Knuckles is too relieved to even care for her teasing remark, quickly stepping to her and looking her over with concern written all over his face.

“Are you alright??? What happened??”

“Needed a diversion,” Rouge shrugs with a small smirk at the echidna’s scanning eyes.

“Told you,” Shadow remarks.

“So you’re not hurt then??” Knuckles asks just to make sure.

“I’m fine,” she assures with a softening smile on her lips, nodding at the echidna as if to try and make sure he knows she’s serious, “Not a scratch.”

“Good..,” Knuckles breathes, only then noticing the endearing look Rouge is giving him and the knowing one Shadow is. His cheeks redden, “I-I just mean for the emerald! Because if you had been hurt, we might not have it!”

Shadow snorts at this, Rouge just quirks a brow with a hummed giggle.

Knuckles stumbles over his words a moment before eventually huffing out, “Well—You do have it, don’t you?!”

”Of course I have it, Knucklehead,” she rolls her eyes fondly, reaching into her bag to pull out the blue emerald inside, “All shiny and perfect as always.”

“Excellent,” Shadow’s lips curl up slightly, pleased they’re finally getting somewhere, “Let’s get it out of here before they lock onto its energy signature and track us down.”

“Right,” Rouge nods, placing it back in her bag, “They’ve likely figured out it’s missing by now. So your place or mine??”

“Tails’,” Knuckles answers quickly, moving to lead the way already, “We can contact Sonic and Tails from there and hopefully finally get this ball rolling.”

“What exactly is the ball we’re getting rolling??” Rouge asks, following Knuckles now.

“The kid has theoretically developed a way to communicate through dimensions,” Shadow explains, “We just needed the chaos energy to power it.”

“Impressive. How does he plan to be able to lock in on a specific dimension?? Couldn’t he accidentally call some psycho, world-ending Shadow from hell knows where to come here??”

“He’s connected it to our Shadow’s communicator,” Knuckles explains, “Its wavelengths are exclusive to our team only and meant to be able to traverse through certain realms for brief moments in time as is through chaos energy since he designed them for Shadow and Sonic, so Tails is pretty confident that once he locks in on it, it’ll only broadcast to his watch.”

“So they’re powered by Shadow and Blue’s chaos energy??” Rouge asks, seeming intrigued now, “That’s a hell of a gadget..”

“I’m not great on remembering the specifics,” Knuckles adds with a sigh, approaching Rouge’s vehicle they took there to ride back to Tails’, “But I’m pretty sure that’s how it works.. Something like that, at least. Plus, if we have this Shadow here with us, then—“

“Surely I’m somehow linked to the other Shadow and can make the connection through my own energy using this emerald,” Shadow finishes, nodding in agreement with Knuckles’ observation.

“Right,” Knuckles nods, climbing into the passenger seat of the car to which Rouge takes the driver and Shadow slides into the back.

“That’s a whole lot of science and chaos talk,” Rouge snorts, already beginning to drive them away from the GUN facility. The quicker they get out of there, the better, “Which usually means you’re playing with fire if my knowledge of the GUN science division is anything to go off of..”

“Tails can handle it,” Knuckles affirms confidently, “The kid knows more about chaos science than anyone I know. He’s had plenty of time to study it when he still lived with those two lovehogs before they moved out.”

“Why was he studying chaos science??” Shadow’s brows furrow curiously.

“We had enough incidents with our Shadow’s powers becoming a bit..”

Knuckles pauses, he and Rouge both exchanging a knowing glance before he hesitantly continues,

“Out of control.. Tails wanted to find a way to help him control them better. Help everyone rest easy, especially Sonic and Shadow.”

Shadow hums at this in thought, looking down at the inhibitor rings on his wrists.. they’re there to keep his abilities at bay. Help him not to lose himself in all that potential energy that’s balled up inside him. He wonders if perhaps their Shadow didn’t have such rings.. or perhaps he lost them at some point..

Shadow knows of only one time he ever lost his..

It’s still floating around somewhere in space, he assumes.

By the time he had woken up from that incident, he had newly designed ones by the doctor around his wrists. He currently wears ones designed by GUN’s scientists..

He doesn’t mention this. Feels like it wouldn’t be received well.

Though, he is curious how inhibitor rings designed by the fox may differ than ones designed by GUN..

Perhaps they’d be less restrictive. More freeing.. allowing Shadow to use his abilities to their full potential better without fear of being a danger to others and himself.

It doesn’t matter, really. At the end of the day, the fox fears him back in his own world. They’re not friends. Not even acquaintances really. He’s simply his rival’s sidekick and nothing more. 

Almost feels like a shame… seeing how much his alternate and the fox have accomplished together in this world and knowing the potential there now..

“So let’s say we contact our Shadow,” Rouge says after a bit of driving, “What then??”

“Well, the hope is that he has made contact with the other world’s Tails. And if not, that we can inform him to.”

“Why?” Rouge quirks a brow, “kid got a plan on how to get them swapped back already??”

“Sort of,” Shadow says with a frown, “He has some sort of portal in mind.. but it has to be synced with one from my world. Thus, the fox there needs to build one too.”

“What if the fox there isn’t smart enough for that sort of thing?” Rouge asks, always a thorough skeptic.

Shadow ponders this a moment, thinking back on all the times he’s seen that kid flying that plane. All the gadgets and modifications he’s made to it. The tech he sees Sonic and his friends carrying around. The mech suits the kid has designed to fight with.

“I think he’s more than adequate,” he responds, “The people in my world aren’t so different than the people here. We all simply have… different connections.”

“So personalities are the same, social statuses are different??” Rouge questions, glancing at Shadow in her rearview mirror. He nods back to her.

“That sums it up.”

“You said in your world, you trust me,” Rouge says bluntly, her brows furrowing a bit as her eyes meet his in the mirror, “…Why??”

Shadow takes a breath. He’s done more damn talking in the past few days than he’s done in months back in his world. It’s exhausting.

“Well, from what we’ve been able to put together, the place our worlds diverge is after the ARK Battle..”

Rouge looks back to the road, but Shadow can see the intrigue in her eyes.

“In this world, Sonic was the one to find me after I fell from space.. in mine-… in mine, that was you.”

Rouge’s eyes flicker back up to his at that, searching as if to see if he’s playing a trick on her or being serious.

After a pause, she hums with a small smirk, “No wonder you ended up so much cooler than this world’s Shadow.”

“I’ll have you know we all think Shadow is the coolest of our group,” Knuckles defends with an eye roll, “And he’s not near as much of a grouch as this one anymore— no offense.”

“None taken,” Shadow dismisses.

“So what— you’re saying I make people into miserable grumps???” Rouge huffs defensively, glaring over at the echidna.

“If the shoe fits, bat..,” Knuckles shrugs and leans back in his seat with a smirk only to earn a whack upside the back of his head from the thief, “Hey!!”

“No being an ass allowed in my car,” Rouge declares her nose pointed up.

“You little—“

“If it’s any consolation,” Shadow interrupts before the two’s insufferable bickering can get started, “…I don’t think you turned me into a grump.”

Rouge glances back at him in the mirror again, smirking slightly, “Then how do you explain the difference between your personality and our Shadow’s??? Looks like you knowing me has made you pretty miserable.”

“Or stable,” Shadow argues to which this seems to intrigue both the echidna and the bat, “…I don’t know what happened here with Black Doom, but in my world? I sided with earth and fought off the invasion, defeating the Black Arms for good.. I credit a lot of that to you being by my side during the ARK and during the fiasco with Metal Sonic..”

No one speaks for a long moment after that. Shadow knows whatever happened with the Black Arms was a touchy thing in this world.. but after a pause of silence, the bat smirks a bit and comments,

“Well wouldn’t ya’know.. Looks like I’m a better influence than you and your rag-tag group of misfits, Knuckie~”

The echidna huffs at this, crossing his arms and grumbling under his breath.

Shadow can’t help but smirk a bit at this, glad Rouge doesn’t seem to be taking some sort of guilty responsibility knowing this. Hopefully it only helps her to feel better about herself. Even if she never admits it, he knows she battles mentally with whether she’s truly a good person or not.

In his eyes, she’s one of the best.

[bronx-bomber87]

Happy Saturday all :) We only have 5 eps left in this season. I can’t believe it. 17 days to the premiere. Well 18 for me since I don't have cable just Hulu but still. Ahhh the Dim and Juicy Ep. I remember the 3 week hiatus to get to it was the worst. Felt like we had a lot of extended breaks in S5. Drove me insane. But anything is better than the one we’re coming out of now ha I’ll take 3 weeks over 9 months any day heh.

I liked the parallel in this how unhealthy Jake/Sava were. And how solid Tim and Lucy are. I mean Dim And Juicy were a mess. My god the man cheated on her more than once. They are not relationship goals lol I enjoyed them nonetheless though. I know Eric and Melissa had a blast filming this. Did my best to get everything in. Content heavy one. Let us get started.

5x18 Double Trouble

We hit the ground running in this one. Sava is waiting for Jake outside of prison. He’s getting released due to overcrowding. Not because he was good LOL Even Sava makes a crack it wasn't that. Been serving about 6 months for the drug charge got in 4x22. It’s a trip to watch them. We get all the benefits of Melissa and Eric’s chemistry inside another couple. It's wild. Sava all but squee's when she see's Jake which is pretty cute.

They launch themselves at each other once he’s free. All kisses and hands. Saying how much they missed each other. All the chemistry and swaying cuteness that comes with them. This scene is pretty cute to watch. They do look like they are so in love which makes what Jake does later so confusing and awful tbh. He greets her friend Lisa with a hug and you can see Sava breaks it up pretty quickly.

Sava brings Jake back to her side. Asking what he wants to do first? Being the classy gentlemen he is saying she knows what. Ha Horny horn dogs. I do love it though. it’s like getting the most reckless AU version of Tim and Lucy. Although they wouldn’t cheat so it’s not entirely accurate lol Sava asking him if he wants to go straight? Jake replying 'Nah, screw that. Let's be bad.'

This leads us into the documentary. Shots of Jake and Sava during it. My god they are sex crazed af. I think that’s why everyone loved watching them though. heh They legit were gonna make a sex tape and got caught LOL I remember being so excited and confused as to what this episode was going to be ha. All I knew was going to be a documentary one and I always have a soft spot for these ones.

We start off with Lucy getting mic’d up. She looks way more nervous this time around. Why you ask? Her person isn’t with her. Her safe space and grounding force is missing. She even asks why she can’t be interviewed with him? They want their POV's to be separate this time. It’s so sweet she misses him and needs his presence to calm her nerves. This makes me so happy I cannot.

We watch her take a deep breathe knowing they have to be apart. They ask how Lucy knew of Jake Butler in the first place? Lucy goes on to explain about Tamara’s car and drugs they found in it. Which led them to Jake. They bring up the fact he and Tim look alike. Tim is already grumpy and hates these damn things. What happens when you remove him away from his sunshine human.

He’s extra grumpy. It shows in his very first shot. His body language screaming how much he doesn’t want to be here. The crossed arms (mmm hello biceps.) Tim defiantly saying how they don’t look the same at all. Refusing to believe they are anything alike. Other than looks Jake is the complete opposite of everything Tim is for sure. He’s so sassy and salty when the director says they’re identical. ‘Says you.’ Oh my love. I adore you.

They come at Lucy with both barrels about being Dim and Juicy for their OP in 'Double Down.' Knowing their ‘pretend’ intimacy was so much more than that. Lucy looks like she’s getting overwhelmed poor thing. She tries to divert it back to what they accomplished with their OP. Not the fact that they were UC together as a couple. The director presses more asking if that’s when her and Tim became intimate?

There’s a reason they pulled Tim from her for these questions. He would’ve knocked this guy out for them being so personal. Also for making her feel uncomfortable asking them. She can’t even look the man in the face when she says this BS line about pretending. Cause it’s utter crap and she knows it. Yeah they were in other relationships at the time. To quote Angela from 5x01 ‘All true. Not what I asked.’

Lucy defending them both. Saying they didn’t get together until they were both single. Which is true and I am eternally grateful for. Do love her making sure everyone knows this. That they didn’t do anything untoward during their OP. Cause they wouldn’t while in relationships. Not who they are. They were damn close but didn't. Why they are the opposite of Jake/Sava. The director says he wants to dial in on that. Lucy becoming agitated asking do we really have to?

These questions clearly getting under her skin. The director noting it’s astronomical they would even meet the both of them. Let alone have both Jake/Sava together and her and Tim as well in a relationship. Before she can answer Tim interrupts says interview is over. She asks what's wrong? He tells her not here.. Lucy thinking it’s linked to questions she’s being asked. I love him holding the door for her as they leave. Ever the gentlemen.

The closeness and height difference is glorious in this shot. You can tell when they’re alone by her body language Lucy goes into calm down Tim mode. Her hand reaching out for his and subtly touching it. Thinking she has to get him to settle down for hearing those questions. Before Lucy can talk Tim explains why he removed her. Has nothing to do with that. He pulled her over because Jake has gone missing. Doesn’t want to do police work in front of the cameras. Saying Nolan and Celia got missing persons call and it’s about Jake. Lucy is shocked saying 'What?'

Nolan and Celina show up and Sava is freaking out cause Jake is missing. The director asks why Jake and Sava are at a mansion in Beverley Hills? We find out they’ve been casing rich families. Taking over jobs like handy man, nanny etc so they can live in these fancy houses and steal their stuff. It’s pretty smart despite being awful LOL This last family needed a handy man. Jake beats the crap out of the current one. Strong arms his way into taking his job.

I do love seeing how tall he is in that camera shot. mmm. Tall drink of water that man. Jeans and a leather jacket? Yum. Gimme. Luckily this family needed a nanny as well. So they both fit right into this scenario. Angela saying Sava slid right in LMAO I’m dying at Wes’s reaction. They’re so cute I can’t stand it. I do love me some Wopez. He tells her that's a really descriptive way to say it HA These documentaries always produce the funniest little moments like this. Why I love these and have a soft spot for them.

We return to Nolan’s and Celina questioning Sava. She is still panicking. Saying this is why she didn't want to call the cops. Nolan noting because they're doing something illegal? She tries to defend their jobs there. That they're "straight" now. John gets her back on track by saying Jake disappeared? We cut to another video slash moment. Sava and her videos ha it is super cute how he looks at the camera. That smile we all love. Jake saying she needs to remind him to erase security footage. My god they’re sex bunnies LMFAO. He gets up to grab another beer and asks if she wants anything? She said lobster salad.

The ass tap he gives her on his way to get another beer. my goodness. I love it. Reeling over here. Don't worry about me. They must’ve had so much fun filming this. I mean Eric mentioned it was one of fav eps of the season. The BTS they did leading up to his showed how much they enjoyed it. Her little dance after he says he’ll get her lobster salad. Haha Sava just living her best life in this moment and it’s showing. Sadly this is the last time Jake is seen alive on camera.

We find out Jake took off and never told Sava where he was going. Which is heartbreaking. Because she clearly loved this man very much. Moral compass or not she loved Jake. That gets them on the topic of lying and secrets in a relationship. They ask her if Tim and her keep secrets? Lucy says nothing big.

That honesty is the most important thing in a relationship. Cutting to Tim and his reply I’m rolling. Eric killing it in this episode with his sarcasm. The king delivers once again. I mean he’s not wrong he is sitting there because of her secret. Well intentioned secret though LOL One born out of love. This one was funnier than the other two I thought. Just lots of funny/punchy bits like this one. I enjoyed it so much.

We return to station. Aaron’s calling in he found a body. That it’s Tim. The expressions in this scene are primo. First off Lucy and Celina's confusion is hysterical. Standing next to him and hearing this when he's very much not. Tim looks so annoyed Aaron couldn’t tell it wasn’t him LOL Also irritated at the thought of being dead. Like he's insulted he would ever be dead in a dumpster haha Oh Tim I love you so much.Like Aaron you’re all looking for Jake and your mind goes to Tim LMAO Never gonna live this down my dude....

Tim grabbing Lucy’s radio off her hip is doing things to me. I also adore the looks when he does. She just allows it only looking down. Such a deep level of comfortability in this action too. Lucy doesn’t react at all. Just used to Tim and his antics. It’s the little glances through out this portion love too. Tim's look into the camera cracking up as well. Like this friggin dope thinking i'm dead... His face the literal version of SMH ha I loved this mini moment so much.

They ask Tim if it was disconcerting he saw a version of himself dead in the dumpster? Being Tim he’s not going to show a documentary crew of all people his vulnerability. That’s reserved for one person and one person only. We shoot back to Lucy who says she has nightmares. God I can only imagine the nightmares seeing that produced for her though. Even though it wasn’t him you know she carried that with her when they left.

I bet you she had nightmares that night and Tim had to soothe her. Damn that would be good fic... LOL Anyways they ask Lucy if she thinks Tim has nightmares? Lucy tells them no but he’s been doing the job longer. I love her defending his high walls though. Saying why they’re in place. Not wanting them to judge him for it. Refusing to let anyone cast a negative light on him.

The director asks if she’s jealous he can turn it off like that? Lucy’s answer is great because it’s very her. Telling them No. Personally she needs to feel for people it’s who she is. I totally get that I am a massive empath. It’s how I connect with people as well. It has it's downsides it’s true but worth it in the end. When they ask her bout his walls being an issue? I LOVE her smile. Because those walls have never really been an issue. A challenge for Lucy yes in slowly breaking his down over the years. But never an obstacle for them.

We all know she saw behind his walls very early on in their relationship. Saw the man hiding behind that wall. Tim has been a soft marshmallow for her for YEARS. Legit years. Why she has zero hesitation in her reply. He was soft for her long before they got together. It’s just now he allows himself to fully be this way openly and he’s ok with it. Well when they’re alone he is. Of course he’s going to be rough and grumpy with the crew. They’re not his person. Nor would he ever tell them he was soft for her.

That's not Tim Bradford at all. But his actions speak louder than his words ever could. You have to earn that out of him though. Lucy earned it million times over. Why she is the only one who gets to see it. Does crack me up the way the director says. ‘No sir....’ After Tim asks him if he looks like a big softy? You know Tim loved instilling that fear in him. He may be super gone for his wife. But he’ll be damned if he doesn’t command fear and respect around everyone else. These two the epitome of Grumpy x Sunshine per usual. Tim is hard ass unless you’ve made past his wall. He loves Lucy most so she gets all the soft goodies haha

Sava shows the director a video she’s scared to share with the team after being questioned. Thinking they’re gonna use it against her. It’s a video of them driving around being all cute. Saying I love you to the camera and such. But then get run off the road in an attempt to kill them. Their car gets totaled and Jake has them bail completely. Car and everything they leave behind. They were able to locate the car for evidence after they see this.

They couldn’t get anything from the car scrapings unfortunately. Had the most common paint out there. So another layer was added to this mystery. Who was the driver? Sava then gets a text threatening her about an item she had no idea about. One that needed to be delivered. It was sent to her and Jake. The texts went on to be violent in nature toward Sava. So it was time for Lucy to go UC to figure this out. Meet up with this person threatening her.

Thanks to Lucy’s UC Op the SL finally has some answers. The guy contacting them was related to Jake they were cousins. He was into some shady stuff and was an international arms dealer. This where I really feel bad for Sava. She had no idea about these back ally dealings he was doing. Not only that but he was cutting her out of the deal on top of it. That Jake targeted this family for a specific reason and she had no idea. Makes me sad when she says she thought he loved her oof.

That she knew him. Pretty sad. We find out later through Sava. That Jake always had a burner phone. They were able to get that number through this whole thing with the shady cousin. It’s where we find out Jake was cheating on Sava. Again….Lucy calling him the Shakespeare of sexting LOL They ask her if she’ll read some of them? It’s adorable how flustered she gets. Saying she can’t her Nana would be watching this. HA

The director does the dumbest thing he could do. Asking Tim if he would read some? Like did you really think that was gonna happen bud? Like really? His reply of if Lucy wasn’t gonna he sure as hell wasn’t going to. Telling him to take that away from him. Have you not paid attention at all in these documentaries? Why would they think asking was a good idea? LMFAO Mess with the bull gonna get the horns people.

We find out the person Jake was cheating on Sava with was Lisa. Her best friend…Like damn it’s bad enough to cheat but with her best friend? God…As douchey as it gets on his part. Jake breaks up with her via text but Lisa can’t handle the fact he was choosing Sava. It’s when everything comes together. We find out she tried to run them off the road and kill them. When that failed she asks for Jake’s forgiveness. Wanting to meet up. When he showed up she killed him immediately and dumped his body. Shit….That's a seriously scorned women right there.

This next portion is the definition Grumpy x Sunshine. They ultimately decide not to charge Sava with anything. The director asking what Lucy thinks of this? She of course gives the softest, most empathetic, and hopeful answer. Because it’s Lucy Chen. She exudes all that in her decision making. It is her super power after all. Naturally her answer was geared towards a second chance. Thinking maybe this will put Sava on the right path.

We cut to Tim saying ‘Of course she said that.’ He knows his girl so well. What’s so great here is his expression as he says it. That smile of his when he says that line. We all know one of the reasons he fell for her is that sunshine. That empathy and her seeing the best in people. She charmed her way into his heart with it. He truly does admire her for it. You can see the fond affection his face and tone when he says this.

He may not agree with her but he loves that about her. The man loves her so much even when he’s being sassy it comes off as affectionate. It's the first time we see him smile this episode. Why? He’s talking about Lucy. She brings it out in him. She melts him even without even being present. Just the thought of her and he lights up. Her compassion is one of his fav things about her. Gah they cute.

They finally get to to be interviewed together. It’s the best part of the episode. Director not wasting any time with his first question. Asking them if they’re worried cause their doppelgänger relationship was so dysfunctional? Lucy once again seeing the best in them. Telling him it was an unfair characterization of them. That Jake cheated not only that but cut her out of a gun deal after that. Not healthy in the least but to her not dysfunctional.

I adore how riled up Tim is with his questions. Protective Tim has entered this conversation. Getting very agitated with what he’s implying. Look at how Lucy looks at Tim as he goes off on his rant. She loves this man sitting next to her. Grumpy rants and all. The amount of affection on her face as he continues his tangent. She could watch him go off all day. My heart. The director saying he thinks it's reasonable question. Tim doesn't agree and tells him off. Saying they’re working too hard. Ha I love him.

Tim continues on (very passionately might I add) about separating their relationship from Jake/Sava’s. Want's to make it VERY clear they are nothing like those two. That the only thing they share is looks. He is so offended he would even compare the two. I mean it’s true. They’re not on the same planet as Tim and Lucy. Lucy continues to look at her man with serious heart eyes. Her smile giving me all the feels.

She is loving his fierce defense of them as a couple. Saying Jake/Sava based their lives on deceit. Of course it infected their relationship. He’s not wrong…This next bit gets me all in my feels. The way he looks over at Lucy. A real genuine smile just for her. Look at his smile. I'm a puddle. He is the absolute softest for her. *heart clutch*

Saying they’re in a very different place. His passionate defense is of them is sexy if you ask me. Also look how different he is with her by his side. Sharing more than he's been doing in his previous interviews. Being a little vulnerable cause she’s there with him. More than he has the entire episode. I cannot. This makes my heart so happy.

The look on Lucy’s face when they ask what place they’re in? She is also ready to throw down with them. Incensed they would even ask that. Her reply is perfection. Saying ‘If you don’t know, then you haven’t been paying attention.’ I remember thinking this was a shot at anyone complaining this season. (and I LOVED it) Which blew my mind btw whenever I saw it. Cause if you could be negative in a season this good what makes you happy? I remember unfollowing some people cause I didn't want their tainted vision in my feed. If you could look at their relationship and not see the beautiful progression you weren't watching the same season as me.

To not see what they’ve built to this point in the season. You are like Lucy said clearly not paying attention. I remember seeing some posts about not enough PDA, kisses or intimacy. (there was lots of intimacy btw just not straight up making out) You’re missing the point of the realistic healthy adult relationship that's being portrayed. They're not teenagers who will be angsty over nothing. These are people in a stage of their life where that nonsense isn't going to happen. Any angst they've had has been productive. If you came out of this episode thinking they needed to be more like Jake/Sava you missed the point entirely. Of this season really. They are not them.

The beauty of Lucy and Tim is in the small tender moments. The little things that add up to so much. Yes I love kisses and such don't get me wrong. God I love them. Will lose my mind over any in S6 no doubt. But there is so much more to a relationship than just that. The emotional intimacy and how they’ve grown together since 5x10 is unreal. The massive shift in Tim alone is enough to tell you how well written they are. What a healthy adult relationship looks like. Had their bumps along the way but what couples doesn’t? I just loved that line from Lucy. S5 is a game changer in the best way for them. If you can’t see it or how they've both grown together you clearly haven’t been paying attention. That line was amazing and I loved her saying as such.

The director takes shot at what place they're in. Coming up with some buzz words. As generic as he could possibly be. Lucy calls him out for it. Because it no where near describes what these two have. Tim is simmering as this guy continues to try and rile them up. I adore him ready to go off and Lucy immediately calms him with a single touch. That’s all takes for him to go from raging bull to heart eye Tim in an instant for her.

Tim was ready to thrown the hell down. I love protective Tim. Lucy taking the wheel in this moment is everything. Her touch basically saying she's got this. Looking directly at her man when she says this next line above. Also don’t think I didn’t see your eyes move to his lips madam. I do adore how she is looking at him. Exuding every ounce of love in her body for him as she speaks. They’re so in love make my heart hurt in the best way. Her eyes so full of warmth and affection for the man sitting next to her. They really are in a beautiful place. Making my shipper heart so very happy.

Tim’s sweet smiles as she rubs her thumb up and down his wrist in a soothing manner. I love it so very much. Never be over how she make's sure to keep eye contact as she calms him down. Tim also doesn't break his eye contact with her as she does this. They're killing me with all the shipper feels in this moment.

Let’s not forget her necklace on full display here. In this beautiful moment. Happy looks so damn good on them everyone. Another thing I love so much is how Tim lets her take over. He was ready to shut this down. Kick them out. She places her hand on his arm and he’s at peace. Lets her direct them from here on out. Only Lucy has the power to soothe him this quickly and effectively.

She’s calmed Tim down enough to have him rejoin the convo. Saying as police officer your future is never certain. Lucy adding on anything can happen at any time. Tim rolling it into kicking them out is amazing. Telling them straight up they’ve overstayed their welcome at this point. I mean they really have LOL Cracks me up how she turns her head towards him. Not really shocked but realizing he's over this now. Her smile is the best.

I love him pointing his finger. The shots at his relationship with Lucy were his breaking point. That is the most precious thing in world to him. Something so sacred. Why Lucy had to stop him from eating them lol Lucy’s reaction is the best. She loves this insane man sitting next to her so much. Her pushing his arm down like 'Ok babe that’s enough.' lmao. Such a wifey move to do that but also she knows Tim is at his limit. Tells them it's time to go now....

I love them instantly going into couple time mode once it's over. Lucy asking if he wants sushi? Tim saying how it’s perfect. Then looks back at them glaringly. Saying this place better be spotless when they get back. I love her escorting him out of the apt. Hand on his back directing him towards the front door before he pops off more. Such a married move. God damn I love them so much everyone. Fantastic ep from start to finish. ❤️

~~~~

Side notes-non chenford

Grey’s picture and how happy it makes him I love it so much. It’s so cute I can’t stand it.

He was so distraught when it was destroyed lol They replace it and it’s so sweet hilarious adorable thing for Grey.

Thank you to all my readers you make my entire day when you like, comment and reblog. Tis been a joy for me. See you all in 5x19 :)

[trippinsorrows]

ltye 23 + authors thoughts

i'm not gonna respond to asks until tomorrow to avoid spoilers for those who haven't read the chapter, but i just wanted to say that you guys are so sweet and supportive. that's it. that's the tweet. 🥺❤️

***now please don't read beyond the read more if you haven't read the chapter***

i love ya'll for real, but, it was hilarious as hell to me that ya'll thought one of roman's hoes was gonna crash this party. this man might as well have the secret service patrolling his property. ain't nobody he don't want there getting access. 😭😭😭 that doesn't mean we won't eventually see interaction between solana and one of them before all is said and done.

just to clarify, if it wasn't already obvious, dwayne is roman's actual, biological cousin. matteo is roman's half brother. same mother. different fathers. that dynamic will be explored more in future chapters. so yes, roman lied to solana, somewhat, about his relation to matteo.

solana's choice of guests outside of the obvious invitees were based upon her interactions with them via training at the warehouse. bianca and jade giving her tips here and there, montez and trick also making appearances and comments. solana grew to feel comfortable with them. there was a section i was going to include to cover that more via a conversation between her and roman, but it messed up the flow.

there was also a version where dwayne and matter arrive during the party, but it didn't make sense to me to have them show up, sit on the big news they had until the party ended. that being said, there would have been this funny ass exchange between jey and dwayne (pre beatdown lol)

“I see that head still good and bald, Uce.” “And I see you still cosplaying as them bad ass kids biological father.”

i also need ya'll to know that 'candy' by cameo was absolutely played, the twins, montez and trick trying to show sami the proper way to electric slide to that timeless classic. aggressive fist being thrown down and all.

the next two to three chapters will have some moderate to heavy angst/intense situations, with one of the more angsty/intense ones occurring in the immediate chapter (24). one that i think will come as a big surprise and may invoke mixed reactions. i'm going to do my absolute best to write it appropriately. as always, i will use the appropriate cw/tw's. please read them.

also want to point out that solana and roman were first intimate in chapter 14. thus, they've been sexually active intermittently, more frequently recently, over the past almost 10 chapters.

lastly, solana really did pick the perfect time to get knocked up, huh?

[shinki26]

The Sims 2 Disc Installation and fix guide for Windows 10/11 PCs

I’ve been seeing around the internet people demonizing the discs and saying they are “bad” “old” “unsupported” “buggy” “ancient” and a bunch of other bad words and also outright refusing to give support to disc users.

I’m writing this guide to hopefully instruct people on how to properly install, fix and run their disc based The Sims 2 game and also educate you on why the discs are not as bad as everyone makes them to be.

Just a warning: I’m a Windows 10 user, I don’t know if exactly everything is going to be 100% accurate to Windows 11, but the game SHOULD work the same on it.

First things first, some clarifications about common misconceptions of both the Ultimate Collection and TS2 disc games I’ve been seeing being tossed around:

1. The Ultimate Collection has compatibility patches for modern hardware: 

This one is actually kinda true? The UC did have some patches made to it compared to a fully patched disc game but no one has been able to tell what exactly it did.

A fully patched, fixed and correctly installed disc game should work the same as the Ultimate Collection, with no difference in compatibility or game performance.

2. SecuROM doesn’t work on modern OSes so you can’t run the game off the discs: 

Totally untrue. People who says SecuROM doesn’t work on Windows 10/11 haven’t actually tried running a game that uses it at all. It 100% works even on Windows 11. What doesn’t work on modern OSes is SafeDisc, which all packs released before Bon Voyage used. So if you install BV and any pack released after it, the game IS going to run normally as it’s using SecuROM instead.

3. But SecuROM makes the game lag: 

True, for some machines it does happen. But as I will explain in the guide, you can uninstall SecuROM with the official removal tool and just use NoCD executables to have it not install itself again.

4. The discs requires Flash and it’s been deprecated:

No, the discs DO NOT require Flash. The only thing that uses it in the setup is a pop up that used to ask you if you wanted to register your game. Since of course you can’t register it anymore, you can just close it and it WILL NOT affect anything.

That out of the way, let’s get to the guide!

What you are going to need:

-All original TS2 patches released by EA back in the day: They’re all hosted HERE on ModTheSims. 

Please, be aware that there may be multiple variatons of a patch. You need to pick the right one for your game. If you have The Sims 2 Base Game DVD version, you will have to download the second option where it says “DVD Patch Notes”, for example. For Pets and Seasons the “DD” patches mean Digital Download, so if you have them on either CD or DVD them both are going to use the “Disk Patch” If you seem to be not able to download them, right click the download link and choose “Save Link As”.

If you have The Sims 2 Deluxe / Double Deluxe / Holiday Edition / Other compilations you’re not going to need the Base Game patch as those versions are already updated!! You also don’t need the Nightlife patch if you have Deluxe or Double Deluxe!! The same thing applies for the Collections: You don’t need to patch their EPs!!

-Grumpy Loader: Get it HERE on ModTheSims.

-If you have Bon Voyage and/or packs released after it... SecuROM Removal Tool: Get it HERE.

-If you have Mansion & Garden Stuff... Sims2RPC: Get it HERE on ModTheSims by @lazyduchess! If you DO NOT have this pack, you’re going to need to source a NoCD executable of the game based on your latest installed pack.

-If you DO NOT Have Mansion & Garden Stuff... 4GB Patch: Get it HERE.

-Graphics Rules Maker: Get it HERE.

Having downloaded everything, you can start inserting your Base Game disc one! Or your Base Game DVD!

Installing the Base Game:

There’s no mystery in this part, install your game normally as you would back in 2004 following the instructions of the setup.

Three of the biggest problems I’ve seen people have when installing the Base Game is:

1. I get a red pop up saying “This app has been blocked for your protection”

This happens usually on Double Deluxe games and later EPs such as Bon Voyage, FreeTime and Apartment Life.

There’s two ways you can circumvent this. First one is the one that I personally prefer:

-Open the Task Manager -On the top left, click “File” -Click “Run new task” -Click “Browse...” -Now go to your disc drive in your PC and open it, select Autorun.exe -The target box should be pointing to “D:\Autorun.exe”. The “D” letter changes depending on what letter your disc drive is set to in your PC -Check the “Create this task with administrative privileges” box -Now click OK.

The setup is going to run normally now. When you are installing EPs that show you this error, you can do the same thing to every one.

The other way is just to change your PC’s date to somewhere before 2020. This is going to work too, I can’t explain to you why though! Something about licenses expiring!

2. I get a Flash pop up when I try to install!

As I explained earlier, you can just close it and the installation will continue normally.

3. The setup just hangs at a specific percentage and won’t progress anymore!

This is mosty probably the setup asking you to swap discs! DVD users do not have this problem. What happens sometimes is that the setup GUI is supposed to make a pop up window appear in front of the GUI asking you to swap to disc 2, but on modern OSes it doesn’t appear sometimes. Actually, it does. It just is in the background, if you minimize every open window on your machine you’re going to see the little pop up! Just swap to disc 2 and press “Ok” on the pop up and it should resume installing. The same thing can happen when having to switch to Discs 3 and 4.

After installing the Base Game:

Yay, you did it! See how the discs aren’t the devil??

So, after installing the base game you are going to need to patch it.

Open GrumpyLoader, on the top left select “Load...” and on the window that opens, choose the Base Game patch’s executable you’ve downloaded and open it. It’s going to automatically patch your game, if you are on the 4 CD version of the game you may have to swap discs. Sometimes GrumpyLoader throws errors when updating, especially when it ends. But you can just ignore it.

After patching, your Base Game is FULLY installed and properly patched, congratulations!!!

But if you didn’t already try, you will see that you can’t run the game as it doesn’t open. That’s because the Base Game uses SafeDisc that doesn’t work on modern OSes as I said earlier.

Installing Expansion and Stuff Packs:

It’s the same process of installing the Base Game. Follow the setup instructions. After installing each one, PATCH them with GrumpyLoader. For example: you just installed University! Do NOT immediately install another pack right after.  Follow the same GrumpyLoader patching process you did on the Base Game but choose the University patch instead. Do the same thing to ALL EPs and Family Fun Stuff.

Also, there has been some info online about installing packs out of release order can mess up your game.

I personally don’t think it’s true as I never had any problems but I prefer to be better safe than sorry.

If you want to, Install them in this order:

-University (or University Life Collection) -Nightlife (skip if you have The Sims 2 Deluxe/Double Deluxe) -Christmas Party Pack (I don’t recommend if you have Happy Holiday Stuff or The Sims 2 Holiday Edition)  -Open For Business (or Best of Business Collection) -Family Fun Stuff (or Fun with Pets Collection) -Glamour Life Stuff -Pets (skip if you have Fun with Pets Collection) -Happy Holiday Stuff (skip if you have The Sims 2 Holiday Edition) -Seasons -Celebration Stuff (skip if you have The Sims 2 Double Deluxe) -H&M Stuff (skip if you have Best of Business Collection) -Bon Voyage -Teen Style Stuff (skip if you have University Life Collection) -FreeTime -Kitchen & Bath Interior Design Stuff (skip if you have Best of Business Collection) -IKEA Home Stuff (skip if you have University Life Collection) -Apartment Life -Mansion & Garden Stuff (skip if you have Fun with Pets Collection)

If you’ve installed all packs, great! You can even launch your game from SP9′s (Mansion & Garden Stuff) disc and executable as it uses SecuROM which WORKS on modern OSes.

Getting your game to work properly:

Your game is fully installed, patched and even running if you have Bon Voyage and later released packs!

But you probably noticed very heavy lag, crashing, bad graphics and things not running as they should. That’s because, just like the Ultimate Collection, the game is a PITA to get running properly on Modern OSes! If you have Bon Voyage and/or later released packs: I HIGHLY recommend you to uninstall SecuROM from your machine. This is going to help greatly with game performance. Use the SecuROM Removal Tool I’ve linked earlier and remove it from your PC. Do NOT open the game again as it’s going to install itself again if you do so.

If you have Mansion & Garden Stuff: After uninstalling SecuROM, you’re going to need to install Lazy Duchess’ Sims2RPC Launcher I’ve linked earlier. Follow their instructions on the download page and be sure to apply the 4gb patch in the launcher as it’s going to GREALTY help with the crashing.

Or... if you DO NOT have Mansion & Garden Stuff: Get an appropriate NoCD executable for the pack you are using to launch your game and apply the 4GB patch to it. Open the 4GB patch executable and use it on your game’s exe.

After doing all that, all that remains is fixing your game performance, resolution and graphics!

Install Graphics Rules Maker and open it. Firstly, you’re going to have to add your Graphics card to the game’s database. To do that, go the “Device Info” tab and add it there.

Back to the “Settings” tab, be sure your game is set to “The Sims 2″ and is properly recognizing where your game is installed, if for some reason it isn’t, click “Browse...” and point it to your latest installed pack’s folder. For example: “C:\Program Files (x86)\EA Games\The Sims 2 Mansion & Garden Stuff”.

-Force Texture Memory: Use the auto-detect button and it should automatically calculate the best value for your graphics card.

Check “Disable texture memory estimate adjustment” and “Enable driver’s memory manager” boxes. If you have an AMD Radeon HD 7000 series, also check the “Fix AMD Radeon HD 7000 series recognition”. If you have Intel integrated graphics, check the last two boxes. Now you can set your resolution! Choose your default (which one the game is going to start with) and maximum resolution your game is going to support.

After doing all that, you can click “Save Files...”

And... Done! You got your disc-based The Sims 2 game fully working, properly patched and fixed!!!

Any Feedback on how to improve this guide is very welcome!

Happy Simming, y’all!!! :)

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved at our archive

This is the scientific version of letting nazis come hold conferences.

By Michael Hiltzik

On Oct. 4, Stanford University’s newly minted president, Jonathan Levin, opened an on-campus conference about pandemic policies by expressing the hope that the proceedings would “bring together people with different perspectives, engage in a day of discussion, and in that way, try to repair some of the rifts that opened during COVID.”

He was followed to the lectern by the conference organizer, Stanford public policy professor Jay Bhattacharya, who described the event’s goal as fostering “dialogue with one another rather than having a situation where the goal is to destroy people who disagree with you.”

He said he hoped that the conference would be a “model” for how to bring together people of divergent views.

If only it were. Within minutes of their opening remarks, their hopes were exploded.

That happened during the conference’s opening panel, which was labeled “Evidence-Based Decision Making During a Pandemic.”

Turning the conversation to the issue of COVID’s origins, panelist Andrew Noymer, who teaches about population health and disease prevention at UC Irvine, launched into a fact-free attack on Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fauci has become a target of relentless smears by right-wingers and congressional Republicans.

“I believe,” Noymer said, “that the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus are that it’s ... an experimental virus that escaped from a lab and Tony Fauci is intimately linked to the funding for experiments that created this virus.”

There’s no evidence that the virus escaped from a lab, much less that Fauci as NIAID director funded any experiments that created the virus. No one on the panel called Noymer to account.

A few other low points during the day reflected the organizers’ having invited conspiracy-mongers and purveyors of long-debunked claims to share the stage with public health and science professionals who have spent the last few years battling a tide of misinformation and disinformation about the pandemic.

Stanford posted videos of all the conference panels and speeches on its website and on YouTube on Friday, expanding the potential audience beyond the few hundred people who attended the event in person.

As I mentioned in an earlier column about the conference, the idea that universities such as Stanford should be arenas for airing all opinions in a search for truth is simplistic and historically incorrect. Universities have always had, and even embraced, the duty to draw the line between fact and fiction — to determine when an assertion or opinion falls below the line of intellectual acceptability.

“Science and quackery cannot be treated as having scientific and moral equivalence,” John P. Moore, a distinguished biologist and epidemiologist at Weill Cornell Medical College who played a part in debunking misinformation about the role of HIV in AIDS during the 1990s, wrote recently. “Do NASA scientists attend conferences by people who believe the moon-landing was faked? Do geographers and geologists attend conferences held by idiots who believe the earth is flat? Of course not.”

Stanford did some things right. After the initial conference agenda was published in August, it was criticized on social media and in the science community (and by me) for mainstreaming an “anti-science agenda (and revisionist history),” in the words of vaccine expert and pseudoscience debunker Peter Hotez.

Several more participants were added to the final roster in a possible effort to balance the lineup. (It may be that the organizers approached some of them before the original announcement came under attack.)

This effort bore fruit. In the first session, for example, health policy experts Douglas K. Owens and Josh Salomon of Stanford’s medical school educated their fellow panelists in the realities of crafting social policies in the first months of a deadly pandemic with little-understood medical characteristics or health implications.

Yet a persistent subtext of the conference was that the social interventions taken against the pandemic, such as business and school closings, mask and social distancing advisories and lockdowns, were generally worse than the disease. This echoed the position of Bhattacharya, a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, a manifesto published in October 2020 that called for ending lockdowns and school closures and pursuing “herd immunity” through “natural infection” of almost everyone other than the aged and infirm.

During the opening panel, moderator Wilk Wilkinson, a blogger on the concept of “personal accountability,” offered the astonishing criticism that public health leaders “focused very narrowly on deaths from COVID, and often it came at the expense of other social values” such as “being able to visit people, ... or putting children in school as they normally would go to school, or attend funerals.”

It fell to Salomon to observe tactfully that “in the early part of the pandemic, in March 2020, “it made sense to focus on mortality. We all saw ... the stacks of body bags in New York City.” Over time, he said, social trade-offs from public health interventions can be weighed, as they are today. But if there’s a higher imperative for public health officials than reducing deaths from a deadly pandemic while it is in full cry, what is it?

As it happens, researchers have found that social interventions did succeed in reducing infections and mortality, a conclusion that was barely mentioned at the conference.

COVID death rates in U.S. states were reduced by restaurant, gym and pool shutdowns, vaccine mandates for school and government workers, and stay-at-home orders, according to a massive study published by the British medical journal The Lancet in April 2023. Infection rates were reduced by bar, restaurant and primary school closures; mask mandates; restrictions on large gatherings; stay-at-home orders; and vaccine mandates.

Social policies in place during the pandemic are easy to denigrate because their costs were evident but their positive effects were often invisible, Salomon observed. “It’s harder for us to recognize the lives that were saved, the hospital systems that were not overwhelmed, the ... illnesses that were avoided.”

Throughout the conference, anti-government paranoia and misinformation about pandemic policies were strong on the wing. Rutgers biologist Bryce Nickels — who has accused scientists of “fraud” for concluding in a 2020 paper that COVID most likely originated in the natural spillover of the virus from animals via the wildlife trade in China, not through a laboratory experiment gone awry — expressed the conviction during the panel on the origins of COVID that “the pandemic was caused by reckless research and a lab accident.”

Nickels insinuated that the scientists behind such research “have blood on their hands or culpability in some level.”

I asked Bhattacharya if comments such as Nickels’ and Noymer’s comported with his desire to eradicate from the debate over COVID “the goal ... to destroy people who disagree with you.” He hasn’t replied.

Levin told me by email that “revisiting pandemic policies, with the benefit of hindsight and data, is a valuable topic for study,” and that he thinks “we’ll learn more from that inquiry if we frame it around questions and evidence rather than ‘who was right.’”

Some presenters uttered evident misinformation. Consider Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and a former COVID advisor to the Trump administration, who attacked pandemic lockdowns and their advocates because lockdowns “failed to stop the dying, they failed to stop the spread — that’s the data.”

But this is a flagrant category error. No one argued that the lockdowns would stop the spread of COVID or “stop the dying.” They were consistently portrayed as policies to slow the spread and consequently mortality in order to relieve the crushing pressure on healthcare facilities and personnel long enough to enable them to get a handle on the pandemic — “flattening the curve” was the watchword. And over time, they succeeded in doing just that.

Then there’s Marty Makary, a prominent surgeon at Johns Hopkins University who made a name for himself during the pandemic by repeatedly predicting that the pandemic was on the verge of ending due to natural immunity, and was consistently confounded by the appearance of successive new waves of deadly COVID variants.

Makary related during the opening panel that he was frustrated because once data arrived about the social effects of lockdowns “there was no interest in evaluating” what was “the largest public health intervention in modern history.”

But that’s just wrong. Data-driven analyses of social interventions surfaced even in the earliest days of the pandemic — including a multidiscipinary symposium sponsored by Stanford in the fall of 2021, featuring 54 experts from academia, public health and government.

Up to this day, the medical, public health and social effects of the pandemic and pandemic policies have been the subject of unrelenting study — more than 700,000 papers by nearly 2 million researchers thus far, according to an estimate offered by Stanford epidemiologist John P.A. Ionannidis in his closing conference remarks.

The conference organizers wanted to congratulate themselves for producing what Bhattacharya described as “the first event where people of very different viewpoints about what happened during the pandemic are going to speak to each other in a way that’s constructive.”

But a conference in which conspiratorial delusions and outright falsehoods were treated as deserving the same respect as scientifically validated research, and in which the authors of serious virological and epidemiological studies, as well as respected public health authorities, were subjected to smears, was nothing like “constructive.”

Considering Bhattacharya’s expectation that this conference should be a model for others, then: Let’s hope not.

[silurisanguine]

OC character deep delve - Seren Jones

Questions originally from a post by Painted-Bees, but the post seems to have vanished. Luckily I'd kept my draft as i started answering so here they are in their entirety. I tag the Coemancer Crew as always and anyone who'd like to do this as i really found it helped flesh out my ocs as the questions ask things i hadn't thought about. This is for Seren Jones, my Starfield OC - See her original look, her look during her early Starborn days and her more settled self.

Under cut because there are 50 questions!

1. How does your character think of their father? What do they hate and love about him? What influence - literal or imagined - did the father have? She loves her father Michael dearly. He helped give her a strong understanding for the need for education, but made learning fun, even in the most trying circumstances. She loves his enthusiasm for learning, but wishes he'd be more careful with his gambling. Though knows he is a secret card shark when it comes to poker!

2. Their mother? How do they think of her? What do they hate? Love? What influence - literal or imagined - did the mother have? She adores her mother Anne. Her mom was always the rock that held her family together even when they had to move from one planet to another. She was always there when Seren was upset, though she knows she got her emotional reactions to things from her mom too. As well as she thinks her empathic nature. She knows her mum hides it but now she is an adult she sees little tells and wishes her mum was more open about it. Once Starborn, she senses it clearly from the versions of Anne she brings herself to meet.

3. Brothers, sisters? Who do they like? Why? What do they despise about their siblings? Thanks to the Colony war, it put a scupper on her parents wanting any more children, instead choosing to focus on Seren alone.

4. What type of discipline was your character subjected to at home? Strict? Lenient? Her parents were pretty laid back with her growing up, never really needing to be strict with her as she was a quiet child who never really got into trouble, who enjoyed learning and kept to herself mostly.

5. Were they overprotected as a child? Sheltered? She was protected as a kid, mainly at first from the war, as much as possible but when she moved back to Akila, she soon learnt about prejudice and resentment from others that was only made worse when they moved to New Atlantis again. Her parents may have been laid back with her, but were protective against those who tried to bully her.

6. Did they feel rejection or affection as a child? Only ever affection from her parents.

7. What was the economic status of their family? She remembers them living in a large home in Midtown when she was little, then a modest apartment in New Atlantis, then when they moved back to Akila, the home was smaller in Mid town. Thanks to her father being a professor and her mom working for various businesses as PA, she never went without, but they tended to be modest with their income, just in case. It's why she was happy to help fund a nice central apartment for them when they retired to NA.

8. How does your character feel about religion? Her parents are both Enlightened, though not deeply involved and she is an atheist too, but doesn't subscribe to any system. She can respect other faiths until they start assuming she is like them or tries to push their beliefs on her. Now she is Starborn she knows there are things she doesn't understand, but still doesn't think a divine being created it.

9. What about political beliefs? She grew up Freestar and values freedom, but she also sees the theoretical benefits of the UC. Having grown up in both societies she sees the good and bad in both. Now she feels both systems need a major overhaul and redesign. Ones that care for all walks of life.

10. Is your character street-smart, book-smart, intelligent, intellectual, slow-witted? She has two degrees, one is starship design, the other business, so yes she is well educated. She wasn't street smart at first, but soon learnt to be once she became a whistleblower.

11. How do they see themselves: as smart, as intelligent, uneducated? She knows she is smart and thanks to her empathic nature, can be manipulative. She hopes her compassionate morality tempers that.

12. How does their education and intelligence – or lack thereof - reflect in their speech pattern, vocabulary, and pronunciations?

As above she can use words to manipulate people to her point of view. People have always considered her to have a 'silver tongue'. Being Starborn now and knowing how events usually play out makes it even easier for her.

13. Did they like school? Teachers? Schoolmates? She did a combination of virtual and in situ learning. She didn't enjoy early school as jumping from Freestar to UC then back, made her a target for kids from both sides. It wasn't until secondary school, where she had settled into Akila again, did she find at least some fair weather friends to make life less lonely. When she moved once again to UC space, she stayed with the school for a bit learning virtually so she'd be with people she knew, even if they were never close with her. Her teachers were alright, though she knew they also held prejudices against her, especially the UC teachers when they found she was educated in FC space. She often had to work to prove she was as educated as the rest of the students. Thankfully her father being an acclaimed professor himself, was often able to have a quiet word now and then with them and put that to rest.

14. Were they involved at school? Sports? Clubs? Debate? Were they unconnected? Not really. She did get involved in history club at one point as she was fascinated by Solomon Coe and how he started the FC, but she often argued with the teacher who ran it, who often was very biased against the UC for everything, which Seren knew wasn't accurate. Other than that she tended to keep to herself.

15. Did they graduate? High-School? College? Do they have a PHD? A GED? She graduated with honors in Business and starship design.

16. What does your character do for a living? How do they see their profession? What do they like about it? Dislike? Currently? She doesn't have a set occupation. Each universe is so unique she has to adapt to them. Practically she is an explorer and adventurer...sometimes thief and smuggler: acts she does to survive. In the original universe she loved being part of Constellation and hopes to go back to that when the time..and universe are right.

17. Did they travel? Where? Why? When? She moved a lot with her parents between Akila and New Atlantis, as her father took what ever teaching jobs he could before, during and after the Colony war. When she as an adult turned whistle-blower against the company she worked for, she had to move around a lot whilst she was in hiding as a miner. She made the best of it, her explorer nature developed as part of it. Once she joined Constellation she travelled so much she lost count of the planets she visited. Now her travels take her to places she'd never though possible.

18. What did they find abroad, and what did they remember? That people are the same no matter what.

19. What were your character’s deepest disillusions? In life? What are they now? That when you think things are bad, they can get worse.

20. What were the most deeply impressive political or social, national or international, events that they experienced? Oh boy...The fact the UC kept Vae Victis alive and he knew and used Terrormorphs? The fact Ron Hope was a traitor to the FC, that the UC created the Crimson Fleet in their vile treatment of prisoners. That the artifacts Constellation were collecting led to the multiverse! Just a few things...

21. What are your character’s manners like? What is their type of hero? Whom do they hate?

She is polite, but she is street-smart now and can get the feel for how to interact with people. That was how she was so good at going under cover with the CF for Sysdef. She doesn't have heroes, though her parents are close to that. She hates anyone who enjoys cruelty- The Hunter especially.

22. Who are their friends? Lovers? ‘Type’ or 'ideal’ partner? She is close friends with Barrett and Andreja, as well as Vlad. Less so with Sarah, though she respects her. The love of her life is Sam, in all ways and forms. She never met someone who sparked joy in her life, like he did and still does.

23. What do they want from a partner? What do they think and feel of sex? A best friend, someone who understands them and supports them. She loves sex, the intimacy and connection with another person on that deep level. Thankfully she found a partner who was very into it too.

24. What social groups and activities does your character attend? What role do they like to play? What role do they actually play, usually? Reluctant leader in her original verse. She never wanted to take such a role in Constellation, and even though Sarah was the defacto leader, she often felt that she did more to run the group than Sarah did, when it came to the Artifacts at least. Now they play what ever they need to be to survive each new universe.

25. What are their hobbies and interests? She used to love ship building, and that will come back to her soon. she also loved decorating her homes and outposts. She enjoys weapon and spacesuit design as well as everything that comes with exploring.

26. What does your character’s home look like? Personal taste? Clothing? Hair? Appearance?

Her OG home in Akila was cosy as was her apartment in NA. She liked to mix the more rustic FC style with contemporary features. Clothing wise, she is smart practical, favouring darker colours. Her hair was originally dyed silver grey, but she's since been dark turquoise blue and now sporting deep purple.

27. How do they relate to their appearance? How do they wear their clothing? Style? Quality? She like to wear darker makeup, especially lipstick, getting some semi permanent makeup done at Enhance so she doesn't have to worry about it. Hair wise, she loves colour even if her styles are practical. In fact everything now is practical, but she is keen to maintain her appearance.

28. Who is your character’s mate? How do they relate to them? How did they make their choice? Partner? Sam Coe. She and Sam share a similar sense of humour, she adores how devoted he is to his daughter and thinks she fell in love with him over that first. It showed how compassionate he was.

29. What is your character’s weaknesses? Hubris? Pride? Controlling? Grief and vengeance.

30. Are they holding on to something in the past? Can he or she forgive? At the moment she cannot forgive the Hunter for what he did and from everything she's seen and experienced, she never will. She wishes she could have held onto something from her past, but lost it all in the Unity except her memories. But she holds onto her love for Sam.

31. Does your character have children? How do they feel about their parental role? About the children? How do the children relate? She doesn't have any biological children, though she became much like a mother to Cora originally. She believes Cora thought of her as a mom too, but things didn't go well after Sam's death, with Cora blaming her for not saving him. Now she's Starborn, she's not sure she can have children herself.

32. How does your character react to stress situations? Defensively? Aggressively? Evasively? Depends on the situation. When she knows it's going to be stressful, she can be steady. But sudden events can knock her for six and she can be very emotional about them.

33. Do they drink? Take drugs? What about their health? She is Freestar, so can hold her liquor. She enjoys a glass or three of whisky or bourbon. She had tried Aurora once, didn't think much of it. Now she is Starborn her health is exceptional, but she knows it comes with caveats.

34. Does your character feel self-righteous? Revengeful? Contemptuous? She believes in vengeance. She crosses the Unity in order to become strong enough to end the Hunter.

35. Do they always rationalize errors? How do they accept disasters and failures? She didn't do well after Sam's death. Found it very hard to accept it wasn't her fault. Since then she'd had to time to accept that The Hunter played them all.

36. Do they like to suffer? Like to see other people suffering? They do not enjoy suffering. They jumped universes to try and run from it! But they would happily see The Hunter suffer as well as anyone else who enjoyed cruelty.

37. How is your character’s imagination? Daydreaming a lot? Worried most of the time? Living in memories? She daydreams a lot about finding somewhere to just stop. She worries she will never find that. She keeps her memories close, though she is starting to be more open to living in the moment.

38. Are they basically negative when facing new things? Suspicious? Hostile? Scared? Enthusiastic? She has no choice in experiencing new things, if she has a chance to find a universe she can stay in, she'd take it. She is often terrified of what she will find next but she is quick to adapt.

39. What do they like to ridicule? What do they find stupid? Stupidity and arrogance. She likes to bring down those who are both. See her original universe Delgado and The Crimson Fleet...also Ron Hope.

40. How is their sense of humor? Do they have one? Sometimes quirky and light hearted, sometimes dark and dry. Her experiences have changed her somewhat.

41. Is your character aware of who they are? Strengths? Weaknesses? Idiosyncrasies? Capable of self-irony? She is now acutely aware of the fact she is Starborn. She isn't human anymore. She knows she has powers beyond any human and that comes with a sense of superiority she fights to restrain. Thankfully her empathy helps her keep her sense of compassion and morality.

42. What does your character want most? What do they need really badly, compulsively? What are they willing to do, to sacrifice, to obtain? To find a universe with a Sam just like her first. She knows now it wont be the same, but she can try again and do better this time. She sacrificed her humanity to do this.

43. Does your character have any secrets? If so, are they holding them back? She keeps her Starborn nature close until she trusts those she's with as there is no hiding her abilities in a fight.

44. How badly do they want to obtain their life objectives? How do they pursue them? Desperately. She jumps universes to find the right one.

45. Is your character pragmatic? Think first? Responsible? All action? A visionary? Passionate? Quixotic? She is passionate, but holds it back as best she can in situations where she needs a clear head.

46. Is your character tall? Short? What about size? Weight? Posture? How do they feel about their physical body? She is 5'6" and strong, wiry physique. She is Akilan born so stronger than she appears. She holds herself tall. She knows her Starborn body will always be healthy, but worries what it has changed about her.

47. Do they want to project an image of a younger, older, more important person? Do they want to be visible or invisible? She knows she can command authority, but temper it with camaraderie that people just happily work with her. Being Starborn and in new universes she plays the role she needs to whilst learning where she is.

48. How are your character’s gestures? Vigorous? Weak? Controlled? Compulsive? Energetic? Sluggish? She tends to mirror people when she talks with them, as her empathic nature uses that to make them feel comfortable around her.

49. What about voice? Pitch? Strength? Tempo and rhythm of speech? Pronunciation? Accent? Her voice is cultured Akilan though again she can mirror accents if needed to work with people. Slightly melodic and well spoken.

50. What are the prevailing facial expressions? Sour? Cheerful? Dominating? Very neutral face, but she's been told her eyes are piercing as if looking into their souls.

[officialinuyasha]

Yashahime - Takashi Shiina Blog Translation : Shonen Sunday S January 2022 [Part 2]

11/29/2021

The early lives of the three princesses as depicted in the original work, the anime, have a fantasy flavor and an awareness of “fairy tales”. Towa-chan and Setsuna-chan “grew up just the two of them in a forest protected by a barrier, and the subordinate of an evil witch attacked their paradise”, which is very romantic. Meanwhile, in the comicalization I tried to create an image of the personal tragedy of kids whose parents were Sengoku warriors. Using the scene from the previous chapter where they’re transported in an ox carriage, it’s simplified, and I thought an image of “war” was necessary. 

The idea “to select mu onna as android wet nurses” came from depicting “the reliability of the serious Sesshomaru-sama in a gorgeous mansion modeled after the Rokujouin mansion of ‘Genji Monogatari’ in a casual way”, and the story came together as “youkai are sometimes frightening and different beings than humans, but regarding the Yashahime they are friends and family”. 

The imps/little onis who are together with the mu onna are a yokai called kanashibari, and originally (1) appeared as tormentors of (Inuyasha’s) mother played by the mu onna in order to trick Inuyasha by Lord Sesshomaru. I love them so much, their eyebrows and eyes, their body shape, their clothes, everything about them is just too much for me. They’re creepy-cute. Therefore, when I had the mu onna appear again, the circumstances are that I wanted them to be together (with the princesses) by all means, so they were called out. I did the setting as adding to the atmosphere where such things hang around as a demon dressed as a court lady, and it was like “Since we worked with Lord Sesshomaru before, we have often worked with him on the same spot again”... Yeah, exactly that.

I tried to draw Konton-san, who has shaved his beard and changed his eyes (when compared to the anime) after a meeting with Takahashi Rumiko-sensei, where the topic that it might be interesting to increase the level of beauty of enemy characters in Shiina's version was brought up… Well, it was like “In Shiina’s universe is that how it is? Lol” (laugh). In addition, I also let my personal desire to draw a “cool Jaken-sama” explode. Considering the fact that he was so scared of the band of the seven, he doesn't seem to be that strong against the storyboard mid-boss level, let alone the small fry (laugh), but I plan to have a more detailed account of what happened here later on. For now, I'd like to say that he did his best to protect the children, and I'd like you to record the charming voice of Cho-san, who plays Jaken in the anime, in the style of Gilboa-san from ‘Gundam UC’: “Take care of Tikva... Take care of my family... (Boom)".

Needless to say, Towa-chan's narration at the end contains my thoughts on the much-loved masterpiece "Inuyasha" and "Yashahime". When they start running in the style of an anime opening, I think it would be more exciting if you could play the theme song of the first half of the first season, 'New Era', in your brain. I made it with that in mind. Like “Let's run, let's take you to the promised place (2)" (laugh).

The image of Rin-sama (formerly Rin-chan), who is sealed in the epilogue, was changed to a more old-fashioned single hakama (hitoegakama) and thin silk (but for various reasons it's not as sheer as the original) because I felt that a properly dressed lintel would look like an Edo period samurai wife, but the rest of the story follows the original.

I think it's a statement of intent that “the story is the same as the anime as a general framework”, but as I've said many times before, the extent to what is considered a "general framework" will differ from person to person, and I'll be rearranging various parts including character situations and motivations, so it's not the same as the original anime, but the world line is surprisingly very close to it. I think I've managed to create a good balance and distance between the two versions, so please enjoy what I've made of the original work and the way I've rearranged it.

So, up to this point, this is the prologue and departure arc. The first volume containing these three chapters is scheduled to be released around January 18th and it will have a gorgeous specification with color pages, so be sure to buy it, please. The fourth chapter, which begins a new development in the next issue, takes place in the village of the exterminators led by the grown-up Kohaku-kun. I’m also preparing a surprise unique to the manga worldline, and I’m currently working hard on writing the story, so please wait for it.

Source: https://cnanews.asablo.jp/blog/2021/11/29/9444067

Notes: 

1- It refers to the original work. 

2- The very beginning of the song.

[id-element0]

Bypassing TS2 intro movie

I honestly don't know who would need this but since I have it, I can also share. I was fixing/revamping my ReShade preset the other day and I said "Why don't I also try and install it for the sims 2 while I'm at it?" This reminded me that I still had to hit the space bar when the intro video came up. I realise a lot of people still handle it this way or just delete the movie file. Both ways are equally annoying to me so I decided to solve it. What I did was creating a half-second long blank movie in avi format and changing the extension. Why is it better than hitting the space bar or just deleting the file, you ask? Well, it's effortless. You don't have to do anything apart from replacing the original file. It also deals with the issue that comes with deleting the file, that of the game hanging for a moment after the logo because it's searching for a file that doesn't exist.

No screenshot because there's nothing to show. The transition from EA logo to loading screen is quite seamless with a momentary black screen. So for anyone interested, here it is. Also, my first sims 2 upload - yay, I guess.

- INSTALLATION -

You need to be able to see file extensions in your file manager. Search for how to enable it according to your OS if you cannot see file extensions.

For Starter Pack -> “C:\Program Files (x86)\The Sims 2 Starter Pack\Double Deluxe\Base\TSData\Res\Movies\”

For Origin/EA App -> "C:\Program Files (x86)\Origin Games\The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection\Double Deluxe\Base\TSData\Res\Movies\"

For Retail/Disc -> "C:\Program Files (x86)\EA GAMES\The Sims 2\TSData\Res\Movies\"

Find the file that says intro_eng_audio.movie and change the extension part 'movie' into something like 'bak'. This is just for precaution if you want it back again. If you already deleted it then just download mine.

- DOWNLOAD -

:: MEDIAFIRE | SFS ::

And now the technical details for the nerds.

The video codec EA uses is Electronic Arts Madcow Video or in short 'mad'. It is allowed to be decoded but not encoded. Meaning you can watch media created with this codec but cannot create media with it. I know the game can load media encoded with AVI so I decided to create an empty avi file and just change the extension to 'movie'. It turns out that as long as the name is the same, the game doesn't care the codec is different.

So in theory you can use this file to replace ealogo_audio.movie as well. If the file in the Base folder doesn't work try ..\TSData\Res\Movies\ in your latest pack. For UC and Starter Pack it would be SP9; for disc version it would be whatever you installed last.

[eretzyisrael]

by Jessica Costescu

A student group at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law published an anti-Semitic cartoon depicting the school's dean, who is Jewish, holding bloody utensils over a dinner table, a version of the ancient blood libel employed in anti-Semitic propaganda that accused Jews of using the blood of Christian children for baking matzah and other rituals.FreeBeacon

Berkeley's chapter of Law Students for Justice in Palestine posted a cartoon depicting law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky holding a fork and knife dripping with blood over a dinner table, with the caption "No Dinner With Zionist Chem While Gaza Starves!" The graphic, which was posted on Monday, was deleted approximately half an hour later, but the Washington Free Beacon obtained a screenshot. Shortly after, the cartoon was reposted, but without blood covering the utensils.

The Instagram post came in response to an email from Chemerinsky last week inviting third-year law students to eat dinner in his home, according to the Law Students for Justice in Palestine chapter. The group is led by Malak Afaneh, a third-year Berkeley law student who has commended Palestinians for their "active resistance against the apartheid state of Israel."

"This dinner is the prime example of a normalization PR event that hopes to distract students from Dean Chem's complicity and support for the genocide of the Palestinian peoples," the group said in a caption under the cartoon. "While Dean Chem wants to wine and dine his students, he continues to approve of UC investments into weapons companies like Blackrock, Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop, and more."

Law Students for Justice in Palestine encouraged students to boycott "all of Chemerinsky's events" and demand that Berkeley divest "from ALL TIES to the apartheid state of Israel." Berkeley Law School declined to comment. Chemerinsky did not return a request for comment.

The grotesque cartoon comes after the House Committee on Education and the Workforce announced last month that it was requesting internal documents regarding Berkeley's response to the outbreak of anti-Semitism on campus.

Afaneh started at Berkeley Law in 2021, according to her LinkedIn profile. One year later, she shared her desire to use her law degree to aid the Palestinians in their "battle for liberation."

"For years, Palestinians everywhere have engaged in active resistance against the apartheid state of Israel," Afaneh wrote in a 2022 Facebook post. "As a lawyer, I hope to aid in this battle for liberation, so that I and generations to come may see a Palestine free from the river to the sea."

Another student, Matt Fernandes, is a member of and organizer with Berkeley's Law Students for Justice in Palestine. In 2022, Fernandes promoted a bylaw that amended the group's constitution to include a ban on pro-Israel speakers from participating in club events. He also accused Zionists of holding "positions of power" with "connections to media," according to anti-Semitism watchdog Canary Mission.

Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine did not respond to a request for comment.

The Free Beacon in a Feb. 1 report unearthed a similar cartoon at the University of Pennsylvania. Dwayne Booth, a lecturer at Penn's Annenberg School for Communication, published a slew of anti-Semitic cartoons, including one that depicts Zionists sipping Gazan blood from wineglasses.

[adobe-outdesign]

I see all your neopet posts and reblogs, so how a neopet review? What is your favorite neopet design and why?

Gotta go with the Xweetok for this one. I've always loved this design ever since it came out—it's like the perfect blend of cute and elegant at the same time.

Xweetoks are vaguely chipmunk-esq with the stripes and general head shape, but the actual body anatomy is more like a fox than any kind of rodent. The end result is something that feels like it could be a real animal, even if it isn't.

And speaking of stripes, the use of color on these guys is also particularly good. They have these really pretty thick black lines running from their heads all the way down to their tails, with color often (though not always) constrained to the stripe and the mane. For example, in the basic colors shown above, brown is used as the base with bright pops of color elsewhere, rather than the entire Neopet being a single color.

In addition to the colors being pretty, the lines also accent the body shape and give it a great sense of movement. This is especially noticeable in their old circle pose, where you get this really nice curved body shape due to them sitting backwards.

It's also worth noting that Xweetoks are one of the only Neopet species to have open eyes that don't have human-like corneas or irises but are also more than just black dots. The deep blacks of their eyes really help to accent the black stripes on their bodies, while the color in the middle helps to pop whatever secondary color is used.

Thankfully, Xweetoks also fared pretty well from customization; the only major change is them now having one paw raised up to hold items (which doesn't look great, but it's not like the fists look good on any Neopet) and slightly different front leg anatomy. Some changes, such as removing the weird thin line above the eye and making the mane thicker, are actually improvements. I do wish it kept the highlight on the mane like it did on the head, but otherwise, Xweetoks look just as good now as they did before if you can get over the fist.

(Also, Xweetoks are one of the only species where female pets look better than males, due to the default pre-customization design being taken as the female design for a change.)

Favorite colours:

Faerie: Faerie Xwees have always been absolutely gorgeous. The light brown base combined with teal and dark brown is beautiful, and the shape of the brown markings accents the body wonderfully. I also love the style of the wings and how the antennae on the head run directly off the stripes, the shape of which are matched by the first set of wings. Unconverted faerie Xwees are super dynamic, but the converted ones still look quite nice if you want to be able to customize them.

Mutant: What a fantastically sleazy design. Taking what's basically a chipmunk of sorts and making the mutant version a rat is a fantastic concept, complete with buck teeth and a naked tail. The expression is also fantastic (slightly more so in the unconverted art, but the converted still looks pretty good).

Pirate: Unfortunately the UC version of this pet isn't available any more as of the time of writing, but even the converted design is nice, with a nice dull grayish-blue base and some nice red and gold accents that really pop. The old art really went hard though, with the mane basically acting as a beard and the face having a different, tougher expression. I particularly love the ponytail at the back of the mane.

BONUS: I also have to give a shoutout to the fire Xwee, because I have one. :) The fire mane and stripes against the black base works beautiful; definitely one of the all-time best fire pets.