#How old is it...? I think it still has pictures from late 2011 on it...

[blackwaxidol]

Found them... Hopefully my 3DS can still boot up, the last time I used it I noticed it was taking a little longer to turn on but otherwise was functional.

[condensed-ink]

I've been thinking a lot about #FixTF2 and I know that some might have their doubts about the movement, however, I've realized that, even if it does not succeed in getting Valve's attention, it will end up contributing towards an important development in recent years - the shift in the public perception of Valve.

If you are person who was growing up in the early 2010's then you obviously remember how Valve games were essentially the cultural zeitgeist of the time, how you would see pictures of King Gaben on every meme/YouTube thumbnail during a Steam Summer Sale. As I understand it, Valve essentially rode this wave of good will throughout the 2010's. Even when everyone was getting frustrated with the lack of sequels for games such as HL2 and L4D2, some people would just excuse it with "ah y'know Valve, not communicating and not doing anything is just their style, this is just probably part of Gaben's 5D chess - tier master plan". However, the cracks in this image have been slowly showing up for a long time:

Portal fans haven't had anything since Portal 2's release back in 2011. We have had some small VR titles but that's hardly any consolation.

Left for Dead 2 came out all the way back in 2009 with nothing afterwards. As of June of 2024, the game still has more than 10 thousand concurrent players yet it is also unplayable for a significant amount of people due to reported DDos attacks.

The suffering of Half - life fans at this point is a meme in itself. The only thing we got was HL:Alyx back in 2020 and, even though it's a very good game, it was inaccessible to a lot of people at launch due the costs and lack of VR hardware. We were left on a cliff-hanger AGAIN and four years later we have no news of any follow-up.

In my opinion, Valve to some extent could ignore these fandoms since they were smaller compared to their big earners. But it is the recent issues with these bigger titles that have started to test everyone's patience and tolerance for Valve's bullshit:

Team Fortress 2 - I mean what else is there to say: rampant cheating and idle bots, bot hosters doxxing and swatting people. The bots crisis has been destroying the game for the past 5 years. If we remember the original SaveTF2 movement, it had a more positive tone, i. e., people talking about how much they love the game and pleading Valve to fix it. Well, one shitty tweet and two years later the tone has gone from "Please fix the game" to "FIX THE FUCKING GAME YOU ASSHOLES" and rightfully so.

CS2 also has a myriad of issues. CS:GO became CS2 after the game jumped to the Source 2 engine, but the resulting game, by many accounts, is a downgrade. A lot of game modes and maps from the original game were not included and are still not present as of June of 2024. Cheaters are rampant. To what degree I cannot say but it is to an extent where a significant enough portion of the player base is affected. Also, the game hasn't had an operation (major content update) since 2021. The player count is still high, but a lot voices in the community have been chewing out Valve for this level of incompetence.

With DOTA 2 I cannot say for sure. Some people talk about neglect whilst others say the game is in a decent state considering the game still gets frequent updates and patches. At most I can say that there is a portion of players that are dissatisfied with the state of the game but most likely to a much lesser extent than in the previous cases.

HOWEVER

All of that is just one part of the double whammy, the second part is probably is much worse than the first - a lack of continuity for Valve's legacy.

I mean, let's think about it for a second here: most of us who grew with the Valve classics are probably in our mid-to late twenties at this point. Of course, I'm not saying that there aren't any younger fans but the bulk is the old guard. I'm pretty sure a lot of kids and teenagers don't even know a lot about these games and it's not their fault, they weren't old enough to experience them. The blame lies SOLELY with Valve because they have done NOTHING to boost the visibility of their older series due to the fact that they haven't bothered to make a single proper sequel for any of them.

And speaking of visibility, Valve's advertising strategy is non - existent and downright insulting . They really have this holier-than-thou perception of themselves, where they think "I am THE Valve softworks, makers of TF2 and Half-Life! How could you NOT know of us?!?!" and then expect everyone else to spread news of their games through word-of-mouth. Like, I'm sorry, Gabe, but we don't owe you shit. I'm not gonna advertise your shitty card-game and upcoming mediocre 5v5 hero shooter just because I had fun playing TF2 back in high school. Like, it's no surprise that you're not gaining any new fans when this has been your modus operandi for the past 10 years.

TO CONCLUDE

This is where we are right now: the old guard is either apathetic or straight-up hates Valve for their negligence, the younger generation barely knows about most of Valve's OG game series due to the lack of any meaningful output. At the end of the day, Valve isn't going to bankrupt, they're gonna keep taking their 30% cut from Steam and peddling gambling addictions to kids via cases. However, the era of good will is over, nobody is cutting them any slack anymore and, frankly, they deserve all the shit that's going to get thrown at them.

[rainedragon]

Mini Lolita Fashion History Lesson: MILK

Today, MILK is generally known as an 'otome' or 'girly' brand, and many of their modern items don't look like what modern lolita think of as lolita.

A recent MILK collection However, in the late 80s and early 90s, MILK was considered to be one of the quintessential Lolita brands.

1990s lolita wearing MILK In a 1994 zipper interview about the history of lolita fashion the brand representative for MILK states "I think what is now called lolita fashion is the fashion that milk has been making for a long time."

MILK was founded in 1970 by Hitomi Okawa (大川ひとみ). When Hitomi Okawa started as a designer there were not many DC brands yet and ready to wear fashion was really just starting to become more widespread in Japan. Okawa attended an art university in Kyoto because of a love of drawing that started in elementary school. She used to draw illustrations of girls and make things like paper dolls. At the age of 11, she drew many pictures of the same clothes and changed the patterns (polka dots, checks, flowers). She grew up the daughter of a doctor, in an affluent home where her mother would read magazines like Harper's Bazaar with 1950s and 1960s American fashion. She also looked at American fashion catalogs as a child, and cites this study of clothing in magazines and catalogs as her earliest sort of "studying" of fashion. 

50s/60s Harper's Bazaar In addition to drawing inspiration from the 50s & 60s Harper's Bazaar & American clothing catalogs, she also drew inspiration from military uniforms and how they have custom buttons and custom fabric and details like that, as well as current trends in London and Tokyo as the brand continued to develop. When she started however, she says that she was the only one making this sort of cute girly clothing in Japan and she felt like she had to make it because no one else was making what she wanted to wear.

50s/60s Harper's Bazaar

After graduating from Seian College of Art and Design, Department of Design, she started MILK in Harajuku. She wanted to start in the coolest place possible, so she decided on Central Apartment.

MILK Shop Front in the 70s, Central Apartment

She had come to Harajuku when she was either in High School or her first year of University and had stood in the middle of the pedestrian bridge right off Harajuku station, and she looked down at Omotesando and thought "Here is the coolest place, I want to be here!", and that's why she chose that location. The Bridge doesn't exist any more, it was torn down in 2011. She wasn't aware at the time that Central Apartment was a popular place for creators, she just thought that street was nice and that Central Apartment was modern and cool. In a 2021 interview she confessed that she sometimes still goes up to the pedestrian bridge on the Yoyogi Park side and looks at Omotesando, and when she does, she feels the same way she did when she was 20 years old.

Central Apartment (原宿セントラルアパート) was initially an apartment complex built in Harajuku in 1958 at the intersection of Meiji-dori. It was initially built for special international travelers like US military personnel. In the mid 1960s/early 1970s, the lower floors were converted into stores with offices in the upper apartment floors.

The Coffee shop Leon on the first floor was a popular spot with creative people. There were also shops like Mademoiselle Nonnon launched by designer Taro Aramaki which sold French style clothing and lots of horizontal stripes. Mademoiselle Nonnon is considered to be the source of the border (horizontal stripe) trend in Japan.

Initially, "MILK", was expensive and unrealistic for everyday wear, so it was mainly used as a stage costume for idols, however, people started wearing Milk as everyday clothing as time went on.

MILK also experimented with a Bridal line in the 70s as well.

While their runway looks were generally a bit more loud than the way the pieces would have been worn in real life, you can see some prairie revival influence their early 70s items as well as some silhouettes in the '76 collection that are starting to look more lolita-esque.

Here are a few runway examples from the 1980s, note the border print of a carousel in the 1988 collection and the knee length ruffled skirt in the 1982 one.

By the early 1990s, MILK was heavily featured in coordinates worn by young women who considered themselves lolita in magazines like Cutie and Zipper, and was also advertising in those magazines.

1990-1992 Cutie advertisements for MILK

Early 1990s looks from MILK were fairly consistent with what was on offer from similar shops like PRETTY and Shirley Temple.

MILK Coordinates from Nene magazine, 1995

Speaking of Shirley Temple, the founder of Shirley Temple, Rei Yanagawa (柳川れい), worked as a designer for MILK before starting the Shirley Temple children's brand in 1974.

As time went on, lolita fashion started to diverge from the MILK style, while MILK followed their own design concept and look more at current trends in girly fashion. Today, some iconic MILK items like their heart purse are still frequently used in lolita fashion, however, it would be difficult to walk into MILK today and put together a coordinate that would read the same as one made from items at Angelic Pretty.

While goth and punk brands typically have no issue relating themselves to goth or punk fashion, brands popular with lolita have sometimes resisted self-describing themselves as lolita, most likely in an attempt to not alienate non lolita customers, due to lolita fashion having a mixed reputation. MILK, like many other Japanese brands, especially DC brands, maintains that they make MILK style, even though their influence on what we call lolita fashion today, is unmistakable.

Past Posts: Olive Girls

[natriae]

bonus #2

masterlist

1.4k words

4 years since the end of another chance

"aieee,"

"yeah,aaieee," you giggled at your little girl. Right now instead of eating her food she played with the large diamond ring on your left ring finger. Her eggs were long forgotten as watched the engagement ring in awe. Under it sat a small silver band engraved on the inside with 11/04/12 and then 23/11/25 the days the two of you got together. Ushijima seemed hesitant on adding the original date, but you told him how important that day was for you and it was clear how important that day was for him too.

April 12th, 2011

Ushjima had come to your family's house just as the sun had begun to set and the birds chirped ready for bed. He politely knocked on the door then bowed to your father asking if he could take you on a quick adventure. Believe it or not Ushijima Wakatoshi didn't have the same amount of confidence when it came to your parents as he did on the court. As a 16 year old boy he was still nervous that they wouldn't see him as a good suitor for you. He was more than ecstatic when your dad gave him a small smile and said yes he may. You were far too excited to see him that you had run out of the house without a jacket. You had only noticed when the two of you had walked by Ushijima's house. He quickly climbed into his open window and grabbed the first hoodie he found. His new Shiratorizawa hoodie his mom had gotten for him when he had just got accepted into the school. You giggled watching the tall man try and fit through his tiny window. You knew a little about his mom and how strict she was, but you never realized how much he had risked when he snuck out to see you. Running back he whisked you away from your thoughts by trying to get his hoodie over your head. You giggled attempting to help him. He was like a big puppy not realizing his own strength and aggression until it was too late. Seeing the panicked look on his face, worried he hurt you, you took hold of his hand and swung it a little to get him to lead the way. After walking a bit through a clearing and past a small stream there was a field full of cherry blossoms, your favorite.

"I needed to get you out here now. They're in full bloom." His deep voice rang through your ears. It always shocked you to hear how deep his voice was for how young the two of you are. Without thinking you ran to him and jumped snuggling into his neck. Immediately he wrapped his arms around you and held you up. He didn't lose his balance not even for a second making you fall more in love then you already are. For at least an hour he watched you run around picking flowers and taking pictures of the pretty trees. Making sure to run back to him and have him hold the prettiest ones. At one point, when the clock was hitting 7, he lightly grabbed your wrist before you could run off and get more. You watched his eyes falter a bit before he decided to look down at the flowers in his hand. Looking back up his mouth opened and then closed then did it again. His face got red and he looked around at the scenery again. You watched his chest rise and fall taking a deep breath before putting both of your hands on his face so he faced you.

"Is everything all right 'jima?" you asked. Your bottom lip jutted out and your eyes widened trying to understand what he was thinking about.

"Will you be my girlfriend?" He asked fiddling with the flowers in his hands.

"Of course I will," you said trying to hide the large smile that graced your face.

Present

who would have guessed that 16 years later the two of you would have a happy 14 year old boy and a one year old little girl. The two of you had named her Sakura. Your favorite flower and where Wakatoshi had asked you out. Her name represents the renewal of your relationship and how beautiful it will be. Feeding your little girl you couldn't help but think about how amazing Wakatoshi has been. Right now he was packing with Isa for your family to take a short trip to Japan. It was difficult to convince him that he didn't need to

do all the work in the house, but he wanted to prove to you that he was a good husband especially after the two of you got married.

"the videos resurfaced," His deep booming voice rang through the kitchen as he rolled in a large suitcase.

"of sakusa?" You asked as you tried feeding some more eggs to your daughter. Forgetting about a fork and just using your fingers hoping she would open her mouth and take a bite.

"yeah, his dad's paying for them to be taken down,"

"ugh, rich people are lucky they can do that," you said, shaking your head.

Isa's voice rang through the hallway eavesdropping on your conversation, "aren't we rich though?" He asked, tilting his head to the side. In just four years he's grown up so much. He wore contacts now, has better style, and his hair had gotten so long. It's hard to believe that he's not your baby anymore.

"You will lose your job. I'm not paying for you to keep it," Ushijima's voice responded in a strict tone as he took the luggage into the garage to be packed away into the car. Isa nodded his head following his dad with two smaller suitcases.

After Sakura had eaten most of the eggs you lifted her up and handed her to her father while you cleaned her chair. She looked much more like you then 'jima, but she had his signature hair color making her clearly her father's child. You had gotten pregnant not long after the wedding ceremony…which wasn't surprising considering how many times you asked Wakatoshi to make you a mommy again, and then all the times you chanted it during sex. But onto the more wholesome details Wakatoshi acted exactly how you predicted he would during birth. He held your hand, let you squeeze it till it turned white, he gave you kisses on your forehead while you pushed, he cried when he held his daughter for the first time, he was nervous about holding her worried that his big hands would crush her tiny body, he even would tell her a story every night before bed.

Wakatoshi had reassured you that he would take full care of her when you guys were on the plane. He was like magic and your swore he knew it too. Anytime she would cry the minute he picked her up and snuggled her into his jacket she would immediately settle down. She was being fussy? All Wakatoshi needed to do was brush his thumb over her cheek and she was fine. At one point you were worried your baby had died since you didn't wake up once in the night, but it turned out that Jima was snuggling her as she slept peacefully in between you too. Her small cubby hand wrapped around your husband's pinky.

You really had nothing to worry about. Wakatoshi is the perfect husband, perfect dad, and the best volleyball player. You will shove it into anyone's face who thinks otherwise.

tags: @mineta-phobic @rukia-uchiha-98 @ssc7514 @megumuro

a short little bonus for the next bonus to make more sense

[the-tzarina-alexandra-paracosm]

Some of my favourite art - a timeline

Part 2: 2010-2012

Cca. 2011 (aged 10). Mario fanart. This was my main fandom at that age. We can see the very first iteration of my signature (Alexandra D.* except with a drawn 5-point-star. I later simplified the design but otherwise kept the signature ever since).

2011 ish. Adventure Time fanart.

Mia and me fanart (does anybody else remember that show haha?). Cca. 2012

Mid-late 2012. Mario and Final Fantasy fanart. I was introduced to FF via the Mario Hoops game illustrated in the very first pic.

Late 2012. Final Fantasy I fanart.

Late 2012 or very early 2013. Final Fantasy XI fanart. One of the first documented attempts at drawing in an anime style, which will henceforth be the main influence of my artstyle for the next few years.

------

The main characteristics of this era are big heads contrasted with thin bodies and limbs. The eyes are at first simple ovals but eventually transition to an anime style. Bright colours but mostly in pencil this time; much smoother and intentional colouring than the previous years. More diverse facial expressions and poses than before, but still with significant anatomy mistakes.

From a more meta point of view, the most significant aspects of this era are 1. The development of my personal signature and 2. The intentional archiving of my art, as can be seen by the numbering system. Whereas around my tween years I had started to get extremely self-conscious about my art and threw a good chunk of it away on a whim because I didn't like it anymore, by the time I was about 11 ½ ish I developed a sense for the necessity of art preservation. Thus I stopped throwing old art away (and if I really hated half a drawing but loved another part I cropped it, hence why so many pieces of paper are visibly cut up). I was eventually very sorry that I had ever thrown out any art. While these are some well-preserved pieces, this timeframe is actually a lost media era of my art because of the sheer amount I disposed of, have away, or didn't put effort into keeping in a safe place. The first lost media era being ofc my earliest childhood drawings, which, ironically, were much more well preserved than my tween era drawings, but at some point we were no longer able to locate the box with my oldest stuff. One day I hope to find it again. I cannot say the same about my tween art, most of which I actively destroyed. This has been a harsh lesson I had to learn, and I urge any young artist to not fall into this trap, no matter how "cringe" you may think your art is. Having learned this lesson, starting around early 2013, I started keeping my drawings in a box and indexing them (hence the numbers. #4 means it was one of the very first drawings I preserved and a very recent one at the time of establishing my personal drawing box). I'm currently almost at 3000 if not already having passed that threshold. That's 3k pictures in a 12 year timeframe. And I'm sure that if I had never lost any piece of my art ever, the lifetime number of drawings would be double that.

So if you, especially if you're a young artist, ever feel insecure, please don't throw away or destroy your art! And remember that progress takes time. I'm showing my favourite drawings across the years but please remember that it took my entire life + thousands of drawings worth of practice to reach my current level. Don't compare yourself to other artists, your art is worth keeping around even if not yet to the level you expect.

[hoardlikegoldenirises]

I’ve edited my timeline a bit (a lot...) and the old version of this drawing just wasn’t really useful for me anymore because of certain changes etc. so i finally expanded it a LOT so i have a better idea of what flash’s hair should look like.

(while peter stays mostly the same XD he’s just not interested in experimenting with his hair i guess)

putting some individual bits (well, groups of 3-4) below the cut:

Flash in his late teens; his only form of hairstyling in high school was buzzcuts from his mom so i just wrote “high school” instead of an age lol... once he goes off to college he starts growing his hair out and by the time he loses his legs that’s about what it looks like (18ish), and then the one with the hello kitty shirt is about a year later, how he looks by the time he’s 19 and a half... then a few months later he buzzes it all off after some stuff happens that upsets him, that i won’t go into here but will be uploaded to the AO3 series as a fic later. short version is “he has a revelation about himself and gender that he’s really, really not ready to deal with and locks himself back in the closet” (not that he was really out of the closet but he was rolling around in 2006 wearing a hello kitty shirt and nail polish lol) so yeah he ends up depressed again, and drinking more (still not legally old enough to drink but he has his fake id and other ways of getting it, of course) and trying to be Outwardly Masculine like he was before :(

oh i’ll also note—since it’s not visible in these busts lol—flash has of course been using a wheelchair since he was 18 and a half, which is obviously because of the events in “these are not the clothes [...]” where doc ock crushes his legs... so aside from the teenage stuff, he’s in a rigid wheelchair throughout this entire au—i decided against him ever getting prosthetic legs because initially he is young enough that growth is still a partial factor, on top of prosthetic legs already being even more expensive than wheelchairs and already requiring multiple fittings in the early stages even for adults who are totally done growing, and then later they’re just like... poor... plus not being on his dad’s insurance after a certain age (esp. after being kicked out but i don’t think he was disowned)... even by the time he and peter get married and flash is on peter’s health insurance i doubt they’d be able to afford a pair of otk prosthetic legs on the salary of one full time teacher and one part time assistant gym teacher lol—that shit’s like tens of thousands PER leg... even with insurance i doubt they’d be able to throw together something like 20k-40k (or more) for prosthetic legs on top of being due to replace flash’s wheelchair... granted they do have rich friends (and my headcanon in 616 is that harry and/or liz are probably the ones who helped pay for flash’s mobility aids in the first place) but imo neither are the type to want to go asking for money, regardless of harry or liz’s willingness to give it to them... and being like, “hey can i have $40,000?” is a BIG ask lmao

ANYWAY Flash is still kind of in a rough place in his early 20s, but starts to get better and feel okay with the things that made him feel happy before, so his hair starts growing out again and he busts out the spidey choker but not the nail polish. am considering having andi be a character around this time (though obvs she’d be like... 10) but not sure about how i want to do that... or if i’ll ever write it XD def still having drinking problems as he gets actually legally old enough to drink but less depression = less drinking for him, to some extent... his beachy curls are just the cutest though

not pictured: flash converts to judaism in 2010 (along w/ his mother and sister)

(2011 necklace just a regular fine silver chain necklace peter got him for his birthday)

mid 20s flash is a lot happier and starts wearing nail polish again, as well as getting his associate’s degree and also starting the *other* AA (alcoholics anonymous) or a similar program happening kind of concurrently with some other stuff (Harry’s also been going through it which partially leads to flash realizing he wants to change some things in his life) and also just because he’s so busy with school and other stuff that it’s really just become a lot more impractical for him to drink as much, and with the support of aunt may and peter and his friends he’s getting a lot better about his drinking and also a lot more comfortable with himself and his sexuality and gender presentation now that he’s had time to think about it more and not be so afraid. turns out 7 years away from your abusive father helps a lot... also harrison specifically has had kind of poor health and while idk if flash is even in contact with him anymore, if he is then, that might contribute to flash being like, fuck i don’t want to be like that...

anyway he gets job as an assistant gym teacher at midtown around the same time peter gets a job there (though peter’s been teaching already for a few years while getting his masters, but he was teaching at a school near chelsea instead of in queens)... Flash puts his hair up at work but at home it’s like, :> girly time.

and peter proposes when they’re 26, cause he’s been thinking about how that stuff has been legal in nyc for a couple years (since 2011) and just. he’s peter. he wants to get married. he’s a wife guy. i doubt flash says yes IMMEDIATELY because he has some hang-ups related to his home life growing up and peter and him haven’t always had the smoothest relationship, so understandably he isn’t ready to say yes immediately .... but like... they’ve been exclusive for a few years on top of some off-and-on stuff in their early 20s, and peter has seen him in some of his worst, most rock-bottom moments in life as well as helping him realize who he is inside, and still loves him, so he says yes.

also around this time, along with the convo about if marriage is the right fit, they have a convo about flash’s ... “identity issues” and talk about that and make good strides there. peter helps flash embrace that aspect of himself, especially now that peter’s mature enough to be capable of supporting flash without being pushy or aggressive or expecting him to just magically be grateful LOL—my, how they grow up XD so this is when they first start experimenting with feminine terms of endearment (at least on purpose) and stuff like... well, they’re engaged so i guess it’s just fiance LOL so not girlfriend. “wife-to-be.” and other more uh. nsfw things 😂

(the blue pendant necklace is a wedding gift from felicia)

they get married, still 26 because their wedding is in the spring and flash’s birthday isn’t until june and peter’s is in october, but like, ALMOST 27, the long hair is definitely what flash has at 27 following the wedding, and then the even longer hair is around the time the man-spider fic is taking place and has grown out a lot.

i’m still using he/him pronouns for flash in the man-spider fic as of my most recent edits, but i actually am not 100% sure what the deal is with that. i think there are lot of feminine terms of endearment in the privacy of their home, and i’ve had felicia call flash a pretty girl, and even tossed in a “wife” in a recent edit of ch 1, but flash isn’t really publicly out... “boy mode at work” as the doodle says lol. there’s always a chance i go back and edit pronouns. we’ll see how that shakes out. i think when flash is somewhere around mid-40s that might shift over to like, more feminine everything... a more comprehensive social transition i guess

then the late 40s one is mostly an estimate of like, this might be what flash looks like in 20 years... but idk for sure. wife city. a couple of white hairs but she’s not going gray as much as peter is lol

also—re the wedding stuff: originally there was no yarmulke for flash’s wedding outfit but i recently committed to flash asking his mother about their heritage (in “last week [...]”) with the idea that maybe his mom’s side is jewish or used to be jewish (but that there’s been a lot of intermarriage) and now have decided flash converts in 2010, so not an interfaith ceremony, just a jewish one.

here are their wedding rings. peter proposed without a ring but after they talked through if marriage was the right step for them and flash agreed to it, flash also eventually asked if he could get an engagement ring... because gender. so they buy a really small, simple one that doesn’t attract too much attention but still has a little tiny diamond... peter offers to wear one too but it’s not very practical for his line of work (spidey lol) so they end up just getting the one for flash. and then their wedding bands match but flash’s is skinnier just cause he doesn’t want to draw too much attention to the set. like it’s a small, happy thing for him, but that doesn’t mean he wants randos staring at his rings (and also they’re not exactly wealthy on a single full time teacher’s salary + a part time assistant gym teacher’s salary to support them and pitch in for aunt may...)

i can see peter getting an anniversary ring for flash eventually too... maybe 10 year...

also as a sidenote, i just wanted to say i def agree that peter doesn’t need to be married to be an adult or be mature, and that it’s weird when people boil it down to “peter has to be married to be an adult.”  the problem with comics right now isn’t that he isn’t married, but rather the circumstances for why it was decided that they had to end that relationship, and the way he is watered down into a nothing character with no personality and no flaws who isn’t allowed to swear or drink in the name of Mascot-ification while his dark hair and features are made lighter and more generic (arguably more aryan) (latter also a problem with flash and why i only draw flash with curly or wavy red or strawberry hair now instead of the straight yellow blonde he’s been given over the past 20 years)

ANYWAY

what i’m saying is that while marriage shouldn’t be the only way for a romance to continue, etc. and emulating traditional gender roles and marriage roles is not the only way to be in love etc. i do think peter is a wife guy (and how many times has his first solution to literally any problem with a woman has been “oh no i have to propose”?) so i think in this case it’s warranted, and peter being like, well, gay marriage is legal... and we both have jobs at the same school now... and we’re probably gonna move soon... maybe we should get married.... makes sense to me 😂 especially considering things like healthcare and the fact that flash is no longer young enough to stay on his dad’s insurance... and peter is very much a protective (overprotective) person who wants to take care of the people he cares about... makes sense that he’d be like, i love you, i want to be with you for as long as possible, let me take care of you better

but also: me smushing fictional characters together like barbies: teehee wedding

me giving flash longer and longer hair and more feminine presentation could also be talked about as like, trans people don’t need to emulate traditional gender roles—but i like when flash has long hair and i think it looks pretty and cute. but also frankly part of the reason i gave flash long hair is less to do with gender presentation and more to do with the fact that i grew up in a family where 4/5 of my uncles grew their hair out long as adults specifically because they’d all had buzzcuts their whole childhood and adolescence so growing their hair out was a way for them to assert their personhood lol

and i think that applies to flash here too, in addition to the genders and long hair as a form of feminine androgyny

as for peter:

i drew a lot less for him XD his hair is mostly the same 2-3 styles cause he doesn’t care that much about fashion whereas flash has the whole Queerness and Gender thing going on. (otherwise i wouldn’t have given him like 10 hairstyles LOL)

late teens and early 20s, peter starts to loosen up a little bit with his hair as he gets older and more adult... he also loosens up his clothing for all of five seconds because with the symbiote when he’s 17-18 (mostly 18) he doesn’t need to hide a suit under his clothes, it just exists, so 18 is his “slutty button-downs” era XD  but then a few months before he turns 19 he loses the symbiote so it’s back to buttoned-up collars and turtlenecks and stuff... but sexy instead of nerdy. also he shaves his awful teenage boy barely-a-mustache.

that era of looser hair and more tightly done casual clothes is also around when flash goes back to trying to be masc and he and peter are separated (both in terms of peter living away from aunt may’s house and also in terms of not dating) for a little while.

but, early 20s is also when peter and flash get back together after a couple years and enter a steady relationship—when they’re around 21, 22 years old? and that happens kind of concurrently with flash figuring himself out with less fear, and peter helps with that a little bit. so as peter starts getting shaggier and less uptight, flash also starts to relax and grow his hair out. so they get shaggy hair together 😌 (though flash’s is def longer, peter just needs to go get his hair cut more often XD)

mid-20s, you can see Pete has gotten shaggy as he loosens up! but then some shit happens over a span of ~3 months that’s not great that i won’t get into here (see this post ) and he ends up hospitalized etc... after that, he gets his hair cut once he’s doing better, and keeps it pretty short and tidy from here on out as a way to, i guess... have some control over his life. it makes him feel better to be clean-shaven, neatly coiffed, etc. so from his mid-20s onward he’s permanently said goodbye to the baby mullets.

and then like i said he doesn’t go through as many hairstyles so i didn’t bother drawing out 10 different variations of his mid-20s haircuts... cause they’re all roughly the same but with varying levels of bang length depending on when the last time he got a haircut was XD

so skipping to 26/27 for the wedding stuff, and then 28 for man-spider... he’s matured now.... (damn wish i was that put-together at 28, my life’s a mess😂) so in man-spider they’ve been married for a little over a year (rough strain on the second year of marriage 😅) and then after it, he looks mostly the same but is a little bit fuzzier (even more?!) and has slightly pointier teeth.

and then in his 40s aka DILF with bad facial hair era, his hair will start going PRETTY gray pretty quickly... with that white streak... his hair is gonna be more silvery than flash’s as they age, partly cause of the stress of being spider-man and partly cause silver fox suits him lol

(not that flash hasn’t had stressful stuff happening too but it’s a little different)

and yes i gave him stupid facial hair, as is his right. any middle aged peter needs some kind of dorky goatee or mustache, that’s just the rules okay. i almost gave him a beard but i didn’t like the way it looked XD (also a beard under the mask seems unpleasant)

he dies at 49.

i drew this anyway:

I mostly just wanted to doodle that cause I thought it was cute but like... Peter gets gunned down before he even hits his 50th birthday. like literally a few weeks before he turns 50. It’s tragic but not surprising in the end and probably something they were a little prepared for considering everything that happens in their life together. at least flash will be a hot milf widow. (except she dies of a broken heart on his birthday instead) (aka a heart attack + a fall in the middle of the night)

i’ve just been thinking about that scene in asm500 where future peter gets taken out by a literal swarm of cops and a sniper... though that universe obviously has its own stuff going on and implies peter kinda goes bad, and i’m not really looking to do that to him or flash (as much as i like a Killer Spidey, i don’t think it’s the right fit here) we’ll see... i just know i want to re-emphasize that peter will treat flash with love, gentleness, and tenderness up until his last breath... wifeguy til the end. i think maybe fisk is involved or something...

anyway misc doodles from the past two years:

tfw you turn from a circle to a dorky teenager into being chiseled

i’ll also note that peter has a lot of issues ... like a lot... and he was already a temperamental teen but he has some serious anger and other issues as a teenager due to sexual trauma as a 12 year old :( poor kid. you can see mentions of that in the stuff i have posted; peter’s mostly coping as an adult but sometimes it creeps back out... :/ contributed to his antisocial behavior in high school for sure. also he hit puberty so hard XD his voice dropped like three octaves between age 12 and age 18 lmfao

added flash onto this older drawing so i could have a comparison of the way they grew... they both had major growth spurts but flash’s happened when he was around 13 and peter’s didn’t hit until 16-ish (well no he had a smaller growth spurt around 12-13)... a couple of angry children XD... also edited this to make ben shorter cause i realized i made him like. very tall on accident. but closer to 5′11″ here instead of like 6′2″ XD

and peter’s spidey suits over the years... first costume is dorkier and also a little more silver age styled, then black suit as an 18 year old and then he makes a new suit since he’s bigger after losing the black suit, and needs something better and more durable... has also filled out a LOT by 19/20 lol now he’s got that booty... and i think his suit probably tends to be some variation on that suit throughout his adulthood...

i’ll note that originally i planned for the black suit to be a little earlier but some stuff changed, so peter probably shouldn’t be QUITE that gangly and thin in the black suit. but otherwise it’s mostly right.

i also have this variant (with bonus six arms style) which i like a lot too though for all of these i don’t actually love the spider logo’s look ... this was a scrapped idea for a different AU so just ignore the six arms and spider face stuff XD not relevant here, just looking at the suit style

it’s really just the default spider-suit i draw tbh XD (this pic and the next obvs from that 8 page comic i did, not from this au)

i like this logo style better.

also bonus: a general idea of what the rest of the gang looks like..

[floosies]

Radio

early 2000s au

eddie munson x oc!fem

warnings: mentions of drugs, cursing, future smut, friends to lovers 18+

(a/n: im sorry this chapter took forever, i've been going back and forth on alot of the details but i hope that it isnt too bad)

series masterlist

December, 2011

London was colder than Hawkins when winter came about but Frenchie settled into it. It took time for her to come around to all the changes. How she'd ran into him for a moment but he didnt even recognize her now and how ridiculous she'd felt afterwards for crying about it. She knew it was wrong to go and love bomb her boyfriend in the aftermath, but she needed to reassure herself that it was him now and not Eddie.

That bad moment had come and gone, she spent October and November in and out photoshoots and concerts with Alexa who had been her rock through the changes in life. Fame had a weird way of being, the highs were high and the lows were fuckin ocean deep. Her relationship was on the rocks, though she wanted things to work out, her work and social life was more important to her.

Being with him made her think of the past, but he didn't want to give up on them. It was a weird place to be in, but through liquor and lines it all felt totally possible.

Eddie's mind never once thought back on a party and why would it? He was in his element, the band on its second album with a huge tour around the U.S there were constantly an array of changing faces. Though he wouldn't deny that none of the girls he would get with after a show held any deep feelings to him. There was a sense of never letting himself get that close again, or at least for the time being. Why would he anyways? There were projects and money to be made everywhere around him. From music awards to tv show appearances and online interviews, the band was busy.

Did he still think of Julie? Only if he opened up the old lyric notebook with the picture of them on the first page. On the difficult nights where he'd drank too much and started to think too deeply on what could have been if she hadn't been taken away from him he would cry over their picture. He swore if he ever saw her again he would take it as the miracle it would be and never let it happen again, that regardless of it all he wouldn't let her leave again. But in his mind he knew it was probably a dream, a very unlikely dream.

-

Though, the universe has a weird way of being. Corroded Coffin's last stop before home for the holidays was the UK, they had some interviews lined up in early December as promos for their latest single off the new album which was to be released after the new year. Frenchie having more of an online personality as well as a love for rock music was offered the interview gig by the radio station's social media coordinator.

However, she wasn't informed until a week or so before that she would be interviewing them. She had taken the gig back in late May with only the knowledge that it would be whatever band had music coming out in the early new year. Safe to say it could have been any rock subgenre or band, but just her luck it happened to be her old friends.

A couple of days before the interview was set to be held, she found herself moping around Alexa's flat. Her head laying off the side of her friend's bed, "I mean what if they're angry when they realize it's me?" Alexa glanced at her from the window sill before blowing out the smoke from her cig into the open air, "why would they be angry? You said they were super close to ya." Frenchie sighed, "I just never got the chance to give anyone, any sort of closure." Her friend nodded, "still men aren't as complex as us, I doubt they'll feel that way." In a cynical way it made her chuckle, maybe she had a valid point.

-

The day of the interview she was a bundle of jittery nerves and despite her cup of tea or her constant breathing exercises, she was beyond afraid. To everyone on her team, they assumed it was because she had mentioned she was a big fan of theirs. Due this assumption, they implored she met them before the shoot began. Apparently it wasn't all of the band that had come, it was only Jeff and Eddie, of course it would be the founders, always busy with the business side of things.

Softly she knocked on the door of their green room, it was opened by someone on their team, but they recognized her and let her in. Immediately she saw them getting their hair and make up done. With every nerve in her body on super speed she spoke, "hey guys! Nice to meet you. I'm Frenchie, I'll be interviewing you today."

Eddie knew that voice, recognized it like the back of his hand. His head whipped up to look at her, it was her. She was blonde now, but it was her. Jeff reacted before he could, "no fucking way!" With that he ran up to hug her. No one around them understanding what was happening. His body and his mind were not in union but some how, some way, he ended up holding her too.

It had been far too long, yet here she was, slightly different, but holding him for dear life. They both could hear Jeff explaining what was happening to everyone in their green room, but Eddie and Julie were in their own world. Holding onto each other as if trying to make up for the last couple of years. She had to be the rational one, she whispered to him, "we're both on a time crunch love. I wanna get you home in time for the holidays." He nodded into the embrace, "You're really here. I can't let you leave like the last time." She held him tighter, "I'll get your number before the end of today. I promise you won't lose me again." Her voice as soft as he remembered it the last time he spoke to her.

-

If the fans were truly as dedicated as they claimed to be, they would surely notice the way Eddie was starring at Frenchie throughout the interview. His gaze focused in on her with a sense of affection or flirtation, in his replies to her questions as well. Jeff looked just as happy, maybe not as intrigued but both boys were playful with her.

If her fans were the same, they would think she was probably flirting with him beforehand. However, both of them were known for their charisma so maybe they could play it off. Especially knowing Eddie was currently a taken man. She knew better, and she was happy for him. However, when she mentioned it in the interview Eddie's joy was suddenly somber, because of course he was being reminded that despite having her again, there was someone else in the picture.

-

True to her word however, like they had the first time around, she got his new number. They'd spent the whole night on facetime talking about their recent projects but Eddie needed to see her one last time before he want back to Hawkins. Thankfully she had nothing planned the following day and his flight wasn't until late the following evening. She wasn't sure what was going to come out of this meet up.

Unbeknownst to her, Eddie had spent the rest of the night looking through her social media accounts and searching up her name. Of course he watched her interviews, googled all the photos of her at Paris fashion week, and read the articles about the guys she was allegedly linked up to. One of them was a guy from a band under the same label as him. Had she been near him this whole time and he hadn't noticed? Fuck. Then he saw the tmz photos of her with some actor, these were more recent.

-

She spent most of the early morning cleaning her place up as her mind raced with what conversations would be had between the two of them. Everything was fairly new to her, she'd only moved to Mayfair some months back, would he think she sold out? Did it matter? With the sound of the doorbell sounding off the walls of her flat, she was pulled back to the reality of the moment.

Once opening the front door, there he stood, a shy smile on his face like the one he'd given her the first time they met up by the bleachers all those years ago in high school. She moved to the side, letting him into her place. He noted the scent of vanilla all over the house and the framed pictures of her and her new found famous friends.

"This is some place you got," he joked as he kept looking around. Behind him, she was smiling, "I only moved here a couple of months back. I was living in east London for a while, it's not as bad as I was told it would be, but some friends of mine said it'd be best to move to green pastures sort of speak." Eddie couldn't take his eyes off her, it was his girl, but she was so different. "It's not such a bad thing, I'm not that different, promise." His eyes widened, "shit did I say that out loud?" She giggled, her laugh making his heart ache.

She offered him something to drink, while she went into the kitchen he kept looking around at her photos, all the magazine covers and articles she'd been featured in. Then he noticed the photo of her with him, he hadn't realized how long he was staring til she said something. "We broke up not that long ago, it was after your label's album party." Eddie looked a bit confused, "you were there?" She nodded, her hands holding their drinks, he took his from her grasp and followed her to her living room.

As soon as they sat down she started explaining where'd she gone and how she'd ended up in London in the first place. What broke Eddie's heart was finding out she knew when he'd left, and that neither of them could have done anything to try and find each other. His hands fell into his head as she spoke about it, "I should have left your friend with my manager's number-" "Eddie no you had your dreams-" "and you were part of them!" She didn't know what to say to that, part of her wasn't expecting for him to care about her after all this time. "Of course I care about you. Julie you were the only reason I even kept going." She hadn't realized she'd thought out loud either, "I just mean you have everything now Eds, I see you and the guys causing mayhem everywhere and your new girlfriend, and I'm happy for you. Really I am, and it's why I just thought we'd say our peace and move forward-"

His head was spinning, "is that what you want? You want me out of your life?" Her eyes widened, "that's not what I meant at all! Eddie you just have-" "I don't have shit Jules, the whole first album is about you, I can't stand being sober half the time, and as for my girlfriend she's just there-" "Eddie don't say that, you know you love her." He shook his head, his hands clasping onto hers, "I love you and I don't want to lose you again." This wasn't how she wanted it to happen, "no. You're not going to hurt her because of me. Eddie i'm here for you always as a friend, but I won't let you ruin the good things in your life." By this point they were both on the verge of tears. Here he was begging like a child for something he knew he had elsewhere, but he only wanted it from her.

All he could was hold her, and its what they did for the rest of the time they had left before he had to be back home. When he left it felt like a part of him had both been placed back into his heart but not at all correctly. It wasn't any better on her end, Frenchie kept thinking on all things she could have said or done, but she was never the girl who would be a homewrecker, especially now with both their names in the limelight. She loved him, and he loved her, but fate again wasn't on their side.

[beardedmrbean]

Wait Omar have a daughter?

In her 20’s?

Is the college student her stepdaughter because I that Omar was in her late 20’s.

Also yes a daughter of a high profile politician is totally homeless. Omg heard that time Obama eldest try to hide the fact she was the daughter of a former president for her film career…even though she was 25 director who film got into a film festival?

Dear god anyone can smell the nepotism from that age alone. And oh lord how my community fanatical (well many still do) treated the Obamas when they were in office

Wait isn’t IIhan Omar a Somali immigrant? Don’t Somali have a Muslim terrorists issue too? Or am I being racist?

And you guys are supporting the hamas who would have thrown rocks or shoot you for being LBGT

The greatest trick 9/11 did was allow Muslim activists hide their brutal colonialism and act like relatation from other religion groups was because they were racist. Not saying I’m enjoying the dead kids form bombing.

But it weird how I learn about the Ottoman Empire and the janssisaes from 2011 historical fiction game rather than my own education system

She's 41, born in Somalia so can't be president, came in as a refugee in 95, daughter that's in the news is 21, you'd think given her history she'd appreciate life in America more, but instead she acts incredibly entitled.

Also yes a daughter of a high profile politician is totally homeless. Omg heard that time Obama eldest try to hide the fact she was the daughter of a former president for her film career…even though she was 25 director who film got into a film festival?

She lost her campus housing for a few days, she was suspended and that means everything, not that she'll accept responsibility.

Did not know that about Malia, hmmmm

Malia Obama has been labeled a ‘nepo baby’ after presenting her directorial debut

And I imagine people are calling the folks saying that racist,

"Though the 25-year-old filmmaker released the movie under the stage name Malia Ann"

Ya that'll cover it till someone sees a picture.

Emilio Estevez did that starting out, not sure if casting directors recognized him but he mad a run of it before saying ya ok I'm Martin Sheen's kid, Malia would have to do everything blind for that to work odds are her identity leaked very quickly.

Wait isn’t IIhan Omar a Somali immigrant? Don’t Somali have a Muslim terrorists issue too? Or am I being racist?

Went over all but the last bit there, and it's a geographical issue not a race issue so not racist at all, also

Also there's

This section is basically middle east came to Africa, Ethiopia has Eritrea blocking their access to the water ever since it broke away too.

And you guys are supporting the hamas who would have thrown rocks or shoot you for being LBGT

The term "Pinkwashing" was created to express why it's totally different when they support a country or region that would kill them for existing while complaining about the toy section at Target being gendered in the same breath.

More "white man's burden/noble savage" thinking, remember they've also got people in there defending the rape and murder that happened on 10/7, if you see someone saying 'by any means necessary', that means they're ok with gang raping Israeli women and children and any other atrocity you can think of, at least if you want to take them at their word that it really is ANY means.

I didn't say it, they did, and the people that do say it need to convince me they aren't ok with it now. Thankfully nobody I know has gone that route.

The greatest trick 9/11 did was allow Muslim activists hide their brutal colonialism and act like relatation from other religion groups was because they were racist. Not saying I’m enjoying the dead kids form bombing.

They voted as a solid red block for the most part till then, not that I blame them for switching parties then, problem is the portions of the community that are more fundamental than Omar's group is. Might be shocked how many American Muslims hate her because of various reasons most having to do with her not being their kind of Muslim.

But it weird how I learn about the Ottoman Empire and the janssisaes from 2011 historical fiction game rather than my own education system

Ya, I didn't even get that I just started reading one day and managed to plow through dozens and dozens of wiki pages, oddly it all started with the question

"Why did Constantinople get the works" because I knew it was more people's business than the Turks.

TMBG have a official video, but I like the tiny toons one better

[scotianostra]

Happy 78th Birthday pop star Rod Stewart.

Being Scottish is not always a physical thing,  Roderick David Stewart being one such instance, he was born in London on January 10th 1945, his father was Scottish and had been a master builder in Leith, his mum was a Londoner.

To steal the words of two Rod Stewart aonga being Scottish to him is “ You're in my heart, you're in my soul” or one that is littered with nods to his Scottish roots”Every beat of my heart” includes   “Here's one Jacobite “, “ Just for auld lang syne, “  And to the northern lights, And the swirling pipes, How they make a grown man cry”. I could fill this post up with lyrics from many of his songs, Rythm of my Heart, or his unofficial 1978 world cup song,  Ole Ola, his cover of Purple Heather, or his versions of The Skye Boat Song and Auld Land Synes .

During the 1960s, Stewart was a part of several different bands. In 1966, he joined the blues-influenced Jeff Beck Group and experienced his first taste of success. The group toured the United Kingdom and the United States and released two hit albums. In 1969, he joined what became known as the Faces. Ron Wood was one of his bandmates and became a member of the Rolling Stones. Stewart also performed as a solo artist and scored his first big solo success with the album Every Picture Tells A Story, which featured the hit single “Maggie May” in 1971. That same year, the Faces had a hit with the song “Stay With Me.”

Stewart moved to the United States in 1975. The next year, he reached the top of the U.S. charts with “Tonight’s the Night” from A Night on the Town. Stewart continued to have a slicker, more pop sound as the decade progressed. He also developed a reputation for his partying lifestyle and for dating numerous actresses and models. With 1978’s Blondes Have More Fun, he had another smash hit single with “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?”

The 1980s proved to be more challenging for Stewart. While 1981’s Tonight I’m Yours went platinum, the albums that followed did not fare as well. He ended the decade on a positive note, however. His remake of the Tom Waits song “Downtown Train” in 1989 received a lot of radio play. A few years later, he released Unplugged and Seated, which was recorded at MTV Unplugged concert and featured the hit “Have I Told You Lately.”

With his distinctive throaty, almost scratchy-sounding voice, Stewart decided to take on some of the classic songs and make them his own with It Had to be You: The Great American Songbook. He recorded four volumes of the Great American Songbook series, and won his first Grammy Award (best traditional pop vocal album) for Stardust: The Great American Songbook, Volume III in 2004.

t the age of 60, Stewart became a father for seventh time. His son, Alastair Wallace Stewart, was born on November 27, 2005. This was his first child with then fiancée Penny Lancaster. The couple married in 2007 and welcomed a second son, Aiden, in 2011. He also has a daughter, Kimberly, and a son, Sean, from his first wife Alana Stewart and a daughter named Ruby with former girlfriend Kelly Emberg. He also has two children from his marriage to model Rachel Hunter—Renee and Liam. Stewart publicly acknowledged his oldest daughter, Sarah Streeter, in 2013. Streeter was born when Stewart was only 18 years old, and he and the girl’s mother had decided to put their baby up for adoption. Stewart and Streeter first met in 2008.

In 2006, Stewart returned to rock music with Still The Same: Great Rock Classics of Our Time. The album reached the top of the pop charts in October of that year. Stewart put down the microphone and picked up a pen to write his 2012 memoir Rod: The Autobiography. The following year, he made an impressive return to songwriting with his album Time. Stewart co-wrote of many of the record’s songs as well as serving as a co-producer on the project.

Always a bit of a rascal  Rod shows no signs of living a quiet pensioner lifestyle, a couple of years ago he and his son were involved with an altercation in Florida, with Rod throwing a punch at a security guard after he refused them entry to an event.  He will need to be careful or he might end up being arrested by wife,  Penny, who as well as working as a model, has volunteered as a Special Constable in the police.

Stewart was estimated to have a fortune of £215 million in the Sunday Times Rich List of 2021, making him the 12th wealthiest person in the British music industry.

Rod was knighted in 2018 for his contributions to music and charity, and while many of us don’t agree with the notion we can’t take away that Sir Rod is not just a talented musician – he is also a philanthropist who has dedicated much of his life and resources to giving back

Sadly, life has not been so giving to Sir Rod of late. The music icon recently lost his brothers, Don and Robert ‘Bob’.

Bob died in November, a day before his 88th birthday and only two months after the loss of Don.

Recently, Sir Rod surprised a Brighton barber and singer to thank him for raising £14,000 for charity. The touching gesture from the British rock legend was shown during an episode of The One Show.

In recent years, Sir Rod’s charitable focus has become a little more direct due to his own health scares following his diagnosis of thyroid cancer (2000) and later prostate cancer (2019).  It all opened his eyes to the preciousness of life, and Stewart has now devoted much of his time to helping publicise the various fights against cancer and help those who are not as fortunate as he was.

More recently, the Maggie May rocker has also shown his caring nature by renting a home for a family of seven fleeing from the ongoing Russian war. Despite saying he usually keeps ‘all my charitable efforts nice and quiet,’ he publicised this hoping to inspire others to help.

So, as Sir Rod celebrates his 78th birthday, it is clear that he is not just a talented musician but also a kind and generous individual who has made a positive impact on the world.

Here’s to many more years of great music and philanthropy, Happy birthday, Sir Rod Stewart!

[woohooasbats]

sims tag

Thank you @occultpuppy for the tag! In classic Bats fashion, I am filling this out 4 billion years late.

1. Alpha CC or Maxis Match? I used to be hardcore Maxis Match but I am getting into Maxis Mix these days because of the characterization you can achieve with skin details and eyes. 

2. What’s your favourite sims death? Few deaths are as good as the Mummy’s Curse in Sims 3. Honorable mentions go to pufferfish nigiri and deathl-scented flower arrangements for hot babes that do murder.

3. Do you cheat when your sims gain weight? I’ve had a vain sim buy the insta-lean reward before, but I hated the result so I haven’t used it since. Other than that, no.

4. Do you use move objects? Who doesn’t???

5. Favorite mod? I’ve been playing this game waaaay too long to have just one favorite, lol. If I have to choose just one to feature right now… TOOL, maybe? But the Nraas suite from the Sims 3 days is also a contender. 

6. First expansion/game/stuff pack you got? Of all time, Livin’ Large, of course. I usually get the first expansion for each installment of the series. I got all of the Sims 4 expansions at once, though. 

7. Do you pronounce “live mode” like aLIVE or Living? Live as in alive. Sorry, folks.

8. Have you made a simself? I tried once but it looked nothing like me. I’m not really a simself kind of player. 

9. Who’s your favorite sim that you’ve made? Come onnnn don’t ask me thisssss. If we’re talking completely from scratch, I have to say Biagio. I think Luisa is a really good-looking sim, but she’s technically based on her Sims 3 counterpart who was born in-game. 

10. What sim traits do you give yourself? If I have to pick just 3 traits from Sims 4, it’s probably Art Lover, Perfectionist, and Jealous.

11. Which is your favorite EA hair color? Probably platinum blonde? Or possibly the brown and gray for added townie flavor.

12. Favorite EA hair? I really couldn’t tell you. It’s probably a male hair. A lot of CC male hair is a little too K-pop for my taste.

13. Are you a builder or are you in it for the gameplay? I like a healthy mix of both, but I’m bad at building so it gives me anxiety. That’s when I set the game down and walk away for several months. 🙃

14. Favorite life stage? None! I play on really long lifespans and it’s a joy to watch a sim go through them all. 

15. Are you a CC creator? I’ve recolored things for myself and make my own poses, but I don’t follow any quality control so I don’t share them. 

16. Do you have any simblr friends/a sim squad? Not really. :( Most of my mutuals from the Sims 3 era seem to have retired. Shout out to the people that do consistently interact with my stuff. <3 I’m trying to be more active so I can connect with people again. 

17. What’s your favorite game? (1, 2, 3, or 4)  They’re all special in their own way! If I have to pick, it’s a toss-up between 2 and 3. Sims 2 had some of the last really EXCELLENT writing of the series, and Sims 3 is still undefeated in terms of sandbox gameplay. 

18. Do you have any sims merch? No, lol. I think I had that USB at one point. No idea what happened to that. 

19. Do you have a YouTube for sims? No, but I want one!!

20. How has your “sim style” changed throughout your years of playing? I used to play strictly one family legacy-style on normal lifespans, trying to get as many generations as possible. Now I like to take more time with my characters to develop them. Now I play extreeeemely long lifespans and rotate between many families. 

21. What’s your Origin ID? 🏴‍☠️

22. Who’s your favorite CC creator? Don’t make me pick, lol. Just scroll my finds blog @batsfinds or my Pinterest.

23. How long have you had a simblr? Since November, 2011 🥲 Fuck, I’m old. 

24. How do you edit your pictures? Gshade + Photoshop/Lightroom

25. What expansion/game/stuff pack do you want next? BANDS BANDS BANDS BANDS BANDS BANDS BANDS BANDS BANDS BANDS BANDS BANDS BANDS BANDS BANDS BANDS BANDS BANDS BANDS BANDS BANDS BANDS BANDS BANDS BANDS BANDS BANDS BANDS BANDS BANDS BANDS BANDS BANDS

26. What expansion/game/stuff pack is your favorite so far? I really like Vampires and Cottage Living. 

Thanks for reading! Tagging my love, @veryflirtytransportalate and you, dear reader!

[prettytragcdies]

mun questions! 5, 7, 11, 12, 14.

5. is there a muse you really want to try? if yes: what’s stopping you?

I'm officially writing Lauren Colby from the original Dynasty now, despite the fact that only like me, myself, and I even know who she is, so let's see. I wish that I could write some of my other favorite characters from various shows like Judith Ryland from the reboot of DALLAS, Edie Britt from Desperate Housewives, Julie Cooper from The O.C., etc. I just don't think I could find their voice well enough to keep them in character and write them the way they deserve to be written. I've had to learn the hard way that just because I love a character a whole lot, it doesn't necessarily mean I would be any good at writing them. Then there's also the unfortunate fact that a lot of my favorite shows are ones people from today either don't know anything about or simply just don't write for, but ah well.

I also super duper lowkey want to write an OC Vampire Diaries muse who would be Tyler Lockwood's sister, but that's only because the actress who played Carol Lockwood is back on The Young and the Restless.

7. describe your favorite relationship dynamic. (can be any kind, platonic, romantic, familial, antagonistic, etc.)

That's easy. My favorite relationship dynamic of all time will forever be familial. Mothers and daughters are probably at the tip top of my list, followed closely by fathers and daughters, siblings, etc. Romantic relationships would probably come in second place after all of that, and it's even more fun when the romantic ones eventually turn into new little families. Yeah. I don't know why. I just very much enjoy writing any and all aspects of family.

11. describe your ideal outcome/endgame for the muse you are currently writing. if you are a multimuse blog: do this for your current favorite muse, or the muse of the last reply you posted.

Scarlett Eleanor Ewing is my favorite and the one whose life I have most planned out, so I guess I'll do this one for her. Being married isn't a part of her life she can picture, but the more years I write her, the more I want to see her trying to navigate an actual marriage. So yeah, I guess my ideal endgame would be for her to be either President or Vice President of Ewing Global and either married or divorced with at least one child. I want her to be happy and healthy, despite everything I've put her through to get to that point lol. She's still hella confident and entitled, but some things aren't ever going to change, no matter what.

12. what roleplay trends do you remember from the year you started tumblr rp? how did you feel about those trends?

You know you're officially getting old when you don't even remember but like one or two of the trends from that year. I feel like it was 2011 or sometime around then, and groups were where it was at back then. I joined a small handful, and they were okay. Just like everything else, they had their fair share of pros and cons. I also remember people used gifs more than they did icons back in those days, and I didn't mind that part at all. Sometimes it can be more fun to use gifs, as long as they aren't huge and stretch all the way across your reply, especially when you're scrolling through on a mobile dashboard.

14. which roleplay community has been your favorite to write in?

I know everyone is probably expecting me to say DALLAS, and while it certainly is one of my favorites, I also need to give a shoutout to the soap opera world. I made so many friends in that genre back in the day, some of which I'm still in close contact with today. We've just had so much fun together over the years, and tbh it's part of the reason why I've had so much muse for Lauren Colby and Serenity Scorpio lately. One of my old friends lured me back to RP.ME ( a.k.a. MySpace 2.0 ), and I've officially fallen back down the rabbit hole(s).

[jamesfalt]

this is a wip i'm posting here and NOT to twitter separately (i'm just gonna link to this post on twitter) but i kinda wanted a place to quickly talk about seacrette's development bc true to her name she really fucking stayed secret for like 13 years. she's not a character i really put emphasis on at all either despite existing as long as my other utaus.

so yeah long ramble bc she's just that old of an oc

her original bank was recorded likely late 2011, if my old deviantarts were still accessible i could get a more exact date bc i remember i kinda tried to hype her up to my like 20 deviantart followers by saying was "working on a secret project" and the joke was that her name WAS secret. i was gonna do a big reveal like HAHA GET IT. SECRET PROJECT?? HER NAME IS SECRET???

but as i mentioned in the comparison post yesterday, i ran into issues with her that i don't quite remember. i believe some notes were really fucked up? and instead of recording into a folder on my desktop i was recording directly into the utau voices folder and it just like Corrupted or s/t to the point where i couldn't salvage that bank at all. today i think some of those problems would be fixed by. redoing the frq files but in my defense i was 11 and barely understood how to use audacity let alone a program that, at the time, didn't have an english translation

design wise, i couldn't tell you why i designed her that way honestly. i think i wanted a character with white hair that wasn't one of my kirikitties at the time? but why she, a blue bird, had no blue on her design i couldn't tell you. i tried to hunt down any form of proper ref of that design but i must've redesigned her quickly bc these are the only pictures i could find of this design

when i went to redo her, i could not for the life of me get it to do the NEW files to show up, it just kept defaulting to that original fucked bank. the only way i could get it to change was by naming the folder differently despite that ORIGINAL BANK NO LONGER BEING IN THERE and so the kirakira "seacrette" came to be and just stuck

seacrette's act2 i never...released? i'm thinking i ran into the problem i ran into with roxy back then where due to the nature of where the utau folder was (on the program files that u need admin perms for), it just refused to zip the sound files no matter what. ok yeah i checked my mediafire and she was in there but yeah, no sounds. just the oto, readme, and character files

OH WAIT MEDIAFIRE TELLS ME WHEN I UPLOADED IT. SHE WAS DONE IN OCTOBER 2011 that's right bc her original concept was super edgy that she was involved in some fucking werebird attack and her bird parts were mutilated. that's why she has the 1 little feather on her tail.

design wise here, i don't think i ever really landed on a design i liked, which could've also explained why i never did a proper voicebank video too.

the quality on her act2 wasn't that bad though so when i got slightly better at utau i simply redid her oto but i just still never released her even after 3 years unless there's somewhere i'm not looking, but i never had a proper voicebank dl video for her so i doubt it.

this redo came with a redesign where i tried to actually incorporate more blue into her design dklsjhdsf and this is where i mainly got her current color scheme

as you may know, when i moved from colorado to california, my childhood computer what kaput on me and i really had to fight salvage files from it, and the idea was always to get a hard drive reader to transfer the rest after i got a new computer the following year, but my dad, in a drunken fit, destroyed his OWN computer and after that fit we came to find that he had also taken to that hard drive. it only had a slight dent in it, but i never did get a chance to see if it would still work bc then we had that emergency move out of california, the hard drive wasn't my top priority anymore, and i left it behind. perhaps it's sitting somewhere around that area still, but everything that was on there that i didn't salvage is gone. that included every single voicebank i couldn't get to zip. i do not have access to seacrette's act2 anymore

i don't know exactly when i decided to scrap the albinism(?) design, it was during revoice when i redesigned her to be an npc for roxy, and then i remember drawing an early design of this current look in 11th grade

this art that i have NO CLUE of when i drew it was probably around 2021ish based on the eye shapes is where we get the first look at the new seacrette design

OFFICIAL SEACRETTE ACT3 DESIGN FINISHED IN 2022 APPARENTLY is where we land now design wise. i incorporated all that green i really liked in her original design while also making it VERY CLEAR she's a blue bird. i got rid of the edgy backstory, she's still blind just blind by natural occurrences now. i think i tried giving her yellow eyes but i just liked the blue more bc it balanced the design more

may of last year is when i sat down and recorded her for the first time in 10 years and i have continued the tradition of not releasing her KLSDFJHKLSDFJ but i recorded her shortly after i started testosterone, did her in one day so i knew that she would be set. and currently she just sits needing me to do her boxart. like that's where we are today. i might go fuck with her oto some bc i learned i was still doing one part wrong but overall, i just need to do her boxart and we'll be set to go, i'm going to use the cover i linked as her release song and then the one i did yesterday as her preview video

tale of the oc i've had for 13 years but jsut never really released bc ?????

[fa-by]

Hi Faby I have a question L said that she knew she was queer when she fell in love with her best friend when she was 15 and that her and L started to have a physical connection when she was 15 and I know everyone says that she was talking about C because L met C for the first time when she was still 15 but to me that doesn't make sense because L and C only started to get closer after L turned 16 and her and C basically just met so how could she be talking about C?

Hi to you, dear Anon 👋🏼😄 I know it doesn’t seem to make sense because the narrative’s goal is to confuse you and get you on their side by making you abandon the ship. You have to pay attention to the details and what they say because there are always flaws in the stories that our Camren are forced to tell. But don’t worry, I’m here. I’ve already talked about it many times, but I’ll explain it again to make you understand better and answer your ask at the same time.

So. During Becky G’s ‘En La Sala’ podcast (October 28, 2020), Lauren said she realized she was queer because she fell in love with her best friend when she was 15 and they started having a physical relationship. She forced herself to think that kissing and sleeping with her friend every once in a while was just a funny thing and nothing important; something that she has ‘normalized’ in her head by justifying it as something that ‘straight girls do’, and therefore fueling her internalized homophobia. Personally speaking, I believe in this. Not in the ‘she fell in love’ part because Laur’s still forced to say that the only girl she has ever loved is Lucy, but I believe Lauren and Lucy really did everything L said. Lucy was the first real unlock thanks to which Laur experienced the attraction and the feelings towards the girls she’d always felt and hidden deep inside herself. I firmly believe that Lucy was the first girl among her crushes on girls Laur acted on, and with whom she experimented in secret given the environment in which they both grew up and which still surrounded them at the time.

Now, the time frame in which this experimentation happened. Paul Martinez, the one she believed was her first love and whom she believed she would marry, broke up with her in late July 2011, and she only managed to move on when she wrote a song about how she felt on September 17th of that same year. Lucy moved back to Puerto Rico in February 2012, returning to visit Miami occasionally (that’s why the fetus pictures with Lucy and Camren at Laur’s house). Therefore, the time frame in which that experimentation happened, is from the end of September 2011 to February 2012. It could’ve happened in all those four months, or only in two, or only in one. Who knows. But that’s the time frame. Time frame during which Laur was 15 years old.

Having explained this, let’s move on. Camren first met during the first phase of the audition, the ‘cattle call’, on May 1, 2012, in Greensboro, North Carolina. You know? Where that short and really cute conversation started by Mila happened: “Hi, I like your shirt”, “Thanks. I like your jacket”. But it ended up there because they didn’t become friends from that day. They didn’t exchange phone numbers and they therefore didn’t even spend time together at home in Miami. They were still just two strangers who had auditioned for a TV show to pursue their dreams like so many other people. Oh and, on May 1, 2012, Laur was still 15, and Mila had turned since almost two months; therefore they were both 15 years old. The moment they became friends by no longer detaching one from the hip of the other, was two months later, on July 25 in Miami, when they met for the first time for the first day of boot camp (L went to C: “You’re the Cuban girl!”). On July 25, 2012, Lauren had by then turned 16 for nearly a month, and Camila was still 15.

Now let’s move on to the biggest miscalculated mistake that, either they made her say, or Laur herself said; perhaps even deliberately and not by mistake. On June 26, 2020, and therefore before the podcast with Becky, the PAPER Magazine article was released. In that article, Lauren explained, along with other things, that she’d been in love with her best friend for seven years. But the calculations don’t add up, for two things to be exact.

First thing: The Laucy narrative includes that A) Laur fell in love with her sure, Jan at 15 when they kissed and hooked up during parties.

P.S. Is it just me, or does this smell like what actually started happening to Camren the following year? I mean, the Like Friends Do situation whereby Laur got out of her internalized homophobia and realized she loved her and then got her head out of her ass by finally going to get her girl? No? Just me?

B) The wanting but not being able to be with her and giving her what she wanted made them grew apart not by her choice and not because Lucy returned to live in Puerto Rico and they simply grew apart for the distance and Lauren’s busy schedule with 5H, no, no.

P.S. I don’t know about you, but this still smells like Camren’s story to me.

C) Lucy returned to her life after she had a car accident on May 17, 2015:

“She came back into my life when I was 18. I was on tour and I was in my room in a hotel somewhere and she called me”. From that moment on, Lauren decided they would’ve been together “all in” and “now we’re gonna be in this relationship”. Yeah, sure. No contract that was supposed to help both of them involved here. No, no.

D) They broke up because Laur confirmed that theirs was a very toxic relationship, and the specific reason she gave was because they both weren’t fully healed from the past yet, but that they still loved each other very much. Mmmh-hmm, okay 🥱😴 Yeah, no, yeah, sorry. I fell asleep as a result of hearing bullshit.

Second thing: Ty.

Shall we reveal the miscalculation (again)? In love with her at 15, got together with her at 18 and broke up at 20 (1 year and 8 months, from mid-May 2015 to mid-January 2017), and after less than a month, start of another PR dating Ty. Now, 20 minus 15 (Laur’s two ages from the beginning to the end of the ‘story’), how much is it? 5. Shall we calculate from the moment of Laucy experiment to when they ‘broke up’? From late September 2011 to mid January 2017, how many years are? 5! 5 years and four months to be exact. According to the logic of the narrative, if she was oh so in love with Ty as they made her proclaim every two seconds, it means that she’d stopped loving Lucy that same year, and it’s not 7 years anyway! It’s still 5! Do we want to try with two last calculations? Okay. Also because you may have wondered: “Faby, what if we instead calculated from when ‘they got together’ to the release of that PAPER Magazine article?”. I’d answer that it’s still 5 years. From mid-May 2015 to June 25, 2020, it’s 5 years and 1 month to be exact. “Faby, what if we tried to calculate from the beginning to the publication of the article?” From the end of September 2011 (beginning of the time frame of the Laucy experimentation) to the publication of the article on 25 June 2020, it’s 8 years and 9 months to be precise. Not even in this case it’s 7! So, as you can see… And at this point I wonder: is there an alternate world where math calculations lead to 7 and not 5 here? What was that? Why say 7? Well.. I actually know why.

Shall we play another little math game? Can I reveal the truth in the lie? Let’s try to make sense of this 7 together now.

Lauren explained that she’d been in love with her best friend for 7 years in that interview, right? The interview with PAPER Magazine came out on June 26, 2020, but was done before the date it was released. We all know Laur was born on the 27th, and therefore in both cases, Laur was 23. And tell me, dear, how much is 23 minus 7? Sorry, I can’t hear your answer. A little louder please? Got it, got it. Can I also write it for everyone else who’s reading? Okay, thanks: 16. Wait, 16??? So who was Lauren actually talking about? Ohhh. How foolish of me. That’s why it ‘smelled like what actually started happening to Camren the following year’ to me. Because Laur was talking about Camila all along 🤦🏻‍♀️

🤣😏😎

Sarcasm and jokes aside, do you see how easy it is to manipulate and confuse people's ideas? It's still 7 years if we calculate from mid-January 2013 (after the first real New Year's kiss and the signing of the contracts with Syco/Epic) to the release of that PAPER Magazine article on June 25, 2020. And it's still 7 years even if we calculate from July 25, 2012 (first day of boot camp) to June 25, 2020. Camila is the answer to the 7 years because even if they try to make Laur modify the narrative by making her change the names with the PRs' ones, she's always talking about Mila anyway in reality.

Does it make more sense now, dear? I hope I’ve taken away all your doubts 🥰 Stay safe and have a good day 🤗 You guys too ❤

[robiinjason]

Hiii, do you have any recs for Robin Jason comics? I'd love to read more about him but I have no clue where to start. Love your art btw it's all adorable <3

Sure thing!!! And omg thank you 🥺🥺 your art is super cute too!!

If I were to rec One Thing as a starting point for Robin Jason, Batman #408-#429 covers Jason’s main run as Robin and his death arc and is the main essential reading I’d recommend. It’s fairly short and a good place to start imo! 

Among others, it includes his post-crisis origin and first outing as Robin, his first meeting with Dick, the Garzonas incident, and his death and its immediate aftermath in the Death in the Family arc. 

While Jason’s time as Robin in post crisis is fairly short and not as hard to get through as other characters with longer runs, i know Reading Comics Hard so I’ll make a shorter list first, with more recs under the cut!

Batman #408-#409 (Jason's origin)

Batman #410-#411 (his first outing as Robin)

Batman #413 (smart boy Jason)

Batman #415 (more good Jason moments)

Batman #416 (his and Dick's first meeting, also Dick and Bruce argue)

Batman Annual #12 (has a solo Jason story set at his school)

Detective Comics #569-#570 (Jason gets to kick the Joker's butt)

Detective Comics #571 (the Scarecrow kidnaps Jason)

Detective Comics #573 (this one’s just cute)

Superman Annual #11 (Bruce, Jason and Wonder Woman visit Superman on his birthday and stuff happens)

Blue Devil #19 (Jason is pen pals with Kid Devil)

Batman: the Cult (a 4-issue pretty dark miniseries where Bruce is kidnapped and brainwashed by a cult. Some great Jason moments)

Batman #424-#425 (The Garzonas storyline, or when Jason may or may not have pushed somebody off a building. Trigger warnings for sexual assault and suicide)

Batman #426-#429 (A Death in The Family, or Jason’s death arc)

I’ll be referencing this Jason reading list, since it’s what I followed when I started reading. It can be checked for a more comprehensive list of his appearances too, since I’m not aiming for a full list! (though I might edit it to include more stuff eventually.)

First things first, Jason got rebooted once during his time as Robin; he was originally a circus kid like Dick in pre-crisis (before the reboot), and later in post-crisis got his more well-known origin as the orphan who stole the tires off the batmobile. I’ll be focusing on post-crisis Robin Jason since I’m still reading his pre-crisis run, but the list I linked has more info on that if you’re interested!

Batman and Robin-focused 

Stories centered on the Dynamic Duo!

Batman #408-#429 - Jason’s post-crisis run as Robin, as mentioned above! The last four issues are the Death in the Family arc. The Batman: Second Chances trade collects a good chunk of these (#408-#416), plus Batman Annual #11 and a couple stories from before Jason’s post-crisis origin.

Detective Comics #568-#582 - Jason’s Robin run in Detective Comics! It’s a fun read and Alan Davis’ art style is very cute imo. (Jason isn’t around from #575 to #578 due to getting hurt in #573)

Batman Annual #10-#12 - More Batman and Robin stories. #12 has a Jason solo story set at his school! 

Batman: the Cult - a 4-issue miniseries where Bruce is kidnapped and brainwashed by a cult. A pretty dark story and one of the last ones from before his death. Jason has some great moments in it!

Dc Retroactive: Batman - The 80s - Story from 2011 written by Mike Barr, who wrote Jason’s 80s Robin stories in Detective Comics!

Robin 80th Anniversary 100-Page Super Spetacular - One of the stories, More Time, is about Jason and Bruce and goes between the past (with Jason as Robin) and the present (with Jason as Red Hood). Short and very sweet!

Crossovers/Teamups

In which Jason meets or teams up with other characters, with or without Batman!

Blue Devil #19 - Jason is pen pals with Eddie Bloomberg/Kid Devil and teams up with him! 

Action Comics #556 + #594 - Jason meets Superman!

Superman Annual #11 - For The Man Who Has Everything, or where Jason goes with Bruce to Superman’s birthday, first meets Wonder Woman, and Stuff Happens. (Jason gets to be the hero!) 

New Teen Titans V2 (1984) #18-#31 - Jason joins the Teen Titans for a while! It’s fun to see him in a team and his characterization here is really good imo. (this is the span of issues he appears in but he isn’t in all of them)

Legends (six-part miniseries) - A DC crossover event! Jason has short but great appearances (the time where he breaks his leg, but wants to get up and help anyway).

Nightwing Year One #101-#106 - A rewrite of Dick's Nightwing origin with occasional Jason appearances until #106, which is a retelling of their first meeting where they work together to rescue Alfred. While I have Issues with the characterization of Jason in this, it has some cute moments and I’d be remiss to not include the story that introduces Dick’s nickname of “Little Wing” for Jason.

After his Death

Stuff dealing with the aftermath of Jason’s death and the impact it left on others. (Some of the stuff here is just listed for a single page or panel rather than a full story about Jason)

Batman #430-#432 + #496 - Bruce in the aftermath of Jason’s death. 

Batman Annual #13 - Jason appears in a flashback.

The New Titans #55 - Dick and the Titans find out about Jason’s death, and Dick confronts Bruce about it.

Batman: Year Three + A Lonely Place of Dying - While these focus on Dick and Tim respectively, they’re set after Jason’s death and show how Bruce is dealing with it. Year Three is in Batman #436-#439 and A Lonely Place of Dying (Tim’s origin story) is in Batman #440/New Titans #60/Batman #441/New Titans #61/Batman #442, also included in reprints of Death in the Family.

Detective Comics #618 - Has a nice little moment of Tim looking up to Jason.

Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #100 - The issue is mainly a Dick origin story, but in the end there’s a sweet and sad story about Jason’s beginning and ending as Robin.

Nightwing Secret Files and Origins - On the first story, Taking Wing, Jason appears to Dick as a dream/hallucination while the latter is having a near-death experience and accompanies him through various of Dick’s memories.

Joker: Last Laugh #6 - The one time when, upon believing Tim was killed and being taunted with Jason’s death, Dick kills the Joker. (the full thing is a six-issue miniseries)

Nightwing (1996) #63 - The aftermath of Dick killing the Joker (though he was revived), but I’m mainly including this for the one panel that shows a picture of Dick and Jason on what seems to be a ski trip.

Batman: Gotham Knights #34 - At the end there’s a story called “The Delusions of Alfred Pennyworth” about Jason’s ghost and Alfred.

Batman: Gotham Knights #43-#45 - Has a flashback to a Barbara and Jason teamup and a recap of Jason’s death as a social worker looks into it and investigates Bruce’s family.

Detective Comics #790 - Bruce talks to Cass about Jason on the day of Jason’s birthday.

Robin V4 #85 - The story itself is about the Joker reflecting on the Robins and Jason only appears briefly, but I think it’s worthwile to include as it’s one of the few times where the involvement of Jason’s mother in his death is acknowledged after Death in the Family. (Also there’s a panel where Jason kicks the joker on the crotch)

Green Arrow V3 (2001) #7 - The one panel where Jason is shown swinging around in heaven :)

Alternate Universes/Other Media

Some stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else/isn’t quite comics/isn’t really canon, but I think is neat and wanted to include!

Letters - letters from readers sent during when Jason was Robin and after his death. They can be interesting to look through to get a sense of how he was seen by readers at the time (there’s even an eulogy by a clergyman!). The ones I’ve seen can be found in this tag, and this post links to a few too (as well as some other info regarding Jason and the vote that led to his death).

The Batman Files - A book that contains several files over various topics and characters across Batman’s history. Among other things, it has Jason’s death certificate. (mainly including this because early on I spent a while trying to find out how old he was when he died)

Tiny Titans #23, #29, #33, #39, #45, #47 - An adorable alternate universe comic in a kid-friendly setting! Jason’s design in it is very cute.

Batman The Brave and the Bold #13 - Jason and Robins from other points in time team up to save Batman!

Teen Titans Go! season 6, episode 17 (Egg Hunt) - He doesn’t actually appear, but Jason is namedropped and said to be Batman’s favorite Robin.

Batman And The New Robin (unmade cartoon) - An unproduced animated TV series from the late 80s that would have starred Bruce as Batman and Jason as Robin! Unfortunately the project was abandoned and the show was never made, but the full series bible is available to read in its entirety and a link to it can be found here! There’s a page on it on the Lost Media Wiki as well.

[the28thofseptemberr]

mutual mummies

a look into the close relationship between the tomlinsons and styles, especially anne and jay

this one is less of solid larry "proof" and just shows the really sweet and lovely relationship between the tomlinson and styles families, especially the close relationship between anne, jay, louis, and harry.

i did get sort of mushy and soft while making this because it's adorable, but it's also saddening because jay passed away in late 2016. regardless, i hope this will make you smile :)

before we begin, what does "mutual mummies" mean? it basically means that anne is harry's mother (obviously) but she is also louis' mother, and vice versa with jay being both harry and louis' mother - mutual mummies, get it?

anne is claiming that louis is like a son to her, like family, and jay is claiming the same thing with harry. it shows just how close anne and jay were with harry and louis. neither anne nor jay have claimed this with the rest of the boys, which means that this “mutual mummies” thing is exclusive to anne, jay, harry, and louis only. again, this doesn't really mean anything, just that anne, jay, harry, and louis got on really well, but i still really love this and i think it’s so sweet.

also - i tried my best to take new, clear screenshots of all the tweets in this post, but some of the tweets have been deleted so i had to use old blurry screenshots, i hope you can still read the tweets :p

onto our first tweet, which is a tweet from jay on december 25th, 2010:

in this tweet, she refers to herself as harry's adoptive mother, which shows how close jay and harry must have been for her to call herself that. 

tweets on january 16th, 2011:

these tweets entertain the possibility of harry going to france with jay and the tomlinsons - less than half a year after the band was formed, harry was already close enough to the tomlinsons to go on vacation with them, maybe?

on february 1st, 2011, jay wished harry a happy birthday:

jay says that harry feels like her family - which is obviously really sweet. keep in mind that this happened around five to six months after the band was formed, meaning that harry and louis had only known each other for around half a year, and they've gotten so close that jay feels that harry is part of her family. 

and don't forget these adorable pictures of harry and jay:

here's another tweet, this one on february 22nd, 2011:

jay isn't thankful the x factor made her son a star - she's thankful that it helped louis find harry (not meet, but find!!), and she's also thankful that she was able to find anne through the x factor, which, again, is super sweet!

the first use of the #mutualmummy hashtag seemed to be on october 8th, 2011, in an adorable interaction between anne and jay:

this #mutualmummies thing wasn't a one-time thing, though, because a little over a week later they used a variation of the hashtag again (this time #mutualmummyhug) on october 19th, 2011:

and on october 31st, 2011, anne replied to jay's halloween tweet with a picture:

(mummy hugs, get it?)

there was also 2011 christmas:

don't forget that while the boys were on their 2011 christmas break, and louis said he was going to miss not only harry, but also anne as well?

and it was mutual, because harry asked louis to come with him and spend time with "the fam" - not just anne, but the rest of harry's family as well!

which is cute, because it's sort of like a "bringing my boyfriend to meet my whole entire family" sort of thing.

the worst part about all of this was that harry and louis were going to be apart for three days. THREE. DAYS. they literally couldn't be separated for three days.

on february 1st, 2012, jay wished harry a happy birthday again:

she calls harry "poppet" (adorable, of course) but she also refers to herself as "mummy jay", once again backing up the idea that jay is like a second mother to harry.

months after the first use of the #mutualmummies hashtag, anne and jay do it again on march 21st, 2012:

on november 24th, 2012, one month before louis' 21st birthday, jay tweeted:

note that in her reply to a fan, she tagged anne, who hadn't been involved in the exchange previously. this twitter exchange was talking about louis' birthday/age and, officially at least, didn't have anything to do with anne, so why did jay tag her and add the #mummylove hashtag? maybe it's because they are two "mutual mummies" discussing their mutual son's upcoming birthday?

and here's a twitter exchange between jay and harry's stepbrother, mike, on december 22nd, 2012:

mike tweets about not being able to see jay that christmas, meaning that maybe they usually see each other, as if the tomlinson-styles usually get together every regularly.

plus this is an exchange between louis' mother and harry's stepbrother, where they sound like they're very close and friendly with each other. can you think of two people who would have introduced them to each other and caused them to become so close (ahem, LOUISANDHARRY) because of tomlinson-styles family gatherings?

then, on february 18th, 2013, this happens, where anne and jay confirm they are still best friends:

a day later on february 19th, 2013, what seems to be the final use of the #mutualmummies hashtag:

in conclusion:

because of louis and harry, the tomlinson-styles are really close, especially anne and jay, who were best friends. there was also a very close relationship between harry and jay, as well as anne and louis.

there are still other sweet moments between anne, jay, harry, and louis, but i was too lazy to find the other ones lol. hope you guys enjoyed this post! let me know what you think! (also this post has literally been in my drafts since october i have no idea why i didn’t post it earlier)

[causeiwanttoandican]

The Times

Prince William’s close friends on what makes him tick — and why he’s not trapped

March 20 2021, 6:00pm

As the world devours the Harry and Meghan interview, what’s going on with the brother who was left behind? He’s embracing his destiny, William’s close friends tell the Sunday Times royal correspondent, Roya Nikkhah

Next month Prince William will celebrate his tenth wedding anniversary — the day he became a duke and embarked on the most formative decade of his life. Back then, the tentative 28-year-old newlywed was not ready to devote himself entirely to royal duties. A decade on, he is in a very different position.

The job of being the heir to the heir to the throne, of finding a balance between life and duty, is difficult at the best of times. These are not the best of times. In their bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey this month the Duke and Duchess of Sussex accused the royal family and the institution around it of racism and callous disregard for a suicidal newcomer, among many other damning charges. Harry the spare also declared that William was trapped within “the system … My brother can’t leave that system, but I have.”

In the immediate aftermath of the interview William was “reeling”, a source close to the duke says. “His head is all over the place on it.” Four days after the Sussexes had their say, he hit back during an engagement with the Duchess of Cambridge at a school in east London. Asked about accusations of racism, William retorted with restrained fury: “We’re very much not a racist family.” He also confirmed that he hadn’t spoken to Harry yet, “but will do”. By the weekend it emerged they had “been in contact”.

William is thought to have been less than thrilled a few days later when that conversation made global headlines after the American presenter Gayle King, a close friend of the Sussexes, revealed live on air that it had not been an easy chat: “I did actually call them to see how they were feeling,” she told viewers. “Harry has talked to his brother and he had talked to his father too. The word I was given was that those conversations were not productive.” The intervention prompted a senior royal source to say that “none of the households will be giving a running commentary on private conversations”.

A close friend of both brothers says Harry’s “trapped” comment was “way off the mark”, insisting that William does not see it that way. “He has a path set for him and he’s completely accepting of his role. He is very much his grandmother’s grandson in that respect of duty and service.”

When the Queen turned 90 nearly five years ago William admitted “the challenge” that “occupies a lot of thinking space” is how to “modernise and develop” the royal family, and make it “relevant in the next 20 years’ time”. Twenty years now seems like a very long time. In the hours and days after the Oprah broadcast, William was at the heart of all discussions with the Queen and the Prince of Wales about how to respond to the Sussexes. He was keen that the issue of race should be acknowledged in the Queen’s statement as an area of particular concern that “will be addressed”.

William has always railed against being a “ribbon-cutter royal” and the issues he champions — mental health, battling racism in football, homelessness and his ramped-up eco-warrior role — are a window into where the future King William V will take the House of Windsor. A friend says: “He’s a small-c conservative. He values tradition and the need to go around the country, but he realises he can make a difference beyond traditional royal duties.”

Today royal popularity is, to put it mildly, in a state of flux, but William’s strategy has been working. Post-Oprah, he ranks just below the Queen at the top of a YouGov poll of royals. Not so long ago such a position looked like a long shot, when the “workshy Wills” and “reluctant royal” tags plagued him and he was clocking up fewer days of royal work than his nonagenarian grandparents. Pictures of him hitting the ski slopes and clubs of Swiss resort Verbier in March 2017, missing a Commonwealth service that even the Duke of York flew back for, didn’t help.

After the lasting PR gold dust of the Cambridges’ 2011 wedding and the births of Prince George and Princess Charlotte, it was the first public nosedive for William, who was still working as an air ambulance pilot. “That pissed him off,” a friend says. “He was leaving home at 5.30am, getting home after dark and saving lives in between, but people were still being critical of his commitment to his [other] job.” William was based at Cambridge airport with East Anglian Air Ambulance for two years, where he was on call for “some very sad, dark moments”, often working “on very traumatic jobs involving children”. He later acknowledged that “after I had my own children … the relation between the job and the personal life was what really took me over the edge, and I started feeling things that I have never felt before”. But it was a job he loved, because of “working in a team … that’s something that my other job doesn’t necessarily do. You are more out there on your own.”

A former royal aide says: “Immediately after their wedding he had a very clear idea of the pace at which he wanted to take things.” William was adamant he wouldn’t curtail his day jobs, first as an RAF search and rescue helicopter pilot in Anglesey and then with the air ambulance. “If you’re not careful, duty can weigh you down an awful lot at an early age,” he said, insisting he didn’t “lie awake waiting or hoping” to be king. He delayed full-time royal duties until the autumn of 2017, when, acknowledging the Cambridges’ future required more time at “monarchy HQ”, they moved from Norfolk to London and George started school.

He’d had to fight his corner for the air ambulance role. A source close to William reveals “there were lots of raised eyebrows in the Palace when he wanted to do that. While the Queen and his father backed him, some senior courtiers questioned whether it was becoming of a future king to be doing a middle-class role, hanging out with ordinary people. They thought he wouldn’t stick it out, he’d find it boring, or was doing it out of stubbornness to put off royal duties. He was pretty bloody-minded about it, and determined that other people’s expectations in the media or the system shouldn’t get in the way of his own values.” In the wake of Harry and Meghan’s interview much has been speculated about the extent to which royal life is dictated by Palace officials, but it is clear that William has managed to forge his own path. Who knows how high those senior courtiers’ eyebrows rose in 2019, when William spent three weeks shadowing the spooks of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ to learn how they combat terrorism. He insisted on being called “Will” and lunching in the canteen every day.

Those closest to the duke say his resistance to the idea of full-time royal duties stemmed not only from a desire to achieve something for himself but also from a fear of the impact on his family life. Miguel Head worked alongside the prince for ten years until 2018, as William, Kate and Harry’s communications secretary and later as William’s private secretary. “In his role everyone’s going to tell you you’re marvellous,” Head says. “The RAF and air ambulance jobs were about knowing what his abilities were, what he was good at in his own right. Without that he’d still be hankering for something that was his own.” After children came along he says William developed a “visceral determination to give them a life of consistency and privacy that were missing for large parts of his own childhood”.

Another close aide says the plan enabling the Cambridges to have a few years of “normal” married life, away from the full-time glare of the royal spotlight, paid dividends: “For years, the battles around privacy and paparazzi intrusion were all-consuming. He wanted to know, could we build them a credible plan allowing them a family life while slowly increasing the profile of official life? It took years to get there, but the success of that plan allowed him to be confident and content in his role. He’s not worried about his kids’ privacy any more and he has been able to be the kind of dad he wants to be.”

“Marriage maketh the man,” a friend says. “Catherine’s groundedness has been the critical anchor. And where his relationship with the media was once all fury and frustration, he now understands using the power of modern media, so the public feel they’re getting enough access.”

The children’s birthdays are marked with photographs — often taken by the Duchess of Cambridge — and there has been a noticeable increase in their public appearances of late. While not “officially” staged, William was happy to let George and Charlotte be photographed at their first Aston Villa match with Mum and Dad in 2019. Pandemic set pieces have shown the family clapping for the NHS on the steps of Anmer Hall, their Norfolk home, and, before Christmas, their first red-carpet appearance together for an evening at the panto with key workers and their children.

As they celebrate their anniversary on April 29, friends who joined the Cambridges on their wedding day tell me the partnership’s equal footing is key to its success. “They’ve got a solid relationship and she gives him confidence,” one says. “There is no jealousy, no friction, they are happy for each other’s successes.” In private William talks as passionately about Kate’s work as his own campaigns, and takes pride in her growing confidence on the public stage.

William has said his grandmother’s approach to being head of state is to take “more of a passive role. She’s above politics and is very much away from it.” He doesn’t plan to meddle in party politics, but he was not happy about the unenviable position the government put the Queen in with the 2019 proroguing of parliament, which was later ruled to be unlawful and forced an apology from Boris Johnson to the monarch. Constitutionally the Queen had no alternative other than to act on the advice of her government, but in William’s reign there will be “more private, robust challenging of advice”. His last three private secretaries — Christian Jones, Simon Case, now the cabinet secretary, and Head — had all worked in government departments, helping William to keep his finger on the political pulse. The new incumbent, the Whitehall heavyweight Jean-Christophe Gray, who served as David Cameron’s spokesman, continues in that vein.

The former Conservative leader Lord Hague of Richmond was last year appointed as chairman of the Royal Foundation to develop William’s work on mental health, the environment and a raft of new support programmes for key workers. “People internationally and nationally respect his credibility and knowledge on these issues,” Hague says. “He’s very persuasive. You only see that behind the scenes. He knows what he wants and he goes out to get it.”

Charlie Mayhew, chief executive of the conservation charity Tusk, has known William since he was 20. In 2005 Tusk and Centrepoint, the homelessness charity championed by Princess Diana, were the first patronages William took on. “In those early years I kept having to pinch myself to remember how young he was,” Mayhew says. “He was much more mature than his age and very aware of his destiny coming down the track. He had a sincerity, but never without wicked humour. His teasing is merciless.”

William knows some people see his passion for conservation as a posh man’s part-time hobby, but Mayhew says the duke’s “genuine and huge knowledge” undermines that view. “He’ll call and WhatsApp to flag up something that I haven’t even seen in the conservation space. He can be impatient to get things done.” Last year William launched the Earthshot prize, a £50 million Nobel-style environmental award to galvanise solutions to global problems over the next decade. He believes “conservation and the environment … shouldn’t be a luxury, it’s a necessity”, Mayhew says. “That’s the drum he wants to beat. He’s got a megaphone and wants to use it in the most constructive way. He speaks for that next generation and I think they can relate to it.”

A turning point for William was his 2015 official visit to China, one of the world’s largest consumers of ivory, where he met President Xi and condemned the illegal wildlife trade as a “vicious form of criminality”. Unlike his father, who has refused to visit the People’s Republic over its human rights record and treatment of Tibet, William’s view was that despite the UK’s fractious relationship with China, “we’ve got to engage”.

“It was very political, raising the illegal wildlife trade in China. I’m sure the diplomats were having all sort of nightmares in advance,” says Mayhew, who joined the duke in China. “But he was gathering greater confidence that he had the ability to be a mouthpiece for the issue.” Mayhew reveals that while William was visiting Japan before China, he still hadn’t secured a meeting with Xi. “But when the Chinese saw all the high-level meetings he was having in Japan, they changed their minds and Xi made time for him.” Later that year, as Xi began a UK state visit, William appeared on Chinese television condemning the ivory trade. Two years later China banned the trade.

In 2018 he spent months prepping for his most high-stakes overseas visit yet, to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories that summer. Navigating the diplomatic tightrope walk between Jerusalem and the West Bank, he visited a Palestinian refugee camp in Ramallah. As he travelled back to Jerusalem, he changed his speech for a reception with young Israelis and Palestinians to strengthen his solidarity with the latter: “My message tonight is that you have not been forgotten … The United Kingdom stands with you.” It was a bold move, but both sides hailed his visit a success and the officials breathed a sigh of relief. To the delight of the travelling press pack, William’s engagements on the final day were brought forward, allowing the diplomat duke and president of the Football Association to land back in the UK in time to watch England’s World Cup tie.

Ask him if he’s a peacemaker and William will laugh, saying Kate is the mediator. But according to a source close to William and Harry, his bridge-building skills were deployed in the lead-up to Harry and Meghan’s wedding in 2018, when tensions in the Kensington Palace household, then still shared by the brothers, were running high: “Every time there was a drama, or a member of staff on the verge of quitting, William would personally try and sort it out.”

As the brothers clashed more over the substance and style of their work, and the family hierarchy that William is a stickler for but Harry is less keen on, a split was inevitable. When they finally divided their households in March 2019, it had been a long time coming. But he never thought that a year later his brother would up sticks for America.

The pair went for a long walk to clear the air after the “Sandringham summit” when the Megxit deal was hammered out, but did not part shores as friends. What upset William the most was Harry and Meghan’s surprise launch of their “Sussex Royal” website before the summit, which featured their blueprint wish list of a part-time, commercial royal future. Later, when the Queen decreed they could no longer use “royal” in their future ventures, their website hit back with this bold statement: “While there is not any jurisdiction by The Monarchy … over the use of the word ‘Royal’ overseas, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex do not intend to use ‘Sussex Royal’ … or … ‘Royal’ …” Both “the content and that it’s still online is staggering”, a senior royal source says. “That was it for William, he felt they’d blindsided the Queen in such an insulting and disrespectful way,” says a source close to him, who reveals it was still at the forefront of William’s mind at the Commonwealth Day service one year ago. It was the Sussexes’ final engagement as working royals, and the froideur between them and the rest of the family was unmistakable.

It is a year since the Sussexes left for California and William misses Harry. “Once he got over the anger of how things happened, he was left with the absence of his brother,” an aide says. “They shared everything about their lives, an office, a foundation, meetings together most days and there was a lot of fun along the way. He’ll miss it for ever.” A close friend says William “definitely feels the pressure now it’s all on him — his future looks different because of his brother’s choices, it’s not easy.” Another friend says: “It’s still raw. He’s very upset by what’s happened, though absolutely intent that he and Harry’s relationship will heal in time.”

After lobbing bombs in his Oprah interview, Harry said: “I love William to bits … We’ve been through hell together … we have a shared experience … The relationship is space at the moment, and time heals all things, hopefully.” Harry would be wise not to set his stopwatch.

The first test will come this summer, when the brothers could be reunited for a series of family engagements including the Duke of Edinburgh’s 100th birthday and the Queen’s birthday parade in June. In July they are scheduled to unveil a statue of their mother at Kensington Palace, marking what would have been Diana’s 60th birthday, an emotionally charged occasion with the world watching.

While a chasm has opened up between the brothers, William has grown closer to the Queen and Prince Charles. He has helped them to navigate their way through Megxit, Prince Andrew’s removal from public life following the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and, now, the Oprah controversy. “That has changed the way the Queen sees him and values his input,” a courtier says. William also feels his relationship with his grandmother has “massively improved” in recent years and their views are “more aligned than ever”.

Friends say there has also been a “renaissance” in William and Charles’s relationship. “As the years passed there were strains imposed by the system — money, work, competition, Diana,” one says. “Part of William’s evolution is that as he has become closer to his father, he sees their similarities. At William’s wedding there was a gag in one of the speeches that he was more like his father than he’d ever admit, which made a lot of us laugh. As their respective destinies get closer, it weighs more heavily on them and strengthens the bond. The rift with Harry has also brought them closer.”

William is said to hate “flummery”, though the role of future king comes with plenty of bowing and scraping. But in 2017, for the first time publicly, he didn’t get his way. As a new parent worried about rising teenage suicide rates, he had spent a year convening a Cyberbullying Taskforce with big cheeses from tech and social media giants including Facebook, Snapchat, Apple, Google and Twitter. He wanted them to adopt industry-wide guidelines creating safer online spaces for children. According to William the meetings at Kensington Palace got “fruity” and the tech giants didn’t come close to the change he wanted. He was furious.

Tessy Ojo, chief executive of the Diana Award youth charity, sat on the taskforce. “He was deeply disappointed,” she says. “He didn’t come into it as ‘the duke’, he gave emotional pleas as a father.” William has since publicly condemned social media giants for their “false choice of profits over values” and privately offered support to the family of Molly Russell, who took her life at 14 after viewing images of self-harm online. Ojo believes it is William’s “lived experience of the fragility of life that guides the work he does”.

It also shapes the way he and Kate are raising their family. William has said he is determined that the grandchildren Diana never knew should “know who she was and that she existed”. He “constantly” talks to his children “about Granny Diana” at bedtime, so that they know “there are two grandmothers in their lives”. Earlier this month on Mother’s Day, Kensington Palace’s social media feeds published George, Charlotte and Louis’s cards paying tribute to “Granny Diana”, revealing it is an annual ritual for the Cambridge children. After a difficult few weeks for William, a line in Charlotte’s card provided poignant insight into how he is feeling: “Papa is missing you.”

He is on course to be a more modern monarch than any before him, but William is still a creature of habit at heart. He has the same tight circle of friends from his schooldays, one of whom says that, with William, “it’s all about trust and loyalty”. He plays five-a-side football in his Villa socks when he can, goes to the Chelsea Harbour Club gym he went to as a child with his mother and has a “smart casual” public uniform of chinos, jacket, blue shirt and no tie.

“William’s not trying to be down with the kids,” a friend says. “He never wants to be painted as irrelevant or dull, though he’s allergic to being compared to celebrities. The public doesn’t always get to see his funny side, but otherwise he’s the same in private as in public. He once said, ‘I’ll be in the public eye all my life. I can’t hide who I am because I’ll be found out.’ ”

In 2019, during a visit to a youth homelessness charity supporting LGBT people, William was asked how he would feel if one of his children was gay. “Absolutely fine,” he replied. “I fully support whatever decision they make, but it does worry me from a parent’s point of view how many barriers, hateful words, persecution and discrimination might come.” Such a personal exchange was a radical departure from royal engagement small talk. But William, the first in his family to be photographed for the cover of a gay magazine, had personally put the issue on the agenda.

As president of Bafta he gave the academy a diplomatic dressing down in his speech at last year’s ceremony, expressing his “frustration” over the lack of diversity: “In 2020, and not for the first time in the last few years, we find ourselves talking again about the need to do more to ensure diversity in the sector and in the awards process — that simply cannot be right in this day and age.” The 2021 nominees announced this month suggest his words hit home.

William “thinks the public look to him to keep royal work looking modern”, a confidante says. “The Queen and Prince of Wales are providing continuity and stability. He’s carving out his own relationship with diverse communities. He sees it all as a way of doing things now that will help a smooth transition when the time comes.”

Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, as a former frontline worker himself, William has led the royal charge supporting key workers. “Now, more than ever, he knows what his role in public life is, and he sees the value in it,” a close aide says. Chatting to NHS workers in January, William said: “Something that I noticed from my brief spell flying the air ambulance … is that when you see so much death and so much bereavement, it does impact how you see the world … as a … darker, blacker place.” Soon after the first lockdown was announced, the Cambridges’ Royal Foundation launched Our Frontline, a round-the-clock mental health and bereavement service for key workers.

Miguel Head says the future King William will continue to campaign on his big issues: “I can’t see him backing away from causes he’s passionate about. And while he’s not someone who loves ceremony, he knows the importance of it. When he gets the top job he won’t do away with it all. He’s mindful the monarchy represents something timeless that’s above all of us, and many people like the magic and theatre of it.”

Roya Nikkhah

Roya is royal correspondent at The Sunday Times. Over more than a decade she has covered royal events for the BBC, interviewed the Prince of Wales and Prince Harry and presented the films Prince William, Monarch in the Making and Meghan and Harry: The Baby Years.