#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

[gunsandspaceships]

Review of Official MCU Timelines: The New Official Timeline (Phase One). Part 1

My (unofficial) but logical (the right one) detailed timeline of the Phase One.

Review of The Old Official Timeline

Review of The MCU Guidebook Timeline

This is a review of Phase One dates from The Marvel Cinematic Universe: An Official Timeline, which is the newest and most complete timeline from Marvel Studios. We'll see if it's actually good or still not good enough. The book can also be used as a weapon because it's huge and heavy.

I won't copy-paste the entire timeline from the book here, but will focus only on the incorrect or questionable dates, and add details when the official timeline only gives a year/season/month. If I don't mention an event/date from Phase One here, it means the book has it set correctly.

Note: Fury's Big Week events and dates will be covered in a separate post.

Correct dates are highlighted in blue, questionable or too vague - in orange, and incorrect ones - in red.

First comes the date from the new timeline and then the comparison with date/s from other sources.

❔ Unknown (p.25) vs 600 years BIM (old timeline) - Odin hid the Tesseract on Earth:

The date of this event only appears in the old timeline - 600 BIM, which is 1408 AD. The new timeline mentions that it happened after the battle with the Frost Giants, but also says that it is unknown when exactly it happened.

📅 June 1943 (p.33) vs June 15, 1943 (my timeline) - Candidate Rogers met Agent Carter; 📅 June 1943 (p.33) vs June 15-June 21, 1943 (my timeline) - training at Camp Lehigh:

I added some details because they are easy to identify from the movie.

❌ Nov 3 - 10, 1943 (p.34, 329) vs Nov 3-4, 1943 (the guidebook) or Nov 3-5, 1943 (my timeline) - Cap brings the freed prisoners of war back:

We have options here. Unfortunately, the people at Marvel forgot how to count and think in their new timeline, because the 35 miles the soldiers had to walk would take about 12 hours. What exactly were they doing for the whole week?

📅 Mid-1940s (p.35, 256, 329) vs December 1944 - January 1945 (my timeline) - Barnes fell from the train; Zola is captured:

The date is very vague. In the movie we can pinpoint it with more precision: 1) It happened a couple of days before the Valkyrie flight; 2) There was snow; 3) It was after November 1943 and before March 1945; 4) It was in 1944 and 1945 at the same time. Is this a mistake? Or it could be December 31, 1944 - January 1, 1945.

❔ March 1945 (p.35, 329) vs January 1945 (my timeline) - The Crash of the Valkyrie:

It could be any month in early 1945. But only January can save the guys who wrote "1944" and "1945" for the train mission in the same movie. Remember, those events happened a couple of days apart.

P.S. This book contains absolutely idiotic notes from Miss Minutes, which Marvel only created more problems for themselves. It was so easy to fix, but instead they took this approach:

📅 1940s (p.38) vs June 23, 1945 (my timeline) - the exact date on this picture:

📅 1946 (p.38) vs March 15, 1946 (my timeline) - The Zodiac Mission (Agent Carter one-shot):

❌ Another "f*ck up of TVA" (p.53) - Miss Minutes tells us that the IM1 presentation has an error with Tony's age when he became CEO of SI. But as I explained in my MCU Guidebook review, there is no mistake: the movie says "at age 21", not "when he turned 21". Bots are all the same, I guess.

❌ 2011 (p.56, 89, 121, 250, 330) vs Early 2012 (my timeline) - Steve Rogers is found in the Arctic; April 2012 (my timeline) - Rogers wakes up after 67 years in ice:

Scenes at the end of CA:TFA and deleted scenes from The Avengers give us some clues as to how much time has passed between his first day in the 21st century and the events of The Avengers (May 2012) - no more than a few weeks. The weather in New York on the day of his awakening also suggests it is most likely April.

The year he was found depends on how long it took SHIELD to unfreeze him. It could have been late 2011, but I doubt they needed that long.

📅 Mid-2000s (p.68, 90, 330) vs March 5, 2004, 2:30 pm (my timeline) - The Creation of the Hulk:

In the movie, there is a photo from April 2004, as well as a newspaper and the earliest documents from March 6-7. We can also see a clock on the wall in the lab scene, so we can determine the date and time of the incident.

📅 Early 2008 (p.70, 330) vs End of January/Beginning of February, 2008 (my timeline) - Tony is kidnapped by The Ten Rings:

Tony spent 3 months in captivity. May 2nd minus 3 months equal a more precise date.

📅 Spring 2008 (p.71-73, 330) vs April 30 - May 25, 2008 (my timeline) - Tony's escape and the events of IM1 after Tony's return from Afghanistan:

Again, we can figure out months and even dates based on the movie itself. See my IM1 Part 3 timeline for details.

📅 Spring 2008 (p.71) vs May 2, 2008 (my timeline) - Tony returns from Afghanistan and shuts down weapon manufacturing at SI;

📅 Spring 2008 (p.72) vs May 5-15, 2008 (my timeline) - development of Mark II;

📅 Spring 2008 (p.72) vs May 18, 2008 (my timeline) - Battle in Gulmira;

📅 Spring 2008 (p.73) vs May 19, 2008 (my timeline) - Stane takes Mark I, kills The Ten Rings, and orders SI engineers to begin work on Iron Monger;

📅 Spring 2008 (p.73) vs May 24, 2008 (my timeline) - Battle with Iron Monger;

📅 Spring 2008 (p.73) vs May 25, 2008 (my timeline) - "I am Iron Man" press conference;

❌ Spring 2008 (p.76) vs December 2008 (my timeline) - death of Anton Vanko; Ivan begins work on his arc reactor:

As I said in the IM2 Timeline, it can't be spring (or the same time as the "I Am Iron Man" press conference) for many reasons.

Ivan was released from prison sometime in December 2008, and he still looks like he just got out. Plus, Moscow looks like it's December, not May.

📅 Spring 2010 (p.77, 330) vs May 11 - Mid-June, 2010 (my timeline) - Events of IM2:

One of the events is Tony's birthday, so we can narrow it down considerably using the Stark Expo countdown on Tony's TV in the lab.

Notice that this timeline FINALLY acknowledges that it has been two years since IM1, not six months.

❌ May 5, 2010 (p.78) vs May 23, 2009 (my timeline) - The Grand Prix Assault:

While the real Monaco Grand Prix Historique does take place in early May, in the movie it could not have taken place on May 5th, based on other dates, including Tony's birthday.

Review of The New Official Timeline Part 2

[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

[theeyeofthetigger]

Warning: discussion of animal death and grieving

Just kinda processing

It's still not hitting properly

Like I was so busy at work today that I could barely think about what happened yesterday but then I got on my break and I just cried the entire time I was in the break room

And my other cat seems so lonely without her

Pumpkin's never been in a house without at least one other cat there, and I think she's figured out that she's not coming back

And I just sat by her on the floor for a while today and cried

She keeps going to sit in the spots that BE used to occupy, because she always had a spot near her, just far enough away that they weren't close bc they got along well enough as they could for cats that were a decade apart in age

And I felt so guilty while I was at work because the entire mall was experiencing a data shortage so no one could use their phones

And today was the first day where I wasn't terrified that I was going to get a call from my mom about her again

Because that happened while I was at Spirit, she called me mid shift because she thought /that/ was the time

But she decided she was ready yesterday

She was comfy and cozy and had all of us around her because I was off that day, miraculously, and we all got to take her in and say goodbye

Two days ago, I came home from work, and we decided against going to my grandma's house to bake cookies because we were worried about her, and on the drive home, there was a vibrant, beautiful rainbow shining in the sky, past the rain

And I knew it was going to happen

I knew we had to just come home and spend one more day with her

So we made some ready to bake cookies and had her on a soft bed a bit of a distance from the front of the oven (we have a little nook under the counter in our apartment and that's where she was for the past couple days), and turned on the light so she could watch the cookies rise

I just felt so guilty for being absolutely relieved that despite having no signal at work, I didn't have to worry about it anymore, because I've been living on edge about this since early October and now she's finally at peace

And I know I shouldn't feel bad for that but I do and it's hard

It's 3am and I need to be up for work in 6 hours and I'm just sitting on the edge of my tub writing this and crying again

I just keep thinking back to this exact time the day before, when I was up late knitting because I'm working on my grandma's Christmas present, and I went to go check up on her in her little kitchen nook and she wasn't moving so I went to pet her just to see if she was sleeping and she looked up and made a little chirp at me to say hi

And by 11:40 that morning we were driving her down to the vet, because it was time

I know she was a nearly 15 year old cat and she was very very very sick (possibly cancer)

But I've had her since I was in high school and she has gotten me through so many hard times and several moves (including across states, because we got her when we lived in Maryland) and I miss her so fucking much I don't know what to do

Pumpkin misses her too and I don't know how to comfort a cat

I googled it to see if cats grieve and they do and it really seems like she is

If you've scrolled this far, here's some pictures of my sweet girls

The first one is from 2011, when she was just a little baby

Second is from 2021 when we were all curled up watching Hunter x Hunter and trying to keep warm during a cold snap

And the third is from the 20th, where Pumpkin climbed into her bed to keep her company for a little while

She was so so small at the end, I was so scared for her

I'm sure I'll find some closure on this eventually

But for now I'm in so much pain and I'm going to take whatever time I need to process it when I can

I love you so much, Bright Eyes

Know that you lived a life full of so much love

If you decide to throw a kitten at us from wherever you are, I can only hope that they have half as much determination and stubbornness as you did up until your last hours

[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.

[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

[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).

[influencermagazineuk]

Bradley Cooper is probably one of the few actors in recent times who have successfully broken into directing. His journey as a director has been really impressive, and his first directorial effort, 2018's A Star Is Born, was a critical and commercial success which earned him nominations for Best Picture and Best Actor in the Academy Awards. Then, in 2023, Cooper released Maestro, a biographical film about the legendary composer Leonard Bernstein, in which he not only directed but also portrayed the famed musician. Once again, the film earned a Best Picture nomination, making Cooper's directorial career a remarkable success right from the start. Despite working with many of the industry's top-tier names, Cooper never shied away from sharing actors he admired and wanted to collaborate with. In 2011, when he hadn't even considered stepping behind the camera, Cooper was asked to name his dream co-stars. "Daniel Day-Lewis for sure!" he said, along with other legendary names like Philip Seymour Hoffman, Joaquin Phoenix, Cate Blanchett, Kate Winslet, and Tom Hardy. "I think Michael Fassbender’s incredible and Carey Mulligan is great, there’s a lot of young actors that are really good and who I’d love to work with," Cooper continued. Even at that early stage, it was clear that Cooper had a great respect for talent and was eager to work with the best in the business. Raph_PH, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons It's interesting to note that Carey Mulligan, who was mentioned in that 2011 interview, would later join him in Maestro. Mulligan played Felicia Montealegre, the wife of Leonard Bernstein, a role that required her to navigate a complex mix of emotions, from compassion to deep frustration. Mulligan's portrayal, particularly as her character faced the heartbreaking reality of her terminal illness, was universally praised. In fact, her performance is one of the standout features of the film, proving Cooper's early instincts about her talents were spot on. At the time of that interview, Mulligan was only 26 years old, fresh off an Oscar nomination for An Education. It's clear Cooper's recognition of her potential was incredibly prescient.Looking at the other names on Cooper's 2011 wishlist, it's fascinating to see how his career has unfolded. He did, in fact, get to share the screen with Cate Blanchett in Nightmare Alley (2021), directed by Guillermo del Toro. While they do not appear that often together, their union is a notable one. Cooper also worked behind the scenes on Joker, co-producing the film, which starred Joaquin Phoenix. Cooper never had the opportunity to work with late Philip Seymour Hoffman, but he did find himself in a project that is related to him. In Licorice Pizza (2021), for example, Cooper was paired by director Paul Thomas Anderson with Hoffman's son, who is also simply named Cooper. About the other film actors he named, Cooper hasn't collaborated yet with Tom Hardy or Michael Fassbender. Still, it seems he has just starting his directorial career and has plenty of shots with his dream co-stars. Another of Cooper's upcoming projects, Is This Thing On?, in which he will co-star with writer Will Arnett and Emily Blunt, may become another one of these names on his long list. Very little is said of the film, yet it is probable to be another success both critically and creatively speaking given Cooper's history. With only two films under his belt as a director, Bradley Cooper has emerged as a force in Hollywood with a keen eye for talent who knows how to direct it and create powerful, memorable performances. As his career continues to evolve, it's safe to say that his list of collaborators only grows, while many of the actors he admires will surely want to work with him as well. So far, with early success and the promise of what may follow in the potential future projects, Cooper's journey in both acting and directing would appear to be just getting started. Read the full article

[jodilinbio]

Part 43

I sent a letter to Andy’s sister Marla since I couldn’t find his address, asking her to say hello to him for me. I admitted that moving away without telling him where I’d gone had been mean and that I missed him and was curious about what he was up to these days.

Shortly after, I received a message saying that the only way Andy would forgive me for dumping him was if I sent his old recorded phone message tapes to his sister.

I was stunned by how much he still sounded the same, though I was disappointed to hear he was also clearly stoned.

I thought back to when I would record his phone messages for him, as he didn’t have the means to do it himself. But I mailed that tape to him before we left Phoenix and wrote another letter to Marla letting her know this.

“Guess I’m not the only unforgiving person in the world,” I’d written in a journal entry of mine on Kiwibox before I left that site, which was later sold and changed entirely. A young woman in Maryland responded, making a good point: she said Andy should forgive me because he wanted to, not because of anything I could give him.

Damn right, I agreed silently, feeling a bit embarrassed to be learning from someone half my age.

One day, I was browsing a prison inmate locator site and, out of curiosity, started looking up people I’d known in jail. Mary had told me about Myra and Hope, who each got forty years for child abuse, but I wondered about some others.

I studied Hope’s booking photo—she looked exactly as I’d expected: depressed and anxious. Myra, though, wore a wide smile, looking happy as ever. What could be so exciting about a forty-year sentence? I wondered. But then, if someone could be sick enough to abuse children, perhaps they could also be crazy enough to smile about forty years behind bars.

Yeah, smile, Myra. You’ll be an old lady when you go home. :)

Over the years, I’d wondered about Rosa, regretting that we hadn’t kept in touch, though I’d assumed she was deported to Mexico.

But there she was! I recognized her picture immediately. I was glad to finally find out what had happened to her, even if the news wasn’t good; sadly, she was serving twenty-five years for second-degree murder.

In late September, my worst fears for Mary came true. I knew she wanted to be hopeful and trusting, so I tried not to express my fears that she wouldn’t be released in exchange for her testimony against the man who killed her child, as she’d been promised. If anyone knew that cops, lawyers, and judges could be dishonest, it was me. And sure enough, even though she’d signed a plea agreement stating she’d be free after testifying, the judge, who clearly had a preconceived opinion about her, ordered her to prison at the trial’s end. So, after a decade in jail, she now had to serve two years in prison, with her release date pushed to June 2011. Understandably, she was very depressed, and I haven’t heard from her much since the sentencing, as she’s much busier now. She described it as a “modern-day boot camp.”

In late September, Tom learned from a news article about a site that pays people to complete artificial intelligence tasks requiring human input, which has been a great supplement to our income!

If I thought finding Rosa, despite her grim circumstances, was thrilling, nothing could compare to the surprises I’d receive on October 3rd and again on Christmas!

One day, while taking a break, I found myself thinking of the kind woman from the camp I was in as a kid who had shown me such compassion. Who was she? Where was she now? What was her life like? Fourteen years earlier in Phoenix, I had tried to find her, but with no luck. But the internet has come a long way, I thought to myself as I logged onto Facebook. Searching for a group for that camp, I found one and messaged the group’s owner with my story. He said he loved helping reconnect old campers and counselors and would do his best to identify her.

At first, I’d thought I’d attended the camp at age 9, but on reflecting on one of my few memories, it hit me: I’d been about 11. I remembered a bunch of us kids trying to convince some of the counselors that we were “bionic.” But had The Bionic Woman even aired when I was 9? A quick internet search confirmed it hadn’t been released until 1976, so I must have been 11.

I let the group owner know, adding that she hadn’t been a regular counselor. He tracked down a list of names from 1976, and a few people in the group recalled a woman with a dog who matched my description. “It’s Eileen,” they said. “She had a dog named Sydney.”

Finally, a name! I messaged her and to my delight, she responded within hours, confirming that yes, she had been at Camp Naomi in 1976 and she even remembered me! Today, she has kids and grandkids and lives in eastern Massachusetts. We’ve kept in touch since I found her.

If finding Eileen was a surprise in itself, my next surprise truly floored me: reconnecting with Marie from Valleyhead. A couple of years ago, I’d set up an account on Classmates.com to enter a drawing. While there, I looked up Valleyhead, my old school. Despite its dark history—closed in the ’90s after an FBI investigation into abuse and embezzlement—I was curious about any familiar names, and I spotted Marie’s. Tall, dark, Italian, and very much my type, she looked fantastic.

While browsing the group page, I left a public message with my Facebook details, just in case anyone wanted to reach out. To my shock, Marie did! She remembered me, asked how I was, and shared that she was living in Trumansburg, New York with roommates and studying criminal justice. I was surprised by how excited she seemed to reconnect, even saying she’d love to chat.

As we talked about our Valleyhead days, I mentioned my crush on a staff member named Mary, which led to a surprising revelation: Marie had a crush on me! I couldn’t believe it. We’d rarely interacted and never shared a room or any classes.

[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 ?????

[edwardos]

The Internet has wrecked the certainty of a shared understanding of what "nostalgic" from post to post is going to mean, precisely, and I see that your post was made in 2020, but I have a lot of things to tell you all about 2012 YouTube for Minecraft.

I long for it.

This will be a very long post with pictures.

2012 Minecraft videos probably don't get talked about much because they weren't generally inside Alpha or Beta, which are the versions considered the golden age of the game.

For the record, I take no crap from the ill-researched notion that just because a certain ruling somewhere says that Release 1.2.5 content is allowed, people who like Beta actually consider FR 1.2.5 to be the same breed. It's a huge misconception that YouTube videos lately keep spreading, probably because they go to Reddit for a few minutes to look at a sidebar that mentions FR 1.2.5 (which didn't come into legislation until quite some time after the subreddit got popular and was put there purely to allow an arbitrary broader freedom of what posts you could make), and not think twice about it. Old Beta players who actually still play it know that the game changed drastically at the exact moment hunger was added to Beta. It's a group of people who usually hate Beta 1.8. Minecraft 1.0 has much of the same problems. This is coming from somebody who fondly remembers FR 1.2.5. It's off the rails with its gameplay compared to Beta 1.7.

People say the range of versions people identify is subjective, saying stuff like "for me the golden age was Alpha to Release 1.5", but I believe it shouldn't be subjective. I think the range of Classic to Beta 1.7.3 should be made objective. As objective as the term "The Renaissance" for real life history is. Think about it. We know exactly when hunger and sprinting were added, and due to the clear numbering system it's far less fuzzy than real world historical eras were. But it would certainly be an uphill battle to try to cement a standardized golden age ruling.

Anyway, 2012 was probably the golden age of videos based on Minecraft. (More research is needed.)

Even though Alpha and Beta videos were important and certainly did get made, 2012 was particularly special for new Minecraft videos. The 2012 to 2013 video metagame was not the same as the one in 2010 to 2011, but next to 2010 and 2011 it was another bright era of the game for YouTube.

I will attempt and hopefully not fail now to explain why.

The thing about 2012 is that YouTube videos on Minecraft were very different (though it's our new video metagame that's the fucking "abnormal" one, not the old one) and they relied far less often on clickbait design and that whole nightmare school of thought than people do now. I don't think I was paying attention for the 2020 period of YouTube time but I imagine videos now are much the same as they were at the time of OP's post. Clickbait and mass-produced revenue farms. Outside of channels similar to StampyLongHead, the closest thing to clickbait I can remember from near that time - and I never watched Stampy, I just know that the channel exists and has some unfavourable rep - was when a server video would be like "Pranked!" because multiplayer was full of practical jokes, even as far back as early Beta.

Videos were more like experimental TV shows than they were like a modern YouTube video. I wouldn't say "scripted", but they had a quality to where it was basically as entertaining as if there was a script. Like watching the memoirs of an old man living alone in the wilderness who builds shacks and fights the elements and wild mountain lions on camera.

Videos could go slowly and not have a single-vid hyperactive throwaway gimmick. If there was a gameplay gimmick, it'd be a right proper game mechanic shift that redesigned how the game was played - not just because the premise sounded funny - it would truly be an interesting way of playing the game, and they'd spread it out over a robust series or miniseries of multiple episodes. (All of that is something I always thought we needed more of, even before I got sick of YouTube and sick of Minecraft.) And usually that format had much better results, as they'd create a pretty scene of what is now an antique version of the game, if they weren't also telling a story. But it goes beyond being "not clickbait". It goes beyond a lot of things in ways that are hard to capture that we hardly ever get to watch now.

And just to get it out of the way, I did some digging into the etymology and definitions of "nostalgia" while working on this post, and I should post a bit of my findings here. Especially since it was kind of a soul-searching moment for me in the end as I have despised the word "nostalgia" for a few years now and then somehow I loosened on it after learning something important about it.

I know it's not really an issue for most people, but I found that the definition of the word was played with too fast and loose by the internet for a long time, and in 2016 videos of mine, I played fast and loose with it too. It has long been something that bothers me. The point here was that I've chilled out a bit more about it because this definition from an actual physically-printed dictionary appears to cover all the bases. It was then that I found out that you don't need to have actually been there to experience the thing when it was happening to qualify. It says "a bittersweet longing of things [...] of the past", yet it doesn't specify whether or not it existed in your own memories. The definition is loose enough that much more uses of it fit than I thought. So yeah, I guess I can say it. I'm frequently nostalgic for 2012 Minecraft on YouTube.

Though it seems a lot of people use the word to mean something more like "engaging with stuff from my past and feeling a fun warm feeling of recall" now. I actually used to think it was that a few years ago and was in for a shock when I opened an actual dictionary in a thrift store because it seemed incompatible with what I thought I knew.

But to be clear, I believe people should never tell another person that their opinion is just nostalgia. I personally believe that the choice should be up to the person who has the fond memories, and that intruding on that is highly disrespectful. People in the Minecraft fandom try to tell others that their opinion is "just nostalgia" a lot, and that's the main reason I get touchy.

Let's move on.

Minecraft Versions in 2012

At the start of 2012, the full release version of Minecraft had come out and was briefly the most cutting-edge official major version. Minecraft 1.0. Technically Minecraft 1.0.1. I would have thought the need for bugfixes would create more, but it's just 1.0.0 and 1.0.1, and apparently 1.0.1 was a server program only. Knowing what were then the latest versions can help to explain why things were the way they were. What caused the 2012 Minecraft video metagame to look like that. And I hope not to disappoint people because of this, but be warned that there are a lot of very popular 2012 channels that I never watched back then. So, for example, don't expect any AntVenom stories from this. Also just real quick, 2012 was a really explosive time for massive Minecraft mods that made their way into many extremely widespread YouTube series.

Minecraft 1.1 came out just a couple of weeks into 2012 and it quickly became clear to me that the game would be getting bigger and more frequent updates than I expected. Though I don't know how quickly. It's hard to say because 1.1 was really small, notably adding spawn eggs (ok...) and the Pirate language pack (BOSS!). I think some small group of people genuinely thought the game updates were going to stop at Release 1.0.

Then 1.2 snapshots started coming out, which doubled the world height and, in the 1.2.4, added totally new variation in plank colours.

A world height of 256 back then - and in any version containing the same height made since - was a big deal. And it came out as early as 2012 March. I believe people rushed to immediately make use of that extra vertical room, but I'm not sure. This probably sounds like it doesn't mean much, but I think it says a lot about the time when you know about it: all these updates coming out quite frequently, the genuine excitement around them and how fresh they felt at the time, and even though updates had hunger mechanics and overpowered players compared to monsters of the night - those monsters failing to impose the earlier threat level they once had - the game wasn't freakishly controversial with the playerbase. Sure there were complaints on the Minecraft Forum - but more than now, people were content with the latest version of the game by a majority population. I think. There were fights, but not like the huge-scale and unbelievably divisive ones we have now. A lot of complaints were seemingly baseless and didn't gain traction or importance the same way "I lost my Minecraft account because of the forced migration" did in more recent years.

And Minecraft Release 1.2 felt nice. Of course, this was after the huge riot that Beta 1.8 caused, but if you're in 2012 Minecraft, all the pain around that is starting to be left behind now.

Now, to switch gears and actually say stuff that's more immediately meaningful, we have to talk about Mindcrack. Maybe not much about The Yogscast, but definitely Mindcrack. And if you want to know, that picture up there is from Yogscast Lewis playing a map with Simon Lane called The Tourist.

At the time Mindcrack was producing some really meaningful videos on FR 1.1 to roughly Release 1.6 versions, which was before Season 4 and beyond when they started slowly petering out until Season 5 totally fell apart and stopped seeing member activity and then somehow the userbase forgot Mindcrack ever existed at all.

But Mindcrack was a source of innovation. I don't think I can claim that "Mindcrack invented the concept of playing a multiplayer survival server where people played together while recording different let's play videos on it". However, Mindcrack were among the first to actually do it, and lots of posts on the Minecraft Forum in my time could be frequently seen asking people to join a similar but much less-known server using the words "like Mindcrack" or "Mindcrack clone". And it's possible that they're the reason Ultra Hardcore Mode is played the way it has been for such a long time in the previous decade and beyond.

Rewind to "MindCrack Ultra Hardcore: Season 1" in 2012.

This was a modded four player co-op server in Minecraft 1.1 with the goal of staying alive long enough to kill the Ender Dragon. Because yes, you had to install a mod to play Ultra Hardcore back then. And it was the beginnings of Mindcrack's long-running but currently washed-up Ultra Hardcore tournament series. I don't know how UHC video-making is played in 2024 with Lucky Blocks and random drops and crap, or if it's even recognizable or not, and I don't want to try to find out, but here's how it looked in my time period:

8 or more people who play Minecraft get together. They log into a server and meet in a circle near the center probably around something faintly monumental but small. They explain the deathmatch ground rules and pick teams in some way. Or it's every one person against every other one person, they mix it up. There are artificial barriers around a very long perimeter to keep them in. Everybody is randomly teleported to spread out locations and they wait for the starting clock to count down. Then it's almost pure Minecraft survival, done in real time, with no cutting ahead so as to preserve the synchronization of multiple interestingly-overlapped perspectives recorded at the same time. They try to watch out for other players because at any time they could get attacked. Some people die before they even find a hostile player. The season may or may not have some special mechanic built into it, like a goal to defeat the Enderdragon driving it or a perpetual sunset hour of the game world. It takes about 5 episodes for a survivor's playthrough to end, and there are several playthroughs between the many people playing together.

However, that picture up there was Guude and his friends doing a proto-UHC thing. Four players working together against the environment to achieve a common goal, as I said. And there were three seasons of just that before the competitive PVP aspect was put into play, in Season 4.

I didn't check out Mindcrack until problematically longer than it took for me to discover The Yogscast, but those were the two major sources of Minecraft video media from 2012 and 2013 that I happened to get content from. I don't think I spread my viewership of channels very far, and I wasn't satisfied with Coe's Quest.

Mindcrack was already long-since established before 2012. It started as a singleplayer series in Alpha (episode 1 came out before the Halloween Update) by Guude, and one day in the Alpha 1.2 era of 2010 he randomly decided he would make a new multiplayer world and add people to it, without changing the series name.

That was Mindcrack Season 2. A primitive Minecraft Alpha and Minecraft Beta server. As Beta 1.8 had its big debut, Guude created Mindcrack Season 3.

↑ I've always fucking loved the visuals of this, since deciding to revisit it one year. It looks so atmospheric and beautiful. ↓

And this was, emotionally, a short time before 2012 would start, and Mindcrack would transform into a popular Minecraft series powerhouse. If it hadn't already. All the while Guude himself was probably posting a new Mindcrack video of his own 5 times a week.

Here's a picture from early 2012.

That's VintageBeef's unfinished castle on Mindcrack Season 3 on what I think - based on the upload date - is around January 2nd, gameplay time. It would have been Minecraft server version release 1.0.1. You can actually see Vintage Beef in this video, but not in a screenshot I could take that contains the castle as well.

I don't know how much these screenshots are doing for you (readers), but in my opinion the old stuff outperforms builds in newer versions when it brings a lot of much-needed prettiness and pungent appeal, stuff that is just missing in Minecraft 1.15 and beyond. Especially with those yuck new textures.

It was one of those servers. One of the multi-perspective survival ones focused on building and naturally-occurring networked moments. At the time, "Mindcrack" - as I said earlier - was what people defined this kind of server in relation to when trying to recruit for a new server series of their own. The medium didn't have a name, people just called the medium "Mindcrack clone". Then people forgot about Mindcrack and started using "Hermitcraft" in their phrasing, or otherwise just counterproductively calling it "an SMP" (really, you're going to narrow "Survival Multiplayer" down to that non-broad a definition? My inner linguist is appalled).

That's one of many things that separate it from The Yogscast. I know I could just say "Mindcrack was like Hermitcraft", but honestly I can't stand Hermitcraft and the sheer blandness of its personality. Except for Tinfoil Chef, he was genuinely a personality to remember. Also, fun fact, Tinfoil Chef, obscure though he may have been, was also significant enough and present making videos in 2012. If you like the style of the era I'm describing, then depending on your tastes I may be able to recommend his videos.

There's a point to be lifted from the poster's choice of words back there: culture. "Culture" is a hard thing to pin down and I might fail here, but I will try. Though, I don't know how "culture" was intended to be defined here. The videos could be something special but I think of culture as being more like "we're going to do Hasbro pony and troll face stuff and have funny personalities and swear", and less like "here's an actually good video that happens to use Minecraft 1.3 and it's not clickbait".

The first thing when watching old Mindcrack videos with Guude or BDoubleO in them that you notice is their genuine personalities and propensity for casual adult-oriented humour. Guude was always saying things like "I need a condom" and "Vechs got his dick wet". They just straight up did not care about the potential child audience demographic. And I really wish more Minecraft YouTubers in the 2020's were like that. I'm obviously not saying all popular Minecraft content needs to do this, but god I wish some of it would. Even just 20% of the channels that get attention.

It may surprise you to learn that BDoubleO100 up there was actually adult-oriented at the time himself. Yes, really. The child-aimed stuff he started doing after then was the result of a slow-boiling but massive Flanderization. It wasn't like sneaking adult jokes in, either, he actually was incredibly blatant about it, and the series OOG Legendary was fucking funny with that.

The personalities were also frequently more genuine aside from when they were being totally engulfed in a running gag (like Sips and Sjin were when they just wouldn't stop pretending that a beaver mafia was after then or something and that things that never happened in well-known movies happened), as opposed to dozens of AAA channels putting on a mask to be more kid-friendly or to make more money. Or both.

Obviously it wasn't just Mindcrack. It wasn't just polyvideo servers or Ultra Hardcore playthroughs, either. In spite of the comparative limitations this game had when you look at it against our software we have now, 2012 Minecraft media bases were actually quite diverse.

Hunger Games PVP had a pretty large share in the market. Videos based on Super Hostile custom maps were quite common, and custom map videos in general were very common. The Yogscast had an extremely long playlist of challenge map playthroughs that I watched, which had all of the Shadow of Israphel stuff grouped in for some reason, which led to me watching Shadow of Israphel very slowly because I "had to" watch several episodes of totally unrelated custom world creations on the way.

You also had a lot of singleplayer let's plays, obviously, modded and non-modded. Videos covering new updates like Minecraft 1.4 when they were just snapshots were exciting, and I remember being genuinely spooked by the tease and reveal of The Wither. Actually they took it a step further, by nicknaming it "The Witherking". Yes, they put "king" in there. The mod spotlights were amazing and looking back I don't know how in some places the programmers of the mods in the plentiful videos made on the subject got so advanced. There were also a buttload of Technic Pack/Tekkit/Feed The Beast series, many of them coming from just the Yogscast channels. Many of these modded versions felt like the Minecraft Beta of technology tycoon games. The Twilight Forest, for a time, was basically as famous as The Aether. Let's also not forget about Rurikar22, even though that probably didn't kick into high gear, exactly, until maybe 2014. The creativity of that channel was amazing. You know what I don't recall seeing back then? Hundreds of how to build a house tutorials. People were building their own shit. If you couldn't build the way other people built, it didn't matter to other people. And naturally there was original content such as machinimas, built-for-video custom maps and, of course, animations and music videos.

Sadly, in spite of all the nice stuff I've said about that time period, I'm pretty sure that even if new videos on Minecraft 1.2 and such came out today, and they perfectly recreated the commentary style, editing, level of intelligence at gameplay, and microphone setups, I would not be able to enjoy them in 2024. For one thing, there's all the horrid mouth noises (that's the non-Edward term for "lishing"), some of which I'm sure even my godsend flatscreen from last decade won't filter out, so for me, to watch more or even go back to existing videos, misophonia would have to stop being a concern. Like it was around 2019 I think that I tried to rewatch the fondly-remembered Minecraft with Sips and Sjin series, and I got pissed off and stopped because the mouth noises that the microphones were picking up were just that disgusting. Something that did not give me any trouble the first time, back when the episodes were new.

There's also the pacing. After Guude, BDoubleO was my main Mindcracker for a long time, as I chose him to be my perspective on Season 3, but they both had really long Minecraft videos at the time that - though I could put up with it back then - would probably bore me to death now and that I swear could have and should have been edited and trimmed more. I suspect that, knowing him, Zisteau did not have this problem. These personalities also were prone to screw things up in ways that would make me yell at the screen due to their sheer blundering in 2024. Hell, I got pissed off at some of the common no-brainer mistakes even in 2013. See: people trying to create upward corners when placing minecart rails. And I'll never forget Sips and Sjin having no idea how to fix the problem with placement of ladders and trapdoors that had an OBVIOUS solution in one of their Buildcraft-ish series.

But worse still, I've kind of just changed. I'm pretty sick of newest Minecraft, but if they played even my favourite versions from release or Beta/Alpha, and did it well, I still probably wouldn't be able to be into it the same way. I have retro versions enhanced by years of skill and new software to boost them, I even have my own mod that's great for survival in playtesting, but even there I don't have the same unending devotion or magic. I don't play Minecraft nearly as much as I used to and I'm not hooked on the game or videos like I once was, probably because there's been so much pain and wasted time on things that I shouldn't have done or that shouldn't have happened to Minecraft, and the luster is basically just gone. That's the hardest thing about the "nostalgia". Knowing that no matter what resources and video builders I had, I couldn't get to feel the same way again. I don't even get to have that much fun rewatching old videos that had already worked for me before. When I'm watching 2012 Yogscast videos again, it's just not the same. And one of my favourite places to haunt, the near-beginning of Mindcrack Season 3 in 2011 with Beta 1.8, has been basically ruined as a haunt spot by that fucker W92Baj and his bullshit misophonia-aggravating food "joke".

Minecraft and its videos have never been perfect. There's always been something holding the experience back. Every version of Minecraft, every video made on them, if it's not bad or average, it'll be good but with something preventing perfection from getting into the experience.

Minecraft Alpha, for example, is really fun once you know how to make it work, but is almost wrecked by the nihilism-burn of there not being that much content to use and there being no way to change your spawn in-game.

Minecraft 1.2 is one of my favourite release versions due to its history, but it's got hunger mechanics, a share of bad bugs, enchanting annoyance, "You cannot sleep right now, there are monsters nearby", and iron farms.

Those of you who know me well will know that I don't even have to start talking about what annoyances I have in versions from FR 1.13 onwards to know I'm not even close to being OK with them.

The best videos from 2012 aren't perfect because of some hindsight issues such as boredom (usually poor editing), lishing problems, repetition, a sense of emptiness (which is somewhere to be found in many an era), and, indeed, often not even being finished. Even Shadow of Israphel - before it killed itself with no ending, hint, communication, or attempt at closure - suffered from some pretty saddening issues. But the old stuff is better than what we have now.

What we have now is a polarized and violent Minecraft society where some kind of elite makes 95% of the Minecraft videos, 80% of those videos do the same ideas over and over, those ideas are horridly produced and designed, kids are bound to have nightmares, and the remaining YouTube video market is either Hermitcraft, people criticizing the metagame, people criticizing the criticizers, a handful of medium-sized channels that explore old versions like Beta 1.7 (thank god for that at least) and finally, a lot of very small, unheard of channels that make normal let's play videos kind of the way people used to, often being on old and/or alternative versions, but they don't have thousands of subscribers. Type "Minecraft" into the YouTube search bar and submit it today, and you will get a trough of cancer.

I don't even have to "admit" that some people want to create good videos and are still trying. I can just say they're still trying. Because it's just that YouTube is not helping them on their way. Nothing about the way YouTube is designed now is going to promote a video like Yogscast Survival Multiplayer if it'd never been done before and it just came out today. They're neglected by the recommendation algorithm, AND the search algorithm (even when you get extremely specific, for some stupid reason). And I keep giving up on trying to find the good videos. I find myself being very disappointed in what the very-small Minecraft Beta YouTube channel videos with New Frontier Craft and the like have to offer when I find them in the last two and a quarter years. I'm not going to name any of them, that would be mean.

At least the extremely small channels are trying it. They're trying to make things that make sense to a high-standards viewer. Somewhat conventional entertainment that if done right, might create a sense of withstanding the passage of time. Because the small channel stuff is substance over fads. And they don't get promoted anymore.

Now what gets promoted is shit like "MINECRAFT SPEEDRUNNER VS HACKER" and "UHC BUT DIAMONDS FALL FROM THE SKY AND THE FIRST PERSON TO TALK FALLS IN LAVA" and "APHMAU IS PREGNANT" and "The Most Secret Underground Base in Minecraft" (note: you can't keep a base secret in unending lax rules multiplayer Minecraft, it inevitably will be found and people who find it can always break the blocks even if they're obsidian) and my personal favourite, "MINECRAFT PEACE WAR".

Now, I've said before that I like enhancing Minecraft with either mods or command/hack enhancements to create innovation in how the game is played for Minecraft video series. But this is not that innovation. It's always one video for each game hack, for one thing. But beyond not being actual lengthy series where you watch a world develop at a good pace taking multiple episodes... the hacks are wacky ideas but not good, interesting ideas in terms of reshaping gameplay. It's an ugly parody of the multitude of altered-game survival serials I always wanted. Before YouTube went to shit, I sadly only had a limited amount of experiences with the true innovation, such as that in DvZ Simulations or the brief time in Mindcrack when they tried to make a season have Ultra Hardcore health and healing mechanics. I also tried to make series like that of my own, but in the end I couldn't manage to pull it off. Again, slim pickings and far between them, and they'd be succeeded by an abrasive Minecraft video metagame that picks up a nonsensical premise for one video like a toy that does nothing but be a toy and then throws it away to replace it with the next blockbuster 15 minute thing. And modern YouTube has just as many disgusting mouth noise problems as 2010's YouTube did, if not more. You could say it's really a lot like modern action films in Hollywood, except that Hollywood spends more time recycling cool intellectual properties from the past.

In 2012, what got promoted was more like "Richard Plays Minecraft Episode 27: Killing The Wither". Or perhaps something like "Minecraft Maps - The Dagmore Castle: Part 4". You can read the difference.

I'll finish the main bulk of this by treating you guys to a fun quiz!Which video thumbnails are from the 2012-2013 era of YouTube Minecraft, and which ones are much more new? (EXTREMELY DIFFICULT QUIZ 99% WILL FAIL.)

I hope you didn't strain your cranium too much with that puzzle!

I still can't tell what definition OP was using for the word nostalgic, whether it was the dictionary definition from the last time I checked, or some other intended meaning. But I know one thing. 2012 and 2012-orbiting era Minecraft videos had serious merits, ones that are mostly unavailable on the website nowadays.

These merits are often neglected even when they're the really essential fundamental ones. I feel like I'm deprived of mainstream Minecraft videos that actually do something for anybody above the age of 17. And again, due to how everything in both the world and myself has changed, even if I had the ultimate Wayback Machine, I'm simply not able to go back to watching those videos, even though I love that old era. I honestly want something new to happen. I want something new and totally unexpected and good to hit the let's play blogosphere. I can't very well rewatch the majority of what I once saw, and yet I look back on it with some amount of fondness. The 2012 zeitgeist was a good one.

Welp, I committed. Now I just hope that my impulsive monologue doesn't end up getting me entered into discourse or scare some of my followers away. I'm kinda nervous now.

Is anyone else suddenly massively nostalgic for like... 2012 Minecraft youtube culture?

[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!