#I've been working that event since 2017

[wyrddogs]

That feeling when I'm looking at my calendar for October through February, where I'm working events I'm not competing in for four separate clubs, and trying to squeeze in field trials and nosework trials where I can. And also rest weekends. Very important.

I genuinely enjoy volunteering, but man. Gotta be careful of burnout.

[rui-drawsbox]

remembering the most memorable mc's (with canon appearences) from the otomes i played

all of them are phone games btw. and looong rambling about the games after the cut!

Mystic messenger has been in my radar since i was in elementary school but i played it for the first time after the spanish traslation came out (2017 i think?) Seven shaped my type in such a specific way that im not really sure why loved him so much (it was the whole "he loves you in every route" stuff). I like a lot the default mc, most of the fandom did and that was enough to won me over

Rosa is top tier protagonist tbh, Tears of Themis has really good story and characters (as far i played, not a lot but i enjoyed it) The reason i'm not that much of a fan is bc the game is expensive asf and not very free to play friendly. You're either lucky or have a big wallet with the gacha

i miss my wife man(Marius)

Ephemeral has to be one of the best free to play otomes i've played tbh (if my memories aren't tricking me, it's been years) Good artwork, good storyline, good characters and as far i remember you can unlock one chapter of the character route per day (mabye two days, idk) and the mc's background has an important role in every route (she's a zombie! she's pretty now but eventually will fall apart, aaaaand her story gets expanded in one of the routes!) ((shes also adorable)) There's also a sequel, if you wanted more of the boys! never finished it but i'd recommend it

Honorable mentions! Huellitas Mágicas is a great game! has a really good cast with well fleshed arcs for all the characters, even the scondary ones! The game shines more for the development of *all* the characters rather than just the protagonist/ml. The main theme is overcoming insecurities! Each love interest has a different way of helping our (very insecure) protagonist and helping different characters with their own struggles :DD

10/10 i recommend this game if you want something cute and can be finished in a few hours, if i remember right. It also has a sequel! with like- 12 new love interests, also never finished it bc i didnt found a guide that worked for me but ñek

A3! is my canon event as a gacha player. Discovered the english/global server, tried it and got bored, left it for a few months, tried it again and fell in love, noticed the game was going to shut down bc low sales -HAHA :(-. This is not a otome btw, this is here bc Izumi has to be one of my favorite protagonists in gacha games ever

last but not least! Obey me! Shall we date? oh dear, what have they done to you :(. The original had intense powercreep to force you to pull cards -multiple times bc that makes them stronger- and even now, the company showed a lot of favoritism to some characters, leaving others to dust bc they don't make the same money. Not to say, they released a new game with the same cast and new main story (ignoring all what happend before). And let me say: THEY LITERALLY WANTED TO KILL THE ORIGINAL GAME.

Nightbringer might be a decent game but i don't trust the devs anymore, i still remember what happend with Asmo's birthday right after the release, and honestly i don't want to sit there watching how they disrespect my favorite characters again and again and again. Loved the characters hated the devs. 5/10 you can play it if you want but i don't recommend spending money on it, it's not worth it, just search #obey me here in tumblr and enjoy the amazing fanworks that i can assure you have a lot more love than the game itself

i miss my wife man (mammon and levi)

[ranticore]

Ok so, what is Inver how can I read it gimmie the sales pitch pspsps pretty please

This is Inver! It is an alternate history northwest Europe

It's a play on the old region of Doggerland; the North-East Atlantic Archipelago* with sea levels reduced by a catastrophic past event that spread parts of the fairy world out into the real world. This Event also wiped out all human life in the area pictured above, leaving it uninhabited for hundreds of years before it was slowly settled again by people from the land bridge to Hibernia, and people coming up from Aquitan

As a result of a war between these two groups of people and subsequent cultural exchange, Inver's dominant culture is a Hiberno-French mixture. Br*tain does not and has never existed.

The Event in Inver's history has still left large swathes of this land uninhabitable, with the only way east blocked by the Ruad, a hostile, labyrinthine, and largely impassible fairy territory. This has stifled the ability of these lands to produce much of value; Inver is a poor country, considered a kind of industrial backwater with a monarchy descended marauding werewolf war clans. This paragraph could last literally forever if I liked (and I did like. that's why there's books)

Inver's Régian Era, roughly equivalent to the Victorian era irl, is the stage for my main book series Moth Viper Foal (#mvf) (links are to the books & the tag on my art blog). It is an era of great change in Inver; much of the capital city is ruled by criminal gangs and a foreign church while the great noble houses, having lost touch with their people, turn on one another for sport. The story follows the sequence of events that ultimately results in catastrophic change for everybody in the region, and the dawn of a new era (that's as vague as i can make it)

But really it's about the (gay) struggles of outgrowing your relationships, setting higher standards for yourself, and all the various ways someone can fail to be a man. Main (POV) characters are three ex-conmen & one DLC extra nobleman. Before the start of the story, a catastrophic argument between two of the guys precedes one of them (Félix) getting kidnapped by the Black Horse, a fairy. He is returned five years later, a servant of the horse, to find that his friends (and ex-friends) have changed completely in his absence, and his old life is done for good.

I'm very bad at summaries so idk really. It's a story about interpersonal drama and friend breakups between some guys and also fairies are there. It's all i think about. Every other setting & post on this blog not about Inver was made as a kind of mental break from thinking about Inver. I've been working on it since 2019

you can check the overall tag to see posts from both my blogs including some very nice art and some absolutely heinous AUs (Pern Story among them??? maybe. idk if i tagged it)

also there's two more stories set in Inver, Ancient Inver which is a telling of the wars that founded the country and also an exploration of Being FTM, and also Modern Inver which is set in the distant future of 2017 and it's a buddy cop/detective thriller about a ranger investigating a series of supernatural kidnappings with the help of the guy who did most of them.

[sineala]

Are there ANY stony/Star Trek AUs?

Okay. Um. I'm just going to assume this is a legitimate question and not actually a way to express frustration about my progress on the sequel I am writing (I stared at this ask for a while), so I will just conclude that you must have missed the Steve/Tony Star Trek AU I wrote, um, back in 2016:

Straight on till Morning (109848 words) by Sineala Chapters: 6/6 Fandom: Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616, Avengers (Comics) Rating: Explicit  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply  Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark  Characters: Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, Carol Danvers, Janet Van Dyne, Hank Pym, Wanda Maximoff, Pietro Maximoff, James "Rhodey" Rhodes, Clint Barton, Donald Blake (Marvel), Jocasta (Marvel)  Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Star Trek Fusion, Action/Adventure, Romance, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pining, Angst, Secret Identity, Identity Porn, Sex Pollen, Fuck Or Die, Caves, Sex In A Cave, Technobabble, Happy Ending, Cap_Ironman Big Bang 2016, Community: cap_ironman, Podfic Available  Summary: 

Tony Stark resigned his commission in Starfleet five years ago, after a disastrous away mission, and he swore he'd never go back. He just wants to be left alone to build warp engines in peace. But the universe has more in store for him than that, as he discovers when Admiral Fury comes to him with an offer he could never have expected and cannot possibly refuse: first officer and chief engineer aboard the all-new USS Avenger, a starship of Tony's own design. What's more, the Avenger's captain is Steve Rogers, hero of the Earth-Romulan War. Believed dead for over a century, Steve is miraculously alive... and very, very attractive. 

But nothing is ever easy for Tony. As he wrestles with his secret desire for his new captain and his not-so-dormant fears, another mission starts to go wrong, and Tony becomes aware that Steve has secrets of his own -- and the truth could change everything.

So, yeah, if you actually haven't read that one, that'll keep you busy for a while. It's a Trek fusion with comics Steve/Tony, set in the era of the later TOS movies. (This is important so that you can picture the correct uniforms, and also because it actually matters that the events of Star Trek II, III, and IV have happened.) It was a Big Bang fic, so it's got some great art by Ran and Phoenix -- embedded in the story -- and also M_Samro made a really amazing podfic of it, if you like podfics.

For a charity auction in 2017, I promised I would write a sequel, and I plotted the whole thing out and started writing this extremely epic sequel, which was unfortunately, about a plague threatening the galaxy, and I got about 120,000 words in and then 2020 happened and I decided I needed to not be writing it right now. So it went on an extended hiatus.

But the good news is that I've actually gotten back to it! I picked it up again last month and I've put 40,000 more words in it since then and at this exact moment I am currently working on the last scene of Chapter 4 (out of six total)! I swear it is happening! I've been putting in about a thousand words a day for the past month! It is really happening this time! The sequel is coming! I promise! I know it has been years but it's happening!

See? It's happening! (I would include a screencap of the part that is happening, but all of Chapter 4 is pretty spoilery.)

So that will exist! Someday! I mean that!

And if you're asking about Steve/Tony Star Trek AUs by people other than me, there are some! If you filter the AU - Star Trek Fusion tag by Steve/Tony, there are 25 matches. Several of them are related to my fic (remixes, art) but there is some stuff that isn't my fault! I haven't read a lot of them because I was trying not to read things that seemed like they might be similar to mine while I was plotting my series here, and also I have never finished watching DS9, so I skipped the DS9 ones.

Under Stars by vulcanscully: A fun fusion that I thought was interesting because Steve is an ensign and that's not how this usually goes.

Discovery of the Century by DepressingGreenie: More 616 in flavor than a lot of the Trek AUs, this is basically Finding Steve In The Ice but Make It Star Trek. As far as I am concerned, Finding Steve In The Ice is great every time.

and so we rebuild by raeldaza: I'm probably biased because this one was inspired by my fic, but I also really enjoyed this one for not being how these things usually go. A lot of Trek AUs in many fandoms are written through a TOS/AOS kind of lens and will often do a Kirk/Spock thing and make one of them a Vulcan or half-Vulcan. In this one that's Tony, but also he's a terrible Vulcan! He's found a new way to disappoint his father!

Stellar Love Affairs by AvengersNewB: I honestly had never imagined a Star Trek fusion that was also A/B/O but I think it really works here! It's like bringing pon farr full circle.

Xenophilia by Captain_Panda: Captain_Panda has several Trek AUs but I am reccing this one because it's the longest. And also the whumpiest. Everyone loves some good away-mission whump!

So there you go! Live long and prosper! I promise I am still writing this Star Trek AU sequel!

[brf-rumortrackinganon]

What do you make of the moment when Kate shrugged William's hand on a Christmas show in 2019? The sugars use this to show how they actually hate each other, but I've always thought Kate just reacted immediately because they never did PDA and she was caught by surprise, as in to say "what are you doing? we're working"

I've been following the BRF since the Sussex drama, so I don't have decades the reflect on, but from what I've seen, it really seemed there was a no PDA rule. They also appeared much stuffy, even towards each other, with Kate standing straighter, making sure she was walking behind William, often keeping her hands in front of her as if to protect herself. But the last years, the seem more at ease in public, allowing some hands on the back here and there. And I've actually been wondering if H&M overdoing it with the PDA meant the BRF could actually relax a bit and allow some touching without looking unprofessional.

There isn’t a “no PDA” rule. The rule is that everyone is expected to be professional at work. And PDA - over the top PDA like the Sussexes - is not professional behavior in any industry, in any profession, in any country in the world.

William and Kate are affectionate and playful with each other. They always have been, long before Meghan had Harry in her claws:

Before their engagement: L - Graduating St. Andrews in 2005 C - Saying hello at polo in 2006 R - Paparazzi catching them making out. Date unknown, suspected sometime 2009 (based on William's hair).

Newlyweds: L - Canada, July 2011 C - Edinburgh, July 2011 R - London Olympics 2012

Early Parenthood: L - Christmas Walk, December 2013 C - Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, July 2014 R - Rugby World Cup, September 2015

Before the Love Bomb: L - Hiking in India, April 2016 (there's a well-known story from royal reporters on the India trip that William and Kate were close and affectionate until they spotted the reporters and photographers. Once they saw the royal rota, they immediately separated and became more formal/professional.) C - Private family ski trip, February 2016 R - Canada, September 2016

Before Meghan made her official debut with Harry and the BRF: L - Heads Together awareness event, February 2017 R - Wimbledon Men's Final, July 2017

And no, I didn't see "the incident" as Kate shrugging off William's hand because it was PDA. I see that moment as Kate adjusting her position in her seat and William briefly touching her. If you watch the clip, you'll notice that Kate's whole body wiggles; her shoulders, her trunk, and her legs. William just happened to touch her in that same moment. If she was shrugging him off, if she was recoiling from his touch, only her shoulder would have moved. It was a harmless, normal moment that happens to everyone.

Others may see it differently, and that's fine.

Harry and Meghan overdoing it with the PDA didn't open any doors for anyone to be more affectionate or show more affection. All they did was highlight the difference between working professionals who a) know they're on the job, b) know their roles for the job, and c) know that their job is bigger than their individual needs and people who think their love and togetherness is more important than the job.

[zahri-melitor]

Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths:

I finished working my way through this as an event, and I've got to say that DC can't decide what it wants to do with the Multiverse. We've just gone from restoring the 52 Earths (Mostly around Convergence/Multiversity) to discovering the Dark Multiverse (Dark Nights: Metal, 2017), to rebooting the Multiverse at the end of Dark Nights: Death Metal to form the Omniverse (2020), but also restrict things back to 52 Earths only, to rediscovering Infinite Earths in Dark Crisis (2022), to the conclusion of Absolute Power being "we have once again cut off the Multiverse, but now we're going hard for Elseworlds instead" (2024). Make up your minds! Do you want to use the multiverse or not??? Please stop switching it up every 2 years!

Okay that rant aside, this is yet another event that cares very deeply about plot points and characters from COIE that have barely been seen in the intervening 36 years (and generally only in other events that reference COIE heavily). I don't have any emotional attachment to Pariah and the Anti-Monitor.

Structurally, it was an interesting event, in that there were about 4.5 plots going on.

Plot 1: the Justice League get trapped on dreamstate Earths born out of their subconscious wishes. In terms of commentary, Barry trapping himself in a 1950s comic book, Clark wanting to raise Jon (on the farm, with literally no other heroes from the Superfamily around), and J'onn J'onzz creating a future where he's merged humans with cephalopods/octopus so that they're psychic were probably the most interesting of the lot. Barry proves once again he's disconnected from the present, Clark is obsessing over his loss of Jon's childhood at the expense of everyone else, and J'onn...is once again mourning the loss of his culture and looking for a way to feel less disconnected from Earth. Still not quite turning into the sands of Mars tho boyo. Blah blah the League are feeling they're not communicating properly, they need to take a break and focus on themselves.

Plot 1.5: The Flashfam go to extract Barry and work out WTF is going on because they're the most reliable multiverse jumpers, and the Lanterns recruit everyone as bodies are needed (as all the heavy hitters are as stated trapped in dreamstate Earths).

Plot 2: Jon Kent forms the most underskilled novice Justice League since the early 1990s that largely consists of the latest legacies of various families, getting some direction from Black Adam. Their collective experience as superheroes MIGHT total 20 years active, and if it makes that it's because Booster and Ted are supplying most of that experience.

I am underwhelmed by this team, to put it mildly. There's a lot of "I need to be Superman as my father isn't here!" from Jon, and a lot of boring "Damian grows up to be Batman" foreshadowing where Damian outright insults people a lot, and Yara looks confused and irritated over why she's hanging out with them both. Jackson's trying his hardest, bless his heart, but because nobody really cares much about the Aquas they get that bit of the plot out of the way early on. I'm not sold on what this lot were actually trying to accomplish, despite once again being presented at the future of the DCU.

Plot 3: Dick and the Titans realise they have to step up to actually take leadership, because as noted Jon Kent's Justice League is out there competing with Justice League: Task Force days of "there are four warm bodies here, and only half of them are under the age of 18, we're good to go right?" for level of threat defence. Also Slade's busy trying to kill both Dick and Gar because he can something something dark forces corrupting him mad about Grant's death for the 87th time blah.

Plot 4: Young Justice get kidnapped into a further separate reality to keep them out of the way while the two generations on either side of them try to step up to leadership, and have a bunch of angst about being left out/left behind (I am going to discuss this separately. Spoilers: I thought it was one of the most interesting parts of this event).

My general impression of the entire event was the intended purpose was to showcase both Dick and Jon's leadership abilities. I think it achieved this, but not necessarily in the hoped for way. Dick showcased once again why he is the centrally trusted character of the DCU and can convince everyone and anyone to follow him. Jon showcased that he is absolutely not a leader, he needs to stop thinking that he is required to fill Clark's shoes, and DC need to stop trying to make it happen.

The bit where I most started rolling my eyes is when they decided that Jon Kent, half-Kryptonian powered by sunlight, from a species famously incredibly vulnerable to magic, needed to lead the team going into the magical pure darkness/demon dimension that has no sunlight "because his connection to the sun protects him". Jon's biggest weakness not starting with K is magic. So let's put him in a dimension consisting of magic and have him have to survive off the power of his sunlight...which he immediately wastes and burns off a lot of power by trying to fly. Power that he can't recover, because he's in said dark demon dimension with no sunlight.

Jon, sweetheart, you are not the brightest bulb.

My second biggest eyeroll was meeting Red Canary, Sienna, who accomplished exactly nothing when she accidentally got caught up in Damian's strikeforce that otherwise consisted of "a teleporter for travel, Peegee for her experience with the Cosmic Tuning Fork, and Dr Light because Kimiyo is both COIE linked AND has strong light based powers to fix the situation". I am still unsure of what the point of Red Canary being there was, because she mostly just snarked with Damian and got into trouble. Even if she was intended to eventually be revealed to be Sin Lance with memory problems or something she was not a convincing character.

The Flash storyline in and of itself was fun, but I'd actually already read it when I was reading through Adams' Flash run. It worked just fine in context of the event and it worked as a tie-in where you just skimmed over the event. Adams' Flash run is very entertaining.

As far as DC big summer events go, this one felt more about 'we want to reach these end conditions' (Justice League disbanded for a while, Justice Society of America back, Titans to step up as the headline team) than the actual content of the event itself. It was an event for the sake of having an event, you know?

I dunno. Maybe I would have cared more if I'd actually read COIE, but it felt derivative and like there was a lot of time wasting for the sake of referencing specific things that happened in COIE, whether or not they made sense for this storyline.

Oh and as a note, one other useful thing this event did do was specify that Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is supposed to be in continuity for Kara, and basically contemporaneously too.

[rose-tea-and-strawberries]

So, Across the Spiderverse has had me in a chokehold since I watched it. Could you imagine a Yuu in the House Mouse au who is not exactly powerless, but her abilities are not magic-based? Welcome to the crossover that nobody asked for, and I'm gonna pretend that secret identities don't exist for a moment and that disrupting canon events from astv don't exist.

Spider!Yuu's spidey senses can tell when danger is afoot. Whenever she's on the clock, there's fewer accidents and just swings by before Goofy trips and tosses all the dishes. She can tell when either Pete or Mortimer are here.The staff can rely on her for cleaning the high ass ceilings because she can climb up walls with no problem. And her webs make the best Halloween decor.

Von Drake and Jumba being so fascinated with Yuu's anatomy and intelligence. Whether has organic webbing or made web shooters of her own, they want so badly to experiment on them (definitely not gonna try to get bit by a radioactive spider too, nope).

Jamil being torn from freaked out to having a crush on a girl with spider powers. Jafar trying to convince him that she's not an actual spider so that his ship could sail

Yuu making a web hammock to calm down the little kids in the club. Next minute she's having a strength competition with Hercules and Gaston because she can lift up to ten tons.

The clubgoers seeing her memories and freaking over the fact that Yuu has been up against so many dangerous foes and life or death situations such as the iconic train scene. It scares them even more than the overblots do.

The Parr family from the Incredible (if they're here in the au), feel so bad because she's doing vigilante work all on her own. Edna mode upgrades Yuu's spider suit to a new level with glee.

Yuu: No capes please. It's disrespectful to my image.

Edna: *sniffle* Would you like to be my daughter?

Okay okay okay first of all I'm going to vent a bit about ATSV because Pavitr my boy, my sunshine, my everything is literally so important to me like hell yeah give me the south asian/brown kid representation (now if only there was an young asian girl with a bob so I can feel better about that Dora the Explorer look my mum forced me to have throught 90% of primary school whilst all of my friends got to grow their own hair out)

Also not going to lie the only reason I'm into ATSV is because I've been a Mayday Parker stan since 2017 - like she is everything (and her backstory is just so sad like PeterMJ didn't deserve that). My favourite spider-people after Peter are his multiversal daughters because girldad Peter is everything (I actually own physical copies of the Renew Your Vows comics that are about Peter and MJ's daughter, Annie-May Parker, and they are so frickin good) but I digress...

Yes but Spider-Girl!Yuu is so cool. Thank you for giving me this idea.

I don't know if I want Yuu to have her own Guy in the Chair back in her universe and for Idia to feel jealous/threatened or for her to have no guy in the chair until she comes to twst and Ortho is like 'my time has come'

Ohh imagine the insane parkour skills she, Ruggie and Aladdin would have.

I know that being insanely smart in science is a Peter Parker thing and doesn't really apply to all Spider-People but I think she would be a science whizz (and joining the science club - making Crewel's already glaringly obvious favouritism skyrocket) and hanging out with all of the scientist characters like Prof Von Drake, Jumba, Yzma etc.

Her and Herc would be training buds. He'd see her and her heroics and superhuman friend and be like 'new best friend :D'. Phil loves the heroic potential she has and wants to train her but Pegasus and Megara are like nope and swoop him away.

Oh but imagine the beastfolk finding out about her enhanced senses and how sometimes they cause sensory overload and helping her out because they grew up like that so they know how to manage it better (I once read a fic that said that Savanaclaw showers have soaps with subtler scents to accommodate their enhanced sense of smell and like yes) whilst she's still getting used to it and has to keep it a secret back in her world.

I'm thinking back to all of the MCU!Peter Parker fics I read and all of the spider DNA tropes that tickled my fancy and I can just imagine the twst/HoM cast reacting to things like her having no thermoregulation (and going into hibernation), her purring, her being allergic/having a poison like reaction to peppermint, her having fangs (her being venomous would be cool as well - like imagine Kaa being all fanboying over her fangs and venom glands) etc..

Okay so I remember having a bunch of ideas about this but I can't recall all of them so here... 😅

[nerdygaymormon]

It's been awhile since I blogged about therapy, but some things were said today which I want to remember. This blog is partially a journal for me.

————————————————————

First we began by talking about the hurricanes and all the stress and anxiety. I told him about stress eating and not doing any exercises and feeling blah because of it, but a hurricane is not an everyday event. He called it an anomaly, which I like that way of phrasing it. The weather and being without power was an anomaly and my behavior reflected that. This week I've gotten back on track.

Next I shared two pages from my book (which I had never brought before to therapy) about new beginnings, and the therapist was surprised that I felt that way. I spoke of how this year I joined a new friend group, I stopped the disordered eating, I became VP of a non-profit, all topics we have talked about in therapy. He didn’t realize those are all new this year, that yes, it could feel like a turning of the page to a new one.

I compared it to coming out. Yes, there’s the first time, there’s the big one where you tell the most important people, but that’s not the end. You come out again and again. It isn’t like those first times, but each time can feel like a bit of new start in that relationship. I feel like this year was a new start in my relationship with me.

My therapist commented that I have a tendency to come in and say something indirectly, and then as he asks questions I will take steps towards a destination and finally will directly say what I had been hinting at. That made me laugh. I didn’t realize I do that. I swear I didn’t come with the intention to share about new beginnings but I think I subconsciously meant to.

The therapist then said, “Okay, you’re here. You’ve had these successes. Now what? What are your plans for the future? What do you want to work towards?”

Talk of the future actually frightens me a bit. For much of my life I had to just focus on surviving the current of my life and the hard space I was mentally in that there wasn’t space to imagine the future. 

Another thing is I've been suicidal at different times of my life. I have had several ages that I didn’t think I would live past, so imagining a future past that didn’t seem reasonable or useful, but then I make it and I feel lost, like “now what?” 

I didn’t tell him this but a few years ago I was convinced I wouldn’t survive my 50’s. I’m 53 now and I am not in that same head space but I haven’t adjusted in my head to think about the future.

I shared some thoughts about an idea I’ve been working on that would feel like wrapping up this phase of my life. To which he asked what comes in the next phase? Idk. I’ve been so fearful of the future I try not to think about it. If I continue on my current trajectory I just imagine a lonelier and lonelier life as my nieces and nephews grow up, as friends inevitably drift apart. 

That led him to bring up romantic relationships. I told him in the book I have written a few questions. Am I unlovable? Did I wait too long? Are there any good men left? 

To pursue a relationship means being open. To date means to make yourself vulnerable in a way that others can hurt you. It means knowing what you bring but also what your flaws are, and how you’ll be perceived by others. Dating can be fun but also it’s not really that fun and can open you up for pain. I did some dating beginning in 2017 and stopped when the pandemic hit. I wasn’t in a good mental place afterwards to pick that back up again, I’ve been needing to work on myself (from being passively suicidal to realizing I have an eating disorder)

He surprised me when he congratulated me on being honest in my assessment of myself and for being willing to share with him 

[internationalvigilantes]

One Year Later...

So it's been a bit! Exactly one year since I started this account, and not much has happened! Seemingly!

First thing's first, today's a holiday! It's been exactly 7 years since The Patriots was first created back in 2017 and exactly 1 year since I started the website! (I know it says 2 up there but I'm tired and making this at midnight alright?), it was so long ago when I threw together a cheesy communist supervillain to paper and built a show around him! Which eventually became a web-comic after I realized the animation industry is hard and evil and scary right now!

Ain't he cute!

As I said on my main blog I have answers, not INTERESTING answers, but ANSWERS!!!!

>The Patriots is still happening! Just a whole litany of life stuff's been going on, attempts at college, invoicing, as well as me realizing that making a web-comic is a LOT harder than a lot of folks make it seem! Since I first launched the website (with help from the ever lovely @docilepillow), Episode 1: Boston Commune has been wholly edited twice! Episode 2: Generation Evil! has finished its first couple drafts, and much more recently Episode 3: Rip & Terror has FINALLY been outlined after months of mulling! A bit more obvious: Patriots art still happens sporadically via my end of month art-dumps over on my main blog, though like most of my projects I have been sluggish to put together an area where all the characters and their biographies are spread out (Commie King, the first character and namesake of CK Day, doesn't even have an article!), which is where I segue into articles!

>The site is not abandoned, just outdated! I've been thinking of redesigns and perhaps simplifying how I do bios so you can get the regular scope of the character as well as it being just Easier for me, the hardest part of course is always the ref itself, but I've also thought of a myriad of other updates to the characters themselves (hint: a simpler description of Red's powers and the dropping of Lucy's boyfriend maybe probably!), honestly with my creative process expect edits to be a normal occurrence! The Patriots kinda-sorta-sister-series, Phenomenal! Made waves during Artfight over The Patriots themselves this year, and I look forward to giving them bios too, just...not here, duh, but I feel like that's worth mentioning. TL;DR stay tuned for Commie King's long-awaited biography wowza

>WHAT NOW!!?? Well, I'm still working on it! That's it really! The Patriots is just slow, that's just how I operate, but it's my brainchild and it's very special to me, as much as it is just a bunch of niche stuff in a blender making an even more niche smoothie. Trust me, with recent events, I have even more a mind to work on my silly superhero action comic, it's always on my mind, but it IS happening! Yeah!

Er, that's it Gootbye!

[whumptober]

Meet The New Mods

Thank you very much for the warm welcome! To begin we’d like to say a very big thank you to mods Pan and Claire, as well as Jo, Marie and Kat, for their hard work in creating and continuing the event for six years — especially with how big the community has become! We have a momentous job ahead of us when it comes to modding the community and running the event as well as they did, but we are determined and up for the challenge.

So perhaps it’s time to introduce ourselves:

gunshou tumblr | discord | ao3

fandom old (she/her)

I’ve participated in Whumptober for a few years, although I never finished. I’m a writer who can’t write fluff to save my life; if a character isn’t going through some kind of trauma in canon I’ll make it happen in fanfic. I live with an old blind mini poodle and intense imposter syndrome. I used to mod communities on Livejournal (fandom OLD) and I’m really excited to be a part of the new mod team. Please feel free to follow and interact with me!

Surro | 21 | he/him | @promptsforyourwhumpfic

AO3: SurroWhump

Discord: surro_

🎵 - I’m Not Okay (Chris Catalyst) and Will of the People (Muse)

I've been lurking in the whump community since 2017, and have been a whump enthusiast for as long as I can remember (seriously, all of my original characters have to had some sort of whumpy backstory). I’ve been a loyal Whumptober completionist since 2018, and have written my fair share of angst for a variety of whumpees and OCs.This is my first time being a part of a mod team, and I am really thrilled to be a part of such a big event! I look forward to working on this project and interacting with the wider community.

Kitty | she/her | @mrmustachious

AO3: TheWeatherOutside

Discord: justkitty.

Hello everyone! Those in the Whumptober discord may know me as being a mod there since last year, but if not, then hi! I have been a completionist for Whumptober every year since 2019, and it’s safe to say that the event quickly became one of my favourite times of year. I’ve been a fan of whump since well before I knew what it was, so it’s been amazing to find a community filled with so many like-minded, wonderful people creating such fantastic (and evil ;)) works. I’m so excited to be a part of the team, and I am looking forward to seeing what everyone creates this year.

Vanne | 21 | queer | she/her | @fl4tlines

AO3: savanne

Discord: v4nne

🎵: Lowlife — YUNGBLUD & Cheap Love — girli

Hiya! I’ve mainly lurked in the whump community for a while, across several different blogs. I was a Whumptober completionist in 2021 on an old blog, but I haven’t completed it since! I mainly write OC whump, with more focus on emotional suffering compared to the physical elements. Outside of whump, I volunteer and run a wildlife rehabilitation unit, work in retail and keep the ADHD goblin in my head happy by cycling through an endless list of other hobbies like graphic design, wildlife photography and traveling for gigs. I’m really looking forward to helping put together Whumptober this year and being a part of it!

[cypressure]

Have you got any recommendations for dinosaur nonfiction books?

Your art makes me so happy 🥺

hey thank you, i appreciate your saying so (and also giving me the opportunity to talk about dinosaur books)! under the cut for length--

starting off with an overview before getting down to specific topics, my first recommendation is Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved by Darren Naish & Paul Barrett. this was first published in 2017, but the third edition was just released with plenty of updates to reflect new discoveries and hypotheses. it's very thorough and accessible, and takes you through all the major clades of dinosaurs and everything we know about their evolution and ecology. this is definitely the best starting point for getting up-to-date with dinosaur science.

the end-Cretaceous extinction has been getting lots of popular attention lately (thanks to DePalma and the Tanis site I suspect), so if you'd like to learn more on this subject, I love The Last Day of the Dinosaurs by Riley Black, also from 2022. this is the scariest dinosaur book i've ever read--she paints an incredibly vivid and horrifying picture of the aftermath of the meteor impact, and of how the animals which survived the event managed to live on.

if you want to read about how exactly we know all these things about dinosaurs, I just recently picked up Dave Hone's How Fast Did T. rex Run? (titled The Future of Dinosaurs in the UK i think), published in 2022. he delves into what we know from the fossil record and how paleontologists work to figure these things out, as well as what we don't know yet and what we probably will never know, and the difference between those two. i suggest it for learning about paleontology as a scientific process, and it's a very interesting read.

so far, all of these books have been about dinosaurs as a whole; if you are looking for popular publications about specific groups, there are not as many options unfortunately (for some reason there isn't a huge audience for 200-page books about obscure thyreophorans. sighs disappointedly). most of what we get is about the large, more familiar clades; you will see books on tyrannosaurs, and there's a few field guide-style books about Mesozoic birds (which tend to be very beautifully illustrated but kind of technical; see below for titles). my pick for clade-specific books is The Sauropod Dinosaurs: Life in the Age of Giants, by Mark Hallett and Matthew Wedel, from 2016. this one goes into serious detail about every conceivable aspect of sauropod paleobiology, which as you can imagine is a huge and fascinating topic, and all the artwork is gorgeous. caveat: it being 8 years old means there's some science in there which will be outdated by now, but as far as i can remember it's still worth checking out.

and finally, as a paleoartist, i have to mention paleoart books! if you're interested in the science behind the choices paleoartists make when reconstructing extinct animals, especially for your own practice, i cannot recommend enough Mark Witton's The Paleoartist's Handbook, from 2018. he thoroughly explains how to interpret fossil evidence and paleontological research from an artist's perspective, and covers about everything from soft tissues to composing a scene. this is one of less than a handful of books on this particular topic, and it's definitely the most in-depth.

with any scientific subject you have to be careful with older books; this is especially true with paleontology since the discipline has accelerated so much over the past few decades and shows no signs of slowing down. i would even hesitate to recommend anything published more than 10 years ago, since new discoveries and technology have made so many questions and hypotheses moot (and in turn created new and more interesting ones)! the only exception to this is a recommendation for historical significance: Robert Bakker's 1986 The Dinosaur Heresies is essential to understanding what modern paleontologists call the Dinosaur Renaissance, or how our perception of dinosaurs changed from lizardlike evolutionary dead-ends into the active, successful bird ancestors we see in reconstructions now. this book kickstarted that change, and it's easy to see how: it's a very engaging read, Bakker argues his points very effectively, plus there are cute dinosaur cartoons. (i also love a lot of older works for their personal significance, but gushing about formative dinosaur books is something for another post.)

finally, thanks to the wonders of the internet, books are not the only way to learn about current dinosaur science! the best way is always by reading paleontology papers, where scientists directly describe and illustrate new discoveries or hypotheses. however, i know jumping straight into the technical literature may be overwhelming: fortunately a lot of paleontologists have social media, blogs, and/or podcasts where they write about their work and new developments in the field. the heyday of science blogs is kind of past, but there are still a few very good ones out there: this list on Feedly has a good selection to browse. being just self-published material, all of these don't have the benefits of peer review that papers and books do, so always be willing to take things with a grain of salt and do your own research.

of course this is a non-exhaustive list, especially limiting myself to both works recently published and which i have actually read. i've certainly forgotten or missed out on many new paleontology books (Dean Lomax's Locked in Time is one of these which i still haven't gotten ahold of yet, but which im very excited to get to); i welcome any additional recommendations or thoughts from the rest of paleoblr!

i hope this was helpful and i wish you luck in your reading :)

[intervalart]

Shorthand AU Masterpost

So my brainrot has gotten so bad that I currently I have 5 AUs for The Idiot Cowboys. At this point they might as well be OCs because this is....... Ridiculous. I have never had this happen with any other series I've been into.

All of them are still WIPs, and anything is subject to change because I have no idea what I'm doing. (pic to break up the cut)

-Vampire/Werewolf (this one you already know); I use BBFF for short when referring to this. BBFF is short for Bark Bark Flap Flap, because I am garbage at naming things, lol (Masterpost here, and I will also post a short and simple summary comic I made for it when I get the chance)

This only happened cuz of the amount of research I've had to do to scientifically justify the supernatural elements in my mind. (there is a lot of science nonsense in here, ESPECIALLY around the vampire mechanics, believe me)

This is also a slowburn from hell, cuz they are both Very Bad at dying, to the point where they through the decades up to Near Future (for those not in the fandom, it's a wacky setting with robots and psychic powers and basically a kaiju fight. Y'know, just how the people in 1994 imagined 2014 would be) and they both are intended to have unique designs for that era too. (only MD is designed for that so far, will post later.)

---

-Fae AU; (I call it Lil Guys AU cuz again, awful with names) still set in the wild west, but it's kinda borrowercore with somewhat darker pepperings of Home Safety Hotline in terms of lore.

I'm working on a summary for that that I will post when it's ready, but it also has a lot of magic mechanics to it. However at this point it's mostly ramblings and whatever bullshit I doodled (and there is A LOT OF IT at this point, because this is the main one i have been scared of posting), and a lot of fic that I've not posted anywhere because I am TERRIFIED of sharing my writing, lmao.

Their relationship moves a lot faster in this one, probably because they're both facing The Horrors™ together that are under the surface of the fantasy facade, and they have to trust each other to survive. (Mostly because they are both silly little rat guys) This one is very much high risk, high return in terms of their relationship.

---

-Duende AU; This one, I literally stuck them in my own OG setting with my OCs (for all 5 of you who know it, it's Yukure's series, which i do need to post more of the lore for, sorry lol)

Essentially, Sundown is a normal guy/former sheriff due to being a suspect in an Unfortunate Event that befell his town in 2012 (The year which the main catalyst occurs in the series), but he was acquitted and sorta "honorably discharged" since he couldn't ever really face his job again (the investigation and trial dragged on for 5 years up to 2017, where the series takes place)

And here, MD is his "Duende" (sorta like being haunted by a ghost/having a Familiar, but they're also functionally a parasite on a host)

They have a similarly antagonistic relationship here, but it's a bit different here because Mad Dog thinks he's pretty much a normal, charming, handsome, witty, suave bounty hunter, who's not sure why he got stuck with some guy with ptsd and depression, and why he suddenly has weird cool powers, and now he's coping with essentially being a ghost/incorporeal.

---

-Vaudeville AU; this is not so much an AU as it is a continuation of canon

Essentially, MD finally catches Sunny after years of goin' at it, collects the bounty money, feels aimless and and horrible because he has no purpose in life. (a core factor here being a sense of loss because he knows he couldn't beat Sunny at his prime, he had to wait til age caught up with him, and he's realizing how much of his own life he spent on it and is Going Through It)

So he breaks Sunny out of jail, talk out their problems, and live the rest of their lives with the bounty money hiding from the law. (fake names, new aliases, everything)

The Vaudeville part comes in cuz MD eventually buys a theater with the reward money, and the setting takes place in the early 1930s as a LAL fan chapter which I keep meaning to write. (These two are really just minor characters in that setting but it's fun anyway lol)

They're in their 70s at this point, but they're still kickin!

---

-Roleswap; this is pretty much just what it says on the tin. If Mad Dog was the outlaw and Sundown was the bounty hunter.

I think MD is wanted for (allegedly) burning down a theater that he was performing in (in truth, the owner needed insurance money and blamed it on him)

This one in particular is fascinating, mostly because Sundown isn't dead inside.

He still has light in his eyes and people to protect. They survived the attack, but he still left town to draw attention away from them, and hunts bounties to survive. (he sends the money to them)

This one is probably the least developed, but still open ended for shenanigans. (I REALLY wanna make the designs for it too...)

[madsworld15]

Letter to Gavin Creel

Dear Gavin,

I was in the middle of a major website project at work on Monday when I heard that you had passed away. For the first time in my life, I actually sobbed hysterically at the death of someone famous. When I say sobbed hysterically, I mean unable to focus on anything because my eyes were too wet and my chest was too tight. I hadn’t cried like this since the day my grandmother died four years ago.

You see, I don't usually get this visibly upset when people in the public sphere pass away. Sure, I was sad when people like Sondheim, Betty White, and Robin Williams died. But I've never been so upset that I couldn't function. That is just your impact on the world, for me and so many others.

The last time I saw you in person was in 2017 at the stage door of She Loves Me. Despite it having been years since then, I believe that if we’d met at a stage door or other event today, you’d still recognize me. Because that is the type of person you are. I guess were, now that you’ve passed, but I can’t find it in myself to talk of you in the past tense. It just doesn’t seem real that someone so full of life and immortal is no longer here with us, dancing through this thing called life.

You don’t know this, but I got to see you perform in my favorite musical, Into the Woods, when the tour came to Philadelphia in April of last year. It was a last-minute decision that fell on a weeknight, so I couldn’t stay late afterward to stage door. Of course, I thought to myself that I’d have plenty more opportunities to see you work your craft. Now that you’ve passed, I wish I had said “fuck it” to having to be at work the next day and stayed to chat with you.

Like so many of those who looked up to and admired you, I first discovered you when I was in HS watching Eloise at the Plaza. As a child, I had adored the Eloise books, so naturally, I was excited to see a film made about the precocious girl. Back then I had no idea who you were, just that your name was attached to the character of Bill. I adored Bill and his silly, over-the-top theatrics and became obsessed with watching the movie just for him – though Eloise was great, too.

Then, as a freshman in college, I started talking to this person from New York City through a mutual fan group on Facebook. She encouraged my very limited knowledge of musical theatre and introduced me to so many new things. One of them was a bootleg recording of Hair from 2009. The energy you exuded on stage was palpable, even from the grainy 2000s video.

At that point in my life, I was sure I would never get out of Kansas. I knew I was different and didn't fit in with the other people in my small-town Kansas community. By the time I left and moved to NY in 2013, I still wasn't sure what my identity was, but I was certain I belonged to the queer community. Upon arriving in New York, I quickly found myself immersed in the musical theatre community there.

One of the first shows I saw was The Book of Mormon. I would visit the theatre at least once a week, sometimes even twice. I didn't really have the finances to do that, but my mental health demanded comfort, and that show was where I found it. So, once or twice a week, I would play the lottery or do standing room.

By the time you moved from The Book of Mormon on the West End to Broadway, I was ready for you but also hesitant to love you because your predecessor, Nic Rouleau, had had such a profound impact on my mental health and self-worth. From the moment I met you, though, I knew I could never have any feelings other than love for you.

Sure, I already knew I loved you as a performer from the years of watching bootlegs of your performances, listening to your EPs, and loving you in Eloise. However, my connection and attachment to The Book of Mormon was so great that each time the leads switched, I had a hard time adjusting.

It was different with you, though. You immediately took me under your wing and made me know I was important to you. That first night, you forced me to hand over my phone for our photo, and you scrolled through filters until you found the one you wanted. Then you insisted we do silly faces, that serious faces weren't needed. It was as if you knew I needed comfort more than a professional stage door selfie.

Over the course of the year you were part of the Broadway company, we interacted many times. Every time you saw me, your face would light up, you'd insist on a silly photo, and then you'd ask me if I was doing okay and how work was going. You genuinely wanted to know. It was something that got me through those extremely dark days of working a job I hated but not knowing any other path I could go on.

I didn't ever tell you this, but those moments kept my suicidal thoughts during that time at bay. Knowing I could swing by the stage door at any time, whether I'd seen the show or not, and talk to you was what got me through. We never talked about anything profound or world-changing, but you asking me about my day and encouraging me to find my passion changed my whole life.

After you left Mormon, I didn't see you again until the final days of She Loves Me. I fully expected you to not remember who I was, but you did. Once again, your smile grew at the sight of me, and you made a joke while wiggling your face to emphasize the mustache on your face. I wish I'd taken more time to tell you about my life that day. To connect more with you, but I didn't.

I had no way of knowing that would be the last time I would see you perform for many years. Not long after that, my finances took a major hit, and I moved to NJ, making trips to Broadway a bit harder to accomplish. So, I wasn't able to see you in Waitress or Hello, Dolly. But, man, did I want to. I did have the chance to watch clips of you in these shows and bask in the glory of your singing voice and stage presence, even if it was from afar.

I started to understand myself more clearly and made friends who helped me find an identity that made sense to me. Then, 2020 hit, and I suffered quite a few losses in my family. I struggled to keep my head above water, but my queer friends reminded me that there were things worth living for. Through these friendships, I started to find my way out of the mess I was in and found joy in musical theatre again. I started to listening to your personal music and the cast albums of your shows. It wasn't the only music I listened to, but it helped me get through the most.

Then, Into the Woods happened. By this time, I had started to be a co-leader in a local Tri-State Queer group. We would all get together and talk about TV, Broadway, Music, and Movies. It was so rejuvenating. A group of us got tickets to see Into the Woods on Broadway, but I couldn't be part of that due to finances. However, my best friend works for Ticket Philadelphia, so he promised that I could go with him when it came to Philadelphia on tour.

And that brings us to the close of this letter. I got to see you exude that joy all over the stage one last time in Into the Woods on Tour. It was one of the best nights of my life. Your performance of Agony will live on in my memories forever. As will your performance of I Believe in The Book of Mormon.

I never got around to telling you this in person, so I will say it now: Thank you so much for all the moments in my life that your presence or your voice got me through. Your passion for life and love was always awe-inspiring, and it's what I will carry with me through the years. We all deserved to see you do so much more in the world of Broadway, musical theatre, and beyond. Life truly is unfair, but I'm grateful for what I was able to experience with you.

Rest easy, dance often, and spread your sunshine from the beyond.

Mads

[leonsliga]

Keeping On

–> It's been a long road back from injury for Manuel Neuer, but at 38 he is once again integral to Bayern München's success. After breaking the Champions League clean sheet record against Arsenal in the quarter-finals, he reflects on a career that still has plenty of road ahead.

Manuel Neuer is in a reflective mood. Now 38, the Bayern München goalkeeper became a father for the first time in March - something which can add a fresh layer of perspective to anybody's outlook. Yet right now, as he sits speaking to Champions Journal, his focus is on another event which prompted much introspection on his part - the career-threatening lower-leg break he suffered in a skiing accident in December 2022.

"If we were to ask the medical staff and the rehab team, they would scarcely believe that we are where we are today because I think out of every ten people only one or two manage to come back from that," he says. "Particularly after the injuries and with the games I played, it couldn't have gone any better than it did, for me to be standing in goal and performing well again. It was a big strain for me, which is normal for a serious injury. I think everything takes time and ultimately nature decided if it would work out or if I would never be able to play again.”

That he was back playing for Bayern ten months after the fracture to the tibia and fibula in his right leg was down to "thinking positively and the desire to play football and play professional sport again". That determination should surprise none of us given the admirable longevity of a player who, among the goalkeeping fraternity, is second only to lker Casillas for most appearances in the Champions League, with 138 (prior to this month's semi-finals) to the Spaniard’s 177.

Moreover, with his clean sheet in the quarter-final home victory over Arsenal, he did not just help his team into another semi-final but surpassed Casillas's record of 57 shutouts in the competition. "It's not the most important thing there is but it's nice for my team-mates - and all the colleagues I've played with in the past - if we think about our defensive work. I started with Schalke and then continued at Bayern, right up to the present day, and it's great that it's not over yet."

Those clean sheets are part of a bigger picture in which he has made over 500 appearances for Bayern and worn the captain's armband since 2017 - earning a special place in the club's pantheon as one of only three goalkeepers to have held aloft the European Cup along with Sepp Maier and Oliver Kahn.

As an interviewee, Neuer speaks with the clarity and maturity of a man on the verge of 500 Bundesliga games and - ahead of this summer's EURO - 117 senior caps for Germany. He is polite to the point of shaking the hand of every member of the film crew present as he introduces himself.

Since his early days at Schalke, his first club, he has been considered a pioneer of the sweeper-keeper role though in his eyes, defensive security still represents the most important thing a goalkeeper can give his colleagues. "I think being able to give the rest of the team the feeling that they've got someone at the back that they can rely on to provide assurance, that's the decisive factor.”

That assurance was there again in Bayern's semi-final first leg against Real Madrid as he flung himself to his left to keep out a deflected shot from Toni Kroos, then stood tall to foil Vinícius Júnior in a one-v-one. Arguably, it has always been there - at least to some degree. His first clean sheet in the Champions League was on 3 October 2007 in a 2-0 Schalke win at Rosenborg. Then he was a fresh-faced 21-year-old playing for his home-town team. Looking back on his younger self, and how he has changed, he says: "I would just be more relaxed [nowadays] and also not try and decide everything on the pitch - that is kind of the difference from Manuel at the beginning, at Schalke, who wanted to take a lot into his own hands, to do a lot himself. I also know that I cannot influence everything. I'd say I was a bit wilder - I didn't have this sense of calm and maybe the charisma as well. I was, of course, always an attacking goalkeeper who tried to join in the build-up play.”

"It's obviously been a long time since then when you look back on it. It's also very normal, given that I'm now 38, that I've developed a fair bit since then. But it's nice to cast your mind back to those days, and how things were at that time."

Now we are back in those days, let's stay there a little longer. With Schalke, he reached the Champions League quarterfinals in his debut season of 2007/08. In 2011 he helped the Gelsenkirchen club into the semi-finals where they lost to Manchester United. That summer he headed south to Bayern. Remembering the move, he says: "It certainly wasn't easy. There was a lot of media scrutiny about my character in making the switch from Schalke to Bayern. There were lots of fans who weren't thrilled about it.

"I think that the support of the club, of the team, was very important. I already knew lots of the German players from the national team - they were definitely very excited that I was coming to Bayern. That was something that I realised from the first day when we started training at Säbener Strässe [Bayern's training ground in the south of the city] and then at the training camp. And so, I felt very comfortable from the beginning."

His first campaign in Munich ended with a Champions League final defeat at Bayern's home stadium against Chelsea. He had shone in the preceding semi-final victory over Real Madrid, saving from Cristiano Ronaldo and Kaká in the concluding shoot-out. These were not his first spot-kick heroics, mind: two saves against Porto had taken Schalke to the last eight in that debut season.

"You have to radiate confidence and try to show your opponent that you are stronger than they are," he says of the mano a mano challenge that penalties bring. Yet he tasted the downside of those duels in the final against Chelsea, with Bayern beaten despite his stop from Juan Mata. "Fundamentally, we were satisfied with how we performed on the pitch, but in the end we didn't get over the line," he recalls of a year in which they also finished runners-up in the Bundesliga and German Cup. "It meant that we were extra motivated when we went into the next season and that made a difference. I think that the coaching staff around Jupp Heynckes were also very motivated. From the first day, it was clear that we all wanted to achieve something that season, and you could see that from then on."

Cue a treble-winning campaign, with successes in the German league and cup allied to a 2-1 Champions League final success over Borussia Dortmund at Wembley. Back-to-back clean sheets against Barcelona in the semi-final had underlined, in Neuer's own words, that he was "someone that can be relied upon". It meant he ended his first two campaigns in the competition with Bayern with a total of ten clean sheets. And his development continued the following year with Germany’s World Cup triumph in Brazil, where he racked up four more shutouts.

He relates: “I gained a lot of experience from 2012 to 2013, from the success, and also the next stages because we had coaches who taught us a lot. I think the team developed too, which we also benefited from, and then the German national players became world champions. We had a lot of self-confidence. I was able to learn a lot from the good coaches and from my good team-mates and no one can take that experience away from you. That is why I can always play to the best of my ability, even in big games."

If that was one golden chapter, another came in 2020 when he lifted the Champions League trophy again, with the Bayern team who defeated Paris Saint-Germain in the final in Lisbon. That was the competition that concluded in empty stadiums in Portugal owing to the pandemic. "It meant a lot to me; he remembers. "I think it was the best team performance that we put together for the club. It was a bit harder given the conditions that we had to play under during the coronavirus period. How we prepared, and the spirit and fitness we went into these games with... put simply, we earned that success. It wasn't always clear that we would beat Paris in the end. We worked really hard to stay in the game and then Kingsley [Coman] made it 1-0.

"That was a team success and, unfortunately, you could not celebrate with the fans. That was the downside, that we won the Champions League in Lisbon, which of course meant just as much to us, but it would have been even better if the spectators had been there."

Neuer, for the record, registered clean sheets in both the one-off semi-final against Lyon and then that final versus Paris. His enduring excellence has been on display this season too, since his return from injury - with four shutouts in seven outings up to the semi-final stage.

It would be no surprise if the first of those, clean sheet no55 of his Champions League career at home to Copenhagen on 29 November, had felt especially sweet, coming 421 days after the previous one against Viktoria Plzen on 4 October the previous year. If this takes us back to the difficulties - physical and mental - of his injury, he cites a silver lining.

"I think every break and every injury also has some good in it. Nothing comes at the right time. The injury was supposed to be simple but you have to look deep into your eyes and say, 'Hey, I will take this challenge on and will try to come out of it stronger.’ That took a little while of course but I couldn't expect anything else."

Once again, Neuer has experienced enough of football's ups and downs to see the bigger picture. And right now, it holds more than one reason for optimism, including the prospect of playing in Germany's home EURO this summer - home town Gelsenkirchen and adopted home town Munich are among the ten venues. He has not forgotten the feeling of the last major tournament his nation staged, the 2006 FIFA World Cup. "In 2006, I was watching in public viewing areas and soaking up the atmosphere - it was just sensational how Germany hosted the world," he says.

Back then he was 18 and had just completed his first full season with Schalke's second team. We go back to the question of his evolution as a player over the years. "I would say that maybe I am a bit calmer, and also more disciplined in my actions, though it always depends on the team-mates we have, who is playing, how do I have to adjust as the goalkeeper, what game plan we have, what does the coach want, how high is the line, how are we defending, how do we want to play out from the back? There are always little things that change and that is the case whether I play for the national team or for Bayern, and it is the same from coach to coach in the seasons when we have competed in the Champions League - there are always nuances that are different, but fundamentally I have always stayed true to the way I play." And while that involves Neuer's work with the ball at his feet, he has not lost sight of the one thing that matters above all for a goalkeeper: "The clean sheets." 

~ Written by Simon Hart for Issue 19 of the Champions Journal

[socially-awkward-skeleton]

All Along the Watchtower

Pairing: Captain John Price x Fem!OC (3rd person POV)

Word count: 2.6k

Warnings: some military jargon, mild angst, brief mentions of sexual activity in the past, brief mentions of violence

Summary: Sgt. Rory Sinclair with the Special Reconnaissance Regiment of the British army has been called on to assist with a joint US/UK operation. Quickly discovering that her Commanding Officer for the mission is a man she's met before...

A/N: Rory Sinclair is a dual citizen (both Canada and the UK) who's been living in the UK since she was 14. She is 28 at the time of this fic, Price is 32. This series is set in 2017 before the events of the first MW game. Rory's thoughts are bold and italicized, other italics are used for emphasis. Will also be available to read on AO3.

October 13, 2017 09:37 - Special Reconnaissance Regiment Headquarters, Stirling Lines, Credenhill, Herefordshire, United Kingdom 

Rory sat in her cubicle, grey plastic walls surrounding her, free of any personal items. Scouring hours of footage shot during a scouting mission in thermal vision, taking note of timestamps and important location details for her report, she couldn’t help but taste the acrid pang of jealousy. It was the duty of her and the other SRR operators in the office to painstakingly comb through reports and footage, collecting intel. The nerve center for army intelligence. Keyboards clacked and phones rang as information was filtered and passed along to where it was needed.

"Sgt. Sinclair."

A deep voice broke the monotony around her, it was one that few ever heard unless the powers that be deemed it so. She’d only heard it once before when her transfer to the SRR was approved. Spinning in her seat at her desk, she rose to stand, her hand raised in a salute as she stood at attention. "Colonel Rourke, Sir?"

Rourke, a man with decades of experience as part of the British army, stood at her desk. Brusque and stern, he was a bulldog of a man trapped in an office space. He would have been more comfortable leading a fleet of tanks rather than an infantry of analysts. "At ease, soldier." She relaxed, hands held behind her back as he continued, "I don't make a habit of personal visits, but I've just left an important meeting and I need your attention for a moment, Sergeant."

"Of course, sir."

“Follow me.” Leading her away from the bullpen she was sitting at and towards a quiet corner, a potted plant was the only company there. Free from prying eyes and ears, he turned his back to the rest of the room, and lowered his voice. "There's a joint operation happening between the Americans and the SAS, and they require our assistance. However, they're looking for boots on the ground experience, and a fair portion of the SRR operators currently available for missions of this sort of nature just don’t have that. But you –"

She nodded, her face falling somewhat. She'd only transferred six months ago and was still settling in. The SRR HQ provided a different type of work than she was used to, but she appreciated the change of pace it gave her, utilizing a different portion of her skill set. It also meant she was closer to her father rather than being half a world away in the middle of a war zone – but a soldier could only be at peace for so long. 

"I understand you were transferred here to clear the headspace, but I can’t think of anyone better suited. You have an impressive record, Sinclair. A real asset. You’ve a history with counter-terrorism, been in the thick of it, and I have a Station Chief with the CIA here who wishes to speak with you."

It wasn't a question or an offer. She had been selected. An honor bestowed upon her. There was no turning it down. Not that she would. Ambitious, career-oriented – she had no reason to say no. Walking past the cubicles of operators, it was a stark contrast to where she was less than a year ago. The ground no longer shook as bombs dropped overhead, bullets didn’t tear through the air or rip through kevlar, it was quiet here. Safe. She still played an important part in the war effort, but without the risk to life and limb. The blood no longer dripped from her hands, though that still didn’t make her clean. 

The colonel stopped outside a large meeting room and opened the door for Rory, directing her inside with his hand. The room was empty except for one woman with a coffee and a laptop sitting at a long table. Dressed in business casual clothing, she looked prepared for a day at the office compared to the soldiers around her wearing their uniforms. Looking up, her face serious, she tilted her head in Rory's direction but spoke with the Colonel, "Is this her?"

"Yes, this is Sgt. Sinclair."

Like a child being spoken about between a parent and a teacher, she was recognized as being there, but not as part of the conversation. Things had been set in motion, all of which she had yet to be made privy to. Rory was no stranger to working on a need to know basis, moving up the ranks meant for much of her career she often merely had to follow in the direction she was being pointed. This was certainly no different.

"Good to meet you," the American said with a nod of her head. "I'm Kate Laswell." Holding her hand out to the open seat beside her, she directed Rory to it. "Take a seat."

Appearing sure in her steps, even while the stress took hold, she stopped at the table and took a seat, exhaling her breath finally as she settled into the chair, still trying to hold the proper decorum expected of a soldier. 

"You can relax, Sinclair. It's just you and me." Laswell looked at the Colonel and the door quickly closed, leaving the two women to sit alone in the large, echoing, blank slate of a room. She sipped her coffee, her eyes shifting to the screen of her laptop before speaking again. "I assume the colonel didn't reveal much about what's going on here, did he?"

Shaking her head, the short choppy locks of her chestnut bob hovered around her neck. "No, not really. Just that you're looking for boots on the ground?"

"Not exactly. We have the boots, it's more so a certain expertise." Kate glanced over at the younger woman, her brow lifting. "Why's a soldier like you working behind the scenes?"

Rory stretched her neck from side to side, cracking her knuckles. A cigarette suddenly seemed like a very good idea to her. "It was suggested I take a transfer from the field after I completed my last tour.” Glancing over at Laswell, she noticed the woman had begun looking right at her, scrutinizing her. “I spent the last several years in Iraq during the civil war. Working with CIA, PMCs, whoever my unit was assigned with." Her eyes fell to her fingers as she started to pick at the hangnail on the edge of her thumb, the skin underneath as sore and raw as the memories.

"Off the books?"

She cleared her throat and returned Laswell’s eye contact. "Oftentimes, yeah."

Kate paused, her head tipping to the side. "Seen some things, huh?"

Rory tried to get a read on the woman, it was hard to get much from her face or her demeanor. There was empathy or at the very least some form of understanding. Was she a soldier in the past? Or just an overpowered cop like some of the other CIA agents she'd met? She scratched her brow, clenching her jaw. "Did some things too."

"Not afraid to get your hands dirty then." Laswell’s face never seemed to change, her mouth drawn in a straight line as she folded her hands on the table. 

"I did what was asked of me."

"Like?" The station chief seemed genuinely interested in her, trying to get a beat on her all the same. Both of them were in the process of figuring out who they were about to get into bed with. 

"Primarily I focused on targets of high importance to prevent further incursion from the insurgency. Assassinations, interrogations – been there, done that."

"Assassinations?" Kate's voice rose, her interest piqued.

"I”m SSC trained. Ran a fair few missions that left me in some nests in high towers."

"A sniper, huh?"

"Yeah. When needed."

Nodding, Laswell’s straight face seemed to break for just a brief moment into a nearly unnoticeable grin. "How many confirmed kills?"

"High importance targets? Thirty three. I lost count of the random sods," she said with a shrug.

Laswell sipped her coffee, unfazed, hearing news like that was just a walk in the park for this woman. "No stranger to deep recon then?"

"It's in the name,” Rory confirmed. “It's what the SRR does. It used to be part of the SAS, but broke off and focused on the intel part of things. It’s why I was specifically transferred here and not just put on leave. Command didn’t want to lose someone with my experience."

"You have some connections with intelligence?"

"I have friends at MI6."

"Good.” Laswell’s attention fell on her completely. “Well Sinclair, I have a friend who's running this op – he's SAS – and you sound like just what he's looking for. If you're up for it, of course." 

Rory contemplated the decision for a moment, she hadn’t thought she’d be back out in the field quite so soon, and considering the fact that none of the details of the mission were being revealed to her until she agreed to come, she assumed she was heading into some real shit. Her hands slipped from the tabletop and into her lap, a tremor shaking through them out of sight, before she nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, I'd like that."

"Great." Laswell shut her laptop and scooped it under her arm as she stood, collecting her coffee cup in her other hand. "Come with me."

Her brow lifted. "Just like that?" She was well accustomed to the bureaucracy and strict measures the British army seemed to enforce, things didn’t just happen, not without cutting several layers of red tape and after being passed through multiple hands first.  

"Just like that."

She stood up and followed behind the Station Chief, keeping pace with her as they moved through the halls. Rory was in no position to argue, nor would she want to, it was nice not to be beholden to the rigidity of the chain of command. This was more cavalier. Very American. 

"So, you straddle the line between spy and soldier, huh?" Kate asked, her eyes kept forward.

"Sort of like you, I assume?" Rory asked with a sideways glance, her lips curving into a half grin.

"Sort of." Kate huffed out a laugh. "Yeah."

They turned the corner and headed down the stairs, the reverberations of their shoes on concrete bouncing off the walls. Once an RAF base, now the headquarters of the SRR and the 22 Special Air Service Regiment in the midlands, it was sprawling with large open fields. Out on the parade, a helo sat waiting, it’s rotor warmed up and the blades spinning. There was no time to grab her things, it was get up and go, the moment she said yes she was being tossed from the frying pan into the fire. The urgency was clear, she had likely already been transferred and meeting Laswell was simply a courtesy. 

Ducking under the blades, the shadow of each one cutting across the sun as it broke through the dense cloud cover above, Laswell pulled open the door of the helicopter. “Head inside,” she said with a tip of her head towards the waiting entrance into the vehicle, raising her voice to be heard over the engine. 

Rory climbed in and looked over at the row of seats, noticing another soldier sitting there, already strapped in. His face stern as he shifted, adjusting his hat, the overwhelming scent of cigar smoke drifting from him. Scratching at his cheek, his nails dragging through a thick fuzz of facial hair, he glanced over at her and then turned back to Laswell who took the seat across from him. "I assume this is the one, Kate."

"Yeah, John, this is her.” Laswell pulled on the front of her jacket as she sat back and got comfortable. “Sergeant Sinclair, meet Captain Price."

Rory's brow furrowed for a moment at the name. It was familiar, but she couldn't pinpoint how. Was it one she'd seen in a report? As she strapped into her seat, steely blue eyes measured her up before turning his attention to lighting the Villa Clara cigar he’d pulled from one of the pockets of his vest. 

"Nice to meet you, Sergeant."

His voice was deep, rumbling, and it stirred something in her. She was no stranger to appreciating someone’s timbre, but this was something different. He seemed so familiar, she couldn’t place how, but she knew it. Intimately. And then the memory hit her – the bathroom stall. Five years prior, one night in a bar. The sheer chance of them meeting like this damn near improbable. Her stomach dropped. Jesus. His face was nearly recognizable beneath the facial hair that hadn't been there the first time they met. His voice had become more gruff, lower than she remembered. The cigar he was currently smoking gave a clear indication as to why. Swallowing down the embarrassment that threatened to burn at her cheeks as she looked at him, gauging his reaction to her name - if he recognized her the way she suddenly did him, he didn't show it.

"Good to meet you too, sir," she said. Her gaze fell to her hands, remembering how it felt when he had held them. Trying her damnedest not to look at him, she preferred to appear nervous over the mission and not the man who had suddenly become her commanding officer. 

Tugging at the tactical vest he wore, Price tilted his head back, puffing on his cigar and looking out the window as the helicopter began to move, the inside shaking as they lifted up off the ground. 

There was no backing out now.

Laswell passed her a tablet, and started giving her the brief. “That is Igor Zorokov, Russian oligarch and alleged trafficker. Weapons, drugs, information…people.” Rory’s eyes locked on the screen, scanning through images of the man. Older, blond, in relatively good shape. Not the type someone might assume as a master criminal upon first inspection. “He has ties around the globe, but his stronghold is in Eastern Europe. Supplying several military coups with funds and weapons, he’s a dangerous man with people at disposal in his back pocket, and we have reason to believe he’s funding terrorist activities.”

“And we’re investigating him? Or taking him out?” Rory needed to prepare for exactly the type of mission this was going to be. Recon was one thing, taking someone’s life was another. 

“Erring on the side of caution. The Russian government could easily sweep just how far his global reach is under the rug if he’s brought to light, especially since it’s been beneficial for them. We want to find out who he’s funding and put a stop to the pipeline he has through his many ventures.”

Rory hummed, muttering, “Putting a tourniquet on before cutting off the arm.” 

“Exactly." Price's voice cut through the roar of the engine. "First stop is Kastovia, have a friend who’ll meet us there and get us into Russia undercover.”

“Nikolai?” Laswell asked.

“Yeah.”

It was clear these two weren’t just casually paired together for the mission, there was a long-standing relationship. Trust. She certainly understood how being a soldier who just so happened to have a friend who could get into the places they normally couldn’t would be beneficial, having an American ally even more so. 

“I hate to be a bother, ma’am," Rory spoke up, "but I’m not exactly prepared.” She felt damn right naked. Her duffel was down in the red brick complex below that was steadily getting smaller and further away. Her gear, her weapons, all of it was disappearing out of view as she sat there in her fatigues.  

“No need to worry about that, Sergeant.” Price replied instead, blowing out a stream of smoke. “Nik’ll have us covered when we land.”

All she had to do now was sit back and relax (as best she could) and try not to let her mind stray too far afield as the memories flashed before her eyes of the man who sat six feet from her.

[sassyfrassboss]

Your timeline missed one pretty crucial event - the February 2017 shopping blind. It's made the rounds again recently. I think it's important to keep calling it out because that was the very first hint that Meghan had Kate in her sights and the very first clue that Meghan's PR wasn't matching up with reality.

(I've said this before but I think Meghan first planted the shopping blind to accuse Kate of snobbery and elitism but she has since realized it works for the race card too and now she's planning to tell us Kate has been racist towards her from the very beginning.)

Oh I did forget that! I also didn't include Skippy's wedding or the Fab Four Forum...

So when Meghan and Harry's relationship was outed I scoured the internet for articles about them...and the BRF of course.

I can no longer find the article but it was around the time of the shopping trip car ride that there was an article claiming that Kate had made a secret trip to LA to meet with Meghan because Kate was so in AWE of Meghan and wanted to learn how to speak and pose for photos.

It talked about how much Kate looked up to Meghan and was so happy to build a friendship there. Of course, probably why I can't find it was that it was taken down for being super false, but it falls in line with Meghan's Classy PR at the time.

I don't think Meghan ever wanted to be friends with Kate. But I do think that Meghan wanted Kate to revere Meghan and bow down to her as superior.