#Which is weird because I know for a fact they used windows computers in other classes but

[degenezijde]

Even a couple of years ago, when I got chromebooks lugged to the classroom so my 17yo pupils could do their writing assignment in class instead of at home, I had pupils asking me if they could type it out on their phone instead because they couldn't work a keyboard.

this can't be true can it

[foone]

So Warframe added a "Pom-2" Alternate 1999 computer (that's needed for weird void magic future science wizardry). Thoughts?

Only thing I have that's a sort of question mark is that I don't know of many setups that would have needed a 5 1/4" floppy in 99 (or why it has both the tower and the under monitor unit)

ugh. OKAY, so... the tower and desktop combination is just weird. I have, on one occasion, run a "server" that was two towers, and the original PC supported a DUAL-DESKTOP mode, but both types together? nonsense.

dual monitor was rare but possible in 1999 (win98 added native support), so I think the best interpretation here is that this is actually two computers. maybe the one on the left is missing the keyboard and mouse because it's being used as some kind of server for the other computer? I used a little case like that to run my first linux server, which was also acting as a router for my internal network.

The OS is weird. The icons above the menu-bar look like win98, the dialog box is windows 3.x, the menu-bar icons on the bottom are pure os X (although they remind me of like a web-TV kinda system, like hotkeys for email/internet/etc), but the greyscale is very classic mac system. Actually it kinda reminds me of C64's GEOS, but GEOS was very classic-mac.

Like most CRT-filters, they turned the scanlines up WAY TOO HIGH. No CRT I've ever seen looked that fucking terrible. The monitor buttons are a bit odd: You didn't get monitors with buttons on the front until long after they were all color... but maybe it's a color monitor that's showing a monochrome OS?

as for the floppies: yeah. There are multiple mistakes here.

5.25" in 1999 is just silly. If you still had 5.25" disk drives in 1999, you were intentionally doing some retrocomputing stuff. For reference, around 2001 my PC repair job would specifically ask me to copy data off 5.25" disks, because they didn't have any 5.25" drives anymore, and I was their only tech who did.

The other mistake is that they have THREE floppy drives. so the PC doesn't really support that, natively? You can do some tricks and make it work (The youtuber Tech Tangents did a video on how it could be done), but realistically two was the normal max.

The final mistake is that all the drive activity lights are on. Those are only supposed to be on while the drive is reading or writing... and I don't see any disks in those drives! Let alone a situation that would involve turning all three on at once (I don't think that's even possible on most floppy controllers!)

In fact, the main time you'd end up with the drive lights stuck on like that is when you've installed the drive cable upside down. That ends up with them getting stuck on and non-functional. So this computer looks, to me, like it was put together incorrectly and no one noticed.

I don't believe that font would be on a black & white retro computer. Nope. Too smooth and too big.

There's also a USB icon on that OS: I don't think there's ever been a monochrome OS that supported OS, and looking at that computer case I don't believe that it has USB. Maybe the tower would, but the desktop? no.

That keyboard is off a Gateway 2000 computer. Something like this:

[sadesluvr]

heyy saw that you take requests again xx

i NEED some william/steve fluff nothing in particular its really up to you🥹

im so soft for him😭

A/N: Hi Anon, TY for the ask! I went with the Steve persona just because I feel he's a little nicer (despite the obvious XD). This is more of a drabble but I hope you like it! :)

Working in the public sector was extremely tiring, especially now, at the turn of the millennium, where more people were beginning to lose their jobs to computer software that was slowly on the rise. Luckily, you had Steve, one of the career counsellors at the local governance department, to help you sift through the workload.

Steve had been in the business longer than you (considered a ‘vet’), and had even won an award for ‘Social Worker of the Year’. Higher ups respected him, colleagues invited him to work dinners, and you certainly liked him - which was why you’d spent time in the office into the late hours of the night. It was 11:30PM when you’d both decided to call it a night, switching off the desk lamps and shutting down the copiers, completely oblivious to the fact that it had begun to snow outside.

“Damnit..” you muttered as you tried to start the engine of your car, desperately wanting to get home, make a warm mug of cocoa, and fall asleep. It seemed the universe had other plans, as no matter what you did the car didn’t start - and to make things worse, the sheer cold had caused your key to get stuck, ultimately breaking off in the ignition.

You were screwed.

A knock on your window signalled that help had arrived. It was Steve, painted with a warm smile spread across his cheeks, accentuating his dimples. 

“Need a hand?”

You weren’t entirely sure why he hadn’t dropped you home, but you knew that you were far too tired to care. You woke up on a chequered, albeit slightly worn yet comfortable couch with a blanket draped over you. What struck you the most was the fact that you were still in the majority of your clothes from the day before, but your top had been replaced with a large jumper, which smelled faintly of black coffee.

“Don’t worry, I didn’t see anything,” a voice chuckled, and Steve strolled into the living room holding two mugs. He looked like a different person entirely - dressed in a sweatshirt rather than a button up, cosy socks and slightly ruffled hair.

“You used the bathroom before you crashed last night,” he continued, placing a mug down onto the coffee table. “That’s how you got the sweater. It’s a little stained, but it’s all good,”

“Oh,” you said, rubbing your eyes. What time was it? “Thanks…”

“I hope this isn’t weird,” he said, smiling down at you as he perched himself on the armrest, sipping his own drink. “Gas was low, and the roads were icy…It just made sense to come here, you know?”

You nodded, savouring the taste of the drink on your tongue. It was your favourite; Steve had clearly remembered it from all those mornings at the office. 

“I get it,” you shrugged. “Your couch was kinda comfy, actually…I won’t be long, I know you’re not a big fan of having people over…” you finished, pulling yourself from your slumber. Steve may have been a well-liked guy, but he’d always been rather shielded when it came to his personal life.

Instead of being met with rejection, the man shook his head and raised his hand. 

“Don’t worry about it,” he smiled. “Half of the office has called in. It’s basically a day off,”

You raised your eyebrows and stared at the man in shock. Days off were basically foreign, let alone to someone as hardworking as Steve. Glimpsing out of the window, you could see that the snow had settled; a thick white layer lined neatly on top of the man’s car. Considering yours was still down at the office, and travel was likely dangerous, it meant that you were going to spend a whole day at his house. Just the two of you.

The thought made your heart flutter. Steve was rather attractive; mature, bright eyed, and most importantly, divorced. You wondered if your feelings for him were mutual, but judging by the way he was staring at you, you got the idea. 

“Are you sure you’re gonna want me around?” you teased, smirking. “Work and home life doesn’t mix…”

“I’ll take my chances…” he whispered, gaze unwavering as he walked over to the small fireplace opposite, lighting it so that it produced a few embers before joining you on the sofa, his long legs and large frame taking up most of the space. Whilst some may have found this claustrophobic, you found it rather inviting. There was something about him that was cuddly. 

He lifted up his arms, and you instinctively snuggled under him, burying your face in his chest as he lazily flicked through the channels of the television. It was an unexpected, yet perfect start to your winter.

If you were lucky, you’d spend the rest of your seasons like this.

[lilblucat]

I just saw the ask by slushysblog. In response you sent a gif that blew me away:

You see, I'm just getting into digital art, and my PC can only handle about 5 or 6 layers before my graphics environment crashes. (Ofc this forces me to restart my PC and lose anything not saved.)

I've learned to work around this, my art isn't nearly so complex as yours, but I know if I want to continue I'll have to get a better computer at some point.

I was hoping you could tell me a bit about the technical side of your work. What are your PC specs? What software do you use? That sort of thing.

Thanks in advance! I love your art!

My set-up is complete overkill for art. It's a heavy gaming-ready desktop PC I got a few years back that I've upgraded the RAM and storage on over the years. I was doing fine with 16GB of RAM but I always have open a lot in CSP and other stuff so upgrading was definitely something I needed to do. 16GB should be fine for most people though.

You can also see that I run Arch Linux and uh yeahhhhhh it's a long story. The short of it is that my old laptop broke its Windows install during an update and I was completely unable to fix it so I just.... switched to Linux lol. I started out on Ubuntu and switched to Arch after a while. I don't rec using Arch unless you know what you're doing, Ubuntu is way easier.

What you might find more interesting is my away from home set up on my laptop since it's an older gaming laptop.

The graphics card is actually a NVIDIA Geforce 850 or something. It's so old that you can't play some games on it. However, I have no issues with it for art. I can open my comic project files in CSP fine on it. It's also running on Linux Mint, which isn't showing up on the little image for some reason. Both of my devices run Linux, but that's a me preference/need thing and I don't rec messing with your operating system if you don't know much about computers. It gives me a bit of an edge since the system doesn't use as much RAM as Windows but yeah don't touch unless you're committed to learn. Windows will serve you fine. Or MacOS even.

As for my program, I use Clip Studio Paint EX. I bought Pro a long time ago and upgraded to EX because of the extra tools for comics and animation (I've heard animators don't like CSP though, it's the BEST program for comics however). It's a really solid program but the recent changes to pricing and updates is really stupid. Fun fact: I use only default brushes and materials because getting it to run on Linux breaks the store. I also use an older version of it because of how I got it working on this system.

For my tablet I use an XP-Pen Artist 12 Pro. It's a pretty solid screen tablet on a budget (I bought it on a sale) and I have no issues with it. I actually partly got it because I thought it was cool that XP-Pen carries official drivers for Linux too, and this helped a bit since this was before Windows bricked on me and I switched to that. It was kinda weird how it played out lol. I would heavily not rec a Wacom tablet unless it's an older one for cheap. Wacom is stupidly expensive and you can get a better bang for your buck at other companies. My first tablet is a Wacom and it's still holding up pretty well but their quality on their new tablets isn't great. Check out XP-Pen, Gaomon, and Huion for better tablet options.

[wirewitchviolet]

"They Don't Teach Kids About Computers These Days!"

I see variations on this a LOT these days. Sometimes it's people in their teens/early 20s being frustrated at how they're expected to know everything about computers, sometimes it's college professors straight up HORRIFIED when they realize they have students who don't have any understanding that their hard drive, a school's internal network, and on a public website are completely distinct places for a file to be located, and I kinda figure the weird stress a lot of people seem to have about the concept of getting a game and not having it just go into their Steam library specifically is a related issue.

Now on the one hand, obviously, I sympathize with this. I have a series of posts on this blog called How A Computer Works, because... I want to teach people about this stuff. (That's still ongoing by the way, I've just got a lot else going on and need to settle on the scope of the next lesson.) On the other hand, uh... I'm from the generation before the one that apparently has all the computer literacy problems, and nobody taught us this stuff in school... and the next generation up wouldn't possibly have had access. So was anyone taught how to use them?

Now I say "they didn't teach my generation how to use computers in school" but that isn't technically true. I see a lot of people call people my age "the Oregon Trail generation" when this topic comes up. Sort of on the edge of Gen X and Millennials, going through school in that window where Apple had really really pushed the Apple ][ on schools with big discounts. And they did have "computer classes" to learn how to do some things on those, but... that isn't really a transferable or relevant skill set.

Like, yeah, if you're below the age of let's say 30 or so as of when I'm writing this, the idea of what "a computer" is has been pretty stable for your whole life. You've got some sort of tower case, a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse, and in that tower there's a bunch of RAM, a processor, video and sound cards of some sort, and a big ol' hard drive, and it's running Windows, MacOS, or some flavor of Unix going for the same basic look and functionality of those. It's generally assumed (more than it should be, some of us our poor) that a given person is going to have one in their home, any school is going to have a whole room full of them, libraries will have some too, and they are generally a part of your life. We can probably make the same sort of general assumption about IPhone/Android cellphones for the past what, 15 years or so too, while we're at it. They're ubiquitous enough that, especially in academic circles where they're kind of required professionally, people are going to assume you know them inside and out.

Prior to the mid-90s though? It was kind of a lawless frontier. Let's say you have a real young cool teacher who got way into computers at like 5 years old, and now they're 25 and they're your computer class teacher in the mid-90s. The computer they got way into as a kid? It would have been this.

That's not a component of it, that's the whole thing. A bank of switches for directly inputting binary values into memory addresses and some more switches for opcodes basically, and then some LEDs as your only output. Nothing about this is other than the benefits of fundamentally understanding some low level stuff is going to be useful at all in any sort of practical sense if you sit down a decade later with one of these.

This at least looks a bit more like a computer you'd see today, but to be clear, this has no mouse, no way to connect to the internet, which wasn't really a thing yet to begin with, and no hard drive, even. You did not install things on an Apple ][. You had every program on a big ol' floppy disk (the sort that were just a circle of magnetic film in a thick paper envelope basically and were, in fact, floppy), you would shove that in the disk drive before turning the machine on, it'd make a horrible stuttering knocking sound resetting the drive head, and just read whatever was on that right into memory and jump right on in to running Oregon Trail or a non-wysiwyg text editor (i.e. there's no making bold text appear on screen, you'd just have a big ugly tag on either side of your [BOLD>bold text<BOLD] like that). It was not unlike popping a cartridge or disc into an older video game console, except for the bit where if you wanted to save something you'd have to take the disk out while it was running and pop a blank one into the drive to save to.

So when I was a kid and I'd have my "computer class" it'd be walking into a room, sitting down with one of these, and having a teacher just as new to it as I was just reading out a list of instructions off a sheet like, "flip open the lock on the disk drive, take the disk out of the sleeve, make sure it says Logo Writer on it, slide it in with the label up and facing you, flip the lock back down, hit the power switch in the back of the machine..." We didn't learn anything about file management beyond "don't touch anything until the screen says it's done saving to the disk" because again, no hard drives. I guess there was a typing class? That's something, but really there's nothing to learn about typing that isn't where every key is and you only (but inevitably) learn that through practice.

Now, overlapping with this, I eventually got myself a used computer in the early 90s, very old at the time, but not as old as the ones at school. I had a proper black and white OG Mac. With a hard drive and a window-based operating system and everything. And... nobody taught me a damn thing about how that one worked. My mother just straight up did not touch a computer until something like 2001. I didn't really have any techie mentors. I just plugged it in and messed around and worked everything out. Same way I worked out what I was doing with older computers, mostly on my own at the local library, because that computer class wasn't much, and how I was totally left on my own to work out how to hook up every console I ever owned, which was slightly more involved at the time.

That forky bit in the middle was held in place with a pair of phillips headscrews. Had to keep the VCR and cable box in the right daisy chain order too.

Enough rambling about how old I am though. What's the actual disconnect here? How did my generation work out everything about computers without help but the next one down allegedly goes dear in the headlights if someone asks them to send them a file?

Well first off I'm not at all willing to believe this isn't at least largely a sampling bias issue. Teachers see all the clueless kids, people asking online for help with things is more common than people spontaneously mentioning how everything is second-nature to them, etc. Two things stick out to me though as potential sources of the issue though:

First, holy crap are modern computers ever frail, sickly little things! I'm not even talking about unreliable hardware, but yeah, there's some shoddy builds out there. I mean there's so many software dependencies and auto-updating system files and stuff that looks for specific files in one and only one location, just crashing if they aren't there. Right now on this Windows 10 machine I've got this little outdoor temperature tracker down in the task bar which will frequently start rapidly fluttering between normal and a 50% offset every frame, and the whole bar becomes unresponsive, until I open the task manager (don't even have to do anything, just open it). No clue what's up with that. It was some system update. It also tries to serve me ads. Don't know if it's load-bearing. Roughly every other day I have to force-quit Steam webhelper. Not really sure what that's even for. Loading user reviews? Part of me wants to dig in and yank out all this buggy bloatware, but I genuinely don't know what files are loadbearing. This wasn't an issue on older computers. Again, screwing around with an old Apple ][, and old consoles and such, there wasn't anything I could really break experimenting around. It was all firmware ROM chips, RAM that cleared on power cycling, and disks which were mostly copy-protected or contained my own stuff. No way to cause any problem not fixed by power cycling.

Next, everything runs pretty smoothly and seemlessly these days (when working properly anyway). Files autosave every few seconds, never asking you where you actually want to save them to, things quietly connect to the internet in the background, accessing servers, harvesting your info. Resolutions change on their own. Hell emulators of older systems load themselves up when needed without asking. There's a bunch of stuff that used to be really involved that's basically invisible today. The joke about this being "a 3D print of the save icon" already doesn't work because how often do you even see a UI element for saving? When we still used disks regularly, they held next to nothing and would take like half a minute to read and write.

And don't even get me started on launchers and start menus and all that.

So... basically what I'm getting at here is if you feel like you never learned how to properly use a computer, go get your hands on an old computer and mess around. There's yard sales, there's nice safe runs in a browser emulators, hell there's kits to build your own. That or just look for someone wearing like a Mega Man T-shirt or playing a Madonna CD (hell maybe just any CD these days) and start politely asking questions, because again just because everyone who knows this stuff just had to work it out on our own doesn't mean you should have to.

[pudding-parade]

Get to know you - Sims Style

@rstarsims3 tagged me for this a while back, and I'm finally posting my answers, which took me a while to compile because 1) Blabbity blab blab blab, as usual, and 2) Still needing lots of rest and stuff, so no sitting at a computer for hours on end.

But here we go! I'mma put my blabby answers and my tag list behind Ye Olde Cut.

What’s your favorite Sims death? What an odd question, especially to lead off… Well, I guess if I had to pick one, it'd be the one from TS2 where cloudwatching occasionally brings a satellite down on the cloudwatcher's head. But generally, mine die of old age, if they manage to get that far. I play with long, but realistically proportional, life stages, mostly because I'm almost always playing "experimental" saves where I'm "road testing" rulesets and such, so I need a lot of time to work out kinks and test ideas and stuff.)

Alpha CC or Maxis Match? I land on a combination of more-realistic (but not ultra-realistic) stuff for CAS, but for everything else, like with furniture and deco and stuff, I tend to prefer CC stuff that visually fits in with the EA stuff in terms of style and textures and whatnot, so that the CC doesn't stick out like a sore thumb when combined with EA stuff. In fact, my "go-to" CC for build/buy is stuff that adds on to EA stuff, like more doors/windows that match an EA door/window.

Do you cheat your sims weight? What, to make the fat ones skinny? The skinny ones fat? The skinny ones buff? No. I don't see why I would. It's easy enough to make a sim gain or lose weight without cheating, which I'm assuming means just using the sliders.

Do you move objects? Is there anyone who doesn't? That's a serious question. Is there any one who doesn't? I want to know.

Favorite Mod? I'm leaving aside the NRaas mods because I don't see them as mods so much as things that are just essential to make the game playable in the often-weird ways that I play. There are others that I also consider just essential for when I'm playing in certain styles, especially for more primitive settings. But for ones that are optional and just pure fun, I'd nominate all of @thesweetsimmer111's baby- and toddler-related ones.

First Expansion/Game Pack/Stuff Pack? I know for TS2 it was Seasons. For TS3…For a long time, I had just the base game, which I got when it came out, but didn't play beyond trying it out and then going back to TS2. Then, years later, I got a new computer and decided to give TS3 another try, but I couldn't find the CD or DVD or whatever it was, so I bought a combo pack with the base game, Late Night, and the High End Loft or whatever it is stuff pack, so I guess it would be Late Night. Other than that, I bought all the other TS3 EPs in one go when EA had them on sale for 50% off via Origin, which that combo pack forced me to install. (But which I am now free of again. 🏴‍☠️)

Do you pronounce live mode like aLIVE or LIVing? As aLIVE. Because that is when the game is live. Games do not live, but they can be live. See, this is one reason why English sucks.

Who’s your favorite sim that you’ve made? Here's a thing about me: I don't really get attached to the pixel people. For me, they're just tools. I'm guessing it's because I'm not a storyteller when it comes to Sims, so I don't see sims as characters. Sure, sometimes I find one endearing for one reason or another. Usually, they have traits that make them assholes, and I like to watch them create chaos and ruin wherever they go. One of the founders of the Random Legacy that I will get back to one of these days is one of those. But I find I like other people's sims more than mine, though that's more of a testament to those simmers' story-telling skills than anything else.

Have you made a simself? Only by accident. A few times I've just been randomly moving sliders around and somehow I ended up with something that looked like me at some stage in my life. It stayed that way for a minute or three, before I yelled OH GOD NO! and quickly slidered the horror away.

But to be honest? I find the entire concept kind of creepy, at least in terms of putting a self-sim in the game and playing them as a character. That would just feel weird to me. That said, I suppose it might have been something that would have appealed to me if I had played when I was a kid, but the game didn't exist when I was a kid. Computers didn't exist when I was a kid, at least not in a form that regular people could own and that could fit on a desk. I was in my 40s when I started playing the game. My daughter played TS2 when she was a kid, and she had a self-sim inserted into the stories she would play, so…yeah. Maybe it's a younger-person thing. Or maybe I'm just weird. Yeah, it's probably that second option.

Which is your favorite EA hair color? Probably the black, but even with that I have to add some highlights to it because otherwise the hair just looks like a creature from the void eating the sim's head.

Favorite EA hair? None of them. They all need to DIAF.

Favorite life stage? I don't have one. I have a least-favorite, babies, because they're basically just objects, but once they're actually sims, I enjoy playing sims of all ages equally.

Are you a builder or are you in it for the gameplay? I originally bought TS2 just to build in it, and for a couple of years, that was all I did. I only started actually playing the game later. Now, I enjoy both building and actually playing the game, depending on my mood. Usually, I'll have a binge of building, but I eventually come to a point where I'd rather do anything other than build. Then I play the game. Then, eventually, the urge to build comes back. So it's a back-and-forth.

Are you a CC creator? I made lots of stuff for TS2, mostly object retextures/recolors. I've made a few minor things for TS3, and I retexture hairs and add preg morphs to clothing for my own use, but I wouldn't consider myself a CC creator for TS3. In fact, I'm actively resisting learning how to make stuff for TS3 because I really don't want to go down that rabbithole again.

Do you have any Simblr friends or a Sim Squad? Friends in the sense of "people I enjoy talking to and sharing ideas with and sometimes arguing with here on Tumblr?" Sure. Are those the same as friendships that develop face-to-face in the real world? Nope. But, sometimes I like talking to my Simblr friends a lot more than talking to my real-life friends, so make of that what you will. Y'all are less draining sometimes. LOL

Do you have any sims merch? No official merch, but my brother-in-law is into making pottery, and several years ago he made me a big stoneware mug with a plumbbob on it. Which is ironic because when I play the game I turn off the plumbbobs because I hate them. LOL But I love the mug. It's heavy enough that neither cats nor wagging dog tails nor giant snakes (though he could do it if he focused all four of his brain cells on the task) can knock it off of tables, but not so heavy that I can't comfortably lift it. I use it for eating soup and the occasional mug cake, and also for drinking the awful herbal tea my husband makes me drink, though since the recent surgery, I don't have to drink that anymore! *dances* So now it will just be my soup or cake mug. Or one for tea that I actually want to drink.

Do you have a YouTube for sims? I don't have a YouTube for anything. Well, OK, I have a YouTube account for watching other people's stuff and making playlists of things I want to watch, but I don't post videos on it, and I don't really watch video game-related stuff on YouTube, either.

How has your “Sims style” changed throughout your years of playing? It hasn't, really. I've pretty much always just come up with wacky scenarios to play and see how they go. In fact, for me, coming up with the scenario and figuring out how to make it work in the game and then inventing a ruleset to govern it is sometimes more fun than actually playing the scenario. LOL

And my Sims all look like the game made them because…the game makes all of them. I just poke the random button until it produces something that doesn't look too much like a freak of nature, then I hit up a couple sliders to remove or tone down any remaining freakishness. (Though I confess that I will spend an inordinate amount of time sculpting the titties of those who have them. Why? I have no idea, other than I just like me a nice pair of titties. Too bad there aren't any sliders for male titties…) Then I just slap on a different hair, maybe change the eye color, and slather on some makeup and facial/body hair and shit until they don't look too stupid, and then off I go. From there, they're all born in the game, and I just leave them as-is, mostly because I can't be bothered. "I can't be bothered" is pretty much my philosophy of life.

Who’s your favorite CC creator? I hate this kind of question. I feel like all they do is disappoint and discourage people if they're never picked. I refuse to do that over something so trivial. So, my favorite CC creator is you, the person reading this. Yes, you. Even if you don't make CC. It doesn't matter. You're the best.

How long have you had Simblr? I started my TS2 one in 2013. (I can remember that only because I know that I started it the same year I met my husband. LOL ) I started this one….2 years ago? 3? Something like that.

How do you edit your pictures? Other than basic cropping and resizing and maybe adjusting brightness/contrast a bit if the pic is too dark or whatever, I generally don't. I don't even use Reshade all the time anymore, only in certain situations, though I do have an NVIDIA profile for the game that adds ambient occlusion and better antialiasing and shit like that. Sometimes, though, I'll decide to photoshop scenery pics, and then I just kind of stab at it with various tools and filters and layer blends and shit until I like I how it looks. There's no actual process involved. I'm random like that.

What expansion/ gamepack is your favorite? I gotta go with World Adventures. Bits of it are a bit, shall we say, culturally problematic, but man, I never get tired of doing those stupid, stupid tombs. LOL Plus, I love that NRaas Traveler allows you to "travel" to any world, and I don't think that mod works without WA, so…. Yeah. WA.

Tagging: I have no idea who's done this, so I'll just tag a few random people, off the top of my head. Feel free to do or ignore, as you choose. No pressure from me! So...@nectar-cellar, @happy-lemon, @erasabledinosaur, @esotheria-sims, @lilleputtu, @littlefrenchsims, @anamoon63, @lazysunjade, annnnnnnnd @papermint-airplane.

[trash1129]

SELF-SABOTAGE | Chapter 5: I’m meeting Lucifer today!

(Written under images and 2 more images after written portion)

(Y/n) sighs as she sent the last text to Soobin. She peers through the large window to the cafe just to make sure he didn’t lie to her straight up. Though there was no point in doing that since she saw his old beat up bike chained to the bike rack next to the front door of the cafe. Finally, with a slight huff, she walks in much to her dismay.

Blue Orangeade cafe was a hugely popular place on campus, so it was no surprise that the whole place was packed with students; wether is was for studying or just the fill their ever growing caffeine addictions. The place had a very modern look to it. The color scheme being a mix of warm tones and white. When (Y/n) walked in, she was instantly hit with the smell of freshly brewed coffee and pastries. If it wasn’t under the current circumstances, she could see herself enjoying getting a coffee and studying in a quiet corner here. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as peaceful of a circumstance for her.

“Welcome to Blue Orangeade cafe!” A loud voice rung out. Her head snapped over to whoever called out the greeting and saw someone she recalled being Yeonjun and Soobin’s friend. Beomgyu, was it? Quickly shrugging it off, she gave a small wave and looked around the cafe for Soobin. It wasn’t hard to spot him. He was awkwardly sitting alone at a table for two in the back corner of the busy cafe with his laptop open. He didn’t seem to even being doing anything on it. Once (Y/n) spotted him, she begrudgingly made her way over to the table.

Soobin, on the other hand, was practically shaking in his seat. He was more nervous than he’s been before around her which was weird. Maybe because it wasn’t in a group setting? Maybe because they weren’t in classroom and were just by themselves? He didn’t know but all he knew was that he could use this chance to turn their dynamic around. That was a lot of pressure in itself and his massive crush on her wasn’t helping that fact. So for the last couple of minutes since he’s been in the coffee house, he has been staring at his blank computer screen while nervously messing with his fingers.

“Hey,” (Y/n)’s annoyed huff left her as she finally walked behind the seat across from Soobin. He quickly snapped his eyes up to her direction and quickly tapped the space bar on his laptop to light it up to make it seem he was working.

“Oh, uh, hey.” The nervous boy coughed out awkwardly causing the girl across from him’s face to scowl. (Y/n) sighed and pulled the chair out from the table. She quickly grabbed what she needed from her book bag then put it on the back of the chair and took a seat.

“Well…?” She started making Soobin slightly jump.

He stared at her like she grew 3 heads for a hot minute before responding. “Well what…?” He asked confused.

The (H/c) girl across from him scoffed, “what do you mean ‘well what’?” She snapped. “Since you waited oh so long for me to show up, you must have gotten some ideas for the project down” (Y/n) finished.

Shit.

Soobin didn’t even think of what the project would even be about. He was too busy stressing over being partnered with (Y/n) if didn’t even cross his mind to even find topics. Slightly clearing his throat, he quickly did what anyone would do in this situation. He woke up his laptop as quietly as possible (since it wasn’t even properly awake since he had just been sitting there) and went to the only place that could fix his problem.

Google.

After a few minutes of panicked searching he finally spoke up, “Cognitive thinking in children?”

Silence.

(Y/n) stared at him. “Cognitive thinking in children…?” She repeated slowly like it was the stupidest thing she had ever heard and to be fair, to her, it was. Soobin glanced up from his laptop only to glance back down towards the screen due to her extremely judgmental stare. After another beat of silence, (Y/n) spoke up once more.

“I think I somehow gave you too much credit for once, Choi Soobin.” She huffed out. “What does the cognitive thinking of children have to do with the current topic in class at the moment?” She finishes. (Y/n) could feel her blood pressure rising. She couldn’t tell if he was really that stupid or was doing this to irk her, but with how he was acting, part of her thinks it was a mix of both.

Soobin had another small moment panic. What was the current topic they were talking about in class? He needs to stop staring at (Y/n) and pay attention to class. Damn, he really was down bad. He was quick to go to their classrooms online class to check the current topic. Social psychology, perfect. Just as he opened his mouth to respond, (Y/n) cut him off.

“You’re lucky that I knew you wouldn’t pull your weight in this project and found a topic we could do.” She smirked at the annoyed look that flashed across Soobin’s face. “We’re going to do it on people perception.”

“And why do you get to decide?” Soobin asked but it came out more snappy than he liked. He’s gonna blame that on muscle memory. “And what do you mean ‘you knew I wouldn’t pull my weight’?” He pressed; Man, he really needs to stop.

“I get to decide because you don’t seem to know what we are even learning. You know for the top of the class, you’re really stupid.” She spat out.

“And you talk a lot of big game for someone who comes in second in everything compared to me” Soobin was quick to say out of reflex causing the female across from him to glare harshly at him.

The once barely bearable atmosphere around them was quick to drop down to an unbearable one. They sat across from each other with a tension so thick that it could be cut with a knife. (Y/n) with her arms crossed and a look that could murder while Soobin across from her with a mirrored expression and his tongue pressed to the inside of his cheek in annoyance.

After a heavy beat of silence and deadly gazes, Soobin snapped back to his wits. This would get them no where; Project wise and dynamic wise. If he really wanted to try and turn them around, he had to break that habit of defaulting back to their “rivalry”. He quickly glanced to the cafe bar and then back to the angry girl across from him.

“Have you gotten a drink yet?”

His sudden question caught (Y/n) off guard. Her face scrunched in confusion for a quick second before hesitatingly responding, “uh no?”

Soobin quietly nodded to himself then got up from his seat, “Neither have I. Let’s go order our drinks and start brainstorming for the project.” He explains and starts making his way to the front of the cafe to the bar.

(Y/n) sat there in confusion from the sudden attitude change and also shock because she was pretty sure that was the longest Soobin has ever held eye contact that wasn’t a glare with her.

Feeling someone staring, she looked back to see Soobin waiting for her to follow him with a look of ‘are you coming or not?’. She awkwardly got out of her chair and followed him to the register. Once there, the guy who first greeted her came up,

“Hey (Y/n)! Sup, Soobin!” Beomgyu greeted once more and smiled. Soobin greeted him back with a smile while (Y/n), slightly confused on how he knew her, waved at him awkwardly. “What can I get you guys?” He asked.

“I’m gonna get my usual iced blonde vanilla latte.” Soobin replies and then looks at (Y/n) for her order.

“Uh, just an iced caramel macchiato for me.” She mumbled out.

Beomgyu nods and types it in. “Okie dokie, it should be done at the end of the bar in a few.” He smiled and gave Soobin a playful glance one more time before heading behind the bar.

The duo silently walked to the drop off plane after paying and stood there tensely.

Finally, (Y/n) spoke up. “Okay, what the fuck is going on?” She asked with a brow raised causing Soobin to jump.

“What?”

“Are you bipolar or something?” She snapped. “You insult me and then now you’re all ‘let’s get drinks and work on our project’.” She eyed him suspiciously.

Soobin tried to fight the urge to snap back but failed, “excuse me? Is it wrong of me to want to get the project done rather then get nothing done and bicker with you like a child?” He glared in retaliation causing (Y/n) to gape at him in shock.

“Are you calling me childish?!” She screeched.

“No, I’m calling you a literal child because even most childish people don’t act the way you do!” He shot back quickly without even thinking.

“Oh, you wanna talk like that, huh-”

“(Y/n)?” A painfully familiar voice cut them off.

(Y/n) froze up and snapped her head over only to see the one and only, Do Jaeyi. Her heart dropped to her stomach when she saw him. What was he doing here?!

Soobin looked over eyebrows knit together in slight confusion.

“What are you doing here? Whatever, it doesn’t matter, I’ve been wanting to talk to you. Hear me out, I know you’re tired of me saying it over and over but you know we loved each other. I’m sick of pretending that we weren’t happy together. You were happy weren’t you?” Jaeyi rambled out, going to reach for her hand.

(Y/n) quickly pulled her hand towards herself, “Jaeyi, quit it.” She grit out. Her heart was racing. Why couldn’t he just leave her alone? She was sick of him. Wasn’t it enough that when she found him talking about how much nuisance she was, that she cried for almost a week straight, heart broken, as he acted like there was nothing wrong with their relationship? She was done with everything to do with him. He was just a huge thorn her side at this point.

She wanted him to stop. She wanted to finally just be left alone. Everyday she was sick and tired of looking over her shoulder just to avoid him. So, without much thinking, she grabbed Soobin’s hand and glowered at Jaeyi.

“I really didn’t feel right telling you because the break up was so recent but I’m getting really tired of you bothering me. This is my boyfriend, Soobin.” She sent her ex a passive aggressive smile as his jaw dropped along with Soobin’s.

(Y/n) was quick to throw Soobin a look telling him the play along.

“Your…what?” Jaeyi was in awe.

Soobin quickly gathered himself and grabbed (Y/n)’s hand in return. He put on his most charming smile and looked at Jaeyi, “it’s nice to finally put a face to the person who has been bothering my girlfriend nonstop recently.” He said in sarcastic kindness.

A tense stillness seems to fall over the trio. Both Soobin and (Y/n) smiling in mock way toward the shocked and seemingly heart broken Jaeyi.

“One Iced blonde vanilla latte! One iced caramel macchiato!” Beomgyu called out and was quick to stare at the three, “woah, did someone die or something?”

Summary: After (Y/n) breaks up with her ex, Do Jaeyi, she isn’t left alone by him. Finally after being bothered nonstop, she breaks and tells him she is dating her high school rival, Choi Soobin. Now they are left to keep up the act of being a couple till this all blows over. Little does (Y/n) know Soobin has been waiting for a chance like this.

Previous | Masterlist | Next

A/n: phew, so we finally have it! Time to pick stuff up! Sorry for the lack of updates, I was going through it- anyways enjoy!

TAGLIST. Open @etherealcherrie @i2lain

[deluxewhump]

The Scry: chapter II

CW: not a lot. tentative reassurance and comfort. building trust. series warnings for human trafficking, whumpee with exploited powers.

He decided he’d rather bring this Carlo boy home with him than leave him in the building overnight.

It wasn’t just that Ingrid asked to see him. It was a new and sudden sense of responsibility, even if its contours were rough and undefined. All day he felt a tug between the professional aloofness he usually liked to maintain at work and the desire to be a source of comfort for the precog boy they’d given him.

He was clearly abused before. By whom, for how long, and in what ways was not clear. The fact he was so concerned if this business was a fully legal venture or not made Max think for sure he was one of the repossessed precognitives that had been used in day trading and investments, or even the less subtle art of ripping off casinos and lotteries. Who needs risk management when you can see the future?

Which is exactly how he was supposed to use the poor thing, except with the green light from the United States government.

…At least for now. Carlo didn’t belong to him (the thought was jarring anyway, now that he saw the precogs were flesh and blood). He belonged to Spartan, and only because recent legislation had made it possible. It could always go the other way. Spartan could decide they weren’t worth it, sell them to another company. Or the winds could change in Washington (or the state of Maryland? He didn’t know. His mother would know), and the feds could demand the precogs back.

Five o’clock came. He knew it without checking the clock by the shadows on the office wall. The sun dipped behind the neighboring buildings, winter-orange rays cut by symmetrical blocks. He heard people talking in the hallway on the way to the elevators.

Carlo was curled in the armchair by the floor to ceiling window, dozing. He startled awake at the footsteps outside the door, confused for a moment as to where he was. He looked at Max and Max smiled gently to put him at ease.

“Hey.”

Carlo yawned sleepily, trying to stifle it.

“I’m gonna head out in a few minutes. You wanna come with me or stay here?”

Carlo looked at him closely, a quick up and down as if seeing him for the first time.

“My girlfriend is at home,” Max said as he began to gather his things, powering off his computer. “We can make some dinner. Probably watch some TV. She likes these really trashy shows, reality shows and competitions and whatnot. Honestly, I’m really into the one we just started. It’s like the reality show version of Clue. I’ve got a spare bedroom. We can make it up nice and warm for you.”

Carlo watched him slip his laptop into his briefcase. He felt like he was coaxing a wild animal out of a thicket.

“Or you can stay here. They have a spot for you downstairs I guess. I haven’t seen it. I imagine it’s like a dorm or a barrack situation. Who knows, maybe they went all out and it’s the Four Seasons down there.”

Does this kid know what the hell you’re talking about?

He busied himself by checking his smartwatch. It was a weird for him, saying this kind of stuff to this boy he’d just met, handed off to him so absurdly.

“The things I said to you this morning… all that still stands if you come home with me. I’m not gonna hurt you. It’s safe. I promise.”

—

Ingrid was way ahead of him. By the time they got home she’d been home for an hour and started dinner. There was a load of laundry in the wash, and she was talking to her mother on the phone. She saw them in the doorway and blurted a quick gotta go before hanging up.

She only stared for a second, to give her credit. He had too, when Cissy first dropped him off.

“I really don’t know what I was expecting,” she said when he was upstairs. “But it wasn’t that.”

She treated him like a guest, but there was a reservation behind her smile, the same as Cecelia had. It was in the eyes. Carlo held out a hand for her when they met, and she took it gently, giving it a little dip more than a shake. For some reason it made Max’s heart ache to watch.

When dinner was done and cleaned up, they sat on the couch to watch Ingrid’s new reality show. He and Ingrid both thought the best way to go about it was just to continue their normal routine and add him in, not make a big deal out of it.

Carlo was in the wingback chair next to them, his feet tucked underneath him and a blanket tucked up close. He was always cold, Max noticed. When they’d left the office the December wind had seemed to physically pain him, and he had trouble warming up, even inside.

Ingrid lifted her head from Max’s lap, shifting upright into a cross legged position. “Carlo?” She asked. “Can you… can you see your own future?”

Max’s head snapped away from the TV. She was always telling him he was too blunt, too pragmatic and state-your-purpose. And yet he hadn’t dared ask the poor thing something like that yet.

Carlo looked at Ingrid with those big doe eyes of his, bruises like shadows on his face. “No ma’am,” he whispered. Max read his lips more than actually heard him. He cleared his throat. “Sometimes it happens, but it’s not good.”

Max could understand her curiosity. They didn’t know anything about these things. There was almost nothing on the internet. It’s like they’d been kept in Area 51.

“Why isn’t it good?” she asked cautiously. Her copper-red hair was pulled into a bun, her eyeliner smudged from laying on a pillow over Max’s lap.

“It’ll hurt me,” he shrugged, like that was something not entirely unexpected. “It’s not supposed to be used for that. It’s against the code of conduct.”

Ingrid’s eyebrows knit for a millisecond before she relaxed her face again, cool neutral. “Whose code of conduct?”

Max pinched her calf where Carlo couldn’t see. Her knee twitched towards him a centimeter, but she didn’t bat an eye in acknowledgment.

Carlo looked from Ingrid to him, unsure if he should say. A commercial for dish soap ended and their show came back on, the cliffhanger middle of a reality show challenge.

“Hey,” she said, picking the remote off Maxs thigh and turning up the volume on the tv. “Shelly’s gonna win this one again, look at her.”

—

He brought Carlo extra blankets from the linen closet. One was an old family quilt, hand sewn by his great grandmother or something, he couldn’t remember exactly, but his mother always mentioned it.

The spare room was a little dusty, and there were some cardboard boxes in one corner— things of his fathers he hadn’t gone through yet. His parents divorced when he was in college. It had been coming for a decade, the spaces between sentences and looks growing wider by the year until they were more like roommates, strangers with a grown child who shared their DNA.

His father lived out in Phoenix now. He had a girlfriend Max and Ingrid’s age. His mother lived downtown, closer to the true love of her life, the law practice she and her business partner ran. Sometimes, even now, he would feel a twinge of annoyance at his mothers seemingly bottomless devotion to her practice.

She’s like one of those German Shepherds that carries rocks around in its mouth til it bleeds, he’d said to Ingrid in a particularly ungenerous moment. She’d been too kind to point out it was maybe a twinge of jealousy, but he felt it in her sympathetic little downturned mouth.

That possibility was too immature and borderline Oedipal for him to want to contemplate. After the divorce finalized, he inherited the old family Victorian at twenty four, and had lived in it these seven years since until it felt like his house and no longer his parents’.

Carlo got gingerly into the single bed, made up with fresh sheets earlier in the afternoon by Ingrid.

Max laid the heavy extra quilt at his feet. “It's a little chilly upstairs at night,” he admitted. “Can I get you some socks or something?”

“I’m okay,” Carlo said politely. Max went to the dresser anyway, pulling out a thick pair of socks folded into a ball.

“Just in case,” he said, and set them on the bedside table.

“Max?”

He paused in the doorway.

“Are we going to start tomorrow?”

Something in the tender innocence of the question stung. He couldn’t tell if it had been asked out of fear or curiosity, though he sensed both on the boy almost constantly.

“Yeah,” he answered truthfully. “We should take a shot at it, if you’re ready.”

“Okay.”

“You think you can get some sleep?”

“Yes, Sir.”

Just let him keep doing it, if that’s what he wants to call you. Maybe it’s a way to keep it professional, keep some distance. Let him have that.

“We’re right down the hall if you need us. Ok? Anything at all.”

In the dark of his bedroom, Ingrid turned to him restlessly. He could feel her eyes on him, the blue glow of the digital clock just enough to see the outline of her shoulder.

“I’m sorry I asked him that.”

“It’s fine.”

Ingrid could be impulsive, but her regret and introspection later was always twofold. She’d drink a few glasses of wine at dinner with their friends and worry for a week she’d been too candid, laughed too loud. She thought she’d been accidentally rude to their waiter once and asked Max to turn the truck around so she could go back and explain her mistake. He didn’t turn the truck around, of course. He told her she was way in her own head, to learn to let it go.

He felt for her arm in the dark, followed it down to her hand and held it loosely. She turned her palm up to reciprocate.

“I wonder, too,” he told her. “I wanna know who hurt him like that, for one. And the elephant in the room— could he see our futures, if he tried?”

“I don’t think I wanna know my future.”

“Me either. And if you do know it, could you inadvertently change it? Is it set in stone? Does him having precognitive sight mean free will is an illusion after all?”

Ingrid groaned. Both as a lapsed Baptist and devout atheist, she didn’t like that.

“Sorry, kid,” he grinned in the dark. “We don’t need to worry about free will before bed.”

“Tell me how it goes tomorrow. I don’t wanna know my own future, but I wanna know what he can do. What it’s like.”

“I will,” he promised, squeezing her cool hand. “I’ll tell you all about it.”

Scry taglist;

@whumpsday @distinctlywhumpthing @pumpkin-spice-whump @just-a-whumping-racoon-with-wifi

[1007xf]

With the 4th of August just around the corner, I was thinking about a little something The Tapestry does that I really like and that is its portrayal of how it is to be a weird lonely little nerd.

Warning comically huge rant. I wasn't planning for it to be this long. I do not know what possessed me. It's 2:30 in the morning.

In Homestuck proper, the beta kids are also lonely kids who only really have eachother, however Homestuck's setting kind of obscures this fact because Beta Earth, really, truly, feels empty. Unless there is something I'm forgetting (I haven't read actual Homestuck in a while, oops. I should really re-read.) Beta Earth is just normal 2009 Earth. And you can see that if you look at all of the cultural references in it. Earth Beta isn't empty because all of John's shitty movies had to have been produced by someone, because someone had to have been frequenting Bro's weird puppet porn website, because we literally see other human beings talk trough the Internet on Dad's PDA and such (I wonder whatever happened to fedoraFreak haha). Beta Earth isn't objectively empty, of course. Yet it feels like so, because its main cast seems to only superficially exist in it. You could probably assume John, Rose and Dave all went to school (funnily enough I looked it up and April 13th 2009 was a Monday. Damn brats, skipping middle school so they can contribute to the creation of a new Universe.) because that's what kids their age do (Jade doesn't count for obvious reasons). Yet we never really seem to see or hear about all that. These kids only interact with eachother and their guardians (well, the living ones anyway), and so it's hard to see Beta Earth as a planet with a living breathing ~6880 billion humans on it. It's really more of a cardboard cutout of Earth, where the idea of culture and people is there, but none of the moving parts are present.

And so, it really feels like, even though Jade is the only one who is actually secluded, all 4 kids live in isolation, their only window to social interaction being their computers and the Pester Chum client. It feels like John, Rose, Dave and Jade are the only real individuals on Earth, because even their guardians don't feel like much more than placeholders or just vessels for one joke or stereotype. And this makes it seem like the kids are placed in this impossible full yet empty world, which is not something any of us are living in (I hope so!).

Most lonely people aren't alone . You can't say Homestuck's portrayal of loneliness, especially at that young pre-teen to teen age is accurate because it literally feels like the cast is alone (sans Jade bla bla I said this already) and so of course they'd be lonely. In any case, it portrays being lonely (take a shot everytime I write this word. Or don't! It depends on how suicidal you're feeling at this particular moment) all the same, just in a different (and less likely) way.

And with that bigger than I expected speil about Homestuck out of the way, let's get to the actual post. It has been said already the The Tapestry is an amazing MSPFA on so many fronts, but I'll say it again, just because it deserves it. The Tapestry is great, go read it if you haven't.

The main cast of the comic (sadly not counting Sedranovel, Limeweld and Expanaiver. I know they're technically also protagonists but they just.... don't really fit the idea I'm trying to portray here. Sorry!) is also 4 youths who play a God Damn Game. They're aliens too, but they're "like a human but..." type of alien, so their world is not all that different form ours. And a thing you'll notice right away as you start reading the comic is the emphasis that is placed on the worldbuilding, from the grand aspects like the the Solar System on the alien world and its geographical and political structure to the minute aspects like a mecha anime or the educational system of just one of many nations. Right of the bat, unlike Beta Earth, Siltsphere is bustling with life, culture, conflict. It helps that we also get to literally see other setyrs, lots of them in fact. It's nice eye candy, since they're usually part of the huge sweeping landscape scenery porn pages, but it's also a stark reminder of what is at stake. All of the supernatural fuckery afoot now affects not only the protagonists but also a planets entire civilization.

And yet, the main cast seems to gravitate towards eachother only. And unlike in Homestuck, we know that they have acquaintances and that they talk to others. Sosav mentions her neighbors, Handa makes friends with the pagan kids at his school, Deime tries (and fails) to connect with his countrymen. They have a form of social lives, each different, but they exist and they acknowledge the existence of a complex world with lots of real individuals. But they're all best friends with eachother. Oenia mentions that she doesn't really have friends outside of the other 3 and I think this is true for all of them.

Each off the 4 main characters is a bit weird and they're all definitely huge nerds. That is to say, they're all very passionate about their interests. And, sadly, intense passion, especially when directed at something not viewed as necessary to society, can sometimes be very alienating. Because most of the time it's hard to find someone who shares the same spark of love for that thing. I think Handa illustrates this problem the best, what with his... I want to say inferiority complex but that sounds kind of mean haha. He definitely loves history and art, and he is good at them too. Excellent, really. And yet, we hardly see him proud of his achievements. Because he thinks that his talents are a waste of time and energy, because they're not "necessary". Because those passions don't prepare you for a "real job". Because the world goes round thanks to the work of scientists, not artists. This is all really relatable to me personally, to a scarily accurate degree. And this sort of thinking is sisyphean, really. Because you'll reach a high where you think you did good, where you look at your art and say "wow, I've gotten better, this genuinely looks good!", but then the little shitty voice at the back of your mind will remind you that drawing won't help you solve cancer or launch rockets or whatever and therefore you're useless to society. And if this thinking sounds dramatic that's because that's how it is. Sosav literally calls Handa out on this, which shines a light on the fact that, since Handa lives in an almost-utopia society, he really shouldn't have to worry about stuff like that. And he shouldn't, but he does, because this line of thinking doesn't make sense anyway!

I wrote all that just for one of the characters! Imagine if sat down to dissect the others too. I could write 3 different posts just about Deime. But I won't because then I'll probably forget what the point of the post actually is. Yeah, there's a point. Remember the point? Jesus.

The point about being a lonely stupid nerdy kid. Like I said before, being super into something can sort of isolate you from your peers, because it's just hard to connect with those you don't have a lot in common with. But that doesn't mean you won't talk. You'll greet eachother, have meaningless conversations about whatever during recess, maybe you'll even hang out outside of school. But, really, there will never be anything there. Because it just feels like your brains are wired differently. Of course, I feel like the parallel to neurodiversity is starting to become obvious here. I'd say more, but I'm not an expert and while I do suspect that I am neurodivergent myself, I was never and probably will never be diagnosed by a professional, so I can't really say I'm in a position to write about this.

That's how you become lonely without being alone. And it's worse, because you'll see the people (or setyrs, I guess) in front of you and they're your age, and they're just like you, and they're going trough the same life experiences, but there just isn't any spark there. The thread to connect to them just isn't long enough.

That's why you need other weirdo nerds in your life. And thank fuck for the Internet. Because otherwise, where would I be ranting into the void about some fancomic to probably one or two people, or maybe just myself? Hah.

The main characters are all into very different things and they're from pretty different environments, yet they seem to click together anyway. And it's because I think when you're a passionate nerd, seeing someone just like you makes you admire them. And they don't have to be way better or more skilled than you, they could be just at your level, yet you feel enamoured by their passion nonetheless and they feel the same for you and that's friendship! Handa admires Sosav for her physics knowledge and Oenia for her art improvement, Deime, despite his bickering with Handa, definitely recognizes his (comically potent) art skills and Oenia is amazed by Deime's "search engine skills". It's all really cute. I love it when in bigger groups of friends you can tell that everyone is friends with everyone and they all have unique relationships with eachother.

That being said, I believe that, miraculously, I may be reaching the end of my... whatever this is. This thought vomit. This is mainly just me writing down whatever came to mind with only a rough idea of what I wanted to say. Is more or less a clusterfuck but I did manage to say some things I had on the brain. High chance there's grammar or spelling mistakes in here I didn't catch on my proofread, so sorry for that. Good night 👋 and read da damn comic.

[transsexualhamlet]

👋 and 👁️ for the TMA ask game!

hi anon!! tma ask game

👋- What characters that don't meet in canon would you like to see interact?

I answered this already with Alice and Tim, but for another pair I think Gertrude and the old woman from Piecemeal should duke it out grandma style. I think the battle would be of such epic proportions.

I also would like to see more of Elias's interactions with other avatars, especially would have liked to see the sort of rivalry between him and Maxwell Rayner. I want to know what the eye's head of affairs thinks of the Guy Who Hates Vision's head of affairs

👁️- Do you have any experiences you'd like to make a statement about?

I have offered one scrap to the Archivist already, however it's basically inedible since it was strange and unexplainable but not frightening. Most of the things that have actually frightened me are very mundane and juvenile or just dreams I'm afraid but I do have one saga which really stands out.

So there's this building which used to exist.

Basically, my dad works as a newspaper reporter which is a profession which barely exists anymore, but it's a local paper whose office has been in the same building for almost 200 years. Note that this is Midwest America so that is an impressive number here. And this place was fucking WEIRD. I entered it periodically since I was a small child but the amount of things about this building that have given me nightmares is... really a concerning number, and not just because a lot of these were memories from when I was a child, my dad had admitted to feeling the same way about it and being convinced it was somehow haunted. I think that's silly, really, I think whatever was going on with that building was Much Less Explainable than that.

It wasn't really a very large building, just a usual small town main street storefront office, but I swear to god it was bigger on the inside, not just because it had FOUR FLOORS of consecutive sub-basements beneath the ground level to fit the paper's archives. (And it isn't just that archives are weird either, because my mom was also a newspaper reporter for a different and much larger newspaper which also had archives I explored a lot as a child. They were NORMAL. These were WEIRD AS FUCK.)

There was a front office which was kind of normal, although perpetually in a state of 70s decor with 90s-00s computer equipment. But to the side, there was a sort of half lower level that was a set of strange and uselessly placed yellow-lit yellow-wallpapered corridors with literally nothing in them save the occasional box of scrap paper and ancient office supplies. No one ever went down here and I'm not sure what it was used for other than as part of the fucking backrooms, and the one time I went in them as a child while my dad was working I got stuck and was wandering through them for istg half an hour before I found another door out. Every time I went into this place it was always late and my dad was always the only person in the building other than me because he never came in during normal hours, and so all the lights would be off and everything (except for the backrooms corridors) would be pitch black save for the occasional fire red computer light and exit sign. There's no place in my life that was more of a liminal space. It had that dingy musty office smell, the constant overhead light buzz, the overlarge massive dark rooms full of nothing but old film and miles of wires and computer banks, the mazes of empty rooms with random office supplies that always looked like they hadn't been touched in months despite it being a functioning office at the time, the fact that in the fifteen years my dad worked in this building I never ever once saw another human being in the building except for him (and he never went to explore with me either), the one specific window that if I looked out of it over main street always always made me feel so disoriented and terrified because the street somehow looked Wrong from that angle like we were wayyy higher up than we were supposed to be (and I never saw people out of it either any time I looked despite it being Main Street, although I'm sure this is just coincidence) This however is just sort of normal. The real weird shit was the archives.

The building was knocked down several years ago. The reasons why were really vague. They said that it had been bought out to build a hotel and the paper had to move, but they never built a hotel there and the lot sat as empty rubble for years. It's still not fully built over. But the stuff that really stuck with me was what I saw when I visited it for the last time, literally one day before they knocked the place down. My dad wanted to bring me with to help him take as much free office supplies as he could before everything was just a pile of rubble, so we went through all the rooms looking at everything all cleared out. It was really strange. I hadn't been there for several years at this point, so I... well, I expected it to look different? Renovated? At least the computers should have been newer? But everything was exactly how it had been when I visited it back in the 2000s, I mean, *exactly*. I suppose that says something about newspaper budgets but come *on*. It was unsettling, of course. Most of the stuff had been taken out, but there was a really unreasonable amount of things that had just been left for rubble. We were confirmed to be THE LAST people that were in that building before it was knocked down, but people had left just... entire systems of Old Ass Computers Still Running and strange lights in distant rooms we couldn't find, even though my dad's job was to like make sure everything was unplugged, I don't think we managed that, because it was really easy to get lost in there. We took out some office supplies, but mostly we got sidetracked bc we kept finding rooms that my dad had never seen before, I think a lot because many large cabinets had been taken out/moved away, but why would that many be covered up anyway? There were plenty old closets that looked like they hadn't been touched for 20+ years. It was really cool but also just started to get freaky after a while. And I uh, couldn't find the yellow corridors? At this point I kind of wanted to because that was the main thing that I remembered about the place (and I knew about the silly backrooms thing by then and wanted to take a picture as a joke) but they were just Not There, and where they had been it just went out to the edge of the street, which yknow. Was always how the building looked on the outside. Don't ask me. But my dad asked if we wanted to check out the archives and I was like well, haven't they taken everything out and moved it already, and he said they had but they Most Certainly Hadn't. The entrance to the archives was this extremely heavy metal door with a ridiculous crank handle (this is a normal archive thing, it's to make sure it's still safe in case of a flood or fire, but still fucking weird) and there were two floors of nothing, because stuff had been moved, but the stairs kept going down. I asked my dad what was down here but he said he'd never had reason to go there before since it wasn't his job. But whatever it was wasn't going to exist the next day, so we might as well check it out.

It was this unfurnished room, half of it was so small that only I could fit inside even with my head bowed, and had an extremely uneven floor with several two-foot drops where the ceiling dropped as well. It went out so far that it would definitely have been under the street and not under the building, but it only had one old ass lightbulb. It made me pretty terrified and I felt like it was going to collapse in on me and leave me like 40 feet beneath the ground, which to be fair it absolutely could have done considering how fucked the structural integrity of this building was. The thing was this place seemed to have no purpose, other than a few pipes that were hanging around. The only thing that was even in the room was some really old archival material which appeared to have been both fire and water damaged. It was all the oldest stuff, from the early 1800s. I don't think I touched it because it was sort of menacing, and most of it was in German, I think? but it was stuffed like in a really far corner. Not on a shelf or anything, like as far as physically possible to reach, in a really tiny fucking crawl space just sprawled on the ground. No one had taken or moved it for some reason and we left that room after being in there even five minutes and didn't finish looking around. Those books are still under main street. I think about that sometimes and I dream about that building that doesn't exist anymore. Definitely the scariest place I've ever been in. absolutely zero explanation for that.

[lightblueminecraftorchid]

Okay I’m talking about OneHalf anyway I like it too much.

Imagine you are an employee at a large company in the mid 1990s. You use MS-DOS; your company hasn’t sprung for Windows 3.0 because it would be expensive to update all of their equipment, and DOS works just fine for spreadsheets. Besides, everyone here is still using Lotus 1-2-3, and you don’t want to bother learning a new spreadsheet program like Excel.

You and your coworkers on your team share files a lot. You have to, really; you have a lot of data that needs processing, and it’s best to get a second set of eyes on something before you give it to your boss. Right now, you’ve just received a floppy disk from your coworker, Dan, to run on your computer and make sure everything looks right. Apparently his computer has been making some weird noises lately, and he’d rather be sure that everything saved alright, since your computer hasn’t been having any issues.

You insert the floppy into the disk drive, boot up DOS, and run the files. He’s got some spreadsheets, and a copy of Adventure; a game you’ve been wanting to play with him for a while. Dan’s great like that. Everything works fine. Looks like everything saved okay, but you keep a copy on your computer, just in case. You pass the floppy disk back to Dan and quickly move on to something else. Soon, the workday is over; you save your work, maybe take your floppy disks home if you have a home computer, and power down your computer. Maybe Dan’s just been having a bad week; computers make weird noises or hang unexpectedly sometimes, it’s just a fact of life. You hope it clears up by Monday, but it’s not really your problem right now.

Next Monday, you go into the office and start work again. Your computer boots up and- did the disk drive always sound that way? You feel like something’s off, but… your computer boots fine. Your files open normally, Lotus 1-2-3 doesn’t have any issues. It feels like there’s a tiny bit of lag between typing commands and programs opening, but that’s nothing new. These computers haven’t been updated in a while; maybe they’re just getting old? Or maybe Dan’s anxiety over his computer got in your head. It’s probably fine.

But on Tuesday, it still sounds weird. And Wednesday. And Thursday. You’ve heard of viruses before; there was that big news scare over Datacrime II and Michaelangelo, although they didn’t turn out to really be an issue. You know that viruses usually increase your file size, so you just check real quick. Graphics seems fine, 19,742 bytes still. You check Lotus 1-2-3; seems fine. It’s fine. VSafe isn’t pinging you, so… you’re probably just overthinking it.

Several weeks pass. You get used to the new way your computer boots up; Dan and you commiserate about the computers getting old and out of date. You joke about it with other coworkers; your boss hears about it and assures you that your computers will be replaced when there’s a budget for it, but for now, please try to take care of these machines.

And then, one day, while you’re working, you hear Dan pause. You look over, and you see that he’s just staring at his screen. His computer, which he had just booted up, says “Dis is one half” on the screen.

You both share a look, and then he hurries off to the IT department.

He comes back with a guy you’ve seen in passing, but don’t really talk to. He’s holding a floppy disk and explaining to Dan that, since this just happened, he probably has some sort of virus on his device. The IT guy finds that Dan’s files are the size they should be, but that the drive’s making some weird sounds, so he’s gonna be safe and install a clean version of the Master Boot Record, just to be safe. It’s probably some silly prank from a coworker with a hobby computer at home; he starts asking Dan if he’d left his computer on unattended lately, or used any floppies from people he didn’t usually work with.

Your computer was making those same weird sounds. Now seems like an important time to mention that, but the IT guy keeps talking and you’ve got to go home soon. In five minutes, you’ll be off the clock, and your boss has a habit of shooing everyone out the door who isn’t doing something past 5. You say your goodbyes and tell Dan you hope his computer gets fixed soon.

The next day, you walk in to an ashen-faced Dan waiting by your desk.

His files are trashed. That clean copy of the master boot record must have been corrupted or something, but the IT guy used the same floppy on a test computer and it worked exactly as it should have. Whatever happened after was enough to get the IT guy panicking, and worse, everything Dan has done on that computer for the past three years is toast. Even programs that come with the computer, like CONFIG, seem to be broken; he tried to run it, only to get back a ton of gibberish text.

The IT guy comes running back in, saying that his test computer is now making that weird sound from Dan’s computer. He’d taken another floppy and downloaded some of Dan’s surviving files, and now that he’s run them on another device, he’s confirmed it; Dan’s computer had a virus, and removing the virus is how the computer broke. Problem being, none of the three of you know what that virus is. All you know is this:

- Dan’s computer made a weird sound on startup

- Dan gave you one of his floppy disks, and you ran it

- Right after that, your computer started making the same noises

- Dan didn’t lose any of his data until he tried to get rid of the virus

You realize you have a very important decision to make. Do you let the IT guy try to disinfect your computer, so this doesn’t spread? Or do you keep working as usual, hoping that your computer doesn’t break like Dan’s?

This is what OneHalf does; it creates an encryption key, and then, every time you boot up, it encrypts the last two sectors of your hard disk. It’s memory resident, so any .com or .exe files you run get infected (like that copy of Adventure), but it uses stealth techniques to hide the increase in file size. It also decrypts files you try to access that are encrypted, effectively hiding from the user that there’s an issue until it’s much too late. Because it has to spin the disk to the encryption key to decrypt your files, and because the virus itself leaves instructions to decrypt your files in the master boot record, the seek test sound on startup is noticeably different.

Once half of your hard disk is encrypted, OneHalf will show the message “Dis is one half” when you boot up. That’s the first explicit sign that you’re infected. By then, much of your data is encrypted, and if you try to remove the virus by installing a clean copy of the master boot record, the instructions to decrypt your encrypted files are lost, and those files become unrecoverable. Specialized programs have to be used to find and save the encryption key and decrypt your files while safely disinfecting your computer.

[x3kristax3]

Eternal Love

A/N: here is your warning to be ready for the tears!

Chapter 1

I’m standing the spot he told me to be, today is six months since Hannah was found and we found out the truth about Richy. I've kept in touch with the gang but it's been different since Hannah was found expect with Jessy and Dan. 

I saw him in Duskwood but between the FBI, Hannah and Lilly we didn’t have much time alone. I knew that was going to happen. He stopped by my apartment three months ago and spent the night. We were curled up on my bed watching movies cuddling all night. I woke up to us tangled together and he took my breath away while he was still sleeping. I knew sleep wasn’t a luxury for him so the fact he felt safe enough with me to fall asleep even if it was just a little bit was all I needed to know our souls were interlocked.

I’m outside a motel, nothing fancy but it's where he told me to stand and wait for him. I’m looking at my phone but nothing new is coming through. I’m so focused I don’t realize someone came up until they wrap their arm around my waist. I fight until whoever is trying to take me until I hear his voice in my ear.

“It’s me, my love,” his voice soothes me like no other and I spin around looking into those ocean blue eyes full of love. I want to kiss him but he is wearing his mask so I nuzzle into his shoulder as I pull myself closer to him.

He grabs my hand and takes me inside the motel I had been standing outside of. He takes me to a room and unlocks it and I see this is where he’s been staying at last for a couple days and my heart breaks. His bags are always ready to go but he decided to let me see this side of him finally. He pulls me towards the bed and kisses me. I melt into his arms not wanting to break this kiss. I put my hands on his arms not wanting to let him go as I know every time with him is limited. We are so into the kiss that both jump when he computer goes off and he pulls away. He looks at his computer and it shows his pursuers location and I realize this might be even shorter than I expected it to be tonight. I sit on the bed and sigh.

“MC, I don’t have to leave yet” he grabs my face. “They are just close but not that close that I can’t spend a night with you.”

“Will you sleep tonight?” I ask as now I see the dark circles under his eyes and how tired he is.

He leans into me and whispers in my ear “ i don't think either of us will sleep tonight.’ he turns my head so my eyes are looking into his and my body melts. We kiss deep again and he lays me back on the bed.

As we lay in bed afterwards, I run my fingers along scars and he kisses me softly. I can see he’s tired but I know he won’t sleep with them being so close. He puts the TV on and I curl into him. My head on his chest not wanting to let him go, afraid of when I’ll see him again if I do. I feel my eyes getting heavy and I fall asleep.

I wake up to the sun coming in through the window which is weird because I remember them being closed last night. I sit up and see his stuff is all gone and my heart breaks. I feel the tears falling down my face but this is part of loving him.

I see a note on the nightstand by my phone.

MC,

I will always love you but I had to run. As you were sleeping they got even closer. This isn’t the life I wanted for you. While I love you with all my heart, please don’t wait anymore for me. Please move on with your life.

Jake

I look at my phone and see our last text message and my heart breaks because he deleted where to meet him so it's him telling me he loves me and will always be there. I want to text him but decide not to and I get dressed. I see the key for the room on the desk and I sigh. I hope the room is at least paid for. I head down and check out for him, thankfully it was paid for and head out to my car. As I get to my car I see the FBI and I sigh. I head back to Duskwood even though I have no idea why. I would rather go looking for him but I have no idea where to even start.

I pull up in front of the house I found and break down crying right in the car. I never expect him to do this to me. I knew what I was getting into but my heart loves him. My phone goes off and after I stop crying I look at it. 

Jake: Please don't be upset with me. I had to do this for your safety. I hope you got out before they showed up. I will always love you.

I don't answer him but I head into the house and Jessy is there taking care of my dog. She sees the tears on my face but instead of saying anything she just hugs me and I fall to pieces.

"It's gonna be okay. You will see him again and forget all about how it hurts when hea leaves," her voice is soothing but she doesn't know the reason for the tears.

I shake my head and head to my bedroom and curl up under the blanket with my dog and sob. I hear the front door open and I know she is leaving me alone. I  can't admit the truth to anyone right now.

[babeczka415]

Eternal Love

Chapter 1

I’m standing the spot he told me to be, today is six months since Hannah was found and we found out the truth about Richy. I've kept in touch with the gang but it's been different since Hannah was found expect with Jessy and Dan. 

I saw him in Duskwood but between the FBI, Hannah and Lilly we didn’t have much time alone. I knew that was going to happen. He stopped by my apartment three months ago and spent the night. We were curled up on my bed watching movies cuddling all night. I woke up to us tangled together and he took my breath away while he was still sleeping. I knew sleep wasn’t a luxury for him so the fact he felt safe enough with me to fall asleep even if it was just a little bit was all I needed to know our souls were interlocked.

I’m outside a motel, nothing fancy but it's where he told me to stand and wait for him. I’m looking at my phone but nothing new is coming through. I’m so focused I don’t realize someone came up until they wrap their arm around my waist. I fight until whoever is trying to take me until I hear his voice in my ear.

“It’s me, my love,” his voice soothes me like no other and I spin around looking into those ocean blue eyes full of love. I want to kiss him but he is wearing his mask so I nuzzle into his shoulder as I pull myself closer to him.

He grabs my hand and takes me inside the motel I had been standing outside of. He takes me to a room and unlocks it and I see this is where he’s been staying at last for a couple days and my heart breaks. His bags are always ready to go but he decided to let me see this side of him finally. He pulls me towards the bed and kisses me. I melt into his arms not wanting to break this kiss. I put my hands on his arms not wanting to let him go as I know every time with him is limited. We are so into the kiss that both jump when he computer goes off and he pulls away. He looks at his computer and it shows his pursuers location and I realize this might be even shorter than I expected it to be tonight. I sit on the bed and sigh.

“MC, I don’t have to leave yet” he grabs my face. “They are just close but not that close that I can’t spend a night with you.”

“Will you sleep tonight?” I ask as now I see the dark circles under his eyes and how tired he is.

He leans into me and whispers in my ear “ i don't think either of us will sleep tonight.’ he turns my head so my eyes are looking into his and my body melts. We kiss deep again and he lays me back on the bed.

As we lay in bed afterwards, I run my fingers along scars and he kisses me softly. I can see he’s tired but I know he won’t sleep with them being so close. He puts the TV on and I curl into him. My head on his chest not wanting to let him go, afraid of when I’ll see him again if I do. I feel my eyes getting heavy and I fall asleep.

I wake up to the sun coming in through the window which is weird because I remember them being closed last night. I sit up and see his stuff is all gone and my heart breaks. I feel the tears falling down my face but this is part of loving him.

I see a note on the nightstand by my phone.

MC,

I will always love you but I had to run. As you were sleeping they got even closer. This isn’t the life I wanted for you. While I love you with all my heart, please don’t wait anymore for me. Please move on with your life.

Jake

I look at my phone and see our last text message and my heart breaks because he deleted where to meet him so it's him telling me he loves me and will always be there. I want to text him but decide not to and I get dressed. I see the key for the room on the desk and I sigh. I hope the room is at least paid for. I head down and check out for him, thankfully it was paid for and head out to my car. As I get to my car I see the FBI and I sigh. I head back to Duskwood even though I have no idea why. I would rather go looking for him but I have no idea where to even start.

I pull up in front of the house I found and break down crying right in the car. I never expect him to do this to me. I knew what I was getting into but my heart loves him. My phone goes off and after I stop crying I look at it. 

Jake: Please don't be upset with me. I had to do this for your safety. I hope you got out before they showed up. I will always love you.

I don't answer him but I head into the house and Jessy is there taking care of my dog. She sees the tears on my face but instead of saying anything she just hugs me and I fall to pieces.

"It's gonna be okay. You will see him again and forget all about how it hurts when hea leaves," her voice is soothing but she doesn't know the reason for the tears.

I shake my head and head to my bedroom and curl up under the blanket with my dog and sob. I hear the front door open and I know she is leaving me alone. I  can't admit the truth to anyone right now.

[natashalie-lumley]

Welp, I kept saying I was going to write this the next time I was on my computer and then I keep forgetting and since I've already turned the dang thing on twice today I'm using my phone and hoping autocorrect catches most of the errors.

Lately I noticed something that I think used to slide under my radar (esp since one example is years old, both in terms of how long it's been around and how long it's been in my head), and it's probably thanks to tumblr honestly. Because both examples have to do with disability and having access to things as a disabled person, and also kind of in terms of privilege too. And those are both things that, while conscious of, I did not fully think about until joining tumblr. Anyway, here goes.

There's two pieces of media I've been thinking about that I feel show people not thinking outside of their own experiences. The first, and oldest, is from an episode of Parks and Rec. In it Ron Swanson and Chris Traeger are talking about childcare (someone correct me if I'm wrong please but I believe it's the episode where Chris has a nervous breakdown and is trying to learn "Ron's style of parenting" or something) and Chris mentions getting a white noise machine that includes outdoors sounds. Ron's reaction is to give Chris an incredulous look and say "you purchased a machine that mimics the sound of an open window??".

Now, I get it. Ron is a country man, he's lived around wilderness probably his whole life, and he seems fully healthy. So the fact that this seemed so weird to him kind of makes sense. I'm not saying it doesnt. What I -am- saying is that Not everyone can even open a window, let alone open a window and hear trees and crickets. People with asthma or bad allergies sometimes have to have the windows closed to be able to Breathe. People living in the city are likely just going to hear cars if they open theirs. And some people may even just like the predictability of recorded sounds because there's no risk of sudden scares. All things I wouldn't have thought of a few years ago, but now that I have I kind of want to poke Ron in the shoulder and point things out.

The other is from a tiktok series that I follow, which portrays some folks running a cafe. In the episode in question they talk about having set up on doordash and the following exchange happens

Employee 1: You did raise the prices 15% right?

Boss: of course I did. If they don't want to come in they can pay extra.

As someone who is currently carless, dependent on other people's availability, and just enough physically disabled that walking to the nearest grocery store (a block, basically) or to the nearest gas station (block and a half) and back is usually out of the realm of possibility... that hurt. When I use doordash it's usually for extreme purposes Because it's so expensive. And for someone to basically say "if they want to pay less they have to come here for it" as if EVERYONE COULD DO THAT made me so... angry and disappointed and made me start second guessing my abilities again. And in this case, I genuinely don't know if it's something that just didn't occur to the character (let alone the creator) or if they didn't care. And that sucks.

Anyway. That's my rant for the time being. Back to debating writing my Cinderella short here.

[sanguinifex]

Fun fact: did you know that American insurance and healthcare companies still HEAVILY use faxes in 2023?

Yup. Faxes.

If you’re old enough to drink, your parents might have one in a closet. If you’re a little older than that, you might have seen it on a Mr. Rogers rerun, or if you’re a bit older than that, when that episode first aired. Weird oversized desk phones with paper reels in them? Sometimes office-capacity ones that double as printers? Ring a bell?

Well, you see, twenty-first century American capitalism tends to form duopolies or triopolies, explicit monopolies being illegal since the previous century. And how do these companies hold onto users, how do they create dependency and up the cost to switch? They deliberately avoid interoperability. Apple vs Android vs Microsoft. Google Drive vs OneDrive (plus, in the corporate world, AWS). Epic Systems vs …there are others, but all the medical systems I’ve interacted with since college use Epic. Which is only ever pronounced ironically. Anyway, all these different insurance and healthcare companies are keeping all their very important info and documents in individualized and often proprietary databases that they can’t mutually access. Sometimes you can’t even open the native filetypes on different software, like how Mac word processing had to be exported as .doc so you could open it on the Windows school computers to print it off your 2-gig flash drive.

Here’s the magic of fax. The US telephone system is a public utility. While the provision of service to your phone and my phone may be handled by different entities—again, courtesy of twentieth-century monopoly breakups—it is illegal for one service provider to not be interoperable with another service provider. It is standardized like railroad gauges or 0.7 mm pencil lead. You can have a T-mobile phone plan and call someone who has Verizon and be able to hear what they say, and it won’t be distorted, pitch inverted, or translated into Swahili simply because of the difference in cell carriers.

This means that fax is the ONLY universal document format in the United States. You can use it to transform a paper form into a stream of fax data, which can then be turned into another paper form or into a PDF file on someone’s computer via conversion software (which, this being America, there are multiple proprietary programs for, none of which can talk to each other except by fax). You can also convert a PDF into a fax, and then print it or convert it back to a PDF at its destination. Yes, it’s possible to send a fax that has never, at any point in its life cycle, been a physical piece of paper!

So yeah, the US healthcare system and also property insurance runs on faxes, literal grandpa technology, because capitalism hates interoperability so much that it’s sabotaging an industry, insurance, that only exists because of capitalism. Also interoperability should be mandated on the same international level as the Geneva Convention and if tech companies position themselves as digital infrastructure, we should nationalize them.

But yeah, that’s why I have fax machine duty on Wednesdays at work.

[lego-owl-house-project]

Lego Owl House Project WIP 01: The Rough Draft

I’m a year and a half into this project, but since I only just made this blog, I have a backlog of old WIP post to write! Here’s the first one.

The Owl House is shaped really weird. I knew from the onset that getting the dimensions of the building exactly right would be a challenge, so before starting on the actual model, the first thing I had to do was construct a mock-up. This initial rough draft now serves as the blueprint for the actual model.

The first step for this was deciding on the footprint of the model. There are no direct overhead shots of the Owl House as of yet, and there definitely weren’t any when I started, so figuring out exactly how long all of the walls are in relation to each other was tricky. I had to use several screenshots showing the Owl House from different angles to piece the footprint together (pun intended).

With the outline determined, I had to figure out where all the rooms are. The Owl House crew clearly put a lot of work into keeping things consistent, because pretty much every room we see in the show does in fact have a specific location within the house—I’m almost certain they have full blueprints of the Owl House somewhere that just haven’t been made public. The first floor was pretty easy:

Looks pretty good so far! I wanted the model to be as close to a real house as possible, which meant including everything—even the hallways no one thinks about. Unfortunately, this is where I began running into a recurring problem: The Owl House, as is standard for cartoon buildings, is much bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. For example, whenever we see the inside of the kitchen in the show, it looks to be nearly square—but when you fit it inside this true-to-the-show floor plan, it winds up looking wide and short.

Next, I had to figure out the Owl House’s vertical dimensions. To do this, I first built the front facade:

Working off of the facade, I could then determine the heights of everything else. To make sure that every detail is in the exact right place, I used a ruler to measure the distances between various architectural details on my computer screen, and then converted my measurements from centimeters to brick lengths find the correct relative distances.

Here’s the completed mock-up from the front:

On to the floor plan for the second floor!

The problem of the Owl House being bigger on the inside returns here in full force. To make space for a 4-stud-wide hallway (the minimum width necessary for minifigures to comfortably fit through), all three 2nd-floor rooms wind up being pretty tiny, especially Luz’s room.

This is also where some of the show’s inconsistencies become apparent. For example, I know that the bathroom is located as shown above because of the following scene (screenshots not in chronological order; it’s just to show the process of elimination):

However; we can clearly see in a shot from the same episode that, to the right of the bathroom door, the hallway either ends in a wall or turns a corner, rather than leading into a staircase as it does in my model. I have no idea where the staircase is actually supposed to be, but what I decided on is definitely incorrect—I just had no other options.

The hallways are also generally difficult to place. There’s a hallway right outside Eda’s room which has a window, implying that Eda and Luz’s rooms should be on different floors, but given that Eda’s room is shown to be level with the open air platform full of plants in S1E4: The Intruder, the existence of a third floor just doesn’t make sense. The hallways are also sometimes shown to turn corners, which the floor plan of the Owl House just plain doesn’t have the internal space for.

All this to say that, in determining the layout of the Lego model, some assumptions and compromises had to be made. Every room wound up with a small footprint and a high ceiling, meaning that the internal details will be squished; a problem exacerbated by the fact that Lego minfigures are wide and short compared to actual humans while TOH characters are thin and tall.

Regardless, I was able to complete a rough draft of the model that looks pretty accurate overall! Here’s the back:

Despite the weirdness of hallway layouts and two floors vs three floors, the mock-up accounts for every room we see in the show save for the basement, which I count as a win! It’s highly accurate from the outside, and accurate enough from the inside.

The final model will have the exact same dimensions as the rough draft, but with the walls and roofs filled in, and of course with way, way more detail. :D

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