#YOU CAN SEE THE LITTLE BRUSH ICON IN THE CORNER LMFAO

[turian]

trying to convince myself i can actually draw again so i can work on more important things. therefore, isabela sketch

[taehyungsgrowl]

Curling up w Xavier in bed. Him shirtless in sweatpants (but it’s the 80s so make them cheetah print) and you just in a big purple t shirt of his. Curled up in bed just listening to each other’s heartbeat. Him spooning you w his hand absentmindedly stroking up and down the groove of your hip up to the bottom of your ribs down to your pantyline. Just basking in togetherness as you discuss yourbday 🌽

I’ve been screaming about cheetah print sweatpants since last night; I love a fashion icon!

Also.. the light tickles he would cause as he just glides his hand up and down your thigh hello death

but yeehaw!

There wouldn’t be any pressure to do or say anything. He’d just be happy to have you in his arms. He’d have music softly playing in the background to fill the silent moments. He’d tell you about his auditions, hopes, and dreams. Xavier would feel so comfortable around you, he’d tell you things he’d never thought he’d be able to share with anyone. 

And imagine the playfulness? 

Like maybe a cheesy 80s love songs starts playing and he rolls on top of you, the entire weight of his body on yours. 

(we’re going w “i just can’t stop loving you” by michael jackson for this lmfao)

“What are you doing?” you ask in between laughter as he settles on top of you, his hands on either side of your head. You can tell he’s trying to keep a straight face, but see a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. 

“Shh,” he laughs, his attempt to stay serious crumbling.

“My life ain't worth living If I can't be with you.” he regains his composure and sings along, entirely out of tune, “I just can't stop loving you!!!” 

He can feel you laughing underneath him, making a smile crack on his face. He dramatically brushes his quiff up with one hand as he continues to serenade you. 

“Xavier!!” you exclaim his name as he grinds his hips down on you, not-so-playfully, dry humping you, “You don’t even like this song!” 

He tried to continue his little “show” but is belly laughing so much, he finally rolls back on to his back and pulls you on top of him, “Yes, but I like you so..” he shrugged before pulling your head down for a kiss. 

[borisbubbles]

Eurovision 2010s: 02 & 01

It’s here.When you’re reading this I’ll be safely tucked away on a vacay, but let me say, it’s been an intense two months. 408 write-ups, 408 desperate famewhore, 408 beautiful people (and Boggie.). 406 have been ranked and now it is time to reveal whom I think the best entry of them all is.So let us start with the runner-up, the also-ran the entry that ALMOST could’ve made it, but didn’t. 

02. Iveta Mukuchyan - “LoveWave” Armenia 2016

All-time ranking: #12 

Hey, it’s me. Look,

I know it might sound strange but suddenly I’m not the same I used be

it’s like I’ve stepped out of space and time and ~Come Alive~

When she touched us, the world went silent. Calm before the stormed reached us. The art in motion set off all sirens. She took over our heartbeat - beat - beat

IT’S TAKING OVER ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

God I should just stop quoting “LoveWave” but it’s stronger than myself. SHE SHOOK MY LIFE LIKE AN EARTHQUAKE YOUR FAVES COULD NE-E-VER HAVE! It, too, is a stunning masterpiece, a masterclass in seduction, an example of how everyone should tackle avant garde. Completely original- ok lmfao that isn’t true, the Aminata influence is pretty obvious here. However, unlike most other copycats, Iveta understood that imitation is best served as a form of flattery: in other words she took on a great formula and made it even better. If Aminata was the “Love Injection”, the Iveta is the “Fierceness Injection”.

or more like a LOVEwave

SPREADING LOVEWAVES AND MY HEART GOES BOOM-BA-BA-DOOM-WO-OH-OH. 

At the relatively small cost of a lesser vocal performance Iveta brought us a more unfiltered, more realistic, more intense exploration of what love actually does to somebody and the result is supereffective. 

“LoveWave” is edgy and dynamic beyond my wildest expectations. It absolutely shatters me from start to finish. It’s a thrilling rollercoaster that never slows down and the second you believe you’ve figured out this meandering song’s musical formula, there’s yet a new twist around the corner. Its layers unfold slowly, gracefully, beautifully like the budding rose. There is only one entry that can compete with it in terms of its innovativeness and that’s the winner of this ranking. 

ARMENIA

A country of high risk/high reward entries. Armenia isn’t always good, and they are in fact very often terrible. However, the moments when they are good are moments of undisputed slayage. The persistent coin flip of the Armenian selection is a very exciting ride and I always look forward to seeing what they have on offer, provided they can fix their staging problems. 

________________________________________________________________

and now the moment you’ve all been waiting for: the WINNER is none other than: 

01. Lena - “Taken by a stranger” Germany 2011

All-time ranking: #04

Let us start by noting that Lena is DEFENDING HER TITLE, and what a defence it is. 😍 I shan’t get ahead of myself, but know that 2011 Lena blows 2010 Lena completely out of the water. Gone are the days of constipated adorkability. This beautiful introverted cygnet finally transformed into a graceful, confidence black swan. 

Okay so... as it turns out, my bitching about German women and 2011 entries was only foreshadowing for the inevitable: my favourite song in this decade is the German entry from my least favourite year of the 2010s.  😂

Of course, the fact this daring and amazing entry was sent by a country which usually doesn’t do daring, in a year which otherwise doesn’t do amazing only further enhances the spice, but there actually a more rational reason for me ranking Lena first:  “Taken by a stranger” marks the first time, the first true time an avant garde entry was taken seriously in modern Eurovision. 

Remember what I said about the original source always being the best? We are here. “Avant-Garde Eurovision” is Lena City and we’re all living in it. Before “Taken by a stranger” novelty entries were either greeted with mockery (Silvia Night, Pas de deux, Divine, Visionary dream) or as flukes, anomalies within the system (Sanomi, Dancing Lasha Tumbai). Critics saw them as shallow gimmicks and little more.  

“Taken by a stranger” reinvented the way people look at experimental music and did it with great style. Lena proved that weird can be accessible, that quirky can be high-quality and that artistic can be enjoyed. She proved that ‘different’ has a place in Eurovision.

She also proved that giant condoms make perfect dancing costumes:

 Without Lena, we have no precedent for “LoveWave” or “Love Injected” or “Rhythm inside” or “Midnight Gold” or “Skeletons”. Without Lena laying the groundwork and being greeted with praise, some of the greastest, most innovative entries in Eurovision may have been brushed off like “Telemóveis” and “The Social Network Song” were.

Now, I understand that “Euphoria” arguably set the same precedent as “Taken by a stranger” did and that’s definitely a valid point. However two counterpoints: One: Loreen came after Lena and therefore only expanded on the foundation that Lena already had established the year before.  Two: I love “Euphoria” but each time anyone in my vicinity praises it for being unique, a masterpiece, ... a great... song I just *yawn* instantly becooome *yawn* soooo tiiiiiiired, :snore:. “Taken by a stranger” is the true unsung hero that shaped the contest in what it is today, and remember, unlike Dina Garipova I always reach out to those who need it the most.

However, that’s the theoretical backstory behind  “Stranger” winning my ranking, what about the practice? What about the live? Does it hold up to the placement I gave her?

The answer is a resounding YES. “Taken by a stranger” is a shining example of an excellent, near-flawless perfomance: Lena takes the microphone with mad confidence, gets absorbed by her song’s dark, psychedelic energy and delivers an A+ singing and miming effort. Her soul-piercing stares into the camera are chilling beyond the bones.

The story told here is immersive (the quirky beat), credible (Lena’s faces), humorous (dancing condoms) and entertaining (all of the above), all at once. It unfolds like a neo-noir audiobook. I can only think of a handful other entries that hit a similarly wide spectrum of great eurovision qualities with the same killer accuracy as Lena did, all of which (lovewave, euphoria, love injected, city lights, etc)  made it deep into the ranking.

Over the years, I’ve patiently waited to see if anyone could replace Lena as my favourite of the decade. Over the years many came close, but never were great enough to dethrone her. The act which came the closest was indeed Loreen, but with “Statements”, not “Euphoria” and we all know how that journey ended. Perhaps its for the better. In her two iconic stints Lena proved that both chartable hits AND avant garde novelties can be worthy Eurovision entries, paving the way for Eurovision’s renaissance into a contest everyone takes seriously again, which makes her, in my humble opinion, one of the most, if not the most, important people to ever participate in the Eurovision Song Contest. 

ALL HAIL THE DOWAGER EMPRESS OF THE 2010S:

Germany is the ultimate hit-or-miss nation. There isn’t a single country in the history of Eurovision that has ranked as often in my bottom 5 or top 5 as Germany has (T10/B10 for the semifinal era). I always either love or hate their entries (with the exception of Jamie-Lee). At the same time however, I am often frustrated by them. Their penchant to make the WRONG decisions out of a severely misguided sense of “tolle Klasse” is what causes them to often select utter garbage and it irks me because they are capable of undisputed greatness. Lena is the quintessential example of Germany at their peak and I both look forward and dread what the upcoming decade will provide. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ That concludes my ranking, I hope you’ve enjoyed it. 🤗 Since I started this endeavour my follower count almost doubled to 225-ish and BorisBubbles received 800 individual page views per day, roughly 20K per month. THANK you for all the support and for coming back to me. It means a lot and keeps me motivated to gladly return with more ranking material on the 1st of April 2020, when I hope we can kickstart the 2020s in great style. 

If you want to see the full list, free to consult the overall list on IMGUR or delve into the archives 

In the meantime, take care and we’ll hopefully see each other in April! 😘 Love, Boris. 

[gundampilot]

Inspired by @dialup2002 to post some more old stuff. :) This is a desktop screenshot I posted on my DevART account January 2005. Kicking it with Windows XP, but I loved/preferred the classic style that I was accustom to (95-98-ME). I made the wallpaper used, but I’m having trouble finding a copy of it. I’ll prob try to remake it in non-1024x768 resolution lmao. Not sure if this is from 2005. It might have been from 2004, but I hadn’t posted it yet. I did that a lot. Some fun notes about some of the software icons pictured (lots of info):

Firefox - THE FIRST BROWSER TO DO TABS OMG. I was a huge advocate for Firefox, especially in its initial releases. They were doing things on the internet nobody had really seen up to that point, and made it popular! Since I had so many issues (as most people do) with Internet Explorer, I was shopping around for a new browser at the time of this shot. Google Chrome didn’t exist yet. (Can you imagine??)

IE - As stated above, I disliked IE. It was kept for various reasons, however. Such as testing website layouts, since the mass-majority of people used it and things looked different in browsers when you were coding.

Opera - While giving Firefox a try, I also managed to snag a very, very early copy of Opera. I’ve always been the type of person that loved to try out new stuff as early as possible, and this was a very special piece of software that I wanted to give a go. The reason that it was special? You had to send away for a CD for it. That’s right, kids. They snail-mail’ed me a CD because it was considered “commercial software.” I paid to get that browser lmfao. I was super super hyped later in 2005, because it became “freeware” and I was able to more-easily push my friends to try it out. The devs were (and still are) seriously awesome. This is why I still use Opera as my main browser today! Ya’ll should try it if you aren’t already! You can even use your most-beloved Chrome extensions on it. :)

Soulseek & WinMX - Holy crap, you guys! lmao Is anyone here old enough to remember these programs?? XD This was basically where most people went after Napster bit the dust. This was when we were all scrambling, trying to find a new P2P sharing program. This was right in-between the eMule/Donkey phase and before the Limewire/KaZaA fiascos where people’s computers were being overloaded with viruses from companies trying to stop pirating. Ahh, the wild, wild west... Days were so exciting when you spent hours downloading something that could potentially ruin your computer lmao

WS_FTP - Still one of my favorite FTP programs for Windows! Works like a charm! These days I use Transmit 5 for Mac, but this was my first program ever for file transfer protocol. It’s basically a tool for uploading files to my website’s server, because back when I first registered it, there was no web uploader for that kinda stuff. Now I stick with that because it’s easier and I’m used to it lol

Veo Digital Studio - Used to use this for my webcam back before webcams were built into laptops, and before they were common enough to have amazing freeware available for them.  (Also this is hilarious.) The quality was horrible, but I was hella excited to take pictures and share them with friends and on my blog at the time. From what I remember, there was something I used after this that was some type of South Korean selca software. Haduri? Something like that. It was really cute and even let you do little animations. :) 

Animation Shop - Okay. So... from what I remember, this might have been owned by the people that made Paint Shop Pro? I think it was Corel. I honestly don’t remember where I got this from, but this is what I used to use to make animated gifs (because Photoshop just....didn’t for some reason? I had to use PSP at some point, I remember that. I just don’t remember why lmao. It might have been my copy didn’t allow it, or my computer was just too shit to run it good enough, or just stopped working because....Windows). 

Adobe Photoshop 5.0 - I originally got this rip from a friend of mine, whose dad got a CD from his company that he worked at. It was an official/real license, which was really awesome! I think this was the first version of Photoshop I ever owned (!!), which is pretty amazing to think about about! I had that CD copy for a few years. I initially was gifted a copy of the CD around 2001-2002 or so. I know for a fact I had newer versions (7.0 was legend before CS suite came around), so I’m not sure why I was using this one at this point lmao. My guess is, like mentioned above, something happened with my computer and I didn’t want to format it and reinstall everything lol or because it was the fastest version I had installed to boot up and do a quick photo edit.

Adobe Photoshop 7.0 - I do remember this took a long time to start up. I can only imagine this was like a bad pirated copy or something, or was so bloated with new stuff in it, and that’s why I kept 5.0 for a quick boot. I know I used this majority of the time, though. Most of my backups for brushes and fonts are from backups that include 7.0 as a zip. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  My computer wasn’t the most powerful at the time, despite what I pushed it to do, so this is prob why.  But hell yeah! Photoshop represent! lol I still use it today, and its still one of the first things I install on a fresh OS install. Enjoying CC 2017 these days.

Nero Start Smart - I was so excited to make mix CDs and share them! Back in the day before you had stuff like playlists that were sharable on YouTube/Spotify, etc, you had this to share music. Or play in your car. Or CD walkman. Nero was a software you could burn your CD-Rs and make your own laser-etched album art! I begged for years to get a CD burner lmao. Back when casette tapes were still around enough that my parents were like “but why???” lmao. They were not common back in the day like they became over time, just, like, included on your computer. Back then you had to buy one and install it into your computer tower yourself! I got mine I believe.....in 2001? It was the year after the Playstation 2 was released. The first one I got was just a very standard burner. Did a very specific type of CD burning at a low (slow af) speed. It was $700 lmfao. Let that sink in for a minute because my parents didn’t let me forget about it for the next four years lmfao. I saved up birthday and Christmas money and went halves on it. Then I upgraded to the one that this one was! c: Which did the laser etching, and DVD burning! (And you better believe I was burning DVDs of stuff I was downloading online lmfao this was the golden age of the internet where everything was just available everywhere as long as you had the patience to download that shit, because it took forever to download)

Volume Control - My dad and I messed with the wires on all of these random computer speakers and stereo speakers that we had collected over the years and hotwired our own version of a 5.0 surround sound in the room, which was mounted to the ceiling corners and above the computer station. It was lit. I needed Volume Control easily accessible because sometimes the speakers needed redirecting, or I needed to turn the beats down because my mother was tired of my fifth time playing the Gundam Wing OSTs and Miyavi. (It was metal, okay???)

Windows Media Player - I did not use this to listen to media. Let me reiterate that. I did not use it to listen to media on. lol this was specifically used to rip tracks from CDs that friends lent me, because it was the easiest software I was able to use to change the KBPs for quality control and the ID3 tags so I could save it and organize it for use in Winamp and know wtf I was listening to lol. Nobody used WMP for listening to music.... xD 

Winamp - The best music player. Period. Still. Nothing beats it. Pls, pls, Nullsoft! Come back and make a native version for MacOS. :’((((  I would buy it! Doesn’t even have to have new features or look different. Classic look, pls pls! 

Media Player Classic - Do people still use it??? This player was amazing! Paired with k-lite codec pack, it played everything. It was like VLC before VLC. And it looked good. Clean. Small. Could be installed anywhere which was nice. And the codec packs just made everything look and run fantastic! 

Recycle Bin - .... Trash XD 

Magnifier - This was for my dad because he had bad eyes and couldn’t remember CTRL +/-/0 to increase the text on pages that he wanted to read.

My Documents - Where I saved all the stuff I downloaded. Not the real My Docs. Just a folder that I named as such, with a custom icon. I don’t know why I wanted it there lol. I think to just have a uniform square on my desktop haha

Journal - I renamed this. I forget the original name of the client, but it was the official client of LJ. It was basically a program that let you write up posts for Livejournal and you could format things, draft them, etc, and post without uploading to your journal/blog. I liked it because sometimes I couldn’t post right away, and it made making drafts a lot easier for me to go back and edit. It also let you edit past posts, which was really convenient instead of looking for it on the web version one post at a time.

AIM+ - I loved AOL Instant Messenger, but over time the ads became too much. I invested a lot of time in 3rd party clients. I was constantly switching between AIM+, Adium, DeadAIM, Pigeon, Trillion, etc. Depended on what I wanted to do that day. Want to clone a SN? Want to skin the colors of the chats? Need transparency? Want to customize your lists? Want to log into more than one msg system at once? They all had their strengths. This was my msg service of choice. Back in the day you were either on this, MSN, or Yahoo!. Some people rocked ICQ and there were a few others, but these were the most common from who I knew/hung out with. I miss those days. <3 

You can see WinMX running in the taskbar lmfao so I was prob downloading something at the time of snagging this quick shot. I also had DevART open (prob because I was gonna share this on there). I really wish I had more programs open at the time of this! XD It’s wild to look back at some of the software changes over the years!

Anyway, that’s one of my oldest screenshots that I can find that I’m able to share right now. :) I’m going to be posting a remake of that wallpaper that I did later today for those of you that want that, too.

If you read this far, thank you!! Hope you had fun reading about old stuff!