#and hope the water doesn't rot everyone's roots this year

[jedi-bird]

There is about six inches of standing water in this nine inch hole. Our yard is saturated to the point that it can't absorb any more and more rain is coming this week. I had hoped to get all the new plants from yesterday planted today but only got one rose and the vegetables planted; I didn't account for having to widen the trench I dug a month ago, nor did I expect it to not help. That wound up taking up a lot of my time and energy, so the annuals will have to wait until Monday to go into the ground and the raised beds. At least we're out of our drought for now.

[lixie-phoria]

━━ ⟡ new year's day ꒱

kissing your boyfriend under the fireworks was straight out of a fairy tail, complete with the pre-climax angst and a tooth-rotting happy ending

felix x gn!reader / warnings - fluff!! / 0.6k words / a/n - happy new year loves 🫶🏼 I'm sorry this is so rushed I wrote it in 15 minutes 😭

"the audacity of that boy," you curse, eyes scanning frantically through the crowd for any sight of a familiar mop of dyed blonde hair, but in vain.

"two more minutes!" someone cheers, and the crowd bursts into a fit of ecstatic chatter and anticipation.

you stand alone, fists anxiously clenching by your side as you try to calm down. felix had been right here, literally 30 seconds ago. but you made the mistake of looking away for a fraction of a second and he was gone. just like that. vanished into thin air.

"pick up pick up pick up," you mutter as you bring your phone to your ear, chewing at your lip anxiously.

you get directed to voice mail.

he was going to get it when you found him.

"60 more seconds! start counting!"

felix couldn't have chosen a worse timing to leave you alone, really. it's your first new year as a couple, and he'd been so excited to kiss you under the fireworks at midnight. he had suggested the entire date. and then he disappeared a minute before the big moment.

"I can't believe this," you whisper to nobody in particular, slinking away to the back of the crowd unnoticed.

curse him and his short height. you would never find him in this mass.

you just hoped he was alright at least.

30 seconds.

nearly everyone is with their partner, the air filled with excitement. your heart falls into a bottomless pit of anxiety.

15 seconds.

the sky is dark, waiting to be lit up at any moment now.

this is ok, you think unconvincingly. maybe something important came up.

you try calling him again. voicemail, again.

3.

2.

1.

the first cracker goes off in a burst of colours, painting the night sky with strokes of purple and gold and pink. it leaves you awestruck, the shades reflecting on the waters of the Han River.

"happy new year!"

but the voice doesn't come from the crowd. it comes from behind you, and you whip around to see your boyfriend standing there with the giddiest smile on his face, bouncing on the balls of his feet. and in his hands is the biggest bouquet of flowers you have ever seen, flowers of all shades and shapes.

"surprise!"

you can barely register what he's doing until he pulls you closer, the bouquet squished between your bodies as his lips meet yours halfway.

fireworks of your own go off behind your eyes as you melt into the kiss, smiling when he groans at the sensation of you tangling your fingers in his roots.

he's here.

you deepen the embrace, ignoring the crinkling of the paper and the fireworks going off in the sky.

he's here, and it's perfect, just as you had imagined it would be.

"sorry I left. wanted this to be worth it," he mumbles, finally pulling away, bashfully handing you the bouquet.

"felix i-"

it's so pretty. you gap at it as the colours of the fireworks paint the flowers in mixed hues.

"happy new year, angel. I love you."

there's very little you can do to stop yourself from throwing yourself at him again, your lips a tangle of love and desperation.

he tastes like the brownies you both had baked that afternoon to bring to the site. he probably ate a few when he went back to the car to get the bouquet. you giggle at the thought. so predictable.

"I love you too, lixie. happy new year."

he's here. he's yours. and it's all you want.

©lixie-phoria, 2024

tags : @foxinnie8 @hamburgers101 @starlostlaiba @jiisungllvr (send an ask to be added/removed)

[danpuff-ao3]

With Snarry AUctober fest wrapping up, with plenty of wonderful new creations, I decided to throw together a rec list of my Top 5 favorites (like I did with my Thon recs) to get you started. I plan to go through past years of AUctober fest to do this, too.

Synthesis

by armassy. Harry/Severus. Rated: E. Words: 11,280. Muggle AU. College/university. Enemies to friends to lovers.

Severus is a brilliant but hard-to-work-with chemistry professor, who only teaches because he has to but would much rather spend all his time doing research. Harry is the grad student that either Albus or Minerva - the head of the chemistry department on paper, even though everyone knows Severus always gets what he wants - has assigned to essentially follow Severus around and tell him “no” when he’s being unreasonable. Harry is tasked with keeping Severus on budget and preventing all his students from quitting his class. Severus takes this as a personal affront.

After Spinner's End

by enoby_w. Harry/Severus. Rated: M. Words: 4,222. Paranormal. Pining. Angst. Happy ending.

When Harry left his aunt and uncle's he hadn't meant to end up in Cokeworth. But he'd fallen asleep on the bus; it was late, and now he needed somewhere to stay until morning. While the crooked, empty house on the corner looked like it would do just fine in a pinch, had Harry bothered to ask, the locals would have told him the house at Spinner's End might look empty, but it wasn't. Something lived there; whatever it was, it was best left alone.

Conditions to Bloom

by LoveCrumb. Harry/Severus. Rated: T. Words: 9,865. Mutual pining. Fluff and angst. Muggle AU.

Severus lets his gaze fall to the sagging aloe plant in front of him, and it hardly takes a cursory glance before he has his diagnosis. “Root rot,” he says. The man’s eyebrows shoot up on his forehead. “But how do you–I’ve hardly been watering it at all!” Supporting a drooping leaf with the tip of his pen, Severus eyes the unnatural lean of the stem and gives the customer a disbelieving raise of one eyebrow. Prompt 2024-11: Severus is a plant doctor who takes in people’s sick plants and nurses them back to health. Harry is a well-meaning plant dad whose poor plants are constantly on death’s door.

Mating for Life - Breeding Season in the Highlands of Scotland

by sillybeans. Harry/Severus. Rated: E. Words: 3,332. POV Dudley Dursley. A/B/O. Alpha Severus. Omega Harry. Crack.

“Among the ruins of an ancient castle in the Highlands of Scotland lives a human species like no other.“ Dudley watches a very educational documentary out of boredom.

Flutter

by SquibNation10. Harry/Severus. Rated: E. Words: 30,286. Muggle AU. Curses. Birds. Angst. Hopeful. Grief & trauma.

He said uselessly, "Sev, don't go." "I'm s-sorry-" Harry cupped Severus' face and gazed into his eyes. His eyes were dark brown, almost black, sad, raven, mine. "These stay the same," Severus said. "Remember that when you look at me. Remember, it's me.” Flutter does my heart, When you ask me to stay. I want to live in the moment But the past keeps me a prey. Prompt # 2024-76 Prompt: AU - Apartment Life Harry's been warned to steer clear of the 24th floor. Curiosity got the better of him and Harry checks it out. Its deserted except for apartment 2444. Harry notices signs of life—a faint light under the door, soft sounds of movement.

~ Bonus: Self Rec ~

She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not

fem!Harry/fem!Severus (Hyacinth/Sulpicia). Rated: E. Words: 11,875. Hanahaki disease. Curse-breaking. Language of flowers. Magical theory. Minor Hyacinth/Ginny.

There's an outbreak of Hanahaki, and Curse Breaker Hyacinth Potter is brought onto the case, to work closely with the Aurors and Unspeakable Sulpicia Snape. Snape doesn't have a romantic bone in her body, and Hyacinth is happily in love with Ginny Weasley. They have nothing to worry about...right?

[pynkhues]

it always bugs me so much when you get takes on YT like "everyone is rooting for Logan because his kids are so spoiled" and beyond initial reactions of wtf is wrong with you, he has a huge hand in making them that way (as he's used to degrade them)? it's like a learned helplessness mixed with... like when you have to grow up so fast (especially Shiv, whose mother decides she's complicit at 13, and Eldest Daughter Syndrome Kendall), you stay stunted, more like a five year old than 30-40. hope this made sense and wasn't just rambling

Oh gosh, you're braver than I am for wading into the waters of YouTube comments, hahaha, I feel like they're generally a hotbed of Bad Takes.

But yeah, it's insane how there's this cognitive dissonance for some people to see the way Logan's sabotaged his own children – I think especially after 3.08 where the show made it explicit. Kendall tried to do exactly what Logan said he wanted + what people (namely Stewy and Naomi) have been telling Kendall to do since s1 and get out, only for his Dad to tell him no.

It's such a clear, concise and achingly painful demonstration of the sort of father Logan is. He grinds his children down until they know exactly how unwanted, incompetent, and pathetic he thinks they are, but when they try to take the exit he offers them, he yanks them away from it. He wants them there, broken in like dogs or horses, in the cages he builds for them, and it's one of my favourite things about the show that that doesn't make some glossy haired, broad shouldered hero to root for, but rather four complicated, broken people who have no idea how to survive on their own, because their father's made sure they couldn't.

And like you said, Caroline's no better. The pairing of Caroline and Shiv's scene with Logan and Kendall's was honestly pretty close to TV perfection, and it created this amazing sense of how they were adultified as children and are now infantilised as adults. Like you said, to make a 13 (or 10! There's no saying Caroline's not the one misremembering) not just complicit, but blamed for her own abandonment is insane, and abusive on such an insidious level, it just makes me the flames gif from Clue.

The floor rots out from under this family, and while the siblings play their part in their own self-sabotage, that rot was spreading long before they were in the picture.

[leam1983]

On the Games Workshop-ification of Paradox and the V:TM Franchise.

Remember Bloodlines 2?

We wanted it, desperately so, for a few years. We saw teasers, one solid vertical slice. We had a release quarter and - Hardsuit Labs imploded. Bryan Mitsoda left the project, Rik Shaeffer stopped posting Twitter updates on the subject.

It's still sitting in my GOG launcher, waiting for a release date that'll likely never arrive - long past its refund date.

Paradox Interactive didn't sit on its laurels, though.

First came 2019's Coteries of New York, developed by Draw Distance. This reasonably dense visual novel didn't exactly impress with its plotline or design, but it sort of came across as the new IP holders testing the waters, checking for means to turn a profit over the bloated corpse of what now probably feels over-promised and underdelivered. Then came Bloodhunt's announcement as a Battle Royale setting, and eventually Swansong's announcement and release. Today, community leads at White Wolf and Paradox dropped allusions at more projects to come, helmed by other studios.

And that, well... That worries me.

Lucas Raycevick recently produced a video essay in which he, as a fan of tentpole RPG releases such as BioWare's old fare, bemoaned the ways in which fans of Games Workshop properties were effectively spoiled for choice - with several different devs and publishers all distinctly approaching Warhammer or Warhammer 40K properties through projects spanning several different genres. From strategy games to horde shooters and sports game sendoffs, there's been a ton of content to sink your teeth into if you're reasonably fine with massive peaks and valleys in your overall experience - as some of the produced titles are Space Hulk, incidentally, and others are Necromunda: Hired Gun. The highs are fairly high, and the lows can sting quite a fair bit; especially if the team involved comes this close to successfully reaching for the moon.

Necromunda isn't a bad game by any stretch of the imagination, mind you - but it still is insultingly janky at times, and feels as though its mechanics haven't really been designed for its pastiche of Doom Eternal's movement and attack mechanics. It tries its best, sure, but it's sort of hard to appreciate the end result in light of absolutely stellar productions like the first Dawn of War and its expansions.

Obviously, the opposite approach is laser-focused. The almighty publisher backs a single one of its devs for a mammoth stretch of four or five years, all in the hopes that the end-product will be an absolute banger. When it works (see The Witcher and its sequels), it really allows for a team to showcase what drives them. When it doesn't, it crushingly displays how hubristic it can feel to stick all of your eggs into one basket.

Vampire: The Masquerade is unique in the sense that it's straddling both genres. One leg seems to be rotting away - or are these blooms I may spot on the Twittersphere, gleams of hope for a renewed development cycle? The other leg burst open into a conflagration of roots, and there's really no telling what will eventually come to define the modern Vampire experience for PC or console gamers. Are we still going to play Bloodhunt six months later? How about Swansong? Its Telltale-meets-Quantic-Dream-plus-RPG-stats structure won't be to everyone's tastes, and serves to remind many of the dashed hopes of that one, darned Tentpole AAA release that isn't likely to come to fruition. More to the point, how much Vampire is too much Vampire? The World of Darkness' socials suggest that there's plenty more content to expect in the coming years, and that it's likely we'll see the familiar setting declined into a number of unusual genres - XCOM with fangs, you might think - or maybe an offshoot of Diplomacy 4 putting you in the shoes of a city's Prince...

Personally, all I want is for V:TM to be more than another Games Workshop situation, with a shovelful of middleware and two, maybe three standout exceptions. As it stands, however, considering how most of the involved studios have been mostly unknown, it's hard not to get the sense that Paradox is hedging its bets for a low-risk, high-reward type of deal. A bit like a Ventrue sipping at the carotid of an undecided college frosh, I'm sort of left feeling unsatisfied...

[lifewithchronicpain]

I planted some pot seeds back in March or April and 3 sprouted. Then they remained in a state of not dying but not growing for fucking months, and everyone told me to give up on them but I didn't.

They had been neglected when I was healing from the worst of my surgery and not getting a water for a week when mom forget about them. I also repeatedly asked my mom to get miracle grow from the basement and it never happened until I could finally go into the basement myself. When they got nutrients and proper attention they began to show signs of growing them two of them died.

Still one remained and it finally started to grow tiers over 6 months after it was planted. It finally showed signs of it's sex and I had a friend who has grown them before confirm it's female. Yay! I wanted to use both sunlight and artificial to help it grow but my mom doesn't want the grow lamp in the window. 🙄 So I'm hoping just artificial light will work. Honestly I'll be surprised if anything flowers from this plant.

It's been ridiculous how hard it is for me to grow a plant that is literally a fucking weed. Part of the problem is it's legal to grow weed in my state but not buy seeds for some bullshit reason. So I have to rely on whatever I get through pot. These days pot is highly engineered and doesn't really have the seeds you'd get like ten years ago when I started smoking pot regularly. Back when it was also still illegal.

So I think the seed quality is meh and then the position of my house means the backyard doesn't have enough light and if they're outside they would have to be in the backyard secured behind the fence. My mom actually grew pot plants one year in the 90s in the backyard when the trees didn't block out so much sun as they do now.

So indoor growing presents it's challenges. One batch of seeds died when Giles ate the heads of the sprouts. Other attempts failed because of over watering and not enough light. They'd get root rot or they'd stretch themselves too far getting light and couldn't support itself. I have gotten a good grow lamp since then but I still have trouble dialing in the right amount of water. Last year I had one success that turned out to be a male. Disappointing.

So finally I have a growing female pot plant and I hope I can get something out of it. We shall see. I almost wish I had a male to go with it because I could use some fucking seeds. My sister says she has some so I'm going to try those in my next batch.

[thaumcraftvibechecker]

reach DEEP within your local detective agency and you may find a friend and goth

Name: Zolin Latreille

Aliases: None

Aliases: None

Gender/Pronouns: Nonbinary (unaligned), they/them

Sexual/Romantic Orientation: Bisexual

Age: 25

Birthdate: 4/16

Occupation: Detective

Height: 5'9"

Build: Slim

Skin Tone: Pale

Hair: Two-tone black and purple (dyed, naturally black)

Eyes: Blue

Identifying Marks: Two-toned hair, piercings

Appearance: A person with a dark aesthetic to their clothes and an analytic look on their face. They never look 100% put-together, even when they try their best to look as such. "Perks of the job," they say. Zolin Prime is clearly extremely meticulous about maintaining the two-tone color to their hair--nobody has ever seen the dye on it look faded or the natural black roots visible on the purple side. Zolin Alt doesn't touch up the roots as often but wears a gray beanie so it's never visible that this is the case.

Personality: An intelligent and resourceful detective who cares a lot about actually solving mysteries and helping people. They're friendly (if a bit awkward) and believe themselves to be funny (whether or not they're right depends on present company). They are loyal to a fault to anyone who has proven to be a true friend and they don't react well to being tricked or betrayed.

Motivations: Curiosity, determination

Current Goal: Solve mysteries

Life Goal: Find Celen [Zolin Prime], become the greatest detective known to man [both]

Motto: "If you're still breathing, you're not beaten yet."

Best Quality: Fiercely loyal and determined

Worst Quality: Unbelievably stubborn and will jump on a spear for a person they met thirty minutes ago

Fears: Failure, abandonment/betrayal, deep water

Hobbies: Gaming, drawing, writing questionable poetry, buying goth clothes on the internet

Talents: Drawing, getting a perfect split dye, playing guitar

Skills: Problem solving, hacking, cooking, observation

Alignment: Chaotic Good

Group/Organizational Affiliations: The DANK-Tectives (Zolin Prime), SolveIT (Zolin Alt)

Family: Celen Latreille (older sibling)

Best Friends: Roberto and his entire family, Scotty Buckets (also father figure), Miss KC, Daniel, all of the DANK-Allies (per the finale, these consist of James Li, Jim Beret, Tedison Gibbs, Leo Chi, Kal, Mimi Diallo, Alec, Dave Martin, Julian Klein, and Hobo Joe) [Zolin Prime]; Homen Locksher, Ms. Tary, all of the other branch heads (Jim Tomsen, Gateman Walter, Kendra Jones, Stephanie Gameton, Angelo Draten, Trudy Wells, Julliet Dawson, and Conrad Markson), Benjamin Harton, Mina Jones, Lillian Artson [Zolin Alt]

Relationship Status: Single

Significant Other: None, but has their eye on someone

Other Relationships: Garrith (if James and the former master didn't kill him they will), Walter Buckets (even if he is dead they will dig him up and beat his corpse to a pulp for what he did) [Zolin Prime]; Ivan Lian (they hope he rots in jail), Kurt Samuels (he is dead to them and they won't hesitate to make him dead to everyone else if he ever does that again)

Secret: No matter how many times by how many people they've been told that this isn't healthy and they need to make peace with it, they're still pouring all of their spare energy into looking for Celen [Zolin Prime]; They're not handling the Structure incident nearly as well as everyone thinks they are [Zolin Alt]

Influential Memory: The day their parents died

Role Model: Scotty Buckets [Zolin Prime], Homen Locksher [Zolin Alt]

Crush: Julien Klein (Zolin Prime), Angelo Draten (Zolin Alt)

Source of Embarrassment: Not the most socially adept person out there, to put it mildly.

Source of Pride: They are phenomenal at what they do.

Backstory: Two of them, to be exact!

Zolin Prime: Lost their parents at age ten (two years after finding an injured Roberto on the beach and nursing him back to health), lived with a relative who farmed out most of the responsibility of taking care of them to their older sibling Celen. When they were sixteen, Celen took a study abroad trip to Paris and never came back. Haunted by both the fact that there was no body and no signs of where they might have gone and the fact that the last words they said to each other were in anger, they took advantage of their natural knack for investigation and threw themselves into detective work in the hopes that one day they could bring Celen home. They took an internship at the DANK-Tectives agency and used it to cover what expenses their scholarships didn't pay. A few months after they graduated, they grew restless with their lack of upward mobility and decided to take things into their own hands...

Zolin Alt: Still lost their parents, still lived with the relative, but never found Roberto (although they still have a deep desire to one day get a pet parrot) and never lost Celen, at least not in the sense that Celen is physically missing and unreachable (they're living out of the country, attending grad school in Paris). Went to school to become a detective anyway, since they enjoyed the thought of solving mysteries for a living. This particular version of Zolin exists because originally, Zolin Prime was not able to stop Detective Roberto from sacrificing himself to hold the lever down on the Time Matrix. When the spire exploded and killed him, it created a paradox: if the Detective Roberto from the 1800s mysteriously vanished and never made his way to a humble little New England beach where an eight-year-old baby bat goth was vacationing with their family, then Zolin would never have even gotten to the point of stopping Garrith's plan because Roberto's presence was essential to the success of so many of their cases, which means there would be no Roberto-Time-Tron, ergo no Roberto to hold down the lever, which would mean nothing would have killed Detective Roberto and he would have never disappeared in the first place, which--you get the idea. The point is, that paradox split the time stream and created two timelines: one where Zolin held the lever down, and one where Zolin and Roberto never met (and, it's possible, Roberto never existed).

Zolin Prime's timeline is the canon end--well, mostly. The paradox cemented them as a temporal anchor of sorts, since the stability of the two timelines now hinges on them, and as such the time stream takes very good care to never give anyone a reason to go back in time to save them. So when James brings the HQ crew back to the ruins of the temple to recover Zolin's body, everyone is surprised to find them alive. Comatose and badly injured, but alive. In Zolin Alt's timeline, Garrith fails for a different reason: Walter isn't getting the influx of cash necessary to hire all those dudes because Ivan is hiring dudes to steal all the expensive fence-worthy stuff for his own evil plan and also the DANK-tectives dissolved pretty early on because with Marvin gone (also poached by SolveIT in this timeline) and Scott stretched thin all by himself the money to keep the lights on just wasn't coming in. So nowhere to embezzle from. SolveIT suffered a similar fate in Zolin Prime's timeline, so Ivan isn't a threat there.

Maps Canon To Their Storyline: The DANK-Tectives series [link is to final map in the series but it has links to the whole series] (Zolin Prime), The SolveIT/S.I. Files series (Zolin Alt)