#and i tend to see major events the day of release

[bisamwilson]

MOVIES ARE BACK BABEY

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

I love your work and enjoy your theories, so I thought I'd pop up and ask a question, my question being; why do people like yuu so much? They don't really have a point in the story and stuff-this kinda sounds like I hate yuu but I don't I'm just curious on why they're liked in the EN Fandom so I apologize if I used the wrong choice of words or anything, also why is yuu called 'the therapist'?

Rather than saying “the EN fandom likes Yuu”, I think it’s more accurate to say “the EN fandom likes the idea of Yuu”. Yuu is not a character in of themselves, but is an easy proxy for anyone and everyone to self-insert (be it the player themselves or an OC of theirs) because they are so loosely defined. This makes it very easy to “project” (ie insert whatever traits you want) onto a blank slate on an individual level and to be more personally invested in the events related to Yuu.

In an ironic way, Yuu not having a major impact on the story encourages fans to create their own alternate tellings and scenarios (typically substituting their own interpretation of Yuu or an OC into their role) to change things. This, in turn, heightens the attachment to Yuu because of the time and effort being devoted to this insertion. Over time, the feelings can grow stronger with each repetition, and it forms a sort of bond and all the affection that may come with it.

This is in part why the self-insert and OC culture of TWST is so strong; Yuu is practically designed to be projected onto. Even the name may be a reference to this—Yuu as in, “you”. They’re meant to be “you”, so many people become attached yo Yuu because that is essentially a representation of “themselves” in the world of TWST (especially when you consider that one’s imagination amplifies this relationship).

Brief aside for a second, I want to emphasize that this is a phenomenon that is specific to the EN fandom. The JP side also has Yuusonas and OCs, but they are often not as fleshed-out as the ones you’ll see from the EN fandom. Most of the time, the Yuusonas/OCs from JP are more generalized (less individualized looks, far less details in backstories, etc.) so that any onlooker can still insert as the Yuu. Meanwhile, the Yuusonas and OCs from the EN side tend to go into a LOT of detail about their creations. I believe this reflects a fundamental cultural difference between JP and EN (more specifically America/Canada): collectivism vs individualism, conforming to a group vs standing out from the crowd. (I discuss other differences I’ve observed between JP and EN in this post.)

The “Yuu is NRC’s therapist” line is a joke from the earliest days in the fandom; this was way before most of the main story had come out and no one knew how little of a role Yuu would actually play in the overall narrative and changing the characters’ lives, nor the fact that the OB boys would get treatment from an actual therapist (a detail revealed in book 6, I believe). The therapist role was likely derived mainly from something Crowley says in the prologue about how Yuu can be the one that teaches the boys how to get along with one another. However, the more main story content released, the more it became apparent that what Crowley said was just flat-out untrue. (I go into more detail about that in this post.) Nowadays, I think that the term is used more ironically.

[cypressure]

Have you got any recommendations for dinosaur nonfiction books?

Your art makes me so happy 🥺

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[bluedalahorse]

Hi! I was wondering, what do you think Simon and Sara’s relationship is going to look like in season 3? It’s been shown that they had a really strong connection as siblings but do you think that might be permanently broken? I hope that you are having a wonderful day!!

Ahh, thank you for this message! And I very much love talking about the Eriksson siblings, so your ask has made my day.

As a heads up, I write from Sara’s POV in the longfic I share with @heliza24, and as such tend to think of a lot of the events in Young Royals from Sara’s point of view first. So this response may be more about her than about Simon, since I am wholly unused to thinking of things from his perspective. I invite some of my more Simon-savvy folks to weigh in on his behalf, if they see one of my points that they could build on. I have also linked some of my past metas in case they are illuminating.

So I am thinking—hoping—that the resolution to the Eriksson siblings falling out will be one of the major plotlines in season 3. I imagine that they will reconcile with one another, but I also imagine that Lisa will make us stress our way through it, because she takes great pride in playing with our emotions and making us cry.

Before I talk about season 3, I want to talk a little bit about what gets established as true in season 1. While Simon and Sara do have a strong bond with one another, there are also unspoken tensions running through their relationship from the beginning. Simon’s been parentified into a role where he thinks he has to look after Sara and help her find friends and be successful at school. Meanwhile, Sara wants to be more independent and have a chance to define herself outside of her home and her family. Sometimes this comes out in messy ways, like when she talks about her cheap riding pants. I also think about what’s unspoken, like when Simon has Rosh and Ayub wish Sara a happy birthday. This is an incredibly sweet gesture on Simon’s part. At the same time, I can imagine it was potentially pretty embarrassing for Sara throughout her teenage years to have no friends of her own, such that her brother attempts to share his friends with her.

On one hand, Sara and Simon celebrate one another’s happiness. Simon is glad to see Sara becoming friends with Felice, Sara teases Simon in a loving way when she figures out his relationship with Wilhelm is taking off. On the other hand, they are also starting to keep secrets from one another. Simon’s going to see his father, for instance. While on the surface, that’s mostly about the “business” of the money and the booze and so on, I think there’s also a part of Simon that misses connecting with his father over music and other things. There is a part of him that wants things to be better, who (based on what Ayub says, anyway) always ends up disappointed. Meanwhile, I would argue that Sara and August are already developing attraction to one another before the video gets released. Even without the video release happening it’s likely more would have happened between them and that this would have affected Sara’s relationship with her family and friends, although it would have happened in a very different way.

ANYWAY. Part of the reason I’m bringing up this rehash of season 1 in the first place is that I think we as a fandom tend to idealize that scene with Sara teasing Simon about being in love with a prince. And it’s incredibly cute! It’s easy to feel sympathy for Sara in that moment because she’s doing something a lot of members of fandom would do in her place. Wouldn’t we all love to tease Simon about being in love with Wille? 

Outside of that scene, though, there are other moments where the Eriksson siblings aren’t quite on the same page, or there’s tension between them that’s going to come out in other ways later. Not because one or both of the Eriksson siblings is evil, but because they’re both growing up and figuring out who they are and what they value, with all the mistakes along the way that entails. Even if the video never got released, they still would have had to reconcile the different people they are becoming and the different ways they grapple with their family history of trauma. August is not the root of the tension between them, but he is the catalyst that brings that tension to the surface. In another situation, it might have been something else. I think any good reconciliation scene has to have that complex understanding of their season 1 relationship lying underneath it if it’s going to feel satisfying.

As for paths to reconciliation, I can’t say I know exactly how things are going to play out. I have a few thoughts about what sorts of plot points could make for good storylines (they don’t all need to happen, these are just different ideas I could see working) and a few things I don’t want to see happen onscreen. So I’ll organize them into bullet points below.

Things I’d be interested in seeing happen with the Eriksson siblings:

I keep wondering if Sara might run away or disappear for a while at the beginning of season 3 in a way that has people close to her worried. At the end of season 2 she’s costumed in a way that feels stuck between worlds, wearing the half of her Hillerska uniform without insignia and the purple jacket that matches her brother’s signature color. I don’t know if I believe Sara was taking that suitcase back to Linda’s house, at least not long term. I can see her trying to run away from everything. A situation like that could shake things up for both Simon and August and force them to talk to one another in situations that don’t involve rowing or drug intrigue, and that could make for interesting interpersonal drama. Like a scene where August and Simon actually have to interact honestly and there’s impassioned yelling of truths? Give it to me. I’m honestly more excited for that than I am for sweet Wilmon moments, because I’m 99% certain I’m getting enough sweet Wilmon moments to make me happy, but I don’t know if I’m getting anything equivalent to the “Simon beats up August in a field and then August rocks and cries” scene we see in 1.3, and I love that scene.

I’d also love a series of events where Wilhelm and Sara get to know one another more, and Wilhelm then acts as the person who helps the siblings reconcile. There’s a reason the writing team has gone out of their way to keep Wilhelm and Sara from interacting for so long, and it’s probably because they have some deeply significant interaction planned between them. Wilhelm would also be motivated to help Simon and Sara reconcile because he knows what it feels like to lose a sibling. And I think it would help Sara to get to know Wilhelm, too. She doesn’t know much about him the way the audience does. At the beginning of season 2, Sara isn’t super trustful of Wilhelm, and given what she knows about him, this actually makes perfect sense. I can see his coming out speech at the end of season 2 as something that lays the foundation for her to trust him more fully, though of course their relationship would need to be built up over time.

A storyline where Sara is pregnant could theoretically be on the table. This one opens up thematic questions about adulthood and whether we can break generational cycles, and that could be the catalyst for some worthwhile Sara-Simon conversations. If Sara decides to seek an abortion, she might be in a position where she confides in Simon about that. This could shift the calculus of their relationship a bit—before, Simon’s protectiveness  of Sara, although well-intended, has always had him responding to her as if she is younger, or at least less mature. Yet this would be a situation that they could respond to as young people entering adulthood, perhaps more as equals. Alternately, combining this idea with the idea above, what if through a series of events it ends up being Wilhelm who finds out that Sara is pregnant and supporting her through the abortion process? There’s potential there, too.

If Sara doesn’t run away, she may try to move in with her father. I know a lot of people don’t think it’s likely, but she went through enough life-changing things last season. If she doesn’t feel comfortable going home to Linda, maybe she feels like going to her dad is the only place she can go. This could also push her relationship with Simon in new directions, and push them to have some needed conversations.

Overall, I would also like Sara and Simon to realize that they have some important things in common, and that they are more alike than they are different. Both of them are deeply empathetic and caring, but also at times guarded because of their past traumas. Also for fuck’s sake they somehow managed to fall in love with the teen boys who were first and second in line for the throne, and yet neither of them comes across as particularly monarchist. There’s got to be a dark humor in that, right? I hope we get a scene where they’re able to laugh about that—not in a way that trivializes it, but in a way where you feel the gravity of their situation sinking in.

Things I don’t want to see happen:

I do not want to see Sara get a Dorothy Gale, humbling, click-your-heels ending where she’s back home and everything reverts back to “status quo” and we’re supposed to assume she’s happier, and it’s only then that she can reconcile with Simon. I especially do not want to see this in a universe where it looks like Simon’s going to end up an internationally renowned music star or Prince Consort or both. I just feel like this happens to female characters a lot, and so many female character arcs are about being humbled. It’s easy to think of the part of herself Sara shows at Hillerska as “not the real Sara” but… Sara is eighteen. She’s figuring out who she is. I think Sara At Home and the Sara At Fancy Boarding School are both real, in a way, and she’s figuring out how to integrate those aspects of her personality that are in conflcit. Maybe this is something I feel strongly about because of the way school, and especially university, helped me express sides of myself that I wasn’t able to express at home growing up. But if the message we get sent about Sara is that only her brother and her mother knew the “real her” and she should just be humble or whatever, I will eat an entire bar of soap out of rage or something.

Likewise for the show using rhetoric along the lines of, oh no, poor little naive neurodivergent Sara did not know August was a big meanie manipulative predator, gosh isn’t it great that we have confirmed that she was enough of a Virginal Ingenue for Simon to forgive her. Sara is neither a Virginal Ingenue who is fully pure of heart nor a Wicked Jezebel who intended to wreck her brother’s life so she could get laid in a fancy dorm room. Sara and August’s relationship was as complex and fascinating as Wilhelm and Simon’s even if the season 2 outcome was more negative by the end, and there are a lot of ways that the two mirror one another. I don’t want Simon to be like “oh I get it now, I can forgive you because you were a manipulated, perfect victim.” That would just feel… icky? And it would flatten what I see as an important connection between the siblings.

For the love of Freya and Epona, I do not want Sara to die. I don’t think she will, I think there was some interview where Omar said that no one was dying, and I hope I’m right about that. That would feel even more icky than the two plot points above, and it might be one of the few things that could kill my love of this series.

One thing that worries me about season 3 is that we really don’t have much indication of what Sara’s arc is going to be yet. There hasn’t been much promo material with Frida compared to the other actors and one news release way back in the day even listed her as “recurring.” Which, as one of Sara’s most steadfast enjoyers on tumblr, freaks me out a little. These promotional details would make sense in a “Sara runs away” scenario or perhaps a “Sara goes back to Marieberg” scenario.

Whatever the case, I hope Sara isn’t sidelined. I don’t think she will be—Lisa clearly has as much love for her as she does for the other characters—but I sometimes worry that if she were sidelined, fans wouldn’t care as long as Wilhelm and Simon got to kiss one another onscreen enough times and go on cute dates. Ultimately, though, I have to tell myself that this worry is all in my head, and that most fans in the fandom want to see Sara have a meaningful arc, and want Simon and Sara to have a chance to reconcile. So now all that’s left to do is wait and see what the new season yields, I guess?

In the meantime, we can always write fic about the two of them reconciling and see how close we get to canon!

[wuxiaphoenix]

Colors of Another Sky: A Matter of Timing

One of the problems of doing your research is sometimes you know too much. For example, someone inoculated with smallpox - variolated, instead of vaccinated - will come down with smallpox inside a few days.

Yes. Actual. Smallpox. Hopefully a mild case, one you can get over in a few days - but historically those are horribly miserable days. And you’re contagious a bit before, during, and probably at least a week after you’re sick. So if you don’t stick to strict quarantine or stay only around people who are already immune, you can spark off an epidemic. This is generally known as a Bad Idea.

In case any of you needs to use something like this in a story, smallpox spreads not just by airborne exposure, but by the infectious matter from a pock - the “seeds” of smallpox - contacting any break in the skin. Sick people who have to be out and about shed pocks; kids run around barefoot. You can see where this is going.

(For more history, check out The Speckled Monster, by Jennifer Lee Carrell.)

Theoretically, with sufficiently advanced science/magic, you could reduce the time someone was sick or contagious. But given you have to rely on variolation in the first place, you probably can’t eliminate it completely.

This is a major life interruption. Worse, from a writer’s POV, it’s a major pacing interruption. If it’s minor characters you might be able to get away with just a passing mention of John Doe having an awful time in quarantine, then have him show up in the story later as appropriate, likely still a bit pale and shaky but well enough to be released from house arrest given it’s an emergency.

(Of course it’s an emergency. That’s the way it always goes, right?)

Main characters are trickier. A major life interruption feels like it ought to be a major part of the story. But who wants to read a whole book where the character’s sick?

(Well. If you’re writing a zombie apocalypse and someone gets bitten, that might fit. But I tend not to write things that bleak.)

A novel’s too long; a chapter seems too short, unless the story makes a habit of covering events with “and a week later” intervening. If the character being sick is the only major event you’re skipping... the pacing feels wrong.

Which is why I’m considering making it a short story.

Two weeks seems about right for characters to do some settling in and frantic research before a party has to take off to handle another monster emergency. It’d let me do some slower slice-of-life stuff and give the characters time to explore the area they’re confined to. Which is actually fairly large. In a time when a lot of people still think smallpox is a curse sent by angry ghosts, and there are actual contagious curses that create monsters - you don’t just variolate your doctors, or your monster-hunters. You treat everyone they live in contact with.

Meaning as long as our variolated characters stay inside that minor village and steer clear of kids under two, they can move about on days they feel up to it and not worry about starting an epidemic.

Now to figure out what should go into the slice-of-life. I know I want Ningpo embroidery, book browsing, brainstorming about wine grapes, and upside-down rice noodles....

[todayimgonnaplay]

Today I'm Gonna Play: Nu: Carnival

I've always seen mobile gacha games that depict lots of female characters. I don't see much of the same for male characters, despite some games showing huge success of having them (i.e. HoyoVerse games and Fate Grand Order). I stumbled across a mention of this on a post about gachas with a male majority cast. I checked to see if it's worth it.

**TW: This is an 18+ BL game containing sexual content to the point that it's not even on the App Stores, although a censored version will be released soon for the stores. I will not be detailing the naughty bits much regardless.**

I have to say, when the content warning popped up mentioning that a scene contains adult content and that I have the option to skip it, I thought it'd be something akin to softcore for some reason. Instead, there was an entire scene with everything shown in all its glory and descriptions. I did get a laugh out of being surprised.

But admiteddly, this game does not cut corners in presentation, at all. The art style is very appealing with a diverse amount of character designs that fit various tropes, and the animation is actually spendid, both in regular and explicit scenes. Although regular animations do tend to move around with a lot of exaggeration, so this can be a turn off for some players. Maybe it's because I don't play BL or adult games much so I'm not in the know for what's the latest or what's buzzing, but I'm getting the impression that this game is a lot more underrated than expected.

The story is not too bad. At least for once I'm paying a little attention to it in a gacha game. It basically acts as an isekai where you gain the role of being a successor to a sorcerer and sex somewhat acts as an energy source. Character dynamics are nice where present, but the best part for me personally is that I like that the relationships are depicted in a healthy manner, where it's more consensual. There are also side stories in the form of events which are fun to read through.

Gameplay is surprisingly fun! It's turn-based with a front view perspective. The UI is very animated which feels like it's giving me little dopamine hits lol. Your party consists of the characters in different tiers known as rarity, and they also have roles such as debuffers, healers, strikers, etc. so there is a fair share of strategy involved. Your party also needs to be leveled up via potions, as well as increase their ranks (kind of like ascensions in Genshin Impact), and also increase certain base stats known as Potential. However at some point it does get grindy as the requirements for getting to the next levels gets higher and higher in terms of your team's power level. This is a system I loathed in another gacha game (Final Fantasy 7: Ever Crisis), but it's more bearable here because the game offers you other things to do instead, such as events.

As for the gacha aspects, there is a way to get the rolls you want by using a guest account and then binding when you're satisfied, so it is generous in that sense. I'm also F2P so far and I've had decent rolls in the beginning, though lately it's been awful lol. I did think about spending a bit of money, but the prices for what they ask are ridiculously high, which is one aspect I dislike about the game. You can instead gain rewards through quests such as dailies, weeklies,etc., join a guild to do quests in order to collectively earn rewards, do explorations and craft things, or buy with other currencies that don't require payment.

In the end, I'm actually playing this game religiously , but I'm also quite relaxed with it. It's a nice game to drop by and do some stuff and then hop off while you go about with your day. I do hope that the censored version can bring in more users (the intended audience, that is).

[cannibalcoyote]

Johnny Depp: Bodyguard Bestfriend

Imagine being a long time bodyguard for the Depp family, and having to be a witness during the trial:

*Includes blood, violence and domestic violence, based off of real events but not completely accurate*

Well, this is not where I expected to be. The year is 2022, and I'm currently sitting in court, waiting to be called to the stand.

_______

I can still remember the day I got fresh out of the army, I had a music major under my belt as well as 5 years active duty as a Calvary Scout.

I was so lost, I had no idea what I was doing, so I just started applying for security jobs - figuring my military time would come in handy, it did.

I got hired by a company that ran a security-for-hire gig, renting us out to anyone that needed us. I got a lot of shit at first due to my height, being only 5'6 isn't exactly scary, not to mention that women also aren't very intimidating usually. I did prove my worth in the end, I had a lot of training when it came to hand-to-hand combat, and I was also very adept at creating plans and schedules.

That's actually how I met Mr.Depp, or Johnny as he prefers... He had hired us for a gig out in LA; he had his family with him at one of the red carpet events, and wanted complete security for his wife and children. We hadn't talked at all, I was the head of my crew, making sure everyone was in position and ready in case some fan - or fanatic as I prefer - came jumping at them.

There were two people that had me on edge though, Johnny has two young children, and children tend to be unpredictable. This only became apparent after the night had already begun, Jack stayed close to his parents, but Lily seemed intrigued by me. Maybe it was because I was the only female security guard there, I really don't know.

It wasn't really annoying or anything, all that happened was she walked with me, wanting to hold my hand as we walked past the screaming fans. She got kind of scared of them, clinging onto my hand and sleeve, I knelt down and offered her my sunglasses, which she skeptically put on.

"Now those flashes won't hurt your eyes." I state with a smile that she immediately returns, flinging her arms around me in a hug. The screaming increases in intensity at this, making her friendly hug turn into a slightly scared embrace. I sigh quietly as I look to see the family quite a ways away, 'no way she'll do that alone' I think to myself.

I release another exasperated sigh before wrapping my arms around her delicately, picking her up.

"Don't drop my glasses kid." I say sarcastically, hearing her lightly giggle as I start walking back to Mr.Depp and his family.

Entering the awards was a breeze, there were fences, security guards were everywhere, everyone stuck together; it's the leaving that causes issues. Mr.Depp has a habit of wanting to leave early, meaning that it's just us against an ocean of people.

I already assumed he would want to leave early, so I had my crew create a tunnel through the crowd for the family that led them straight to the car. Everything had gone just as planned, although one issue did arise, Lily-Rose had disappeared. They were in the limo and Johnny was thunderous, exclaiming that they couldn't find Lily as he hurriedly attempted to exit the car.

My men looked to me, I took over, ordering some to stay with the car and for the rest to get searching. I looked over at Mr.Depp, who had one foot out of the car, with a sigh I walked over and gently shoved him back inside the car. He was obviously unhappy, even more so since I stopped him from exiting the vehicle.

"What are you doing! I have to find my daughter!" He yelled as he tried again, but I blocked his attempt.

"Mr.Depp, I have my men out looking for her, we won't leave without her." I reply calmly.

"That's not good enough!" He huffed angrily, glaring at me.

I was getting nowhere with him being polite, time to switch tactics.

"Take a look around sir! If you get out now, not only will your daughter be missing, but you will be too!" I exclaimed, glaring back at him as I waved my hand towards the frenzied crowd. He took a few seconds just looking around, I noticed his anger slowly slip off of his face, instead replaced by worry and fear.

"Sir please, if I know you'll stay in the car with your family, I can send more people to search for her." I explain, resting a reassuring hand on his stiff shoulder. He looks down to me, his face holding a calmer tone as he nods in understanding, sitting back in the car with a defeated sigh.

"Just find my daughter please." I nod my head, stationing 4 men on the car before sending the rest to search for Lily. I start searching as well, although I walk along the outskirts of the crowd to observe them.

The place is full of hustle and bustle, some of the fans seem to be looking for her as well, my crew are sweating bullets in fear of the repercussions for losing one of their clients. I simply shake my head, now is not the time to think of the repercussions, I need to keep my head in the game.

Turning around to glance back at the car, I notice something in the distance and take off running, two large figures are dragging away what looks to be a resistant juvenile. I call over my shoulder for some help, continuing my sprint when I hear some of my guys following me. When we get closer we can hear muffled cries and screams, it triggers an aggressiveness in myself that I'm surprised by.

We tackle the guys, quickly subduing them. I hand mine off to the other guy, worried I might do something rash. I quickly pull Lily away, not wanting her anywhere near those guys.

"Lily, what happened?" Her voice is uneven as she stutters out an answer. Explaining how she went looking for me before she was grabbed by them. I have to hold in my tears, she was looking for me? This is my fault, I should've kept a closer eye on her, especially after what happened earlier today!

I hug her tightly, making sure that knows she is safe now, that her daddy and mommy are waiting in the car. I kiss the top of her head, feeling her curl up against me in a comforting embrace. I heave a sigh before calling over two other guards, asking them to escort Lily back to the car.

She is reluctant, refusing to let go of me at first, but I made a promise to check in with her when I reach their hotel. That did the trick because she slowly released her hold.

I sternly instruct the guards to keep a firm hold of both her hands as they walk her to the car, not wanting her to slip away to look for me again.

I tiredly turn around to the two men on the ground, rolling my eyes as I call the police to have them taken in. This was an attempted kidnapping after all, can't let them roam the streets.

The cops arrive a few minutes after the limos leave, the situation takes about an hour overall, meaning the time is now around 11pm. I send the two remaining guards home before I begin driving over to the hotel. My stomach feels sick, I'm unsure of what will happen when I arrive.

Walking into the lobby, I'm immediately met by some of my men. They explain that Mr.Depp has demanded to see me as soon as I arrived, now I feel sick as a dog. The elevator ride was eerie, I've never felt so nervous, but then again, my client's daughter has never been kidnapped before either.

I still try to hurry, not allowing my worry to slow my actions. Although, my timid knocks may have given away your uneasiness.

A few seconds pass as the door unlocks and swings open, being met with the neutral look of Mr.Depp

"Mr. Depp I—" I got interrupted by a light tackle to your legs. Looking down, I notice it's Lily latched onto me, a contagious smile spreading across my face. My nervousness completely disappears as I kneel down to her level

"Shouldn't you be asleep right now?" I ask lightly as she pulls back from the hug. As she's about to respond, Johnny interrupts, saying it's past her bedtime, and that he had some business to discuss.

He had the whole penthouse floor to himself, so he simply walked to the outside patio on the opposite side for us to talk. I started getting nervous, he probably brought me over here so his family won't hear him yelling at me. He takes a breath, and I brace myself

"Thank you... for today." His voice is quiet but firm as he speaks.

To say I'm shocked is an understatement, his daughter nearly gets kidnapped, and he's thanking me? He turns around, being met with my astonished expression

"But sir, your daughter was kidnapped because I-" I attempt to say, but he halts my sentence.

"STOP... Stop it, I know you're blaming yourself." His tone is stern, almost fatherly, he is old enough to be my father.

"But sir, it was my negligence that led to thi-" I attempted to continue, but was cut off once again as he grabbed both my shoulders, forcing me to face him. His face is calm and serious as he speaks to me.

"No, no it wasn't, Lily told me what happened." He explained.

I stayed silent, wondering what she said, we looked at each other for a few solemn seconds before he let out a silent huff. His hand slips from my shoulders as he turns around and rests them on the railing, gazing at the city lights.

"She told me how she purposely went off looking for you even though she knew she wasn't allowed to do that." He continued.

"I'm also sorry... about yelling at you earlier, I was scared for my daughter, but that's not an excuse for my actions." He apologized, shoulders slumping as he spoke.

"It's alright-" I try to reply, I'm starting to understand where Lily gets her interrupting habit from.

"No it's not, stop trying to let me off the hook just like that, let me finish my piece." He stated in that stern fatherly tone again as he turned to face me. I sheepishly avoid eye contact, nodding my head for him to continue. A few seconds pass before he speaks again.

"Come to breakfast with my family tomorrow, we all would like to thank you, not to mention, I may have some business to discuss with you." With that he turns and walks off, leaving me standing there dumbfounded.

__

The next day we had a friendly breakfast, it made me think of when I was still close with my family.

Lily clung to my side the whole time, asking about my job, if it was fun, what I used to do, where I'm from. So many questions were asked within the span of 1 hour. Johnny had me stay behind, walking us over to a nearby cafe to discuss "business," whatever that means

"I want to hire you." He abruptly stated, stopping me from sipping my drink.

"You already hired me?" I reply with a confused tone, scrunching my eyebrows slightly.

"No, I mean, I want you to be part of the permanent security team. That means you'll travel with me and will always be near." It took me a few moments to realize the sincerity in his tone, he was being serious. He wanted to hire me after what happened yesterday?!

"What? why?" I exclaimed in confusion and shock, stuttering when I realized how rude that must've sounded.

My stuttering is cut off by his laughter, obviously finding my reaction amusing. He calms down quickly, but an endearing smile remains on his face

"I like you, you're surprisingly easy to talk to even though you are so quiet. My family seems to enjoy your company even though we've only known you for a day, my daughter has also taken to you surprisingly well."

"Okay, but don't you want my CV and everything?" I respond, still a little confused. He rubs the back of his neck, his grin turning into a sheepish smile

"I may have called your boss last night and requested your folder..." he trails off, looking at his drink.

"What... Are they even allowed to give you that?" I responded.

"Sorry about that, and no, I don't think they were allowed to do that." He replies, glancing back at me. I'm still shocked, my mouth hanging open slightly

"I know that's a bit intruding and inappropriate of me, but we're leaving soon and I-" He rambles, but now it's my turn to interrupt him.

"I accept." He's about to continue his explanation before an astonished look washed over him

"You do?" He asks, tone showing how surprised he is, perhaps he thought I would turn his offer down.

"Yes, now if you don't mind, I'd like to drink my coffee now."

For the rest of the day he had a big as smile on his face, which only grew as he told his family the news.

_______

From that day on, I lived and traveled with them, scheduling the details and shifts, making sure everything was ready for his arrival, I even sometimes functioned as a tutor.

At first he had me as just a guard for the entire family, but as the kids got older he assigned me specifically as Lily's bodyguard. I didn't mind this, it just meant that we could go out shopping together more often. As she grew, we developed a very close bond. When she was younger she acted like I was a second mother, but when she became a teen I became her big sister.

Over the years, Mr. Depp became Johnny whenever it was just us or the family. He always scolded me for calling him Mr.Depp, saying it made him sound old. He really became a father figure for me, especially after he finally learned why I never mention or talk to my family. Mrs.Paradis, or Vanessa as she preferred, became friends with me, though we weren't as close as Lily and I. Jack also became closer with me, though I could tell he felt a little awkward around me, I think he has a slight crush, though I can't be certain.

They became my family, I loved them so much, I hoped it would never end. Of course, all good things eventually die.

I was on set with Johnny for the Rum Diaries, it wasn't unusual for him to bring me along, it felt more like bringing his daughter with him instead of a bodyguard.

It was all fun, the movie was going great, he seemed to be having fun. But something was different after he returned home, he seemed off, like something was eating away at him. I tried getting him to talk, he just brushed it off, saying it was nothing; but I could tell by his smile that he was trying to reassure himself as well.

That was the beginning of the end for my happy family, the separation was not something anyone was happy about. I knew it stung when Vanessa learned how much younger Amber Heard was, she confided in me that this was something she always feared deep down. His kids were okay, they weren't ecstatic, but they weren't angry either; I could tell they just wanted their father to be happy.

Amber was... something else. Johnny seemed happy, it was like a year long honeymoon phase, although she wasn't exactly the nicest person if you ask me. Jack and Lily quickly began to dislike her, as did I, we would actively avoid her at all costs.

I especially tried to avoid her, she would always glare at me if I was anywhere near Johnny, demanding that I call him Mr.Depp even when we were just at home. She set me on edge, and the wedding only made it worse.

Lily was vehemently against attending the wedding, meaning I wouldn't be going either since she wanted to go out instead. I pulled Johnny aside and explained the situation. He was unhappy, but accepted his daughter's decision.

Before we left for our trip I pulled Johnny aside, taking both his hands warmly in mine as I said my congratulations and wished him well.

I spot Amber in the distance, beginning to walk towards us, so I hurry myself. I un-clip the chain around my neck, taking Johnny's hand, allowing it to coil in his palm before closing it. I look at him, smiling at the shock on his face, clearly surprised by my actions.

"B-but, that's your fathers ring!" He stutters, conflicted by what I've done.

"And now it's yours." I reply

"Y/N, I can't take this!" He exclaims, trying to give it back, but I shove his hand into his chest.

"Johnny, you've been more of a father than he ever was... I want you to have it." I responded quietly, feeling embarrassed by what I said.

He smiles as he pulls me in for a warm hug, immediately making me feel at ease. As we part, he kisses my check gently before separating completely. He removes the ring from the necklace, sliding it onto his middle finger before re-clipping the chain around my neck.

I thank him, and he's about to speak when Amber steps into our conversation. I can tell by the hostile glare in her eyes that she isn't very happy with me, but Johnny doesn't seem to notice. She drags him away before he could speak, but I simply smile and wave as he sheepishly does the same.

I pivot on my heel and head off to find Lily.

_______

If I thought she was bad before the wedding, I had no idea what was coming after the honeymoon.

Something was off with Johnny, he was a lot quieter, and that's saying something since he is already a reserved person. They also seemed to argue, I already knew about their arguments from before, but now they seemed to be happening in the open a lot more. Lily hated Amber, refusing to interact with her, always dragging me away to her room whenever Amber was near.

I don't object, Amber had taken to yelling at me too, so I enjoyed the moments Lily and I would scramble away and avoid talking to her. We survived like that for a few weeks, but then Johnny called us into the living room. Lily and I glanced at each other in confusion, wondering if either of us did something wrong.

"Y/N, Lily, I've called you here because there is going to be a slight change in Y/N's job." Lily and I both relaxed, assuming that it was going to be small and insignificant.

"From now on Y/N, you will be Amber's personal bodyguard." My eyes widened, I glanced over at Lily to see what I'm sure is the same reaction as me. Lily opens her mouth to argue, but Johnny holds up his hand to silence her.

"My decision is final." I looked away from Johnny to see Lily's eyes watering subtly. She looked between them both before running off back to her room; I went to run after her, but a firm grasp yanked me back.

Looking back to them, I noticed it was Amber who had pulled me back, a stern scowl on her face.

"Where do you think you're going?" She asks, her voice is definitely going to get on my nerves.

"To talk to Lily?" I state in confusion, wondering why she stopped me.

"She'll be fine, but I need you, I'm heading out with my sister to go shopping. Be ready in 10." She left no room for me to talk, simply turning and walking off. To say I was stunned is an understatement, so much is happening, it's hard to wrap my head around it.

I must've looked as lost as I felt because Johnny reached over and placed his hand delicately on my shoulder. I nervously look at him, being brought back to Earth by the warm, gentle look in his eyes.

"Are you alright, doll?" I smile slightly at the pet name, he's been calling me that since about a year after hiring me(I told him about how the guys in my unit jokingly called me"Doll").

"Yah, I'm just... Shocked. It never ran through my head that you might assign me to someone else, I guess it was unexpected for Lily too." I reply, looking down in thought.

"I never did plan on assigning you to someone else." Johnny stated, his voice holding a hint of annoyance, but it was well hidden.

"What do you mean?" I asked, now completely confused.

"Humph, I didn't want to reassign you, but Amber practically demanded that you be assigned as her personal bodyguard." He responds, looking away as he explains, it sounds like he wants to complain, but he is holding back.

I open my mouth to respond, but my voice is taken away as I gasp in surprise. Johnny looks at me, startled by my unexpected reaction. Now that he's looking at me, my eyes widen in worry.

"What? What is it?" He asks quickly, wanting to know what's made me like this.

I slowly reach my hand out towards his face, he lets me, it's not uncommon for me to poke him or fix his hair, but this is different. My hand gently caresses the skin under his left eye, how did I not notice the swelling?

When he realizes what I'm doing, he almost reels back within the blink of an eye, turning around so I'm facing his back.

"Johnny. What's going on?" It was meant to be a question, but it came out as a demand. His body deflates slightly, realizing I'm not letting him off the hook. He turns to speak, but is interrupted by Amber bustling down the stairs, speaking loudly on the phone.

"Y/N, hurry up and pull the car around already, we have to pick up my sister and you're making us late." Amber states in a grating tone.

"Alright alright, but give me a second, wanna take a selfie with Johnn-err Mr.Depp." I state, quickly correcting myself after noticing the look in Amber's eyes.

"Why do you want a picture with him, you see him everyday." She stated flatly.

"My family demands proof that I work for him." I reply effortlessly, she luckily has no idea that my family and I have had no communication for over 10 years. Johnny, however, immediately noticed my lie, thankfully only side-eying me.

I take out my phone, standing next to him, taking a few, telling Johnny to angle his head more to the right in a few. I smile after our 10 second photo-shoot, hugging him quickly before speed-walking out the door to grab the car.

He's probably flabbergasted right now, wondering why I lied about my family, and why I wanted to take some pictures with him. To be honest, I don't think that swelling got there due to something innocent, so I took a shit ton of pictures with him so that I can look at them.

I drive the car around to the front and wait for Amber. In my spare time, I open my phone and look at some of the photos. Not gonna lie, he's always prepared for a picture, even when he's caught completely off guard.

Analyzing the pictures, I note the swelling under his eye, as well as his cheek and a little bit on his nose. It's subtle, I'm surprised I caught it. He's also got a very light bruise that looks like it's in the last stage of healing. I go to look closer, but quickly shut my phone off as Amber enters the back of the car.

_______

That wasn't the only time I had an impromptu photo-shoot with Johnny, there were quite a few to come, all of them capturing worse injuries than before. Halfway into their marriage I knew for sure what was happening, before that I had only heard the fights and been left to assume, but getting caught in their fight was wild.

Amber had been up in his face, pushing him, saying vulgar and cruel things as he tried to leave. The other security were looking at me, wondering what they should do. This wasn't the first time we removed Johnny for his safety, so I quickly sent a text for someone to pack him a bag, motioning one of the guards to grab the car and bring it around.

I was Amber's guard, I'm supposed to protect her, but I know deep down that my default is to always protect my true family, and that certainly isn't her. So when I walk over and see her pull her arm back to slap him, I don't hesitate to stop her.

I grab her arm, shoving her back so that I'm between them. I don't want to fight her, that would definitely get me fired, the only thing I can do right now is protect Johnny, and possibly myself. The anger in her expression magnifies as she looks back to me, Walking up and getting in my space, clearly wanting a reaction. I stand firm, not allowing her to get to Johnny, but not wanting to hurt her either.

"Get out of here Johnny." I say, not removing my eyes from the threat.

"And leave you here? No way." He states firmly.

"I'll be fine alright, I'll catch up with you okay? G/N(guards name)! Take Mr. Depp to the car and get him out of here!" I shout to the guard across the room. I can see him coming closer in my peripheral, leading Johnny away, though I can tell Johnny felt extremely conflicted.

All the while, I'm blocking Amber as they escape, not letting my guard down until I hear the elevators beep from down the hall. When she realizes they are gone, it's like she somehow got even angrier. She looks down the hallways, then fixes her glare on me. Before I have time to react, I find myself across the floor, my mind dazed, a stinging on the left side of my face.

I shake myself as I stand, taking a few seconds to realize I just got punched in the face. I touched my lip, it got caught on my tooth and is bleeding something terrible. I wiped the blood off with my sleeve, but know it's useless right now.

"Oh, don't tell me you've never bled before? What with your military time?" Her voice is so patronizing as she leers, she taunts me anytime she can and it's reaching a boiling point.

"ENOUGH!" I yell, but she simply smirks, enjoying my reaction.

"Too scared to fight me? Afraid you'll lose?" She continues her taunting, looking down at me with her annoying height.

"More like I'm afraid I'll kill you." I state grimly, my instincts telling me she's going to strike out and that I should attack her first, but I know if I hurt her, it'll get turned on me. I wait a second, taking in a deep breath before shaking my head and turning around.

"Stop running! You people can't keep RUNNING!" She screams as she shoves me back around, screaming in my face.

"You make us run! You're so fucking awful that the only thing we can do is leave!" I shout back, shoving her off of me.

"If you walk out that door, consider yourself fired." She states arrogantly as I walk to the front door. My hand hovers for a second as I think everything over.

"I consider that a blessing, but you're not my boss." I growl before turning the handle and walking down the hall, taking the stairs instead of the elevator. I call G/N, asking them to send me the address as I start up my car.

Johnny was not happy when I got there, in fact, he looked ready to tear into me, but immediately stopped when he saw my face. About halfway through the drive I started crying, wondering how long she's been hurting him, how long she's been treating him like shit. He only takes a second to study me before rushing forward, pulling me into a comforting embrace as I cried into his shoulder

It's kind of funny looking back now, he was so focused on comforting me even though he was the one experiencing that mistreatment for years. He was always a gentle and caring man, but that moment made me realize just how selfless he is.

From that moment on, he allowed me to photograph his injuries without making me act as if I simply wanted selfies with him. He only agreed to it as long as I wouldn't let myself get hit for him, he hated seeing me get injured, and he didn't want his spouse to be the cause of it. I was scared when I agreed, scared that I could do nothing, but I quickly realized that getting him out of there would keep us both safe.

I kept all the photos on my computer, making sure to have duplicates, as well as keeping a hidden copy of prints. Johnny would also send me photos from when I got hurt, he wanted me to save them as well. She's only hurt me a few times, mainly when I try to get between her and Johnny, I usually would've broken her arm already, but I could never do anything to hurt Johnny.

_______

I was brought forward as one of Johnny's witnesses, I didn't want to go up there, to explain what I had to witness and allowed to happen. I felt disgusted with myself that I let Johnny get treated that way for so long, but I know that he had to leave her by his own decision.

In all the recordings brought forward, I was usually in them, you could hear me in the background, or I might've been right in the middle of it. I knew that the defense was going to lay into me, try and tear me a new one, but I hope that I can take the publicity and stress of it all.

I somehow managed to stay basically anonymous throughout all my years of watching over the Depp's, only pictures and videos of my covered face being seen, but now I'd be in front of the world. My name out in the open, my face on every news channel, my family will know where I am - that's possibly the scariest thing about this.

I've been holding my breath during every video, every picture, and every statement. It's always hard when I hear something that includes me, I always feel like I was an enabler in his abuse because I didn't do more; but I know Johnny would get angry with himself if I told him. When he explains moments in a recording where I got between them, or where I would force him to leave, I always found myself tearing up.

I hear my name being called, I look around, seeing the nod of encouragement from his legal team. They've been so supportive and careful with me, they know about my military time yet still treat me like a delicate flower, it's nice. They've become friends to Johnny and me, I'm glad he found them.

I smile back as I step forward, feeling Johnny gently drape his hand against my arm as I walk by, a soft reassurance that he's there with me.

I swear in, keeping my voice steady as I look at the judge, allowing my eyes to glance around the room for a quick read, avoiding looking in Miss Heard's direction. Johnny and I promised that we wouldn't allow her even a second of our attention, we wouldn't look at her, we wouldn't talk to her, and outside this courtroom we wouldn't speak of her.

I seat myself carefully, eyeing the screen in front of me, glancing to the jury, Johnny's attorney, then finally landing on Johnny. I told him all of my worries, he knew of my fear of the limelight, as well as my worry that my family will recognize me and try to contact me.

Throughout all of this, he's somehow stayed strong, even though he suffered far more than I, he refused to let me feel alone, so I refuse to not play my part in this case; if anyone deserves something good in their life, it's Johnny Depp.

[housewarningparty]

Hi hi! I was wondering, how do you choose what to read next? I know you get recs from friends and I assume you read stuff from authors you already know you like, but beyond that, how do you hear about new books? Goodreads? Sometimes I have a million books I want to read but other times nothing at the library is of interest to me and I tend to get stuck there mentally while waiting for my books on hold to be available 😂

Also, do you have any recs for horror books about ghosts? I want to read a good ghost book :) bonus points if there are sapphic ghost books!! 👻

there are a bunch of places i check in on to keep up on new titles or find out about interesting backlist stuff

first, for new releases, there are different columns/websites that exist just to catalogue the new stuff coming out (mostly from major publishers, if you're looking for indie or selfpub these probably won't help much)

io9 has their Bookshelf Injection column of new SFF (and some horror) that gets published every month

Jumpscares has a similar list for horror titles

for a more "literary fiction" bent you can always check out Bookmarks' Best Reviewed Books of the Week posts

If you're looking for a little more editorializing/reviewing I'd start looking around on sites like Book Riot (example lists include: Best Werewolves in books, 9 Books with Disabled Main Characters etc) or Electric Lit (Example: 10 Must Read Books set in Cairo, 7 Books About Grotesque Bodies).

Additionally, there are places to get recommendations that feel a little more tailored and personal. There are podcasts I enjoy for this (mostly for horror) like Talking Scared or Books in the Freezer. And there's always booktube (though finding a reviewer you like can be tricky) I like TheShadesofOrange, Petrick Leo, and Jess Owens.

There's also reddit (r/fantasy, r/horrolit, r/lgbtbooks, r/printsf are the main places I go to). Goodreads does have its uses, though admittedly I use it more to track my own reading and to follow friends, authors I like, and a handful of reviewers whose opinions I trust. Overall, I think the GR community as a whole is a total clown show and I don't put much stock into the rating system there.

If you have some favorite authors and they are on goodreads or social media, I'd say it's usually pretty worthwhile checking out the books they're hyping up.

finding new or interesting books is pretty easy, but choosing what to read from my own, admittedly ridiculously huge library? that's trickier. tbh, i mostly go on vibes.

alright for the second part of your question.

i love a good haunted house story!

anyone you ask with any taste at all is probably going to give you the answer i'm about to, but if you haven't read it yet, the #1 haunted house book I can recommend to you is Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. It's a classic for a reason. If it sweetens the pot for you - the character of Theo is a lesbian. There's great subtext between Theo and the book's main character, Nell. A scholar recruits people who've had experiences with the supernatural to stay with him in a purportedly haunted house to see if they can come up with proof that ghosts are real. Shit gets whacky. One of the finest american novels ever written, regardless of genre.

If you want more sapphics and less house it might be worth checking out Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M Danforth (yes, the Cameron Post author). I had some issues with this one. I wouldn't say I didn't like it, but I know a lot of people liked it more than I did. It's very queer, has an interesting dual timeline - one plot set in the past tells the story of a mysterious tragedy befalling an early 1900s girls boarding school, the other plot is about a movie being made about those events in the present day.

The Red Tree by Caitlin R Kiernan - okay this one IS also about lesbians but it's probably the darkest book on this list. A struggling middle aged writer moves into a creepy old house after the death of her girlfriend by suicide. In the house, she discovers a lost manuscript of a previous resident who had been researching local folklore and documenting sinister events seemingly linked to the gnarled, tree on the house's property. Things do not go well. Very well written (have some issues with Kiernan but they're an incredible talent and, worth mentioning, they're the only genderfluid writer in the genre that I know of)

Another book I always recommend on this topic is Echoes edited by Ellen Datlow. It's a HUGE anthology of short ghost stories. Some of my favorite horror short fiction ever written is in this collection. It's a great way to be introduced to some of the best horror writers around right now - Datlow is a legendary editor. I recommend anyone interested in horror check out her collections. The stories in Echoes are varied in theme and from a variety of different voices.

Other ghost books that whip ass

Come With Me by Ronald Malfi - after his wife is killed in a mass shooting, a man gripped with grief discovers a secret she'd been hiding from him for their entire marriage. He picks up an investigation she had been secretly pursuing that sets him on a collision course with an apparent serial killer. A story of grief and the secrets we keep from the people we love.

The Good House by Tananarive Due - a woman has to return to her childhood home, still awash in the grief of losing her teenage son there two years ago. While staying there and with the help of an old friend, she begins to unravel the strange tangle of tragedies that have surrounded the house since her grandmother's time, and to uncover the truth of what really happened to her son. A story about generational trauma and breaking cycles.

The Last Days of Jack Sparks by Jason Arnopp - this one's great on audio. This book is told in the style of a posthumously published book from a VICE style douchebag journalist who was attempting to write a book that would once and for all disprove the existence of the supernatural. Extremely unlikable main character, but that added to the experience for me - I was very stoked to get to the part where bad things would begin to happen to Jack Sparks. This one's got a lot of dark humor and some genuinely scary scenes. Love it. Wish more people would read it.

Hope you find something in there you like! Good luck!

[misscammiedawn]

50 Days of HypnoFetishes - Preamble

Should you wish to just get to the kinky stuff and ignore my ramblings, scroll down to Day 1.

Ella Enchanting made a post where she will go over 50 fetishes over the course of a month.

I happen to be an asexual deeply involved in hypnokink and as a matter of exploring my sexuality, providing context for my partners and giving an opportunity for individuals to springboard off of my concepts and build off of my ideas, I wish to post 50 days worth of scenes and suggestions within hypnoplay and elaborate on why they bring me such joy.

Firstly, I want to make a ground rule clear. I am presently a sex-repulsed asexual. Experiencing physical arousal is a huge negative for me, whether it be a matter of gender dysphoria, trauma triggers or just hating the way my mind and body are impacted, I am deterred by arousal. That alone makes my perspective a little unapproachable to the majority of the community I share. Even sex ambivalent asexuals do not tend to have such a relationship with their sexuality.

For that reason I wish to make it clear, before starting that when I describe things as hot, I am referring to an exalted drive within the heart that multiplies passions and creates a high. The best way I can relate it is the emotional peaks of being at a rock concert or sporting event when the crowd erupt into a frenzy of applause and euphoria. Granted one would not say that it was hot when The Packers pulled off a 2 point conversion in the 4th, so it is not a 1-1 comparison. But there is a firm difference in my body and mind between aroused (good) and aroused (bad) and that's the nearest I can equate it to. I look for emotional climax, not physical. I wish I had better vocabulary for it than that.†

Which is why hypnosis is such a draw for me, because there is so cerebral. I am able to maneuver within a scene on either side of the watch with as much degree of comfort as I wish to be afforded. In fact, scenes where I specifically cannot and do not touch my partner are hot as fuck. My first entry to this challenge will explain further.

During these posts I will make it clear when I am talking from a Top perspective and a Bottom perspective and how I interpret the allure. Pulling someone's hair and listening to them whimper for me is not equal to being put in front of a keyboard and told to stare through the screen and let my fingers type. They are both delightful and scenes that bring a lot of joy, but one has a heat and exchange of passion and power, the other is a release which typically ends with a sudden rush of emotions in an explosive array as the impact of the scene is realized. If you read through my posts you may find that that sense of smoldering intensity drawn out versus the powerful rush of a cluster of emotions are what the majority of my interest boils down to.

That all said, let me share my intrigues with you!

-

50 Days of HypnoFetish - Day 1: Unwinnable Conditions

Alignment: Top driven desire.

I have written on this topic more than once. Feel free to check some of my prose built off of this intrigue.

I consider myself a Fae. Less a gender and more an aesthetic. I love the idea of binding a partner to a contract and finding that they are stuck between my contradicting messages and see just how they react. Of course, I tend to have things laid out in my head when I begin a scene like that which is designed to draw about the reaction I want.

"There's a difference between a command and a compulsion" is the opening line to one of the stories I wrote about giving a partner the powerful desire to kiss me and hitting them with a freeze trigger. If hypnotists had special moves, this would be my 3-bar Super. The idea is so very simple. Tempt a partner with something they want.

'With every passing second you'll find my lips to become a focus, a temptation. Feel my words lace lovingly around your heart and pull you closer. With every word you wish more and more to kiss me, to taste my lips, to feel my passion match yours. Memories of each kiss can just flood back to the edge of your senses as you continue to desire it, as you feel your lips magnetized to mine. Surrendering all resistance as it is melted away by this powerful desire that overrides your senses. Want turns to desire. Desire turns to crave. Crave turns to yearn. Yearning becoming compulsion. You are compelled. You must kiss. Need to kiss.'

The idea is to build a smoldering fire which catches and turns into a raging inferno all stuck behind the dam of a trigger. That passion and power will continue to increase until given the "kiss me" trigger. Then all that built up desire will erupt in one go and draw a partner close as I forcibly slam them with a single word.

"FREEZE."

And watch them stop on the spot.

Then I take my time. Admire the look plastered upon their face... particularly their eyes. I have done this suggestion so many times and each and every time I have done it the eyes remain fully animated. I have seen burning desire, pouting disappointment, fierce determination, submissive acceptance and confusion which typically melts into one of the previously listed emotions.

That's when my fun begins.

To orbit a partner (within their comfort level) and tease them delicately in their frozen state, brush a hand down their hair, place my finger to their lips, whisper so close to their ear that they feel my lips graze their skin. Tell them how that desire to kiss is still building. How soon enough they will be given their reward, but I just wish to let them simmer a moment. Perhaps I'll repeat the trigger a few more times, ramp up their yearning until it almost threatens to break the strength of the freeze command.

Every second the intimate connection between hypnotist and hypnotee grows and the hypnotee is kept in a position where they very much wish to obey the original compulsion but are bound by the overriding command.

My downfall is that I often give them the ability to speak and whimper, because I like to hear the pleading as the submissive headspace overrides senses and leads to a scenario where all they have is their words to convince me that I should release them from this teasing cage of my power...

As a note, for a specific partner, this scene works just as well with bondage and being outside of their range of movement. Feeling them struggle against their restraints is quite lovely. Though I much prefer the complete and total control that the freeze offers.

See, with the freeze, it's that flirtation with hubris that truly makes this scene a delight for me. The way that I am tempting fate. The only thing holding my partner back in those moments is their obedience and I am actively courting them to try to break it. At any moment I could lose control of the scene, but at that exact moment, in those powerful teasing moments where I tempt and tantalize-- oh in those moments, I am Alive.

Later in this list of scenes/interests you'll find my affinity for bratting and the back and forth. But here is the difference between the summon/freeze combo and a scene with active bratting. It's the fact that I Win. No matter what. The only winning move is not to play. It's like the suggestion version of a double bind. You kiss me, I win - Good Toy, you obeyed. You stay frozen until I give you permission - That's my obedient plaything, you did just as I instructed.

I get so much fire from creating a scenario where the only way to end the scene is to do exactly as I desire. I feel like an absolute Genius when I have a partner in the palm of my hand, pushed and pulled by my desires.

It takes a deeply imaginative brat to find a loophole in those moments. The kind of brat who listens very closely to your rules and learns the way of the Fae and utilizes your own powers against you.

...Daja has defeated me in this arena once and has saved up a way of escaping it one further time. My weakness is that I love the pleading too much. Sometimes giving your switchy partner their weapon of words is not a good choice for maintaining total control.

But I admit defeat when it comes for me.

Tomorrow I'll talk about my affinity for those battles of wits and how fun it is to lose.

---

FULL SCHEDULE MASTER POST

Day 2: Bratting link goes here

Tagging @ellaenchanting as requested.

† - This topic is more complicated than this, I am trying to be clear and understood by removing minutia caused by monthly cycles, mood swings and personality shifts. Anything more specific would be an overshare.

[adrianicsea]

I was sure someone would've sent Adam for the character ask, so, if you're still doing them and no one else has asked: Adam?

you and me both, honestly!! but at this point i’ve talked about almost all of the main characters in saw, so it’s great to finally knock out the OG :)

first impression— i was SO so enamored with adam from the get-go. leigh very obviously gave himself some of the best material in the first movie, and i feel like adam’s character archetype (depressed punk who seems kiiiiind of ambiguously gay) has only become more popular in the time since the movie first released. he was definitely my favorite!!

current impression— adam is still in my top 5 saw characters, and i’m still very endeared to him! i don’t think it’s a stretch to say that he’s at the heart of the series, both given his portrayal by leigh and by the fact that adam’s death is the catalyst for so many other major events in the timeline (amanda’s downfall, lawrence’s apprenticeship, etc).

favorite moment— either his “face it larry, we’re both bullshitters” speech towards the end of the movie, or his moment of realization just before john wakes up!! although he has so many great moments, it’s almost hard to pick :)

idea for a story— i’ve had the beginnings of a sleeping with ghosts prequel where we see how adam spent his year as a wandering ghost in my wips for awhile now!!

unpopular opinion— i have two that come to mind right away: firstly, as much as i love and miss adam, i would NEVER EVER want him to come back alive in the series. as i said, his death is so instrumental to the series, undoing that would harm the series’ narrative integrity (such as it is) on a MASSIVE scale. secondly, i feel like a lot of people tend to overlook adam’s political leanings and intelligence when they write him, and that sort of bugs me. he has things like a cuban flag and a black panthers “free huey” poster on his walls— those are HUGE and very telling details about the kind of person he is!!

favorite relationship— lawrence, to the surprise of no one. i’ve already talked about the interdependence they have on each other; another thing i find compelling about the two of them is all the strengths we see adam has over lawrence!! he’s more of a creative thinker, and i’d argue that he has much more raw life experience than lawrence by virtue of their different class backgrounds. it compels me to no end to think about all of the things that adam could have taught lawrence about in a world where they had that opportunity.

favorite headcanon— this is a VERY widely held hc in this day and age, but the headcanon that he’s trans!! i think it adds a TON of extra dimension to his character, not to mention it makes me happy as a trans guy myself :)

[cheltranslations]

Haru-san /Events Tomorrow！@Nonaka Miki (23.08.22)

Chel here 😈💜👾

Thank you very much

For coming to look at my blog！

Your likes and comments

Make me super happy！

☁��🎀Yesterday's 2 choices🎀☁️

Subtitles？Dubs？

Subtitles

Was the slight majority！

But、compared to the last time I asked these 2 choices

I feel like dubs have become more popular…！

I also prefer subs

But I've recently noticed that I actually tend to prefer

Dubs for non-English things！

Many foreign films don't have subtitles、

So I prefer dubs out of necessity！

☁️🎀❛ ･ ❛🎀☁️

17ki member Inoue Haruka-chan 💙

She told me

That she likes my sense of style… 🥺

So I chose some clothes in my style

That I thought would suit Haru-san

And gave them to her as a slightly late birthday present 💙

She's so cuteー！🥺

Thank you for wearing them！

(T/N News and information has not been translated)

☁️🎀Today's 2 choices🎀☁️

Do you eat quickly？Slowly？

For reading until the very end

Thank you very much ❤️

Please come by again tomorrow！

Releasing on 8/30

Morning Musume。Best Selection

〜The 25th Anniversary〜

Tomorrow we have a release commemoration event

@Ikebukuro Sunshine City Fountain Plaza

You'll be able to watch even if you turn up at the last minute

So please come！

Details are here

Being held on 9/23、24

Album Release Commemoration Events

The 23rd has 2 shot chekis、

And individual long talks

Still with slots available！

Final applications、are open until the day after tomorrow！

Please come by and support us🌠

See ya 🐾

[starseedfxofficial]

The Hidden Art of USD/CAD: Mastering the 5-Minute Timeframe The USD/CAD currency pair has long been a staple for Forex traders. But here’s the kicker—most traders aren’t approaching it with the finesse needed to truly exploit its hidden potential. In this article, we’re not just taking a stroll down the main boulevard of basic indicators. Instead, we’re heading into the alleyways of underground strategies, whipping out some ninja-level tactics that’ll have you taking your 5-minute trades from “meh” to marvelously profitable. Grab a coffee and let’s get ready to unveil the secrets that the pros often keep under lock and key. 5-Minute Trades: Where Mistakes Become Expensive Lessons Trading on a 5-minute timeframe? Let’s be real—it’s like trying to juggle while riding a unicycle. Things can fall apart quickly if you don’t have the right moves. One minute you’re up, and the next—bam—your trade is down faster than your enthusiasm at a weekend budget-planning seminar. But here’s where most traders trip up: they treat USD/CAD like any other currency pair, ignoring the nuances that actually dictate its rhythm. When trading on short timeframes, the price fluctuations come fast and furious, so having a few secret weapons to anticipate those sudden swings is key. The beauty lies in seeing patterns that aren’t obvious on the surface. Let’s get into the details and show you how to step up your 5-minute USD/CAD game. "Forget the News, Watch the Herd" Most traders obsess over the news, hoping to catch a big move when headlines hit. Here’s a hot tip that you won’t hear in the mainstream—ignore it. Yeah, I said it. At least when we’re talking about the 5-minute timeframe. The USD/CAD is highly sensitive to oil prices, and that’s well known. But what’s less obvious is the behavioral trend traders tend to follow after big oil announcements. Forget watching the news release—instead, observe the initial herd reaction. Think of it like everyone running towards the buffet at an all-you-can-eat event. They might be excited, but the smartest move is waiting until the line has died down to load up on the best without being trampled. When a major oil report is released, there’s usually a whiplash—an initial spike in USD/CAD followed by a retracement as the herd corrects. If you can wait out the noise, you can enter on the retracement, getting in at a better price. Using contrarian thinking in a 5-minute window can be the difference between you joining the masses in a loss or sniping a profit as the market reverts. How to Use Hindsight Resistance Zones Let’s talk about an often-missed gem: Hindsight Resistance Zones. Sounds fancy, but it’s a straightforward concept—using the recent past to predict immediate resistance levels. Most traders focus too far back, pulling their resistance levels from four hours ago or even days back. But here’s the scoop: in a 5-minute timeframe, levels from the last 15 to 30 minutes are often much more reliable. This micro-analysis gives you an edge, allowing you to catch those minute shifts before the big players react. Think of it like taking an umbrella when the sky’s just turning grey—the weather report says rain might come later, but you’re already prepared while everyone else is about to get soaked. Set up your charts with short-term support and resistance zones. Once you’ve mapped those, your goal is to place limit orders just beyond these lines, catching those quick moves and slipping out before the herd even knows what hit them. The Indicator Combo Platter: Bollinger Bands and ATR When trading USD/CAD in 5-minute bursts, basic moving averages just aren’t going to cut it. We need something with a little more kick. Enter the dream team: Bollinger Bands and the Average True Range (ATR). Bollinger Bands can help you see the volatility squeeze—when the bands start to contract, you can bet your coffee mug that a breakout’s on the horizon. Pair this with the ATR, which will give you an idea of just how juicy that breakout might be. ATR tells you whether the recent price action is a tiny drizzle or a full-on thunderstorm—which is vital intel on the 5-minute timeframe. Together, these indicators work like PB & J. Or better yet, like coffee and Monday morning—you need both to survive. When volatility contracts and ATR spikes, you’re primed for an explosive move. The best part? You’re armed with not just the direction, but the potential force of that move, which makes timing entries a breeze. Slingshot Pullback: The Scalper’s Dream I want to share one of my favorite, lesser-known tactics: the Slingshot Pullback. It’s all about letting price action wind back, like pulling a slingshot before releasing. This strategy works exceptionally well with USD/CAD on a short timeframe. Here’s how it goes: - Wait for an Overextension: You need to spot a candle that stretches just a bit too far—like a kid reaching for the cookie jar when they’re a tad too short. - Watch the Retracement: Inevitably, there will be a pullback as profit-takers exit. This is the slingshot getting pulled. - Enter the Moment It Stops: As soon as that retracement stops, enter on the bounce back in the direction of the original move. You’re banking on the idea that momentum isn’t spent yet—it’s just catching its breath. This tactic is powerful because most traders jump in during the overextension, and when the market breathes, they get wiped out. You’re doing the opposite—waiting for the market to inhale before you exhale profit. Ninja Moves and Beyond The USD/CAD on a 5-minute timeframe is like a dance—one where everyone else is stepping on their own feet, and you’re the one gliding across the floor. By focusing on what others overlook, leveraging contrarian insights, and using rapid adjustments like the Slingshot Pullback, you’re positioning yourself not just to win, but to do so stylishly. And don’t forget—trading isn’t just about winning. It’s about losing less. You’re not trying to catch every move—just the good ones. Leave the bad ones to the overeager traders who forgot to bring an umbrella. Ready to elevate your trading game even further? Check out our in-depth Forex resources at StarseedFX. You’ll find next-level methodologies, advanced tools, and an expert community that’s as eager as you to leave the herd in the dust. So, what do you say? Share your experiences below, or maybe a time when a “simple mistake” left you feeling like you were playing the wrong sitcom character. Let’s learn, laugh, and get those trades right! —————– Image Credits: Cover image at the top is AI-generated Read the full article

[ladala99]

Some rambling below: about the stuff going on Reddit, my current video game habits (including some things about Pokemon), The Legend of Heroes: A Tear of Vermillion (including major spoilers so watch out), and Trails fandom opinion the Gagharv trilogy. All over the place!

Whelp. None of you probably know this but Reddit was my main fandom space for Pokemon/Spyro/other video games that aren't petsites, and well, there's this thing going on over there.

I've been trying to get off of it for a while anyway. Too easy to waste a ton of otherwise-productive time, I keep running into spoilers for games I'm still playing, and also I tend to doomscroll the political subs.

So maybe this will finally get me off of it. Certainly the fact that the admins are giving an ultimatum to the mods of various subs (including r/pokemon, my most frequented one) leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth and makes me not want to engage with the site. The whole attitude the site owner(?) has about it is just disgusting, and if it's true he idolizes Musk, that's all the more reason to have nothing to do with it further.

So what to do with this extra time that I don't want to be productive and just want to type essays at strangers about my interests? I guess here's as good a place as any! It's my blog and I can put whatever I feel like on it. Some of you are probably following for that type of content anyway.

------

So, to start, I guess I'll explain my current video gaming schedule. Starting the month before Pokemon Scarlet and Violet released, I decided to change up my video gaming habits. I had previously had a schedule where I played different games according to the day of the week. This resulted in me not making a ton of progress on some games and kinda feeling discouraged with how long it was taking.

The month before Scarlet/Violet came out, I went into my customary no-main-series-Pokemon-for-a-month period, and decided that I would instead play Animal Crossing: Wild World and only Animal Crossing: Wild World during that time-frame. And you know what? It was great! It was both relaxing and fairly motivating since I knew I had only a certain amount of time with it before I put it away again.

Scarlet/Violet released, and I extended that idea. I even wrote some blog posts here while I was... avoiding spoilers on Reddit... I had a schedule to get through the game (Gyms only on Wednesdays and Saturdays, one plot event max per day) and once I hit the postgame, I had one month to do whatever I wanted before putting the game down for the moment. That postgame month, again, was amazing. Just some guilt-free gameplay of doing whatever I felt like at the moment. Motivation to get the Pokedex done (I did so) and then try some other things. I didn't get everything I tried to do done, but I did a good variety of things and had a good time.

After that, I went on an alternating two-week, one-month schedule for different games. Two weeks on something chill, like Animal Crossing, followed by one month of an actual game, like Breath of the Wild. Alternating between a set of Pokemon games and non-Pokemon games.

And that's a great schedule for games I'm good with playing a bit, taking a break from, and getting back to. But what about heavily story-based games or ones I haven't beaten before? I'm not playing multiple hours a day, so even a month isn't always enough to finish!

Well, enter my new schedule: play for two weeks, check to see if I'm still having fun or if I accomplished what I intended to accomplish, if I'm not done and I'm still having fun continue, otherwise move on.

When Pokemon HOME became compatible with Scarlet/Violet, I felt strongly about transferring everything I could in, so I took a two-week timeframe to do so. My initial goal was to get everything breedable into Scarlet, I accomplished that, and then I moved on to trying to get extra Legendaries. I speedran Shield to get what I could out of a new playthrough and then ran out of time. That's okay - I'll finish later. Because I accomplished my initial mission and I have other games to play. This excursion was interrupting a different game I was (and am) trying to get through. One that I'll start a new section for below.

Also just to put it somewhere: I'm tracking my games on HowLongToBeat now. Here's my profile. (I don't have the time on Zelda because I'm going to use the Switch menu's time at the end)

------

My current game is The Legend of Heroes: A Tear of Vermillion. Yes, you read that right. I'm not being silly with the name of the Zelda game (I already posted about that earlier anyway). I'm playing Tears of the Kingdom as well, but it's not my main game at the moment.

And I just have so many feelings about TLOH: AToV. (If you don't want spoilers for it, stop now because I am not holding back.)

I first played it as a young teen. I got to the end but never actually beat the final boss. But it stuck with me. I don't remember much of the plot other than two very powerful, very spoilery scenes.

It's so weird going through it how much and how little I remember. Like the entire plot is about not-Catholics vs. not-Satanists (and the not-Catholics aren't always good) and I didn't remember that at all. But I did remember bits and pieces, particularly out-of-context bits about certain characters. (spoilers start now) Like there's this black-haired girl I saw and immediately went "missing sister! :O" But she's not actually Avin's missing sister, but another character's. A character I hadn't met at that moment. There's another guy I just met and immediately went "oh, I like him! :)" and I still don't remember why he sticks out so much since he doesn't seem that much more important than other characters I forgot about completely.

And the two things I did come in remembering (really, really spoilers now) involve Mile dying halfway through and turning up again at the end of the game as a dark mage, so everything he does is just. . . I'm paying so much more attention to him and he's like, the perfect healer. He's functionally the healer in that he's the party member who's always with you that has healing spells, but he's also such a healer in the story, too. He cheers up Avin when they were kids, being a friend to a traumatized boy who just got separated from his beloved sister. He gives up his wish to help Avin out. He goes with Avin on the dangerous journey when he has no personal stake other than to see his friend succeed. He acts as a foil for Avin, who has a quick temper, calming down every tense situation, and even lying when it helps diffuse a situation. And then he dies.

I'm not there yet. I just remember the pool of blood and the shock I felt. I think I'm getting there soon, though. Because Avin just reunited with his sister and I don't remember that lasting long. (I didn't even recognize her portrait, unlike the Baron that I feel positively about for unknown reasons.)

It's just so good! And yet...

------

Before I started the game back up, I was looking at the modern The Legend of Heroes games for Switch. I wondered if it was worth getting one of the more recent games. So I decided to check out the fandom and see if there were any tips for fans of the Gagharv Trilogy (which A Tear of Vermilion is in) getting into the newer games.

Uh. . . no. There aren't. Fans of the current series mostly have not played the Gagharv Trilogy and actually think they're kinda bad. Particularly the PSP versions (which is the only version that got translated to English and the version I have).

And it's funny, since when I see people say why you should play the Trails series (what the new games are considered), they say a lot of the same things that are accurate to the Gagharv games. One of the main gushes I've seen about the series is that random NPCs have lives that develop as the story develops - you'll meet the same characters again and again as you happen to travel the same places they do. And that happens in A Tear of Vermilion. There's this writer guy that you meet and tell your adventures to, and his agent will keep giving you books. There's a greedy merchant you keep running into and Avin keeps getting mad at him. And there's so much variety in character conversation - gain a new party member and talk to everyone in the village and they'll talk to/comment on the new party member. Every time a major event happens, you can go back around town to hear everyone's opinion on it. There's some secret books that characters will give you if you talk to them after certain plot events.

I'm guessing this is a Pokemon Sword/Shield situation where while the Gagharv Trilogy is good, the Trails series is so much better that the Gagharv Trilogy is bad in comparison. That's the only way I can make sense of it.

------

Anyway, that was a lot and did not stick to one topic. But I just have a lot of thoughts right now. Here's Mile's official character portrait for making it through the whole thing:

[moonlit-tulip]

There's a pattern I've noticed in several video games, over the past decade-ish, of putting their worst feet forward during their early segments. Starting out, over the course of their initial hours, with weak writing, uninteresting gameplay, or otherwise low-quality content, relative to what shows up in the later sections, then slowly ramping up in quality as the player progresses, in such a way as to make their opening segments' quality unrepresentatively low.

Traditional game design wisdom, as I understand it, holds that one is supposed to do the opposite of this. Start, in the beginning, with one's strongest content, in order to hook players and get them to keep playing. Devote more development effort to content more players will see, which tends to mean the content earliest in the game—before there's been much player attrition, and before too many different branching choices have been made—gets the most effort put into making it good.

(Tutorials tacked onto games' beginnings as an afterthought, with minimal development time put into them, are an unfortunate exception to this tradition; but they at least tend to be short, in most games where they exist at all.)

To the best of my ability to discern, the inversion of that common wisdom—the pattern where the earliest parts of a game tend to be the weakest—tends to be a product, not of deliberate developer choice to prioritize the quality of the later sections, but rather of specific modern development patterns. In particular: the move towards digital distribution as a default, and the resulting popularization of live-service games.

Back in the old days, games were released as largely-unitary things. A studio would develop a game until it was complete—or until they hit their deadline and had to rush out a release despite its incompleteness, in many cases—and then that would be the game. There would, potentially, be a handful of expansions released, for particularly successful games, but the only games which tended to receive routine content updates as far as I'm aware were MMOs.

Now, though, digital distribution is the norm, and it's considered routine and default for game developers to release a game initially in substantially incomplete state and then to slowly flesh it out over the course of many subsequent iterative content updates. One sees this most obviously in games following the Early Access model, but it shows up plenty even in games not following that model, as with the various gacha games which release with an incomplete story which then gets continued over many successive updates.

The thing about this change in development patterns, though, is: when the developers are releasing the game in an iterative fashion like that, it means that the early parts of the game will be the parts made when the developers were least experienced. And, while some development teams will go back and make major changes to bring the early game up to later quality standards—Terraria, for instance, has had extensive updates to its early game over the years—many development teams will instead prioritize adding new things over fixing old things, to better retain the interest of those players they already have.

What results, then, is a quality curve wherein, the later one is in the game, the better the game is, not because this is actually an optimal way to lay out a game from the standpoint of expected quality-of-player-experience, but because the developers were better when they were developing the later parts than when they were developing the earlier parts. And thus, in a pattern directly opposite of the traditionally-recommended one, the early game is the weakest part, and some fraction of the players who might well have enjoyed the game as a whole will be driven off by that relative weakness.

(Two examples of this which have particularly struck me are Arknights, whose first several story chapters largely failed to draw me in but whose event stories and later story chapters were very good once I stuck the game out for long enough to reach them, and Grim Dawn, whose first act managed to be such a perfect storm of weak level design, unengaging combat, and failure-to-show-off-most-of-the-game's-strongest-points that, despite my having gone into it on release very much wanting to like it, I only managed to take a playthrough far enough into it to recognize the game as genuinely good this year, more than six years after its initial release.)

[pinespittinink]

can you explain the lightlark thing? I'm very confused. If the book doesn't even come out until September, how can anyone know if it's good or bad? Wouldn't all they have to go off of be a super short summary (that always try and make things sound better than they are)? and you mentioned some blurbs from other YA authors. But that doesn't tell you much about a book. And I saw someone say something about a movie deal? How can there be a movie deal on a book that's not even released yet??? Doesn't that usually happen after a book makes it big? My brain is hurting trying to understand this. I've never heard the title Lightlark in the first place but I saw someone mention tiktok, so that probably explains why I don't know it. I avoid that place like the plague.

Gratefully and sincerely, A very confused writeblr.

I feel like I could make a PowerPoint about the entire Lightlark debacle by now, but I’ll try to put everything I know out here as unbiased as possible!

I made an error in my og post and I guess Lightlark is coming out later this month, not September- regardless, it’s currently unreleased. Basically, the early readers have been given access to advance reader copies— called ARCs— which is how they’ve read the book prior to the drop date. The purpose of ARCs is to spread word of mouth and generally drum up good press for the book ahead of time; you get an ARC for free, you write an honest review (most of those tend to paint the book in a favorable light, though of course everyone has their own honest opinions), and people read the reviews and get an idea of what it’s like beforehand. They’re like reviews from laymen rather than industry professionals, like Chloe Gong (These Violent Delights), who read early copies to provide backcover promo blurbs.

So that’s where the initial reviews are coming from! The distribution of ARCs and relation to goodreads reviews is super important to how well a book may sell and be received upon release. Pretty commonly, you’ll see positive ARC reviews, and then the rating will naturally drop a little and even out post-release, once the greater public can read and give way more opinions, good or bad or any range between.

Now, as it turns out still, the vast majority of readers don’t check goodreads prior to picking up or buying a book. They see a cool cover or read a backcover and are like “huh, sounds neat” and go about their day. But that doesn’t undercut the fact that this process is still a HUGE part of the pre-release period.

The movie deal is actually not that uncommon of a thing. Books will get optioned for tv or film adaptations, but the key kicker here is that way more often than not, they aren’t made public knowledge until production is beginning and it’s a known thing that the adaption will actually happen. The fact that Alex Aster is sharing that her YA fantasy romance debut is getting a movie is… well you can make up your own mind about that but the fact is that it’s not the normal course of events! Those things are generally kept way underwraps. Lightlark may die in production hell, for all we know.

The other integral piece of information to this current blowup is that Alex Aster is rich. She lives in NYC, her sister makes an absurd amount of money (she’s nearing the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, there’s an article floating around about that), and this is how she was able to have her cover reveal done on a New York Times Square billboard. She is not a rags to riches story, and while she’s been querying from a very young age, she is still a young author in her twenties who has published a successful (I believe) MG fantasy series, and is also white-passing, conventionally attractive, and frankly, a marketing genius, if the way tiktok has taken off with Lightlark is any indication.

People are giving her a lot of flack for lying about how she’s promoting the book, which is boiling down to her talking about various tropes/scenes/dialogue that happen in the story which….apparently don’t happen on the page, according to people who have read the book already. I can’t speak to this personally, and only regurgitate what everyone’s been passing around, which is that the bulk of what she’s presenting the book as is falling far from the mark. Lightlark is pitched as The Hunger Games meets A Court of Thorns and Roses in a dark fantasy setting, and suffers the most (in my opinion) from - MASSIVE case of “cool concept, bad execution.”

Genuine readers of the ARC have torn this book a new one in varying levels of language from professional to juvenile hole-poking, but the general consensus right now is the book is bad. Not the scummiest literature on the block by any means, but just a poorly written overhyped book.

Now some people (the twitter/tiktok crowd) are even going after the other YA authors who blurbed her book, calling them out for leaving glowing reviews, which is behavior I frankly think is uncalled for and juvenile. But that’s the nature of a nasty bandwagon and negativity train. It’s fun and cool to be a hater sometimes, right? Get in with the crowd? 💀

I think everything surrounding Lightlark is genuinely fascinating. Will I read it when it comes out? Probably not, unless I rent it from the library. But I do think that what’s happening right now, the review bombing of people going onto goodreads to leave one star reviews for the sheer hell of it, calling Alex Aster nasty things and accusing her of things unrelated to the hype and promotion of the book, is really gross and a very negative side of the entire relationship between traditional publishing and social media. The current rating for Lightlark is 2.35 stars. It’s been dropping all day and I haven’t seen something like this happen ever. If anything I’m curious what will come next, if anything good, and I’m resigned about the hive mind of the internet.

[flickeringart]

Minor aspects

While the nature of the major aspects in astrology is quite straightforward and has been covered more than sufficiently, there’s still a lot of fog surrounding the nature of the minor ones. There are a lot of minor aspects that can be taken into consideration when interpreting a chart… however, since they are labeled minor they won’t be as obvious and much more difficult to spot in one’s own life. Note that this doesn't mean that they aren't impactful. There’s a lot of speculation and vague terms used when describing them. It seems that every minor aspect is said to have a “spiritual/creative dimension” as if that is supposed to clear up any of the mystery surrounding them. Perhaps, on one level, we don’t want to pin them down too much because certainty is the enemy of exploration. Or perhaps it’s the case that the aspects themselves don’t want to be pinned down? There’s an appeal in keeping certain things mysterious in our lives, to avoid defining and putting rigid labels on phenomena. It makes life alive and beautiful. Many people dismiss astrology is because they are afraid that they’re going to be reduced to a set of characteristics and have their personality mapped up to the point of being able to predict and foresee patterns of behavior and fated themes. The fear of knowledge is not irrational; it is probably healthy to an extent. Knowing too much can be dangerous and rob life of its magic. “Curiosity killed the cat”, as the saying goes. However, this is not the whole truth because curiosity also leads to expansion and better understanding, so let’s not be afraid to concretize these aspects, it's not the same as "killing" their potential. Life is never completely in our hands anyway, there's no risk of knowing it all.

Quintile (72°)/Bi-quintile (144°)

These aspects are said to have something to do with individual style and quality of creative work. It is suggested that these aspects say something about a mental-creative process of imposing one’s mind on a particular subject. It is also linked to talent and gifts the individual would possess that have not been actively learned. Basically, it seems to be indicative of the particular way a person would approach a subject. For example, the quintile would not describe the activity itself - the activity could be painting, knitting, running, cleaning or whatever – the quintile/bi-quintile would point to the way the person approaches the activity.

For example, Ted Bundy (whose chart I’ve explored a bit here), has Neptune bi-quintile the MC. Neptune, being the planet of illusion hints to Bundy’s quality of being a chameleon, deceiving the public as part of his personal style.

Prince Harry, (whose chart I’ve touched upon before), has his Moon bi-quintile Neptune. The Moon can be indicative of the mother figure, and his mother Princess Diana certainly had an elusive style and charm that was a bit deceptive and seductive. Of course, he would have the same thing going in his own life but it would perhaps be difficult for us to spot. He also has Moon quintile Venus and he definitely has a style/quality of emotional-physical comfort. He has Pluto quintile the AC, which would point to a style of showing up in the world that is powerful and intense. He has a tendency to come off as destructive and chaotic at times. There’s also a quintile aspect forming between Mercury in the 8th house and the MC which would hint to a public image that is colored by the “taboo” things he has said about his family in the recent present, but also in the past. He’s a public image that is aligning with the style of the playful amoral trickster.

As I’m going with charts I’ve already explored, let’s look at the quintiles in Meghan Markle’s chart. Her Venus is quintile Uranus and it perfectly describes her style of “wokeism”, that is, appearing to be objective and intelligent about feelings and affective values. She has a style of being “the loving humanitarian”. Whether she is this way in an actual sense is debatable. The quintile aspect is describing the quality and style not the actuality. But, it is disturbingly close to reality that it somehow becomes reality. It’s like the actor who adopts another energy signature in order to portray a different person. It doesn’t really matter if a person is rotten at the core - if he has a loving way of being, what difference does it make? The style is real enough to not reflect and give the impression of love.

Semi-square (45°) / Sesquiquadrate (135°)

These aspects are said to precipitate events. The nature of these two aspects is more immediate than the square aspect (which causes tension and doubt and needs constant navigation). The conflict represented is usually unconscious and is therefore not easy to identify. However, as these conflicts tend to manifest quite abruptly, we can take a look at the concrete problems the person faces. The planets connected by a semi-square/sesquiquadrate aspect will be in conflict but force some kind of release (that may result in an accident because of it’s autonomous/unconscious function).

I have Saturn sesquiquadrate my Moon. Since I tend to unconsciously block my emotional responses, the pressure builds and I am “forced” to get out of a situation, “forced to listen to my emotions”. I have encountered the theory that the sesquiquadrate in particular is manifesting as something that is looked down upon societally. This would make sense considering the aspect forces a breakout of one of the planets and nothing that is immediate and abrupt is ever favorably looked upon when it comes to social-societal structure and predictability. I have been meaning to take on commitments that would further my status in society in terms of formal education (Saturn in the 9th conjunct the MC) but I have not been able to do it without considerable decline in my emotional well-being. So, I have been “thrown out” by unconscious forces every time I’ve tried.

My sister has her Venus sesquiquadrate Saturn. She’s known for her deliberate and strategic way of dressing. She plans her outfits carefully, there’s nothing haphazard about the way she presents herself. However, she has Lilith conjunct Venus so she can push the limits and simply do what she pleases sometimes as well when the pressure of Saturn becomes too much. But, this often causes external judgment. A relative of mine has her Sun semi-square Venus. I can tell that she’s highly aware of her appearance. She is very pretty but there’s always something that is a bit off between what she wears and her self-expression. It’s like it doesn’t quite fit and it’s irritating.

To get back to the celebrities, Meghan Markle has Neptune sesquiquadrate Mercury. Is it possible that this forces distortion and vagueness in opinion and communication? It would certainly fit the bill. She also has Uranus sesquiquadrate Mars. She simply has to “break out of her confining situations”, cut people out of her life and move on in her own way. Uranus is also sesquiquadrate her MC, which seems to point to her unconscious pull to “do what she wants to do” at the detriment of her public image and reputation. Notably, Uranus sits in her 5th house of personal enjoyment and creation.

Prince Harry has a semi-square between Mars and Pluto. When he is angry it blossoms into rage and he can’t see straight. It has gotten him into quite a lot of trouble and societal-social disapproval. It seems that this is a common theme with the sesquiquadrate and semi-square. He also has his Moon sesquiquadrate Jupiter. Isn’t it the case that he tends to indulge in a way that makes him look bad in society?

Quincunx (150°)

This aspect is typically found between planets incompatible by element and mode. Basically, they have nothing in common and have a hard time cooperating, which will cause minor stress in the individual because of necessity to work around the incompatibilities. The planets are not in direct conflict but they are uncomfortable with each other.

For example, I have my Moon quincunx Mercury. Every time I sit down to write I’m mildly disturbed by little things like an aching back, a headache, restless legs or whatever. It’s not very comfortable for me but I can still keep with it, however it might take a toll on me health wise. The quincunx has been related to health issues because of the mild stress that it causes. It is manageable and one is usually able to cope with the stress, but it’s not very pleasant. Because it is not as demanding as more disturbing conflicts in one’s life, it’s in the background causing irritation.

Meghan Markle’s Venus makes a quincunx aspect to her MC. This suggests that she has a hard time reflecting her value on a public level, it’s as if how she’s perceived publicly disturbs her sense of ease and comfort. She has an Aries MC with a Virgo Venus and she’s continuously depicted as a bully these days, as some kind a selfish and aggressive bitch (the more negative attributes of Aries). This must be undermining her self-worth immensely, however, it’s perhaps too minor of a problem to do anything about. It is still there nonetheless, harping on in the background, breaking her down and causing slow disintegration…

Semi-sextile (30°)

Planets forming semi-sextile aspects are said to be able to aid each other, to have a better connection than if they had no link at all. Usually one planet is in the sign that comes before the sign of the other; in other words, a semi-sextile might be forming between Mars in Aries and Venus in Taurus. The semi-sextile usually connects consecutive sign like this, but planets could be in semi-sextile in the same sign, like Mars in 0° Taurus semi-sextile Venus in 30° Taurus. In any case, the planet placed at an earlier degree or in the earlier sign can draw on qualities of the planet in the later degree or the later sign and vice versa. For example, Prince Harry’s Venus in Libra is semi-sextile his MC. He can draw on his sense of harmony a diplomacy to benefit his public image. His Mars in Sagittarius is also semi-sextile his MC, which makes it so that he can draw from his Martial qualities of energy and action to influence his career and success.

Parallel/Contra-parallel

These are called aspects in declination because they are measured by latitude and not by longitude. This essentially means that two planetary bodies can aspect each other in a certain way measuring the distance between them north-south of the celestial equator. Two planets at the same degree north and south of the equator form a parallel aspect and can be interpreted the same as a conjunction (some say that it's more obscure like a quincunx/semi-square). Two planets opposite each other north and south form a contra-parallel aspect and can be interpreted as an opposition (some say that it's basically the same as the parallel though).

I have found, looking at my own chart that these aspects only confirms already existing aspects measured by longitude or it confirms the sign that a specific angle is in. For example, my MC is in Aries and it is also parallel Mars. Mars is the ruler of Aries so it emphasizes my already martial MC. My Sun is conjunct Saturn and it’s also parallel Saturn. My sister has a Scorpio MC and it’s also parallel Pluto, the natural ruler of Scorpio. For example, my sister has a wide Moon-Mars conjunction (6°) but they are also in contra-parallel. How is this supposed to be interpreted? I would simply see it as Moon-Mars is connected strongly despite the orb being a little wide with the conjunction.

However, it’s not always the case that parallel and contra-parallel aspects only confirms already existing influences. They can also add themes and connections. My sister doesn’t have any longitude aspects between Saturn and Uranus but they are contra-parallel to each other.

Septile (51.43° - a 1/7 of the 360°)

It is said to indicate a hidden flow of energy between the planets involved, an inner sensitivity to the spiritual dimension of the planets. Another description I have come across is that the planets “darkly interact” and there’s an occult theme surrounding the connection.

I have Venus septile Jupiter in my own chart. Going by the said method of interpretation, it would mean that I have sensitivity to the hidden wealth and underlying beauty and abundance in life. I think it is quite accurate.

Novile (40° - 1/9 of the 360°)

Is said to be describing a contact of perfection/idealization. It also seems to have something to do with spiritual awakening and growth, lack of fear and freedom.

Having Sun novile Saturn for example could be interpreted as a feeling of communion with the world and life itself through responsibility and the control one can exercise through self-expression.

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There are of course other minor aspects to explore, but I'll stop here for now.