#but i just wanted to get some stuff out of my system

[uncle-fruity]

Also, like... I get that there is a lot of anxiety about being seen as morally good & fighting for everyone at every turn, but! Crucially, the people who try to guilt trip you or judge you off your Tumblr presence don't fucking know you. They don't know what you do off Tumblr. They may not know any other social media that you DO use for your politics and heavy posting. And, tbh, at a certain level of offline activism & direct action, it is actively dangerous for you to be posting about what you do online, so a perceived lack of interest or dedication online does not necessarily translate to the efforts you put in to causes you care about.

Fact of the matter is, YOU are the only one who knows what you get up to. If it's not as much as you think you should be doing, that's for you to assess and change. If you feel like you're doing enough, or if you feel like taking on more responsibility in activism would overwhelm you or burn you out, that's okay! You know your limits better than anyone else. You get to set your priorities. And if you really want to help with social justice causes, you HAVE to take care of yourself. Anger, fear, and guilt are not sustainable motivations to drive a movement. You NEED places to relax and have fun and not think about how bleak things can get. You NEED to have places to retreat, enjoy yourself, and remind yourself that it's all worth fighting for.

I know this, because I'm in my 30s now. When I was in my early 20s, I was friends with a lot of folks who went hard during the Ferguson protests, and while many of them are still active in their activism, almost none of them are operating on the same level as they used to. All of them are burnt out & depressed. I spend a lot of my energy urging them to take care of their most basic needs. We also have a problem with a lot of older activists being too broken & traumatized to continue organizing. And part of the problem is people within the movement encouraging people to push past their limits until they have nothing left to give. Or just having no support systems in place to help people recover while actively judging people who need them & can't continue without them.

And, like, it's hard, because it's easy to start feeling like no one cares about the stuff you care about when you're out there trying to make change -- especially true if all your activism is online posting & raising awareness. It can feel like you're talking to a void or a brick wall. The idea that you are so stressed & strung out & never let yourself take a break from the harsh reality of the world while there are people who have the audacity to make time to enjoy their lives and put their efforts into other activities that aren't directly related to The Cause -- well, that's why a lot of people resort to guilt trips. I know I did, too, when I was younger and freshly angry. And I know that those guilt trips did nothing to convince anyone of anything. In fact, it was the constant guilt trips that made me retreat from those online groups. Where they might have had any and all skills I could offer, they instead made me feel like shit for doing what I could handle at the time. And even though I knew guilt tripping was a major manipulation & abuse tactic, I still resorted to it and, in doing so, I felt wrong. Like I betrayed some of my core values by trying to make people feel so bad that they would suddenly realize that they should be ashamed & join the movement headfirst. It just... doesn't work that way. A guilt trip will turn people off. If you want people to join a movement or be more active in a movement they are already part of, it is so much better to encourage them to come with you to organized events or give them something tangible to do that they can actually accomplish. And if you're just talking about posting online, well... that is not the most important thing to focus on, and is a really bad measure to judge someone's morality.

All that to say, a guilt trip is usually a manifestation of the desperation folks are feeling. It's not right to guilt trip folks, and if you're at that point that you feel like that's the only thing that will get people to change and care, then I'm sorry to say you are probably on the verge of your own burnout and you need to take a break. Please don't let people make you feel bad for not being angry or on your activism shit 24/7. And don't judge yourself harshly when you need to have boundaries online. The best tactic will always be community building and working with people & their various skills on their level. Compassion and encouragement go so much farther than guilt.

No matter what a post on tumblr tries to tell you, your moral and ethical stances will never be determined by what you reblog and what you scroll past. Don’t let manipulation tactics force you into doing anything you don’t want to do.

[t00thpasteface]

honestly i think a lot of us should consider getting involved in local republican primaries and conventions and stuff to get less cartoonishly evil people into the party. i mean if we're stuck with a two-party system anyway, i feel like it'd be in our best interest to try and defang the worse party, instead of only pushing the vote-blue-no-matter-who angle that's been giving us so many pro-war candidates (or just plain incompetent ones). i mean like pushing from the inside to take face-eating leopard stuff off the platforms... we could potentially fumigate the republican party from the inside out if we really dug into it i think.

my extended family has a statistically above-average gay & trans proportion, and what i've gathered from talking to older/more conservative-leaning relatives is that there seems to be a strong and widespread desire to just see some politicians who will decrease/reprioritize the collection and spending of tax money and reeeeally don't like the way the republican party as an organization always tries to bundle that with attacking queer freedom... the same way i (and many of you i hope) hate the way the democratic party seems to have been bundling promises of various minority protections with drone strikes on the middle east. it would probably be worthwhile to find local politicians and movements that want to get the anti-queer stuff off of the local/county republican platforms before it can spread out to the state or national levels. i really believe the true frothing hatred of the biggest names is a vocal minority... like, in my experience, people in real life really are just like "how's it going man" more often than not. i think there's an untapped potential for a powerful bipartisan de-zealotification.

of course we should be doing the same for the left too, but i really don't think the solution for a two-party system is to just make it a one-party system instead by only showing up every two or four years to vote blue down the ballot and then stop thinking about it the rest of the time. no i don't have all the solutions or the perfect battleplan; this push would look different for every household in every city in america, because this country is so diverse and so are its issues... i just think we should be taking the shaka zulu approach of tackling the system from both sides instead of just throwing ourselves against the left flank only.

[suzukiblu]

Day seven of “obligatory sugar baby Kon” behind the cut. tw: implications of past grooming/abuse and the inherent problems in someone who was in that situation trying to flirt with someone actually age-appropriate. prev: (( chrono || non-chrono ))

“. . . ‘fast’,” Kon echoes awkwardly, glancing down at their hands. Tim tries not to wince. He definitely sounds like an idiot or a prude or–whatever. Just incredibly, incredibly uncool. 

He has actually never felt less like a prude since getting to know Kon well enough to notice things like how good the bastard looks soaked in Kool-Aid, but now is just . . . really not the time for thoughts like those, yeah. 

“I, uh–I’ve never actually, um . . . with anyone, actually. Guy or not,” Tim half-admits, though it feels stupid that being a virgin is something to admit instead of just a statement of fact. Normally it wouldn’t be, is the thing, but he just really doesn’t want Kon to think he sounds lame or antisocial or . . . whatever, exactly. “I actually would literally not even know how to, uh . . . give you ‘tips’ or anything. Unless I had like, the prep time to do some research, I mean. It’s just, uh–I don't date much, to be honest. Or, uh. Pretty much at all? Like, you're definitely more experienced than I am either, uh, either way, like that's just–I don't do much of this stuff. Any of it. I have in fact gone out with exactly two girls in my life and they both were definitely, um–also the ones who were making the moves and all.” 

It's not that he never want to make a move, just usually he's too busy being way too in his own head about it or something else entirely or–

God, he is rambling so much, Tim realizes, repressing a cringe when he realizes how blankly Kon’s currently staring at him. Because it is very, very blankly, that Kon is staring at him. 

Crap. 

“Uh,” Tim says with a grimace. “Sorry. Um. If you were expecting something . . . faster, I mean.” 

Kon should definitely not have anything that fast if he’s thinking of himself as a product, Tim’s basically positive, but also that’s actually not any of his damn business, but also he definitely needs to look into Kon’s dating history just to add a few names to his list for when he finally goes supervillain and just maybe look into–

. . . Kon is still just staring blankly at him. 

Tim fails to repress the cringe this time. 

“Uh,” he attempts again. “Kon? Are you . . .?” 

Kon turns literally crimson and ducks his head, but also doesn’t actually stop staring at him. 

. . . alright then, Tim thinks. 

“I do like you. I like you a lot. Like–I like-like you a lot, if I have somehow managed to not be embarrassingly obvious about that at this point,” he tries, borderline flailing in the conversation now since Kon is apparently no longer willing to use his words and he was already not doing that great with it when Kon was using his words, and he can’t even talk with his hands or anything because he’s holding Kon’s hands like an actual grade schooler, except probably no one ever has held Kon’s hands like–no, no, he is not far enough down the supervillain pipeline to be able to finish that thought process and deal with the psychological consequences of having to not burn down the system about it, he really cannot do that at any point in the next ten to fifteen years whatsoever. “This isn't–I'm just–it's not me not wanting to . . . take some pictures, eventually. Just . . . maybe we could wait a bit on it. Stick with the streets and buildings for a little while longer, maybe?” 

He tries for a smile and also tries not to cringe again over how weak an attempt it feels like, and then has the uneasy and uncomfortable thought that actually doing anything like that isn’t even really–is that ethical, even? Even the idea of doing something like that? Kon doesn’t really know Robin all that well, no, but they’re on the same team and the same side, and they’re teammates and at least arguably friends, and Kon also doesn’t know he is Robin, and– 

“Um,” Kon says, his hands tightening just a bit around Tim’s and his face still blazingly and borderline inhumanly red as his head ducks a little lower and his mouth curves into what is, in fact, the most unfairly soft smile that Tim has ever seen on the bastard’s face. “We could do that, yeah.” 

Tim was thinking about something, probably? Which hopefully wasn’t something important, considering just how ruthlessly Kon just fried his brain out of his head. Which is not even reasonable or logical, because all Kon did was . . . well, imply he was fine taking things at Tim’s pace and not actually going to get immediately bored if he didn’t put out and was actually interested in just being together, and also did it while smiling at him like that. 

Alright, fine, Tim knows exactly why his stupid brain got itself fried. He’s still apparently embarrassingly easy, though. 

Well, that’s not exactly new information in regards to Kon anyway. 

[freezerbnuuy]

My Quick (ish) Way of Cleaning Up CC

I know that there are other ways to do this, and you don't necessarily need to do it this way, but this is how I quickly clean up CC I no longer need / want whilst the game is open using an older non-Curseforge version of Mod Manager.

Since of course you can't always delete or move game files whilst the game is open (at least not on Windows) what I do is use Mod Manager to tag things as 'to be deleted' so I can delete everything in one go after. Sometimes When it comes to pose pack thumbnails or CAS thumbnails I don't always remember the hair or creator just by looking at the thumbnail, so this works better for me.

Download the old version of Mod Manager. You can download the one that doesn't use / connect to Curseforge by clicking the white 'Download Mod Manager' button, then below the 4 buttons for the different operating systems it says 'Show All Versions' in grey text on the bottom left. Click it, and download the 1.0.9 beta for your Operating System.

I recommend backing up your CC before doing any cleanup in case you delete the wrong thing.

When you're done, open the program and whilst your game is open click Settings.

Click 'Analyse Thumbnail Cache'. This will search for missing item thumbnails in the localthumbcache.package and update them in Mod Manager.

With that done, it'll make cleaning up your CC a lot easier. So now it's the fun part, going through the relevant stuff in-game (buildbuy stuff in Live Mode, CAS stuff in CAS, testing out pose packs in Pose Player etc...)

First, we need to create a Category that we will tag our CC as.

To do that :

Go to the Categories button on the left-hand sidebar.

You'll see a green button saying 'Add New Category'. Call it 'DELETE' or 'TO BE DELETED' or something.

Click 'Add' and you'll see a little header at the top of the screen with your category's name on it.

Whether you're going through Live Mode to clean up Build-Buy, CAS to clean up clothes / accs or the Pose Player to clean up pose packs, you can easily and fairly quickly add all unwanted CC using this program to the 'TO BE DELETED' category to get rid of it all at once.

Let's say you're going through CAS CC, you're starting by cleaning up your hairs, and you've got a hair you've decided you don't like or don't need anymore. Once you've found it in-game:

Provided you've organised your CC to some level, you can look for it by thumbnail in a Hairs folder.

If not, and you have lots of files that are hard to sift through quickly and you know the creator's name, search for the creator instead. I'm going to be using a QR Sims hair as an example (I would never, EVER delete this hair it is one of my favourites! This is just an example)

(You may have problems searching for the creator because some creators have different names on their files than you'll know them by online, and others don't always name their files something that's easily-searchable or tied to them. You may also have issues if you've used the Bulk Rename Utility program to rename CC or remove spaces.)

QR Sims's hairs have their name on the thumbnails and they have their name in the file names. Select Home on the left-hand sidebar, and then you click the little triangle shape in the top left corner and click it to bring up the drop-down.

I've put in QRSims, and it's bought up all of their hairs. I click the 'Hair' to bring up the thumbnails of all the hairs and then I locate the one I'm looking to delete.

Select the hair that you want to delete, and then we're going to add it to the 'TO BE DELETED' category.

Click the little triangle-square-circle icon in the top right icon bar.

A dropdown will appear. Change the drop-down to 'TO BE DELETED' then click the green + button. Click 'Go Back'.

If you've done it correctly, you'll see a little 'TO BE DELETED' tag on the top of the thumbnail.

Once you're done going through CC and tagging stuff as 'TO BE DELETED', save and close your game.

Now, go to Home on the sidebar, and then click the Search triangle in the top right-hand corner.

On the Categories drop-down on the bottom of the menu, change it to be 'TO BE DELETED' and it will come up with all of the CC tagged as such, as well as the folders they are in.

Click the folder name/s to expand them, then click 'Select Filtered' on the bottom of the drop-down menu on the right. If all done correctly, all of the 'TO BE DELETED' files should be highlighted.

Then just click the bin icon in the top-right icon bar, click Yes and it'll delete the files for you.

I hope this is helpful for someone!

You can also use the 'Problems' option on the left sidebar and Duplicates to locate duplicate CC and delete it.

[theglamorousferal]

Team Phantom - Extended Edition

EbonyDarkness - Hey freeloaders, I found some options for us. ping so I know I have everyone’s attention

PollyPocket - here because we legit just narrowed these down together

AmityUnsolved - Here!

IToldYouSo - here, hoping for one close to public transit

TaeKwanDo - same buddy

DashingDash - hey, i’m gonna be paying some sort of rent whether you like it or not, I’m no freeloader.

PharaohTuck - i on the other hand am gladly claiming the title

AStarIsBorn - here but lurking, I’m getting ready to go out tonight

IShotFirst - same, but also paying attention so I can roast these places if need be

SpaceCase - I’m hoping for a place that directly crosses a leyline, then I can put a door to the gz in a closet

IToldYouSo - dude what even is your powerset

SpaceCase - come over sometime and I’ll show you the updated files, honestly we should probably all meet up in the ops center soon, it’s been too long

EbonyDarkness - agreed, we can plan that later, for now we have our options

EbonyDarkness - option one is the most customisable. It’s a block of apartments with a courtyard in the center 

EbonyDarkness - it is however in a place known as Crime Alley

PharaohTuck - um how about no

PollyPocket - we could invest in a really good security system

PollyPocket - fenton, wouldn’t your parents be able to make a shield to go around the place?

SpaceCase - uh probably, but I’d rather we stay off the radar of the local vigilantes as long as possible

SpaceCase - plus isn’t there a whole ass crime lord that runs that place? 

IToldYouSo - I still say he’s the second Robin

EbonyDarkness - FOCUS!

EbonyDarkness - option two is an old hotel with a restaurant on the first floor and a pool on the tenth

EbonyDarkness - we would be purchasing it from the Penguin however

PollyPocket - he’s said he’s gone straight and has been for at least a year according to the articles I had wes look up for me

PollyPocket - thank you again for that @IToldYouSo 

IToldYouSo - no problem, anytime really, just ask

EbonyDarkness - moving on

EbonyDarkness - option three is my personal favorite

EbonyDarkness - it’s a large manor with a few acres of land

EbonyDarkness - it’s on the outskirts of Gotham proper though, so we’d have to drive into the city

EbonyDarkness - we’d be purchasing it from Timothy Drake-Wayne and be neighbors with Brucie Wayne

EbonyDarkness - mom actually tipped me off to this and got me Tim’s number because she remembered hearing him complain about needing to sell the place at a gala she recently attended

PharaohTuck - Sam.

PharaohTuck - Are you telling me you have Tim Drake-Wayne’s personal cell phone number???

EbonyDarkness - please don’t be weird about this

PharaohTuck - I will try my best. My vote is the manor.

PharaohTuck - I’m going to go scream now.

EbonyDarkness - we don’t have to vote just yet, I’m gonna put all the details in the drive

EbonyDarkness - there were some weird stipulations for the manor too

EbonyDarkness - he wanted to be able to still store the artifacts his parents had collected until he could find proper homes for them and warned us not to explore the caves under the mansion, that there was a gas down there or something

DashingDash - kinda sus ngl

TaeKwanDo - I mean, he probably wants to preserve his parents' stuff, didn’t they both die in really shitty ways?

AmityUnsolved. - According to the news reports I found, yeah, it wasn’t great.

SpaceCase - looking at the map we were able to put together of magic sources around Gotham it looks like all three of these places are close enough to certain ley lines or thinning of the veil that I can safely have a door to the gz without needing an outside source of power

EbonyDarkness - sick

EbonyDarkness - I put all the info in the drive, everybody research it, we can vote on it when we meet up

EbonyDarkness - I’m thinking this friday night? anybody busy?

SpaceCase - barring ghost shit I’m good

PharaohTuck - I’ll be there.

PollyPocket - I’ll bring sodas! No offense fenton, but I don’t trust anything in your house

SpaceCase - none taken

IShotFirst - If someone wants to pick me up from work and help me haul it, I can bring Nasty Burger for everyone

DashingDash - I can grab you once I’m done at the shop

IShotFirst - sounds good to me, I’m off at 6

DashingDash - bet

TaeKwanDo - could somebody pick me up after my shift at the shelter? I’m off at 4

AmityUnsolved - I can pick you up if it’s okay with Wes that we start and end a bit early for this week’s podcast?

IToldYouSo - I’m cool with that

EbonyDarkness - Cool, so 6:30 at earliest at FentonWorks this friday

Amity Parkers moving to Gotham for college. Sam and Paulina pooling their trust funds together to buy an abandoned hotel and fitting it as apartments for everybody. They all train together in the courtyard to keep their skills up and just because it's fun. Suddenly an influx of super competent self-trained (or maybe ghost-trained) young adults.

Everybody having their little niches and suddenly they all have more free time that's not being taken up by ghost attacks so many of them started different YouTube channels with info they found out from the ghostly residents of Amity. Star and Paulina running a history of beauty channel going over makeup, hair styles and fashion, special guest Sam when going over alt fashions. Dash and Kwan running one on the history of sports. Wes and Mikey running a conspiracy theory podcast. Valerie running a martial arts channel. Danny just info-dumping about space and spacecraft in videos that range from 45 minutes to four hours. Tucker running a how-to channel for fixing tech and coding. Sam running a combination true crime and witchy channel. The Trio running a Let's Play channel.

Ghostly things happening in all of the videos and everybody guesting on everybody else's channels leads to everybody thinking it's all an elaborate ARG. Danny just floating through the walls half-asleep with a glowing shaker bottle in the background. Some of them when they're in the middle of a rant seem to forget to take a breath or their eyes or freckles start glowing. On a livestream Paulina snaps at somebody off screen and her eyes are suddenly glowing green. Danielle pops in during a charity livestream that the Trio are running and calls Danny-Daddy, Sam-Mom, and Tucker-Dad and is just floating on the back of the couch. Danny doing a stream to watch a rocket take off and suddenly a robe and crown flash and he disappears in a flash of green and the stream is just dead space until the rocket's about to take off and Danny comes running in and jumps over the back of his chair to watch it and cheer.

[ohquail]

SBG as Voltron AU

Friends that wanted to be tagged: @blue-eyed-moon-child @niredsw @random-gamer1942

The roles

Black Lion: Tyler He's very much leadership material and with Ashlyn as Allura, it gives Tyler the perfect opportunity to be leader when she's not around yet give her the ability to run things like she does in the comic and Allura does in the show.

Blue Lion: Taylor She's thoughtful, caring, puts others first, like Lance did with everyone (LANCE STOP GETTING HURT), and Allura did at the end of the show.

Red Lion: Aiden Very loose and fast, likes to live on edge, very much a second hand man and doesn't take leadership even when he could, allowing Tyler and Ashlyn to take over. But also protective of everyone, like Keith is of Shiro and King Alfor was of Allura.

Green Lion: Logan Probably the smartest in the group when it comes to school like things. I think that he would struggle in the same way Pidge did when connecting to nature, in the "I like being inside but if I have to connect to the tree I will"

Yellow Lion: Ben Big guy, smart, compassionate, thoughtful, just like Hunk and Gyrgan.

Ashlyn is Allura Ashlyn is Allura because she fits the role of Red as much as Aiden does. So when/if Aiden gets the Keith running off to galra arc, Ashlyn gets the red lion :D

Alex is Coran

Maverick is Zarkon

Ryan is Thace

Jasmine is Haggar (without the weird, being honerva bit? like no romantic feelings please)

Charlie is Sendak (Maybe I'll draw these later)

Continue for Chapter 1: (This will be a continuing series & I will be splitting episodes into one-two chapters depending on length)

“You come up here to rock out?” Aiden asked, removing Logan’s headphones slightly. Logan jumped, whipping around to see who was behind him. “Oh, Aiden, Ben.” Logan greeted with a sigh of relief, “No, um, just looking at the stars,”

Aiden and Ben exchanged a glance. "Stars?" Aiden echoed, lifting his gaze to the empty canvas of the sky. "It's a little cloudy tonight, don't you think?"

Logan shrugged, “So?” “Where'd you get this stuff? It doesn't look like Garrison tech.” Aiden frowned, giving Logan a confused look. “I built it,” Logan sat up proudly and grinned at Aiden and Ben. “You built all of this?” Aiden asked as Ben bent down to touch one of the pieces of equipment. Logan reached over and gently smacked Ben’s hand away, “Stop it!” He turned his attention back to Aiden, “With this thing, I can scan all the way to the edge of the solar system.” “That right?” Aiden asked, a smug grin on his face, “Would you say, all the way to Kerberos?” Logan froze, slightly glaring at Aiden. “You go ballistic every time the instructors bring it up.”

Logan glared at Aiden. The blonde continued, “What's your deal?”

Ben reached towards Logan’s equipment again. “Second warning Ben!” Logan turned and scolded.

“Look, Logan, if we're going to bond as a team, we can't have any secrets.” Aiden squatted down to Logan’s eye level. Logan sighed, “Fine. The world as you know it is about to change. The Kerberos Mission wasn't lost because of some malfunction or crew mistake.” Ben reached over to touch Logan’s computer. “Stop touching my equipment!” Logan demanded.

Ben made a face of disgust before sitting back and nodding that he’d listen this time. Logan continued, “So, I've been scanning the system and picking up alien radio chatter,” “I’m sorry what?” Aiden asked, blinking in disbelief. “Aliens? Really?” Logan nodded.

“So, you're insane. Got it.” Ben’s phone spoke out for him. “I'm serious.” Logan promised, “They keep repeating one word, ‘Voltron.’ And tonight, it's going crazier than I have ever heard it.”

“What is Voltron?” Aiden asked as if Logan had all the answers.

“I have no clue,” Logan gave a helpless shrug.

Suddenly the PA activated, “Attention, students. This is not a drill. We are on lockdown! Security situation Zulu Niner.” The gentleman on the comms instructed, “Repeat: all students are to remain in barracks until further notice.”

“What's going on?” Aiden asked, a frown as he looked up at the PA system. “Is that a meteor?” Logan asked, squinting through his glasses. “A very, very big meteor?” Aiden asked, in disbelief as he turned back around. Logan grabbed his binoculars from his bag and held them up to his face. “No. It's a ship,” Logan looked slightly panicked. Aiden grabbed the binoculars and pointed them at the sky. “Holy crow! I can't believe what I'm seeing! That's not one of ours.” “No. It’s one of theirs,” Logan shook his head and started packing up his stuff. “Where are you going? We’re under lock down,” Aiden furrowed his brow in confusion and upset.

“I've got to see that ship,” Logan told Aiden, grabbing his binoculars back before dipping over the short edge of the building they were on. Aiden watched for a moment as Logan hit the ground and started running towards the airship that had now crashed into the ground. “Come on Ben,” Ben grabbed Aiden’s arm before the blonde jumped off the building after Logan. “This is the worst team-building exercise ever,” He had typed into his phone. It read the message out loud before Aiden laughed and turned to jump off the building.

The sound of multiple Garrison vehicles departing to the crash site erupted from the building just before Aiden landed with a thud on softened earth, a cloud of dust billowing around him. Ben touched down more gracefully, landing on the balls of his feet. His eyes remained focused on Logan's receding form.

——— As soon as they approached the crash site, Ben and Aiden noticed that Logan had set up his computer behind a rock formation. Aiden and Ben ran over and crouched down with Logan. “What are you doing?” Aiden asked, looking over Logan’s shoulder to see the computer. “Trying to hack into their security cameras,” Logan shushed Aiden with his finger. “You can do that?” Ben’s phone spoke out for him. “Yeah,” Logan answered without anymore explanation. Aiden and Ben glanced at each other with concerned emotions etched onto their faces. “They set up a camera in there and I grabbed its feed.” Logan moved the computer for Ben and Aiden to both see.

“Look!” Aiden pointed at the screen at a teenage boy struggling against restrains. A staticky voice came through the feed, “Hey! What are you doing?” The boy asked, continuing to struggle. The head of cadet training, Iverson, motioned for two people in hazmat suits to hold the boy down. “Calm down, Tyler. We just need to keep you quarantined until we run some tests,” Tyler continued to struggle against the people in hazmat suits, “You have to listen to me! They destroy worlds!” He grunted as one of the people threw his shoulder into the table, “Aliens are coming!” “That's Tyler! The pilot of the Kerberos Mission! That guy was in our class!” Aiden looked completely shocked.

Ben watched the video feed for a moment longer, his fingers quickly tapping on the screen of his phone. “Guess he's not dead in space, after all,” the robotic voice echoed around him.

“But where's the rest of the crew?” Logan asked, his eyebrows furrowing as he scanned the screen for the other crew members.

“Do you know how long you've been gone?” Iverson asked Tyler. Tyler shot Iverson a disgusted look, “I don't know. Months? Years? Look, there's no time. Aliens are coming here for a weapon.” Tyler continued to ramble, “They're probably on their way. They'll destroy us. We have to find Voltron!” “Voltron?” Logan asked, staring at the screen in disbelief.

“Put him under,” Iverson instructed, “Until we figure out more,” Tyler freaked out, “Don't put me under! No! There's no time!” He assured them but one of the hazmat suited people stuck a needle into his arm.

The trio outside the tent watched as Tyler drifted off to sleep. “They didn't ask about the rest of the crew.” Logan frowned. “Why didn’t they ask about the rest of the crew?” “What are they doing? He's a legend. They're not even gonna listen to him?” Aiden exclaimed, throwing his hands up in exasperation.

“We have to get him out.” Logan decided, shutting his computer and stashing it into his backpack. Before Aiden and Logan could jump the gun and rush into the tent to save Tyler, Ben held up a hand as he tried to quickly type out his thoughts. “I hate to be the voice of reason, always, but weren't we watching on Logan’s computer because there was no way to get past the guards?” “That was before we were properly motivated,” Logan assured Ben with a pat on the shoulder before a large explosion rang out on the opposite side of the canyon.

“Is that the aliens? Are they here? They got here so quick!” Ben’s phone rang out after a moment. “No, those explosions were a distraction, for him.” Aiden pointed at a hooded figure parking a hover bike before they rushed into the tent where the Garrison was keeping Tyler.

“The Garrison's headed toward the blast, and he's sneaking in from the other side.” Aiden frowned.

“Who is that?” Ben’s phone asked before Logan and Aiden both jumped over the wall. “Only one way to find out!” Logan called up to the tall boy before the blonde and brunette started to sprint towards the tent.

Ben hesitated, glanced toward the distant explosion once more, then sprinted after them, his phone clutched tight in one hand.

Inside the tent, Tyler was still unconscious, his face pale against the cold metal table. Two people in hazmat suit were examining the unconscious boy as the hooded person walked into the tent. “These readings are off the chart,” One man said before the other noticed the hooded figure. “HEY!” The man shouted, pointing a gloved finger at the intruder.

But the hooded figure moved with a speed that didn’t seem quite possible. They knocked the two men unconscious swiftly and efficiently before rushing over to the table and yanking off their hood. “Tyler?” Taylor asked, her eyes seemingly playing a trick on her. She unbuckled her twin brother from the table before wrapping his arm around her shoulder. “Nope.” Aiden walked in with Logan right on his tail. “No, you— No, no, no. No, you don't. I'm saving Tyler,” “Who are you?” Taylor asked, before looking at Logan. “Logan?” “Hi Taylor,” Logan waved before looking around the tent. “Where’s the rest of the crew?” “No time for that! We need to get out of here before the Garrison grumps come back,” Aiden insisted.

Text from Logan’s phone rang out in the silence. “They’re on their way back. Now.” Logan pointed at the entrance where they had left Ben on look out.

Taylor glared at them, her eyes flitting between Aiden and Logan. But she could feel Tyler sagging against her, his breaths ragged. “Come on,” Taylor sighed, motioning with her free hand for Aiden to walk with her.

Logan followed after them, casting a nervous glance over his shoulder. "We're coming out," Logan sent a message to Ben, who was still outside the tent. As soon as they got outside, all 5 of them loaded onto Taylor’s hover bike, “Can we catch a ride with you? Thanks!” Aiden smiled at the hispanic girl as he climbed up on the bike after her.

“Is this thing going to be big enough for all of us?” Logan asked, as Aiden handed him Tyler. “No,” Taylor started the bike and took off as the Garrison professors and admin started to approach the tent. “Why am I holding this guy?” Logan asked, adjusting Tyler’s weight on him but careful not to let the boy fall off the bike.

“Can't this thing go any faster?” Aiden questioned, with a judgmental tone.

“We could toss out some non-essential weight,” Taylor shot back with a smirk on her face.

“Oh, right!” Aiden looked around for something to toss off the bike, “Okay, so that was an insult.” “Big guy! Lean left!” Taylor instructed to Ben. Ben leaned as instructed. His silent compliance added a much-needed stability to their chaotic escape. Tyler groaned softly in Logan's arms, stirring but not waking.

“Aw, man! Mr. Harris just wiped out Professor Montgomery! No, no. He's fine,” Logan assured the rest of the group. Taylor rolled her eyes.

“Big guy, lean right!” Taylor instructed Ben again and he did as he was told. “Guys? Is that a cliff up ahead?” Logan asked with stammer in his voice.

“Oh, no, no, no!” Aiden protested. “Yup,” Taylor smirked and pressed on the gas pedal. “No, no, no!” Logan and Aiden screamed as the bike approached the edge of the cliff.

“What are you doing? You're going to kill us all!” Logan asked, regret of this adventure seeping into his voice. “Shut up and trust me!” Taylor commanded, her grip tightening on the handlebars. As their speed increased, the ground beneath them dropped away and for a moment they were suspended in air.

————— In the morning, Taylor walked out to where Tyler had been admiring the sunset. “Hey Ty,” She greeted her brother.

"Hey Tay," Tyler responded, not taking his eyes off the horizon. He was sitting on a rock, legs folded beneath him in criss cross applesauce.

“It's good to have you back,” Taylor moved and sat down next to Tyler.

Tyler turned and looked at her with a faint smile on his face. “It's good to be back,” Taylor smiled back before laying into the questions, “So, what happened out there? Where were you?”

“I wish I could tell you, Tay. My head is still pretty scrambled from the whole experience,” Tyler shook his head softly. “I was on an alien ship, but somehow I escaped. It's all a blur. But, how did you know to come save me when I crashed?” “You should come see this,” Taylor stood up and offered Tyler her hand.

——— “What have you been working on, Taylor?” Tyler asked as Taylor yanked a cloth off the cork board on the wall. Logan, Aiden and Ben paused what they were doing and looked over at the twins.

“I can't explain it, really,” Taylor looked at the bulletin board, “After getting booted from the Garrison, I was kind of lost and found myself drawn out to this place. It's like something some energy, was telling me to search,” “Search for what?” Aiden asked.

“Well, I didn't really know at the time until I stumbled across this area,” Taylor pointed at a picture that was almost out of her reach, “It's an outcropping of giant boulders with caves covered in these ancient markings. Each tells a slightly different story about a blue lion, but they all share clues leading to some event, some arrival happening last night,” She turned to Tyler, “Then, you showed up.” A thought dawned on Tyler, “I probably should thank you all for helping Tay get me out of there,” He extended his hand towards Aiden. “Aiden, right?”

Aiden nodded and took Tyler’s hand in his. After a firm handshake, Tyler moved to Logan and Ben. “The quiet guy is Ben. I’m Logan. So, did anyone else from your crew make it out?” “Uh, I’m not sure. Everything is a bit of a daze still,” Tyler frowned, “Sorry,” “It’s okay, don’t worry about it,” Logan assured Tyler.

Ben typed up something on his phone, “Yeah, sorry to interrupt, but back to the aliens. Where are they now? Are they coming? Are they coming for us? Where are they at this very moment?” Everyone chuckled at the automated voice messing up a few words at the general repetitiveness of the message. “I can't really put it together. I remember the word ‘Voltron.’ It's some kind of weapon they're looking for, but I don't know why,” Tyler paused, “Whatever it is, I think we need to find it before they do.” Ben quickly typed up another message, “Well, last night, I was rummaging through Logan’s stuff, and-” “Why were you going through my stuff?” Logan asked, cutting off the automated voice. Ben rolled his eyes softly before typing out a new message and letting it play. “I watched a lady bug crawl in. But, then, I started reading his diary.” “What?” Logan asked, grabbing the book Ben pulled out of his pocket away from the taller boy. Ben’s message kept playing out of the phone, “I noticed the repeating series of numbers the aliens are searching for -looks a lot like a Fraunhofer line.” “Frown who?” Taylor asked with a frown on her face.

Ben typed a reply quickly, “It's a number describing the emission spectrum of an element, only, this element doesn't exist on Earth. I thought it might be this Voltron. I think can build a machine to look for it, like a Voltron finder,” Aiden stared at his cousin in shock as the tall boy pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. Ben typed up one more message before opening the paper up. “The wavelength looks like this.” “Give me that!” Taylor demanded before holding it up to the picture she had pointed to earlier. The two pictures, the graph and photograph, matched up perfectly.

———

“Okay, I admit it. This is super freaky.” Aiden mumbled under his breath as the group traversed the desert plateaus. “I'm getting a reading.” Taylor looked at the small device that Ben had put together and given her to read. “This way,” She pulled Logan, who’s bag was filled with the rest of the equipment and attached to the device in Taylor’s hand, in the direction of the reading.

After a while of walking, they came across a cave. Adorning the walls was several carvings, no, hundreds of carvings of a female lion.

“Whoa.” The group looked around and gasped simultaneously. Tyler turned towards Taylor, “What are these?” “These are the lion carvings I was telling you about,” Taylor assured Tyler, before dragging her hand over the dust on the wall. Immediately the carving lit up bright blue and shined in Taylor’s face. Taylor jumped back into Tyler’s arms as the ground crumbled beneath the small group. Everyone screamed as the floor collapsed and shot them down a slide like earth fixture. “TAYLOR!” Aiden complained as soon they landed. “Why do you and Ben feel the need to touch everything?” Ben turned and glared at Aiden, but remained quiet as usual. “I didn’t know that touching the wall would make the floor collapse,” Taylor told Aiden, everyone turned toward a large giant Lion with a force field. “Is this it? Is this the Voltron?” Tyler asked. “It must be,” Logan took the tracker device out of Taylor’s hand. “This is what's been causing all of this crazy energy out here.” “Looks like there's a force field around it.” Aiden point out as Taylor and he started to walk up to it.

“Does anyone else get the feeling this is staring at them?” Taylor asked, moving slightly. “No,” Tyler followed his sister and the blonde up to the lion. “Hm, yeah no. It’s definitely following me,” Taylor decided. Aiden walked up and gently put his hands on the force field. “I wonder how we get through this,” Taylor smirked as a idea popped into her head, “Maybe you just have to knock,” She rapped her fingers against the cool energy field, it immediately fell away. “AH!” Taylor jumped back slightly. A vision of a large robotic man appeared in all five kids minds. “Woah,” Logan looked up at the lion.

“Uh, did everyone just see that?” Tyler asked, rubbing his head slightly. “Voltron is a robot.” Aiden muttered as if in a trance, “Voltron is a huge, huge, awesome robot.” “And this thing is only one part of it! I wonder where the rest of them are.” Taylor mused as she walked up to the lion. “This is what they're looking for,” Tyler whispered, mostly to himself. “Incredible.” The lion stood up as Taylor approached, and Ben and Logan screamed. “Come on babies! Let’s check it out!” “Hate to be a voice of reason, like ever, but Taylor stop touching things!” Aiden ran after the girl as she darted into the Lion.

Tyler motioned for Ben and Logan to follow him after the other two. Ben typed something up on his phone quickly, “Isn’t this a bad idea?” “Yeah but it’s a fun idea, live a little,” Tyler smirked before walking up into the lion as well. Ben and Logan glanced at each other once before following Tyler into the ship. As soon as they entered the lion, Aiden turned to them. “Okay, guys, I feel the need to point out, just so that we're all aware. We are in some kind of futuristic alien cat head right now.” “Yup,” Taylor smirked, moving to sit down. She put her hands on the controls.

As soon as she did, a deep purring spoke through her head. “Woah,” She turned to the rest of the group, “Did you guys just hear that?” “Hear what?” Logan asked, looking at Taylor. Taylor looked around the small cockpit, “I think it's talking to me.” She mumbled, before moving the controls around. The lion immediately took off, and the lion shot out of the cave.

Aiden, Logan and Ben grabbed each other and screamed. Tyler started at them in disbelief for a moment before turning his attention to Taylor. “Careful Tay,” He pointed out a rock formation. Taylor responded immediately, moving the controls around to avoid the obstacle. “You are the worst pilot ever!” Logan screamed as Taylor sent the Lion into a spiral.

With an eager grin, Taylor turned to the others and exclaimed, “Isn't this awesome?” Taylor asked. “Make it stop.” Logan begged, “Make it stop,” “I’m not doing anything.” Taylor promised, “It's like it's on autopilot.” The Lion steered itself towards the atmosphere, “Where are you going?” Aiden asked, stumbling as the lion rocked violently.

“I just said it's on autopilot!” Taylor insisted, “It says there's an alien ship approaching Earth. I think we're supposed to stop it.” “What did it say, exactly?” Tyler asked, leaning forward to look out the window.

“It's not like it's saying words.” Taylor felt the eyes of all 4 boys fall onto her in disgust and disbelief, “It's more like feeding ideas into my brain, kind of.”

“If this thing is the weapon they're coming for, why don't we just, I don't know, give it to them? Maybe they'll leave us alone.” Ben’s phone read out for him. Tyler turned, offended, “You don't understand,” He assured Ben, “These monsters spread like a plague throughout the galaxy, destroying everything in their path.” Ben gulped, clearly distressed but Tyler continued, “There's no bargaining with them. They won't stop until everything is dead.” “Okay, he gets it,” Aiden defending, “Don’t lay into him like that,” They all turned to see an alien ship entering the space around Earth’s atmosphere. Taylor interrupted the boys before a huge argument could erupt, “Okay, I think I know what to do.” She pushed the controls forward and the lion shot forward into the sky.

“Hey! This isn't a simulator,” Logan reminded Taylor as the Lion reached the exosphere. “That’s good. I always crashed the simulation when I was in school,” She smirked at Logan who gave her a panicked look. “That’s not calming!” Logan told Taylor as the girl moved the controls around. “Let’s try this!” She exclaimed as she pushed the controls forward. The jaw of the lion open and a beam of energy shot out towards the alien ship. The energy beam hit the side of the alien ship, causing a series of bright, violent explosions to ripple across its metallic hull. “Nice job, Tay,” “I think it's time to get these guys away from our planet.” Taylor said, piloting the lion away from Earth. They got a good distance before the alien ship started to follow them. “Oh no,” Tyler mumbled under his breath. “They're gaining on us!” Logan panicked, pushing the back of Taylor’s seat. “It's weird. They're not trying to shoot us. They're just chasing.” Taylor observed, her fingers nimbly adjusting the controls as she kept a steady eye on the pursuing ship.

Aiden put his hands up to get everyone’s attention, “Okay, seriously, now we think having aliens follow us is good? I am not on board with this new direction, guys.” “Where are we?” Ben’s phone read out, the digital voice cutting through the noise in the cockpit.

“Edge of the solar system. There's Kerberos,” Logan pointed at the moon of Pluto. “That’s impossible, it took us months to get out here,” Tyler gasped in disbelief, “We got out here in five seconds.” A spherical opening, a distorted sphere with a glowing center opened up in front of the lion. It was a good distance away but the Lion seemed to be dead set on going through.

“A wormhole of sorts, where does it go?” Logan asked Taylor, who struggled and said she didn’t know.

“Tyler, you're the senior officer here. What should we do?” Taylor looked up at her brother.

Tyler looked at the other kids, “Whatever is happening, the lion knows more than we do.” Tyler looked at Aiden, who nodded, “I say we trust it, but we're a team now. We should decide together.” Taylor glanced around, all for boys nodded at her. “Alright, guess you’re all skipping class tomorrow,” She pushed the controls forward and the Lion shot into the wormhole.

———— As they exited the wormhole, an entirely new vista unfolded before their eyes. Kaleidoscopic patterns of nebulae painted the alien sky, with twinkling stars that seemed to breathe and pulse with life. “Where are we?” Ben’s phone read out again, its digital voice sounding even more surreal amidst this cosmic seascape.

“I have no clue,” Logan answered, “I don’t recognize any of these star patterns,” “Me neither,” Tyler looked out the window at the sky. “We must be a long, long way from Earth.” The lion approached a earth like planet, “The lion seems to want to go to this planet.” Taylor told the boys, “I think I think it's going home.” The lion soared into the planet’s atmosphere, plunging through plumes of vibrant, iridescent clouds. As they broke through the final layer, a sprawling cityscape came into view, nestled amidst a lush expanse of emerald-green forests and crystalline rivers.

"Doesn't look like anything from our textbooks," Aiden remarked, his eyes wide with awe.

“Um, is it just me or is anyone else having second thoughts about flying through a mysterious wormhole? Why are we listening to a robotic lion anyway?” Logan asked as the Lion approached a castle like building. “It got us away from that alien warship, didn't it?” Taylor shot back. “I don't know if you noticed, but we're in an alien warship.” Tyler pointed out, patting Taylor on the head.

“Oh, are you scared?” Taylor teased. “With you at the helm? Terrified,” Tyler poked the side of her face before turning his attention to the castle they were approaching.

The castle was enormous, a towering structure of gleaming spires and arching buttresses that seemed to shimmer with an ethereal light. As they landed, Tyler pulled everyone’s attention to him. “No one's happy to be in this situation, but we're here now. If we want to get through this, we've got to do it together.” “Yes sir,” Aiden gave a teasing salute.

“Don’t do that,” Tyler crossed his arms.

“Look at that castle though,” Taylor got out of the pilot seat and tried to book it out of the lion. Tyler grabbed her arm and stopped her, “Keep your guard up.” “Is something wrong Tyler?” Logan asked, cautiously prodding for information. Tyler turned to him, “My crew was captured by aliens once. I'm not going to let it happen again,” As soon as the kids were out of the lion and walking up to the castle, the lion moved. “No! I knew it was going to eat us! No!” Logan screeched, covering his head with his hands. The lion roared and the entrance to the castle opened. “No, it’s just opening the door for us,” Aiden pointed out, touching Logan’s shoulder. The slightly taller boy looked up and sighed in relief. Taylor ran into the castle, “Hello?” She called out into the pitch black foyer. “Taylor! Be careful!” Tyler scolded his sister as the boys walked in after her.

“I am!” Taylor promised, “Hello? Is anyone there?” “Please hold for identity scan,” A voice called out before a beam of light scanned over the five kids.

“What? Why are we here? What do you want with us?” Logan asked as the beam stopped scanning them. Lights leading down the hall flickered on, “Guess we’re going that way,” Aiden started walking down the hall. As they all walked down the hall, the lights continued to flick on, lighting and leading their way. Eventually, they were lead to a room with two cryo-pods. Ben typed up a quick message on his phone and played it out for everyone, “Where are we?” “It's some kind of control room,” Logan observed, scanning the unfamiliar technology around them with a hit of curiosity. “Are these guys dead?” Aiden asked, tapping onto one of the cryo-pods. The pod opened with a hiss of air and a red headed girl fell out, her knees buckling as she called out, “Dad!” Aiden leaped forward and caught her, “Hello there,”

“Who are you? Where am I?” The girl asked, looking up into Aiden’s eyes. Aiden smirked, “I’m Aiden, and you’re right here in my arms,”

"Quit the flirt, Aiden. We're not in a rom-com," Tyler grumbled, stepping forward and offering a hand to the girl. “Who are you people?” The girl asked, pushing Aiden to the ground as she took Tyler’s hand. Tyler helped her up. “Where is King Mike? What are you doing in my castle? “A blue lion brought us here,” Taylor butted in. “How do you have the Blue Lion? What happened to its paladin? What are you all doing here? Unless,” She paused, “How long has it been?” “We don’t know what your talking about,” Logan said as the girl pushed away from Tyler and walked over to a small panel sticking out of the floor and started typing on it. “Why don't you tell us who you are? Maybe we can help.” Tyler suggested, sticking his hands in his shorts pockets. “I am Princess Ashlyn of Planet Altea,” Ashlyn informed the earthlings, “I've got to find out where we are and how long we've been asleep.” Logan looked over her shoulder, “Okay, that's how that works. What is that language though?” A man groaned before Ashlyn could answer. He fell out of his pod before jumping up, “Enemy combatants!” “Nope! Nope!” Taylor assured him otherwise, “We’re friendly, I promise,” The man looked skeptical but stood at ease. “It can't be.” Ashlyn gasped, covering her mouth. “What is it?” The man asked, suddenly very worried for the princess. “We've been asleep for 10,000 years.” Ashlyn stared forward, “Planet Altea and all of the planets in our solar system have been destroyed. Alex, Father is gone. Our entire civilization,”

“Maverick,” Alex shook his head is disbelief. “Maverick?” Logan asked in confusion.

“He was the King of the Galra. A vile creature and enemy to all free people.” Ashlyn started to sink onto the floor. “I remember now, I was his prisoner,” Tyler crossed his arms over his chest. “He's still alive? Impossible!” Alex stared at Tyler in disbelief and distrust. “I can't explain it, but it's true,” Tyler nodded, “He's searching for a super weapon called Voltron.” Ashlyn stood back up, “He's searching for it because he knows it's the only thing that can defeat him, and that's exactly why we must find it before he does,” “We?” Aiden interrupted, “Why us?

Word Count: 5,074

[transhuman-priestess]

How I Scan Negatives

I've been doing film photography for 3 whole weeks so of course I am now an expert and you should toooooootally listen to me for my expert opinion on this matter.

But in seriousness, this post isn't meant to be a how-to guide, but if you can glean some useful information from it, that's really neat and I'm glad.

Part 1: The Scanner

There are a couple different ways to scan negatives. The simplest is known as camera scanning, and that just means you use some kind of backlight and take a close-up picture of a negative with a digital camera of some kind.

I've done a couple of scans like this but since it ideally relies on a macro lens, something which costs about $300 at a bare minimum, and more if you want one that's actually, yknow, good. Also, camera scanning inherently limits you to one picture at a time.

So my scanner is a flatbed Epson "Perfection" V600. I purchased this scanner because it is the least expensive flatbed scanner you can find that also does transparencies. It can scan 12 35mm negatives or two 6x9cm 120 negatives at a time. The Perfection V850 can do a full 36 exposure roll of 35mm but costs 4.33x as much.

So this thing is fine.

The first step is to cut my negatives up. This isn't as horrifying as it sounds. I have binder pages that hold 6 6-exposure strips, so a full roll of 35mm (which i will from here on out refer to with the slightly antiquated but slightly faster to type "135") takes up a single page.

Next, I mount them in the handy negative mounting frame that Epson provides, and put it in the scanner.

Now we can move on to the actual scanning.

Part 2: Scanning Software

This is, without a shadow of a doubt, the most irritating part of the whole ordeal. There's lots of decent scanning software out there, but there's fewer options for really good scanning software. Most of the "automatic" stuff sucks at being automatic so I end up doing most of it manually.

The scanner comes with the inventively named "Epson Scan," which is a very competent program if you want to scan and don't care about dust and scratches on your film. That is because I have yet to figure out what combination of options actually gets it to properly remove dust and scratches. This is mandatory, because I do not have $10,000 to spend on an industrial-grade negative pressure ventilation system for my bathroom/processing lab. Dust is avoidable, but ultimately inescapable.

The ins and outs of dust and scratch removal are interesting but not interesting enough for me to do a deep dive on them. The very short version is that the scanner scans every frame twice, once with visible light and once with infrared, and overlays the information from these to get rid of dust and scratches.

So instead of using the admittedly competent pack-in software, I opted to purchase SilverFast 9 SE. I paid $49 USD for this because I could not find a cracked version of the full-featured "HDR Suite" version and, frankly, i haven't missed the additional features.

SilverFast has a wizard option (Do they still call it that?) that walks you through the various steps of scanning. I haven't used it since my first roll.

The first step is to do a "pre-scan", which just scans the whole thing at a low resolution so you can pick the frames out of the lineup.

This is my screen at this point. The first step is to draw around the individual frames. This takes about 5-10 minutes depending on how anal i'm being about framing and overscan.

Now that i've let the computer pick the frames to save time for demonstration purposes manually picked my frames its time to boost the scan resolution from a postage-stamp 300 pixels per inch to an actually-usable 3200. You'll also note that i'm scanning these as "positives" rather than negatives. The "negative" scan option adds something called "Negafix" that i cannot turn off and that tries to color-correct for the negative stock's film base color. It is monumentally bad at this unless your stock is pre-loaded in its database which, as far as I can tell, hasn't been updated since 2005. We'll deal with that later though.

Now that we have the basic setting defined we go over to the "frame" menu seen above and copy these settings to all frames. I could set them manually, but copying settings over is the one thing this software is good at doing automatically. This may have something to do with the fact that it is essentially copy-and-paste, which you may recognize as a basic feature of every computer since 1987.

Occasionally, and unpredictably, the scanning software will turn on "Unsharp Masking." The wikipedia page on this option will explain it. I will not, because my contempt for the option rivals my contempt for the Republican Party, The Catholic Church, and Portland's insistence on driving 5 below the limit on the highway. I turn it off and if I could i would find whoever invented this option and eat their dog.

Once that is turned off we get to turn on the most beautiful option that SilverFast 9 SE has to offer, iSRD. iSRD is the previously-mentioned scratch-and-dust removal.

I have found that, in this one instance, the automatic settings are completely acceptable to me. They eliminate most of the really problematic dust in high-detail areas. The hairs and dust that gets left behind is usually easy to deal with via clone stamp later.

Now that the boring stuff is out of the way we get to the tedious, yet, to me at least, fun part. Histogram adjustment!

What you're seeing here is a histogram, its a graphical representation of the brightness of an image. Our goal with this is to maximize the dynamic range of the image. All that blank space to the right of the "mountains" (and some of the "lowlands" on the left) need to be eliminated so that the file can use as much of the bandwidth they have for actual useful image file stuff. This is pretty simple. We just slide those little arrows until they bound the mountains better.

Once we do this we can check the output histogram and see how it's mapped all the image data to the full bandwidth.

This has to be done individually per-frame, since each frame is slightly different.

Now that's done we can actually scan. I use the "Batch Scan" function, which scans everything one-after-the-other. I'm not going to show the dialog windows because 1.) its boring and 2.) I don't want to reconfigure the save path the way I did for the above images. It's a privacy thing.

After we've scanned everything its time to move on to...

Part 3: Color Grading

This is the part you've never heard about before. It's the most involved, and the most important, and it's worth getting into why.

Computers are amazing at storing information, at sorting information, at rearranging and processing information, but they are fundementally incapable of the most important part of dealing with information, assigning meaning.

I'm sure a lot of folks are going to be very very angry at me for saying that, but I actually don't care, and what's more, I'm confident the computer scientists I know will agree with me.

Film is better at storing images than computers. Period, this is a physical fact. The amount of dynamic range and resolution contained in film exceeds the ability of computers to contain it completely. So scanning is always going to be about compromises. You're trying to maximize the amount of useful information you can see by eliminating as much of the un-useful information as you can. But the computer doesn't actually know what is and isn't useful, so we have to tell it.

In order to do this, we use image editing software. I know a lot of photographers who swear by Photoshop, but fuck Adobe, and I know a lot of photographers who love GIMP, but GIMP's user interface is so convoluted as to be detrimental to my purposes. So I use Paint.NET, which is Windows-only, a fact which is sure to get me hate mail from several users including one of my best friends. (Sorry, Murder*.)

Here we have an unaltered** negative. There's a bit of overscan you can see on the left side of the image, and obviously its currently in portrait orientation. Before we go any further, I'm going to fix both of these things.

I like to crop my negatives in a 3:2 ratio. This is the natural aspect ratio of 135 film, and i like that similitude. Paint.NET lets me set a fixed aspect ratio for selections, which is nice

Now that the overscan has been cropped out and the picture is rotated properly, we can invert the image to a positive, and here is where it will become apparent to you exactly why color grading is important, and why there's no such thing as an "pure scan".

Wow! That's very...blue? Well, yes, it is. Color negative film mostly has an orange base. This helps compensate for shortcomings in the dyes used, and those shortcomings are why we have to color grade. The next step I take is to open the "levels" controls, where you'll see our old friend, the histogram!

This histogram looks different, but it's the same basic concept, with the difference that this program lets me adjust red, green, and blue individually. You'll also note that the individual RGB histograms broadly look similar, just out of sync. This is because of the orange base. They won't always look that similar, and in this case it's largely because the sky was overcast that day and there's a large amount of gray in the entire image.

We're going to adjust the input histogram first. Here, our goal is to map the maximum amount of dynamic range possible to the final image. Color balance is not yet important. So we slide the little arrows up and down from the top and bottom so that as much of them fill the output histogram as possible without clipping.

What is clipping? Clipping is when the black or white levels "blow out". Some clipping is acceptable in some images. A bright, sunny day will invariably have some clipping, and if you go out of your way to avoid it the image will look weird and flat. But in a picture like this where everything is muted and gray, we want to avoid it.

Clipping, by the way, looks like this, and is why i don't let the computer automatically adjust the level balance. Some people like this look with the deep black shadows, I do not.

But, onto doing it the Proper*** way

You can see the image is looking a lot better, but it still has a notably off color cast to the image. Its kind of green. Now we can move on to adjusting the output histogram. There's two ways to deal with this. We can adjust the input red, but this will result in highlight clipping. I actually don't mind highlight clipping as much, and in this case we have several red lights in the image both on the BMW and the crossing gate, so we're going to adjust that input histogram.

Truthfully, I should have thought of this before picking this image to do a demonstration on, but at this point its too late to turn back, and like I keep saying, this isn't a "how-to" guide.

So we still have a bit of a color cast, but its (mostly) in the midtones. Now it's time to bring out our secret weapon: gray balance, also known as neutral point or gray point.

That middle slider can be adjusted for red, green, and blue independently, and that's exactly what we're going to do.

This looks, for the most part, very good. I'll probably go back and tweak the gray points in the red and green a bit more, and i often go through these steps 2-3 times, repeating with finer adjustments before finally confirming the changes.

Truthfully, I don't remember if the BMW was pure white or eggshell white, so i'm going to err on the side of "eggshell" because the rest of the image looks weirder if i adjust for that white to be "pure".

And now, Voila! A fully color-graded image.

Does it look exactly like it did IRL? No, not quite, but again, scanning is all about compromise. I'm sure someone with more experience could do a better job than me, but the point here isn't to show you how to make things perfect, it's to show how I, Ivy Michaels do this.

If you made it through this far, congratulations! I love you! I hope you found this interesting. Thanks for reading <3

*Murder is e's actual name.

** i have censored the license plate of the 25-year-old BMW in my shot out of privacy concerns. It is not my car, and i do not know the owner. The negative has not been cropped, rotated, inverted, or graded in any way. Only the license plate has been removed by select-and-stretch. *** Despite my repeated slides into "we/us" language, this is not a how-to and is not intended to be a statement of objective correctness. It is "correct" in the sense of "correct to my personal workflow"

[sergeantcowboy]

Hey I'm gonna pretend like the western worlds decent toward facism isn't a thing and that the already fundamendally flawed democratic system of the US isn't actively collapsing in on itself as we speak, I'm gonna share some oc facts.

(In all seriousness: to all my american followers or whoever happens to see this please stay safe. If you're part of any of the groups trageted by the right wing please keep yourself alive, they want you gone and just being alive is already resistance. I believe in you.)

Wow look at that! OC facts! (Mainly Crow's backstory and family stuff)

TW: parental death

Crow was born in New Jersey to a teen mom who had him at 16. He spent the majority of his childhood being raised by his grandparents.

His mom still lived with them, aside from some of the time in his early childhood where she attended community college for a bit.

She's a very nice woman and did her best but she was mostly clueless about parenting. Even as a small child Crow recognized her insecurity in that area but he still loved her.

His full name is Simon Francis Trevino. At this point he's so used to Crow he actually reacts a millisecond later when someone calls him by his actual name.

He hasn't met his father but at this point he isn't even really interested in the guy. His mom didn't talk about him much either.

Crow got bullied as a kid. He did have some friends in the neighborhood, but not anyone at school. He went to a catholic school that was in a different area, meanwhile his neighborhood friends went to the local public school.

His family is originally from the domican republic, both of his grandparents were born there. His grandfather's family immigrated to the US when he was still a child. His grandmother immigrated to the US as a young adult.

He speaks spanish very poorly, much to his grandparents disappointment.

His grandpa is kinda too into toxic masculinity, he has tried to raise Crow to be "manlier" from day one.

He's also not a fan of the fact that Crow likes other guys but he's not outright disowning him over it. He's just kinda awkward about it.

Same with his grandma, she's leaning on being more accepting though.

Both still prefer to call him "creative" or "different" if it comes up around extended family or neighbors.

Around the time Crow was 13 he got into a fight with a bully over a stolen diary. The fight got more violent than anticipated and the bully ended up hitting Crow's head on the pavement, resulting in his eyebrow scar.

As per tradition in school, they both got expelled for a week for fighting, despite the fact that the bully had been the one stealing Crow's property. The bully was also clearly the one with the upperhand in the situation. Crow did start the fight... cough

Crow had already been lashing out a bit at some of his classmates for the bullying, and after that incident he was officially branded as a "problem child" by the school.

His grandparents made the decision to send him to bullworth academy, partially to set him straight (not like that) and partially to "toughen up" a bit.

Around the same time they, along with Crow's mom, had been planning that she could take full custody of him and move away to learn more independence and also have a more "conventional family life". So instead of just sending Crow to live in the dorms, he and his mom moved to bullworth where they rented an apartment and his mom went on to work from part-time job to job.

She even worked as a maid for the Harrington household for a bit, before being diagnosed with breast cancer and getting fired so that the Harringtons could avoid having to pay any sick leave.

Her cancer was diagnosed late, so it was already at stage IV, and it was one of the more aggressive forms of breast cancer (triple-negative).

Despite getting help from his grandparents, they could barely afford the treatments. Crow started doing odd jobs around town and eventually started selling stuff at school for some more cash. It proved to be more profitable than he initially thought, he was around 14 years old at the time.

Crow and his mom had already made plans to move back to New Jersey to save more money and to be more around family, but she passed away before that could happen.

Crow went back to New Jersey for a bit, attending her funeral and taking a break from school, but after a month he and his grandparents made the decision to send him back to Bullworth where he'd live in the dorms now.

Crow continued his side business at school mainly because he realized he liked the adrenaline rush of doing something that wasn't allowed, and that was before he was even selling cigarettes and alcohol.

At the age of 15 he started getting into that part of his business as well. He also started spending time in his dorm room learning how to forge signatures just to make counterfeit hall passes and such.

He also started smoking because he got too curious about cigarettes. And, well... he already had some packs to sell, might as well try one.

He doesn't stay at bullworth during christmas, preferring to go to his grandparents house.

Even though he spends a most of his time there doing chores and helping around the house.

And even though he doesn't like dressing up to go church every christmas morning.

He still wants to see his family.

And visit his mother's grave.

[ganondoodle]

(Original art) Xaror, any pronouns, species (?), age (?)

short summary about them; they act as both an antagonist and an ally since they are only really interested in what they want or whats fun to them, they are immortal and call themselves 'death itself' since they have a special connection to souls (being the only one able to communicate with them) and the ability to seperate souls from their bodies in such a way that nothing can harm the soul afterwards their main goal is to .. bother and disturb the 'celestials'*, which they hate, as much as they can, breaking into their palace, freeing prisoners, destroying research, destroying the place, and most importantly, making as many souls unusable to them as possible-

they dont want to destroy the celestials though, they cant fight them anyway and this game of doing 'good' only with the goal of annoying them is their most treasured activity, so Xaror doesnt intend to stop them from killing or hurting anyone, only from harvesting what they are actually after (though Xaror doesnt actually care as little as they think they do about people, and has a soft spot for demons)

most of their appearance is later into the story; Zaphira (the empress) had been in coma and the medical facility she was treated in was destroyed by Shargon (orange eyed demon who acts as her bodyguard for the first part) in an attempt to save her from her estranged relatives taking over her country after they heard of her decline in health, she is believed dead but washes up on the shore of the mountain Xaror resides at years later (it has a reason, too much to write here) and they slowly nurse her back to health, the reason they give for it is that they found their first encounter very fun, thats all (is it?)

(more lore under the cut bc this is already so long .. im trying to keep it short q-q ......... this is stuff i have been working on since i was a kid so uh, some things might be cheesy but i cant change them anymore ..)

just to get some basics out of the way; theres three worlds, the celestials palace, human world and demon world, each are their own planet connected via different gateways

*celestials (possibly not final name, loosely based on angels) are the last remaining "survivors" of their planets demise, when their world died the most powerful among them cannibalized the weaker to sustain themselves until there were only less than 10 left, who each turned into different beings from it and dont resemble their own people much anymore, they built a palace from what was left on their world that protects them from space as its atmosphere collapsed shortly after- however they still needed something to live off; they discover the human world and are delighted to find rather short lived people with powerful souls, the best kind of sustenance for them (now), they aim to herd them like cattle, but a problem arose when it turned out another world has long been in contact with the human world; demons

demons are semi immortal creatures that act as protectors for their world, protection they extended, more or less secretely, to the human world ensuring them a long and secure life- the celestials need them to die at their whim though (demons are few in numbers, hard to kill and rarely have offspring, not an ideal target); as they worked out a plan on how to get rid of demons one of the celestials, Xanthriel (time) grew somewhat fond of people as they spent alot of time in the human world to observe and research them; in the end turning on their own completely, but losing the fight against Uriel (knowledge)

Xanthriel was supposed to be executed for their betrayal, but it doesnt work, instead they are splintered into many parts after a lot of struggle, most body, memory and most strength is one part (ending up as motionless forever bleeding corpse kept locked up in the palace), the rest is some time later gathered together and reforms as a seperate, weak mockery of them, they embody Xanthriels emotion- Xaror, without memory, strangely cut to pieces (hence all the missing limbs and broken halo) but driven by an unstoppable desire to disturb the celestials (they live seperate long enough to each become their own person, at some point Xaror discovers Xanthriels body after all and they merge back together, though as they are now two, Xanthriel only takes over once directly after merging, stays silent for a long time and lets Xaror be themselves, only later revealing that they are there at all .. hiding perhaps- i rarely have specific ideas for voices, but Xanthriels is like, like coarse rocks being violently rubbed against each other, less voice more noise)

(also, the celestials use Xanthriels blood from the day of their execution to create a plague that nearly wipes out all demons, only the youngest of them survived, effectively robbing them of everything, culture, history, knowledge etc- as demons rarely have children, like a complete restart of their society, they disappeared from the human world, and over time being largely forgotten as actually existing- the celestials wanted them all gone however, so they kept kidnapping them to try and find somethign that would work similarly against the young ones too (and then in general, bc the only usable blood of Xanthriel was from the day of their fall, and that has long since been used up) one of the young ones was Shargon, he was the only one still alive from his group

(also, the celestials use Xanthriels blood from the day of their execution to create a plague that nearly wipes out all demons, only the youngest of them survived, effectively robbing them of everything, culture, history, knowledge etc- as demons rarely have children, like a complete restart of their society, they disappeared from the human world, and over time being largely forgotten as actually existing- the celestials wanted them all gone however, so they kept kidnapping them to try and find somethign that would work similarly against the young ones too (and then in general, bc the only usable blood of Xanthriel was from the day of their fall, and that has long since been used up) one of the young ones was Shargon, he was the only one still alive from his group (he wasnt the strongest or special, he was jsut the last in the row and always got the lowest dosage) when Xaror found them in yet another break in into the palace and got him back to the demon world .. where he was promptly blamed for the others that were taken and treated like a pretender/fake/spy bc what he got put through changed his eye color (something that demons cannot change in any form) to one that does not exist among 'real' demons (orange ... notice the inner color of Xarors broken halo? :) ), some even suggesting killing him, but none of them were brave enough to do it (they were all kids still) .. except Eadrya (the big blue-ish one, largely regarded as the strongest demon alive) but Shargon managed to escape, and since then lived largely in isolation- this is part of why he is so hated, and why he starts to spend so much time in the human world after rediscovering the pathway there)

[lagomorphics]

lucky card au thoughts..... smiles

i want the crowns to exist in some way (in this au the 'cults' are represented as the bishops influence over the specific area of Olden Faith Ave) + love it when theres magic going on sooo ive had a few ideas

i think the bishops 'god' status would be represented by something On their person (for nari; she has a pin on her vest that looks like the red crown! and has a giant tattoo on her back as well <3), and also theyre just straight up immortal/way stronger than a regular person

stuff like the mini bosses perhaps have a small accessory of sorts on them that is kinda like a statement of "more trusted/has more power", and definitely stronger than the average person (the witnesses would be even stronger) (hierarchy would be like. bishops > witnesses > mini bosses > lackeys)

these little accessories are also kinda like a 'bind' of sorts? kinda like saying to everyone that "this one has MY power and represents me", im also having way more fun and just saying that its kinda like the bishops are sharing a small bit of power directly from their 'crown'/'godlihood' (i'll find a better way to describe it eventually LMAO)

for Nari + Ines; she gave them a pretty big portion of that power in the form of a ring, did NOT tell them what it was for until they realised "holy shit, this thing can turn into a weapon. and i am Way stronger. what." and then later turned it into an earring because it being a ring flustered them way too much

Nari did this because Ines is the only person she has to deal with her siblings (still doesnt trust Jahel to not betray them lol), and so hes trying to give them a Massive fighting chance here.

"but what about Jahel?" well, they also have some of this power. wonder how they got that though 👀.....

[icewindandboringhorror]

finally finished all of one character's entire quests/optional dialogue/questions/etc.... 100,000 words... .... aughhh

[flaarre]

i’ve had some time to let it sink in that trump won so i’ll try to add my thoughts about trump winning. sketchy stuff happened during the election. there were people’s registration being revoked right before the election, there were bomb threats, there was an arson, republicans definitely tried to steal the election. i can’t say for certain if harris would’ve won if none of that happened but it’s important to remember the shady stuff republicans did. there was also obviously racism and misogyny, though i believe most of it came from right wingers who wouldn’t vote for a democrat anyways. another reason trump won is because of the democrat’s support of israel. there is a lot of division with both democrats and republicans about the israel palestine war. one thing i can say for certain is that will do worse than democrats. still, republicans may have capitalized off of the democrat’s support of israel. also some people didn’t vote at all because of their support. too many people have either decided not to vote or voted third party. this definitely didn’t help. but one thing that really surprised me was that trump won the popular vote. he lost it in 2016 and i thought people liked him less since then. i thought that at least he would lose the popular vote if he won but i guess not. but what now?

trump has said to christian conservatives that if he won they wouldn’t have to vote in 4 years and it will be fixed. he said he is planning on outright abolishing the presidential election. he also said he will be a dictator on day one of his presidency. but let’s be honest he’s just saying things. he would definitely love to abolish the election but the system is way too complicated to abolish it like that. even though the trump administration is gonna try horrible things that dictator comment was probably just meant to be an edgy joke. still he will cause damage and even worse the trump administration will be full of republicans much more principled than he is. they will try to enact project 2025. a lot of it won’t happen but it’s concerning that anything in project 2025 will happen. climate change will be worse. the rich and powerful will get even more rich and more powerful. same sex marriage might become illegal again at least for most states. gender affirming care will be much harder to get if it’s even possible and minors won’t get any of it. but they won’t be able to abolish the election. they won’t be able to make simply being queer illegal even if they get close. you can still survive 4 years.

i seriously doubt republicans will win next election. they will cause long term damage but not all hope is lost. what they want more than anything for all marginalized minorities is for them to be gone. so try your hardest to not let them win. this is a low point but it will get better. so please try your hardest to survive. if for no other reason, keep going out of spite. it will be hard but we can do this.

i’ve always tried to be an optimist. i thought that harris would win by a lot and it would be way less close than everyone was thinking. i’ve been telling myself about the blue shift and how harris has improved so much since the counting started. but idk how to stay optimistic anymore. i can’t see harris winning anymore. i can hardly believe what is happening right now. idk how she could win enough votes. idk what i’m gonna do if trump wins. i know most things on project 2025 won’t happen but republicans will try and it will still damage this country. hopefully california will be alright because i don’t wanna move. i’ve lived in california all my life and i don’t wanna leave my friends and family. i’m fortunate to live in california but i really hope marginalized people living in red states will be alright. even if it will be hell we need to survive.

[mintowls]

FIRST EVER ARTIST ALLEY TABLE DONE!!!

[pokimoko]

I have had it with these motherfucking spam bots on this motherfucking site.

[isfjmel-phleg]

🥜

[cuteniaarts]

@katkastrofa, circa 40-ish hours ago: Hey, what if our newest bunch of OCs adopted a baby from one of the other brothel girls who knew she couldn’t afford to raise one? That would make for some fun shenanigans :D

Me, with a notoriously non existent sleep schedule, instinct of self preservation or concern for my poor wrist: Alright, bet. Watch how fast I can make you fall in love with this hypothetical baby >:)

Daneli as a gentle and loving caretaker-turned-adoptive-mother is something that can be So Personal, actually, and originally I was going to leave it at this quick sketch, but then I got carried away thinking about what this child will grow up to be like raised by this little gang of misfits, so…

Here she is!! A little older and so, so beautiful, I need more of her in my life immediately, she’s way too precious

And, because I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t also add a sapphic element to this absolute cinnamon roll, a small crack ship that I’m only half serious about for when she’s a little older still:

All in all, we may be getting impossibly far from canon, but I for one already cannot get enough of sweet darling Kumisai <3

(I fully drew three pieces from scratch in 9 hours I cannot feel my brain or my hands anymore send help)