#core safari

[maxphotoarchive]

August 29, 2024

[realsafari]

picture me, in highschool, attempting to act normal after getting sudden intrusive thoughts of being railed within an inch of my life in math class

[vulcanette]

didn’t expect to immediately start sobbing listening to Patrick’s new work ♥️

[wiswolf]

mark mckenna is so wisten coded and i’m so tempted to use him now

[invinciblelikeu]

he’s so chronically online i love him

[reunitedinterlude]

safari zone core / golf gay

[kayleighjennifer]

Mean (Leah Williamson x reader)

As a Putellas and Alexia’s little sister, it was a huge shock for everyone when your transfer from Barcelona to Arsenal got announced.

Fans guessed that it is because you’re always in your big sister’s shadow or wanting to gain new experiences. Both aren’t particularly wrong but the real reason for your transfer is the naked blonde goddess, who is tangled naked in your sheets in the house you got raised in.

You have been dating for a year now and with every month passed, the distance got harder so you decided that you’d leave your home country and join the WSL. This week will be your last one in Barcelona for a while so you and Leah decided to spend the summer break with your family.

Eli, Alba, Alexia, Olga and the two of you spend the holidays in South Africa first, two weeks of beautiful cities and landscapes and an amazing safari, being able to see the big three and even penguins. After the two weeks all of you went back to Spain so you could pack the last things.

Yesterday Leah, Olga, the Barcelona girls and you went out to celebrate the last time and you had a great time, spend by laughing, drinking and dancing.

You turn to your girlfriend with a smile. It will be hard not being able to see your family everyday but you’re certain that it’s the right decision.

You push a bit of hair out of Leah’s face and place a kiss on her beautiful lips. The next few minutes are being spend by you adoring Leah, while she’s slowly stirring awake.

“Good morning cariño, slept well?” Due to the fact that you’re still tired, your Spanish accent sound even heavier than normally. Leah loves it and even now, being barely awake, it sends an electric feeling through her body, leaving her definitely turned on.

“Mhm, and you?” Leah turns to you, the sheet falling down, which leaves a heavily sigh of her exposed body. You bite your lip and nod, not being able to look away.

Your girlfriend notices it of course and smirks. “Baby girl, my eyes are up here, remember?” She grabs your chin and makes you look into her, by now, dark blue eyes. You nod and rub your tights together, trying to get some sort of relieve.

“Aw, baby, you know the rules. I want you to use your words, don’t I?” Leah looks directly into your eyes, holding intense eye contact. “Leah, my sisters and my mom are downstairs, we can’t do it right now”. You try to convince her but your body language betrays you directly.

“Just keep quiet and nobody will notice babe”. She hovers above you by now and connects your lips in a needy kiss, not even waiting for your answer.

You grab her hips and push her even more into you. Your body feels like it’s on fire and vice versa for Leah. “Hmh good girl”. She praises you and you move your head to the side, giving Leah better access to your neck.

She starts to leave wet kisses everywhere, marking your weak spot. One of her hand starts massaging your breast, the other one starts playing with your clit, making you a needy mess quickly. “Fuck Leah, please”. You breathe out.

“Mhm what do you need love?” You don’t have to look at Leah to know that she’s smirking at you. “Your fingers, more please!” You beg her and your body arches off the bed when you’re nearly reaching your peak.

Leah chuckles and suddenly removes her fingers from your body. “What? Leah?” You pout and try to get her hands to your dripping core. “Babygirl, like you just said, we shouldn’t fuck in the house you grew up in and besides judging by the delicious smell, breakfast is ready” She smiles at you innocently.

“You’re so mean” You pout, but start to make yourself look not fucked, which is a bit hard due to the hickeys Leah left.

[legend-as-old-as-time]

Inspired by @muaka-safari's analysis of Vakama's relation to anger.

My hypothesis: Nokama, while stressed too about fulfilling her duty, has a different core issue in relation to it. Rather than the aspect of fulfilling a command by her leader, she constantly thinks of her behavior. For her, her conduct is part of her duty.

She has to act a certain way. She has to be in a certain way, or she is failing.

Which makes sense. She is a teacher, after all. She has to be a role model for her students. But what if it went deeper than that?

Nokama puts a lot of stock in order, reflecting her Metru and the vahki assigned to this metru: The bordakh. These vahki carry staffs of loyalty that instill uncompromising desire for social order.

Official material depicting in-universe information describes Ga-Metru in a very flattering light. It's the city's spiritual center and said to be favored by Mata Nui himself.

None of the Ga-Metru hold any jobs in terms of repair, manifacturing, or engineering. Matoran from other Metru do these jobs for them. Ga-Metru is privileged.

But like with everything in Metru Nui, this is only one side. The side most would think about first, whether as good or bad. The other one of this reputation means that all ga-matoran must be peaceful, right? They are orderly, spiritual, wise, etc. Otherwise Mata Nui wouldn't love their Metru as much.

Ooof. Of course, some would feel arrogant about that. But mostly, that'd be a lot of pressure. If you're the favorite of the city's most important person - your God - then you have to show it that you're showing reasons why you're the favorite? And keep it up all the time?

I doubt all ga-matoran took it that deeply to heart, but some of them likely did. They have to act responsibly. Among them is Nokama.

Remember what I said farther up in the post that she thinks she has to act in and be a certain way? We see it regularly.

Nokama in the movie and in the movie's novelization [[gave the Po-Matoran a sharp look. “Your negativity pollutes this sanctuary, builder.”]]

She snaps at Matau and tells him they have to take their duties as toa seriously.

She scolds herself after she argues with Vakama in the Archives. Never mind that it's a genuinely stressful situation and the others barely ever consider that they themselves need to make an effort to argue less. In my reading it felt like she deemed it more a moral failing of hers rather than a practical concern?

She tries to mentor Vakama and steer him into the direction of being leader. We're never given a concrete in-universe reason. (Out-of-universe, the writers clearly pushed the fire toa into the leader role.) But maybe Nokama saw it as her duty and responsibility to keep teaching in the one way she could, if she wouldn't teach matoran anymore? (Not to mention that's the only connection to her old life that she still has.)

She asserts that she's a toa in the comics when Nidhiki mocks her, Matau, and Vakama to be overgrown matoran.

Feeling rejected by the Great Temple when she enters it as Toa Hordika deals a heavy blow to her. She feels impure, as if she's longer fit as she is to serve the Great Spirit in his regard.

She has a rage breakdown, yelling that "She's still a toa!"

On the other end, Nokama notably has moments as Toa Hordika, while she's trying to calm down and find stability with Gaaki's help, where she doesn't seem to care about her previous high standards anymore. She feels tempted to give into her hordika side and is much more reckless, less thinking about how she acts as a toa.

She also makes an effective and chaotic team with Matau. As @crystaltoa pointed it out, they both are now "hold my beer" types, while they act about each other as "I can't take you anywhere with me!"

As if the transformation into a hordika beast, which looks nothing like a toa's supposed to, has freed Nokama from a great weight.

(@crystaltoa She might still think back on the Great Temple, however, and wonder if the stain on her from being transformed into a Toa Hordika remains.)

[staticair]

[safari zone core]

[danandphilupdates]

safari zone core 🐛

phil insta post

30/6/23

[inficetegodwottery]

A call for aid from Firefox Users

I have absolutely no fucking idea how to solve these problems, and there are asks with no answers all over the internet elsewhere that are years old.

There is a weirdly hostile atmosphere on Reddit's Firefox boards to asking questions about features Firefox doesn't seem to have. And obviously, official support forums are about as helpful as they ever are. Given that I've seen and reblogged countless extremely informative posts about Firefox stuff on Tumblr, I just have to hope one of you guys knows answers to some of these issues.

Because I want to move away from Chrome. I really, really do. It is a constant source of stress and fear at this point. Google is an insanely evil fucking company and I despise them, and admire Firefox's stances on privacy and commitment to user security. But I cannot use a browser that lacks so many of the organizational elements I'm used to using in order to deal with my extreme neurodivergence and inability to process information all at once combined with my tendency towards flitting from one train of thought to another constantly.

Using Firefox (I've tried to switch five times over six or seven years) in the past has been overwhelming and stressful and completely devoid of certain features I could use to control those feelings on browsers like Chrome, Opera, and even Safari.

So if anyone has any solutions or suggestions for the specific issues I describe below, it would be an enormous weight off my shoulders, and help me feel a lot safer than I do now.

I'll admit that my tab fever is insane, and I've regularly racked up 2000+ tabs on Chrome. But I can sleep/unload just about all of those tabs constantly, making it so I can keep my trains of thought completely paused without the slightest impact on my computer's performance while I work on something else, and come right back to them without having to dig through the Bookmark system. And the way I generally keep that insane number of bookmarks organized is with separate windows and TAB GROUPING. Bless tab grouping, the saviour of my sanity. With that feature, I can have a completely organized tab tree with color coding, searchable groups, easily group and ungroup tabs or move them to different windows, and I can manage all of them from the same UI I'm managing ungrouped tabs from.

This is a feature which Firefox appears to fundamentally lack, despite apparently having had it implemented fully at some point.

I will say that I tried several addons before making this post, specifically Simple Tab Groups, which was atrocious, and Panorama View actually looks fantastic, but also.... Firefox has placed a security warning on that one. Great.

So if anyone knows of a hidden browser settings option, an overlooked tab grouping addon, or some other way to implement that feature on Firefox, I would be eternally in your debt. I just do not have the ability to process or work on a browser that I can only have like forty tabs open without losing track of everything I'm doing because they're all on a single ribbon. Or completely overloading my RAM.

On that note, is there any setting to make the browser use less memory? I've had the core process run up to almost a dozen gigs of RAM with only twenty tabs open, and there's absolutely no way it needed all that processing power for four YouTube tabs and a bunch of settings pages.

Lastly, there are a number of times while I was using Firefox that I lost power or the program crashed (and it crashed a LOT) and I lost everything. Every tab, every bit of work I was doing at the time, with no way to recover them. I've had that happen with Chrome too, but WAY less often, and when it recovers all my tabs it does so while PRESERVING MY TAB GROUPS, and it also doesn't load every tab in until I actually move to that tab. Firefox loads every tab it's recovering all at once, which usually completely locks up my computer.

At this point I'm pretty much only using Firefox to watch YouTube videos past the adblock, despite desperately wanting to transfer literally everything over to a browser that I KNOW is the safer and better option. But every time I've tried, the total inability to organize like I used to, losing all my progress and being unable to regain it whatsoever, or just using up four times the amount of resources that my browsing would on another platform has drive me away. I don't want to be driven away. I want to solve this, but I've had to accept that I can't do that alone.

I greatly appreciate any help or advice anyone can give. Even if just only one of these questions gets answered or only one of these problems gets solved, that's a win in my books. And thank you for reading, even if you don't have any of the answers I'm looking for.

[swanqueenffprompter]

Regina Mills is trapped in a life she never wanted. At 33, she works tirelessly for her mother, Cora, at the family’s powerful company—a position she loathes but feels obligated to uphold. Her relationship with her mother is strained at best, and her thoughts often drift to the father she hasn't seen in 28 years. Henry Mills, her beloved father, disappeared from her life when Cora took her away after their bitter divorce. He left for South Africa, where he built a new life running a safari, and she hasn't heard from him since.

One day, Regina receives an unexpected letter from a South African lawyer. Her father has passed away, leaving her his pride and joy: the safari. The news shakes her to the core. Despite the anger and resentment she feels for being abandoned, something compels her to pack her bags and head to South Africa.

Upon arrival, she is greeted by the wild beauty of the African savannah—a stark contrast to the cold, sterile world she's used to. But as soon as she steps foot on the safari, she clashes with Emma Swan, a fiercely independent and stubborn worker who has been with the safari for years. Emma isn't thrilled about Regina's sudden appearance, and they quickly butt heads over how things should be run.

As the days pass, Regina begins to uncover secrets about her father and herself that she never imagined. Meanwhile, despite their initial animosity, the chemistry between Regina and Emma becomes undeniable. Sparks fly, and beneath the tension, an unexpected bond forms.

But with Cora trying to pull Regina back into the corporate world and Emma wrestling with her own past, they’ll need to navigate more than just the wild terrain to find a path forward—both for the safari and for themselves. Will they give in to the passion growing between them, or will their differences tear them apart before they even begin?

[pinof]

safari zone core 🐛

[hannahmanderr]

For @scarletsaphire's ask in response to this ask game. Prompt was #19 for Gray Ghost.

important blob ghost context here lol

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Danny, I swear there’d better be a good answer to why you brought me to the freaking dumpster behind the Nasty Burger at two in the morning.”

He turned back to look at her with a sheepish grin. “Aw, come on Val, I know how to show a girl a good time.” 

That earned him a thwack on the back of his head.

“Ow! Okay, okay, lesson learned,” he grumbled, rubbing where she’d hit him. 

“I’m still serious about having a good answer,” she said. She hugged herself tightly. “And thanks for warning me to bring a jacket by the way. Why can’t I put my suit on again?”

“You’ll scare them off.”

Valerie stopped in her tracks. “Them? Oh my God, do not tell me you brought me here to a dumpster to see ghosts!”

“Hey, you already established the dumpster thing!” he said, still wearing his goofy grin. “And I won’t tell you I brought you here to see ghosts, ‘cause I brought you here to meet ghosts.”

“... You are about three seconds away from getting shoved into your own thermos, ghost boy. Human or not.”

He finally dropped the grin. “Right. Sorry. Serious mode. But, uh, I am being serious about meeting a few ghosts.”

She frowned. “I thought we talked about this.”

“I know, I know. And I promise I’m not trying to change your mind or anything, I just… wanted to show you.”

He watched her carefully, trying to read her poker face. He hoped she believed him about not wanting to try and influence her. She’d made him promise, after all, and he didn’t break his promises.

Especially to someone like her.

Even if she was so close, yet still so far.

When she didn’t respond, he ventured further. “Think of it like evidence or something. Or - or when you go into a safari and you just watch animals do their thing in their natural habitat.”

“Isn’t their natural habitat the Ghost Zone?”

“Eh, sort of? There’s enough ambient ectoplasm around Amity for them to sustain themselves, I think. Plus I kinda get the feeling I’m like a magnet for the stuff, and since I’m always here…”

He tried not to shy away under her piercing gaze, as pretty as it was.

No. Bad Fenton. Friend.

Finally, she sighed heavily. “Alright. Show me what you got. But only because you already dragged me out here in the middle of the night, okay? This isn’t gonna be a regular thing.”

“Yes!” he said with a fist pump. He realized how stupid he probably looked, but he was too excited to care.

He turned toward the dumpster, trying to ignore the odor drifting out from the one opened side. Taking a deep breath, he put his fingers to his mouth, and with a little bit of energy from his core fused into his breath, he whistled soundlessly.

Soundlessly to humans, anyway.

Valerie tilted her head. “... What the heck are you doing?”

He shot her a grin. “Consider it the dinner bell.”

The first one faded into visibility right in front of Valerie’s face. She squeaked in very uncharacteristic surprise, and Danny didn’t miss how her hand twitched up to her bag, where he knew she stowed a spare blaster or two. To his relief, she didn’t move her hand any further and instead let the ghost drift towards him with a wary glare.

The little blob ghost was round, bright green and about the size of a grapefruit. Actually a pretty decent size for a blob ghost like this. Its core glimmered brightly from within its fluid body.

It floated towards him with curiosity brimming in its red, beady eyes. “Brrrp?” it ‘said’ as it bumped against Danny’s cheek. The sound could only be described as the perfect midpoint between a chirp and a purr.

He smiled widely and used one finger to scratch the underside of the blob. “Heya Jeff,” he said, making sure to pour as much affection as he could into his voice. In return, Jeff chirped again and nuzzled against his neck contentedly.

Valerie seemed to be frozen in place, not sure whether to be upset, disturbed, or endeared. Her eyes flicked back and forth between the blob sitting on Danny’s shoulder and Danny himself. “... You named a blob ghost Jeff?”

“Not me. Uh, Kat I think her name is. The cashier? In the year above us?”

Her eyebrows lifted at the name. “That’s who she’s been going on and on about? I thought she was talking about a puppy or something!”

“Mmm, nope. Probably this Jeff. I’m assuming anyway.” He scratched Jeff again. “Where’s everyone else?” he murmured, this time in ghost speak.

He didn’t really like having to speak ghost in front of Valerie, especially as she was still getting used to all his weirdness, but the blob ghosts didn’t really understand much beyond the common ghost language. Through some trial and error, he and Tucker and Sam had found that they seemed to understand human languages if there was enough emotion behind whatever was being said, but it had to be a pretty strong emotion, and even then it was hit or miss. They still always responded to Danny best, anyway.

Blob ghost communication aside, he couldn’t help but wince just slightly when he saw her troubled reaction to the ghost speak. Her face exploded with surprise before melting back into a guarded caution.

Jeff chirped a response before floating off his shoulder and zooming inside the dumpster. “Where’s he going?” Valerie asked quietly.

“Getting the rest of his family.”

Sure enough, a few seconds later, Jeff emerged from the open dumpster lid, followed closely by a dozen or so more blob ghosts, each of varying size and transparency, but all sharing the same green color. They all swarmed Danny, rubbing up against his face and shoulders and arms and brrrping happily.

He laughed at the ticklish sensation. “Alright, alright, cut it out guys!”

They in fact did not cut it out. If anything, they just cuddled up to him more. Excitement radiated from their tiny little auras.

Even through the bombardment of affection, he managed to catch a glimpse of Valerie’s face soften into slight amusement, even trying to stifle a laugh herself.

That alone made his heart and core soar far higher than any attention the blob ghosts could give him.

“Red, I’d like to formally introduce you to the Nasty clan,” he said proudly, attempting (and somehow failing) to gesture to the ghosts around him.

She pulled a bit of a face, but Danny didn’t sense any increase in hostility or wariness. “That’s not very nice.”

“I mean that’s what everyone calls them.”

“... Everyone?” Her eyes followed a particularly excited blob, only about the size of a grape, zipping around Danny’s head. 

“Yeah. A bunch of employees kind of took up naming them all, since they’re always hanging around here.” He glanced at her. “Honestly, I thought you would’ve known about them by now. Especially with your trackers and all.”

She scowled. “Daddy made me promise to keep them off during shifts after I got written up for ditching to help stop that one ghost who was tearing up the boardwalk.”

“Oh yeah, I remember that guy! You should’ve seen me trying to get off the Tilt-a-Whirl after they emergency stopped it so I could find a place to change. I just kept crashing into things.”

“Isn’t that what you normally do anyway?” she teased, a genuine laugh bursting from her lips. It sent Danny blushing deep red for more reasons than one.

Sticking out his lip in a pretend pout, he plopped down right onto the cement and folded his legs underneath him. “You hear that?” he asked the blobs, not caring that they probably didn’t understand a word of what either of them were saying. “She’s being mean to me.”

“Hey, you asked for it, bringing me out here in the middle of the night.” She knelt in front of him, nearly touching her knees to his. His heart skipped a beat as he realized how close she was.

No! We’re not doing this! Think of something else!

“They have a real name too,” he blurted in a desperate attempt to immediately derail this train, abort, abort -

“A real name?”

He cleared his throat as Jeff settled into his lap. His hands instinctively wrapped around him gently and began petting. “Well, like, an actual name. A ghost name.”

She watched as Jeff began to purr contentedly and flatten himself against Danny’s legs. “Will you tell me?” she asked quietly, refusing to meet his eyes.

Crap. Of course he didn’t think this through. Of course. “I - well, um, the thing is, there’s - there’s not exactly an English equivalent…”

“... Tell me anyway.”

His eyes jerked up to see her staring intently, a complete contrast to how she’d just been moments ago. The light of the blob ghosts’ glows cast a glimmer in her gorgeous green eyes, making him swallow thickly.

“Vakrot,” he whispered in ghost speech. “I… it kind of means ‘potato’? But not exactly? Ancients, I don’t know how to explain this…”

“Potato,” she repeated with a smile of disbelief. She shook her head. “Figures. They’re kind of shaped like potatoes anyway.”

He tried to calm his heart as another blob - this one nicknamed Pepsi, for some reason - nestled into his hair. They were way too tuned into emotions, and agitating them wasn’t going to do any favors. “I guess I never thought of that. I always assumed it’s because they like french fries so much? But now that I think about it, it’s not like there’s exactly a ghost equivalent of french fries - well, I did have these things one time at this little stand out past the Carnivorous Canyon, and they tasted a lot like fries, but they were in little balls, and Tucker -”

He blushed again when she held up a hand to stop his babbling. “Is that why you had me bring these?” she asked, pulling a paper bag out of her own.

He grinned. “Yeah. I thought you might like to try and feed them.”

“Feed them?” She raised an eyebrow. “Doesn’t that kind of go against the idea of it just being observation?”

Two of the blob ghosts were trying to squeeze themselves into the bag already. He snatched it away and held it shut tightly. Those things could be slippery when they wanted to be. “It’s fiiine,” he said with a drawl. “People do it all the time. It’s like feeding the ducks at the park or something.”

“You know that’s bad for the ducks, right? And wildlife experts are always having to tell people to quit feeding animals.”

He dropped his hands into his lap, bag and all, nearly squishing Jeff. “Killjoy.”

Now it was Valerie’s turn to grin sheepishly, though hers seemed far more timid. “Look, someone’s gotta keep you in check, Fenton. You may be trying to babysit Amity Park, but you need a babysitter of your own half the time.”

Hmm. He did not know how he should feel about her calling herself his babysitter.

Trying to shove those thoughts away too, he offered the bag out to her. “Come on,” he said, as if he were coaxing a puppy. “You know you want to.”

She stared at the bag, then at him. Then at the bag again. His heart thrummed faster despite himself.

After nearly a minute of contemplation, she slowly took the bag and opened it. The blob ghosts immediately caught a whiff of its greasy contents and drifted over, chirping and purring. Danny noticed how her muscles tensed ever so slightly, and he gulped.

He was worried for the blob ghosts, thank you very much. He was absolutely not thinking about how well-defined her arms looked in the pale glow.

Nope.

Valerie, with a look of trepidation, took a single fry from the bag and held it out gingerly towards the tiny grape ghost that had been racing around Danny’s head. It didn’t need any more invitation before it simply stuck the end of the fry through its body, nearly running into its teeny core. 

Danny couldn’t help but grin wildly as Valerie’s face morphed into one of fascination. The best thing about blob ghosts was their translucent exterior, which gave them a perfect view of how the little ghost - Pipp, if he remembered correctly - swam its ectoplasm around the portion of fry it had absorbed. The little portion of fry dissolved away and funneled into its core, causing it to glow the slightest bit brighter.

His felt like his face was going to split open as her wide eyes found his. “Cool, right?” he asked eagerly.

She was already holding the fry out to Pipp again. “I… I never knew they could eat,” she whispered. “I never knew it could be so beautiful.”

If only you knew how beautiful you really are.

His stomach started doing somersaults. 

He was so, absolutely, 100 percent screwed.

He forced himself to swallow and grab a fry for himself, offering it to Jeff, who immediately absorbed the entire thing in one go. Much like Pipp’s, Jeff’s glow radiated stronger.

“These guys are the best kind of ghosts for converting stuff into ectoplasmic energy,” he explained. Was his voice really shaking that badly, or was it just his anxiety talking? “That’s why there’s so many of them. They can keep themselves going on practically anything. And then they like to kind of put themselves right around ambient ectoplasm and help feed back into it.”

“Like a weird, unalive version of a tree.” Her voice was breathy. “A tree that likes french fries.”

He couldn’t help but giggle. “That’s… surprisingly accurate?” he said as he made a grab for a few more fries.

They spent the next few minutes slowly feeding fries to the blob ghost clan, laughing as one named Bingus (God, that name cracked him up) nearly absorbed Pepsi in a rush to get to a fry first, cooing with pity at the ones who got left out, and chatting back and forth about ectoplasm and ghost biology.

That last one made his core sing with just how genuinely fascinated she was with the science of it all.

Soon enough, they were surrounded by brightly glowing blob ghosts, lighting up the area like tiny green fairy lights. Pepsi had nestled herself back into Danny’s hair again, and Bingus perched on Valerie’s shoulder. Each of them held a blob in their lap, and other than one that had randomly decided to stick itself to Danny’s elbow, the rest drifted around the two of them in a lazy, post-french fry bliss.

Danny offered his last fry to Pepsi as he watched Valerie gently stroke Jeff in her lap. His stomach was still doing somersaults, and the urge to say something - anything - to her was becoming impossible to resist.

“Hey,” he said quietly. Thank the Ancients he could do without a little less oxygen, because he was pretty sure he was breathing way too shallowly. “I… I’m sorry.”

She looked up at him in confusion. “For what?”

Breathe in, Fenton. “I promised you I wouldn’t try and push you. Back when we - when I finally told you the truth.” Breathe out. “You said you wanted time to figure things out for yourself, and you didn’t want to be rushed. And - and then I go and do something like this…”

She didn’t break her gaze on him. “I’m guessing… this isn’t just about the ghosts, is it?” she said with a quiver in her own voice.

He didn’t know how it happened. He couldn’t feel his own limbs. All he knew was he felt himself lean forward and she leaned forward just a split second later and her lips were on his and his lips were on hers and they were sharing the most tender, soft kiss he’d ever experienced under the warm glow of all the little blob ghosts.

He wanted to leap. He wanted to fly. He wanted to dive to the ground and pull himself up at the last second and laugh at the thrill it left in his stomach.

None of it would compare to the thrill he felt kissing her.

And yet…

Something in the back of his mind desperately tried to pull on the reins. This isn’t right. 

You’re still pushing her.

You’re taking advantage of her.

That had him crashing back down to Earth.

Shaking, his heart and core aching, Danny opened his eyes and pulled back just far enough to take his lips off hers. Valerie’s eyes flew open as she felt his warm kiss disappear.

Their foreheads were still close enough to touch. Desperately trying not to break down, he rested his against hers and gently grabbed one of her hands. 

“I… I don’t…” he whispered, struggling to find the words through the haze of his panging heart. “Are you… do you… really want to do this?”

He had to ask.

Even if the answer broke his heart.

For a few impossibly long seconds, her green eyes bore into his blue, and another pang rippled through him as he drank in the tiny galaxies he could see behind her gaze.

And then she had her hands on his cheeks and her lips on his again, kissing him with an insatiable fervor. He found himself too stunned to do anything at first, and as soon as he could comprehend the situation, he was reciprocating just as longingly, holding her waist as if his half-life depended on it.

If he had been flying before, he had shot beyond the stars now.

Something flickered behind his closed eyelids, but it was the farthest thing from his mind. This moment, right here right now, this was the only thing that mattered. The only thing that existed. The only thing he could ever want and need, filling his heart and core with a love he couldn’t put into words.

And if her kiss was any indication of how she felt, if the emotion radiating from her entire being was true, then she felt the exact same love in that moment.

This time when the kiss broke, it was mutual. They stayed there on their knees, foreheads pressed to one another, both catching their breath and trying to calm their fluttering hearts.

He kept his eyes closed. He wanted to savor this. Memorize every detail. Memorize the feeling of her mouth on his. Memorize each feeling soaring through him at top speed.

“Um, Danny?”

His eyes popped open. “Wha- oh.”

So that’s what the flicker had been.

The blob ghosts hadn’t moved, but now instead of their normal green, their cores shone in a glittery gold, piercing through their translucent skin and casting the two in a soft, golden glow.

He lifted his head as he stared at them in wonder. “Oh Ancients, of course.”

“What? What happened to them?” she asked. A distant part in the back of his mind trilled happily at how concern for the little ghosts filled her voice.

He grinned shyly. “Okay, so um… you know how I said blob ghosts can take like, almost anything and turn it into energy?”

She narrowed her eyes. “Yeah…?”

“I think, um… I think they might’ve felt our emotion? Since it was so strong? And converted it into energy?”

Red tinged her cheeks. “And what the heck did we do that made it turn gold?”

Well.

He was pretty sure he knew the answer. If the pull in his heart was anything to go by.

Instead, he let his grin widen. She was so going to hate him for this. “I mean, those fries came from McDonald’s right? The golden arches?”

As expected, her fist landed right on his bicep, forceful enough to startle the blob ghost latched onto his elbow but not strong enough to hurt. “Okay, yeah, I deserved that.”

Valerie shook her head with a blinding smile. “You’re such an idiot.”

She laughed and threw her arms around his neck, kissing him again in the light of the warm, gold glow.

[the-sleepy-archivist]

Favorite Firefox Extensions

Firefox is a very extensible browser - through a combinations of addons and userscripts you can make it behave just about any way you want. The best part is, they're all free. Here are some of my favorites.

Note: if you have an Android device, check out my post about Firefox for Android's new extended support for addons!

Note: if you have an Apple device, check out my favorite Safari extensions here!

Last updated June 2024 (fixed link for Bypass Paywalls Clean).

Index:

uBlock Origin

Tab Session Manager

Sauron

Bypass Paywalls Clean

Auto Tab Discard

Video DownloadHelper

Highlight or Hide Search Engine Results

TWP - Translate Web Pages

UnTrap - YouTube Customizer

Indie Wiki Buddy

Cookie Auto Delete

ShopSuey - Get Rid of Ads on Amazon and Ebay

LibraryExtension

uBlock Origin

(compatible with Firefox for Android)

This is the first addon I install on any new Firefox browser. It's an adblocker, but at its core it can remove pretty much any HTML element from a website, and it comes with pre-configured lists for removing everything from ads to cookie banners to those annoying popups that ask you to sign up for email newsletters.

Tab Session Manager

Have you ever accidentally lost all your open browser tabs due to a computer update, or even just accidentally closing Firefox? With this addon you no longer have to worry about that - it automatically saves your open tabs and windows every time the browser closes, and autosaves a restore point of tabs every few minutes in case the browser crashes unexpectedly. Opening all your previous tabs and windows is a one-click deal.

Sauron

Ever wished your favorite website had a dark mode? With Sauron, now it can! Sauron attempts to intelligently figure out how to edit the color scheme of the web page (including text) to make it dark-mode friendly. It preserves the original color of images, but dims them so that they don't blind you. You can disable image dimming or dark mode on a site by site basis too. It's not perfect since it is making guesses about which colors to change, but it goes a long way toward making the internet an enjoyable place for me.

Bypass Paywalls Clean

This addon removes paywalls from hundreds of news websites around the world or adds links to open the article in a wrapper that provides the article text (like the Internet Archive etc.)

Auto Tab Discard

Ever wanted to keep a tab open for later use, but you notice the browser getting slower and slower the more tabs you have open? Auto Tab Discard will automatically "hibernate" tabs that you haven't used in a while so that they use less resources on your computer. It's smart enough not to hibernate pages that are playing media (like YouTube) or that have forms you haven't submitted yet (like job applications). You can customize how fast it puts tabs to sleep too and exclude certain websites from hibernating at all.

Video DownloadHelper

This addon can download streaming videos from most modern (HTML5) websites, and even finds soft subtitles that accompany the stream and downloads those too. Just browse to the webpage that has the video on it, click the icon in the Firefox toolbar, and select the video you want to download and click "Quick Download". For YouTube I would recommend using a YT downloader website (like KeepVid) to download the video directly, but Video DownloadHelper really shines for websites that aren't popular enough to have dedicated downloader websites like that. I've used it download videos from a Japanese film festival streaming portal, news websites, etc.

Highlight or Hide Search Engine Results

This addon allows you to blacklist websites and completely remove them from Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo search results. Don't want to see image search results from AI websites? Blacklist them. Searching for tech support advice and getting frustrated by all the auto-generated junk websites that stuff themselves full of SEO terms to jump to the top of the search results without actually providing any information at all? Blacklist them so they don't come up in your next search. Conversely, you can also whitelist websites that you know and trust so that if they ever come up in future search results, they'll be highlighted with a color of your choosing for visibility.

TWP - Translate Web Pages

(compatible with Firefox for Android)

Does what it says on the tin: auto-detects a website's language and provides a button that can translate it to a language of your choosing. You can also just select individual text on the page and translate just that. Note that this sends whatever text you translate to the servers of your selected translation service (Google, Bing, Yandex, or DeepL), so keep in mind the privacy implications if you don't want your IP address associated with having read that text.

Edit: As of version 118, Firefox now has the ability to translate text locally on your computer, without needing to send it to a cloud service. You can enable this in Settings -> Translation -> Install languages for offline translation. Note that at this time (May 2024), 18 (mostly European) languages are supported. More info here.

UnTrap for YouTube

(compatible with Firefox for Android and they have a Safari for iOS extension too)

This addon lets you tweak the YouTube interface and hide anything you don't want to see. For instance, I hide all the "recommended" videos that come up when you search YT now. They have nothing to do with your search, so they're essentially just ads YT puts in your search results. I also hide Explore, Trending, More from YouTube, and Shorts sections, but you can customize it to fit your preferences.

Note: depending on the particular set of tweaks you want to make to YouTube, you may prefer to use YouTube Search Fixer instead. User preference.

Indie Wiki Buddy

I loathe Fandom.com wiki sites - they are cluttered and filled with ads and autoplaying videos that follow you down the page as you scroll. The organization is also hostile - if a community tries to leave their platform and bring their content to a new wiki hoster, Fandom bans them from the platform and reverts all their deletions/changes. Indie Wiki Buddy attempts to find an independent alternative for the wiki you're trying to browse and automatically redirects you to it, and if one doesn't exist, it will redirect you to a proxy site like antifandom or breezewiki that shows the Fandom content but removes all ads/videos/background images so you can actually, you know. READ it.

Cookie Auto Delete

(compatible with Firefox for Android)

Websites store "cookies" - little text files with info about you - on your computer as you browse so they can track you as you browse the internet. This addon automatically deletes cookies from a website a short while after you close the last tab you had open for that site. You can customize how long it waits before clearing cookies too. Note that this can sign you out of many websites, so you can whitelist any site you don't want cookies cleared for.

ShopSuey - Get Rid of Ads on Amazon and Ebay

Removes the ads/recommended products that clutter up Amazon and Ebay search results and product pages.

LibraryExtension

This fantastic addon recognizes when you are viewing a book on many popular websites and can automatically check whether that book is available in any of the library systems or subscription services you have access to, including how many copies your library(ies) have and how many are currently checked out. The best part is it shows the availability for physical books, ebooks, AND audiobooks at supported libraries. The extension currently supports libraries in Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, but it also supports some global repositories like the Internet Archive and subscription services like NLS Bard for the blind and print disabled, Kobo Plus, Libro.fm, Anyplay.fm, Bookmate, and Everand. Great extension for people trying to support their local library and also save money.

Filtering+ for Tumblr

This addon lets you add tags or phrases to your tumblr tag filters with two clicks, without leaving the dashboard. I've been asking Tumblr for this tag filtering behavior on their mobile apps (i.e. press and hold a tag to get a filter option) for at least a year now in asks and surveys, without ever stopping to see if someone had already implemented this on desktop. More fool me. This addon is from the author of XKit Rewritten. Note that the right-click tag filtering only works on the dashboard; it will not appear if you are on someone's blog. Right-clicking selected text to filter the phrase works everywhere based on my testing.

[jacquesthepigeon]

safari....nathalie and the agrestes were fr fr into colonization core

I had a good witty response to this last night but didn’t respond yet bc it was sleepy time and it was so obvious I would remember in the morning

It’s morning and I can’t remember