#i hate youtube tv too i’m NOT touching tumblr tv

[sinnabee]

is ANYBODY else having this problem where every time you try to watch a video in tumblr on the app, it MUTES IT. after .2 seconds so it can hit you with this little pop up saying “check out tumblr tv!” because i am going to mc-freaking lose it if this keeps happening.

still trying to figure out if it’s at all related to the way i won’t even be touching the screen and my dash gets yoinked either forwards or back so far that i have no hope of finding my place again. we are not thriving in these conditions lads (gender neutral)

[angelwithnightmares]

WARNING: LONG RANT AND EXPLANATION

I feel like I have to stand up for myself now when I’ve seen the way some of the people in this fandom have been spreading rumors about me on Twitter.

I’m going to take this from the beginning.

//

In November, I was kinda new on Twitter. I remember seeing a tweet in my feed, it said “Let Robin say lesbian in season 5” and to me, who lives in Sweden, the word lesbian isn’t a very “bad” word. It’s actually a very common and normal word here, and we have a bunch of movies and tv-shows when lesbian girls and women simply say: I’m lesbian! So to me, I had NO IDEA that in the US, it’s seen as a “bad” word and that’s why the fans wanted her to verbally say it. I totally get that now, but I wasn’t aware back then. Silly me then made a comment, because a very cute and funny little moment popped up in my head and I felt like: AH I need to write this. It was something along with:

“Or gay, because imagine how cute it would be if Will came out as gay, and Robin would say “I’m gay too”, and then a stunned Dustin (or someone) would say “Okay, so while we’re at it - does anyone else want to come out of the closet?” And then Mike slowly raises his hand.”

I didn’t think much more about it, and the next time I logged into Twitter I had gotten like 50 qrts with: LOADS of death threats, gifs with people murdering people, people calling me lesbophobe, people mocking my grammar, my age, people saying weird things to me about Will etc. I was in such shock, I deleted the tweet right away and had a panic attack. What the hell just happened? How did that made me a lesbophobe? I’m bisexual myself, and I LOVE lesbians. I have also a bunch of wlw ships that I love. But all that shit just because I didn’t know that the word lesbian was very uncommon for americans to say in American media and how they wanted to change that.

Anyways, I deactivated my Twitter because all these horrible rumors about me triggered my suicidal thoughts (I suffer from depression), I made a new one and people figured me out right away so I changed alias and pfp/header but people still figured out it was me.

I blocked every single toxic person I came across, a few months passed and one day I was on Twitter again. This time, it was about an analysis of a scene in Stranger Things. Me and an iconic Byler here on tumblr were analysing the scene when everyone says goodbye at the end of season 3. First, Mike looked uncomfortable af when El kissed him, and later on he looked uncomfortable when she was close to him, hugging and touching and making a forehead touch. In one of the gifs, to ME it looked like the hand movement from El was kinda harsh when they made that forehead touch and I just couldn’t understand how people thought it was cute. It was a personal opinion and just a harmless analysis. Both me and this other person were also saying “Nothing against El though, she’s a kid, but I guess if the roles were reversed - if Mike would be the one to kiss El with her not kissing back, with open eyes, looking uncomfortable and shocked, I guess people would have accused him for SA or something. Not that we did, but we know that it would look a lot more bad if Mike was the one who kissed her and not vice versa simply because of the statistics. WE NEVER ACCUSED EL FOR SA. We both love her and she’s my favorite female character in the show. I just don’t like the SHIP Mlvn and I didn’t get how people thought that scene was cute. It was simply an analysis, nothing more. Not an accusation. Not a hate post. That post had over 200 likes and LOADS of reblogs with people who thought the same. But still only me and my friend were attacked. That also lead to ANOTHER accusation: of me being antisemitic. Why?

In year 2006, I first started my YouTube channel. I was very interested in learning how to edit, so thanks to tutorials I learned by myself how to edit. I was 14 years old when I read Anne Frank’s diary for the first time and I saw so much of myself in her. I also loved the way she described her relationship with Peter in the diary, so I watched “Anne Frank: The Whole Story” from 2001 and thanks to my family I could get that movie on my computer so I could make tribute videos of her since she inspired me so much, to never give up on my dreams and to ALWAYS follow my heart and believe that every person is truly good at heart. I made my own trailer for the movie, because there was none to be found on YouTube. My edits became very popular for being back in 2007, and soon loads of people found them. 90% was so happy I made these tributes, that I let the memory of her and all the people who tragically was murdered by the nazi’s back in the 30/40’s live on. But there was also a bunch of REAL antisemitics who called Anne a bunch of horrible stuff in the comments, people who claimed the holocaust never happened etc and I was defending her and the other victims for dear life. I was so proud of my edits, like I said: I was 14 years old and she was my biggest inspiration. My parents also watched these and they didn’t think they were problematic in any way so of course I trusted them and their moral.

And yes, I also made two tribute edits of her and Peter (I didn’t even knew about the term “shipping” back then) but this person on Twitter said I was making “ship edits” about Anne Frank. I have made all of my old videos private now, mostly because of the bad quality but also because of this person who now made me embarrassed of them instead. I wouldn’t make these edits today. Here’s a glimpse of one of them:

Is this antisemitic in any way?

Anyways, because of this person + a lot of others, this made me and my friend to eventually deactivate our tumblr accounts. I hade SO much going on in my personal life back then too, so this was just too much. They found out things about my family situation and that made me freak out, I was threatening them with the cops just because they were attacking and stalking me and my family on a personal level. They were harassing me on TikTok. On DM. On Twitter. People were leaving me and I felt like shit. Luckily there was a bunch who still were standing by my side through all of this and I am SO grateful for you all. Never forget that, you guys made me come back here.

Also, now when one of my tweets became popular on Twitter, of COURSE these people found me and started spreading these rumors again. I found that out from some of my friends here, sending me ss.

I just can’t fucking believe these people. All because of a silly little tweet which ended up in a total DISASTER.

End of rant. I hope at lease some of you understand.

[firecrackerhh]

…are you 5.

Legitimately I’m being sincere, did you steal your mom’s phone and make a fucking tumblr account to bitch about a tv show you clearly aren’t mature for?

“What is with this show and sex?!” Dude it’s fucking hell, did you think everyone down there is doing the sacred missionary position? Do you think people down there are having the most vanilla sex possible?

Are you a fucking baby?

What’s wrong with the sex jokes? Honestly, do they make you uncomfortable or something? Like sucks to suck my dude, but that’s a you problem.

If it makes you soooo uncomfortable to watch or whatever you can just shut the fuck up and not watch it, preferably forever.

Jesus Christ you anti fucks are no better than evangelicals, you people need to get laid, or at least touch some fucking grass.

Also as expected, the usual “but the pilot-“

BITCH THE PILOTS FOR BOTH SHOWS MEAN FUCKING SHIT.

Get the fuck over yourselves! Those days are gone, your headcanons and ideas will never become canon in either fucking show, yeah the sex stuff wasn’t as overt in the pilot because it was on fucking YouTube! Even Helluva Boss has to censor out any dildos or whatever.

This is fucking bitch baby behavior and I don’t respect it.

“Waaaaah it’s too horny!” Is it? Good. Fuck off you crybaby little bitch. Imagine being an adult and acting like this about sex in movies or something, embarrassing!

Go back to the fucking evangelical church you came from you fucking amoeba, the real adults are fucking talking.

“Since when did sex become part of the world!?” Bitch there’s sex in our world, did your parents not teach you the birds and the bees!? Hell is basically our world but more chaotic, why wouldn’t it have kinky sex in it is the question.

I hate children.

[chellyfishing]

so i’m watching patrick willems’ video about when stars becoming brands (youtube link, it should be on nebula as well but i’m not logged in on my phone for some fool reason) and it’s touching on something that has really been getting me down lately (spoilers it’s capitalism, i’m sorry this is about capitalism).

see, we here on the hate ads website really hate ads, and i do too. but i’m also a let ads play person, because i know that’s how artists make money. like i use adblock to various degrees bc some websites simply will not work on my devices without it and as a security measure, but you know. i primarily watch youtube on my tv and i try not to hit the skip button. i let sponsorship rolls play. maybe it’s because i was born during the reagan administration. i just tune out or go to the bathroom or get a snack or answer messages on my phone. letting ads play doesn’t mean, like, watching ads.

awhile back i read an article on/interview with sydney sweeney (i think it was this one but when i look i mostly get a ton of “articles about this article” lmao) and it’s kind of lived rent-free in my head since. so my thesis statement, and more or less the point of this article, is that artists don’t make money from their art. they make money from selling unrelated products. art is profitable, but not for the people making it. we are, all of us, in the business of selling.

i don’t have the data on all of this and i’m not going to do a bunch of research for a tumblr post five people max are gonna read, sorry, but you can see a pretty obvious example regularly with youtube creators of all genres. some do get by on, or mostly on, patreon alone, but not everyone can afford to do that. many are very upfront that it’s adsense and sponsorships that keep the lights on. as someone who watches their work without giving directly, the least i can do is understand and respect this fact.

remember when those twitch numbers got leaked and everyone was real pissed at critical role for awhile? this is absolute bananas to me because critical role is what we always talk about wanting artists and creators to do! they own their own work! the ceo is travis! this is why the watcher boys split from buzzfeed as well btw, there was no rancor, they just want to own their shit, and this is a good thing! everyone should be able to reach this level. it’s just that almost no one does.

art is so important. it sustains us. where would we be without it? but the people who are making it can’t sustain themselves. the corruption and exploitation of the music industry, for example, has been an open secret for decades, and it’s only getting worse thanks to vultures like spotify (who’s making money there? not musicians, that’s for sure). also, think about athletes! this has been true for athletes for ages. think about how their equipment and arenas are always plastered with branding. people at the peak of human condition, working their bodies for years to make a fool out of physics, and also to sell you cereal.

so how can people win here? audiences resent when they have ads and sponsors, but they also resent success. capitalism makes it impossible to take a breath. even “successful” people are in a precarious position because there’s no safety net if something happens. we just have to keep selling. perfume, alcohol, cell phone cases, plots of land in scotland. it’s never enough.

anyway dismantle capitalism, seize the means of production, and in the mean time it really doesn’t hurt that much to let ads play sometimes. etc etc etc have a nice day.

[todaydreambelieversfic]

Author Spotlight: Gleefulpoppet Day 1

Author Spotlight: @gleefulpoppet​ 

How did you get into Glee and Glee fandom?

Crazily enough, I was having the worst day ever a couple of years ago, and I was down a rabbit hole of Ms. Mojo’s top 10 videos; I’d never seen any of them before. I watched the Top 10 TV Kisses, and when the Klaine one came on, I got the chills! I sat back and thought, “WOAH! What did I just watch? That was intense on a whole different level. Like I’ve never seen on television before.” I set out to figure out how to watch Glee and was thrilled that it had been put on Netflix. I took some vacation days I had been hoarding and binge-watched all six seasons in about ten days. That led me to watch every interview I could find on YouTube, which led me to Tumblr, which led me to fanfic.

In general, what drew you into writing (and/or creating)?

I’m an artist by trade “in real life,” so I know how imperative creativity is to our mental health (I could talk about that for hours, so I’ll just leave it there). I was always interested in writing in the back of my mind but had never thought about it seriously.

What was it about Glee that made you decide to write fanfic for it?

For the first time, I didn’t want to create art with the characters; I wanted to write about them because I was so unsatisfied with the show itself. I have a love-hate relationship with Glee like a lot of us do. The characters were brought to life in such a fantastic way I couldn’t get them out of my head. They took up residence in my mind, and I couldn’t help but think about how I would have written them. And when I ran out of fanfic to read and couldn’t find more of the kind of stories I wanted to read, I decided to write my own.

Have you been a part of other fandoms before? Have you written fanfiction pre-glee?

I’ve always been a huge fangirl, the biggest one before Glee was probably BBC Merlin. But I had never read or written fanfic before Glee.

Is there a trope you’ve yet to try your hand at, but really want to?

I want to try so many things. Now that I’ve started writing, it’s something I doubt I’ll ever stop. I wrote a one-shot about a vampire/werewolf combination, and I’d love to expand on that someday. I also would like to write Daddies!Klaine, but I haven’t gotten there yet. I hope to very soon.

Is there a trope you wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole?

Incest. I accidentally read a few chapters of a story that was not tagged correctly, and BAM, there it was. I threw my phone across the room in shock. And I can never get that scene out of my mind—I still cry thinking about it.

How many fic ideas are you nurturing right now? Care to share one of them?

I have a list of about thirty stories I’m serious about wanting to write and then the list is about fifty more deep of just random one-lines and thoughts that “could be” a fanfic someday. 

I’d love to share! One of the things I want to do is rewrite the classic Audrey Hepburn movies with Kurt and Blaine. Maybe, Breakfast and Tiffany’s and Roman Holiday to start with. Not sure when I’ll ever get to them, but I think about it a lot. 

***

Check out Gleefulpoppet’s Fics

Better Knot Bow Tie Company -  Blaine Anderson has been a Better Knot Bow Tie Company monthly subscriber for years. This summer he's taken a hiatus from Broadway to facilitate the Journey Performing Arts School's summer program in New York. What happens when a zany bow tie sets off a chain reaction of events that may change their futures forever?

Soulsongs and Seastars -  In a world where Doms and subs depend on the symbiotic relationship their pheromones provide, it can be a matter of life and death to go too long without a claim. When one of the most powerful Doms in New York comes home for some much-needed family time, he stumbles upon a scene that throws his instincts into high alert as he witnesses a sub do something he’s never seen before. Will the bravery of one man change his life forever? Kurt Hummel knows there’s only a one-in-a-million chance of finding his Soulsong, but what are the odds it could happen in a run-down mall in Lima, Ohio?

The Playhouse on the Edge of the Forest -  In the small town where Kurt lives, there is a forest of trees his home is nestled right up against. In the backyard, there is an enchanting playhouse made of bricks and wood and has genuine glass windows with metal striped awnings and flower boxes. This is the tale of his adventures in the playhouse from age 3 to 33 and how everything changed when he met the boy next door.

[a-dragons-journal]

My Experiences of Nonhumanity

I get asked about “what makes you/people in general feel you’re/they’re otherkin” a lot, and while the answer is far from simple and my experiences are anything but universal, I figure it deserves a write-up once in a while. A friend asked about it a couple nights ago, so I wrote up a huge long message on Discord, and decided to rewrite it into a Tumblr post for posterity. This’ll be a long one, folks; hit J on desktop to skip.

It’s worth noting ahead of time: none of these things are required to be otherkin, and none of them automatically mean you’re otherkin. In fact, most of them are little more than mildly “weird” quirks when they occur in isolation, and only start to push outside the range of “normal human experiences” when many of them occur together. You can’t look at someone (including yourself) and say “they like collecting things, they must be dragonkin!” It’s not that simple. You have to take the individual as a whole even as you examine each specific experience in more detail - don’t lose the forest while you’re studying the trees. This is just a description of my personal experiences.

Shifts

- Phantom shifts/supernumerary phantom limbs: Probably the most obvious thing and the hardest to brush off, although I still managed to do so for years. Phantom shifts, aka supernumerary phantom limbs, are the experience of feeling limbs or body parts that do not and never have physically existed. In my case, the most common phantom limbs to show up are my wings and tail; other body parts, such as digitigrade legs, horns, snout, and paws/talons, also make appearances less frequently. While my phantom limbs almost never attempt to replicate tactile sensations/interactions with the physical world, they’re often defined by very vivid proprioception (ability to tell where your body is in space, mainly via muscle stretch receptors), and I can tell where each part of the limb is at any given time - it’s not just a shapeless sense of “weight,” or it wouldn’t be phantom limbs. I can also move them at will, typically. My phantom shifts are typically spontaneous and involuntary, but they’ve been induced artificially a couple different ways as well, though I can’t typically do it at will.

- Sensory shifts: Still not something I’m totally sure I experience, but there are definitely times my sense of smell becomes insanely strong compared to usual even for me, which fits the definition of a sensory shift.

- Astral shifts: While I’m far from an adept astral traveler, when visualizing “traveling” within my own mindscape, I shift form fluidly between human and dragon - although I almost always have wings at the very least.

- Cameo shifts: Mentioned only because it’s relevant to my phantom shifts. I realized at some point that the reason I get cameo shifts of canine/feline ears sometimes is because they usually show up when they’re pricking/flattening to express emotion, and the muscles that move to do that action are basically the same as the ones that do those actions with the crest that runs down my neck, and because of my obsession with cats/dogs/horses as a young child and because that’s not a particularly strong phantom shift for me usually, I connected the dots a little wrong and created a false association.

- Self-image: This isn’t technically a shift, but it’s going here anyway because it doesn’t really fit in any other section either. My body image/self-image is weird. I know, consciously, what I physically look like. However, my instinctive self-image is... hmm. What I “expect” to see doesn’t always match up with what’s actually there when I look in the mirror. Teeth are a huge point of fixation for me for some reason; I always expect them to be larger, sharper, stronger. I expect my neck to be longer, my face to be... different. I expect scales in places. I expect claws. Even knowing consciously that of course it won’t be there, it’s still strange sometimes that it’s not. There’s sometimes some mild disconnect when I see myself. (Sometimes not. But sometimes.)

Homesickness

(Or, the sense of missing something you’ve never had - not of “I want/want to be [x], and it makes me sad/upset that I don’t have/am not that,” but of “I should have/be [x], and it is fundamentally wrong that I do/am not.”)

- Flight: I have always wanted to fly, and for a long time I thought everyone ached for the sky the same way I did. Most people don’t, as it turns out. Yes, everyone’s fantasized about flying, but most people don’t feel bones-deep, crushing, physical pain in their chest thinking about it. Most people don’t lift up onto their toes instinctively straining for the sky. I’ve felt that aching longing for it for as long as I can remember.

- Connection to dragons: For as long as I can remember knowing about dragons, I loved the idea of them and even when I was very young, when I’d only really been exposed to media where they were the great evil for the hero to defeat and received no more character development than “evil, destructive, fire-breathing beast,” I was always on the dragon’s side and wanted to learn more about them. That hasn’t faded. I’ll watch an absolutely terrible movie or TV show that I otherwise loathe if it has good enough animation and sound design on the dragons. (Looking at you, Game of Thrones.*) I would commit arson to see one of those Isle-style dragon survival games actually go through and finish production. (Holding out hope for the Dragon Game Project on YouTube; go check them out if you haven’t already.) I’ve also used dragons to represent myself for pretty much as long as I’ve had an online presence - years before I ever heard of otherkin, I was calling myself Dragonheart.

- Dragon-like creatures: Snakes, crocodilians, and dinosaurs all fall into this category - all of them give me a similar heart-and-breathing-pick-up, aching familiarity to dragons. They’re not perfect, but in a snake’s scales and a crocodile’s bellows and a dinosaur’s spectacular reptilian size I see echoes of us and I have always loved them with a passion, even before I quite knew why.

- Dragon/”monster” noises: Sound generators, creature sound design, real animal noises, etc. that are meant to be monstrous and that most people find unsettling or even frightening, I find comforting and relaxing. Alligator bellows, “monster noise” soundscapes, etc. all apply here.

* No shade on anyone who likes Game of Thrones, I’m just not a fan. :P

Behaviors/Instincts/Urges

- Hoarding: I’m still not sure how much of the crystal thing is "monkey brain say Shiney Colorful," how much is a witch thing, and how much is a dragon thing, but some of it is a dragon thing.

- Territorial/possessive nature: I can get... extremely territorial over my stuff and my home. This can extend right into being ridiculously protective of my people too, although I do try to rein that in to a reasonable amount. This also extends into games like Capture the Flag, because put me on defending the border during middle and high school and I got frighteningly territorial. (Fun fact, this extends to spiritual protection stuff and it has almost gotten me in trouble a few times on that front.) The other main side effect is my brain trying to claim completely inappropriate things as “mine,” like every piano I have ever touched or, that one time, the entire city of Portland.

- Prey drive: Going on a walk in the woods with me will always be an exercise in stopping every twenty seconds because I heard a small animal move in the brush and froze instinctively to track it. Prey drive ranges from "okay I can indulge this enough to track-stalk-chase without actually intending to catch-kill-eat" to "this is entirely inappropriate and needs to Stop Right Now" depending on the day and the situation - sometimes it’s fairly low-key and innocent, but sometimes it's also being confronted with the sudden and completely serious/genuine thought of grabbing someone or something by the neck/around the body with your jaws and hunt-prey-kill-devour when it's completely inappropriate and kind of disturbing or even sickening. It’s one of the more annoying things, although it’s not like it’s severe enough that I’m an actual danger to anyone - it’s just a gut thought that gets filtered out at the conscious level without significant problems. This also bleeds into games (I get... maybe a little overenthusiastic during tag) and even watching TV shows or gaming videos - most of the time at least part of me is rooting for the hunter because I relate to them as a fellow predator, even if the audience is supposed to be rooting for the prey - I mean, protagonists.

- Basking/heat-seeking: Probably only partially a dragon thing, but despite the fact that I hate heat in general, radiant/sun heat and heat from a heated surface are both fantastic feelings provided the ambient air temperature isn't too high. I'm guessing this is at least partially a reptile brain thing.

- Height-seeking: Give me a chance to climb up on top of something - a rock, a cliff, a chair, a table, a bunk bed - and look out over everything else, and I'll take it in an instant. Getting to climb up on the roof is the best thing that's happened to me this entire quarantine.

- Flight instinct: Being mildly leery of cliffs not because I am afraid of falling, because I'm really not, but because there's always some part of my brain that goes "jump, fly, this is a perfect takeoff spot" and I have to squash that before I do something particularly stupid. This manifests in other ways, but that's the most dramatic (and annoying) one. This is also one of the things I noticed as definitively not normal long before my awakening. (The Grand Canyon was fun.)  Similarly to the prey drive thing, it's not like I'm actually in danger of throwing myself off cliffs, it’s just - there's a not-insignificant part of my brain that thinks "hey we should go run and jump off and take a quick flight," in the same way I might also casually think "hey I should stroll across to the corner store for a bag of chips" before I consciously decide whether or not to do that. It’s the exact same type of thought process, despite the fact that one of those things is something I might do on any given school day, and the other is, you know, physically impossible.

- Combat instincts: I get in a fight and my pure instinct is to bite or claw, not kick or punch or whatever it is humans do instinctively. I have those reflexes now courtesy of Krav, but I had to train them in - if you’d thrown me into a fight before, I absolutely would have resorted to claws/nails and teeth immediately (and I still will, when pressed into a corner). Sometimes, unfortunately, this goes off completely unwarranted, either in an anger situation that does not deserve a physical response, or for no apparent reason whatsoever. It's one of the more problematic things, but once again - it’s not like it’s a compulsion, just a gut-emotion thought that gets filtered out at the conscious level.

- Scent focus: Who knows how much of this is environmental influence and how much is instinctive, but I always have and still do focus on scent more than most humans seem to. I can identify people by scent, I seem to pay more attention to it than most people do. I also seem less bothered by natural body smells than most people do, but considering the responses when I asked around in the otherkin community once about that, unclear whether or not that's connected.

- Nonhuman noises: I make just a bunch of weird nonhuman noises, and always have. Growls, hisses, croons, hurrs, throat-clicks, chirps, etc. I've never met any human who does them instinctively like I do except my half-sister (whom I didn’t meet until a couple years ago), and she was just as surprised to hear me do it as I was surprised to hear her do it.

- Affection: Face-rubbing, light head-bonking against someone’s shoulder/body/head, and love nips/bites are all perfectly acceptable ways to show platonic affection, to dragon brain. Human society disagrees. The instinct to do these things is so strong that I definitely do give into the first two with people I’m close with, and I have physically had to catch and restrain myself when I was about to unthinkingly bite/nip someone’s skin because I wasn’t paying enough attention.

- Movement: Moving on all fours just feels better than moving on two legs, even though it’s objectively physically uncomfortable because humans aren’t built for that. I also have the instinctive want to be a lot more flexible than I’m capable of being, in ways I’m not capable of being - curling all the way around something or someone to squeeze them tight in the coil of my body, turning my head a hundred eighty degrees because my neck Should Be Longer.

- Expression: Baring one’s teeth when frustrated, irritated, or angry is not a particularly human instinct. I realize it’s something a lot of primates do do, but. *gestures at society* Humans ain’t one of them, at least not anymore. Even in Krav Maga, which is a self-defense style that focuses on being vicious and “dirty fighting” to survive a real street fight, every single time I have a new partner (and most times I have a partner I’ve worked with before) and I get tired enough to get snarly, they respond with some variation of “god that’s scary”. See also: gesturing at things with my nose because it should be long enough to make that a much more dramatic gesture than it ends up being.

- Den/lair/small spaces: I never feel safer than when curled up in a tiny alcove just big enough to comfortably fit my body curled up into it. The only position I’ll prioritize over it is getting up onto a high space.

Past Life Work

Unlike every other bullet point on this list, most of these didn’t apply until I started actively seeking them out, because, you know. Past life memories are like that.

- Past life regressions: I’ve got a tag for these, but tl;dr I take anything I learn from a past life regression or similar meditation/visualization with a whole spoonful of salt, forget “a grain,” because I know for a fact my brain is very good at making stuff up with these types of exercises. Unfortunately, they’re the only way to get information on certain things, like appearance.

- Tarot: Got a tag for that too. I use tarot to ask questions and confirm or reject suspicions.

- Spontaneous memories: I don’t have many, but they’re clear as day when they do appear. I don’t count something as a “true” memory unless it includes senses I can’t reproduce through imagination - smell and touch, mainly. Mostly these are quick flashbulbs, nothing cinematic or anything like that.

- Noemata: Again, I don’t have much in the way of noemata, but what I do have is persistent and consistent. I know things about my wing shape and flight style despite not having really experienced that in detail during past life regressions. That particular set of noemata has been confirmed to fit with real-world physics and bat wing shapes (the closest wing type to mine that exists or has existed on Earth).

[curlewsteph]

COVID THERAPY VIEWING

It’s been a year indeed and a struggle, but when I’ve needed an escape I’ve found solace in some brilliant tv series this year that I want to take a moment to remember. Immersing myself in characters, online discussion, podcasts and more, has kept me going and allowed me to block out everything that 2020 has been when I’ve needed to. This is my first and possibly only Tumblr post but here, the place where I’ve found so much great conversation, fan fic, gif sets and more to add to my enjoyment of my favourite things to watch, seems the best place to leave my own thoughts. So here goes from the year’s beginning to its welcome ending:

TURN - Washington’s Spies

I’ve got a thing for moody Jamie Bell (The Eagle 😍) and discovered TURN last New Year looking for other historical dramas he’d appeared in. These characters completely captured me and drew me into a historical period I’d done my best to avoid since flunking it during A Level history. Abe made quite the most useless spy but his passion and compassion sold him to me. The Culper Ring story is fascinating and the show brought to life the real lives and conflicts of those involved. Intriguing portrayals of morally corrupt characters (Simcoe, Andre etc) who surprise you at every turn kept me gripped and props to some extremely fine acting and characterisation. The found family dynamic of the Culper Ring was a real joy and Brewster will forever be one of my most favourite characters. I wanted more personal development and not really being able to ship Abe with anyone especially was a let down but it was a fine series that really kept me company.

PEAKY BLINDERS

I’ve no idea why it took me so incredibly long to watch this series but having eventually succumbed I was hooked from the very first episode. Brooding, oppressive, threatening yet full of charm and humour with characters that jump out of the screen and take your heart without asking, made it addictive viewing for me this year. The next series is light years away but I’m waiting for you Tommy.

THE 100

Thank all the stars that we had good weather during lockdown because the final series of this post-apocalyptic drama almost ruined my summer. I’ve followed every twist and turn over the past six years, had my Bellarke heart broken time over time, shared the pain and angst of an array of brilliant characters and watched through my fingers when the creators treated legions of fans of all factions, worse than mortal enemies. But the end was coming and I stuck with it - despite my misgivings since the overturning of the Writers Room - buoyed by some hopeful S6 content, but I should have listened harder to my guts. Despite some flickers of promise in S6, it was beyond clear to me that the new writing team simply didn’t have the same connection to the characters and history of the show. Instead of wanting to resolve arcs and reunite characters we’d become inexorably entwined with, the lure of the new and an opportunity to reinvent and take a detour sparkled more brightly to them - something I will never ever be able to fathom. Fans forgotten, long running storylines dropped and characters - including our leads - essentially abandoned and made for a horror show of a final act. S7 broke my heart and I should have seen it coming. When I’ll feel ready to rewatch The 100 again I don’t know, but I’ll end my run when the show should have at the S5 finale and save the CPR scene for an occasional treat. Farewell and May We Meet Again.

THE MUSKETEERS

Salvation comes in leather and 18thC lace. I ADORED this so much! Again I was incredibly late to the party because it seemed such a frivolous show but a Youtube fan vid drew me in and I’m so thankful for it. The plots are mostly light but tackle some important issues, the tension is chest heavingly dramatic and everyone looks astonishing and oh my was this the antidote to an anti-climactic apocalyptic obsession that I needed. There’s humour, kindness, compassion, daring do and a huge dollop of care and an emphasis on the value of friendship too. Clever dialogue, confident female characters, wry humour and some seriously good acting healed my heart. And yes the outfits helped. I loved it all and was transfixed by Tom Burke’s Athos.

STRIKE

...which led me to Strike. I don’t do whodunnits and crime fiction as a rule is just not my thing, usually because the core cast is always too small and I miss the found-family dynamic and they often feel claustrophobic, plus the predictable focus on difficult but supposedly fascinating men in the lead can be dull. In some regards, Strike is no different but Tom Burke’s performance and more significantly Holiday Grainger’s skill in playing Robin and how she transforms the usual “gritty detective with attractive sidekick” dynamic on its head, is really superb. I’ve read the books now too - my first JKRs. Honestly, parts are overwritten and a little indulgent but elements are breathtaking and as she’s so involved in the series too it’s a tie up I became incredibly invested in and the actors on screen are the characters on the page for me too. One does not lose out to the other, which is often the case with dramatisations. I can’t wait for the next instalment.

THE LAST KINGDOM

#TeamUhtred #TeamUhtred #TeamUhtred that’s it, that’s all there is to say, although it’s not obviously. TLK has been a slow burn for me and I began it several times when it was first aired by the BBC. The early series felt small, focussed on a pretty hateful hero who I failed to connect with, but I loved Aethelflaed and her story with Erik and Uhtred’s growing maturity was intriguing too. And then Netflix came in and the show exploded! Better scripts, more than the same 3 locations, impressive costumes and set-piece battles with characters that grew and grew. I rewatched S3 in preparation for S4’s release which I binged in style in lockdown 1 and cried when it ended. Utterly brilliant and a cast of characters that came closest to replicating the joy of my first fandom experience with the outlaws of Robin of Sherwood. Uthred has become a leader, has had to reckon with his responsibilities and shows a tenderness as he’s aged that the young callous warrior lacked. But if it weren’t for his bunch of faithful arselings I wouldn’t be watching at all. Without Finan there is no TLK for me. He’s my favourite character to have emerged in years. It’s the humour, the humanity of him that makes me cheer for him every time - as well as the arms 😍 Long live TLK. Or a final season at least.

VIKINGS (*spoilers for S6b)

2020 ended another long standing favourite series that I’ve followed for years. Unlike The 100 I’m not as deeply invested in this saga but Vikings has kept me company for so long now that the show feels part of me. It’s certainly lost it’s way over time but my favourite characters still shone brightly and those we lost were sent off triumphantly. I’ll forever miss Ragnar and the show lost a lot of its appeal with his passing, but the homage paid to such a talisman of a character was always done well. Later series did feel repetitive and the drama between the Ragnarsson brothers diluted. But Ubbe - my love - stayed true and the ending for him and Hvitserk (I always felt so heart sick for him) both felt fitting. And Bjorn’s final climax was awe inspiring (I do wish the tomb had stayed closed though). I’d have absolutely loved more time to have been spent on Ubbe’s future adventures instead of the endless hours in barren wastelands and storm lashed ships, but what we got was good. As for Ivar... an utterly unforgettable character (performed superbly) who became human again was a journey to behold. I’m glad it went that way but honestly I lost touch with him with all the time spent on the Rus storyline that repeatedly ate its own tail. Getting back to Wessex brought the show full circle and I loved it for that. Farewell Vikings. I hope Ubbe and Torvi are still doing ok in their new Valhalla.

[lovemesomesurveys]

How are you doing today? It’s only 1:56AM, but so far I’ve just ate a bowl of ramen and watched a couple YouTube videos. What was the best thing that happened to you today? My ramen was quite delicious, ha. Which cell phone network are you on? Verizon. Do you like the smell of cinnamon? Yesss. What was the last book you've read? I just finished, “The Secret She Kept” by Elle Gray and I’ve started, “Autumn’s Strike” by Mary Stone.

Are you hungry right now? No, I just finished eating. What was the last thing you've had to drink? Water. How often do you visit this website? I’m on Tumblr all the time. Do you like frogs? No. Are you afraid of dying? Yes. Do you like bananas? I love bananas.    Do you like the show American Dad? Meh. It has its moments, but overall I’ll pass. I don’t ever watch it by my own choosing, I just catch it here and there because my family watches it.  What TV show do you miss the most that's no longer on TV? Gilmore Girls, Degrassi, and True Blood come to mind first. Are you currently fighting with someone right now? No. Is your life full of drama? No. I have other stressful things I’m dealing with, but not of the drama variety. How long can you hold your breath underwater *shrug* Where's the last place you've been to out of state? When I went to Arizona to visit my grandparents about 6 years ago. Have you ever been kissed in the rain? No. What letter does your last name start with. -- What are you listening to right now? I’m watching Gilmore Girls. Have you ever had a pet that died? Yes. Would you rather use a trackpad or a mouse? Trackpad. Do you consider yourself politically intelligent? No, not at all. Have you ever done any volunteer work? Yeah, I’ve done a lot with Girl Scouts, school clubs, and class assignments. Do you like the Beatles? I like some songs. Is it night time where you're at right now? Yeah, it’s 2:08AM. Do you like steak? Nope. Do you eat healthy? No, I definitely don’t. How often do you work out? I don’t. What was the best gift you've ever received? I couldn’t possibly choose. Have you ever participated in a spelling bee? Nope. If you could have one wish right now, what would it be? Good health. Do you owe anyone an apology right now? I kind of do. Are you the jealous type of person? I can be, but it’s not something I feel much. Or at least haven’t felt in a long time. I feel envy more. Have you ever tried doing yoga? Nah. Do you like getting massages? I’ve never gotten one. Would you rather be too hot or too cold? Cold. Are you good at telling jokes? No, I’m pretty much the worst. I don’t tell many jokes. When was the last time you've attended a sleepover? Several years ago. Tell me one of your pet peeves. Eating sounds. Do you wear glasses? I do. Do you like to keep your nails painted? I haven’t painted my nails for the past few years. Have you ever had a pedicure? Nope.  What is your favorite smell? I have several favorites. Do you like the TV show Full House? I do. Would you rather listen to country music or rap music? I like both. Are you a Duck Dynasty fan? Nope. Have you graduated high school yet? Uh, yeah, back in 2008.  What kind of person were you in middle school? Quiet, shy, awkward. Nothing has changed. Do you have any major regrets in your life? I have a few. :/ Do you like pixie sticks? Eh. I did as a kid, but I don’t have much interest in them the older I get. Do you like French toast? Mmm, yes. Are you a fast typer? I am. Are you good at doing math in your head? Nope. Or at all. Have you ever played with Silly Putty? Yeah. Do you take in a lot of caffeine daily? I do. I love my caffeine. Do you like watching Football? Nope. Or an sport. What language do you wish you could speak? Spanish. Do you know a lot about history? No, I wouldn’t say that. If we could travel back in time, where would you travel to? Can I travel back to childhood? Would you ever consider joining the military? No. I couldn’t anyway, I’m physically disabled. Are you a cigarette smoker? No. Have you ever done something you didn't want to just to look cool? That’s kind of how it was when I used to drink and smoke. I wasn’t a big drinker or smoker, only did so socially, but still. I also did so on my own accord, I’m not blaming anyone, and I’m not going to say I hated all of it because I did have good times, but there was a big part of me that did so because I felt I had to. My friends liked to do it and I wanted to partake with them and not sit out on the sidelines by myself. It’s just that truth be told I think I would have rarely drank at all if it weren’t for that and likely would have never smoked. It had its fun moments, but I didn’t feel the need to partake all the time like they did. Do you like zombie movies? Nah. Have you seen The Hunger Games? Yep, all of ‘em. Do you have a favorite piece of clothing? All my graphic tees, t-shirt dresses, leggings, and lounge shorts. All my comfy clothes, basically. Do you own any Uggs? Nope. Are you wearing any rings on your fingers? No. Name a TV show that you absolutely can't stand. Most sitcoms today. Do you have any unusual talents? No. Or any kind of talent. Do you look like your age? *shrug* I’ve been told I look younger. Do you feel confident in a bathing suit? Nooo. Do you do a lot of online shopping? I do. Do you like the Harry Potter films? Yeah. Do you judge people based on their sexual orientation? No. I care about who a person is, their personality, and whether we vibe. Have you ever been told you had an accent? No. Have you ever ridden an elephant? Nope. Are you allergic to pollen? I do have seasonal allergies. Have you ever eaten sushi? Ew, yes. Not a fan. If so, do you like it? Nope. Are you a fan of anime? No. Would you rather play Xbox or Playstation? Playstation. Are you a big fan of seafood? I don’t like seafood at all. What kind of food are you craving right now? I’m good right now. Are you currently in a relationship? No. If not, are you happy being single? Yeah, it’s for the best. Do you like to go fishing? No. Are you a fast runner? I used to be. I don’t have the energy or strength anymore for that.

Have you ever worked at a fast food place? Nope. What's on your mind right now? Now I’m thinking about food cause of some of the previous questions. Are you texting anyone as you're taking this survey? No. Have you ever had a nasty rumor spread about you? No. Have you ever sent someone sexual pictures of yourself? No. Do you like who you are on the inside or the outside more? Neither. :/ Are you good at drawing? No, I have no artistic abilities. Do you know how to dance? Nope. What's your favorite reality TV show? Catfish, Teen Mom OG, Teen Mom 2, The Voice... Do you think Kim Kardashian deserves to be famous? I don’t care. Are you excited for Christmas this year? I’m always excited for Christmas. Do you celebrate Halloween? I mean, I put up some decor, watch scary movies, and partake in treats. I stopped dressing up and carving pumpkins a few years ago. Have you ever had a concussion? No. Do you pretend to be someone you're not? No. I certainly wouldn’t pretend to be... *gestures vaguely* this. Do you listen to heavy metal music? No. Were you sad when Michael Jackson died? I was just surprised. Do you have more upper or lower body strength? I barely have any strength anymore it feels like, but I used to have really great upper body strength. Have you ever been in a tanning bed? No, and never want to be. Do you like hot tubs? No. Do you know anyone who is battling cancer? No. Have you ever donated money to a charity? Yes. Do you get bored easily? More so nowadays. I didn’t used to. Have you ever peed your pants in public? Maybe as a little kid. Are you afraid of roller coasters? Yes, except for the Cars and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad roller coasters at Disneyland. Are you good at doing tongue twisters? Not really. What was the last movie you've seen in theatres? Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Have you ever been to a drive-in movie? Yeah, a few times but it’s been a long time. I’ve been wanting to go to one, though. Are you good at doing fractions? Meh. I’m alright. Me and math don’t get along, but I could do some things somewhat. What is your favorite holiday? Christmas and Halloween. Do you prefer Apple or Android? Apple. Would you rather have a tablet or a computer? Computer. Do you like things that are touch screen? Yeah. What age did you have your first kiss at? 16. Do you regret losing your virginity to whoever you lost it to? I’m still a virgin. Do you have a good relationship with your mother? Yes. Do you like the color lime green? Sure. What are your plans for tomorrow? I don’t have any. Would you rather wear jeans or yoga pants? Yoga pants. Do you like your clothes to be baggy and comfortable or tight and revealing Baggy and comfy. Do you wish you could change something about your hair? Yeah, it’s really not a good look right now. I pretty much chopped it off a couple months ago for reasons and it’s in that awkward phase as it grows out. I want it to be longer and dyed red again because currently it’s all natural and I don’t like it. Have you ever gotten a makeover? Yeah. Do you get mad easily? No. but I get frustrated and irritable easily. Have you ever punched someone in the face? No. Do you think the minions from Despicable Me are cute? Ehh. Did you have a Gameboy as a child? I did. Would you rather have chocolate or gummy worms? Chocolate. I’m not a gummy fan. What are your favorite pizza toppings? Extra cheese, garlic, green onions, spinach, cilantro, crushed meatballs, and pesto. Have you ever auditioned for a talent competition? No. I don’t have any talent. Do you make good sandwiches? I think theyr’e better from a deli or when my mom makes them haha but sure. Would you rather get high or get drunk? High. Have you ever failed a drug test? Nope. Do you like the Silent Hill movies? I actually haven’t seen them. What is one thing you need to work on to make yourself a better person? I have a few things I need to work on.

[kayliemusing]

42: top 3s

1: Top 3 ice cream flavors - classic vanilla, birthday cake/birthday batter, bubblegum

2: Top 3 Disney Movies - Mulan, Onward, Soul (but this changes frequently lol)

3: Top 3 vacation destinations - I've never been outside of my home country so I'll say my top 3 DREAM destinations: NYC, Hawaii, a random countryside in either France or the UK

4: Top 3 places to shop - Dynamite, Sephora, Winners/Homesense

5: Top 3 subjects of study/classes to take - English/anything creative writing related, Interior Decorating/Design, Communications?

6: Top 3 make up products - YSL Touche Eclat Foundation, literally any Mac Lipstick but it has to be matte, & Fenty Beauty contour stick

7: Top 3 music artists - Taylor Swift - Of Monsters and Men - The Lumineers

8: Top 3 spices/herbs - Cinnamon - Nutmeg (literally tastes like autumn) - Paprika

9: Top 3 drinks - Diet Coke - Hot Chocolate - Vanilla Bean Frappe

10: Top 3 apps to use - Instagram - Pinterest -iBooks

11: Top 3 months of the year - May, October, December

12: Top 3 clothing items - My black/white turtle neck, high waisted jeans, plaid blazer

13: Top 3 binge perfect tv shows - Bones, Supernatural, Brooklyn Nine Nine

14: Top 3 romantic dates - (I've never been on a date but if I had, it would be this) Evening walk, late night drive, late night coffee date (tbh anything at night feels romantic)

15: Top 3 kinds of flower - Water lilies, cherry blossoms, roses

16: Top 3 christmas movies - A Christmas Carol (2009), Home Alone, The Polar Express

17: Top 3 OTPs - Nesta and Cassian from ACOTAR series by SJM, Manon and Dorian from Throne of Glass series by SJM, Casteel and Poppy from From Blood and Ash series by JLM.

18: Top 3 quotes to describe your life - "I write not to find, but to leave" by Scherezade Siobhan - "I want to be myself again. I want to be six. I want to stop knowing everything I know" by Catherynne M. Valente - "The truth is, I pretend to be a cynic, but I am really a dreamer who is terrified of wanting something she may never get" by Joanna Hoffman.

19: Top 3 characteristics you love about yourself - my kindness bc it's not surface level kindness, but actually something deeply rooted within me - my resilience even tho sometimes it doesn't feel like resilience - my loyalty bc it is a hard as steel kind of loyalty

20: Top 3 kinds of candy - Maltesers, Kit kats, smarties

21: Top 3 ways to exercise/ be active - Walking, dancing, mowing the lawn/shoveling the sidewalk

22: Top 3 spirit animals - wolf, hummingbird, tiger (i googled it bc i didn't know and i was scared it was a joke but)

23: Top 3 petnames - I like 'lovebug', 'love', 'sweetheart'

24: Top 3 books read outside of school - The Hating Game by Sally Thorne, A Court of Silver Flames by Sarah J Maas but viewers discretion is advised, Crush by Richard Siken

25: Top 3 most used websites - Youtube, Tumblr, Pinterest

26: Top 3 people you last texted - my mom, my bestie megan, and my sister bc they're the only people i text...

27: Top 3 hashtags you use - the only time i use hashtags is if i'm trying to promote some of my writing so I'll usually use writingcommunity, writersonig, poetryonig lol

28: Top 3 instagram accounts you follow - Trista Mateer, Griefmother, obviously taylor swift

29: Top 3 guilty pleasures - buzzfeed quizzes, early 2000s music, romance novels

30: Top 3 summer activities - Going to the zoo, long evening walks, campfires and s'mores

31: Top 3 things to draw/doodle - hearts, flowers, random swirls bc it's the only thing i can doodle...

32: Top 3 aesthetics - cityscape aesthetic, autumn aesthetic, rustic aesthetic

33: Top 3 things you'd buy if you gained three million dollars - a new car, a condo, another cat

34: Top 3 ways to treat yourself - facial, a large bag of maltesers, buying the makeup i really want but have been putting off

35: Top 3 celebrity crushes - Evan Peters, Matthew Daddario, henry cavill

36: Top 3 books from your childhood - Love You Forever by Robert Munsch, The Big Friendly Giant by Roald Dahl, and Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmens

37: Top 3 accents to hear - Australian, super poshy british accent, new zealand accent

38: Top 3 scents - Fresh rain, vanilla, sweet cinnamon pumpkin from bath and body works

39: Top 3 "Friends" quotes - "WE WERE ON A BREAK" -Ross, "Guess things were just going too well for me" -also ross, and "it's so exhausting waiting for death" - phoebe

40: Top 3 cupcake flavors - tbh I haven't tried that many cupcakes so your typical vanilla, chocolate, and Pink Lady Cupcake from Babycakes Cupcakery

41: Top 3 fruits - Pomegranates, Strawberries, Raspberries

42: Top 3 places you've had amazing pizza from - Pizzahut, Dominos, Pizza73

43: Top 3 sports teams to watch - i don't

44: Top 3 crayola colors - uh, i guess red, purple, and pink??

45: Top 3 things you hope to accomplish in college - Certificates/Degrees in Copyediting and Creative Writing, and I think simply just deeper critical thinking skills when it comes to writing and books

46: Top 3 fanfictions you've read - I read more books than fanfics, I've read a couple on tumblr but don't remember the names sorry :/

47: Top 3 people you miss right now - my dad, my best friend bc she's in vancouver, taylor swift bc she's not on tumblr anymore rip

48: Top 3 fears - Failure, Loss, not achieving anything in life/not reaching my full potential

49: Top 3 favorite literary devices - Foreshadowing is always god tier, cliffhangers although evil i love those too, symbolism

50: Top 3 pet peeves - People dragging their shoes on the floor when they walk, when you tell someone your fav hobby/music artist/interest and they immediately go 'oh I hate X!', and people who go 'you're so quiet!!!' but in a way that draws in more attention and/or makes me feel more uncomfortable like i would literally rather die

51: Top 3 physical things you find attractive - Hands, nice hair, defined jawlines

52: Top 3 bad habits - Nailbiting, picking at my blemishes oops, lip biting

53: Top 3 pets you've had/wish to have - Cats bc they complete me, I've always wanted a Samoyed, and I've always wanted a turtle

54: Top 3 types of foreign food - Chicken Chow Mein, deep fried shrimp, japanese chicken wings

55: Top 3 things you want to say to someone in your lifetime - 'I quit', 'I love you', 'you changed my life'

56: Top 3 dog breeds - Samoyed, german shepherds, collies

57: Top 3 cheesy romance movies - You've Got Mail, How To Lose a Guy In 10 Days, 10 Things I Hate About You

58: Top 3 languages you speak/wish to speak - French, Sign, and maybe Japanese?

59: Top 3 series (book, movie, television) - The Cruel Prince series by Holly Black, A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas (but literally only for Cassian and Nesta), From Blood and Ash by Jennifer L Armentrout

60: Top 3 pizza toppings - Mushrooms, alfredo sauce, pineapple

61: Top 3 youtubers you're subscribed to - Game Grumps, Charlotte Dobre, Megan Batoon

62: Top 3 tattoo / piercing ideas - I want to get a tattoo on my wrist of the last thing my dad ever wrote me, a hummingbird tattoo right next to it, and then a cross on my index finger

63: Top 3 awards you want to win - National Book Awards, Nobel Prize, and maybe even Goodreads Choice Awards lol

64: Top 3 emojis - Laugh/Crying emoji, the please sir emoji that kinda gives off those puss n boots eyes, and the stars emoji

65: Top 3 cars you dream of owning - 1970s Chev Impala, tbh a cute little Hyundai Venue, and maaaaybe the 1964 ferarri 250 gt luso (idk if that name was totally right but i had to do tons of googling to find it. i don't know a lot about cars and i don't really have a top 3 lol)

66: Top 3 authors - Right now I'm really into Sarah J Maas, Sally Thorne, and Holly Black maybe?

67: Top 3 historical figures - Jesus, Anne Frank, Vincent Van Gogh

68: Top 3 baby names - Ryder, Leila, Gracie

69: Top 3 DIYs - Candles, refurnishing old furniture (i.e. my mom and i painted our wooden garbage can), and really just any type of autumn diy

70: Top 3 smoothie combos/flavors - Strawberry/Banana, Mango, Strawberry-Mango

71: Top 3 songs of this month - Happier Than Ever by Billie Eilish, Biblical by Calum Scott, and Visiting Hours by Ed Sheeran

72: Top 3 questions of this post you want to be asked - I did them all bc I made it a survey instead of an ask meme ;)

73: Top 3 villains - Regina/The Evil Queen from Once Upon a Time, Cruella De Vil, and Moriarty from Sherlock

74: Top 3 Cities you want to see - Montreal, NYC, Vancouver (honorable mention: LA)

75: Top 3 recipes you want to try - different kind of salad and/or burger bowls, Stuffed bell peppers, and homemade lemon loaf

76: Top 3 dream jobs - Bestselling author, the person who runs a companies social media accounts, youtuber/blogger

77: Top 3 lucky items - tbh don't have one

78: Top 3 traditions you have - Christmas Eve Service and if I don't go to that at least incorporating reading the christmas story on christmas day or eve, idk if this counts as tradition but going to the corn maze every fall, and whenever it's easter/christmas/thanksgiving we always have a big meal w/ family

79: Top 3 things you miss about being a kid - reckless abandon, dreaming about growing up with hopefulness and no dashed hopes, experiencing holidays like halloween and christmas as a kid

80: Top 3 harry potter characters - I've never read or watched Harry Potter rip (ok well i saw the first and second (and maybe third?) movie in the sixth grade I think) but I think I really liked Hermoine, Harry obviously and Dobby

81: Top 3 lies you were told - i don't have 3, but this one has a story but basically when my sister and i were in elementary school my sister got hit by a car and so the insurance thing was that she would recieve 10k when she was 18 and as a child i thought that was unfair so my dad told me that my sister had to split it with me when we were 18 lmao obviously that didn't happen (i think i realized that wasn't true in middle school)

82: Top 3 pictures in your camera roll right now - Pictures of my cat, one of my sister in a hilarious filter, and a picture of my rocking my TS merch

83: Top 3 turn ons - Kindness, defined jawline, easy going

84: Top 3 turn offs - arrogance, unkempt, super loud and obnoxious

85: Top 3 magazines/news papers/ journals to read - I don't read much of those so I'll tell you some sites I love for writing purpose's: there's Wellstoried, justwriterlythings, springhole.net (which is filled with generators if you're stuck and also tons of infomation and advice)

86: Top 3 things you wish you had known earlier - that toad in Mario Party was wearing a mushroom hat and that it is actually not his head, that immaculate means 'clean' before i misused that word like several times over the years, and that the one turn i always take on my way to work where i thought everyone didn't know how to drive was actually bc i didn't have the right of way rip me

87: Top 3 spongebob episodes - the one episode where spongebob and patrick find a ghost ship, that one episode where they form a bikini bottom band and perform it at a football game in a little fish tank, and the one episode where squidward has his first snowball fight

88: Top 3 places to be in the world - I'd love to be in NYC, Montreal, or Hawaii

89: Top 3 things you'd do differently - I would not have applied for RDC, similarly I should have just paid the 500 dollars to the one certificate program I wanted to do instead of overthinking it, and I wish I wouldn't have ended a friendship the way I did

90: Top 3 TV shows from your childhood - Spongebob Squarepants, That's So Raven, and Hannah Montana

91: Top 3 meals you love - Turkey Burgers, Chilli, and Instant Pot Chicken Tortilla Soup

92: Top 3 kinds of tea - i don't drink tea

93: Top 3 embarrassing moments - one time in sixth grade I tripped and fell right on my face in front of my crush, this other time like a couple years ago i opened the door to my car and only realized much too late while i was staring at this random family that it was not my car, and when i went to the gas station to get gas and couldn't get my gas lid on my car opened and this guy had to help me which was already embarrassing enough but then the gas pump wouldn't work so i had to go inside to pay just to realize i forgot my wallet and had to shamefully walk back to my car and then run back inside the convenience store and then pay and then walk back to my car and finally fill my tank.

94: Top 3 holidays to celebrate - Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving

95: Top 3 things to do in the rain - have an existential crisis, pretend you're in a music video, walk through puddles like you're six again

96: Top 3 things to do in the snow - Sledding, Build a snowman, shovel it even tho you don't want to

97: Top 3 items you can't leave the house w/o - phone, keys, wallet

98: Top 3 movies you'd like to see - Jurassic World 3, Hotel Transylvania: Transformania bc i'm a child, and the animation of the addams family

99: Top 3 art mediums - Writing fiction/poetry, painting, music

100: Top 3 museums you've been to - Royal Tyrell Museum, Canadian History one in edmonton lol, and heritage park in calgary

101: Top 3 school memories - Middle school dances when the popular kids would grind to the song "Low" which was always an interesting experience, in the twelfth grade at winter formal when we all shouted "SHUT UP AND DANCE!" at the same time when they played Shut Up and Dance, and the day i left

102: Top 3 things you don't/Won't miss - School, my sisters ex, 2016 bc she was a rough year yikes

103: Top 3 pick up lines - "My name is Will. God's Will.", "I'd like to take you to the movies but they don't like you bring your own snacks", "are you from tennessee bc you're the only 10 i see"

104: Top 3 sports to watch - none of them

105: Top 3 taylor swift songs - all too well - exile - coney island

[cctinsleybaxter]

2020 in books

2020 was a year of changed reading habits; people reading more than ever or not at all, some changing their tastes and others turning to old comforts. While there weren’t any huge overhauls on my end, more free time did mean a total of 32 in a wider range of genres. In the past couple of years I found a lot of the things I read to be kind of middling and ranked them accordingly, but this year had some strong contenders in the mix. With college officially behind me I love nonfiction again, and I really need to stop being drawn in by novels with long titles that ‘sound interesting.’ A piece of advice to my future self: they will only make you angry.

The Good

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky I loved the BBC radio play when I first listened to it back in 2017, but didn’t know if I could stomach the idea of actually reading the 700-page book, especially since I already knew the plot (spoiler alert: this had no effect and I gasped multiple times despite knowing what was going to happen; Fyodor’s just that good at atmosphere.) The story follows Prince Lev Myshkin, a goodhearted but troubled man entering 1860s Petersburg high society and meeting all of the wretched people therein as he navigates life, laughs, love, unanswerable questions of faith, and human suffering. I care about it in the same way I think other people care about reality TV shows and soap operas. I’m so personally invested in the drama and feel so many different emotions directed at these clowns that it’s like being a fan of Invitation to Love (with an ending equally upsetting to that of the show ITL is from, Twin Peaks.)

Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlanksy I adored this book. The first half reads a little like a Wikipedia article, and I was worried that it was leaning too clinical and would be disaffected with colonialism and indigenous peoples, but even that oversight is corrected for as the text goes on. It’s not going to be for everybody because it really is just the world’s longest encyclopedia entry on, well, salt, but it’s written with such excitement for the topic and is so well-researched and styled for commercial nonfiction that I think it deserves any and all praise it’s gotten. We have to talk about that time Cheshire was literally sinking into the ground, and companies who were over-pumping brine water to steal each other’s brine water said ‘no it’s okay it’s supposed to that’ so were legally dismissed as suspects.

Midnight Cowboy by James Leo Herlihy Cried. 10/10. The plot of Midnight Cowboy is very classic and actually has a lot in common with The Idiot, as 20-something Joe Buck moves from the American Southwest to NYC and meets myriad challenges as a sex worker. I’ve been obsessed with the movie for a few years now and the book made me appreciate it anew; I think it’s rare for an adaptation to take the risk of being so different from its source material while still capturing its spirit. The movie doesn’t include quieter moments like the full conversation with Towny or time spent in the X-flat, nor does it attempt to touch Joe’s internal monologue or his and Rico’s extensive backstories, but these things are essential to the book and are some of the best and most affecting writing I’ve ever read. Finally! The Great American Novel!

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones I would firmly like to say that this is probably the best horror novel ever written. The setup is very traditional in that it’s about a group of friends facing supernatural comeuppance for a past mistake, but delivery on that premise is anything but familiar. A story about personal and cultural trauma that raises questions about what we owe to each other and what it means to be Blackfeet, with a cast that’s unbelievably real and sympathetic even at their absolute worst. Creepypasta writers trying to cash in on the cultural mythos of lumped-together tribes wish they were capable of writing something a tenth as gruesome and good as this. It could very well be a movie the visuals and writing style were so arresting, and I can’t wait to read whatever Jones writes next.

Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas This is the least accessible title on the list since it’s a college textbook for people with background in film, but it was so nice to read a woman unpacking film theory with the expertise and confidence it deserves that I have to rank it among the best. I had an absolute blast reading it and am going to have to stop myself from bringing up the horror of 1960s safety films as a cocktail icebreaker.

Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson

The year’s toughest read by far, but also its most rewarding. Thompson uses mountains of documents, government-buried intel, and personal interviews to explain what happened at Attica from beginning to end, and does a fantastic job of balancing hard facts and ‘unbiased journalism’ with much-needed emotion and critical analysis. It’s more important reading in the 2020s than any kind of ‘why/how to not be racist’ book club book is going to be, and the historical context it provides is as interesting as it is invaluable. The second half drags a bit in going through lengthy trial processes with some assumed baseline knowledge of legalese (which I did not have. All that criminal minds in 2015… meaningless), but aside from that editing and prose are some of the best I’ve seen in nonfiction. 

The Bad

The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn A friend and I decided to read this together because I’m obsessed with how insane the author is and wanted to know if he can actually write.

He cannot.

The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All by Laird Barron Barron is an indie darling of the horror fiction scene, so I was excited to finally read one of his collections but can now attest that I hate him. If you’re going to do Lovecraft please deconstruct Lovecraft in an interesting way. I had actually written a lot about the issues I have with how he develops characters and plots, but one of the only shorthand notes I took was “he won’t stop saying ‘bole’ instead of tree trunk” and I feel like that’s the only review we need.

Bats of the Republic by Zach Dodson Look up a photo of this author because if I had bothered to glance at the jacket bio I honest-to-god wouldn’t have even tried reading this.

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone I went in with high expectations since this is an epistolary novella I’d seen praised on tumblr and youtube but oh my god was there a reason I was seeing it praised on tumblr and youtube. This is bad Steven Universe fanfiction. Both authors included ‘listening to the Steven Universe soundtrack throughout’ in the acknowledgements, and to add insult to injury there’s a plug from my nemesis Madeline Miller.

The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton The premise of this one plays with so many tropes I like that I should have been more suspicious. It’s a dinner party with stock characters one would expect of Clue, and rather than our protagonist being the detective he’s a man with amnesia stuck in a 24-hour time loop. Body-hopping between guests, he must gather evidence using the skillsets of each ‘host’ until he either solves Evelyn Hardcastle’s murder or the limit of eight hosts runs out. I read a lot of not-very-good books, and it’s so, so much worse when they have potential to be fun. This is how you lose the most points, and how I abandon decorum and end up writing a list of grievances: • Our protagonist can only inhabit male hosts, which I think is a stupid writing decision not because I’m ‘woke’ but because wouldn’t it make sense for him to also be working with the maids, cooks, and women close to the murder victim? • Complaining about the limitations of hosts makes some sense (e.g- there’s a section where he thinks that it’s hard to be an old man because it’s difficult to get to the places he needs to be quickly), but one of his hosts is a rapist and one of his hosts is fat. Guess which one gets complained about more. • One of the later hosts is just straight-up a cop with cop knowledge that singlehandedly solves the case. We spend some time being like ‘wow I couldn’t have done it without the info all eight hosts helped gather’ but it was 100% the detective and he solves the murder using information he got off-screen. • The mystery itself is actually well-paced and I didn’t have a lot of issues with it (e.g, there’s a twist that I guessed only shortly before the end), which makes it all the worse that the metanarrative of this book is INSANE. No spoilers but the reveal as to why our unnamed protagonist is even in this situation is stupid. I just know they’re going to make it into a movie and I’m preemptively going to aaaaaaaaa!!!

Trust Exercise by Susan Choi The fact that this was the worst book I read all year, worse even than the bad Steven Universe fanfiction, and it won multiple awards makes my blood boil. I could rant about it for hours but just know that it’s a former theater kid’s take on perception and memory, and deals with sexual abuse in a way that’s handled both very badly and with a level of fake deepness that’s laughable. Select fake-deep quotes I copied down because at one point I said ‘oh barf’ aloud: -I’m filled with melancholy that’s almost compassion. It’s sad the same way. -[On a friendship ending] We almost never know what we know until after we know it. -Because we’re none of us alone in this world. We injure each other.

There are also bad sex scenes that I can’t quite make fun of because I think (HOPE?) they’re supposed to be a melodramatic take on how teenagers view sex, but I very much wanted to die. Flowers were alluded to. Nipples were compared to diamonds.

Honorable/Dishonorable Mentions (categorized as the same thing because, well,)

The Life and Death of Sophie Stark by Anna North This book was frustrating because the first third of it is fantastic. It’s set up to be a takedown of the manic pixie dream girl trope, jumping from person to person discussing their relationship with the titular Sophie, and indirectly revealing that she was just some girl and not the difficult and mysterious genius they all believed her to be. Then in the third act, BAM! She was that difficult and mysterious genius and she’s now indirectly brought all the people from her past together. I wanted to scream the plot beefed it so bad, but the good news is I really liked this octopus description.

It was the size of a three-year-old child, and it seemed awful to me that something could be so far from human and obviously want something as badly as it wanted to get out of the tank.

Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore Cool new nightmare speedrun strat is to hear a 2-second anecdote from a documentary that people used to get radium poisoning from painting watch faces, be curious enough that you buy a book to learn more, and be met with medical and legal horror beyond anything you could have imagined. This was almost one of my favorite books of the year! Almost.

Radium Girls is very lovingly crafted and incredibly well-researched; one of those things that’s hard to get through but that you want to read sections of again as soon as you’ve finished. The umbrage I take with it is that it’s very Catholic. The author and many of her subjects are Irish and their religion is important to them, but it casts a martyr-y narrative over the whole thing that I found uncomfortable. Seventeen-year-old girls taking a factory job they didn’t know was dangerous are framed as brave, working-class heroes, but there’s not a set moral lesson to be gained from this story. Sarah Maillefer didn’t make “a sacrifice” when she agreed to the first radium tests, she agreed because she was terrified. She didn’t think she was helping she was begging for help.

The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Tsing Tsing is an incredibly skilled researcher and ethnographer; there are so many good ideas in this book that I’d almost consider it essential leftist text… if I could stand the way it was structured. Tsing posits that because nature is built on precariousness she will build her book the same way, allowing it to grow like a mushroom, and thus chapters don’t progress linearly and are written more like freeform poetry than a series of academic arguments. Some people are really going to love that, but I’m me and a mushroom is a mushroom and a book is a book. I don’t think in the way Tsing does, and while I tried to keep an open mind it’s hard to play along when something is this academically dense and makes so many ambitious claims. As if to prove how different our structuring methods are, I’ve made my own thoughts into a pros and cons list

Things I liked: • ‘Contamination’ as something inherent to diversity • ‘Scalability’ as a flawed way of thinking (Tsing has written whole essays about this that I find very compelling, but a main example here is that China and the US have come down on Japanese matsutake research for being too ‘site specific’ and not yielding enough empirical data) • Discussing how Americans were so invested in self-regulating systems in the 1950s we thought they could be applied to literally everything, including ecosystems • “The survivors of war remind us of the bodies they climbed over- or shot- to get to us. We don’t know whether to love or hate the survivors. Simple moral judgements don’t come to hand.” • Any and all fieldwork Tsing shares is amazing; I especially liked reading about the culture of mushroom pickers living in the Cascades and their contained market system

Things I didn’t like: • Statements that sound deep but aren’t, e.g- “help is always in the service of another.” (Yep. That’s what that means. Unless an organism is doing something to help itself which then nullifies your whole opening argument.) • A very debatable definition of utilitarianism • “Capitalism vs pre-capitalism,” which seems like an insanely black-and-white stance for a book all about finding hidden middle ground • A chapter I found really interesting about how intertwined Japanese and American economies are, but it tries to cover the entire history of US-Japan relations. Seriously, starting with Governor Perry and continuing through present day, this could have been a whole different book and it’s a good example of what I mean when I say arguments feel too scattered (the conclusion it reaches is that in the 80s the yen was finally able to hold its own against the dollar. Just explain that part.) • A chapter arguing that ‘true biological mutualism’ is rarely a focus of STEM and is a new sociological development/way of thinking which is just… flat-out not true

For all the comparisons art gets to ‘being on a drug trip’ this anthropology textbook has come the closest for me. Moments of profound human wisdom, intercut with things I had trouble understanding because I wasn’t on the same wavelength, intercut with even more things that felt false or irrelevant. I can’t put it on the nice list but I am glad I read it.

[purplesurveys]

1278

Social Media Survey

[joybucket]

What is your favorite social media site?  Either Twitter or YouTube, though I never use YouTube as a social media site per se so I guess this round goes to Twitter.

Do you use...

facebook? myspace? twitter? snapchat? instagram? youtube? pinterest? bzoink? another site with message boards? tumblr? deviantart? xanga?

Facebook

Do you get on Facebook every day?  Yeah pretty much all throughout the day. I used to never use it, like never ever; but back in college all announcements were coursed through Facebook so I was technically required to be on it regularly, and it was from there that I began to see memes and start to be more active. I’m a shitposter more than anything though and I rarely ever post stuff of my own. How many FB friends do you have?  I have 679 at the moment but I want to get rid of like 500 of them; it’s just such a long list to go through so I never get to proceed with my unfriending spree lol.

Have you ever been on a deleting spree?  HAHA I just mentioned that. I’ve always wanted to, but like I said 679 is already such an exhaustive list for me, and that’s considering I only started touching my Facebook in like 2019. I can’t imagine people who started Facebook in like 2009 and have 4000 friends aka most people I know.

Have you blocked a lot of haters?  I don’t have haters; at least I’m not aware of any that I have. Not that it’s something I care about at this point.

Do you get bullied online a lot?  No, but that’s also because I don’t really open the channels for people to send in hate. I don’t have Q&A handles like Curious Cat and I never pick out that option in Instagram where people can send in questions.

What's your favorite Facebook app?  Oh I never use Facebook for their apps. Are those still even a thing...? Anyway, I mainly go there to be on the hunt for stupid memes I can reshare or to watch videos that are either funny or informative.

Are you a fan of selfies?  I don’t mind if other people do it, but I think I’m honestly bad at selfies so I almost never take them. I’ve never figured out my angles or what filters look ok on me.

Has anyone ever called the police on you because they didn't like your status?  No but I have had my posts reported because they were deemed ‘offensive.’ Which is weird because my posts that have been taken down are those that speak out against disgusting men, which says a lot about Facebook runs their shit more than anything else.

Are you in any facebook groups?  I’m in nearly a hundred groups, both private i.e. for school purposes, and public.

Are you the admin of any groups?  Nah. Too much time and effort needed out of me.

Do you report abuse to group admins whenever you see it?  Yes. I report the post then leave the group.

What could make Facebook better?  They could put more effort into detecting and banning troll farms.

What year did you start using Facebook?  I made an account in 2012 because of a high school class that required us to upload this specific video-format homework onto Facebook (which in hindsight is such an insensitive homework considering that was nearly a decade ago when the Philippines was still severely behind in internet connection speeds?? Ugh). But I didn’t start actively using my account until around two years ago.

What is your current profile picture of?  Myself, posing in front of the sunflowers in school during the recent graduation season.

Did you like the old Myspace better than Facebook?  I was never a regular user of Myspace, so...

Pinterest

What are some of your favorite boards?  I’ve never had a clue what the purpose of Pinterest was. I mean I have an account...but I’ve also never gotten the hang of it?? so I never touch it hahaha.

Have you ever done a craft you saw on Pinterest?  Well no, because I’m terrible at arts and crafts anyway.

Do you have a Dream Wedding board? If so, what's on it?  No.

If you have a Dream House board, what does your dream house look like?  Ok fine this one I did start hahahah but I don’t even remember what I added on there anymore. I’m sure it was filled with modern-style houses with minimalist interior design.

Do you wish they'd bring the "like" button back?  I’m not even aware of this option.

Do you have a Bucket List board?  Not aware of this either.

Which do you like better: Just Girly Things or And That's Who I Am? The second one sounds less childish. < Same, and it sounds like it covers more.

Do you have a board for tattoos you like? If so, what are some of your faves?  No. The only one I ever made was the house one, then Pinterest quickly became boring from there when I realized there wasn’t much else I could do besides making mood boards.

Do you have a "Random" or "Miscellaneous" board?  No.

Have you ever reached the maximum number of boards?  No.

Do you have any secret boards?  No.

Have you ever had a Pin deleted because of copyright laws?  No.

Do you have a Color board? No.

Do you have an About Me board? If so, what's on it? No.

YouTube

Do you have a YouTube channel? If so, what is it?  Technically I do but I only have it so I can tailor video suggestions to my interests and so that I can like videos and subscribe to channels I like.

What kind of things do you post on YouTube?  I’ve never posted any video on there, not even private ones. I’m also not the type to comment.

What do you like to watch on YouTube?  These days YouTube serves as a stress reliever for me, which is to say I would typically go for humorous BTS-related compilations because there are sooooo many hilarious channels that make these great videos haha. Occasionally I’d go back to channels or series that I used to frequent, like Good Mythical Morning, Buzzfeed’s Worth It and Unsolved, Try Guys, Watcher, etc. 

Are you subscribed to any channels?  To so many.

Do you watch any vlogs? If so, what ones are your favorite?  Hm probably Jiwoo’s, though her channel is called Mejiwoo. I find her content calming and conversational and basically fun to binge-watch when I’m not looking for anything super super particular to watch.

If you have a channel, how many subscribers do you have?  0. I’m just a lurker.

Will you subscribe to my channel? (msg me if you want a link!)  Only if it’s really fit to my interests, I guess.

Do you watch music videos?  Rarely; not a fan of MVs in particular. I only really ever put an exception for BTS.

Have you ever watched a TV show on youtube?  Well no since their copyright team works hard and works fast lol. I do watch entire video game walkthroughs from time to time.

Have you ever worked out to exercise videos on youtube?  No, I can’t care less about working out tbh.

Have you watched Amanda Todd's famous video?  No. I’m scared that it might be too upsetting or triggering for me.

Have you ever looked up how to do something on YouTube?  Not really, I prefer looking up articles that can teach me step by step in words.

Do you get a lot of hate comments on youtube?  No, I’ve never posted anything on there.

How long have you been a youtuber?  Never been.

Instagram

Do you post on Instagram a lot?  I do 1-3 Instagram stories in a week, I would say. As for posts, I only have 4 in total and I don’t really feel the pressure to add more. I just post when I feel the want to.

Have you ever posted a poll on instagram?  Nah, I’m not too sure if anyone would participate so I’ve never tried. If you don't have an iPhone, do you wish you could use Instagram?  I’m pretty sure other operating systems can also use Instagram...

Do you have any followers?  Around 50, I think.

Do you like Instagram filters? I’ll use them sometimes to make my stories appear prettier.

Twitter

Do you think twitter is stupid? Hehe show me at least one person who doesn’t think so. < Coming from someone who regularly uses Twitter, agree. It is crazy stupid but stupid is what I’m there for. Which is honestly not always such a bad thing to me - I like that people are more themselves, more stripped-down, vulnerable on Twitter. People always seem to want to show off their best selves on Facebook and Instagram, so I’m actually kind of grateful that there is at least one social media out there where people can just be their clumsy, goofy selves.

How often do you tweet?  Probably a maximum of five a day. Nowadays I’m on there mostly to just scroll through my timelines.

Do you get on twitter every day?  Yes, both on my personal and fan account.

Bzoink

Do you make a lot of surveys?  I never make them but I try to take them as often as I can.

Do you take a lot of surveys?  Haha sorry, was one step ahead of you. Yeah, I do.

Do you post in the message boards?  Nah. I dunno if I’m even permitted to check the message boards on Bzoink considering I don’t have an account.

What types of surveys are your favorite?  Categorized surveys like this one or countdown ones can be fun, but at the end of the day I like sticking to the classic random survey.

Do you have friends on here?  Not on Bzoink, but here on Tumblr yes! There’s a number of people here I like keeping up with :)

Do you post all your secrets on here?  Again, not on Bzoink; but yep I share pretty much everything here.

What type of survey do you think I should make next?  Anything but basic/about me-themed ones that will ask for my name and eye color and weight.

Do you read peoples' answers to your surveys?  I’ve never made a survey.

Do you think you are good at making surveys? 

Do you try to make unique surveys?

What type of surveys do you want to see more of?

Random

This or That

Scattergories

Have You Ever

Are you like me?

About You

Personal, Deep Questions

Girly

Music shuffle

Would You Rather

Do you have this in your bedroom?

Long

Short

All About Your Crush

Fashion

Make-up

School

Music

Your health

Your friends

Confessions

Girl Confessions - how different is this from just confessions? Hahaha

R-Rated

Controversial topics

Myspace

Did you have a myspace when you were in high school?  I started an account in like 4th grade when Myspace was ~big, but I didn’t find it fun and everyone my age was on Friendster anyway, so I was largely inactive.

Do you use myspace now?  No. Is it still even around? I have no clue.

Do you miss bulletins? I didn’t get to join in on the fun so there’s nothing to miss.

Did you like customizing your profile with the old myspace?  Not attributed to Myspace but I did have a lot of fun customizing my Multiply and Tumblr accounts back in the day. That was a period where I really got to learn and play around with HTML :)

Did you have music on your profile?  Not on Myspace again but I did on Multiply! I had a cute little playlist that played the songs immediately as soon as you landed on my page hahaha.

Did you learn HTML when you used Myspace?  Tumblr, yeah. I believe the skills are still there but I’ll definitely be a bit rusty.

Did you have a customized cursor?  Oh, no. Wasn’t a fan of those as I found them a bit tacky.

Did you use glitter graphics?  Also found those tacky haha no, I never used those.

Do you remember posting glitter graphics on friends' pages?  Nope.

Did you make "dolls"?  I don’t recall ever making those.

Did you use photo captions?  Not sure what this is referring to so let’s just say no.

Did you have a photo slideshow on your profile?  Hmmm nope, I don’t think so.

Xanga

Did you have a Xanga account back in the day?  No. It wasn’t big here so I had never heard of it until I started taking surveys on here and heard people mentioning Xanga, actually.

Do you have a xanga account now?  No.

Did you post photos and quotes on your xanga page?  I never had any.

Snapchat

Do you use snapchat?  I did; I was superrrrr active on there for a time. It kind of just got old at one point, though, and my feed got more and more dead until I too just left my account dormant altogether.

What is your favorite filter?  There were a lot of cute ones on there that helped me be more confident with taking selfies but my favorites have to be the dog and flower crown ones.

Tumblr

Do you understand Tumblr?  I had a better handle of it when I ran a fan account that required me to be more active; but now that I really just go on here to take surveys I just use the basic functions and nothing more. But yeah, I understand just enough to get by.

Do you use Tumblr?  Yeah. Even on the days I don’t post surveys, I regularly go on here to keep up with friends I like keeping up with like Elisabeth, Lane, Steph, Lina, Julie :)

Other

What forum sites did you use to love that aren't around anymore?  There was one message board I frequented for this girly/tween magazine I used to collect, but I won’t share the name.

Are there any other great social media sites that you recommend?  I think this survey was able to cover all the main ones I use.

Do you use a photo editing site? If so, what?  I use apps instead of sites to edit my photos.

Do you ever use BeFunky.com?  Nope.

Do you use a video editing site? If so, what?  Nah, I rarely have to edit videos in a super intricate, detailed way. Apple’s video editing features suffice for me.

Have you ever downloaded fonts?  Very occasionally since it’s never necessary.

Have you ever used photobucket to upload an image?  No but I remember going on there back in the day to look for images. I never uploaded any, though.

Do you use iTunes?  Not anymore. I have an account on Spotify now.

Do you listen to music on Pandora?  No, never used it.

[surveys-at-your-service]

Survey #359

“i’m only a crack in this castle of glass  /  hardly anything there for you to see”

Do you look better with your hair down or up? It's too short to go up. Has you mom ever directly told you that she favoured your other sibling(s) over you? Yeesh, no. Have you ever read The Outsiders? Seen the movie? Read the book, seen the movie. Adore both. What’s your favourite drink from Jamba Juice? I don't think we have those here. Can you stand eating the crusts of a slice of sandwich bread? I don't mind the crust at all. Do you do your homework at home or in class? Prior to college, I did my work right after getting home to get it out of the way. In college, I did it in-between classes or when waiting for Mom to finish class. Do you feel uncomfortable sharing drinks with other people? Yes, I never do it. Do you get jealous if your boyfriend hugs another girl? I'm single, but hypothetically, I wouldn't... It's just a hug. At least for me, it's just a friendly gesture. Is there something that happened in your past you hate talking about? A few things, yes. Is it hard for you to be “just friends” with the opposite sex? Nah. If you had to choose, what color is your favorite? Baby pink. How many times have you dated the person you’re with now? I’m single. Has anyone suspected you of being a different sexuality? Yes. Do you like chocolate or vanilla cake more? Chocolate. Does it bother you to have blood drawn or not so much? Nah. What color is your toothbrush? It's a white electric one. Do you normally fall asleep fast or slow? Ridiculously slow. Have you ever had a severe allergic reaction? No. What do you want to be for Halloween this year? I'd love to dress up as like a Ms. Oogie Boogie and take some cool pictures, but I highly doubt it'll actually happen. What color are your glasses, if applicable? Black. Do you still look in the toy aisle, or do you pass it by? I walk past it. What are your summer fashion essentials? I don't have fashion essentials for any season. Do you have your own website? For my photography, yeah. Do you think you would be a good salesperson? Ha, no. I worked in retail before and I fucking sucked. Do you like candy corn? NO. Just colored wax, ugh. Do you like to wear skirts? I don't wear anything that shows my legs. Were you happy as a kid? Yeah. That, talkative, and hyper. Favorite store to browse but not really buy anything? Haha, I LOVE going on MorphMarket now and again to browse the ball pythons especially, but boy if I had the cash and space would I buy like fifty of them at once. I don't really know about a store I like browsing but not buying from. Skittles or Sour Patch Kids? Both are great, but I guess Sour Patch Kids. BUT, if you throw SOUR Skittles in there... then it's a war lol. If tattoos were free, how many would you have? A HELL OF A LOT. I wanna be just about totally painted. Do you wear a retainer at night? Not anymore. I had one, but I stopped using it. Are you afraid of dolls, puppets, or clowns? I'm not a doll person, particularly porcelain ones. When you’re in your room, do you keep the door locked? No. It's not even closed. Do you think your face is mostly symmetrical? Actually no, and I'm self-conscious about it. Stupidest thing you have ever said out loud? OH Christ, I'm not retrospecting on this. What’s your least favourite ice-cream flavour? That I've actually tried, strawberry. It's disgusting. What was the last good news you heard? I got approved for TMS therapy! Who was the last person to comment on your Facebook status? My friend Lyndsey. How did you meet him/her? World of Warcraft. She's actually my guild master, and she is the sweetest damn person. Have you ever learned any self-defense? If not, would you be interested in learning? I haven't, but yeah, I'd like to. When was the last time you took a nap? How long was it? Yesterday. For some reason, I actually slept a LONG time, like at least three, but probably close to four, hours. I mean I was tired, but I didn't feel THAT tired. Do you like Gushers? YAAAAAAAAAAS What would you do if you could do anything without failing? Actually get a degree for SOMETHING. What is your native language? English. Do you have a younger brother or sister? A younger sister. If so do/did they really get on your nerves? No. We were very close as kids, but we've drifted apart. Now, she absolutely doesn't get on my nerves. I'm so proud of her. Name something that happened to you that was completely unexpected. Uhhh I dunno. Do you judge people that have multiple piercings? Lol wtf? No. Do you watch the Olympics? No. What did you have for breakfast this morning? I had Kix cereal. Do you like orange juice? Yes. So long as it doesn't have pulp in it. Do you think it’s cruel to keep an animal in a cage while you’re away? It depends on the size of the cage as well as how long you're away. Do you have a pet gecko? No, but I'd love a fat-tailed gecko. Are you scared of reptiles? Not at all, I adore them. Is your car messy? I don't have my own car. Mom's kinda is, though. It needs a wash badly, but because of her bumper literally being zip-tied on, she doesn't trust going into a car wash. And neither of us are about to do it manually, lol. Have you ever seen the show 16 and Pregnant? No, fuck that show. Do you buy expensive clothes? No. Does death scare you? Not really. What are your current goals? Conquer my social anxiety, get a job, lose weight, do something to strengthen my legs... Those are the four biggies. Do you clap or cheer when at a concert? I did both at the one I've been to. Do you drink coffee? What brand? No. Do you use a comb or brush? A comb. When you were younger, did you ever do that exclamation point that looked like an upside down triangle and had a really big dot? No. I loved the cutesy girl handwriting though, haha. I just could never do it. You’re locked in a room with the person you last dated, any problems? Well yeah, we're locked in a room lmao. What kind of relationship do you have with the last person you kissed? It's perfectly fine, we're best friends. Have you ever gotten burnt by a cigarette? No. Do you get mad when people smoke around you? Yes. Honestly, have you ever eaten raw cookie dough? Yeah, more than once. When was the last time you were on a city bus? Never. Do you have a garden? Does it have flowers, vegetables, or both? No. Where do you want to raise your kids? Who said I even want kids? Have you ever been to Cracker Barrel? Yessssss, good shit. Have you ever seen a ghost? I think I have. Have you ever burned an ant with a magnifying glass? No. Have you ever been to craigslist.com? Yes. Have you ever used Nair? Yes, on my legs. It works, I just have stupidly hairy legs that need so much to get it all. How many tabs do you have open and what are they? Two YouTube tabs and then Tumblr. What browser do you prefer to use? Chrome. What room are you in right now? My bedroom. Are you excited for anything this month? 1.) I get my tattoo on the 19th, and 2.) I start TMS next Wednesday. What language course did you take in school, if any? I barely survived one semester of Latin, then I did all four available German courses. What language would you most like to learn? I'd love to improve my German. What would you like to get a degree in? Photography. What book are you reading, what genre is it and do you like it so far? Wings of Fire: The Brightest Night. It's young adult fantasy, I think. Did you ever sometimes flip through your text books even when you didn’t need to? Yeah, mainly to just look at pictures because I was that bored in class, haha. What types of magazines do you read? None. Would you prefer to read a book, watch a movie or TV show, or play a video game? Play a video game. What’s your current relationship like with the person you lost your virginity to and do you wish it was different? We don't have any relationship anymore. I don't regret losing it to him, if that's what you're asking. If you mean our relationship stance, it'd be nice to still be in touch with him, but I know it wouldn't be healthy for me. Have you ever felt responsible for someone’s death? Pets, yes. No humans. What was the last book you recommended to someone? Idk. What’s the most difficult thing you and your current or last significant other have gone through? Distance was very hard. What’s your best memory with your ex? I'm going to assume this refers to "the ex." In which case, we were "play arguing," and I came storming into the kitchen after him to make a point, and I slid mid-sentence, and he caught me. We just held each other laughing our asses off. It's the simple things, man. Who was the last person that asked to hang out with you and what’s the story of how you met that person? Summer. My little sister and her were in pre-k together and became friends, but I gradually became closer to her than Nicole did when we were teens. Has anyone ever asked you out and you turned them down? Yes. Is there something you generally always ask for help with? Yeah. Like recently I've been having apples and peanut butter a lot, and I ask my mom to cut the apple because I'm terrified of knives. Do you feel comfortable telling people how much you weigh? NOPE. Have you looked at any old photos of yourself lately? No. In a relationship, have you ever been on and off with your partner? No. Do you consider cooking to be an art? Yes. Are you a fast or slow reader? I'd say I read at a moderate pace. Does it take a lot to gross you out? It depends on what it is, but I am actually more squeamish than I used to be.

[upsidedowninmyworld]

All of them? :$

I can’t sleep. Why not

1: How tall or short do you wish you were? The height I am now

2: What’s your dream pet? (Real or not) Hmm...Gizmo

3: Do you have a favorite clothing style? Anything comfortable really

4: What was your favorite video game growing up? Sonic

5: What three things/people do you think of most each day: My partner, my future, and what it all holds

6: If you had a warning label, what would yours say? Very quiet, slow to anger but proceed with caution

7: What is your opinion on [insert person/thing here]? 🤷🏻‍♀️

8: What is your Greek personality type? [Sanguine, Phlegmatic, Choleric, or Melancholic] uhh when I took this test in high school, I was melancholic

9: Are you ticklish? Yes

10: Are you allergic to anything? Loads

11: What’s your sexuality? Bisexual

12: Do you prefer tea, coffee, or cocoa? Cocoa

13: Are you a cat or dog person? Cat

14: Would you rather be a vampire, elf, or merperson? Hmm vampire

15: Do you have a favorite Youtuber? I did

16: How tall are you? 5’2”

17: If you had to change your name, what would you change it to? I like mine

18: How much do you weigh? [Only ask this if you know the user doesn’t mind!] too much for me to be comfortable

19: Do you believe in ghosts/spirits? Yes

20: Do you like space or the ocean more? Uhh I like both equally

21: Are you religious? Kind of

22: Pet peeves? When people touch my stuff without asking. Bad breath

23: Would you rather be nocturnal or diurnal [opposite of nocturnal]? Nocturnal

24: Favorite constellation? Not sure

25: Favorite star? Not sure

26: Do you like ball-jointed dolls? No?

27: Any phobias or fears? Not saying

28: Do you think global warming is real? Yes

29: Do you believe in reincarnation? Not really

30: Favorite movie? Forrest Gump

31: Do you get scared easily? No lol

32: How many pets have you own in your lifetime? 5?

33: Blog rate? [You’ll rate the blog of the one who’s asking.] what?

34: What is a color that calms you? Blue

35: Where would you like to travel and/or live? Australia, London

36: Where were you born? LA

37: What is your eye color? Brown

38: Introvert or extrovert? Intro

39: Do you believe in horoscopes and zodiacs? No lol

40: Hugs or kisses? Kisses

41: Who is someone you would like to see/visit right now? Cody

42: Who is someone you love deeply? Cody

43: Any piercings you want? Second ear piercings

44: Do you like tattoos and piercings? Yes

45: Do you smoke or have you eiver done so? Before

46: Talk about your crush, if you have one! He’s pretty great. Been with them for almost 4 years :)

47: What is a sound you really hate? A certain person’s voice

48: A sound you really love? The ocean

49: Can you do a backflip? Not anymore

50: Can you do the splits? If I stretch, yes

51: Favorite actor and/or actress? Natalie Dorner and Ed skrein atm

52: Favorite movie? I already answers this

53: How are you feeling right now? Tired

54: What color would you like your hair to be right now? Half white half Black

55: When did you feel happiest? I think it’s been a while

56: Something that calms you down? Writing or drawing

57: Have any mental disorders? [Only ask this if you know the user doesn’t mind!] nothing diagnosed

58: What does your URL mean? My world is odd

59: What three words describe you the most? Quiet, contemplative weird

60: Do you believe in evolution? Yes

61: What makes you unfollow a blog? Posting things I don’t like

62: What makes you follow a blog? Posting things I like

63: Favorite kind of person: a genuinely nice person that is honest

64: Favorite animal(s): pandas, otters

65: Name three of your favorite blogs. 🤷🏻‍♀️

66: Favorite emoticon: 😻

67: Favorite meme: I have too many

68: What is your MBTI personality type? I can’t remember

69: What is your star sign? Uhhh Pisces...?

70: Can your dog roll over on command, if you have a dog? Yes

71: What outfit out of all your clothes do you like to wear the most? A black shirt and jeans with converse

72: Post a selfie or two? No thank you

73: Do you have platform shoes? I do!

74: What is one random but interesting fact about yourself? I can bend my thumb all the way to my arm

75: Can you do a front flip? Not anymore

76: Do you like birds? Sure

77: Do you like to swim? Love it

78: Is swimming or ice skating more fun to you? Swimming for sure

79: Something you wish didn’t exist: not saying

80: Some thing you wish did exist: someone that is no longer here

81: Piercings you have? Just my ears for now

82: Something you really enjoy doing: reading

83: Favorite person to talk to: Cody

84: What was your first impression of Tumblr? I like this site

85: How many followers do you have? Uhh I haven’t looked in a while

86: Can you run a mile within ten minutes? I use. To lol

87: Do your socks always match? Yes

88: Can you touch your toes and keep your legs straight completely? Yes

89: What are your birthstones? Aquamarine

90: If you were an animal, which one would you be? Panda or a cat

91: If a flower could aesthetically represent you, what kind would it be? A rose

92: A store you hate? Hmmm not sure

93: How many cups of coffee can you drink in one day? I don’t

94: Would you rather be able to fly or read minds? Read minds

95: Do you like to wear camo? On occasion

96: Winter or summer? Winter

97: How long can you hold your breath for? About 30-45 seconds

98: Least favorite person? HAHA

99: Someone you look up to: my dad

100: A store you love? Any bookstore lol

101: Favorite type of shoes. Converse

102: Where do you live? In LA

103: Are you a vegetarian or vegan? If so, why? Nope

104: What is your favorite mineral or gem? I don’t have one?

105: Do you drink milk? Yes

106: Do you like bugs? No

107: Do you like spiders? Yes

108: Something you get paranoid about? The future

109: Can you draw: kind of

110: Nosiest question you have ever been asked? How sex was with a person I slept with or how I could stand sleeping next to ex because he snores really loudly. Like freight train loud

111: A question you hate being asked? Who’s the smarter or prettier twin. I usually get that I’m smarter

112: Ever been bitten by a spider? Yes

113: Do you like the sound of waves at the beach? I do

114: Do you prefer cloudy or sunny days? Cloudy

115: Someone you’d like to kiss or cuddle right now: codes

116: Favorite cloud type: what

117: What color do you wish the sky was? Purple

118: Do you have freckles? No

119: Favorite thing about a person: clean hands

120: Fruits or vegetables? Fruits

121: Something you want to do right now: see someone

122: Is the ocean or sky prettier? Ocean

123: Sweet or sour foods? Sour

124: Bright or dim lights? Bright

125: Do you believe in a certain magical creature? Sure

126: Something you hate about Tumblr: 🤷🏻‍♀️

127: Something you love about Tumblr: 🤷🏻‍♀️

128: What do you think about the least? Work

129: What would you want written on your tombstone? 🤷🏻‍♀️

130: Who would you like to punch in the face right now? HA

131: What is something you love but also hate about yourself? My mind

132: Do you smile with your teeth showing for pictures? Yes

133: Computer or TV? Computer

134: Do you like roller coasters? Yes

135: Do you get motion sickness or seasickness? It depends

136: Are your ears lobed or attached? Attached

137: Do you believe in karma? Sure

138: On a scale of 1-10, how attractive would you say you are? Like an 8 on a good day

139: What nicknames do you have/have had? Quite a few

140: Did you have any pretend or imaginary friends? Yes

141: Have you ever seen a therapist/shrink? Yes

142: Would you say you are a good or bad influence to others? Good

143: Do you prefer giving or receiving gifts/help? Both

144: What makes you angry. A lot

145: How many languages do you speak fluently? One

146: Do you prefer boys, girls, and/or non-binaries? I’m bi soooo

147: Are you androgynous? No

148: Favorite physical thing about yourself: my butt lol

149: Favorite thing about your personality: my ability to see the good in everyone even when they’re shitty. Also my least favorite thing about myself

150: Name three people you would like to talk to right now in person. Well my dad, Cody, my grandma

151: If you could go back into time and live in one era, which would you choose? The one rn because I am a minority

152: Do you like BuzzFeed? Sure

153: How did you meet your spouse/girlfriend/boyfriend/partner? [If you have one.] uhh dating app. Technically a football game.

154: Do you like to kiss others’ foreheads or hands for platonic reasons? No

155: Do you like to play with others’ hair? Just codys

156: What embarrasses you? Not a lot

157: Something that makes you nervous/anxious: the future because I can’t really talk about it with anyone without stressing people out. But it helps me feel less anxious so I’m kind of stuck

158: Biggest lie you have ever told: oof

159: How many people are you following? 🤷🏻‍♀️

160: How many posts do you have on your blog(s)? 🤷🏻‍♀️

161: How many drafts do you have on your blog(s)?🤷🏻‍♀️

162: How many likes do you have on your blog(s)?🤷🏻‍♀️

163: Last time you cried and why: ooh like a few days ago

164: Do you have long or short hair? Short

165: Longest your hair has ever been: to my butt

166: Why do you like, dislike, or have neutral feelings about religon? I don’t want to answer this

167: Do you really care how the universe and world was created? Yes

168: Do you like to wear makeup? Yes

169: Can you stand on your hands or head for more than thirty seconds? No

170: Did you answer the questions you were asked truthfully? Yes

[romancing-lady-whistledown]

Just wanted to comment on your last post - there was no frustration and drama for me when I was watching Elu and Skam and Skam France before I made the huge error of looking for the fandom and joining it. Now I realise it was a big mistake, I have to constantly block people on Tweeter for hating on my faves and I've come to really hate another remake which I only didn't care about before having to deal with its stans. So I totally understand what you're saying. Me, I wish I'd never joined.

So this got long af so I’m gonna put it under the cut lol

Oh I absolutely feel you, when I say frustration and drama, I am refering to the live-watching experience and all the fandom drama that comes with that. I have a very polarizing feeling about being in the online fandom personally. For me the positive aspects have been so big that I can’t say that I wish I’d never joined personally, but especially if the positive aspects I’ve experienced haven’t been part of your fandom-experience I definitely see how you can get to the point where you wish you never joined in the first place, especially in the past year, because the negative aspects...they’re rough, and they do make the experience of the actual show different from if you just watched it on your own or you watched it as a casual viewer in the country it’s airing in, rather than as a part of the fandom on Tumblr and/or Twitter.  

I watched the original Skam as a casual Norwegian viewer, I was in a Facebook-group with other casual Norwegian viewers, there was never any drama about anything, not the clips, not the characters, not the actors and not the creators of the show. It was just watching the clips, often someone commenting about how the clip was cute, funny, sad ect, and then everybody moved on with their day. There would sometimes be a thread with questions like “Where do you think William is?” or “What do you think is up with Even?”, but it was always very casual. Sometimes I think the online fandom forget that the majority of the remake-viewers are the casual local viewers, the ones who only casually watch that one remake as a show on it’s own, not as a part of the “Skamverse”. The international Twitter/Tumblr-fandom is just a little part of the people watching the show and the opinions we see here don’t necessairily reflect those of the more casual audience (as one can often see in for example reaction-videos on Youtube where the reactors watch alot of shows at the same time and might not even blink at something that might’ve been a big deal in the online fandom). 

Being a casual viewer worked so well for me with Skam, the whole viewing experience was very chill and enjoyable. I did the same thing with Skam France S1 and S2, I watched the first episode of every remake, and Skam France was the only one I felt compelled to continue watching. It wasn’t the most exciting experience plotwise since it was just the exact same as the og, but I love the cast, I love the French language and it was overall pleasant and fun enough that I kept watching both seasons all the way through. As someone who has no attention span for TV-shows, the fact that they did keep my attention without anyone to push me to keep watching is enough for me to not concider them bad in the way alot of people do. Not very exciting after having watched the og, sure. Do I prefer the og S1 and S2? Yes. But bad? I personally wouldn’t say that. If I came into the fandom before I started watching on my own I know I would’ve been told to either skip S1 and S2 or skip Skam France altogether, and that obviously wouldn’t have been very good advice in my case, although it might be for someone else. That is why, when someone shows up on Tumblr saying they wanna start watching the remakes and ask for advice, I never ever tell them not to watch a remake. I could be robbing them of something that might deeply touch them, just because it didn’t touch me. 

This brings us into one of the aspects of being in the online fandom that can be both really positive and really negative, that being the way it can affect your experience of the show itself. On the positive note, there’s no way I could’ve gone through Skam France S3 in the casual way I went through the original Skam or S1 and S2 of Skamfr. No way. Having someone to talk to about all the amazing moments with was an actual need for me. Hell, two years later and I still need that. Not to mention the fan art and fics that has kept Elu alive for me ever since S3. There was this whole detective-work in the fandom about finding Eliott’s Instagram during S3, finding out about the Instagram-posts David and Niels made about the S3 clips, being in the online fandom actually added to the experience of watching S3 for me, and even now almost two years after S3 I’m left with some actual friends, friends that aren’t even in the fandom anymore but who I still talk to almost daily, as well as some lovely bloggers who are still invlolved in the fandom and who’s blogs I prefer to visit rather than visiting the tag.

But then there’s the negative side of this. While being in the online fandom certainly can add to the experience, it can also affect it negatively. That was what happened with S5 and S6 for me, to the point where I had to switch between staying completely off Tumblr and delete the Twitter app from my phone. While S5 had a couple of plotlines I didn’t like, it also had alot of amazing moments when it actually was dealing with the main theme of the season. S6 did not give their plotlines the proper exploration and conclusion they deserved, but on the other hand the reason why that was so frustrating to me was because I found those plotlines so interesting and actually wanted to see them explored properly. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have cared if the plotlines were dropped out of nowhere, like ofc it would’ve been weird but if the whole Tiff-plot suddenly disappeared I wouldn’t complain. While they were flawed and nowhere near the level of S3 for me, I did enjoy so many of the clips and Skamfr S3, S5 and S6 are the only remake-seasons I have downloaded on my computer knowing I will rewatch them regularily. If I didn’t overall enjoy them, I wouldn’t wanna rewatch them. I don’t hate-watch anything. I could barely get through Skamfr S4 (a season I genuinely didn’t like) and I could not get through Wtfock S4, (which I liked even less). So the flaws Skamfr S5 and S6 had didn’t turn the seasons as a whole into trash for me, but I know they did for alot of people and going to the tags while in the middle of the live-watching experience couldn’t just be a bummer, it could almost transfer some feelings and opinions that weren’t my own onto me just from seeing them repeated so many times. I appreciate nuanced discussion, which does include constructive criticism, and there was alot of that too, but there were also alot of posts that I would not concider that. In this case, when I got some time and distance away from the live-watching experience and got the space to think for myself, I realized that as often is the case, my feelings about the seasons weren’t black and white, or in this case, masterpiece vs trash. Yes, I don’t like certain plotpoints (like the love triangle and car-scene from S5 or the Tiff-plot and the overly rushed conclusions to the otherwise interesting plotlines in S6), but that doesn’t mean that I personally think S5 or S6 as a whole are trash, not when the good episodes and clips were as good as they were to me personally. The online fandom experience has also, just like for you, completely turned me off from another remake that I otherwise felt neutral about and at one point even liked, which really is a shame.

So yeah this turned into a long ass essay just to say, the online fandom-experience is a true mixed bag for me. Although the positive experiences I’m taking from it, mainly the lovely and talented people, the friends I made and the full Skam France S3 experience, ultimately made it worth it for me, I can totally see how, especially if you didn’t have those experiences, you would simply wish you never joined. When it’s a pain, it’s a pain.

[dipplie]

This is how I cope don’t @ me

1: Top 3 pets you wish to have Bunny, Mouse, pet bee 2: Top 3 Disney Movies Tangled, Zootopia, and a close tie between The Princess and the Frog and Wreck it Ralph 3: Top 3 OTPs Nick and Judy (I’m not a furry), honestly probably the other pairings from my 3 (4) favorite movies like Felix and Calhoun or Tiana and Naveen or whatever 4: Top 3 pick up lines Pick me up- no literally please just carry me around like sweep me off my feet no like ACTUALLY like ju- 5: Top 3 summer activities Lying in the grass, listening to music on the swings, drinking from the neighbors sprinklers because you didn’t bring water on your walk 6: Top 3 school memories    -Once in 5th grade we were doing an egg drop, and I put mine off till the day before, so my parents just gave me a jar of peanut butter, and I just put the egg in the jar, and when they dropped it from the school roof it exploded all over the pavement and left a stain for years.    -Another time in 9th grade, a couple friends and I wrote a giant “send nuds” in the snow beneath my friends next class’s window, and some other kids took a picture of it and spread it around, and like the whole school was talking about it for a day or two (though we denied it was us so we didn’t get in trouble).    -And in 12th grade the last day of the 3rd semester, my AP Psych teacher said “you know you guys might not come back after spring break since the covid-19 virus might come to America.” And half the class was like: “I hope so we don’t have to come back haha.” And then we went into lockdown for a year 7: Top 3 things you find attractive Being looked at, Being talked to, Being touched at all oh my go d 8. Top 3 shops I dunno man can I say Build-a-Bear Workshop I’ve never been there 9: Top 3 romantic dates Theme park, Aquarium, Build-a-Bear Workshop 10: Top 3 drinks Milk, Milkshakes, the color purple 

11: Top 3 spices/herbs oh my god im too white for this question I think doritios are spicy, SALT 12: Top 3 apps to use not tumblr 13: Top 3 months of the year not winter 14: Top 3 clothing items Skirt, Bows, Thigh-highs 15: Top 3 kinds of flower Daffodils, Buttercups, Dandelions (yes I’m aware they’re a weed) 16: Top 3 Christmas movies Home Alone 1, Those stop motion rudolph ones, the original grinch 17: Top 3 things you don’t/Won’t miss Angsty middle schoolers, Angsty high schoolers, Angsty people 18: Top 3 games Minecraft, Stardew Valley, All the Zelda games between 2002-2009 19: Top 3 binge perfect tv shows I really don’t watch actually T.V. shows I just watch anime sometimes maybe and youtube series man 20: Top 3 kinds of candy Butterscotch, Chocolate coins, Those little pebble chocolates that looks like fish tank rocks 21: Top 3 ways to exercise/be active Well I have an answer, but I don’t think I can say it~ 22: Top 3 spirit animals (I’ve heard something about this being possibly racist so I’ll approach this wish caution) Bunnies, Lambs, a pet rock 23: Top 3 petnames Honey, Muffin, Sweetheart 24: Top 3 places you’ve been to A yearly carnival my old town had once a year, Disney World even though I almost drowned there, The Arcade in my old town called Bananas 25: Top 3 most used websites Youtube, Tumblr (regrettably), Pintrest 26: Top 3 people you last texted My boyfriend, my friend, my co-worker friend 27: Top 3 hashtags you use imagine using the tags how they’re supposed to be used 28 Top 3 items you can’t leave the house w/o clothes (i’m really funny) 29: Top 3 guilty pleasures I write self-insert sometimes I guess 30: Top 3 subjects of study/classes to take Psychology, Sociology, certain art classes 31: Top 3 things to draw/doodle My OC’s, My friends, inappropriate stuff 32: Top 3 aesthetics Cottagecore, Bloomcore, Wonderland 33: Top 3 things you’d buy if you gained three million dollars Pretty things, Cute Clothes and stuffed animals, therapy 34: Top 3 ways to treat yourself Buying pretty things, Wearing cute clothes and holding stuffed animals, therapy 35: Top 3 cartoon crushes Kyoya from OHHC, Mako from Kill La Kill, Marceline/Marshall Lee 36: Top 3 things to do in the snow Draw in it, make snow sculptures, eat it 37: Top 3 accents to hear Russian, Spanish, idk spanish 2 38: Top 3 scents Vanilla, Cream, Strawberries 39: Top 3 things to do in the rain Sit in the car quietly, make out probably, cry 40: Top 3 cupcake flavors Chocolate, Chocolate 2, Chocolate 3 41: Top 3 fruits Cherries, Strawberries, Grapes 42: Top 3 holidays to celebrate Halloween, Christmas, Valentines 43: Top 3 embarrassing moments My friend jokingly revealing my weird self insert fanfic I wrote in middle school (that was gross don’t ask about it) to my friend group, getting a constant D- in AP Stats the whole semester and the whole class secretly knowing about it, wearing an oversized minecraft shirt in my 6th grade school picture 44: Top 3 crayola colors Seafoam, Canary, Cotton Candy 45: Top 3 things you hope to accomplish in college Get back into theater and actually be included and noticed, not cry in the bathroom, feel cared about by my classmates 46: Top 3 fanfictions you’ve read don’t ask me that you can’t ask me that the last fanfics i’ve read were in middle school  47: Top 3 people you miss right now My boyfriend, Two of my friends GJ, my dopamine  48: Top 3 fears Being hated, Being alone, Being abandoned 49: Top 3 favorite literary devices (oh god it’s been a minute hang on) Alliteration, Juxtaposition, Colloquialism 50: Top 3 pet peeves Saying one thing and doing another, trying to act like you’re being the bigger person by not choosing a side, constant self deprecation 51: Top 3 music artists AJR, 3OH!3, Fake Type 52: Top 3 bad habits BFRD OCD, speaking before I think, lately I’ve been lashing out  53: Top 3 ice cream flavors Cookie Dough, Bubblegum, Cheesecake 54: Top 3 meals you love Bread and cheese, cheese with bread, I like dairy and bread 55: Top 3 things you want to say to someone in your lifetime Where are we going, What are we gonna do, what are you doing onii-chan (im so sorry) 56: Top 3 dog breeds Small, fluffy, actually a cat 57: Top 3 TV shows from your childhood The Amazing World of Gumball, Courage the Cowardly Dog, y’all remember Might Bee??? 58: Top 3 languages you speak/wish to speak Better French, More ASL, I guess Spanish would be useful 59: Top 3 series (book, movie, television) I like the first couple Saw movies but then it went kind of downhill, I eventually stopped keeping up with SU ad AT but they have lesbians now and we love that, and I guess I read Warrior Cats in middle school. 60: Top 3 pizza toppings Cheese, ???, that’s all I need 61: Top 3 youtubers you’re subscribed to Markiplier, Erolds Story, Wilbur Soot 62: Top 3 tattoo / piercing ideas Little Flower earrings, Little flower tattoos, Little flower stuff 63: Top 3 awards you want to win love trust and affection  64: Top 3 emojis 🍄🐝🍋 65: Top 3 things you’d do differently have different parents 66: Top 3 places to be in the world In love, Back up, Purgatory  67: Top 3 things you miss about being a kid Lack of responsibility and pressure, Mental illness, Lack of shame 68: Top 3 baby names Penelope, Theodore, Sofie 69: Top 3 smoothie combos/flavors Grape, Strawberry, Cherry 71: Top 3 turn ons People being patient with me, People treating me equally, Being touched kindly at ALL 72: Top 3 turn offs looking like Tyler1 73: Top 3 recipes you want to try Sugar spice and everything nice 74: Top 3 dream jobs Primary School Teacher, Child Consoler/Therapist, I dunno being a storytime animator sounds nice... 75: Top 3 lucky items Fidget Toys, Stuffed Animals, Random Office Supplies (you know the ones)

[soft-trait]

I just realised I’ve never actually introduced myself so I found this get to know me tag and thought I’d do it hehe

Rules: post a pic of your simself with your traits and answer the questions!

My traits: gloomy, creative, lazy

Questions under the cut (there’s lots)

1. WHAT IS YOUR FULL NAME? Tessa (idk if I want to put my full full name lmao)

2. WHAT IS YOUR NICKNAME? Tess

3. BIRTHDAY? July 25th 2000

4. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE BOOK SERIES? I don’t really uhhhh, read

5. DO YOU BELIEVE IN ALIENS OR GHOSTS? Aliens have to exist, like have to, ghosts I dunno about though

6. WHO IS YOUR FAVORITE AUTHOR? Stephen King

7. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE RADIO STATION? Do people still listen to the radio?

8. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE FLAVOR OF ANYTHING? Cherry

9. WHAT WORD OR PHRASE WOULD YOU USE OFTEN TO DESCRIBE SOMETHING GREAT OR WONDERFUL? Swaggy

10. WHAT IS YOUR CURRENT FAVORITE SONG? S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W by My Chemical Romance

11. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE WORD? shit

12. WHAT WAS THE LAST SONG YOU LISTENED TO? If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know) by The 1975

13. WHAT TV SHOW WOULD YOU RECOMMEND FOR EVERYBODY TO WATCH?  Shameless

14. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE MOVIE TO WATCH WHEN YOU’RE FEELING DOWN? Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind

15. DO YOU PLAY VIDEO GAMES? Besides The Sims not really

16. WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST FEAR? I’m scared of way too many things but I think my biggest fear is being abandoned, not being financially stable, not being able to live comfortably etc

17. WHAT IS YOUR BEST QUALITY, IN YOUR OPINION? I think I’m pretty funny sometimes

18. WHAT IS YOUR WORST QUALITY, IN YOUR OPINION? Too many, I’m selfish, clingy, needy, lazy, incapable of acting like an adult, I overthink everything, the list goes on

19. DO YOU LIKE CATS OR DOGS BETTER? Dogs, no offence but fuck cats

20. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE SEASON? Winter hands down

21. ARE YOU IN A RELATIONSHIP? Sure am, for just over a year and a half

22. WHAT IS SOMETHING YOU MISS FROM YOUR CHILDHOOD? Not being scared of everything, never being anxious, being mentally and physically healthy

23. WHO IS YOUR BEST FRIEND? My boyfriend, I have no other friends, none

24. WHAT IS YOUR EYE COLOR? Blue

25. WHAT IS YOUR HAIR COLOR? Ginger

26. WHO IS SOMEONE YOU LOVE? My bf

27. WHO IS SOMEONE YOU TRUST? My bf

28. WHO IS SOMEONE YOU THINK ABOUT OFTEN? My bf (sorry he’s the only person I care about)

29. ARE YOU CURRENTLY EXCITED ABOUT/FOR SOMETHING? I’m excited to get McDonald’s again after lockdown is over

30. WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST OBSESSION? Sleeping

31. WHAT WAS YOUR FAVORITE TV SHOW AS A CHILD? iCarly, Victorious, that shit

32. WHO OF THE OPPOSITE GENDER CAN YOU TELL ANYTHING TO, IF ANYONE? bf

33. ARE YOU SUPERSTITIOUS? I don’t think so

34. DO YOU HAVE ANY UNUSUAL PHOBIAS? I have emetophobia (fear of vomit)

35. DO YOU PREFER TO BE IN FRONT OF THE CAMERA OR BEHIND IT? Behind, I wanted to make movies, be a director etc for awhile but I change my mind lots

36. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE HOBBY? Sleeping

37. WHAT WAS THE LAST BOOK YOU READ?  Reasons To Stay Alive by Matt Haig

38. WHAT WAS THE LAST MOVIE YOU WATCHED? The Miseducation of Cameron Post

39. WHAT MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS DO YOU PLAY, IF ANY? Nope

40. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE ANIMAL? Monkies but only the cute ones

41. WHAT ARE YOUR TOP 5 FAVORITE TUMBLR BLOGS THAT YOU FOLLOW? @bellessims @lunchsims @evoxyr @ridgeport @meatballteeth and so many more I love everyone on here

42. WHAT SUPERPOWER DO YOU WISH YOU HAD? Teleportation

43. WHEN AND WHERE DO YOU FEEL MOST AT PEACE? In bed

44. WHAT MAKES YOU SMILE? Not much

45. WHAT SPORTS DO YOU PLAY, IF ANY? Nope

46. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DRINK? Coke

47. WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU WROTE A HAND-WRITTEN LETTER OR NOTE TO SOMEBODY? Probably in primary school when we were forced to

48. ARE YOU AFRAID OF HEIGHTS? I’m afraid of falling from said heights

49. WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST PET PEEVE? Ignorance and rudeness for no reason

50. HAVE YOU EVER BEEN TO A CONCERT? Yes sir

51. ARE YOU VEGAN/VEGETARIAN? Nope I luv chimkin

52. WHEN YOU WERE LITTLE, WHAT DID YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GREW UP? A model (hahaha), a SFX artist, a makeup artist, a director, a coroner/forensic pathologist, funeral director, now I want to be a tattoo artist

53. WHAT FICTIONAL WORLD WOULD YOU LIKE TO LIVE IN? Sex Education, I just wanna be Otis’ friend

54. WHAT IS SOMETHING YOU WORRY ABOUT? everything, I’m pretty much constantly worried about something or everything

55. ARE YOU SCARED OF THE DARK? Not if I know where I am, I’m scared of the unknown, not knowing where I am or what I’m touching in the dark

56. DO YOU LIKE TO SING? I like it but I’m horrible

57. HAVE YOU EVER SKIPPED SCHOOL? I pretty much missed the last few weeks of my last year of school and didn’t go to my bio class for the last few months of it, whoops

58. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE PLACE ON THE PLANET? My bed

59. WHERE WOULD YOU LIKE TO LIVE? Canada

60. DO YOU HAVE ANY PETS? 2 cats, they’re annoying as fuck

61. ARE YOU MORE OF AN EARLY BIRD OR A NIGHT OWL? Night owl, I never wake up before 11am

62. DO YOU LIKE SUNRISES OR SUNSETS BETTER? Sunsets

63. DO YOU KNOW HOW TO DRIVE? Nope and I don’t want to

64. DO YOU PREFER EARBUDS OR HEADPHONES? Earbuds

65. HAVE YOU EVER HAD BRACES? Nope

66. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE GENRE OF MUSIC? Alternative, Metal, Hardcore

67. WHO IS YOUR HERO? ur mum

68. DO YOU READ COMIC BOOKS? Nope

69. WHAT MAKES YOU THE MOST ANGRY? When people eat my food or when people get my order wrong

70. DO YOU PREFER TO READ ON AN ELECTRONIC DEVICE OR WITH A REAL BOOK? Real but also neither

71. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE SUBJECT IN SCHOOL? It was art

72. DO YOU HAVE ANY SIBLINGS? Brother and sister, both older

73. WHAT WAS THE LAST THING YOU BOUGHT? Makeup

74. HOW TALL ARE YOU? 5′6, 169cm (nice)

75. CAN YOU COOK? I physically could if I had to but nope

76. WHAT ARE THREE THINGS THAT YOU LOVE? My boyfriend, movies, tattoos

77. WHAT ARE THREE THINGS THAT YOU HATE? People, most food, when shit doesn’t work

78. DO YOU HAVE MORE FEMALE FRIENDS OR MORE MALE FRIENDS? I have no friends

79. WHAT IS YOUR SEXUAL ORIENTATION? Straight

80. WHERE DO YOU CURRENTLY LIVE? At home

81. WHO WAS THE LAST PERSON YOU TEXTED? My boyfriend

82. WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU CRIED? Yesterday

83. WHO IS YOUR FAVORITE YOUTUBER? I have lots, Pewdiepie, Sidney Lavin, Clare Siobhan, Poofesure, heaps more

84. DO YOU LIKE TO TAKE SELFIES? Sometimes but I always look ugly in them

85. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE APP? Instagram

86. WHAT IS YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR PARENT(S) LIKE? Not bad

87. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE FOREIGN ACCENT? German

88. WHAT IS A PLACE THAT YOU’VE NEVER BEEN TO, BUT YOU WANT TO VISIT? Canada, Italy, Greece, Europe in general, Japan

89. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE NUMBER? 7

90. CAN YOU JUGGLE? Nope

91. ARE YOU RELIGIOUS? Nope

92. DO YOU FIND OUTER SPACE OR THE DEEP OCEAN TO BE MORE INTERESTING? Neither, both scare the absolute shit out of me

93. DO YOU CONSIDER YOURSELF TO BE A DAREDEVIL? Hell no

94. ARE YOU ALLERGIC TO ANYTHING? Not that I’m aware of

95. CAN YOU CURL YOUR TONGUE? Yep

96. CAN YOU WIGGLE YOUR EARS?  Nope

97. HOW OFTEN DO YOU ADMIT THAT YOU WERE WRONG ABOUT SOMETHING? When I’m wrong

98. DO YOU PREFER THE FOREST OR THE BEACH? Forest, fuck beaches

99. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE PIECE OF ADVICE THAT ANYONE HAS EVER GIVEN YOU? yolo

100. ARE YOU A GOOD LIAR? Sometimes

101. WHAT IS YOUR HOGWARTS HOUSE?  Slytherin

102. DO YOU TALK TO YOURSELF? Sometimes

103. ARE YOU AN INTROVERT OR AN EXTROVERT? Introvert

104. DO YOU KEEP A JOURNAL/DIARY? Nope

105. DO YOU BELIEVE IN SECOND CHANCES? Depends on what they did

106. IF YOU FOUND A WALLET FULL OF MONEY ON THE GROUND, WHAT WOULD YOU DO? I mean I could always use more money...

107. DO YOU BELIEVE THAT PEOPLE ARE CAPABLE OF CHANGE? Yes

108. ARE YOU TICKLISH? Hell yes

109. HAVE YOU EVER BEEN ON A PLANE? Yup

110. DO YOU HAVE ANY PIERCINGS? Yup, both ears, septum and nostril

111. WHAT FICTIONAL CHARACTER DO YOU WISH WAS REAL? Tate Langdon

112. DO YOU HAVE ANY TATTOOS? Yup, 5 so far

113. WHAT IS THE BEST DECISION THAT YOU’VE MADE IN YOUR LIFE SO FAR? Downloading Tinder lmaooo

114. DO YOU BELIEVE IN KARMA? I’m not sure

115. DO YOU WEAR GLASSES OR CONTACTS? Nope

116. DO YOU WANT CHILDREN? Absolutely not

117. WHO IS THE SMARTEST PERSON YOU KNOW? Me

118. WHAT IS YOUR MOST EMBARRASSING MEMORY? My whole life is an embarrassment

119. HAVE YOU EVER PULLED AN ALL-NIGHTER? More often than not

120. WHAT COLOR ARE MOST OF YOUR CLOTHES? Black and red

121. DO YOU LIKE ADVENTURES? Depends on what it is, I don’t really like going outside

122. HAVE YOU EVER BEEN ON TV? Yup I was in an ad for Caprisun, I got paid to scream

123. HOW OLD ARE YOU? 19

124. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE QUOTE? I honestly can’t think of a single one right now

125. DO YOU PREFER SWEET OR SAVORY FOODS? savoury