#i have two more to post for jan but i started them before this one

[lilyoffandoms]

Thanks @storyofmychoices for letting me borrow Lilah this month to get me back into arting!

[The original posts here and here.]

[jokeroutsubs]

Joker Out between dreams and reality (Val 202: Music 202) - Part 1: Bojan and Jan

Today, 3.08.2023, Slovenian national radio station Val 202 broadcasted a recent interview with Joker Out members Bojan Cvjetićanin and Jan Peteh. Below is the translation of the interview, which you can listen in the audio file above, or on this direct link.

~

Interviewer: Joker Out, the five-man band that sent Slovenia into a frenzy and is well on their way to sending Europe into a frenzy too. After their Eurovision performance in Liverpool, a lot of doors opened to Bojan, Kris, Jan, Nace and Jure. And Joker Out are stepping through all of them with decisive steps. Massive crowds at their concerts at home and abroad, concerts until the end of the year in Serbia, Croatia, Poland, Scandinavia that sold out in minutes, and crowds of dedicated fans around the world who seem to know all the lyrics by heart, even though Slovenian is far from familiar to them. I talked about all that with Bojan Cvjetićanin and Jan Peteh, two of the founding members of Joker Out. To start with, I asked them whether they’re living their dreams.

Jan: Fortunately, we're living more than our dreams, we’re living our lives. Bur what’s happening right now was still a dream not so long ago, yeah.

Bojan: I passed the Museum of Modern Art yesterday and saw that they currently have an exhibition called “Don’t dream your dreams”, so… it’s better to live them.

How are you absorbing everything that’s happening right now? A Slovenian band that’s, let’s say, more “midstream”, has never managed to do what you’re doing right now. Are you watching that with excitement, wonder, maybe even fear?

Bojan: Yeah, it all definitely caught us a little unawares. It’s true that everything that’s happening now was absolutely our aspiration when we decided that we wanted to go to Eurovision this year. And what we secretly and not-so-secretly wanted really came true. But I’d say that you cannot be prepared for all that to really happen. It’s truly crazy to follow these moments when we announce a concert abroad in some city, often in cities we’ve never even been to, and before we can even all post “juhuhu”, it’s sometimes already sold out, so… I mean, damn.

Jan: Never in my life could I have imagined that I’d see a full venue in Glasgow or London sing our songs in Slovenian, so moments like that are definitely the highlight of every week and month. But then there’s a big contrast when you come from that somewhat surrealistic experience into the quiet of your own home, and you’re at home for a few hours. Because you don’t know if this is real life or just a dream, or if you’re shifting between them. So it’s unusual, but… I’m enjoying it immensely.

Jan has pointed out that even abroad, fans sing Joker Out songs in Slovenian. After one of their recent concerts in the UK, I saw a comment on social media that went something like this: “I didn’t understand a word, but that was the best concert in my life.”

Jan: That’s what Bojan says at the start of every concert, “prepare to not understand a word for the next hour and a half.” But people are screaming, enjoying themselves. And some even pretend to understand the songs, even though they probably don’t.

Bojan: Well, that’s the main point of music, right? Music is special exactly because you don’t have to understand it, you just have to feel it. But it is weird for us because we’re not used to this happening with Slovenian language. Especially because… really from the moment we started making music, everyone was telling us that first of all, with Slovenian you can’t even make it in Slovenia, second of all, absolutely no way you could make it in the Balkans, and we’re not even going to talk about breaking into other foreign countries.

Bojan says that even with the upcoming songs, and hence with the new third album, they will not forget their mother tongue. Especially because they recognise you can achieve a lot even if you don't sing exclusively in English. Their ambition to tell an even bigger story, to expand to larger venues and to have a new, larger fan base is turning things around.

Bojan: As you mentioned in the beginning, we are a mainstream band. In mainstream music it is always a good idea to include the masses and make your music easily accessible to them. We have witnessed an initial push of interest after Eurovision, with some fans genuinely drawn to us as musicians. They're really, really committed to learning the material, because they want to come to the gigs and enjoy themselves. They're taking it to the max and that's phenomenal. And it's also our aspiration to grow. After all, writing songs in different languages is, by definition, a kind of musical experiment.

Kris (in the background): And a challenge.

Bojan: Yes, absolutely a challenge. We're not setting off to write the third album as an English only album, of course. We've decided that we want to do a multilingual album, it will absolutely include Slovene, Serbian and English, and hopefully include some Spanish and French language as well. That is something we want to play with.

Not only Slovenian and English, the other languages represent a challenge as well, say Joker Out. Speaking of the third album, it's already, let's say, marinating, in the making. Joker Out is also a band that has not suffered the so-called curse of the second album. It was, dare I say it, was even better than the debut. Are you concerned about the possible third album curse?

Jan: Our Demons have obviously defeated the curse of the second album. As for the progress of the third album, we recently had our first really creative rehearsals since December, when we were working on Carpe Diem in Hamburg. From then on, we've accumulated so much creative potential, that it simply poured out of us during those few rehearsals. Now each time we get to our rehearsal space, our need to create becomes so intense that I think if we keep this up, we won't have to worry about the demons of the third album either.

As Jan points out, they are not lacking in creative inspiration. Bojan agrees, adding that in recent months they have often been 'emotionally shocked'. This means that emotions have boiled up and things that they were not used to before have been happening, which made it difficult to process certain situations. Last week, Joker Out parted ways with one of the members of their core team, who found himself under an avalanche of criticism, especially on social media, for inappropriate behaviour. The news of the termination of the collaboration was followed by many thanks from fans that the band members had not only heard the message, but had also taken action about it.

Bojan: Yes. We have really had a very, very complex situation that we have always hoped would never happen to us, but as we said in the statement, we hope and believe that it will never happen again. What has happened was that one of our team members has created an unpleasant atmosphere with our fans, with our listeners, in a repetitive, how shall I say... Pattern. He often chose the wrong words, and this in turn led to many feeling, I would say, unpleasant, uncomfortable. Both at our concerts and on social media. And that is something that is absolutely unacceptable for us. We have always tried to put 1000% positive energy out at our concerts and share it with people, and the people also gave that energy back to us, so any disruption of that process is, as I said, unacceptable to us. And we absolutely had to say goodbye to this member.

The singer of Joker Out says it was the right decision and the band stands by it, adding that they have learned a lot from this experience. If nothing else, they have realized the true power of social media. They have learnt that it can bring a lot of good things, but there are also a lot of bad things that you can't be prepared for.

Bojan: I have to say that, yes, I've withdrawn from social media now, because I want to make this album under positive influences, not negative influences, and really, on social media I feel like I'm trapped in a world that I don't really want to be trapped in. So, yeah, for example, let's say two days ago, I was really negatively shocked, or affected by a moment when... We had a concert in Ptuj, which was a really specific experience, because I was having a panic attack on stage for an hour and a half, and I was just thinking about whether or not I was going to faint or not. I don't know why, whether it was the air, whether it was too much coffee, or what happened, but it really wasn't a pleasant concert for me, so within 20 minutes after the show I was rushing home, right. But on Twitter there was this post, some girl who said that I... that some security guard or somebody on my behalf invited her backstage after the concert. Which, whoever was there, including the organiser, knows wasn't even remotely true, because as soon as I got out of the shower, hands shaking, I got into the van and went home, sitting next to Nace, bag in hand, so as not to throw up right there in the car. So, there are some things we are not prepared for. There are dimensions that are a whole new world for us.

In the second part of the interview with Joker Out on "Val 202" (name of the radio station, "Wave 202"), we're sticking to departures and leaving. Joker Out is a group where two band members were replaced in the past seven years. The drummer Matic was replaced with Jure and the bassist Martin with Nace. That's why I am interested in how replacements influence the group or rather the ahmosphere in the group. A music group has to breathe as one. Jan says that each member brings a different energy to the team. He's convinced that one half of the first album and the whole second album would have sounded totally different if the drummer Jure hadn't joined them.

Jan: At this point, I'm simply happy that it happened, and it goes for Nace as well. Because now, I can hardly imagine two better persons for this band or better friends.

Jure (in the background): Awww!

Bojan: The fact is, members leaving a band is definitely a very difficult thing. We've had five members in the band since its creation. And as Jan said, when the energy changes, the balance that was there gets disrupted. Now there are only two possible scenarios. One is that the new energy is less suitable for the collective and the whole balance is brought down. Or that it is more positive and elevates the whole thing. I believe the universe helped us somehow; in both cases the energies that joined us, pushed us into new realms of creativity, positivity, literally everything in a very short time. So, I know that everything happened here just the way it had to happen. Even if you ask Martin, who just left the band, because he wanted to pursue another path in his life. You can ask him now, I know, because I live with him, because we are roommates. He is the luckiest man because, in the same short time that we have started branching out in new directions, his personal spheres have taken off in the best possible way, and he is, as we say, kicking ass. We can say that by 2023, everything that went on has happened as it should have.

Everything happened like it was supposed to happen, says Bojan. Also in Liverpool on the Eurovision stage. Barely three months later, Joker Out are living the life they could have only dreamed about. Masses of fans, sold out concerts and a feeling that only the sky is the limit. Is the current success partly or solely due to Eurovision, that's our next topic.

Bojan: It's absolutely not just a consequence of what happened in Liverpool because that was just one big catalyst for everything that we've been doing as a band since the beginning. (It also has to do with) how we dealt with Liverpool. Because what is happening today, as I said, was planned. We didn't know to what extent it was going to be realized, but it was a plan. Liverpool has made a difference for us in a way that no other night in this world can make because it has literally brought us, in one night, bizarre numbers of new audiences that we could not have imagined before. So, in one sense, yes, that is what Eurovision did for us; we cannot deny it. But on the other hand, it was us who did it.

Jan: In harmony, Eurovision and Joker Out, hand in hand.

Bojan: Together forever Joker Out, hand in hand.

Jan: *singing* # Together forever #

Together forever. Behind the group Joker Out is 7 years of creating. For the very end, a question, where do they see themselves in 7 years.

Jan: Now I've had a couple of people ask me recently how do you handle it when there's so much going on. To me, it seems like a primary school experience, where every year, the new grade is a little bit harder, but you're also evolving from the previous years. So, if we were thrown from zero to where we are now, we wouldn't even know where to begin. We have quite a bit of experience behind us now. It's a very steep road, exponentially growing, mathematically speaking, and I'm glad that we are at a point where nobody is confining us to a certain determined path that we should follow, but it's all up to our own volition. Whatever we decide to do, we will do, and I think that we can be very happy about this kind of artistic freedom. So, I'm also very excited and eagerly awaiting to see where this will take us.

Bojan: Here, Jure is suggesting that in 7 years we'll be doing Wembley. There was an idea that we should book Wembley now for the year 2030 and we release the tickets today. It would be the first concert in the world, where the tickets would be sold 7 years in advance. Then we'll wait and see what happens. If something will happen, it'll happen; if not ... it will get canceled due to illness.

All: (laughter)

Translation cr: @kurooscoffee, @beeoftheanxieties, drumbeat, +2 anonymous jokeroutsubs members

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tabs give me superpowers

Berliners: Otherland has added a second date (Jan 28) for my book-talk after the first one sold out - book now!

"Lifehacking" is in pretty bad odor these days, and with good reason: a once-useful catch-all for describing how to make things easier has become a pit of productivity porn, grifter hustling, and anodyne advice wreathed in superlatives and transformed into SEO-compliant listicles.

But I was there when lifehacking was born, and I'm here to tell you, it wasn't always thus. Lifehacking attained liftoff exactly 19 years and 348 days ago, on Feb 11, 2004, when Danny O'Brien presented "Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks" at the 0'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (aka ETCON). I was there, and I took notes:

https://craphound.com/lifehacksetcon04.txt

O'Brien's inspiration was his social circle, in which people he knew to be no smarter or better or motivated than anyone else in that group were somehow able to do much more than their peers, in some specific domain. O'Brien delved deeply into these peoples' lives and discovered that each of them had merely ("merely!") gotten very good at using one or two tools to automate things that would otherwise take up a lot of their time.

These "hacks" freed up their practitioners to focus on things that mattered more to them. They accomplished the goal set out in David Allen's Getting Things Done: to make a conscious choice about which things you are going to fail to do today, rather than defaulting to doing the things that are easy and trivial, at the expense of the things that matter, but are more complicated:

https://gettingthingsdone.com/what-is-gtd/

One trait all those lifehacks shared: everyone who created a little hack was faintly embarrassed by it, and assumed that others who learned about their tricks would find them trivial or foolish. O'Brien changed the world by showing that other people were, in fact, delighted and excited to learn about their peers' cool little tricks.

(Unfortunately, this eventually opened the floodgates of overheated posts about some miraculous hack that turned out to indeed be silly and trivial or even actively bad, but that wasn't O'Brien's fault!)

I'm one of those people whom others perceive as very "productive." There are some objective metrics on which this is true: I wrote nine books during lockdown, for example. Like the lifehackers O'Brien documented in 2004, I have lots of little hacks that aren't merely a way of getting more done – they're a way to make sure that I get the stuff that matters to me (taking care of my family and my health, and writing books) done.

A lot of these lifehacks boil down to making your life easier. There's a spot on our kitchen counter where I put e-waste. Whenever I go out to the car, I carry any e-waste out and put it in a bag in the trunk. Any time I'm near our city dump, I stop and throw the bag into their e-waste bin. This is now a habit, and habits are things you get for free: I spend zero time thinking about e-waste, which means I have more time to think about things that matter (and our e-waste still ends up in the right place).

There's other ways I use habits to make my life easier: after many years, I learned how to write every day:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/22/walking-the-plank/

For longer-form works like novels, I "leave myself a rough edge," finishing the day's work in the middle of a sentence. That way I get a few words for free the next day, meaning I never start the day's work wondering which words I'll type:

https://locusmag.com/2014/01/cory-doctorow-cheap-writing-tricks/

One of the most powerful habits I've cultivated is to have a group of daily tabs that I open in a new browser every morning. The meat of this tab group is websites I want to check in with every day, either because they don't have RSS feeds, or because I want to make sure I never miss an update.

This tab-group habit started before RSS was widespread, when most of the websites I wanted to check in on every day didn't have feeds yet, and for many years, this group was just a set of daily reads. But over the years, I started throwing things in the tab-group that I needed to stay on top of.

My daily tabs are in a folder called "unfucked rota" (they were originally in a folder called "rota," which got corrupted and had to be reconstructed in a folder I called "fucked rota," until I finally took a couple hours off and got it in good running order, hence "unfucked rota"). As I type this, "unfucked rota" contains more than a hundred websites I visit every morning, but it also contains:

The edit-history pages for four Wikipedia entries I'm watching;

Chronological feeds of my books on Amazon and Audible, to catch counterfeits as they are posted;

The parent notification portal for my kid's school;

The mileage history for the airline I flew on yesterday (I'll delete this once the flight is posted);

The credit card history for a card I reported a fraudulent charge on (I'll delete this once the refund is posted);

The sell-pages for three products that are out of stock (I'll delete these once the products are in stock and ordered);

A bookmarked newest-first Ebay search for a shirt I like that has been discontinued by the manufacturer;

The new-survey-completed pages for my last two Kickstarters;

The courier tracking page for an item being shipped sea-freight to me from Asia.

The tail end of this unfucked rota changes all the time, but as you can tell, it's got a lot of stuff that would be time-consuming to build a whole new system to track, but which has a web-page that can be easily added to a daily, habitual check-in and then removed when it's not relevant anymore.

Some of these things have email notifiers or RSS feeds, but those are too easy to lose in the noise. I generally delete email from ecommerce sites unread, since 99.99% of the messages they send me are unsolicited marketing nonsense, not the "notify me when this is back in stock" message I do want to see (same goes for my kid's school, which sends me fifty unimportant messages for every message that I must reply to).

Most of the internet is still on the web, which means it can be bookmarked, which means that it takes me one second to add it to the group of things I'm staying on top of, and one second to remove from that group. I get up in the morning, middle-click the "unfucked rota" item in my bookmarks pane, make a cup of coffee, and then sit down and race through those tabs, close-close-close.

It takes less than a second to scan a tab to see if it's changed (and if I close a tab too quickly, the ctrl-shift-T "unclose" shortcut is there in muscle-memory, another habit). The whole process takes between one and 15 minutes (depending on whether there's anything useful and new in one of those tabs).

Tabs, like lifehacks, are also in bad odor. Everyone stresses about how many tabs they have open. It's even inspired Rusty Foster's excellent newsletter, Today In Tabs:

https://www.todayintabs.com/

But this is a very different way to think about tabs. Rather than opening a window full of tabs that need your detailed, once-off attention later, this method is about using groups of tabs so that you can pay cursory, frequent attention to them.

In a world full of administrative burdens, where firms and institutions play the "sure, we'll do that, but you're going to have to track our progress" game to get out of living up to their obligations, this method is a powerful countermeasure:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/02/02/david-graebers-the-utopia-of-rules-on-technology-stupidity-and-the-secret-joys-of-bureaucracy/

My little tab habit is so incredibly useful, such a powerful way to seize back time and power from powerful actors who impose burdens on me, that I sometimes forget how, for other people, tabs are a symptom of a life that's spiraling out of control. For me, a couple hundred tabs are a symbol of a couple hundred tasks that I'm totally on top of, a symbol of control wrestled back from others who are hostile to my interests.

This isn't how tabs were "meant" to be used, of course. It's an example of the kind of "innovation" that comes from users repurposing things in ways their designers didn't necessarily anticipate or intend.

This is what Jonathan Zittrain meant by "generative" technology back in 2008, when he published his incredibly prescient The Future of the Internet: And How To Stop It:

https://memex.craphound.com/2008/07/22/zittrains-the-future-of-the-internet-how-to-save-the-internet-from-the-internet/

For Zittrain, "generativity" was the property of some technologies that let its users generate new, useful tools and solutions for themselves (this is very different from "generative AI!")

Zittrain described how "curated" computing systems, like mobile devices that relied on apps that couldn't be adapted by their users, were dead ends for generativity. 15 years later, the dismal world of apps has proven him right:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/24/everything-not-mandatory/#is-prohibited

To the extent that "lifehacking" is about doing more, rather than being more deliberate about what you accomplish, it can be harmful. I am not immune to the failure modes of lifehacking:

https://locusmag.com/2017/11/cory-doctorow-how-to-do-everything-lifehacking-considered-harmful/

But overall, using tabs as something I close, rather than something I open, is a source of comfort and calm for me. For one thing, ripping through a group of tabs every morning means that I don't have to worry about missing something if I go too fast. I'll get another chance tomorrow:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/27/probably/

Decades ago, Dori Smith dubbed her pioneering blog her "#Backup Brain":

https://web.archive.org/web/20020120231027/http://www.backupbrain.com/

At their best, our systems – be they physical, like a spot on the counter where the e-waste goes, or digital, like a tab-group – are "congitive prostheses." They allow us to move important things from the highly contested, busy and precious space between our ears and out there into the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

Like those lifehackers that O'Brien studied for his presentation in 2004, I confess to feeling a little silly about telling you all about this. For me, this habit of decades is so ingrained that it feels trivial and obvious. And yet, when I look at people in my life struggling to stay on top of a million nagging administrative tasks that could be easily watched through a morning's flick through a tab-group, I can't help but think that maybe some of you will find a useful idea or two in my unfucked rota.

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/25/today-in-tabs/#unfucked-rota

[asteria-argo]

You mentioned is one of your WIP posts about how the Richmond coaches share repairability of the players, I would love to hear your thoughts on who belongs to who?

Not only do I have thoughts, I have a whole chart.

The way this works in my mind is that it's a combination of how helpful the coach actually is when the player has a problem, how likely to player is to go to the coach for help and how well they get along just as people.

We'll start with Roy. Roy's only got a couple of players that are really his problem, for a couple reasons. One, Roy is scary and unapproachable but also two, Roy became a coach after most of the players had already cemented themselves as either Ted or Beards problems. That leaves Roy with Isaac and Jamie.

Jamie as Roy's problem is self explanatory. Ted fumbles the bag with Jamie every time he tries, and Beard kind of freaks Jamie out, so he doesn't usually go to him for help. We all agree Jamie is Roy's problem.

Isaac is also Roy's problem. This has canon basis, I can cite my sources but for convenience sake I'll paraphrase my reasoning and that is that Roy was a lot more instrumental to Isaacs development than any of the other coaches. Roy is the one who chose Isaac as the next captain, it was Roy who helped Isaac through his slump in season two before Roy had even come back to be a coach, and it was Roy who spoke to Isaac after he went after that fan in the stands. Isaac is Roy's problem.

Next we'll talk about Beard. Beard in canon doesn't have a lot of one on one interaction with any of the players, so I'm going mostly on vibes for the players that are his problem.

That's why Bumbercatch is mainly Beards problem. I think their weird girl energies line up pretty well, and when Bumbercatch is doing weird things Ted doesn't know how to handle, Beard is usually able to step in. Jan Maas is also mostly Beards problem, because Jan Maas appreciates Beards direct but minimal approach to coaching.

Colin is also a good balance of Ted's problem and Beard's problem with a slight lean towards being Beards problem. Not because Colin actually goes to Beard for help that often, more because Beard decided Colin was his problem and keeps an eye on him when he can. I was actually tempted to make a little circle that included Trent and put Colin there, because that is who Colin actually goes too for help more often than not, but in terms of The Coaches, Colin is usually Beards problem.

Zoreaux and Richard were tricky for me, because they don't do a lot in canon so I think they both fall under the general umbrella of being Ted's problem because he's the manager more often than not, but I think Beard is pretty involved with the goal keepers so Zoreaux is his problem sometimes.

As for Ted, he will usually take point in issues regarding Dani or Sam. As the manager, everyone on the team is under the blanket umbrella of being his problem, but Sam and Dani will usually seek Ted specifically out for help with things on the occasions they need it and Ted is always be happy to help them to the best of his ability.

As for all the background himbos, they fall solidly in the center thanks to the fact that because they have at best vague personalities and I don't even know most of their names, so they're usually the problem of whoever is closest to them at the time.

I hope you enjoyed this because I spend So Much Time thinking about it.

[catboybiologist]

Transition journal and documentation: Jan and Feb of 2024

Measurements for January are up, and February will be soon to follow! Tagging @whalesharkcat and @trans4hire here. If you want to be tagged when I post these, let me know! The advice for injections is in the journal below.

Some quick notes to clarify things:

I'm consolidating qualitative observations into my journal. Oftentimes these haven't been easy to cleanly classify into different categories of observation, so I'm not really gonna bother.

As I'm sure you've realized, the timing of these observations isn't consistent. I have a private document with exact date stamps for everything, and these are mostly right at the end of the month. But my levels checks don't match up to this cleanly, so I group them with the closest set of other measurements. Sometimes I don't have one that cleanly fits.

I can't trust myself to measure height anymore, to be blunt. I want to ask the doctor every time but chicken out about it easily.

But anyways.

And now, as a journal, a brief summary of my thoughts on the past two months:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

*deep breathing*

fuuuuuuuucccckkkkkkkkkk

Okay. So. I'm not gonna list off everything that's happened since the year started. So many independent things started happening, one after the other, that I had to start formatting it as a bulleted list to tell people I know irl what's been going on. Each one has been a crisis on its own- massive emotional events, health problems, health problems in people close to me, transphobic drama with former "friends", academic&research problems, and a resulting mental health spiral. And all of this leading up to my qualifying exams at the end of February, for which I barely scraped by and passed.

But. With all of this. There's silver linings.

The biggest one is that the start of this year has been a stress test of my overall emotional state since starting HRT. I'm not gonna lie- if all of this had happened a year ago, I don't think I would be here now. I either would have completely snapped and done something I regret, or... yeah. But as it stands? I cried. A lot. I isolated a bit. I had mood swings and anxiety and anger and excitement and relief and highs and lows beyond my wildest dreams. It was intense. It was not pretty. But it was cathartic, and healthy. Before this, I would've processed all of this as a generic, stressful, anxiety-ridden malaise, that would've weighed down on me until a breaking point. As it stands, however, I made it. Not in a neat way, not even really in an emotionally stable way, but I made it. And there is no fucking way that would be true pre-HRT. I think I can genuinely say at this point that estrogen has been life saving for me.

In the middle of all this, I switched to injections, right at the start of February. A mistake? Maybe, but I'm too fed up with delaying my progress because "the time isn't right", so I stubbornly refused to delay that change any further. It's a goal I worked out with my provider ahead of time and I stuck to it. So how's that been?

It's been an incredible and WILD experience. I'm on estradiol valerate. For those that don't know, estradiol is conjugated with another compound, which is then cleaved over time in your body to release it. For injections, that results in a peak irculating levels about 1-3 days afer injections. Some people feel it more than others- and holy shit, do I feel it. This has given rise to "the Sundays", because on Sundays, I'm going fucking nuts. My senses are heightened, and I start craving and reacting to physical touch in intense ways. It's not always sexual- while arousal comes easier to me the closer I am to peak, mostly I just become a cuddleslut. It is WILD. I'm also more emotional and cry more easily. Some cis female friends I have confirmed that it mirrors the feelings they get at a certain point in their monthly cycle, so essentially the fluctuating levels are giving me the sensory and emotional effects of a period every week.

The flip side of this is that I feel like shit on Thursdays, like I missed a sublingual dose when I was on that. After the first two weeks, I started taking 2mg sublingual on Wednesday night and Thursday mornings to avoid this, which helped a lot. My provider specifically said this was a good idea, so if you're dealing with that yourself, consider trying it out. I might move to a 5-day injection interval instead, but we'll see.

I've only had one problem with injections so far, which I'm dealing with right now- on my fifth self injection ever, I had unsteady hands and hesitation before stabbing myself, causing a not-great needle stick. Currently, I have a nasty looking injection bruise. Not painful, and healing pretty well, but not fantastic to look at. Self injecting has been intimidating and scary, moreso than I thought it would be. But the actual physical pain is much, MUCH less than I thought it would be, its just that the lizard brain refuses to stab yourself.

If you're thinking of switching to injections, here's a bit of my advice:

keep as many oral/sublingual pills on hand as you can anyways. These will be helpful if you feel your injections aren't carrying you emotionally for the entire interval, or if you don't have an environment where you can inject regularly

If you have a provider, they should provide a nurse tutorial and consultation for you to inject properly. If they don't, try to insist on one. They'll give better advice than I can.

think less, do more. Ideally, the actual moment of the stab should be painless. Be quick and steady about it. The fluid entering feels like pressure and slight burning, but nothing more than that.

vary your injection sites. A doctor or nurse should explain this to you, but this reduces risk of doing what I did and bruising yourself.

be extremely sterile about things. All of the wiping down and sterile technique you'll hear? Don't fuck around with it. Infection is no joke, and absolutely can happen.

Purchase spare needles and syringes from a pharmacist or online. Several reasons for this- one, if you make a mistake and a needle is no longer sterile, you don't want to hesitate about throwing it away. And two... well, let's make a second point about this.

If you want to stock up on estradiol for the future (if you're worried about future access to HRT), this can be easier with injections- but you have to be careful, and you'll need extra needles (for the love of fuck, do not reuse needles). Vials will always have excess medication, because it allows standard volumes to fill and distribute, and it also ensures that needle draws will always be able to be fully submerged. Do NOT try to run your vial out. You WILL run into sterility and contamination issues. That said, vial expiration dates are typically measured from time of first puncture. This will vary, but for me, I was told that the vials are good for 4 weeks after the first puncture. This is overcautious, but not egregiously so. My recommendation would be to use each vial for 1-2 extra punctures, and open the next vial a bit later. Still get prescription refills as frequently as you can. That way, you can stock up on unpucntured vials in case anything happens to your supply. THIS SAID- if you notice ANYTHING wrong with the vial- if the seal isn't containing the fluid properly, if bits of the seal are falling into the medication, if you can see a noticable hole in the seal, DO NOT USE THAT VIAL. Look me in the fucking eye. Do. Fucking. NOT. get sepsis. Do not fuck around with this. The flexibility to be cautious about your vials is a great reason to stock up on a bit extra in the first place.

To anyone in the US, if you're comfortable with doing this to stock up, I would highly, HIGHLY recommend starting this now. Slowly start using your vials for 1-2 punctures extra, stock up unbroken vials. Just in case something bad happens after the elections.

Typically, your medication will come with two sizes of needles- a draw needle (puncture the seal and draw medication into the syringe) and an injection needle. You might want to consider going *slightly* smaller on one or both of those needles. Estradiol is dissolved in a viscous oil as medication, and can be difficult to draw and dispense as a result. But, if you're patient, a smaller gauge might help. For the draw needle, it can help do less damage to the seal and preserve it a bit longer. For the injection needle, if you have a bit more sensitive skin, it might be comforting. Don't deviate too much, though, ESPECIALLY without a medical professional involved.

Remember that I'm not a medical professional, please consult one whenever possible.

I'm still on spiro for now, and I'm continuing it until my next levels check comes back clean. I don't want to erase months of progress getting my levels up by dropping it too early.

Measurement-wise, there hasn't been much change. But I'm starting to realize that the measurements aren't really telling the full story. My breasts look so much larger and, for lack of a better word, breast-like than they did even a couple months ago, but that hasn't been coming through in the measurements very well. I think what's happening is that my fat around my sides is shrinking at the same time my breasts are growing. This is reflected a bit in terms of underbust and waist measurements, but it still seems more dramatic than those are letting on.

Face wise, I think I'm really seeing some changes now. It's hard to put into words, but I'm starting to look more and more androgynous or femme by default, especially if I shave. I'm estatic, honestly, and I hope the trend continues. My chin and nose continue to be problems, but as the structure of the face around them changes, that's becoming less and less true.

I've been getting laser, but so far it's done pretty much nothing. There's lag time, and some of my health issues meant that I had to delay a session and get both sessions at a much lower power than I would've like. I was really hoping to have visible hair removal by June or so, but it looks like that's not happening. That kinda stings, and is a huge blow to my ability to pass by the one-year mark, which has been my target.

I think my boymoding has been holding, for the most part, although its been harder. Even with my sports bras, small bumps are visible under a t shirt, and the face changes won't be unnoticable forever. I've def been more loudly bisexual, and I think most people just write it off as me being fruity. Cis people can also be pretty oblivious, especially when changes are gradual. That being said, I've been coming out slowly to people, giving my usual speech of "I'm still presenting as a man for now, but just so you know this is what's going on", which removes a lot of the pressure and anxiety from boymoding. Still, I haven't told everyone (notably, labmates and family), and my timeline of social transition between June and August seems to be holding steady.

So uh, yeah. If you're curious about anything specifically, I'm an open book, although I may move it to DMs if it gets too personal. Hope that my progress updates are helpful to at least someone!

[lovvecherrymotion]

okay very brief munich gig report (mostly under the cut) i probably am forgetting 90% of stuff but let's goooo:

i got EE and i was there by 10 am? i was number 39 and i was pretty okay with this. i did end up getting a really good spot anyway

munich queue 💜💜 i mean, i've already made a post about meeting all of you, but it was truly lovely. i got so many gifts and bracelets! this fandom is full of talented, kind people

the soundcheck was ngvot (every single time i've been to a show i've heard ngvot at some point lol) and vem da greš, both of which i really enjoyed

I GOT TO GIVE NACE MY GIFTS!! like i don't even think he heard what i said BUT THEY'RE WITH THEM. FINALLY. i can be at peace now lol

i really enjoyed both Sector 5 and JC Stewart! they were both pretty good openers! i hadn't heard any of their music before, but i still had fun

WE STARTED WITH KATRINA WHICH I WAS SUPER HAPPY ABOUT

AND I GOT BELE SANJEEEEEE. and bojan said we nailed it the first time which had me like "duh, ofc, i'm here????" I WOULD NEVER FUCK UP MY BELOVED BELE SANJE

we got both Šta bih ja & Schlager. i really really really wanted Bluza so hopefully in london 🤞 i enjoy Schlager more that i've listened to it live lol (and jance were very cute during this song)

on the topic of jance, everyone was mentioning the nacekris was strong last night but as someone who was right in front of jance and barely got to see the others honestly it was kinda hard for me lmao i didn't get those vibes at all. i was so shocked opening tumblr hahahaha. jance were super sweet and smiley and 🥺💕 a solid 95% of what i captured was them and i can assure you they were both very soft and happy

no pijano :((( but he did help bojan at the start of EW and it was very sweet, i love them so much

bojan spit on me. better said, he spit on jan but i was, well, right in front of him, so i got it too lmfao

during the UM bojan was also right in front of me because a little girl got to sing with him (and even went on stage!!!!) and then a super sweet 15yo girl who had her birthday yesterday also got to sing UM - i was next to both of them so i saw bojan VERY WELL. he didn't actually go into the crowd this time

during novi val i made a finger heart at nace AND HE SMILED AND DID ONE BACK AT ME. i know it was for me because everyone got the half hearts lmfao (and then @flananjan told me you could see the heart in a story they posted on their insta and i almost died on the subway back to the hotel)

at some point (i can't remember before which song but i'll probably figure it out when i look at the photos) i put my portuguese flag on stage and jan picked it up 🥺🥺 he then asked me in the softest fucking voice "Portugal?" and i was able to say two entire words to him "yes, Portugal" AND I DIDN'T EVEN DIE ON THE SPOT. he then placed it down and like idk i just!!!! jan knows i exist and i'm portuguese BYE

and when i thought the night just couldn't... well, get any better, JAN GAVE ME HIS PICK. his hand was warm and like way softer than i expected??? this is now my most prized possession. i literally CANNOT believe jan peteh himself gave this to me

the boys didn't come out at the end because they were tired, apparently??? but i was still very happy about all of this. i'm now way less stressed for london (because i won't be carrying around a bag full of stuff for them omgggg) and manifesting i get to meet them then 🙏

munich, thank you for having me 💜💜💜 i can't wait to come back

[izpira-se-zlato]

JO Berlin, 12.03.24

Haphazard, incomplete, typed up for friends on discord and yeeting here in case anyone finds it interesting

I arrived at 16:10 and was number 18 for general access. Now I need to figure out how to remove the number before our business event 😂 . There was no one else for like a hour before or after

The queue was super chill. I got rid of a few more Hojans

we had doors at 19:00 for GA and the first opener started at 19:15, which was unexpected but nice

Sector5 were so much fun! And there was one (1) hardcore Fan in the audience 😂

JC Stewart made the same jokes as in Helsinki but I am easily amused so it was a good fit

while waiting for the gig to start, my friend checked her IG and saw that her favorite place to get film developed had posted a pic with Sadie... I forgot her last name again. Sink? Damon's bff. Damon and her left in a cab after the gig

I was Jance side 4/5 row. Pretty nice spot, I think

Katrina opener!! So did they drop SSOL for good?

WE GOT BARVE OCEANA

Bojan came into the crowd to have a friend sing and he was so sweaty and so close

People were so respectful and didn't touch him I think?

their outfits??

I died at Bele sanje, a Jance moment I will post which. Yeah.

there was another moment later where Jan brushed his hand through Nace's hair

Kris came over so Jan and Kris played at Nace and it was hot

Jan sat down at the piano for um and I think he actually played a note or two

no PiJanO otherwise. I don't think he played it for ew either

Bojan is getting better at the ew piano part. He actually lost his lyrics tho when he saw the fan project by the official JO discord

no bluza 😭

Bojan said the actual working title is Behind Those Eyes but for Germany it would stay Schlager (it is not a Schlager)

he was very surprised by how well we knew the lyrics to šta bih ja

we won't understand the majority of the songs on the new album if we don't speak Slovene/Serbian. Everyone cheered like mad

I actually saw Jure several times??

the stage was too small for Racik backdrop

"who's from somewhere else? I guess a lot of Finnish people? No? Polish?"

there were eight people (according to Bojan) from Slovenia and he hoped they already knew them before ESC

I think Bojan checked with Jan/warned him that he would spray him during omamljeno telo

Nace kept smirking at Jan??

no encore because everyone just. Left after the band and left the stage

the boys looked so so happy on stage

Post gig edition:

we talked to Vita and omg she is lovely. Also, I need to stop talking so much. But jfc

I got a selfie with Teya 😊 did not talk too much, also bc she had to get into her Uber that was waiting

Nace and Kris came out for pictures but left before we had a chance to talk to them

Jan came out afterwards and talked to the ten or so people still left

his fucking voice oh my god

Jan's coat is fake fur and not as soft as it looks

I gave Jan a Hojan sticker

I asked Jan if he knew what date it was and he did 😂

according to Jan, Jure doesn't come out after gigs bc he goes straight to sleep

pretty sure Bojan is sick again (still?) He took a group pic with some people to not stay out in the cold for ages, and then just waved at us to "preserve his health for the tour"

[wen-kexing-apologist]

10 BL Boys I Want Carnally

I was tagged by @twig-tea, but I do what I want so I'm ignoring the Boys thing (and on at least one occasion the BL thing). Anyway, without further ado, and in no particular order.

Win!Lin- Cupid's Last Wish

LOOPHOLE FIRST!

gif by @angelbesideme

Thanks to Cupid's Last Wish, Jan is a boy here! So I am choosing Win from Cupid's Last Wish before he body swaps back. HOWEVER, if I'm honest, it was less Win and more masc!Jan that made my brain short circuit so do with that what you will.

Toon- Seneha Stories

I am breaking from the prompt immediately, but this is my post and I can do what I want, so I am choosing Toon from Seneha Stories, which @so-much-yet-to-learn brought my attention to. Seneha Stories is definitively not a BL, but Toon is hot, kind, sad, and he fucks so I'd be living my best life.

Miw, Neo, Shin, and Mae - 3 Will Be Free

THIS IS NOT ME SUGGESTING A FOURSOME, THIS IS JUST ME TRYING TO PREVENT FOUR OF THE TEN SPACES FROM BEING 3 WILL BE FREE.

I like it when my fictional women not only are capable of murder, but have, in fact, murdered. Miw and Mae are hot, competent, killers, fucking over evil billionaires so what is not to love?

I am not immune to Neo and his slutty little crop tops. He has three brain cells and they are all that is keeping him from not dying. Iconic to be honest.

I am not immune to Shin and his glasses, and his kindness. I mean, the boy got cut with a knife and not only comforted the kid that wounded him when he started freaking out but dated him.

Mollie - The Warp Effect

gif by @patpran

MY FIRST NON-BINARY REP IN THAILAND, MY BELOVED. Mollie is so fucking hot, they are talented, they have sick tattoos, they are fighting for themselves, and are changing the landscape of media, what is not to love?

You could also almost certianly put in any of Silvy's characters and I would probably want them carnally, cause...it's Silvy.

(honestly, I'd go for Nim too, but again, not for her character's personality, it's the masc!Jan effect)

Kim- KinnPorsche

gif by @namchyoon

For this scene and this scene only. Honestly, I think if nothing else this shows you that my type is people who could actually maybe kill me in a fight.

Or at the very least, people I could get in to a homoerotic fight with.

Anyway, Jeff gives me gender envy and the first time I saw this gifset, I thought he was a butch lesbian.

Speaking of homoerotic fights

Phaya and Sand - The Sign

MENACE! A MENACE I TELL YOU! I truly well and deeply have an appreciation for when someone who (I assume) typically would top absolutely just vibrates out of their skin at the first sign they might be topped.

And I'm adding Sand here as well because I think my jaw dropped like ten feet when I saw her on screen.

Sand, baby girl, let me know if Yai doesn't treat you right, cause I will.

King- Bed Friend

gif by @earthfluuke

Shout out to this man, I've seen him on at least three of these lists. But who could blame us? Look at him.

Choy Yu Na- Semantic Error

She did that bisexual sit and my heart was hers.

And for my last two picks, I certainly am asking myself the question, do I want them carnally or do I just want them?

Mork -My Ride

Helloooooooo Mr. Dimples. I mean....I feel like I don't need to explain myself here. We all get it, right? We understand, right? And besides, he gives rides for a living or something...

Minoru- Our Dining Table

HE'S JUST SO NICE, SO KIND, SO TIRED. @isaksbestpillow is so right, he is a mother. I love him.

Tagging @so-much-yet-to-learn, @solitaryandwandering, @respectthepetty and anyone else who sees this and wants to join!

[bluginkgo]

"Nice Corpse House My Guy" Remastered Behind Scenes!

The most glaring and obviously annoying thing that's evident in this comic- if you even wanna call it that- are the god forsaken BACKGROUNDS. There was a lot of experimentation going on for backgrounds here. Because the first couple pictures, THAT is what I used to draw backgrounds as. Trees are sticks and grass is flat. I realized that wasn't gonna cut it. I didn't like it at all. So I started experimenting and boy was it messy. It finally sorta settled on the style by the end of the comic. I'm still unhappy with it, but it'll have to do for now.

Here's a small comparison

One thing that I ran into was how I was gonna show that N was in his "killer mode." I could have placed the X's over the pupils, but found it unnatural looking in my style. So instead, it was settled to a concentrated light in the pupils.

Best seen between these two. The second N snaps out of it, the X/light in his pupils disappears, and the normal light returns to his eyes, which is similar to Uzi's.

Another thing I started slowly including was Uzi's little tooth on her beak.

The jutting out portion on her beak is a personal touch. Although it doesn't really matter, I included it to separate her from the rest of the "worker drones." Seen as she's an absolute solver host and has a solver form, something was going to creep up in her crow design, hence the little teeth. Doll would have them too, given I draw her in the form I've been thinking about.

Another thing I ran into, was WHAT WAS UZI GONNA TAKE N DOWN WITH?! This is a bird vs. a dog! No way was a bird gonna decommission a whole dog! Then this scene came up in my recent rewatch of Murder Drones.

And it clicked. Loooong long time ago, I had a very specific hyperfixation: birds. One thing I learned that some pigeons do, was they're capable of doing a somersault. And in mid-air, too!

I was finally set. The SICK AS HELL RAILGUN was downgraded to a simple piece of shiny glass/pebble that attracted Uzi- and crows love shiny things. And the same pebble will be used to launch at N's sensor that made him trip over. Because I was also not going to draw N doggo losing his head. I love gorey and bloody shows and art- hence why I watched Murder Drones- but I honestly had no idea how to recreate that, and I suck at drawing gore in general, I mean, did you SEE the crow N was chewing on? That was my best try honestly.

Here are some progress shots and how the layers worked in the scene where N is bonked with a stick.

As per usual, start with a sketch, this is actually 2nd sketch. The first is much rougher, just some circles and random shapes to outline his body form.

Then, this is all outlined and rendered. Along with some additions like the stick and the little rock.

The background was the hardest, aside from some weird angles I picked to draw Uzi and N at. I suck at backgrounds, like I've mentioned many times before. So, this needed a lot of testing and experimenting. Most of this works because I found some cool brushes to use. But aside from that, I honestly still don't like how it looks. It's slightly better than my stick trees and flat grass though, I guess.

Put it all together, add a black layer to simulate nighttime, put some lights to show moonlight through trees and voila, you've got an N doggo that got bonked by a stick! I see this project/comic mostly as practice and testing. Background testing mostly, and some brushes. The background/brush testing actually spilled over into another post of the solver Uzi I made a bit back. I'd say I was pretty happy how it turned out, but brush wise, I was going to test around a little more.

NUzi comic 'Sleep' is my next project. Uhhh, don't ask me when I'm gonna have it out, I have no idea. I'm guessing sometime end of Jan and beginning of Feb. But that might be delayed seeing as Murder Drones ep7 should be out sometime soon too, so I'll need to go crazy about that for a bit and then I'll go back to my usual thing ^_^ 'Sleep' will take place still between the Pilot and Heartbeat.

P.S. I have all 26 pages story boarded... good god what happened to the 'mini' part of the comic 😭

Anyways, why are you still here?! Have a cookie ^_^ you made it! Have a nice day now, bye bye <3

[eteisvalssi]

gig report london 11.4.2024

now that i'm back home and stuck inside for a couple of days bc of bovid, i can finally finish my gig report from london! it's gonna be a long one 😅

i won't be getting too much into how i traveled to london bc the story is long, but let's just say that i would arrange it differently now that i experienced it

in london i met up with @joyuntold, who was my roommate for the two nights! kiitos for letting me tag along with you <3 we had so much fun just yapping the night before the concert that i almost forgot how tired i was at that point 😂

i hadn't slept in well over 24 hours so i went to sleep at 8pm local time and had a good night's sleep before going queueing so that i could stay there for the whole day after i'd gotten my number

the queue had already started the day before because of a misunderstanding and it being posted on social media, which caused the word to spread and suddenly everyone was getting their numbers and just going away for several hours. can we please just not do this?

i did have a fun time in the queue though! there were a lot of familiar faces but i just got really shy with my english for some reason and felt very awkward not talking, so i hung out with my finns a lot during the day

but everyone i talked to that day like overall was just super nice once again! i met and talked to a few mutuals too!

the first band member we saw was jure, he walked past the queue and we all just said hi to him

jan and nace came to the venue together shortly after. i waved at them and nace waved back :)

i didn't see the other band members come to the venue but we did see the family guštin walk by a couple of times

the ee line worked so well, we formed the number queue ourselves and the crowd management worked really well for us. there were multiple lines formed for every type of ticket, but i heard that the ga line was not as successful

i had already lost my hope for barricade on jan and nace's side with how many people there were in the queue before me, but i literally got the perfect spot on the barricade and didn't even have to run for it!

when we got inside i had already completely forgotten about the soundcheck so i was actually surprised when they came on stage 😅 they played astp and proti toku

roots & wings were fun, they were just trying really hard and that was kinda adorable :)

elle coves was amazing! hadn't listened to her songs at all beforehand but i really enjoyed it!

they played the gola setlist and i do get why it's their favorite one

kris especially was on fire during the gig!! idk if it was because his family was there but he gave his everything on stage

we got the demoni scream!!!

also idk what was in padam that night but bojan was really living it and i really felt it and got literal goosebumps

i remember there being a moment when i was like the jance shippers are gonna eat this one up, but i'm too feverish to remember what it was rn

we had a surprise guest on stage! louie starkey, grandson of ringo starr, came on stage during umazane misli and did his own solo.

a finnish translation of umazane misli was also sung that night by yours truly <3 i have no memory from that moment but i just saw a video of it and bojan showed a thumbs up to the band when i started singing 😂 btw if anyone else has any footage from that moment, i would love to see more!

we were like there's no way they're not gonna play ssol and were kinda shocked that it was not on the setlist, but of course they came to play it as an extra encore

after the gig i stayed at the barricade and kiki came over to give the setlists and i got one <3 that was the first time i'd even tried to get one so i was kinda surprised to get it, but it's now on the wall next to my photos i got printed :)

when we went outside there were a lot of people waiting and bojan did come to greet us quickly and take the picture he posted on instagram

i waited for a while but my feet were hurting so much from standing all day that i called it a day just a bit too early and just went to the hotel

the next day i found out that if i'd literally walked back towards the venue with the others instead of leaving to the hotel i would've met some of them 😅

my next two days were spent exploring london, we went to camden town with a friend i'd met before at a gig but we only got to know each other in london! and on saturday i was on a bus on my way to london and it was a sunny day and suddenly sunny side of london started playing from my playlist and that felt so good

overall it was a very fun experience! i got to meet so many cool people, i saw my favorite band yet again, i sung in finnish at fucking shepherd's bush empire, i basically traveled solo for the first time and it went very well. i'm really glad i decided to go :)

also i joked about getting bovid from the gig when i was feeling kinda stuffy and tired yesterday and today i tested positive with covid 🤠

[matan4il]

Last post of good-natured silliness regarding Mile and Apo's trips! (the first can be found here and the second here)

Jul 28, Mile posted a pic from the car in Paris in the rain set to Jazz (his and Apo's fave music genre). Then he started posting from flying back to and landing in Bangkok. He was wearing the same cap with a big 'A' on it that he wore during departure on Jul 19, even though weather wise, that cap didn't make sense then and even less so now.

When he left:

And as he returned:

This is kinda similar to Apo, who wore his trinket necklace both when he departed Bangkok on Jul 19 and when he came back on Jul 25. It has two silver circle rings, joined by a heart pendant.

Apo when leaving:

And upon returning:

Back on Jul 6, when they went to Song Wat together, I noticed these joined rings and that, because most of the time the heart holds the two together, it makes them look a lot like Mile's double circle silver ring, which he has had for years, way before KPTS.

While Mile's ring is obviously not connected to Apo, I did wonder when Apo started wearing his trinket necklace which includes this pair of joined rings, and whether they might intentionally have been chosen for their similarity to Mile's (once locked together with a heart). I can't actually answer any of these questions, other than to tell you that Apo doesn't seem to have worn these rings before he re-met Mile in Oct 2020. At least I couldn't find any evidence that he did, not on his fingers and not on his necklace (though he did wear other necklaces). The first time I could find him wearing the joined rings on the trinket necklace is a pic Apo shared on Sep 13, 2021:

He's also wearing it in a pic he shared Sep 16, 2021, you can see it a bit better there (especially since on Jan 10, 2022 he posted another pic from the same occasion where the necklace with the rings and heart is even clearer). Also, as far as I can tell, Apo changes the trinkets he wears with the paired rings, but he always wears those. Make of all this what you will...

Mile posted a vid on Facebook from the plane as it approached Bangkok, captioned it with text about saving money to construct, buy and decorate a house, and added this post to his "Happiness during the day" album:

He also pasted the same text about saving money for a house onto a vid of an apartment with a view of NYC, which he shared on his personal IG, and we all know who loves that city and even lived there for 7 months...

After landing, Mile posted on IG pics and vids from the Eiffel Tower in the rain on Jul 27, and he captioned them with "Something is more romantic with rain... #LikeYou ^^". Within 13 minutes, Apo liked the post and commented, "Very romantic."

Mind you, the entire 10 days they've been apart, neither one of them used the word "romantic" in any of their captions. While Mile WAS ACTUALLY IN Paris, at the Eiffel Tower, in the rain, he didn't use the word "romantic," but he did right away after he returned to Thailand.

Apo posted on IG 15 minutes after Mile did, sharing pics from Jul 21 in China, and he captioned them "Sleep no more." Except unlike me, Apo capitalized every first letter of each word, which is what Mile always does with his own captions in English. Mile commented not long after with "Cool."

Another thing to note is the day before, Jul 28, as Mile was flying back to Thailand, Apo posted a pic from China, from Jul 23, where he's doing a half heart, and he captioned it, "Miss you."

Just as a bonus... On the same day, while Mile was flying back to Bangkok, his mom posted multiple pics and vids of herself in a green shirt (Mile's color) and yellow pants (Apo's color).

Wait, bonus #2! Mile also mentioned returning very soon. Pond replied to a photographer that he'll see him in September. The Paris Fashion Week 2023 starts on Sep 25, so we might get some more Mileapo in Paris then.

Did I miss anything? Probably, there's been a lot. But I hope this series of posts made you smile! You can find more of my Kinnporsche/Mileapo stuff under this tag. xoxox

[krukel]

After @seokoilua posted about the My Life, My Music interview (a while ago, this post is partially from my drafts!) I went to relisten to it. And in general it is a very fun interview with a lot of insightful moments about their creation process (Ne Bi Smel in particular) and the mixing process for example. Their voices in general are very soft (in tone, not volume) especially when talking to each other and the vibe is 🥰 I wanted to highlights some of my favourite moments because I want more people to know about them:

2:35 - They talk a bit about doing many concerts in a row and Kris says: "At one point in the summer we had four consecutive days of concerts and the fourth day was already the wors-" (gets cut of by Bojan). Knowing they have now done 7 concerts in 6 days during the nordic tour this is a little funny and a little sad to hear :(

3:59 - Not necessarily a moment but the first song (chosen by Bojan) is Ni Panike by Masayah and I think more people should go listen to Masayah so I'm including it >:)

14:30 - Ne Bi Smel was first called "burning room" and, quoting Bojan, "it couldn't have been more of an Ed Sheeran song." It sounds like the rest was not initially impressed: "and when I brought it to the rehearsal room the boys were like, yeah, hm, yeah no. and I think Jure just started banging on the drums and the guys took on the guitars and started playing some riff."

15:35 - The host asks a question about something they said somewhere else and Bojan and Kris argue a bit about who said that in the first place. It's very cute and my favourite moment is Bojan whispering at the end "I don't think so" because of course he needs to get last word in

21:34 - Hater!Kris returns because apparently he sends "not to appealing" songs to the groupchat?

Kris (about Jet Black Diamonds): The first time that we heard them it was their first single Retro Anorak, and I remember sending over the video to the guys in the group chat and I was like "oh, this is interesting," because usually I send some really… not too- Host: Obscure Kris: No no. Not too appealing Slovenian songs, because- Bojan: Yeah, Kris does that Kris: to be honest there's loads of them and I keep kinda getting them recommended somehow on Facebook or I dunno, it's like a positive feedback loop

Honestly the most surprising thing to me about this is that in the year of our lord 2022 Kris still used Facebook actively enough to stumble across things like that

23:56 - Kris talks about forming Buržoazija and how his guitar instructor recommended Jan: "Jan at that point was really like- I didn't really understand what he was about, he was like an introverted guy, really, also listening to a lot of metal and I was like "okaaay? I guess we'll try?" and then we started to practice and really got along."

25:45 - Luka (Apokalipsa's guitar player) and Martin already knew how to play and Bojan didn't and that's how they decided that he should sing. Also their first performance (also up on youtube, baby Bojči is very cute) was two (2!!) weeks after they started practising together

28:49 - About creating outside of Slovenia

Host: Is there something specific that you haven't yet done that you are desperately keen to do, or is this gonna gently evolve? Bojan: I dunno about the desperately want to do, I guess one thing we "truly desperately want to do" is go out of Slovenia to create. To try a new space. So go to a studio somewhere outside of our borders and see if the mindflow is different there. That is the only thing I can think of right now. Maybe Kris has- Kris: In addition to that, I really wanna see us tour anywhere, anywhere outside of Slovenia" Host: You are beginning to get to the audience already a little bit, […], you can find opportunities Kris: Yes, yes, we are, don't worry about it. We just don't want to talk to much about it yet Bojan: Let's say we're gonna have another interview next year and we're gonna have so much to talk about

This was before Hamburg where they created Carpe Diem and before London and honestly I'm glad they're getting to experience that Erasmus+/semester abroad experience because it's something they really wanted to do and they seem to be enjoying it a lot

[pastafossa]

How do you get past writer's block? I have a fic that I'm working on that is updating on a schedule, and I made the mistake of giving myself a month off in between parts and now I can't really get back into writing it. I don't want to leave it abandoned because I have a few people who I know are really invested and I don't want to leave them hanging, but I'm having a hard time getting as excited to write it as I did before.

Ok so I'm in a weird place for this, hilariously. Because The Answer That Usually Works For Me (TM) and that carried me through a regular weekly update schedule for almost two and a half years is, in fact, not at present working for me apparently my brain can write through a pandemic but not through recovery from the shit that went down in December/Jan so we found my writing kryptonite. However, I'm going to assume you're closer to 2021 Pasta than 2024 Pasta. SO LET'S GO WITH THE METHOD I NORMALLY USE SINCE IT WAS SUCCESSFUL FOR YEARS. Cause that's the thing: sure, I've written almost a million words, and pumped out chapters for years (ignoring the past few months) but I promise, I hit the same walls as everyone else even when nailing weekly uploads. But over those years, I came up with a fairly solid list of steps that I'd go through one by one.

Fun one first: when I'm in a block, I almost always try re-engaging with canon first. I'd rewatch my favorite episodes, binge a whole season, or even the whole series depending on how much of a boost I needed. For me at least that was often like Pavlov's bell, my favorite story triggering a flood of affection. I'd remember why I loved this fandom and the characters so much, and it could often kickstart my brain and excitement back into gear. If you really want to dangle a carrot and your fic touches on canon, focus on watching parts you're excited to get to in your story. A big one for me in TRT for example was the post-Nobu, Nelson v. Murdock episode, since I'd had that planned for TRT almost since the start, and I was very excited to reach the hurt/comfort I had planned. Even if your fic isn't following canon though, see if it'll give you a creative rush again!

So let's say step 1 doesn't work, either because the canon just isn't hitting the spot or because your fic is dealing with something else. In this case, my next step was usually to jump ahead to write a scene I was really eager to get to. It was often a short blurb, but it was always something I REALLY wanted to explore, and because I'm also a reader who likes exactly the tropes and plots I'm writing, I want to read what fucking happens. Except, fuck, I'm not there yet, am I? And I can't see how that scene finishes until I write my way up to it and finish it. This is my own carrot. Multiple scenes in TRT were written months or even years in advance, simply as a way to bribe myself. This is also an option!

But maybe this doesn't work. Sometimes it didn't. This is when it got a bit more serious. For anyone who was reading at the time, you'd have noticed that I'd sometimes drop side fics, either Matt POVs or one-shots. This was me, in essence, working on the shower principle (basically, ideas/solutions will come if you stop thinking about it and do something else, like take a shower). I figured if I went and wrote something else - either with less stress, or something fun and dopamine-inducing - the part of my brain focused on my Big Fic would wander around the writer's block beneath my notice. And it almost always worked, all while I still kept my brain trained that, hey, even if we're not writing This Thing, we're still writing.

But let's say this doesn't work either. You're well, and truly, stuck. Been there now and then. And, you're going to hate this one. I hate it but it works 9 times of 10. And it is: Write anyway. Half of it was spite. I was not going to give up my schedule, I liked my schedule. The other half was that I knew myself. I knew if I could just get past the chapter/plot/dialogue I was struggling with, I'd be able to roll along again. And so I made a rule: whatever I wrote didn't have to be pretty. It just had to exist. If that meant I wrote, "Jane chased the cat in circles and caught it. She was happy." then that's what I wrote. Because everything, EVERYTHING, can be fixed in editing. But you can't fix what doesn't exist. And so there were those nights when I would scowl and groan and snarl and bash my head against that writer's block until 5 in the morning, but in the end Jane chased that fucking cat adn caught it, it was written. Hilariously, sometimes those chapters have wound up amazing (likely because I spent so much time hammering at them) and reader favorites. There are absolutely, I believe, moments where you can, and should, see if you can push through.

But that brings me to *waves* now. A lesson I've only recently recently and with encouragement. Namely... sometimes brain no go and that's ok. My steps work for me 99.9% of the time, but I've done the above during the past few months, and it just... hasn't dragged me out entirely out of it yet. Sometimes, our brains demand that break, especially when things just aren't going great. There's a reason TRT had a break of roughly 2 years between chapter 4 and chapter 5 (feel free to check the chapter index with dates on AO3!). I had some life things happening and I just was not in a place to write, even if I was still busily plotting and planning and thinking about TRT behind the scenes. And that was ok. We're not machines. I came back like a bulldozer in Jan 2021, yes, and bulldozed through weekly updates, but that break was needed. And now I'm obviously taking a short one again while I recover from everything. It's ok if you're not in a place for it. So the last step is one I've been told a lot by dear friends recently as they helped me through this: be kind to yourself, and try not to stress if none of the above works. The story will always be there, and if TRT is any indication through all its highs and lows, your readers will be there when you start up again.

[e-adlirez]

Thea Stilton Treasure Seekers Review/Ramble

Behold, an impulsive ramble about a possibly-obscure trilogy that's been translated to English during quarantine-ish, adding to the obscurity.

So the Treasure Seekers, huh? :3

Coming out a little prior but more or less over the course of quarantine and thus a lot of people not having ready access to it, the Treasure Seekers is what turned out to be a trilogy of what it says on the tin: the girls hunting down cool treasures as a result of going down the world's biggest and highest-stakes scavenger hunt written a hundred-ish years prior to the present time.

Gonna be giving MAJOR spoilers for the first book in the trilogy, and there'll (probably) be one post per book in the trilogy. If you haven't read the book, here's a copy on the Internet Archive you can read before skipping ahead to the review, enjoy, it's pretty good. If you've already read the book or don't care about spoilers, please proceed below the cut :3

The story begins with the girls on summer vacation in Scotland. Shenanigans get started when they meet this old hermit woman who has in her house a mysterious heirloom tapestry with a mysterious poem on it.

The tapestry has this poem that talks about a place with sweet winds, petals that will lead you to something beneath them, something about midnight and birds, and an alabaster garden created for the "jewel of the palace" (like me to you), that is guarded by a friend with deep feet. Sounds like a whole lotta cryptic shnit the theory heads would enjoy :D

Anyway so the girls go visit Beitris (the hermit woman) the next day to return something they borrowed from her only to walk into a holdup :D

Said holdup-ers are these two grunts led by this mysterious lady hiding her identity under a black fedora and thick-framed Ray Bans. The girls deal with that situation real quick and get the guys to scarper (if you're wondering how they did that, "the police are coming"), and once it all blows over, they find that the thugs only stole the tapestry despite ransacking the entire place like raccoons. Such a realization leads to a revelation on Beitris's end, so she entrusts the girls with the tapestry's backstory in a segment I will describe as LAAANNNEEEE LOOOORRRREEEEEE (said in a MatPat voice, we'll miss you king :'])

-

The tapestry was a family heirloom passed down to Beitris by her grandmother Petra, who got it from her older sister Aurora Beatrix Lane, who is basically British Amelia Earhart. Wasn't into girly shnit, liked being outside and also archaeology, studied in the University of Cambridge as an Archaeology major and learned how to fly a plane, all while punting early 1900s gender norms into oblivion with her pants and motorcycle. Motorcycle queen, plane queen, archaeology queen, but then everything changed when this British Amelia Earhart did a British Amelia Earhart.

The context behind Aurora Beatrix Lane's disappearance is something relating to her work with her mentor Jan Von Klawitz, who was doing archaeology things with her and probably got up to some wild shnit, but we would never know because Aurora is very secretive about her plans and her destinations, and she only came home to the UK once, after her first trip, and that was when she gave smol child Petra the tapestry to guard because it led to "a very precious treasure", but she can't show it yet for the time being. The vibe was Aurora was planning on using the tapestry to show the treasure it hides once she's done with her archaeology shenanigans.

But then she did an Amelia Earhart but completely untraceable since she never revealed her destinations, so uh there's that :D

-

Back to the present, this little storytime from Beitris has gotten the girls sucked into a rabbit hole. They are now hyperfixated like nobody's business and this Aurora Beatrix Lane is JUST LIKE THEM FR, and as a result they decide that y'know what they still have a few days before classes in Mouseford starts, and while they're at it, they're gonna find Beitris's tapestry and maaayyyybeeee find the alabaster garden. First destination: Girton College at the University of Cambridge, Aurora Beatrix Lane's alma mater.

The girls take a quick jaunt to Girton by train and then by bus to have a lil' chat with the dean, who reveals to them that they're looking for the central archive if they're gonna be looking for the deets on a student from a hundred years ago, but uh the archive is closed for the day, please come tomorrow. (Wonder why, maybe it's because they rode from Scotland to Girton by train which takes a shnitload of time. /nsrs but fr tho I wonder if the original Italian had them drive over there by car-- they did rent an SUV, and going by car would be way faster, like it'll only take a seven-hour drive faster) They come back the next day, are let into the archives, and oop, they find a well-preserved diary with Aurora's initials hidden in the Stanley Library.

Y'know what that means, LANE LOOORRRREEEEE

-

So two months into her accompanying Jan on his excavations, she notes that Jan's been acting a bit sus lately-- being very nervous, being extremely protective over his luggage, being weird about hiding some of the relics he's found, and also a weird-ass incident where while exploring a small village's old castle, Aurora found a hidden chamber with a tome inside that Jan immediately snatched and was like "I'll take care of it don't worry, don't worry about the protocol stuff I'll be fine I'll take care of it". And then he went back to "normal" after that. Hmmmm.

A month later, while Jan was talking with one of his collaborators on their train to England, Aurora stumbled into the tome again, suspiciously in Jan's personal luggage instead of being properly archived and catalogued like it should've been. She read it, saw a thing about the Seven Treasures of the World, and that caused her protagonist genes to kick in since now she's now very tempted to look into finding them and showing them to the world.

After that, she went to some libraries to investigate and eventually decided to confront Jan about the whole treasures thing and his first reaction was he was pissed, calling Aurora a snoop and everything poking into his things. Then after calming down he said "just pretend to not see", but oh no, dear reader, Aurora was not gonna pretend to not see. She ain't gonna pretend to not see the fact that her mentor was actually a treasure hunter and collector who'd been using his occupation as an excuse to snatch some nifty treasures and keep them to himself like every European country who's stolen artifacts from Asian countries ever, ohohohooooo noooo, she's gonna do something about it.

-

The girls scuttle on over back to Scotland and Beitris, to find that uh oh dear, the thugs came back again and this time they were asking about the girls specifically. Beitris pulled the same trick the girls pulled to get them to leave. So NOW the thugs are looking for the girls for whatever reason and wanna know their deal. Anyway, the girls show Beitris Aurora's diary, tell her about the summary, and also that unfortunately some of the pages are missing, and the diary doesn't say shnit about the tapestry so far. Beitris helps by giving them a letter that Aurora sent to Petra about the tapestry and its treasure, but interestingly mentions that she should "only trust Robert".

Since I haven't mentioned him before, Robert Neville was Aurora's flight tutor, a flying medic, and was toootttallllyyyyy just friends with Aurora you guys they were totally just frie--

He is dead in the present time, but his nephew John Neville is a (former) lighthouse keeper for the Ar-Men lighthouse in the IÎe de Sein, Brittany, France. So the girls head on over there, land in France, insert a thing where Vi feels like she's being watched but is like "maybe it's just a me thing, I dunno".

They head over to the Île de Sein, find an old man who turns out to be John, are invited to his house, tell him about their situation, and John mentions that he himself has been researching like crazy too about Aurora ever since hers and Jan's simultaneous disappearance over the same place at the same time in the same terrible storm. And also the fact that Robert was totally devastated when he got the news and spent years looking for her. He gives them his notes that he's accumulated over decades of researching in his pastime (which amounts to just Aurora's trip to Mexico), and tells them that since Aurora was looking for seven treasures, they'll need to find out where her seven trips took place, which will not be easy because Aurora was extremely secretive, and she only made her first trip even remotely public.

First place is Mexico so might as well head on over-- oh god the holdup-ers are back to holdup.

The thugs snatch Aurora's diary and book it before the girls can do much besides get an impromptu ocean bath, and oh dear, the thugs' boss has them now, and it's not the mafia cosplayer lookin' woman. But that's something I'll address later :3

Nonetheless, they carry on since the thugs never stole John's notebook, and they use it to go to the Puuc Route in Mérida, Yucatán (sounds very specific until you realize that Mérida is the capital of the Yucatán, and one thing everyone and their mother knows about the Mayan ruins there like Chichen Itza) to find more clues.

They do some more research on the Puuc Route, find some clues about "an invisible place, guarded by the chattiest of creatures", discover that it means they have to go to Uxmal, get a dub against the unfortunately acrophobic thugs, and realize that yes, Aurora did in fact sneak another one of her diaries in there.

This one doesn't have as much Lane Lore to contribute besides a clue that the girls find leads to Kannauj, Uttar Pradesh, India, a city known for its perfumes :3 sounds like "sweet winds", doesn't it? Oh and there's also something about a place with two lakes, which turns out to be Lakh Bahosi, a bird sanctuary about an hour's drive away from Kannauj. The girls head on over and try to do some investigating, but it doesn't take them that long to find a pair of grunts struggling under the weight of a very familiar tapestry while their boss was struggling to supervise them with her heels constantly digging into bird sanctuary dirt.

Anyway so the girls concoct a little scheme to steal the tapestry and the thugs fall for it like fish for a fishing lure, and they managed to scatter with the tapestry. After getting to a private space in the sanctuary, they find a clue that leads them to a set of coordinates that they find is a beeg tree. Oh and the treasure seems to be a present that was made for someone close to Mumtaz Mahal, as in "the jewel of the palace", the woman the Taj Mahal was made for; and the tapestry has a set of coordinates that is leading them to a beeg tree, with deep roots/feet. Oh hell yeah it's all comin' together.

They get to the tree, deal with the mafia lady for a little bit, find the treasure, and it turns out it's a very exquisite perfume bottle made of alabaster called "The Perfume of the Earth". They find a little note from Aurora explaining the treasure and its value and the significance of finding it, and now the girls have found the treasure Aurora had been searching for, and now's the time for a villain reveal?

So I haven't talked about him yet and have glossed over this guy for the entire ramble. See the mafia lady, Cassidy? Yeah she's not the big boss here. It's this guy who has a whole secret base in Denali National Park, Alaska, and has been overseeing everything behind the scenes. And by everything, I mean everything: He was alerted to the whole thing with Cassidy's first raid of Beitris's house, found out about the girls' involvement, and for a good half of the book, was trying to figure out what the girls' motives are for interfering with his line of work and what they might know about this whole thing he's looking for, which is the alabaster garden.

This guy has been keeping tabs on the girls through Cassidy and her thugs, who've been stalking the girls ever since France. He and Cassidy figured out in Paris that the girls are Mouseford students on vacation, and he was the one who gave the orders to snatch the journal from there. He was the one who told the goons to tail them to Mexico, and he was the one who managed to look up the girls' names, backgrounds, reasons for being in Scotland, all from the comfort of his base in Alaska. And only then, only then did he go to India himself to supervise and put a cap to his goons' buffoonery.

Who is this guy? Well, he is a treasure hunter who just wants to enjoy the treasures Aurora Beatrix Lane has hidden from his great-grandfather a hundred years ago. That's right, meet Luke Von Klawitz, the current heir to the Klawitz legacy and the treasure trove Jan Von Klawitz left behind in spite of his disappearance. Unfortunately Jan was better (and old enough) to secure a family legacy of greedy artifact hoarding.

So while the girls were in Lakh Bahosi, Luke was too with the goons and Cassidy (who is not his right-hand man and more just... a subordinate trying too hard to impress him), being the babysitter with these guys on leashes, as he tries to keep their stupidity under control. He intercepts the girls as they're about to leave Lakh Bahosi, blocking their path, and asks about the alabaster garden. The girls obviously don't spill and prolly would've gotten themselves blackbagged and interrogated had a friend they made prior to Lakh Bahosi not shown up in her dad's truck and came in clutch. (It sounds cliche and like it came out of nowhere but trust me it makes sense in-universe-- after the girls left the friend's family restaurant that they were hanging at, Luke's goons came over to interrogate them about the girls and where they went. Subtlety, who is she?)

The girls bring the perfume to a nearby university so it can be brought to a museum, send the tapestry back to Beitris, and return home to Whale Island, to read the last bits of Aurora's second journal and presumably to

So that's the book :D I put in a LOT of spoilers, but I'd say that reading the book is still worth it because you'll be able to get the connecting tissues that tie the organs of this story together. H-hopefully this all made sense . .'''

First things first, if you're not used to how Scholastic kids' novels are written, then uh, you might wanna get used to it, because the English translation of Thea Stilton is very... that. It's not beating the kids' book allegations in English, unfortunately. On the brighter side, though, it's pretty good for Scholastic standards! The pacing's very fast, but it feels about right-- gives me the same energy as diving deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole and going to all sorts of places because of the hyperfixation responsible for consuming their sanity for all of a week or so. The dialogue isn't nearly as atrocious as the worst it's capable of being (oh trust me we'll get to that). The tapestry puzzle and how the girls work towards solving it is very coherent and logical for the situation they are in at the beginning, and it's very satisfying to see everything come together and for things to slowly make more and more sense in the poem despite it being as vague and puzzle box-y as it was.

The Lane family lore is very well-thought-out, and Aurora Beatrix Lane is the perfect spiritual predecessor to the girls, what with her love for adventure, love for travel, strong moral compass, and the strong compulsion to elbow drop every single feminine social rule under the sun. I can totally buy her being someone the girls would totally hyperfixate on researching, because she feels like that kind of compelling character-- a passionate young archaeologist who decided to put her own safety on the line for the sake of what she believed in and to dunk on Klawitz and his selfish (and very illegal) goals of hoarding the treasures of the world to himself.

As for the villain, I'll be real gamers, Luke Von Klawitz is probably the most intimidating if not terrifying villain in the entire franchise. He has drones spying on every corner of the world for him, he has goons he can contact at any time and have them do his bidding (to mixed results it seems), he has cutting-edge technology that he uses for terrifying means, all in the safety and comfort of his secret underground base in Alaska where he has his little basement filled to the brim with historical artifacts he's kept all to himself to enjoy. Lemme run this through you again:

He was able to learn the girls names, the university they're studying in, and why they were in Scotland in the first place, all without ever meeting them face-to-face or having his goons interrogate them directly. All he needed to learn all of this was the (not very helpful) research by Cassidy, and a few commands put into his world-connected supercomputer.

Are you intimidated yet? I sure hope you are :D this guy's got a lotta potential is what I'm saying. He's a bit of a brat who wants what he wants and wants it immediately, but he's also a bit of a chess master who looks over things in the background while his minions do all the work for him. Really the only thing holding him back is the incompetency of his goons, and technically it's not even that they're very stupid-- Cassidy and her grunts Stan and Max are very good at swooping in out of nowhere to wreak havoc, dip in and get out before anyone can do anything about it. They're decent if not good at the job they're usually assigned: low-level grunt work. Unfortunately they're not good at much else, which drove Luke insane this entire book, haha.

The girls' dynamic with Cassidy, Stan and Max was refreshing in the sense that the girls aren't always getting punted by them, and the goons aren't always taking Ls just from physical contact with the girls. Cassidy and the goons always had the element of surprise on their side, being able to show up out of nowhere and do their thing before the girls have time to even blink; but once the girls figured out their whole shtick, it was easy to learn that they are easily outclass-able by five mouse Oxford students in braincell count and thus act accordingly. They force the girls to think fast and come up with some snappy plans on the spot, and the girls force Luke to realize he hired Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dum, and Tweedle Dummy as goons :D

Now uh, I have been complimenting this thing the entire time, but there is one little thing I have an issue within this book, and that is the whole... Power of Friendship thing they've got going on throughout the book.

Yes, unfortunately, the Friendship Curse has claimed this hardcover series too, and while it's not the worst here, it's still... it's still a bit atrocious :D

For instance, the conclusion Cassidy and Luke come to for the girls' reasons for interference is "friendship". Literally, Cassidy literally says to Luke, "It seems they did it out of friendship, Sir", and then Luke responds with an evil cackle and is like "FRIENDSHIP? THE POWER OF FRIENDSHIP DOESN'T EXIST IN THIS WORLD! AIN'T NO WAAAAYYYYY THEY'RE NOT FIVE SCHEMERS WHO WANNA GET THE TREASURES THEMSELVES", which is like... I don't get that vibe from Luke anywhere else in the book? Luke values efficiency and getting what he wants-- he's not hired Cassidy to be all buddy-buddy with her, he hired her for a job and she has to work to fulfill said job. He just wants competent employees, and y'know what, that's valid. Not a single part in that have I seen "ew power of friendship". It's very villain for the sake of villainy kind of energy, which I don't think fits Luke with the other bits of information we get of him? He's following his great-granddad's footsteps-- not a single minute of that did that mean "the spirit of friendship doesn't exist get yo head outa the cotton candy"

Then there's... how this applies to the girls.

inhales

WHY DID THEY MAKE VIOLET THE GROUP'S FRIENDSHIP PROPHET GRAAAAHHHH

I probably would make a full-blown rant about this at some point, but one thing I never liked about any of the hardcovers was how Violet of all people is the group's assigned friendship prophet. She'd occasionally make a comment about how uh something something the power of love is the strongest of all, and every single time I don't like it :D

Sure fine you can chalk it up to character development since her early months in Mouseford, but in the earlier books it's heavily established that she's the pragmatic one, the braincell keeper, the one who keeps the girls' group ADHD on track or the one who reminds them that "hey we've been at this for a really long time and it's now 2AM, we should really turn in now". Being a friendship prophet is a Colette thing, not a Violet thing, and I'm not trying to insult Colette or anything like that. I would be far more okay with it if Colette was the one to go on about the "power of love" because she's literally the HOPELESS ROMANTIC! She's the one with her head in the clouds, the one most likely to fangirl about ships in movies, the one who chooses to ship Romeo and Juliet and pretend to not see the entire second act of said play for the sake of believing in love.

If Colette had a line where she gushed about the power of friendship, I would've just chalked it up to "that cheesy-ass statement is something she'd totally say ngl", as opposed to the jarring whiplash I get from seeing Violet of all people call upon the Power of Friendship.

Again, probably will rant about this at some point (lemme know if you're into that idea), but yeah -m-

Literally just chuck the power of friendship bits and replace them with something more practical/realistic/grounded/whateveryouwannacallit, and it's basically perfect! Even the bits where the girls make friends on their journey is believable! Those don't have to be altered at all! Geuh it drives me insane, almost to the point of wanting to do something about it....

Well, that's enough rambling for today. I can't use up all my steam on this first book-- I plan on making ramblings for the second and third books, after all.

See ya Stilton fans, and for the newcomers from Twitter, welcome :D I hope you enjoy your stay :D

[seidenbros]

Breaking the Ice - Chapter 1

Pairing: Wylan van Eck x Jesper Fahey Summary: When Hockey star Jesper Fahey is knocked unconscious during a game, he is out for weeks. Once back on the ice, his coach Kaz Brekker teams up with figure skating coach Inej Ghafa to bring him and figure skating talent Wylan van Eck together, because he'd come back from a very bad injury before, and they think these two can learn from each other. What neither of them know is what happened between them a few months back at a Charity Gala. Or, well, nearly happened. Misunderstandings are pretty much inevitable, especially because they don't really talk to each other properly. What is undeniable, though, is the attraction between them. Will they be professional enough to ignore this, or will the sparks between them begin to melt the ice more and more? And of course, there is also Jan van Eck, hockey legend, praised by many, but hardly anybody knows what it really was like for Wylan to grow up in the van Eck mansion - and what his father did to him even after he moved out.

Warning/Tags: POV Jesper Fahey, POV Wylan van Eck, Alternate Universe - Hockey, Alternate Universe - Figure skating, Hockey Coach Kaz Brekker, injuries, Jan van Eck is the scum of the Earth, sexual content, implied child abuse A/N: HELLO! It's finally time to post this, because I can't keep it to myself anymore. This Hockey/Figure Skating AU has been in my head for a long time, because I love both sports, and I think they fit these two so well. There will be some more explicit content in the later chapters, which you don't have to read, if you don't want. I'll make a note at the beginning of the chapter, and give the parts a different text colour or divide it from the rest of the text some other way. It won't affect the story, and it's not like these are whole chapters, just parts of them. I hope I can stick to my schedule with posting a chapter every Friday, so you know you can expect that. I also hope I managed to explain certain terms when they pop up, so they don't stop the reading flow (though with the jumps in figure skating, I didn't explain them in detail) Special thanks go out to @taylacosplays @shog_draws @shippoutsy and @saskia_s89 (all of them on Instagram) for reading this when I started with the first two chapters and giving me their opinion, because I was so unsure about this. You're the best! So, now, I hope you enjoy 💚

Read on AO3

“Fahey to Helvar, moving past Bukowski, back to Fahey. He shoots… and scooooores! Goal for the Ketterdam Crows!”

“Sharpshooter does it again and scores his second goal of the night.”

“It’s certainly a great start to the season for the Crows.”

“Especially after that crushing end in the playoffs last season.”

“True. But it seems like they did their homework in the off-season.”

“I sure hope so, because I’d love to see a lot more of that.”

The first game of the new season was a huge success for the Ketterdam Crows, who won the game 3:2, with two goals from Jesper Fahey and one from Matthias Helvar. Helvar’s offensive line had the team captain in the centre, Jesper on his left wing and Tolya Yul-Bataar on the right wing. They were a force to be reckoned with. At least they were that now again, but at the end of last season, a lot of their team had played with injuries, and they’d been exhausted - and that had shown. In the third round, they hadn’t even won one game. Jesper had wanted to play despite two broken ribs and the third time he’d gone down, he’d been out for good.

That alone had crushed him, and he’d spent the first part of the off-season far away with lots of alcohol until his coach, Kaz Brekker, had personally dragged him back home. Oh, he’d gotten the lecture of a lifetime when Kaz had set him straight and told him that he’d been drinking too much, and the time for wallowing in self-pity was over. Jesper had needed that, because he knew that he could get distracted from what was really important quickly, and hockey was important to him. As were the people on his team, and so he’d been back for the first training session, even if he’d been a little hungover. Kaz hadn’t said anything to him then, and the game today had shown that they were all taking the game seriously. They were paid a lot of money, that much was true, but it was something they loved, something they wanted to excel in.

With the first game out of the way - and a successful one at that - they were all in a good mood to take part in the Charity Gala the following day. It was a big event that was held once a year at the beginning of autumn, and Jesper had been looking forward to it ever since he’d gotten his ticket. The tickets were expensive of course, but that was only because that was one way of gathering money for charity. Another way was an auction that took place in the evening after the dinner itself. The Crows were contributing a training session with the whole team as well as being on the bench for the next home game. Jesper quite liked that, because it was always nice to see some happy people who really enjoyed that.

Jesper opted for a dark blue suit for the night, a black button down, topped off with a tie in the same colour as the suit - Nina his physiotherapist had chosen that one for him, because to an event like this, he couldn’t go without a matching tie. He wasn’t a big fan of them, but he had to admit that they completed the look. Once it got later and the official part was over, he was sure that it wouldn’t be a problem if he either took the tie off or at least loosened it. Before that, he’d have to talk to a couple of people, smile for the camera, and enjoy a five course dinner menu that he was really looking forward to.

“I’m on my way downstairs,” Jesper said into his phone the moment he picked it up. Kaz had put Matthias up to picking Jesper up for this, so he wouldn’t be late. It was just a safety measure, but it had still made Jesper roll his eyes.

“Alright. You’re sitting in the back, Nina’s already with me.”

“Woah woah woah hold on.” Jesper stopped in his tracks, reaching for his wallet. He took one last look in the mirror and grinned at himself before grabbing the keys. “Our Nina?”

Nina Zenik, physiotherapist not only for Jesper but for a couple of guys on the team. Jesper liked her a lot, and not only because she was good at her job. She didn’t back down from anyone and handled the locker room talk without a problem. Hell, she even managed to get the guys to blush with the way she talked, and Jesper loved to see it. The two of them were able to talk about pretty much everything, even stuff that had nothing to do with hockey. He’d known that Matthias hadn’t been able to take his eyes off her for a while, so he was glad that he’d finally asked her out.

“I told you that I’d bring a date.”

“Mhm, could have just mentioned who your date was.”

Jesper hung up the phone and put it in his pocket. After making sure that he had everything he needed, he headed out the door and took the elevator down. Matthias’s car was waiting right outside the apartment building where he lived, so he could get inside immediately.

“Hello gorgeous, nice to see you here,” Jesper said with a grin from the backseat as he reached his hand out to the front to squeeze Nina’s shoulder gently.

“I see you stuck with the tie I chose for you,” she said as she turned around to him with a smile on her lips. She really did look absolutely stunning in a red dress that hugged her curves and matched the colour of her lips. She was stunning, and Jesper really hoped she wouldn’t eat Matthias up and spit him out when she was done with him. He may be a big, buff guy, who could throw a punch and had the hardest and fastest slapshot in the league, but Jesper knew how fragile his heart was, and that it took him some time to open up. The fact that Matthias was taking Nina out, and to an event where everyone would see them together nonetheless, really had some meaning.

When they got to the location, Matthias’s car was parked for him. Sometimes, this still felt strange, but at an event like this, it was part of the whole experience. Jesper looked up at the tall building and took a deep breath before he followed the other two inside. In the entrance hall, there were already some decorations as well as guideposts. He knew that the Charity Gala was held at the top floor of the building. He’d been there once, so he knew that they’d have a beautiful view over the city and the harbour, though Jesper was rather sure that there was more than enough to catch his attention and keep him from going to the window front to stare outside.

Once they stepped out of the elevator at the top, they were greeted with a glass of champagne each, before they were shown the seating plan. It was kind of interesting to read all the names, figure out who else was here, and especially who they would be sharing a table with.

The name van Eck made his eyes widen slightly. Jan van Eck was a hockey legend, and as a child, Jesper had been looking up to the man, as had a lot of other players. Most of them probably still did, but not Jesper. After he’d met him once a couple of years ago, when he’d just started playing for the Crows, he’d been so arrogant and condescending, and he’d told Jesper that he didn’t think he had it in him to play in the big league. Well, being here and being a very valuable player for his team, proved that man wrong. It would be very satisfying to be sitting at the same table as him. There was also his son, Wylan van Eck, who was a talent on skates as well, but not in hockey gear. No, Wylan was making money as an extremely good figure skater. Jesper had seen him practising once, not so long ago. He’d spent quite some time in the fitness room at the rink and everyone else had already left. He’d needed this to clear his head, and after a long, hot shower, he’d wanted to head out, when he’d heard music coming from the rink. Curious, as he always was, he’d gone over there and had seen Wylan van Eck on the ice, skating, or more like dancing to the music. Even without seeing his face straight away, he’d known that it had been him. Wylan van Eck had a very distinct way of moving, pure elegance wrapped up in one person. It always looked so effortless when he moved over the ice, as if he was flying. The only thing that had destroyed that idea, had been the swish swish of his skates on the ice. Jesper had watched him, completely enthralled, until Wylan had spotted him. He’d stumbled a little, but hadn’t fallen, and Jesper, feeling responsible for that, had quickly turned around and left the building. He’d felt like he shouldn’t have seen any of that, but he hadn’t been able to stop himself. Well, tonight he’d get the chance to talk to him for the first time. He just had to watch out that he didn’t stare at him, because Wylan was beautiful, almost had something ethereal to him. But that might still be better than doing or saying something stupid, which could always happen with Jesper. He’d try to behave tonight.

The food was incredible and the live music accompanying the dinner fit rather well. Not that he’d listen to piano versions of songs in his free time, but it fit the atmosphere here, and anything louder would definitely be too much. After all, there were conversations at the table as well, and Jesper tried to follow them, though he had to admit that it was difficult to listen to anyone else when Jan van Eck overpowered everyone with his voice. That man really thought he was the most interesting person anyone could ever meet, and it was annoying to say the least.

His eyes landed on his son, who didn’t look up to his father or even listened. In fact, when his voice got too loud or he laughed unexpectedly, Wylan winced or rolled his eyes. It wasn’t obvious to everyone, but Jesper paid close attention - despite telling himself beforehand that he wouldn’t. Wylan was way too fascinating to not look at him, and when their eyes met, Jesper couldn’t help but smile, no matter that Wylan quickly averted his gaze again and looked down at his plate to concentrate on his food.

“Hm?” he asked as he turned to Matthias who had just said something to him, but Jesper had been too preoccupied with the man  across from him.

“I asked what you were looking at.”

“Nothing in particular.” Oh, he’d definitely not tell Matthias that he’d been watching van Eck’s offspring, because he might never hear the end of it.

“Mhm, sure.” Maybe, Matthias didn’t believe him, but at least, he didn’t pester him with any more questions. Nina may have had something to do with this when she reached for his hand and cradled it in her own, beaming up at him.

Jesper finished off the last bits on his plate, before he looked over at Wylan again. It had gotten a bit quiet at their table, because van Eck was talking to his son, making sure that nobody could overhear them. There was something in Wylan’s eyes that made him wonder what this was about, but it certainly wasn’t a friendly conversation. That proved to be true, when Wylan got up a little too quickly, his chair almost falling backwards.

“If you’ll excuse me for a moment,” Wylan said to the people at the table, a polite smile on his lips as he showed them his empty glass. Jesper figured that he’d need something a little stronger than the champagne they were serving here.

Jesper kept an eye on him, while pretty much everyone else at their table hung on Jan van Eck’s lips again - except for Matthias and Nina who were deep in conversation by now. Just like he’d expected, Wylan ventured to the bar, but he didn’t just get a drink, he got comfortable on one of the barstools. Without rethinking this, Jesper got up, excused himself, and followed him. There was enough room at the bar, and they only had dessert left, which would take a moment to be brought out, considering that most people were still eating.

Jesper stepped up next to where Wylan was sitting and placed his elbows on the bar. While he saw Wylan turn his head towards him in the corner of his eye, he kept his eyes on the bartender, who walked his way as soon as Jesper smiled at him.

“What can I get you?”

“A Spellbound for me, please, and one for him as well.” Jesper nodded towards Wylan with a grin, and the bartender just nodded and got to work.

“I… already have a drink,” Wylan said a little confused, turning more towards Jesper, who was now turning to face him as well, leaning with his hip against the bar.

“I know, but I think you’ll really like this one. And I think you might need it.”

“What makes you say that?” He got a little defensive, his back straightening and Jesper could see that he was wearing suspenders beneath that nice black jacket he was donning. Interesting.

“Saw the way you were looking at your Dad, so… you might need more than one drink.” Jesper shrugged his shoulders, knowing that he’d just implied that he knew who Wylan was. It wasn’t a secret after all. The lopsided smile he got from Wylan in turn definitely had its effect on him, drew him in even more, and instinctively, he inched a little closer.

“Very observant, and also very, very right.” Wylan downed the drink that had just been put in front of him, making Jesper widen his eyes.

“That bad, huh?” Jesper raised his eyebrow, but there was still the hint of a smile on his lips.

“You have no idea. But I’d rather not spend time talking about my father here.”

“Yeah, I can think of better things to talk about than him.” Rolling his eyes, Jesper cast a quick look in the direction of their table, before he focused on Wylan again. “I’m Jesper by the way.”

“Oh, I know.” Wylan smiled at him and it lit up his whole face, now that they weren’t focusing on his father anymore.

“Do you now?” Jesper let his eyes roam over his body, starting with the shoes that went perfectly with his black suit, over his legs and his waist up over his chest and the bowtie that perfected the look until he reached his lips, lingering there a moment too long, before their eyes met again. Wylan’s were framed by long lashes that would make anyone jealous.

“I mean… of course. I know who plays hockey here.” The way Wylan’s cheeks started gaining colour betrayed how nonchalant he wanted to be.

“Aww and here I thought you may have looked me up.”

“Maybe I did.”

“Now, it’s getting interesting.” Jesper took another step closer, but then the barkeeper brought their drinks and Jesper quickly paid for them. He handed one of the drinks to Wylan and held up his own glass. “I hope you’ll like it, but it’s really good.”

“And the colour goes well with your suit,” Wylan observed, making Jesper laugh out loud at that. It was so random in a way, so refreshing, that it was amusing in the best way.

“Yeah, you got a point there. Cheers.”

“Cheers and thank you.” Wylan took the first sip of the drink, humming happily at the taste. “Oh yes, this really is amazing. You have great taste.”

“And not just in drinks.” Jesper winked at him, before he hid his smile behind the glass while taking another sip. It was wonderful to watch Wylan’s reaction to everything he said and did. It only spurred him on to get to know him even better, maybe tease him a little more.

“Is that so?” Wylan asked, sizing Jesper up, and he had to admit that he straightened a little under his gaze, put out one leg and pushed his free hand into his pocket. He hadn’t expected Wylan to say something like this, and he quite liked this duality he was showing. For a moment, he cursed the dress code here, because he’d usually have a few buttons at the top undone and the tie in his pocket, so Wylan would have at least something to look at, but it seemed like he was rather interested in what he was seeing as it was.

“Mhm, maybe I can prove that to you somehow.” Some motion at their table caught his attention again, and he looked over. They were motioning for them to come back, since dessert was being served, even though some people had just now finished the previous course.

“This is too pretty and good to down, no matter what my father will say when I come to the table with anything but champagne or whiskey.” Wylan rolled his eyes and hopped down from the barstool, his glass still in hand.

“Does he ever shut up? I feel like he loves hearing himself talk.” Jesper pulled his hand from his pocket and put it on the small of Wylan’s back to slowly guide him to their table again.

“Oh, you have no idea.” Wylan shook his head just slightly, but put a smile on his lips again as they kept walking.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t listen to him anymore, so I hope the dinner is over soon, so we can leave the table again. If you need saving from them, just let me know.”

“Thanks. That’s very kind of you.”

“And save me a dance later, will you?” Jesper had to shoot his shot right now and hope for a positive reaction, because he still wanted to get to know him a little better. And he’d get him away from his obnoxious father.

“I will,” Wylan said with a smile in Jesper’s direction, before he had to move around the table to get to his chair. It was fascinating and a little concerning how Jesper could immediately see the change in Wylan’s face as soon as he was close to his father.

But that dance never happened, because Wylan left the table after dessert and another drink. Jesper could see his father holding onto his wrist tightly, trying to keep him in place, but Wylan said something to him and ripped his wrist from his grip, before he got up and swiftly made his way out of the room.

Jesper didn’t hesitate a second. He got up and didn’t even say goodbye to Matthias and Nina - who were pretty much occupied with each other anyway, so he doubted that they realised that he was leaving, or maybe just thought that he got up to get some fresh air or something of the like. Good for him and good for them, because it showed just how well they were getting along.

On his way out, Jesper managed to grab a bottle of champagne while nobody was looking. It wasn’t exactly like he was stealing it, since the champagne was free, part of the menu they’d paid for, but some people would probably not be that happy if they saw him leaving with the bottle.

Once outside the ballroom and in the hall, he saw Wylan step into the elevator. Jesper had to jog over there to catch the closing doors so they opened again for him. Wylan was leaning against the wall on the other side, but immediately looked up when the doors opened again. With a smile on his lips, Jesper stepped inside and held up the bottle.

“Couldn’t let you dash off all by yourself.”

[saucyjothoughts]

hi i’m the insane ovulating bb boo (https://www.tumblr.com/saucyjothoughts/761525861925191681/im-ovulating-rn-and-i-genuinely-cannot-look-at this post btw) and i’m glad i’m not the only one because yes…

that being said, i’ve been reading all the posts and the quick mention of jealous!nace got me thinking of the idea that Nace, although very calm and collected on the surface, very secure in the relationship Nace, would rage with jealousy at the idea of his partner doing anything with anyone else (he does find it hot, but he likes the idea of punishing his partner)

like imagine this:

Nace dragging you out of a party/hang out with the others after you and Jan got a little too close for Nace’s taste. You’re watching his jaw clench and his fingers grip the steering wheel to the point of his knuckles turning white. After a long, brutal and quiet drive home with you squirming in the seat with dripping wet panties and his hard cock straining in his jeans, he leads you upstairs into his apartment, closing the door all calm and collected on the outside before he finally slams you against the nearest wall and grabs your throat, prying your mouth open with his other hand and spitting inside, muttering lowly for you to swallow and humming in approval while degrading you. he doesn’t praise; he knows you don’t want it right now, so he only sticks to one word responses like ‘good’ and ‘yes’ but never gives you more, knowing you need to be completely broken down by him.

he forces your legs apart by showing his knee between them, muttering in your ear to hump his thigh like a bitch in heat, watching tauntingly while you struggle not to close your eyes because he tells you not to. he finally moves his knee away, chuckling at the whine you let out, moves his hand up your skirt and shoves your panties to the side, plunging two fingers inside. you’re practically dripping down his hand as he plunges deep inside you, curling his fingers to press on your g spot. when you start to shake, telling him you’ll cum soon, he pulls away and finally takes his cock out, rubbing your slick on himself before shoving his length inside you and taking ahold of your hips and pounding you, telling you how good of a fuck toy you are, how tight you are and how fucking *good* it feels to have you squirming on his cock. he ignores your orgasm, knowing it’d happen regardless, going until he shoots up inside you, thrusting until he’s done before finally calming down, breathing into the crook of your neck and gently kissing the skin there, holding you until you both calm down.

anyways, uhm, slay? sincerely, 🧦 boo (plz lemme keep this one i wanna make the cum sock joke)

🧦 boo, my beloved - please let me climb into your head and live in your brain. Every word of this is magical.