#i originally made more but then tumblr said no so

[luckymousey]

Thoughts about Ace's dream (parts 245-248) (mostly things I liked)

THEY FINALLY UPLOADED ACE’S DREAM BABYYYYYYYYYY

First of all, to be honest, when I first saw the snap in Tumblr I thought: wait, didn’t the Stitch event end already?🤨 and then I realized it was his dream.

Let’s start!

⚠️ English is not my first language, and there are spoilers⚠️

There might be some spelling mistakes

Cater filming everything with his phone through the whole ride, I just love how he’s still himself (Honestly, I feel that not a single student of Heartslabyul would feel dizzy because of the traveling, yk, they’re based off Alice in Wonderland, and Alice fell through a hole, I’m sure they would feel dizzy by others things, not something that’s similar to a roller coaster ride) and then he says: ah, but Grimmy was shouting too loudly and the wind is annoying, I need to put music to hide it 😔

I also love the fact that he takes photos of everything even knowing that the photos aren’t in his real phone (I hope they find a way to recover the photos for Cater)

When Sebek asked if Ace is from Sunset Savanna I was like: wait, weren’t they friends? How could he not know? And then I realized i had been looking at too many fanarts of the first year gang *slaps forehead*

Honestly, I’m impressed by how much knowledge this guys have, when Deuce said that Ace lived near the capital of the Kingdom of Roses, Leona started talking about how it was not possible for them to have an ocean near (maybe I’m too dumb to know things like these, maybe not)

Grim getting disappointed that it was a dream, he really wanted to have holidays the 365 days of the year 😂 (my baby son is so cute)

Cater saying that he knew skateboarding and surfing, I don’t know, I just LOVED that fact, even more, I’ve a headcanon of the TWST actor AU I wrote some time ago that says that both Leona and Cater use their brooms like surfboards while filming because they go surfing together during summer.

I love that we got to know more about Cater

Idia’s comment right after Cater explained why he liked those hobbies, he’s like a narrator inside the book, but instead of talking to the public, he talks to himself

AND RIGHT AFTER THAT HIS OWN BROTHER SNITCHES ON HIM, HAHAHA, I just couldn’t stop myself from laughing when he said Idia also made himself a small boat (the video I saw was in Spanish and it said “barca”, which means boat in English, I’m not sure if the game referred it as a literal boat tho)

And Idia’s wish? Riding a shopping cart through a home goods store? I also wish for that, Idia, a lot of people wish doing that, you’re not alone, my man.

When Idia got scared because Cater reminded him of the time when he kidnapped Riddle and others with a smile, he just started stuttering, so cute (his actions weren’t cute tho)

ACE MAKES HIS APPEARANCE, YES BABYYYYYYYY (I love him so much 😭)

Idk why, but I just love when the characters shout at people, like calling them from afar, and Ace nailed it

It seems like the Lilo and Stitch event doesn’t happen in the original timeline, because everyone was so surprised (even Yuu has the option to make a comment about his shirt or his sunglasses)

Honestly, I never, EVER, thought about the fruit that was on Ace’s shoulder until Grim pointed it out, I swear to you all that I started laughing once I imagined someone having to walk with those and couldn’t stop until I remembered I still had to watch the episode (and now I got another headcanon for the actor AU 😈)

AND NOW RIDDLE APPEARSSSSSS

I loved when he went like: “don’t overdo it, got it, Ace?” And then everyone was like: “YOU ARE ALREADY OVERDOING IT!” I think they thought Ace’s imagination was too powerful

When Cater pointed out that Riddle was showing his bellybutton, it reminded me of that meme of: SHOW US YOUR ANKLE, SHOW US YOUR ANKLE (we’re talking about Riddle here, I wouldn’t be surprised if he got flustered about naked skin)

I realized that Riddle is kind of naive, because he says: “Ace told me this was a formal attire for an island” and he just did as he was told, my poor boy, one day, you’re getting pranked

And then he slowly approaches Cater and whispers (which made him look sooooo cute) him if he looks weird (NO MY BABY, YOU DON’T, 10 OUT OF 10, YOU’RE SLAYING MY QUEEN), HE LOOKED LIKE A BABY ASKING HIS OLDER BROTHER FOR ADVICES

Considering both Silver and Sebek are in the same club as Riddle (in one of Ruggie’s cards, Sebek even got punished by him while doing club activities) their surprise is understandable

One thing I didn’t really like is that we didn’t get to see fake!Trey or fake!Cater wearing new outfits 🥹

I know they all wear makeup, but for someone reason my eyes couldn’t stop looking at their eyes, they are all so fucking gorgeous, ugh

Honestly, does someone here knows if Cater is rich or not? Because they also mention that Cater was the one who rented the private island (I know it’s a dream, but who knows) maybe it’s because of his father’s job?

And Cater immediately getting into his role, he knows what he’s doing, he’s so smart, I love him.

When Ace suggests getting changed because he doesn’t like seeing the school uniform Leona said (I’m not quoting from the game): “we’re BUSY” I felt it was more like: “I want to get over this bullshit and take a nap”

THE WAY ACE WAS SMILING WHEN HE ANNOUNCED THE REASON OF THE CELEBRATION, that is the same smile he has when something good happens to him, but knowing what’s going to happen next, I just couldn’t help it🥲

I also realized how much I like when a lot of characters shout at the same time, it’s nice to hear

The part where Ace denied when Trey said how they would get sad talking about Yuu leaving, I know you’re just a tsundere, accept it, Trappola I’m still not prepared for that part

In the video Idia says: “I could be hit by a extroverted lighting” I’m just loving everyhting Idia says

I got sad when Ortho said there was no point in attacking him, I wanted to see Ace getting bullied (don’t hate on me, it’s just karma doing its job)

I would’ve loved if Jack and Epel were there too

Ace was talking like a salesman: “we got pink shirt here, and then a yellow one, and then a blue one” I just can’t with him 😂

We can’t see what is really happening between the characters (like, two characters could be hugging but we aren’t able to see it because this is not an anime, yet) but I believe Grim took Ace by his hair, pulled it and shouted in his ear to make him clear they were in a dream, YOU’RE DOING GREAT BABY, SHOW HIM WHO THE REAL BOSS IS

Aaaaand, we made it until here, no matter how many times I say it, I’m not prepared to reach that part

[eddiediazismyhusband]

Long time no see…

wow it’s been a while…

for starters: i just want to say thank you to @lenaboskow and @mazzystar24

the two of you have stuck by me through the whole rollercoaster that has been my break from tumblr and i don’t think i would have wver come back if it wasn’t for the two of you, so thank you both for being such amazing, talented, beautiful, gorgeous friends to me through it all ❤️

and to those who have sent me kind asks/messages while i’ve been gone, thank you all for the kind words of support and encouragement as well- you are each appreciated so deeply and i can’t thank you enough!

so… a few things have happened while I’ve been gone

the first of which being my 22nd birthday in october which thankfully was spent with AC and a hot shower after having been without power for 12 days in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene; despite the inconvenience of having no power or water in those 12 days, i was still immensely lucky to have been safe and received no damage to my home unlike countless others who unfortunately are still recovering from the storm.

the other major-ish life update from my time away:

i adopted a puppy!!!

in early october (in fact, while we were still without power), I adopted this precious little girl (called ellie) from my local humane society.

she was around 3 months old when i adopted her, and in the beginning of January, she turned 6 months.

she has been a massive help in managing my anxiety and depression, keeping me company and giving me something to love and care for, and in the few months i have had her, she’s already wrapped me around her paw

i could not have asked for a better fur baby than her ❤️ she is probably the best thing that happened to me in 2024, and I cannot wait to see all the adventures life takes her on.

In other news; I’m back!

I had made the decision a few months ago to step away from tumblr as the landscape leading up to the s8 premiere of 9-1-1 was immensely difficult and taxing on my mental health, and I realized that it wasnt healthy to feel the way I so strongly did about the show or the fandom, and I needed to take a step back, alter the way i approached the show and fandom, and refocus on other things.

one of those things was refocusing on my job. shortly before i took a break, i had started a new job and was still very much in the training phase when i made the decision to take a break from tumblr. since then, i have been focusing on establishing myself as a reliable hardworking employee at my job, and i’ve also been focusing on the future;

i currently plan to take a flight attendant training course to become certified, and eventually find work with an airline.

because of this, 9-1-1 and the fandom have taken a back seat to more important things.

that being said, i still watched the entirety of 8a (not live, but a few days after airing once i had the chance to grill sarah and addie about what happened each episode- i have a lot of opinions on how things have gone and seem to be going but now is not the time nor place for that). i have still posted the occasional fic on ao3, and i am still working on my various wips as i am able to

i eventually realized how much i truly did miss being a part of the fandom, and have made the choice to come back, but going forward, i’m going to be doing things differently:

1. i will not be engaging in speculation or anything of that nature about future episodes- all it does is give me anxiety that manifests through frustration and i don’t want to continue feeding into that

2. i am going go be returning to my original philosophy of “the block and delete buttons are my friends.” in the last few weeks before my break, i found myself engaging more and more with toxic fans rather than just blocking them or deleting their replies to my posts- that won’t be happening anymore: if you come on my page being toxic or rude, you will be blocked and ignored because i do not have time for that shit

3. i want to branch out to other fandoms- this will remain a 9-1-1 blog first and foremost, and the majority of what i post will be related to 9-1-1, but i will also occasionally make posts about other fandoms/media that i have an interest in

4. most of what i post will either be fic related, headcanon related, or memes. as stated above, i do not have a healthy relationship with spec, and therefore i am not going to foster that by actively involving myself in it.

all that said, i’m really gald to be back, and i’m looking forward to being involved again! i hope everyone who stuck to the end of this long ass re-introduction post is having a wonderful morning, afternoon, or evening wherever you are in the world <3

[undescribed1mage]

Lindsay Atherton, Lillie-Pearl Wildman, Clarice Julianda, Imogen Bailey, Kamilla Fernandes, and Bobbie Chambers in Newsies!: The Musical <3

🎥: @lasagnatrades

[userlaylivia]

I forgot some more again so I'm gonna make a part 3 lmao like I forgot rachel green, monica gellar, raven reyes, octavia blake, prue halliwell, and etc so be warned lol it may not be as many as the last two though lol

tagging some people: @maya-matlin, @tudorgirl, @nessa007, @useragarfield, @makeyouminemp3

[voltttmeter]

i havent been able to draw ANYTHING because im busy thinking ab GAY PEOPLE

[dany36]

Just got the sins of the father trophy and—

holy shit the last words that lae’zel told me before I had to kill her

“I’m glad it was you. No other blade would have sufficed” OHHHH MY GODDDDDDDDD JUST END ME NOOOOOOOWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!

[satanic-fruitcake]

hhhh

[c0rpsedemon]

it's 2023 and i'm still bitter about how kuroshitsuji, a complex slow burn mystery manga, got absolutely massacred by its shitty semi-episodic shota/fujobait anime adaptation

[victoriacoffee]

I officially learned how to use the multiply layer setting! Kinda sad it took this long, but I also barely did digital art until kinda recently

Definitely gonna rant in the tags

Because I can't not post these, here's a pic of it before most of the shading for comparison, and also a picture of him with the tower and house *not* blurred because I did kinda put work into the scene even though I knew it was getting blurred, ya know?

[wabblebees]

thought id update to say; i survived opening night!!! and not only that, it went REALLY fucking well, and people seemed to REALLY REALLY like it omfg... god this is so crazy

[clocks-are-round]

sometimes my taste in media blows me away a little

like, i love red vs fucking blue when in personality i am a socially anxious introvert who probably is too optimistic and people-pleasing about stuff and is scared of being disliked and cries over fictional media lol

ok, i like to think i have a little more backbone than the above but like. idk i just found it kind of funny. like i know there’s all types (of queers)— jkjk but like we are a high demographic relatively speaking— in this fandom but i dunno. i like shows about chaotic assholes i guess lol

i’m debating whether to even post this since it is clearly written out of sleepy rambles but like. yeah sure why the fuck not

dan vs and sao abridged and that sci fi one i’m forgetting the name of with the cynical genius and her himno best friend also fall into the same chaotic assholes category lol

yeah imma sleep now. i hope y’all are doing goodddd

[ekingston]

SO HERE IS THE WHOLE STORY (SO FAR).

I am on my knees begging you to reblog this post and to stop reblogging the original ones I sent out yesterday. This is the complete account with all the most recent info; the other one is just sending people down senselessly panicked avenues that no longer lead anywhere.

IN SHORT

Cliff Weitzman, CEO of Speechify and (aspiring?) voice actor, used AI to scrape thousands of popular, finished works off AO3 to list them on his own for-profit website and in his attached app. He did this without getting any kind of permission from the authors of said work or informing AO3. Obviously.

When fandom at large was made aware of his theft and started pushing back, Weitzman issued a non-apology on the original social media posts—using 

his dyslexia; 

his intent to implement a tip-system for the plagiarized authors; and 

a sudden willingness to take down the work of every author who saw my original social media posts and emailed him individually with a ‘valid’ claim,

as reasons we should allow him to continue monetizing fanwork for his own financial gain.

When we less-than-kindly refused, he took down his ‘apologies’ as well as his website (allegedly—it’s possible that our complaints to his web host, the deluge of emails he received or the unanticipated traffic brought it down, since there wasn’t any sort of official statement made about it), and when it came back up several hours later, all of the work formerly listed in the fan fiction category was no longer there. 

THE TAKEAWAYS

1. Cliff Weitzman (aka Ofek Weitzman) is a scumbag with no qualms about taking fanwork without permission, feeding it to AI and monetizing it for his own financial gain; 

2. Fandom can really get things done when it wants to, and 

3. Our fanworks appear to be hidden, but they’re NOT DELETED from Weitzman’s servers, and independently published, original works are still listed without the authors' permission. We need to hold this man responsible for his theft, keep an eye on both his current and future endeavors, and take action immediately when he crosses the line again. 

THE TIMELINE, THE DETAILS, THE SCREENSHOTS (behind the cut)

Sunday night, December 22nd 2024, I noticed an influx in visitors to my fic You & Me & Holiday Wine. When I searched the title online, hoping to find out where they came from, a new listing popped up (third one down, no less):

This listing is still up today, by the way, though now when you follow the link to word-stream, it just brings you to the main site. (Also, to be clear, this was not the cause for the influx of traffic to my fic; word-stream did not link back to the original work anywhere.)

I followed the link to word-stream, where to my horror Y&M&HW was listed in its entirety—though, beyond the first half of the first chapter, behind a paywall—along with a link promising to take me—through an app downloadable on the Apple Store—to an AI-narrated audiobook version. When I searched word-stream itself for my ao3 handle I found both of my multi-chapter fics were listed this way:

Because the tags on my fics (which included genres* and characters, but never the original IPs**) weren’t working, I put ‘Kara Danvers’ into the search bar and discovered that many more supercorp fics (Supergirl TV fandom, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor pairing) were listed.

I went looking online for any mention of word-stream and AI plagiarism (the covers—as well as the ridiculously inflated number of reviews and ratings—made it immediately obvious that AI fuckery was involved), but found almost nothing: only one single Reddit post had been made, and it received (at that time) only a handful of upvotes and no advice. 

I decided to make a tumblr post to bring the supercorp fandom up to speed about the theft. I draw as well as write for fandom and I’ve only ever had to deal with art theft—which has a clear set of steps to take depending on where said art was reposted—and I was at a loss regarding where to start in this situation.

After my post went up I remembered Project Copy Knight, which is worth commending for the work they’ve done to get fic stolen from AO3 taken down from monetized AI 'audiobook��� YouTube accounts. I reached out to @echoekhi, asking if they’d heard of this site and whether they could advise me on how to get our works taken down.

While waiting for a reply I looked into Copy Knight’s methods and decided to contact OTW’s legal department:

And then I went to bed.

By morning, tumblr friends @makicarn and @fazedlight as well as a very helpful tumblr anon had seen my post and done some very productive sleuthing:

@echoekhi had also gotten back to me, advising me, as expected, to contact the OTW. So I decided to sit tight until I got a response from them.

That response came only an hour or so later: 

Which was 100% understandable, but still disappointing—I doubted a handful of individual takedown requests would accomplish much, and I wasn’t eager to share my given name and personal information with Cliff Weitzman himself, which is unavoidable if you want to file a DMCA.

I decided to take it to Reddit, hoping it would gain traction in the wider fanfic community, considering so many fandoms were affected. My Reddit posts (with the updates at the bottom as they were emerging) can be found here and here.

A helpful Reddit user posted a guide on how users could go about filing a DMCA against word-stream here (to wobbly-at-best results)

A different helpful Reddit user signed up to access insight into word-streams pricing. Comment is here.

Smells unbelievably scammy, right? In addition to those audacious prices—though in all fairness any amount of money would be audacious considering every work listed is accessible elsewhere for free—my dyscalculia is screaming silently at the sight of that completely unnecessary amount of intentionally obscured numbers.

Speaking of which! As soon as the post on r/AO3—and, as a result, my original tumblr post—began taking off properly, sometime around 1 pm, jumpscare! A notification that a tumblr account named @cliffweitzman had commented on my post, and I got a bit mad about the gist of his message :

Fortunately he caught plenty of flack in the comments from other users (truly you should check out the comment section, it is extremely gratifying and people are making tremendously good points), in response to which, of course, he first tried to both reiterate and renegotiate his point in a second, longer comment (which I didn’t screenshot in time so I’m sorry for the crappy notification email formatting):

which he then proceeded to also post to Reddit (this is another Reddit user’s screenshot, I didn’t see it at all, the notifications were moving too fast for me to follow by then)

... where he got a roughly equal amount of righteously furious replies. (Check downthread, they're still there, all the way at the bottom.)

After which Cliff went ahead & deleted his messages altogether. 

It’s not entirely clear whether his account was suspended by Reddit soon after or whether he deleted it himself, but considering his tumblr account is still intact, I assume it’s the former. He made a handful of sock puppet accounts to play around with for a while, both on Reddit and Tumblr, only one of which I have a screenshot of, but since they all say roughly the same thing, you’re not missing much:

And then word-stream started throwing a DNS error.

That lasted for a good number of hours, which was unfortunately right around the time that a lot of authors first heard about the situation and started asking me individually how to find out whether their work was stolen too. I do not have that information and I am unclear on the perimeters Weitzman set for his AI scraper, so this is all conjecture: it LOOKS like the fics that were lifted had three things in common:

They were completed works;

They had over several thousand kudos on AO3; and

They were written by authors who had actively posted or updated work over the past year.

If anyone knows more about these perimeters or has info that counters my observation, please let me know!

I finally thought to check/alert evil Twitter during this time, and found out that the news was doing the rounds there already. I made a quick thread summarizing everything that had happened just in case. You can find it here.

I went to Bluesky too, where fandom was doing all the heavy lifting for me already, so I just reskeeted, as you do, and carried on.

Sometime in the very early evening, word-stream went back up—but the fan fiction category was nowhere to be seen. Tentative joy and celebration!***

That’s when several users—the ones who had signed up for accounts to gain intel and had accessed their own fics that way—reported that their work could still be accessed through their history. Relevant Reddit post here.

Sooo—

We’re obviously not done. The fanwork that was stolen by Weitzman may be inaccessible through his website right now, but they aren’t actually gone. And the fact that Weitzman wasn’t willing to get rid of them altogether means he still has plans for them. 

This was my final edit on my Reddit post before turning off notifications, and it's pretty much where my head will be at for at least the foreseeable future:

Please feel free to add info in the comments, make your own posts, take whatever action you want to take to protect your work. I only beg you—seriously, I’m on my knees here—to not give up like I saw a handful of people express the urge to do. Keep sharing your creative work and remain vigilant and stay active to make sure we can continue to do so freely. Visit your favorite fics, and the ones you’ve kept in your ‘marked for later’ lists but never made time to read, and leave kudos, leave comments, support your fandom creatives, celebrate podficcers and support AO3. We created this place and it’s our responsibility to keep it alive and thriving for as long as we possibly can.

Also FUCK generative AI. It has NO place in fandom spaces.

THE 'SMALL' PRINT (some of it in all caps):

*Weitzman knew what he was doing and can NOT claim ignorance. One, it’s pretty basic kindergarten stuff that you don’t steal some other kid’s art project and present it as your own only to act surprised when they protest and then tell the victim that they should have told you sooner that they didn’t want their project stolen. And two, he was very careful never to list the IPs these fanworks were based on, so it’s clear he was at least familiar enough with the legalities to not get himself in hot water with corporate lawyers. Fucking over fans, though, he figured he could get away with that. 

**A note about the AI that Weitzman used to steal our work: it’s even greasier than it looks at first glance. It’s not just the method he used to lift works off AO3 and then regurgitate onto his own website and app. Looking beyond the untold horrors of his AI-generated cover ‘art’, in many cases these covers attempt to depict something from the fics in question that can’t be gleaned from their summaries alone. In addition, my fics (and I assume the others, as well) were listed with generated genres; tags that did not appear anywhere in or on my fic on AO3 and were sometimes scarily accurate and sometimes way off the mark. I remember You & Me & Holiday Wine had ‘found family’ (100% correct, but not tagged by me as such) and I believe The Shape of Soup was listed as, among others, ‘enemies to friends to lovers’ and ‘love triangle’ (both wildly inaccurate). Even worse, not all the fic listed (as authors on Reddit pointed out) came with their original summaries at all. Often the entire summary was AI-generated. All of these things make it very clear that it was an all-encompassing scrape—not only were our fics stolen, they were also fed word-for-word into the AI Weitzman used and then analyzed to suit Weitzman’s needs. This means our work was literally fed to this AI to basically do with whatever its other users want, including (one assumes) text generation. 

***Fan fiction appears to have been made (largely) inaccessible on word-stream at this time, but I’m hearing from several authors that their original, independently published work, which is listed at places like Kindle Unlimited, DOES still appear in word-stream’s search engine. This obviously hurts writers, especially independent ones, who depend on these works for income and, as a rule, don’t have a huge budget or a legal team with oceans of time to fight these battles for them. If you consider yourself an author in the broader sense, beyond merely existing online as a fandom author, beyond concerns that your own work is immediately at risk, DO NOT STOP MAKING NOISE ABOUT THIS.

PLEASE check my later versions of this post via my main page to make sure you have the latest version of this post before you reblog. All the information I’ve been able to gather is in my reblogs below, and it's frustrating to see the old version getting passed around, sending people on wild goose chases.

Thank you all so much!

[kelpiemomma]

the forgotten god and the one who brought him back

ugly sketchy. i meant to include emmet and akari and rei but. its 1 am and i chose to stop here lol

[foldingfittedsheets]

I was telling my coworker about my weekend and he was in hysterics listening to my cascade of bad and bizarre decisions. Since most of my coworkers know I have some small notoriety here he asked, “Did you put this on tumblr?”

“No! I’m too embarrassed!”

He exclaimed, “You write about your UTI’s and dildo bathrooms and this is too embarrassing!? Pillows??”

So fine. Here’s my embarrassing pillow story for your enjoyment.

I have been struggling desperately to find a new pillow that I love. My Tempurpedic Symphony was over ten years old and disgusting and I needed to stop sleeping on a biohazard so I finally tossed it. I tried to replace it with a new one but Tempurpedic changed the density and the new one is shit.

Thus began the saga of pillows. My parents got me a Purple Harmony. I liked it very much in store. At home it was too tall. I exchanged it for the low. This was too low. Frustrated I called my mom to ask if she liked hers to which she said no so I asked to give it another shot.

Enter, the villain. My mom’s house does not smell bad. But it does smell strongly. It’s hard to quantify and again it’s not a bad smell it is simply powerful and foreign. The pillow I took from her was saturated with what my beloved and I began to call Mom Smell.

The pillow still smelled like mom’s house weeks after coming into our home, even after being slept on and with protectors and pillow cases, the smell permeated. The pillow was still too tall. So then I entered an experimental phase. The purple pillow is made up of a latex insert with a gel grid around it on the outside. The inset was too tall, but I could use the gel grid external to wrap around a pillow that was too low!

I stuffed every conceivable iteration into the purple grid. I tried the new symphony. I tried existing pillows in my home. I even borrowed a pillow from the back room at work which wasn’t in inventory so it was okay and the worst part was that was the perfect height but too soft to stay that height and ended up disappointing me and being surreptitiously returned.

I then tried an IKEA pillow that a Reddit thread suggested was similar to the original symphony and was delighted to learn that it came in three pieces so the height could be adjusted. This kicked off a new round of experimentation after I realized the pillow itself was rock solid and hurt my ears. The 1” insert could be added to things to try to bring too low pillows to the correct height. I still need to try to return this pillow.

I then turned to my friend who also owns a mattress store and asked if he had a Technogel pillow to trade for one of the Purple pillows. He agreed and I ended up with a Technogel that’s 5.5” which is sliiiiightly too tall. Then I remembered:

During this frenzy of pillow madness I’d foisted two pillows onto my mom in exchange for the purple pillow and belatedly realized that one of them was a Technogel that had been too low. Now with an insert I realized it could be perfect. So I got the pillow back but I faced a problem.

The Mom Smell.

I didn’t want to wait two or more weeks for the smell to pass normally. So I got the pillow back and indeed, it had Mom Smell. I then remembered that my beloved had been gifted something called “pillow mist” from their employer ages ago that had a sage smell I liked.

So I took the pillow, sprayed the inside of the dryer and set it to low to coat the nice sage smell into the foam.

This was a mistake.

The dryer suddenly reeked of sage and musk, the heat having amplified the mist out of all proportion. The whole upstairs screamed the contents of the innocuous bottle and my head instantly hurt. Now not only did the pillow reek of a new louder smell, so did the dryer.

I looked around and spotted vinegar and decided to wipe down the dryer with it in hopes of wiping out the overpowering mist smell. Afterward it smelled like hot vinegar which was something of an improvement. I regarded the pillow and could practically see animated smell lines coming off it. I wiped that with vinegar too. Then it smelled like SAGE Vinegar Mom.

I finally collapsed in a puddle of defeat, having created and defeated several problems but ultimately having made a pillow much stinkier than before.

My beloved came home.

They listened to my tiny tale of woe with increasing amusement.

They asked, “Why didn’t you use the Febreze?”

“What? They don’t have Febreze that’s unscented, do they?”

My beloved walked into the bathroom and came out with a bottle of unscented Febreze that would have solved my problem instantly. I facepalmed hard enough to cause brain damage.

I sprayed the pillow. It sat for a few days, ready to join my parade of pillow experiments. The sage and vinegar are both thankfully gone.

It does however still smell faintly of my mother.

[higherhell]

Popping on to say sorry for the extended absence once again and that I'm not sure when I'll be back in full capacity. To paraphrase that one old newspaper clipping about life being one damned thing after another being an understatement, The Damned Things Are Overlapping, quite a lot right now. Miss you all and I hope to catch up at some point but I don't know when exactly. One would hope soon, but everything feels like shaky ground right now, so no promises. Love you though 💜