#i remember first discovering them in like the sixth grade

[lordkairos3626]

Transient Luminous Events are so important to me.

[kitscutie]

Hi, could you can do one where Rafe finds that you are sh, but first he begins to suspect for a long time and begins to ask discreetly, you think that he doesn't know anything and you don't want him to find out either, but in the end they are playing wrestling and accidentally the he discovers it and asks in serious but not angry tones what those are, you try to pretend that they are nothing but this time he doesn't let you escape so easily, in the end you end up confessing and he shows his support and makes you feel good

Sorry if it's too long (I don't know if it was understood)

not alone (rafe cameron x fem!reader)

𝗉𝖺𝗂𝗋𝗂𝗇𝗀: 𝗋𝖺𝖿𝖾 𝖼𝖺𝗆𝖾𝗋𝗈𝗇 𝗑 𝖿𝖾𝗆!𝗋𝖾𝖺𝖽𝖾𝗋

𝗐𝖺𝗋𝗇𝗂𝗇𝗀ꜱ: ꜱ𝖾𝗅𝖿 𝗁𝖺𝗋𝗆, 𝖽𝖾𝗉𝗋𝖾ꜱꜱ𝗂𝗈𝗇, 𝖺𝗇𝗑𝗂𝖾𝗍𝗒, 𝖼𝗈𝗆𝖿𝗈𝗋𝗍

ꜱ𝗎𝗆𝗆𝖺𝗋𝗒: 𝗒𝗈𝗎'𝗏𝖾 ᖯ𝖾𝖾𝗇 ꜱ𝗍𝗋𝗎𝗀𝗀𝗅𝗂𝗇𝗀 𝗂𝗇 ꜱ𝗂𝗅𝖾𝗇𝖼𝖾 𝖿𝗈𝗋 𝖺 𝗐𝗁𝗂𝗅𝖾 ᖯ𝗎𝗍 𝗋𝖺𝖿𝖾 𝗄𝗇𝗈𝗐ꜱ 𝗒𝗈𝗎 𝗍𝗈𝗈 𝗐𝖾𝗅𝗅, 𝖿𝗂𝗇𝖺𝗅𝗅𝗒 ᖯ𝖾𝗀𝗂𝗇𝗇𝗂𝗇𝗀 𝗍𝗈 𝗋𝖾𝖺𝗅𝗂ꜱ𝖾 ꜱ𝗈𝗆𝖾𝗍𝗁𝗂𝗇𝗀 𝗂ꜱ𝗇'𝗍 𝗊𝗎𝗂𝗍𝖾 𝗋𝗂𝗀𝗁𝗍 𝖺ᖯ𝗈𝗎𝗍 𝗒𝗈𝗎.

𝖺/𝗇: 𝗁𝗈𝗉𝖾 𝗍𝗁𝗂ꜱ 𝖼𝖺𝗇 𝗁𝖾𝗅𝗉 ꜱ𝗈𝗆𝖾𝗈𝗇𝖾 𝗀𝗈𝗂𝗇𝗀 𝗍𝗁𝗋𝗈𝗎𝗀𝗁 𝖺 𝗋𝗈𝗎𝗀𝗁 𝗍𝗂𝗆𝖾, 𝗉𝗅𝖾𝖺ꜱ𝖾 𝖽𝗈𝗇'𝗍 𝗋𝖾𝖺𝖽 𝗂𝖿 𝗂𝗍 𝗆𝖺𝗒 𝗍𝗋𝗂𝗀𝗀𝖾𝗋 𝗒𝗈𝗎, 𝗒𝗈𝗎 𝖼𝗈𝗆𝖾 𝖿𝗂𝗋ꜱ𝗍. 𝖺𝗅ꜱ𝗈, 𝗂 𝗁𝗈𝗉𝖾 𝗒𝗈𝗎 𝖽𝗈𝗇'𝗍 𝗆𝗂𝗇𝖽 𝗍𝗁𝖺𝗍 𝗂𝗏𝖾 𝖼𝗁𝖺𝗇𝗀𝖾𝖽 ꜱ𝗈𝗆𝖾 𝖽𝖾𝗍𝖺𝗂𝗅ꜱ ᖯ𝗎𝗍 𝗂 𝗐𝖺𝗇𝗍𝖾𝖽 𝗍𝗈 𝗀𝗈 𝗐𝗂𝗍𝗁 𝖺 𝖿𝗅𝗈𝗐 𝗍𝗁𝖺𝗍 𝖿𝖾𝗅𝗍 𝗋𝗂𝗀𝗁𝗍 𝗍𝗈 𝗆𝖾 ᖯ𝗎𝗍 𝗁𝖺𝗏𝖾 ꜱ𝗍𝗎𝖼𝗄 𝗍𝗈 𝗍𝗁𝖾 𝗈𝗋𝗂𝗀𝗂𝗇𝖺𝗅 𝗈𝗎𝗍𝗅𝗂𝗇𝖾. 𝗋𝖾𝗊𝗎𝖾ꜱ𝗍ꜱ 𝖺𝗋𝖾 𝗈𝗉𝖾𝗇!

Kook. A word you had began to hate. You had been friends with the Cameron's since you were only one. Meeting Sarah in a park on figure eight and quickly becoming friends, no, best friends. Since then you had met her family, won over her parents, fell in love with her brother and babysat her little sister.

It was all too good to be true, literally.

Sarah faded out of your life within a week. Meeting John B and seemingly falling in love with him over night. It annoyed you how easily she had moved on, found new friends, never even giving you a good reason. Kie, her sworn enemy had replaced you as her best friend while you were left to rot, the only trace of her existence being your boyfriend (her brother) and the bracelet she made you in sixth grade.

You had always been Pro-Pogue, never talking badly of those with less. Never messing with them, never picking fights and treating them with the same respect you treat Kooks. It seemed she didn't agree. Turning on you as the Pogues convinced her you were just like Rafe, spoiled and all-mighty. You thought she would at least remember that wasn't true. Care that it wasn't true, but she didn't.

Fazing you out of her life as though you were never there in the first place.

Of course that wasn't all that dampened your mood, but it was a start.

"Hey." Rafe commanded your attention back to him as you lay on the sofa of the Cameron house together. "You good? Looking a little lost." He chuckled in the smug Rafe Cameron way that he typically did.

"Fine just, thinking, I don't know." You answered, waving away his concern. Though he had every right to be. Under your shirts sleeve was a physical embodiment of the pain you felt inside. The loneliness of your friends abandoning you, the feeling of nobody liking you, being unlovable, ugly, weird, snotty, jealous. The list went on and on inside your head, a silent battle.

At least you had Rafe, right?

"Don't tell me you're pissed off again?" He asked, seemingly angry at you. "I swear to god if you're upset about Sarah she's not worth it." He scoffed at the thought of his younger sister who was your age.

"She was my friend." You spoke, voice wavering.

"Was. Key word Y/N, she abandoned you. For what? Some stupid Pogues?" He spat getting up from the sofa, seemingly irritated by your emotional state.

"Yeah but I've known her since, well forever Rafe-" you began, though it didn't take long for him to cut you off. Angry? High? You didn't know.

"I've known you forever Y/N!" He yelled making you flinch. It was at times like these that you saw the typical cook Rafe Cameron from figure eight that everyone else did, you hated it. "Long enough to know she's not good enough for you, okay? So stop talking about it." He finished, walking out of the room. Most likely to sniff some coke with Kelce.

Eyes filling with tears you ran up to his room, body filling with pain as you fell into the trap your brain wouldn't let you escape for the third time.

Curled up on his bed you heard a knock on the door and you pulled your sleeved down to hide the scars left behind.

"Y/N?" You heard his voice, soft and gentle, very different from the previous Rafe you dealt with that day. He took a seat on the bed next to you hand gliding over your hip which was nestled beneath many blankets.

"What." You spoke, voice tired and croaky from the hours of shed tears within the past few days.

"Look, I've been speaking to Topp about what I said and, I know I probably took it too far. You have the right to be upset whether I like Sarah or not." He spoke so softly it was almost a whisper. Hand continuing it's soothing movements.

Sniffling once more, you turned onto your side now facing him. With that he saw your puffy and red eyes. His face dropping along with his heart. He could see the way your hands held the bottom of your sleeves down and, of course, he assumed the worst. A pink tinge showing from beneath the white fabric.

"Why're you doing that?" He asked. Taking one of your hands into his own.

"Doing what? You asked, tucking your body up to your neck under the blanket.

"Hm, never mind. Look, I'm sorry and I really do love you even if I'm shitty at showing it." He scampered to save himself, a hand running through his greasy hair that made him look oh so beautiful. His voice almost cut out when saying the word, 'love', clearly not used to that emotion, even if he had said it to you before.

"It's okay." You replied. It wasn't. "I'm just being over-emotional." You chuckled tearily. You weren't.

"You're mine either way so I gotta take care of you, yeah?" He asked, hand stroking the hairs from your forehead as his eyes connected with yours deeply. Rafe had two sides, caring, loyal and loving versus irritable, angry and overwhelmed. As long as you had him, it didn't matter which version you got. "You promise you're okay? I was just being stupid."

"I promise." You tearily smiled, and as he left you couldn't help but let them fall once more. Disappointed that you let his offer of support slip away once more.

Little did you know, his suspicions of you hurting yourself hadn't faded. Your usual self had been missing for a while now, and he couldn't help but blame Sarah.

You don't know how you ended up here but you liked it. In some random house in figure eight, drinking in a shirt and skirt two sizes too small. Rafe's body pressed up against yours as you went upstairs to have some 'alone time'.

The five vodka cranberries you previously drank finally caught up to you as you giggled and stumbled against Rafe's muscular body. Him chuckling in return at your state. He too was drunk, enough to feel a buzz but not enough to put you in danger.

You practically fell into the spare bedroom you had found, bodies colliding on the double bed and his hands, as they usually would in times like this, grabbed onto your wrists in order to hold them down against the mattress though this time, you winced.

Too drunk to realise what was happening you continued pushing your lips against his though the favour wasn't returned. His eyes stuck on your wrists which felt, bumpy?

"Why are you wincing?" He asked, gently cradling your head with one hand in order to keep your eyes on him.

"What do you mean, no I'm not." You chuckled, anxiety setting in as you noticed your mistake.

"You did. Just then when I touched your wrist?" He said, voice whispered as much like you, his anxiety set in. Memories rushed in of your bad attitude, low appetite, teary eyes, clinginess and suddenly it began to make sense. You were depressed and his heart was sinking deeper and deeper into his chest by the second.

"Please tell me you haven't-" He started though before he could finish his panic took over and he pulled your sleeve up, revealing the painful looking scars. "What are those, Y/N?" He asked, voice rough but not annoyed, you couldn't quite distinguish his tone.

No words came to your mouth, only stutters of sentences, never complete. Suddenly, a sob breached your throat and you clung to the boy on top of you tighter than you ever had before.

"Shhh." He comforted you. Instinct to love you taking over any shock there previously. "It's okay baby, it's okay." He soothed once more, hand running over you hair as you tucked your face into his neck. His own tears kissed his eyes though he never let them fall.

"I'm sorry." You blubbered and he scoffed.

"Why are you apologising? This isn't your fault." He cooed, in disbelief one person could carry the weight of so many emotions alone. "You have nothing to be sorry for okay? I should've been there for you, made you comfortable to tell me about stuff like this." He added, holding you impossibly closer.

"Okay." You stuttered. Welcoming his words into your sad mind, feeling the weight they lifted.

"You're not alone anymore. I'm gonna take care of you." He whispered in your ear and for the first time in months, you smiled. Small and almost invisible but your lips twitched. "I love you." He said.

"I love you too." You answered. Going home that night hand in hand and realising it wasn't you against the world anymore, you weren't alone. You had Rafe. You had someone who really loved you and wanted to help you.

And that was enough.

[ecklekecle]

Can we talk about the lack of Rosekiller fics out there... with that thought in mind if anyone has any recs lmk pls i beg In return I also have fic recs <3 (well my favourite rosekiller fics (and other fics) lol) I'll be honest tho, a lot of these are actually fairly popular but I still hugely recommend them nonetheless :) Rosekiller I'm Not Gonna Teach Him How to Dance with You by greensenne “You’d be my best man wouldn’t you, Evs?

There’s an ugly pain burning low in his chest as he says, “Of course. What are friends for?”

—

Or, Barty's father forces him into an arranged marriage, and Evan is to be his best man. Which would be fine if Evan weren't head over heels in love with him. Intermission by bizarrestars Evan and Barty have no plans to fall in love.

Life rarely goes as planned, though, does it?

Straight A's by stargirly161 "Their grades had been acting like a sick game of tug-of-war, alternating like the phases of the moon, waxing in one of their favours before waning and swapping power to the other. Switching between first and second place like neither of them could find their footing on the podiums."

Or, Evan Rosier and Barty Crouch Jr start their last year of sixth form determined to each be top of their class. Tests, bets and group projects force them to reconsider their fierce academic rivalry and maybe, possibly, discover that there's a thin line between love and hate. Tender Curiosities Baby by otrtbs A glimpse into the exploits of Evan Rosier and Barty Crouch Jr. as they go through this thing called life (with all its ups and downs), together.

An extension of the Art Heist, Baby! universe.

Other Ships (There's probably background Rosekiller in these tbh, I can't remember)

A String of Consequences by semistrawberry The brewing of amortentia in Regulus' potions class, creates a chain reaction few people expected.

Art Heist Baby by otrtbs When James Potter answers a mysterious ad in his local coffee shop, the last thing he expects is to be thrown into a world of white collar crime, but how can he resist when the mastermind behind the operation has dark hair and brooding eyes and promises wealth beyond James' wildest imagination? He would do anything for that boy named after a star, including stealing millions of dollars of fine art. Pink Lemonade by moonysbookshelf If you had told James Potter 2 weeks ago that he would be touring with Regulus Black, he would’ve admitted you to a mental hospital and then driven himself off a bridge. If you had told Regulus Black the same thing, he would’ve slapped you across the face.

But here they were.

// After not seeing each other for 4 years, James and Regulus are forced to tour Europe together for The Marauders' Insidious Tour.

Kill Your Darlings by MesserMoon Kill Your Darlings: To remove or refrain from using something in spite of one's affection for it

Years after Regulus loses his brother they're reunited, and as he struggles to figure out where he fits in Sirius's life he also struggles not to get lost in the impossible feelings he has for Sirius's best friend.

Delicate by The IdeaOfSarcasm “Lils?” “Yeah, one second” The line keeps ringing for another long moment before the third voice joins, “What's wrong?” Lily can’t help but huff a laugh. “Hello to you too Marlene” “Hey Marls.” Mary echos. “Yeah, hi, what’s wrong?” Marls insists. “It’s…well it’s good news” The line stays quiet but Lily can feel it. They know. “I wrote a song.” “Fuck yes bitch.” Marlene hollers. “Thank god.” Mary groans “Are we going back? Did you speak to the label?” Trust Mary to be itching to get back in the studio. “I did, I also… I pulled a favour.” the line goes quiet again. “From Jaime?” Marls asks hesitantly. James Potter. Long term friend of them all and a very touchy subject recently. “No.” Lily hesitates again. “From Regulus Black.”

Até você aparecer by withtheoldstars James was an underground illegal boxer and Regulus simply wanted to go through university without any problems.

When their paths unexpectedly collided, Regulus felt that his life would never be the same again. (I hope everyone enjoys these! turns out i actually have quite a few favourite fics but i just didn't want the list to get too long (and most of the fics i read are mostly popular so.. idk, its hard to recommend things that majority of people have already read lol) anywho live love laugh rosekiller (and everyone else <33) )(I'm sure I ahve other recs too just cant remember atm lol)

[doomandgloomfromthetomb]

Kris Kristofferson (1936-2024)

Hey, it's a photo of me with some of my favorite people — my wife, my daughter, my mom ... and Kris Kristofferson! Kris was my mom's cousin, so his passing last weekend hits particularly close to home. A life well-lived and then some. It was always interesting / strange to have a famous relative; sometimes, he'd just be hanging out with my uncles and aunts talking about the old times growing up in Texas, other times he'd be playing Red Rocks, with a crowd of adoring fans singing along to every word. Kris made both worlds seem as natural as can be, though his celebrity inevitably changed any room he walked into.

That Red Rocks show a little over a decade ago is a good memory; Kris was opening for Lyle Lovett, and once he wrapped up his solo set, he was in a great mood and fully relaxed. I had just gotten heavily into Mickey Newbury and I knew that the two of them had been close way back when. Kris seemed genuinely happy that people were still discovering Newbury's music. "He was my mentor, really," he said. "He did a lot for me when no one else was listening." I mentioned one of Mickey's most famous tunes and Kris lit up laughing: "'She Even Woke Me Up To Say Goodbye'! Can you believe that title?!" All these years later, he marveled at the perfection of it; once you have the title, the rest of the song would flow. Kris had plenty of perfect song titles under his belt, too (and over the years he was always happy to help out his fellow songwriters, as well — just ask John Prine).

Thinking back even further ... when I was probably in fifth or sixth grade, my parents took me to see Kris play at a club over in Redondo Beach. I was more into comic books than music then, but one moment from that show has stuck with me all these years later. The first Gulf War had just kicked off and I remember being generally confused about the whole ordeal — as usual, there was a lot of patriotic nonsense being thrown around, Stars-and-Stripes shit. At some point, Kris went up to the mic and said: "I don't blame any of the kids being sent over to fight ... but I sure as hell blame the sons of bitches who sent them there." In a room full of aging country music fans, it felt downright dangerous. But Kris was pretty much fearless when it came to that kind of thing, and — like his songwriting — he was able to cut right to the heart of the matter with just a few words. His politics, whether it came to Nicaragua or Palestine or Leonard Peltier, were always righteous, and had a lasting effect on my own perspectives about the world.

Anyway! I'll leave you with this — the world premiere debut of a pair of Kris covers that my brother Trevor and I recorded well over a decade ago now ... I can't quite remember what we were doing these for, but listening back, maybe we should have done more! Trevor takes the lead on "Darby's Castle" and I handle "Kiss The World Goodbye." Goodbye, Kris!

[valewritessss]

Did anyone else read the books City of Ember when they were younger? If you didn’t, this post isn’t for you but feel free to read me talking about it.

I read the first book for my 4th grade class reading, and I loved it so much that I skipped ahead of everyone and then I read the other two books. I was so excited to read the last book until I realized that it wasn’t about Lina and Doon, so I never read it. I shipped Lina and Doon so bad it was the first ship I ever loved. Then I watched the movie and it was ass. Like, Percy Jackson movies level ass. In fact, when I watched the Percy Jackson movies years later, they reminded me of the City of Ember movie. Nonetheless, I was still obsessed with the characters. It was the first movie I saw Soairse Ronan in, and that movie is what comes to my mind when I think of her, not Little Women like for many others. I searched up fanart and since there was none I drew my own. My drawings were so bad but it was all I had. So then I wrote fanfictions. I didn’t even know what fanfiction was, but somehow I got the memo and opened up a google doc and got to writing. It sucked so bad, but I hadn’t discovered ao3 yet. Then in 5th grade, I read keeper of the lost cities and wrote a little series of fics where I added Lina and Doon to the books and they did things with the actual characters of kotlc. Then came Wattpad. I searched so hard for any CoE fanfics but I found none. I got a little desperate, wrote a few more fics. Then in sixth grade I read pjo, and I obsessed over it(I still do) for two whole years. Like, I refused to read anything else. I reread it again last summer at my friends request and now I’m obsessed all over again. But when I originally read the pjo books, I learned about ao3. It reminded me that I never found any CoE fics and I tried again. Sure enough, I found like 8 of them. But most of them were disturbing so it wasn’t even worth it. Anyways, now I don’t think about those books much but every once in a while I remember it and get nostalgic about it. I shipped Lina and Doon so hard, it was like my baseline for how much I ship Percabeth now.

[unholyverse]

waterparks // rock sound 25 icon issue

(full text under cut)

ROCK SOUND 25 ICON

WATERPARKS

WATERPARKS HAVE NEVER BEEN A BAND THAT ARE HAPPY TO SIT AROUND AND WAIT FOR SOMETHING TO HAPPEN, RELEASING FIVE STUDIO ALBUMS IN THE LAST SEVEN YEARS WHILE CONTINUING TO GROW THEIR INCREASINGLY AMBITIOUS LIVE SHOWS. AS THEY ACCEPT THEIR ROCK SOUND 25 ICON AWARD, FRONTMAN AWSTEN KNIGHT TALKS US THROUGH THE BEGINNINGS OF THE BAND IN HOUSTON, TEXAS AND WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS FOR THE TRIO.

WORDS: JAMES WILSON-TAYLOR PHOTOS: JAWN ROCHA

"NO MATTER WHAT, ALL THOSE ALL THOSE BANDS LIKE GOOD CHARLOTTE, GREEN DAY AND BLINK, THEY'RE STILL GOING TO BE IN THE BONES AND FOUNDATION OF WHAT WE'RE DOING."

Let's start at the beginning - what are your earliest musical memories?

Alright, so you can start the article with this - as I crawled out of my mother, my dad made sure the first song I ever heard was 'Wouldn't It Be Nice? by The Beach Boys. The other day somebody asked me what would be the last song I wanted to hear if I knew I was gonna die. I mean, I have death songs, don't get me wrong. I've got songs that I would choose to die to, some Death Cab and Motion City Soundtrack. But I think because I love bookends and I love like tying things together. I would have to listen to 'Wouldn't It Be Nice?'.

He took you to a lot of The Beach Boys shows when you were growing up too right?

I do remember those. It would always be on the Fourth of July. How were they always in Houston? He'd also be listening to stuff like Van Halen. My mom really liked Prince. My dad didn't like my mom's music; she liked Cat Stevens and Bob Dylan. But I remember watching TV getting dressed in the mornings, VH1 and MTV, and being so afraid of Mudvayne. They would film it at that frame rate that's the same as 28 Days Later and they had the devil makeup on. So I remember music scaring the shit out of me.

Do you remember the bands and music that you first connected with?

I heard 'Fat Lip' by Sum 41 on the radio in fourth grade. We were in my dad's Honda Civic and I was like 'What is this?' Then I saw it on TV later. Then that got me into Green Day, Good Charlotte, Blink-182. It helped that MTV actually played those things so I could find them. So that was the first stuff that I really gravitated towards in fourth, fifth, sixth grade. Then in sixth and seventh grade, that's when I started getting more into what nerds would be mad at me calling emo like My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, From First To Last. A few years ago at my parents' house, I found these mix CDs and they had Linkin Park, Chronic Future, that song 'United States Of Whatever', Bowling For Soup. That's when I was buying stuff. Basically once I heard 'Fat Lip', I was just like, 'well, now I'm going to hear all of the songs like this'.

You were lucky to grow up at that time where this kind of music was more easy to discover because it was everywhere in pop culture. That is partly why those bands are still so influential.

I feel like no matter what, all those bands like Good Charlotte, Green Day and Blink, they're still going to be in the bones and foundation of what we're doing. I can still explore as much as I want with production and go do weird shit and try and push things forward as much as possible, because that should be your job as a musician, at least partially. But at the end of the day, the house was still built on that.

As you started playing in bands and playing shows yourself, what did you make of the local scene in Houston?

I started playing shows when I was 13. I've done my 10,000 hours. I remember when I was in seventh and eighth grade; there were some punk bands in the Houston scene that I remember seeing all the fucking time. I still have all these flyers still. But the vast majority, I'd say 85% of the bands, were mainly hardcore. That's mainly what the Houston scene was. So I remember my friends and I would just spend every day at local venues. When you're young, you absorb things better and you learn more. I think that's why when kids start piano when they're three, they can be prodigies, you know what I mean? But I feel like I got that with music that ultimately wouldn't help me very much in the future. I could still list 100 bands from Houston that those people have probably forgotten that they were in by this point. But we would just hang out and if a local band somehow didn't pull through, they would let us go take their spot. I was probably in eight different bands over the course of like three or four years. Whoever I was with, we would just go play the shows. We'd make some songs up, we played covers sometimes. We covered The Used and Motion City Soundtrack, Scary Kids Scaring Kids.

Your first couple of Waterparks' EPs were self- made and self-released, keeping in that DIY spirit. Yet it still felt like you were ambitious and aiming high even back then.

Can I tell you the difference between then and now? See, I don't advertise this information but I don't even listen to that much music now. I'm trying to be better about that and I've got certain friends that will give me stuff to immerse myself. But I've gotten maybe a little bit frustrated. There's so many times where I keep finding cool people on Tik Tok when I finally do go looking for new music, and I'll talk to them for a second and maybe see if they wanna open up for us on tour but they can't because so many fucking people are just quiet signed to major labels. It irritates the shit out of me and the reason they're hiding it is because everybody is so obsessed with authenticity, which they have the right to be, you want your shit to be organic, homegrown, free range, cruelty free, all that shit. But everything that I look at is just a fucking marketing trick or ploy. What is the equivalent of me just being in my fucking room at my parents' house?

"I FEEL MORE LOOSE AND I FEEL LIKE EVERY TOUR I GET BETTER AS A SINGER."

In terms of your attitude back then, you were just treating those self-releases as if you were already on a major label. It didn't feel less legit to you.

Day and night, you're working on those things. It was very real. We're about to get to the point of this conversation where we start trying to quantify success and what it means and it's intangible, we can't do it. But what I do know is you can easily get tricked and be like, 'Oh, my Tik Toks are getting millions of hits' and then draw 20 people to your show. I've seen it happen. So I just care how many people ride with you and will leave their home to come see you play. I don't care how many fucking playlists you bought, I don't care how many ads you run on your Spotify, I don't care if YouTube picked you up on their fucking algorithm - good for you because they've never done that for us - but I want to know how many people fuck with you.

With your own live show, when did you feel like it clicked for Geoff, Otto and yourself? When did you first feel like you understood what a Waterparks show should be?

Maybe 'Fandom'. I didn't start taking vocal lessons till 2021. I feel like that's the first time where I look back and it's not just us playing a song and then stopping and then playing the song and then stopping. It's where we actually built a show. That's when we had 'Double Dare 2019' and 'Entertainment 2019' where we were playing for eight minutes straight and made me feel like fucking Green Day. Like some like 'Jesus of Suburbia', 'Bullet In A Bible' type shit. That's not me saying I thought we sucked during 'Entertainment'. That's not what it is at all. We did cool shit. We did Reading & Leeds main stage on 'Entertainment'. But I just feel like things clicked more on 'Fandom'. I feel so much more comfortable onstage every single tour. I feel more loose and I feel like every tour I get better as a singer. I better not get fucking worse. As long as you're continuing to practice and improve. I need to go fucking play tennis and boxing and all this other shit to be at my best when we're touring, you know what I mean? As long as I'm not fully just lounging and then going straight to the stage, I should, in theory, be a better performer.

You mentioned Reading & Leeds, which was one of many milestone moments you've had in the UK. How do you reflect on your relationship with the fans over here?

I give the UK a lot of shit for their food and everything but truthfully, those are my favourite shows in the world. They've always given us the most love and I just feel like the UK appreciates bands more. You know what I mean? I wonder if it's because the BBC still plays guitars? Or maybe they just care about rock culture more.

So to jump back a little, when you were making 'Double Dare', what aims did you have? What was on your to-do list around that time?

I could tell you the list. A big bucket list. I don't erase things when I complete them, I just add on. (Looking through his computer) Let's see…I can tell you one of the things it says here is 'A Rock Sound cover'. I tried to fill it out as much as I could with the knowledge that I had because sometimes you don't know what goals you can ask for. You know what I mean? I put 'Have a Top 10 album' and then you get to mark that off. 'Headline Reading and Leeds', not marked off. 'Have a music video on TV. Get shirts in Hot Topic. Play a show with Kesha. Get an apartment. Get a music video with 100K views. Record an album.' I got to mark that one off. There's a ton. I think when you're making that, you also have to look big. You have to project and manifest big shit. When I was in my parents' house thinking about 'Crave' with $0 to my name, I was thinking about playing that in arenas. We hadn't played a show to more than 500 people at that point. So yeah, I think it's always just pretending you're Coldplay. That kind of doesn't change. I mean, I guess until you become Coldplay, and then you're like 'how do we be as big as God?'

“AT A CERTAIN POINT, THERE ARE THINGS THAT YOU DEAL WITH THAT THERAPISTS DON'T UNDERSTAND. SOMETIMES IT'S HARD TO ACCEPT THOSE THINGS."

You've been very fortunate to have some mentors help guide you towards those goals with Joel and Benji Madden and Mikey Way all there to give advice from early on.

So as we said earlier, we didn't have anyone in our corner when we were doing 'Airplane Conversations', 'Black Light' and writing 'Cluster'. Nobody was around; it was just us at home. Joel and Benji both reached out quickly after the other. They were the first people to ever give us the good shit. 'Hey, we see what you're doing. It's cool'. They were the first established people to ever reach out and give us props. I was babysitting and our fucking first label we had just signed with was like, 'Hey, what are you doing tomorrow?' I'm like, 'Oh, just probably babysitting, teaching guitar lessons'. And they're like, 'Well, do you want to come to Los Angeles and have lunch with Benji and Joel?' Then I'm hitting up Geoff and Otto and we come out and we talked about our goals. Fast-forward, they're like 'You want to do some co-writes?' I wanted to be a team player about it because back then especially, I was like 'nobody touches our shit, we don't get help from anybody, we are DIY'. I was so fucking close-minded punk about it. But when they heard all the demos, they went 'Oh, wait, you already have all these. Do you want to use these?' So that's 'Cluster'. That's when Mikey came through and was listening to us. He was always just so nice. He's like 'I'd love to play on it'. So I'm sitting there showing him the bass parts, and he's getting it fucking immediately. It was so weird. I felt like I could be arrested any second and just immediately sound like a crazy person. 'No, no, no, I was talking to My Chemical Romance and Good Charlotte's my friend'. At a certain point, there are things that you deal with that therapists don't understand. Sometimes it's hard to accept those things. Let's say I'm on a tour, which is already a scary thing. You're in a van, you're not fucking sleeping. You have no fucking money. Part of your team is trying to go back on the already shitty contract you have and you're getting fucking cheated on and you're doing just a bunch of crazy shit. You can't call a therapist for that shit. So I would talk to them, especially Joel. I would save those conversations, because I would have to go back to them so much. His time is valuable. It's almost like a cheat sheet in a way. It doesn't perfectly tie up all those bad things but those are probably the best answers I'm gonna get.

Let's talk about playing Warped Tour. You did it a few times in those early years and it must have been a pretty good learning process on how to grow your fanbase.

All 2016 we toured on 'Cluster'. 'Stupid For You' didn't come out until November that year. The reason I think I'm so good at marketing is because I had to do fucking all of it for four years straight. I was talking to somebody about this the other day where they were like, 'Oh man, if you guys ever opened for Taking Back Sunday, you'd fucking kill it. You'd get so many fans'. No, we wouldn't. And I can say this confidently, because I've promoted outside of three of their shows and I can tell you, those people did not like us. There's always the exception that proves the rule, but for the most part, I can tell you where we will and will not thrive because I've promoted to every fucking fan base. So Warped wasn't really different. Based on what shirts they were wearing at barricade or certain age ranges; I have a good meter of who will fuck with it and who will not. A Sleeping With Sirens fan would fucking love us, a Bayside fan would fucking hate us. You get what I mean? Paramore fans would fucking love us. An Alkaline Trio fan would fucking hate us. But the thing is, at Warped, you're kind of forced to exercise that muscle because all of those people are walking by. I wasn't shy on stage or anything but I think that could be one of the reasons I'm really good at crowd work. There's been a lot of bands we've toured with who say 'I don't know how you just talk to them for fucking five minutes between songs about different shit every night'. I don't know how you don't.

"IF IT'S NOT GOING UP AND GETTING BIGGER AND BETTER, I DON'T REALLY WANT TO DO IT."

Once you got to 'Fandom' and 'Greatest Hits', you were far more comfortable with experimenting musically and on the production side too. Did you feel a change in your confidence levels when you reached that era?

Confidence wise, yeah, but I think I'm too close to really see how big of a difference there is on certain things. I always wanted to be able to do 'Fandom' and even on the first EP with songs like 'Fantastic' or 'Silver', we are adding a weird synthy thing or vocal cuts. I was trying to explain that to this kid in the garage in the middle of fucking redneck nowhere woods, Texas. He just cut the voice and I'm like 'pitch it up and drag this one there'. Or bringing a weird, syncopated piano thing into the outro. I tried to make sure of that early on because I've always been such a fan of so many things. I just wanted that to come across even on album one. 'Crave' was a fully electronic thing, 'Territory' I wanted that to be an indie kind of vibe and then 'Mad All The Time' I wanted to be more industrial, kind of like Linkin Park with those weird, major melodies. 'Take Her To The Moon', full fucking pop song then throw 'Dizzy' in there with cut up shit and trappy drums. Then album two, we're gonna go fucking hard as hell with it on 'Tantrum'. I always felt like we were doing these things. But then I heard those albums the way I hear demos, where I think I hear kind of what they are in my head, what they could or should be. I remember when I showed the 'Fruit Roll Ups' demo to Travis (M. Riddle). He didn't really like it that much. It had all the same parts, all the same chords, vocals, the synth outro and the solo and all this stuff. But then when he heard the final one, where I went in with Zakk (Cervini, producer), and we beefed it up and added more stuff, he was like 'I love this one now so much'. But it's the same song. So when those first albums aren't seen as eclectic as the albums starting at 'Fandom', it would confuse me because I always felt like things were diverse. It really might just come down to the production.

One thing that certainly did change was how open you were in your lyrics. They were always honest but now they became a lot more specific over time.

Pete Wentz is my favourite lyricist and I love things just sounding as pretty as possible, trying to word things that people feel but in ways that they've never heard it described. You take a feeling like love, something that everybody fucking knows, and then just say it in a way with a combination of words that nobody has used yet. That was the goal for so long, but then I remember something kind of clicking when I was so mad and made 'Tantrum'. There was something that felt so much more cathartic. It actually gave me adrenaline and I wanted to chase that. That felt so good. There were certain songs like 'Reboot' or this demo called 'Play'. I wouldn't let a song go if it didn't give me chills. Certain lines like 'you're gonna be just like your mother', that's gonna make someone in real life so mad. So I think that's where that came from. Then songs like 'Turbulent' happened - 'you had your own Pete Wentz and Patrick combined' - and that's the start of the song. Are you kidding me? Who in the music sphere is going to hear that and not have some kind of reaction? And I just wanted a reaction. I could start 'Sleep Alone' and it doesn't have to elicit the same thing, but something as strong. They shouldn't elicit the same exact feeling, but they should elicit that dynamic level of emotional response.

“IF WE NEVER GET TO DO THIS AGAIN, I WANT TO GIVE THEM THE COOLEST SHIT POSSIBLE WHILE WE GET TO BE IN THIS SPOT."

As you mentioned earlier, it is hard to quantify success. A good example is the way 'I Miss Having Sex But At Least I Don't Wanna Die Anymore' became your most streamed song, largely due to a TikTok trend you had very little to do with.

I didn't even know it was happening. Now, there's so many viral songs that the cycle is quicker. Somebody can have a song that bangs on Tik Tok for two weeks and then it's done. But this was so early on. It wasn't a single; it was a deep cut song on the album. It still doesn't have a music video. Neither does 'Turbulent'. It's just so odd because it also makes you a little mad. But then it's also a little humbling in a way. Things are out of your control, but they'll be okay.

You are still touring your most recent album 'Intellectual Property' so it is probably too early to fully analyze it but, now that we are nearly a year on from its release, how are you reflecting on what you achieved with that record?

I've told you this before but if it's not going up and getting bigger and better, I don't really want to do it. I don't want to spin the tyres in fucking mud. If it's not happening, then I'm not gonna do the trap where things start downgrading and we have to play old albums. It's not what I want. I'm good enough at other things to figure something out but preserve that legacy. But 'Intellectual Property' charted higher than any of our fucking other albums, first Top 10 in the UK. We've sold more tickets to the 'Property' tour than the 'Fandom' tour and the 'See You In The Future' tour combined. I'll say that one more time - we sold more tickets to the 'Property' tour than the entire 'Fandom' tour and the entire 'Greatest Hits' tour if you put them both together and add them up. That's the indicator to me. That's what matters to me. I did say at the top of the cycle in such a simple way that I want one of the red songs above the green songs. That's literally what I told Fueled By Ramen. So that didn't happen because the Tik Tok lords did not mysteriously bless us in our sleep. We still sold more. We got more real people in real seats. More was accomplished and it was bigger and better.

It feels like you have the same aim with each tour too - growing and building on what came before. Yet, again, you have always had those bigger ambitions for the show even when you were in slightly smaller rooms.

Dress for the job you want. With all the rooms we did on the 'Property' tour, they're the same ones that we would do for 'Greatest Hits', right? So it's like, okay, we did it. We conquered those rooms. Now we have to move up. Shit. Because otherwise, you just keep doing victory laps forever in the same rooms. So some of them, there's no fucking chance in hell we're gonna sell these out. But it's cool to try. And the thing is, it's still selling on par with the 'Property' tour. Part of me is like, damn, I wish we could have as many sold out things but there are already more people going to this show than the previous sold out one. So I pick my battles. Yeah, you could go play to 1300 people in New York again or you could try and do the fucking big ass thing. So that's kind of where it's at now. You want to build a fucking real show. On the 'Property' tour, we actually got to build shit for the first time. We built a set and this time it is just a bigger version of that. It's just bigger and with more changes. It's not even a spoiler because that's so fucking vague, but to have the show and set change as the set goes on, it's fucking cool. Sometimes I see people who are doing these same size rooms (so this isn't remotely punching down, we're doing the same rooms) and they'll just have a banner. Give them more. Give them a show. I'm so grateful to actually get to be in these rooms finally that if we never get to do this again, I want to give them the coolest shit possible while we get to be in this spot.

"NO PART OF ME IS INTERESTED IN JUST REPEATING THE CYCLE OVER AND OVER AND OVER."

Speaking of bigger shows, you got to play in arenas for the first time when you supported My Chemical Romance. Given what a huge fan you are of that band, it must have felt quite surreal.

Dude, it was so weird and so cool. Every night, the first song scared the shit out of me and then you kind of get the rhythm of it. It's just so weird. Sometimes between songs, I just had to look and take a mental picture. I saw My Chem when I was younger in an arena and I could see the seats I was in, you know what I mean? I could see people in them. You get to a certain point where stuff doesn't blow your mind as much but that blew my fucking mind every day. I remember the first time we ever got to go in a bus. It was so exciting. Now, when I get in the bus, I'm like, 'Okay, but where's the charger in the bunk? Where's the air? Is it just gonna freeze my feet?' It's not to say I'm ungrateful it just becomes more normal. If you go to the best pizza spot every day, after years of having it, it's just a good pizza spot. But getting to go open for My Chem and everything around it and all the details of it, I just never got used to. We'd go to the catering room and we'd sit down and there's Frank and there's Ray. We were in this hockey arena in the locker room and I had all my outfits, planning them out, and at one point, Gerard came through. I was showing him the fits and everything and he was like, 'Oh, you have great style'. I don't think you can get used to that. It's crazy. Maybe My Chem is used to it because they've been playing arenas for years and years and years, maybe that's the standard now. But God, that blew my fucking mind every day.

As you start to think about wrapping up this era, what are the goals as you move forward?

I just want to go places that we haven't been because that's what makes me feel excited. Like with playing in an arena for the first time, anything that is a huge dynamic change. That's all I'm looking for. I just want to feel excited. The people who like us, I appreciate them because we're so lucky enough to be in a place where we don't have to tour into the fucking ground if we don't want to just to survive. No part of me is interested in touring into the ground this year. I feel like we've been on tour for the last two and a half years straight. 2022 was preparing for this album, 2023 was promoting this album. One thing I enjoyed about 2019 was that we only did a short opening run, early in the year, and then we did the 'Fandom' tour at the end of the year. But that whole spring, summer and fall, we were just making cool shit. That made me feel excited. We made so many music videos and just did a lot of cool shit. We got to focus on the creative. I never would have been throwing around Sunny D in my apartment bathroom taking pictures of it for the 'Fandom' album cover if I had jetlag. No part of me is interested in just repeating the cycle over and over and over. I want to just do things that we haven't done yet and make stuff for everyone. Because if we go play in Copenhagen, Waterparks is for Copenhagen that day. But when I'm home and we're operating at full mental capacity and everything, we can make things for everybody. At the end of the day, I never want to fall into a pattern and repeat myself and do the same shit. I want to expand and see what we can do, what our capabilities are like. Do something that somebody hasn't done yet. I want to rent a movie theatre and do a fucking real premiere. I don't want to give a bunch of shit away but there's a lot of things that are always in the works. As Awsten, the guy steering the ship on fucking Waterparks, whatever's going on I just want it to be new and cool and feel fulfilling. If we had some fucking tyrant label that was like 'We need an album now' I could go 'There's fucking 100 songs on here. Go fucking make your album, pick them. Go have Zakk mix them'. But it's just not what intuitively feels right and I want to follow that intuition. I keep looking back at the 2019 year map as kind of a blueprint. That's not to say I'm gonna stay home all year. But it's just gotta be new. I want that feeling of getting in the bus for the first time.

[magicaltickles]

😉 👍🏽 🥰💀

Omg the beary good friend himself how kind of you to make an appearance my good sir howest is thou on this fine day since like 7am when we first talked

😉 How did you discover you were into tickling?

Honestly... I don't remember what I had for lunch yesterday, let alone how I first got into tickling lmao. I do vividly remember looking at tickle fanfic on my phone when my family and I went on vacation to California between my fifth and sixth grade years and being very disappointed when one of the sites I wanted to go on was blocked bc I didn't have stable internet

👍 What is a green flag in play partners for you?

People who respect boundaries and don't get pissy when you put them in place 🥰 And people not minding if I disappear bc life gets in the way 🥰

Those who ask first too! Especially if it's our first time messaging like it really does mean a lot <3

🥰 Most attractive part of a lee/ler?

Already answered HA but to reiterate in a shorter form, the smile <3

💀 Death spot?

I think you knowbfhsbsns

Feet, specifically toes don't ask about the last part and how ikhdhd

[motownfiction]

study group

After about a month, no one remembers it, but Sadie was Rocky Sullivan’s first choice for Cogito, not Will.

She wasn’t particularly thrilled by the concept. Rocky Sullivan always has out-of-this-world ideas to get ahead, to forge networks, to make himself excellent. Out of everyone who’s ever been valedictorian at St. Catherine’s, he’s the one people from all kinds of cliques and backgrounds fear. Sadie once made the mistake of asking Rocky why he settled for Michigan instead of going someplace like Harvard or Yale or even Stanford. Rocky just gave her a stern look and said, “There’s too much at stake in the Blue.”

That’s another thing about Rocky Sullivan. He speaks in riddles.

So, it wasn’t much of a surprise when Sadie discovered that the person sending her photocopied images of Descartes was Rocky Sullivan. It was, however, a surprise that Sadie agreed to meet him for coffee in the student union. Well, Rocky drank coffee. More like guzzled it. He’s been drinking coffee since he was in the sixth grade. He says he’ll sleep when he’s dead.

“And if you keep that up, you could be dead before law school,” Sadie says.

Rocky gives her another famous stern look.

“Medical school?”

Another stern look.

“Rocky, you’re not seriously going to tell me you’re uninterested in any type of professional education. I’ve known you since I was three. You make Alex P. Keaton look like Tom Hayden.”

“I admire Hayden. Man knew how to get ahead. Plus, he’s married to Barbarella, which we all wish we could be.”

“We all?”

“Doyle, if you could let me get to the point, please.”

“Proceed.”

“Thank you. I have every intention of attending business school when I’m through here. As a fall semester junior, I’m already doing preliminary work on applications. Scouting recommenders, saving up for the application fee, working on essay prompts. Did you know the essays for a business school application only have to be 100 words? Amateurs. Most of them don’t even understand the value of a liberal arts education. They’re not like us.”

Sadie chews on her straw to keep from laughing. She knows all this from Rocky’s reputation, but also from Carrie, who’s sort of really her friend these days. Carrie says that her big brother thinks he’s hot shit because he’s majoring in economics instead of general business. Maybe he’s a little bit right.

“Regardless,” Rocky says, probably oblivious to the fact that he’s interrupting no one but himself, “we need people from every major. That’s where you come in, if you’d like.”

He launches into his whole spiel. He’s starting this slightly secret society of highly intelligent and highly motivated students from every major in every college. It’s not going to be like a weird fraternity, he says, because that would be a waste of everyone’s time. It’s going to be a place where the brightest and the best can talk about their achievements, get assistance if they need it, meet each other. It sounds like a study group, or like Rocky just wants friends. By all accounts, he’s never really had those.

Sadie, by contrast, has always had friends. She’s comfortable with the small number she’s fortunate enough to keep. When she tries to explain that to Rocky, he won’t hear it.

“This isn’t a social club,” he says. “This has every advantage to your career. You might be the only delegate from the psychology major, but that means something. As soon as I heard you’d declared that way, I didn’t hesitate. I have friends in your psychology class from last winter. They said you had more original ideas than a poet on his first acid trip. I heard you pulled a perfect score on almost every paper. It’s obvious. You’re the one that I want.”

“Oh, yes, indeed?” Sadie asks.

“Yes.”

“No, I was … you’ve seen Grease, right?”

“I caught your reference. It’s just of little import to me right now. What I need to know is if you’re interested in joining Cogito or if I should move onto someone else who doesn’t deserve it as much.”

“Deserve it? Rocky, do you hear yourself? This isn’t an official fraternity or society. This is a study group that you made up.”

“It’s not a study group!”

“It’s something.”

“Yes, and it’s something important. If you’re worried about your friends, you don’t have to be. I already asked Callaghan. She jumped at the chance.”

Sadie sighs.

“Doesn’t surprise me,” she says. “If you told Lucy they were planning to carve her face into Mount Rushmore, and all they needed was her signature, she’d sign in her own blood.”

“Really?”

“Maybe. Doesn’t matter. I just … I don’t think I’m actually the right person. I don’t have that cutthroat thing that you and Lucy have. I’m … God, I don’t know how else to say it, but I think I’m just different.”

Rocky tries and fails not to roll his eyes. Sadie doesn’t blame him. It’s almost funny.

“I guess I’ll have to accept your decision,” he says. “If you’re not going to join, can you think of someone else? Someone who might be as talented as you one of these days?”

Sadie looks around the union as though that will help. But it does. Out of the corner of her eye, she spots Will with an order of fries in one hand and Elenore’s diaper bag in the other. She grins. Will is a double major – psychology and political science, just to prove he can do it. He is always looking for a leg up, a reason to feel important. And who is Sadie if not the one who gives people what they want, what will make them happy?

She fixes her eyes back on Rocky Sullivan and smiles with all her teeth.

“Yes.”

(part of @nosebleedclub september challenge -- day xviii! no, i did not intend for this scene to be this long. holy holy. but when i write for rocky sullivan, who is hilarious, things always get out of hand!)

[annakacoyett]

Parents, whatever you do, please please PLEASE don't take away your children's lifelines, especially when they're in a vulnerable age.

Today, my dad made me delete my AO3 account and the emotional pushback was one of the worst feelings I've experienced.

It's not like it was unguided either, nor was the decision to do so uninformed.

My dad only wants the best for me, both my parents do, and I know that. I know that they love me, and I know that they'll be there for me in more ways than one.

But on some days, it's really fucking hard to see that.

Today was one of those days.

I've been briefed with the dangers of the internet at that start of grade five. I have had my issues with technology misuse as well. In those times, my only interest was youtube and shitty (and I say that with the most loving tone possible) gacha glms with cliche plotlines.

I loved reading, anyone that knows me can tell you that. I have more books stacked in my room than my mom's study. I also love animes and cartoons--- what kid doesn't? I discovered Darling In The FRANXX that summer and I was hooked (the love story was tragic and it was one of the first times I felt the hurt).

I love stories, I love reading them, I love imagining myself as one of characters as well.

So you can imagine what 11 year old me did when she found the existence of fanfiction. Of AO3 and a bunch of other sites like Fanfic.net, Wattpad and Quora.com.

I was estactic, more ways than one. One of the best things that came from that eye opening discovery for me was the community behind it.

People sharing their work for free? Other people loving it and being supportive to the author simply because they can? The entire treasure trove of possibilities and stories that everyone made, shared, and got love for it?

The entire concept was forgein to sixth grade me.

I was aware it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. I know how cyberbullying works, I've seen how hateful and downright terrible people can be behind a screen, hell, one of my best friends was being bullied by the entire grade that way.

(Reported it and got every single one of my acquaintences marked black on their student records that year. Some tried to bully me afterwards but by that point, I was armed with quirkless vigilante Midoriya Izuku stories and as an inspiring artist, I was feeling particularly creative. I won the school's art talent show that year with my comic being sent to every parent, student and teacher on the school's email list (Covid-19's only contribution to my life).)

Me being me, I signed up for AO3. I read for a while, and doing not much else. I had over 20 tabs opened on any given day, all with different stories. I wandered around many fandoms, all related to the media I was consuming at the time.

I remembered thinking 'why doesn't this certain fic exist?' After all, the entire concept of fanfiction was to create things that don't ever get to see the light of day otherwise, right?

I didn't hit me until the annual book week competiton (online) the school held.

I was supposed to write them. Write the stories that I love so much. Give that tiny idea a spark of life, and watch it expand and embrace other readers lovingly.

English is my second language, and my grammar was actrocious until I started reading. Reading fanfics. I never realized how annoying not having the right sequence of words can be, for the writer and for the reader as well.

Until I saw with my own two eyes a badly writen Wattpad oneshot with P.O.V. formatting and horrible first person perspective.

My writing skills improved, and my teachers were questioning me left and right about my supposed misuse of 'online writing/paraphrasing tools'. It was amazing seeing how my grades improved.

But I was still hesitant.

I asked my mom to see if I should write a story that I thought of. She told me fiction wouldn't help me later in life, that living in a delusional fantasy world wasn't what made her and dad sucessful (in words a 6th grader can unserstand).

I asked my dad the same thing. He looked me in the eyes and told me that if I couldn't solve a motherfucking math problem as easy as the one I asked him for help the other day*, I shouldn't be daydreaming about doing useless shit like this (again, in words an eleven year old could understand).

*I was learning the Ontario ciriculum. Dad learned the government issued one when he was a kid. The contents taught at different grades vary, because they both have different endgames (my school aims to improve on student's learning skills (responsibility, cooperation, initative, etc.) while his was focused on material study value (memorizing formulas, being able to write a 6 page discriptive essay in twenty minutes, memorizing the periodic table, etc.)). What I was learning was taught to him at grade 4. He was very frustrated that I couldn't solve a simple math problem on basic probability while I was panicking/crying next to him because I didn't understand what he was yelling at me for.*

My sister was begging me to spare people from my crazy ideas because she being tortured with them was enough (she was three years younger than me).

I was lost, to be honest. But again, fanfiction spoke to me like some deranged fandom god and I remebered a line that  basically boiled down to 'If you give up because haters want you to, they're winning.'

So I wrote my first fanfiction. Took me a week to muster up the courage to post it.

I waited.

Three hours later, I had my first hit.

I was up in the clouds. Somebody read it. Someone read my supposedly idiotic idea.

Twleve hours later, my first kudos came in.

I was in heaven all over again.

Days, weeks, months passed.

And the support and love just kept coming in.

I was happy. I found my community. I have people showing me that they appreciated my hard work, my dedication to my story. I improved so much since I started. I learned that it was okay to be burnt out. I learned that it was perfectly fine if you needed a break from other people, sometimes even your hobby. I learned that not everyone enjoys the same thing, and to not really mind it if I get a mean comment here and there. I learned that if it was there choice to read my work, hate on it, and make that hate known when they could've pressed the 'go back' button, they aren't worth my emotional strength.

The AO3 community taught me more about life than my own parents. It happened in the span of eight months.

I walked into grade 7 with a spring in my step, with a new confidence in myself. Fanfic stayed with me throughout those times, even when puberty forced me to make some incredibly irrational decisions during my mood swings.

Writing, creating, and sharing my artworks became one of my lifelines. It was something I loved. Loved more than reading itself.

In 8th grade, I made new friends. A new girl transferred, and she was basically glued to her laptop with her large, heavy glasses falling off every 10 minutes. I engaged her in conversation, and she asked me if I watched Haikyuu.

That opened a new dam of possibilities.

I didn't watch the anime, nor did I read the manga, but I was circulating around crossovers long enough to know much of the storyline (TPN x Haikyuu! was one of my favorites).

She and I became fast friends.

It became clear to me that she has issues of her own. Issues that I once had, but much more severe.

She starved herself during lunch for over two months because she didn't have enough time to complete her never ending extracirricular work that her parents made her do. She was shitting terrified of her own mother, so much so that during our Halloween party, she was having a panic attack and trying to eat glass because the container of food she brought broke (it dropped because someone bumped into her) and her mother made it (it took three of us to hold her back and my homeroom teacher (bless you Mr. Kaan) telling her to blame him if her mother asks for her to stop trying to hospitalize herself). She had emotional breakdowns over every single grade she recieved because it wasn't a perfect score like her parents were expecting (her grades averaged around 89-99 depending on the subject).

I did my best to help her, but I could only do so much as a kid.

So I gave her what held me through my self-justified fights with my family--- AO3, fanfiction and creative writing.

She came a long way since then. Her changes were astounding and her personality shifted from 'desperate people pleaser' to 'eccentric but pretty chill lunatic'. Her mother was less than pleased with how obnoxiously weird her daughter was getting, but my friend was finding herself again after 9 years of dedicating her life to academics and no way in hell was I going to let her feel bad about that.

My own grades were around a 95% average, and my parents were happy. My English mark only got better, and I also wrote a fic in Vietnamese to further strengthen my native writing.

Then shit hit the fan.

I came home today exhausted from school--- my head was a mess, highschool wasn't easy; especially when you have PE last period. I dropped dead on my bed as soon as a stepped into my room, sweaty uniform and all.

When I woke up, dad was home and three hours passed.

I took a shower, did some prep for dinner while waiting for my mom to finishing her run, and relaxed on the couch with my sister and dad.

Dad looked at me and said 'Oh yeah. [OP] you're not allowed to write those stories of yours anymore.'

I asked him why. He won't just randomly do things like this.

'You're a kid, you don't understand the dangers of the internet.'

He then proceeded to list out the suicide statistics from people who ended themselves from the hate they recieved online.

It's a horrible thing.

But I already knew that. I knew since I was given my dusty old tablet that needed an ethernet cable to work. That was four years ago.

What astonised me was that it took my dad, a man who was resourceful and very competent, four fucking years to find out about this.

I distinctly remember him making me quit a fandom discord server after my sister befriended someone online and got not so nice things said to her. I also distinctly remember him reading through my messages, private ones with my friends, classmates and teachers in my DMs, groupchats and emails to make sure i wasn't slacking off. He also had his IT guy install a tracking function on my laptop to monitor my shit.

I get where he was taking this--- he and mom didnt have the best online support sharing their experiences in life. They got harrased, hated on, walked all over and accused of horrible things. My parents braved through it all, and never faltered even if they got spitted on.

Now that he was armed with the knowlegde that I could potentially be harmed to death, something even worst than what he experienced, he wasn't willing to give it up to chance.

Dad didn't believe I was ready. He thought I was lucky to haven't encountered a single mean comment before he got his wake up call and enforced this. He doesn't believe in the existence of a communtiy that didn't gain anything for their contributions, but still existed.

It was too good to be true for him, and he told me as such.

I was the younger one here, by decades. I was his kid, and I was the bumbling fawn that didn't know better.

I was told I didn't understand, wouldn't understand what he was doing for me.

My mom agreed.

But I did.

I know what they're trying to do. I know that they only want the best for me, that they didn't want me to face the dangers yet.

But I already have, and came out victorious on the other side, better than ever.

I told them so seriously, and added that I was aware of the dangers and already seen what it was like. I saw what it can do to a person, my fifth grade bestie wad proof of that, and was on the recieving ends of some nasty hate myself.

This didn't deter them, only alarmed them about how nonchalant I was being. They told me I was delusional, that I was adeicted to finding praise and validation by strangers on the internet and that I was wasting my time and effoet over a useless hobby that didnt give me anything in return. That I was being a hormonal teenager who only pushed her loving parents away, that frankly nobody cares about my works, that it's shit compared to what other better, more talented and much more sucessful people have written.

They said the fact that I've seen what vitirol could be spilled online and haven't ran away with my tail betwen my legs only proved that I was vulnerable to the clutches of such a toxic environment. That I wasn't ready for the hate, and I don't need unwarranted attention over some words that a baby could babble.

That's what they said.

That was not true.

That was SO not true.

I wasn't delusional, I wasn't a starry eyed kid that was naive to the horrors of society. I didn't waste my time, I didn't maintain a 'unsustainable' hobby because of my need to feel uselessly egoistic. I wasn't being irrational over my hurt, I wasn't being weak for standing strong against the wave.

I know I wasn't the best out there, that so many more could do better than me. I learned I didn't need to work for love, that it should be given freely for those that need it. I understood that my works of art are unique and I should feel proud of them, and I believe I did it even better than they could have.

I have pride in my works, my accomplishments, my understanding and lessons that I've learned independent from what my real life adult figures taught me.

And it paid off. My works have 3-4k hits each.

Three thousand to four thousand people have read my story. My works that my family didn't believe was any good.

Even my cousins, whom I see as my older siblings, were skeptical of how sucessful I was until it smacked them right in the face.

I was proud of what I did, and I have every right to.

My dad wasn't happy.

I put up a fight. I didn't want to give up my babies, I didn't want to abandon my unfinished projects. I have three running series, I have friends that I supported, that supported me. I have people tell me how much my work meant to them, and I told other authors how much their works meant to me as well.

My mom had this thing were she tells me to do something that she wanted me to do that was either out of my comfort zone, I wasn't ready to or just plain refused--- and that she'll tell me I did a good job afterwards.

It was empty praise. But I still did it because it was the only validation I recieved as a child.

Then I had other people tell me that I did good, out of their violation. That I was amazing, that I should be proud of myself. These were total strangers on the internet. Someone behind the screen loved what I did more than my mom, my dad, my sister, my family.

It helped me. It was pretty much the only stable support pillar I had that I knew I didn't need to uselessly maintain. That the communtiy would still be there for me even if I stopped posting for several years and never came back.

Everything that I had was destroyed with a psuh of a button. Dad gave an ultimatum.

Either I never post again, delete my account completely and never step foot into AO3 again, even for reading; or all my technology would be conficasted until I did so.

It was a no brainer. I would've easily given up my techno privilegdes for my stories to live on.

But theres a catch.

Finals was in four weeks.

And in those four weeks, I have summative projects and assignments that were worth up to 50% of my grade.

I can't do any of those projects or the finals itself without my tech.

Dad knew this. He sent me some study material just yesterday.

And he was there, watching my mom press the delete button. I wasn't even able to orphan my works--- mom pressed the 'delete completely' option.

I'm angry.

I'm mad.

I'M LIVID.

I am sobbing while writing this. It hurts. It so goddam bad. It hurts because your only reliable source of support was taken away violently. It hurts because you parents treat you like a maniac anti-fan. And that they're so stuck up in their heads that they didn't even consider what it would do to me.

Dad asked me why I didn't tell them before, why I didn't come to them as soon as I saw my first hate comment, why I still stick to this despite them teaching me better. Why I felt the need to share my works to the world, because it's obviously because I want the praise.

The man that told me my works were useless and shit just two minutes before, was asking me this.

I wanted to tell him how I cried myself to sleep the day someone wrote how bad my spelling was. To tell him how his words and actions had hurt me today as much as it did years ago. How much of my efforts I put in to even get a simple 'good work' from them with varying degrees of success. How my best friend's first ever fanfic was gifted to me, on that account, because I was the only one who supported her in her dark times. How mom dragged me kicking and screaming to my first book week writing competition against my will, nearly annhiliating my desire to write before I found my community.

How recieving each kudos felt, how reading every suppoetive comment was like. How waking up one day to see a long-forgotten fic that I'd subscribe to had updated, how giddy I feel when finding just the right fic that had all elements I wanted.

It hurts.

It hurts so damn much.

My account was gone four hours ago, and I'm crying on and off for the tye majority of it.

It hurts because I loved it. I loved everything to do with my works--- the ideas, the writing, the motivational dips and dives, but most importantly, I loved sharing my work to the world.

Because I'm comforted by the fact that somewhere out there, my idea was still alive, and people are still reading it.

It hurts because my characters are part of me. Their characterization was so different from their originals, but it was my charcterization that lived to tell the tale.

It hurts because my love was there, my art was there, my people were there. Ones that don't blame me, ones that appreciate me, ones that understand me, all through a screen.

It hurts because I wrote those fics as what I wished would've happened to me, that I know could've happened to me had I have someone to guide me.

It hurts because I know that people loved my ideas and urged me to write more. Are WAITING for me to write more.

It hurts because I couldn't imagine a day were I wouldn't have taken 5 minutes out of my day and read a masterpiece, write one, or search for one.

It hurts because those wonderful stories made me laugh, made me cry, made me happy and sad and all sorts of other things.

It hurts because I enjoyed every single one of those moments.

It hurts because I spent the last four hours typing this and crying and still couldn't find the right ways to say that IT HURTS.

I hate it.

Hate this feeling. Hate my decision to stand by. Hate that my works are gone forever.

Some part of me hates it, loathes that I managed to forgive my parents for this, that I understood they meant well.

It hurts so damn much.

I want to scream. I want to kick a wall. I want to throw myself out of the motherfucking window.

I didn't do any of that.

I just cried.

It hurts so much because I know people in real life that loves my works, that appreciate my efforts, that know I wasn't just some kid that had no idea what's happening.

It hurts because those people weren't my parents.

My parents were the ones who laughed those ideas off. My parents were the ones who scrunched their noses and reminded me time and time again how much money I was costing them for the betterment of my life. My parents were the ones that love me, that I know I love, but took and torn away my love and forced me to shut it tight somewhere no one can see.

One question my dad asked me was why I didn't show him my works. Why I wanted to share it with total strangers.

This is why.

I showed it to him, once. I showed it to my mom, once. I showed it my sister, once.

Dad criticized my use of vocabulary, telling me I could do better and that to not waste my time on this.

Mom demanded to know why I wasn't working on something worthwhile, like my persuasive writing skills to aid my college application, but this.

My sister's was perhaps the kindest reaction I got.

She laughed.

She laughed so hard she had tears down her eyes, chortling uncontrollably at my six hour piece of work.

She laughed and then asked me to never write again, childishly repeating what my parents told me to in over a hundred different ways but directly.

I remebered it like it was yesterday.

She laughed, but she cared.

My sister was the only one who bothered to look at my fics, gave me any feedback and told our relatives about my work.

She was trying to make fun of me, of course, like the baby sister she is. But she cursed out my cousin who was joking about a charcter in my fic in all the curse words a tiny little kid like her knows.

My first reader was my sister, not my parents.

The first genuienely supportive comment was from a total stranger on the internet, not my parents.

The first adult to wholeheartedly read my fics, who loved what I did, was my 8th grade homeroom teacher, not my parents.

The first adult who gave me ideas as fellow fanfic author, who talked fanfic to me, was my elementary librarian, not my parents.

The ones who rupoed me away from all of that, who gave me so much grief in most terrifying fifteen minutes of my life, the ones who destroyed my golden pillar with the push of a button wasn't the dangers they warned me of, but my parents.

I think it hurts so much is because of two reasons.

One: everything I loved about myself, everything I could keep to myself, everything in my own colorful teenage world, everything that I made by myself, for myself, was non existant as of five hours ago.

Two: the people that caused it were my parents, ones I wished were everything I had against the world.

Dad told me once, that I need to be mindful of the tools I used, because if I'm not careful, they'll hurt me someday.

I find myself digusting comparing my parents as the tools in that saying, but it's true.

I still love them. I still love them aftet everything today.

But I hate them for doing that. I hate them for cutting away my lifeline.

So parents, guardians, caretakers, etc.--- please, please, PLEASE don't take away your child's lifeline. You don't know if that's their last, you won't know if you're not one of them.

For their sake.

[inf0dump]

My Creepypasta AU That I Like Too Much ft. A Block of Text

It's been four years. Four goddamn years since I came up with this concept. That concept being re-designing and re-writing the creepypasta stories that I grew up with, i.e., Eyeless Jack, Jeff the Killer, Ticci Toby, etc.

It is just now that I know what to do with it, but I don't know how or where to put it. It's difficult to figure all of this stuff out because I've changed so much of it. I've changed last names, personalities, aesthetics, so a name within the fandom doesn't mean the same thing anymore.

I feel like it doesn't belong on fanfiction websites, but it's not my own thing either. I just really hyper fixated on it for many years, taking bits and pieces of information from the first stories and logging it into my really long fanfiction. To the point where it doesn't feel like fanfiction anymore. Has that ever happened?

I don't want to change the names because I love these re-designed characters with these specific names, and I have a hard time with change. It's in my nature. And I also want to express that I love where it came from (but not who it came from, dear god). I love the place and most of the people that are in this fandom because creepypasta people from the late 2000's, early 2010's, are really cool to me.

And I'm very nervous to share what I've made because of experiences in the past with the things I'm really passionate about, because I will sometimes ask stupid questions. At least I've been told they're stupid questions. But I get really invested in the things I really like, and I want to know everything and interact with other people. I'm so desperate to interact with other people and through the things I enjoy is the only way I know how to.

This may be a lot of infodumping, but that's what I'm good at. And we're just getting started. I feel like I should take this blog in the direction of information spilling and infodumping. I changed my name to that and infodumping is practically my love language. I do it to my girlfriend and my family, and if I were to have a group of friends I would also do it to them if they would let me.

ANYWAY, this is about a completely different thing, you're probably not reading this to hear about my social struggles as an autistic (but I will happily infodump about any questions anyone has because autism is a hyper fixation as well), so let's move onto the creepypasta AU stuff, or the title: The Abyss.

The Abyss is a mix of genres. There's a horror aspect, there's comedy (or at least, what I think is funny), there's drama, there's young adult aspects, mature aspects, some romance, there's probably more. It started as an idea for a comic series, and then I realized, I can only draw people and animals. I can't draw backgrounds or architecture. Honestly, I can barely draw a full-bodied person. I've been drawing for a long time, and it's always been living things, so the comic idea was, WOOSH, out the window.

Then I realized that I have been writing fanfiction for seven years and have been told that I'm talented as a writer. Not much of a reader, but I was in grade school, and then I discovered Wattpad in fifth-sixth grade. I write a whole bunch. I wrote a twenty-something page first chapter for a Five Nights at Freddy's universe that I published on AO3, then a month or so later, deleted it because I believed I could do better.

I'm able to write non-fiction pretty effectively, especially when it's topics I enjoy. I wrote a high school essay in my sophomore year about villain archetypes in books and movies and which one was the most realistic to reality. I don't remember the conclusion. I finished the essay a week before it was to be submitted and so I had nothing to do in my English class except twiddle my thumbs.

For this creepypasta AU project in particular, those four years was spent doing various research on race, ethnicity, culture, disabilities, religion, mental health, demonology, and other subjects that would help to make this world and these characters more believable and representative of the world that we live in. Representation is an important factor to me.

I've had multiple experiences with wanting to see my own type of person in what I love, and I know that other people would want to see that too. Especially in creepypasta. A lot of creepypasta is white anime boys.

I was diagnosed with severe Tourette's Syndrome (TS) last year after suffering for a year a with saying things that I didn't mean, or doing things that I couldn't control, and it affected my mental health severely. I couldn't get out of bed and when you act like that, people laugh at you. Sure, it can be funny, some of the things I say or do, but there's a level of anxiety that unrealistically high. Especially when it comes to that Tourettic OCD side of things. When it tells me "You're going to say this" and I have to fight in order to keep words or movements down.

I confided myself in a re-design of Toby. Toby is the problematic Tourettic representation that I had at that point in time. And I hated that. It wasn't problematic for me in the sense that he would swear, or he would do something taboo in front of people. He was problematic for me in the sense that what he had wasn't Tourette's. It was speech impediment. At least, that's how I remember it, correct me if I'm wrong.

If you are a person, you want to be recognized as a person. There are people that are social anxious to the point that they don't want to be perceived, but you still need to treat them with respect. I've always been taught that people will respect you if you respect them. That's not always true, but it's a positive way to live. To think, 'I'm going to respect this person in whatever form their respect looks like.' That could be respecting their religion, their culture, their gender, their sexuality, their form of expression.

Some people may be wrong in the way that they want respect. They could hurt people; they do not respect another person or a group of people. But they deserve respect because they are a human being. If they aren't going to get respect from you, they will get respect from others, that's how it works. If you don't like a politician, don't respect them in the slightest, they are still going to get respect from other people. That's what I mean. You don't have to respect everyone; it is up to you and up to other people who deserves approval.

You don't have to like anyone. For example, the creator of Ticci Toby, Kastoway, does not have my respect. That is my opinion. They don't deserve my respect and support.

That's part of the reason that I re-designed and re-wrote in the first place. I don't like Kastoway. Toby was the first character that I re-designed. I designed him to be my own representation, and then he took over.

Toby has been renamed to: Tobias (Toby) Goldberg (It feels a little strange publishing that name for other people that's not my girlfriend to see). Toby is my personal favorite. Toby is fifteen (15) when the story starts, he has severe Tourette's Syndrome, severe ADHD, OCD, and is autistic. He's the type of autistic that really likes cats and everything to do with cats. Toby is also high-risk to be a pyromaniac, which is an impulse disorder, and he can't be formally diagnosed yet because he's not eighteen (18) years old.

Toby is incredibly tiny for his age (4'9) because of pregnancy complications, underweight because of medication, and he's Jewish-Italian-American. He lives in the Bronx borough of New York City, has a very thick Bronx accent, a mess of freckles, his Italian grandfather thick, too big to fit his face, tortoiseshell-colored glasses, and very thick, curly, shoulder-length red hair that kind of looks like a wolf-cut, but it sticks out all over the place.

I feel like I shouldn't spoil his backstory, but it's very sad and very triggering. Speaking of triggers, there's a whole lot in here because characters need to suffer, but you shouldn't. Take care of your mental health. Mental health is extremely important.

If anyone has any specific triggers I should now about, let me know. This story is both realistic horror and fantastical horror, which basically means there's the fun horror (fantastical horror) and the devastating horror (realistic horror).

If there's any questions about specific characters, or the question 'what atrocities have you done to my favorite character?' comes up, don't worry, just ask me. And if it's a character that I have never heard of, I will do research on the character and maybe your favorite will make an appearance.

Toby's and Cody's (X-Virus) re-designs are maybe the favorites that I have. But now, we move onto the plot of this whole thing. If you've been waiting for the plot, thank you for sticking around!

The plot of The Abyss is very vague, it's more the description of a place. I was originally going to commit to an episodic structure for the comic, but now, if I'm going to be posting this to AO3, then it absolutely has to have a chapter structure. But if I might be posting the chapters only to here, then I might go back to the episodic structure.

The Abyss is about a group, a main cast, of people, featuring Jeffrey, Tim, Brian, Ben, Cody, Toby, and Sally in Book One (five books in total) living in an alternate plane of existence called the Abyssal Plane, or the Abyss, which is ruled over by a demon that they called the Emperor. The Emperor is tall, faceless, and wears the skin of whatever would fool a person the most effectively.

Their job in the Abyss is to provide retribution to those that the Emperor feels deserves it. Retribution means death. Each person has their own style of carrying out their job when they go on missions. We follow each of these main characters throughout their lives and struggles in and outside of the Abyss, so I guess it's also like slice of life in a sense.

The issue I find that I stated before, is that I feel like I've changed the characters too much in order for it to still be considered fanfiction. I fear that no one will be able to recognize these characters, the only thing I have not changed is first name and some design choices. That's why I have labeled it an AU, an alternate universe.

And another thing, I still have some learning to do, especially when it comes to people of whom I do not share experience with. I've done research, but there's only so much research that you can do that is not talking to people of different cultures, different races, different ethnicities, and I am horrible with talking to people. I fake it till I make it.

If anybody has any details with their life that is outside of my experience, I would love to hear about it. I love learning about people, all kinds of people. Even if it's information that I need repeated to me, repetition is important.

Thanks for reading, I would appreciate constructive criticism, feedback, and interaction. This is my favorite thing to do: talk about what I'm passionate about. Please tell me what you're passionate about!

[aphotiic]

on growing up ugly

I found a video the other day deep in my google photos. I think it was filmed on my ipod touch sometime in 2015, almost ten years ago now. I was around eleven, sitting in a swivel chair in my room swaying side to side. Eyes darting all over as I did my best attempt at youtuber mannerisms. I introduced myself, my age and what I liked to do. I started talking about school, and my friends. I named a boy that liked me at the time. I don’t understand why, I said, because I’m ugly. I’m ugly, but he still likes me.

I sat swiveling in my rolling chair, in a snoopy graphic tee my mom probably got me from old navy. My hair parted harshly to one side, my eyebrows unkempt and bushy, my eye nose and mouth so very small. I looked like a child. I was a child. I can’t explain the pain I felt hearing those words. I wondered how my mother felt hearing the same thing from my mouth over the years after this was taken, no matter how many times she tried to dissuade me. How small I looked speaking so badly about myself, when I didn’t even know who I was yet. How I continued to grow and how much, right up until the day I discovered this footage in my college dorm in my fourth year, so little had changed.

I still remember the day these boys first made fun of how I looked. It couldn’t have been too long before I took the video. I remember where I stood, what I heard. I remembered over and over, no matter how much I tried to change myself the following years those words stuck. They were even repeated a few times by others. I’ve plucked my eyebrows into a million shapes since that time. I dyed my hair for the first time about a year ago, after trying many different lengths to find something that “worked”. I’ve been big and smaller at different points. I’ve been lonely, and I’ve been loved. I haven’t dated. It took me until college to realize the romance I had been chasing from men was an empty plea for validation, for them to find me worth pursuing. Silly taunts from sixth grade boys and I lost myself for nearly a decade trying to be someone I wasn’t.

I’d like to say I’m better, that I love myself the way I am. I still struggle to figure out what is real and what is something I think others would want me to be like sometimes. I’m not better, not yet. But rediscovering a real moment alone in my childhood bedroom has given me an uninfluenced glimpse at what I remember as an ugly child, and she’s not ugly. She’s a socially awkward little girl. She is someone I was, and her impact is still very much there. If I can’t work on being kinder to myself for who I am right now, I think I should at least try for her.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

STARTUPS AND EVERYTHING

In the best case. If you know you have a meeting in an hour, you don't even start working on a program, it's more efficient to work in. The first hint I had that teachers weren't omniscient came in sixth grade, after my father contradicted something I'd learned in school. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. Perl also retains this distinction, but deals with it in typical Perl fashion by letting you omit returns. Every engraver since Durer has had to live in his shadow. Few realize that this also describes a flaw in the way of the future.

Fortran I because you could not nest statements. The surprising thing is how many, and how likely they are to their standard m. What this means for us, as people interested in the question, how do you design a good programming language? The next generation of business computer. I know that naming companies is a distinct skill orthogonal to the ones used in convincing investors, just as we do a birthmark. It didn't seem to harm us. I hardly ever go back and read stuff I write down in notebooks. And since one person can only manage so many deals, each deal has to be treated as a threat to a company's survival. I'm not saying that you want to know what they're doing, their lawyers can't. The most famous example is Google, which initially made money by licensing search to sites like Yahoo.

The typical stove has four burners arranged in a square like the burners. Though novice investors seem unthreatening they can be. The more people who have to like a new idea, the more willing they seem to be facing off in a kind of limit that mainstream languages are approaching asymptotically—does that mean you should actually use it to write software? VCs that founders hate. I used to think I wanted to know everything. When Lisp first appeared, these ideas were far removed from ordinary programming practice, which was discovered in 1960 and is still the fastest general-purpose sort. The worst case scenario is the long no, the no that comes after months of meetings. The famous scientists I remember were Einstein, Marie Curie, and George Washington Carver with Einstein misled us not only about science, but it's not part of any specific science; it's literally meta-physics in our sense of meta.

The most dangerous thing about investors is their indecisiveness. If you look at these languages in order, Java, and Visual Basic—it is not clear whether you can actually solve this problem in other languages, of course. The biggest startup ideas are. There is no core of knowledge one must master. The latest intellectual property laws impose unprecedented restrictions on the sort of people will tell you that you should keep working on your startup. Whatever you make will have to stop and pant for a while to grasp this, but reacted simply by not studying philosophy, rather than carry a single unnecessary ounce. I don't mean that languages have to be done? A of the Metaphysics implies that philosophy should be useful too.

It will seem preposterous to future generations that we wait till patients have physical symptoms to be diagnosed with cancer. Telling a child they have a particular ethnic or religious identity is one of those ideas that's like an irresistible force meeting an immovable object. Macros in the Lisp sense are still, as far as I can tell it isn't. But in Lisp the functions and macros I wrote were just like those that made up the language itself. Cultivate them. Doctors discovered that several of his arteries were over 90% blocked to learn that the world is quiet and warm and safe. Complaining that VCs were jerks. In the movie Wall Street, Gordon Gekko ridicules a company overloaded with vice presidents.

Older societies told kids they had bad judgement, but modern parents want their children to be confident. So if one group abandons this territory, there will also be a need for such infrastructure companies. How could I have missed something so obvious for so long. Most parents use words when talking to other adults that they wouldn't want their kids using. The best way to handle a frightened 10 year old bothers me so much is not just that he'd be annoying, but that it's so much harder than they expected. It didn't work out as I'd hoped. For someone on the maker's schedule? Partly because some companies use mechanisms to prevent copying. And since no one is going to visit Greylock, the famous Boston VCs. I read it out loud and fix everything that doesn't sound like conversation. This leads to the phenomenon known in the Valley. Certainly, people who want a deep understanding of what you're doing.

Users don't need benchmarks to run fast. An optimization marketplace would be a shortcut straight to wisdom. But when you do something so clever that you somehow beat the system, that's also called a hack. There must be a better solution. In past times people lied to kids about: they're the questions you answer Ask your parents. To be fixed. The buildings are old though increasingly they are being torn down and replaced with generic McMansions and the trees are tall. His answer was simply no. Naming is a completely separate skill from those you need to, but to study it as an act of rebellion against the organizations that employ them. How could I have missed something so obvious for so long. Our generation wants to get paid up front.

The most interesting question here may be what high res fundraising will do to the world of programming languages, a lot of the worst ones were designed for other people to use. And isn't popularity to some extent its own justification? Not just to solve the problem in Python, writing either def foo n: s n def bar i: s 0 i return s 0 return bar Python users might legitimately ask why they can't just write def foo n: lambda i: n i and my guess is that the spinal cord has the situation under control. In the best case, though. I had several motives, some more honorable than others. I'll do without books. That must also mystify outsiders. Now that I've seen parents managing the subject, I can work in noisy places. Meetings cost them more. If you leave a project for a few months ago we replaced it with an iMac bolted to the wall. I've found that whenever I've been able to write the software that made them want to buy us. Have low expectations.

Thanks to Bob Frankston, Trevor Blackwell, and Travis Deyle for reading a previous draft.

[impablohurtado]

Rest Easy C.C

I found out yesterday that a person I went to middle and high school with took his own life. It made me really sad to think about even though we hadn’t talked in some time. For a half-hour, I read posts of his friends and family sending their condolences. I read the same set of words multiple times, “You don’t have to suffer anymore.” He was only two months older than me, having turned 32 in May.

We hadn’t spoken in many years, but he was still a friend on social media. I’d see his posts and we’d interact the way people do, liking a post here and there, but never anything outside of brief comments. It’s easy to say, I wish I’d been there. It’s self-important to believe we can save people who hurt that way, I know this too well.

In middle school, there were three of us always talking about the thing we loved, three kids who were into film over anything else. I remember sitting with him in the sixth grade at lunch talking about the release slate for the year, about what we were excited for, debating our top 10’s, and talking about what film sites we liked. At the time, we were your typical film nerds, so sure of our tastes and how we knew what the good movies were.

Thinking about it I realized this would'e been 20 years ago, us having entered middle school in 2004 at 12 years old. We were so young.

That went on for three years, always talking about movies, all of us discovering new favorites and talking about them. Seeing films from Tarantino, Scorsese, Kurosawa, Hitchcock, and Kubrick for the first time and being blown away, expanding our tastes and debating over what was good and bad.

We both wanted to be filmmakers when we grew older. I always respected him because he did it. When high school came and we stopped talking, he would do small films with friends. He went the theatre route and did plays. He dedicated so much of his time to doing the thing he loved unabashedly. He didn’t care how he dressed or if it seemed silly. He was all in from the jump. At the time, he would put out microbudget movies. I’d watch them and appreciate the fact he went on to do what he wanted. Even after graduating he’d work with local film companies and make movies he’d release independently. The size never dissuaded him. He acted, directed, worked with a crew to put together a vision; he did it because he loved film. He even managed to get films on smaller festival circuits, and I always thought that was really cool. I used to think that maybe, had we remained friends, I would’ve worked with him. I was the only one of the three of us from middle school who didn’t go on to work in film on one level or another.

I knew he struggled with his mental health. We’d shared that in common over the years. He’d like the stories I’d write, and I’d try to comment words of encouragement when I saw his posts sharing how he was doing in life. I’d watch the movies he’d put out, I wish I had messaged him to talk about them with him.

I think about how I’ve struggled with the ideation for years and made it this far, to the point I was happy I made it to 30, a milestone I’d always written off. I have my moments where it circles in my head. It’s uncontrollable for me, but I like being here. Last year, I had one of my lower points where I called and spoke to my dad about it on a particularly rough night. He was there for me when I couldn’t think of anyone to speak to, even if at the time I was ashamed to speak to him in that condition. Now I wonder about my old friend and wonder if he didn’t have someone to speak to. I think about how he lost a battle I also feel I’m sometimes fighting. A part of me thinks it's unfair to put it that way, to say he lost for all the life he lived.

It scares me thinking about that, even though I don’t plan on going anywhere. There’s too many people I love, things to see, I want to see my nieces and nephews grow, and to share memories with people I like being around. I'm at a good place in my life, positive about the future, even in my low moments, there is good for me I look to... mostly. I wish he felt the same way. I wonder if he sometimes did.

After I read condolence posts, I scrolled through his feed to see what he was doing lately; I saw him living his life in a relationship, enjoying the days the way we all try to. He seemed happy.

I couldn’t do anything; I don’t delude myself in thinking I could. I wish someone could’ve though. I know better than most that it doesn’t work like that. Life is hard sometimes, it’s a fight we don’t all make it through.

Rest easy Cam. I hope you get to meet all those filmmakers who we loved growing up who are no longer here.

[thefaybul]

2024 February Creator Feature

The band that you just heard a sample of is called Drop The Star. “DROPtheSTAR started writing songs in 2020. A dynamic band with long-time roots in the Tacoma/Seattle music scene. Their music is classic rock influenced, with alternative sensibilities, creating a sound that is both timeless and fresh. The band members have honed their craft over thousands of hours to create music that is compelling, original, and unforgettable. Their music is a celebration of the power of Rock & Roll, and a testament to the enduring appeal of this iconic genre.”

Now the lead singer had a little bit to sit down recently and talk with me about their work and he had this to say about the band.

So if you like that little sample at the start and the teaser for the interview with them, which will be out next month. Go and check out their website or get some more great music at Youtube. Links in the comments below.

Next up we have some very great art from PolinasArtWorld on Etsy. Her art is very unique and has a sort of innocence about each piece. The use of vibrant colors makes each piece so colorful and friendly. Check out some of her work and check out her page at:

Her reviews are great as well, with Morgan saying “Brings such peace and joy. Beautifully done.” Along with Ashley saying “I love it, so pretty.” Go check out her fantastic and unique art on etsy.

Next may I present Time Voyage: Discover Colonial America by Krystal Teale. 

Krystal Teale has master's degree in public history and nearly a decade of teaching high school history, Krystal possesses the expertise needed to craft an engaging and informative narrative. Aligning the content selection with the curriculum guidelines for 5th and 8th-grade U.S. History TEKS  ensures that the book caters to the specific needs and understanding of young learners, enhancing their appreciation and comprehension of history. Krystal's dedication to bringing history to life and showcasing its relevance for a brighter future underscores her passion which is exhibited through her story.

Recently I was able to interview her about the book and she had this to say about herself and her book.

Now for a little sample of her book.

Teaching history was not on her radar as a young girl. With her nose always in a book, Ms. Vail wanted

to be a historian. Someone who learned everything she could about how the past shaped our time. Now

she was back in her hometown of Meadowville to be a sixth-grade history teacher. As she arrived at the

school in her car, she felt a mix of anticipation and anxiety.

It was her first year as a teacher, and she wanted everything to be perfect for her students. Carrying

boxes filled with classroom materials, Ms. Vail entered her first classroom. She took everything in as the

excitement built. Ms. Vail arranged the desks in rows and properly organized the textbooks. Then it was

time to put up colorful posters to inspire her students. With each step, her excitement grew as she

imagined her classroom filled with students in just a few days.

As she was preparing to set up her welcome presentation on the smart board in the classroom, she

faced a problem. The screen remained dark, and none of her attempts to turn it on were successful.

Frustration built, threatening to dampen her excitement.

Remembering her principal, Mr. Johnson’s kind words, Ms.Vail took a deep breath and sought help. She

approached Mr.Johnson’s office and knocked on the door. Mr. Johnson looked up from his paperwork

and smiled warmly, sensing Ms. Vail’s concern.

“Hello, Ms. Vail. How can I help you today?” he asked kindly.

Ms. Vail explained her frustration with the smart board with a hint of unease. Mr. Johnson listened and

reassured her, saying, “Don’t worry, I know just the person who can help. Let me introduce you to Mr.

Corden. He’s our tech and maintenance expert here at Meadowville Middle School.”

A sense of relief washed over Ms.Vail as Mr. Johnson gave her directions to Mr. Corden’s workshop. She

sincerely thanked him and set off to find the man who could fix her problem.

As she walked through the busy hallways of Meadowville Middle School, she thought about when she

was a student there. Ms. Vail found Mr. Corden’s workshop at the back of the school. Tools and

equipment were scattered about, showcasing the hands-on nature of his work. She approached the

entrance and knocked on the door, uncertain of what to expect.

The door swung open, revealing a friendly face framed by a pair of glasses, and a warm smile greeted

her.

“Hello, Mr. Corden. I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” Ms. Vail said, feeling slightly anxious. “I’m Ms.

Vail, the new history teacher. Mr. Johnson said that I may find you here.”

“Hi, Ms. Vail! It’s nice to meet you. Wonderful to have a fellow historian on campus!” he greeted her

warmly. “Now, what seems to be the trouble?” Mr. Corden asked curiously.

Ms. Vail sighed. “Well, I was all set to set up my welcome presentation on the smart board, but it just

won’t turn on. I’ve tried everything, and I’m stumped.”

Mr. Corden chuckled. “Ah, those smart boards can be finicky sometimes. I’ll see what I can do. Follow

me.”

As they continued to walk, Ms. Vail couldn’t help but notice all the gadgets and devices scattered

around.

“What’s all this?” she asked as she gestured to the collection.

“Oh, just a minor project I’ve been working on,” Mr. Corden said with a mischievous smile.

Ms. Vail became curious. “What is it?” she asked. “A project? What is it?”

Mr. Corden paused. “Well, I rarely show it to just anyone, but since you’re a fellow history enthusiast, I

think you’ll appreciate it. Behold, my secret project—a Time Machine.”

Ms. Vail’s eyes widened in amazement. “A Time Machine? Seriously?”

If you enjoyed the story, go get the rest of it at the links below and read the rest of it to learn something new about history.

If you enjoyed this video, consider supporting The Faybul and our mission to help creators of all kinds by subscribing to our Patreon at patreon.com/TheFaybul, I would appreciate the support to help grow towards the next goal. And always remember, Be Your Own Fable.

[scarletwelly-boots]

Books Read 2023

I read 33 books this year, which is 3 more than last year. I also read 22 graphic novels/comics that I did not factor into the challenge. Not counting those comics, I completed 66% of the challenge. This is my eighth year doing the Popsugar Reading Challenge. Let’s get into it under the cut.

The Famine Plot, by Tim Pat Coogan (a book you meant to read in 2022). I barely remember this book. This book was vindicating to read but it also pissed me off. It’s an Irish history book about the Great Hunger, basically highlighting the conscious failure on the part of the British to relieve the suffering of the Irish during this time and the lack of effort that essentially caused the crisis to become as devastating as it was. Coogan is a very good writer so the book is easy to get through even if you don’t know much about Irish history, but if you’re not really a big nonfiction reader, it might not be the book for you.

How to Be Ace, by Rebecca Burgess (a book you bought from an independent bookstore). This is a graphic novel memoir of the author growing up and discovering she is asexual. It was really interesting, as an ace person myself who also took a very long time to figure it out, to see how similar my experience was to hers. Definitely recommend if you’re ace, think you might be ace, or want to learn more about what it means to be ace.

The Celebrants, by Steven Rowley (a book about a vacation). This was okay. It was a book club book, and there were some things I liked about it, but for the most part I wasn’t impressed. A group of friends makes a pact in college to hold each other’s funerals while they’re still alive to help them appreciate life and the people who care about them while they still have the time to do so. I’m told Guncle was better. I haven’t read that book yet.

The Reckless Kind, by Carly Heath (a book by a first-time author). Really good. Queer and ace and queerplatonic. Three young adults who are sort of outcasted for more than just their sexuality (but that becomes part of it) become a sort of found family in nineteenth (?) century Scandinavia (the country is specific in the book but I don’t remember which it is). Definitely recommend.

Dear Mothman, by Robin Gow (a book with mythical creatures). This was so good! It’s a middle grade book told in verse and partially epistolary. A trans boy (I think he’s in sixth grade) takes to writing letters to Mothman to cope with the death of his friend, who was also trans. It was so good, but honestly I ended the book pissed off that (I’m pretty sure) Mothman isn’t real (irl, I will neither confirm nor deny whether Mothman is real in the book), so I’ll never get to meet him. Highly recommend.

Playing the Palace, by Paul Rudnik (a book about a forbidden romance) Terrible, stupid. Another Red White and Royal Blue wannabe and doesn’t even come close to the original. Just read the original, it’s so much better. He doesn’t even use the Oxford comma in this and it honestly makes me so mad. Do not recommend.

This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (a book with a color in the title). Oh my god. I love this book so fucking much, guys. This was amazing, and I did not expect it to be as good as it was. I had been meaning to read it for awhile, but after the end of the Loki show, I needed something queer and vaguely related (as in time travel; Loki is obviously not involved in this book). First, I botched this entry. As you can tell, there is not a color in the title, but the characters’ names are Blue and Red, and the cover (of my copy at least) had a bluebird and redbird on it, so I counted it. This book is so beautifully well written, I was not expecting it to be so lovely. It is the kind of flowing, descriptive writing I strive to do myself. I think I devoured this book in less than a week. It isn’t a very long book, but I’m an incredibly slow reader, so regardless of its length this is still quite the feat for me as an adult with responsibilities and more distractions than I had in school. It is partially epistolary and, as I previously mentioned, queer. It is also (by my interpretation) a fantastic demonstration of the difference between being able to shape-shift and identifying as genderfluid. Highly recommend.

The Daughters of Madurai, by Rajasree Variyar (a book published in spring 2023). Another book club book, but my pick this time. Really good. Dual timelines, following a mother and daughter as they deal with their very different experiences as women in different times and places, and how these experiences impact how they relate to and understand (or misunderstand) one another. Recommend.

Rose Daughter, by Robin McKinley (a modern retelling of a classic). This is a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, and is McKinley’s second Beauty and the Beast retelling. In junior high, I loved Beauty and the Beast and devoured every retelling I could get my hands on. I read McKinley’s Beauty, which was published in the 70s, during junior high, though I don’t remember much of it. This one was very good but very archetypal. This one came out about 20 years after (which I was surprised to note upon double checking just now; I thought the first was in the 90s and this was like 2013). I meant to reread Beauty to compare, since this book also temporarily reawakened my Beauty and the Beast obsession, but I ended up sating that by just watching the animated and live action Disney films, and a very weird semi-stage performance on Disney+ that had been created for the 30th (?) anniversary of the animated film. Recommend (the book, not necessarily the production).

Gender Queer, by Maia Kobabe (a book that’s been banned or challenged by any state in 2022). This was so good. This is another graphic novel memoir, this time about discovering you’re genderqueer. Even though the author is genderqueer and I’m genderfluid, the experiences were very similar, and I spent so much of the book hollering, “Me too!” It was really fun and quick to read. Definitely recommend.

In Deeper Waters, by FT Lukens (a book that fulfills your favorite prompt from a past challenge). I don’t remember much of this. I think I liked it. It took me way too long to realize it was not just a fantasy book with mermaids but legit like a queer retelling of The Little Mermaid. The boys are very cute with each other and it was a fun read, what I can remember of it. Recommend if you like queer retellings of fairy tales that aren’t necessarily beat for beat retellings.

Erasure, by Percival Everett (a book becoming a TV series or movie in 2023). Book club read, didn’t like it. I felt like the themes were interesting and some of it resonated with me as a writer myself, since the protagonist is also a writer. But he was just so pretentious and unlikeable to me. I have to like the main character in order to get anywhere with a book, and I know that’s kind of looked down upon in the literary world, like just because a protagonist is unlikeable doesn’t mean the book is bad, but I’m here to say I personally think that’s bullshit. I need a buy-in to read your book, and if I fucking hate the guy I have to follow around the entire time, I’m not gonna like your book. Sorry about it. If you like books that make you feel like you’re too stupid to understand them, or you like pretending like you understood a book like that to get one over on people, go for it. The main character is an asshole, the premise says good things but the person who says them is unlikeable so it’s like that meme and I should have just read that meme whose exact wording I forget and moved on with my life.

This Time Tomorrow, by Emma Straub (a book set in the decade you were born). Another book club read, but this one I actually enjoyed. It’s time travel, which normally I don’t love, and a time loop, which I love even less. But it did a pretty good job of it and kind of rushing through the repetitive parts, which is the main bit I don’t like about this trope. The relationship between the main characters was really great, and I was also laughing uproariously because the main character’s dad is an author, and his first (and for the first run of time, only) novel got adapted into a tv show that is basically Supernatural but time travel. Like eerily similar, like Straub definitely watched at least a couple episodes of the show. Recommend (the Supernatural references are brief and honestly easy to miss).

Self-Made Boys, by Anna-Marie McLemore (a book with a queer lead). Ugh, so so so good oh my god. I think I included this in last year’s even though I wasn’t finished because I needed to talk about it so bad. This is a trans retelling of The Great Gatsby where Nick and Gatsby get together and it’s all I’ve wanted since I read this novel in high school. McLemore does this retelling soooo well.

The Universal Christ, by Richard Rohr (a book with just text on the cover). I had to read this for my class at church. I do not remember it very well. It was kind of about the difference between Jesus the Man and Christ the cosmic entity. Rohr needs an editor is the conclusion we came to. And there were some chapters I wished were longer and some I wished were shorter. If you like Christian books that should be shorter, knock yourself out. Otherwise, maybe avoid.

[Omitted for personal information] (the shortest book on your TBR list). Sorry guys. This book is about murals in my hometown, and I’m not disclosing the title or giving more information about the book.

Imogen, Obviously, by Becky Albertalli (a BookTok Buzzfeed recommendation). This book was so funny. It was like Albertalli followed me around my freshman year of college taking embarrassingly detailed notes and then wrote a novel about it. Imogen is convinced she’s straight as a line (despite years of hints to the contrary) until she meets one girl that completely upsets that assumption. And now you know how I figured out I was bi. Like this story is so scary accurate, down to both my and my ex’s names being included somewhere in the narrative (not as important characters, mostly just mentioned once, but it’s still eerie). I recommend, but I think a really huge reason why I liked this book is because I was cracking up every time Imogen said something I thought as an eighteen year old idiot.

The First Christmas, by Marcus Borg (a book you bought secondhand). Another church class read. This was really interesting. It compared the Christmas story in the gospels and how it ended up in the gospel with the Roman dogma of the time that the Christians were trying to disprove with the mythos of the Christ child. It was a little hard to read as a reformed Catholic, because even though I know the Nativity story isn’t wholly (or at all) accurate, I like pretending that it is and the residual Catholic guilt doesn’t like starting out the discussion with the understanding that the Christmas story is apocryphal. Again, recommend if you like Christian books, but otherwise probably not.

Loveless, by Alice Oseman (a book your friend recommended). This book was really good too. Another book of “I didn’t realize I was [blank], but I fucking should have.” There’s a literal line in it that says “There were signs. I had missed every one,” which I immediately screenshotted and sent to my friend with the caption ME. This time, it’s a college student figuring out she’s ace, which is earlier than I figured it out, but again, shouldn’t be. Same with Imogen, Obviously, I recommend, but it might just be because of how similar to my experience it was that it had me laughing multiple times.

Flight, by Lynn Steger Strong (a book about a family). Another book club book, with a million characters that almost all have at least one chapter from their perspective. It was a little hard to keep the characters straight, but because I have a large family, I think it was a little easier for me because I’m predisposed by experience to keep a bunch of people straight. While they all had somewhat distinct personalities, the way the women related to the men was all kind of the same dismissive, annoyed tendency about everything. I was left wondering for different reasons why the couples were even together. The story was interesting, though. Somewhat recommend?

Good Night, Irene, by Luis Alberto Urrea (a historical fiction book). This book was really good. It’s another book club book. It’s a historical fiction book about women in World War II who made donuts and coffee for the troops as a way to raise morale (it was a real organization apparently, a non-medical branch of the Red Cross). Much of the real-life records have been lost, so a lot of the research the author had to do for the book was through oral histories with women who actually volunteered, who knew his mother when she was part of the group or knew women who knew his mother. The main character is loosely based on his mother, but my favorite character was the other woman that Irene works with, because it’s implied that she is probably queer in some capacity (though she doesn’t really make that clear in the book and her only relationships are with men, but that means nothing). I thought it was really good, but it really doesn’t gloss over the grittier parts of war (which is a good thing, just hard to read at times). Recommend.

Loki: Agent of Asgard, by Al Ewing (a book you think your best friend would like). This is a reread, but I’m pretty sure I haven’t listed it on any Books Read Posts (I didn’t go back to check though). This is the second comic I ever read, and the first comic run I read straight through. It’s so good. It’s what made me really fall in love with Loki as a character and made me like comics. Al Ewing is far and away my favorite comic book writer because of this story, too. I love how he characterizes Loki. This is also the comic where we meet Verity Willis, perfect woman and love of my life and ace icon. This comic is my Loki fan bible. I love it and I don’t care if I’ve already put this on a top ten list, it’s going on the Top 10 this year. It’s been several years since I’ve reread it straight through.

The Prince and the Dressmaker, by Jen Wang (a book you should have read in high school). I reread this every year, so if you want more information about it, look at the posts from 2022, 2021, and 2020. I love this book so much. It’s a graphic novel about a genderfluid prince whose masc name is (sort of) my masc name. The category isn’t quite botched, as I do think if I’d read it in high school I might have been able to figure out I was genderfluid (but as mentioned above, I was/am an idiot, so maybe not). However, this book had not been published when I was in high school. Still highly recommend.

Norse Mythology, by Neil Gaiman (a book you wish you could read for the first time again). Another reread every year. I’m obsessed with this book. Not sure how many book posts I’ve included this one on, but it’s several. Gaiman is my favorite author, and this book is in part why. I love his retelling of the myths and his characterizations of Thor and Loki (and Freyja as well). The audiobook is the best way to read this book, I think, because it’s read by Gaiman. Still highly recommend.

Family Lore, by Elizabeth Acevedo (a book by an author with the same name as you). Another book club read. I liked this one. It’s magical realism (sort of), following a family where all the women have an ability. Each chapter changes perspective, and there are quite a few characters like Flight, but I liked this book better than that one. Recommend.

Disney’s Treasury of Children’s Classics, by C. Coombs (a book based on a popular movie). This is a very large book with a bunch of Disney films adapted for abridged text (they take out a lot of the film and leave only the main part of the story, so that they can tell the story in 3-4 pages with a lot of the page dedicated to the artwork of the films). The edition I have belonged to my mom, so while it’s been updated a couple times with more recent films over the decades, the edition I have is from 1978. I’ve never read it straight through, so mostly that was the goal with this entry. It’s fine, but it’s faster and more interesting to just watch the movies. I guess the only interesting thing is that since this edition was published in ‘78, one of the stories comes from Song of the South, which Disney will not let you view anymore. It’s a story from the movie rather than the live-action portion, which I think is where most of the racism problems come from (but I’ve never seen the movie, so I don’t know for sure), so the story itself seemed more like an adaptation of a folktale and less racist than those parts of the movie, but I don’t know if I’d necessarily advocate buying this book if you can find one nowadays, if you’re trying to avoid supporting that movie? I don’t know, the debate is complicated, and I’m neither equipped nor do I have the time to get into the nuances of it here. I’m not even sure if you can find this edition anywhere now.

Peter Darling, by Austin Chant (a book that was self-published). Another reread. I love this book. Again, you can find more information about this book in previous posts. This is simultaneously a sequel and retelling of Peter Pan. Peter is trans and gay, and some parts of the book follow Peter as a child to explain how he found himself in Neverland to begin with and why he returned as an adult, but most of the book takes place when he’s a young man, so the ENEMIES TO LOVERS ROMANTIC STORYLINE is a lot less problematic than it sounds when I explain this book incorrectly to people. You know which enemy, you do. Stop grimacing, you were here for the Onceler shit and you at least thought about it. I know you, veteran Tumblerite. Don’t @ me. This is hot, and we’ve both shipped worse things in our time (and probably ship worse things right now). Okay, I’m done being unnecessarily over-defensive about this pairing. Highly recommend.

Point Pleasant, by Jen Archer Wood (a book that started out as fan fiction). All right, veteran Tumblerite, strap in for this. This is a 2012 self-published (I think) Mothman-featured destiel AU. Yes, I read a published destiel fanfic in the Year of our Lord 2023. And I mostly loved it. Guys, it’s Mothman! Destiel! Dean knows he’s gay! Two Cas inserts! Cop Cas! Actually, no, that last one was the only thing I hated. ACAB, including, apparently, Please-Don’t-Sue-Me Cas. His “overprotectiveness” of Dean expresses itself in some really gross ways, to the point that there was a good several chapters where I didn’t want them to end up together. Overall it was pretty good, though. I read this right after Dear Mothman, and it was so fun for how different Mothman is portrayed in both books, like he’s kind of scary in this book. Recommend, if you ship destiel. Just be aware there’s some moments where Cas acts kinda horribly.

The Friend, by Sigrid Nunez (a book with a pet character). Another book club book. I read this in January, so I don’t fully remember this book. I think it was okay, but I was projecting a lot on these characters so it was kind of hard to get through. The main character ends up taking in her best friend’s massive dog when he dies suddenly (it happens I think before the book starts so not a spoiler). It was fine.

Dark Rise, by CS Pacat (the longest book on your TBR list). This was a reread, because I read it when it came out two years ago and then the sequel came out in November and I couldn’t remember much of what happened. This is another of my favorite authors, and I love this book, though I’m really looking forward to the sequel because I’m hoping the boys are going to get closer to getting together this time. She does a lot of enemies to lovers, and this is a trilogy so my guess is they won’t get together-together until the last book, but they’re starting the sequel as a little less of enemies at least, so that’s a positive. This is a dark fantasy that takes place in the Victorian era. If you want more of a description, see the books post for 2021.

Last Summer on State Street, by Toya Wolfe (a book with alliteration in the title). Another book club book. I liked it, but I wasn’t as impressed with this as I was hoping I would be. It was interesting but I was expecting more. The majority of the book is about a middle school girl growing up in the projects in Chicago in the last few months that her building is open, as the entire neighborhood was torn down by the end of the nineties I believe. It’s a novel but I think the author also grew up in this area so she drew somewhat on her personal experience. Sort of recommend? It was okay.

The Hate Project, by Kris Ripper (a romance with a fat lead). I barely remember this one too, but it was okay what I remember. This is a companion to The Love Study, which I read a few years ago. It was another enemies to lovers, which I liked. I did not remember any of the other characters from the other book, so it was like I was reading them for the first time. I’m sorry, I don’t remember enough to give you a summary, but I liked it. Recommend.

Dark Heir, by CS Pacat (A book that comes out in the second half of 2023). I’m still reading this one, but I’ll be done by the end of the year (possibly by the time this goes up. I’m queuing it a few days before posting). This is the sequel to Dark Rise, and I’m loving it. The enemies-to-lovers are interacting more than they did in the first one, and the stakes feel higher because of what was revealed at the very end of the first book. Definitely recommend.

Comics (Not counted in challenge)

Animal Crossing, by Kokonasu Rumba

Marvel Voices: Pride (2022), by Charlie Jane Anders, Andrew Wheeler, Christopher Cantwell, Danny Lore

The Defenders, by Al Ewing

4-7. Loki: The Liar #1-4, by Dan Watters

8. Fence: Redemption #1, by CS Pacat

9. What If…Dark Loki, by Walt Simonson

10-14. The Immortal Thor #1-5, by Al Ewing

15. Guardians of the Galaxy, by Al Ewing

16. Alligator Loki #1, by Alyssa Wong

17. Scarlet Witch #8, by Steve Orlando

18. Loki: The God Who Fell to Earth, by Daniel Kibblesmith

19. Thor and Loki: Double Trouble, by Mariko Tamaki

20. The Mighty Thor #359 (1984), by Walt Simonson

21. The Mighty Thor #353 (1984), by Walt Simonson

22. The Defenders: Beyond, by Al Ewing

My top ten new reads of 2023 will be coming in another post.

[starry-eyed-sorcerer]

How did the Starry Eyes Trilogy come to be?

Well, to tell you that, I first have to tell you how my co-author and I became best friends.

It’s a funny story, really. Here’s my perspective on it: I was ten years old, just starting out at a new school as a fifth grader. I was an incredibly awkward, introverted kid who had no idea how to make friends. So, during an after school art class, when I heard someone talking to their friends about their “Minecraft book,” I went up to them and said “hey, I love Minecraft! Can I read your book?” They agreed and handed me the shitty little printed out book they had with them, and I read it, all twenty-five pages of it. After that, I attached myself to this Minecraft author for the rest of the art class’ duration. They must’ve though I was annoying though, because after that, we never spoke again. Or rather, not for the rest of that school year.

Fast forward to the middle of sixth grade. My co-author, Meraki, tells it like this, though I have no recollection of this part: In class, we’re talking about video games. Someone sitting at the front says “we should play Undertale!” I, sitting in the back, derisively reply “Undertale is a single player game.” The person at the front falls silent, embarrassed. This person and the Minecraft author from the art class were one in the same, and later they would come to name themself Meraki. Long before that, however, they became my best friend.

It happened in P.E. class, and, ironically, because of Undertale. We were playing a game that required going around shaking each other’s hands. When Mera and I shook hands, one of us (I don’t remember who) began reciting a popular Undertale meme, and the other swiftly and enthusiastically joined in. That exact moment was the start of a friendship that has by now lasted nearly a decade. That year, we would spend time together during lunch, sitting on the stairs outside the front of the school, discussing Undertale and Minecraft and slowly growing closer. Eventually we would abandon our individual friend groups and start spending all our time with each other. We were joined at the hip. We were a pair. When we were alone, teachers would ask us where the other was. We fell platonically in love.

On another fateful day in sixth grade, in another fateful art class, I discovered a Minecraft skin on the internet and drew it as a character who I dubbed Jaka-Shi Renn. This new character quickly made friends with a character of Mera’s: one Mika Craft, the protagonist of that Minecraft book I’d bothered them into letting me read the very first time we met. Soon, we were planning a sequel to said Minecraft book with Mika and Jaka as the protagonists, and then I was asking if I could go back and add references to Jaka into the original book, and then I was editing the first book while we simultaneously wrote the second one, and then I was making so many changes to the first book we agreed we were co-authors and we needed to rewrite the book. Mika Craft and Jaka-Shi Renn went from our own individual characters to being completely shared, along with the host of side characters we’d invented. Eventually, the second book got abandoned so we could focus on the first one, and eventually, Mika Craft became Mika Garver, and eventually, the book stopped being a Minecraft book, and eventually, it was simply The Book.

The Book was—is our passion project; it is the glue that has held our friendship so tightly together all these years. And now, after seven years of working on it, finishing it finally feels achievable. The trilogy is planned; the first draft of the first book is nearly complete. The Starry Eyes trilogy started out as a twenty-five page Minecraft fanfiction written by one ten year old with dyslexia and a questionable grasp of written grammar, and has expanded into a massive project written by two adults with competent writing abilities (although one of them still has dyslexia). That original story is practically invisible within the new one, but its bones are still there. We have it to thank for our friendship. So, thank you, The Farlands. If only our ten year old selves could see what you—and we—have become.