#i was too lazy 4 an actual graphic so heres a simple one with how the sky looked when she was born n her natal chart alignments

[adultswim2021]

Tim And Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! #22: “Chan” | August 4, 2008 - 12:30AM | S03E02

Hot off the heels of what I maintain is the single worst episode of Awesome Show comes “Chan”, which I maintain is one of their best. Solid humor throughout, and the slighter bits are propped up by the stronger things in the show. THIS is Tim & Eric, baby! 

Chan is named after one of the running bits in the episode that kicks off with the cold open, which announces that Channel 5 is celebrating “100 Years of Jackie Chan”. The way they do this is by having sketch characters as well as their cadre of weirdo outsiders deliver stilted and awkward compliments to the camera as if addressing Chan himself. This is capped off with Jan Skyler admitting “and I think you’re cute” while Wayne who acts performatively miffed. I quote that line, which sorta requires performing it just like Jan, on a regular basis. It is sickening. 

A lot of the Chan testimonial lines are strong, but towards the end of the episode they show Richard Dunn who delivers maybe my favorite line of the episode: “If I had another father I would love to have you my father cuz I love the way you’d make me grow up!” The concept of having an old man ask a younger old man to be his father, the garbled delivery, the nonsense sentiment of loving the way someone hypothetically “making” you grow up... hell, the little graphical flourish of having Dunn’s face roll away in a CGI coin for no reason make this moment so goddamn sublime.

There’s a memorable commercial starring the Tiny Hat crew (right? I’m sorta shooting from my hip on this one and don’t feel like looking it up). They play a board game called “It’s Not Jackie Chan”. The idea is that Jackie Chan permeates the average American’s thoughts to such a degree that accidentally answering Jackie Chan in a game where the answer is never Jackie Chan is inevitable, just like death and being dead. The commercial ends with a great gag where one of the players slams the “wrong” buzzer and won’t let go of it, eventually staring down the camera as his cheery advertising smile fades into a frown. This one hits, big time. 

Zit talk is maybe the weak link here, but only because of how simple and small in scale the whole thing is; it’s just Tim and Eric talking about dealing with zits, showing stills that purport to show their actual zits that wound up appearing on camera. This seems pretty improvised, and it’s funny enough. One of the stills is from either shooting the Tom Goes to the Mayor sketch from season two or from one of the deleted segments from said sketch. I was curious, and actually looked at that sketch on streaming, and the particular shot they showed the still of doesn’t seem to be in the finished episode. Eric does indeed have a small spot like in the still, but it’s much less pronounced in the video footage I saw, so either makeup or photoshop was involved in the discrepancy. 

Quilting with Will is pretty good, too. I think this is a better sketch than the Lazy Horse mattress sketch. Will is good at visceral intensity while becoming unhinged. At its weakest, you just feel like Will is simply doing the thing he does. But there are some really inspired moments in this, like the insert shot of him pretending to lay in his coffin. The weak link of the sketch might be the older woman, Lynette, whose attempts to improv thwart the very funny things Forte is saying. In a lot of shots, you can hear little wisps of her dialogue clipped off, meaning they had to cut around her lines with very close edits. She says “TMI” at one point. Bad instincts, Lynette. This sketch has quite a bit in the deleted scenes on the DVD, and they are worth watching. I wish they deleted Zits to make this one longer. 

Steve Mahanahan’s commercial (or perhaps it’s an instructional video) for getting the most out of your child clown rental is really wonderful and unsettlingly creepy. The concept of child clowns, and the way Steve Mahanahan treats them (it’s literally child abuse with a coat of cheery paint slapped on it) was more digestible in the earlier sketches, but this one shows shot-on-degraded VHS footage of actual children dressed as clowns. It’s uncanny and uncomfortably real-seeming. So much so, that re-re Pizzagate believers (unlike me who believes in Pizzagate the CORRECT way) targeted Tim & Eric partially on the basis of this sketch. This targeting actually lead Tim to do an impromptu episode of his Office Hours show just to address this and try to explain the humor of it.

The proper Tim & Eric wraparound features Eric as the wealthy husband of a beautiful blonde sexpot played by Abbey Brooks, whom we saw in the Pizza Boy sketch from season one. Tim is a sleazy rat-tailed homewrecker who gleefully “bangs” her while Eric is away on driving business. Eric catches on and eventually disposes of his wife, puts on a blonde wig, and surprises Tim and kills him with a gun. These scenes are all punctuated by a soulful singer named Sire singing about “Sexual Romance”.

On paper, it’s fairly meager, and I can’t help but suspect Tim of just wanting to write a love scene with Abbey, even though his on-camera interactions with her are pretty tepid and above all else absurd and played for laughs. Censorship notes lead them to doing all kinds of things that only a little bit look like sex-having, which ultimately lead to a funny performance. The performances really do elevate this one, and I like when the Tim & Eric wraparounds are more like this and less “hosty”. I also think the end of the episode is one of Eric’s best moments, and it plays to his strengths with his naturalistic deadpan delivery. His face while shooting Tim is priceless, the final line is great because he's saying it. I also love the Silk-Stalkings-sounding end credits music. 

During the Valentines’ Day Watchalong, Tim and Eric said of the sketch that they were trying to exploit the LA lifestyle for comedy, by renting tacky mansions that are mostly used for freaking pornos. Tim also mentioned that Sire (who is actually a pretty talented singer), went on tour with Tim & Eric, and that Tim had recently sold Sire some antiques, so they still keep in touch to some degree. Speaking of commerce, Eric’s dad apparently tried to buy the car used in the sketch.

I remember this season being a step down generally speaking, but this one’s as good as any of the good episodes from previous seasons. There’s one more all-timer coming up this season, but I’m rusty on the rest. Am I excited, or what.

MAIL BAG

You don't even like the title of the episode, "Blaster of Both Worms", I think it's kinda cute.

"and I think he's cute" lol. To be honest, I didn't even really consider the title and my feelings for it, and I don't know if I even really get it. The second worm = his peenie? Answer me at once. But, I guess I like it. It sounds cool!

[trinh24]

ALT English Boards for Junior High School

Here’s a guide on how I conceptualize and create my English boards for the junior high school I work at!

1. Come up with a theme

This can be something simple and seasonal or very specific. I focused on holidays a lot, but I wish I had more time and leeway in my classes to teach the kids more about Lunar New Year, which is a holiday I miss celebrating and that they aren’t familiar with! Other good ideas would be less popular holidays that aren’t talked about in Japan like Hanukkah, Ramadan, or MLK day. If you can’t think of anything, you can incorporate the school events like a prediction for the sports festival weather, messages to teachers, or even messages from teachers to students. Don’t be afraid to do a non-seasonal theme for December if you’ve had enough of Christmas or don’t feel passionate about it.

My students tend to be very lazy when they read the board, so I don’t bother teaching grammar or anything about English on the board (unless that was part of the theme). They only look at it from far away for a short time, so I need to make things large and focused on one activity. Teaching a culture is also more interesting than grammar or spelling. English in the classroom is already boring enough for them.

2. Plan the assets

On my boards I put:

The name of the month

A paragraph or so of English explaining the theme, split into individual sentences

An activity that involves the students reading and touching the board in some way. Things that work well for the JHS level are polls where they vote for 2+ options, sticky note prompts to write or draw something, or freebies where they can grab notes or cards you made for them. My co-ALT also had Halloween masquerade masks that they left by their board for the kids to try on, and that seemed like a great idea too if you have a big budget to splurge at the 100 yen store every month. Polls are by far the best thing I’ve tried so far on my boards!

Themed pictures and stock images to decorate

Some other JETs or ALTs I noticed put whole calendar sheets on their boards and have a word/song/etc of the month corner, but those take up too much space for me. (If you had a giant amount of space then go crazy.) If there’s too much clutter or I haven’t outlined the activities to be punchy and bold enough, my students won’t be interested.

3. Create the assets in Canva.com + Hand-draw assets

I use Canva to create my typed and printed materials for my boards. If you like another site then use that. For my style, it’s good to mix both hand-written/drawn and typed/printed materials so that the boards look cute and friendly but also legible and clean.  I recommend rotating your document to landscape to fit more printed text on one sheet. If you want to use things for multiple boards or again the next year, you can laminate stuff too.

The assets I choose to be printed are: - English sentences (because I have bad handwriting). Please choose a font that has handwritten lowercase “a”s and “g”s. Comic sans MS is actually perfect for this. (If you want to print Japanese text, type in Japanese into the search bar to find cute rounded fonts that are compatible with Japanese characters) - Pictures and images (Canva has a good selection of graphics and stock photos.)

The handmade assets are: - the letters for the month (usually too wide or big to comfortably print on A4 sizes without wasting a ton of paper) made on construction paper - the Japanese text (written under my printed English). I choose to write the Japanese because I know how to and it occasionally impresses other teachers. It also forces my students to walk up close to the board if they want to rely on the Japanese.

4. Assemble the board!

For my boards, I put the month at the top, the English text to one side, and the activity to the other. I separate the English text into smaller sentences and caption with Japanese. This helps when maybe your 3rd years know the grammar but 1st years don’t.

Having distinct sections helps the board flow better. Drawing a line with a marker connecting all of the sentences in the order they should be read in helps. Also, visually distinguishing important sentences or words with underlines, borders, and colors can also help.

For activities, use a clear action verb so the students know what the activity is. I recommend saying: “Let’s vote!”, “Let’s write!”, “Let’s make Valentine’s Day cards!”, etc.

5. Show it off!

When you’re done, you can hang it up and be the first to participate in the activity! Asking the other JTEs, faculty and staff, or your favorite students to participate next can help avoid an empty, sad void. Walking out during lunch break and after school to stand by the board to explain it also works to lure the students over.

At the end of the day, this is my personal style of English boards. I’ve thought about making more unique, stylistic ones for every month like my predecessor, but this simple formula works for me and the current students. Be sure to adapt boards to suit the English level of students and try only translating a few words if they can read well.

I’m really proud of my October and March boards; they got a ton of participation, and I feel like they were fun. :) Some other months were kind of boring or just straight up ugly, so you can guess what those are. If I could go back and fix them, I’d make them nicer since the I think the board’s visual aesthetic is really important. There’s plenty of time for desk-warming as an ALT so use that time to plan for the months in advance!

Here are some of my boards!

(Graduation theme! All the students ended up writing notes to their friends. Not a single teacher thanked, even though I tried to convince them they should write to teachers. The “learning new things with my friends” option also has too many votes since the boys stuck extra on that one. I stopped them from trying to make a sticker smiley face.)

(Halloween theme! The students drew the ghosts themselves! The English text lifts up with the flap to reveal Japanese translations underneath. My students don’t like touching the board unless they really need to, so I don’t think they used them. Maybe the flaps would work better at eye level for small elementary-school students.)

(Thanksgiving theme! I should have made this interactive or made the students write something.)

(Valentine’s theme! I wish I had better cards, I didn’t like the gift tag templates on Canva and should’ve made my own. A section to show off cards students wrote would’ve been good too.)

[bunsblr]

Tu... torial? Pt. 5.

Final part of my tutorial! This is a little all over the place, because that’s how I am in this stage of editing. Also I didn’t proofread this...

Open this in dashboard for best view of the screenshots.

Disclaimer: I have no formal training for any kind of graphics stuff, I work in an office as a receptionist - I serve coffee for a living. I am absolutely self taught and while I consider myself pretty comfortable with photoshop, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t about a gazillion of other things that can be done that I have no idea about. There are people far superior than me in the Sims community. This is just how I do it, with techniques I have picked up through the years. Some things I go over in these will be pretty basic, some things a little more unorthodox. Disclaimer 2: My edits take time. This is what I do to relax, one edit takes several hours for me. Sometimes days :))) Disclaimer 3: My photoshop is in Swedish, which is my first language. I tried my best to find the English translations for every step that I do.

Tools used: The Sims 4, Adobe Photoshop 2020, One by Wacom Pen Tablet (very basic and unfancy).

It´s hair time baby! I very much enjoy drawing hair on sims. I make a new empty layer on top of my base Sim layer.

This is where having a drawing tablet makes a huge difference. We need the brush to be sensitive to pressure to get the effect of hair strands. I chose a hard brush, small small size (how small depends on the picture size of course, but I usually land somewhere 6-9 px)

I pick up a color from the hair, I usually starts with a medium light color.

I start by drawing strands around any tips of the hair so they don't look quite so solid. I do this part with both short and long hairs. Hot lazy tip: straight unlayered hairs is the absolute easiest. This is a layered hair so I start with the bottom and work my way up. I pick up different colors from the hair as I go along, to add dept.

Continuing up in the hair and add strands to the pointy bits.

When I feel like the pointy bits have been softened I select one of my hair brushes. I use these ones by Para Vine.

I start painting "around" the hair with one of the lighter colors picked up from the hair, changing the direction of the brush every once in a while for a more natural result.

After this the hair is looking a little fuzzy, so I'm going to go back with my small harder brush to fill these parts out.

I don't add a lot of them, just small bits here and there for filling.

This is a little overkill but... now we have some of that "squary" thing going on in the hair as well that are still showing through our painted layer. Now we could paint over these, but painting can actually be overdone and I wan't to keep the hair recognizeable because the creator put a lot of work into it! So I go into liquify and smooth over any wonky lines still showing, just slightly.

A comparison of before and after hair. Still recognizeable, but softer.

This is our result so far. We've come a long way, but we're not done.

At this point (or actually sometimes sooner) I add an adjustment Curves layer, this will not end up in the finished image, this is just to give me an idea of what the image might look like with more contrast (which we will add later). I keep this at the very top of the layer panel and turn this on and off as I go. Very important to have it turned off if we are going to eyedrop a color and use that to paint, since it would pick up the wrong hue if we have it turned on.

Now I still want the front of my sim to be a little darker to fit my lighting, but I don't want to go over with any more shadow. So I duplicate my Sim layer, and go to Layer -> Adjustments -> Curves. This will only change the active layer, as opposed to creating an adjustment layer down in the Layer panel that will change all layers below it. I drag the curve down a bit to make my new Sim layer darker.

I add a layer mask to my new Sim layer, and bucket fill it with black color so the new layer gets hidden.

I chose an absolutely HUGE soft brush, with medium opacity, and starts painting white on the areas where I want the new darker layer to be showing. And blend by going back with black where the line is to harsh.

Time to add some highlights. I create a new empty layer between my two Sim layers, and add a clipping mask by holding Alt and hovering on the line between the new layer and my bottom sim layer, until the little square with the arrow symbol comes up and then click. This will make whatever I do on my new highlight layer, only show up on the areas where the layer underneath is filled.

 Time to paint. I disable the curve adjustment layer for this. I choose a bright color, in this case a light pink because I didn't want a contrasting color for this picture. I go with a big soft brush around the edges where I want my highlight to hit. In this case, the arm, the hand, the arch of the back and the calf. I didn't add anything to the face in this picture because I didn't like the way it looked, but usually a little highlight to one of the cheeks is just *chef's kiss*

And somewhere around here I got really stuck and really struggled to follow with this tutorial. I felt the picture was lacking something and I tried several different things. I added light rays, tried creating different light sources, there was a moon at some point. But I ended up with just a simple additional gradient shadow down in the right corner (on a new layer down in the Background layer group). Life changing…

And then I didn't like the pink highlight on the skin (sigh, this is how I work, but it’s not recommended to be this indecisive) so I removed that and added a more beige-yellowee highlight instead. And forgot to take a picture after the highlight was added....

And now I go into nitpicking mode. I add a new empty layer on top of my Sim layer, I add it under the highlight layer so it automatically takes on the clipping mask of the Sim layer, I name it Clean-up Crew and go in to refine anything slightly wonky. Picking up colors with the eyedrop tool and going over flaws with a tiny brush.

When I fixed this little light area on the back of her head I left the Clean-up Crew layer and went to my Hair layer instead, because I still have that separate and it's above all the other layers.

I thought my sim was a little too far down in the picture so I moved her up by selecting my whole Sim layer group and the layer on which I have her ground shadow, chosing the move tool and pushing them up. This will move all the layers in the Sim layer group as well as the ground shadow layer equally.

I'm telling y'all, nitpicking mode could go on forever. Added more strands to the bangs.

Noticed a little pointy part on the calf, so I wen't into Liquify on the base Sim layer and smoothed that out. Since the highlight layer has a Clipping Mask corresponding to the Sim layer, the highlight stayed in place.

I duplicate my Sim layer group once more, and merge the layers within this group. So now the Hair, Highlight and Clean-up Crew is all merged onto the Sim layer. I hide the previous Sim groups.

With my new Sim layer selected, I go to Image -> Adjustments -> Hue/Saturation. I want to make my Sim a little less bright so it will match the background a bit better.

I drag down the Saturation and Brightness slider a bit until I like what I see. After this I save my whole image as a PNG-file because from now on I want to edit the whole picture but still want to keep this psd-file as it is for anxiety purposes. Important: I disable my curves layer before saving this as a picture, I don’t want that brought with me into the next steps because I will be adding new curves there.

I open my new saved PNG-file. I go to Filter -> Convert for Smart filters. This will allow us to go back and change any filters we add to this layer. I go to Filter -> Camera Raw Filter and for some reason this window opens up humongus. I start by dragging down the temperature. How much depends on the picture, usually more if it's nighttime.

I pull up the Whites a bit for a cleaner look.

Now I add a Curve Adjustment Layer. Now you can add Contrast in the Camera Raw Filter as well, but I prefer the curve layer because I like to control the different levels. This way I can make my darkest parts a little brighter, giving just a little washed out flair to it all.

I select my background layer again and go to Filter -> Noise -> Add Noise and choose a level that I think looks good. This just brings the picture together a bit more. Also vintage vibes :)))

I add my frame (because it´s my aestethic and I think it looks cool on tumblr) by resizing my workspace and adding a filled white layer underneath the background layer.

I resize my picture (Image -> Image Size) because we don't need it to be huge.

And they I just fine tune the Filters and Curves until the end of time :’)))

And that is that my friends! That’s the end of the tutorial! I hope you could follow somewheat and that someone found it useful. Thank you for reading and never be afraid of contacting me if you have any questions :) I’m very friendly.

[derekfoxwit]

Doctor Dorpden’s Critical Tips of Prestige

Note: This post was made with satirical intentions in mind. I’m only emphasizing because I’ve had a couple of comments on previous joke posts I’ve did take it seriously. With that said, here we go.

Tip 1: For starters, remember that when looking at the work, if the Mystic Knee twitches fast enough to punch a hole in a wall, this suggests that the work should be near the lowest of the low. No further development of opinion is needed.

Tip 2: For an equal degree of sophistication, give the warm comfort of nostalgia at least 5 times more chances than the new thing that MAY seem actually poggers.

Tip 3: If you have the anecdote of encountering shitty fans, then use them as a scapegoat for the show they flaunt over being shitty. Clearly, they’re always making the show the way it is.

Tip 4: If you haven’t heard much about a newer film or show you’re yet to watch, there’s an 85% chance that film or show is actually not worth your time. The Father (2020) isn’t as widespread as Joker (2019) for a reason.

Tip 5: At this point, just go for the Asian Artist Dick. I’m actually in the mood to see merit in that because I want to look edgy against cute doodles. Stop attacking Uzaki-Chan, you cowards!

Tip 6: Avoid the electronic tunes. They’ll make you smell like a bum, for there’s no structural in a music album that’s nothing but wubs.

Tip 7: If you see a Tweet that looks dumb, use it as a means of generalizing all the fans of a work as sharing that same opinion.

Tip 8: If the cartoon I’m given doesn’t provide me with mature ideas such as slicing an Arbok in half or fake boobs, then the cartoon might as well be on the same level as Teletubbies.

Tip 9: You know the music is (c)rap when it brings up drugs, regardless of lyrical context.

Tip 10:  Raw mood is the indicator of quality cartooning. If you’re quick to assume the worst in the newest HBO Max original cartoon, then you got thyself a stinker. Same thing if you were super bummed out when watching a new thing, regardless of anecdotal context.

Tip 11:  When you’re not given continuous throwbacks, ensure you’re as reductive and over-generalizing about the works shown as possible.

Tip 12:  If your hazy and imperfect as hell recollection of a children’s film, whether it’s Wall-E or Lilo & Stitch, would describe said film as “too sugary” or “key-waving schlock”, then that HAS to be the case. No meat on that bone whatsoever.

Tip 13: Simpler, more graphic style that isn’t as realistic as old-school Disney or Anime? You got yourself a lazy style with zero passion put into it.

UPA? Who’s THAT?!

Tip 14: Don’t trust anyone saying that western children’s cartoons had any form of artistic development after 2008 (with, like, TWO exceptions). If it did, why didn’t we go from stealing organs in a 2001 cartoon to showing opened stomachs in a 2021 cartoon?

Tip 15: Big booba is always important to the strong female character’s quality.

Tip 16:  Only MY ships count, for they provide me with a feeling of intelligence.

Tip 17: “PG-13″ and “R” rating just simply mean you’re not caring for expressing themes in a sophisticated manner. It’s just THAT simple until I dictate otherwise.

Tip 18:  In this age of smelly radicals, “Death of the Author” is more important than ever. Without it, this’ll imply that a classic like The Matrix was secretly toxic, due to what the Wachowskis have to say about it being an “allegory of trans people.”

Tip 19: Turn the fandoms you hate into your torture porn. Ask in Tweets to Retweet one sentence that’d “trigger” them. Go out of your way to paint all of them as blind consoomers. That’ll show them, and it’ll show how much more intelligent you are compared to those clowns.

Tip 20: Whatever the Mystic Knee dictates upon the first viewing of a work is what shall indicate the full structural extent of the film.

Tip 21: The mindset of a 2000s edgelord is one that actually understands the artistry of the medium of animation. Listen to that crazy but ingenious man.

Tip 22: Because sheer ambition makes me feel manly, the high pedestal you bestow upon a cartoon work should be based mostly on the mere mention or mere suggestion of serious topics. This means that pure comedy is smelly.

Tip 23: Is the new work tackling subjects that you’ve loved a childhood work of yours for covering? Just assume it’s super bare-bones in that case compared to the older case, for there’s nothing the older work can do to truly prove itself otherwise. Seriously, Letterboxd. Stop giving any 2010s cartoon anything above a 4/5

Tip 24: If the Mystic Knee is suggesting that the work is crummy, then consider any explanation off the top of your head for why the work in question is crummy.

Tip 25: Sexual and gender identity is inherently political, so don’t focus on them in the story. It’s no wonder why Full Metal Alchemist has caught on more than the She-Ra reboot.

Tip 26: Since I got bothered by a random butt monkey type character in a crummy cartoon, I’m now obligated to assume that having a butt monkey will only harm the writing integrity of the cartoon.

Seriously, Mr. Enter....what?!

Tip 27: We’re at a point where pure comedy for a kids’ cartoon is doing nothing but dumbing down the children. Like seriously...... I doubt Billy and Mandy would ever use farts as a punchline, unlike these newer kids comedies.

Tip 28: The difference between the innuendo in kids’ cartoons I grew up on and the ones Zootopia made is the sense of prestige they give me. Just take notes from the former instead.

Tip 29: Wanna make a work of artistic merit? Just take notes from the stuff I whore out to. It’s just THAT simple until I dictate otherwise.

Tip 30: Always remember this golden rule: If the newer work, or a work you’ve recently experienced the first time, was truly great, why isn’t it providing the exact emotions from your younger, more impressionable years?

Tip 31: If the Mystic Knee aims to break the bones of a character doing certain things (.i.e. having body count of thousands; lashing out to character; etc.), that means the character is bad and deserves no redemption.

Tip 32: If you want me to believe there’s any intrigue or depth in your antagonist, give them redemption, for I am in need of that sorta thing being spelled out. Looking at you, Syndrome. Should’ve taken notes from Tai Lung.

Tip 33: In a case where you’re going “X > Y” (.i.e. manga compared to western comics), ALWAYS CHERRY PICK! Use the recent controversies of the “Y” item while pretending that the “X” item has never had anything of the sort.

Tip 34: BEFORE you bring up those comments that shat on the original Teen Titans cartoon back when it was new, whether for making Starfire “more PC” or whatever.......the DIFFERENCE between them and me is that THEY were just bad faith fools that couldn’t see true majesty out of blind rage. I, however, am truly certain that calling any western TV cartoon from 2014-onward a work that transcends its generation suggests a destruction of the medium.

Tip 35: Based on fandom growth, it shows that any newer show isn’t being watched much by kids, but rather loser adults that act like children. Therefore, there’s more prestige in what I grew with.

Tip 36: The focus on children is bad at this point since the children of today have attention spans that flies would have.

Tip 37: A select few screenshots (or even one) of either a less elaborate attacking animation, less realistic game graphics, or a less on-model image in a cartoon indicates EVERYTHING about the work’s quality.

Tip 38: Consuming or writing media where characters go through constant suffering is little more than gaining pleasure out of it. YOU SICKOS!

Looking at you, Lily Orchard!

Tip 39: Whether it’s a sexual awakening story or just simply a romance, focus on a character being lesbian, trans, bi, etc., then it shouldn’t be in a kids’ work. It’s too spicy for them by default. Kids don’t want romance anyway.

Tip 40: The very idea of a western cartoon with no full-blown antagonist (i.e. Inside Out) is a destruction of animated artistry. Sorry, but it’s just THAT simple until I dictate otherwise.

Tip 41: Unless it’s my fluffy pillow, such as Disney’s Robin Hood, it should be obligated to assume the inserting of anthros is only there to pleasure the furries. Looking at YOU, Zootopia!

Tip 42: With how rough and rash The Beast was, it shows that he was more of an abusive lover. Therefore, I refuse to believe that Beauty and the Beast has any of the meticulous moral writing that most of Disney’s other 90s films has.

Tip 43: When you suggest one work should’ve “taken notes” from another work in order to do better, BE VAGUE! Those who agree will be shown to be geniuses.

Tip 44: Remember how morally grey Invader Zim was? That really goes to show how little the Western Animation scene has been trying since that show. Really should just be taking notes from that series (and of course anime).

Tip 45: Even if I have a radar that clearly indicates such, hiding the item I look for inside an enemy is always bad, for I refuse to believe it would be inside the enemy.

Goddamn it, Arin!

Tip 46: People struggle understanding your gender identity or pronouns? All there is to see in that is a giant cloud of egotism that reads “My problems” zapping another smaller cloud that reads “other people’s problems”. Seriously, kids are starving, so WHAT if you identity confused someone. Grow a spine!

Tip 47: Stop pretending that adaptations should colorize how a story or comic series should be defined. No way in FUCK can a cartoon or film incarnation become the definitive portrayal of my precious superhero idol.

Tip 48: Enough with your precious “limited animation” techniques, YOU WESTERN HACKS! All you’re doing is admitting to sheer laziness and lacking artistic integrity. Now if you excuse me, I’ll be watching more anime, since that gives me a sense of prestige.

Tip 49: If getting five times more detail than the 2D animated visuals have requires someone getting hurt, so be it. No pain, no gain after all.

Tip 50: Yes, I genuinely struggle to believe there’s this majestic level of layered material without having the most immediate yet still vague re-assurance practically yelling in my face. But that’s STILL the work’s fault, not mine.

Tip 51: Every Klasky-Csupo cartoon has more artistic integrity than any of them cartoons with gay lovers such as Kipo or the Netflix She-Ra show.

Tip 52:  If Sergio Pablos’ Klaus is anything to go by, we have no excuse to utilize those smelly as fuck digital animation “styles” found on Stinky Universe, Suck-Ra or Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turds.

Tip 53: Stop projecting your orientation onto works of actual talent. Seriously, how does Elton John’s I’m Still Standing expel ANY rainbow flag energy?

Tip 54: Hip hop and electronica have been the destruction of music, especially the kind that’s actually organic and not farting on the buttons of a beeping or drumming gadget.

Tip 55: The audience for cartoons has become significantly less clear over the years. We should just go back to Saturday mornings of being sold toys or shit kids actually want.

Tip 56: PSAs for kids shouldn’t be about ‘woke’ content. They should be actual problems such as doing drugs; not playing with knifes / outlets / matches; or acceptance.

Tip 57: The instant you realize a detail in a childhood work that’s better understood as an adult, you’re forced to paint that work as the most transcendent thing in the world. It’s just THAT simple until I dictate otherwise.

Tip 58: Before you lash out on ALL rich people, remember this: #Not All Rich People.

Tip 59: There’s nothing to gain out of the (c)rap scene other than becoming a spiteful, gun-wielding thug that sniffs weed for breakfast.

Tip 60: Since the Mystic Knee told me to get anal about prom episodes in several gay cartoons, this shows that writing about one’s younger experiences just makes you look pathetic.

Tip 61: Another smelly thing about Zootopia is how it was painting a police chief as stern and exclusive. #Not All Chiefs

Tip 62: Me catching a glimpse of Grave of the Fireflies as a kid and turning out fine shows that you may as well show kids more adult works without worry. No amount of psychological questions being asked will suggest otherwise.

Tip 63: There’s a reason why the Mystic Knee keeps leaning more toward the 90s and early 2000s than most decades. That knee KNOWS where there’s a sense of true refinement.

Tip 64: The BIG difference between rock and electronica? Steward Copeland actually DRUMS. All that the likes of Burial, Boards of Canada, Depeche Mode and several others did was push drum buttons.

Tip 65: One exception to the golden nostalgia is when the work in question doesn’t stuff your face with fantastical, bombastic stories. At which point, there can only be rose-colored blinds covering Nickelodeon’s Doug. Nothing of merit or personal resonance to be found.

Tip 66: Remember that the sense of nuance in the work comes down to there being everything including the kitchen sink, whether it involves multiple geographic landscapes; giving us hundreds of characters; etc. Only through the extremes will I be able to tell there is nuance.

Tip 67: Once you see a joke that has an involvement with sexual or violent content, just ignore the full picture and just reduce it to having nothing to it but “sex, violence, gimme claps.”

PKRussel has entered the chat

Tip 68: With all the SJWs messing up the art of comedy, lament the times where you could be called a comic genius, NOT a monster, for shouting out the word “STAB,” calling a gay weird, painting Middle Easterns as inherently violent, etc.

Tip 69: Guitar twang will always win out over (c)rap beats. There’s a reason your grandma is more likely to listen to Lynyrd Skynyrd than Kendrick Lamar.

Tip 70: Once the Mystic Knee notices a lack of squealing at the video game with linearity, that shows there’s more artistry in going full-blown open world.

Tip 71: Related to Tips 66 and 68, ensure your comedy gets as much information and mileage out of each individual skit as possible. EMPHASIZE if you need to. Continuously spout out your quirky phrase of “STAB” if needed.

Tip 72: Based on the onslaught of TV shows with many seasons and episodes, animated or otherwise, it shows that there’s more worth going for that than simply having a miniseries or a 26-episode anime.

Tip 73: Building off of the previous tip, you’re better off squeezing and exhausting every little detail and notable characterization rather than keeping anything simple and possibly leaving a stone unturned, especially if there’s supposed to be a story. 

Tip 74: Playing through the fan translation of Mother 3 made me realize how much some newer kids’ works just try too hard to get serious. Why even make the kids potentially think about the death of a family member?

Tip 75: The fear I had over Sid’s toys from the first Toy Story and similar anecdotal emotions are the be-all indicators of what kind of show or film is fitting for the children.

Tip 76:  Seeing this British rapper chick have a song titled “Point and Kill” just further exemplifies the fears I’ve had about rappers being some of the most harmful folks ever.

Tip 77: The problem with attempting to make a more “relatable” She-Ra is that kids aren’t looking for relatability. They want the escapism of buff fighters or something similar. This is why slice-of-life is so smelly.

Tip 78: Based on seeing the rating of “PG-13″ or “R,” I can tell that the dark humor is little more than “hur dur sex and guns.” Given the “TV-Y7 FV” rating of Invader Zim, the writers should’ve taken notes from that instead just so I can sense actual prestige.

Tip 79: The original He-Man has more visual intrigue in its animation than any of those smelly glorified doodles found in the “styles" of the 2010s and early 2020s.

Tip 80: It’s always the fault of the game that my first guess (that I refuse to divert from) on how I have to go through an obstacle won’t work.

Tip 81: Zootopia discussing prejudice ruins the majestic escapism I got from my precious childhood films from 1991-2004. Them kids might as well be watching the news. Now to watch some Hunchback after I finish these tips.

Tip 82: There is no such thing as an unreasonable expectation, and there’s especially no wrong way to address the lack of met expectations! For example, if you expect some early 2010s cartoon on the Disney Channel to be a Kids X-Files, yet you get moments such as some girl getting high on stick dipping candy, you got the right to paint the worst out of that show for not being “Kids’ X-Files.”

Tip 83: Related to my example for Tip 82, if you get the slightest impression of something being childish, you know you got yourself a children’s work that does little than wave keys and has basically nothing substantial for them. In this situation, those malfunctioning robots found in Wall-E are the guilty party.

Tip 84: Without the extensive dialogue that I’m used to getting, how can one say for certain there was any amount of characterization in the title character of Wall-E?

Tip 85: Ever noticed yourself gradually being less likely to expect an upcoming work or view a work you’re just consuming as “the next best thing”? That’s ALWAYS the fault of smelly “artists” (hacks really) and their refusal to give a shit.

Tip 86:  It’s obligatory for your lead to be explicitly heroic just so there is this immediate re-assurance that they’re a good one.

Tip 87: Without the comforting safety net of throwbacks, one cannot be for certain that there has been an actual evolution of a series or the art of animation and video games.

Tip 88: Don’t PSA kids on stuff they give zero fucks about. That means no gender identities or pronouns, race, etc.

Tip 89: Don’t listen to Mamoru Hosoda saying that anime women tend to be “depicted through a lens” of sexual desire. He’s just distracting from the superior prestige found in anime women.

Tip 90:  If you’re desperate to let others know that your talking points are reasonable, just repeat them over and over with little expansion on said talking points.

Tip 91: 7 or more seasons of art is better than 26 episodes of art.  EVERY TIME!

Tip 92: Always remember to continuously talk up the innuendo and mature subject matter of the childhood work as the most prestigious, transcendent thing of all time. With that in mind, there’s a high chance that your favorite childhood work will be better known than Perfect Blue (1997), and there’s likely a reason for that.

Tip 93: An art style that gives many characters relatively more realistic arm muscle details will always shine through more than any sort of art style done for “simplicity” (laziness, really).

Tip 94:  Seeing a few (like, even VERY FEW) people show more enthusiasm for Steven Universe over Invader Zim really shows the lower bar that has been expected out of the western animation scene compared to anime.

Tip 95: Electronic music makes less conventional time signatures cheap as hell. REAL music like rock makes them the exact opposite.

Tip 96: If your Mystic Knee suggests that the 90s cartoon being viewed doesn’t showcase a vague sense of refinement or artistic integrity, then every related assumption of yours is right. EVERY TIME!

Tip 97: Doing everything and the kitchen sink for one series or movie shows a better sense of refinement and prestige than any form of simplicity. THIS includes character design as well.

Tip 98: The advent of that Star Wars: Visions anime really shows just how stinky western cartoons have become.

Tip 99:  For those wondering, no, Europe isn’t being counted in my definition of “western animation”. Doing so is a complete disservice to prestige.

Tip 100: If even less than half of these tips aren’t being considered, you can kiss that prestige badge goodbye. After all, I SAID SO!

[jeonqukie]

SOMEBODY ELSE / 02.

SYNOPSIS / After years of working up the courage to confess his feelings for you, Min Yoongi decides to give up and move on from the unrequited position he has put himself in. However, when you discover his veiled attraction towards you, you dwell on what could have been. You find yourself ready to reciprocate the same sentiment for him, only you’re too late when he reveals he has already found someone else. Consequently, you’re lured into a series of meaningless and warped encounters from the one person you swore to avoid.

FEATURING / Primarily featuring Min Yoongi and Kim Taehyung.

GENRES / Angst, romance, mature, some fluff, unrequited love, & friends to lovers (?).

WARNINGS / This chapter contains alcohol consumption, graphic language, mentions of sexual activity, and other mature themes.

WORD COUNT / 15k words.

TABLE OF CONTENTS / To be redirected and get the latest on the story, click on the table of contents.

NOTES / After god knows how long, it’s finally here. I want to apologize now for how delayed this chapter was. For context, this was supposed to be completed by December 2019 but due to some poor organization and scheduling on my part, I’m so sorry that this is like, 2-3 months delayed. This will be a very short series (either 4-5 parts only), so I will be sure to start outlining part 3 as soon as possible. Again, this series was inspired by the famous sitcom, Friends with a lot less comedy and a little bit more angst. Feedback is very much appreciated as always. Thank you to those who have showed their love for part 1; I really appreciate it. ( ´ ∀ `)ノ～ ♡

© All rights reserved to jeonqukie. All or portions of my work may not be reproduced, distributed, modified, or used in any way whatsoever without my permission.

“Yoongi better not put the blame on me for being late. I will cut someone who brings up the fact that I’m always late.” Cluttered in the back seat of the Uber driver’s car, you pulled out a crisp five dollar bill out of your purse and offered it to the patient man who sat at the driver’s seat. Notoriously known for his antiques of being fashionably late, Jimin first hops out of the back seat of the car and offers his hand to ease your exit out of the vehicle.

“I got ready an hour and a half earlier than usual and I was done just in time.” He offers his arm for you to cling onto and you savor the warmth of his clothed body. He wore a crispy white button shirt with the top buttons undone to expose the expensive jewelry that adorned his neck. The sleeves rolled up to his elbows to expose his milky skin. Skin tight leather pants practically pasted on his long legs and you could already feel the stares of the long line outside of the club at the posse’s arrival. 

“It’s fine. Yoongi isn’t one to throw a fit over something like this.” You scoff clinging so closely to his warmth. In contrast to Jimin’s neutral colored attire, you opted to wear a two-pieced ensemble. The crop top ending at the middle of your torso and your skin tight pencil skirt ending right at the middle of your thigh. The sparkling material still shimmering in the moonlight. 

Just in case the weather wasn’t in your favor, you clutched on a large leather jacket on your arm along with a plain black clutch that contained your phone and a few paper bills necessary for any emergencies throughout the night.

“It’s literally been six months since those two let us know that they’ve been secretly seeing each other. I still don’t understand how you never realized Hobi has been fucking with Michelle for a year.” With a simple shake of your head, at the corner of your eye, you see Seokjin awaiting with his hands tucked inside the depths of his pockets.

“Where the fuck have you two been?” He seethed taking long strides towards where you stood waiting for the arrival of another vehicle.

“Since they’re renovating Michelle’s bathroom, they have deprived me of my own bathroom.” You grimaced at the thought of the couple taking their time in the shower, refusing to hop inside the same shower that the couple resided in for a decent hour. “I had to drive over to Jimin’s place to actually get ready. It turns out traffic is a bitch and - well, here we are.”

“You may have to sanitize your bathroom tomorrow or something.” Jimin murmurs underneath his breath.

Seokjin shivered at your story and he grimaced at the thought of his two closest friends fucking in the shower for nearly an hour. “Fuck, alright, it was good enough for me. Let’s see if it’s good enough for Yoongi.” He scrolls through his contacts, only to tap on Yoongi’s name placing the mobile device on his ear. “Yeah, we’re here - Hoseok and Michelle are running a little la - oh, okay, see you.” Tapping on the red button on his screen, Seokjin motions his head over to the very beginning of the line were two bouncers held clip boards with a large list of names attached.

“Yoongi should be at the front to confirm with the bouncers.” Seokjin muttered while he paved the way towards the very first person in line. You hear a series of curses coming from club-goers while they accuse the three of you for cutting in front of the line. However, at the right time, the large doors reveal the man of the hour himself.

You weren’t aware of how tightly you clutched onto Jimin’s arm as Yoongi reveals himself to the crowd.

It’s been nearly two weeks since you had last seen him. He had been promoting alongside a bunch of the artists he has worked with the entire month and, just recently, he had bleached his hear a nearly platinum blonde.

It was a new look on him - definitely something new.

The bright blonde hair stuck out like a sore thumb to you… in a good way. You didn’t expect to like it.

His mane had been slightly ruffled to one side. He probably did it himself knowing just how lazy he had been when it came to making himself look presentable. The outfit, though, was a stark contrast from what you had imagined. He wore a black turtle neck tucked underneath a pair of skinny black jeans with a leather belt that you had gifted him for Christmas. He complemented the rest of the outfit with a leather jacket and, suddenly, you’re hyper aware of the fact that Jimin is shaking you as gently as possible.

All eyes are on you as you remain glued to the concrete floor.

“Are you just going to stand there and gawk at me or are you going to give me a hug?” Yoongi playfully scoffs at you, but you feel your weak arms let loose of the grip it had on Jimin’s arms and he encourages you to walk ahead of you.

As you both entered the nightclub, you are greeted by a conglomerate of people already raiding the dance floor and the bar that had resided adjacent to it. But your entire world stops spinning when you his arms - so foreign - wrap themselves around your frame before you respond back to his actions by slithering your arms around his neck.

“I missed you.” You admitted out loud to yourself and he chuckled into your hair before he pulls you away.

“I was only gone for a month. I told you that you could’ve came with Tiffany to visit.” The name still made your throat swell up and you chewed on the inside of your cheek, shaking your head.

“I figured I’d be third wheeling since I was the only one willing to come and see you.” Rolling your eyes at his statement, Yoongi’s eyes begins searching for something across the second level of the night club.

“Tiffany should be with my co-produer right now. I don’t know if you remember him - Namjoon?” You nod at once when you see Namjoon trying to have a private conversation with Tiffany as he leans in to talk into her ear. “She’s definitely milking this night more than I am.” You are reminded once again that this was Yoongi’s night. Just recently, three of the songs he had produced had been nominated for a multiple music awards and this was a celebratory night for the record label. On top of that, it was the company’s New Year’s Eve party and Yoongi was given the opportunity to invite as many people as he can.

“I’m proud of you.” You practically yell into his ear as he guides you over to the bar where Seokjin is already talking up the bartender and Jimin is ordering the necessary drinks for the newcomers. “I know I’ve said it a lot through text messages, but I just wanted to… say it out loud this time. I really am proud of you, Yoongi. You’re living the dream you always wanted.”

There was a small glint of melancholy in his eye, but you don’t quite catch it when you turn your attention to the drink that Jimin passes over to you. You decide to offer the drink over to Yoongi and bring it up in the air. “Congratulations, Yoongi. What a way to end the year, huh?” You laugh when you take small sips of the drink before passing the other drink over to him.

“Thank you. I wouldn’t have done it without you.” His sentence is left hanging in the air. It’s ambiguity very clear to the both of you and the tension in the atmosphere is so dense that you are left trying to breathe so deeply. “I - I wouldn’t have done it without any of you.” He refers to Seokjin and Jimin as well before they pass him over a bottle of beer. 

Your relationship with Yoongi got more and more complicated from the very first encounter you both had six months ago. Just a mere six months had passed by before your relationship with him was put at a fine line.

It took a decent month for things to cool down. You both buried yourselves in work, both made the excuses of passing up on any group hang outs and - for some odd reason - you both synchronized in not seeing each other. Until the cycle broke during Tiffany’s birthday where she personally wanted everyone at the group to be there. One month of not seeing his face or hearing his voice, you thought you could survive with the mere thought that he existed in the same universe as you did. But that wasn’t enough. You were slow to warm up to the idea of even making things right between the both of you.

You weren’t so sure when things started feeling somewhat the same again.

But it was when the news dropped that Hoseok and Michelle got together. Hoseok, being Yoongi’s roommate, and Michelle, being your roommate, had been sneaking our behind your backs late at night participating in unspeakable encounters. You remembered it so vividly like it was yesterday. Hoseok mentioned that he had to go out of town for a business meeting and you planned on visiting your mom’s for the weekend. However, your own mother ended up cancelling after she had an emergency at work only for you to come back to see Yoongi waiting at your front door dumbfounded.

He had caught them red handed when Tiffany requested that he would drop off a pair of shoes she had borrowed from Michelle earlier that month.

It was a big mistake to return the shoes that evening.

But it was almost a blessing in disguise for everybody.

The cat was out of the bag; Hoseok and Michelle had been seeing each other and you and Yoongi were left to piece the puzzles together only to end the evening in a total state of chaos and reprieve.

From then on, things were slightly coming undone. The tension between the two of you had lifted in the air and you were back to unconsciously suppressing your feelings for him and, suddenly, the pain you experienced seeing him with Tiffany had been numbed out. Though you weren’t necessarily happy to see him with her, you were more than grateful that you weren’t really suffering at this point forward.

It wasn’t until they decided to move in with each other where the familiarity of torment rose from the depths of your stomach. You remembered them announcing it at a movie night Michelle had organized and, immediately, everyone’s curious eyes had alternated from yours and Yoongi’s. 

You avoided his stare for the longest time, not wanting to risk the chance of physically vomiting.

But you thanked Michelle for helping you push through that evening.

“If it makes you feel any better, it didn’t look like he was too happy moving in with her.” The words echoed in your head repeatedly, but you remembered just how much of a good person Yoongi is. He didn’t gloat on purpose on your face. Tiffany made the announcement to share such good news to entire posse.

It was something to be proud of for Yoongi; he was moving forward from a healthy relationship… and that’s all you could really ask for.

The party came to full swing at the arrival of Hoseok and Michelle. They were quick to greet and apologize for their late arrival to Yoongi, but he refused to listen to their excuse. More so, he was just happy that they were able to attend. At this point, you can feel the heels you wore starting to be more of a nuisance than a fashion statement from all of Jimin’s dancing. But the drunken demeanor kept you distracted from the pain at the soles of your foot.

Not even one drink into the night, Michelle demanded that you save her a dance for the both of you but Jimin had been too busy twirling you around in the middle of the dance floor resulting in you seeing stars as you guffawed into his chest.

At the corner of your eye, you can see that Jimin’s dance skills had earned him a decent size of admirers - nothing special about that but you knew that once he found that one girl he was willing to hook up with, you were going to be left all alone with no one to kiss that evening.

For the most part, you were more than okay with not sharing the tradition with anybody. Normally, a simple peck on the mouth from Michelle was enough for you to participate in the tradition, but she had Hoseok now. It was a ludicrous idea to even feel remotely excluded from a silly tradition as a new year’s kiss, but Seokjin already had his eye on the bartender. Inevitably, you knew Yoongi would have Tiffany to share the kiss with. You’ve grown so used to the idea of Yoongi and Tiffany being so intimate with each other, but the pain had been so numbed down that you were just accustomed to the feeling.

The only two people left to find people to kiss had been you and Jimin and he made a deal that he would be your friendly date for the evening, even going so far to offer a smooch at the strike of midnight.

So when you saw the one girl he had his eyes on, you furrowed your brows at him, chewing on your cheek. “You’re my date, Jiminie.” You slurred and he rolls his eyes.

“Oh, c’mon, YN. She’s really cute. I’ll give you a midnight kiss, but I just want to get her number, please?” He coaxes as he guides you through the dance floor and you turn your head to the girl who had been eyeing him the entire time.

“She is cute.” You sighed, slowly releasing from his hold. Suddenly, he spun you into someone else, crashing into their chest as you grunted at Jimin’s abrupt motion. “You better be back in 10 minutes! I’m going to be real upset if you don’t kiss me at the countdown!”

Clutching onto the arms of a stranger, you slowly pull away from their hold only to realize that this was no stranger.

It had been Yoongi who was caught off guard as he held you in his arms. The song blasted so loud in your ears; the song that he had produced and your cheeks flamed a scarlet tint at the proximity of your bodies.

“Jimin’s kissing you at midnight?” You scoff at his playful sneer and you chew on the inside of your cheek, rolling your eyes at his chuckle. “Oh, c’mon, YN. You seriously want to be one of the simpletons who participate in a new year’s kiss?” Yoongi’s choice of words ensues you to erupt in a series of laughter and you unconsciously feel your body gravitate closer and closer to his as the amplitude of the music increases in your ears.

The night club had been too loud that you had to lean into his ear to respond back to him. “Well, you must be one since you’ll have Tiffany to kiss tonight.” You retort back to him before pulling away. His hands had been placed gently onto the small of your waist. It wasn’t low, but respectfully high so it didn’t seem so awkward having to sway to the rhythm of the song he had produced. “Where is she, anyway? She’s supposed to be the one dancing with you right now!”

“Bathroom.” He simply answers into your ear as your bodies bump into each other in the middle of the dance floor. “She’ll be back soon.”

The friction of your bodies against each other made your throat hot and your cheeks hotter than ever. You nodded once simply before realizing just how long you had been this close with each other. It’s been months since he held you like this in his arms. Instinctively, you feel your arms slithering themselves around his neck, still able to dance nonchalantly.

“Tiffany won’t be upset that I’m dancing with you?” You practically yell into his ear before he shakes his head, just as intoxicated as you were. The heavy scent of beer clinging so closely to his skin and mouth and you swallowed hard when your eyes shoot towards his pillowy petals.

“She’s not the jealous type.” He simply replies and you catch his eyes lower onto your glossed lips. Tilting your head to get a good read of his visage, the DJ hired for the event began screaming to the crowd that there was merely 5 minutes left before the clock strikes midnight.

“I would have pinned her to be the jealous type.”

“You are though.” He counters and you are left to knit your brows together, denying his statement before he rolls his eyes as he unconsciously closes the space between the both of you.

“I am not the jealous type.”

“You literal threw a fit when Jimin wanted to dance with that one other girl.” He justified and you rolled your eyes once more, clearly not accepting defeat. Yoongi swallows hard as you habitually pout your bottom lip clearly not enjoying being accused of letting the green-eyed monster take over you.

“He promised he’d kiss me.” You declared, scrunching your nose in the process.

Losing all sense of logic, Yoongi chuckles darkly, digits digging onto your exposed skin at your waist. “You’re such a brat.”

“Oh, now, I’m a brat?” You whine playfully, exasperated of his accusations. This earned a large gummy smile stretching on his mouth and you were hyperaware of how long it had been since it had been since you two bonded like this. It felt so nostalgic to have him this close, have him be this playful with you. Within that moment, it was blissful - forgetting of who was around you, forgetting about the confession made months ago.

“I missed you, YN.” He sighs blissfully, laughing and leaning forward, bumping foreheads with each other.

“I - I missed you, too.” Both of you had the wides smiles on each others faces. Guffawed laughters shared between your dancing bodies and, at that very moment, you were happy. You are taken back to a time where you two can be effortlessly yourselves with each other. You did not have to analyze your actions and words around him; everything was done purely out of pure desire.

You thought your actions would have no repercussions.

You were taken back to a time where you were two best friends, probably unconsciously in love with each other.

But the realization sets in that this was not some fantasy story. The smiles on your visages disappear very slowly at the realization that you can’t go back to where you had been nearly six months ago. Still having your foreheads pressed against each other, noses bumping with eyes fully pinched shut at the feeling of his hot breath fanning your face.

“I - I have to go find Jimin.” You sigh, itching and craving just to feel the slightest touch of his lip on yours. The DJ announces that there is one measly minute left - one measly minute to go looking for the guy you were supposed to kiss, yet you spent what little seconds you had to be with the guy you could not have.

“YN…” He sighs, opening his eyes. You are met his half-lidded eyes yet you read the desire, desperation, and exhaustion in his irises. “You don’t know how bad I want to kiss you.” Your heart stopped beating at that very moment and when the thirty second countdown begun, your sober consciousness had been screaming at you to pull away from his grip. But, deep inside, you felt your heart swell to a tenfold at his confession.

You had to chant to yourself that he was drunk.

You probably didn’t hear him correctly.

But your mind was no longer playing tricks on you when you feel his mouth move ever so closely, just centimeters away from the skin of your lips and he was a million miles away from you when Jimin saves you and Yoongi a million years of regret. Just in time, Tiffany finally squeezes through the crowd, glad to have found her rightful boyfriend at the perfect moment.

“There you are! I swear I was looking everywhere for you!” Eyes wide, Yoongi controls his breathing as he is faced with the girl he is supposed to be spending the evening with. She smiles unknowingly at him and then at Jimin and yourself. The tension was so thick in the air that you do not have the words to countdown.

“Five, four, three, two — Happy New Year!” Jimin’s gentle hands caresses your cheek and you read the sympathy in his eyes when you see Tiffany tip her toes to place feather-like kisses on Yoongi’s — the lips you desperately sought to feel on yours.

With tears in your eyes, you held them there, but Jimin read you very well. His thumb caresses the corners of your mouth, soothing the familiar pain arising in your chest. “Happy New Year, YN.” He sighs before he leans down to place a very delicate, quick kiss onto your mouth. You savored the comfort of your friend and you pull away only to pull him into a well-deserved hug.

“Happy New Year, Jimin.” He doesn’t let you go when he feels your body go limp in his arms.

“You can just drop me off here.” The Uber driver who sat in front of you came to a slow stop at the curb and you searched through your purse to offer the quiet man a ten dollar bill, offering him a kind smile. “Have a happy new year, sir.”

He thanks you for your gratitude before you carefully exit the vehicle. Your barefoot hitting the cold concrete floor as you clutch onto your heels. You closed the door right behind you as you began the long journey from the entrance of your apartment complex parking lot onto the front door of your unit.

You’ve sobered up a bit, still a bit tipsy from the hard liquor, but you were slowly getting there. The vivid memories of the past hour made your heart swell and shatter all at once as the scene replayed in your head. You knew yourself well enough that if you encountered Yoongi one more time that evening, you would not have been able to stay sane.

Your legs took smaller and slower strides towards your unit and when you begin to fish the keys out of the depths of your clutch, you come to an immediate halt as you see a tall, dark figure hovering around your door. You really needed to have a conversation with the homeowner’s association to add brighter lights at night because suddenly your senses had been heightened at the stranger’s presence.

“E - Excuse me, sir, is there somebody you’re looking for?” Your voice so small yet so familiar to the stranger and he spins around, surprised to see such a familiar face look completely different right before your eyes. “T - Taehyung?”

“You nearly scared the living shit out of me sneaking up on me like that.” The timbre of his voice deep and warm and his hushed tones tickled the back of your neck. He looked so different from the last time you saw him.

His dark long locks slightly curled and messy from, what you can only assume, the holiday festivities. He sported a silk button up t-shirt tucked underneath a pair of dark washed skinny jeans. However, he was wise to wear a large coat around his broad shoulders. However, you raise your brows as he nursed a bottle of champagne on his arm and you tilt your head as you studied the change in appearance.

He was still the same yet he looked like a change man.

“Wh - what are you doing here?”

“Right.” He shook his head, whispering to himself as he offers you a soft grin. “I was in town for work. My flight was supposed to be tomorrow afternoon, but they airline company had to cancel due to some scheduling incident.”

You swallowed hard as you awaited for him to continue his story. Meanwhile, he stood right across from you - this time, he studied the way you presented yourself that evening. Your hair is much longer. He compared the length to the last time you had seen each other. Your skin was paler due to the winter season at its peak. There was less sun and he could only assume that you covered yourself from head to toe. You had lost some weight yet you looked relatively healthy. The bags underneath your eyes seem to sunk deeper onto your skin.

Who knew in a matter of six months so much has changed?

“That - that doesn’t explain why you’re in front of my door step.” You retort shyly, encouraging him to explain himself further.

“I don’t leave for New York in two days.” He swallowed before he held the wine bottle in his hand. “I - I figured I would stop by and say hi.”

His appearance wasn’t the only thing that changed.

The way he spoke to you so shyly as if this was your first time meeting each other. He points towards your door with a look of suggestion. “Can I come in? Who knew the west coast would be so fucking cold?” He practically shivers, surprised to see you able to keep yourself warm. Perhaps due to the alcohol still in your body and you decide to make a move on it as you begin to unlock the apartment only to reveal a semi-presentable living room.

“I apologize for the mess. We were all in a rush to go to this New Year’s Eve party, so we didn’t have a chance to clean ourselves up.” Tossing the keys over to the coffee table, you strip yourself off of your leather jacket to hang it at the coat rack. Thankfully, Hoseok and Michelle left the heating on because you were greeted with warmth and the smell of vanilla and marshmallows in the air when you decide to light a candle to create a homier ambience.

“I see you’re one of those types who decide to wait ’til January to take down their Christmas decorations.” He jeers at you and you chuckle at his comment before you point towards the sofa for him to get comfortable in.

“I am not. Michelle and I put so much effort into actually making this place look good, so why waste our efforts when winter season hasn’t ended?” You counter and he decides to slip the coat right off of his torso and you stare at the slight tug of his collar to expose his translucent skin. “Did you want me to get you a glass for your champagne?”

“You should get yourself one as well because we’re drinking this together.” His forwardness still remained the same and you rolled your eyes before you began searching through the cupboard for decent glasses only to find two pairs of coffee mugs that you and Michelle purchased at Target. When you open the drawer to capture the wine bottle opener, you toss it over to Taehyung who began unwrapping the wine to reveal the cork and he attempts to effortlessly remove the cork with ease.

You amble over to where he sat and you offer him your pink mug which he knits his brows in confusion and you shrug at his reaction only to watch him pour a quarter full of the alcohol into Michelle’s blue mug.

“I probably should have said this when I first saw you, but here’s to a happy new year.” He finishes pouring his own serving before he raises the pink mug for you to clink at and you toast right back to him before you take small sips of the cool champagne, savoring the warmth that coats your throat later. “You said you were at a party.”

You nod at his statement only to place the mug on the coffee table, making yourself comfortable with the space in between the both of you.

“I was.”

“And it’s 1:30 in the morning and you’re home so early?”

“Correct.”

“Why?”

“I just wasn’t feeling it.”

He raises his eyebrows when he takes larger sips of his champagne only for him to lean back and look right at you with curious eyes. “This doesn’t have to do anything with Yoongi, by any chance?”

Trying not to offer him any reaction, you sat there with a neutral expression shaking your head. 

“Nope, not at all.”

“You’re a terrible liar.”

“I am not lying.” Your pitches increases and he shakes his head, deciding to drop the subject.

“Okay, clearly, you don’t want to discuss Yoongi.” He starts softly before he takes a scoot closer to where you sat. “How is Michelle? I’m pretty sure she still doesn’t like me, but I think it’s polite to inquire about someone who is near and dear to you.”

You erupt in a fit of laughter only for him to offer you a boxy grin and your palm wraps around the expanse of the mug on your lap. “She’s doing well. It turns out she’s been sleeping with Hoseok — I don’t know if you remember him —“

“The choreographer, right?”

“Yup, that one.” You correct before you took small sips of the champagne into your lips, already feeling the familiar buzz earlier that evening. “They’ve been keeping their relationship a secret ever since the beginning of this — oh, well, last year now and we only found out halfway through the year.” You shrugged at the revelation only for him to nod along.

“What about the other two? The chef and that guy I took headshots of for a casting he was trying to do for that one photoshoot?”

“The chef is Seokjin. But he is now a proud owner of a restaurant. It took a lot of investors and a lot of fucking money from his savings account, but the place is doing really well. Jimin is the guy you took headshots of; he’s not an actual model, just something we thought we’d do for fun, but he’s really just an art curator.” You read Taehyung’s face and he is utterly taken aback by Jimin’s career choice.

“Who would’ve thought?” Suddenly, you are presented with an opportunity to view Taehyung from a different perspective.

You didn’t know who was sitting right across from you and you see his mouth move but don’t hear the words coming out of them.

“H - huh?” You stammer, coming to a realization that you appreciated his seemingly interest in your life.

“I was asking if you still worked for that internship you were in since junior year.”

“Uh, yeah, they’ve been training me to be an assistant to the division head of advertising. I wasn’t really expecting to be a candidate, but they figured since I did technically work with them the longest, I sort of know the ropes around the company.” Finishing the remaining contents of your mug, you see Taehyung offer you a proud grin, swiping his tongue right across his rosy petals.

“Just one step closer to being a division head.” He encouraged and you feel warmth flutter in your chest, appreciating just how much he was proud of your achievements.

However, he truly meant it.

He has witnessed all of the trials and tribulations you went through to earn a permanent spot in the company you were currently working at. There was stiff competition, but he was there to remind you that you were worthy to achieve the goals as long as you worked hard. The stress of the internship got the best of you and you could only offer him so much of your time. Whenever he’d tried to offer comfort, half of the time, Taehyung succeeded in alleviating any frustrations. 

But there was always one guy who beat you to it the other half of the time.

You were in denial when Taehyung was curious about the nature of your friendship with Yoongi. 

He tread cautiously when it came to him. But as time went on, he could no longer bite his tongue and keep his thoughts to himself.

He had been your boyfriend at that time and he felt that he had some right to give his opinion regarding your friendship with Yoongi. He didn’t demand much — his time was to implicitly convince you that you possessed the same feelings as Yoongi did to you.

When Taehyung felt like he had enough of your denial and Yoongi’s obvious efforts, he surrendered his position and decided to take a step back, clearly not wanting to be a part of a cat and mouse game.

But he was a victim of it.

He wasn’t the same man he was the beginning of the year, though.

He’s more solemn and more accepting. He was more conscious of other’s feelings and perspective of things — he had a better understanding of others and he’s definitely had a better understanding of you.

Downing the rest of the alcoholic beverage inside the pastel-colored mug, Taehyung settles it at the coffee table before he runs his long digits through his textured hair.

“So what’s the real reason why you’re home, YN?”

The silence was overwhelming, but you find comfort in his presence. It wasn’t intimidating despite the way his eyes examined your much smaller frame from head to toe as you took measly sips from your own mug.

Was there even a point in lying?

“Yoongi said he wanted to kiss me.”

“Did you want to kiss him?”

Surprised with your speedy response, you nodded once, realizing the grip around the circumference of the mug.

“But you didn’t, right? You’re not like that.”

You shook your head silently and, now, you’re met with the familiar swell around your throat like somebody had been choking you gently, forcing you to hold onto your last breath.

“I — I would never do that, but… if Jimin didn’t come and save the day, I — I think we would have gotten into a seriously sticky situation.” The memory of Yoongi’s body against yours, the heat of his breath and words fanning against your scarlet face, and the scent of his cologne and cherries off of his skin — Tiffany’s scent. “It can’t happen again.”

“What’d Jimin do?”

“He kissed me instead.”

Raising one brow at you, he pokes the tip of his tongue to swiped across his thick petals.

“Jimin kissed you?”

You nodded once.

“Is this another guy I was supposed to be worried about?” He jokes which earned a song-like chortle erupting from your throat. The sound of your laughter spreads a warmth deep inside this chest. He enjoyed the way your voice filled with so much hope and how your worries were stripped away from you when you giggled.

“He promised he’d kiss me at the countdown.” Your statement earned a chuckle from him and he shakes his head, ridiculing your request. “I didn’t want to be the only who didn’t have anyone to kiss.”

“I didn’t have anyone to kiss at the countdown.” Taehyung simply states and you forced yourself not to stare at his lips but you, obviously, fail at this because he catches you red-handed at the instinctive motion. Your irises immediately shoot to his mouth and you swallow hard.

“You didn’t kiss anybody.”

“Not yet at least.”

You despised the cocky sneer on his face, rolling your eyes as you grabbed a cushion and shoving it in his face.

“I was kidding, I was kidding!” A hearty laughter erupts from the depths of his stomach.

But you did miss his cocky personality. It was a playful side of him and his comments seemed very much nostalgic of when you had first met him. When the fits of laughter settled into a comforting silence, he clears his throat when you see his boxy smile disappear into a more calming position. “Okay, hypothetically speaking, if I said I wasn’t kidding,“ He admits before he swiped his tongue across his mouth to wet his lips. “Would you kiss me right now? Be my first kiss for the year?”

The way the tone of his voice change in a millisecond knocks you out of your seat. You’re aware that you’re holding your breath as you examine his features for the umpteenth time that evening.

Did you want to kiss him?

“That depends.”

“Depends on what?”

Is he single? Was he seeing someone in New York?

“Are you seeing anybody?”

“I haven’t had time to meet anybody, YN.” He scoots his frame closer to where you sat whilst he leans his upper body closer to your smaller face.

Does he expect anything to happen that evening?

“If I do kiss you, are you expecting we go further?”

“Depends on the kiss.” He was so quick to his replies as if he’s thought this moment so many times in his heads.

Has he imagined this moment?

He takes his sweet time leaning in to your face. All throughout this tantalizing moment, he hovers over your lips careful not to touch your skin on yours. The smell of vanilla lingers from your skin and your breath smells of champagne.

“You want to kiss me?”

“If I say yes, would that change your decision?"

You thought about it for a moment before the tip of his nose collides very softly against yours and you can’t help but chuckle at the action, scrunching your nose in the process.

“Hm, I’m not so sure.” Your playful tone gave Taehyung further encouragement to lean in closer, just two lips barely brushing against each other.

Eyes half-lidded with so much fondness for you. He stares lovingly into your eyes before they fall on the two petals threatening to pucker against his own. The comfort that emerged from his chest so familiar to him.

“You didn’t say please.” You teased.

He breathes a chuckle fanning your face in the process.

“YN,” He starts as he pulls away very slowly from your face, missing the warmth of his own breath on your face. “Would you do me the honor of being my first kiss for the year, please?”

A series of laughter fills the room and Taehyung could care less if you said yes or if you had said no because it was more than enough for him to see that he has made your night somewhat better and you appreciated the way he helped you completely forget Yoongi — at least for the past 15 minutes, he’s helped you completely forget Yoongi.

“Yes, Taehyung, I would be delighted to be your first kiss of the year.” The sounds of your laughter soon fade into silence. You sat still where you were positioned and Taehyung froze in a subtle manner as he examined you from your eyes down to your lips.

His digits tickled the skin on your cheek to the back of your neck and an eruption of goosebumps appear on your skin.  You emitted one breath that visibly fans his face before you flutter your eyes closed as you feel his pillowy petals on your own.

There was a hesitance from both your mouths. Your touch on his felt so fragile, afraid that the slightest addition of pressure onto your mouth would have you falling apart. The tickle and warmth of his fingers caressing the skin of your cheek allowed you to relax and lean in forward into the kiss. Taehyung took this as a sign that you were enjoying this so much more than usual. He pokes his tongue momentarily, tasting the bitter flavor of the champagne lingering in your mouth. A sigh erupts from your mouth and the conscious voice in your head tells you to pull away before things go further — before you do anything you regret.

“Taehyung,” You swallow every ounce of desire when you attempt to peel your body off of his. “We can’t do this again. We’re different now.” He nods his head in agreement, swiping his tongue across the expanse of his mouth. “We’re different, but that doesn’t mean my feelings for you has changed.” You were left speechless; mouth open with no words slipping between your lips. “We’ve changed for the better, YN.” Hesitant at first, Taehyung musters all the courage to reach for your fragile digits that laid upon your thigh. First, he fiddled with the pad of your fingers before he laces them around his hands.

“I’m not this college asshole boyfriend who controls over every aspect of your life.” He confesses looking into your eyes. “Just give me one more shot, YN. I can show you that I’m better.”

“But I — I don’t think I’ve changed for the better, Tae.” You feel your fingers unlacing away from his and you could feel your heart drop on the floor. “I don’t even know if I’m ready for another chance in any sort of relationship.” It came out as a scrutinizing joke, but it was the cruel truth you had to face.

The silence was a little too overwhelming for your liking.

You were thankful the silence wasn’t as uncomfortable to him as it were to you. Because the pad of his index finger lifts your chin up and his eyes meets your once again. “You’re still in love with him, aren’t you?”

Choosing not to reply to his answer, you did not want your face to give away any sort of response for him, so you chewed on the inside of your cheek looking into his eyes.

“You — you don’t have to answer that. It’s not fair.”

His thumb caresses your cheek so softly and you savor the warmth of his palm on your skin. It was such a comforting gesture and he tucked the strand of hair behind your ear, hoping it was enough to soothe you.

“I can never have him.” You realize and his eyes meet your glassy irises. “We can never be together.” Unsure of whether this is your inebriated consciousness enabling you to think out loud, but you chew on the inside of your cheek as you focus on something else other than the salty tears building in your eyes.

Taehyung remains silent across from you and you can’t blame the guy. What was he supposed to say to you?

“I’m happy for him though.” You attempt to convince yourself when you feel his hot thumb at the corner of your lip.

“I’m glad you’re happy for him, but are you happy?” He reassures you, swallowing hard. “You’re amazing, YN. It pains me to see you like this. Even after all these months, it seems like you’re numb to the pain. If not me, there is someone out there very much willing to be with you.” Unsure of what to reply to him, you can’t help but offer him a meek grin. “I appreciate that, Tae.” He sighs as you finally got a hold of yourself, relieved to see that he has brightened up your mood even if it is for the slightest bit.

He pulls you into his arms to wrap his large arms around you and you can’t help but appreciate his warm embrace by slithering your arms around his as well. “Any guy would kill to have you.” He whispers as he pecks your forehead, digits combing through your silky hair.

You melt in the comfort of his arms and you feel your lids slowly flutter shut. The steady rise and low of his chest indicate that he is just as comfortable as he is with the embrace.

“I — I should probably get going now.” He announces very softly, hoping not to disturb your tranquility.

“I, uh, yeah. It’s getting late, huh?” You sigh and you slowly peel yourself once again from his embrace.

“It is.”

“How’d you get here? Did you want me to get an Uber for you or something?”

“No, I — I drove here.” You see him slowly lift himself up from the sofa and fish the car keys out of his pocket, carefully folding the blazer jacket he had on earlier.

“You’re not drunk.”

“Not the slightest bit.”

“I don’t believe you.” The crease on your brow exhibited concern over your former partner’s safety.

“I’ll be fine, YN.”

“I don’t want to risk you driving home when you’re tipsy. You could get pulled over or you could get into a little fender bender or you could —“

“Then what do you suggest I do?” Taehyung’s folds his arms, raising a brow at your rambling.

“Spend the night.”

The softness and warmth of your mattress had managed to keep you toasty throughout the frosty winter morning. You curl up onto your pillow and stretch only to open your eyes and discover your naked body entangled with the linen sheets underneath your frame. Swallowing hard, the notable fatigue from your encounter with Taehyung is evident in your inner thighs and the unpleasantries of a morning hangover soon rakes over your brain.

You slowly rise from where you lay only to find the other side of your bed to be completely tattered. Pillows clearly slept on and your clothes folded over by the foot of your bed. You blush at the thought of Taehyung gather all of your tattered clothing early in the morning only for him to sneakily depart from your household.

However, the smell of bacon soon emerge from the other side of the door and you are lured by the aroma of freshly brewed coffee. A muffled conversation is being held right next door and you scramble to search for a clean pair of pajamas to keep you warm and decent for your appearance that morning.

Creaking open your bedroom door to enter your living room into the kitchen, you are perplexed to see a shirtless Taehyung wearing a pair of plaid pajamas with a white t-shirt on himself. But what truly catches you off-guard is Hobi offering Taehyung a mug while he pours himself a hearty cup of coffee while Michelle cracks open the egg in a pool of bacon grease.

“How many did you guys have to drink?” Hobi curiously interrogates Taehyung.

“All we had was the champagne and we may have finished the last bits of tequila.” Michelle makes a face that contorts into disgust and you agree because you recall the burn of the spirit down your throat.

“Speak of the devil,” Michelle’s eyes darts over your confused state. “Good morning, sunshine. I’m making your eggs how you like it; drenched in bacon fat.”

Unaware of the strange situation right in front of you, you amble towards the cupboard where you grab yourself a mug, redirecting it towards Hobi signaling to pour yourself a cup as well. Unsure of what to really say currently, you take careful sips of the hot caffeine into your mouth. Your eyes meet Taehyung who can’t seem to read your expression well. Your brows knit together at how Michelle and Hoseok had manage to treat having Taehyung over at your household as a normal occurrence.

You were expecting Michelle to be kicking the poor soul out of the apartment. But here he was standing sharing a cup of coffee and sharing stories with your roommate and her boyfriend — your two best friends.

“A — alright, what the fuck is going on? Morning afters with him always end up a disaster.” Michelle raises both her brows at you and Taehyung can’t help but chuckle to himself as he swallows his cup of joe.

“Oh, c’mon, YN. I’m not that evil now, am I? It’s the new year, I don’t want to be rude to our first guest of the year.” She reaches for a clean plate before she offers you two cooked eggs with a slice of bacon and toast on the side. “Please eat. You need carbs in your system because Taehyung tells me you guys didn’t drink enough water before you two went to bed which is why I have these for you.” Popping open the lid of a painkillers, she offers you the proper dosage. Taking the two small pills into your mouth before you swallow them dry, you knit your brows further still attempting to understand the complexity of the predicament you have found yourself in. You take a sit on the stool where Taehyung seems to be sitting.

“How do you like your eggs, Taehyung?”

“Scrambled, please.”

Michelle then cracks two eggs into the pan before she hastily scrambled the eggs into the pan, hoping it would be enough to satiate his appetite.

“Where did you get these? I’m pretty sure I returned all your clothes that I have lying around here.”

“They’re Hoseok’s.” Taehyung simply answers. “I hope you don’t mind, but I used your robe to get a glass of water earlier this morning and — uh, he offered to let me use some spare clothes he had lying around your apartment, so I figured it’d be better than using your robe.” He chuckles and Hoseok laughs along with him as well.

“Yeah, man, I don’t know when you have to fly back to New York, but just leave it here when you’re done.”

“Thanks.” He expresses simply before Michelle places two slices of cooked bacon and the rest of the scrambled eggs on the side along with a slice of toast.

“Eat up, you two. You guys didn’t really drink much, but you weren’t hydrated enough before you two went to bed.” Michelle sighs. “It’s the basics of hangover prevention! I expect you guys to learn from this.” She scolds once more and you begin diving into your breakfast, shoveling the heated breakfast placed right in front of you.

Unaware of the conversation Hobi started between him and Taehyung, off of the corner of your eyes, you see Michelle excuse herself to her room. However, she shoots you a look before she enters inside your room — a signal for you to excuse yourself as well. “Um, I’m going to go look for my phone really quickly.” You conjure up an excuse before you lift yourself off of the bar stool and scramble over to your bedroom where you had caught Michelle awaiting for your presence inside your bedroom.

“Okay, I know it looks bad.” Her eyes had scanned your room, but you were tight lip when you see that your room had been relatively neat and organized. Your outfit and Taehyung’s attire from the previous night had been folded at the foot of your bed while his side of the bed had been tidied up. However, you were very much aware of the ripped up condom packet at the nightstand which gave an indication of your rendezvous.

“But I’m sure it was because we were drunk.” You lied through your teeth.

“He told me he wasn’t drunk.”

You stood silent and you chewed on your cheek.

“He wasn’t drunk?” You questioned.

“Did you think he was drunk?”

“I — I wasn’t drunk.” You confessed with blushed cheeks, unaware that Taehyung had lied about being drunken the previous night.

“So you were both sober?”

You shook your head, swallowing hard when you sat on your bed. “I was… buzzed, perhaps. But I honestly thought he had been drunk and I convinced myself that I didn’t want him anymore, but I think I was just trying to find an excuse to be with him again.” Michelle nods in agreement, wide-eyed at your justification. “He wants you back, YN.”

“You don’t know that.” You counter.

“I caught him in our kitchen this morning, YN.”

You furrowed your brows in confusion.

“He was naked.”

Your brows raised at once.

“I was, too.”

You sputtered at your thoughts and couldn’t help but escape a cackle, hoping it would lighten up the awkward with your roommate.

“I’m serious, YN! Do you know how embarrassing it is to walk out and see him butt naked in our kitchen looking for water?” You can’t help but continued chortling to yourself, clutching onto your robe. “I ran back in my room, telling Hobi to give him a pair of pajamas! The poor thing didn’t have anything to sleep!” Tears began swelling at the corners of your eyes and you grinned from ear to ear at her story.

Michelle nudged you playfully before she sat right next to you, settling into the comforts of your queen sized mattress. “When we were both decent, he said something along the lines of me hating him so much that I should probably leave the apartment.”

Your grin disappears at his statement, surprised to hear the statement leave her lips. “I was this close to calling an Uber back to his hotel.” Michelle sighs before she closes her eyes and you chew on your cheek, seeing that she is about to reveal something she wasn’t expecting. “But he said that he had a late Christmas present for you in the car.” You raise your brows, still confused about the statement. “And then he asked — very politely, may I add — if he could leave a painkiller and a glass of water by your nightstand, just to make sure you don’t suffer searching for the damn thing like you always do when you’re hang over.”

There is a giddiness at the depths of your chest that made the corner of your mouth twitch into a weak grin.

“He never did that before.” Michelle sighs as she stares at the ceiling. “You both just fuck and then he sneaks out in the morning. I catch up him so many times leaving your room and he doesn’t say a word — doesn’t really give a shit about you.” Inhaling deeply when she turns to look at you, you turn to look her in the eye as well. “He asked me if he was allowed to spend the night… just to make sure you were okay when you woke up.”

You immediately turn away from her profile, this time, you stare at the ceiling. “It’s different now because it seems like he seems to give a shit about you, YN.” She concludes and you begin to nibble at your supple bottom lip, concerned at her thoughts. “It could be some kind of facade. But, when you talk to him, he’s not… that bad.”

You agree with her statement and tuck a strand of your hair behind your ear. “Are you guys planning on getting back together or what?”

You shrug at her statement, attempting to piece the puzzle together as well. “We haven’t really discussed it. All I remember is we had our second shot and everything sort of… unravelled itself. One thing led to another and we couldn’t help ourselves from then on.” You whisper ever so softly, afraid that he would overhear your vulnerable thoughts. “It was… different last night; too raw to reply, to be honest.” You sigh in bliss and you try to shake your head back to reality. 

“I… I really don’t want to discuss anything — I don’t want to establish something we’re both not ready to handle, you know?”

She nods and gives you a meek grin, proud that you were — at least — attempting to take your time with your decision and your feelings regarding the current predicament.

Pushing yourself up from where you laid on your bed, you offer your hand for Michelle to get up from your mattress as well. “C’mon, who knows what Hobi is telling about me? I’d like to defend myself, you know.” You were hasty to your door when you hear a booming laughter come from the kitchen.

Ready to turn the knob of your bedroom door, you hear Michelle call out your name.

“YN,” she begins and you turn to her, wondering what else she has to say. “Believe it or not, but you’re glowing. That’s how I know it’s different.”

The muffled trickling of keys from outside immediately dropped the current conversation to hushed whispers. Because not only could you hear the muffled sounds of keys rattling outside your door, but you could also hear the sounds of Jin’s whining from your front door.

“I already told you guys before we left I left my key at my fucking place before we left to get the donuts. I don’t understand why I’m getting all the blame.” He hisses at somebody and you stand up from where you sat right next to Taehyung, folding your arms as you await for him to open the door.

“Because I texted you before I left to bring your keys, hyung. You’ve been boasting how you only have access to YN and Michelle’s apartment considering I’ve been revoked of my fucking keys because I threw that Friendsigivng at their place when they went back to visit their parents and left their place completely trashed.” He rattled the keys unlocking the first knob and attempting to jiggle the key into the other lock. “And Yoongi-hyung says he lost his, so you were the only one with keys!”

“Stop arguing, you imbeciles.” Yoongi grumbles before the door swings open slowly only to see Taehyung completely stop mid conversation at the presence of Jin, Jimin, Tiffany who held balloons that spelled out ‘Congratulations!’ and, finally, Yoongi who held the two stereotypical pink boxes that most likely contained donuts.

“Oh, shit, we didn’t think you guys would be up this fucking early.” Jimin scans the room to see Hobi already working on the dishes, Michelle is sat on the other end of the section sofa while Taehyung sat comfortably on the other end. However, you were busy tidying up the kitchen along with Hobi.

“And we have a new face!” Tiffany’s dulcet tones follows a cumbersome tension in the entire room. At this point, everyone is fully aware of your previous feelings for Yoongi and his feelings for yours.

To have Tiffany acknowledge Taehyung’s presence somehow is much better than any of the three acknowledging him because she reaches over to extend her arm while introducing herself. 

“I’m Tiffany — Yoongi’s girlfriend. Sorry for barging in just like that. I just get really excited meeting new people, s’all.”

Taehyung stands from where he sat and extends his arms shaking her hand as a response and nodding along to acknowledge Jin, Jimin, and Yoongi. “I’ve heard about you from YN. It’s nice to meet you.” He darts his eyes towards you raising his brows only for you to blush scarlet, avoiding any eye contact with your three other best friends.

“It’s been — what? Nearly a year since we’ve seen you, Taehyung.” Jin clearly forces a smile trying to keep the atmosphere as friendly as possible. Jimin already quite familiar with Taehyung’s personality and reads the expression of Michelle’s faces that she has seemed to be completely unfazed by his presence. However, her eyes pay close attention to Yoongi’s tense jaw as he examined the man at the center of the room.

“In case you didn’t know, Tiffany, I — I’ve dated YN for a while.” He clears the air, hoping to break the sudden tension in the room and you shake your head at his sheer audacity. However, it did bring some sort of relief to the situation. He always seemed like the type not to hide anything. He was transparent for the right reasons. There was nothing really to hide at this point. 

“Which is why everyone is so surprised to see me here… again.”

“Oh, I see.” Tiffany concludes, nibbling on her bottom lip and silence fills the air. But you come to the realization that you were questioning why the four new guests were somehow invited to your household.

“Hold on, what are we celebrating? What’s with the balloons and donuts?” You raise the question only for everyone to go wide-eyed before Taehyung tilts his head nonchalantly.

“Didn’t Michelle tell you in your bedroom earlier?” Taehyung scratches his head but the perplexes expression painted on your face answered it for him.

“Oh my god, YN, please don’t tell me you haven’t taken a long at Michelle’s goddamn hand.” Jin practically scolds and your eyes shoot over to where Michelle had scurried off to Hobi and you catch sight of the bright, shining diamond gracing her ring finger and you feel the high pitched screech erupt from your hand at the top of your lungs, running over to Michelle.

“I swear to god, Hobi! I didn’t think you had the fucking guts to do it!” You yelp at the newly engaged couple right in front of you. You leaped into the arms of Michelle and Hobi, bursting with so much joy that you couldn’t contain the grin that stretched from ear to ear right across your face.

“Alright, how much do we owe you, Taehyung?” Michelle nudges at Hobi and Taehyung shoves his hands in the depths of the sweatpants he wore.

“Ten bucks each, so twenty.”

“Wh —“

“We made a bet to see how long you’d figure out. Hobi thought you’d notice straight away, I thought you’d notice once breakfast was done and you would help clean up around the house, and Taehyung said you wouldn’t notice until someone gave it away.” You rolled your eyes at the three of them, immediately nudging Taehyung’s side only to have him wrap an arm around your neck, resting his arm on your shoulder while he nestles his head on top of yours.

“You guys suck, you know that?” You grumble only for Jimin to search through all your cupboards, searching for something around the kitchen. “Jimin-ssi, what are you looking for?”

“Wine.” He sighs only to be defeated to see the empty bottles by the end of the counter. “You guys must have been completely blacked out if you finished that all to yourself.”

“It wasn’t just me. Taehyung had some to drink too.”

“Plus, it’s not like we drank it all at once.” He clarifies only for Jin to realize that Yoongi had raised a single brow at the statement, already shoving a donut inside his mouth to keep himself busy, unable to distract himself from the old flame right in front of his eyes.

“We need a toast, you guys! We’re at that age where we have friends who are engaged.” Jimin emphasized only to look through the refrigerator only to find a gallon of milk along with orange juice and he sets the gallon of milk, grabbing 8 glasses from the cabinets to pour them in each. 

“Alright, everyone, grab a donut.”

Jin flips open both boxes only to reveal the heavenliest of donuts before everyone’s eyes only for you to grab a chocolate donut and grabbing a glass of milk to hold up. “Tiffany, honey, I know your resolution was to make healthier choices, but we can always go for a run right after this. It’s a special occasion.”

Everyone couldn’t help but laugh at Tiffany’s reluctance to reach for a donut, but she grabs the smallest out of the bunch before she grabs a glass of milk to herself. At the corner of your eye, you had caught a glimpse of Yoongi’s arms circling around her waist, nuzzling his nose into her hair before he places a single kiss on her head.

There is a hot swell on your throat as you look away only to feel a heated pressure at the small of your back to see Taehyung reach for the same donut as you and you offer him a glass of milk for him.

“To Michelle and Hobi-hyung,” Jimin starts only for everyone to clink their glasses, sharing a toast. “Who knew that YN and Yoongi would be the ones traumatized to witness you two butt-naked on this very spot?” His hands pats on the kitchen countertop and makes an atrocious reaction at the realization of their sweating bodies on the marbled counter top. “I must admit, I cannot believe I’m saying this, but we cannot wait to witness even more naked shenanigans from you two.”

An eruption of laughter fills the atmosphere and there is a sense of tranquility and solidarity with all of the dynamics of each and every individual in the room. When each person takes one large gulp of the milk, you all take a bite of the soft donuts only for Michelle and Hobi to share a delicate and sweet kiss.

There is a tug to your side where Taehyung pulls you closer only to watch him devour the rest of his donut and he drinks the rest of his milk. A milk mustache forms on his lips and you wipe it off with your thumb, chortling at his playful personality.

Suddenly, the ache in your chest numbs down to a bare strangle.

And, for once, your eyes aren’t locked on him.

“Hey, uh, congratulations again for getting engaged and all.” Taehyung awkwardly interrupts the conversation between Michelle and Hoseok only for Michelle to raise her brows at him. “Thanks for — you know, earlier this morning.” He scratched the back of his head as you observe him from afar.

“You mean, not kicking you out?”

Taehyung nods and you fold your arms, watching the dynamic between your roommate and your former partner unravel before your eyes. There was a glint of hope in the way her eyes traveled from head to toe and the desire for his eyes not to meet hers.

“You’re starting to grow on me, Taehyung-ie.” The man before you purses his lips and nods once at her final conclusion. You are confused, but — ultimately — curiouser about what the two have conversed about before you had awaken from your deep slumber. “Pretty sure YN will have you as her plus one for our wedding.” From the corner of her eye, Michelle glances at you before she winks over at him and he responds with a forced chuckle. “However, if you two have a repeat of your previous encounters, then I’ll be sending you an invitation, nevertheless.”

He looks up at her scratches the corner of his brow with a sly grin across his visage. “Well, let’s hope I won’t be getting one.” He implied causing a few stares from some listeners in your humble abode. A blush creeping on your cheeks at the realization that he had intentions of making sure that you two would not end up in this endless cycle of make-up and break-up. “Say goodbye to everybody, Taehyung, because I’m walking you to your car.” As you capture his wrist around your fingers, he merely waves a goodbye to everyone, sending his pleasantries to all the people he had met and to Tiffany who he had the pleasure of being introduced to. With the muffled goodbyes on the other side of the apartment, you close the front door right behind you before you begin stomping over to where the guest parking had been at your apartment complex.

“What — what did you mean by all of that?” You jumped straight onto the topic, not wanting to prolong the conversation.

“Do you have plans tonight?” You shake your head no and with a crest of your brow, he tucks a strand of a stray hair behind your ear.

“Have dinner with me tonight.” He requests and you swallow at his statement. “I told you. I’m leaving tomorrow afternoon. I would like to spend the last day here with an old friend.”

“Flame. Old flame.” You correct him.

“Ah, right.” He merely chuckles but you push past him, pacing back and forth at the parking lot, trying to get a better understanding of the predicament you both were in.

“Why is Michelle being so nice to you? And what did you talk about with her —“

“Why don’t you go and ask her for yourself?”

“She — she won’t tell me.” You sighed, rolling your eyes in the process.

“Then have dinner with me tonight. Have you been to that new sushi restaurant downtown?”

“I — uh, no, I haven’t had the time to try it out.” You grumble chewing on the inside of your cheek, awaiting for his response.

“Then I’ll pick you up at 7 tonight, dear. If you really don’t want to go, just shoot me a text.” He unlocks his car and he begins his journey over to where he had parked. “If you’re in anyway interested, wear something comfortable.”

You stood there glued to the asphalt of the parking lot floors as he hops inside his vehicle, turning the engine on. You shake your head in disbelief at the audacity for him to leave you even more confused than ever; expecting to get answers, instead, you were given more questions and inquiries running at a hundred miles an hour racking in your brain. You amble back to your apartment unit lethargically, trying to add two and two together before you see a figure standing outside of the front door of your apartment unit only to recognize it was Yoongi.

“Please don’t tell me they locked us out.”

“No, uh, we’re fine.” Yoongi merely grumbles and you fold your arms, hugging yourself for warmth as you feel the freezing breeze brush past your thin pajamas. “I was just curious about —“

“About?”

“Why he’s suddenly crawling back to you?”

Taken aback by his choice of words, you choose not to meet his eyes and they soon land on his shoes and your fuzzy slippers. The proximity of his stance from yours relatively distant from each other.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Yoongi.”

“Oh, c’mon, YN, you were doing so well. I haven’t seen Taehyung in months — you were doing well without him.” Knitting your brows at his estimation, there is a lock on your jaw when you realize that Yoongi had no idea of your encounter with Taehyung.

He was aware that you two had seen each other, but he wasn’t made aware of the gory details that occurred. As a matter of fact, it was only Michelle who really discovered of your encounter with Taehyung.

“I was doing well because I was desperate for a distraction, Yoongi.” You breathed out without hesitation, mustering up every ounce of courage in your system to look him straight in the eye. 

“It may seem like I’m doing well — I earned a permanent position at my job, got promoted, and now I’m a possible candidate for another promotion. But that’s because I forced myself into this lifestyle, Yoongi. I forced myself to suppress any emotion I felt.”

He stood still frozen as he gazed right into your eyes. The clench in his jaw indicated that there was an obvious tension between the both of you.

“With or without Taehying, I wasn’t doing well, Yoongi.” You admitted and gnawed on the inside of your cheeks. “I was just findings ways to… not self-destruct.”

“You will if you go back to him.”

“He’s different now.” You defend and see the tinge of annoyance in Yoongi’s pretty face.

“Don’t be silly, YN. I don’t want to see you get hurt again.”

“Well, that’s just something we gotta get used to, I guess.” You grumble in annoyance as your teeth clatter against each other because of the cold.

“Stop being so stubborn. He doesn’t deserve another chance.”

You’re starting to grow annoyed at his words and you walk towards your front door, grabbing the knob. “Yoongi, I understand you’re my best friend, but don’t you think I’m doing this in an attempt to get over you?”

Glued to the cement, he is as a still as a statue at your response.

“I see you’re happy, Yoongs, so I’m going to try to be happy too.” 

After hours of scouring through your wardrobe to find something “comfortable” for your date with Taehyung, you settled upon a black bodysuit that is tucked underneath a faux leather skirt. You complemented the outfit with a pair of stockings and knee high boots along with a blazer in case the location of the date was far more fancier than the usual.

But the blazer was absolutely unnecessary.

When Taehyung had picked you up from your quaint unit, he wore a black turtle neck along with a pair of black skinny jeans complemented with a long trench coat to protect him from the chilly weather.

He informs you that a colleague of his is still holding a viewing session of his photography collection in a near by art gallery which piqued your interest. Relieved to hear that you were more than interested with the idea of the exhibition, you two listened intently to his colleague present the final viewing session before you two ventured together.

Of course, Taehyung guided you through the exhibited admiring the angle and the perspective his colleague had decided on. You would listen intently, enjoying the decent moscato served. There is a familiar warmth in depths of your abdomen, not from the wine, but from the way his beautiful digits tangled along with manicured ones.

After the viewing session, he had reserved a spot by the new sushi restaurant you heard your co-workers discuss every month or so. You decided to order the quintessential edamame where you two would pick at the pods and pop each bean into your mouth while you two decided upon what to try. You were both interested in the different rolls they had to offer, popping each roll into your mouth in a split second.

“Holy fuck, you need to try this one.” He would say. You witness the way he effortlessly picks up the roll and hovers it by your lips and you open your mouth allowing him to pop the small morsel upon your tongue.

When you would close your mouth and start chewing, he would nod happily only to begin diving into a different roll.

The dinner ends when the both of you are sufficiently tapped out. However, to your surprise, there is a gelato boutique next door to the sushi bar and you persuade Taehyung that you would pay for his gelato since he had paid for dinner.

He takes up the offer.

You both request for a piccolo sized gelato. He ordered an agostino which was an Argentinian dulce de leech. Meanwhile, you were taken aback by the charcoal vanilla which you ultimately grew to love.

When you get the order you had both requested, Taehyung mysteriously jerks his heads outside only for you to follow behind him as he looks both ways to cross the street.

“Where are we going?” You grumble, struggling to catch up with him.

“We’re going for a walk.”

“Why are you going so fast?”

“Maybe you’re too slow.”

“Well, slow down for me, will you?” He chuckles at your whines and you began scooping the gelato into your mouth, allowing it to melt inside your mouth.

“Taste good?” He hums before he shovels a large scoop of his gelato inside his. You nod at once. Your eyes settling on this cup and he moves it closer to you, nudging for you to try the agostino. You take a small scoop and place it on your tongue to taste the overtly sweet creaminess.

“Here, try mine.” You switch cups and while you mindlessly shovel more of his gelato into your mouth. Taehyung pauses, grins at the way your eyes glisten, despite the lack of light underneath the night sky.

He takes small shovels of your flavor into his mouth as you two amble around the block. He could really get used to this.

The conversation that you two participated in had been interrupted by the high pitched tone in the depths of her purse. She hands you back the small cup before she fishes the phone, unlocking it.

He enjoys the way the bright light shines upon your smiling face.

However, his brows knit into one when he watches your beautiful smile drop into a frown. The inflection of confusion is evident in the way the crinkle in your eyes disappear and the furrow of your brows are put together.

“What is it?” He inquires and you lock your phone, not hastily, but you shake your head, offering him a grin to ease his worries. “Did something happen?”

“No, no. It’s nothing to worry about, to be honest.”

But you were lying — to yourself and to him.

“Who was it that texted you?”

You didn’t want to have to lie some more to him, so you decide to take smaller scoops of your gelato. Suddenly, you had lost your appetite. “It was Michelle.”

“What’d she say, if you don’t mind me asking?”

You paused momentarily, debating on whether you should answer him truthfully or not. There was nothing to hide at this point. Taehyung knew about your predicament with Yoongi. 

However, would it be wise to disclose him on Yoongi’s stance between your renunion with the man right in front of you?

“She told me Yoongi had called Hoseok.. wondering where I was.”

“What’d he say?”

“He didn’t say anything. He wanted to consult with me, first.”

“You didn’t answer.”

“I’m on a date with you. It’d be rude of me to just text them, suddenly.”

The corner of his lips twitch to a weak grin. However, he understands your uncertainty of the predicament.

“You’re not sure what to do. You’re afraid if you tell Yoongi the truth, he’d be disappointed because we’re, hypothetically, together. But if you hide this from him, you’d feel like an awful friend for hiding such a big thing from him.” Taehyung voices out the dilemma and you shake your head, swallowing the heaviness of the situation.

“Taehyung, we are on a date.” You conclude and stop on your tracks, chewing on the inside of your cheeks. “As your date, my attention will solely be on you.” He appreciates the way you are approaching things. However, he stops you in front of you, eyes leveling with yours.

“And, as your date, I want you to have a good time and, clearly, you seeing that text dampened your mood.” You remained straight faced with him, losing all appetite for the Italian dessert laying on the palm of your hand. “I care about how you feel, YN. You can talk to me.”

He lifts his hands to caress your cheeks. The thumb nudging at the corner of your mouth to encourage a grin to appear on your visage. “Taehyung, the past two hours I’ve been with you, I — I have never felt this good about myself in a  while.” You confess and he stops caressing your cheeks, pained to see that you sincerely have not been satisfied for the past six months you had not seen each other.

“A part of me is happy to hear that. But the other absolutely despises the fact that you’ve been suffering for this long.” There was a heat suffocating you on your throat and you grit your teeth, forcing yourself to hold back the water works.

“It’s true though and I want to savor every moment I have left with you. I don’t know when I’m going to see you again, so I’m going to be in the moment with you.” You conclude, not wanting to discuss your current dilemma with him — not because you didn’t want to discuss it with him, but because you were spending every moment with him on a ticking clock.

Unable to control himself any longer, Taehyung leans down to firmly press his mouth onto yours. Petals enveloping your own and the heat of his tongue swipes across your lower lip to express just how truly touched he was by your words. His hand cupping your profile and swiping away your flying hair against the cool wind.

Eyes half-lidded with warmth and pleasure, you return the action with as much fervor as he had originally began with. His tongue tasted of the milky treat and you were growing addicted to the taste of the gelato. Careful not to spill any of the melted gelato onto him, you are already slithering your arms around his figure, pulling away to gasp for air.

“As much as I’d like to do so much more than kiss you,” Taehyung was the first to speak between the both of you. He tucks a strand of your hair behind ear and caresses the softness of your cheeks. “It’s starting to get a little late and I have an early flight tomorrow.” He sighs sadly, staring right into your eyes.

A small pout has formed upon your face and you decide that perhaps it’s best you both stop now.

“Time flies by when you’re having too much fun.” At your simple statement, Taehyung leans down and pecks your mouth delicately. His thumb nudging at the corner of your mouth.

“C’mon, let’s get you home.” He announces and you can’t help but agree with him. Delicate digits lace themselves around his skinny, beautiful ones as you both walk back to where he had originally parked.The entire ride back to your humble abode you spent the entire time singing many throwback love ballads at the top of your lungs. Two empty gelato cup nestled in between your thighs while you harmonized with Taehyung’s beautiful baritone voice.

He steers left and enters your apartment complex where you both try to calm your giddiness by lowering the volume of the radio. He pulls right in front of your building and you turn to him when he puts it on park and he bites his lip when he looks at you.

“I had an amazing time, YN.” Taehyung declares and you nod, blushing. “Who knew we would start off the new year together, huh?” He can’t hold himself from cupping your face and kissing your cheek, returning back his initiation by deepening the kiss.

“I had a good time too.” You sigh into his mouth and are reminded of your previous encounters the night before. “A — Are you sure you don’t want to come inside?”

“As much as I’d love to extend my evening, but I really need to get some packing done and get an early night in considering I’ll be traveling all day.” You were satisfied with his answer. Though, initially, you were upset he wouldn’t ease your desires, you were glad that you both were taking it gradually slow.

At least this time, you were taking it slow.

“I know it may be too soon, but do you know when I get to see you again?” He pulls away momentarily to think back. “I’m not quite sure. I do travel every other week because it’s part of the job. Most of the time, it’s here in Los Angeles, but it’s not a hundred percent guarantee.”

“I understand.” You replied and his grin softens when he lays his eyes on your mouth once again, placing the gentlest of kisses on your soft petals. “I guess I’ll see you whenever I can then.” His fingers tickle the back of your neck when you both share a sweet kiss.

However, you are interrupted by the bright light shingling right to your right. The sounds of the glass tapping right next to you startles you and Taehyung is visibly confused to see Tiffany and Yoongi standing right next to his rental car.

Your eyes meet Yoongi’s and you are visibly stiff from where you sat, shocked to see the couple outside.

Taehyung rolls down the window for you and Tiffany waves a hello to the both of you.

“Oh my god, you guys! You got back together!”

You both immediately shook your heads, wanting to clear the other. There is a wave of relief in Yoongi’s face, but shame in Tiffany’s at her assumption.

“No, we’re… we’re trying to work things out, but not officially together.” Taehyung clarifies.

“Oh, noted.” Tiffany nods and bites her lower lip. “I’m so glad you both get a second chance at something though. You guys should have came earlier though! We had a Disney movie night with Michelle and Hobi. It would have been a cool triple date.” At the mention of your future plans with Taehyung, Yoongi has returned to his state of disbelief once again. Unsure of how to react, he remains difficult to read.

“I bet it would’ve have been fun.” You sighed and turn to Taehyung, kissing him on the cheek, hoping for the cumbersome atmosphere to die down. “Call me when you’ve arrived to your hotel safely.”

When you hop out of the car, Taehyung says his goodbyes to both Tiffany and Taehyung and he exits the apartment complex, relieved to have clarified it for everyone that you and Taehyung were just working things out.

“I’ll see you guys later. I’m… really fucking tired, but we should definitely have another movie night next weekend or something.” You grin at Tiffany and fish your apartment keys out of your purse, hugging Tiffany goodbye before you head back to door.

There was a part of you that screamed to avoid any physical contact with Yoongi, but you did not want to alert the already tense moment by not offering him one in front of Tiffany. However, he had already decided upon himself to dismiss the conversation but unlocking his car where had parked.

“God, he’s been grumpy all night.” Tiffany complains and your curiosity is piqued. What could have possibly irked him so much to the point that he is still vexed up until now? You bite back any inquiries regarding his mood; afraid that perhaps it had something to do with your little reunion with Taehyung.

“Nothing like wine and chocolate can’t fix. I’m sure that’ll brighten up his mood.” You advise and Tiffany agrees before she waves another goodbye. Turning away from the departing couple, you attempt to fish out the keys out of your purse and enter your unit.

The living room is pristine. You would have assumed that it’d be trashed for the evening, but the cushions had been positioned beautifully on the sectional. Not a single crumb laid on the carpeted floors of your apartment and the scent of vanilla lingers in the air. The lights are turned off at the hallway and inside Michelle’s room, assuming that the couple have turned in for the night.

When you strip your coat off of your frame, you hear the lightest of knocks behind you, sneaking a peek inside the peep hole to see Yoongi awaiting for a response. Unlocking all the locks and opening the door for him, he invites himself inside and you are ultimately confused at his presence.

“Did you forget anything?” You inquired, unsure of his purpose for coming back inside your abode.

“How was your date with Taehyung?” You held your breath at the mention of his name and, suddenly, you can feel the density of the atmosphere around you. It was unbelievably quiet and all you can hear is the ticking noises of your noisy kitchen clock.

“I had a good time. If you were curious, we went to that sushi place downtown and there was a gelato shop next door.” His jaw tightens as you reply and he scratches the back of his neck, swallowing at his following inquiry.

“Was it really good enough that you had to reconsider getting back together with him?”

“Yoongi, it was just… a date. Taehyung and I don’t even know what’s going on, so we’re going to take it slow —“

“What the fuck does that mean? Hoseok says you guys fucked last night and, now, you’re taking it slow?” His annoyance was infectious and the knitting of your brows was a sign to Yoongi that you were puzzled with his current stance in your relationship.

“Why does it matter to you, Yoongs? Quite frankly, my dating life is none of your concern. You have your own to cherish and rejoice in. Meanwhile, I’m still trying to puzzle the pieces together.”

“I don’t want you to get hurt again.” He seethes and you scoff at his reason.

“I’ve gotten used to it, alright? I appreciate the concern, but this is my decision to make — not yours or Michelle’s or Hoseok’s — mine.” You take a step closer and you can’t help but savor the scent of his new cologne that Tiffany had recently bought as his Christmas gift. He stays silent as he reads your face, looking you directly in the eye before you swallow hard.

“Can you answer me honestly?”

You nod once and you can feel your heart beating faster, jaw clenching at the anticipation of his question.

“Why are you so hesitant to go back with him? You had sex with him, agreed to go on a date with him — why take things slow? What’s with the reluctance to establish a relationship when you think he’s changed?” The question hit you hard and there was one simple answer to it, but you bit your tongue because it’d complicate everything so much more; Because if you answered honestly at that very moment, everything at that moment would be real.

You were still in love with him.

And the way your eyes remained disconnected from his. Your breath hot as you sighed, releasing all the exasperation in this sticky situation was enough for Yoongi to understand your hesitation.

Nothing had to be said.

Frustrated with the excruciating silence filling the air, Yoongi takes a sharp inhale before instinctively cups your face into his palms and crashes his mouth onto yours. It was unexpected yet almost necessary for a moment like this. Months of pent up anguish, frustration, and desire to feel his mouth on yours, it was finally happening.

His mouth tasted sweet like ice cream. You hated the way you can taste a slight taste of strawberry on his mouth because you knew he had kissed Tiffany and it was her lipgloss that you were tasting. Suddenly, you are overwhelmed with Tiffany.

He wouldn’t kiss Tiffany like this. Unless, you didn’t think he had kiss Tiffany like this. He was kissing you like it was his last dying breath and you despised that he was good at it. You can feel the pace of his breathing when your bodies collide against each other, seeking for more contact than a lust driven kiss.

And you can’t help but inhale the scent of his goddamn cologne. It was intoxicating and you could smell the fabric softener of his clothes rubbing against yours. The callouses on his digits were rough on your cheeks, but there was a tenderness in the way he caressed them. A roughness in the way his other set of digits would tug at the root of your hair but a sense of comfort int he way the pads of his finger massage your scalp.

You were putty in his hands and you savored his mouth.

But it was too overwhelming; the taste of chocolate ice cream now tasted of strawberry lip gloss and the smell of his sandalwood cologne now a coconut infused perfume that littered his shirt.

The palms of your hands landing on his chest as you gently tugged his much bigger frame off of yours. The hold he had on you now gone and you whimpered at the loss of his touch.

“T — Tiffany’s waiting for you.” There is a look of pain and regret painted on your visages and you wiped his taste off of your mouth, hating the fact that you loved the way he tasted. You wanted every fiber of him off of you, avoiding addiction.

“Right.” He cleared his throat as he backed away from your frozen body and he clutches the knob of the door. “YN, please —“

“My… lips are sealed.” You breathe, knowing very well that you two had committed into something that has ultimately ruin someone’s trust and happiness.

“Thanks.” He opens the door and turns around. However, before he leaves, he turns to you and you can see a sense of sadness in his visage. “N — Nothing has changed, hasn’t it?”

The tears began building up in your eyes because you knew perfectly well what he was talking about.

Even six months later, you two were hopelessly in love with each other.

“Not one single bit.”

↪ Please stay tuned for the next part!

[the-cookie-of-doom]

More “No Racism in Fandom”

https://princeescaluswords.tumblr.com/post/612666763445944320/more-no-racism-in-fandom#notes

https://brydeswhale.tumblr.com/post/612668772496637952/more-no-racism-in-fandom#notes

Claude @princeescaluswords Frollo:

Didn’t you hear? There is no racism in the Teen Wolf Fandom! (And even if there was, it wouldn’t be a big deal.)

So, there’s absolutely no racism in the new Teen Wolf story I read yesterday. It’s part of a very popular series. It’s one of those extra chapters people connect to a greater work. There are, of course, no tags for CHARACTER BASHING, or GRAPHIC DEPICTIONS OF VIOLENCE, or THE AUTHOR IS AN ENORMOUS SCUMBAG RACIST.

The interesting part is that it’s not a whole story. It’s not even a narrative. It’s just little extra scene they slid in to help set the atmosphere. It’s got Peter Hale, Derek Hale, Alan Deaton, and Marin Morrell in a room, talking about history.

Now, this is an AU. Which means the author has the right to change things from canon. This is gives them freedom, but, I believe, gives them responsibility. So, you have to understand, all of the following revelations are not from canon, but from the author’s own mind.

First things first, Peter Hale – still a serial killer and a con artist, though his attempt to murder teenagers in season 4 is reduced to “Peter and Scott fought over Scott’s alpha powers” – reveals that the Hale fire was not the fault of Derek being seduced by Kate, which the audience has believed for eight years. It turns out that there were powerful wards on the house – things never mentioned in canon, things never even hinted at in canon – that would have prevented Kate from approaching the house with ill intent. She couldn’t overcome unless someone let them lapse.

You guessed it! Deaton let them lapse because he was too busy talking to pretty girls in bars. You know those black men – sexually aggressive and irresponsible!

Next, instead of insisting Laura come home from college in New York – a new interesting tidbit we never even heard a whisper – Deaton shipped Derek off to her, depriving the territory (a word that doesn’t exist in canon) of a leader. You see, somehow Deaton was able to convince the authorities to ship an unrelated child across the country without anyone objecting and without actually interacting with Derek, who we know had never met him. Them black men, so lazy! He was so irresponsible that he dumped more Hale children – Brett and Lori – off on Satomi rather than take care of them himself. After all, black men are deadbeats when it comes to children.

(This story could be renamed the Greatest Hits of Anti Black Male Stereotypes.)

It doesn’t stop there. Deaton is accused of neglecting his duties because he chose to focus on Scott rather than Laura, Derek, or Peter. Because he’s their House Elf. His life is not his.

And then, he’s accused of damaging the minds of Isaac, Scott, Stiles, and Allison with his unnecessary ice baths (I’m not sure why the author thinks Isaac’s mind was damaged. Maybe it was because he kicked Derek to the curb and went with an alpha that wouldn’t use him a child soldier.) He also – get this! – knew that the nogitsune was in the tree and knew it would be dangerous for Stiles because of his non-fucking-existent Sparkity-Spark-Spark.

So you see – all the mistakes of white people, from Serial-Killer Petey, to Derek, Lord of Bad Decisions, to the United States Government – they are not actually the mistakes of white people at all. They are actually, 100% the fault of the black man who didn’t kiss enough white ass in canon.

To top off this extravaganza of white supremacy, the author has Peter carve a RUNE OF PENANCE into Deaton’s back. I’m not able to read the author’s mind, so I have no idea whether they meant to call back to the Antebellum South and owners branding their runaway slaves.

Now, this is an AU – which means that canon doesn’t matter. But it also means that the author is 100% responsible for what they put up on the page. And what they put up on the page is hot racist garbage. I want to share it with you because I had to share it with someone.

I can hear people saying – you’re being way too mean. This is fiction! It’s not real. After all, these characters aren’t real, so the author can indulge in any sort of depravity they care to indulge in and no harm, no foul.

I keep forgetting the cardinal rule of fandom –

In fiction you can be as racist as you want to be – in real life, you have to hide it

#teen wolf fandom problems #fandom racism #alan deaton #fanfiction #shameless #big big big time fandom racism

~*~*~

Come collect your toxic middle aged garbage, Scott McCall/Tyler Posey Defense Squad

-

What, and I sincerely do mean this, the fuck. 

I’m just

I’m astounded? I mean Jesus Christ, that’s a lot to unpack. PEW is being especially awful here and it would actually be impressive how much he’s managed to miss the point, if it weren’t so horrifying. 

First of all, given that this work is an Alternate Universe, the author is free to write WHATEVER THEY DAMN WELL PLEASE, regardless of whether we ever “heard a whisper of it” in canon. 

Second of all, since PEW is obsessed with canon, I think all of those actions with Deaton are perfectly reasonable to assume given what we know about him. And what do we know? That he was the Hale Emissary. That the Hales died during that time. That when Derek came back, Deaton made no attempt to work with him, and actively worked against him, with Scott. 

It’s not implying that he’s sexually aggressive or lazy just to have Deaton in a bar talking to women? What the fuck? Your incel is showing, PEW. If anything, it was just a way to open the plot; the author needed the wards to fall, and if Deaton was in control of the wards, then Deaton needed to not be maintaining them. Simple as that, just a decision to move the plot forward. Just because you didn’t like it, doesn’t mean it was bad writing, and it certainly doesn’t mean it was racist. 

Deaton convincing the authorities to ship Derek off the Laura? Um, no. She was his older sister, and as far as we know in canon, his only living relative. He would have been sent to Laura regardless, that how the system works. Once again, that’s not implying that Deaton is lazy. That is literally what would have happened in a real life situation. 

Deaton did make a mistake in canon by neglecting Derek/his pack. We know, IN CANON, that Deaton was pledged to the Hale pack as their Emissary; that means his loyalty does belong to them. We never see him pledge himself in that way to Scott, he never claims he is Scott’s emissary, and in fact, if my memory serves, he does say/imply that he’s not an emissary at all anymore. 

As for damaging the teens: did you forget that Isaac was put in that ice bath specifically to do a spell to access his memories? And you do know memories are stored in the brain? And that Deaton said/heavily implied it could hurt Isaac if they weren’t careful? Yeah, he was very much endangering Isaac, and Allision, Scott, and especially Stiles, since he was a human and therefore guaranteed susceptible to hypothermia. But there is also the fact that they were dead for several hours. Hellooo, brian damage! That is not at all an unfair assessment to make. 

PEW once again shows us just how disgusting he really is. I hope that poor author is getting support from the fandom. 

[sophtopus]

Okay many people have not read Toby’s Long Tweet about Delta Rune

http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sqn3p9 See that URL? It’s the official link. Here is the full transcript copy pasted from the Tweet. I won’t put it under readmore because people tend to scroll past that. Past the break line is Toby’s own words. Deltarune is it’s own world. It’s NOT related to Undertale. This is exactly what he said in point 1 of his post. It’s also something he had worked for 7 years (earliest file was 2012). This game was more difficult to make compared to Undertale. Toby also doesn’t know when he’ll ever finish Deltatune. That’s why he released this demo to share with us. I cannot stress how important it is to be patient with the artist/author and let them do whatever they want. If Toby wants to create something new, LET HIM! Trust the Dog that he’ll make something interesting! Repeat TLDR: Deltarune is NOT Undertale!!! No matter how many similarities they have, they are NOT the same. Insisting that it’s the same will just rob you of enjoyment. It’s all in the first question. Scroll down for the rest of the transcript.

Here are my thoughts on Ch 1 of Deltarune. This should answer some questions.

It's October 4th. The DEMO (first chapter) of my game is supposed to come out on Halloween. Actually it was done a little while ago but I'm waiting for the translation to be finished. I feel like I should address what I think people will think before the game comes out. Of course, if I'm all wrong about this, then I just wasted my time, but... QUESTIONS I PREDICT PEOPLE HAVE 1. "Is this a sequel? What's going on?? I'm scared..." Please don't worry too much about that. Actually, I'm worried if people worry too much about "what it is," they might not be able to properly enjoy it... (laugh) I will say that basically, what you're seeing here is not the world of UNDERTALE. UNDERTALE's world and ending are the same as however you left them. If everyone was happy in your ending, the people in the UNDERTALE world will still be happy. So, please don't worry about those characters, and that world. It will remain untouched. To rephrase that, DELTARUNE's world is a different one. With different characters, that have lived different lives. A whole new story will happen... I don't know what you call this kind of game. It's just a game you can play after you complete UNDERTALE, if you want to. That's all. 2. "I have questions I want to ask about the story..." There's a lot of questions I'd like to answer, too. That's why I have to make the game. Please wait until then. 3. "When will the next chapter come out?" This is a difficult question. When I made the demo of UNDERTALE, I made it to prove to myself that it was possible to make a whole game alone (with some help with the art). Because I was able to make it in a few months, I felt that I had proved that it was possible. However, making the demo of DELTARUNE... took a few years. So, given the length of the rest of the game, and how long I'd be willing to spend on a project (7 years maximum) I think the answer is that it's actually impossible to make this game. Lots of things make this game harder to make than the last time. - The graphics are much more complicated and don't play to my strengths (black and white battle graphics were easy...) - The battle system is much more complicated due to multiple characters (I'll write about this later) - The overworld and other sections are more complicated due to multiple characters - Having multiple main characters is much harder to write especially introducing everyone properly in chapter 1 - The entire town had to be created correctly on the first try to set up properly for the rest of the game And further things outside of those: - Trouble starting tasks/concentrating and general difficulty paying attention - Travelling / other responsibilities like translation/ports - Self-doubt / burnout regarding the creation of the game Essentially it's not possible to make this game as one person (and Temmie). However, it MIGHT be possible to create the game if I'm able to make a team. So I'm going to try making a team. Because I really want to make this. But I may not be able to succeed because I have no experience successfully directing a team and I have no idea who I'm going to work with. Since I haven't started assembling the team yet I have absolutely no estimation of its completion. It could take up to 999 years depending on the efficiency level. By the way, I currently plan to release all of the chapters at once after we complete them. I'm not sure how long that will take. You'll buy all of the chapters at once as one purchase. That'll be the only option. I'm not doing pre-orders because I don't like those. It just seems like the best way not to burn anybody. Price is unknown. It depends on how long the game is, and how much it costs to make... I don't know anything about what consoles, etc. it'll come out for because by the time it comes out we might be on Playstation 14 or something. So... in short, I have no idea. 4. "Is this the game's final design? Will you change anything?" It's possible I could change things. This is basically a demo. I might even change this first chapter before release depending on how development goes. This is really an excuse to talk about the parts I think had issues. THE BATTLE SYSTEM: I think the battle system could be explained better. I had a super duper long explanation of things here but really it boils down to: 1. UT's system is incompatible with multiple party members but I wanted to do it anyway because it's cool 2. I'd like to make it so for pacifist players, characters won't have to "defend" so much Oh. The people who tested the game thought that the TP system and animations were cool so it's not all bad. By the way, did you notice that getting close to bullets makes enemy attacks end faster? It doesn't work for every attack, but... EVERYTHING ELSE: I thought everything else was OK. Actually some parts were kind of lazy, like finding the key pieces, but oh well. The UI had some things that could be changed too. When making a game, there's so much to do you have to draw the line somewhere. That's why I need other people to help me (laugh) Oh, and I have no plans to add more content to the first chapter. 5. "Will there be multiple endings?" No. No matter what you do the ending will be the same. (Honestly most games are like that, but for some reason it feels really oppressive to say here...) I think that's part of the reason why the ACT / FIGHT system feels so vestigial in this one. Oh... I'm just talking about the battle system again... 6. "I found some kind of bug, will you fix it?" Hopefully an e-mail for that exists on the website by now. Or, it would be better if you could tweet it with #deltarunebug . That would really help us and make our lives easier because tweets are easier to ignore than e-mails 7. "Can I be on the team?" I'll ask you first!!! (Total silence) 8. "What's the progress on the rest of the game so far?" 0%!!! Nothing!!! I've done nothing!!! I mean, I've done some songs and written the whole story, but... Since no programming or final art has been done, it's best to just think of it at 0%. 9. "Will you do a Kickstarter?" I still haven't finished that damn Alarm Clock, are you kidding me? There's no way I'm doing a Kickstarter this time. 10. "The game doesn't work" / "I don't like the game" / "Will there be a version for (platform)?" Because it's a free download I'm surrounded by a forcefield that destroys all complaints and platform requests. There might be more platforms for the DEMO but I don't want to make any promises. (At the very least it'd be nice to do something for the people who bought the game on console.) By the way at the time of writing I haven't even rendered a Mac version whatsoever at all. I hope I can release it... (laugh) 11. "Can I buy the soundtrack for Chapter 1?" Yes! You can buy it at [ http://tobyfox.bandcamp.com ] And other forms of distribution will be in the works too. I'm writing this in the past so I don't know what I just said. 12. "Any closing remarks?" (No one asks this, but...) Thanks for playing my game. I hope you liked it. For the past 3 years I've been waking up in the middle of the night unable to go back to sleep because I've been thinking about the scenes that happen in the game. Even though so many details are still hazy, I really want to show you the things I've been thinking about. That's really my only reason for making this game. If I don't show you what I'm thinking, I'll lose my mind. (It was actually a totally selfish motivation...) By the way, I was really worried at first about making this. The expectations for my next work would be really high, so high that I knew that no matter what I did, I felt like people would be underwhelmed. If you played "UNDERTALE," I don't think I can make anything that makes you feel "that way" again. However, it's possible I can make something else. It's just something simple but maybe you'll like it. See you in ?? years... OK? Don't forget.

[alicedrawslesmis]

Art Tag Game!

Haven't done a tag game in ages Ok, let's do this!

Tagged by @pilferingapples about idk a year ago or something... I had this in my drafts :P

1. One Insecurity - Are my drawings too white?? I'm white but also I'm latinamerican so... am I doing a bad thing by drawing europeans all day? Is it TOO WHITE

2. Two fears - That my works will never be as good as my talking about them - To miss every deadline ever

3. Three (Art) Turn-Ons  (wait what does op mean by art? art as praxis or art as technique?????? I'll just just do both)

Technique: - Simple and well chosen color palettes - Expressive tension lines (gimme those diagonals) - Space (bitch gimme those empty spaces)

Praxis: - Dialectics - Art that involves drawing/design/space/the body of the viewer - Art that features local culture but not in a corny eurocentric way (I sense a pattern here)

4. Four Life Fandom/Art Goals - Getting rid of my illuminist way of thinking about art (images don't have to correspond with camera optics in order to be good, brain) - Actually making that Les Mis graphic novel - BIG DRAWINGS. URBAN-SIZED. GIMME BRIDGES TO DRAW ON - Publishing my sketchbooks

5. Five Things I Like Drawing (again I'm gonna assume op meant drawing as technique not as praxis) - Bodies moving - HANDS - Eyes - Flesh (this is sounds morbid but I promise it is just that I like to draw bodies... living bodies I mean... again, not morbid) - Fabrics/Hair

6. Six Weaknesses - Stop Being So Arrogant Alice - How to draw a horizon???? - Too lazy to actively study human anatomy - It Still Looks Like Anime No Matter What I Do - It always looks weird when you flip the image - Stupid foreshortening

7. Seven things I love - I love drawing with charcoal and high-graded graphite, tho I don't post it here  - When people leave comments on my things - Using photoshop - Good Art - Having deep AND interesting conversations with people about art - This force of nature right here:

(Carmen Silva leader of the Hotel Cambridge squatting in São Paulo also leader of my heart)

8. Tag Eight people

@alfredsnightmare @aroacevaljean @enjolfag @oilan @enjoloras this is for art but it could be for fics! who knows! ( @thecandlesticksfromlesmis we never talked but we stan) ( @deboracabral same to you) ( @paraequora-loves-les-mis I can't tag you? but the sentiment is there)

[kokoronopikuseru]

Review: Pixelogue

A little late to post this, but I intend to share details and reflect on the editing of Pixelogue, in hope that it will help editors and organizers who need advice. (If you’re not interested in editing info, just skip to the last section)

Details are in Chronological Order -

# Software:

I designed everything from scratch in AE, with all the stock plugins. I had to relearn everything I used to know about AE; I last used it extensively in Pixelophobia years ago and furthermore, I wasn’t really used to the new CC interface. I had to seek tutorials for every simple effect I wanted to execute. It sure was difficult for me. For english speaking editors, this is probably your main tool if you intend to do simple video animations and graphics.

# Planning: Song Choice

I had intended to use a Korean Indie Track as stated in the collab details page. Sadly, the music really didn’t fit the music. I spent about 3 days rearranging the clips in every permutation I knew. I didn't really manage to find an arrangement that suited the clips. The unfortunate reality for editors is that we are usually at the mercy of the submission clips. I finally chose something Tigres’ described as “Shawn Wasabi-like”. It was a major challenge for my editing since I wasn’t exactly used to creating work that is colourful or cheerful rhythm-wise. I had to have major re-planning if I wanted it to work out.

# Editing: Draft

My process for editing clips always starts from arranging the combos. I used Vegas for this since, well, it IS a video editor, and it is pretty fast in processing clips. For learning purposes, here is the link of my very first draft (https://youtu.be/kRDwXTnxXGw). I think it’s necessary to spend a longer time at this stage, so as to visualize how its gonna turn out. And of course, to ensure that this is the flow of the CV you really wanted. By this stage, you should also have planned out the fillers (as denoted by the empty instances in the draft) and roughly how long your intro and outro will be. 

# Editing: Intro

I didn’t really want to make something too kawaii. But yet, I can’t really escape the colourful imagery I imagined the intro to be. I compromised and made something that alternates between some modern TV visuals and old school TV visuals. 

Modern TV; I was greatly inspired by those colour wipes that vloggers used for their youtube channels. It was one of those common and simple transitions that AE users exploit regularly. I found ways to incorporate it in a radial and a rotating wipe. The font animations were all plugins in AE that I found. I wasn’t gonna edit every alphabet like the previous CVs I made.

Old School TV; I took most of my inspiration from the adjustment knobs on analog TV. I found that it goes well with the subtle static noise in the music track. Hence I employed selection circles, and drew an actual knob (not sure if you guys realised that was what it was supposed to be). I also warp bulge the static background as well as the words, to emulate the concave glass distortion present in analog TVs. 

And in the final burst of images, I made the clips alternate between 16:9 and 4:3, just to show the juxtaposition between modern and old school.

I really hope people notice all these small details. I didn't feel it was impactful enough, but I guess these are probably cool facts for those who are interested.

# Editing: Combos

I always render my CV in a 16:9 resolution, simply because it IS more pleasing to the eye now that computer monitors are no longer square. My preferences have yet to change. However, with regards to the clips, I have read enough indirect feedback that the cropping wasn’t something that most people liked. I took this criticism pretty seriously, and thought it was time for me to hop on the bandwagon, to try the new-age style of CV editing.

I had to put in much more effort to retain a 4:3 combo in a 16:9 visual space, with an additional need to create a secondary background layer. But because of this decision, it gives me more freedom to explore options of panning and perspective movements.

I create a blurred and expanded duplicate of every combo as a background. I thought it was great that I could retain the original colours and give the clips a “floaty field”. No one has done something like this before, so it was instantly cool and hip. It also gives more room and potential to play around with the transitions too. Eg, fading the background before the clip (transition from Tigres to popte). Interestingly, all the backgrounds all have different properties, namely position, scale and degree of gaussian blur. The reason was really because some clips were seizure inducing due to their extensive movements. I thought it would be nice to vary all of them, which adds a unique aesthetic touch to all the combos.

I am pretty new to editing in a 3Dimensional Space and camera tracking. I was intending to do something as simple and fluid like Talentica Neue. Well, I learnt it wasn’t as simple as I thought. I had about 5-6 Parameters of camera movements, and frankly till now, don’t really know what each one does. I highly suggest for editors who wanna try 3Dimensional camera tracking, watch more tutorials and try simple practice projects. Learning how to utilize it properly will extensively improve your editing game.

Oh yeah, remember to use the graph editor for EVERYTHING. Acceleration and Decelerations have too much aesthetic value to miss out on.

# Editing: Outro

Because I have spent so much time on all other parts of the CV, it’s only responsible for me to put in some effort on an outro which I am usually way too lazy to make. Yeah guys, it’s important to make outros too guys. I used the same warping and television static effect from the intro to retain a sense of continuity. It's simple and nice, I liked it.

# Combos; (Warning: Difficult to Stomach) 

I’m gonna be a little too frank about this- the quality of combos I received were lower than what I usually work with (I love my UPSB submissions tho). I guess this is the huge downside of organizing sign-up CVs to an international community that is slowly dying and regressing. It was even harder when most didn’t submit on time. I had only 7 clips by the deadline. I wanna admit that I had moments regretting that I was organizing Pixelogue as a majority-signup CV. Some of the filtered combos either didn’t fit the style of CV (really sorry padrace) or was just bad due to the lack of effort. Mostly bad.

But here’s the heart of the matter, this might really reflect the standard of the international community. 

I’m not sure if I am the only one who feels this way, but I feel that most of the current international CVs can be separated into two groups, the JEB invites, and the rest of us. Don’t get me wrong, I do acknowledge the high standards JEB spinners deliver. But I’m not comfortable with the fact that they don’t submit better materials since their combos are guaranteed to be featured, and mainly because the quality of an international CV is often a 50/50 hit or miss (could be lower). Who can blame them really. Even so, their names are usually enough to make the lineup look great. 

> Pixelation was an all JEB sign up CVs. Pixelarium, Pixelophobia, Pixelography, Pixeholic were invites-only CVs, a mix of international and JEB guys. <

Most of my CVs have a JEB last spinner or a JEB dominant lineup towards the end. (coffeelucky 6th is also guilty of this). Clearly, you can see how much we use japanese invites as a way to boost the “quality” and hype of our projects. Yeah, sucks to admit it, but I am sure these are common sentiments shared with many of us international CV editors for a pretty long time.

Well, its not something I’m really contented with. In fact, I don’t like the way this becomes the norm. 

More recently, around the time I released “Express 12.1.18”, I really wanted to believe in us - the international community veterans, the borderline pen spinning retirees, that we can perform. I didn’t wanna believe that the international community was any inferior. I finally felt ready to edit something solely from our pool of people. I can accept that I don’t have to rely on japanese invitations to superficially enhance the CV. We have enough to make something great ourselves. 

I fondly assert that the international community does NEED this kind of confidence. Otherwise, we will always be second rated. Seen as the lesser beings. Y’all JapEn tiering meme-lords know what I’m talking about. I personally  needed this to prove to myself that it will work out for us even when the scene looks pretty shitty now. And yes, I did feel better after this.

# Conclusion

It didn’t really garner much attention especially when there was a flood of CVs being released around the time it was released. But I do love it a lot. It’s made up of familiar spinners that I cherish, good combos that I’m thankful for, and finally, an editing that drained my whole summer holiday away. Yeah, I do love it a lot. Definitely one of my proudest work.

[raptorofwar]

If they ate a dozen a day, the math is fairly simple; 200 days. But that’s boring, and I’m not here to do boring math.

The image depicted appears to show a box of 2,400 original glazed doughnuts, which according to the Krispy Kreme website contains 190 calories per doughnut. If we assume the average person consumes 2,000 calories per day, a simple back-of-the-notebook calculation gives us a figure of around 10.5 doughnuts per day. Dividing the full 2,400 doughnuts by 10.5 gives us around 228.5 days. Significant figures indicates the actual time is likely a bit higher by a day or two.

What delights me about the numbers Krispy Kreme has provided, however, is the wealth of other data. Let’s look at fat. According to Calorieking twenty to thirty-five percent of your caloric intake should come from fat. Let’s take the lower bound of that first. 20% of 2000 calories is 400 calories, which lowers our daily doughnut consumption to a measly 4 doughnuts per day, meaning it’d take us 600 days to get through the entire box. However, Calorieking also notes that many Americans (look at us fatties) consume over forty percent of fat in our diets, cutting the required time in half to 300 days, closer to our original 228.5 day calculation.

Saturated fat is another matter altogether. Healthline recommends, on a 2,000 calorie diet, 13 grams of saturated fat per day, bringing our daily doughnut consumption down even further to 2.6 doughnuts per day, or a whopping 923 days to consume all these doughnuts. Of course, while this would meet your saturated fat limit, you’d also be chronically malnourished due to a lack of actual caloric intake. So you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Actually, if you didn’t buy the box of 2,400 doughnuts, you wouldn’t really be damned. Anyways.

The American Heart Association recommends no more than 2,300 mg of sodium, and claims the ideal limit is 1,500 mg, giving us 27 and 17.5 doughnuts per day, respectively. This is a large number of doughnuts (citation needed) and you’d likely suffer a significant degree while attempting to metabolize so many. Doughnuts are not known for their sodium capacity (citation needed), so this makes sense. Oh, and this would between 141 and 137 days, respectively.

Mayo Clinic recommends between 225 and 325 g of carbs each day, and again, a quick calculation gives us 10.2 and 14.8 doughnuts per day, for a total of 235 and 162 days.

Less than one gram is too vague for me to work with when it comes to fiber, so let’s move on. Healthline recommends 50 g of sugar per day, which gives us 5 doughnuts per day, or 480 days. However, Healthline also notes the average consumption of sugar is around 77 g per day, which gives us 7.7 doughnuts per day and around 312 days.

You may have noted my decimal places are vague and tend to change with no explanation. I may have noted your mother.

Protein, 3g per. Healthline (again). Couch potatoes get 56 for men and 46 for women, coming out to 18.7 per day for men and 15.3 per day for women, which gives us 128 and 157 days.

And now we’ve reached the bottom of the dietary information page. We’re done.

I said we’re done.

The volume of the human stomach is around 1.5 to 3.5 liters, and grains are passed along around every 2-3 hours. Let’s say we shovel doughnuts down our mouth as fast as possible to digest.

For inexplicable reasons, someone has created this graphic online, which gives us a lovely size estimate for our Krispy Kreme doughnuts:

Calorie count is a bit off what it says online, but with this we can calculate the volume. Unfortunately, I do not remember my calculus well, so I’m going to approximate a lot of shit. Let us assume that the Krispy Kreme doughnut is like a CD except an inch tall (it’s obviously not, but I’m too lazy to figure out how the curvature would be). Volume would then be:

π ((3.5/2)^2 - (1.4/2)^2)*1 = 2.5725 π inches^3 ≈ 0.0420 π liters ≈ 0.132 liters per doughnut

1.5 liters/3 hours = 0.5 liters/hour as our lower bound and 3.5 liters/2 hours = 1.75 liters/hour as our upper bound gives us a rate somewhere between 3.8 and 13.3 doughnuts per hour, giving us between 631.6 and 180.5 hours, coming out to somewhere between 7.5 and 26 days. After this you would most likely be dead.

And finally, let’s step out of the bounds of reality altogether. Let us assume you are nothing more than a mouth, with which to shovel Krispy Kreme doughnuts down.

Unfortunately, I could not find (was unwilling to put the work into finding) rigorous studies on just how much you can shove in your mouth, so I was forced to use Quora. 125 mL becomes 0.125 liters. Assuming you’re shoving doughnuts in at a rate of a mouthful a second, you will consume a bit less than a doughnut a second. If you can somehow keep this up without popping like a balloon, you will finish the entire box in less than 38 minutes.

I’m hungry.

2,400 Krispy Kreme Doughnuts - Perfect for EVERY occasion 

The donut chain created the special ‘Double Hundred Dozen’ as part of its new ‘Occasions’ offering which caters to large scale events and parties. 

[firstpuffin]

The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening remake

-Note: It’s kind of embarrassing to admit but my comments around the visuals of A Link to the Past and Link’s Awakening are straight-up incorrect. The two games did not share the same visual style and I honestly don’t know why I said that; I most definitely knew better. Still, I’m not going to get rid of it because the internet needs more examples of people admitting to be being wrong.

I say a lot that I want to be positive, but it’s really gonna be hard with this one. See, at the latest Nintendo Direct it was announced that they would be releasing a remake of the 26 year old game, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. As it happens I was already considering writing something about this game in a “Games from my Childhood” article, but that would actually have been positive! This one is… well, I’m going to at least try and balance every negative with a positive.

-at least the title screen looks good-

  So where to begin: I won’t cover the story because spoilers but how about some personal background? The game came out a year before I did (ha! bad jokes) and I have no idea when I got my grubby little paws on it, but it was a part of my life genuinely for as long as I can remember, along with the Pokémon games. I never completed it as a child, but my memories of it were so good that I returned to it as an adult and completed it, learning its sad secret.

-hey! according to this it released the same year I did; me getting my years mixed up I guess-

  Link’s Awakening (LA) was originally a pet project made outside of work hours which is why it borrows resources from other games such as the Mario series, but it was eventually released to critical acclaim. The gameplay is much the same as its immediate predecessor A Link to the Past (LttP), but with a number of new items and a unique soundtrack. Visually it is much the same as well, although its original release was black and white for the GameBoy with Link’s Awakening DX adding colour for the GameBoy Colour.

  So let’s start with the visuals as that is most of what we have right now: the original shared its visuals with LttP what with them using the same assets (tools, resources etc) and LttP had a sequel recently that looked really nice. But the upcoming LA remake looks nothing like it; I wouldn’t expect it to but when a defence of the artistic choice is that “it’s an update of the original graphics” (so why not use the assets from the LttP remake?) or that it somehow “reflects the atmosphere of the original” except there’s no reason for it to be any different to, again, the LttP remake. And in response to the “atmosphere”, LA was one of the darker yet in some ways more whimsical games; this new style is childish to the extreme.

  Don’t get me wrong, I love something that is good and childish, but there is a level when it stops being great and starts to feel like they condescend to the player. Bright colours, simple faces, high pitched noises- Oh god the noises!! I’ll expand on the sounds later but I’m still on the visuals. I’ve heard the game described as looking like Claymation, which isn’t wrong, but my immediate thought was that it looked like cheap plastic. And after watching it again and again as I discussed it with a friend, this opinion stuck.

-tell me this doesn’t look like claymation; this isn’t a game, it’s an animated short film-

  You know how shiny and tacky cheap plastic usually looks? Imagine an entire game like that; an entire world like that. Fans of anime may understand what I say next, but there is a large element of “chibi” in this new game. Large head, tiny body. It’s often seen in short 4 minute spin offs of popular series.

-as you can see, chibi is hardly meant to be taken seriously-

-just to hammer things home-

  So shiny plastic, silly chibi art with a soulless expression. Oh yeah, that. Link’s eyes have zero soul behind them. Zero. He’s a freakin’ monster. Have you seen those Funko Pops? You know how empty they look? Some have said it somehow reflects the original game’s art again, but back then they didn’t have the technology to make him look soulless and young me always thought he looked determined; it was really cool.

-determined; dead inside-

Okay, so I said I would try and be fair, and I have shat upon the plasticine toy-box long enough, so here’s what is good visually. The areas are actually really nice. 

Ignoring the nail varnish sheen on everything, things are really detailed. There is an unfortunate trend in games, likely due to technical limitations, to have flat textures. Basically, imagine the difference between a tile or wood panel floor, and a picture of a tile or wood panel floor. But this game looks to have really tried in these areas. The grass looks thick and lush, tiles look like more than a photograph on the floor and even the flat flowers on the ground look decent. Just a shame it all looks like LEGO. Actually, a LEGO Zelda game would be awesome. But this is not that.

  I haven’t explained that very well, it’s an area that I am new at but I will say that clearly a lot of care has gone into the assets and the world. It is not a lazy game in any way.

-don’t tell me those trees and rocks and- well, everything, don’t look like LEGO-

Next I’m going to talk about the sound. First of all, I’m convinced that they have artificially increased the pitch of Link’s voice so it is painfully sharp to the ears. I’ll admit, I have an unusual sensitivity to lights and sound and thus I prefer darker colours and quieter sounds; I avoid clubs like the plague and not just because I’ll likely catch it there. So maybe, just maybe, I’m noticing something that won’t be a problem for most, and is just unfortunate for me. And let’s ignore that it doesn’t match the darker tone of the game.

  And the music? Also quite high pitched. And super cheery. It doesn’t have either the dreamlike or dark tones that could be expected (and just thinking of how it could be dreamlike gives me shivers; it could be so good) but is instead inanely cheery. In fact, I hope they sped everything up for the trailer and the pitch is just an unfortunate side-effect.

  On the plus side, the trailer opens with a cool cinematic and I swear the music changes from a nice, cheerful rendition (I don’t dislike cheerful in-and-of-itself) of the Zelda main theme to the death squeals of various instruments that I mentioned before. On top of that, it ends on a really nice vocal version of the LA theme, Ballad of the Wind Fish. If the trailer had been the cinematic and that closing song alone then I would be beyond excited about the remake. Thank heaven it wasn’t, I’m not sure my love of the series could survive such a plummeting disappointment.

-and here’s the actual trailer for your perusal- 

So I’ll finish here. I was originally very pleased, excited even that they had decided to remake what was a favourite, underrated and apparently forgotten game, but I kept my expectations low because I knew what to expect from these companies. I thought I did anyway. I was still disappointed. I thought I had prepared for the worst. Still, at least it gave me something to write about.

  But, the game has clearly had a lot of work put into it and gameplay-wise it actually looks to flow really well so I’m sure it controls like a treat. But the visuals and music are too big of a deal for me to let slide; if it keeps up like this then it could literally be painful for me to play. Still, games do change a lot from the initial trailer to its release and I even put forth an idea of why the sound may hurt me so much here. Maybe the final game will be a lot better. Unfortunately, the things I want to be done in games and such rarely are, and I am often alone in my complaints.

And finally, yes I am aware that the famous and incredibly popular Wind Waker entry in the series also had similar complaints and became, as I said, incredibly popular. I wasn’t a part of that crowd, I was too young and honestly, Link’s Awakening was the only Zelda game I had actually played at that time. 

[thebookishgoddess]

#Project14Lists 2018: Bookish Ships

My first post for the #Project14Lists bookish event is a list of my bookish ships! I know, controversial. Not everyone ships the canon couple, or ships that one character with anyone at all. Nevertheless, we are all here to express our love for books and the couples that our favorite authors have written, not to throw shade or spill the tea on each other’s ships. We are all trash for something, and we must respect each other’s trash (if that makes any sense, haha!)

For today’s list, I will be putting up twelve of my favorite bookish ships and my favorite fanart of them (with credits to the brilliant artists, of course!). There are waaaay too many ships that I love, if I’m being realistic here. But I got lazy after the 12th graphic I had to edit up for this. I’ll be dabbling on my favorite quotes/scenes of the ships and a little reaction to said quote or scene.

Let the fangirling commence!

Cover photo credit: johannathemad

1. Thomas Creswell & Audrey Wadsworth from the Stalking Jack the Ripper series by Kerri Maniscalco

Favorite Quote/Scene: “You are not mine to take.” He brushed his lips against mine. Softly, so softly I might have imagined them there. My eyes fluttered shut. He could persuade me to build a steamship to the moon when he kissed me. We could orbit the stars together. “You are yours to give.” --Hunting Prince Dracula

Are you bloody kidding me with that? Honestly, Thomas and Audrey is on the top ten of my favorite ships of all time simply because of that scene alone. This scene shows how much Thomas values Audrey as his equal and partner despite all the mayhem they went through. Also because Thomas Cresswell is every girl’s #bookboyfriendgoals because he’s suave af. I WILL SHIP IT TO MY GRAVE.

Art by phantomrin

2. Elias Veturius & Laia of Serra from the Ember Quartet by Sabaa Tahir

Favorite Quote/Scene: Laia is curled in a ball on the other, one hand on her armlet, fast asleep. 

"You are my temple", I murmur as I kneel beside her. "You are my priest. You are my prayer. You are my release." --A Torch Against the Night

SHUT THE FRONT DOOR. Do men like Elias Veturius even exist in the 21st Century? Hells no. Well, maybe, but the probability of one existing is about 1 to a million, so there’s that. I have never been so moved by such a simple statement, especially since that mantra is supposed to be Elias’s mantra to like, what was it? His honor in fighting for the Empire? But when he said that to Laia, it’s the same level of honor and I’m just so emotional about that?? What even?? How dare Sabaa?? 

Art by gabriella.bujdoso

11. Draco Malfoy & Astoria Greengrass from the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling

Favorite Quote/Scene: DRACO: Which is why you need this [time-turner]. I have been holding onto it, barely resisting using it, even though I would sell my soul for another minute with Astoria.

DRACO: You [speaking to his son, Scorpius] know what I loved most about your mother [Astoria]? She could always help me find light in the darkness. She made the world — my world, anyway — less — what was the word you used — “murky.”  

--Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

CAN WE JUST TALK ABOUT DRACO MALFOY FOR A HOT MINUTE? This man, who firmly believes himself hopeless soon after the Battle of Hogwarts ended, gets the happiest gift of all by having some girl named Astoria Greengrass see the good in him and love him for who he is. If that isn’t the best trope in a ship, I don’t know what is! We know nothing about Astoria other than the fact that she’s some obscure sister of yet another obscure classmate of Draco’s named Daphne. And yet, she seemed one of the most integral characters to me in Cursed Child when Draco said that he resisted using the time-turner to see his dead wife. 

Let’s not forget how when Scorpius time-traveled to a VoldemortWins!AU that Draco still ends up with Astoria. I think that’s what so beautiful about Draco and Astoria. They’re such a minor couple in the background of Hinny and Romione, but they carry so much history we’ve yet to know thanks to their darling cinnamon roll of a son, Scorpius. Anyone who truly knows me is already knowledgeable of the fact that I cry over this ship on a daily basis. And I’m sorry again that I had to cry and make one heck of a long description for this ship because they’re my ultimate fave *ugly sobs*.

Art by blvnk-art

4. Cress Darnell & Carswell Thorne from The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer

Favorite Quote/Scene:

“Captain?“ “Cress.“ She couldn’t not say it, although she realized he was right. It was sort of scary. Much scarier than it had been the first time she’d told him, out in the desert. It was different now. It was real. "I’m in love with you.” He chuckled. “I should hope so, after all that.” He leaned forward and pressed a kiss against her temple. “And I love you too.” --Winter

FIRST OF ALL, WHAT THE ACTUAL FORK I AM SCREECHING OVER THAT. That scene was probably one of the most memorable scenes I’ve read in the last installment of the Lunar Chronicles. Forget how Levana died and all was well. I cannot help but forget this very scene that sets every other couple in the series apart because of how well-written and developed these two were together. Right now, I am super tempted to re-read the Lunar Chronicles, just for the heck of rereading Cresswell (the ship name) all over again. 

Art by vvivaa

5. Tedros & Agatha from The School for Good and Evil series by Soman Chainani

Favorite Quote/Scene: “But you are my queen. No one but you. And I like seeing you wear it. Because as long as you do, I know you still love me. And given our history of miscommunication, physical cues are helpful.” --The Last Ever After

I absolutely adore Tedros and Agatha. I have been rooting for them since day one of this series and I will never stop (even if Soman highkey tore them apart in Quests for Glory, for shame). They’re probably the most realistic couple to me, if there was a better word for it? Miscommunication definitely happens a lot between these two because Tedros can be pretty dense sometimes and Agatha can be quite arrogant. But I always love how they come together in the end to work it out because that’s what most couples do--they fight, but they don’t lose sight of what’s really important to them. Tedros and Agatha physically embodies those kind of relationships and I am absolutely here for it. Soman needs to stop hurting me after Quests for Glory though because Tedros and Agatha being apart up until Crystal of Time physically hurts me askhjsfkhja.

Art by thevioleteuphonia

6. Nina Zenik & Matthias Helvar from the Six of Crows duology by Leigh Bardugo

Favorite Quote/Scene:

“I am grateful you're alive", he said. "I am grateful that you're beside me. I am grateful that you're eating." 

She rested her head on his shoulder. 

"You're better than waffles, Matthias Helvar." 

A small smile curled the Fjerdan's lips. 

"Let's not say things we don't mean, my love.” --Crooked Kingdom

I AM STILL HIGHKEY MAD FOR WHAT LEIGH DID TO THIS SHIP. I won’t say more, but I will say that this is the most painful ship to have ever sailed and I will never get over it. But also the sweetest and well-crafted because of how much these two characters developed over the course of two books. Granted, Nina and Matthias had their history together before the Dregs, but even without it, Leigh wrote them in a way that makes you believe they really are meant for each other in the end despite all adversity. I’m happy Nina is likely going to get a female love interest in Leigh’s installment on Prince Nikolai’s story, though her being with Matthias will always have a special place in my heart.

Art by nilaffle

7. Lira & Elian Midas from To Kill A Kingdom by Alexandra Christo

Favorite Scene/Quote:

“If you get shot,” Lira says, “I’m going to treat you like you’re incapable of doing the simplest tasks.” 

She cradles her arms around her knees to keep out the cold. 

“See how you like it when I hold out my arm to help you walk, even though you’re not shot in the leg.” 

“I’d be flattered,” I say, “that you would look for an excuse just to hold my hand.” 

“Perhaps I’m just looking for an excuse to shoot you.” --To Kill a Kingdom

I love a good “do I want to kill you or kiss you, it’s interchangeable” trope between couples, and when it comes to Lira and Elian, they pretty much seal the deal on that kind. Lira, the princess siren, is pretty much a cray murderer that takes people’s hearts and Elian is a prince-pirate that’s set to destroy her and kill her for good. I mean, it can’t get any more angst and interesting than that. The way they slowly develop in this standalone is very intriguing because not a lot of authors can pull off a realistic romance fantasy the way Alexandra Christo did. I just absolutely love Lira and Elian, their funny banters and their angst. They’re the kind of ship I would sail forever, really.

Art by silketara

8. Ron Weasley & Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling

There was a clatter as the basilisk fangs cascaded out of Hermione's arms. Running at Ron, she flung them around his neck and kissed him full on the mouth. Ron threw away the fangs and broomstick he was holding and responded with such enthusiasm that he lifted Hermione off her feet. --Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

CONTROVERSY. But seriously, I absolutely adore and love Ron and Hermione together because of their balance as a couple. There are times where Ron will be street smart and there are times (but most of the time) where Hermione will be book smart. Plus, I definitely think they need each other at times to get off their own high horses because we all know Hermione can be a wee bit intense and Ron can be a wee bit ignorant, but that’s the beauty of them balancing each other out. And that particular favorite scene I just showed proved just how far their relationship as more than friends have come. I practically squealed the first time I read their first kiss scene!

Plus, have you seen them in Cursed Child? I know hardly anyone considers it canon, but adult Ron and Hermione are the cutest ship to squeal at in that book--which seems to be one of the very few good things that book had ever produced. 

Art by johannathemad

9. Elain Archeron & Lucien Vanserra from the A Court of Thorns and Roses series by Sarah J. Maas

Favorite Scene/Quote: Lucien’s hands slackened at his sides. His voice broke as he whispered to Elain, “You’re my mate.” --A Court of Mist and Fury

Here we go, y’all. Another controversial ship. Let me just say that I want Elain to be happy, and whether it’s with Azriel or Lucien or by herself, I’m totally down for that. I just simply love the idea of Elain and Lucien together because of how actual smol beans they both are. Elain, our sweet flower girl and Seer with Lucien, our soft and loyal Fae--I mean, honestly. If I’m weak for ships that want to kill each other, I’m also weak for ships that have the softest hearts. I think they both have their own struggles and I definitely think they’ll grow from those struggles together. 

We all know what happened in ACOFAS and how Elain pretty much snubbed Lucien, but I still have high hopes for them. Maas has a plethora of novels coming out for the minor characters of the ACOTAR series, and I’m betting Elain and Lucien will get their moment in one of those novels. I haven’t lost hope yet! I mean, I bought magnetic bookmarks of these two, so it’s pretty clear I want these two to be endgame, haha!

Art by embaileyart

10. Nesta Archeron & Cassian from the A Court of Thorns and Roses series by Sarah J. Maas

Favorite Quote/Scene: Cassian grunted in pain, but lifted his bloodied hands - to cup her face. “I have no regrets in my life but this.” His voice shook with every word. “That we did not have time. That I did not have time with you, Nesta.”

She didn’t stop him as he leaned up and kissed her - lightly. As much as he could manage. --A Court of Wings and Ruin

I think the whole, if not all, of the ACOTAR fandom can agree that Nesta and Cassian are endgame through and through. Judging by that intense moment alone as per the scene presented above, I can pretty much say that while they both have a long way to go, the foundation has already been built from there. I mean, come on, people! They were willing to get killed by the King of Hybern if it meant protecting each other. If that isn’t squeal-fangirl factor trying to protect each other from some evil war lord, I don’t know what is!

Art by meabhd

11. America Singer & Maxon Schreave from The Selection series by Kiera Cass

Favorite Quote/Scene: “Break my heart. Break it a thousand times if you like. It was only ever yours to break anyway.” --The One

My high school fangirlish heart is exploding with memories of how much I loved America and Maxon back then, and I still do! This single sentence above said by Maxon says so much about how far he and America have come together through the adversities faced during the Selection and the rebellions that came with it from the people of Illea. Their love story is definitely one for the ages. While it’s your typical poor girl marries rich prince story, they’re definitely worth the remarkable development they’ve have over the course of three beautiful books.

Art by marimari999

12. Arin & Kestrel from the The Winner’s Curse trilogy by Marie Rutkoski

Favorite Quote/Scene: She turned to look at him, and he was already looking at her. 

“I’m going to miss you when I wake up,” she whispered, because she realized that she must have fallen asleep under the sun. Arin was too real for her imagination. He was a dream.

“Don’t wake up,” he said. --The Winner’s Crime

I’m in slight tears because I still remember this scene in the second book. The scene wasn’t actually real, but a dream that Kestrel had after months of being separated from Arin by some messed up duty to her country. Y’all have no idea the struggle these two had before they finally got their happily ever after (they did, just a little heads up for any hopefuls wanting to read the trilogy). This scene definitely gave me a sense of the impending tragedy of them being together (and yes, there’s also a forbidden love trope, sign me tf up, amiright), but it was a momentary bliss to everything that’s been happening during the course of when that scene happened. I absolutely adore Kestrel and Arin, and I’m so mad very few people have read of them or the series ahhhh.

Art by taylordraws

Phew! That was a lot of ships and hunting down for their quotes. Admittedly, I had some trouble with looking for scenes/quotes and that’s actually a perfect opportunity for me to start bookmarking my favorite parts of a book.

Aside from the struggles, though, I’d love to hear some of your favorite bookish ships, whether we ship the same thing or not. It’s always interesting to hear someone else’s point of view of ships, especially ones where our ships contradict. Feel free to sound off in the comments below!

[imadeletingmysocials]

Here’s my little Fallout New Vegas modding guide

Modding new vegas is a bit more tricky than some other stuff because it recquires some very specific out of date stuff and manual handling sometimes. Remind yourself that sometimes if a mod isn’t 100% working it’s because the rar file came with a loose file you need to specifically put in the folders rather than just using a mod manager to load it.

Important things to install:

FOMM - I learned the hard way that NMM although more accessible is very weak, FOMM is strong and overwrites permissions, actually being able to install mods properly, sometimes NMM won’t even install textures because it didn’t get all of the permissions or something.

NVSE - It’s a way to extend the limited engine of New Vegas, it is an exe file and loader that opens New Vegas, if you have it extracted to your Data folder you’ll have FOMM have a “launch NVSE” in it. You’ll need this to practically run anything. 

Mod Configuration Menu - Neccessary to configure many mods, sometimes other mods overlap with this by trying to insert their own version of MCM, just fix that by re-activating this mod in the end.

Anything else will probably be recommended by Nexus before you download something.

Mods I recommend:

Solid Project - Do you like Fallout 4′s little tweaks but like a sane person know it’s a badly designed and paced game? Well There’s something called “Solid Project” that does a lot more than that, it adds a few Fallout 4 mechanics but most importantly goes well with “enhanced camera” and gives you animations of going out to open doors, climb ladders and pick up things with your hands! 

It also has a super useful weapon wheel (that you activate with mouse3) that you equip each slot with R and a quick inventory you can leave with K, the little item menu reminds me of Tomb Raider for PS1. Oh and each special item you pick up spins around in 3D, there’s a lot more too like the dynamic quest markers from Fallout 4 but unlike Fallout 4 you cannot un-mark a quest so you’ll have to get a empty quest mod called “The Quest” in case you don’t want “300meters afar” always on your screen.

 All it’s missing is the quick menu from Fallout 4 which is found seperate but is a must-have to anyone wanting some more fast gameplay: Fallout 4 Quicklook

Roleplayers Alternative Start - Start in a shed where you can customize your character a little more quicker and even give them some backstory that can give some extra stats. It might be a bit weird because the pacing of New Vegas is specifically done in such a way that makes you start in Doc Mitchell for your own good, it might put you somewhere where you are underleveled but if that bugs you, you can practically start in the same place rather than randomly.

FOOK - The only overhaul mod I seem to use fully, it changes the little things in games such as making items change their stats, it’s not too unfair, the changes are fairly little and it’s usually stuff like “why does this item not do this” and this game does it, it also fixes a lot of bugs, adds a few items and changes the texture for the stimpack.

As far as overhaul mods go, this one’s fairly simple and runs well with all of the other mods I ran, unlike other overhaul mods where you can only run them alone for a seperate playthrough. It’s important to note that this overhaul mod comes in 2 files, you need the esm file and the data file, run both or else you’ll have missing textures and a lot of issues.

Project NEVADA - The most recommended overhaul one, keep in mind that after installing you have to manually activate the esm files. In terms of immersion it gives you that cool visor vision that might annoying for many, and it does kind of make the HUD stuff stuck in place which nullifies aHub a little bit (talk about later), but it does improve stuff like FPS mechanics like a grenade button (G). 

I dissagree with the re-balance esm file though so I recommend disabling it since I’m too used to everything New Vegas. If you add this mod and realistic headshots, the slowmo function where you press C to slow down time gets REALLY fun and challenging, changes the whole game into a more strategic FPS game rather than a RPG one.

NVEC Complete - Considering how finnicky New Vegas is sometimes when it comes to adding a lot of mods without them clashing and overloading the engine, NVEC Complete is a easy way to just bundle everything toghether. It’s a exe file that installs a compilation of some of the best user-made mods that you can turn off in the mod configuration menu. There is a lot to cover here but it includes most famous quest mods.

Blind - Wanna make New Vegas look like more of an RPG? How about numbers popping out showcasing how much damage you make? If some specific numbers coming out of specific places annoy you, you can just disable them in the MCM. I don’t like the “heal” effects, I just want the damage numbers on enemies, I never knew my fists only did 1 HP of damage towards radscorpions before this.

Textures and other aesthetics:

NMCs_Texture_Pack - Honestly this has probably been used by about everyone, it is THE texture pack everyone uses, comes in 3 big 1gb files, takes a while to load them in FOMM but they do make everything look nice.

Wasteland Flora Overhaul - Based on an actual study of the flora of Vegas, and considering New Vegas is nuclear missile hit free, it’s realistic that New Vegas would actually look like this. Also the textures are very nice and I really like the plants.

A Familiar Friend - Pip-Boy 2500 - This really makes the pip boy more interesting and it makes me feel more connected to the classic Fallouts, in fact a lot of the replacements or additions I have in textures is making the game feel like more of a original Fallout and that Fallout 3 never happened, stuff like:  Classic Adobe Buildings is great because it’s more true to the lore.

Fonts:

Fallout Classic Fonts  To spice up your new experience you may want a new font because Fallout’s New Vegas font is kind of ugly after a while, I use “Fallout Classic fonts”, keep in mind that you do have to follow extra instructions on how to set a new font, you need to go to Fallout.ini in your “my games” folder and edit the [Fonts]. Usually there’s a text file to help this process, also I’m pretty sure most font mods can only be loaded through FMM. 

HUD:

aHud is a must (Or it’s upgraded counterpart if you want more:  One HUD - oHUD that includes more features), you can organize your hud that way, you can get some custom huds, the one I use is cellHUD which is a bit finnicky because one of the versions of that HUD is the main file needed for the second version (install the non-icon version then icon if you want the icon version).

Also I’m pretty sure (or at least mine) custom HUDS do not erase text such as “HP” or “AP”,  you'll need to edit  \Steam\steamapps\common\Fallout New Vegas\Data\Textures\Interface\interfaceshared0.dds ...A dds file is something you can edit like an image. Nevermind you will never get the HP text out of your hud apparently? 

Animations:

Get Enhanced Camera, seriously, it’s very cute to always look down and see your body, it sometimes clashes with other animations but just keep your head up if you are doing common FPS things like the pick up animation from Solid Project.

I use Weapon Animation Replacers - Enhanced Camera compatibility pack, it makes me feel as if I’m in the game or something.  (The Mod kind of is broken combined with other mods that use animations) It’s not everyone’s cup of tea in FPS games because the weapon is realistically low and cannot be seen all the time unless you are aiming down it’s scopes. Be sure to copy  NVSE_EhancedCamera.ini in the rare towards the NVSE plugins folder in New Vegas’s data and you won’t have a wonky body with no arms. If anything follow the good instructions on their page.

ENB:

If you got a PC that can run Nier Automata in it’s lowest settings chances are you have a PC that can run a pretty neatly modded beautiful New Vegas that adds modarn things like better shadowing, a fancy depth of field. I recommend installing an ENB for last because some say that it might cause issues while you are configuring mods and cause them all to crash? 

So your ENB only starts working when you see in the corner your graphic card information at the start, to be able to do this you gotta follow instructions very clearly (usually each ENB you get has it’s own easy to follow install instructions), and be sure to get d3d9.dll from the latest version: enbseries_falloutnv_v0322, or else your ENB won’t work.

Add to enblocal: in my case it is “VideoMemorySizeMb=8192″ (the ENBlocal should be the ENB pack you installed from Nexus or something, unless it won’t have this option), you can put your graphic card ram in there or just put 0 if you want to skip this entirely?

Important: Go into the New Vegas Launcher and turn off anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, HDR needs to be checked, go into Advanced and turn off Depth of Field, Water Displacement off, you need to do this because the ENB reprograms this things, now when you use the new vegas launcher your fallout.ini file becomes read only again, so do the fallout.ini stuff (like the fonts). 

You’ll know you’ve hit your limit when certain mods just do not respond anymore. The most obvious sign would be lack of custom HUD if you are using one. Considering New Vegas loads fairly fast, it shouldn’t be that painful to test each mod individually. 

Anyways I got kind of lazy with this post so I’m just going to show a list of my mods since the rest is fairly obvious:

Some Stuff I had in NMM which might be the reason why they’re not 100% working unlike the ones I put in FOMM. 

[cherrypixelbun]

RAMBLE: Booting a portable DOS collection, the pros and cons

Quite a while ago I posted screenshots of a bootable FreeDOS USB stick that I have with a collection of games installed. Like I mentioned in my initial Twitter post about it, I was inspired to do it by Lazy Game Reviews, who made a video where he had a full install on a high-end PC. After that I had an idea. “What if I could run my DOS games from anywhere, not just on a single PC." I got a USB stick, and went to work finding a portable solution.

What I did was not a full installation of FreeDOS. Instead I used a program called Rufus for making bootable USB sticks. Normally you’re supposed to give it the ISO of whatever OS you wish to boot but it gives you MS-DOS and FreeDOS as built in options. While I could have gone all in with actual MS-DOS, FreeDOS has better compatibility with modern hardware. FreeDOS also has a USB installer available on their website, but it’s just that. An installer for putting the operating system onto a hard drive. When installed via Rufus, you don’t get the full packages that you can download from the FreeDOS website. Instead you get just the kernel, the very bare essential thing needed to boot the operating system. While this works good enough for a lot of games, quite a few of them require extra memory of some kind. DOS on it’s own only uses 640k of RAM, even if you have 4GB on your system. After manually creating and editing my own CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT (the two important system settings files), all my DOS stick boots at startup is HIMEMX (For that extended memory), CuteMouse (A wonderful generic mouse driver), and 4DOS (An enhanced command line interface). In retrospect I probably could have extracted a full setup from a virtual machine, but what I have now is functional. This so far works with just about everything I’ve thrown at it, aside from games with CPU speed issues, but this was a problem even when DOS was relevant and not a modern incompatibility.

I’ve tested this USB stick on a handful of computer setups to see how much compatibility varied. The first was my personal desktop. It’s got an AMD FX-4350, an Nvidia 750Ti, and 8GB of RAM. The second was my HP Spectre x360 laptop. The third was a salvaged embedded all-in-one PC that was originally part of a fancy restaurant cash register. It has an Intel Celeron 420, no GPU, and 2GB of RAM. I use it pretty much as a DOS gaming machine with Xubuntu on the hard drive for the pitiful amount of Linux and Windows games (via Wine) that it could run as well as downloading/moving games without having to use my main desktop. Each computer booted into DOS just fine.

First, I should address the issues that were present among all three computers. The first and what is probably a dealbreaker for a lot of people. The sound, or lack thereof. While modern video displays are just as capable of running FreeDOS as ones from decades ago, none of the sound devices in any of the computers I tried had compatible drivers. The only sound I could get was from the “PC Speaker”. A simple device that can play simple square-wave tones and not much else. Sure a clever developer could get some decent sound effects and music but for the most part all you get from it are beeps and boops. Back in the day this was an actual loudspeaker in IBM compatible PCs, but most beepers these days are tiny piezoelectric beepers. While it still works, it doesn’t produce as good of sound quality. The DSS MP3 player was impressive in DOSBox, but on my home computer you had to really try and pick out the music as the poor little buzzer struggled to play pretty much anything from the new wave pop of XTC to the heavy metal of Aria. There is the OPL2LPT that I could plug into the all-in-one for some FM synth music but it’s expensive and would only be used on one machine. I don’t mind the beeping however, I’d rather have that rather than no sound at all.

Video is a better story, but still one with caveats. The first thing to note is that newer Nvidia cards don’t seem to play too well with CGA and EGA graphical modes. While the HP laptop and the all-in-one had no issue displaying those outdated visual standards, my 750ti gave everything a green tint. Some text modes, like when trying to play PC-Man or Paratrooper had invisible text. LGR also ran into this issue in his video so it is something with Nvidia GPUs. While disappointing, I can’t really fault Nvidia for not playing well with graphics modes that aren’t used by modern computers. This second quirk is more of a nitpick than anything serious. This “problem” is the aspect ratio. While you can set most monitors and TVs to correct aspect ratios, this could potentially cause issues with the more “unusual��� video modes. I wouldn’t know firsthand with DOS, but I usually handle aspect ratios on the driver-side of things because my monitor can be weird about some resolutions even when using Windows 7. Of course DOS doesn’t do this in software, so whatever you’re running gets stretched to the aspect ratio of the display. It’s a pet peeve of mine to see 4:3 stretched but it’s not a dealbreaker. If you’re lucky, some 3D games like Car & Driver let you adjust the aspect ratio or set a custom resolution.

So putting aside those limitations, what can you play on this USB stick? Here’s a list of the things I’ve got on here and run with no issue:

Doom I & II

The Oregon Trail 2nd Edition

Silpheed

Super Street Fighter II

Retro City Rampage 486

Sim City 2000

Arkanoid 1&2

Jazz Jackrabbit

Paku Paku

Rise of the Triad

Shadow President

Ancient Domains of Mystery (The free version, which still gets updated but lacks features from the paid release. Said paid release only supports modern PCs AFAIK)

Tales of Middle Earth (2.0, Maj’Eyal is only for modern PCs)

Golden Axe

PC-Man

Paratrooper

Alley Cat

robotloveskitten

Catacomb 3D (original)

Softdisk Catacomb Trilogy

ChampProgramming games

Wolfenstein 3D

Duke Nukem 3D

A lot of much older DOS games have their speed tied to the CPU so are completely unplayable on modern PCs, hence why it’s mostly 90′s games on there. Your mileage still varies, but it’s nowhere as much of a crapshoot as trying to play something from 1983. Overall, I’m happy with the results. It boots fast and without having to run another OS underneath like DOSBox means that I don’t have to worry about a game struggling on my new space age machines. I recommend anyone who has a spare USB stick try the same thing. It’s easy, doesn’t take up much space on the stick, and probably will run on your machine just fine.

[ghostboy-gamedev]

Learn Log #3 - GUI

This week I studied various elements of Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) including text, logos, buttons and cursors. For practice, I made a mock-up of a fantasy RPG menu which turned out alright. Apologies for the late post. I was a bit busy this past week. Hopefully this doesn’t cause a delay in next week’s post but we’ll have to wait and see!

Text and Font

To practice my font making skills, this week, I tried to make readable fonts in the smallest sizing possible. My reasoning behind this is letters might be read in large passages of text, so a smaller size will likely be required – especially for small menu spaces such as inventories.

Above was my first attempt which used 3x4 pixel letters. While many of the characters were recognisable, a good number were not. The ‘M’ and ‘W’ were utterly unreadable, and some of the characters were difficult to read, like ‘S’ and ‘X’. I decided to move up to a 4x5 size.

With this slightly larger size, I attempted to make both uppercase and lower case letters, most of which worked pretty well. While most characters such as the ‘S’, ‘E’, ‘3’, ‘Z’ and so forth benefited from the extra pixel in the Y-axis – characters were still needed an extra pixel along the X-axis. Characters such as ‘M’ and ‘W’ were still basically unreadable, and characters such as ‘T’ and ‘I’ were difficult to align along the even number of pixels. To fix this, I moved up to 5x5.

Finally! I have successful ‘M’s and ‘W’s! From this test, I really think that there are a few principals for creating nice fonts. 1) If you know or unsure about if the letters ‘M’ and ‘W’ are involved then make the canvas size for each letter at least 5 pixels wide. The same can go for characters like ‘S’ with regards to height. 2) Make the canvas size an odd number along the X-axis to better align specific letters.

With this last font set, I was also able to size the canvas for different types of characters differently. Capital letters occupied the full 5x5 canvas, lowercase letters occupied a 3x4 canvas (except for the ‘M’ and ‘W’ which had to be 5x4), and numbers and symbols filled a 3x5 canvas. I did this so readers could better distinguish between uppercase and lowercase letters, and similar characters like ‘O’ and ‘0’. I’ll have to see what it’s like an actual game later, but I think it’ll be a pretty useful trick.

I do think I will be able to make larger fonts than this and size them down in the Unity engine. Even if this is the case, I think this worked pretty well as practice within tricky boundaries.

 Logos

I think logos and titles are pretty crucial to a game. They plaster the cover and main menu of the screen, and I’m sure we can all think of a few memorable logos we’ve seen in games. So, now that I’d practised making text I wanted to make a banner logo for my Itch.io page. The first thing I did was a little sketching on paper before converting it to a small pixel art concept, as shown below.

The recommended banner size for Itchi.io is about 900px wide. I was not going to start here, so I decided to do my rough draft at 45x26 and detail it as I scale up. I made this draft by implementing the concepts I really wanted first and building around that. I knew I wanted to include the ‘S’ wrapped around the ‘T’, so I started there and worked my way through the logo. I also wanted to include a little ghost, so I left a space for it in the bottom left corner. Next, I wanted to add some detail and hollow out the letters, so they were white with a black outline. This is useful as it means the letters are both white and black, allowing the logo to be read on dark and light backgrounds.

To add the detail, I scaled up the previous logo by 400%. This allowed me to round out the edges and create a nice ‘blocky-but-smooth’ look. I also adjusted the ‘G’, ‘T’ and ‘S’. The original ‘S’ and ‘T’ combo made the ‘S’ seem a little bit strange, but this new version was a lot better. With the hollowed out ‘G’ I made it seem like it was beneath the ‘H’ which I thought was a nice effect. I left one of the ends of the ‘Y’ very blocky to make it seem like it had been interrupted by the T. At this point the logo was 180x104, so I scaled it up by 500% to reach 900x520 before adding more detail.

If someone were to ask me, ‘Hey, should I make a 900x520 pixel art logo dealing round edges and circles?’ I would slap them. In fact, I’ve slapped myself because I did precisely this, and it took ages. At smaller sizes, circles can easily be adjusted, viewed, or manipulated to trick the viewer into thinking they are looking at a round edge. When you need to make 4 circles, the largest being 220x220 this becomes insanely difficult. Looking back on this issue I definitely should have used anti-aliasing - I completely forgot about it if I’m honest. The ‘O’s didn’t even come out looking that great. They look quite boxy – definitely should have used anti-aliasing. I have regrets.

Luckily the other letters turned out much better. I did adjust the ‘Y’ also as previously the logo read ‘Ghosty Boy’ rather than ‘Ghost Boy’. This did make the canvas 840x520, but I don’t think it’ll be a noticeable change. I’m pretty happy with it, especially after all the time it took. I may revisit the logo at another time (especially to fix up those ‘O’s).

Above is the final logo, I added the pattern used in my profile picture (slightly desaturated to make it easy on the eyes) to the insides of the letters and called it a day (or 3 days. I hate the letter ‘O’).

 Buttons

So, we’ve got our game’s font and title, what we need now are some buttons for interacting with the menus. To practice making button sprites, I decided to make link buttons for social media sites. I started by making the designs of the buttons, as shown below.

I started with small, white 9x9 designs of each social media sites’ logo on a background of their associated colour. I wanted the buttons to be small (to be put on the sidebar of a website) and completely circular. The Itch.io logo could not fit onto the small size, so I made a rough-looking videogame controller instead.

I then expanded these designs into a larger 13x13 circle which I would later turn into the button. Not much happened in this step but this.

And the buttons were done! I shifted the logos of each button upwards before adding a shadow and highlight line on the bottom. Buttons require some sense of depth or separation from the background to show that they can be interacted with. This is really all that’s needed, but more detail can be added to make the button look more appealing.

I added a shadow around the back of the buttons to emphasise the edges of the buttons, separating them from background. I then added some more detail to the highlight to make the button seem shiny and draw attention to it. By alternating between highlights and normal tones, the button appears metallic. Finally, I changed the white logos to a light yellow so the white didn’t seem too bright.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how the buttons look. The colours on the Itch.io button are a bit desaturated which conflicts with the metallic look. This is due to the colours of the actual logo being quite desaturated. If I were to return to it, I would change it to be pink or orange to capture a similar colour but make the button as bright and eye-catching as the others.

 Cursors

There’s not much to talk about in regards to cursors. The default cursors of PCs and Macs are pretty good, however, adding a custom cursor image to a game makes it look really cool I think – even if it’s just a simple adjustment. I tried my hand at making some cursors. The circular points make fitting cursors for shoot games as they’re reminiscent of a gun scope. The hand cursor is a little tricky to do in a small space and might not be worth it as cursors need to be small. Like I said regarding text - if Unity has an option to scale down cursors that will make things much easier. These are some simple ones, but I’m sure there could be more eccentric designs even within these cursor shapes.

 Assessment

So, for this week’s learning assessment, I wanted to make a mock-up fantasy RPG menu based on the items I made last week. This was definitely not a lazy excuse to use the same colour palette and 100% a sincere artistic decision.

The first thing I started with was the buttons. It is crucial a menu’s buttons are clear and easy to read so they should dictate the size and presentation of the rest of the screen. I really liked the scroll item from last week, so I decided to make the buttons scrolls. This made the addition of depth more complicated, but I think I did an alright job by adding a shadow bottom right of the scroll.

For the text on the buttons, I wanted to delve into the fantasy aspect and use rune-like letters. I had to tread a fine line between clarity and the desired aesthetic of the letters which took a lot of trial and error, but I think I got there in the end.

I then scaled up the buttons to add some further detail to the scroll and the runes. I thought the plain white background looked pretty bland so I decided to make a background.

I made a mountain range as a background for the menu and changed the text of the ‘PLAY’ button to an outlined red. I kept the background quite simple as this week’s topic was interfaces, and I was concerned that a detailed background might distract from the interface elements. I turned the ‘PLAY’ red because I wanted to give the impression that the option was being selected. I had ample empty space to the left of the screen, so I decided to create a logo for the game to fill that space.

[photo]

After some more trial and error with different rune letters, I created this logo giving this fake game the title ‘Mt Doom’, inspired by the mountain range background. The rigid rune style really gave the title a more menacing feeling which was good. The ‘O’s used looked a bit weird as I had trouble turning them into a rigid rune style. I increased the size of the logo to add more detail and popped it into the menu screen.

The extra detail made the runes look a bit nicer. The ‘O’s were still off but did fit the rest of the font a little better after adjustment. My biggest concern was how out of place the whole logo looked. This was quite clearly because of the pure white colour used for the letters. I could change this to the white within the colour palette; however, this colour was used in the background, so I decided to match the selected button and use the colour red for the logo.

The red made the logo really pop while fitting in with the rest of the piece. Additionally, some light shading on each of the letters made letters stand out even more. I also moved the black outline of the text slightly to the right to make it feel more like a shadow rather than just an outline. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel like the logo had a grand enough presence for its purpose and menace to shine through. To fix this up, I digitally resized the logo by approximately 133.33%. Now, digital resizing really works well for stuff like 200%, 500%, 1000% and so on because it just adds pixels. However, a resize of 150% means you are resizing the image by 1 and a half-pixel which is not possible. This creates jagged, messy lines – but I decided to give it a shot because why not?

To my surprise, the sizing was perfect, and the messy lines actually worked somewhat with the aesthetic. The shading did get messed up a bit, and if I were to do this again I would go back and adjust the shading, but overall I actually think it improved the piece. Finally, I decided to add a cursor, a watermark and social media buttons into the piece, as shown below.

This watermark and the social media buttons do look a bit out of place in the piece, but I think that works in their favour. It draws attention to them and makes it clear that these are not part of the game or menu. This is particularly useful as those social media sites will open an external tab so showing they’re not part an internal part of the game is important.

Looking back on this piece, I do wish the background had more detail. Initially, I didn’t add it so the interface was clear and this may have worked. Still, the fact the background is very simple makes it aesthetically different and distracting. Also, while the scrolls were a nice concept, they could be designed to have more depth and a better select state. Overall, what I took from this practice is that this design process of ‘Buttons to Background to Logo’ is quite useful, but I do need to make adjustments as I go through each stage in the process.

 Conclusion

That concludes week 3 of learning pixel art. In week 4, I will be diving into environments starting with grass, trees, bushes and some other features of nature. I’m really excited to build pixel art environments, and I think I’ll enjoy it more than this week as I got a bit sick of making letters over and over again.

My learning and this blog post wouldn’t have been made possible without these fantastic resources. Go check them out if you wanna learn some stuff about pixel art!

Creating A Pixel Art Font by TutsByKai

How to Make a Pixel Logo by TutsByKai

Pixel Art 101: Buttons by Pixel Pete

How to Animate a Button by TutsByKai

How to Make Pixel Art Cursors by TutsByKai

[clairious]

Hi There! I hope you don’t mind me messaging you but I am really in need of advice. This is my Pokemon RP blog and I want to make it mostly for Pokemon. I’m really trying to figure out what I can do for people and working on my blog a lot. I hope you don’t mind me messaging you but totally looking for advice. -Mun

Woah. I’m pleasantly surprised to see this, but I gotta warn you. I’ve been told I can be pretty rude with this kind of stuff, so uh, take it with a grain of salt, I guess? 

This’ll be split up into a few parts; since you haven’t used tumblr as an RPing medium before, here’s some tips to mask all that and blend in a whole lot smoother, yea?

Terminology;    aka. what does all this shit mean.  

   •   mun; pretty much the roleplayer, the person behind the character, the person who’s writing all this stuff down. short for mundane. because the ‘mun is boring,’ haha.

  •   muse; your character, the person the blog’s all about.

  •   selective; kinda redundant imo, but it’s frequently seen enough on blogs. just means that folks don’t always follow back or don’t always interact.

  •   private/mutuals only; mutuals means you and the person in question ‘follow’ each other. it’s pretty much simple as that.

  •   munday; mun + day. usually a day when there’s pretty much stuff about the ‘mun’ 

  •   memes; simply askbox games used to help one another interact. not all people consider them ‘canon’ to a blog, so be careful!

  •   crack; generally anything non-canon to a blog. it’s when a particular trait of a character is emphasized to the point of ridiculousness.

 •  sexual sunday; right. uh. yeah. it’s a thing, but idk why nor do i care.

Blog Basics;     aka. simple stuff most folks overlook. 

    •  About Page; it looks like you’ve got a handle on this part from what i saw. although, i’d change that 150 cm meaning 3′0″ because i’m 150cm. that’s 4′11″ pls. don’t be afraid to get into a deep history and flesh it out more, people here love that stuff. on the flip side, if it’s 10+ page essay of a background, folks won’t read it either. the about page is what gives us what the heck we’re getting into, so take your time and embellish it a little, yeah? think of it as a synopsis to a story, something relatively short and sweet to get the reader’s attentions.                        •  use headcanon posts to dig more into the details. it serves a double purpose this way, by promoting your character actively on the dash later without an actual promo. another method to entice rpers to your character.

    •  Info Pages; something that folks tend to for get is to ENABLE pages. this would allow mobile viewers to read the pages without having to search all over or change the blog to a desktop format to find stuff.  

   •   Extra pages; A page with your character’s team is a must here! Or at least, common pokemon they’re around or expected to see around them. 

Tumblr Basics;          aka. stuff i noticed people do.

    • post trimming; i’d recommend getting xkit to ‘trim posts.’ in one of the ‘updates,’ tumblr did, we can no longer cut reblogs. a way of ‘trimming’ them without xkit would be simply deleting the old replies and just pasting the last into the post and continuing off from there. if lazy to do that, simply deleting the last reply from a reblog entirely is preferred to having a bunch of reblogs.

   • moving from asks to threads; if you want to continue a thread from an ask, it’s best to just make a new post and slap a link to the ask somewhere on that new post.

   • following; tumblr rping has this system which people ‘follow’ who they want to interact with, usually.     

Aesthetics;     aka. how to make your blog look pretty.

     •  Snag a theme from theme resource sites. eg. theme hunter.                honestly, i’d recommend a minimalist theme if you’re not too big on fancy graphics. they’d give just as much of an impact as one of those highly decorative themes and all you need to provide is maybe an icon or a sidebar image. best part is, depending on your face claim, this site is pretty good at providing icons. and, you know, it’ll make folks focus on you writing.

     •  Snag a face claim for your character.                 people are like crows; they like shiny stuff. plenty of people get a feel for a character from looking at their character’s face claim. guiltfreeicons, animucons, and dawns-icons are some nice place that’ll provide icons for you if you’d like. 

Tumblr Tips;    aka. stuff i’d tell my younger, pretumblr self.

   •   Don’t be afraid to communicate. Sure, folks can be intimidating, but nothing will happen if no one does anything. Besides, most of those folks that are ‘intimidating’ are probably like that because, guess what, they’re usually on the talking side. Take a bit of initiative, folks like that.

   •   Don’t approach someone for an RP without an idea in mind. That’ll turn down rpers instantly. It’s hard sometimes, sure, but guess it depends on how much you want something towards someone’s own demons of not wanting to do something or w/e. Look at their bio; find something there that you could use for an idea. more than a gym leader battle, how about finding them with their pokemon or teaching someone. they’ll definitely appreciate it.

   •   Not everyone will want to RP with you. It’s inevitable, but hey, there’s how many people and how many blogs out there? The pokemon community is much larger than it looks; there’s plenty of fish in the sea. 

   •  OCs take time and effort. Don’t be disheartened if you’re not super popular. Because they’re not seen in the franchise, you gotta be a bit assertive in interactions and communicating with others. While it has some downsides in those sorts of terms, at least they’re not taken for granted like canons.

Not sure if I forgot anything; either way, I hope this helps!