#i'm sorry i don't know how to put things under ReadMores

[8ft]

QUICK GO

THOUGHTS ON TOWER/ APOTHIOSIS?

tower they could never make me hate you. this got really long. it's going under a readmore. word of warning... this is kind of just about tower. i haven't gotten every apotheosis ending, so i don't feel like i'm ready to dissect her just yet. sorry!

tower was one of my original favorites when i picked the game up. a really fun fact is that i just... thought fury was her only chapter 3? i didn't clock how to get to apotheosis for a while and i had violence in my heart. she presses a lot of my The Character buttons, though. the ego. the ruthlessness. Big Woman.

her whole superiority thing makes her a bit hard to pick apart, but that's part of the appeal. we're the reason she's like this now. we're curious enough to listen to her, but apparently so intimidated by her that we roll over and cave the second she presents an actual threat. we've shown her that we'll follow. of course that's what she expects of us.

now, she's been given the power to actually force us to act against our will. and she's playing touys with it! (bffr if you were locked in a basement at the mercy of some giant bird with a knife and suddenly You were given the power in the situation would you not do the same) the first thing that comes to her mind to punish us for our defiance is to force us to slit our own throat. #girl. it's notable, though, the way she "eyes us with soft contemplation" beforehand. she really gave it a good ponder. made sure that it wasn't just a suitable punishment, but one that'd reinforce her position over us- dying by our own hand at her command. making us stab ourselves in the lungs after that is just overkill. barely even punishment anymore, moreso just a display of her own power. reinforcing to us- and to herself- that she is our god.

something i love to point out, though... the cabin and stairs being reflective of the princess' mental state isn't exactly the world's biggest revelation, but tower's accomplishes a few things. it dwarfs us, naturally, makes us feel Lesser... but it also establishes her viewpoint of Herself and Her destiny being the top priority. its size is built around Her comfort, everything else be damned.

her ability to get into our head and hear the voices / the narrator without actually needing to enter our body like the other vessels is also pretty fun! LOVE her dominating will. this appears to be unique to tower, too! apotheosis only remarks on the presence of the voices during a goddess unraveled, when you share your pain with her.

... actually going back into the scripts it's debatable whether or not she can hear the voices. she does kill the narrator and start piloting him, but the one interaction she has with any of the voices...

i don't know. it could just be a lucky guess, sans style. i choose to believe the first option if only because it reinforces her divine image. anything for women!

ANOTHER fun thing... to get to the fury from her- (i pause for tomatoes to be thrown at me)- you, of course, have to try and slay her. that's not what gets her to break, though... it's the fact that she was brought to use her hands against you. THAT. is interesting. what's also worth noting is that, while she's admonishing us, she doesn't immediately start in the scary red text voice.

(line 1 + line 2)

she doesn't even have the echo.

the genuine disbelief is just... awesome. and hilarious. she's so utterly stunned by our insolence that she can't even put on the Scary Goddess Voice. so much of her is empty bluster. we've reminded her how small she actually is. she might be inches away from godhood, but she still exists in meatspace.

it was her own decision, after all. if she's so above it all, she could've easily, like, blown us up with her mind or whatever. cough. but she returned our violence. she not only smacked us so hard we bounced, but doubled down and ground us into the floor like an insect. twice in a row, she brings herself down to our level, and then blames us for forcing her hand.

the image tower presents is beautiful and overwhelming. that's what she needs to be to maintain her position. inside, she is childish and petty and cruel and i would not have her any other way.

uhhh... go listen to a few songs. THANKS FOR THE ASK!!!

night club - precious thing

cloudeater - hardly wait

night riots - nothing personal

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

AITA for abandoning my party in the middle of a notoriously tough dungeon?

i (26m) was playing ffxiv and had just unlocked a new dungeon. all my friends were asleep and i was too excited to wait, so i decided to go against my social anxiety and run it with randos.

the scant handful times i'd run dungeons with randos before went great - earlier that day after another dungeon i'd even gotten player commendations from two of the players in a party i was healing for - so i was more or less confident this time would be fine as well.

boy oh boy was i wrong...

i got matched with three players we will simply call tank, healer, and dps (age and gender unknown for all three). i went in as a bard (all my other jobs were too underlevelled), filling the remaining dps role.

things went awry almost as soon as we set foot in that dungeon. i died in the first room to some enemies that aggro'd on me and ganged up on me. the rest of the party left the room pretty much immediately after all enemies were dead.

i politely asked to be resurrected, to which healer reluctantly complied. they told me to "just rez next time", which would've sent me to the beginning of the dungeon. in hindsight that would've prolly been fine since it was only the first room.

after i caught up to the others i once again got swarmed with monsters. this is gonna be a pattern if you couldn't tell. after i'd died to this pattern a couple times tank yelled at me for "constantly pulling everything ffs".

for those who don't know, tanks (at least in this game) have a special ability that basically acts as an aggro magnet. i have a strong suspicion tank wasn't using said ability considering how often i got swarmed, but we'll never know for sure.

now the mid boss was where it truly went to shit. no matter how much of a distance i kept from that damn thing, no matter how well i evaded its aoe attacks, i just kept dying over and over again. one time the rest of the party even got sent back somehow. i'm not sure how.

and why did i keep dying you may ask? because healer never healed me. not once after they resurrected me at the beginning did i notice my hp go up aside from when i used hi-potions or my one (1) healing spell, both of which have a very long cooldown. i think they were glued to tank the entire time, completely neglecting me and dps.

and yet, i was the one taking the blame for everything. for pulling the enemies tank should've pulled. for constantly dying, which i couldn't help because healer never once touched me after that first resurrection.

it was really starting to affect me so after i let my dead body be sent back to the beginning of the dungeon i finally put my foot down and left the dungeon. this disbanded the party, not only kicking everyone from the dungeon, but likely also penalizing all 4 of us because of my actions.

i will clarify that this wasn't just any old dungeon; it was aurum vale. it's a dungeon you need to be at least level 47 for. while i don't know much about it myself, judging by the way my friends talk about it the semi-universal verdict is that it sucks major balls. it' would's not be a fun dungeon to have to redo, that's for sure.

i was on the verge of tears for well over 30 minutes afterwards, both from the emotional afterquakes of fear and anger but also from the guilt of abandoning these people like that.

so, am i the asshole? am i too sensitive? should i just have sucked it up and kept going?

tldr; i felt like my party of randos were blaming me for being the weakest link while doing their own jobs poorly, and decided to prioritize my own feelings by leaving the dungeon, dissolving the party and forcing the others to start all over again

Oh no. Oh honey. I am so sorry Aurum Vale is just like that. I'm gonna put the poll here and some extra INFO/advice under a readmore because it's a bit long, but please read on before voting.

First: don't let leaving bother you too much, it didn't kick everyone from the dungeon, that's not how it works. If one person leaves, the queue just refills the party with a new person and the dungeon continues like normal, or everyone else now has the option to leave without penalty.

Aurum Vale's first room is a motherfucker--basically it's an older design with lots of wandering monsters, so on the first room especially you need to hug the left hand wall as tight as you can to aggro as little as possible. Let the tank go first and grab aggro on mobs. Don't pull for the tank, especially at this level range. Let them do their job. I can't say for sure whether they had their aggro-generating stance on, could go either way, but I can see why they got annoyed at someone pulling stuff they weren't ready for yet. While wall-to-wall pulling is pretty standard in this game, that's the tank's call to make, not the dps's--and some of these older dungeons with funky level syncing or enemy pacing make wall-to-walling more difficult and not for everyone.

(BTW, as an aside, tank stance works as a personal buff, not a magnet--they do still need to hit things to grab their aggro, sometimes more than once if someone else has already established on them. If they already have a pack they're working on and you grab something way on the other side of the room, you'll have to bring it over to them so they can take it off you!)

If you do die to mobs between bosses, sometimes the best thing to do is just release and respawn! If you get a rez, you'll have a debuff that makes you weaker for a while. Definitely if it's the very first room, releasing is the move most of the time.

As for dying to bosses: was it definitely the mid boss, the cyclops? Because the other two (the plant and the morbol) both have mechanics that make you take slow damage over time unless you eat a fruit to get rid of it. You want to eat a fruit every 2-3 stacks of the debuff that you get because that's where the damage starts to get more severe; before then, the healer can probably handle you.

Basically, it seems like this party mistook inexperience for malice and was rude to you in response. Not healing you, for example, is absolutely inexcusable. You did some things suboptimally that made the dungeon harder for the group, but honestly we were all there once, don't let it get to you too much. Try it again with your friends bearing the stuff I mentioned in mind, and it'll go much better! But as an aside it SUCKS to heal, if you have a more experienced friend you should let them handle it haha

[corpupine]

I've been doing a lot of thinking...and I feel like I need to scream this out somehow even though I'm sure it's been talked about before (and I'm putting it under a readmore because it gets long).

No matter what, in any playthrough you do and any timeline you create.

UNDERTALE is a game about guilt.

You have Toriel, so guiltridden she couldn't protect her own children that she devotes herself to never letting another child leave again. And then they do!! over and over again, that guilt compounds until it's the center of her life and every choice she makes!!

And obviously Asgore, so guiltridden that he couldn't protect his own children from humans that he spends the rest of his days trying to get out and get revenge on them--as if that will stop the voices in his head saying, if you had been out there with them you could have stopped it, you could have stopped those humans from killing your children, and maybe he could have!! Or maybe not!! He'll never know and it eats him from the inside out!

Alphys, oh my sweet summer child this fandom does not deserve you!! Alphys, so guiltridden from her own perceived failures as a scientist that she began to try anything, anything to make the King happy, and it seemed to be working at first, and then it was so everlastingly worse, how can you cause something worse than death?? without even trying??

And it shows up in little ways, silly ways, too! Ways you wouldn't even think about as guilt! Undyne! She feels guilty that she won't let Papyrus join the Royal Guard so she gives him cooking lessons instead! Papyrus feels guilty that he's not in love with you after one date so he'll "keep being your cool friend and act like this never happened!"

SANS MY BOI don't even get me started. His guilt isn't as physically obvious but he made a promise to toriel, he promised her he would keep the human safe, and in timelines where you save everyone he follows you pretty much all throughout the Underground (even if he doesn't do anything to help smh) because he'd feel guilty not doing it, and in timelines where you kill everyone he feels guilty for not stopping you, AND in those SAME timelines he feels guilty for stopping you because it means he's breaking his promise to Toriel to keep you safe I!!! This boy can fit so much cosmic guilt in him!!!!

Asriel! FLOWEY!! Do you ever wonder if he feels guilty about being the one to wake up again? The one to survive, when Chara had to die twice?? He sits at their grave and he will do anything, anything to drown out those thoughts so he befriends and kills and torments and it's all the same and it's all useless!!

And their guilt compounds each others'! Toriel makes Sans make that promise because of her own guilt, which increases his! Asgore's guilt is what pushes Alphys so far past the limits of ethical science, because he increases hers!

And all of this, all of this, ALL OF THIS pales in comparison to you!!!

You!! The player! You return to the Underground after maybe accidentally killing Toriel or a few others because you didn't know, you never wanted to hurt them!! You listen to Flowey and you come back and you save them all!

You! The player!!! You cry at the ending and you'd feel guilty, so guilty about letting them all go, wouldn't you? So you ignore Flowey's pleas to let it alone, and you come back again, you say hello to your dear friends but this time it isn't the same, this time you kill them all because you want to see everything this game has to offer, might as well get your money's worth, the fights are cool, right?? And then you get hit with the most unsatisfying atomic bomb of an ending and the only thing left is your own reflection staring back at you from the black screen of your computer as the horror dawns, what have you done???

YOU!!! The player! You go back again even though there is no Flowey left to tell you to, and you save them all again because I'm sorry, I'm so so sorry, nobody deserves what I did to all of you, and it's all good, nobody remembers, and then you get to the end. The game knows what you did!!! It never forgot, and it'll make certain you never forget either!! Guilt!! Guilt, guilt!!! It's baked into the code of this game!!

Anyways tl;dr, maybe it actually did make sense to give this game to the pope

[menlove]

i saw on some of your posts that you say you aren’t an india truther, out of curiosity what do you think caused john and paul to have a fallout? do you think the resentment was more gradual and happened over 68-69? im sorry if you’ve answered this before but i love hearing about people’s theories of what happened in india and the aftermath.

sorry I totally forgot to answer this but for me.... hm. tossing under a readmore bc it got long oops

I think it was more gradual. like the way they act w each other in the get back sessions & just in general speaks more to something more unspoken happening than some big dramatic break up or rejection, at least to me. esp given how john & yoko lived with paul for a while in the summer of 68 (and talk about the world's worst throuple)

I wouldn't say I don't think Anything happened in india, but imo it seems more like.... I saw someone talking about how up until that point they were all on a lot of drugs & india was them getting off them for a minute & they sort of looked around and went "what the fuck are we doing? do I even know these people?" and that rings the most true to me I think.

some of the bigger reasons I have my doubts abt india being some huge thing where they fucked for the first time and paul rejected john are a) they still got along after that. things were weird but not much weirder than they'd been after brian's death b) paul wrote "i will" in india and I've talked before about how I'm 100% convinced that's about john and to me "will I wait a lonely lifetime, if you want me to I will" doesn't sound like the words of someone about to do any rejecting c) the infamous blowing the mic scene in get back is way too lighthearted and makes paul blush and giggle like they're just referencing fucking as a part of their relationship that happened enough to not be disarming. doesn't seem like john is being bitter or trying to egg him on and paul isn't reacting like someone that got called out for fucking john and then rejecting him. it reads more, to me, like just two lovers slyly joking around about a time they fucked that no one else can know about

which brings me to d) I'm also a "they had a sexual relationship" truther (which would be a whole other essay tbh) and so For Me Personally that just doesn't jive w smth big and dramatic happening in india. I just don't think they ever talked about what the fuck was going on between them, whatever it was, and then the typical band breakdown reasons coincided w a breakdown of their personal relationship as well. like just sort of dying out without much fanfare which can honestly be worse than some big rejection or breakup. and then ofc john goes full in with yoko and paul flounders around trying to settle down with a woman and marry her in such a weirdly frantic way. like that quote where he asks if he was supposed to be a 26 year old queer that never got married....... I would wager, imo, that things breaking down w john & then jane would've lead him to a bit of a Crisis about all that. but he found linda and went all in w her and she wound up pregnant so there you go.

which would lead them to a really weird place by the get back sessions, which I at least feel like is reflected pretty well- this awkward tension, paul's nervous desperation, nostalgia for the old times, lingering sexual tension. but not the attitude like they hated each other yet or had some big breakup or rejection. they're still joking and flirting, it's just awkward. the Big Moment would've been something else after that imo, probably john announcing he wanted a divorce but could've also been something more private that would go a long way to explaining why they were basically not on speaking terms at all by the abbey road sessions

again this is all Purely Speculation. mostly based on my more conflicting view from the fandom at large that they did have a sexual relationship and paul isn't as repressed/clueless as he puts on. so w those Two Beliefs in mind, this is sort of the trajectory that would make the most sense to me!

of course, without those two Core McLennon beliefs of mine I can see why people would point to india as the game changer if they think paul is a repressed bisexual who thinks he's straight while john pined over him. like it would make sense in that scenario if that's where the tension snapped & it was just a mess after that. but I very firmly and adamantly don't believe that so it's just hard for me to see the india theory as anything solid when there's a lot of other explanations for why india was such a shitshow

but all that is just me personally! don't have shit to back it up beyond what I can bring up about the evidence of a sexual relationship and paul being closeted that then lead me to these speculations based on that but yeah lmao

(and fun fact lmao whenever we publish it this is gonna be like half of the story of "i need you" so yall will get to see my fully baked opinion there mixed w just what I think would be fun or angsty dbshsjss)

[isawken]

I'm throwing a clown party next month and am in the process of finding appropriate decor and building the clown party playlist. Do you have thoughts on these topics? Seems like your area

oh baby. oh mama. hang on to ur jingly jester hat cus i have spent much time thinking about this (putting this under a readmore cus it got a lil long)

(sorry this is almost all amazon links im confident u can get most if not all this stuff thru other vendors this was just the quickest way for me to show my ideal products)

1: Circus Tent. it is meant for children but believe me u can fit 85% of adults in there. source: i have one

you could also do this tho:

and in that same vein. forget beaded curtains. get one of these bad boys

2: balloons baby!!! it is insanely cheap to get like a 100 pack of balloon animal balloons and a couple pumps. guests could make whatever they want. dogs are way easier than you'd think, watch one youtube video and you can pass on the knowledge sooo fast. just make sure people under-inflate to reduce pops lol. also look at this balloon garland kit it would take forever to set up but look how cuuuuuute

3: this image

4: this one is crazy. this one is wacky. but mini creampies to throw at one another if you've got freaks who don't mind getting messy. get a pack of these and like 3 cans of whipped cream and you've got yourself a slapstick event

5: omg also face paintinggggg i have this kit and it's honestly pretty solid, and if you want to offer a white base you absolutely wanna go with mehron:

6: Clown Name Workshop (With Name Tags). no one uses their name all night. just their clownsona

7: sorry i've gotten off topic but fr pretty much any red and white striped accent will add a Circus Vibe. an excess of pennant garland and pom poms will also help. also i know i already covered balloons but i had another thought: these fucking things

okay and then finally the playlist. i'm gonna be real for how clowny i am in all other aspects of my life i don't listen to much music that i think would fit in here. however! i have a friend who made a playlist a while ago that i think would be perfect to peruse for such a thing:

i hope i gave u at least something that is helpful or sparks inspiration, i hope your party is fun and clownful!!!!

[seafoam-taide]

Tell me about your guys, I want to hear it all

okay. Okay. Sorry i took forever to get to this But I got scared. Anyway

So I guess just right upfront my guys Are an interpretation of the story in cccc but it's more like. Using it as building blocks and adding a bunch more shit to it. Not quite an au because it Is specifically the same story just. Expanded. Greatly

Along with that for once I made a concentrated effort to avoid fandom works for the first couple weeks specifically to find my own meaning in the songs. So. Uh. Now that I'm actually looking at that stuff I'm noticing some large deviations from the typical. So there's that disclaimer.

Okay now that I've set up my anxiety walls I'll just start actually explaining it. Number one. HMS are specifically made to be a system and after the 'first split' they never Actually become one guy again. Unfortunately they're stupid and they love repression 💔 soul is the host bc duh and also it's fun for his character and he's number one denial fan of all time. He does not view himself as 'Soul' he views himself as 'Cash' (name for whole. Stolen from grace kicb). To him Soul is like. This weird puppet persona thing he invented for ???coping reasons??? <- he doesn't actually think about it very hard he just goes huh weird! Probably normal. He views heart and mind as made up figments of his imagination that he uses to make himself feel better and/or beat himself up and thinks of the cycle as something he just keeps doing to himself bc ??? But it's his choice guys trust . He totally is controlling this and is just a horrible person and a freak for not choosing to just be normal ^^ he loves denial of the self and of agency through holding onto the false self and false agency. So 'being whole'/concord is more like. They all compromise to pretend to be a single guy (<- not how they think about it) and the cycle happens bc that Obviously doesn't work.

Mind and Heart each have a different perspective on that situation but don't worry they're both wrong 💕 mind is the most straightforward about it he pretty much just believes the way soul spins (he lies sooo much) it bc he kind of dgaf. So his view of it is that they are three equals and that they are working to be One Guy that Won't Kill Himself. In general he's neutral-negative about 'the whole' and treats it mostly as like an obligation, something that he's in charge of bc the other two really are not Trying Here what The Fuck guys. He also, despite being the one out of the three of them to most view himself as a Genuine Individual, views himself as an individual in the way you would look at an object as a singular item. Sigh.

Heart buys into Soul's perception of the situation but soul doesn't actually know that 👍 Heart knows a lot more than even he's aware of. Not that that helps him. He thinks all of this is a ploy by Cash (doesn't really think of him as 'the whole') to isolate all of the things he hates about himself away from the rest of himself. That being, Heart away from soul. Believes that soul is fully in control of everything that's happening and does not think that he (heart) is a person or real 💔 but at the same time is constantly vying to be regarded as such. He's Very contradictions about kind of everything. So he both 1) does not believe that his actions are under his control and 2) hates himself for how he acts and what he wants and what he does. He also 1) despises soul for being a coward and not accepting him and 2) feels awful about what he's done, what he's doing to soul and wishes he never existed at all. And many more! Shows up to the fandom and duality codes your heart. Just kidding they're All so full of dichotomies Yum

I'm gonna put the rest of anything I put here under a readmore now

You may have noticed I did not even mention Mind once there in Heart's thing. This is because, as heart views himself as made up, he also views mind as not real. In fact does not even believe that he's a representation of logic/thoughts/etc ! To him mind is the horrible freakish guard of his cell that hardly acts like a person at all and is clearly even less real than he is. He thinks that everything that Mind does and says is explicitly to manipulate or force him into doing... ??? Something??? <- also doesn't think about his logic too often 💔

To expand on Soul's rampant lying: his one and only goal is to get this over with as quickly as possible. He does not believe that any of this situation is a real thing, and thinks he is making all of it up, but he also knows that acting like it's real makes it go away faster. Why does he think he made it up and is in control of it if he can't just choose to stop it at any time? Because he's horribly stupid and in denial always. With the sky covering most of his face, he has a lot of control over how he presents himself and uses this liberally. He does and says whatever he thinks will make his mind and his heart listen which means he acts very unpredictably. He thinks very poorly of the other two bc he thinks they're not real And also him and he HATES that guy but he tries very hard to be nonconfrontational and nice. He is constantly trying to get out of interacting with them as much as possible And Also feels a deep incessant need to keep tabs on them at all times (which he does not acknowledge bc there is no need to keep track of them they're just echoes of himself. Obviously. Runs to check on them).

Also bc I need somewhere to put this Hi soul doesn't have a trident. Soul doesn't even do violence. To me soul is a deeply pathetic coward that spends 90% of his time dissociating to hell and back. Sorrgy. I think it's just kind of awesome to give him absolutely zero ways to violently express himself. He's so absent from the album and even in songs where he participates it's purely as a sidelined observer. His solution for getting the others to work together is empty threats, desperate begging, and threatening to kill himself. If this guy willingly choose to make an impactful decision Ever he'd explode. I love you cunty scary soul but I refuse to make my version slay. By any definition of the word. Don't worry there's still lots and lots and lots of violence ^^ heart AND mind both have teeth and claws and they love killing and biting and maiming. They even do those things to each other sometimes! HFGHFJFNFNHHRHEHHEHE

okay. Okay. I know you said you want to hear it all. But this is so much text. I didn't even get to explaining their designs or what the fuck is up with Whole OR THEIR CHARACTER ARCS... all of this is literally just how they are at the start fuckkk. I guess maybe if anyone wants to know more feel free to ask about any of those or any any other posts I've made. I love talking I just get scared

[storagebay29]

james somerton 'apology' video transcript

Note: for those who do not want to watch it. For those who do, here's a link to a reupload as the original has since been deleted. There are a lot of a pauses and 'um's/'uh's, the latter of which are largely ommitted from the below transcript. Posted under a readmore as it's pretty long.

I'm sorry for taking so long to make this video, or to say anything. I'm in the hospital- I've been in the hospital for a little over a week. I tried- Fuck. I tried to do something really stupid... (pause) I'm only here now because before I did it, I called my dad to talk to him one more time and, he figured out something was wrong, called paramedics or 911 or… and they got here and I woke up in the hospital and, yeah.

…

Anyway, I'm not trying to make this a sob story, I'm just trying to explain why I've been so quiet. I had a friend from back home checking my emails and stuff, and yeah.

…

But anyway… I wanna say that I'm really really sorry, really really sorry... for the stuff in the videos, the not crediting people, and for a lot of videos, you know I, I did the opening titles thing, and I tried to put like ‘this is based on X's- this person's research, or on this person's book,’ but I know now that wasn't enough, that wasn't okay. And then there were a lot of times... that uh...  oh god. There were a lot of times that stuff just got put in and there was no attempt at crediting anybody (pause) and I'm really really sorry.

And I'm not, I'm not sorry that I got caught, I'm sorry for ever doing it, I didn't- I honestly honestly... didn't realise that I was hurting people... And now that I know that I was hurting people… I'm just really sorry.

I lost my best friend because of this. Nick and I have been best friends since 2011 or [20]12? We'd been friends online and then. He lived in Ottawa, I moved to Ottawa so we could be, like, friends in person, and then we moved back to- I moved back to Nova Scotia, and Nick came with me. We eventually moved to the Toronto area where we lived together for 7 years? 8 years? We lived together for a really long time… and… he hasn't spoken to me since this happened.

Sorry, sorry I said I wasn't gonna make this a sob sorry. I should’ve got some Kleenex.

Then again I'm really really really sorry for the things I did in the videos: copying people's work and not crediting them properly or at all. I also wanna apologise for the misinformation and just outright lies that ended up in the videos? I didn't- I honestly say that I never intended for any of that stuff to be in the videos, most cases I didn't write it but I should’ve, you know it was my face on the channel, my name on the channel, I should have been, I should have been more diligent about fact checking and stuff. ‘Cause there was a lot of really stupid shit in there. It would’ve- it's just so easy to check, I just never did, I just took it for granted…

I also, I wanna thank Hbomberguy and his team for setting up the fund to make some money available for the authors that were wronged and the journalists and writers and…

I wanna help somehow, I don't know how, a lot of- I've seen a lot of people online saying how much money I apparently make and they’re way overestimating. Beyond the fact that Nick and I split everything 50/50, they're still way overestimating how much money came in… And the Toronto area is expensive, so there's not really any kind of savings, I'm moving home really soon… ‘Cause without Nick there's nothing for me here, and like I said it's really expensive…

And so I wanna say I wanna thank them for setting up that fund, and I wanna help somehow. The only thing I can think of right now is to make the videos, most of the videos public again and every month I can send the ad revenue from all of the past videos- ‘cause there were plenty that didn't have any, any uncredited stuff in them... But I can make them public again, and then every month I can send the AdSense to- either I can send it to Hbomberguy's team, that they can add to the fund, or I can start a fund myself? And every month I can publicly say how much money was made on the AdSense and show it. And send that to the writers and stuff every month. I don't know... what the system for that would be? But I would be more than happy to do that

You know some of the videos like the ‘Killing Stalking’ video brought in like a pretty decent amount of money every month so that would be helpful I think/to them. I'll also put in either the description or the pinned comment the names of the authors so that anyone watching the video knows where all of the information came from, that it wasn’t me going out doing journalism- I never thought that anyone thought that I was doing journalism and stuff, and I don't think anyone did. For the people who actually were doing it should have been given the credit they deserve, they did the hard work, all I did was edit a video. They did the hard work and they- they deserved the credit

(cut) Sorry about that, phone stopped recording.

But- yes. They deserved- they deserved credit, and… when it was something... when it was something like the, the recent... ‘history of hollywood’ videos, right there in the opening credits, I put the Vito Russo's name, that it was adapted from his book ‘The Celluloid Closet’. Same thing went for the gay panic video and the gay holocaust video, they were- the holocaust video was adapted from two books, and the gay panic video was adapted from a lot of journalism, and I- I put their names right at the beginning of the videos.

But and- I understand that's not how citation works... now. I understand that, I get it. And I wanna do better. And I know a lot of people hate me now, ‘cause I did bad shit. But I wanna try and do better. At some point I’d like to make videos again. I'd like to do videos that are fully sourced, where I will put a link to the script where you can find all the sources so that everyone is properly given the credit that they deserve, any the kind of research that's done, credit for any b roll that's used whether it's stock footage, or movies or TV shows or video games, or anything like that, have it all in there. I would like to become a really really good example of giving proper credit to writers and journalists

And I know a lot of you watching this aren't- aren't really gonna care, you'd rather I just disappear. But I would like to try to do better.

I never ever intended to hurt anybody. I never thought that that's what I was doing. Before I went- before I went to the hospital, I read a lot of stuff from people who were really hurt, not just authors and stuff but people who watched my videos who were hurt by stuff in them. People think that I hate ace people and women and bisexual people and lesbians and that's not true. It's really- it's just- it’s not true. And I’m sorry that stuff made it into videos that just shouldn’t have been there: misinformation and lies... But I promise you I did not write that stuff.

I should have been a lot more exacting when Nick and I would be editing scripts but I promise you that those are not- I don't think those things. I specifically want to apologise to asexual people who feel that I just completed delegitimised you. Nick being ace, I- I know that it's kinda like you know, no two gay people are exactly the same, no two ace people are exactly the same, but I kind of, when it came to that I just kind of ran with Nick's judgement and his observations and stuff like that. And I’m not trying to throw Nick under the bus, which a bunch of people are saying that I was setting him up as doing, which is not true…

This whole thing, Nick and I were 50/50 partners, it wasn't I hired him to have a scapegoat or something like that. I never hired Nick. Nick and I were roommates for years before I started doing Youtube videos and then they started- people started watching them and I asked Nick if he wanted to help me write them and he said yes and we started splitting the- first the AdSense and then the Patreon and then the sponsorships, we just split everything. Nick was never supposed to be a fall guy.

I'm sorry. Maybe I should have waited longer to do this. But yeah, I- the- I did not- I don’t think those things and I don't think Nick does either, I think it was just how fast we were writing stuff, and how fast we were putting videos out, it was just too fast. And we weren’t putting the care into them that needed to be put into them.

I've seen a lot of people on social media and other youtubers even lying about me, but other- other- Hbomberguy was not one of them, I just wanna be clear about that, except I was never setting Nick up to be a fall guy and. It was never a grift or anything like that. I swear it was not. It is not.

In the next couple of days, I'm gonna send out a message to the Telos supporters on Indiegogo and explain the whole situation in more detail to them because we were not super clear about everything that was going on with Telos and so I can- I understand if it seems like we weren't doing anything but we were. We were doing a lot of work on Telos. We just weren’t talking about it is because we- we made that initial first announcement for ‘final girl’ and that fell through and I'll explain that to the message I send out to the supporters which I'm sure will end up on reddit or somewhere… And after that we didn't- we didn't want to talk about it too much until we had something really concrete, and I will explain all of that in that message

Telos was and is not a grift. I was never gonna take the money and run. None of the money that came in for telos was ever going to be paying me or Nick. It was going to be paying queer actors and artists, musicians, things like that. And I know there's been lots of talk about budgets and all this stuff, and people saying that I'm really stupid for thinking a movie could be made for that little money, but there are examples of it being done, and I actually do have a work ethic.

Anyway. but yeah. anyway

I do want to keep making videos and I know a lot of you won't watch them and that's- that's fine. But I really liked making videos…

We ended up making a lot of videos we didn't wanna make because people were asking for them, and so there were a lot of videos that we made that we didn't wanna make, and I think those videos are very clear on which ones those were. One of them never got officially released. It was released to patrons, some patrons have shared it to other people before all the videos went private. A lot of people hate the analysis that Nick and I did on it but. And so maybe it's good that that never got properly released, because… maybe it would have hurt people. And I don't want that.

But I do wanna make videos again sometime. I'd love to do like retrospectives on important gay movies. If you watch the channel ‘Be Kind Rewind’ they're an amazing channel that do a lot of retrospectives on older Hollywood movies and I would love to do that for gay movies. A lot of gay movies, people my age and younger have never heard of, things like ‘Torch Song Trilogy’ and ‘Longtime Companion’, and stuff like that, movies from the seventies and eighties and the nineties, things that were like really influential for gay cinema that no one talks about. And you know, I'd like to talk about not just those movies but how they got made and stuff like that. I would love to do something like that.

I swear on my mother's grave that there will be no copying people, no copying pasting. Every source will be cited in a document and on screen. ‘Cause I usually liked doing the research. I loved doing research - reading the books and articles and stuff like that. I- the part of me that was lazy was the copy and paste part. Instead of just putting it into my words and citing them properly and giving them credit… that's where the laziness came in. That was- I wasn't trying to be malicious. That was just laziness. And I promise for anyone who does watch the videos that I make going forward… I promise that will never happen again. I welcome the highest level of scrutiny on the new videos.

…

As for Patreon, I’m going to reactivate it. Because I saw a lot of people on social media saying that I was probably going to reactivate it right on January 1st so that everyone could get a surprise billing and I could take the money and run. And, no. First of all that was never my plan and I'm not gonna do it. I'm gonna reactivate it now so that anyone who wants to leave - which I imagine will be the vast majority - can leave and not have to worry about being billed again in January.

… Yeah. So. In closing. I'm again incredibly sorry... And again I'm not sorry because I was caught, I honestly didn't know how much I was hurting people… and how much harm I was bringing to the community, because that's not ever what I intended. I wanted the channel to be a safe place. I spent so much time deleting comments that were hateful

I recently found out that I wasn't being notified about- that I wasn’t seeing comments that were in replies to other comments so there were plenty of hateful comments in the comment section that were plenty hateful that I wasn’t seeing, and I didn't know that. But I wanted the channel to be a safe place and it ended up not being a safe place.

And for the misinformation, that kind of falls into two categories. 1. I did the wrong research in the historical things and other things they're not what I wrote.

Again, thank you to Hbomberguy and his team for making the fund for the writers. I'd like to try to contribute to that somehow so- if- if it's okay to make the videos public and send all of the- public and send all- it won't be all of videos ‘cause some of them had to be taken down because sponsors wanted them taken down, but I can put the videos back up with the sources properly put in either- for the I guess for the videos that would be going up from zero, I could actually put in sources for the videos, which would be good.

I guess I could- For the other ones that would just be made live again, I could put them in a pinned comment. ‘Cause I think people read pinned comments more than they read the descriptions, cause like the descriptions disappear in a lot of places. Something like that. Something so that I can try and- it won't make up for what I did but just. Something.

So I’m really really really sorry. I hurt a lot of people that I really respect and that really sucks. And.  Nick if you're watching this I know you're probably not but I miss you and…

Yeah I want to do better. I want- I want to do better. I want to prove that I can do better. I don't expect anyone to just give me the benefit of the doubt. But I want to show that I can do better, so I hope you'll let me do that.

Again, I'm really sorry. I'm sorry that the things I did- I'm sorry that I disappointed you. I promise going forward I will do better.

Thanks for watching, and...

…

And I’m really sorry.

[helloarchivist]

Hii, i wanted to ask what ur favorite detail of body/ personality about shanks?

oh lord, i. collapsing falling down the stairs that's a hard one to narrow down, I think every inch of him is beautiful and find him endlessly fascinating BUT I also yammering about him so okay lets try. Putting this under a readmore bc it got long LOL

Favorite part(s) of his body: Probably his scruffy jawline, his chest/tummy/and his hand(s). Just like.

like. do u see what I am saying.

like that divot between his wrist and thumb also I--honorable mention since it's so intrinsic to him people address him using this but also his hair is SO PRETTY. The color, the texture, the way he lays around the nape of his neck.

Anon I'm sorry I think that man is so gorgeous idk how to narrow it down to just one trait lmfaoooo

Okay though moving on!

Favorite personality trait:

This one's getting a couple of things too lmfao.

I really enjoy it about him that he's both funny goofy silly as like. a genuine core pillar of his personality, and also as a conscious choice that he makes so a) the people he cares for feel comfortable around him and b) he can pay attention to situations from a lot closer than he could if he was being A Big Scary Emperor all the time. (plus the bonus reasoning that he knows how powerful he is and how different from other people he is, and has put a lot of effort into being really difficult to provoke because of this).

I love that he's a little shy!!! Like, we've only seen it in small, select situations, but the way he gets kind bashful and giggly when people are gushing about him or being super sweet to him is so lovely and endearing, it feels like such a personal little reaction he has and it makes me wanna wrap him up in my arms every time I think about it.

His propensity for kindness and compassion, and how those things and loyalty to his friends are the most likely emotions to drive him to action. Don't get me wrong, he can absolutely revoke those things if sufficiently provoked, but like. Him talking about how it's okay to cry, how he takes care of the funeral arrangements for Ace and Whitebeard bc despite the fact that the WBP were technically his rivals/"enemies", they're pirates, and people he knows, and they were all in such dire grief that he stepped in to take all that off their plates. The way he entreated Whitebeard to call Ace off the hunt so he wouldn't be killed, the way he stepped in not only to save Koby, but to highlight his bravery and legitimize his need for rest. There is a LAUNDRY list of stuff he does like this, hell the way he interacted with Luffy as a child could be its own long ass post lmfao.

This got so out of hand LMFAO I hope these kinda answered your questions though!!! Thank you so much again for asking, I love and jump on any chance to talk about him. ; u ;

[partyhorn]

Have u ever posted your comic or animation workflow anywhere? Im super curious on how you tackle the process, especially not using a drawing tablet. I know you have a very simple (and adorable) style so that probably helps in terms of workflow -- Im just curious about the steps you take.

Thank you! With both comics and animation my key thing is to not spend too much time on any particular thing, just draw loose and fast. Honestly the only downside to drawing with a mouse is that I can tell my arm has extremely specific muscle memory regarding it- if my mouse breaks and I get a new one I have to spend a good month or so just letting my hand get used to it again lol. Same with if my setup gets readjusted too much- right now my setup is my mouse on one of those padded mousepads, on top of 2 books, with my elbow resting on my 3DS case (I'll get an actual pillow or something for it eventually lol). But luckily thanks to this I suffer very minimal wrist pain 👍

(...Okay I started to go really in depth in my process here, so sorry if this is way more than what you were asking. Putting it under a readmore just to save space lol)

With MFM in particular, I start by writing out the entire script for the next story arc, which really is just all of the dialogue and vague notes about any important actions. Then I do the paneling with very loose stick-figure like sketches of where the characters are and what they're doing. I prefer having very little planning when it comes to character poses and panel shapes, coming up with those on the fly makes things much more exciting and faster to make. But it's the opposite with dialogue... it needs to be 100% FINAL before I draw a single line lol.

That's part of my script for my most recent chapter, as well as what my extremely loose goofy thumbnail sketching is like. I write the script as one big thing and don't separate it into pages until I actually start drawing- then I go and color change it just to keep track of what dialogue goes on each page

After that, I go back and do the ACTUAL sketch, as well as the lettering (I don't believe this is how it's done professionally. I used to do lettering as the very last step in the process... but then found it hard to cram speech bubbles in the right places lmao.) After that is lineart, coloring, background flat colors, then shading/rendering for all of it. I do each step in batches, as in I sketch out ALL pages of a chapter before moving to lineart, I line ALL pages before starting coloring, etc. I find it way easier to be productive when it's broken up like that, though when I first started the comic I used to draw each page to completion before starting the next (but also, the comic's style was DRASTICALLY simpler back then haha)

(Unfortunately I merged some of the shading to the background flat colors so it's not entirely accurate... oops) FireAlpaca has a sand texture feature that I only found out about last year- adding that to the backgrounds makes them look 10x better with WAY less effort.

With animation, it depends on the project. For simple 5-10 second animation I make for fun, there's very little planning lol. I skip some steps in the process- I'll sketch out the keyframes (and maybe any difficult inbetweens if necessary), line those, then go straight into making linework inbetweens. I'm not a cleanup artist and have no experience in that, so I always find trying to line my rough animation makes everything jittery and wobbly. If I do it with a clean line from the start then I can avoid that and save a lot of time 👍

For my bigger projects (such as the Parvey cartoon and the MFM Kickstarter trailer), I do the whole animatic with final audio first and foremost, with the animatic being almost like the keyframes. I split them up into individual shots, .mp4 files anywhere between 1-30 seconds usually, and animate those one at a time. I'm a huge fan of free to use programs and try to use them as much as I possibly can, here's a list of the ones I use:

FireAlpaca- for the actual drawing part itself (storyboarding/animating/etc). FireAlpaca has a feature that lets you export every frame as it's own drawing, as well as an onion skin mode

Windows Movie Maker- for compiling all of those frames into video format, creating individual shots. If you upload all of your frames and set them to around 0.08 seconds, it equals about 12fps (I usually animate at 0.10 seconds/10fps, its a bit slower but looks nice)

Onlinesequencer.net- for making music. It's the place I've made all of my songs on, like the timeloop song, hyperworkaholic, and the background music for the MFM Kickstarter trailer.

Audacity- for editing audio/music. Also great for recording things directly from your desktop

DaVinci Resolve- for editing and putting together all of the shots into one big video. Can get kind of intensive on the computer during rendering, so watch out.

YouCut (app)- also for editing and compiling shots, I used this one a lot a couple years back but I'm not sure how well it holds up. Doesn't need much phone storage to download but needs a lot to render videos.

MS Paint (yes really)- for typing up text. FireAlpaca has a text option but I don't like it as much as Paint's.

...The only thing I genuinely can't do alone is voice acting. Luckily there's a big voice acting community on Twitter and they're all amazing to work with!

This got... way more in depth than I planned for it to be, so sorry if this is way more than what you were asking lol. But that's my general process when it comes to my art 👍

[huntershowl-moving]

SHIPPING INFO // ANSWER THE FOLLOWING FOR YOUR MUSES SO PEOPLE KNOW HOW SHIPPING WORKS ON YOUR BLOG.

WHAT IS YOUR OTP FOR YOUR CHARACTER(S)?

i don't have one particular otp — big ships change depending on the Era hellhound is in!

HOW LARGE DOES THE AGE GAP HAVE TO BE TO MAKE IT UNCOMFORTABLE?

nothing illegal obviously — other than that, aside from long-lifespan characters whose mental maturation is slower, i generally stay away from with 10+ year age gaps when the younger muse is under 20. just feels like a weird power dynamic i guess?

ARE YOU SELECTIVE WHEN SHIPPING?

yes! ships on this blog cannot be pre-established — i tend to lose interest fast if they don't build up naturally, either through lots of ooc plotting or through writing. on top of that, seph is ... piiiiicky. she has very specific Types. generally, ships with very gentle, soft, mentally well-adjusted characters are possible, but transient — seph falls out of love after a point, but remains staunchly protective of them.

the long and short of the matter is she's a freak, and you kind of have to match that to be compatible as a long-term partner. but even then they don't always line up perfectly! idk. seph's weird. simultaneously very easy to ship with and very hard to ship with.

WHO ARE OTHER CHARACTERS YOU SHIP YOUR CHARACTER WITH?

oh i've got lots of good ones going on right now!! pls forgive me for gushing. focusing on currently heavily-plotted and/or written ones for this bit bc otherwise it will be pages and pages!! if i forgot someone you have full permission to impale me on a pike i am SO SORRY. (all of these will be under a readmore at the end of the post for length!)

there are more sort of beginnings/potentials for ships that haven't been explored yet which i haven't included here, but i'm truly excited to see where each and every one of them goes!!!

DOES ONE HAVE TO ASK TO SHIP WITH YOU?

yes absolutely hahaha — at least communicating ooc about it is necessary! i'm much more comfortable shipping with partners i mesh well with as a mun and have an easy time talking to.

ARE YOU SHIP-OBSESSED OR SHIP MORE-OR-LESS?

LOOK I. LISTEN. LISTEN... IM FERAL FOR SHIPS. FERAL. even though seph is picky about them — and i promise it's not personal if it doesnt work, it truly is just her dumb creature ass being unable to normal.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE SHIP IN YOUR CURRENT FANDOM?

N/A for this blog, but as a fun trivia fact, i'm deep in satosugu hell rn

FINALLY, HOW DOES ONE SHIP WITH YOU?

it's all vibes babey. we just start writing their non-romantic dynamic buildup, and if it clicks (or even if u just think ur character would have a crush!) we talk about it ooc and plot some more, then plot some more and before u know it, the angst hammer looms over ur head

Tagged by: @bearratic (thank youuuu!!) Tagging: (points) do it

ship gushing below. <3

@vsagis' villain izuku— i had to put u first bc u kickstarted this shipping renaissance. seph and izuku clicked instantly and started a long-term trajectory that i don't think either of us writers expected. they're just freak enough to match each other, just soft enough to genuinely care. we're really putting these two through the horrors(tm) and watching them fall hopelessly, horribly in love. <3

@spiritcrown's pasha — how could i not mention pasha!! i was so happy to see you back, because pasha and seph's relationship was soooo formative for seph's development wrt romance. seph is absolutely, completely and utterly devoted to pasha. they worship at the altar of her. they would bend heaven and raise hell for her.

@crowshoots' jesper — UAHGHGBBHBH INCOHERENT CRYING NOISES. the first thing seph noticed about jesper was extremely respectable fighting skills, but even then they were definitely uhhhh touch and go for a while there before they started to simmer down and. pin each other down and — one thing led to another and jesper's being antagonized by her antagonists and they're too deeply in love to go back!! i love them. i l

@crowgreeds' kaz — HHHHHHHHH god. hi siri i know ur not around the dash much but idc im writing u into this. kaz and seph both have such a darkness in them that the other recognizes and not only feeds, but when necessary, balances. they're ruthless and violent and mean but at the same time, they have such a softness for each other that they both thought was dead. also, you're the recipient of probably the best rp reply i've ever written (that fucking. hellhound kill description. my GOD im feral for seph protecting him)

@tewwor.... goose is2g we really have the creatures ever. litho — FIRST SHIP!!!! FIRST SHIIIP i still cant believe it took 4 irl years for them to finally admit their stupid feelings. now they're soulmates and there's no turning back. he's the reason seph likes poetry in every verse. the softest snarkiest ship. probably the closest to a true YA-style soulmate seph has. she hasn't forgiven him for all the twilight jokes though tough luck jie & ricochet — the boys... the absolute chaos trio... i never expected seph and jie to fall for each other but honestly i should have. he falls so neatly into her "equally feral" type. ricochet is so calm and seph is kind of intoxicated by that. sheathed claws kind of vibe. just love these three their dynamic balances itself so well

@spungolden's dio — two femmes raised as weapons with deeply suppressed emotions, chillin in a murder alley, five feet apart cause theyre not g— (theyre gay. theyre so gay) these two are so sweet they sometimes make me tear up. they skipped the trauma stage and went straight into lesbian domestic fantasy with only occasional murder.

@chaoslulled oh boy(s). toji — brutally in love. they saw and embraced each other's monster, refused to shy away, and now they somehow revolve in this strange orbit of violent and incredibly soft with each other. i think he's the first of the current ship lineup that seph has in-thread said the L-word to. this ship was so easy to jump right into, the chemistry was like lightning in a bottle. satoru — one of the most genuinely unexpected slowburn ships i've stumbled into. these two read each other for filth INSTANTLY as lonely motherfuckers who, in some way or another, had loved and lost. they haven't even gotten to the oh-shit moment in the slowburn yet but i'm lookin forward to it yakuza sukuna — THE PAIN. THE SUFFERING. AUHHHGHGGGG HOL YOU'RE FUCKING KILLING MEEEE. these two are mirrors in the worst possible way. they've got their throats stuck under their boss' boot heels; they've been disfigured, they've had their siblings used as leverage, they've been made into muzzled dogs. despite hating each other at the start, they can't not recognize that, and it's led to this fierce protectiveness that isssss whoops evolving into feelings. i'm sure nothing will go wrong

@eraserisms' shota — AHHHHHHH god okay most of this ship has been pure plotting vibes and responses to memes, but i truly cannot wait to get into writing more of them because they own my heart and soul. i think they know each other to the marrow in a way that's not super common for seph, and the gentleness and caution with which they're starting to explore revisiting their care for each other is heartbreaking in the best way

@sasouken BEE!!!! ok chronologically(??): deku — so precious and wholesome from the start. your honor he's just a little guy with a big dumb crush. when i tell uuuuuu some of our plotting has literally made me tear up a little??? the absolute bleeding heart on this boy??? HURTS ME??? one day they'll hold hands casper — slated to be our angstiest dynamic, i just Know it. two motherfuckers who love their siblings, inextricably involved in a tangled web of crime and violence. two people who have lost so much and don't want to lose anyone ever again. i will die i WILL satoru — such... a different vibe than i was expecting in an amazing way?? his dynamic with seph is so fuckin sweet? so much physical touch born of trust and comfort. also again: her first ever fwb (for now), which is truly a wild thing to experience. sukuna — i .. . dont even know what to say about this one. (affectionate). he unlocked an entirely new dimension of freak in seph's psyche and attraction style that i couldn't comprehend before we started writing them but retrospectively makes so much sense. what the fuck is going on with these two i have no idea but i am OBSESSED with it. also writing them getting down nasty has been extremely fun, i'm enjoying it a lot

[leosabi]

I'm sorry that you've been having such a rough time lately, hopefully this ask can take your mind off things but if not also feel free to DM me to talk about literally anything

I wanted to ask about your pet hcs for bh6 and leosabi. If I remember correctly Leosabi have two fish and I feel like i remember you saying something about them having a maoi. Do any of the others have pets too?

i actually have to put this under a readmore bc i infodumped too much, lmao. minor warning for unethical treatment of animals (at a festival, not by any of the bh6 characters!)

thanks so much for the ask!! i should draw the pets soon, i'm also adding a page on my strawpage for them <3

we have one goldfish named elmo! we won him in a goldfish scooping game (kingyo-sukui) at a festival we went to within our first year of dating, and convinced krei to pay for a fancy fishtank bc of how much he overall owes big hero 6 (i think we could have convinced fred even more easily tho. but it's funny to blackmail krei. perks of having rich friends, i guess).

goldfish scooping is actually really unethical, but neither of us had researched it beforehand and it seemed fun at the time. the premise of the game is that you pay for a certain amount of scoops, which are flat circles with handles and instead of netting or anything like that it's paper that dissolves easily in water, like this:

and you have to try and scoop stuff out of the water without breaking the paper.

in the one we did, goldfish were not the sole prizes—there were also little trinkets and toys and stuff, and floating ping pong balls with numbers that you could exchange for a bigger prize or candy but those seemed super hard to scoop up lol.

but yeah this is really stressful for the goldfish and they are kept in suboptimal or even completely neglectful and harmful conditions and often overcrowded as well. and it's not like you can buy a fishtank at the booth, they just send it home in a bag with you and you have to carry it around the festival like that...

elmo is safe and well taken care of in our tank at home, but don't participate in these games, even if you plan to "rescue" the goldfish—it just gives more money to the people putting them in these conditions to begin with. it's also fully possible to find these games with just toys and fake fish!

we also have a mayoi named dr. bunsen honeydew, with a million nicknames for short. it for sure doesn't know its actual name, lmao (we also use "he" and "it" interchangeably, because, i mean, it's a fungus and an animal. it doesn't give a shit about gender and doesn't even have a sex to begin with).

after the events of city of monsters, karmi made it a personal project to recreate the mayoi without the extreme growth cycles. ours barely eats at all and will turn up his nose at most foods, but loves to sunbathe and get his face all covered in substrate from our houseplants xD we leave water out for him and also spray mist him a lot!

the new mayoi are also sterile, and must be lab-grown, to prevent creating ecological problems if one were to escape out into the wild. as for how you make something sterile when it self-reproduces to begin with? i have no idea, take it up with karmi lmao

we were some of the first people in line to receive our new mayoi, and got it heavily discounted on the promise that we'd collect and send data to her. they're not a popular pet by any means, because most people are too afraid of them even with documented assurances that they're safe now. wasabi is the only one from big hero 6 that currently owns one—honey lemon desperately wants one but gogo is a chronic skeptic and not all that fond of pets to begin with

wasabi and i are interested in getting a cat as well, but we keep putting it off because it'll tack on an extra fee per month for our apartment (and we really like it here for right now), and we're also not sure how to make sure it gets along with both the mayoi and the houseplants. for the short period of time that cass had a mayoi the first time around, mochi hated that thing, so that's the only precedent we've got for it

as for the others? besides mochi, hiro periodically keeps beetles. i know for sure he's had a rhino beetle and a hercules beetle but i can never remember their names nor which one he currently has, lmao. i don't go into the house part of the café very often, and i go into hiro's room even less often.

fred has a very, VERY long list of pets he wants (some more realistic than others...don't let this man own a python). he, so far, has not been allowed to have any of them, because his parents, despite being kind, are also still insane rich people who value their furniture like gold. he treats minimax as sort of a pet/baby most of the time tho. actually i think heathcliff treats fred as a pet/baby most of the time as well but don't tell either of them i said that sdfhskjdfhskjf

honey lemon also has a long list of pets she wants (primarily specific breeds of cats and dogs, but rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters, mice, and ferrets are also on the list. i believe a couple types of bird were also on the list at one point but gogo was like "you know that's like having a perpetual 3 year old who lives to 70, right?" and there are no longer any birds on the list). i know for certain she'll wear gogo down eventually, but their apartment also isn't super equipped, nor particularly safe, to have pets in (some pretty egregious gaps between the stairs and near some of the cabinets and windows and stuff).

felony carl and globby have an ever-increasing cat population at their place, primarily fosters and rescues! many of them don't stay for super long and end up finding forever homes, but they definitely keep a lot of the cats they bring in as well.

[captmickey]

Don't mind if I do~

For everyone's dashboard consideration, I'll put it under the readmore and point out, once more, this is all silly headcanons that flip flop around so like... yeah.

Here we go!

For Dee: - I like to imagine her parents are something akin to a doctor/herbologist, which is why she is so into reading about facts and such. I also like to imagine her parents as inter-racial though that one is still being figured out (and with it, I like to think she's bilingual). - She is the easiest to make laugh no matter how tough she tries to come off as. And she is tough, but Boybrush and Chuckie know exactly what to do to make her laugh really hard. - She bonded with Chuckie over a mutual interest in pirate trading cards, they had a bit of a competition who could have the better deck before really bonding and sharing facts (she got really excited to learn it was Chuckie that got Boybrush into it too). - Refused to believe Guybrush could hold his breath for ten minutes until Boybrush grabbed her arm and took her to see his dad where Guybrush did it (more or less). She is determined to learn the science behind it and wonders if she could do it too. - Very protective of her boys and will throw hands at the nearest bully if they hurt either of them. It takes both Chuckie and Boybrush to hold her back.

For Chuckie: - His dad is a sailor and is pretty often out at sea (so not so much a negligent dad, but someone who is out on jobs pretty frequent to make sure the family is provided financially), so he's with his mom who occasionally takes odds and ends job. - Speaking of mom, I don't know why I'm drawn to the name Marigold but I am so.... tada. - Chuckie is incredibly shy talking around adults. He can and does joke and throw remarks around Dee and Boybrush, but when an adult enters the room? Goes quiet and lets the others do the talking. - Tallest of the group (and grows up to be THE tallest, sorry Boybrush) and can often be mistaken for someone who is rough... but he's not. He's a big ol' softy (except, again, around Boybrush and Dee where he's more relaxed and will get protective if needed). - Initially terrified of Guybrush. He's heard of stories and tales and such and was a bit of a fan of them somewhat, and he really loves hanging around Boybrush, but a part of him is terrified that Guybrush will go after him because his name is similar to LeChuck and tries to limit as many interactions with Guybrush. It wasn't until Boybrush asked his dad to talk to Chuckie and Guybrush reassuring him that he has nothing to worry about, he won't go hunting after his son's best friend, and even apologizes for scaring him unintentionally (though he has no idea what he did exactly).

For Boybrush (Lucas), - He wanted to go to school only because Chuckie and Dee were there. He's there most of the year until an adventure pops up... then it's back to home-schooling. - Bonded with Chuckie over pirate trading cards because he once saw him in the park with a card of his dad on it. Beamed up and went "Hey, that's my dad! 8D" and the rest was history. - Always comes back with presents for Chuckie and Dee when he returns from an adventure with his parents, ranging from shells to unique items he found while away. - He has a school yard bully and she is meeeeeeeeean. It takes a lot to rile Boybrush up but she can do it in no time by insinuating that his parents aren't really his and that he is adopted etc. She will also bully and say things how Chuckie is really LeChuck's son and Dee will be alone... He compares her as his LeChuck with how angry she makes him. Bonus of Guybrush and Elaine: - Even though Boybrush gets great education from Elaine, Winslow, and occasionally Guybrush, he still wanted to go to school. Elaine initially was confused but figured it would be good for him to socialize while Guybrush doesn't get it but won't stop his son either... he wants him to have the things he never had when he was a kid (school, parents, friends etc). - Guybrush is great with English and can and does help not just Boybrush, but Chuckie and Dee with their homework from time to time. But it's Elaine Boybrush goes to for any and all other subjects. Primarily math. - Guybrush and Elaine are really good friends with Chuckie and Dee's parents. They figured it didn't hurt to befriend other parents since, with respect to Carla and everyone else, they could use some time with other parents. - Hilariously enough, although Chuckie is scared a little of Guybrush, Guybrush is really good friends with Marigold and offers to help her when he can while her husband is away. Elaine finds it endearing that Guybrush even offered such a thing and is proud of him. - During one of their adventures, Guybrush, Elaine and Boybrush ran into Chuckie's dad while he was on a job. Chuckie's dad got so excited and asked them for when they go back home to deliver a present to his wife and son since he won't be home for a bit. - Guybrush, Elaine, and Marigold don't exactly get along well with the PTA, but it's Guybrush that has an on-going feud with Helen from the Parent-Teacher Association. He initially did not care for it (he's a pirate, why would he care) but it was when Helen said something akin to being a bad parents that had him go into Spiteful Mode and learn how to properly bake better lemon squares. He will also trash talk with Marigold during any meetings if Elaine is there with them.

[cephaloph0re]

um i guess this got long enough to put under a readmore. hi i'm alek this is my manifesto about the multitudes dazai osamu contains

(hi context i started thinking about painful interactions between dazai and akutagawa post defection and now we are here.)

i have zero complex feelings about akutagawa for the most part unless kyouka, but generally i think he's pretty well understood as someone who fundamentally is a kind person, someone who wants to protect others, but the trait became distorted by his childhood and then used and changed by dazai. and asagiri clearly shows the capacity for care and protection still exists within him intrinsically and he shows care in so many interactions, he just doesn't have ways to express it simply and without overjustification. and generally he isn't as involved in as nearly as many lives as dazai is-- kyouka, atsushi and higuchi are really the only people he affects and it's not at all close to the degree dazai affects others. he's not meant to be narrative set-up like dazai is-- he and atsushi are both the forward motion of it.

but when it comes to dazai it's just SO much more complicated. obviously partially because we don't know anything about the way he grew up, but i would assume any nurturing ability in him was largely made to be a controlling one. i don't think they're very separate concepts. the clearest observation one can make is that he is severely mentally ill. and i think his suicide shtick has kind of made larger fandom a little blind to the severity of that illness-- you kind of think, oh, obviously he's not right. literally every episode he's in he wants to kill himself. besides the fact that dazai making suicide his way of being almost comedic relief desensitizes both the people around him AND THE AUDIENCE to the real possibility, he's generally characterized as someone who is purely controlling, purely out to use and degrade others for his own gain or a forseen 'greater good,' or he's someone whose (fanon!!) arc of change is-- at least to me-- deeply unrealistic. someone whose malignant traits disappeared during those two years, or at least who figured out how to use them constructively for the agency's benefit. both of these ideas of dazai are, for me, really shallow. he's both and also he's other things! while i think it is true that he's begun using the talent for foresight and manipulation that he has for good, it's also true that he wouldn't have done that if not for oda. that's what beast shows us. dazai is generally a creature of habit, and is reluctant to change or move away from, maybe not a comfort zone, but a place where he does thrive. he needs somewhere to be where he feels valued somehow and if that need is met i think it's hard to rip him away. valued as a right-hand, as a genius, as a rival-- it gives him a unique sort of adaptability. it's dazai's way of feeling secure, even if that value doesn't provide any other fulfillment by nature (see his behavior in the mafia pre and post chuuya, and then in the agency pre and post atsushi). so really, it's not that he's fundamentally an evil and conniving person or that he went through some kind of dramatic personal change inspired by oda's death. it's that he is a sort of amphibian. the organs for breathing air and the organs for breathing water coexist-- they're not something he could will out of his personality. they're intrinsically a part of him. it just so happened that the catalyst for that environmental switch was oda's death. i wouldn't even say he was inspired by oda's words specifically to become a good person, which i think a lot of people believe was both their intent and effect. oda really only wanted dazai to see that life can be beautiful, grating personality be damned. that is the change dazai went through-- not personal, not mental, just a change in perspective. doesn't mean he's a good person and changed for the better, doesn't mean he deserves absolute hell for staying the way he was.

sorry that got away from me terribly but that leads into what i'm REALLY thinking about. which is why dazai remains the world's biggest asshole to a lot of the people he's hurt-- not only directly but on purpose! namely: chuuya and akutagawa (funnily enough two characters who are pretty stinkin similar in motivation but im not getting into that rn). people condemn his actions entirely as evil, selfish, unnecessarily cruel. i'm not going to disagree with them, it's a pretty objective observation. but there are also people who sort of bend over backward to justify it. i see it when i read a chuuya who finds it in himself to forgive a regretful dazai, or when a dazai takes it upon himself to apologize and explain that perhaps he saw himself and it scared him, or that he thought it was necessary but knows otherwise, or anything else to akutagawa. both i think are mischaracterized situations. dazai is fully aware of the way he treats certain people, i think. truthfully the only reasons he doesn't treat atsushi worse are that the agency cares and that any further abuse would only break atsushi, not reshape him into anything dazai finds useful. i think the reason akutagawa's training was so particularly harsh is that with the murder of his group of strays he'd become the perfect blank slate dazai could mold into really, whatever he wanted. he simply had to make someone who was not used to imposed discipline into someone who needed it. i do truly believe he does not hold remorse towards akutagawa now-- truthfully, the leash he put on akutagawa is the reason atsushi survived his initial encounter with fukuchi. it's dazai's letting the leash slack that makes him so furiously fascinated with atsushi. but i also can't find it in myself to completely abhorr dazai for his actions. i think they were absolutely cruel and absolutely a horrific thing to do to someone, but i can also so easily see the benefits that have come out of them. which is sort of a really weird thing to write out but i stand by it. akutagawa and atsushi might have just killed each other by now if dazai had no hand in both of their lives. there would be no reason for them to connect, or, at least i think it would feel a thousand times more forced.

even looking at chuuya! chuuya's own experiences being used by dazai (especially in 16 and in stormbringer) are often mistaken for complete and reciprocal trust. but it's not that-- or not just that. 16 sets a precedent for soukoku of true harmony between the two only being achieved in times of extreme danger. they work together, sure, they fight together. and they are a well oiled team that way! but soukoku doesn't truly shut up and get the job done unless something huge is at stake-- their lives, yokohama. i believe this isn't something dazai would miss. chuuya is a very protective person and he's made to care, violently. in those beginning years he doesn't care much about dazai-- any fascination is very one sided. so dazai pushes him into situations where he's destabilized and alone, and when that happens and the change dazai wants to see is taking place, he likes to offer himself for support. the trust they grow isn't fake for it, but it is set to wires and trained. i'm sure chuuya is aware of the way he's used, but not only accepts it as a part of his existence as arahabaki, he allows it to happen as he gets older. it's the rhythm of the relationship he has with dazai (this has been what i mean when i say people underestimate how toxic 16skk was). do i think eventually dazai makes it onto chuuya's list of his people? yeah. is it right? is it healthy? fuck no! a side tangent into romantic soukoku world: this is exactly why they are one of my favorite pairings. i don't think shippers should come to bsd world if they don't want to explore tilted, stunted and even toxic relationships. it's why i also tend not to read aus for this fandom, because it is each character's history, trauma, and effects on other characters that makes the relationships in bsd so interesting to explore, and that's demonstrated especially clearly to me in the ways soukoku interact, through a lens of (weird and definitely in no way healthy) love. okay back to normal meta world. despite all of that, i can still understand why dazai would act like this towards chuuya. it's not the same as shaping a tool for absolute loyalty, it's colored with an obsession of the lonely boy-god dazai sees chuuya as. i think 16 also establishes that dazai does genuinely respect chuuya. he views arahabaki with a reverent awe. but at the same time he believes someone so powerful shouldn't be relegated to the nanny of a handful of orphans, and for chuuya to allow himself to be caught and collared seems to dazai like pure insanity. so obviously he has to put chuuya somewhere he can use his power to thrive, to be a cut above the rest. i think it's pretty obvious he was expecting to take control of the port mafia with chuuya at his side, just as he did in beast. and remember that detail i mentioned a while ago, how the places dazai flourishes are not the sole providers of any will to stay alive? it was chuuya, first. dazai's utter fascination with chuuya is what kept him from trying serious avenues of suicide, mori aside. then, when chuuya wasn't around to be his object of obsession, i believe to some degree it shifted to atsushi. not in the same degree, but dazai saw someone, like chuuya, who was immensely powerful! and, like chuuya, who had something dazai believed was holding him back. atsushi had no idea he harbored the tiger, and when he did, he was terrified of it up until dead apple. atsushi's obstacle, to dazai, was that he felt absolutely zero pride or trust in his own skills and feared being bold, being without a crutch. and really, who better to teach him that than akutagawa, who'd had dependency and hesitance beaten out of him?

anyway. i think a lot of fandom's issues with dazai come from the fact he seems to be everywhere-- he's been orchestrating everything from behind the scenes since sixteen years old. and while i would say that part isn't on purpose, it's true that so much of the main narrative comes back to him. that's why i do think it's a little unfair to see his actions and immediately label him as a cruel and cold inhuman person-- if you do that, at least consider why. don't dismiss him. don't ignore his actions, either-- that serves nothing, and actively makes his and other characters shallower. dazai's influence is pervasive, and those shallower analyses can seriously detract from the integral nuance of bsd. grins

tdlr dazai osamu is an extremely mentally ill character and i think it's a bit unfair to dismiss him as fundamentally bad. there's more to it.

[unknownlemonglitch]

Hi! Sorry I know this is unprompted and not asked for but I wanted to give a few ideas/tips - when tagging for trigger warnings write the real words. Tagging s3lf harm is not the kind of tag people here are actively blocking - there's no reason to not just write out what ever the trigger itself is. Self harm, scars, blood should all be separate tags too - if you're trying to actively make sure people aren't seeing what they don't want to

When you tag something that's popular and regularly search (moondrop for example) people checking that tag have to scroll down because that's how tumblr works; it would be most helpful/appreciated/safest to put something you think may be triggering under a read more. If you're posting from a computer it is an option when creating a new post. If you're making a post on mobile: type “:readmore:” without the quote in a new paragraph, click enter! You will produce a fine line that looks like this ➡ “———–more———–”

You can add a Read More after you have posted by editing it; Click enter in between the paragraph, do the “:readmore:” enter once again, and you've got that potentially triggering or upsetting thing not just showing up on people's dashes.

Not coming from a place of frustration or anger, just genuinely want to help make sure you know what things are best practice here if you are trying to not trigger people

Thank you so much! I'm kinda new to Tumblr so I suck using it lmao, since there are no like- spoiler filters I rlly didn't knew what to do, But thanks for the advice! I'll definetely use it! ^^

Update: Omg you saved my life hahA- thank you fr!

[atoriv-art]

asks

putting these above the readmore because otherwise i will be speaking into the void

fave. grouping these together to say: i do read fanfic on occasion but it's usually filtered through a friend of mine who reads far more than i do! ie, she reads stuff and sends me what she likes

however she did say that i could tell people to link me things so she can read through them. so feel free to link me whatever in the replies/asks/idk. no promises i will be the one reading it LMAO but we have very similar tastes in characters/pairings and also the types of fics we like 👍

i actually gravitate towards gen fics which are a dying breed lol but you can link whatever you want <3

--

anyway. under the cut: misc asks, sasuneji 💕, also a tiny hyuga ramble

this is so late LMAO sorry, its all in my old blog @atoriv-moved ! haven't deleted any of it so if anything happened it's tumblr's fault. i miss kingdom hearts i need luxu to be in things again so i can go crazy :/

--

thank you so much!!! 😭😭 it always makes me happy to hear the emotional weight of my work comes through! it's what i'm always trying to improve to make the little scenes in my head real :)

--

thank you!!!! i never know what to say to these but they always make me smile 8)

--

thank you so much!! honestly noses still give me trouble sometimes but as someone who is particular about trying to properly translate 3D shapes, especially of the face, in my rendering it's probably one of the most important landmarks :P and i think you can enhance a design sooo much with them, despite my struggles they're one of my favorite things to draw now!

i totally encourage you to start drawing again if you want to! but i'm biased of course hehe

--

cute i never know how to answer these... maybe a little boring but i'm of the opinion sasuke is the clingier one in the rs :)

he's a very loving person but because of both his personality and collection of issues he struggles to fully articulate his thoughts in a manner that doesn't come off as rude or detached, but imo sasuke esp once he's out of his spiral would hate to have his love go unexpressed. so i think him having trouble with words and making up for it with flopping onto the people he loves like a large dog is sooooo cute, and i always think about how clingy he was as a baby.. he is made for latching onto people and wiggling them with a 😐 face

neji on the other hand is Weird About Intimacy since he's trained himself to be self-sufficient, and is hyperaware of how other people might perceive him due to him having to calibrate himself around his family. neji is very principled and especially when he's older won't let his anxieties keep him from doing something he believes in, but it gets a little more complicated when it comes to his personal relationships because for 90% of his life he had no hope of fostering those. so he ends up in a weird middle ground where he Does allow himself to express some of those feelings, but not fully, and often in a very self-conscious manner. his default answer to vulnerability is fluffing up like a cat because that's what's he's trained himself to do lol

so with these two in particular i think it'd combo into a lot of "flopping onto you like a weighed blanket because you're upset and i don't know what to say but i want to be here for you" situations, especially with sasuke doing it to neji because neji struggles with verbally articulating when he needs comfort like that. i think it works wonders for them because sometimes words get really messy when you have their combination of issues... it doesn't mean they can't talk through their problems of course, it just means that if something can be solved by the cat loaf maneuver it will be :)

--

not reading too much into it at all, i love it! i like how much people talk about my kabuto hahaha i really want to draw him more often, i think he's a way more interesting character than he's given credit for (and this is coming from someone who really didn't like him at first :P), and his hairstyle change is one of the most obvious ways to explore that visually imo!

tysm for this, i really enjoyed reading it!

--

i do! i wish more was done with her because i'm really fascinated by the implications of how she's presented, and how she could've shown that being the favorite child of someone like hiashi isn't necessarily a good thing! i always thought she seems like she's a little dissociated from life outside of the clan, which is really fun to work with (and definitely sucks for her because the clan is Not good lol)

i haven't gotten through the arduous task of watching all naruto filler (lmao) but one of my favorites is the one about hanabi and her relationship with hinata, especially the first half, episode 389 i think? i'm really obsessed with the way that episode shows what day-to-day life was like for the kids and the way the hyuga structure themselves, and how it creates distance between them. i'm pretty sure it implies hanabi (pre-plot) didn't know who neji is, for example? which i get isn't canon but i looove that thought. and on a less deep note hanabi is one of the few characters who gets a design i actually like in boruto! i think she looks soooooo cute

since i spend a lot of time thinking about them i actually am fond of all of the hyuga to some capacity, hiashi definitely in a "wow this guy sucks so much it's impressive" way but still lol i think his relationship with his brother and how it informs how he regards neji is very fascinating, or at least the directions it could have taken (if kishi cared at all.) are!

see my problem is that i wish naruto was about weird families and their issues (i am also obsessed with the suna family <3), but it is a shonen anime made for normal audiences

[bugdotpng]

i Did Not intend to write this much but Ms. Gabriella Pentin went off her shits while i was writing this so i gotta put it under a readmore. yammering about design and the compendium and all that under the cut

now that i'm done with coding the compendium... *rubs my grubby little hands together* it's physical media time >:3 i will jump at ANY excuse to use indesign again i miss it so bad after moving to web ;w; it's a wild beast and i've figured out how to tame it over the years so i kinda have an exasperated fondness for it.

fun fact i actually used indesign back in high school for yearbook, and i didn't make the connection until after i graduated college that 1) i was using indesign, and 2) i was doing editorial design. i'd always gravitated toward design before i even realized that's what i wanted to do for a career lmao. i should've known i was destined to be a designer when i wrote my little story with my bestie back in middle school and i spent more time choosing fonts and messing with the layout than actually writing or editing.

hi sorry my fucking gabapentin is off her shits again tonight so i'm chatty as all fuck but oh my god i genuinely, wholeheartedly LOVE taking a shitty, horrible word document and turning it into something presentable. i love formatting documentation and writing out tutorials, or honestly just thoughtfully typesetting a document. i know i say this a lot but that truly is the BIGGEST enrichment activity for me. give me your ugly PDFs i won't make them win design contests but i WILL make them legible and easy to read. i don't like the flashy work i like making things presentable. good design is invisible and all that.

which is why this printed compendium project is going to be so fun and cathartic because my job is making things pretty and presentable ffs i'm the manager of UX development my whole schtick is efficiency and ease of use. and yes i did some organizing and grouping for the compendium but it's largely just stream-of-consciousness writing. no thoughts head empty. or...empty my head of all my thoughts onto the paper don't think too hard about it. oh you wrote a few paragraphs about X? give it an h2 and keep it moving. who caaaares if there's inconsistencies and contradictions, the whole point of this compendium is that it's a light commentary on the inaccessibility of navigating medical spaces. how you have to do so much studying and practically learn a new language in order to communicate with your medical team effectively so they take you seriously. and even then it's not guaranteed. hennyway if you're frustrated reading the compendium then good it worked ghfdsjk

but yes i want to do two separate print projects, one that's really pretty typesetting and thoughtful layouts and the other's a lopsided PDF some boomer professor made scans of in a drunken stupor. they're both enrichment projects for meeee i love my compendium it's my baby ;w;