#i've been on and off tumblr for the past ~15 years and i've had more acconts than i can count for whatever fandom i've been into at that

[plaest2k]

hey, im a young nz artist too and i like making comics/want to do something bigger when im older, and i think your stuff is genuinely so fucking cool. i love it so much. i was wondering how you pursued art after highschool, like did you go to art school? if so, where and what was that like, and if not, how’d you find the time to continue doing it? its always felt like my opportunities for a career in art specifically seem smaller living in nz, but idk your stuff inspires me to think otherwise. thank you :)

kia ora!!

thanks so much for asking, it's truly so flattering that a young nz artist would ask me for advice! <3 sadly i might not necessarily be the best person to ask...

First of all, it's been a loooooong time since i've been a young artist hahaha I'm 32. After high school, I studied architecture at university because, as you're probably aware, we don't really have art schools like our peers do overseas. But after studying for a few years, I had a major depressive episode and dropped out. After that, I ran away to Korea to teach english for a year before coming back to work in cafes for about 6 years. Back then I was pursuing a career in editorial illustration cause that's what all my favourite artists were doing but I didn't realise that it was a dying industry at the time and there weren't exactly lot of full-time professional artists here who could have warned me...

So after about 10 years of trying to piece together some kind of profession in illustration, I ended up looking for a tattoo apprenticeship which was looking pretty promising but my bosses turned out to be not-so-great people. I tried to keep tattooing on my own but that was around the time COVID hit which wasn't (and still isn't) great for a job that requires you meet face-to-face with a lot of people. So, since the pandemic began, I've just been subsisting off of jobseeker, chipping away at comics and the occasional illustration gig.

The whole experience had me perpetually burnt out for the past ~15 years and made me realise that art as a career really just shouldn't be a thing. Under capitalism, it requires either an embarrassing level of compromise, privilege or luck to pursue. All the household-name artists you know in NZ either come from privilege or got unbelievably lucky. I don't say this as a value judgment or anything, most of them are truly wonderful people, it's just what I've learned about them as colleagues who've worked together a few times over the years.

I don't fault anyone for wanting to pursue that, but if you want to make uncompromising art that makes you feel fulfilled, you can't stake your livelihood on it. Art is supposed to be a by-product of life well lived, not content to be sold.

It's why I'm making plans to go back to uni next year to switch careers into a cushy office job because, as you've observed, even if you still want to pursue this as a full-time career, opportunities for artists in Aotearoa is extremely limited.

Having said all that, there's still a lot of nuance to this whole thing that would take me too long to cover in a tumblr post, so if you'd like me to elaborate or anything or have more questions, you're more than welcome to contact me through my email: plaest2k@gmail.com!

And this offer extends to literally anyone who might be looking for advice or just wants to talk about art <3

Final thing: the thought of studying something else at college/ university and keeping your art as a hobby might sound bleak when you're young, but life is so much longer than you think. You might feel like you have limitless creativity and ideas at the moment but when it becomes your entire life, you burn through it all faster than you'd think. It's because you need fuel to inform what you make and you can't get that from just making art. Like I always say, art is a by-product of a life well lived; You need life-experiences; You need to love, hate, care, be hated and loved to make art and you can't do that if you're too busy to do any of that. Those 3 years you spend on a bachelors is nothing in comparison to a lifetime of staring at a blank page, agonizing over what to make next.

[diary-ofamadwoman]

kissing all of my mutuals on the forehead; i love and appreciate each one of you so much♥♥♥

[thirstywoso]

Love me like a sailor - Jessie Fleming x reader

A/N: a little bittersweet childhood sweetheart fic, now I've re-read it I kind of hate it and let's just say there will be a lot of angst coming - you've been warned

THIS IS A RE-POST AS TUMBLR IS HAVING A MELTDOWN

WC: 2k

Warnings: none atm

Synopsis: long distance is taking its toll on you relationship with Jessie

London, Ontario. You knew it well, why?

It was the city you'd grown up in, learned to love and where you now as a 26 year old adult resided. It was also the city you met your childhood sweetheart. Jessie or as most people knew her Jessie Fleming the captain of the Canadian women's soccer team.

You'd met Jessie when you were in kindergarten and since then the two of you had been inseparable. It wasn't until 9th grade though where you'd both realised your friendship was maybe something more, Jessie had been bold and made the first move.

It had been shortly after her debut for the senior team, at 15 years old it was a huge step for her. You'd gone to see her play and unbeknownst to you the feelings you had for the dark haired girl were also creeping their way into her, only the feelings were for you.

So there you were at the sidelines, back then the games weren't so busy but you held up a sign for her "Fleming is my hero" she came over and said hi, the freckled Canadian grinning from ear to ear.

Shortly after the game you found yourself sat cross legged on her bed watching some old movie you'd probably seen a hundred times, yet this time you felt different. Your gaze shifted to Jessie whose eyes were already trained on you, she gave you a soft smile and before you knew it her lips were on yours.

You reciprocated the kiss and in your teenage brain it felt like hours when in reality was more than likely ten seconds, that's where it all started though. The innocent touches, the shared looks until one day you decided to bite the bullet and ask Jessie to be your girlfriend and now here you are just over ten years later. Still loving that goofy lopsided smile and those big brown doe eyes.

The issue with London, Ontario though was that it wasn't Portland, Oregon which is where Jessie currently resided. That being said it was two and a half thousand miles closer than London, England which was where she had been for the past three and a half years.

Jessie playing across the border provided to be easier than when she was across an entire ocean. It mean't she could fly to you during off season, you could fly out to games especially the ones she played on the east coast. It was easier. There was no doubt about that.

Yet after graduating high school together and both going to college on the west coast of America yourself at Berkeley and Jessie at UCLA, then dealing with the time differences being on different continents, nothing felt as distant as it did now.

You always knew Jessie would go far and even though you both decided it was best for you to stay in your hometown to pursue your career it seemed to be eating at you more and more.

This is something you should probably bring up to Jessie, yet it never seemed like the right time. When you saw her you'd go to talk but something inside of you didn't want to ruin the precious time you did have together and then she would be gone again. However, over the phone also didn't seem like the best way to have this conversation. So you kept it to yourself.

That was until you visited Portland, Jessie had been there several months by now, however, you'd only managed to get out there a few times but it was better than nothing.

This time was different though, she was showing you some of her favourite places she had found since being in the city, one of which was a coffee shop on the river. As you walked in you took note of the way the barista who you'd soon come to learn was named Alex beamed at your girlfriend, her face slightly dropping as she clocked you and your fingers threaded through Jessie's. This didn't go unnoticed by you.

She greeted Jessie as you both came up to the counter and Jessie introduced you to her, telling you how Alex had helped her one day when she got caught in the rain and the paper bag with her groceries had split. They'd soon became friends and Jessie would frequent Alex's coffee shop, it seemed odd to you that Jessie hadn't mentioned her to you before.

As you turned to find a seat you noticed that the shelves in the shop contained some old cameras and some books, the layout of the shop and the items scattered is only what you could describe as a representation of Jessie's brain. You mentioned this to Jessie and she told you that's why she liked this place so much, her eyes then wondered over towards the counter where Alex was looking over at you both smiling. A pang of jealousy struck you in the chest.

Once you'd both finished your coffee Jessie suggested one of her new favourite walks that Alex had apparently showed her, you politely declined, feigning a migraine and asking to go back to her apartment.

Arriving back at the apartment you laid down on the couch on your front a pillow under your head as your arms stretched out underneath it, that's when you felt some soft material poking out from under the couch cushions. After a slight tug you find a flannel shirt, one you didn't recognise.

"Hey babe" you call out

"What's up?" Your girlfriend says walking over to where you lay.

"What's this?" You ask holding up the garment in question

"Oh" she scratches the back of her neck "That's Alex's, she must've left it here"

"What was Alex doing in your apartment? Much less leaving clothes?"

"She just came over one day after I'd finished training to bring coffee... she must've got hot and just left it here by accident" Jessie says almost questioning it herself.

"Right.." you say pushing yourself up so you're sat on the edge of the couch.

"What? You don't believe me?"

"It's just. Jessie, you seem real close with her. The way she was eye fucking you across the coffee shop, how her clothes are literally in your apartment. How you've never told me about her ever yet she seems to be a big part of your Portland life, it just doesn't make sense!" You say beginning to raise your voice.

"I didn't bring her up because I want to focus on you when we talk, she was certainly not eye fucking me and she's just been helpful since I met her"

"Yeah, yeah Jessie, you can't deny the way she looked at you" you yell at her

"You're out of your fucking mind!" She yells back

"I'm out of my fucking mind, clearly you are lying or just so stupidly naive if you don't think she likes you"

Your words are almost instantly confirmed when Jessie's phone lights up on the coffee table,

Alex💕: You still coming over after you drop your girlfriend at the airport tomorrow?

"And there we go" you say gesturing to her phone

"Wow, we are really doing that huh?" She says handing you her phone

"Go on look through our messages" she huffs at you rolling her eyes

"I'm not saying I don't trust you Jess, I'm saying I don't trust her" you place her phone back on the coffee table.

Running your hands through your hair you don't know where to look, settling on the ground you can't bring yourself to look at her.

"She's just a friend, even if she does have feelings I promise you I don't" she says tilting your chin to look up at her.

Begrudgingly you make eye contact with her, deep down you know she's right. Jessie could never cheat on you... could she? You shake your head dismissing that thought.

"You're right, I trust you Jess. It's just been hard you know? You've been so far away for so long and I'm not one hundred percent sure how I can keep doing it" you let out a sigh feeling relived you addressed your feelings.

"Right... so what does that mean for you? For us?" She narrows her eyes slightly somewhat taken aback by your statement. It wasn't that Jessie hadn't also felt the strain and had begun to have those questions herself, it was more that she hadn't even thought about you feeling the same.

"I'm not sure, I love you Jess, I always will but it's just not felt right for awhile" you say your chest tightening

"I see, I love you too but you're right it's been hard, what should we do?"

"Maybe, maybe we should take a break. See how we are in a few months from now?"

"And if we are meant to be, we will be?" She says sadness seeping into her voice

"So, this is it?" You ask tears brimming in your eyes

"This is it" she repeats back to you.

"For now" she follows up.

-

Before you knew it you were on the plane back to your hometown, Jessie still in Portland. Your conversation last night ended with the mutual decision to keep contact to a minimum whilst you both figure things out.

You'd gotten on the plane with a book and some music downloaded on your phone, the way you'd kill the next few hours instead of enduring crying babies and staring at the seat ahead. That all went out the window though when a girl in the seat next to you was struggling to put her luggage in the overhead bin.

You being the kindhearted person that you were you'd decided to give her a hand, helping her cram her baggage in as she slammed down the bin door. Only she ended up knocking your phone out of your hand which came crashing down in the aisle.

She was so apologetic but that didn't help the fact you now had a broken phone and a six hour flight with nothing but yourself and your thoughts.

This gave you time to think about your relationship and your own life. You'd been with Jessie for all of your adult life and half of your teenage years, the time you had made you realise how you didn't know who you were without her, this break would be harder than you first thought.

You loved Jessie, you really did. Just for now you knew you needed to see who you were and what your life was without her.

After several hours of your mind ticking away back and forth between if you made the right decision or not, how you felt and if you should've just stuck with it you finally exit the aircraft making your way to the luggage carousel. As you turn to take your luggage you see a pair of feet in front of you and hear what sounds like someone gasping for breath.

"Oh hi" you say slightly surprised at the disheveled girl in front of you, the same girl from the plane.

"Sorry, it's just, I... hold on" she pants out

You stay still your gaze steady on her whilst she regains composure.

"I, I'm sorry about your phone. I couldn't let you go without apologising again and.." she rummages in her pocket pulling out a crumpled napkin with the airline logo stamped on it.

"This is for you" she says handing it to you

"Your dirty napkin?" You question confused.

"No, open it" she laughs

You do, looking up meeting her eyes a confused look still plastered on your face, eyebrow slightly raised and head cocked.

"What, what's this?" You ask

"My number silly" she giggles to herself lightly before carrying on "when you get your phone fixed, call me or text me and we can grab coffee or something and I'll reimburse you for the damage"

"I don't expect you to do that"

"It's nothing really!" She insists

"Well I'll agree to the coffee but don't worry about anything else" you bargain with her

"Deal" she shakes your hand "It's a date"

Those three words replayed in your head the rest of the day.

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

WIBTA For telling my partner I'd like to bring my ex into our relationship?

I'm copying this over from r/relationship_advice, because the responses are giving me the impression they don't really get what polyamory is & I'm hoping tumblr does. For reference: there's me (29M), my ex (28, Trans Man), and my partner (30M).

My ex and I were best friends in high school, went to the same college, & dated through the tail end of undergrad, for about a year and change. We ended things on very good terms, the only reason we broke up was a difference in life paths: I stayed in the city to get my Master's, he traveled constantly for his work (he's a sculptor who makes these huge custom multimedia pieces, they're genuinely some of the most beautiful things I've seen). We fell out of touch for the most part, but I'd see him popping up on social media occasionally, or he'd text me when he was in town and we'd hang out, along with some other school friends.

The last time I saw him before our present situation was about 3 1/2 years ago today. We went out for drinks, he came back to my place after, and we ended up hooking up. He stayed in town for about a week, and we hooked up a few more times, and then he left again. He sort of dropped off the face of the earth after that, but he'd always been pretty sporadic, especially when he had a big project, so I didn't think much about it.

Not long after that, I met my current partner. He's truly one of my favorite people in the whole world; he's incredibly thoughtful, and earnest, and passionate about his morals & principles (he's an environmental lawyer), and more than anything, he's someone I never feel like I have to pretend with. He asked for my number, we had our first date a few days later, and ended up staying awake the entire night just talking about anything and everything, so we went ahead and got 5am pancakes and called it our second date. We've been together for a little over 3 years now, we've been moved in together for about 2, and while we've had the occasional fight or rough patch I can definitely say I love this man, and I plan to spend the rest of my life with him.

So, the big change.

About a year ago (~2 years since seeing my ex, my partner and I have lived together for about a year at this point), my partner and I are having a night in, and there's a knock at the door. It's my ex, looking absolutely ragged, holding a 15 month old baby. As in, a baby who was conceived 24 months before then. Yep, it's pretty much what you're guessing. I let them both in, we had a sit down in the kitchen, and he told me everything he'd been doing in the past 2 years in between me cussing him out for keeping it all from me in the first place. I really do want to keep this as short as possible, so to give you the super condensed version:

She's my daughter, he's completely sure about that, there's no one else he's been with the math is even close to correct for

The second he found out he was pregnant, he more or less panicked. He's got a whole Thing about feeling like he's irresponsible/not a "real" adult, and this really set him off, so telling me felt like "admitting to fucking both our lives up" at the time. His OB/GYN said some pretty awful shit to him about not being more careful as a trans man too, which just made it all even worse

Because of all that, he'd genuinely planned to just never tell me I have a daughter & raise her completely on his own, but a few things compounded to force his hand:

The birth was really rough on him, and his recovery was slow enough he was having trouble going back to work, to the point where money was getting tight

On top of that, our daughter has celiac disease, and between paying out of pocket for blood tests & spending more on baby food she's safe to eat, things got desperate enough he went and took out a really dodgy loan from a scummy payday company

He was at our door because all of this had finally spiraled to a point where he'd lost his apartment, they'd been sleeping in his car for about a week, and he couldn't think of anything else to do

I think I was probably feeling every human emotion in existence at the same time through all of this, but the thing I remember most from the whole conversation was the way my partner kept drifting right back to the baby, and the soft way he looked at her. We put my ex & daughter up in a hotel room for the night and told him we needed to talk, and we'd discuss our options in the morning, but I think even then I kind of knew what our answer was going to be.

Sure enough, for the last year and a half we've been co-parenting our little girl, all three of us. We didn't want to juggle who's got her, or force my ex to find a place to stay, so we've turned my partner's home office into our daughter's room, and redid most of the downstairs layout so my ex could move into an actual bedroom, rather than just sleep on our pullout couch in perpetuity. We finally succeeded in convincing him that rest and recovery was more important than trying to contribute to the house finances right away, and it's been magical watching all that stress and terror slowly fall off him. It's like he's a little more alive again every time I look.

Which is where my question comes in.

I'd like to restate, I love my partner 100%. None of this changes that whatsoever. If I ask, and he says no, that will be the end of the discussion for me completely. But I have eyes. My ex is, objectively, a very attractive man. I know we work well together, and I have to admit I'm very curious to see where that same chemistry could lead now that he's not on the other side of the country half the time. I've also been noticing these little moments between him and my partner. Nothing I'd consider crossing a line, but I've caught my partner checking my ex out several times, as well as vice versa, and they get along remarkably well. Sometimes I'll go to enter a room, and see them both sitting there laughing and chatting and playing with our baby, and I'll just hang back to watch because it makes me so happy.

Add to all that, we're pretty deeply ingrained in each other's lives now. My partner and I don't often go out on dates alone anymore, but the last few times we did it felt as if my ex was missing from the table. We watched a movie together last night, and my ex sat in the middle of us with his feet in my partner's lap and his head on my chest, and it felt just as natural as my arm on my partner's shoulder. It's not about just having sex with him, and it's not that I'd want to invite any old person into our relationship. I know we already all love each other, and I think there's potential for that to become romantic between the two of us and my ex.

It just feels as though we're all holding our breath, waiting for someone else to say it first. My ex certainly isn't going to bring it up when he's living rent free in "our" home (it's his home too, but he doesn't seem to see it like that yet). My partner grew up sheltered enough that I'm not sure he's ever heard of polyamory at all, so he's not going to bring it up. That just leaves me.

My problem is, if I'm wrong about what I think I'm seeing, or if I bring it up the wrong way, I can't take it back. I don't want my partner to feel insecure or betrayed, I don't want my ex to feel pressured or put on the spot, and I definitely don't want my daughter to lose any of us, which I know could happen if we aren't all on the same page. Or worse, if we do all date and it goes badly.

Should I just keep this whole thing secret? Is that even worse? Would I be the asshole for opening this can of worms on everyone else?

Help!

[purpurussy]

what is all of this like for post-hiatus phannies?

I've been trying to figure out how to phrase this for a minute. The most obvious comparison would be that it's like starting a TV show 10 seasons in, but that doesn't come remotely close to the amount of required reading necessary to understand even 5% of the references. This has not been a problem for me, as I love nothing more than a good all-consuming hyperfixation rabbit hole, but something I'm realizing is that you really just had to be there to fully Understand.

I got into d&p properly in December of 2023, when gamingmas appealed to my emotionally curious nature and then gave me some kind of irreversible brain damage which I'm still trying to process. Since then I've been consuming their back catalogue as though it's laced with cocaine, and obsessively lurking on phannie tumblr until I finally made this blog a few weeks ago.

-

I actually watched Dan's videos for a little while back in roughly 2013/2014, but something about his content back then just wasn't working for me like it does now (I have such a clear memory of watching Reasons Why Dan’s A Fail and thinking "aw man why does this cute little twink hate himself so much 😔" and then going back to watching Jenna Marbles lmao. Funnily enough it did make me change my negative self-talk a little bit). I was very much a brief casual viewer who went off them pretty much after watching a few videos, and after that I was sort of vaguely aware of them as the cultural icons of the 2010s that they were, but I wasn't keeping up with them at all. 

I don't even remember BIG coming out, which is insane because I've always been extremely chronically online and it definitely broke containment as a cultural moment (although I think I was trying to minimize my social media use at that point in my life, so maybe that's why it went over my head). I feel like I must have heard something about it at the time, though, because I knew they were gay when I started watching them last year. What's really strange is that a lot of this stuff is kinda timeless to me. I don't remember it happening 5, 10 or 15 years ago - I just witnessed it very recently. For a lot of you guys, BIG happened 5 years ago, but I just watched it for the first time a few months ago. At the same time, in my mind they've just always been gay, since I wasn't in the trenches of the unhinged online culture surrounding them in the early/mid 2010s. It's so confusing to balance my weird temporal perception of these events with the impressions that I get from you guys. Oftentimes I have to judge roughly when something would have happened based on their appearances - it's not actually a *memory* for me, like it is for you. I absolutely love the dynamic and branding they have now, and the deep dives into their past are more of a curious exploration of how they got here, rather than actually nostalgic (or, I suppose, mildly traumatic) for me. It’s still very interesting and compelling to me, but because I love the current iteration of Dan and Phil, not because I’m emotionally invested in who they used to be. 

Sometimes I’ll be aware that an event happened, but I won’t realize how monumental it was until I see people talking about it (I hate to say it but I genuinely don't fully understand why the BONCAs thing was so earth-shattering, but like I said, I've always lived in a post-BIG universe, and I think you just had to be there). There are also plenty of references to stuff that's just been lost to time, which I have to piece together with context clues, as well as the more unhinged demonic stuff that I just don't have any interest in exploring whatsoever (I think I might have watched the v-day video if I'd been there when it leaked and I was a stupid teenager, but at this point, I don't even feel any kind of morbid curiosity for it. I just feel really bad for them that it got leaked. Plus, unfortunately, I think I've learned all I need to know about it through internet osmosis here). I feel like a lot of these events have a real emotional meaning for you guys, when to me, they're just interesting/funny/insane anecdotes which give some context to everything. Some of the shit that you guys lived through back then is absolutely wild, and I love and appreciate all of you for meticulously archiving and documenting everything and for being so willing to answer the same questions over and over again! Otherwise I feel like I wouldn't be able to really be part of this community, and posting my silly little memes on this blog is so fucking fun. So thank you all for that.

It seems like this is one of the most ride-or-die fanbases I've ever seen. The fact that they could invent the concept of YouTubers doing world tours, successfully execute that multiple times, branch out into several other ventures, come out as gay not fully knowing how that would affect their careers, disappear for several years and then come back knowing that there would be a solid audience waiting for them even after their virality had died down, drop merch every 3 seconds - I don't know who else can really get away with that, for almost 15 years, in the extremely "live fast die young" culture of internet fame. And I think it's in no small part because you all have chronic "unconditionally supporting dan and phil" disease. (While we’re on the topic, I feel very lucky to have missed the hiatus era. There's kind of a compression in the timeline for me between the gaming channel going dark and Dan starting his WAD tour, where it's like that time just doesn't exist in the Dan and Phil cinematic universe for me. It took me a while to realize how insane it must have been when they came back in full force, I can't even imagine how that must have felt.)

Of course, there's a caveat in that I'm saying this only really knowing about the tip of the demon iceberg. I’m aware of people engaging in behaviours such as doxxing them, outing them and stalking their families, which is horrifying in and of itself, but I don’t know how long it went on for or how many people were involved. I think people are generally pretty well-behaved at this point, and most of the drama seems to be between different schools of thought within the fanbase itself. I assume a big part of the reason for that is people's varying degrees of involvement in (and remaining notion of guilt for) the boundary-crossing behaviour from the old days. Living with the spectre of this insanity is kind of strange - it makes me feel nervous sometimes that I’m gonna accidentally say something that hits a nerve, or cross a line I didn’t know existed, because there’s all this history that I don’t fully understand, beyond just the normal unwritten rules for interacting with fan spaces online. 

-

The topic that got me writing this in the first place was the orange heart incident, and everyone’s subsequent meltdown. For me, the excitement in them soft/hard/semi launching is more about me just getting excited about any open, proud expression of queer joy - it heals something inside me every time I hear a man referring to his husband or a woman referring to her wife (excuse the gendered terms, ykwim. gay shit). It's just that sentiment, combined with the fact that I'm parasocially invested in them: I'd love to see that energy from my fave little guys who live inside my computer. I am basically rooting for them to become more comfortable with just talking about gay stuff more openly and candidly, and I guess that would require a bit of a hard launch, although I can understand that they don't want to potentially open the door to excessive questioning regarding their relationship. I feel like it ✨hits different✨ for people who watched them for years before they came out. Like, you guys are rooting for people who you watched in real time struggling with their identities and internalized homophobia for years and years, while to me, they’re just some guys who I’m a fan of. Sometimes I get caught up in the emotional frenzy of their hard-launch breadcrumbs even though I don’t feel quite as insane about it as you guys (I said in some tags a few days ago that it’s like the base instinct to turn around and start running if you see a crowd of people running towards you and screaming in terror, even if you have no idea what’s going on). Anyway, I would love to see them being more gooey with each other, and I am gobbling up the breadcrumbs they're feeding us atm, because I love seeing gay people expressing gay love with no shame 🧡 

I think my perception of them as a couple, or of their sexualities independently, is just kind of an extension of everything Dan said in BIG. I really have no doubt that they're a couple, and I don't feel any kind of weird Catholic guilt in saying that, since I neither witnessed nor participated in the insanity back then. I interpreted (I'm paraphrasing) "obviously we were more than friends, but it was more than just romantic, we're like, actual soulmates" followed by "as for the situation now? we're private people and we'd like to keep that part of our lives private" as him essentially saying that obviously they're a couple, but that their relationship is not part of the Dan And Phil™ Brand. The brand is 2 guys who have great chemistry doing comedy together (5 feet apart even though clearly they are gay and in love). And I think that's a completely healthy decision to make, even irrespective of their history. I think a hard launch would be subtle, and it wouldn’t realistically change the nature of their content that much. 

With that being said, to me, it seems slightly wild for people to adamantly insist they're not a couple, or that it’s “invasive” to assume that they are one (not that that really applies to anyone here, but elsewhere on the internet). If they were a straight man and a straight woman, and there wasn't a huge chunk of people on the internet struggling with this oddly conditioned aversion to seeing them as a couple, then nobody on earth would be insisting that it's weird to assume they're together. Dan confirmed that they became romantically involved around the time they met, and building a forever home with your ex is crazy, that's all there is to it.

-

This is kind of a messy stream of thoughts (it ended up sort of becoming 2 essays for the price of 1) and I don't really know where I was going with it. In conclusion I think that day 1 phannies are braver than any US marine and you have all suffered more than Jesus on the cross, and I'm extremely thankful that I get to reap the rewards of your labour now without having lived through the dark ages myself. I also think some of you are holding onto a bit of unnecessary guilt for dumb shit you said on the internet when you were a kid. And Dan and Phil are gay and I love them and I reeeeaaaallllyyy want them to do a podcast so bad because this is all conjecture and I would parasocially love to hear their actual thoughts on it

[carniekisses]

Here's a long post that I really hope Tumblr will not flag as NSFW (please don't flag this), I remember back when I showed off the needlefelt Gomer sculpture I had made, someone asked if I had like a work process to show off for it. And I did not, because I had kept it all confined to a private account. I thought it'd be fun to have something to show for it for this one.

So I've been wanting to make a BJD for at least the past 15 years, back when I was a kid with no money to buy supplies with and also with a worry for symmetry, and also also I wasn't very skilled. It's 2024, and I vaguely know how to use Blender now

I've started this project on April 6th, as I've been documenting this on the above mentioned private account.

Of said model I (much) later ended up only being able to salvage the physical sculpts of the chest and torso parts as I messed up somewhat badly, see down below. I also ended up dropping the 'magnets in hands & feet' concept as it was just redundant, one can simply unhook them off the elastic if they are to swap them out.

At any rate, I 3D printed it all and got to sanding, and painting.

So far so good I guess, really not a fan of how the knee and elbow bean slots were just holes (I fixed that later don't worry)

So This was Not looking good lmao. I used acrylic paint, which was not necessarily the problem, the problem was that I'd applied it with a sponge brush which caused the surface to feel really sandpapery once dry. So don't do that I suppose, bad idea

On top of this, I realized that given the thickness of this doll I absolutely needed double joints in the legs, in order to have decent articulation. You can see in the above pics I *had* sculpted those, but I later fused the knee beans with the shins with apoxy resin, for some reason? I think it was because as I posed the legs the knee beans kept falling *into* the hollowed out shins/thighs, and I got tired of it.

The final blows for this model were me applying some 3D finish resin in a last ditch effort to smooth out the horrible texture, which rendered the pieces extremely shiny and smooth (disgusting), WHICH then prompted me to apply matte varnish to fix that bullshit. It absolutely did not work lmfao, and I have no pictures of that disaster because I became pretty discouraged about having to go back to like square two or three.

Some time passed (months really because I kept getting distracted for many a reason [sanding is so fucking boring, Blender was a mistake, I was feeling overwhelmed, I was too sad/tired to work that day, etc.]), I buckled down and finally retooled the pieces that needed it: everything But the chest and torso parts, off of which I managed to sand the varnish and smooth resin. I had fixed all the double joints too to actually be decently functional this time. The head was completely resculpted to better reflect the character's latest design iteration.

bean slots: Fixed

So after sanding (which was the part I was dreading the entire time, because it's so tedious and also it hurts after a while), I caved and got myself an airbrush to, hopefully, lay paint down good this time.

Very glad I did because the difference is kinda crazy. Please ignore my dirty ass desk, it's what happens when you craft. These pictures are from last week btw.

The blue base and the blush were airsprayed, the finer details like the dark shading and the pinker parts were done with both chalk and just acrylic paint. I miiight remake the eyeballs, or at least add more of a smooth finish. The shine to them is really nice

Here's she with lashes, wearing a shitty little scrap of fabric I cut in 10 minutes for fun (please DON'T flag th), and posing to test out the double joints too, they definitely could be better but they work Fine and I'm okay with that.

As of today I'm waiting for the fibres to deliver, for the wig, I already have the cap done. I guess I can update this when it happens, thanks for reading so far, I hope it was interesting, see you next time.......

[tomorrowsgardennc]

market update // september 14th

drop off versus set up. i get to the market super early, even though setting up takes me 15 minutes, tops. i prefer to avoid the traffic of other vendors setting up, and i like to volunteer around the market before it opens. it's around 50 vendors at this market during the main season (april until december), so it can get busy super quick right before the market opens with everyone coming in at the last minute. not worth the stress when i can just come in early and help others out.

today blew me away. literally. had gusts of wind that were so bad a power pole fell down right outside the parking lot. that means the road that's the main traffic for the market was closed after 30 minutes of being open. that killed sales for *everyone*, including the big bois that sell out every week. coffee barrista vendor said their sales were down to 1/3rd their normal amount because of this. but the die hards willing to brave traffic and walking 2 blocks from parking to the market still made it out.

tue big bois were panicing over sales, but a horrific day in sales for me here still beat a great day of sales at other markets in previous years. no panicing from me, for once. if the road wasn't closed but sales were the same as today THEN i would panic. c'est la vie and all.

my top sellers were the ground cherry produce and the mini flower vases. none of those sales were my normal customers but rather the die-hards just browsing since they weren't eager to get back into traffic. so i met some new faces today, that's good. top reactions to people trying out the ground cherries go to a 3yo trying one, then shaking their head vigorously and then hiding in their mothers hair. another 6yo tried one and then just quickly started eating a whole bunch more. the mom paid for it, blushing, but i thought it was cute.

so imma share a secret with you, tumblr. for me to pass the time, i always wave to the kids who stare at me and tally up how many wave back. my record is 5 in one day. today was only 1. will try and wave better next week.

with it being an unsually slow day, i did end up going home with more than what i came with. but today is also my birthday so that's ok. ton of bread from my favorite bread baker in all the charlotte area, plus bagels, apples, cookies... got 2 large flower bouquets - one for a colleague who passed away this week, and another for me because birthday. thinking about merging all the large flowers together and take them to the place where he worked tomorrow, and keep the small ones for me. idk, i just love smaller bouquets spread around the house instead of one big one.

i didn't take an after-market shot because there was almost no difference at all due to lack of traffic. i did try and get photos throughout the day to share here and i hope that this new series of posts help inspire those who want to or are beginning their business vending journey. i've been vending at several markets and too many events over the past 5 years, so i got a lot of pointers and stories to share. please enjoy.

[cheesybadgers]

Narcos Fic: Old Habits Die Hard (Chap. 24)

Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9, Chapter 10, Chapter 11, Chapter 12, Chapter 13, Chapter 14, Chapter 15, Chapter 16, Chapter 17, Chapter 18, Chapter 19, Chapter 20, Chapter 21, Chapter 22, Chapter 23

Read on AO3

Masterlist

Pairing: Javier Peña x Horacio Carrillo

Words: 3,440

Summary: It's been 15 years since Horacio and Javier brought down Gacha in Tolú, and now they're back where their story began.

Warnings: 18+ ONLY. Brief allusions to period-typical prejudices/politics/legislation, very brief sexual references, smoking, swearing, all the fluff.

Notes: Well....I feel like I should post this with a fanfare or something (just imagine there's one playing), but oh boy, oh man, oh god. I did it. I flipping did it 😭 It's only taken 36 months, copious amounts of blood, sweat and tears, a deranged amount of research, the last shred of my sanity, and probably a fair amount of back/neck pain from sitting at my laptop for too long to get here. But hey, if I don't write a self-indulgent novel-length fix-it fic for a criminally underrated rarepair from a defunct TV show, WHO WILL, I ASK THEE? 😂

I can't fully explain the journey this fic has taken me and my writing on, or the deep love I have in my heart for this ship and the OHDH universe that has lived constantly in my head these last few years. Even when I'm not actively writing, so many things remind me of these two everywhere I go. They got me through the darkest days of the pandemic and somehow became my comfort ship, despite er, certain canon events we don't talk about in this house.

Anyway, I think you've all heard quite enough from me for the time being. So, I will just say thank you so, so, so much to anyone who has read, commented, kudosed, reblogged, liked, sent me messages, made me things, suggested music recs, generally been incredibly supportive and kind ❤️

And thank you to anyone who may stumble across this fic in future. Please never be afraid to leave a comment, even if you're reading several years down the line, I will always love to hear from people about this story.

There will also be some moodboards and playlists posted on my Tumblr at some point (and *maybe* some new - much shorter lol - fics eventually) once I've caught my breath back a bit.

For the final time (unless I randomly think of anything I've forgotten, which is more than likely lol), I’ve also added to my OHDH trivia post to cover this chapter if anyone is interested.

Chapter 24: Suerte (Epilogue)

Early evening rays painted the pastel horizon, their last act of the day transforming the shimmering ocean into an inky palate of fuchsia, violet and saffron, the golden sands at the shore still warm to the touch hours past dusk.

Come the weekend, Colombians would travel far and wide to descend on the many beaches, bars and restaurants that dotted the waterfront. Or if they were feeling adventurous, they would birdwatch, dive off the Islas de San Bernardo, or canoe amongst the mangroves.

But it was mid-week and mid-December – when most locals were at work and school or preparing for Christmas. So, for now, Horacio and Javier had the place to themselves.

There was the added bonus of the coastline turning into a dense forest of palm trees just along from their beach house, civilisation a mile or so away on either side of them, so even at peak times, they remained secluded. It had become a daily ritual to luxuriate in the peace and quiet; a pre-dinner swim with no trunks required followed by entwined limbs and sand in their hair as the sun went down.

Today was no exception, the gentle lapping of the waves around them and their shallow breaths the only sounds to be heard, the taste of salt and scent of sun lotion heavy in the air and on their skin as Horacio rocked into Javier, slow and deep, their chests and foreheads drawn together.

It was almost dark when Javier switched on the shower taps, cascading soothing jets over his head, neck and shoulders. As he soaked his hair, the lights from inside the beach house sprung to life, illuminating the outdoor bathroom with an ambient glow. It was a feature of the premium accommodation they had splashed out on, a rare treat away for a special occasion.

The outside space was a mix of wood, tiles and natural stone for the walls and floors, encased by tall plants and trees for extra privacy. A double shower stood on a platform at the end of a walkway, with a large hot tub branching off in the other direction. On their first night here, they had opted for the tub, surrounding it with candles as a belated ode to Día de las Velitas, lost in each other beneath the bubbles and the stars.

A sturdy embrace enveloped Javier from behind, a position they had found themselves in every morning by the shore before breakfast, looking out to a tranquil sea and a kaleidoscopic sky. The day jobs kept them both on their feet and in good shape, although there was more softness around their stomachs, and Javier was stockier than in his younger years. But his upper body was even broader with muscle now.

He was no gym fiend, but he had accompanied Horacio in some of his strengthening training, wanting to keep his stamina up as much as possible. Not just for the obvious but because he was sometimes required to carry the heavier supplies at work and didn’t want to be shown up in front of his largely youthful team.

It was a welcome development to Horacio, whatever the reason. Not that he ever had any complaints before, but watching Javier blossom as he aged was a wonder to behold. Not to mention, there was more of him to enjoy now.

As for Horacio, aside from the sloping curve of his midriff, he was sheer jaguar strength. Not only in the noticeable places, but his core muscles were in peak condition, the daily horse riding improving his posture and taking him back to the drill commands of his cadet years. His skin was more weathered, and his days of being meticulously cleanly shaven at all times were long gone. But Javier assured him – a lot – the ruggedness was part of the appeal.

Javier wasn’t one to talk either, stubble being a more regular feature alongside his moustache nowadays. But that was mainly due to lack of time in his busy schedule rather than preference, so it wasn’t unheard of for Horacio to do the honours for him. For some reason, Horacio delicately scraping a razor blade across his jaw from the comfort of his lap was far more appealing to Javier than doing it himself in front of the bathroom mirror.

Their hair contained more grey patches, especially around the temples, which was easier to hide when they grew it longer. That wasn’t practical during the sweltering heat of a Texan summer, so they kept it shorter in the hotter months. But in the winter, they could run their fingers through choppy waves and coils of curls to their hearts’ content. And luckily for them, their anniversary fell in December.

“Can you believe it’s been 15 years to the day?” Horacio asked, scattering kisses across Javier’s back.

“This doesn’t even feel like the same fucking place, to be honest.”

“Tell me about it.”

Horacio let out a huff as flashbacks of leading his men on a fleet of raiding crafts towards Gacha’s hideout collided with memories from merely days ago of him and Javier island hopping in a hire boat along the same waters. They had taken a platter of fresh seafood and fruit, exploring the remotest beaches and lagoons, where their only company was the local wildlife.

He could still remember the sensation of the blood at his temple as he lay disorientated on the sand in the aftermath of the explosion, a stark contrast to dozing together under the shade of a palm tree or reading aloud to each other the words of Lorca, Gaitán Durán, Arbeláez, Neruda, Paz, Castellanos and Mistral.

“Although, I did notice signs for the barracks towards Coveñas when we were driving here,” Horacio added with a nostalgic smirk.

“Oh yeah? You didn’t want another night there for old times’ sake?” Javier tilted his head until he found Horacio’s lips with his teeth.

Horacio hummed and put up no resistance, his wet hands sailing with ease down Javier’s body, finding purchase at his hip bones. “It was tempting. But I figured you’d want to make the most of this before Christmas.”

“Damn right.”

They took turns massaging shampoo into each other’s scalps, lathering the suds through thick spirals, tenderly pulling at strands until they purred, thoroughly indulging in the sensation whilst they had the chance. And then they did it all again, rinsing off the soap, floating away on the meditative pressure of the faucet and their fingers.

“We could always see if Alejandra has more spa freebies if it gets too much, though,” Javier suggested through the haze of steam now cocooning them.

“I like your thinking.”

It had been a while since they last used such tickets, their previous visits not dissimilar to how their current vacation was playing out. But despite the chaos that would no doubt ensue, they were looking forward to catching up with Horacio’s side of the family. Between expanding businesses in Texas and Manizales and the oldest half of the brood living and working elsewhere now with the twins staying at home studying, they didn’t get to meet up as much as they would have liked.

However, Elena visited Laredo several times, swapping life stories and recipes with Chucho and joining Horacio and Javier in San Antonio one spring for the Fiesta. Her last holiday outside of Colombia had been before Alejandra and Horacio were born, so she was determined to take advantage of having family abroad before age finally caught up with her. There had even been discussions of a trip to Madrid if Horacio and Javier could arrange cover at work the following year.

“Pops is flying out on the 20th, right?”

“Yes. Marco and Raúl are covering the ranch and animals until your father’s back on the 28th. And Jorge is covering the farm until we’re home from Miami in the New Year.”

No one was keen to leave Luna, Sol and Leo, who had long since retired from ranch duties, but between work and Christmas commitments, Connie taking a full-time job in a different hospital, now Olivia was a teenager going on 30, and the earlier-than-expected arrival of Felipe’s and Juana’s second child – Óscar, a little brother to Claudia – New Year was the only time everyone’s schedules matched up.

These days, Luna, whose main residence was the cottage now, Sol and Leo spent most of their time nestled on furniture or looking for treats in the kitchen whenever food was prepared. However, Luna would sometimes still ride in the back of Horacio’s truck and keep him company in the lower fields.

Kira and Fuego had become old pros, showing their younger siblings, Cielo and Tierra, the ropes, not as replacements to the trio but as a new team with their own quirks and personalities. Thankfully, the dogs and Coco had taken well to the pair of barn cats, Churro and Tamale, who patrolled the outbuildings and dealt with any rodent intruders.

Meanwhile, Chucho showed few signs of slowing down, except one summer when he twisted an ankle, and even that was hard work to get him to rest. But he had been happy to step back from some of his more physically demanding responsibilities in recent years, trusting that the ranch and farm were in capable hands. With their expansion plans a resounding success – plus some new ones up their sleeves – he had become more involved in the business side of the operation alongside Miguel.

And, of course, he was always happy to offer Horacio advice whenever needed. But for the most part, he left him to it since Félix’s retirement, preferring to arrange for the guesthouses to be refurbished or to deliver fresh batches of cooking to aid workers and exhausted arrivals alike on the frontline of the border.

“Bet Jorge was as thrilled about that arrangement as my team.”

“Well, we can always delegate to our deputies whenever necessary. One of the perks of being promoted.”

It had taken Horacio five years under Félix’s watchful eye – and decades of experience – to be granted the title of farm manager. Then, Félix had retired the previous year, satisfied he had picked the right man as his successor and Jorge as deputy.

Horacio still had plenty to learn and likely always would with the constant conveyor belt of change to farming methods and technology that landed on his desk each month. However, there was a sense of familiarity with certain parts of the job, like the meetings, the paperwork, and the budget constraints. Except, this time, it all came without the funerals, the upper echelons of the CNP breathing down his neck, and the crushing weight of a country’s future on his shoulders.

“And a holiday on the Caribbean coast was necessary, was it?” Now that Javier’s hair was free from sand and shampoo, he turned to face Horacio, their lips almost touching.

Horacio nodded sagely and closed the gap. “A critical business need.”

------------------------------------------------------

Once dried off, they lay in a hammock in matching white towel robes under the thatched porch of their beach house with a perfect view of the sea, moon and stars.

“So, you like it here?” Horacio asked after a comfortable silence.

“It’s beautiful. I’m glad we came back – to see it how it’s meant to be.”

“Me too. Although, I fear violence will always be a parasite latched onto Colombia. Just when you think it’s gone from one place, it rears its head again in another. Or even the same place twice if you’re unlucky.”

Horacio remembered the stories he had heard from Trujillo in the last couple of years – particularly about Operation Orion. Officially, the incursion on Comuna 13 had been a success by the Colombian military against the likes of FARC. Unofficially, however, there were rumours of a leaked CIA report, disappeared individuals, and collusion between an Army General and none other than Don Berna’s subordinate. It was hard to keep faith that Medellín would ever be free from its past when history had such a predictable habit of repeating itself.

“I know. It feels like one step forward and two steps back in the States, too. Terrorism might be the new bogeyman, but re-branding to ICE and throwing a shitload of money at the DHS hasn’t stopped the drugs and the people finding their way over the border.”

Javier had heard directly from Steve about the shift in his job role since 9/11. Overnight, Steve’s whole department was removed from their current caseloads and signed up for every counter-terrorism and narco-terrorism course under the sun. It was now customary for DEA agents to be redeployed to the FBI as intelligence analysts if resources required. And if their eyes and ears were pulled away from the drug traffickers, it didn’t take a genius to figure out the consequences.

Meanwhile, in Texas, if anything, people only took graver risks in the wake of a beefed-up Border Patrol. Javier had spent a lot of the past year helping to set up new aid teams in Arizona and New Mexico, the inhospitable conditions of the desert not enough of a deterrent to stop families trying their luck or handing over their life savings to coyotes who didn’t care whether they made it across alive.

“But small things can add up to change. Bit by bit,” Javier added. “And at least they can’t arrest us for fucking in our own home anymore.”

“True. Not that the law stopped us before...” Horacio nuzzled against Javier’s neck before making a move to get up.

They may have joked in the here and now, but it wasn’t a change they took for granted. In fact, Luz and Carla had even persuaded Javier to attend a protest or two and pay bond and legal fees for those who had been arrested. After all, he’d had plenty of experience exchanging money for people’s freedom.

When news of the Supreme Court decision spread, it was another weight off their backs and one less reason to look over their shoulders, a chance to permanently put to bed memories of being spied on during such unguarded sacred moments. It was the final line to be drawn under those dark years, not to erase them because that was impossible. But it was, at least, closure.

Their cigarette was almost done, and Horacio had left the opened pack on the kitchen counter. Once retrieved, he took out another and leaned into Javier across the hammock, pressing the tip of his unlit cigarette against the lit one until it sparked.

“But you’re right,” Horacio continued, holding Javier’s gaze between exhaling a plume of smoke. He balanced on the edge of the hammock, just enough to stop it tipping sideways. “Things can change. But only if we want them to.” He perched their new cigarette between his lips as he reached into the pocket of his robe.

Their first cigarette was little more than a stub, so Javier stooped down to the ashtray on the floor to extinguish it. Once he sat up again, a small cubed box was presented into his spare hand.

Javier stared at the black box and blew out remnants of smoke, eyeing Horacio with an unreadable expression, an unspoken question and answer lingering between them and the mist of tobacco.

He prised open the box to reveal a ring of plain silver. Or, so he thought at first glance. But as he raised it towards the moon, the iridescent light caught on the inner band to reveal an inscription.

Suerte que encontré a mi media naranja.

(Lucky that I found my soulmate.)

“Fuck, Horacio…” Javier’s voice was strained, and his words came out as little more than a whisper. He held the ring between his thumb and forefinger, letting the ethereal reflection from above capture each word.

Horacio watched every shift in Javier’s face with bated breath and a dry throat, his limbs lead and weightless all at once.

“The world’s changing around us,” Horacio said at last; swallowing his nerves and summoning his courage. “But no matter what the law or courts say in any state or country, this can mean whatever we want it to mean.”

Javier’s jaw worked back and forth, his teeth clamping down on the inside of his cheeks. But it was no use, and he let out a trembling scoff, an attempt to distract from the shining pupils he finally confronted Horacio with.

And then a broad smile crept across Javier’s features, his palm connecting with Horacio’s cheek before he plucked the cigarette from his fingers and took a drag. “Pass me my jeans.”

It took Horacio a moment to process Javier’s request. Of all the responses he had prepared for – the good and the bad – that hadn’t been on his list, funnily enough. With narrowed eyes and pursed lips, he complied and fetched the jeans that had been flung over a sun lounger when they stripped off to swim earlier. Apparently, regardless of how humid the climate in Tolú became, denim remained a reliable staple of Javier’s wardrobe.

“Check my left pocket.”

Whatever Javier was up to, Horacio was torn between intrigue and irritation at Javier’s temerity to issue orders despite leaving him hanging. But he did as he was told, and in an instant, everything made sense.

“I can always take it back if you’d prefer…”

But Horacio was already opening the near-identical box, and any teasing faded to white noise as he came face-to-face with the gold equivalent of his own proposal.

“Hold it up to the light.”

The night sky was brighter now, making it easier for the inscription to be revealed.

Mi amor, mi vida, mi hogar, mi vaquero. Siempre tuyo.

(My love, my life, my home, my cowboy. Yours always.)

It was Javier’s turn to observe, and it didn’t take long for Horacio to raise a brow in his direction, shooting him a look of feigned exasperation that only came with the territory of a relationship as enduring as theirs.

“What?” Javier said with disingenuous innocence and a vulpine smile.

It was a contagious kind of smile, one that reminded Horacio they were equals in this and that he shouldn’t have been surprised Javier had the same idea.

“I take it my mother showed you her ring?”

“On my first visit to Manizales. It was beautiful. And so’s this.”

“As is this.”

“I like to think I put my own spin on it.”

“You did.”

They sat side-by-side on the hammock, legs facing towards each other with the rings held in their outstretched hands.

Javier’s thumb slid across Horacio’s left palm, tracing patterns over new callouses born from hard labour rather than war. He circled his wrist, waiting for the familiar rhythm but finding a beat that was, unsurprisingly, drumming quicker than usual.

After subduing with his touch, Javier retrieved the gold band, gliding it carefully onto Horacio’s ring finger, easing it over the knuckle until it rested snugly at the base.

They sat transfixed, marvelling at the light dancing across it as Horacio’s thumb ran back and forth over the curved surface in fascination.

Horacio repeated the ritual of mapping Javier’s left hand, lacing their fingers together as a tangible reminder of their bond. Their devotion. Their vow. Their choice. Whether the law honoured it one day or not.

He picked up the silver to his gold, shimmying it along Javier’s ring finger and passing beyond the slight resistance at his knuckle. Not too much force, but firm enough for it to sink perfectly into place.

With palms connected and fingers interlocked, their foreheads met, chests rising and falling in tandem.

“Te amo tanto, Javier.”

“Yo también te amo. Tanto, Horacio. Tanto.” Javier whispered, over and over in Horacio’s ear like a prayer – their prayer – before brushing his lips above Horacio’s brow, the bridge of his nose, both cheeks and down to his mouth, creating their own sign of the cross with each kiss. A new beginning and a welcome home.

They untied their robes and collapsed onto the hammock in a tangle of limbs, silver and gold melding at their chests and hands; their past, present and future as inseparable as their hearts, bodies and souls.

With one smooth motion, Horacio pinned Javier’s arms down into the netting of the hammock, a dark, hungry gaze passing between them as cool metal fused with hot skin.

15 years and several lifetimes may have gone by. But when Horacio had the man he loved, the man who loved him, his media naranja, underneath him, only one word ran through his head. Mine.

Old habits die hard, he supposed.

[zuzsenpai]

mental health update

I've been having a pretty shit year as far as mental health goes. I mean, I had an actual mental health crisis in February that was one of the scariest times in my life. It was all because I was trying to taper off a psych med and apparently that was a BAD idea.

In the months that followed, I was able to avoid a bad depression spiral thanks to getting back on that particular med. But I've been getting more and more exhausted, and when I have anxiety, I have it REAL bad. Like shaking and chest pain bad. Thought I had covid and nearly passed out waiting the 15 minutes for the test results. Zuko was sick and had surgery and I was in a constant state of misery and shaking and dizziness. I know I should probably get like... Xanax or something for this. Maybe I will in the future.

Anyway, my focus is almost non-existent these days. During and after Zuko's health crisis last month, I have been at a point where my brain just can't move. I think I've spent the last 30 days scrolling tumblr because that and projects at work (the ones with deadlines) are the only things I can actually get my brain to do.

I want to work on fanfic. So I open a project, but then am immediately like "no I can't get myself to mentally be on the same page as this project". I think about a different project and my chest feels tight because I both want to do it and don't want to do it. It's painful. I accomplish nothing. I want to play a game or watch a show but the thought of putting effort into those things destroys my ability to do them. I just sit and continue scrolling tumblr. I long for conversation but when I'm actually conversing with someone, I can only manage a few words and I hate myself for it. I long for validation or praise on past projects to help motivate me into writing fanfic again, but I know that's selfish and I know it doesn't motivate shit.

This is where I am right now. I don't know how to have fun or relax. I don't know how to focus on anything. I don't know how to want to focus on anything. I waste entire days fretting about doing nothing.

I've also never been more exhausted in my life. I got bloodwork done on vitamin D, B12, iron, and thyroid. All are within normal range. So I'm getting a consultation with a sleep doctor (I get about 5% deep sleep per night, which is NOT good). We'll see how that goes.

I'm starting an exercise routine soon. I'm hoping that does something helpful. But I keep pushing the date back in my mind like "let's start exercising next week"... so you can imagine how that's going.

[canyoufucksoniccharacters]

It's time.

Alright, this is gonna be a long one. Not only am I covering the canon, mainline game Sonic, but his offshoots as well. Specifically, I will be covering Sonic in the mainline games, the Paramount movie version, Sonic Prime, and a tiiiiiiny tiny little itty bit of Archie. IDW is, from what has been implied as of the past about year and a half, canon; and it will be treated as such (with some caution, of course.), so it's not going to be handled separately.

Let's do this.

Alright, let's start as early as absolutely possible. There have been several, several statements regarding Sonic's age; the earliest of which was courtesy of our good old friends over at...

There would be a certain (mildly loud) funny video here, but Tumblr's weird barely present copyright protection probably kicked in. Anyways...

In the Sonic The Hedgehog cartoon, also known as SatAM, we get 2 tidbits of information. In the 2-part special called Blast From The Past, we see that Sonic and Sally are about the same age, both being kids of just about equal maturity. Later, in episode 24, Sally states that her age is 16. So, far as we could tell, Sonic was 16, or around that range. Now, we know that these cartoons aren't canon, but they definitely did have an influence over the canon of the series. Fun fact for you, Sonic's love of chili dogs was made up by the cartoons, and later adopted during the modern era by the games. Ain't that neat?

Chili dog related tangent aside, this was the only source we had for Sonic's age at that point. I've seen some say that he was stated to be 15 in the manual for Sonic 2, but upon trying to verify that claim I came empty-handed. The manual does mention Tails being 8, but no mention of Sonic's age as far as I could tell; and the same goes for every other Classic Series game. Except for...

Sonic Jam, the Sonic game absolutely no one cares about! In part because it's not much more than a game compilation and tech demo that served as the stepping stone for Sonic Adventure 1. Sonic Jam includes profiles for Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and Eggman. This is in both the Japanese and English version, and both contain ages for the characters! Tails is listed as 8, Knuckles as 15, and Eggman as "??" or Unknown, in the case of the English version.

This brings us to Sonic, who I will be using the Japanese profile for.

The part that says "年令" translates to "Age". So, here it says that Sonic ranges between 15 and 16... Whatever that means. In the English version, it just says 15. Either way, all these make sense for these games. Sonic's characterization back in the day was all in on the rebellious teenager angle, an effort to give him an air of edge and coolness that other platforming mascots didn't have, which did admittedly win people over during the heat of the console wars! Sonic was absolutely huge when the series was new, to a degree that other mascots just couldn't match up to. Of course, that dropped off over time, but that's a discussion for another day, and not on this blog. This blog is about gay sex, not the videogame industry.

So, Sonic is either 15 or 16, most likely 15. All is good here, everything lines up, other than maybe the fact that Amy was listed as 8 in the Sonic CD manual, but that's probably fine considering back then her crush on Sonic was treated as a one-sided admirer type thing, rather than an actual romantic interest (That was usually reserved for Sally in media that actually cared about that kinda thing, anyways.)

So, fast forward to the Dreamcast; Sonic gets a redesign! Longer limbs, green eyes, and overall less chibi-like and seemingly more mature appearance. So, you would assume he's older, right? After all, him an everyone else around him got the same treatment, except for Eggman who... Seemingly just became a smidge more realistic. A smidge, anyways. You can only be so realistic being shaped like Gru.

Well... Yeah! It would look like it, since no further statements about his age were made, and in the Archie comics, they actually aged him up a year to justify his change in design. Archie isn't canon, obviously, but it shows the direction that was taken; as the players aged, so did Sonic, no matter how much people got up in arms about the green eyes for some strange reason.

... And then Sonic Heroes came along.

Perfectly fine game, mind you! One of the more polarizing ones, sure, and some of the writing could have been a smidge better (specially on Amy's side of things), but overall not really anything egregious. But for our sake... This hellspawn was born.

Ah, the Sonic Heroes US manual. The root cause of incredibly stupid Sonic shipping discourse; as well as the really, really inaccurate Sonic Channel ages.

All vitriol aside, let's look at what it has to say about our blue blur.

... 15? Really? When our previous estimate was also 15-16? Are you actually telling me Sonic 1 to Heroes all happened within less than a year? Amy got aged up from 8 to 12, which... Either age would be a bit concerning considering they're still pushing the whole romantic interest thing, one-sided as it may still be. That aside, it makes no logistical sense for Sonic to still be 15 after he's literally physically shown to be older.

On top of that, this same manual ages Espio down from 17 (In the Chaotix manual) to 16, and Vector up from 16 to 20. Vector I can believe, but uh. Aging down isn't exactly a thing that most people do.

What's worse, this age was then listed in the official Sonic Channel website... Even after they made a game where the first thing you see is Sonic celebrating his birthday. Meaning he had to have been 14 before that game to stay 15, which is contradictory to say the least. Additionally, there's a potential time gap of 5 months between SA2 and Heroes, only ever referenced in the Playstation 3 PSN release of Sonic Heroes.

This age was never once modified, even after Sonic Forces' 6 month timeskip, meaning Sonic had a birthday party, was locked up for 6 months, and somehow didn't age a year during all that. Nor after the several infrastructure-demolishing incidents such as an entire city being flooded and wrecked, the planet being shattered into pieces, among others.

And you wanna know something funny? In Sonic Generations, Classic Sonic is explicitly stated to be Sonic from the past, which checks out considering how he behaves less maturely and is proportionally much smaller. And then in 2015, the Classic Sonic style guide comes out.

15.

15.

15.

Somehow. Some. Fucking. How. Classic Sonic is listed as 15... While Modern Sonic is listed as 15 too. Oh, Amy is also listed as 12, by the way. Despite that being her (ALLEGED) age in Sonic Heroes.

Unless they're from different universes or something, there's no way-

OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE

Yeah, so, Sonic Forces released 2 years after that guide. And it tried, emphasis on tried, to retcon Classic Sonic into being an entirely separate character. This was, however, later undone by Sonic Origins both re-establishing the Classic games as taking place in the past, on top of a TailsTube episode saying as such; that Classic Sonic is, indeed, from the past. It's even stated that Modern Sonic is who Classic Sonic grew up to be!

IDW doesn't make our job any easier, either. This is information from when the Tangle & Whisper story was ongoing;

However... I'd take it with a grain of salt, as it's from before IDW was considered canon, and back when Sega was much more strict on the mandates and what they did and didn't allow in Sonic media. Plus, this was still the age listed on Sonic Channel, before they removed it.

Oh yeah, that. Why don't we talk about that?

On October of 2022, all the ages on Sonic Channel were removed.

This... Was a good move. SonAmy is still being pushed ever so very slightly, with Amy's crush still being present in a recent short even if she's much more mature about it now, which would make their age difference less than ideal. On top of that, the ages really just didn't line up chronologically speaking.

So, where does that leave us now?

In this interview, Takashi Iizuka is asked about Sonic's age; to which he responds that "He's a teenager."

"Teenager" is a bit of a loose definition, probably on purpose. Generally speaking, the range for teenager ranges from anywhere to 13-19, to 13-21 depending on who you ask. Some people make the cutoff at 18, though that's almost never done when it comes to scientific material.

So, let's recap. Sonic is still considered a teenager, but he's always been considered one, all the way back from the Classic series. So, we can safely assume Classic isn't 15; either that, or he was, and the modern series takes place during anywhere from 2-6 years, which I could believe. Either way, he's at minimum about 13-14, as he's a younger version of Sonic who hasn't hit a growth spurt yet.

Then, we have anywhere from 1 to 2 canon birthdays for Sonic, depending on whether you count Runners as canon or not (which I would admittedly not at all fault you for not considering it canon, considering it's a mobile game; and a discontinued one at that), as well as a 6-month timeskip during Forces, potential 5-month timeskip during Heroes (which isn't the most unbelievable proposition or anything, considering it would be a bit weird if Shadow was presumed dead only to show back up like a week later), and a bunch of events that have caused severe structural damage to key locations in the world, namely during Sonic Unleashed and Sonic Adventure 1 as the 2 biggest examples. Oh, and Sonic Forces throwing absolutely everything into disarray on a seemingly global scale, which would take quite a bit of time to be fixed, specially considering that's still an ongoing process in IDW.

On top of all this, it's outright shown that these things don't just happen every week or whatever, things happen off-screen, characters get time off to do their own stuff, and from the looks of it, Murder Of Sonic The Hedgehog is canon, as nothing there conflicts with canon and it's officially endorsed. Which means WE HAVE YET ANOTHER FUCKING BIRTHDAY PARTY, FOR AMY THIS TIME.

Further proving the point i just stated, let's look at the geographical Prison Island. This is what it looks like in Sonic Adventure 2.

A big, mechanical prison complex made out of nothing but cold hard metal. Filled with robots, not a single trace of nature in sight. Said nature however is not too far from these military bases, though! These forests are also on the island.

So, these are the two main parts of Prison Island. Abundant nature, and military facilities. There's very little difference once the story progresses further, though, as the island...

Fucking explodes. (Clip from Sonic Adventure 2 Real-Time Fandub. Credit to SnapCube.)

So, why is this relevant? Well, we revisit this location in Shadow The Hedgehog! The game, not the guy.

As we can see, there is no longer any difference between nature and construct. The base has been completely abandoned, and overtaken by the nearby forests, with greenery sprouting all over it. Now, it's not impossible that plant life in the Sonic series grows a bit faster than real plants, but methinks that an entire military base doesn't get overtaken by nature this hard within a month. There's entire new trees, grass and plants growing all over what was previously pavement, not even the walls are safe! Every single area is either covered in toxic waste, plant life, or both. Plant life that, again, needs time to grow. So there's likely a pretty big chunk of time between Sonic Adventure 2 and Shadow The Hedgehog, even though they're only separated by 1 game, Sonic Heroes.

Add that to the many many reasons these things can't just happen on a week by week basis! On to my next point...

No, proportions don't really mean anything in terms of age. Sure, Vanilla is quite big, and so are the conductor and his wife, but Rouge is undoubtedly an adult and her proportions are more or less the same as everyone else. So all they help distinguish is between children (Tails, Cream) and non-children. In this exact screenshot we see that Vanilla is much taller than rouge, almost being at eye level with each other despite Rouge sitting on an elevated surface, while Vanilla is standing. This height difference is also present in the games, although we rarely get to see them next to each other.

So, all this taken into account, the fact Sonic has been a teenager since the Classic series, the fact there's been a few timeskips and at least 2 birthdays, several events that would need some time to recover from, specially with a still-ongoing recovery process after Forces, the fact Elise is allegedly 17 in 06 (which would make her whole romantic subplot with Sonic even more uncomfortable than it already is by default if he was any younger than say, idk about 16 years old at the least), among many other reasons that I may have forgotten to mention, the chances of Sonic being 15, hell, even 16 are very, very slim. At the very least, he's got to be about 17, and he could honestly be as old as 19 or 20 (depending on whether Iizuka meant he's of adolescent age or a teenager).

So, if you do still view Sonic as a minor, that's perfectly fine, and honestly believable; but with all these facts stacked up, as time goes on, it will be less and less likely that him being underage will be a real possibility. This isn't the Pokemon anime. There's actual structure, lore, and a proper sense of scale; and something like Sonic's age being frozen at 15-16 just wouldn't make any sense.

All this to say, Sonic is, most likely, no longer a minor. There's some wiggle room where he could be one, but 18-19 is the most likely option, specially considering how Frontiers was comfortable with pitching his voice down. Yes, it was for the sake of the game's tone, but Tails's voice for example didn't have that much of a difference to it, because he's a child and it would be weird for a character to sound so much older than they actually are- and this goes for Sonic too.

So, in conclusion, after extensive analysis and every source I could find for Sonic's age taken into account;

You can, most likely, fuck Sonic The Hedgehog.

...

BUT IT'S NOT OVER YET.

We need to take both his other iterations into consideration, as well as address characters whose fuckability status depends on him. First, the alternative versions.

Movie Sonic

This one's a kid. On top of acting much more immature and inexperienced, outright described as irresponsible- hell, Tom even says "Whether you wanna hear this or not, you're still just a kid. You've got some more growing up to do before you're ready to be the big hero". He acts like a kid, is referred to as a kid, and hell, it makes sense, the movies so far have adapted Sonic 1-3&K, the games where Sonic was still just starting out his adventures.

Prime Sonic

This one's... More uncertain. He's definitely quite immature and inexperienced; though he feels more... Reckless than anything else. More of an attitude problem than an age problem, really, considering how Amy and Shadow act, two characters who should be about the same age as him, but that act much more maturely for the most part.

This one's pretty up in the air, I'd say, considering how Prime seems to be comfortable having their own versions of the cast (going by how different Shadow seems to be and how he has seemingly no attachment to Rouge, who is one of the people he trusts the most in canon).

Oh yeah, I haven't watched season 3 yet, but I doubt it changes much of anything about this judgement.

THE SONIC-DEPENDENT ONES

THE ROBOT SONICS

While they're all likely able to consent (... Okay, Mecha MK. 1 is a bit more dubious on whether it's sapient), it would probably be unethical to fuck something that's made to look like someone who's a minor. While they were made when Sonic was definitely a minor, he isn't one anymore, and the resemblance is still there to pretty much the exact same degree, so there's really no ambiguity here.

You can fuck them. Go ham, robot-fuckers.

SCOURGE

Look, we're not covering the mess that Archie can be. But from what I gather, Sonic is, at most, 17 pre-SGW. And this is just an alternate version of that Sonic, who likely didn't go through all the uber weird shit that makes Archie Sonic's age a nightmare to deal with. So, no, unfortunately for a lot of you, you probably can't fuck Scourge. Fortunately, though...

SURGE

Surge's age is, according to this post by IDW artist and writer Evan Stanley, around Sonic's age. So, what goes for the hedgehog goes for the Tenrec, you can most likely fuck her. Go ham.

... Elise?

She was 17 during 06, and some time has passed since then, and it would be weird if she had any bigger of an age gap with Sonic, plus plenty of time has passed since 06, so... I guess you can? I don't see why you would, but power to you, I suppose. Can't judge.

MIGHTY AND RAY

These two have been here since SegaSonic The Hedgehog in the arcades, which happens even before Sonic 2 does! Ray is never once really implied to be young, no matter how much he may seem like Mighty's Tails equivalent (Which... He's not meant to be. He was made before Tails.), and he's most likely about even with Mighty, who is most likely the same age as Sonic, seeing how they're meant to be parallels (down to Sonic's sprites being rehashed for his sprites in Chaotix), and the Japanese manual for Knuckles' Chaotix listing him as 16.

They're here mostly because Mighty is a partial Sonic counterpart, and Ray tends to be anywhere that Mighty goes these days, so they might as well be treated as a package deal.

So, yes, you can most likely fuck them... Even if we have absolutely no idea what their modern versions look like. Seriously, where the hell have they been? At least we know they're fine, considering it's been stated that they're off on their own adventures these days.

Aaaand... That's it! That's all the Sonic-dependent characters I could think of, at least ones that I think don't really merit their own posts. TL;DR

Metal Sonic, Mecha Sonic, etc: Fuckable Scourge: Unfuckable Surge: Fuckable Elise: Fuckable Mighty: Fuckable Ray: Fuckable

The "Fuckable" marks should go with an asterisk, as Sonic's status is "Most Likely Fuckable", but still.

Phew. Finally done. I've spent pretty much all goddamn day writing this. Hopefully this is useful for someone. Hopefully. God knows it'll make my job easier.

I'll just go write the alt text and go eat something, this took... Way longer than I'd like to admit. See you when the post goes up.

Go ham, you beautiful horny bastards.

Edit: Future OP here! I had to remake this post because the DIC bit earlier somehow triggered some weird copyright stuff on Tumblr, basically hiding the post from anyone who isn't directly looking at the blog. In the meantime, I added that bit about Prison Island to further add to his potential fuckability. So his margin for being a minor is even smaller now! How fun! Anyways, now I'll be seeing myself out for the time being. Thanks, and have fun.

[howlingmoonrise]

tagged by the fantastic @sunriseverse! thanks sunny!! 💖

under the cut because this one is long

1. why did you choose your url?

i wanted a new fandom penname and at the time adjective + noun names were a thing. i fiddled with several different variations, tried and failed to acquire kaleidoscopicmoonrise at the time (it's mine now!!), and landed on this one. i wanted something a little spooky, especially since soul eater was my fandom at the time - though it doesn't feel like it now that my icon is a lot more sane-looking lmfao

2. any sideblogs? if you have them name them and why you have them.

uh. yeah. a stupid amount (like 30+?), so i'm definitely not naming them all. most active are obviously this howl blog, my main blog @commandersya, this one for danny phantom and gravity falls stuff, @howlingspacegoo gets some activity every now and then when venom stuff resurfaces, and some others i use for reblogging specific reference stuff. most of the rest are for fandom events i've run in the past.

3. how long have you been on tumblr?

since like 2011-2012. i've seen it all.

4. do you have a queue tag?

lmao absolutely not. i don't use the queue function, though on occasion i'll schedule posts to space them out when i'm going through a tag in order not to reblog all of it at once, or for specific dates like halloween

5. why did you start your blog in the first place?

this one was for soul eater writing purposes. tumblr in general was because my cousin dragged me into it and then i realized there was a lot of bandom stuff in here (i was really into black veil brides for my first year or two on tumblr)

6. why did you choose your icon/pfp?

i broke ties with the soul eater fandom in a not great way and wanted to change my icon. yoi provided the perfect yuri expression with the kind of benevolent dictator smile i really like, despite that not being the original intent for it when the animators drew it ✊😔

7. why did you choose your header?

i had to check my header real quick lmfao. jason todd is just an excellent blorbo and when a good artist draws him.... 👀👀👀

8. what’s your post with the most notes?

oh gods. probably my dracula/barbie fic at nearly 3.5k notes. where's that ben affleck cigarrette pic when you need it. alternatively some ancient black veil brides photo/gif on my main blog.

9. how many mutuals do you have?

idk but i cherish y'all 💖

10. how many followers do you have?

dunno 😭 they're split across dozens of blogs so i'm not counting them all

11. how many people do you follow?

1.8k+, though i should follow more. my dash has times when it's pretty dead.

12. have you ever made a shitpost?

probably? yes. just remembered the i bit the butte psoh post.

13. how often do you use tumblr each day?

however long i'm online on my laptop, more or less. so a sizeable amount of hours

14. did you have a fight/argument with another blog once?

LMAO. i was in both voltron and yoi fandoms, writing for and running events for "problematic" ships. take a wild wild guess.

15. how do you feel about ‘you need to reblog this’ posts?

hate them. 90% of the time it'll make me automatically skip it. for the other 10%, if it has relevant info on the op's original post and that little sentence is on the comments then i might go back and reblog from the op just to get rid of it

16. do you like tag games?

love them!

17. do you like ask games?

see above

18. which of your mutuals do you think is tumblr famous?

i have uhhh. some. olderthannetfic, nemainofthewater, i think also colubrina for a while there, off the top of my head.

19. do you have a crush on a mutual?

if friend crushes count then several ✊😔

20. what is the last song you listened to?

the cramps - goo goo muck

21. what are you currently watching?

i am. so bad at finishing things so like a bajillion shows. the double i might drop despite it having been very very good until like episode 30-something. meet you at the blossom i need to finish like the last two eps. wandee goodday i need to finish four episodes iirc. i was in like episode 5 of century of love. i was on episode... 17? of my journey to you, which if i power through shall be for the antagonist sidepair/trio rather than the main characters. i was also at episode 16 of new life begins, which was fairly good and i do want to continue though i keep forgetting i have that tab open somewhere.

22. sweet/ savoury/ spicy?

savoury!

23. what is your current relationship status?

single and ace so not planning on changing that!

24. what is your current obsession?

the spirealm/kaleidoscope of death, and mysterious lotus casebook

25. what are nine albums/ songs you've been listening to lately?

- La P'tite Fumée - Cypher - Brody Dale - Don't Mess With Me - Stiff Little Fingers - Alternative Ulster - Concrete Blonde - Bloodletting (The Vampire Song) - The Cramps - What's Inside a Girl - Linkin Park - Heavy is the Crown - Miyavi & PVRIS - Snakes - D-A-D - Sleeping My Day Away - Aerosmith - Dream On

no-pressure tagging! @junemermaid @a-memory-a-distant-echo @snorlaxlovesme @where-the-water-flows @nemainofthewater

[starcrossed591]

KDrama Year in Review 2023

While I watched more KDramas this year than CDramas, none of them consumed my heart and soul quite like this year's crop of CDramas did (CDrama review post here). And I dropped KDramas more readily than I have in years past, in part because there were so many more things to watch than I had time for (also I had to finish my dissertation and graduate, etc etc). Still, there were definitely some that I really, really enjoyed, so here's this year's KDrama round up:

16. My Lovely Liar: Started strong, got boring real quick. Dropped for homophobic murder plot. Still, glad to see that Hwang Min Hyn can actually act (although full disclosure, I did still enjoy him in Alchemy of Souls, wooden as that performance may be). Hoping Kim So Hyun can catch a break and get a role in a drama more worthy of her in the near future.

15. Crash Course in Romance: Excellent performances and chemistry by the ML and FL. Romance between two middle aged people instead of youths is also a treat. Dropped around ep 12 because of the unnecessary, homophobic murder plot. Pass.

14. A Good Day to Be a Dog: Surprisingly stronger than the goofy premise suggests, largely on the basis of Park Gyu-Young's performance as the FL who turns into a dog upon being kissed. Pacing problems in the third act around the origins of the whole dog curse thing. Can't say I recommend unless you're really in the mood for some shenanigans, but largely inoffensive if a little silly. (Also it turns out Cha Eun Woo *really* leveled up his kiss game for this one!)

13. Love to Hate You: Perfectly serviceable rom com. Nothing too special, but a nice weekend binge if you're in the mood for that. Also a good way to see Kim Ji-Hoon's v handsome face and that *hair* without having to deal with everything involved with his rather murderous run in Flower of Evil.

12. Joseon Attorney: A Morality: Perfectly serviceable law procedural/Joseon historical. If you don't like either of those genres your mileage may vary, but I had missed having Bona on my screen, so it worked well enough for me.

11. Welcome to Samdal-ri: I seem to like this one more than literally everyone else I know, and I fully admit that my enjoyment of this drama is more vibes-based than plot-based. I guess I have a soft spot for Shin Hye Sun yelling at people at Ji Chang Wook going a bit unhinged over a woman who ran away from him (see also: Lovestruck in the City).

10. My Demon: Very much enjoying Song Kang as a cranky demon falling in love with a human. Very tropey in the best way, and feels like a return to form for the supernatural romance genre. Remains to be seen if they'll land the ending as of this writing, but enjoying as it goes.

9. Doctor Cha: A contribution to the slate of divorce comedies I watched this year (see also: Strangers Again (KDrama) and Let's Get Divorced (JDrama)), a surprisingly touching story about growing older when you've devoted your life to someone who has not done the same for you.

8. Alchemy of Souls: Light and Shadow (Part 2): While Ko Joon-Yung never quite managed to replace Jung So-Min as the FL for me, I definitely still enjoyed the closer to this fun fantasy series. Special shout out to Shin Seung-Ho as Prince Go Won and his pet turtle

7. Strangers Again: I didn't see a ton about this one on tumblr as it was airing, but I found this rom com? melodrama? divorce procedural? makjang? story about relationships and why they end unexpectedly profound. I tuned in expecting mindless makjang hot mess, and instead got a thoughtful meditation on divorce. Left me feeling unexpectedly melancholy at the end, but glad I watched it.

6. The Secret Romantic Guesthouse: Very fun sageuk! Probably won't knock your socks off, but it does what it does very well. Bonus points for a B couple as compelling as the A couple. I've also been a big Kang Hoon fan since Little Women, and there are a couple of other actors in here that I'm always glad to see working.

5. Perfect Marriage Revenge: Tour de force makjang. Came out of nowhere and blew me away. Hits all the right beats, and unexpectedly fun (and was a nice break from the heaviness of My Dearest for me). This was a good year for jaded and slightly unhinged transmigrated FL's back for their #revenge (see also: Story of Kunning Palace in CDrama land), and I was here for it. Also features one of the spiciest make-out scenes of the year, 10/10 recommend

4. See You in My 19th Life: Absolutely loved this haunting, melancholy, and sometimes unexpectedly goofy reincarnation drama. I loved the webtoon and had high expectations, and this drama largely met them! The continuing relationship between sisters Ji-Eum (Shin Hye Sun) and Cho-Won (Ha Yoon Kyung) was a special highlight for me, and while Shin Hye Sun is already a never-miss for me, I'm especially looking forward to whatever Ha Yoon Kyung does next. I prefer the ending of the Webtoon to the KDrama, but I'm still delighted this drama exists and am glad I watched it.

3. The Interest of Love: Look, I loved this drama. Even though it seemed on the surface like nothing but *mess* in the interpersonal lives of these characters working at a bank on the border between a rich and poor neighborhood in Seoul, it nonetheless had some of the most searing class commentary of the year for me. I also love an FL who will (spoiler) pack up her things and disappear at the drop of a hat, even if no one else will understand her decision to do so, because she just cannot deal anymore (see also: the FL in Lovestruck in the City, whom I also love but everyone else hated). This drama kept me gleefully coming back every week in a year where not a lot of others did.

2. Call It Love: A revenge slice of life melodrama that I found unexpectedly touching in its deep melancholy. Loved not only the main couple, but the relationship between the siblings and their pharmacist bestie. A lovely character study. (Also I somehow ended up watching this at the same time as Till the End of the Moon and Li Susu as Ye Xiwu's hidden identity/revenge plot, which was unexpectedly stressful! Had a very "it's the same picture" moment despite two dramas in two genres that could not be further apart.) If you missed this one (and since it aired on Disney+, you might have--Disney+'s effects on the KDrama streaming ecosystem will be the death of me), it's worth seeking out!

1. My Dearest (Parts 1 and 2): Kind of feels like everyone has said everything there is to say about sageuk of truly epic proportions, but it blew me away as well. Epic romance? Check. Twisty political machinations? Check. Heartwarming friendships between women? Check. Strong ensemble cast? And my top FL of the year, Lady Gil-Chae, played to perfection by Ahn Eun-Jin. I've adored her since Hospital Playlist, and am delighted that she's getting the attention and the roles she deserves. Namkoong Min also a top contender for ML of the year as Lee Jang-Hyun. Part 2 dragged for me a bit in places after a nearly perfect Part 1, but such a great drama overall.

Favorite Drama of the Year: My Dearest. See above.

Favorite Female Character: I mean, it's gotta be Gil Chae from My Dearest, right? She starts out as such a spiteful, spoiled noblewoman, and then turns out to have a core of pure steel. Turns out all her conniving and strategizing, which went towards causing mischief in the village, really just needed a proper outlet. While I would never want to be in the circumstances in which she found herself, if I did, she's exactly who I would want on my side.

Favorite Male Character: Everything's coming up My Dearest this year, because this one is Lee Jang-Hyun in My Dearest as well. Checks the box for my competence kink, and has a knack for showing up just when Gil-Chae needs him, even at great personal cost. Also a smart-ass, which I probably like a bit too much in a man.

Favorite Secondary Female Character: Cho-Won from See You in My 19th Life. Her relationship with her reincarnated older sister was almost more compelling to me than the main romance sometimes, and really helped develop how the ties that bind us are not just romantic ones. Also she was just super cute

Favorite Secondary Male Character: Could have picked anyone from Team Himbo in Alchemy of Souls, but gonna have to give this one to Go Won, himbo prince of my heart

Favorite Ship: Again, it's gotta be Gil-Chae and Lee Jang-Hyun in My Dearest. Sometimes, there are drama couples that nearly cause me pain when they are apart, and these two quickly became one of them. Though their relationships is hardly functional for much of it, through all that push and pull, they ultimately learn how to show up for each other. Also, their *chemistry* is insane!

Favorite Secondary Ship: I loved Hye-Seong and Sung Joon, the B couple in Call it Love. Seeing the SFL grow more comfortable with herself after a truly shitty ending to her previous relationship was a nice respite from the hidden identity stress of the A couple in this one. I'm also a sucker for a good romance where you start to see someone you've long taken for granted differently. (Close Runner Up: Cho Won and Do-Yun in See You in My 19th Life)

Favorite Platonic Relationship: Gil-Chae, Eun-Ae, and their maids, Jong Jong and Bong Doo, in My Dearest. I loved loved loved the relationship between these women in this drama, and part of the reason the second half of the drama suffered a bit for me is because of how far it moved away from this core relationship. They were ride or die for each other more than the majority of the men in their lives, and I loved that for them.

Trope that Needs to Die: While I find murder plots in rom coms tedious at the best of times, homophobic murder plots are really not it. Quit it, y'all. It's not cute.

Dramas I Missed: Moon in the Day, The Story of Park's Marriage Contract, and Tell Me That You Love Me (grrr Disney+ on this one) are on the list for next year. I'm probably missing others.

Non-2023 Drama Spotlight: Finally went back and watched Do You Like Brahms? for a hit of Park Eun-Bin. A lovely, if also melancholy, slice of life romance that's just as much about what to do when a (career related) dream that you've worked really, really hard for just isn't going to come through as it is about the main romance. Also made me fall in love with Kim Min-Jae and his lovely deep voice, enough so that I also then went back and finally watched Dali and the Cocky Prince, which was also a treat. Recommend both.

Most Looking Forward To: I continue to yearn for a Yumi's Cells 3, and who's to say if that one will ever come through, but I'm putting it out into the universe anyway. More realistically, I'm looking forward to the surprisingly stacked line-up of sageuks coming up, including Captivating the King and Love Song for Illusion.

[openworldadventurer]

I'm really sorry if this is rude or something, it's really not intended to be, but do you have any proof of your work at Bethesda? I'm writing something for school about how casual a lot of the abuse/mismanagment in the games industry is and want to include some of the things you've talked about in the past, but I can't seem to find anything that actually validates your accounts. Even just an article from a credible source in which your mentioned or smth would be fine, genuinely.

Sorry again if this rude, thank you in advance if you decide to respons!

That's a perfectly reasonable thing to ask, so no offense taken.

But first things first: there are larger and more egregious abuses out there with much more proof than some tales from the trenches on Tumblr. I recommend Jason Schreier's Press Reset (not just because I was interviewed for it about two separate studio closures, Big Huge Games and 2K Marin), but there's no shortage of good reporting on a variety of abuses. (And as for "mismanagement", I wouldn't call any of the cut stuff from Skyrim a sign of mismanagement at all -- that's just what happens in any big open-world game. Every developer plans about twice as much stuff for a game as actually sees the final version -- there are always cuts when we see what we'll have the time and devpower to achieve.)

So please, don't quote "some guy on Tumblr said his name was struck from the game" for your school article -- it'll look like gossip reporting, and it won't even be very exciting. There's real horrors out there with solid sourcing that you can draw from, instead. As for my own credentials: I'm listed in the credits for Fallout 3 as "Fred Zeleny" (you can see me listed in this video of the credits at 2:51), and the various Fallout fan wikis have archives of my "Inside the Vault" internal blog interview I did while working on it.

As I've said elsewhere, I'm not listed in the credits for Skyrim, because they stripped my name along with a few other developers for going to work at different game studios before the project was done. I'm not sure what I can do to offer proof that I was there for that time period, short of sharing my design notebooks or pictures from the company parties, all of which might well be legally-actionable breaches of my NDA. I suppose I could point out which characters are named after friends of mine, but that wouldn't prove much if you don't know them. (Although it's a sweet story: they had just married at the time, and I added them as a little surprise wedding gift. Now their two kids play Skyrim on the Switch and are delighted to see their parents immortalized in Darkwater Crossing.) Now, that sort of professional erasure might not fly nowadays (particularly with a union there!), but that was 15 years ago. And sure, that was frustrating back when I was a young dev. But in the decade and a half since, it's never been a professional impediment, because everyone else in the industry knows that sort of pettiness was/is done all the time. And it doesn't hold a candle to some of the real abuses and horrors I've seen in the industry since leaving Bethesda.

So... yeah. I am who I say I am, but I really hope I haven't given the impression that Bethesda is a uniquely bad place in the game industry. If anything, it was fine in hindsight, albeit a little frustrating how things ended. But I tell tales of what almost happened in those games because those are the games people are familiar with, and because those tales are amusing rather than just horrifying.

Trust me, "here's a funny thing I almost did with Sheogorath!" or "the Bard's College quest was almost way more complex!" are much more enjoyable stories from game development than the real horrors I've seen. You probably wouldn't enjoy reading "that season I slept in the office multiple nights a week to meet deadlines and then the parent company failed to make payroll and laid us all off with no severance and we all cried and my coworker wrote a sad note to the movers who came to take everything away", or "the guy who made us completely retool our game to be more mainstream just stepped down after being arrested for a longstanding pattern of sexual harassment and abuse of employees." Trust me, those are real bummers. So it'd probably be better for your article if you focus on the sort of actual abuse and mismanagement I've shared links for here, rather than the minor stuff from my posts.

Gotta keep a proper perspective, y'know?

[sybaritick]

In response to recent posts I've seen discussing "people on tumblr lying about being working class when they're clearly not/people on tumblr claiming they're regular middle class when they make 200k a year": it's true this is extremely annoying, but i really think this problem exists on EVERY website and also in real life (feel like one can meet working-class-larpers at every US university, but more so the more elite the university is).

People build an identity around an image of their social class, both current and past, and that can be for political reasons (they're a leftist and don't want to be one of the bad rich people) or just because they want to have a bootstraps success narrative around themselves or whatever else. But that identity they build can be completely disconnected from the material reality of their upbringing.

My parents were definitely well-off: my dad was a software developer and my mom also had a tech-adjacent job. Because we lived in a very expensive area, people still made fun of me for class-related reasons as a kid and my parents struggled with financial stuff at times (like having to move out of the house we lived in and switch to renting a smaller condo). However I would still never make the claim I am just some average American, because as a kid my family's income was definitely in the top ~15% in the US.

The thing is though... I think some people either 1) Solely base their perception on the people around them, and if you do that you'll probably think of yourself as average, or 2) have a load-bearing element of their personality that depends on them having been working class background or at the very least have come from an "average" background.

I think the problem here is people building their identities so hard around what their ideology "demands." It's not easy to solve but it's something you have to be honest with yourself about. There is a huge strain of online Tumblr-type-leftism that demands you perform a sort of victimhood/background of oppression or be considered inherently a bad person, and the result is that some people will fake it, but they might not even believe they are faking it, it's part of their self-image.

Don't buy into this idea that victimhood is virtuous.

The first step is do not apologize for any advantage you have and do not feel guilt over any advantage you have: the advantage is good. it lets you do more, gives you power, gives you time or money or connections compared to the average. Everyone has at least some advantages in life, even if they are as simple as "It's an advantage that I was born in at Western country," or "it's an advantage that I'm not blind or deaf." You will never accomplish anything useful, politically or personally, by feeling bad for these things. (You cannot give another person your advantages, or remove your own advantages, by feeling guilty. you CAN use your advantages to help disadvantaged people-- but not through guilt or performative hand-wringing!)

You should feel good and happy about the things many on Tumblr call privileges, because they mean it will be some amount easier for you to get further and climb higher and do more. I love being American. I love being able to do this many pull-ups. I love being male-passing. And I love money. Build from there.

[brb-on-a-quest]

Day Fourteen Day Fifteen Day Sixteen

im SOOOOO SORRY that I left you guys hanging those two days! *cries* the first one I genuinely forget, and the second I was too busy to do it- and I think that this is not the first time this might happen, since the farm (oh yeah, if you're not one of my regular followers, you should know I'm a farmhand lol) is picking up steam, during my down time Im trying to do more physical rest for my body to recover. which means unfortuantely, Ive been spending less time on here in general, and that my longer posts that take more time to write have had to pause for a while.

so, I'm sorry to say but this is the last day i'll be able to do this for a while, but maybe forever. I've had so much fun with it and loved to see everybody's different answers, and how we've all connected!! but for at least a few days/weeks, I need a bit of a break lol. if anyone wants to pick up this game again, with the same list of people I've given already or different ones, you are more than welcome to! and I'm not leaving Tumblr, I'm just not going to do this particular ask game anymore.

our final question: what is something that you you want in your life, and what can you do to achieve it? what steps do you need to take to earn the life you see yourself living?

thank all of you so much! I hope to return again maybe sometime! I wish you all the best :)

Awww no worries gracie! take care of yourself first. Def appreciate all the work it must've taken to come up with good questions. I'll be sure to haunt your inbox soon with hopefully some equally thought-provoking (or not) questions.

ok, actual question: our final question: what is something that you you want in your life, and what can you do to achieve it? what steps do you need to take to earn the life you see yourself living?

To be honest, this question has haunted me for the past...well since before high school. (has it really been almost 10 years since I was a baby highschool freshman?). To be also perfectly honest, my depression and anxiety were so bad I was never convinced I would make it as far as I did... which allowed me to put off answering the question for a long while until the Hour of College Applications approached.

Well, against all previous conceptions of my future, I am still alive and about to graduate in December (literally how) and set to walk across the beautiful stage in May to get my undergrad diploma with some kind of academic honors (I forget the Latin for it). Definitely not the highest GPA, but I am relatively proud of myself considering the effort and, for lack of a better phrase, blood, sweat, and tears that have gone into this. So, steps that need to happen in order to graduate

Pass classes (Preferably with A's but I'm also in a position where hopefully my self-esteem won't die with a B or 2).

Write and Finish my thesis (shaking crying throwing up I don't have enough capacity for this even if it's only 15 pages in Spanish)

Study and hopefully pass a GRE (graduate school readiness exam I think? 'cuz I'm told it's a good idea for master's school applications I can not stress enough how much I hate standardized tests and am so anxious about this that I haven't even opened my books yet, I've just been throwing myself into thesis research instead; I 'know not all schools require this but I'm going into something that's not my major, so I feel some kind of need to prove myself).

Apply to graduate schools for counseling!

Only four things... it shouldn't be so bad.... one would think... (can I please just skip to the part where this is over why do people call college the best years of my life).

The other thing I want to work on is just being a better person and in particular a better friend. My goal is therapy, particularly pediatric therapy because it's such a neglected area where I'm from and also in general I think because there tends to be stereotypes of "oh children can't have mental health problems." but doing that means I want to develop more compassion, friendliness, and patience and gentleness and actual listening skills while being assertive...yk an environment that nurtures personal and other's growth. Which is really hard. Progress has been made but still more to go.

[prismatoxic]

i've told parts of this story before, but bare with me, i'm emotional.

so like, i've had this blog since 2021. my original tumblr blog (made in 2011 iirc) was nuked in 2018 for exactly the reason you think (nsfw ban) and i didn't return for a handful of years because it stung so bad. even when i did, i mostly used twitter.

i started posting to tumblr more regularly when musk's twitter takeover finally pissed me off enough to ditch it. (i have since gone back, sort of, but am not reliably present and mostly just rt art people send me.) i've been pretty consistently here since then, sans a very angry break when all the shit with automattic's CEO happened.

and like... looking through my archives... i only made a dedicated tag for asks last july, even though i've been using an organizational tag system since i made this blog. that's how infrequent they were. my art usually got between 0 and 3 notes. when i left briefly back in january, i deleted every post in my art tag because i didn't want to leave my work here, but also, like... the only things that went anywhere were some of my mgs fanarts. no one owes anyone's work attention, but it didn't feel worth it, you know? like why share it with the public when i can just show it to the like 3 friends i know who care?

i came back partially because i felt... isolated. i have friends on the fediverse and on discord, but tumblr gave me a sense of being in a community, even if i didn't feel like an important part of said community. i missed queuing funny posts to enjoy weeks later, i missed being kept sort of in-the-loop about fandom goings-on, i missed my friends who were still here. (and that last one is also part of why i check twitter more now.)

but that alone wasn't enough, because i was a nobody here and it probably wasn't worth it to try again. but then devot and i started watching dungeon meshi, and i got into chilaios just like i thought i would, and tumblr has the largest concentration of chilaios fanart and posts. not only that, but every post i saw in the tag had so much engagement! i didn't see a single one that went unnoticed, back in february. so i hesitantly came back. i started reblogging chilaios posts. i didn't intend to try and break into the space because i knew it'd just hurt if i went unnoticed again, like i did in other fandoms.

but i made friends, little by little. i started a fanfic. i cautiously began posting my art again. i started writing meta, and shitposts, and replying on other people's posts, and commenting on other people's fics, and now...

that ask tag i mentioned? there are 15 pages of posts with that tag on my blog. only 2 and a half of those pages are asks from before i got into dunmeshi. people talk to me--they care about my thoughts and my opinions, they compliment the things i make. i have a group of like, 30+ people i interact with regularly, many of which i now consider close friends. everything i post gets some attention, no matter what it is.

this isn't a humblebrag, it's just... a thank you. i can't really properly express the depths of the loneliness i've felt in the past. i was an outcast for a long time, and it was way worse pre-2019, but i don't think it's ever fully left me. i've been hurt very, very badly in the past, and i've been abandoned a lot, and i've been ostracized a lot. i've grown into who i am today both in spite of and because of all i've been through, and for that i wouldn't ever change it, but it was still hard.

so today, as i turn 29, seeing asks and gifts pour in to tell me happy birthday, and that i'm appreciated... just, thank you.

if there's one thing you can give me today, it's this: reblog someone's art or writing or meta with some enthusiastic tags. send someone a friendly ask. reply to someone's post to comment on something they've said. write comments on ao3 for the fics that move you, no matter how much or how little you can think of to say.

this is going to sound cheesy as hell, but i genuinely mean it: reach out, and spread joy, whenever and wherever you can. you never know who's in pain, who's lonely or who feels worthless. and if it's you who feels that way, do what you can anyway; a community that isn't afraid to reach out will reach back to you, too. and you're not alone. i care, i promise--and more people than you realize do too.

it's so easy to underestimate how much a kind word can do. they add up, though. so keep going.