#if we do let me know so i can add the url))

[babeyun]

falling alone ✩ l.hs [teaser two]

✩ series m.list | taglist form ✩ synopsis: cold cases were heeseung’s specialty, and he cracked every single one. cold hearts were your specialty, and you have yet to make a single chip in your husband’s. ✩ genre: established relationship au | hurt-comfort ✩ pairing: lieutenant!lhs x housewife!reader ✩ word count: 1.4k | [full fic: tbd] ✩ rating: 18+. minors dni. ✩ warnings: a little more pining between husband!hee & wife!reader, a bit of outsider help. nothing explicit ✩ author's note: hello everyone! i just wanted to let you all know that i am trying my best to get this fic out before the end of the year (and if i don't, i do go on winter break from uni in early december! so we can expect a few fics in that time.) this being said, i will add a taglist link here as well as the series masterlist because i cannot for the life of me keep up with urls at the moment. the people tagged below have already been added to said taglist, but if you wanna jump on and don't see yourself tagged, please fill out the form linked above! thanks!

Heeseung knows that Dr. Bahng told him to leave work at work. However, Dr. Bahng said nothing about bringing home to work. He said nothing about thinking about you at work, or missing you, or daydreaming about you instead of analyzing the reports that a pair of rookies messed up. He also said nothing about reading articles by some sketchy romance columnist on how to keep your relationship alive, which is exactly what Heeseung was scrolling through right now. 

There are things in a relationship that must always be shared in order to avoid, or resolve conflict. How the other person is making you feel, how you are making them feel, and how to tackle both negative checklists properly. It is key to always remember that it must be you and your partner against the problem, not you and your partner against each other.

You make Heeseung feel…alive. You make him feel loved, cherished, and even at some bizarre times, worshiped. You make him appreciate waking up at the ass crack of dawn, your sleeping face relaxed as he peppers kisses across your warm skin – something he's thankful never manages to wake you up, but it adds to all the adoration he holds in his heart for you.

How does he make you feel? Dejected, neglected, rejected. Pushed aside for the true love of his life – work. You never bring it up unless he asks. You never brought it up until last July, when he was slumped in his office chair after drinking half a bottle of sherry whiskey, listening to music and thinking about yet another dead end that deterred him from finding Soyoung. You had approached him with a gentle gaze, a soft touch to his shoulder and asking about taking a shower together. You never questioned him, you never pressured him, you never tried to make him something you assumed he just wasn't – an attentive, doting husband.

And he remembers how he asked you, too. He remembers spinning around in his chair, asking you if he was everything you'd ever wanted. Asking you if he was living up to your expectations, as a husband, as a life partner, as a friend, even.

And he remembers the way you sighed carefully before perching on his desk. "You're everything I've ever wanted, and I'm sure you'll continue to grow and be even more deserving of the love I hold for you." You had smiled, your hand coming to rest on his cheek. "Nothing we can't work through, you know? If I was given a choice in another life, another world – I'd still choose you."

He will never forget it, and he can still feel the warmth of your lips against his as you led him to the bathroom. He can still feel the ache of your love on his skin from the way you held him under the running water, quietly basking in his presence as the mint of your shampoo filled his nose. Nothing is as special to him as you are. 

There are things that should routinely be shared in order to maintain a homeostasis of the calendar. Asking how their day was, if you have any ideas for dinner tonight, or if you'd like to do something this weekend to celebrate the mundane. It shouldn't be difficult to establish a routine with your partner, if you are in tune with them. A kiss goodbye in the morning, a warm embrace in the evenings. A shared meal, a shared bath, a shared bed. 

Heeseung can't remember the last time he fully checked in with you – you always have something to do. You always attempt new creative projects, and his fingers toy with the fabric of his slacks as he remembers that you hand stitched them. He thinks about how you waited for him all night yesterday, and the disappointment you must have felt when he arrived late. He thinks about how he just doesn't make time to tackle the problem that you two are constantly glossing over by being intimate – he knows you don't feel loved. 

He didn't ask you about your day yesterday, or the day before, or last week. He didn't ask you if you were sewing anything new, learning any new pieces on the piano collecting dust in the living room. He hasn't asked about your mother, but at least he knows you don't like to talk about her. 

Heeseung hasn't asked you a single thing about yourself, or your life, and he doesn't know how long it's been. Even last night, your eyes were focused entirely on him – the way his lips twitched when you said you liked the wine he chose, the way he pulled your leg over his in the booth you were sharing. You asked him about work, and he just shook his head as he pointed out the new menu items. 

You love him so selflessly.

Something that works for my partner and I is parallel play. We aren't necessarily doing something together, but we are present in the same room and doing our own thing. Knowing that he is there, and that if I need him, I can reach for him, adds a comfort to our relationship. Aside from this, we also come together every two weeks and address any issues we may be experiencing – both in our relationship and our individual lives. We resolve the issues about us together, and advise the other on our personal issues. Balance!

You do this a lot. If Heeseung is home, you'll wander to wherever he is and sit down where you can, and quietly go about your business. Sometimes it's a new cross-stitch, sometimes it's just putting a headphone in and listening to music. Sometimes you're giving yourself a pedicure, sometimes you're just sitting there staring at his corkboard of paraphernalia while matching your breathing to his. It was subtle, something you thought he'd never notice.

He sighs, exiting out of the tab before grabbing his coat off the back of his chair. Tugging it on, he uses one hand to log out of his computer when he hears three knocks on the door. A lightness of the rapping knuckles similar to yours…and your smiling face appears as you crack open the door. "Surprise?" He hates that he can't bite back his smile, a few of his fellow officers wide-eyed at his expression. He nods silently, and you extend your hand for him when you hear his coworkers whispering about you. With a dejected look, you tuck your hand back into the pocket of your jeans, "Guess we don't want them gossiping, right?" "Right." He mumbles, his own hand twitching around the doorknob as he pulls it shut behind him. He wants to reach for you, embrace the warmth you bring, show you off to the people he often calls his friends. Sunghoon catches his eye, a quizzical look on his face before shaking his head. 

Heeseung reaches for you, but you've already made your way towards the door. Your smile has lessened as you open the door, holding it for him. "How was work?" You ask as he joins you in the cool air, and he wastes no time wrapping his arm around your waist and pulling you in close, his nose buried in your hair. You hesitate to wrap your arms around him, instead leaning back to try and meet his eyes. "Hee?" "Don't ask me about work." He mutters, before pressing his lips to yours softly. You let out a noise of surprise, but you can't melt into his touch before he pulls away. "I hate talking about work, let's talk about you. Over lunch." He takes your hand in his, gently pulling you to his side as he makes his way to the car. He doesn't see yours in the parking lot, so he only assumes you got a rideshare before you clear your throat. "Are you okay?" The words are slightly jumbled as he leads you to the passenger side, opening the door for you, helping you step in. "Hm? Why do you ask?"

"Well…you're actually out of the office. And you want to go to lunch…and you don't want to talk about work?" Your voice is meek, and it makes his chest ache as he reaches to buckle your seatbelt in for you. "I just want to spend time with you. Shall we?" His smile is a little forced, until he sees the soft gloss of embarrassment over your eyes. "Okay."

BABEYUN © 2024. no translations, reposting or modifications are allowed. do not claim as your own. viewer discretion is advised. your media consumption is your responsibility.

TAGLIST [those in red could not be tagged] @thesassy-mia @starfallia @ramenoil @hoonieversies @wintabite @shnnzsworld @eneiyri @jjongsha @ilovejungwonandhaechan @oopshee @capri-cuntz @petalsofink @teddybeartaetae @chocminteu @moon0fthenight @delvziion @heeseungthel0ml @bbyjw @marimariiiiiiii @thenastone

[timeflow]

good evening reddit users, welcome to the website. not seen one of these that tells you how to make this website bearable so here goes

starting off with dashboard settings you want to turn off endless scrolling (it slows down the website after a while of scrolling), turn off shorten long posts because one of the main things about this website is the total lack of a character limit (as an alternative to this setting, you can press j to skip to the next post on the dashboard if the current one is kind of long). turning on timestamps is convenient because it allows you to check when a post was made (don't get me wrong: this website absolutely LOVES reblogging old posts, but there are times when it's worth checking if a post has very old news in it)

turn off best stuff first right away. one of the main reasons cited for joining tumblr is because "there is no algorithm". this is not entirely true, we have one but we routinely turn off anything algorithmic that staff adds. turning off best stuff first means your dashboard will be reverse chronological no matter what, and turning off based on your likes and stuff in your orbit will get rid of the rest of the algorithmically-recommended content that appears on your dashboard

following tags is nice because you will occasionally see posts with tags you follow sprinkled into your dashboard. this is considered good because it's almost always recent, I personally recommend turning on include followed tag posts and just following a bunch of random tags that you think could be interesting (characters, media, topics, whatever)

this one's a more personal thing but I would absolutely turn off any community labels because tumblr staff has recently been just putting a bunch of random posts under this despite being entirely sfw. if you ACTUALLY want to filter content, then go to filtered tags:

unlike the community labels which are put arbitrarily by staff, tags are put on by the actual users and so you can MUCH more reliably filter out content you don't want to see by putting filtered tags. this also works for any kind of content unlike the community labels, meaning you can just filter out stuff that you don't want to see (a particular character, a particular piece of media, a certain topic, anything you want really)

turn on custom theme immediately. the standard view of tumblr.com/url will give people who are not logged in a forced login wall, meanwhile url.tumblr.com will not. by doing this you also get access to your post archive at url.tumblr.com/archive, which lets you look through your posts more easily (the search function is awful). the main benefit of this, however, is that you get to have a custom look to your blog: going to edit theme brings up a menu that allows you to customize your css, add pages to your tumblr blog, etc. all very useful stuff

it's also worth taking the time to consider whether or not you leave your liked posts and list of blogs you follow public (most people have likes turned off, following is also commonly turned off but I personally don't care about others seeing who I follow)

turn off the let people blaze your posts. blaze basically allows you to pay money to show a post to a random group of people by paying money, suffices to say that allowing others to blaze your posts without your consent will inevitably lead to one of your personal posts getting blazed by some prick and now hundreds of people have seen it

asks are one of the main ways of interacting with blogs so absolutely turn them on. whether you allow anons is your choice, anonymity allows people to say nice things without feeling embarrassed about how everyone knows who said that, but it also allows people to send hateful stuff with no consequence.

submissions are like whatever. I personally leave them on but in my 5 years of having this blog I've been submitted to twice.

to close off this post I'll leave my personal thoughts on reblog etiquette:

reblogging is great. reblog the fuck out of anything. does the post amuse you slightly? reblog it. go wild

that being said please don't put anything in your reblogs unless it's like a really important comment. your comment will be immortalized forever if someone reblogs the post from you and on popular posts I have to constantly go back a couple years to get rid of an annoying comment like "LOL THIS IS SO FUNNY" because that person didn't realize that their addition was wholly unnecessary

if you DO want to add something to say your thoughts on the post in a quiet voice that doesn't get permanently added onto the original, consider talking in the tags of your reblog. this is considered nicer since when the post is reblogged from you your tags are not going to stick around. there is also this process known as "peer review" in which if your tags are sufficiently funny one of your followers (or sometimes a random person browsing the notes of the post) will screenshot/copy and paste your tags into a reblog, which is a much more natural way of having your comment added into the post

tags are also nice to use or organizational purposes. clicking on a post with a certain tag on your blog will show you every post with that tag on your blog allowing you to find posts later, alternatively you can go to url.tumblr.com/archive/tagged/[insert tag here] to a similar effect.

that's all I have to say on this subject. have fun on our glorious website

edit: oh yeah also unfollow staff. it will make you look normal 👍

[wizlizbelle3]

Something that works for me and kind of an experiment.

I have discussed methods and stuff and how people have also told me that you need to find what works for you. But there's only one way to get to the void: complete relaxation.

So this is something that I'm doing, and this is something I'd like you to try!

First - I wanna start with a meditation. (Grounding, clearing, calming etc). Great Meditations on YouTube is my favorite meditation channel because they have 5, 10, 15, 20, and longer meditations. They have a variety of all kinds of meditations including a void meditation which is perfect to be relaxed. I'll link some of my favorite ones down here:

Grounding meditation

Void Meditation

Deep space meditation

Deep within yourself meditation

Healing the void space

Secondly - Now that I've done a meditation, I wanna do a quick body scan ( 30 seconds or a minute). Get into a comfortable position (doesn't matter which one, people use starfish cause your body is supported) but it should a position where you won't move.

Lastly - this is the most fun part - I'll put on this vid Void Hypnosis

and as I am listening to it, I'll be doing some breathwork:

Count to 10, then when you get to 10 hold your breath for 10 seconds. Count to 20, then when you get to 20 hold your breath for 20 seconds

so on until your body has gone numb. You can also just do wim hof's breathing but holding your breath for long periods of time makes your body go to sleep which is what we want. You don't need to affirm because the hypnosis is already doing that for you.

If you get distracted after a while, just keep being distracted. It doesn't matter cause you've already relaxed your body and are in a trance.

Remember, you are in the void. Even right now, you are in the void.

Please do let me know how it goes for you! And I suggest using youtube to make a playlist and adding the hypnosis video twice. You can do it if you have a computer. Log into your youtube account - make a playlist - add your meditation - copy the link of the hypnosis and click on the little three dots on the left underneath the title of the playlist - click add videos and paste the URL in the search box then click done - do it again or however many times you want that video in your playlist.

[tiktaalic]

Did lots of people think Cas was going to die in Despair? Like i know he made the deal w the empty but was there a specific reason people thought that episode would be the one or was it more of just knowing his days were numbered bc of the empty deal? <- guy who hasn’t seen season 15 and is so so interested in the vibes of the spn fandom right before nov 5th

Yes. I would like to preface this with the fact that I was in this space as a hater. There were like five supernatural blogs I would search for by url and backread every day. And they would say. Guys destiel is for real going to happen in despair. And i would think to myself. There’s not going to be destiel in supernatural you stupid slut. I was up to date on the meta I just thought people were letting supernatural Charlie Brown football them. Because many such cases in supernatural. Where it seems to be leading to destiel. And then it doesn’t.

Anyway. The empty deal was made in 14 and then kind of got dropped forever. The only time I can remember it coming up is right afterwards where cas explained to jack how he got him back and then is like don’t worry the trigger is happiness im not dying any time soon. Second time it comes up cas is like Dean you are in a shockingly good mood what’s up with that. And deans like well we got jack back no strings attached that’s a pretty big win. And then cas looks sadly off into the distance.

Anyway x 2. I feel like I remember them releasing the promos like stupid far in advance for despair. Edit to say yeah that’s true they were out in August of 2020 for an episode that aired in November. Castiel telling Dean he loved him was treated as a Known Fact As SOON as despair ads aired. people said. Oh. This is it. Bc the pieces to the ad were billie threatening them. dean crying while facing cas. Billie opening a door (which led to Dean and cas). Then dean on the floor with the handprint. So everyone was like oh clearly this means cas tells Dean he loves him which triggers the deal and does this to save Dean and he dies in front of dean causing dean to cry on the floor. This is doubly proved by the handprint like duh this is the only way a bloody handprint on his shoulder would be narratively significant again. And again this was all treated as fact. This was obviously going to be the course of events based on the trailer. And me. Hater. Went ok well cas isn’t going to confess his love because this is supernatural but the rest adds up I do think he’s going to die in front of dean in this scene. Really anecdotal but I remember seeing people upset on twitter MONTHS before this about misha not being in the finale which was surely speculation but not sure bsded on what. I started paying attention to supernatural again in like. July of 2020 so I can only speak to that. I know Covid made the airing schedule really weird. And 1518 was the last thing they filmed before Covid. For reference these shots are the ones people CORRECTLY concluded destiel from.

[antimony-medusa]

How To Set Up An Ao3 Exchange

One of the first things I say whenever anyone asks me about running exchanges is that if you have more than about 30 people in the exchange, do NOT try to match it by hand. That is so much work and takes so much time. Use Ao3's matching algorithm. And people say sure, and then they look at how Ao3 works and they go uhhhhhhhhhh I think we can make a google form work. Because google forms are reasonably intuitive to make work, and Ao3 exchanges are— not.

But the thing is, once you understand the underlying logic for Ao3 collections, they are not that bad, and seriously I can't overstate the benefit of having Ao3 do the matching for you. That's like the difference between 80 hours of curating data as it comes in and then matching it (what happened with hand-matching 325 people for holiday exchange), or 2 hours of double-checking the matching (what happened with matching 125 people for 48 hour exchange). You have to put in extra work to get an Ao3 exchange set up, but it super pays off in the end. So! Here is an intro to how Ao3 exchanges work on the back end. This explanation assumes you know how to sign up for an exchange because I've posted ones like that before, for example, here.

Let's get into it.

THE COLLECTION

The first thing you want to do is set up your exchange collection. If you go to your right-hand drop-down menu, you click on My Collections.

That brings you to every collection you have ever made, and you go to to the right and click "New collection".

That brings you into the back end of the collection. You want to go down and put in a name for the collection that will be the url (so no spaces), a display name, an email for the collection to email when something happens to the collection (this will be public, so use a fandom email), and a basic description.

There's places there to do custom icons and headers, but those are optional, but you can go in and make your exchange pretty later if you want!

We are still in the "setting up" stage of the exchange, so once we go to preferences, you want to select all the tick boxes and make it look like this.

Moderated means that you'll have to manually approve things to be added to the collection (not absolutely necessary but can keep out trolls, and it also means that you can manually check that gifts meet minimums before you let them in to the exchange), Closed means that no one can submit things to the collection yet (once you open your exchange you de-select this), Unrevealed means that any works in the collection will show up as "mystery works" and not be readable (so you keep it unrevealed until the posting date, so people can post early but not spoil the surprise), anonymous means that all authors will be anonymous (this depends on if you have an anonymous portion of your exchange, so it's optional), "show random works" just means that you get a selection of different works when people visit the collection at different times, "send a message to the collection email" is optional but is useful for moderation (like if you're checking people off a list when their gifts get delivered), and "type of challenge" you want to be set to "gift exchange".

and then on this page the only other things of concern are places where you can put in an FAQ, a description and some instructions, but those are all optional! I normally host the FAQ on tumblr, so I just say "go check the tumblr at [link]".

And then you hit the submit button.

Now we get into the nitty-gritty.

First up is some optional stuff— you can add in the times that you're going to do things! This is useful for communication, but not necessary. We're still setting everything up, so you do not want Sign-Ups to be open, that is only selected once you have everything ready to go.

Then scrolling down, you get to Requests and Offers.

This is where you specify the absolute minimum ships or characters that you want people to give you to sign up. 10 is the maximum Ao3 allows, so I always set it to 10 for both "allowed", which is the maximum the site will allow. And required is the low number. I usually set it to a minimum of three, to make sure someone doesn't sign up with "i will only write one ship" or something. This way, people will have to do a minimum of three separate requests and offers.

The "requests visible" is part of the back end thing, and it's up to you if you want to select it or not. If you keep it unselected, the only person who will be able to see requests is the mods, and eventually each person will see their assignment. If you select it, people will be able to browse everyone's requests and both maybe target offers so they can write for a specific person, and be able to find treats (extra bonus gifts) to write for people whose requests they like. Each side has its own benefits or negatives, it's up to you which ones you want to go with!

And here we get into more of the matching info! Let's look at Request Settings.

Now this is what the settings would look like for a multi-fandom exchange. The "details/description" box you want to make mandatory because that is where people will put their DNW and their prompts (and you absolutely want to make sure everyone has a DNW), and the url is an optional one which lets people link an off-site letter on google docs or dreamwidth.

Fandom allowing up to three fandoms means that people can do crossovers if they want (or tag a request something like 3rd life/hermitcraft), and if I wanted to say that people had to request 3 separate servers I would say "must be unique" but I'm okay if people sign up with three Dream SMP relationships in this idea hypothetical exchange, so I'm not selecting the unique button.

I'm ignoring the characters button cause that's extra complication, the only other thing I want to look at is the relationship button. A minimum of 1 ship per request (and there's a minimum of three requests), and let's say you can go up to 20, so people can request LOTS of different ships. I did select "must be unique" so someone can't sign up with the same ship three times. The "allow any" button is off, which means that I will have to select relationships that fit under the fandom that I selected one up, I can't request Shubble/Niki Nihachu (Origins), and put it with a fandom request for Hermitcraft. This has set it so that the absolutely minimum someone can sign up with is 3 relationships (3 requests * 1 relationship each), and the absolute maximum is 200 relationships (10 requests * 20 relationships each).

Requests will look much the same, except I am not putting down details/description or a URL, because I'm not letting people submit requests about what ship they "really" want to match on, they are going to be equally matchable to everyone they offered. Some exchanges will let you submit a requests DNW, but honestly that is so much extra work for the mods, I would not recommend it unless you think it's necessary to stop people from dropping their gifts later.

Okay, so now we take a brief digression into a tag set.

THE TAG SET

Okay so basically a tag set is an extra set of sliders that lets you fine-tune your exchange. If you do not use a tag set, when people sign up they will be able to use every canon tag on the archive, and only canon tags. Which is a LOT of tags, but when I ran an exchange without a tag set there were multiple times of hitting non-canon relationships or tags. But it's also a definite extra complication, tag sets are extra fiddly work and they are even less intituive. If you just want to go without a tag set, skip down to the matching segment. If you do want to avoid hitting people signing up with non-canon tags, keep reading.

I'm gonna say right off the bat that tag sets are the single most like "oh I am getting into the GUTS of the machine" part of running Ao3 exchanges, but if you can make them work they can super streamline both the sign-up (for your participants ) and the matching process (for you).

Oh boy, tag sets. Here we start getting into how exchanges start squeezing the interface to make it do what we want it to. I'm using a tag set, so first I clicked on the "tag set" url there and I made my tag set, and then I came back and selected its name from the drop-down menu on the collection.

When it comes to the relationship settings, you have three options:

Leaving both boxes unticked will allow someone to input any relationship that has been wrangled into the fandom and any relationship in your tag set.

Clicking Fandom Only will allow people to use any wrangled tag that has been associated to this fandom— but only those tags.

Clicking Tag Set Fandom Only will allow people to use any tag in your tag set that is associated with your fandom— but only those tags.

Fandom Only is not very useful for how we're using tag sets, because we specifically want non-canon unique tags we are designing for our purpose. Both boxes unticked is only useful if you want people to be able to do mash-up signups where someone puts ZombieCleo & LDShadowLady (3rd Life) on a signup for a fandom of Dream SMP— which in most cases you don't want, because matching that is gonna be very difficult. (We do something like this for mcyt recursive, but recursive is— weird.) The usual and simplest way to run is to click Tag Set Fandom Only, and that way your participants will get a drop-down autocomplete menu of the tags in your tag set, the ones they can use, when they sign up. Easy and simple!

I am leaving characters unchecked, because in both cases selecting a box will restrict the options available to someone signing up to character tags that have been associated or wrangled into a fandom, and we are either a) not using characters at all, or b) using the character field for gift types (more on that later), and we specifically want unassociated gift type tags that are not affiliated with any specific fandom. What tags? Well. Let's move over to the tag set itself.

So, I started a new tag set, and I'm over there on that screen, looking at it. What does that screen look like?

Okay so, part of the appeal of a tag set is that your participants are able to specify the difference between "Rendog & InTheLittleWood" and "Rendog/InTheLittleWood". You don't have to worry about people getting undesired shipping, because people were specifying if they wanted shipping when they signed up. You can reduce a great deal of people getting matched badly by using relationship matching, because most of the time even if people want a Tommy-centric fic, there's a pretty big difference between people who want "Tommy & Technoblade" and "Tommy & Dream". By specifying who you want the gift to be about, you remove a big hurdle of matching right away. That's why most exchanges run on relationship matching.

However, if there are 37 people on a given server, that's something like 2,600 possible combinations of people if you include both romantic and platonic, and that's before you start getting into trios, and that's just way too many tags for the mods to enter manually. So what you do is run a nomination period, and for a week or two weeks you go to all your participants and you go "do you want to sign up for this exchange? Nominate the tags you want to use now! If it doesn't get nominated, it can't be used!" And then people head to the tag set to nominate.

So, on this page, you want "visible tag list" to be selected, because you want people to see what's already been nominated so they don't duplicate, and you want "currently taking nominations" to be selected because you will be taking those nominations instead of doing them all yourself.

So you have to set up limits on those nominations.

The point of taking nominations is to make matching easier, so people normally use the same fandom and relationship limits as they are going to use on the sign-up, to make sure there aren't dozens of tags in the tag set that nobody's using, just cluttering up the space. It also helps stop the issue where someone sees a tag in the tag set, goes "oh man I love that ship" and signs up, but its an extra tag that no one intended to offer, so they don't match to anyone. That's why sometimes people keep the amount of tags that can be nominated low, I've seen people limit this to 10 tags per fandom, or even 7, so that's up to you.

And you save, and now when you link your participants the tag set, they will have a "nominate" button.

They will hurry over to press that button, and then they will see a page that looks like this.

This is a thing where you absolutely want to give your participants detailed instructions, because what Ao3 will try to do is auto-fill people's nominations with canonical tags. WE DO NOT WANT CANONICAL TAGS. CANONICAL TAGS ARE THE ENEMY OF EXCHANGES. CANONICAL TAGS ARE THE ENEMY OF MCYT EXCHANGES IN PARTICULAR.

Remember back when we clicked the button that says tags have to be unique? The canonical tag for Philza & Technoblade doesn't have a server on it, and people might want to be requesting that relationship for SMPEarth, Dream SMP, Origins SMP, or arguably even QSMP. If you only have the canonical tag, people can only request a specific dynamic once, for one server. And that is a problem for every situation where people interacted on multiple servers, and with the network of overlaps that is Empires/SOS/3rd Life/Hermitcraft and DSMP/Origins/SMPEarth/QSMP, that's going to lead to unhappy participants. So you tell people to nominate the ship and also "disambiguate" it, and add the server in parentheses. And then all your participants will hit the button to submit, and you will go into the "review nominations" button, and you will let those tags into the tag set.

Now I just distributed the tag set to a couple friends, so let's look at what this looks like behind the scenes.

Brace yourself, it's gonna be wild, but I believe we can get through it.

Now here is a perfectly standard look at tag set nominations after a few people have gotten into the tag set. This is why they pay tag mods the big bucks.

As you can see, there are a few things to be gathered. The first things is a bunch of people used the canon tags (because that's what Ao3 tries to get them to do), someone else nominated an x-reader ship, we have one tag there twice (spelled differently), and the tags are Piped (they have both the person's tax name and the username). (You can let tags in that are Piped, but I find that it makes the tag set harder to read, and usually exchanges are character-focused unless you're writing video blogging rpf anyways, so I ask people to submit tags unpiped, using usernames.) And for the tags that were nominated in a way that I want (unpiped, and disambiguated so they're unique), Ao3 is trying to get me to use the canon tag. But I don't want the canon tag, I want a unique tag, with the server on it, with no pipes. So.

So were I moderating the tag set, after a few minutes it would look like this.

That's going through and disambiguating the tags (adding the server, which I could tell because of the fandom it was nominated under), removing the piping and using the usernames instead of tax names, and then re-ordering the names so they're alphabetical so people can find them on the list later, rejecting the x-reader tag, rejecting the duplicate and allowing the one that's spelled correctly through. Amazing. I have tags that I want to use (I did some other tags that were ready to go in other fandoms as well). I hit submit. Am I ready to go?

Not yet! First, associating tags. If you accepted the tags through the tag nomination process, you will have a button up there that says Review Associations.

If you click on this, on the back end, anything that you accepted under a previously accepted fandom will be helpfully paired up with this fandom, with Ao3 trying to say "ah, does it go here?"

You just go down the list, and if is trying to put it in the right fandom, then you click the box, and at the bottom of the page you press submit, and then there's your tags sorted out to your fandoms! Bingo! Are you done now?

No.

Because tag sets are the most complicated part of exchanges.

So. if you open up your tag set, and you scroll down to "Unassociated characters and relationships" there are a bunch of tags that are are lost, Ao3 doesn't know where to put them. This happens when a) you accepted a tag that was associated with a fandom that hadn't been accepted yet, b) it was trying to associate it with a basket fandom that you don't want to associate it with so you couldn't accept the suggested associations (for example: Philza hardcore tags will show up in Dream SMP but you don't want to associate them there), c) sometimes Ao3 just breaks, spaghetti code d), you had manually added these tags on the Edit page— more on that later. So all of these tags you have to manually associate.

You hit the Edit button on the tag set, and scroll down to the bottom, to "tag associations", and start selecting where tags go.

Honestly this is a great time to be listening to a stream or a podcast or something, and then you have the tag set open in another tab so you know what all the unassociated tags are, and you just go down the list like a databasing machine. It is not hard, cause you disambiguated each tag with its own server, it's just time consuming. Note. This is why people go in and accept tags regularly during the nomination period, because if you do this all at the end you've got a BIG job ahead of you.

So, you turned on your VOD playlist and you associated all your tags, and all the tags are where they are supposed to go. You have a beautiful tag set.

But wait, you say, looking at this beautiful tag set. Some of those tags look at little different. What is the "Dream smp and only dream smp" that a couple of them have?

Well.

You see.

Ao3 designed tag sets to work a certain way, and nobody uses them that way. It turns out that "Quackity/Wilbur Soot (Dream SMP)" is a wrangled canon tag, and the system goes "ah, I know where this goes, this is a sub-tag of the major tag, and the top-level tag is Video Blogging RPF, so it goes under Video Blogging RPF, as all MCYT tags do. I am very smart. I have stuck this Dream SMP tag under Video Blogging RPF. I am a good machine". And then you go AUUUUUUUUGH, and then you turn up the podcast a little louder, and then you sit down and you delete the old tag and you write out a new tag that the system doesn't know what to do with, and it goes uhhhhhhh and sticks it in "unassociated tags" and then you go in again and you manually associate it into the right server.

Edit in 2024: I use (DFE) at the end of the tag now, because it's shorter.

It's not hard, it's just time consuming. Shouting at the tag set like STOP TELLING ME WHAT TO DO as it helpfully tries to stick dsmp tags in SMPearth and you wrestle it out of SMPEarth and into the right fandom bucket.

Deep breath moment. Honestly that's the most fiddly part of a fiddly process, so if you can get through this you're absolutely golden.

Anyways. You got clean disambiguated unique tags, and then you associated them in the right spot, and then you found the ones that got sorted to the wrong spot and you associated them yourself, and now you have a beautiful tag set ready to go. It's a thing of beauty. Shed a tear. Your participants can select from anything in this tag set, and you know they want to use these specific relationships, because they submitted them to you. What next?

THE MATCHING

Okay. You have your tag set set up and it's accepting nominations. Your participants are filling it out right now. You go back to your collection. it's time to tell it how to match.

This is the "minimum number to match" pane, and this is the minimum numbers to make a successful match. You want 1 for Fandom, and 1 for Relationship, and that's it. People will show up to the machine as a viable match as long as they have submitted a fandom and relationship that matches someone else's offered fandom and relationship.

This is a minimum viable exchange. You're ready to go. As soon as your tag set is done (or immediately if you're not using a tag set), you're ready to go back and open your exchange to sign-ups.

Congratulations!

FURTHER TWEAKING

HOWEVER. There is more that you can do. For example, do you want to allow people to request or opt into NSFW? There's an easy way to do that! First thing is you go back to your tag set, and you scroll down to the "ratings" section that you've been ignoring.

You select G and E, and that way, if people are opting into explicit that means they're okay with NSFW, and if they only select G, that means they only want a non-explicit piece.

Then on the collection you switch the requests and offers sections to include a place to specify a rating.

You want them to definitely specify at least one, and if you maximum allowed is 2, people can opt into both and say "i'm good with whatever"!

Then you scroll down to the matching section, and you tweak that to make sure that people will match on Fandom, Relationship, and at least one Rating.

Bingo. You now have a toggle to turn NSFW on and off.

But a lot of people like to match by TYPE of gift too, specifying if they want art or fic or playlist or web weave etc. How do you do that? Ah, at this point you are master of all you survey, and you can make tag sets do absolutely anything you want. Remember we talked about using the character slot? You go back to the tag set and you scroll down to "characters".

Now we were matching on relationships, so the character box is unused. And it lets you put in your own tags. So what you do is you start to add in custom tags.

And then you go back to the Collection settings, and on the requests and the offers you go in to the "characters" section and you say "must select at least one, can select up to six".

And then, you guessed it— you go back to "minimum number to match" and you set that "characters" tab to 1 minimum, 6 maximum. Now people who specified that they wanted Art can be matchable to artists who Offered Art. You have unlimited power, the world is at your fingertips.

There's even more customization that you can do, too! There's "additional tags", which is entirely custom tags you add yourself, that can be anything from specifying if people want fluff or horror or hurt/comfort etc— with the recursive exchange we used it to specify the works people were recursing— I'm considering using it for holidays with the holiday exchange. You can let people opt in or out of major archive warnings by selecting "archive warnings" as a thing that's in the tag set and that you're matching for. Once you understand how the underpinnings of how the machine works, you can wrestle it into almost any shape you want.

So. Whew. That's how exchanges work, under the hood. When I say that this is significantly easier than hand matching the holiday exchange, I ask you to picture just how complicated hand matching gets. Go forth! Thrive! Set up exchanges if you want! The world is your oyster!

Feel free to message me if you have further questions.

[onesidedradiostatic]

I can't work out if Alastor genuinely considered Vox a friend or thought of him more as like. A cute pet that dotes on its owner and does little tricks. And then he shows off his cute little pet to Rosie and Mimzy. I don't think he ever viewed Vox as a threat to him in any way, but it makes me wonder about Vox's whole smooth, smart, scary and competent side we initially see in episode 2. Was that something he picked up from Alastor, or was it something Vox already had that might have sparked Alastor's interest? Did he actually mentor Vox in any way or did he just think it was fun to watch him try to build a tiny version of Alastor's empire.

we don't have a whole lot to go off of right now, especially when it comes to alastor's side, but personally I find it more interesting if alastor did genuinely consider vox a friend. even if in his own alastor fashion, there were probably certain walls he never let down. I think it's interesting in that, we know alastor has more of a soft spot for women, so in this pre-husk era, vox could've easily been one of his first few male friends. which kinda makes it sadder it didn't work out. it's like it just proved to alastor "right this is why I don't trust men".

things we know rn are:

alastor calls vox "old pal" at the end of episode 2

alastor allowed vox to take a picture with him at some point

alastor, who is perfectly capable of killing overlords, has not killed vox

also seen this pointed out before, but in the initial commercial alastor filmed in episode 1, although shitty, he did do some actual editing

I wouldn't expect alastor to already have knowledge of how to do this beforehand on his own, question is: did he learn it himself? or did he learn it...

...from someone else in the past?

not to mention he seems to just instinctively already know how to set up shit for filming near the end of the episode. he must have gotten some experience from somewhere.

I think this post describes what they could've learnt from each other in the past best

I like to think alastor saw him as more than just some cute pet, at least back then. it adds more depth to their relationship. obviously there's stuff like the toxic homoerotic stalker-like obsession I feel is one-sided on vox's part (points to my url), but that doesn't mean I think alastor's side of their general relationship is completely non-existent. them having a genuine past friendship that affected both of them in different ways is what adds layers to their relationship I think. they were clearly both affected by their falling out in that they both developed irrational hatred of the other's medium as a result. and honestly? really need to see more of alastor's side of this, I think it'd be really interesting. even though, he hates vox now, and I don't believe he wants him back as a friend, is there any sort of sentiment left from their past friendship? is there a reason why he hasn't killed him? or was the time he almost beat vox an attempt at that? (though I like to believe it wasn't)

obviously, all we can do now is speculate based on the evidence we have in season 1, but for me personally, I like to think they were legitimately friends at some point.

[thewertsearch]

Let's kick things off with a mega-giga ask compilation!

I've spent the last couple of days working through the backlog, and I've been able to answer some quite old asks that were spoilers at the time they were sent.

@kintatsu asked: So, I was rereading your blog, and got to the post where you determine that John's 13th birthday was a Monday, and complain on his behalf that he couldn't really relax due to having the whole schoolweek ahead of him. Well, I checked, and the previous day was the first Sunday after the first full moon after the equinox, i.e. Easter Sunday. So it might have been a holiday week.

John entered the Medium shortly after Easter Sunday, and he did so by biting into an apple. Forget about the god tiers – his most powerful transformation is clearly Catholic Beast Mode.

Anonymous asked: The thing about knowing your Aspect, I think, is that it's the Aspect you most GET. I GET Space and Light, I understand them completely, they are suffused in my bones and my blood, they are writ large upon my brain and every base in my DNA. What aspect do you just GET?

To be honest, I don’t think I know enough about any Aspect to ‘get’ it.

If I had to choose, then I'd probably feel the most natural affinity for Life and/or Doom – and if was forced to pick one, I’d say I'm very slightly more drawn to Life, just based on vibes.

@mhafanlol2000 asked: I think the horrorterror’s plan (or the closest thing we can comprehend) is CHAOS-by which I mean LIFE. Skaia is order. If it can want, then it wants its players to follow the script it has written-the Alpha. It wants propagation, the snake to eat it’s own tail, blah blah blah. That is order. That is perfect servitude. That is NOT life. The gods, meanwhile, want chaos. It wants its servants to live. It does not tell people to do anything. It simply gives them the facts, and says “here is what you should do. You can not, you can do whatever the hell.” It wants romance, conflict, CHAOS. that is life.

And if this theory is accurate to the canon Life aspect, then I feel justified in my affinity for it. It falls fairly closely in line with my own philosophy.

@necrowyrm asked: When searching your blog I always type "thew" before Tumblr autocompletes your URL. That has become who you are to me.. Thew, Glorious Liveblogger, navigating the treacherous seas of Homestuck

Sally ‘Thew’ Ertsearch, reporting in. 🫡

Anonymous asked: there's actually another arthurian joke to do with dave's land/quest. have another look at the disc platform that bro stabbed. how would you describe the shape of that turntable?

Ayy, Dave's a Knight of the Round Turntable! Honestly, that'd be a pretty great name for his theme song.

@caliquill asked: kanaya vs rose would be absolutely hilarious but. kanaya IS the original "I Can Fix Her" girl for a reason.

Anonymous asked: the only real requirement for a name suggestion to be picked was that the firstname was 4 letters. but by really cool coincidence strider and lalonde are 7 letters, and egbert and harley are 6, and if you add those together its 4/13! similarly, both the trolls names were required to be 6 letters (i think hussie mixed and matched them actually, some of the firstnames were suggested as surnames and vice versa) so theres a similar case to be made for 6/12. but just doubling the same number i think holds less water than adding together two different numbers

Number symbolism is just very flexible in general. All Hussie really had to do was introduce a few 'important' numbers, and the fandom could start finding them everywhere!

Anonymous asked: This may be the wrong place to ask, but have you deleted your post of analyzing the Let the Squiddles Sleep song? I can't seem to find it anywhere.

Here it is. Hopefully you're able to see it now!

Anonymous asked: Will the Mega-Ask-Compilation and Liveblog Recap also happen? ~LOSS (19/2/23)

The former is currently taking place. The latter was planned, but after skimming my blog for a bit, I realized I didn't have as much to say about it as I thought I did. Plus, it's been ages, so I'm really excited to look at some new pages. We can leave the old ones for later - I'll probably do some sort of blog retrospective eventually.

Anonymous asked: i figure the trolls' battlefield went through a full set of dnd dice/platonic solids, plus maybe some other notable johnson solids like a truncated icosahedron (aka a soccer ball or buckminsterfullerene), before becoming a sphere. maybe the outer ring went through stages like simple torus, mobius strip, borromean rings or other fun knots, before becoming a mobius net. (not really sure what a mobius net is, mathematically, but that's apparently what the thing around the final form of the kid's battlefield is called.) or maybe something weird happens with that many prototypings, and the battlefield turns into a tesseract or a klein bottle or a menger sponge or a mandelbulb.

If you so much as look at the Battlefield created by the Gigasession, your brain will leak out of your ears.

@manorinthewoods asked: <3Dave, >3>John, >3oJade, <>Rose (by process of elimination) ~LOSS (5/6/23)

I don’t think either of the girls have worn a playing card symbol. The leaf on Jade’s Wardrobifier does kind of look like a spade, but John’s already got that quadrant on lockdown.

Anonymous asked: Reading stuff about skaia on this blog reminded me of madoka, and made me consider that skaia might be like kyube and the other incubators and sburb is skaias way of keeping the unerverse from decaying

Reading this ask makes me realize that Rose is a near-perfect mark for Kyubey.

There’s only one way to save your session, Seer. Form a contract with me, and become a magical girl.

Anonymous asked: man. i dont know what i expected to happen when you found it. but for The Baby Is You to be liveblogged in less than 20 words during a post was not the way i expected it to go

I know it’s not technically part of Homestuck canon, but it really feels like Homestuck canon to me - at least to the same degree as Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, and I liveblogged that.

Anonymous asked: begging (lightheartedly) for you to add posts like LOLCAT and "this guy's an orb" to one of the liveblog tags. they're pretty funny, and it's nice to see off-the-cuff reactions like that, haha. imo it'd be a shame for new readers to miss those kind of posts

Done! I sometimes forget to tag posts like that, because I usually just fire them off and forget about ‘em.

@captorations asked: “Give me a set of rules, and I'll analyze the hell out them, every time.” hello fellow doom player. hope you like the color green

Based on ~ATH’s association with curses, as well as Sollux’s programming hobby, I think there’s a decent chance that Doom relates to coding in some way.

Coding is all about rules, so perhaps Doom, is, in fact, the aspect of rules and logic. I'm not sure why such an aspect would be named 'doom', but it's been obvious for a while that these aspect names aren't always literal.

Anonymous asked: I’d just like to clarify some terminology because it seems relevant, but Aradia isn’t a red blood, she’s a rust blood

[The blood colors all have canon names: Aradia = rust blood Tavros = bronze blood Sollux = gold blood Nepeta = olive blood Kanaya = jade blood Terezi = teal blood Vriska = blue blood (I like cerulean better tho) Equius = indigo blood Gamzee = purple blood Eridan = violet blood Feferi = fuchsia blood and Karkat has no official blood name, but people usually call him mutant blood or candy-red blood - C ]

Oh, there are official names for each color? That’s going to be helpful to disambiguate each blood caste, especially when we really start digging into troll culture and biology.

Anonymous asked: I do believe the top-left ship on the wall - no, Karkat doesn't have red eyes. […] It's probably Vrisrezi, yes, but it could also be Vriskat.

Yeah, I’m still not sure who this ship is supposed to represent.

They have Terezi’s eyes, but the hair and symbol look like Karkat’s. Plus, Nepeta hates this ship, which would make sense if it’s between her crush and someone other than her.

Honestly, my best guess is that it was meant to be Karkat, and the red eyes were just a mistake on Hussie’s part.

Anonymous asked: something I never thought about… is the blue blood sourced from equius or did he get a stock.

Aradia has real blue indigo blood in her veins, and it almost certainly belongs to Equius himself. He could have got it from a donor, but I personally doubt there was anyone else he could ask. Equius feels like he'd be an outsider, even to other indigo-bloods.

Anonymous asked: vriska would be a good strider

Vriska Serket raised by Bro Strider would be the most terrifying character imaginable. I don't even want to contemplate what that upbringing would do to her.

Anonymous asked: Any piece of lore hussie writes needs to contend with the fact that hussie is resolutely committed to the bit. Hence all the words on how different trolls are being entirely blasted aside by 'and then they're just grey humans anyway lmao'

That's the price of admission into Homestuck, for better or for worse. Hussie quite clearly enjoys screwing with us, and we have to take everything we see in the comic with a huge pinch of salt.

Anonymous asked: I'll disagree a bit on the phrasing that Eridan forces Feferi to <> him because firstly she doesn't even seem convinced that he would commit genocide and secondly she dropped him super easily once the lusus-feeding is no longer necessary. While understandable, that doesn't suggest to me someone who is obliged by Eridan's aggression to pacify him. I think she has much more agency in this relationship (or lack thereof I suppose) than that.

Feferi definitely had her doubts – but she must have believed that Eridan was dangerous to a certain degree, because that’s the basis of a moirallegiance.

Forced might not be the right word, but she certainly felt some amount of obligation to pacify him. She sure wasn’t in that relationship for the good of her health.

Anonymous asked: So, Vriska has a conversation with Karkat, where he says she seems to have blackrom feelings for Tavros, but that he doesn't think Tavros can even feel blackrom properly. Then she has another conversation with Tavros in which she antagonizes him, and he notices, but just kind of ignores it and doesn't respond emotionally. Then we see her make a huge dramatic redrom gesture and kiss him. She vacillated because he wasn't into her… incel behavior.

Yup. I’ve always held that Tavros never wanted anything to do with Vriska. He doesn't want to love or hate her - what he really wants is to live in a world where she doesn't exist.

Vriska’s refusal to accept this basic fact is one of the main reasons she’s decided to make his life a living hell.

Anonymous asked: I headcanon that troll blood is analog, but the empire culls non-digital colors because they make the troll race seem like a joke or something. Lol

If there were minor variations in blood color, the Empire probably wouldn’t want to acknowledge it, since the stratification of blood classes forms the basis of their society.

We haven’t seen any trolls besides our twelve (apart from Troll Will Smith) so we can’t compare the blood of two members of the same caste - but we can speculate. Human blood color is known to vary depending on its oxygenation level, and I imagine troll blood would reflect its current chemical composition in the same way.

Anonymous asked: Vriska must be seething while Karkat introduces the concept of quadrants to the reader. Imagine this basic and important facet of troll life, and you're just getting schoolfed it. (This message was sent on 20/10/22.)

This was a fun bit of weirdness from early Hivebent, wasn’t it? In retrospect, it's kind of hilarious that Karkat decided to infodump to Vriska about the obscure, niche topic of… dating.

@sanctferum asked: According to his formspring, Hussie's self-insert's classpect is Waste of Space. He also briefly considers Huss of Lips. This is obviously not meant to be taken seriously but. since you asked @absinthe-and-alabaster asked: i believe hussie said somewhere that FedoraFreak's classpect was "Gent of Piss" Anonymous asked: (not sure if this is technically a spoiler but) hussie has jokingly said that fedorafreak's class is a gent.

If Dad Egbert was a Player, then the Gent class would be forced into canonical existence, as the only class that could possibly define him.

Anonymous asked: If Vriska's control does require the victim to on some level want to do the thing, then Sollux's insistence that you do not under any circumstance eat the mind honey could be something he developed in response to that incident. So that if she ever controls him again, she won't be able to make him eat it.

Wow, I never considered that. That’s a very good (and tragic) take, and I think I'm at least locking it in as a headcanon.

Anonymous asked: the official extended zodiac actually has… 288 signs, if im doing my math right? and also probably hadn't yet been conceptualized when that page was posted (the earliest known evidence comes from 2015). i don't know if any thought was put into the number or if it was just pulled from their ass, but there was a running gag in hussie's q&as where he repeatedly threatened us with a 10,000 page intermission focused on 48 squiddles, each representing a sign from the alternian zodiac Anonymous asked: I believe the troll zodiac is one of the few things in HS lore that was truly retconned, there’s actually 288 signs.

Move over, 48 Squiddles. I want to hear about the 288-player clusterfuck that actually gave rise to Alternia!

@manorinthewoods asked: wheee, you got to the first god tiering! this probably opens up a load of new things to say, so, first off: do you think you need to have a full echeladder to god tier? vriska implied so.

She never outright stated that it was required, but I still think it probably is. You generally need to max out your class levels before you can prestige.

@morganwick asked: Believe it or not, you're still in the "Homestuck could have updated RIGHT NOW" phase of the comic's release schedule. The break after the Equius-Aradia kiss aside, the hiati you've heard horror stories about didn't start becoming a thing until the end of Act 5.

[this was around page 3000. still true at this page though - C]

Hussie’s sheer productivity at this stage continues to astound. Could you imagine having that much creative energy?

Maybe Hussie just drinks twenty coffees a day.

Anonymous asked: as someone who is Normal about aradia it's an absolute delight to see someone dig into her character. she's so fascinating to me. (also, fun fact, a while ago tumblr voted her the coolest character in all of homestuck. so there's that)

Aradia’s awesome, and I still don’t think her death is going to stick.

Her ghost was perfectly capable of existing without a body, so there's no reason she can’t survive her new body's destruction.

Anonymous asked: feferi hasn't just woken up, she won't be stuck asleep until 3 hours and 14 minutes into the future! timestamps, yo

Consider this the first mark on my otherwise impeccable record.

Anonymous asked: does cat have a troll/kidsona? itd be interesting to see a full 4 player session in art

[No kidsona, yes trollsona, but even a picture of her would spoil stuff from Act 6 😆 - C]

What she said. It’ll be a while until we can meet KATYAA SCRENR.

@mhafanlol2000 asked: Hey! You can just call me Fan. In all honesty I’m just some guy who likes your liveblog. He/him. I’m gonna list some fan aspects, and I want to see what you think they’d represent, and what abilities they’d give Law Dreams Might Shape Flow

Ooh, more fan aspects! These were a lot of fun to puzzle out the last time.

Law would be the aspect of command, instruction and agreement. An example power would be giving someone a simple rule they're compelled to follow, such as 'don't turn around'.

Dreams would be the aspect of ideas, motivation and symbolism. An example power would be the ability to detect people's idle thoughts - the things they're not even aware they're thinking about.

Might would be the aspect of growth, conflict and evolution. An example power would be the ability to temporarily enhance someone's Aspect abilities, at the cost of making those abilities harder to control.

Shape would be the aspect of form, encapsulation and topology. Shapeshifting is the most obvious application of this aspect, but it's appropriate.

Flow would be the aspect of persistence, momentum and continuity. An example power would be the ability to 'continue' something that has recently stopped. For example, if your PC ran out of power, they'd be able to keep it running for a while. The longer it had been previously running, the longer they could keep it running.

@martinkhall asked: I think Bro might have been raised entirely by shonen anime and My Little Pony Friendship is Magical (the version that existed only in the heads of the worst examples of Bronys). And puppets. Puppets were definitely involved in raising Bro. Anonymous asked: "He has no known relationship with any of the other parents, but was definitely getting foreknowledge of Sburb from somewhere. I’m not even sure I want to know what sort of childhood produces Bro Strider." well. i mean. he grew up with Lil Cal didn't he? the clearly haunted puppet from the sburban dreamscape of derse? it was what he dropped to earth with. i feel like that might explain at least a small part of, like, whatever he had going on.

That’s true. I don’t trust that puppet one bit, and we don’t know what it was up to before the start of the session.

I still suspect that the thing’s still just as alive as it was on Derse, and is just choosing to play dead.

Anonymous asked: I imagine you might've already been told this, but when checking out your FAQ I noticed you described PS/PQ/FS as "not exactly canon" and that you're less interested in liveblogging them because one of your favorite parts is watching all the story come together -- without spoiling anything, I find it pertinent to mention that Pesterquest & Friendsim definitely contribute to the wider "canon" even though dubiously canon themselves. Definitely "part of the story" so to speak.

Yeah, we’ll have to see what comes of this. The problem is that I’m still fuzzy on what ‘dubiously canon’ actually means.

Hopefully that will become more clear as I’m actually liveblogging these tie-in materials – which I am planning on doing. Only time will tell how in-depth the liveblog will actually be, though.

@manorinthewoods asked: In my Sundered opinion, Bec Noir is the best character design in Homestuck. I can't think of any other interesting designs at the moment, other than some which don't beat him and are spoilers anyway (like LE's). Which design do you find most interesting, out of the ones you have? ~LOSS (22/9/23)

I definitely agree that BecJack has one of the best designs in the comic. Plus, Scratch is so weirdly intimidating for a cueball-head.

Anonymous asked: My favorite part of PKWU is just how pointy Gamzee's chin is. It's so… Defined.

iT’s ToO lAtE, ErIdAn! I’vE AlReAdY DePicTeD MySeLf As ThE ChAd, AnD yOu As ThE SoYjAk >:o)

Anonymous asked: i need you to know ag canonically ripped off the sleeves on all of her shirts just to show off the robot arm

I believe it. I don't even need a source; this is just so true to Vriska's character that it's obviously correct.

@bladekindeyewear asked: If you and your ask screener decide that literary/external-media hero title examples without any details or explanation are alright to pass on unless they're too obviously revealing -- and those in and of themselves are usually in heavy dispute by classpect theorists -- I've long been of the opinion that Monkey D. Luffy and Peter Pan are the best possible literary examples of a Page of Breath.

All Pages of Breath must be associated with pirates. No exceptions.

Anonymous asked: unfun fact: the reason rose and jade dont have a lot of pesterlogs with eachother is just because their text colours were kinda eyestrainy together. thats it thats literally the whole reason!! god damn

Hussie: "I don't write Rose/Jade conversations because they’re hard to read."

Also Hussie:

Anonymous asked: you have officially passed my second favourite flash in literally all of homestuck. it's all so well hinted at beforehand but it still comes to punch you in the gut nonetheless Anonymous asked: My favourite thing in this flash is how the name of the flash isn't John: Rise Up, it's JOHN. RISE UP. it's WV sending a plead to John to not die. My second favourite thing is the way the music remixes Doctor (The theme for LoWaS). Anonymous asked: [S] JOHN. RISE UP. is one of my favorite flashes in all of Homestuck. Savior of the Waking World is some of Toby's best work What are your thoughts on our first taste of god tier? @violetsquare111 asked: So glad you liked Savior of the Waking World! One of my favorites in the comic for sure. It takes a lot of ideas from another of Toby's songs, Penumbra Phantasm, a song that… never actually got finished or officially released. There's still various renditions of it though, and the HS collection links a couple of em. (Some people have speculated that Penumbra Phantasm itself was never supposed to be a Homestuck song, and might end up being used in Deltarune, which would be cool as hell) Anonymous asked: It's crazy to think that just about 12 hours ago John was wearing silly disguises to fool his dad and now he's dying to become a god.

God time!

I do think it was the most emotional flash we’ve had, on the strength of the music alone. Savior of the Waking World goes hard as all hell.

Honestly, when WV started calling John a hero, and telling him to rise, it did start to give me some mild chills. Like, yeah – we know John’s a hero, but it feels extra special when it’s coming from someone who’s normally so irreverent.

@elkian asked: Welcome back, hope you're feeling better! I am losing it a bit over you IMMEDIATELY understanding how this coin flip sitch works, something about the narrative and reasoning doesn't match my brain so I've reread it multiple times with total understanding out of grasp and watching you dissect it halfway into the page is truly wild (delighted). Also feel like I understand it a lil better with your analysis.

Thank you! This message was actually sent the last time I returned from a pause, so apologies that I’m one hiatus late in answering it.

@royalvorpal asked: I just reread your entire blog in anticipation. Anonymous asked: This is such a good liveblog, I'm rereading it again and you are really letting me relive the pleasant parts of my middle school years. Reading this blog makes me feel like I'm back on the school bus talking to my friend about the newest update. Thank you for doing this 💛 Anonymous asked: That return page didn't have any sound, so misleading! (I jest, nice to see you're back.) ~DJ @manorinthewoods asked: Hahahah, we are BACK! Lovely, I've missed this liveblog. Most in-depth Homestuck liveblog I'm aware of, looking forward to the restart! ~LOSS (29/3/24) @popcornsalty asked: So excited to see you back!!! :D @chaosorchestrator asked: welcome back! It's good to hear that you're planning on getting back into it! I hope things have been going ok for you in the meantime! @necrowyrm asked: HAPPY 4/13 (OR AS THE ENLIGHTENED KNOW IT: 13/4) AND WELCOME BACK!!!!!!!!!!!

Thank you for your votes of confidence, and happy 13/4 to you all!

@rippledphysique asked: Just found this blog and devoured it in a few days. I am selfishly wishing you the best in health and life so that it may return one day… @elkian asked: Hey Sally! Just wanted to wish you well on the recovery, the plague is no joke and I hope you've been able to enjoy some kind improvement. And that 2024 will be kinder, as well. Anonymous asked: wishing you the best in your interim, hopefully you can get a better position where you're not prone to burning out! Anonymous asked: Hope you're doing ok!! I miss seeing your cool liveblog on my dash @kittycatttmattt asked: Poor girl… Got killed by the schedule

Thanks for all the well-wishes, as well. Really, it wasn’t the schedule that was the issue – I just had a lot going on in the background last year. That’s all over now, though!

Anonymous asked: yeah, Homestuck's back babeyyyyy - the site was crashing because of traffic and everything @calamitascalliope asked: You coming back from your break resurrected Homestuck's corpse hggfffdd Anonymous asked: i think this actually is the first time homestuck has updated since you started liveblogging lol - homestuck 2 has been inactive assumed abandoned since december 25th 2020. also happy slightly belated blogiversary btw - you've been delighting us with your journey for two years now! @heliotropopause asked: New Homestuck upd8 just dropped. Apparently. Anonymous asked: what are the odds that you start liveblogging again the same exact day that postcanon comes back from the dead? Anonymous asked: crazy news. so literally just today, october 8th 2023, hussie has officially given complete free license to the newly formed "homestuck independent creative union" (HICU) to create content and monetize it with the homestuck brand however they see fit, with zero creative or financial control from any corporations or even hussie themself, though hussie has said they're available for consultation whenever the HICU wants their input. the HICU seems to be made up of people the community largely has respect for, and the person heading all of this up is James Roach, who is one of the most widely respected individual who has been inolved in homestuck "post canon" (ie. after homestuck itself ended). nobody was expecting any of this, it's completely bonkers. hopes are looking pretty high for homestuck compared to where they were merely a day ago.

Throwback to the day I personally resurrected Homestuck.

Has anything come of this since, actually? I haven’t heard anything about this new comic – although I do scroll in the opposite direction any time I see a reference to Homestuck, so I guess it makes sense that I wouldn’t.

@corporalotherbear asked: What’s your favorite Pokémon?

Contrarian, that I am, I’ll instinctively gravitate to Missingno., if only for the nostalgia factor. Gen 1 glitches were my first real experience with pulling back the curtain of a game’s code, and taking a look at what lies beneath.

My favourite official Pokémon are Porygon-Z, Shedinja, Reuniclus and Metagross!

@heliotropopause asked: Breath/Light is an interesting one, because the ‘Mixolydian’ implies a musical theme, and I thought Time was the musical Aspect. Maybe it’s not that simple. They've all got a musical reference in the name- they are called fraymotifs, after all. Anonymous asked: The Fraymotifs are all musical references actually. E.g. Breath/Time is "Ivories in the Fire", the ivories in question being John's piano keys. A fraymotif is a battle theme. Anonymous asked: ivories in the fire is a musical theme, especifically a Rap term used by Snoop Dogg. So yeah it's connected to Dave Anonymous asked: re: fraymotifs: you pointed out "mixolydian", but that's not the only musical term there. feather "cadence", pneumatic "progression", even fray "motif" itself! hell, the building where you buy these things has an emblem with a crossed sword and music note! so i think this might be less a situation of "need to rethink time aspects association with music" and more "fraymotifs have a musical association also" Anonymous asked: if you look a bit closer at those names, (including the one "fraymotif",) you may realize that "mixolydian" isn't the only musical term referenced…. @galaxa-13 asked: You say the breath/Light Fraymotif implies a musical theme, but they all do! Fraymotif is a portmanteau of "fray" (to fight) and "leitmotif" (repeated musical phrase). Each Fraymotif name implies a musical theme.

Dang it. Yup, they’re all pretty obvious references to music.

I wrote that post the day I was trying to wrangle our family PC into running the Homestuck Collection without lag, so I was a little distracted at the time. Please direct all complaints to Windows XP.

[ingravinoveritas]

Babe not wanting to put more attention on this pathetic person but there’s someone here on tumblr who made a mock account of you

Hi there! I've been debating whether to address this publicly, but I received numerous DMs about this last night and have been made well aware of the blog in question.

For context: Over the last few days, the person behind the mock blog has used their main account to make their presence known on my blog, having reblogged one of my posts just to add a nasty comment to it, replying to another one of my posts and attacking my followers, and sending me a hateful Ask, all in escalating succession. This culminated in the creation of the new account last night, which had a name that was an almost identical dupe of my blog name.

To be clear, I have no intention of linking to this blog publicly, as this person's goal and aim seems to be for me to engage with them--someone I do not know, and to whom I have never spoken or responded in any capacity. It also seems that the URL of the blog has changed from being a copy of my blog name to something else, and given that I had a lot of people DMing me indicating that they reported the blog to Tumblr, my guess is that the name change is the result of that.

The only other thing that I will say regarding this is that I'm obviously not thrilled that someone created a blog for the purpose of harassing me (while ironically accusing me of harassing Georgia and AL, despite me repeatedly stating that I do not follow either of them on social media and am strongly against anyone leaving harassing comments on any of their accounts). At the same time, however, I have been subject to far worse in my previous fandom--most notably, one vile incident where someone falsely accused me of distributing pornographic material to a minor, and another incident where the same person contacted my employer in an attempt to get me fired in the middle of lockdown in 2020. So all things considered, this blog is relatively mild in comparison.

And while I'm enormously grateful for the support that I have received from so many kind folks, I would urge you to not engage with this blog on any level, and please especially do not send this person threats of any kind on my behalf. I've said many times on my blog that people are welcome to disagree with me, and that I'm happy to hear the opinions of others who do not share my views as long as they are civil and respectful. What this person is doing is neither of those things, and they've made it clear that engaging with them would be a fruitless endeavor, but that still does not make it okay to send anyone hate. And if the desired outcome here is attention, then the best course of action would be to not provide it.

Again, my deepest thanks to you @phantomstars24 and to everyone else who has let me know about the situation and offered their support, as it means more than I can describe. I'm hopeful that we can continue sharing the joy so many of us have felt over Michael and David these past few years, and leave the rest where it belongs...

[geneeste]

Creating a personal fanfic archive using Calibre, various Calibre plugins, Firefox Reader View, and an e-Reader / BookFusion / Calibre-Web

A few years ago I started getting serious about saving my favorite fic (or just any fic I enjoyed), since the Internet is sadly not actually always forever when it comes to fanfiction. Plus, I wanted a way to access fanfic offline when wifi wasn't available. Enter a personal fanfic archive!

There are lots of ways you can do this, but I thought I'd share my particular workflow in case it helps others get started. Often it's easier to build off someone else's workflow than to create your own!

Please note that this is for building an archive for private use -- always remember that it's bad form to publicly archive someone else's work without their explicit permission.

This is going to be long, so let's add a read more!

How to Build Your Own Personal Fanfic Archive

Step One: Install Calibre

Calibre is an incredibly powerful ebook management software that allows you to do a whole lot of stuff having to do with ebooks, such as convert almost any text-based file into an ebook and (often) vice-versa. It also allows you to easily side-load ebooks onto your personal e-reader of choice and manage the collection of ebooks on the device.

And because it's open source, developers have created a bunch of incredibly useful plugins to use with Calibre (including several we're going to talk about in the next step), which make saving and reading fanfiction super easy and fun.

But before we can do that, you need to download and install it. It's available for Windows, MacOS, Linux, and in a portable version.

Step Two: Download These Plugins

This guide would be about 100 pages long if I went into all of the plugins I love and use with Calibre, so we're just going to focus on the ones I use for saving and reading fanfiction. And since I'm trying to keep this from becoming a novel (lolsob), I'll just link to the documentation for most of these plugins, but if you run into trouble using them, just tag me in the notes or a comment and I'll be happy to write up some steps for using them.

Anyway, now that you've downloaded and installed Calibre, it's time to get some plugins! To do that, go to Preferences > Get plugins to enhance Calibre.

You'll see a pop-up with a table of a huge number of plugins. You can use the Filter by name: field in the upper right to search for the plugins below, one at a time.

Click on each plugin, then click Install. You'll be asked which toolbars to add the plugins to; for these, I keep the suggested locations (in the main toolbar & when a device is connected).

FanFicFare (here's also a great tutorial for using this plugin) EpubMerge (for creating anthologies from fic series) EbubSplit (for if you ever need to break up fic anthologies) Generate Cover (for creating simple artwork for downloaded fic) Manage Series (for managing fic series)

You'll have to restart Calibre for the plugins to run, so I usually wait to restart until I've installed the last plugin I want.

Take some time here to configure these plugins, especially FanFicFare. In the next step, I'll demonstrate a few of its features, but you might be confused if you haven't set it up yet! (Again, highly recommend that linked tutorial!)

Step Three: Get to Know FanFicFare (and to a lesser extent, Generate Cover)

FanFicFare is a free Calibre plugin that allows you to download fic in bulk, including all stories in a series as one work, adding them directly to Calibre so that that you can convert them to other formats or transfer them to your e-reader.

As with Calibre, FanFicFare has a lot of really cool features, but we're just going to focus on a few, since the docs above will show you most of them.

The features I use most often are: Download from URLs, Get Story URLs from Email, and Get Story URLs from Web Page.

Download from URLs let's you add a running list of URLs that you'd like FanFicFare to download and turn into ebooks for you. So, say, you have a bunch of fic from fanfic.net that you want to download. You can do that!

Now, in this case, I've already downloaded these (which FanFicFare detected), so I didn't update my library with the fic.

But I do have some updates to do from email, so let's try getting story URLs from email!

Woohoo, new fic! Calibre will detect when cover art is included in the downloaded file and use that, but at least one of these fic doesn't have cover art (which is the case for most of the fic I download). This is where Generate Cover comes in.

With Generate Cover, I can set the art, font, dimensions, and info content of the covers so that when I'm looking at the fic on my Kindle, I know right away what fic it is, what fandom it's from, and whether or not it's part of a series.

Okay, last thing from FanFicFare -- say I want to download all of the fic on a page, like in an author's profile on fanfic.net or all of the stories in a series. I can do that too with Get Story URLs from Web Page:

The thing I want to call out here is that I can specify whether the fic at this link are individual works or all part of an anthology, meaning if they're all works in the same series, I can download all stories as a single ebook by choosing For Anthology Epub.

Step Four: Using FireFox Reader View to Download Fic Outside of Archives

This is less common now thanks to AO3, but the elders among us may want to save fanfic that exists outside of archives on personal websites that either still exist or that exist only on the Internet Wayback Machine. FanFicFare is awesome and powerful, but it's not able to download fic from these kinds of sources, so we have to get creative.

I've done this in a couple of ways, none of which are entirely perfect, but the easiest way I've found thus far is by using Firefox's Reader View. Also, I don't think I discovered this -- I think I read about this on Tumblr, actually, although I can longer find the source (if you know it, please tell me so I can credit them!).

At any rate, open the fic in Firefox and then toggle on Reader View:

Toggling on Reader View strips all the HTML formatting from the page and presents the fic in the clean way you see in the preview below, which is more ideal for ebook formats.

To save this, go to the hamburger menu in the upper right of the browser and select Print, then switch to Print to PDF. You'll see the URL and some other stuff at the top and bottom of the pages; to remove that, scroll down until you see something like More settings... and uncheck Print headers and footers.

Click Save to download the resulting PDF, which you can then add to Calibre and convert to whichever format works best for your e-reader or archive method.

Step Five: Archiving (Choose Your Own Adventure)

Here's the really fun part: now that you know how to download your fave fanfics in bulk and hopefully have a nice little cache going, it's time to choose how you want to (privately) archive them!

I'm going to go through each option I've used in order of how easy it is to implement (and whether it costs additional money to use). I won't go too in depth about any of them, but I'm happy to do so in a separate post if anyone is interested.

Option 1: On Your Computer

If you're using Calibre to convert fanfic, then you're basically using your computer as your primary archive. This is a great option, because it carries no additional costs outside the original cost of acquiring your computer. It's also the simplest option, as it really doesn't require any advanced technical knowledge, just a willingness to tinker with Calibre and its plugins or to read how-to docs.

Calibre comes with a built-in e-book viewer that you can use to read the saved fic on your computer (just double-click on the fic in Calibre). You can also import it into your ebook app of choice (in most cases; this can get a little complicated just depending on how many fic you're working with and what OS you're on/app you're using).

If you choose this option, you may want to consider backing the fic up to a secondary location like an external hard drive or cloud storage. This may incur additional expense, but is likely still one of the more affordable options, since storage space is cheap and only getting cheaper, and text files tend to not be that big to begin with, even when there are a lot of them.

Option 2: On Your e-Reader

This is another great option, since this is what Calibre was built for! There are some really great, afforable e-readers out there nowadays, and Calibre supports most of them. Of course, this is a more expensive option because you have to acquire an e-reader in addition to a computer to run Calibre on, but if you already have an e-reader and haven't considered using it to read fanfic, boy are you in for a treat!

Option 3: In BookFusion

This is a really cool option that I discovered while tinkering with Calibre and used for about a year before I moved to a self-hosted option (see Option 4).

BookFusion is a web platform and an app (available on iOS and Android) that allows you to build your own ebook library and access it from anywhere, even when you're offline (it's the offline bit that really sold me). It has a Calibre plugin through which you can manage your ebook library very easily, including sorting your fanfic into easy-to-access bookshelves. You may or may not be able to share ebooks depending on your subscription, but only with family members.

Here's what the iOS app looks like:

The downside to BookFusion is that you'll need a subscription if you want to upload more than 10 ebooks. It's affordable(ish), ranging from $1.99 per month for a decent 5GB storage all the way to $9.99 for 100GB for power users. Yearly subs range from $18.99 to $95.99. (They say this is temporary, early bird pricing, but subscribing now locks you into this pricing forever.)

I would recommend this option if you have some cash to spare and you're really comfortable using Calibre or you're a nerd for making apps like BookFusion work. It works really well and is incredibly convenient once you get it set up (especially when you want to read on your phone or tablet offline), but even I, someone who works in tech support for a living, had some trouble with the initial sync and ended up duplicating every ebook in my BookFusion library, making for a very tedious cleanup session.

Option 4: On a Self-Hosted Server Using Calibre-Web

Do you enjoy unending confusion and frustration? Are you okay with throwing fistfuls of money down a well? Do you like putting in an incredible amount of work for something only you and maybe a few other people will ever actually use? If so, self-hosting Calibre-Web on your own personal server might be a good fit for you!

To be fair, this is likely an experience unique to me, because I am just technical enough to be a danger to myself. I can give a brief summary of how I did this, but I don't know nearly enough to explain to you how to do it.

Calibre-Web is a web app that works on top of Calibre, offering "a clean and intuitive interface for browsing, reading, and downloading eBooks."

I have a network-attached storage (NAS) server on which I run an instance of Calibre and Calibre-Web (through the miracle that is Docker). After the initial work of downloading all the fic I wanted to save and transferring it to the server, I'm now able to download all new fic pretty much via email thanks to FanFicFare, so updating my fic archive is mostly automated at this point.

If you're curious, this is what it looks like:

Pros: The interface is clean and intuitive, the ebook reader is fantastic. The Discover feature, in which you are given random books / fic to read, has turned out to be one feature worth all the irritation of setting up Calibre-Web. I can access, read, and download ebooks on any device, and I can even convert ebooks into another format using this interface. As I mentioned above, updating it with fic (and keeping the Docker container itself up to date) is relatively automated and easy now.

Cons: The server, in whichever form you choose, costs money. It is not cheap. If you're not extremely careful (and sometimes even if you are, like me) and a hard drive goes bad, you could lose data (and then you have to spend more money to replace said hard drive and time replacing said data). It is not easy to set up. You may, at various points in this journey, wish you could launch the server into the sun, Calibre-Web into the sun, or yourself into the sun.

Step Six: Profit!

That's it! I hope this was enough to get you moving towards archiving your favorite fanfic. Again, if there's anything here you'd like me to expand on, let me know! Obviously I'm a huge nerd about this stuff, and love talking about it.

[apricotmayonaise]

i wasn't sexually harassed by @/musashi, ya'll are just playing the telephone game.

hi, im slushy, i'm 15 and a half years old, i keep hearing these bullshit rumours about my friend wendy, or musashi, as is their tumblr url. i'm here to go on the record to say, that did not fucking happen. unfortunately, since i got banned in the server this went down in. (ha ha. how ironic.) might be tricky but i do have, like, 10 people who can back me up on this.

so, a rundown of events. me, wendy, and a few other people are in a vc. i post a poll about what i should go as for halloween. the options are pretty skimpy but hey, i'm fifteen, going on sixteen years old. i'm nearly an adult and by the time halloween rolls around i'll be old enough to work, drive, and fuck. i'm a teenager, not a toddler.

a couple server members, i think it was around five, voted on this poll. the mods, specifically the owner, got mad at wendy specifically. they said wendy was sexualising me. wendy was obviously like "no, when i look at a teenager in a halloween costume i see a teenager in a halloween costume. slushy's 13 years my junior, im not a weirdo."

the owner proceeded to get mad at wendy and then told me i should dress up as jesus? which is an odd thing to say. it was less of lingerie and more like a bikini. which gives me a feeling that the people getting mad are the type to sexualise teenagers at the beach.

anyway, wendy, with no warning, got banned for this. the mods said they gave plenty of warning but in those "warnings" they seemed to just be making friendly requests, not mod-ly orders.

the whole claim of wendy "offering to buy" me anything is also completely and utterly false. that didnt happen dawg

anyway, i was confused, angry, and upset about this. wendy was also very upset.

anyway, you know who i was groomed by?? someone else on the server who all the mods continue to reblog from and interact with. they know she's a groomer. i've told them. wendy's told them. at least five other people have expressed concern or disgust at this person's behaviour, and yet they continue to talk to the groomer.

i also want to add that i was completely and utterly spoken over. every time i said "wendy wasnt weird or creepy!" they didn't listen to me because i'm just a minorrrr. i'm just a little girl who obviously can't think for herselffffffff.

as for wendy being a "pedo apologist", i think this just refers to wendy...not being an antishipper? god forbid wendy, a grown ass 28 year old adult with adult responsibilities not get into internet discourse? also i find it pretty gross how we put "actual fucking child predators" and "people who don't care about online drama surrounding made up ships" on the same level of bad. one is something i can scroll past or block the tag of. the other caused me trauma, pain, and having grown up way too fast. fictional characters can't experience pain or tragedy in the same way real children and teenagers can.

this post is in regards to this anon message:

you are a bunch of sick people who don't care about real child abuse. you ignore groomers and let them fly under the radar to target people who you, personally, don't agree with. you're making a real victim into a false victim, and at the time of the incident it was sexual assault survivor's awareness month.

if you're going to call someone a victim, at least fucking listen to them. a real groomer is out there living her life while my friend lost a big amount of friends due to false allegations.

[tpq-heritage-posts]

Our Fandom

@hazellevessque - Alice | Me, The Aiden Mutual, fandom therapist

@queenofapeacefuldawn - Dawn | The Mindy Mutual, Rosh’s SECRETary

@ssj2hindudude - The Blog for TPQ stuff no one they needed, our token boy (?)

@livie1507 - Liv | SHE’S BACK BITCHES

@parrotxx - CJ | The Suyodhana Guy

@sleep-can-wait - Archivist | TPQ Fanfic Dealer

@writergracethepanda - Grace | Our Token White Person, The Rudy Mutual, The Mom Friend

@silverstarssart - Silver | Animatic maker

@thx-sunsxts-addrxss Loife | sunset girl

@burntchickennugget2468 - Hirynne Mutual, fanartist

@fish-ofishial45 - Fishy/Angel | Family Tree Creator

@pinkroses23 - Krithana Prequel Truther

@swans-chirping-in-the-distance - Bee/Bug | KOTLC fangirl

@moondust-on-the-hijabi - Aylin | Obsessed with the moon

@mxnkeydo - Rithi - The Youngest

@maitaiwiththecorpses - Mat | Randomly online, drops the best oneshot ever and leaves, has majestic rizz

@izzy246girl - Isabella | She read it because of me

@autumn-equinox-04 - Equinox | Aladdin AU

@dream-of-potter | Not always online but we love her

@k3bookwormalert - K3G | Yes, like the movie

@sunflxwcrs - Persephone | Chronic slayage

@owocontroversy - Pineapple | Took a lap in the park when she read CoG

@honeyphobia - Loves Spider-Man

@anonymouscuzwhynot001 - Dolphin | Mostly on Wattpad

@windybitzh - The Lurkers

@the-ultimate-bookworm - V | I’m so sorry idk what to put here

@liaazhang - April | I always forget to change her url here

@kotlcswiftie - LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO

@blujaishah - LAST NAME IS SHAH

@book-girl4evaaa - Bea | Shut up Heather!

@my-life-tis-broken - Coming for ssj2’s crown as token boy

@sxturn-to-mxrs - Mini | Why did I not put you here earlier oops embarrassing for me

@strawblob - welcome to chaos

@bharatiya-naari-sab-pe-bhaari - new!!

@shrxe - Shree | WHY THE FUCK DIDN’T I ADD YOU BEFORE I’M SO SORRY IM SO FAKE

@telugu-girl-13 - Hasini | Somehow remembers every detail from the books it’s kind of terrifying

@bookworm-fangirl1 - Ali | Multifandom as FUCK there are so many fandoms she’s in I swear

@solangelo-taylors-version - Ziva | Guys you won’t BELIEVE who got her to read the books

Let me know if I forgot got you!

Silver has a YouTube channel called I See Silvered Stars

Grace has a TikTok called sheepishreader

This is the link to the joint Foul Lady Fortune AU concept our fandom has (and the blog @tpq-flf-au)

Official TPQ magazine @theofficialtpqmagazine

[wide-nose-and-wonderful]

Hello my fellow Black People. How y’all feelin’ Good? Good. So I had this idea. As a way to contribute to the celebration of us this month, I thought a little monthly challenge might be fun. Let this be our opportunity to really show each other some support and love. How are we gonna do that? Well I'm glad you asked. I present to you the Black History Reader Challenge, tumblr edition? What that means is for the entire month I want black readers or black reader/writers to challenge themselves to search tags, ask around, check blogs and find some x black reader coded fics to read and leave comments on. That means you will be choosing 5 or 10 (if you really want to challenge yourself)  black writers on this platform to comment on their work, then leave a nice little excerpt about why we should check out the fic. 

Not only are you providing them encouragement and love with the comment you are leaving on their stories, but you are also shedding light on their beautiful works for others to check out. While it’s totally fine to choose your friends and give them a shout out, it’s also cool to find a writer you haven’t read yet and see what they got. The idea here is connection and interaction. Getting to know one another through the lovely stories we tell as black writers here on tumblr. When you’ve gotten your 5 or 10 selections you would like to highlight, please reblog this post and add your findings as an attachment so we can keep a running chain. 

Please see below on how this should look. 

Writers URL:  Title of Work You Read: (make sure you link) But did you leave a comment?  Why do you recommend it?

Here are mine to kick us off. 

Writers URL: @kumkaniudaku

Title of Work You Read: Saints And Sinners

But did you leave a comment? ☑️ 

Why do you recommend it? The Saint and Sinners Series. Yeah y’all know I read it, I mean look at my blog. Crazy about Franklin. This was such a good read I was sad to see it end. I was like no, this can’t be it! The writer really did a good job of writing transitions, and she really conveyed the characters well. The whole time  I felt like it was watching an episode of the TV show. Oh yeah I was totally invested. Franklin was everything in this, and you’ll dig the OC Dorianne also. She fits right in with the dynamic. This was just really fun. I hope we get to see a continuation one day.

-Wide Nose And Wonderful / Mrs. Saint Writes.

2. Writers URL: @twistedcharismaaa

Title of Work You Read: Contemplating….

But did you leave a comment? ☑️ 

Why do you recommend it? This was very soulful. That’s the best way to describe it. Like sitting and listening to spoken word. This writer took this story and explored it through a third person perspective. So by doing that we were in Lakeith’s head, and seeing things through his eyes. We got to see how he felt, what he saw, it was just a really good read.

-Wide Nose And Wonderful / Mrs. Saint Writes.

3. Writers URL: @megamindsecretlair

Title of Work You Read: Camp Wanderlust 

But did you leave a comment? ☑️

Why do you recommend it? Well, for one I think the concept of doing something pre Snowfall was brilliant, and the fact that we have a camp story that features an all black cast pretty much, that’s awesome because when do you ever see us doing that? Also, if you love Franklin Saint as much as I do, then getting to experience him in that little bubble of safety and innocence is everything. He’s just enjoying his life as a young man, flirting and having a good time. The series has gotten off to a promising start and I can’t wait to see where this writer takes it. 

-Wide Nose And Wonderful / Mrs. Saint Writes.

4. Writers URL: @notapradagurl7

Title of Work You Read: Could've Been

But did you leave a comment? ☑️ 

Why do you recommend it? I liked this fic for the simple fact I knew it would probably be one of its kind. What do I mean by that? Well with the low amount of Franklin Saint fanfics, Leon fics is like come on now, not a chance. I saw this and it made me happy. It was nice to see Little Leon get some shine too. I have a thing for characters that don’t get much spotlight. Sometimes they are the best ones depending on the genre, but I loved seeing this pop up.

-Wide Nose And Wonderful / Mrs. Saint Writes.

5. Writers URL: @slippinninque

Title of Work You Read: You Learned To Like Pretty Things Too

But did you leave a comment? ☑️ 

Why do you recommend it? Everyone is on this TCT kick, and I finally got around to reading one after being tagged. I was like okay okay, I can see what the fuss is. Hey I liked Fontaine, the whole crew actually. But this was a nice read because we got to see a softer Fontaine taking care of his girl and just being in the moment. It was sweet. Might have to check out some more Fontaine fics now. Make sure you give it a read! 

-Wide Nose And Wonderful / Mrs. Saint Writes.

Yay! Got my five, but the month is not over so I plan to get another 5. Happy readings everyone! And again happy Black History Month And Always My People!

No pressure Tags: @megamindsecretlair @notapradagurl7 @slippinninque @fairy-cores-world

[mcytblrholidayexchange]

How To Sign Up To This Gift Exchange

This exchange does signups on Ao3, to help with matching! (Last year it took us 8 days to do it by hand and that's just not sustainable).

Once you are on Ao3, there are two sections, one for your requests (stuff you’re telling people (and the machine) would be a good gift for you), and one for your offers (stuff you’re telling the machine that you can make as a gift for other people). Here’s how you fill them out.

Requests

First you go to the collection that you want. The all-ages one is here, and if you are opting into NSFW (and are over 18), you can go to the 18+ collection! In the sidebar on the left-hand side of the page there is a button for sign-up form, you can press to be taken to the sign-up form.

That brings you to the first page, which looks like this.

Lots of buttons, but don't worry, it's pretty simple once you get the underlying logic!

Let's say I start with 3rd Life. I know I want to opt into pearl gifts, shadowrot, and platonic desert duo. What will that look like?

So I selected the fandom I wanted (3rd Life) and what types of gifts that I was open to. And then I selected the relationships that I'd like as a gift! I could match on any one of these, my gifter might have offered only one relationship in this fandom— but we match on one, so they know which relationship to focus on! And each of those tags is formatted a little differently— the desert duo one the names are connected with a & (so that means i'll get something platonic), the shadowrot one the names are connected with / (so that means I'll get something shippy if my gifter chooses to write that relationship), and the pearl tag is Solo, so that means I could get anything as long as pearl is still the focus! So I have to specify later if I'm okay with shipping or not, or any relationships I don't want.

Additional tags is telling people what kind of holidays I'm open to in my gift— not everybody celebrates the same holidays! For this one I don't want any holidays, so I selected no holidays. And then archive warnings is telling people if I'm okay with archive warnings in my gift— because it's 3rd life I'm okay with graphic depictions of violence, or I'm also okay with no archive warnings in my gift at all! Note that if you select archive warnings that just means you're opting into them as an option, not that your recipient HAS to give them to you. And then we get down to the free text box, where I give my gifter a little more idea of how to make a gift that I'd like. We start with my tumblr, because my gifter has to know how to give me my gift on tumblr eventually! And then a list of likes, stuff to give my gifter some ideas. Mods ask that you include at least a couple likes, and/or some prompts, or link a letter in that letter text box.

What's a letter? Ao3 has a text limit of 5 thousand characters in that box, and sometimes people exceed it because they have detailed prompts— especially if they're requesting lots of different ships as options! You also can't do any formatting unless you code it in HTML. So, if you are running out of space on Ao3, you can write the information for your gifter offsite, on Dreamwidth or Google Docs or a tumblr post! Here is an example from another exchange of what a letter can look like.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you are linking a google doc letter, make sure that you are not using an account that has your real name in it. Make a fandom email for it, or host the letter somewhere like tumblr or dreamwidth, where your real identity will not be connected to your fandom identity. And if you link a tumblr, don't change your blog URL or the letter will disappear for people!

Anyways, I'm not doing a letter cause I'm just doing a quick and dirty signup, so I just did some likes and my DNW! You can also add specific prompts if you want (and it's nice for your gifter if you do) but it's not required!

What is a DNW? DNW stands for Do Not Want, and it's anything (anything) that would ruin a gift for you. You can DNW certain characters, crossovers, types of aus, types of content, specific ways of writing or art, quotes from specific people if you're requesting web weaves, specific music if you're okay with playlists, types of endings, specific sounds if you're requesting podfic— the list goes on. I did a short DNW there to make it all fit within the screen, but my normal one is quite long. There will be a thread in the discord where people can compare DNWs to see if there's anything you want to add to yours.

The rule is that as long as you are polite (nothing like "no kid fic because it's creepy to age down characters") and specific (nothing like "no kinks", because that is too broad and subjective of a category for people to try and navigate) and you don't box your gifter into a specific gift (nothing like "nothing that isn't canon compliant fic specifically about the fairy fort burning") then you're good to go! Because I selected a Solo tag I specifically have to tell my gifter if I'm okay with shipping and which ships, so there's a line there about that. You do need to either put down a DNW or say DNW: no restrictions, so that your recipient knows that everything is on the table.

Please make sure that your DNW and your letter link (if you're using a letter) is included on every fandom box. This is for two reasons. 1) we need to make sure your DNW is in a format that locks once it gets sent to your gifter, not somewhere you could still edit it, like tumblr. 2) There is an option to separate up requests by fandom for people who are looking for extra gifts to give, and that means someone might see only one fandom of your request before giving you something. You need to make sure that anyone who sees just one fandom of your request still has all the information necessary to make a gift.

Note: If you are signing up to the 18+ collections, it's a very good idea to include specific NSFW likes and NSFW DNW because people's tastes can vary wildly, and there's nothing worse than someone carefully making you a gift that's exactly the wrong type of thing for you because are into different things. Give your gifter something to work with and a direction to head in!

And then there's the optional tags box. This is for extra holidays! The additional tags are how you tell someone what holidays you're good to have in your gift, and it only allows you to select 20 at once. But if you wanted to select more holidays than that, you can put them down in the optional tags box! Or you can select any additional tags and just do every holiday at once.

And technically, that's three relationships, so I could call it done there! That's the minimum to request, I'm done. But what if I like other fandoms too? How do I add them? Well. There is a button for that.

In that case, I can hit this button, and it brings me up another request box, and I can do this all over again with another fandom! You can go up to 10 fandoms, with a maximum of 20 tags for each.

But what if you really really REALLY like rats smp and there are 30 tags in the tag set and you want them all?

Two options. One is that instead of putting in relationship tags one by one, you hit the any relationship button.

That will match you to any relationship in the tag set. That doesn't mean any tag on Ao3, but it does mean any tag that's been nominated into the tag set, and we keep the tag nominations open so people can get in their last-minute ships. If you select this one, keep an eye on the tag set to make sure that nobody nominates something that's a hard no for you.

Option two is that you hit the button for another request, and then you just do Rats SMP again, with different tags! You can request the same fandom more than once, with different tags— so you can do a request for your shippy tags and one for your platonic ones, or one for your family tags and one for your non-family ones, or one for desert duo and one for convex, or any other way you want to split it up! As long as you go over the minimum of three relationships requested, you've filled out a valid request! Request ten different fandoms or the same one ten times— it'll work.

Offers

And then we scroll down a little bit to the offers page. Let's take a look at it!

So this is telling the machine the type of gift you are open to making, and making sure you're matchable to someone else's request that will look like the one we just did. You've gotta give the machine the information in a way it'll understand so it can whirr away and give you a match to someone who requested the type of stuff you like to make. So how is this done? I did 3rd life again for the fandom, and the type of gift I can make is fic, so I selected fic for the gift type.

I only need a minimum of three relationships for the relationships, but there's more stuff that'll write than I wanted as a gift, so I have a bunch of relationships in there! I could match on any one of them, so I make sure to offer just relationships I'm confident I can write. Like with the requests, / means a romantic (or sexual, if you are in the 18+ collection) relationship, and & means platonic. Solo: means I can bring any relationships I want into the fic as long as the focus is on the person in the tag and my recipient hasn't DNWed those characters.

When it comes to holidays I COULD go down the list and select everything, but it's easier to just select any additional tag, and that'll make sure I'm matchable no matter what holidays someone selects! I figure that I can do my research on different holidays, and maybe ask for a beta reader to help out if I match on a holiday I'm not used to!

On archive warnings I select no archive warnings apply and graphic depictions of violence, and that means I'm matchable to people who selected either one of those.

And Optional tags is for overflow holidays, but I already selected any holidays, so I'm good to go! This is a complete signup! I can submit it now!

But what if I want to offer other fandoms too? There's rats SMP, there's Hermitcraft, I'm still a DSMP fan—

You can add up to ten fandoms, and same as with requests, you can go up to either 20 tags or "any tag (in the tag set)" for each fandom.

And then you scroll down to the bottom and hit submit, and that's it, you're officially signed up!

Editing and etc

You can go back and edit and tweak your signup any time you want until signups close— remove ships, add them, add prompts, edit your DNW— it's all editable until midnight EST on the 17th of November, when signups close and lock for us to run matching on.

The matching requires:

1 match on fandom

1 match on character (gift type)

1 match on relationship

1 match on additional tags (holidays)

1 match on warnings

So you will be assigned to someone where you have at least one tag in common in all of those categories— a fandom you selected, a gift type you can make, a relationship you said you can do, a holiday you opted into, and a level of archive warnings you said you were good with. The system tries to match you with more tags, but sometimes there are edge cases and you only match on one tag. No matter what is on your recipient's signup, you only have to make one gift, and you only have to make a gift with the tags you signed up with— if someone requested major character death and no warnings apply and you offered no warnings apply, you just can focus in on no warnings apply. Your requests are public, so that people can give bonus gifts if they want to and so that we can pinch-hit your requests if necessary (and so your recipient can see what you requested), but your offers are private (only the mods see them). Make sure you only request things which you are okay having public, or speak to the mods about setting up a sock account.

Signing up gives mods access to your Ao3 email (it's how we send you your assignment), so make sure the email attached to your AO3 account is one that a) you check regularly, and b) are comfortable with exchange mods seeing. You can verify your email here: archiveofourown.org/users/[your ao3 name here]/change_email If for some reason we can’t find a way to give you an assignment (say you only offered ships that nobody was requesting), mods will ask you to make more offers until we can give you an assignment. If we can't give you an assignment— there's nobody in the whole exchange you could make a gift for— you will not be able to continue in the exchange. If we can’t assign you to someone (either you are requesting things nobody offered or the matching just didn't work out to cover you), you will be an initial pinch hit, and someone will opt in to take you on as an extra assignment. Initial pinch hits are normal and expected in an exchange of this size, don't panic if you see yourself as one of them. If there is someone in the exchange that you don’t want to match with (for any reason ranging from "we have each other blocked on tumblr" to "we give each other gifts a lot and we want to give gifts to other people this time"), contact the mods through the ticket system and we’ll hand-adjust the matches. We can only do this before matches go out— if you match to someone you can't create for you'll have to drop your assignment and send it to pinch hits, which we would like to avoid happening if at all possible. Please make sure you send us any Do Not Match requests before signups close!

[scribblers-shadowlands-arc]

Pinned

Links: bsky

Quick introduction to help break the ice. I’m Morrigan 29 yo Butch Trans Woman. On hrt since Feb 2023. Love storytelling both written and visual (Art, Books, Manga, Video Games, etc). I also write and draw myself.

Lifting heavy things for fun and so I won’t fall apart. I will princess carry you if you ask nicely. 

Other Blogs:

ArtisticlySpicyScribbler (previously ScribblersShadowlandsArc I did url switcheroo) - remade it to be a repository for my more risky photos. No need to follow this blog, I repost everything on main anyway.

ArtsyScribbler is my art and writing archive for convenience of keeping them tidy.

Now you know me a little bit, so let’s get to the meat of things. This blog is adult themed. It exists as an outlet for exploration of my gender identity and sexuality and some other similar things.

There will be occasional memes and sfwish reblogs and posts.

Biting, pawing, scratching and other ways to show attention or affection when reblog\comment on my photos are appreciated 

I’m a bisexual t4t both, sapphic, enby. I lean significantly to femme presenting people. But I love me some hot mascs too.

| Minor pls Do Not Interact. I understand you are interested in this stuff, but I could get in trouble because of you, and I rather not.  |

| Addition on age interaction. Thought about it for some time. Irl I not gonna flirt with anybody younger 21-22. It's just arbitrary line I draw for comfort of my mind and safety of both sides.

Online spaces however create a degree of separation and sort of safety (and let be honest it's unlikely we meet irl) It's make it sort of safe-ish playground for exploring and learning about oneself. I sure figured some stuff about myself that way. So it's okay to hit me up if you about 20-ish plus minus. But if I start to feel uncomfortable or feel that I crossing some lines, I gonna pull away (I will communicate that)

If you 18 we can talk on the subject of sex, gender expression, etc. But I not gonna sext or flirt with you, sorry. Get this one year of "oh shit I'm an adult now" before doing something in online spaces with soon to be 30 yo |

Switch and verse. 

Polyam? I figuring this one out since I started transition. But I think I am. For now at least in a way that I will be okay not to be a single partner for my loved one. But not sure that I'll be able manage more then one romantic connection.

For subs who wanna message me. I’m not that experienced domme in a sense of kink, so I may fumble a bit, but hey we are here to have some fun, so I hope it won't be a big deal for you. 

For dommes, I have like 0 experience of being sub. But um Hiii? 

Titles that work for me so far: ma’am, miss, mommy. List may grow. No masculine titles pls

Oh, by the way. I have a demi-human sona, soooo I guess I qualify as furry, not kitten or a puppy (although I may respond for that) but more of a dragon lineage. I still figure out this part of me, so this section is under construction. 

DM’s and asks are open. If we are not mutuals it’s better to ask first before writing something spicy in my DM’s. Mutuals don’t be shy to write to me, I am not scary.

List of kinks - that will definitely grow [ + as domme, - as sub, & for both ]:

Petplay&, intox&?,  bondage&, praise&, cnc&, scent&, pain&, breeding - (not sure for +), nursing&, breath play&

If something is unlisted I either am not sure about it yet and was too lazy to add or it’s no go and I was too lazy to add it. So probably ask before go full throttle on unlisted stuff with me.

Tags: scribblers answers, scribblers rumbles, scribblers pics, scribblers writing, artsy scribbler, scribblers play (video games tag)

[gallavichthings]

GGE2024 Schedule and Posting Guidelines

Here are the schedule (with the urls of the people posting each day) and the posting guidelines (please read and follow them) for the gift exchange.

24/03 (Sunday)

@doshiart

@mybrainismelted

@bawlbrayker

25/03 (Monday)

@suzy-queued

@solitarycreaturesthey

@howlinchickhowl

26/03 (Tuesday)

@deathclassic

@lingy910y

@jrooc

27/03 (Wednesday)

@dynamic-power

@rayrayor

@juliakayyy

28/03 (Thursday)

@ms-moonlight-inn

@heymrspatel

@whatthebodygraspsnot

29/03 (Friday)

@energievie

@arrowflier

@sam-loves-seb

30/03 (Saturday)

@sandrashaine

@notherenewjersey

@look-i-love-u

@sickness-health-all-that-shit

31/03 (Sunday)

@sweetbee78

@grumble-fish

@vintagelacerosette

@michellemisfit

Posting guidelines:

Posting on your assigned date is recommended, but it's not a sin if you can't for any reason. RL happens, after all. These dates are just so we don't end up with several posts in a day and zero posts in another, thus allowing them more time to be truly appreciated. If you can't post on your given day, please let me know, just so I can make sure we don't have half the posts on the same day. ;)

You have to post your gift here on Tumblr, but you can host it somewhere else and post only a link here if you wish to.

On Tumblr, remember to tag (using @) both gallavichthings and your giftee (message me if you don't know their Tumblr account). Please do this on the body of the post (you can use a reblog to do so if you don't want to tag on the original post).

You can post and tag the post as you wish, though I suggest following common sense and using read more on long posts, adding related tags and a summary for fics.

Here's the AO3 Community for those who want to add their works (don’t worry, I won’t make those private). You can also make this a gift to your giftee on AO3, but that's not mandatory. (Also, checking the settings to make sure you're set to receive gifts over there if you'd like that.)

Any other questions, please send me a message in my askbox or via chat.

[untildawn-secretsanta]

2024 Posting Guidelines

You have all day of December 23rd, 2024 to post your gifts (12:01AM MT until 11:59PM MT)!

If you need an extension, I will grant them without question, just let me know as soon as you suspect you may need one.

If you don't receive your gift by the end of the day, you can reach out to me the next day. I will do my best to contact people in advance if the person making their gift requests an extension.

General (applies to all):

Create a post on tumblr.

State the name of the individual your gift is for and be sure to TAG THEM.

Include whether you chose to work with the individual’s OTP, BROTP, or Favourite Character.

Use the specific guidelines for your gift (see below).

At the bottom of your post, be sure to TAG @untildawn-secretsanta. If you are unable to tag me (because tumblr does that sometimes), make sure you DM the post to me as I need to be able to find it.

Use the following hashtags: “#until dawn” “#until dawn secret santa 2024” “#udss2024” as well as the relevant ship and character tags (ex. “#Chrashley” “#Matthew Taylor” “#Climbing Class” “#Jossam”). If you are unsure about a character’s full name, or a ship name, let me know. You are welcome to add any other hashtags that you like, but those ones MUST be included.

PLEASE double check to ensure that your gift meets the requirements and follows the creation rules (I will include them below the cut on this post as a refresher).

Fanfiction:

If your gift is primarily written material, follow these steps while posting:

Complete the general guidelines.

Upload your gift to the fanfiction website of your choosing. If you are unable to upload to a fanfiction website, you may also use Google Docs which will allow you to use a shareable link, or you can post directly to tumblr. (If you use Google Docs, please make sure that your settings won’t allow someone else to come in and edit your work.)

DO NOT POST THE FULL WRITTEN PIECE ONTO TUMBLR WITHOUT A "READ MORE" CUT. I will not reblog long posts as they can be overwhelming! If you absolutely cannot upload anywhere else, you MUST use tumblr’s “Read More”.

Create a quick (three to five sentences) teaser or choose a snippet of the story to post to tumblr.

Below the teaser/snippet, be sure to include a link to the full story. It would be after this point that you would add the “Read More…” with the rest of the story, ONLY if you cannot upload elsewhere.

(Optional) If you have a cover, include that image on tumblr.

Images (Including Fanart and Gifs):

If your gift is an image OR a series of images (fanart/gifs for this exchange), follow these steps while posting:

Complete the general guidelines.

Upload your image(s) to tumblr.

In the caption, provide a quick explanation of the image (ex. “Since you listed your OTP as Chris and Ashley, I drew them drinking hot chocolate by the fireplace.”)

If you are planing posting from a blog URL that is different than the one you are participating under (using an art sideblog, for example), please let me know.

These guidelines are created to be a base for your post. You are welcome to add anything in addition to what was stated above, and you are always welcome to contact me should you require clarification on anything. Have fun creating!

Creation rules for a refresher below the cut:

CREATION RULES

Gifts are not to be posted (in part or in full) ANYWHERE until the exchange date (December 23rd).

CONTENT WARNINGS:

If you are creating anything with gore/body horror, please anonymously double check with your gift recipient to make sure they're okay with that!

Anything NSFW shouldn't be taken further than what the game does. We all know Jess' iconic monologue outside of the guest cabin, and I'd say that's about as far as it should go dialogue-wise. In terms of fanart, you can ask with me if you're unsure. This has never really been an issue in previous years, so I'm not too worried about it. I don't want to censor things super harshly, so if you have any concerns/questions, just ask!

CREATION MINIMUMS:

Word count minimum is 2000 WORDS

Art is a little tricky to create a minimum for, but try to put at least 3 hours into your piece. You want to present a finished drawing to your recipient! No sketches/super rough drawings, please.

OTHER:

Something I would like to touch on is the use of the W word. I think that if we are going to be celebrating Until Dawn, the least we could do is show respect by retiring the use of that word in our fanfic and fanart (many of you already mentioned this in your notes). Instead, I would like to recommend terms like monster/creature instead.

Also, please be careful to not whitewash Josh! Some photo references from the game can make him look pretty pale, so I recommend taking a look at photos of Rami Malek as well!

MODERATION STUFF: I'm currently heading home to see family and friends I haven't seen in months, so I'll be keeping busy and enjoying time with them over the next few weeks. Please be patient, and understand that I won't always be available. 🙏 If you don't hear back from me for over 24 hours, please send a gentle follow up! I have a lot of DMs on the go with all of you right now, so there is a chance that things may get lost. As always, any general questions about the exchange should be posted in ⁠#help in the Discord server.

‼️IF YOU ONLY READ ONE THING, LET IT BE THIS: IF YOU ARE NOT ABLE TO FINISH YOUR GIFT, LET ME KNOW ASAP!!! DON'T HIDE BECAUSE THEN I CAN'T CONTACT A BACK-UP AND YOUR GIFTEE MAY NOT GET A GIFT‼️