#ignore the blurry picture i screenshotted a video

[23fallencomets]

max verstappen and all his little duckies

link

[abarbaricyalp]

A Precious Few, These Precious Days I'll Spend With You 🍂🍁🍂🍁🍂

"Hey, Uncle Sam? Why are people on the internet mad that you and Bucky broke up?" Cass asked as he sat beside Sam on the front porch and dug out pumpkin seeds from the giant bowl of pumpkin mush.

"'Cause people think they're entitled to an opinion about our lives just because we're in the news a lot," Sam answered and deposited more pumpkin insides directly where Cass had just been almost done with the seeds.

Cass scowled at the bowl but got over it quickly. "Yeah, no, I know that one. You've said that one before," he agreed. "Mostly I meant, why do people on the internet think you and Bucky broke up?"

"What do you mean?" Sam asked in his sneaky-not-sneaky way. The way he always tried to prod for gift ideas while thinking he was being cool about it. He was never cool about it. "You know Bucky is working with a new boss and we decided that was an irreconcilable difference."

Cass rolled his eyes so hard he thought he'd prove his mama right and get them stuck like that. "You're really gonna try'n lie to me, Uncle Sam? He's stealing my Fig Newtons. I saw him the other night. No one else eats those except me and him."

"How is Bucky stealing your cookies from my kitchen?" Sam asked, not cool at all. His not-sneaky side eye had disappeared and now he was staring into the pumpkin like there was anything in it. "He lives in DC now."

"Oh, yeah," Cass added. He wiped his hand on his jeans and ignored Sam's half hollered objection to that. He pulled out his phone and then pulled up a screenshot from a video call. "That's the kitchen you designed, right?" he asked, showing Sam the pretty kitchen Bucky had been walking through on their call.

"Why are you face timing my ex?" Sam asked, reaching to snatch the phone away.

"I'm trying to convince him to cut his hair." Cass kept his phone out of Sam's reach. "And! And-- and that's your head, isn't it?" he added, sliding to another picture and zooming in on a blurry spot over the back of Bucky's couch. He scooted a step away before showing his phone this time.

"Since when do you talk to Bucky on the phone?"

Cass scoffed as he locked his phone back. "I've been talking to Bucky on the phone since the first night he stayed here," he said. "He used to sneak AJ and me snacks after bedtime."

"Of course he did. I don't know what you think you know but you don't know it."

Cass pretended to count out the logic in that sentence and gave up. "What I know is: You and Bucky never broke up. He's still coming down to see you and you see him up in DC. You two made this house together and you made one up there together too. Which is so unfair. That's two of everything! Did you make sure there's a good climbing tree up there? When can I go see it? The house, not the tree. But, yeah, the tree too."

"You can't go see it. It's Bucky's house, not mine. I've never been there." Sam stood, setting aside the pumpkin hastily and retreating inside. "I was stealing your cookies and Bucky obviously just has a type," he said as the screen door shut between them.

Cass scrambled to his feet too, bringing both bowls of pumpkin insides with him before the squirrels could eat all of the seeds like they did last year. He struggled with the door and Sam was no help, but he did get inside. He set the bowls into the sink-- the same kind of farm sink Bucky had in his videos-- with a clatter and followed his uncle into the sun room.

"You're allergic to figs; you're not stealing my cookies. And I think Bucky's type begins and ends with you."

Sam sputtered out an indignation that wasn't actually words. He kept fiddling with his record player and Cass thought about telling him not to turn up the volume to drown out the conversation. He thought about telling him that was the same silly thing AJ did and AJ wasn't even a preteen yet and did he really want to be acting like a kid? Except, yeah, probably. Mama and Sam fought like kids all the time, even though they were always fussing at Cass and AJ to act their ages and behave.

"How come you're pretending to be broken up?" Cass insisted before Sam could get the record set. "It's not like it's gonna fool anyone. Not saying y'all were dating in the first place never fooled anyone."

Sam sighed and set the record down on the cradle but didn't lower the needle. "It's safer this way."

Cass made a face and crossed his arms. He'd turned fifteen two months ago (and there'd been a mysterious package left for him in the kitchen with a note in Bucky's old timey scrawl, imagine that) and everyone kept saying he had become a fine young man. But the old ladies from church still giggled and cooed when he stood like this and tried to tell AJ anything. 'Playing at being grown' they always said. He was really going for more of the fine young man right now.

"Safer like how it was safer for you to move back to DC after you became Captain America?" he asked. "And then you had to come back to save the day anyway?"

Sam shot him a sharp look but he didn't argue. Cass had never met his grandfather and he couldn't remember his daddy much at all, but he was pretty certain that look was down deep in the Wilson Family bones, genetic and otherwise. Still, he prodded closer.

"Do you really think neither of you are gonna go running as soon as the other is in trouble? Or that your bosses and all the other heroes don't know?"

"Cassius Adam," Sam warned.

Cass let out a huff. "I'm not gonna tell anyone. I didn't even tell AJ or mama. AJ would sit up looking for him all night of he thought he might be around."

Sam kind of flinched and Cass wasn't sure why. He hadn't meant it in a mean way. He wasn't even really being mean to AJ. It was just true. AJ was obsessed with Bucky and would search for him in every shadow if he might be there.

"Good, you shouldn't tell anyone," Sam said instead of addressing anything else more important that Cass had been talking about. "Remember how he used to play spies with you? Play spies again. You can't talk to anyone about anything he's doing. Even if it's just hanging out in the kitchen or whatever."

Cass already knew all of that. That's why he hadn't said anything. He'd been living with Captain America and the Winter Soldier for more than three years now. He knew how to handle it. It was kind of insulting that Uncle Sam didn't think he had this down pat.

"I'm not gonna spill," he said. "But you shouldn't lie either. What if something happens and mama doesn't know what to do, huh?"

"Happens with what?" Sam asked. He leaned back against the record stand and crossed his arms, a mirror of Cass, just a little to the left. "With Bucky? That has nothing to do with you, your brother, or your mama, alright?"

"No, but it has to do with you. What if you go running off to save him and something happens and you didn't tell anyone anything 'cause you're pretending like you don't like each other? Then what?"

"And you think that rescuing me is gonna be your responsibility?" he asked with a raised eyebrow.

Cass felt his cheeks heat a little. Yes, yes he did, actually. He was getting old enough for it. Elijah wasn't that much older than him when Sam first met him. "It's gotta be somebody's responsibility," he answered levelly, instead of saying any of that, cause that would just lead to a new lecture and possibly getting grounded for the rest of his life.

"It's not your responsibility," Sam corrected. "I've got grown ups helping me. Your responsibility is geometry." He pushed himself off of the record stand. The record was still on it, which Cass knew would drive Sam nuts once he remembered it in a few hours.

"If you're saving Bucky, who has your back?" Cass countered as Sam tugged on one of his curls and walked by.

"Torres," Sam answered easily.

"Nuh-uh," Cass argued. "Torres isn't an adult. You said he can't even babysit 'cause he'll let us try the wings." Cass followed after Sam back into the house and into his bedroom. He pointedly tossed one of Bucky's hoodies from the floor into the hamper.

Sam ignored him. "Just 'cause I don't trust Torres to keep you two on the ground doesn't mean I don't trust him for other things."

"That doesn't even make sense. Uncle Sam!" he whined and threw himself across the bed dramatically. He clutched the edges of the old Wilson quilt (which Sam had totally stolen from the house when he moved out) and rolled twice to wrap himself in it. "You're supposed to have backup. Bucky is your backup."

Sam pulled down the top edge of the quilt so he could see Cass's face. He sat beside him and rubbed at the approximate location of Cass's shoulder. "You're really worried about me, huh?"

"No," Cass lied. "I just don't like you and Bucky lying to us. I don't like you two being separate either. It's easier knowing you have each other's backs."

"Well, sometimes things happen and we can't have the security blanket we want," Sam started to explain, choosing his words carefully. "Bucky and I are both going to be okay, even if we aren't together. And sometimes a little bit of a lie can help. Superheroes. A little bit of a lie can help superheroes, not fifteen year olds. Bucky is running his own mission and having Captain America on his tail constantly isn't going to help him. And the same thing for me. Captain America needs a little bit of distance from what Bucky's doing."

Cass glowered and flipped the blanket over his face again. "That's lying," he insisted. "Nothing good comes from lying."

"I can't believe your mama is keeping that old phrase going," Sam sighed. "Look, can you be bribed?"

Cass lowered the blanket down again. "With what?"

"I'll let you know when he's around and it's safe, alright? You can come hang out with us if you want. You can see that we're alright."

Cass watched his uncle's face for any sign of a lie and he parsed out the offer for any possible ways out of it. Sure, Sam could say every visit was too dangerous, but Cass was pretty certain he wouldn't.

"Like spies?" he asked cautiously. "Just us?"

"Just us until your brother puts it together too," Sam agreed. "Just like spies."

After a moment of more consideration, Cass nodded. "Fine. I'll stop complaining and I won't tell anyone about it unless something goes wrong."

Sam grimaced a little (Cass knew he wanted to argue with that part about things going wrong) but he nodded too. "It's a deal."

Cass flipped the blanket over his face again and did another half roll so he wasn't facing Sam. "Can we put cinnamon sugar on some of the seeds?" he asked. "I don't like it when they're all hot."

Sam laughed a little and he sounded kind of relieved at the change in conversation. "Sweet pumpkin seeds?" he asked. "I've never tried that before. I bet we can make it work."

Yeah, Cass thought to himself, they could make this work.

[averycutesalamander]

i just wanna add to ur smau that boothill maybe leaves hate comments on ipc posts???? bc official hsr on hoyolab posted a pic about jade's timeline and there is an ipc ad featuring jade, under which boothill commented "Oh fudgin' wubbaboo, why's the algorithm recommending this to me! Fudge you!" idk what he's exactly like in ur smau but thought this is a fun fact to share :)

THAT IS SO FUNNY AVAVDBBASBDB ??? I HAD NO IDEA I NEED TO HUNT THAT DOWN

i honestly imagine that he doesn't really look at other people's posts much at all (obviously this is made suspect by in-game events but hear me out.) maybe he occasionally scrolls his front page if he's extremely bored in a circumstance where he can't practice shooting?

buuuuut he could totally see an IPC-sponsored post when he opens the app to post something new and he completely blows a gasket about it. he leaves a comment on it with a million different censored swears. someone screenshots it and the silvergun fandom once again loses their mind because there's absolutely no record of him ever commenting before that's known to fans.

a week later he comments on a post of Jade on some luxury starship and all he says is "💥💥💥" and naturally the theorycrafting quadruples. is this a threat?? a diversion?? some extremely weird flirting tactic??? everybody gets their answer an hour later when the starship fucking EXPLODES. Jade doesn't die but a literal shipload of IPC higher-ups couldn't get out in time. IPC shills start a movement to cancel him ("#NotAllEmployees !!! many IPC members are very charitable and kind and fair as long as you ignore the war crimes and the slavery and the "unconfirmed" political assassinations and the--") but 99% of the people posting under that tag are people making fun of the whole thing. the moderators ban the tag and issue takedowns for a ton of mocking posts for "misinformation." all of the mods are accused of being IPC sellouts.

he gets banned again and his next returning post is the first full-body photo he's ever uploaded. he's holding a MASSIVE classified (well. now declassified) IPC weapon in one hand and making a thumbs-up with the other. he's holding the fucking thing like a fish and grinning like a moron. 2 minutes later he posts a picture of the entire thing shattered to pieces. it kind of looks like it has bites taken out of it. suspiciously human-sized bites, in fact.

the new account gets banned in like 10 minutes flat but that was enough time for the pictures to be re-uploaded a million times. the silvergun fandom has an unprecedented resurgence because a fuckload of people start making edits and art and shit. RPF is made about him. horny RPF is made about him. inexplicable enemies-to-lovers RPF is made about him and Jade. he actually appears in the comments of one of those fics and leaves a death threat. the silvergun fandom enters a golden age of thirst. his comments and DMs are flooded with people giving him tips and info about potential next targets, many of which are fake but some of which are genuine. the branch of the IPC responsible for media control is frantically scrambling to get a hold on this insane phenomenon but no matter how many times they ban him he keeps fucking coming back. determining which one of the "silvergun#####" accounts is legitimate at any given time becomes an olympic sport.

and he just keeps posting nature pics like none of that shit ever happened. decoders lose their fucking minds trying to figure out the "secret messages" in all of his uploads. one of the most popular decoding accounts gets outed as being an IPC employee. he posts a video of a fish in a creek and everybody becomes convinced that he's signaling that he's going to visit an ocean planet. he doesn't. a gargantuan amount of shitty bigfoot-esque hoaxes pop up of people "seeing him" in various impossible places where the photos are conveniently blurry. the IPC wastes a truly insane amount of money trying to figure out if any of them are legitimate. the singular legit post completely flops because they had zero followers and used the wrong tag. boothill comments on it with "🤫😉" and literally no one believes that it's one of his real accounts except the original poster.

[punkenglandissenpai-blog]

I made a monster.

[6mm4d]

is ur request open?? if it is, pls do demon brothers as ur internet boyfriend!! gn!reader, And pls ignore this if the request is closed!

they're ur internet boyfriend!! : demon brothers

yes my requests are open! :-) tysm for letting me write this prompt it's literally so good!! ty once again friend, i hope you like it <:

lucifer

Lucifer never imagined himself making friends online, much less dating someone on the internet but you truly have him wrapped around your finger

That being said, Lucifer craves your attention, he needs twice as much considering your distance, so expect several missed calls when you forget to give him his "goodnight <3 i love you" text

"Hello? MC, whatever the issue is there's no need to ignore me, after all we're adults who can talk out our issues-.... ..You fell asleep early? ....Oh."

"No, it was nothing, go back to sleep"

Lucifer's favorite mode of communication are phone calls, he'll never admit it but your voice has become his favorite sound in all three worlds

He especially likes phone calls before bed, sure you're far away but laying in bed with you on the speaker phone makes his bed feel a lot less empty if he's being honest.

He looks forward to the day that you two get to meet in person although it's so unlike him, he feels nervous at the thought as well

mammon

Mammon is surprised that he bagged such a wonderful person, especially online. I mean, you love and respect him and you're his #1 supporter. It was only logical for him to stake claim.

Of course that's half a lie, he didn't claim you as much as you claimed him, although he'd never admit that out loud.

Mammon is always the first to call and text at every time of the day. He wants to know what you're doing, where, and he wants pictures, lots of pictures.

Obviously he wants as many pictures of you possible. Any at all will make his heart leap out of his chest. Blurry photos, mirror photos, photos of you from far away, he loves them all and he'll set them as his wallpaper.

His favorite mode of communication is videocalls. He really wants to see your face!! What can he say, it's his right as your boyfriend. Expect to hear the screenshot sound several times over the hours.

"Baby, put the sweater on. Huh?! Why not?? ....What?! Im not gonna take a screenshot, literally name one time I've done that"

"..Okay but that was ONCE omg!!"

levi

Levi has always had online friends, that was nothing new, but to know that one of his online crushes was actually dating him now?? He has no idea how he managed that

It comes as no surprise that Levi loves to play video games with you, it's such an easy way to connect and yet he manages to get embarrassed at "physical contact" that is just... virtual

"MC.... Did you mean to put our minecraft.. beds.. together??"

"OMG were wearing the same skin!? Oh gosh, everyone is gonna know you're my Player 2... this is a lot to take in "

Levi's favorite mode of communication with you is through VR Chat. If you didn't have a VR set before, Levi will get you one asap. To him, it's the easiest way to get closer to you without the overwhelming insecurity of video calls ( since he can change his avatar )

He especially loves simulating mundane tasks with you on VR; cooking, having a snowball fight, or running around a flowery park, knowing you're the face behind the avatar next to his own makes his heart skip a beat every time.

satan

Satan figures that perhaps this is a modern day romance. His books detail tragic forbidden lovers whose love perseveres despite all, and well, it's not too different from you two right? There is a wall between you both, or rather a screen.

Knowing this, Satan does his best to keep things romantic for you despite the physical distance.

He loves to have flowers and pastries delivered to your house, hinting to you through text that there's "a special something" at your doorstep and he waits patiently over the phone to hear your reactions

For Satan, hearing your gasps of astonishment and your happy giggles makes the extra effort so worth it. He'd do anything to hear you laugh in excitement.

His favorite mode of communication with you is phone calls, his favorite calls being ones where you can both enjoy each other's silence together, occasionally cracking a joke or affectionately calling out for one another.

"MC?... No, I didn't want to ask you anything, I just wanted to hear you say yes back "

Sometimes he likes to read out loud, not particularly for you to listen to, but just to know that you're hearing him is reason enough

"Hm? You like my voice? In that case, I'll read as much as you want, love :)"

asmo

The moment Asmo saw your face on the internet, he knew he had to shoot his shot. Of course, you responded, who wouldn't? But he didn't think you'd literally end up being the love of his life.

Asmo is obsessed with you and he's not ashamed about it. Anyone and everyone has heard about his "lovely MC" and how precious you are.

Of course he wants everyone to know that you two are an item, what if someone falls for you too? So his solution is to post you on his social media everyday. His Devilgram story, tweeting on Critter, all of the above.

Naturally, he wants to be as close as possible so he starts to buy things in pairs. He has a pink shirt and now you do too! Devil MUA sent him their PR package and now you have one too! Knowing you're both matching makes him feel 10x more confident in his outfit and makeup choices since his lovely MC is looking just as good!

Asmo's favorite mode of communication is video calling with you. He wants to see your face as much as possible no matter what expression you're wearing, he'll commit them all to memory

His favorite video calls are ones were you've just barely woken up, hearing your groggy voice and seeing your grumpy tired face never fails to make him kick his feet and giggle. Even you're disgruntled face makes his heart flutter

"Good morning!!! Hehe, I woke you up didn't I? You're looking at me like... Hahaha! I can't say, you're too cute!!! Go back to sleep, darling. I just wanted to see you"

beel

Beel has never been too active on social media so he imagined this scenario would fit one of his brothers better, but after your late night talks and heart to hearts, he absolutely had to ask you out.

Beel is a doting boyfriend, he loves to hear anything and everything about you. What you did today, what you wore, anything at all.

Prepare to have him praise everything you do, even when you weren't anticipating a compliment... He just can't help the fact that you're so damn cute to him! None of your conversations are safe from his doting

"You did your laundry today? Good job, MC :-)"

"You're wearing pajamas? Oh. Well you still look really cute today :-)"

His favorite mode of communication with you is texting. He's a busy guy so he can't always respond but even then he loves to read your texts when he has time. Naturally, He responds to each and every one of them individually, even if you sent over 10.

He especially loves texting you during breakfast. Seeing your texts and messages always make his days start off bright and he always makes sure to send you a picture of whatever breakfast he's eating at the given moment.

"MC, I'm having eggs, bacon, and french toast today. You should try making some :-) then it'll be like we're both eating at the same table, don't you think?"

belphie

When his brothers found out that he was in a relationship they were awestruck. Even more so when they found out it was online! What have you been up to, Belphie?!

Belphie doesn't care though, he understood his own feeling well enough and confessed to you despite the fact that you were online. He wasn't about to let anyone else snatch you before he had the chance

In this relationship, you have to call and text first. And although Belphie denies it, you're the only person he actively responds to besides Beel. But not without complaints

Despite that fact he loves getting calls and texts from you, even when he acts like it's no big deal. You'll never have a missed call or text as long as he's around, even if you sometimes get some...questionable half-asleep responses

"MC? Hello?...Yes. Im sleeping. How am I responding? How about, how are you responding?.... Maybe..you're sleeping."

Belphie's favorite mode of communication is phone calls. He doesn't have to painstakingly get up to type and not to mention, he can leave you on speakerphone and listen to you all he wants.

He absolutely adores the phone calls in which you both fall asleep together on the phone. Hearing your voice slowly get sleepier and quieter makes him giggle, how can someone be so adorable when sleeping? You're the only one who'd he stay up for, even if it's just to hear you sleep peacefully.

He makes sure to sleep too, but only when he can hear your quiet breaths over the phone.

[buoyant-breeze]

what’s on their phone? hcs

characters ⊱ albedo, bennett, childe

content ⊱ completely sfw, modern au

albedo

the type of person that says he will get a new phone case, but hasn’t changed his case in years. each case he uses is always stylistic and goes for an aesthetic that he is interested in at the time.

used to have a phone charm on his current one, but it broke off, and now there’s just a charm holder sitting uselessly on his case.

the case itself is gold with an alchemical rune on it. it looks fancy, but it was from a video game he played. it is niche enough where no one recognizes it, which is his preference, since he prefers not to draw attention to himself with flashy, pop-culture cases.

does not have a screen protector on. a few scrapes and cuts are on the screen, but you can’t see it unless it shines in the light just right. no one knows how he hasn’t shattered his phone yet.

he’s surprisingly clumsy with it.

lockscreen is an unassuming picture of him and sucrose. the homescreen is a van gogh wallpaper with a verse from one of his favorite poetry books. if i had to choose one, i’d say this rupi kaur poem. he edited it himself.

the poem itself is meant to symbolize his deep yearning for a connection with a person he considers a soulmate in his life. it’s important to him.

does not use any specific layout for his phone: all of his useful apps are out in the open, and the ones that came at factory settings are thrown into a folder for him to ignore for the rest of it’s lifespan.

has a lot of editing apps, art references saved in his photo album (and 70% of his phone’s storage is taken up by said photo album), and takes lots of screenshots of his conversations with friends or love interests over texts to show sucrose.

puts heart emojis in signature colors besides the names of people he actually cares about, like kaeya 💙 💙 💙 or sucrose  💚 🌼. but then you have the people he doesn’t care about. they sometimes get names. other times, it’s just “ginger man.”

bennett

cracked, shattered, ruined; it’s not even a phone anymore.

it’s a piece of metal he can’t replace and no one knows how he still manages to take phone calls with it, or get cuts on his fingers when he tries to text people.

probably always asks his friends if he can borrow their phones, but he’s had a bad track record of accidentally dropping the phones of his friends that he’s banned from touching them after he cracked three different ones, including kaeya’s.

he had the messed up phone for sooooo long, but then kaeya buys him an “indestructible nokia.” it is both a joke and completely serious. somehow, bennett still breaks that one.

has one of those flimsy, stretchy phone cases in a bright red, shitty plastic. no design or anything on it, just some faded-out stickers that he put on the corners that can no longer be deciphered.

wallpaper is a blurry picture of him on vacation with eula, amber, albedo, and aether. in the background, you can see a chaotic explosion of fireworks that does not look safe in the slightest.

used to have a lot of games on his phone like fruit ninja or temple run, but given he can no longer see or really fully use his screen, he can’t play them anymore.

all of his contact names are very plain and actually capitalized, like Kaeya, Razor, Amber, etc. there is no personalization to them whatsoever.

childe

the asshole that has an image of a cracked phone screen as his wallpaper just to shock people. he specifically does this after getting a new screen protector, there’s just something amazing about the way zhongli goes, “you just got a new one, and you’ve already ruined it?” that makes childe feel giddy with mischief.

phone case is blue and has his usual narwhal motif.

he doesn’t know how to put on phone charms, or that they even exist. but if he knew about either of those things, he’d have a whale charm.

lockscreen is either the cracked image just for funsies, or is a picture of him and his family. homescreen will always be one of the newest pictures of his siblings.

saves every single family photo sent, ever. the christmas photos from two years ago? he has them. the vacation they took together to fontaine back in july? those, too. he has literally every single moment on photo or video, especially of his younger siblings.

screenshots recipes off of google that he wants to try. most of the time he says he’ll make them, and sometimes he does.

all of his contact names vary. fucking dottore, haha short man, pretty boy <3, handsome boy <3, pain, and zhongli are all just some of the options. family members get nicknames and lots of hearts to show they are special.

[elysianslove]

Feeling soft, but Miya Atsumu is the type of boyfriend to brag about your accomplishments as if they’re his own. Doesn’t matter how small or big they are, he’ll find someone to brag to. Could be him telling Samu about the recipe you mastered bc “no really, they’d put you outa business if they wanted too” or even him telling journalists about how amazing you are or him posting you all over his socials, showing off whatever pursuit you’ve been involved in recently. In conclusion: Miya Atsumu <3

miya atsumu being whipped for his s/o is one of my favorite things, especially because it’s so accurate and true <3

like there’s no way atsumu would date someone and not be head over heels in love with them. and everyone pretends to be annoyed by it but it’s only because he’s so easy to tease !! and because they’re all lowkey jealous. like they could be having a regular conversation with atsumu but then someone says something and it reminds him of you so now he won’t shut up about you. or like he receives a message from you and then it’s so easy to just sit back, smile dumb, and ignore everyone while he chats with you.

and you know how people ask out of courtesy like “how’s things with you and your s/o?” yeah? don’t ask atsumu. it doesn’t matter if it’s some random person he hasn’t seen in over ten years asking, he‘ll tell them all about how you and him are doing. his excuse every time is ”well they asked???”

he also posts you so much !! like on his main, public instagram, where he’s literally a public figure with a massive following, he posts you all over his story. he has a few posts, but it’s mainly his story, and also he has a whole highlight for you !! just pictures n videos of you, from like screenshots on facetime during his away games to random close ups to videos of him kissing all over your face to candid photos of you. his main instagram isn’t flooded with posts of you just because it’s very monitored and all.

but his spam account? lord help his followers fr.

he only accepts close mutual friends of yours, teammates and some family (literally just osamu) and god, he is such a sap. and he has no filter either !!! like he’s posting pretty candids but he’s also posting the blurry photos and also random videos he takes and also all the tiktoks you do together. all the tiktoks. like think of every trend and then picture you and tsumu because he’s absolutely made you do it. (except the one where you’d just gotten your nails done and are showing it off by grabbing his dick through his sweats. that one was your idea, but he ate that shit up). and when i say he posts everything about you two, i mean it. post sex selfies, him grabbing your tits and making a make shift bra with his hands, the time you two got lost in the city and it rained and you both looked horrendous, and also that time you made him out on a maid outfit but he forced you into one too, but also cute hand holding pics or him cupping your face and squishing your cheeks with one hand.

listen just. atsumu is obsessed with you and he wants the whole world to know.

[starryeyedrookie]

OMG GUYS!! So I was looking for photos for my newlywed questions when I came across this master bedroom and I thought, “Wow, this looks so familiar. I’ve seen this room before.”

And it instantly “hit me” that it’s almost identical to the cabin bedroom in OH bk.2 ch.14 (I took a screenshot from a YouTube video to try to get a picture of the whole room so you can just ignore the blurry little MC the side lol)

They 110% used that room as a reference. Even the three pictures next to the T.V. on the wall are the same.

[ayellowcurtain]

Is it possible that you write a fic where Robbe is feeling a bit frustrated as Sander found new friends at school, and he spends a lot more times with them now, maybe too much as he starts getting late at some of their dates? Bonus point if one of his friends doesn't like robbe that much and Robbe knows it?

Part 1 -  hint of dirty talking, but it’s really a hint, if you blink you might miss it 

It’s been five days. Yeah, Robbe is actually doing a countdown. He doesn’t really have to, based on the number of times he checks his phone to see the day and the amount of time he goes to Sander’s Instagram or their conversation.

He’s been trying to be patient and understands he brought this upon himself, but it doesn’t make it less painful. The cold shoulder behavior he’s been receiving for the past...well, five days. Robbe is ignoring all of it, still texting Sander all day long like he would if they were talking.

to Sander: I think I got a good grade on today’s test. I hope I did, don’t feel like studying anymore.

Hope you’re having fun <3 I miss you

You would laugh at me if you were seeing this. I tried making that pasta you taught me. I mean...it’s eatable so that’s good?

My mom said it’s delicious and for me to thank you for teaching the recipe. But she’s my mom so I can’t take her word for it, I think it turned out okay

He stares at his screen, bitting the corner of his bottom lip, his arms a little tired from being up in the air, holding his phone for so long, rereading the messages he sent today. He types the last one for the night.

to Sander: I’m going to bed now, wishing you were with me. I love you <3

And he puts his phone on airplane mode, checking his alarm for the next morning before putting his phone down on the nightstand, far away enough that he can’t reach easily if he decides to text Sander in the middle of the night, asking to talk just to be ignored one more time.

He hasn’t been sleeping well, starting to worry the second he puts his head on his pillow every night, overthinking everything he said, afraid his words were enough to make Sander change his mind and break up.

He has a few more tests, and some assignments to give to his teachers, but in every free minute that he has, Robbe is checking his phone, knowing what he’ll find: his messages with no answer. Sometimes Sander will at least read them, but he never answers properly. He likes Robbe’s messages or sends a few emojis that can have so many interpretations.

The school is his main focus during the weekdays, his only way to worry about something else other than his relationship, but he does everything automatically not needing to use much of his brain: wakes up, eats breakfast with his mom, goes to school, does whatever test he has, leaves his assignments, watches classes, gets on his bike and goes home.

He doesn’t feel like skating and spending his time with the boys these days. It’s stupid, but he gets even angrier if he remembers what Sander said and his reaction. So he decides to leave Aaron, Moyo, and Jens be for now.  

Robbe moves to his side under the sheets, opening Instagram again. It’s Friday night, finally, and Jens insisted on him to go with them to this new bar close to his place, but Robbe was tired after so many tests and he wanted to be alone. Or with Sander, but that he couldn’t do.

Sander posted a piece of art earlier and tagged some of his friends in it. Robbe opens every one of the links in hopes to find a story or a picture with his boyfriend in it. He leaves the worst one for last. And of course, that’s where he finds something.

Adi posted a bunch of videos during the whole afternoon. Robbe rewatches them more times than he should, just to hear his boyfriend’s voice or to see his blurry smile when Adi films him looking at some art, his favorite camera under his arm and around his neck, laughing over his shoulder to look at Adi when he’s making fun of how Sander would rather look at more art in their free time instead of going out for some drinks.

Robbe didn’t know Sander’s friends were going and he can’t stop himself from wondering why they could go and that wasn’t even offered to him. He stops before he can start disliking Adi even more for no reason other than the boy is not his fan either. He opens the stories again and tries to take a screenshot of Sander’s smile, his messy hair that’s needing a haircut if Sander’s words are something to go by.

Robbe keeps his opinions to himself for four more days, trying not to let Adi get under his skin with all the stories, all about Sander. Or the pictures he posts of all of them at a bar late at night, smiling from ear to ear. He knows part of all these posts is to annoy him. That’s what Adi does, he doesn’t like Robbe and he’ll make sure to piss him off whenever he can. Showing off how Sander is having fun with him and the boys.

to Sander: ’m happy to s you and Adi aer having fun. Hope he wont maaAke you hate me:)

Robbe texts his boyfriend on the tenth night when he’s drunk after going out with the boys because they wouldn’t let him go home yet again. He’s struggling to change to go to bed, wishing he had warmer, stronger hands to help him with that. Robbe won’t get an answer and he’ll be hungover the next morning so he turns his phone off and passes out on his bed.

It feels like he blinked his eyes and when he opens, his mom is carefully putting a big bottle of water on his nightstand and leaving him be for a little longer. Robbe lifts his arm, feeling it so heavy and tired, but he manages to grab the bottle, turn to his side and drink half of it, hoping it’ll help.

He can’t put it back on the nightstand so he leaves the water on the floor and falls asleep again. Using his hand to cover his eyes, wanting to cry and call Sander to break things up already if that’s why he’s trying to do with this stupid silence.

His phone lightens the room suddenly and Robbe opens his eyes, trying to understand where the light is coming from. He looks around himself, everything is exactly as messy as he left it so he puts his head down, staring at his phone until the light fades back to black. He stretches his phone and finds it, letting his arm fall back on the mattress with the phone. His eyes are fighting to close again, but Robbe presses his fingers on the sides of his phone to see what’s going on.

earthlingoddity tagged you in a photo

That’s unexpected, but Robbe clicks on the notification, rubbing his eyes with his other hand to wake up enough to see what he posted.

He clicks on Sander’s username, opening his feed to make sure he saw it right. A picture of him that Sander took and never showed him. He can post a picture of Robbe, but not reply to his messages.

It’s ridiculous how fast his half-asleep, deprived of touch body responds to the caption Sander wrote underneath the picture.

I keep my visions to myself

It's only me who wants to

Wrap around your dreams and

Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?

Robbe lies on his back, reading the caption a few times. It’s not even that sexual, but it feels like it. He opens their conversation, still no new message from Sander so he closes it again, opening the camera. Looking at himself, the sheets falling closely around his legs, Robbe thinks about being stupid and reckless and desperate .

Maybe that will make Sander reply to him for once. Letting his rush of adrenaline take over, Robbe lifts the sheets, looking at the door to make sure it’s closed. He’s harder than he anticipated which is a little embarrassing considering that absolutely nothing happened, but fuck it. He takes the picture of his naked torso, his shirt rolling on his chest from him probably moving too much while asleep, his lean, way too skinny legs, and his grey underwear.

to Sander: you can’t write things like that

And he sends before he can think about it. It’s been a while since they did this. Exchanging photos, but Robbe waits, keeping his phone unlocked. Sander sees the photo right away, but there are no bubbles indicating an answer.

Robbe lets himself wait for five minutes. Sander liked the photo, but didn’t answer, didn’t send a text. Just like the universe is trying to send a clear message, when his phone hits 12:45, it turns black.

“Shit…” Robbe slams his phone against the mattress, hating himself for being so stupid and needy.

Sander really left him on read after that photo.

Robbe rushes out of his bedroom, clicking on the screen a bunch of times to make sure he’s completely out of battery. His mom doesn’t know his password either so he’s not risking her seeing what he just sent to Sander.

“Mom?” He finds her in the living room, soft music playing in the background, everything is off the floor so she can clean it.

“Yes?” She stops her dance party while mopping the floor, turning around to look at him.

“Can you do me a favor?” Robbe keeps pinching the inside of his cheek with his teeth, the embarrassment still filling his every thought like his mom can see in his face what he did five minutes ago.

“Of course. What do you need?”

“I need you to keep my phone hostage for the next 24 hours.” He offers his phone to her, trying not to worry. It’s just 24 hours and Sander hasn’t replied to him in days, it’s not like he’ll miss much if he keeps his distance from his phone for a whole day. She frowns, but smiles softly, holding his phone carefully.

“Okay…” Robbe smiles at her, and she looks at the black screen, “Can I ask why?”

Robbe tilts his head, looking around, not knowing what to say, “I just have some important things to do for school and so I need to focus.”

She doesn’t believe him, keeps staring like she’s waiting for him to tell the truth, but he doesn’t want to and she doesn’t ask either, putting his phone inside her pocket.

“Thank you.”

“No problem, sweetie. If you need anything, just ask.” She says and he nods his head, thinking about making them lunch as a thank you, trying to keep his mind away from Sander and how unfair he's being.

[saveloadreset]

Mew Mew Parallels In Undertale

It’s been forever and a day before I did a pure meta post, but Toby’s latest tweet planted a thought I wanted to articulate.

Recently, Toby shared with us a picture, an image visible for barely a second in the special edition trailer. It appears to be a blurred ad for Mew Mew Kissy Cutie 2, which brought back an old idea I had, about how Mew Mew and Undertale seem to almost mirror each others’ stories.

And since Mew Mew Kissy Cutie is a rough sketch of Undertale’s journey from several angles, this take on Mew Mew 2 interested me. Now, before we go into depth on that, the question I need to answer is: why does Mew Mew Kissy Cutie match up with Undertale? Well, I have an answer, but I wanted to go full hog on screenshots this time, so I think I’m going to put the rest of this argument under a cut.

Before we talk about this screen, we must first talk about what we know of Mew Mew Kissy Cutie already, from the game. There are several incidents where Alphys talks about it, but only two where we get a glimpse of what the actual plot of the story is about. The first is in the ‘Bad Opinion Zone,’ where we see her talk about her distaste for Mew Mew 2.

Now, this doesn’t tell us much about the show, except that Alphys thinks that she thinks that Mew Mew 2 betrayed the premise, themes and lessons of Mew Mew, as originally taught. We would need to learn more to get a grasp on her idea of what the show was meant to be. 

Luckily, we are provided with that a little later when she essentially spoils the whole plot of the show, giving us great insight into its nature. It’s really had to screenshot since it autoscrolls, so I captured a .gif of the conversation instead of just taking a screen.

Transcript:

It’s so good!  It’s, um, my favorite show!

It’s all about this human girl named Mew Mew who has cat ears! Which humans don’t have! S-so she’s all sensitive about them!

But like... Eventually!

She realizes that her ears don’t matter

that her friends like her despite the ears!

It’s really moving!

Whoops, spoilers!

Also, this sounds weird, but she has the power!

To control the minds of anyone she kisses!

She kisses people and controls them to fix her problems!!

They don’t remember anything after the kiss I mean!!

BUT IF SHE MISSES THE KISS!! THEN!!

then, uh and, uh, also I mean, of course

eventually she realizes that controlling people

OKAY WELL I almost spoiled the whole show, but

Uhh, I think you’d really like it!!!

This gives us deeper insight into what Mew Mew Kissy Cutie means to Alphys, and gives us a lot of context for how its story parallels with her personal arc as well as the human’s. 

Alphys

Alphys is steeped deeply in the secrets and shame of the result of her DT experiments. She feels deeply horrified of the idea of anyone finding out what she has hidden, to the point where she believes her friendships are entirely built around lies, and that her friends would immediately abandon her were her mistakes revealed. 

The acceptance of Mew Mew’s friends after she comes clean about her ears would resonate deeply with Alphys, so it’s not wonder that she’s latched so firmly onto the Mew Mew story.

The Human

One thing that doesn’t resonate with Alphys, though is Mew Mew’s ‘special power.’ The ability to control those she kisses and, in particular, erase their memories in order to solve her problems doesn’t really apply to Alphys. But the human’s ability to SAVE and LOAD allows them to control others through perfect knowledge of how they act and manipulate their memories by moving backward in time. 

There’s some argument to be made about the regular rhythm of play, however, I think that assuming a player walks into the story with no outside information, we can expect the progress to move from a neutral run to a pacifist run, wherein the hero first uses their powers to move through a hostile world and out the other side, with dust on their hands...

And then tries again, moving backward in time so as to use their powers for good, culminating in a moment where their powers over time are useless, but that the love and friendships that they have cultivated throughout the Underground can be leveraged by bring happiness to the Underground.

Happy End. But...What about Mew Mew 2? Alphys believes the central arc of Mew Mew was Mew coming to terms with herself, enjoying the love of her friends and, upon accepting their love, no longer feeling a need to manipulate people with her powers. So, in Mew Mew 2, it seems that Mew Mew would have backtracked. She would have likely used her powers, maybe even abusing her friends.

Source

This is blurry and I had time reading it, but luckily @doge-w-a-bloge​ went through the effort of transcribing it all here.

B4D 0P1N10N A dark Masterpiece!

Mew-Mew Kissy Cutie 2 - DVD Video - 16 hr director commentary - includes 18x4 poster of the creators apologizing From The Original Creators Mew Mew’s Pissed Off And Ready To Mew AVAILABLE ON THE UnderNet [Mew Mew] Should be about whimsy and kindness not edgy self-indulgent garbage. Sometimes there are flashes of the original, but they’re greatly what makes the sequel hurt so much. And God does it hurt so much. -The Anonymous Anime Lizard TESTIMONIALS: My GF really likes the first 1 but I noticed she doesn’t have the sequel. So I just bought six of them 4 her!!! Heck yeah!! Five stars!!! -Strongfish91

Setting aside how hilarious Undyne is for a moment, (I know it’s hard) this gives us insight into Mew Mew 2. It’s apparently a much, much darker story. Alphys takes issue with it because it takes what Mew Mew was about in her eyes and threw it in the trash. Kindness and whimsy, gone. And in its place? A dark, ‘edgy’ story instead. 

Not only that, but if you take the summary as reflective of the game, ‘Mew Mew’s Pissed Off And Ready To Mew,’ it paints our main character as very aggressive. Considering how Alphys says it throws away her character arc, it could be that her learning that she shouldn’t control people was ultimately cast aside in Mew Mew 2, making Mew Mew herself the messenger of the ‘edgy self-indulgent garbage’ that Alphys spends her testimonial decrying.

In a way, it almost mirrors the way that people look at the different runs. Sometimes treating the worst run as an ominous hypothetical that only exists to make a true pacifist ending brighter and happier, sometimes decrying the people who play the worst run as too edgy, masochistic or ignorant of the games’ overall theme and resenting the worst run for existing to blemish their ‘perfect ending.’ 

I bet Chara, Frisk and Asriel would have liked it.

[mealha]

Organize your catastrophic camera roll

Digital photos are free and don't take up any physical space. No wonder most of us are digital hoarders. (Antonio Gravante via Depositphotos/)

Since we started carrying smartphones with decent cameras in our pockets wherever we go, we’ve collectively taken more and more photos. Over the past decade, I’ve shot maybe 50,000 with my iPhones, which makes for a hell of a lot of mediocre pictures—and very few good ones.

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re in a somewhat similar situation: years of shooting smartphone photos have given you an entirely unsorted, multi-thousand-picture camera roll.

Digital photos are wonderful, but there’s no point shooting them if you just leave them sitting on your smartphone, totally ignored. Sure you’ve thought about putting everything in place, but just thinking about diving into those folders most likely scares you. Don’t worry—I’m here to tell you that sorting that photo mess of yours can be done, though it won’t be quick.

Keep or cull

There are two main strategies when it comes to sorting through thousands of photos, depending on how you feel about them: You can either aim to keep the good photos or you can cull the bad ones.

Keeping the good photos is easier and will give you a much smaller library. You’re essentially adopting a “hell yeah” or “nope” approach. Simply work your way through all your photos and pull out the ones you think are objectively great. Anything that doesn’t hit the mark gets deleted.

The problem with only keeping the technically good photos is that you throw a lot of baby pictures out with the bath water. Most people have hundreds or thousands of OK photos that won’t pass the test, but it’s also kind of a shame to lose them because they hold so much sentimental value. They’re the repetitive photos of your dog, sunset snaps, or shots from your trip to London with an ex. You can’t say you love every photo or that you’ll ever print them off, but they’re a record of your life, and maybe you’ll just want to have them in the future.

Culling all the actively bad photos is the better long-term solution. Rather than only keeping great pics, you delete all the bad ones—the random screenshots, the duplicates, all those out-of-focus images, the myriad of terrible selfies, and so on. At a guess, I’d say this kind of photo makes up between 50 to 75 percent of what you have on your camera roll.

By purging all the bad photos, you end up with a functioning photo library. All the images in it are meaningful—even if there are thousands of them. It might not be as good as your grandmother’s perfectly sorted albums, but it’s a workable solution for most people.

Just keep in mind that both of these methods will reduce your photo library considerably, but they won’t solve the overall issue—your photos will still be in a huge, unsorted pile, and, if you keep snapping at the rate you are without making any changes, it’ll all become a mess again in no time.

Gather your photos

The only thing worse than one messy photo library is two messy photo libraries. Most people now really just have one: the collection on their smartphone. However, if you still have some holdover photo library on your PC, an old phone, Facebook, or somewhere else, you should probably sort that at the same time.

Choose what you’re going to use as your master photo collection going forward and add all the unsorted photos from anywhere else to it. Boom—one really huge mess instead of several big ones.

For this, I’d really recommend either Apple’s Photo app (with iCloud Photos) or Google Photos, depending on your platform of choice. They both have web, smartphone, and desktop apps so you can access your images from anywhere (provided you have enough cloud storage, but we’ll get to that). A tool such as Lightroom is great if you’re a professional photographer, but is serious overkill for most people: it’s expensive and won’t play nice with your phone.

Get enough cloud storage

If you want to keep a nurtured collection of graffiti pics, you'll most certainly need a lot of space to store them. (Sandra Gutierrez /)

The year is 2020: flying cars glide through the neon-lit metropolis and no one ever accidentally deletes or loses a photo to a hard drive error...

Okay, we’re still waiting on the flying cars but there is no excuse for accidentally losing all your precious baby photos because you left your smartphone in the seat pocket of an airplane. Google Photos and iCloud Photos (plus Dropbox and a few other apps) can automatically back up your photos to the cloud. This is a big deal.

For years, the hardest part of having a photo library was making sure it was backed up. External hard drives dying and taking entire collections of important images with them was a real problem. I lost hundreds of photos I thought were backed up but actually weren’t.

Unless you shoot RAW photos on a professional camera, the cost of enough cloud storage to protect all your photos is almost nothing. iCloud offers 5GB of free storage space, which is not a lot of space, but charges 99 cents a month for 50GB—enough for about 15,000 photos. For bigger libraries, you’ll need to pony up $2.99 a month for 500GB, which should be enough to handle any photo library. If it can’t, you’re not sorting yours very well.

Google takes a slightly different approach. It won’t cost you anything to back up unlimited “high-quality” photos (marketing speak for images compressed and cropped to 16 megapixels and videos limited to 1080p). If you want to keep your images uncompressed and in their original quality, you’ll get 15GB of free storage and then plans start at $1.99 a month for 100GB. Be warned though: everything you store on Google platforms (Gmail, Google Drive, Google Photos, etc.) uses the same space in the cloud. If you have a lot of files backed up on Google Drive, that means less space for photos, and vice versa.

Also, note that you can use Google’s platform even if you have an iPhone—it’s just not as integrated with the whole Apple ecosystem. If you want those free photo backups, grab Google Photos from the App Store.

If you want to, you can buy an external hard drive for $50, but then you have to back things up manually. And since the whole point here is to sort things out once and for all, it’s better to go with the easy option: put everything in the cloud and treat any monthly fee as insurance against losing any important photos from #WolfpackTrip2K17.

Bring out the big guns

Alright—you’ve got one master library packed with thousands of unsorted photos on your smartphone and on the cloud. Now it’s time to sort things out for real. But first, the bad news: this is going to take time.

Unless you only recently took up photography, your photo library is likely a problem that’s been building for years. This isn’t something you’ll be able to fix in a few minutes. Yes, there are apps out there, like Gemini Photos for iOS, that can help you find duplicate or blurry shots, but if you want to get things done right, you’re going to have to go through your library photo by photo—no AI can yet do the job for you.

But that doesn’t mean you have to do it all by yourself. My favorite tool for the job is Slidebox, which is basically Tinder for your photo library—swipe up to delete an image, left to leave it unsorted, or tap to add it to an album. It’s a lot quicker than using the built-in photo app on iOS or Android when you’re going through a lot of photos.

And even with Slidebox, sorting your whole photo mess will take time. If you review an average of 30 photos a minute, 1,000 photos will take just over half an hour. Depending on the size of your photo library, you’re probably facing at least a few hours culling.

A couple of tips to get it done and not die trying:

<b>Do something else at the same time.</b> Don’t just go through your photo library—throw on a podcast or Netflix in the background. It’ll distract you and you won’t feel like you spent three hours just looking at your phone, though you totally did.

<b>Do it in blocks.</b> Spend 10 minutes every evening going through your photo library. Or snatch two minutes while you’re waiting for a train. Don’t try to do it all in one horrific go. It might take you a few weeks to get through everything, but you’ll finish the job sane.

To tag or not to tag

This would be the physical equivalent of having all your photos sorted and labeled. Isn't it pretty? (Markus Spiske via Unsplash /)

Adding photos to albums, naming all the files better, or adding tags to your images is a suggestion you see in most articles like this one—but I’m against that whole idea. In theory, I love perfectly tagged, album-ized photo libraries because they appeal to the productivity geek in me, but I refuse to believe anyone actually has one.

Photo albums made sense when a roll of film had 36 pictures and had to be developed and stored. It’s easy to go through two or three rolls worth of pictures and sort them, but your iPhone can shoot 36 photos in a couple of seconds. Your crazy-into-photography grandmother might have shot 100 photos just last month, and you probably shoot that at a single event.

Now, it’s ludicrous to suggest that most people sort their photos neatly into albums. If it’s something you want to spend hours doing, absolutely go for it. But for the majority it’s just not a realistic option. (I can’t even keep my professional photos accurately tagged.)

Instead, the better solution is to harshly downsize your photo library to a minimum and let technology do the heavy lifting. If you use an app like Slidebox, create big buckets instead of specific folders—I have one named “Travel and Stupid Stuff,” rather than creating one for every trip—and then use the built-in tools to find photos as you need them.

You want photos from your trip to Miami? Your smartphone geotagged them. What about Christmas a couple of years ago? Sort by date. And all the photos of your kids? Well, Apple and Google are going hard on auto-generated tags and facial recognition technology, so their platforms will automatically sort your photos according to who is in them. The systems aren’t perfect, but they work a lot better than spending months of your life categorizing images into discrete albums.

Build good habits

So you’ve sorted your photo library—you’ve culled a few thousand terrible photos and you’re left with the good stuff. Congratulations. Now, the next step is to not let things get out of hand again.

Apply a principle you were probably told growing up: the more often you tidy a room, the easier it is to tidy. It’s the same with photo libraries. You’re unlikely to stop taking terrible photos and taking screenshots of irrelevant memes, but you can at least get into the habit of purging them more frequently than once a decade.

Once a week or month (depending on how much you shoot) go through your photo library and get rid of anything you know you definitely won’t want in the future. It’ll only take you a few minutes and it’ll keep everything nicely sorted. At least until the big tech companies build an AI that can do it for you. In which case, hello robot overlords!

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[scootoaster]

Organize your catastrophic digital photo library

Digital photos are free and don't take up any physical space. No wonder most of us are digital hoarders. (Antonio Gravante via Depositphotos/)

Since we started carrying smartphones with decent cameras in our pockets wherever we go, we’ve collectively taken more and more photos. Over the past decade, I’ve shot maybe 50,000 with my iPhones, which makes for a hell of a lot of mediocre pictures—and very few good ones.

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re in a somewhat similar situation: years of shooting smartphone photos have given you an entirely unsorted, multi-thousand-picture camera roll.

Digital photos are wonderful, but there’s no point shooting them if you just leave them sitting on your smartphone, totally ignored. Sure you’ve thought about putting everything in place, but just thinking about diving into those folders most likely scares you. Don’t worry—I’m here to tell you that sorting that photo mess of yours can be done, though it won’t be quick.

Keep or cull

There are two main strategies when it comes to sorting through thousands of photos, depending on how you feel about them: You can either aim to keep the good photos or you can cull the bad ones.

Keeping the good photos is easier and will give you a much smaller library. You’re essentially adopting a “hell yeah” or “nope” approach. Simply work your way through all your photos and pull out the ones you think are objectively great. Anything that doesn’t hit the mark gets deleted.

The problem with only keeping the technically good photos is that you throw a lot of baby pictures out with the bath water. Most people have hundreds or thousands of OK photos that won’t pass the test, but it’s also kind of a shame to lose them because they hold so much sentimental value. They’re the repetitive photos of your dog, sunset snaps, or shots from your trip to London with an ex. You can’t say you love every photo or that you’ll ever print them off, but they’re a record of your life, and maybe you’ll just want to have them in the future.

Culling all the actively bad photos is the better long-term solution. Rather than only keeping great pics, you delete all the bad ones—the random screenshots, the duplicates, all those out-of-focus images, the myriad of terrible selfies, and so on. At a guess, I’d say this kind of photo makes up between 50 to 75 percent of what you have on your camera roll.

By purging all the bad photos, you end up with a functioning photo library. All the images in it are meaningful—even if there are thousands of them. It might not be as good as your grandmother’s perfectly sorted albums, but it’s a workable solution for most people.

Just keep in mind that both of these methods will reduce your photo library considerably, but they won’t solve the overall issue—your photos will still be in a huge, unsorted pile, and, if you keep snapping at the rate you are without making any changes, it’ll all become a mess again in no time.

Gather your photos

The only thing worse than one messy photo library is two messy photo libraries. Most people now really just have one: the collection on their smartphone. However, if you still have some holdover photo library on your PC, an old phone, Facebook, or somewhere else, you should probably sort that at the same time.

Choose what you’re going to use as your master photo collection going forward and add all the unsorted photos from anywhere else to it. Boom—one really huge mess instead of several big ones.

For this, I’d really recommend either Apple’s Photo app (with iCloud Photos) or Google Photos, depending on your platform of choice. They both have web, smartphone, and desktop apps so you can access your images from anywhere (provided you have enough cloud storage, but we’ll get to that). A tool such as Lightroom is great if you’re a professional photographer, but is serious overkill for most people: it’s expensive and won’t play nice with your phone.

Get enough cloud storage

If you want to keep a nurtured collection of graffiti pics, you'll most certainly need a lot of space to store them. (Sandra Gutierrez /)

The year is 2020: flying cars glide through the neon-lit metropolis and no one ever accidentally deletes or loses a photo to a hard drive error...

Okay, we’re still waiting on the flying cars but there is no excuse for accidentally losing all your precious baby photos because you left your smartphone in the seat pocket of an airplane. Google Photos and iCloud Photos (plus Dropbox and a few other apps) can automatically back up your photos to the cloud. This is a big deal.

For years, the hardest part of having a photo library was making sure it was backed up. External hard drives dying and taking entire collections of important images with them was a real problem. I lost hundreds of photos I thought were backed up but actually weren’t.

Unless you shoot RAW photos on a professional camera, the cost of enough cloud storage to protect all your photos is almost nothing. iCloud offers 5GB of free storage space, which is not a lot of space, but charges 99 cents a month for 50GB—enough for about 15,000 photos. For bigger libraries, you’ll need to pony up $2.99 a month for 500GB, which should be enough to handle any photo library. If it can’t, you’re not sorting yours very well.

Google takes a slightly different approach. It won’t cost you anything to back up unlimited “high-quality” photos (marketing speak for images compressed and cropped to 16 megapixels and videos limited to 1080p). If you want to keep your images uncompressed and in their original quality, you’ll get 15GB of free storage and then plans start at $1.99 a month for 100GB. Be warned though: everything you store on Google platforms (Gmail, Google Drive, Google Photos, etc.) uses the same space in the cloud. If you have a lot of files backed up on Google Drive, that means less space for photos, and vice versa.

Also, note that you can use Google’s platform even if you have an iPhone—it’s just not as integrated with the whole Apple ecosystem. If you want those free photo backups, grab Google Photos from the App Store.

If you want to, you can buy an external hard drive for $50, but then you have to back things up manually. And since the whole point here is to sort things out once and for all, it’s better to go with the easy option: put everything in the cloud and treat any monthly fee as insurance against losing any important photos from #WolfpackTrip2K17.

Bring out the big guns

Alright—you’ve got one master library packed with thousands of unsorted photos on your smartphone and on the cloud. Now it’s time to sort things out for real. But first, the bad news: this is going to take time.

Unless you only recently took up photography, your photo library is likely a problem that’s been building for years. This isn’t something you’ll be able to fix in a few minutes. Yes, there are apps out there, like Gemini Photos for iOS, that can help you find duplicate or blurry shots, but if you want to get things done right, you’re going to have to go through your library photo by photo—no AI can yet do the job for you.

But that doesn’t mean you have to do it all by yourself. My favorite tool for the job is Slidebox, which is basically Tinder for your photo library—swipe up to delete an image, left to leave it unsorted, or tap to add it to an album. It’s a lot quicker than using the built-in photo app on iOS or Android when you’re going through a lot of photos.

And even with Slidebox, sorting your whole photo mess will take time. If you review an average of 30 photos a minute, 1,000 photos will take just over half an hour. Depending on the size of your photo library, you’re probably facing at least a few hours culling.

A couple of tips to get it done and not die trying:

<b>Do something else at the same time.</b> Don’t just go through your photo library—throw on a podcast or Netflix in the background. It’ll distract you and you won’t feel like you spent three hours just looking at your phone, though you totally did.

<b>Do it in blocks.</b> Spend 10 minutes every evening going through your photo library. Or snatch two minutes while you’re waiting for a train. Don’t try to do it all in one horrific go. It might take you a few weeks to get through everything, but you’ll finish the job sane.

To tag or not to tag

This would be the physical equivalent of having all your photos sorted and labeled. Isn't it pretty? (Markus Spiske via Unsplash /)

Adding photos to albums, naming all the files better, or adding tags to your images is a suggestion you see in most articles like this one—but I’m against that whole idea. In theory, I love perfectly tagged, album-ized photo libraries because they appeal to the productivity geek in me, but I refuse to believe anyone actually has one.

Photo albums made sense when a roll of film had 36 pictures and had to be developed and stored. It’s easy to go through two or three rolls worth of pictures and sort them, but your iPhone can shoot 36 photos in a couple of seconds. Your crazy-into-photography grandmother might have shot 100 photos just last month, and you probably shoot that at a single event.

Now, it’s ludicrous to suggest that most people sort their photos neatly into albums. If it’s something you want to spend hours doing, absolutely go for it. But for the majority it’s just not a realistic option. (I can’t even keep my professional photos accurately tagged.)

Instead, the better solution is to harshly downsize your photo library to a minimum and let technology do the heavy lifting. If you use an app like Slidebox, create big buckets instead of specific folders—I have one named “Travel and Stupid Stuff,” rather than creating one for every trip—and then use the built-in tools to find photos as you need them.

You want photos from your trip to Miami? Your smartphone geotagged them. What about Christmas a couple of years ago? Sort by date. And all the photos of your kids? Well, Apple and Google are going hard on auto-generated tags and facial recognition technology, so their platforms will automatically sort your photos according to who is in them. The systems aren’t perfect, but they work a lot better than spending months of your life categorizing images into discrete albums.

Build good habits

So you’ve sorted your photo library—you’ve culled a few thousand terrible photos and you’re left with the good stuff. Congratulations. Now, the next step is to not let things get out of hand again.

Apply a principle you were probably told growing up: the more often you tidy a room, the easier it is to tidy. It’s the same with photo libraries. You’re unlikely to stop taking terrible photos and taking screenshots of irrelevant memes, but you can at least get into the habit of purging them more frequently than once a decade.

Once a week or month (depending on how much you shoot) go through your photo library and get rid of anything you know you definitely won’t want in the future. It’ll only take you a few minutes and it’ll keep everything nicely sorted. At least until the big tech companies build an AI that can do it for you. In which case, hello robot overlords!