#like ok I get I might not get all of the inputs correctly sure

[woodsie]

God as much as I love space channel 5 I forgot how utterly abysmal the timing for the inputs is

[bearpillowmonster]

So yesterday we had our conference call where the CEO goes live and makes a presentation on the state of affairs and blah blah, here's what happened over the past month. The first thing he talks about is these lessons that we have every week where it's like a positive quote (idk something hr probably thought up) and it was something along the lines of walking in each others shoes. But he goes over that topic and what it means to him then moves on to financials.

All year, we've been under what we've been last year but we were still turning a profit. But for some reason, this month was different, it wasn't a percentage, it was zero. I've felt like this month has been decently productive but they also gauge it as a whole company so I don't know. But he says about how we don't get a holiday bonus this year. Which is apparently a new thing, like this is my first year and I got a bonus last year but we also did record numbers, it was a huge spike from the year before so to keep up with it would've been a tremendous effort on all fronts and even then, it was a phenomenon that was still decided by customer base.

They exclaimed how we didn't do anything wrong but there might be some things we could do to improve it for next year which I thought was an alright way of letting them down, though it seemed weird that it was practically unheard of beforehand. But then he says that we got more of a bonus than we should've last year and then everyone lost it.

These calls are live but there's no engagement, it's this guy telling you this without input, why it's even live I'm not sure. But to poke the bear like that was just stupid. He continues on like normal and then at the end talks about the "difference between thankful and grateful" and basically thankful means that you "say it" and grateful means that you feel it. Or at least, according to him. Why he said this, I'm not too sure, maybe he was just trying to say "be thankful you even have a job." but it's a large disconnect when you preach to be thankful and grateful and to walk in each others shoes when you don't yourself. I mean, we were down from last year but they also turned a huge profit on the side that none of us will ever see a part of because they built their own manufacturing company and then sold it and then continued to sell off all the extra inventory that's been sitting around at a discounted price. THEY made tons, but WE didn't get rewarded. They were well within their power and to say that they didn't make enough money to meet a bonus was crazy.

Today I saw something even more unheard of though. He CHANGED HIS MIND. Yes, you read that correctly. The backlash was so hard, even from the board or whatever that he reversed it and then tried to spin it that they're going to shut down a certain project and then give us money that "isn't considered a bonus" it still goes through taxes and all that and works the same as a bonus but he refused to call it as such. And actually, I think last years was a hundred bucks. Childs play for a great year, I know, but it was ok I guess but he TRIPLED IT. The backlash must've been so hard that he is giving us each 300$. That didn't come without him getting back into the grateful thankful speech like it was some power play to show who's boss or something only then to say "since this is taking out of the (fund) then please consider donating your (bonus) for those in need."

But of course, he's already donated and we'll never see how much and we'll never see proof but he can assure us just like any leader who's house is worth 2 million with 8 bathrooms. (literally, I looked it up) the poor guy. I thought we didn't make money this year? No, you're right, YOU made money this year. Who's to say that fund is even real, I'd like to think but I don't trust corps for any funds or donations. Even if it was real, if most of us were paid what we're worth anyway then we might consider it but a lot of us are relying on this bonus and you just tried to take it away.

[auspicious-voice]

UTAU Tutorials - Inputting Lyrics in a UST

I'm back with another tutorial on how to input lyrics in a UST! This is a continuation of a previous tutorial concerning the creation of MIDIs, so if you haven't checked that out yet, I recommend doing so :D

Inputting lyrics in UTAU takes some time to get used to, but it's a bit straightforward the more you use it. Let's get cracking!

Preparing the MIDI for UTAU

Assuming you still have a MIDI ready for import, importing it to UTAU is rather easy. in the UTAU program, go to File > Import MIDI, and select the MIDI of your choice. You will be met with this menu:

Select the track you want to import, and click OK.

This is an issue specific to UTAU (I don't think this affects OpenUtau), but sometimes the UST with the newly imported MIDI track of your choice will look like this.

I often run into this issue, and the BPM is not set correctly to the one specified in the MIDI. It's set at 50000. Luckily this is an easy fix, as you can click on the BPM field and set it to the appropriate one.

The UST should look like this once you set the BPM correctly. Save the imported UST and name it as the main vocal or harmonies - depending on what data the MIDI has.

Repeat this step for every MIDI track you have until you're done.

Lyric Input

Now here's the bulk of the tutorial: inputting lyrics! All you need for lyric input is the lyrics themselves and the song that will be used as a reference for lyric input. I often have the lyrics of the song I want to make a UST of in romaji for the most part, and I listen to the song so that I know which parts have which lyrics.

UTAU has a lyric input field where you can put in your lyrics. You can copy and paste the lyrics into the field like this:

Keep in mind that when inputting the lyrics into the notes, the lyrics will be pasted according to the syllables, not whole words. So you'd want to format your lyrics like "do re mi fa so ra ti do" instead of "doremifasoratido" for example, with the spaces being used as separators.

Select the part that corresponds to the lyrics, and click on the button next the the Lyric input, which should look like the one below.

Eventually, the UST should look like something similar to this:

Sometimes the lyrics might not fit the notes properly, so be sure to adjust the length of some notes accordingly!

Repeat this process for your remaining vocal tracks until you're done.

And congrats, you're done inputting the lyrics for your UST! We're still not done yet, as we want to begin tuning the UST before distributing it. The basics of tuning will be covered in the next tutorial, and I'll try to finish up the other tutorials as fast as I can. :3c

Thank you for reading, and I hope this tutorial is of good use to you guys!

[firefly464]

The Gilded Cage - Chapter 9

hehe i’m very excited :) also thank you pami for doing write time with me that was super poggers and awesome you’re so cool 

Written in collaboration with @pamiiap​​ :D Thank you @tea-with-veth​ for beta reading, and editing :D

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~~~

Three days. That’s how long Eret stayed with the computer. Three days of nothing but staring at the same screen, desperately trying to test out different commands to see what would work. Three days of sitting in a dark, cold room, with nothing to keep him warm. 

Over the past three days, Eret had barely slept. 

He’d lingered there for hours, the clicking of the keyboard and flashing of the screen filling his senses. All he could think about was this could be his way home. A way to end this and leave it all behind. Maybe he could wake up and it would all be a dream. 

A dream.

Dream.

Dream was his friend. Dream was…

Dream was.

After hours of clawing at the keys for an escape, he hesitated for a moment. He curled his hands into fists and relaxed them, trying to release the tension he had. 

Instead of typing commands, he typed:

Why?

If anyone is reading, send me something

A sign, preferably

Tell me I’m not alone

Give me something

Anything

The shaking in his hands slowed, the edges of his vision melted away. He watched as his world faded into darkness.

~~~

“Hey, chat!” He says, on impulse. “How’s it been? Feels like forever.”

“Sorry for the long hiatus, life’s been throwing curveballs at me.” He continues.

Don’t worry!

You’re fine!

Its okay :D

“I hope you guys have been alright. Don’t know what we’ll be doing with this stream so I’m going to start a little poll in the chat here…”

Time melts away as he talks to his stream, he knows that. That’s how streams usually go. It happens in a blur, the eyes of thousands of people aren’t on him anymore. The stream has ended.

He falls into nothingness.

~~~

Journal Entry #1

I found the Console, still can’t get back home yet though. I’m still unsure on how it works, but I know, I know, that I can get home. It’s kind of like a command block, you can input code but it needs some sort of activation key to trigger it. Haven’t found that yet.

I’ll update this as I find more information.

Journal Entry #2

Text commands seem to work, more extreme commands need the trigger. I really should make some sort of command list, that might help. 

Journal Entry #3

I’ve made a list on a separate paper. I’m running out of space.

Journal Entry #6

What could the trigger be? I need to find it.

Journal Entry #8

I haven’t slept in three days. I need to head back.

Journal Entry #9

Nothing new as of the moment. I’m going to start working on a trigger to activate this thing.

Journal Entry #10

I wonder if I could undo whatever Dream did to everyone’s memories? I wonder if I could make it so that they didn’t hate me anymore. 

Journal Entry #13

I can’t sleep. 

Journal Entry #15

Going home back again. Bad’ll still have muffins, I hope. (If George didn’t eat them already)

Journal Entry #16

George ate my muffins. Prick >:(

Journal Entry #17

Packing for another trip to the Console today. Bad made extra muffins to compensate for the atrocity that happened yesterday. (Sidenote: George had his muffin privileges removed for a day)

Journal Entry #20

Bad’s worried. I wouldn’t blame him. I don’t think I can blame myself either. I have to get home.

Journal Entry #24

I’m here. Glad no-one’s tampered with my list. I’ve been gathering some redstone supplies to try and make a prototype trigger.

Journal Entry #27

I’ve tried several combinations of levers and buttons and redstone but nothing seems to activate it. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.

Journal Entry #28

Nothing’s working.

Journal Entry #30

Can’t sleep again.

Journal Entry #32

I don’t think I’ve eaten. 

Journal Entry #33

I have to go ho back. I need to be more careful, George and Bad are getting worried. I don’t want them to be worried about me. They don’t even know me.

Journal Entry #34

Do I even know them?

Journal Entry #37

I won’t go to the Console for a couple of days. That might calm them down.

The weather’s getting warmer actually. I think spring might be almost here. Not sure if seasons might not work the same.

Journal Entry #38

George says it’s already mid-spring. I didn’t realize I’d been here for so long

Journal Entry #???

I want to go home. 

~~~

Eret closed the small book with a sigh. Ever since he had found the console several months ago, he had tried to do his best to keep a record of what he found. 

However, the journal had quickly turned into a place for him to pour his emotions, rather than document his findings. All of his actual records were with the console itself, where he could better keep track of them. 

He placed the small book in his bag, before swinging it over his shoulders. He needed to go back. Even if everything about the small, dark room made him want to scream, it was his only hope. His only way of potentially returning home. 

Gently, he pushed back the small curtain that separated his room from the rest of the community house. Even after several months of staying here, he still hadn’t bothered to make an actual room. After all, it wasn’t like he had a ton of free time. 

Almost all of his time was spent either at the console, or digging out tunnels underneath L’manberg. God, he hated those tunnels. 

As he gently stepped out into the main room, he quickly glanced around, checking to see if the coast was clear. 

It wasn’t as if he didn’t trust Bad or George, in fact it was quite the opposite. He just… He hated making them worry. He knew how much his frequent visits bothered both of them, and so lately he had begun trying to quietly slip away. 

He was almost at the front door of the community house, when a voice called out to him. 

“Eret?”

He froze. 

Shit. 

Maybe, if he kept walking, whoever it was would just… let him go. Maybe he could pretend like he didn’t hear them, and he could just move on with his day. He closed his eyes tightly, trying to figure out the best course of action. 

“Eret? Are you alright?” 

Fuck. 

He slowly turned around, trying his best not to grimace when he saw Bad standing at one of the other doors. 

“Hey…” The word sounded forced, even to him. “Uh, I was just… um…” 

Bad’s face fell ever so slightly as he noticed the small bag slung across Eret’s back. 

“Are you going to the forest again?” Eret tried his best to ignore the way that Bad’s voice was tinged with a slight disappointment. It would only make him feel guilty. 

“Uh, yeah…” 

“Were you just going to leave again? Without telling anyone?” Although there was no accusation in his tone, the words still cut deep, acting as a harsh reminder of his own actions. 

He shifted his weight from foot to foot, trying to dispel some of the nervous energy that was swirling around him. “I didn’t want to worry you guys anymore… I left a note upstairs though, I swear!” 

That was a lie. There was no note, there never was a note. But if claiming that there was helped to ease Bad’s worries, then that was what he was going to do. 

He could tell that Bad didn’t believe him. Although his friend would never actually call him out on it, he could still tell from the way his shoulders slumped ever so slightly, or the small frown that crossed his face. 

“Ok… Well, before you head out again, me and George were hoping to give you something,” Bad’s voice was filled with a forced cheerfulness, complete with a matching smile. 

Eret’s head shot up in disbelief. What on earth did they possibly have to give him? They had already done so much to help him, what more could there possibly be? 

Tendrils of guilt began to worm their way through Eret’s mind, reminding him of all the ways his friends had helped him over the past months, and all the ways he had failed to return their kindness. How was he supposed to accept yet another gift? 

“I really don’t need anything, you guys have already done enough for me,” he protested, knowing full well that nothing he could say would actually dissuade Bad. 

“Nonsense, this is something that we wanted to do for you. Hold on, I’ll go get George. Don’t go anywhere!” he cried out, already rushing out of the building. 

Eret let out a long sigh at the final sentence. Of course Bad didn’t trust him to not run off. 

Why would he?

~~~

Despite every instinct in his body that was telling him to run, Eret found himself rooted to the spot where he stood. When Bad returned nearly 10 minutes later with George behind him, he had hardly moved. 

“So… What exactly is going on?” Even to his own ears, his voice sounded forced and strained. 

“Well, George and I were talking,” Bad started, already rummaging through one of the many chests that lined the walls, “and we realized that you’re going to be king soon, right?” 

Eret couldn’t help but flinch at the reminder. To him, the title of king was nothing more than a reminder of what he had lost. A reminder of the pain he had caused for his friends. A reminder of the pain that he would continue to cause. 

But still, he couldn’t let his own reluctance show. If he remembered correctly, becoming king had meant a lot to his alter-ego. Hell, he had gone so far as to betray his friends, just so that he could secure the crown. 

And so he forced a smile onto his face, doing his best to swallow the bitter taste in his mouth. “I mean, yeah. I’m pretty sure it’s not going to happen for a while, but… yeah that was the idea. Why?” 

Bad’s grin grew wider, his face alight with barely contained excitement as he continued searching through different chests. Even George, who rarely showed any outward excitement around Eret, had a small smile on his face. 

“You’ll see, it’s a surprise. I just gotta find it first” 

“I uh, I think it's hanging up downstairs,” George interjected, already moving towards the stairs, “I can go grab it, hold on.” 

He was gone only for a few moments before he emerged at the top of the staircase, holding something behind his back, hidden from Eret’s line of sight. “Do you wanna explain what it is?” He asked, his question clearly directed at Bad. 

Bad nodded, then turned back to Eret, pride showing in his eyes. “Well, we wanted to get you something nice for your coronation. I know it probably isn’t going to be for a while, but you’ve seemed really stressed lately, and we wanted to do something nice for you!” 

George grinned, revealing a long, extravagant coat from behind his back. “Sapnap and Punz helped out with collecting dyes as well.” 

The silk coat was a deep shade of crimson, embellished with gold accents. It felt nice to touch but it was also durable. The inside of the coat was lined with an insulating fur that pokes over the collar, making the inside of it warm. 

He glanced up at both George and Bad, his brow furrowed in slight confusion. “Wait… Wait is this… What?” 

“It’s a coat! I know it gets cold at night so we made you this. Not to mention, a king should look the part.”

Tears started to form in his eyes, threatening to spill over as he gently took the coat. “Thank you” He forced out, unsure of what else he was supposed to say. 

“Go on then,” George said. “Put it on!”

Slowly, he took off the tattered L’manburg uniform, bloodied and stained with dirt, and put on the new coat. It felt… different. But, a good different. 

“Thank you.”

~~~

Several days had passed since Eret had last left the community house. Several days since George and Bad had gifted him the red coat. 

George could tell that their friend's absence was starting to chip away at Bad, his worry festering underneath his skin. By the third day, George had had enough. 

He quickly packed two bags, complete with everything that they would need for a long journey. He might not have known where exactly their friend had gone, but they knew the general direction. That would have to be enough. 

“Hey Bad!” He called out, his friend quickly coming down the stairs of the community house. 

“Whats up?” 

“Come on, we’re gonna go look for him.” 

~~~

Neither of them had any idea what they were looking for, all they knew was that it was somewhere in the eastern dark oak forest. They had spent nearly a week searching every nook and cranny of the woods, never finding any trace of their friend. 

That is, until they stumbled across a pathway. The dirt had been worn down, leaving a trail that they could follow.

The path had led to a small clearing, with a dark building in the center. 

Both George and Bad had recognized the strange material almost instantly. Bedrock. Eret had somehow found a building made of bedrock.

What the hell. 

The area surrounding the building was devoid of any human life, the only exception being a lone horse that was sleeping in the warm sun. 

“Well, I think we found him…” Bad’s voice was filled with concern. 

As they stepped into the strange building, they saw the room completely empty except for a machine in the middle. And unconscious at the desk, was…

“Eret?!”

~~~

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Taglist :D (feel free to send me an ask if you wanna be added) @hismilw @violet--majesty @chiera99 @koi-boye @waffle-time-god @miss-oleum @porkgavo @crafted-dreams​ @harley-the-pancake​ @lemonaid-ruru  @g3rmpy​​ @somethingtocrowabout  @bee-tubbo​​ @firepowder​​ @jayebird ​ @rayjayo  @carry-on-my-wayward-why​ ​ @echo-delta​ ​ @star-fruit23 ​ @brieflyburningbaguette 

[maleksrami]

gif tutorial ✨🎥

I got a few requests to make a gif tutorial so here it is. hope it helps :) It’s quite long so I’ll put it all under a read more. If you have any questions, feel free to ask or PM me directly for help!

Alright....sooo, I don’t remember the last time I made a gif tutorial on this site, but I figured I would even though I use the same method a lot of gif makers have been using for years. I have never strayed from this process and I’ve been making gifs on this site for a decade. 

There are a couple methods to making gifs. You can import your video directly into photoshop and cut your gif there. OR you can use a separate video player that has a screencapping tool, then import all your frames into photoshop; this is the method I use and it’s how I’ve adapted and perfected my giffing skills over time. 

This post will be long, but I want to be as detailed as I can and explain it step by step. It’s really NOT difficult once you get the hang of it, which is probably why I’ve always done it this way. 

Disclaimer: There are three programs I use and I highly suggest you look for reliable links yourself if I’m not able to provide one. I use pretty old versions of KMPlayer and Photoshop (I’ll explain why later), so be careful where you go looking for downloads. There are some photoshop downloads here, but I can’t vouch for them.

Let’s start :)

DOWNLOADING VIDEOS

I use a program called 4k Video Downloader��to rip HD videos from Youtube. 1080p is the way to go, but obviously that’s not always possible. It’s ridiculously easy, all you do is click the “Paste Link” button and it’ll download your video. Clicking the “Smart Mode” button will let you set the default quality and the folder you want all your videos to be saved to. 

As you can see, here are all the videos I’ve downloaded recently for my gif posts. You can clear this download history list at any time.

SCREENCAPPING 

After your video is done downloading, I open the video in KMPlayer. Now, I use an OLD version of this program because this was exactly how I learned to do this back in the day. You can find old versions online, I don’t really know exactly which version mine is because I’ve had it forever, but it’s the old school one that looks like this.

When you open the video, it might stretch the player to full screen so I always adjust it by dragging the corner of the player inward so it shrinks to a more medium size. This will also make your screencaps not so GIANT, which will take longer to load into photoshop. 

Anyways, you’re gonna open your video and right click anywhere on the video to select Capture > Frame Extract... (or Ctrl+G on Windows). This window will come up. Make sure all your settings look like this to ensure a really smooth gif.

The first thing you should do is click that little “G” button next to the window size at the bottom. That’ll lock in the dimensions of however big you’ve made your video window, and if you stretch it you’ll see these numbers change. If you start capping without remembering to push that and you make your window smaller/bigger, your caps might be a wacky size or look stretched and you’ll have to go back and do it again. Also note the extracting location at the top. All your caps will go directly to a default folder titled “Capture”.

Once all the settings are ready, go to your desired section of the video, pause it, and hit “Start”. Play the video, pause the video when you’ve got all your caps, then hit “Stop”.

Locate your “Capture” folder and doublecheck you got all the caps you want. This is where I take a moment to delete any caps I don’t want in my gif, that way you don’t bother loading them into photoshop and making it take longer than it needs to. 

MAKING THE GIF

You’re gonna open whatever version of Photoshop you’re using. I hilariously still use CS3 to make gifs because the next script I’m gonna run doesn’t work in the free download that I have of CS5, but that’s what you get sometimes when you don’t pay for stuff. Hopefully whatever more recent version of PS you use, you have no problems.

Go to File > Scripts > Load Files Into Stack...

This window will come up. 

Hit “Browse” and locate your capture folder. Highlight all your caps and press OK. You’ll see them all come up in a list as shown above. Press OK again. Your caps will start to load into one big stack of layers. This will take a minute or so.

When it’s all loaded in, you’ll see them all stacked in your Layers window (Windows > Layers). You’re gonna open your animations timeline (Windows > Animation) and click the little drop down button in the top right corner of the window and select “Make Frames From Layers”. 

Click that drop down menu again and hit “Reverse Frames”. Click that drop down menu again and hit “Flatten Frames Into Layers” (this is so our sharpening action will work later). Click the drop down menu again and select “Select All Frames”. All your frames will be highlighted. This is where you’ll set your animation speed. Under each frame you’ll see “0 sec.” Click on that and select “Other”. Type in your desired speed. I usually go for 0.04 if it has a lot of frames. For less frames, 0.05 or 0.06. This is honestly entirely up to your preference. I actually made myself a photoshop action doing all these repetitive steps so it saves me a few precious long seconds of clicking around over and over. I just run the action after my caps are loaded. If you make gifs a lot, I recommend it.

Next it cropping. The reason I don’t crop right away after the files are loaded into a stack is because I like to see where the subject in the gif moves before I decide where I need to crop. I don’t want to accidentally cut anything off. The subject might sway in and out of frame or be off center if I crop it blindly before seeing exactly where the object moves around. So I’ll play the gif first to see exactly where to crop.

Anyways, you’re gonna set your desired width x height of your gif. I’m making this a big gif so you can see the details better. 540 px is Tumblr’s width for big horizontal gifs. If you’re making a photoset with two gifs side by side the width for Tumblr is 268 px.

Go ahead and crop your gif. It’ll resize itself as well. Play the gif back so you can see if anything gets cut off or it’s not where you want it. You can undo the crop and do it again until you’re satisfied.

Here is what my gif looks like animated and cropped. 

As you can see, it plays nice and smoothly due to our screencap settings from before in KMPlayer and with our set gif speed (I used 0.05 here).

Next is sharpening the gif. I use a sharpening action that can quickly sharpen up to 120 frames. You can download it here. Open the action by going to File > Open and locating the file. It’ll be added to your Actions window. (Window > Actions if you can’t see it.) In order for it to run correctly, you have to have the first frame selected on your animation window, as well as “Frame 1″ in the layers window. Just like this:

Click the play button on the action and wait a few seconds for all the gifs to finish being sharpened. For any gif with less than 120 frames (which I hope is always, good God) a pop-up will come up when it reaches the end of the frames asking you if you want to stop.  Click “Stop”. 

Tip: If you think you want to delete more frames, run the sharpening action before you do it. Otherwise you’ll have to flatten your frames into layers again. The first frame and the “Frame 1″ layer should always be the same (the little eye will appear to the left of the layer to let you know it’s visible when you have that specific frame selected) otherwise the action won’t work. 

Here is what my gif looks like now that it’s sharpened.

COLORING THE GIF

This is where all the fun (or pain) comes in. All your coloring will be done by using Adjustment Layers (Layers > New Adjustment Layer). I usually go in the same order of adjustments, but this is where personal style comes in and you do no have to do it in the same order I do. You can practice with this part all you want and see how you like to do it.

I start with brightening the gif first and fixing the white balance if a scene needs it. I chose this video specifically so you could see this next handy trick that a lot of people don’t even know about. It’s a dark scene and the white balance makes the subject look quite blue. 

I can fix this by starting with a Curves layer. By clicking the third eyedropper tool, you can go and click on a white point in your gif (in this case, I clicked on a white square on his shirt) and bumped up the input number a bit for a little contrast (optional). My curves look like this. Click OK.

My gif now looks like this.

It’s much better, right? The white eyedropper tool will become a lifesaver sometimes, but it’s not always needed. 

Next, I go in with a Levels adjustment to do some more brightening. This is all up to preference, but you can play around with this. I typically like to add more contrast with this layer. I just adjust the sliders until I’m satisfied.

Here is my gif now.

Onto yet another brightening layer. Brightness/Contrast. A couple teeny tiny more positive numbers and I now have this.

Next is Selective Color. I wish I could explain this in a way that makes sense, but this is the layer that takes a bit of practice getting down and boils down to how you like the colors in your gif to look. I personally don’t like a lot of yellow in mine, so I focus a lot on the Yellow and Black sliders in each specific tab. I start in the Reds, then Yellows, Whites, Neutrals, then bump up the Blacks a tiny bit.

Here is my gif now. It’s a bit more cool toned, which is what I like.

Next I’ll go in with a Color Balance layer and play with the Midtones and Shadows. 

Here it is now.

This is usually my last step unless I want to adjust the brightness again (which I do), so I might go back into my Curves and Levels layers to bump it up.

And you can totally stop there, but I would like to mention a few more optional layers to add depending on your gif. If I wanted more saturation, I would add a Hue/Saturation layer at this point, but I think it’s colorful enough so I’m not going to.

Another layer you can use is Gradient Maps. 

Setting a black and white gradient map overtop your gif and setting the layer to Soft Light and lowering the opacity to your heart’s desire (you might need to go to the little drop down menu in your animation timeline and hit “Match Layers Across Frames”) can give your gif a very contrast-y look like this.

Or you can change the black color to something else for a different tone, like a dark blue.

Here is my final gif. 

If you want to add a caption to your gif, you can do so with your font of choice (Arial and Calibri are good) and add Stroke or a Drop Shadow to it by going to Layer > Layer Style. You can make sure the text is perfectly centered by clicking on your top frame layer under all your coloring adjustments, hitting Select > All, then clicking your text layer again and going to Layer > Align Layers To Selection > Horizontal Centers. Then hit Select > Deselect and go to your little drop down menu in your animation timeline and click “Match Layers Across Frames”.

Here is what it looks like with a caption.

SAVING YOUR GIF

Go to File > Save for Web & Devices...

A big window will come up where you can preview your finished gif by pressing the play button on the right hand side. In the bottom left corner will tell you what size your gif is. Tumblr’s gif limit is a whopping 10 MB, so we’re good. 

Your gif settings should look something like this. 

We always want to keep all colors at 256 (the highest). Lowering this number will make our gif file size smaller, but also decrease the quality of the gif itself. If your file size is more than 10 MB, I recommend going back and deleting some frames or making some more curve adjustments. Some users also like to set their gif to “Adaptive” instead of “Selective”. This is up to you.

Click Save and you’re done!

[witchcraftingboop]

Re: Jbird & RainS. (Briar) Discourse

Previously, I have spoken with the person who made very serious allegations against JBird, calling him a racist, that were then used by others to spread slander against him. They have since apologized and admitted that JBird isn't a racist, and I genuinely think there was a stark miscommunication that went on to prompt such a claim. I don't want to name them or involve them here, since I do believe they've already reflected enough on the situation at hand, and is still deeply considering the multi-faceted hornet's nest of problems they've stumbled upon.

However, in light of the blatant dismissal and refusal to submit actual proof against the two, I feel as if I should share the information I offered this person before.

If you are basing your arguments against Jbird and Briar off of the previous, separate Discord group discussions of Trio & co. - screenshots of which have been, and continue to be spread years later, by Prim - then I especially implore you to be open to what I have to say. As a third party to this continually and rapidly spiralling debacle, I feel like there's not much I can say or do to assist my friends in being heard, but I feel as if I ought to try. Prim's following is large and actively prepared to follow her "do not interact even to ask questions" policy, so I worry it may be too late already. But I am not without hope or faith.

Tumblr is, unfortunately, a place where hate spreads rapidly, and while I do love the broad community it fosters, I am also aware that, even with the best of folks, it is hard to see the side of someone you've already decided is guilty and not worth approaching for an explanation.

First and foremost, I believe in innocence until proven guilty.

Now then! Onto my offered commentary/input! (Sorry to prattle on so much.)

To start, thedesertgod, also known as Trio, did go through and look for her personal information, which is messed up. But that person has already apologized, if I'm remembering correctly, and left Tumblr. And the other main user who helped spread information about Prim being a race faker also admitted wrong and left. The others in the chat, particularly Mystic and Ronan appear to just be making jokes and stating factual informative summaries, respectively. E-muete also said "ok no" after the Dolezal comment, which is a common "no that's too far a comparison/joke/statement" substitute among their forums and chats and often means they don't actually agree with what they themselves said. Ruby also politely reminds Trio that it's impossible to tell someone's race off of their appearance alone. So what I see here is definitely problematic, but entirely on Trio's part. I'm not saying it's not screwed up to find pictures of someone's parents and debate their race, but the persons who did those things have already left the Tumblrsphere.

Unfortunately, the people you've pointed out don't have a good history with Prim even before the whole "Trio nitpicking her race" thing. Prim used to follow more than a few of them and use their posts to fuel her platform, oftentimes creating uninformed mish-mosh articles with a voice of authority that simply wasn't warranted. As I'm sure you're aware, it's hard enough dealing with people stealing your content word for word, but to attempt to steal your knowledge? Your initiations and rites of passage? And use them to sell yourself as a master of a breadth of practices? The tradcrafters of that particular circle decided to band together and block her from interacting with them directly for that very reason. And because of that, Prim started telling her followers that they are all racist and elitist and ableist and gatekeepers. These terms over the years have become almost like triggers in that once they're said, everyone seems to put on a blindfold and fall into a frenzied rage. And to be fair, Prim is far too quick, in my opinion, to bring up racism as the reason others disagree with her. Most times, I've noticed at least, that if she calls someone racist or says they're unsupportive of POC, she nearly immediately brings up BLM activism in her posts or reblogs. I'm not saying I necessarily support calling all of her activistic inclinations performative, but where the tradcradt group she calls racist is more than willing to talk of and show proof of their contribution, Prim never has and avoids it if asked. I can see both sides, really. But the fact remains that calling someone performative in their actions, does not a racist make. Neither, in my opinion, does interacting with people who are assumed (without real and concrete proof) to be racist.

I can appreciate where you're coming from; honestly, I can. People have grown accustomed to hearing the prefix trad- and preparing for the worst. Racism is a systematic and prevailing problem in the society all around us, so it makes sense to be on the lookout for it. You want to protect yourself and your community. I can understand your sentiments perfectly. But I cannot support "guilty by association" viewpoints. As a WOC who grew up in some rough areas, I have seen boys killed under that very same reasoning. Jbird is a good friend of mine, and I have never questioned his morals or ethics. I have seen no sign of my being looked down upon for the color of my skin, nor anyone else who runs in that very same circle.

What I see is what I see in a lot of faces on this hellsite: hurt. Before Trio and after Trio left, the tradcraft community has been slandered and ostracized. They have shut themselves off to outsiders for the very thing you've done to Jbird just yesterday. They hold their secrets closer than most other communities now because persecution is seemingly forever at their door. On Prim's end too, there has been struggle and pain and needless arguing and hurt. If those you approach seem prickly, it is often because the world has roughened their edges, not because they personally are against you.

I asked for a couple examples from the group and one person (I'll keep them anonymous because I didn't confirm they'd like their name here) said: she has talked about saint magic (trio), hadean pamphlet (trio), hubris (Ruby), fairies, trad craft shit (Mahigan among others), etc etc

From what I personally have seen, her most recent was the Witch Fire podcast. A few tradcraft blogs had a debate/discussion about Witch Fire and its traditional eurocentric foundations in witchcraft not that long ago, and then Prim decided to put out a podcast that was so uninformed, I'm still worried about how younger or newer witches might be hurt by it.

Unfortunately the tradcraft community is vulnerable to that kind of thing [being called names or falsely accused] and an easy target. That's why being called those kind of harsh words - like gatekeeping, elitist, racist, and ableist - are met with so much anger from them. I take it very seriously because I've seen the kind of whiplash it has, especially on such a closed off group.

[A Reply.] Yeah no, Prim "apologizes" by talking about how she's been previously given a hard time with interjections of "but please don't go around spreading hate" and never directly apologizes to the tradcrafter in such posts. Unfortunately, her "apology" did more harm than good. I was hoping she'd just ignore it but . . . This tends to happen too 🤦‍♀️

I think that if both sides were able to approach it as openmindedly as you have, there would be a lot less drama and in-fighting on this app 😩 I really did enjoy talking with you though!

That just about covers everything I'd like to say on the matter.

I do not condone spreading hate, just as I don't condone misinformation or blind allegiance to what one person says. So if you can respectfully and openmindedly address your questions/comments/concerns, I don't see why you can't interact with Briar, Jbird, or myself. I understand it's easy to get caught up in the first perspective you're given, but it is my hope that Witchblr as a whole can be more open to hearing both sides of the story. Blindly blocking and cancelling certain bloggers is something I don't support nor encourage. I understand Prim must be tired of addressing all of the drama that churns around her, so I won't speak as to what her reasoning could be for suggesting such a solution. I'm simply stating what I hope for the community as a whole.

| | Note: The statements above were written early (I think, my sense of time is off) yesterday, and as of yet, I have still seen no concrete evidence that Briar or Jbird have ever made racist comments. On Briar's part, I have seen her observation that activism on a performative platform such as Tumblr can come off as performative, but she never once said she doesn't know or see why Prim would support and promote BLM activism. Something I think was misconstrued and lumped all together to sound as if she thought Prim were faking her contributions altogether. | |

[daeyeolss]

how I make my gifs: a tutorial

Hi everyone! Just in case someone asks in the future + for those curious, I'm here with a tutorial on how I make gifs! If you have any questions whatsoever, please do send me an ask! I’ll be glad to help! The gif I made with this tutorial is the one right here! 

So... let’s start this tutorial with the programs I use.

Adobe Photoshop 2020 - To make the gifs, majority of the work is done in this program.

TopazLabs (Topaz DeNoise 6 and Topaz Clean 3) - To "denoise" and "clean" the gifs, as the names would suggest. Links for download: Topaz DeNoise 6 & Topaz Clean 3

KMPlayer (an alternative would be PotPlayer, or any other video playing program that allows you to capture the frames) - To capture the frames. - I use an older version of KMPlayer, though I don't know which exact version that is.

Now let’s continue onto how I use these programs to create gifs!

Step 1: After you’ve downloaded the necessary programs, download your video. The way to get the best gifs? Quality videos. That’s the first step. For K-pop performances, I recommend this website (the hq files are in .ts form, KMPlayer should be able to open these). Bookmark it! It’s really handy :) Get the video you want to make a gif from and open it in KMPlayer (or PotPlayer or any other program, but for this tutorial I’ll use KMPlayer). Open your video in said program and look for the part you want to make a gif of. Then press CTRL+G (I apologize because I cannot for the life of me remember if this was a standard shortcut or not)

Step 2: After pressing CTRL+G, you’ll be met with this screen:

I’ll briefly explain the numbered parts, but before that, these are my standard settings and just make sure you have them all the same and it should be good!

1: This is where your captured frames will be extracted to. I have them extracted to the standard folder, but you can change this if you want to. You’ll need this folder later when opening the frames!

2: Like it says, this is the image format. I use PNG in the highest quality, as the name would suggest, for the quality.

3: These are the amount of frames the program captures. Say you put in every 2 or 4 frames, you’ll get more choppy gifs. To get the smoothest gifs, put “every frame” (this in turn will increase the gif size as the amount of frames will obviously be bigger).

Once you’ve put in the correct settings and you’ve put the slider where you want the capturing process to start, press “start” (now, before you do this I recommend putting the video on mute as the audio will start to get kinda demon-y the longer you record lol save your ears pls). Then, when you’ve captured all the frames you need, pause the video, press CTRL+G again and click “stop” and close the pop-up/program.

Step 3: It’s time to open up Photoshop! Then go to File > Scripts > Load Files into Stack... (for older versions/another version I used in the past this one didn’t work and I had to use the “Load Multiple DICOM Files...” instead. It should work similarly though, if I remember correctly).

You then get a little pop-up that looks like this:

All you have to do here is click “browse” and navigate to the folder where your captured frames have been saved in. Select all the frames you need, wait for them to load in and then click “OK”!

Step 4: Depending on the amount of frames you’ve selected to load in, as well as the beefiness of your PC/laptop, the frames loading part might take a little while. Photoshop is importing every frame as a separate layer into one file, so just... grab a drink or something and wait a bit! When you’re done waiting, if you haven’t already, go to Window > Timeline. This will show you the animation timeline. For older Photoshop versions this is slightly different (I believe it’s called animation). Then click “Create Video Timeline” and click the 3 squares on the left bottom side (in older versions it’s on the right bottom side, not sure). 

Step 5: After you’ve done all that, you’ll want to select all your layers. You can do this by pressing ALT+CTRL+A or going to Select > All Layers. With all the layers selected, you have to go to Layer > Arrange > Reverse. You only have to do this if you used the “Load Files into Stack” option!

Step 6: After reversing all your layers, you’ll want to go to the three lines you see in the following screenshot, and click “Make Frames From Layers”.

As the name suggests, this turns all the layers into frames. I don’t know why but the first frame will always be 5 seconds long, so to make it easy on yourself when you want to check your gif while editing, just put that on 0 for now. You can do that by clicking the seconds under the frame and clicking “No delay”. After this, check to see if you have the right frames and if you need to delete some (you can do this at any point in the process but I didn’t know where to put it in the tutorial oops).

Step 7: Time to crop the gif to the correct size! For this gif I’m using as an example, I’m making it specifically for Twitter, so the sizes aren’t that obvious (for Twitter I usually use a width of 850 px to keep it sharp, for long size gifs (more height than width for example), I add a background so that it eventually still becomes 850x850 pixels). There’s many posts on Tumblr about the correct sizes for gif/photosets, but a brief rundown of my most used sizes: one gif spanning the entire width of the post has to be 540 px in width. Two gifs next to one another need to have a width of 268 px. I use these dimensions the most! For others, you can Google! 

Step 8: After you’ve cropped the gif, you can do either of two things: either you first add the coloring of your choice and then sharpen the gif OR you do it the other way around. I usually switch these two around depending on how sharp the gif already looks before sharpening because I can’t stand looking at 2 pixels while coloring (lmao). For this one I’ll do the sharpening first.

The whole sharpening process is actually quite simple but you need to make sure that you do the following little steps in the right order or else it won’t work! Select all the layers (CTRL+ALT+A or Select > All Layers) and then click this little thingy:

Then you’re going to Filter > Convert for Smart Filters

If you don’t do it in this order, your gif will end up... well, not being a gif and not moving. If that happens, track back in your history to see if you did it in the correct order! :)

Step 9: The actual sharpening process! After clicking the “Convert for Smart Filters”, you’ll want to go to Filter again and find the Topaz Labs tabs. Personally, I usually do it in the order of DeNoise first and then Clean, but this is a personal thing, really.

I recommend playing around with the settings to see what fits the gif but here are my go-to DeNoise settings (tip: save these as a preset so you only have to click that for faster giffing!):

And my Clean settings:

Press OK when you’re done with these and then go to Filter > Sharpen > Smart Sharpen. These are my SS settings (just copy these, and again, save as a preset!):

Depending on how sharp you want the gif to be, you can input the same settings or go to this in the layers and change the percentage.

Now that we’re done with these... it’s time to flatten it! Just follow these little steps:

And then you wait. Again. I know.

Step 10: After playing the waiting game, you’ll click the three little squares again and do the same thing you did earlier: “Make Frames Into Layers”. Delete the first frame. Add a coloring of your choice (can be a PSD, can be your own coloring, etc. this is honestly just... playing around with things and see what it can do). After you’ve done coloring, select all your frames (same lines as previous screenshot except now you’ll see a “Select All Frames” option, click it!) and change the time to whatever you like (I usually go for 0.05, 0.06, or 0.07. Again, just play around with this!! Try different things!) 

Step 11: Final step! Saving :) I use shortcuts a lot to make things faster so either press ALT+SHIFT+CTRL+S or go to File > Export > Save For Web. Not much to do here, just copy the following settings and save the file!

!!! NOTE: After making a new gif today I realized there’s a weird dotted border on the top of my gifs, it’s a bit difficult to explain but I had no idea what it was. Turns out that the reason why this showed up was because, as shown in the screenshot below, I had “Transparency” selected. If you’re experiencing this too, UNSELECT the transparency and it should be all good!

Also make sure that the “Looping Options” is set to Forever, or else your gif will play only once and then stop!

Tip: While making gifs for Twitter I at one point noticed that if I added in a white background, no matter what I’d do, it’d show up as yellow-y in the preview box. After googling I found that going to the options (1 in the screenshot) and then clicking “Sort by Luminance”, then double-clicking the lightest color (not the transparent one, 2 in the screenshot) and selecting white (or FFF) will get rid of this! This likely won’t be that useful for Tumblr gifs but just in case you ever want to have a white background...!

Then just... save, and upload to Tumblr! :)

Final note: Tumblr has a mix gif size of 3MB. If you have a gifset of 4 gifs you want to upload, all 4 gifs can be max 3MB each. Keep this in mind! If you’re over 3MB, delete a few frames and try again, or resize/crop your gif!

As it turns out, Tumblr has increased their gif size to 8MB, however, the quality tends to get compressed with larger gifs like that so per recommendation: keep them below 5MB! (thank you @yeoli​ for letting me know!)

I hope this helped! If you have any questions, feel free to send me a message and I’ll try my best to answer them.

[normal-thoughts-official]

ok im loving autistic maia/maiaphael but friendship ended with autistic/adhd solidarity malec. my new best friend is autistic/adhd solidarity magnus&maia brotp!! possible thots: no idea how this go, but something (a spell to breathe underwater? a charm to help selkies? a special ocean potion ingredient?) magnus is hyperfixating on overlaps w maias special interest marine biology & just them in a booth in takis or hunters moon very passionately talking back and forth & sharing their interests 🥺

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! oh my god okay but the spell to breathe/be able to see underwater maia would be ALL about that shit. there’s probably even a spell to make sure they don’t get wet like if they are uncomfortable with it sensorially lmao but anyway the point is, maia would basically be able to go swimming and see everything she fucking wants without having to worry about a thing!! especially since if i remember correctly she was kinda scared of going into the sea (she mentioned that “if i’m very adventurous, i might put an ankle” in that flashback) but like with this magnus gets to bring her underwater and let her see everything she wants live, and free from the possibly sensorially yucky sensation of being in the sea (i for one can’t stand it lmao) 

or even if she absolutely doesn’t want to go in no problem because magnus can just use a spell to show her what HE sees! maybe raphael even offers to go in and they can use like seelie rings or some shit so she can be like “omg can you check that reef for me? more to the left?? OH MY GOD I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU JUST FOUND THAT I-” and she’s so excited about it and raphael is also happy because look when was the last time he swam? and i’m pretty sure he never got to see marine life up close so like, this rules actually. even if i think he would have a kidna low energy to keep going, he enjoys it, and he’s more than happy to get to hear the way maia is so excited about that

anyWAY my point is, one way or the other the idea has her ABSOLUTELY STOKED and just immensely excited and just aaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! the two of them meeting up at the jade wolf to talk about this and magnus is like in full lecture mode sharing graphics and his research and explaining everything to her in detail, and maia is just vibrating with excitement, and raphael is just watching them both with the fondest smile because his dad and his gf get along so well and they both look so happy and the sun is hitting his face and this is heaven. he doesn’t give a lot of input because it’s more Their Thing and he’s happy to just watch as they both nerd out to their heart’s content (lmao maybe catarina and madzie are also there? and catarina can help since she is a healer and understands magic that affects bodily functions better than magnus. and madzie is also a little genius cuz i said so so she also helps, even though she alternates between giving input and just zoning out and doing her own thing. but anyway my point with this is they’re all nerding out and raphael is mostly watching and feeling blessed and also giving madzie attention while the rest of them work on this project) 

and they just talk and talk and nerd out about it for hours and catarina and raphael have to be the Responsible Ones reminding them to eat and shit, but it’s the sweetest possible thing and they’re just so excited and also maia and magnus would work SO WELL together okay! and they are both so smart and know so much about what they’re talking about and just aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa i love this!!!

[purplesurveys]

1006

(found at xxbieberburnham)

“The rest of your life”

Are you independent or dependent? Dependent as all hell. I’ll put my foot down on very certain things, but most of the time I prefer hearing input or suggestions from people I trust. I definitely think it’s something I still have to work on because I know I’ll have to be mostly independent at some point.

If you could put your life into a category, where would it go? I feel like this would be easier to answer if you gave a list of categories. I don’t know what kind of insight you’re looking for.

How many animals do you have? I have two, but I call them pets.

Are you popular? Idk and I don’t care. All I know is I don’t actively seek to be so.

What time were you born? 9:11 in the evening.

Have you had any candy this week? Yeah, I had a gummy worm this morning. Mom bought a box of Halloween-themed sweets and there were cupcakes had gummy worms on them alongside marshmallows designed to look like a tombstone.

Are you more afraid of tornadoes or hurricanes? Hurricanes are terrifying, but I’m used to them. We don’t get tornadoes at all so I’ll not only be unprepared for those, but would definitely be more afraid of them too.

Do you like those nerd glasses? Sure, I still think they’re cute and look good on people but I never called them nerd glasses lol. Mine are kinda shaped like one.

Have you ever been in a fist fight? Nah, I’d be wiped out pretty fast.

What color is your house? A light shade of beige.

When was the last time you saw a rainbow? More than a year ago, I’m sure. It was during our ride back home from a journalism workshop, which if I remember correctly was all the way in Cavite. Goddamn we traveled a lot for those workshops.

Have you ever ate a crayon? I’ve never bitten off a piece but I’m not ruling out at least licking.

Ever rode in a helicopter? Nope. Would love to.

Do you like rabbits? Sure.

Do you like mushrooms? For the most part I don’t even think they taste like anything, so I never really had a problem with mushrooms.

“It’s like you step into the room and just press play”

What was the last movie you cried at? That Thing Called Tadhana. I had watched it five years ago after my first breakup; I got to go to Sagada shortly after that breakup, so that movie was actually very therapeutic for me at the time because it allowed me to release my feelings the way Mace did, also in Sagada. Now I’m stuck at home and can’t travel and that movie just hurt too much to finish.

What ice cream flavor best describes your personality? I don’t really...pair ice cream flavors with types of personalities.

Would you rather work for a small or large company? Large, because I feel like I’d be challenged more in those and thus learn more. Also it just looks nicer on resumés, if I’m being honest. Smaller companies are ok too but I prefer those that already have a rep for churning excellent results and having a good track record for workplace culture, like the company I’m currently working with.

Where's your favorite place to buy clothes? Ukays. I used to not like them, but my mom and sister did a great job reeling me in and making me see the appeal.

How many languages do you speak? Two.

What was the worst movie you've ever seen? Me Before You was such a waste of my time. Predictable, cheesy, and typical asshole-guy-softens-up-over-time-oh-and-just-as-you-start-to-root-for-him-we’re-gonna-kill-him-off. But idk, I was with friends who were into movies like those and I wanted to support them, so I went along to watch.

What video game have you played the most? Cumulatively, pretty sure it’s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

What was your favorite TV show as a child? I was a Nickelodeon girl and Spongebob, Fairly OddParents, and My Life as a Teenage Robot were my top 3, with Jimmy Neutron closely trailing at #4. I loved Disney shows too but wasn’t really able to appreciate them as much until I got a little older and could understand their humor better.

What's your favorite sport? My answer won’t change - if it counts, pro wrestling. If it doesn’t, my next favorite is table tennis.

If you were given a brand new yacht, what would you name it? Nothing creative is coming to me at the moment.

Do you believe there’s life on other planets? Yes. Maybe not the ones in our solar system, but those out in the distant universe for sure.

What was the worst place you ever traveled to? Can’t say I’ve truly disliked a particular place we’ve been to. I will say that Chinese people have a...culture that I’m not used to, and I did not enjoy touring with a bunch of them during my cruise. They had buffet habits that I would consider unhygienic, they would sit at the same table my mom and I were eating at if there were available seats(??????? imagine if I just sat beside you at a diner while you’re having lunch?), and apparently it’s acceptable for them to actually look you in the eyes and point directly at you if they’re talking about you with other people. It was honestly a lot to put up with for six days, and the only reason I didn’t lose my temper was because my dad works in the ship and I didn’t want to cause him any trouble.

What is one thing you’re really bad at? Making art.

Do you believe in angels? No. I like referring to my grandpa as my guardian angel, but I don’t actually believe in angels.

Would you rather be a famous actor or musician? I know I’m awful at either, but I’d much rather act.

“where have you been all my life?”

If you could have invented one thing, what would it have been? It’d be cool to come up with something that ends up being widely popular and/or beneficial to society, but do it accidentally; like how popsicles came to be. Imagine building a legacy from your own oopsie lmao sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

What's your favorite exercise workout? I don’t do workouts.

What's your favorite thing to do? Wow, very straightforward. Hmm these days I’m slowly inching back to wrestling, so I’ve been watching compilations and documentaries and doing some catching-up here and there. Lately I’d say that’s my favorite thing to do, but that can always change.

What did you do for your 17th birthday? Gab and I went to Pinto and she brought me to Filio after. Then I got back home to see what Athenna had done to my room while I was out, which was to cover the floor with balloons and the walls with printed photos of Zayn Malik.

Does your local Wal Mart have benches in them to rest? First, we’ll need to have local Wal-Mart stores here.

Was your favorite stuffed animal really a teddy bear growing up? I never liked stuffed animals, so I didn’t even have a teddy bear.

If your house was haunted, what would you do? Not fuck with the ghosts/spirits.

Are you crazy in love currently? Not crazily, but in love.

Are you good at swimming? I can tread and do several strokes, but I also tend to panic so I think that eliminates the concept of me being a good swimmer.

What's worse: Slow internet or slow walkers? Slow internet. I can get around slow walkers; but unless I have mobile data, slow internet is out of my control for the most part.

What is the rudest thing a guy has ever done to you? I can’t pick between whistling at me, catcalling me, lunging at me, or flirtatiously harass me in front of his friends while I was minding my goddamn business carrying a goddamn box of cake at the mall. Yeah, not a very big fan of men.

Do you sleep with the sheets tucked in or out? Out.

What do you do to fall asleep faster? Put on a YouTube video and let autoplay take over.

Do you carry a bottle of water wherever you go? Yeah I used to, until I lost it.

Ae you afraid that one day you might get cancer? The fear of the possibility is there, but it’s not predominantly in our family history and so I’m more afraid of other issues I have a higher chance of getting, like high blood pressure.

“Letters to Juliet”

Are you a fast or slow walker? Fast if I’m running errands, slow-ish if I’m out for leisure.

Do you usually have to wear a belt with your pants? No.

Does it bother you when people's underwear hangs out? Kinda. Even more when their crack decides to show up too.

Are you usually the person to try new things with your hair? No, I am one of the last people in line when it comes to that.

When's your birthday? April 21st.

Do you own a bobble-head toy? Nopes.

What color was the towel you used to dry off with today after a shower? Turquoise.

Has anyone ever walked you home? I’ve had someone drive me home. Walking isn’t really applicable here.

Have you ever liked someone and they were taken? That’s never happened to me.

When was the last time you went fishing? In my past life, maybe.

True or false: You've read the book Lord of the Flies? False.

Have you heard of the band Yellowcard? Yes.

Have you ever seen the show Teen Wolf? I’ve seen an episode and oh my god it was so boring.

Do you have any quotes, lyrics etc on your walls? I used to until my mom took it down while I was in school. I made it myself, so it stung.

Are you a fan of Star Wars? No.

“Our parents never let us cross the street, but we did it anyway”

Has anyone ever told you that you have nice hair? Whenever it was actually nice, yeah. It was never my best feature though.

What brand of camera do you own? I have...an iPhone, if it counts, ha. My old DSLR was a Nikon.

Is there something you're not looking forward to? The next day. Having to go through rounds of anxiety is not enjoyable.

Have you ever read the book Thirteen Reasons Why? Have not read the book nor seen the show, but have read enough of the premise to know I am not a fan.

Do you wear white pants? Sure, I have a pair of white jeans that I absolutely love.

When was the last time you were really angry? Yesterday. My sister and I were ordering KFC from a food delivery app and no driver was taking it because drivers in that company are notoriously picky bitches about their destinations. They kept canceling our orders and at some point I had enough and proposed that we just get Pizza Hut, this time straight from the Pizza Hut website, which has always worked out for us before. So Pizza Hut confirms the order, calls me up and says the ETA, so far so good. Around 15 minutes later the doorbell rings and it’s...KFC? With our original orders? Apparently that stupid ass app took our order anyway after repeatedly canceling it, and I never got one fucking notification that our order was received. Tried to cancel Pizza Hut but they said they had already started making the pizzas, so in the end we had to pay for both meals. I had never been so angry.

Have you ever made a 3 pointer in a basketball game? Hah, of course not. I’ve barely made one of those free throws that are worth one point.

Do you think you look better with your hair up or down? I’ve gotten more compliments whenever it’s up, so that must look better on me even if I personally don’t necessarily agree.

Do you warm up before you hardcore exercise? I don’t exercise, but isn’t warming up recommended anyway?

Do you want a pair of Converse shoes? Not really; I suppose they’re alright. It’s not my favorite brand in the world, but I wouldn’t turn down a free pair either.

Are you more of a studs or hoops type of person when it comes to earrings? Hoooooooooops for days.

How many shirts do you have of your favorite band? Just one. I’m not a band shirt person.

Turn on the TV. What channel are you on? There’s no TV in this room.

Have you ever wore a tie before? Yeah, as a kid my mom sometimes made me wear neckties. They made me SO uncomfortable I was having internal breakdowns about being seen in public. I was 7 years old. Neckties to me were a boy thing and I felt 0% boy; and so it gave me such serious dysphoria. It’s like making a boy wear a pink tutu even if he’s already visibly distressed. Whenever I told my mom I felt uncomfortable, she would just tell me it “looks good.” Jesus Christ. Why did no one ever drag my mom to a parenting seminar? Did no one seriously see the signs???

What did you have for breakfast this morning? Garlic rice, bacon strips, and glazed ham.

“For the Krusty Krab”

Are you good at art? Of course not.

How many times have you read your favorite book? I don’t have one.

Name one thing that you really hate. Raisins, on their own and incorporated in a dish.

Have you ever tried walking on stilts? I haven’t.

Is there a war that you find interesting? Eh, not really. So many of historical accounts are bombarded with war narratives as it is, and I’ve just never really found disputes or tensions among countries to be the most interesting part about history. Plus women were mostly absent, and that makes it even more boring.

Would you rather live in the city or country? City.

Do you think $7 is too much for a movie ticket? Not always. $7 or ₱350 is actually pretty reasonable if you wanna see a movie at an upscale mall; people who watch movies in places like that shouldn’t be complaining about movie tickets that cost that much. But all movie theaters are the same anyway - pitch black, freezing, comfy chairs - so I just go to midscale malls where tickets would be like a hundred bucks cheaper since it’s gonna give me the same experience anyway.

Would you like to be a newscast person? For a long time I thought I wanted to be one because that’s what my entire family was rooting me to become. Eventually I realized reading from a teleprompter, interviewing guests, and asking questions to reporters is not a career I want.

Do you like word searches, coloring or crosswords better? Word searches, then coloring, then crosswords.

Close your eyes and press a random key on the keyboard. U.

How many William’s do you know? I don’t think I know anyone. It’s too foreign-sounding a name.

What time did you wake up this morning? I woke up at around 6 AM, but I fell back asleep immediately and woke up again around 30 minutes later.

Do you enjoy crutches? ...No? That seems a little insensitive for people who actually need them.

What's better: Snapple or Arizona tea? Arizona. It’s because I’ve never had the Snapple one, but tbh Arizona is already pretty delicious anyway.

Make a word out of the word: Dinosaur. Round.

“she said I love this song, I’ve heard it before”

When you were younger, did you play with legos? Yes. I was never a creative kid, but I liked playing with them anyway.

Do you like Trix cereal? It was only my absolute favorite cereal as a kid, no biggie.

Do you get nervous easily? Ugh, yes. My parents asked me to get water containers from our local water station last Saturday and I literally had to allot like two hours to brace myself and make a script in my head. I constantly rehearse shit nearly every time I have to go out of the house.

How long is your Facebook password? I’m not sharing that.

Do you like the movie Mean Girls? No, I didn’t find it funny the first time and that made me uninterested in giving it a second chance.

How do you want your wedding to be? Big, grand. Lots of friends, lots of food. Not Catholic/Christian.

Have you seen the movie or show Catfish? Nope.

Do you hate it when you arrive to something early? Not usually. Being early is my goal in most situations, unless I’m headed to like a party.

Have you ever been on Omegle? A few times as a teenager.

Are you still in love with one of your exes? Yes. It’s not going away for a while.

Do you think it's attractive when guys wear beanies? I don’t necessarily seek out men with beanies lol but I don’t think it looks bad on them either.

What's something that makes you feel shy in public? Unfamiliar situations.

Do you like the shows on MTV? No.

If you could go back and relive one day, what day? That last Friday I was in school before the lockdown happened. If I knew what the next eight months were going to look like, I would’ve stayed much longer in school, dragged my friends out to drink, blew my money on food, had more fun basically.

What's one word you hate to be called? Exhausting. Like being told I’m exhausting to be with. How does that not hurt?

[marvel-lucy]

The Ultimate Weapon, chapter 19

This was supposed to be the last chapter, but I wrote a three chapter postscript. Look, it was my first fic, I was young and didn’t know what I was doing. Forgive me.

Weeks later, and a new routine, a new life, had been established. I still met with Sam sometimes to talk things through when I could feel my anxieties building, but I also had others to talk to now. I worked out, I’d started helping Bruce out a bit in the lab and even started studying, trying to catch up on all those years of missed education. Tony called me Professor Molesworth when he saw me sat in the library surrounded by books, but he also sat with me for hours and taught me maths and science. I spent a lot of time with Bucky. Not always talking, or doing anything. I’d sit and study, feet in his lap, he’d read, occasionally we’d look up at each other and smile. We trained together too, both enhanced and a match for each other and the physical tiredness was great. We were almost inseparable – Tony called up Supertwins – both liking the fact there was someone there who understood without explanation, when at times the anger or the fear returned. We started trying to catch up on movies we’d both missed and insisted on more movie nights. We drank a lot of beer and sometimes slept in each other’s arms when the bad dreams came. Things got easier, and I got happy, which is why it was hard when I felt that something was wrong.

I was aware that people were whispering in corners, or stopping talking when I walked into the room. I tried to pass it off as paranoia when silence fell if I came in but it wasn’t. I could feel the old anxieties resurfacing, about my place here, my place in the world, but Sam dismissed them when I tried to talk to him, just repeating that I was wanted here.

I turned to Nat in the end, knowing that she was usually straightforward and honest but I still didn’t get an answer I trusted. She told me that Tony was organising another one of his dinner parties and it was nothing to worry about, that it was just guest lists and menus. She must have seen the disbelief on my face, but reassured me again, saying that people just didn’t want to worry me after the last time, telling me that at least this time Loki wasn’t invited.

Nat said I needed a distraction and so the next day she and Wanda appeared at my door and told me they were taking me out for the day. My agoraphobia had stayed away since I’d got back in the tower, although I didn’t particularly like crowds and felt a bit vulnerable away from walls, but I could live with it. I tried going out at least a few times a week, to practice being out in the real world, and to join in with everything I’d missed, but other than a few trips to the zoo, I was still happier in the Tower.

I didn’t know what Wanda and Nat had planned but when they pulled me into a fancy looking dress store, I groaned. They knew I had zero interest in clothes, we’d been through this before, so I resigned myself to a morning where they tried things on and I nodded and pretended to be able to see a difference between this black dress and that black dress. No such luck.

“Stark likes fancy for his dinner parties, you know that from before.” Nat said, adding “and last time, I lent you a dress and you ended up sleeping in it then wearing it in the shower, if I recall correctly”. I blushed, remembering how hungover I’d been and how I’d felt about Bucky. Wanda was grabbing dresses off the rails and suddenly they were both pulling me into a changing room and started stripping off my clothes. I shrieked, batting their hands away but they insisted I try on dress after dress. While Wanda and Nat inspected me, I stood awkwardly, repeating ‘too tight, too revealing, too bright...’ about most of the dresses until Nat asked me if I was sure I wasn’t actually born in the 20s, because I was acting like an old woman.

After a while, they let me get dressed again and told me they’d choose for me. It was at that point that I realised I had no money. Embarrassed, I pulled them both aside and tried to explain.

“Guys, I don’t actually have money, I mean, I’ve got a few dollars but, I mean, I probably got an allowance when I was 14 but it’s not like I actually have a job or anything now”. They both looked at me and laughed, leaving me blushing heavily.

“You know you have a Stark Card, right?” I must have looked blank. “Nobody gave you one? Ah, we’ll get Jarvis on it when we’re back. You charge whatever you want to your Stark Card, Tony takes care of it. It’s ‘wages’ for being an Avenger. That, and for putting up with Tony. Look, don’t worry about it, it’s all sorted anyway, and Wanda’s already charged it. And no, before you start worrying, you don’t need to feel guilty about it or anything. Stark has enough money for ten times as many Avengers, and I can’t see you being the type to suddenly start buying islands.” I saw that Wanda was now carrying a big bag although I hadn’t had any input into what they’d bought, so I hoped to god it wasn’t the red one they’d been discussing.

Net they dragged me into shoe shops, where at least the fact I was physically well trained made walking in heels possible, if not something I saw any point in. They made me have another haircut, my hair now reaching my shoulders and all the bald patches long gone, then they finally let us go back to the Tower.

“Right, go have a shower Ruby, we’ll leave your stuff in your room for the dinner tonight” Wanda said, shooing me off as I tried to go and get some coffee from the kitchen. I complained, and she told me to go shower and that she’d bring me coffee. I was sticky from the heat so gave in.

When I came out of the shower, the parcels they’d bought were on the bed, and a cup of coffee was on the side. I breathed in the smell, holding the cup against me as I started to look through the bags. Oh hell no, the dress was red. It was the one that I’d rejected as tight, bright, low cut, too noticeable, not me, laughable. Was this some kind of joke? I unwrapped the other parcels, shoes, underwear, make up, but I was not in the mood. I’d wear something else, and take the dress back tomorrow.

Cross, I put my coffee down and went to the closet, flinging the doors open. It was empty. What the hell? I pulled open drawers, nothing. Through gritted teeth, I opened my door and stormed down to Nat’s room in my robe. She was in there with Wanda and they were obviously both expecting me.

“Hey, not dressed yet, you might want to hurry up a bit” Nat grinned.

“Where. Are. My. Clothes” I scowled at them both as they sniggered at me, and Wanda replied, wide eyed and innocent, that they’d left them on my bed. “Not those ones. Come on guys, you know I can’t wear that dress, I’ll look ridiculous and I’ll feel stupid. Just let me have some normal stuff OK?”

Nat got up and pushed me out of the room. “Not a chance. Go put that on or I will get Bucky to come down and knock you out, and dress you myself”. With Nat, you never could tell when she was serious.

I stomped back to my room and held the dress up, groaning. I put it on but I felt stupid. Like a kid trying to look like an adult. I knew I was sulking but I couldn’t stop myself. I just hoped this dinner of Tony’s wasn’t going to involve too many people.

A few minutes later Wanda and Nat both appeared and nodded approvingly to see I was dressed. They approached me threateningly with makeup brushes and did…. stuff…. to my face. Not much luckily, the serum at least meant I had good skin despite the fact I didn’t do anything with it. Nat handed me my shoes and when I put them on, whistled at me.

“Well damn it Ruby if you don’t look sexy as hell” she winked and I rolled my eyes, stomach churning with dread at the teasing I was going to get for trying to look like this.

Wanda called ‘I’ll see you up there’ and left, and Nat took hold of my hands.

“Hey, Ruby, I mean it. You look great, stop worrying. Remember the last dinner, it was fun right?” I nodded. I had been fun in the end. “Good. Come on then, I’m starving plus I look damn good and want to get some appreciation too” she grinned.

We got into the elevator and I expected Jarvis to drop us at the usual level, where the kitchen and communal spaces were. Instead, the doors opened onto the lobby of the function rooms, a beautiful space Tony used for presentations and his gala dinners.

“Wrong floor?” I questioned, but Nat nudged me forward and towards the door. I pulled it open and stepped in.

And ‘SURPRISE!’. My heart raced and if it wasn’t for Nat behind me with a steadying hand, I’d have either turned and run, or else gone straight into attack mode. ‘Happy birthday’ she whispered in my ear, grinning at the success of their plan.

The room was full, all faces I recognised and I was surprised by just how many people it seemed I knew, but it was pretty overwhelming. I hadn’t made it out of the doorway yet, so Nat propelled me forwards as I gaped. Tony was the first to come over, with Pepper. He hugged me and told me not to let Pepper see how beautiful I was or she might feel threatened. Pepper slapped him on the arm and hugged me, wishing me a happy birthday. More and more people drifted over – Steve, Bruce, Sam – all to hug me and grin at the success of their plan. Sam, like Nat, whistled.

“Damn but you look a hell of a lot better than when we fished you out of that Hydra cell” he grinned. “If I didn’t know you already had your eye on someone, I would be trying my very best here”. I knew he was joking – everyone was too polite to tell me how stupid I looked – but I blushed when he said I had my eye on someone. He didn’t know how I felt surely, about Bucky. I wasn’t even sure I knew how I felt.

“I didn’t even know it was my birthday” I said, changing the subject, and Bruce laughed, kissing my cheek.

“21 today!” he said, as Tony added “now we can get you drunk legally, and I’m still determined to get you to try karaoke”.

There were balloons everywhere, damn it, who knew how much I loved balloons? They'd gone to town with them, the floor was full and the kids who belonged to staff in the Tower were having a whale of a time diving into them. I'd have joined them, but apparently I was an adult now? God I loved balloons though. I grinned around the room as I took it all in. Flowers, tables groaning with food and drink, and faces smiling at me all over. Yes, it was overwhelming, but my heart felt full.

I was surrounded for a few more minutes, as people I’d met once or twice before came over, obviously having been kept up to speed with what was going on, Coulson, Lang, Hill, even Fury came over and wished me a happy birthday and an official welcome to the team. I was swamped for a while, then people gradually went back to their conversations and to the food and music. I tried not to show I was looking around but I hadn’t seen Bucky yet and I was disappointed he wasn’t here. As the crowd cleared, and Nat wandered off with Clint to find a drink, I felt a cold hand on the back of my dress. I turned, and Bucky was smiling down at me.

“Wanted to wait until everyone had left you alone” he said. I felt anchored now that he was here. Anchored and something else. Something I’d been trying to ignore for a while but was sure of now I saw him, cleaned up and suited and looking amazing. He leant down and kissed my cheek and I breathed in his smell, dizzying my overloaded senses.

“Happy birthday doll” he whispered against my cheek, his hand tightening on my waist and pulling me into him. I hugged him back and then he stepped back to arm’s length and eyed me up and down.

“Jeez…” he started, rubbing the back of his neck. “No, I’ve got to do this right.” He looked into my eyes. “You are by far the most beautiful woman in this room, and in fact the most beautiful woman I’ve seen. Always thought so but damn that dress just brings it home”. By now my face was as scarlet as my dress. Bucky moved his metal hand up to my cheek, blissfully cold against my flushed skin. “No need to blush, it’s all true, just own it” he grinned, switching to the other cheek. “It’d be an honour to have you on my arm tonight ma’am” he said with an old school charm, and I grinned, hooking my arm over his as we headed to get drinks and food.

It was a great party. People were kind and welcoming and I felt accepted. I drank quite a bit, giddy with a relieved happiness that my paranoia wasn’t justified; giddy with excitement every time Bucky put his arm around me while I was talking to someone, or stood close to my side so I could feel his warmth. Part way through the evening, going to the bathroom, I bumped into Natasha.

“Having a good time?” she asked and I nodded.

“Thanks Nat. For everything”. I’d been thanking people all evening for kindnesses, for presents, for support, it as becoming almost a running joke but I felt insanely grateful and underserving still.

“You’ve already done the thanks bit Ruby. No more! You’re knocking them out in that dress, knew you would” she smiled. “It’s not unnoticed whose eyes can’t leave you tonight, doesn’t take a spy to see something as obvious as the torch Bucky is carrying for you.”

“Bucky’s my best friend Nat. He’s looking out for me because he knows I find crowds difficult. That’s all.” I asserted, and she scoffed, taking a sip from her drink.

“Ruby, take it from someone who knows. Bucky has been into you since you got here. Now that he’s seen you in that dress, he’s got it even worse”. She smiled at me and said “it’s cute” as I rolled my eyes, then she was off, pulling Clint out to dance while he protested, until she pushed up agapist him and he stopped.

By around 2am, most people had gone off to the guest rooms Tony had provided. Clint and Nat were still wrapped around each other and dancing; Sam and Steve were stretched out on couches near the bar, beers in hand. Tony and Pepper were talking to a group of friends about to leave. I was sitting a little tipsily by the door, waiting for Bucky with some water for us both.

He brought it over and I drank it down, keen to avoid the hangover I’d had last time. Bucky took the glass from me and put it down, then held his hand out.

“Dance?” he asked and I laughed, shaking my head.

“Wouldn’t know how Bucky, and I’m probably a bit unsteady on my feet anyway”. Without speaking, he bent down and took my shoes off, leaving my feet against the cool floor.

“Come on doll. I wanna dance with you. You can’t fall off those shoes now, and I’ll hold you up.”

The music was slower and quieter now as he pulled me away from the edge of the room, but avoiding the centre, staying where the light was dimmer. He pulled me in close to him, one arm wrapped around my waist, fingers of the other hand entwined with mine. I put my head on his chest and sighed, and we slowly moved together to the music. Bucky’s head was resting on my hair; I was shorter now without the heels on.

“You had a good birthday doll?” he asked and I nodded against his chest.

“Best one in six years” I replied, able to joke about my past more often now I felt secure in the present. I felt a laugh rumbling through his chest. We continued dancing together, alone in our own corner, talking occasionally but mostly in silence. My senses felt heightened by being so close to him. My skin tingled wherever he touched me and I closed my eyes, the better to remember this feeling. The song finished and another started and we continued to sway together, when Bucky spoke again.

“Hey Ruby?” I looked up, loving the way he made my name sound. “Been wanting to ask you something for a while, now seems as good a time as any.” I waited, our dancing stopping. “Didn’t want to do anything without your permission, you’ve had enough of that, but I wanted to ask if I could kiss you.”

I froze trying to see if he was teasing me, but I could feel his heart beating near mine and risked everything, wanting this so much. I nodded, mouthing ‘yes’ on my breath.

The first kiss was gentle and feather light. He brushed his lips against mine and instantly my body was alive with heat. He rested his forehead on mine, looking down to meet my eyes, silently checking if this was OK. I nodded slightly, and looked at his lips, wanting to feel them on mine again. This time there was more pressure, still slow, as he pressed up against me and my mouth opened to his tongue. He tugged at my bottom lip with his teeth, then kissed the sting away as I smiled against his mouth. Our kisses become firmer, deeper, and I was lost and giddy with my eyes closed, feeling every inch of my body pressed against him and full of desire.

I was lost in the sensation when the peace was shattered by a loud cry of ‘at last’ and I looked over to see Tony standing, arms aloft, doing a little jig. He pointed at us both and shouted ‘at last’ again, and Bucky and I descended into giggles against each other, and then into kisses again.

We stayed there, in each other’s arms, until everyone else had slipped away, not wanting to break contact, then Bucky picked me up, holding me against him, and took me back to his room. I was home.

[hedwigstalons]

The Tracy Prize - part 1

I’m not quite sure where this one will end up.  I’ll just go along for the ride and see what happens.

xoxoxox

Dealing with students was one of the perils of working in a university but today of all days she could have done without a confused first year accosting her after class.  With end of year exams approaching more and more of them were needing reassurance that they had grasped a concept correctly.  Some days she felt more like a counsellor than a tutor.

A quick glance at the clock showed she had just over an hour before she was due to deliver her presentation.  She still had plenty of time to cross campus and dump her books and files in her office but she would have liked longer to go through her notes before pitching her case to the panel.  The outcome this afternoon had the potential completely change the course of her career.

Crossing the quad in the bright sunshine of early summer she kept her head down and walked fast.  If she could just avoid eye contact with everyone she might make it through without being dragged into another conversation.

She rounded a corner at speed and collided with six foot of solid muscle coming in the opposite direction.

Her world became filled with pain and plaid.

The files smashed into her solar plexus, winding her and causing her to stagger backwards.  Books cascaded from her arms to land in an untidy heap on the floor.  She would have joined them but for a pair of strong arms with lightening reflexes grabbing her and steadying her backwards tumble.

She looked up into the face of the man who had been both her downfall and her rescuer. She saw concerned brown eyes topped by a tuft of dark hair.  

“Are you ok…Dr Ashwell?”  A momentary pause as his eyes clocked her staff ID badge.

“I’m fine. Sorry, I didn’t see you” she answered as she crouched down to scoop up her scattered belongings.

The man had barely flinched during their headlong collision although she was sure a block of books to the abdomen couldn’t have been a comfortable experience for him.  She expected him to continue his journey and was a little surprised when he crouched down beside her and helped reform the pile.

“A traditionalist, huh?” he queried.  “Most people just use the e-book copy now.”

“I like to be able to add my own notes to the margins.”  She let out an audible groan as her tablet was unearthed from the pile.  The screen was smashed to pieces and one side of the device had popped open exposing the internal workings.  “They are also durable.  This is just not my day.  I can kiss goodbye to that grant” she muttered angrily.

“I was to blame too.  Please, let me ping you the funds to replace it.”

“It’s not the tablet that’s the problem.  It’s the flies that were on it that I need.”

A slight look of confusion crossed his brow.

“Don’t you have a back-up?”

“Of course I do but only at home.  I’m meant to be giving a presentation in…”, she glanced at her watch, “an hour to try and win a research grant. Without my slides and data I may as well not bother.”

“Look, if it helps you can use mine.  Maybe download your work and I can stick it on a flash drive for you.”

He drew a sleek tablet out of a smart leather satchel.  The bag alone looked like it cost more than the rent on her apartment.  The device in his hands was even more sophisticated and clearly had holo-capabilities.  Maybe she would take him up on the offer to pay for the damage after all.

“It’s no use. My home set-up isn’t connected to a network.  I got burned once by a research partner and keep things off-grid now.  It’s a decision I’m currently regretting.  Unless by some miracle I can get this thing working I’m screwed.”

She jabbed the power button and the mangled device flickered into life.  However, the display was shot to pieces and there no way of calling up the precious information contained within.

“Where there’s life, there’s hope.  Pass it here. I take it this is at least has some connectivity so you can use University network?”

She nodded.  The tablet was very much a work device for when she needed to be part of the system.  She had only transferred her presentation and a few data files on to it for ease that morning.  She didn’t share the stranger’s optimism that he could extract her work but shrugged and passed the tablet across anyway.  

They moved across to a nearby bench to get out of the path.  They and the books were causing quite an obstruction.  He pulled a phone out of his pocket and made a call.

“John, I’ve got a challenge for you.  I’ll pop you on loudspeaker; I’ve got company.  I need you to try and retrieve some files from a tablet that’s seen better days.”

“Must be bad if you’re calling me.  So what am I dealing with?”

“It’s got power but it’s completely smashed after I sent it flying.”

There was a snort over the line.  “And you guys say I’m the clumsy brother.  Turn on your tablet and I’ll run a tech proximity scan.”

The two devices were placed side by side on the bench.  The mysterious John was evidently able to operate things remotely as as the screen on the functioning tablet flickered through settings without any input from their end.  

“The closest tablet I’m picking up is registered to a Claire Ashwell.  Is that the one?”

Claire gave the affirmative.  Her eyes widened as a carbon copy of her lock screen, or what her lock screen would have looked like if it wasn’t currently a jumbled mess of cracks and lines, appeared on the neighbouring device.

“But my security settings….”

“Are not a problem” answered the disembodied voice.  

The lock screen had disappeared and been replaced with her desktop.  She felt a deep seated unease at how easily this stranger at the end of a phone had accessed her computer.

“If someone could pop a flash drive into one of the ports I’ll transfer across what you need.  Just tell me what to look for.”

The man beside her complied with the request for a flash drive.

“Uh, just the folder called ‘Tracy Prize’.  Everything else I can get from the university system once I’ve replaced my tablet.”

The man beside smiled but she missed it.  Her eyes were focussed on the screen which was currently showing that her precious data was being transferred to the flash drive.

“Speaking of replacing your tablet I’ve transferred some funds to your account too.  It should cover the cost of the tablet and the software that was on it.”

“How the hell did you do that?!”

“You’ve done internet shopping.  Everything leaves a trace.”

The infuriatingly calm voice was doing nothing to dispel her fears of hacking.  Her colleagues thought she was an oddball with her bizarre approach to digital security but the man on the other end of the phone had been able to access her tablet and then her bank account in seconds.  She was just glad that she hadn’t put any of her more sensitive research on her work tablet.

“Anyway, my work here is done.”

“Cheers John.” replied the man beside her and he disconnected the call.  He removed the flash drive and passed it to her.  “Perhaps I’ll see you around, Dr Ashwell.”

She found herself on the receiving end of a beaming smile.  She sat on the bench for a few moments longer and watched as he disappeared across the square and into a coffee shop.  

The whole encounter had only taken a few minutes and if it wasn’t for the mangled tablet and shiny new flash drive in her possession she could hardly have believed it had happened.  

She picked up her books and continued the journey to her office.  Once safely behind its closed door she pulled out her own phone and called up her banking app.  Sure enough her account showed that a healthy deposit had just been made; far more than her basic device was really worth. She resisted the strong urge to delete everything off her phone. Hackers gave her the creeps.  

Another glance at her watch.  45 minutes until show time.

She withdrew a sheath of papers from a folder.  Print outs of the slides she was about to present.  Time to get in the zone.

[oodlenoodleroodle]

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/530726335?storyId=530726335

Yesterday I listened to this episode of NPR’s Invisibilia podcast from 2017 about emotions, and it has some things that are very relevant to conversations about trauma, and I really wanted to share it and I know people aren’t going to go listen to a random podcast episode while they are scrolling tumblr, so I’m just gonna quote from the transcript:

SPIEGEL: Lisa Feldman Barrett is a psychology professor at Northeastern University. And for a very particular kind of person - and I'm going to grant you it is a very, very particular kind of person - Lisa is kind of a rock star because she's someone who has come up with a new mind-blowing way of thinking about emotion. Which is why Hanna and I were super excited to talk to her. And she was excited to talk to us, too - kind of.

BARRETT: Other than the pieces on emotion, I'm a totally big fan [of the podcast].

(LAUGHTER)

SPIEGEL: According to Lisa Barrett, the show that you are listening to right now, INVISIBILIA, has consistently portrayed emotion and how emotions work incorrectly. But in our defense, the reason why we've been wrong, at least according to Lisa, is because the whole culture is wrong. We think wrong about emotions, where they come from and how they work because the way that we experience the world makes it very, very hard to think right about them.

BARRETT: How I would describe what's actually happening will not make sense to people, right? It will seem really counter-intuitive to people.

SPIEGEL: So let's begin the catalogue of wrongness with this, what Lisa says is the very first thing we are taught about emotions that is wrong.

BARRETT: Emotions are built into your brain at birth.

SPIEGEL: We've been told this over and over again, that we are wired to feel X or that evolution has wired us to feel Y because our forbearers on the African savannah had to survive, needed to respond instantly and appropriately to big bad lions and hungry tigers.

BARRETT: So there's a stimulus...

SPIEGEL: Roar!

BARRETT: ...Which triggers a circuit inside you...

SPIEGEL: Holy...!

BARRETT: ...Which causes a bodily response in you...

SPIEGEL: (Gasps).

BARRETT: ...Which then causes you to behave in a particular way.

SPIEGEL: Run!

BARRETT: You know, they're not exactly seen as reflexes, but they're as close to reflexes as you might get. If the stimulus is there, the response is obligatory. That's the view. It's an automatic reaction to the world.

SPIEGEL: Now, according to this view, you can choose how you respond to the emotion that's been triggered. You can suppress it, reframe it, make a photo collage about it. But the initial emotion itself, that is universally programmed. There is nothing you can do.

BARRETT: It just seems absolutely preposterous that an emotion could be anything other than a reaction because in a moment where someone bursts into your house with a gun, there is very little that doesn't seem like a reaction. You know, it's such a strong feeling. It feels like you've been hijacked.

ROSIN: And to me anyway, there is something profound and hopeful in this way of thinking.

SPIEGEL: It's such a beautiful and connecting idea that we all share emotions. I mean, it's the kind of idea if you cut us, we bleed. If our children die, we cry.

ROSIN: That is literally the Coke ad, right? It's the Coke ad which takes you around the world and everybody smiles.

(Singing) I'd like to buy the world a home and furnish it with love.

SPIEGEL: We all smile when we're happy and so know the meaning of a smile when we see it in the face of someone else. Even if their skin is a different color or their culture feels strange, we know what they feel. Emotion is our universal language.

(Singing) I'd like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company.

SPIEGEL: But this - apparently - is not what 25 years of studying emotion has taught Lisa. Basically you're saying, not so much?

BARRETT: For every emotion category that we have in the U.S. that we think is biologically basic and universal, there's at least one culture in the world that doesn't really possess a concept for that emotion and where people don't really feel that emotion.

SPIEGEL: Fear, sadness, anger, surprise, disgust, happiness - for Lisa, there is nothing inevitable about these emotions or any emotions, including the emotion of despair.

SPIEGEL: How many emotions do you feel in a day? Recently, I found myself wondering. This morning, I woke up insecure about my worth. But by the time I got to the shower, which is about 10 feet away from where I sleep, there had been a subtle shift. I was cycling between regretful and angry.

Later at the coffee store, some music on the speakers above my head during my walk out helped me feel determined. I was energized and ready to take on the world. If I had a square jaw, it would have been set. All day long, these emotions wash over me, hundreds of them - thousands of them? I've never counted but I always seem to be feeling them.

BARRETT: Yes, they're seen as happening to you - right? - not something that you yourself make.

SPIEGEL: But that's not how Lisa sees it. Lisa is one of the most respected researchers in psychology right now, lead editor on an enormous tome on emotion. And her latest book, "How Emotions Are Made," is an attempt to synthesize emotion research from a variety of fields - neuroscience, biology, anthropology.

Which makes it hard to summarize in a pithy way, but if I had to boil it down, here's how I'd do it. The way emotion works is the opposite of what you think. Emotions aren't reactions to the world. Emotions actually construct the world.

I know, at first, it didn't make any sense to me, either. So let's start this explanation where science stories usually start these days, with the 3 pounds of meat between your ears and the very difficult job it must do all day long.

BARRETT: The reason why we have a brain is because we have to control the systems in our body. We have a tremendous number of systems.

SPIEGEL: You mostly aren't aware of all of the systems in your body that your brain is regulating.

BARRETT: Systems for glucose. We have systems for salt, systems for oxygen.

SPIEGEL: But if your brain decided to take a day off, kick back, go to the beach, you would definitely notice because you'd be dead.

BARRETT: A circulatory system.

SPIEGEL: So many systems, and all of them need to be managed perfectly in order for you to do anything - any single thing.

BARRETT: So, for example, your brain starts to change your blood pressure before you stand up because, you know, it has to make sure that blood gets to the brain with oxygen, otherwise you'll faint.

SPIEGEL: Which brings us to the obligatory fancy science word that I spent three weeks trying to pronounce correctly - interoception. Interoception?

BARRETT: Interoception is just your feeling of the sensations that come from the movements inside your body.

SPIEGEL: The easiest way to think about interoception is that it's the thing that senses the status of all these internal systems, monitors all the comings and goings. I think of it like an eye but inside your body, turned so it's looking at you.

In the same way that your eye takes in the world and then communicates what's going on to your brain, the interoception thingy surveys your body and then communicates what's going on with all these systems to your brain, only it doesn't do as thorough a job as your eye – for good reason.

BARRETT: You don't feel these sensations in very high fidelity in the way that you see things in the world with a lot of detail. And you can hear things often with a lot of detail, but you don't feel things from the inside of your body with a lot of detail because if you did, you would never pay attention to anything else in the world ever.

SPIEGEL: So your internal eye keeps things super stupid simple.

BARRETT: So the way your brain is wired is to feel interoceptive sensations - the sensations from our bodies - as simple feelings of pleasantness, unpleasantness, arousal, calmness.

SPIEGEL: That is literally all your internal eye can communicate, those four sensations.

BARRETT: Pleasantness, unpleasantness, arousal, calmness.

SPIEGEL: But all day long, it's sending your brain status updates like a teenager on Snapchat, only worse.

BARRETT: Pleasantness, unpleasantness, arousal, unpleasantness, calmness.

SPIEGEL: Feel sympathy for a moment for your brain. There it is, trapped in the dark, silent box of your skull. It's getting these updates about these important sensations in the body, but it doesn't know for certain what's causing them. That unpleasant loop in the stomach just then, was that because the body was hungry or because the man who just sat down across the table is insanely good looking?

BARRETT: Arousal, calmness.

How does it know what caused something when all it has are the effects of that thing? The answer is it has past experience, so it's guessing.

SPIEGEL: Whatever sensation you have in your body, the brain develops a theory - actually a whole bunch of theories - based on previous experience and then uses them to make a prediction about what is going on.

BARRETT: When you have an ache in your body, it asks the question essentially, you know, in this situation, in this context, the last time this happened, what was the cause of that ache? And that's really what concepts are. Concepts are your brain's using past experience in order to make sense of incoming sensory input.

SPIEGEL: OK. Let's pause on concepts because we need to talk about them and the role they play in how you feel. Your culture has a ton of emotional concepts. When you were little, a toddler, you learn them from your parents. You went to the park, and your mom and dad carefully explained to you that that feeling that you had when that two-bit kid in the red sneakers shoved you off the swing, that was anger. Acquaint yourself with that emotion, they counseled, it will likely play a major role in your teens.

SPIEGEL: Sometimes they told you not to be afraid.

SPIEGEL: Sometimes you simply watched how they responded - the contours of sadness and the things that prompted it, the experience of joy and how it was expressed. These were likely the first emotional concepts you learned but you went on. You learned regret. You learned determination. Then in college, you got introduced to the idea of schadenfreude, which during your 20s you practiced liberally.

BARRETT: That's correct.

SPIEGEL: And these concepts, these emotional concepts, they are the things that shape the raw sensations from your interoception thingy - those raw materials of pleasant, unpleasant, aroused, calm - into the actual emotions that you experience. And without these concepts, Lisa says, you wouldn't have any of the emotions that you think of as hardwired, even sadness, even fear, even all the other things that you think of as fundamental and wired into you.

BARRETT: And it's parallel for vision. For example, if you have no concepts, you will see bright and dark. You won't see objects. You know, we know this for a fact. There are people, for example, who have corneal damage or who have cataracts at birth. And then at some point in their adult life, they have a corneal transplant or their cataracts are removed, and we would imagine from the classical view that they would just be able to see everything, but they don't.

They don't see for days and sometimes weeks. And sometimes years there are things they can't see because they don't have concepts. Their brain has no past visual experience to make meaning of the visual sensations that they receive.

SPIEGEL: So all they see is light and dark?

BARRETT: All they see is light and dark.

SPIEGEL: So if you put an apple in front of them, what would it look like?

BARRETT: They wouldn't see an apple. They wouldn't even see an object.

SPIEGEL: You're saying that emotion works the exact same way? That...

BARRETT: Yes. I'm saying that instead of having blobs of light and dark, without concepts you will feel pleasant or unpleasant. You can feel pleasure. You can feel high arousal, being worked up. You can feel low activation, but you don't really feel anger, sadness, fear, disgust or any of the other emotions that we think of as being given to us by nature.

SPIEGEL: What Lisa is saying is that our concepts make the world. And it is hard to overstate how much this changes our idea of what is actually going on when we walk down the street. The usual idea is that you are taking in the true world around you and reacting to it, this real thing that exists outside of you.

But what she's saying is that everything around you is a blob until the concepts in your head shape it into a thing, and then you respond to the thing that you just created. The concepts themselves are the key.

BARRETT: Yes.

SPIEGEL: Now, if you watch the news, it's likely you've encountered a more contained version of the idea that concepts literally shape the world you see.

SPIEGEL: We've heard a lot about troubling police shootings of young black men or George Zimmerman pulling a gun on Trayvon Martin.

SPIEGEL: And part of the way that people talk about police shootings is that sometimes police are responding not to the reality of the people in front of them but to a stereotype in their head. Stereotypes are concepts. In this case, the concept that young black men are dangerous. Critics say it's that concept that shapes what the police see and can prompt them to pull the trigger when there is no actual need.

SPIEGEL: But what Lisa is saying is that concepts like these work in all of us all of the time. They take the blobs in front of us and shape them into what we see. And they take the blobs inside us and shape them into what we feel.

BARRETT: For better or for worse, experiences are constructed. And your emotional experience is not an indication of something objective about the event. That's just not true.

ROSIN: And here is the point of all this, according to Lisa.

BARRETT: That means that you have more control over your emotions than you might imagine. The horizon of control is much broader because.

ROSIN: Because concepts are not hardwired. We can change them. Ultimately, we have control.

BARRETT: Yes.

ROSIN: And this is not just a fun science fact, a trippy nugget you heard on a podcast. That's not what this is.

SPIEGEL: Like, essentially you're saying we have way more control over and therefore responsibility for our emotions.

BARRETT: Yes.

ROSIN: Control and responsibility for our emotions. It's such a puzzle. Control is fun. Who doesn't like control? But responsibility - much less fun, much, much less fun.

SPIEGEL: So if I have post-traumatic stress disorder, say, do I have control over that?

BARRETT: Well... Well, yes.

ROSIN: [Earlier in the podcast episode we told the story of] Tommy Jarrett, the trucker, [who] was traumatized [in a bad crash where a child died]. And if you look at it the court's way, Tommy's emotions start with Michael Jones, [the child’s father], who lost control of his car. But if you look at it Lisa's way, they start much earlier with the concepts in Tommy's head. In the culture where Tommy grew up, a farm in Alabama in the 1960s...

JARRETT: “A man should be strong enough to protect people.”

ROSIN: “A man should be in control of his truck and of himself. And if something goes wrong, it's his fault.” That was the underlying concept that caused Tommy to think he was a killer. So did the PTSD come from Michael Jones, or did it come from inside Tommy?

Even bringing up a question like this, it feels like a radical thing to do because we all like to assume that if we feel something, it tells us something true about the world, something that happened to me. But Lisa isn't saying that PTSD or trauma of any kind isn't real, or that people suffering shouldn't be recognized and relieved, or that we shouldn't address the individuals and systems that harm people.

She's just saying trauma isn't cancer or diabetes, where cells in your body have gone wrong. The problem has much more to do with concepts in your head created by and based in our culture. And those aren't inevitable. Those can be changed.

Lisa identifies herself as a progressive, so she really struggled when we talked about things like PTSD. But she had to admit that yes, her theory has obvious implications for lots of things in our society, even implications she doesn't like.

BARRETT: I see the risk in what I'm saying - right? - but science is science. And we have to - I feel like it's necessary to draw people's attention to what the science has to say. And in the proper context in society, in culture, people can debate the consequences. But I think, you know, I do think that it's very dangerous to treat things as objective when they're not.

SPIEGEL: Emotions are not objective. All kinds of emotions are not objective, even the emotions you have in response to a death.

...

ROSIN: So Tommy. How do we think about Tommy, his pain and the lawsuit? Lisa wants us to acknowledge that Tommy's pain, it wasn't an automatic inevitable response. It came from the concepts in his head. So does that mean he didn't deserve to win his case? Well, Lisa's just asking us to be more honest. We can say yes, it partly came from in his own head, but we as a society still think it's fair and just that he be compensated.

BARRETT: The point is that we can acknowledge the perceptions are constructed or we can ignore it and just keep doing what we're doing anyways. I think it would be much fairer if we just acknowledged how our brains actually work.

ROSIN: Our brains rely on concepts, and concepts make our world, our culture, our systems. Which is why it's useful to know which concepts are shaping us and which ones we're passing on to each other and to our children.

ROSIN: And you know what? If we make these concepts, we can unmake them. But even if we don't choose to do that, even if we decide to build the world just exactly as we've built it down to the very last brick, there in the back of our heads when we experience something that disturbs us can hover a liberating thought - this feeling I have, it doesn't have to be this way. There is nothing inevitable about the world that is.

BARRETT: You have more control over your own experience. You become more the architect of your own experience.

ROSIN: And that's exactly what Tommy did. We met up with him 10 years after the lawsuit. He ended up getting $50,000 from the court. Half went to the lawyers. And in the end, Amanda's insurance company covered it.

These days, Tommy's feeling much better. His life is great now, he says so himself. About a year after the accident, he started driving again. Now, he has his own trucking company and a motorcycle which he and his wife ride out West when they can. About the whole awful period after the accident, he understands one thing for sure now.

JARRETT: My emotions wasn't being true to me. I had every right to be upset and be hurt and distraught. I didn't need to keep telling myself that I was a killer.

ROSIN: That emotion that the court had validated, it felt real, but it wasn't telling him anything real about the world. Tommy realized that basically because he did exactly what Lisa Feldman Barrett says people should do when they feel like a powerful emotion is controlling them. He took this construct which had been in his head since he was a kid, that as a good man and a ninja of a driver he should have been able to prevent the accident.

ROSIN: And he learned a new construct. It took him a long time, more than a year, and a lot of work. And he had help from his family and from a therapist because changing the concepts we've grown up with and absorbed all of our lives is not easy at all. But eventually, Tommy did it.

He replaced his old concept with a new one that led him to the actual truth. He was not a killer. Because when that car skidded across the median, there was nothing he could have done. The new concept? Sometimes a man is not, in fact, in control.

[actiaslunaris]

Tutorial: Making Gifs with Animation Shop 3

This is text and picture heavy and is geared to working with free software available for Windows systems, as much as possible.  I’ll cut once I reach the first screenshot.

For starters, make sure you have at least 10 gigabytes free in your hard drive space. The process I use to create gifs with and without text requires that I use uncompressed video (this simply means that the video I take source from is usually compressed in formats like MP4 and MKV). Uncompressed video takes a lot of space.

I do use a legally-bought software to make gifs with text.  It's  a low-cost alternative to Adobe Photoshop and I acquired it back in 2000 or so.  It used to be called Jasc Paint Shop Pro and is now called Corel Paint Shop Pro.  Animation Shop 3 was bundled with PSP 7, but ceased being bundled shortly thereafter.  This tutorial will include making gifs with text, but the process is cumbersome, and does require purchasing PSP.  (It's inexpensive, however.  I highly recommend Corel products as good alternatives to Adobe.  Currently PSP 7 is available for around $60 on Amazon.)

However, the executable file for Animation Shop 3 is freely available online, with no crack needed for use.  If you're using it on a Windows 10 system, you will need to adjust the compatibility settings to Windows 8.  This is done by right-clicking on it after install, selecting 'Properties' and then clicking on the 'Compatibility' tab. Adjust the version in the drop-down box.

Software needed: VirtualDubMod 1.5.4.1

Avisynth 2.5

ffdshow

Jasc Animation Shop 3

Install these by running them and following directions.  Make shortcuts for VirtualDub and Animation Shop only and open them before using to continue assigning file types to them, especially for Animation Shop 3.

Now you'll need to install some filters for use with Avisynth.  The first of these is a video enhancer to use for coloring your gif. The second is a pack that includes FFVideoSource, which is how you'll be able to open most formats in VirtualDub.

ColorMill

(Here’s a page with some more information about how to use Color Mill, but ignore the directions for installing because you won’t be using them here.)

Install this file by simply dropping it into the 'plugins' folder of where you've installed VirtualDub.  For instance, mine is located at 'C:\Program Files\VirtualDubMod1.5.4.1\plugins'.

Avisynth Plugin Pack

(Here is information on what Avisynth does.  It’s not necessary that you read it for this tutorial,but it does demystify it somewhat.)

To install these, unzip the contained files and then also drop them into the 'plugins' folder, but this time for your installation of Avisynth.  I use 2.6, so this is slightly different, but to demonstrate again, it could be like 'C:\Program Files (x86)\AviSynth2.6\plugins'.

Now, you need video source.  Nowadays, most video is available in MP4, MKV or AVI format.  I use downloaded source to make my gifs because the process of saving individual frames as screenshots, while a viable process, is painstaking.  This setup, while initially complicated, takes a lot of the pain out of the process, once fully set up.

So, if you  have an MP4 or an MKV, create a simple .txt file.  This will become an Avisynth script, by changing the extension of the file to .avs.  Make sure you can see your file extensions on your system.

Into this file, you'll type the location of your source file as can be seen in this sample screenshot, which also includes some further source modifications.  I've cropped two pixels off each side of the source, as well as resized it to the original size.

Stripped of the modifications specific to this file:

FFVideoSource("") Crop(0,0,-0,-0) LanczosResize([integer],[integer])

Once your Avisynth script has been created and saved, drop the file on top of the shortcut for VirtualDub, or open it, using 'File>Open video file...', which will open a window by which you can navigate to your script. If this is the first time doing this, and you've done everything correctly, there will be a slight delay in which it seems nothing is happening and then the file will open.  You might encounter an error if you have not installed anything correctly or have typed your script incorrectly.

To open an AVI, open Virtualdub and open the video file by selecting 'File>Open video file...'.  It should open without problems.

Once open in VirtualDub, you can navigate to the section you want to extract from your video by using the slider at the bottom of the screen. If the video resolution is large and you can't see all of it in the two boxes of video (one for input and one for output), right-click in the video frame and select one of the zoom options.

At the bottom of VirtualDub are the controls. In order they are: stop, play input, play output, move to first frame, back by one frame, forward by one frame, move to last frame, backward to last keyframe, forward to next keyframe, scan to last scene change, scan to next scene change, mark in, mark out.

Mark in and mark out are what you will be using to extract the section of video you need.  Place your slider on the first frame of what you want to extract and press 'mark in' then move to the last frame and press 'mark out'.  Doing so should show a change in the box below the controls.

I've already done this with a section of video, so next you'll select 'File> Save As...'.  Give it a name and make sure that under the section of Video, it says 'Full processing mode' and then '(Uncompressed RGB)'.  Save it.  This should show you progress, if you have 'Show input video' and 'Show output video' checked.

It is easier to do coloring when you've extracted your clip(s). Open your clip in VirtualDub.  Go to 'Video>Filters...'.  A box will open.  Click 'Add...' on the right hand of the box.  Select Color Mill(2.1) and press 'OK'.  This will open a preview of your source (if not, the options have a button to press that says 'Show preview' in the left-hand corner).  Adjust to your liking using the options.

I desaturated mine, as you can compare in this screenshot:

Save your recolor with a different name.  I usually just append the abbreviation 'rc' to my recolors, so my file name here becomes 'beautifulrc.avi'.

Open your recolored file in Animation Shop 3 (File>Open...).  If your file is a large resolution like mine and over a certain amount of frames long, you might get an error message. Press 'Yes' to continue opening the file.

I have my Animation Shop set up to show the toolbars for everything but VCR Controls and have configured them in the manner you see here:

To make a single gif for Tumblr, you need to make sure that it doesn't exceed the specifications of: under 3 megabytes in size and 510 pixels in width.  You'll find those criteria will constrain what you're able to do.  For instance, my raw source for this gif is 1920x1080 pixels, width and height, and has 71 frames.

The less frames your gif has the more you can save on final file size.  The less width your gif has the more frames you can have.  A 320x210 gif can have up to sixty frames and still have great quality and stay under the megabyte limitation.  The more color in your source, the less compression you'll get in your final gif, with the consequence of a larger file size. (This is why I desaturated my source.)

I will be putting text on this gif to show how this can be accomplished with Paint Shop Pro 7.  I will also cull the frames down to less than 30 (aiming for 26 or 24).  I'm going to crop my source as well, because it is currently in 1:85 perspective, which is rectangular and I want it to be square (at 500x500 pixels).

To crop your source, select the button that looks like two twisted ribbons and place your cursor in the source frame, right click and drag, enlarging the selection area.  Your cursor will change to a four-pointed arrow mover cursor and you can move the selection around your source.  If you move your cursor to one of the boundary lines of the selection, it will convert to a two-pointed arrow and you can click and drag this to adjust simply that side.  Go back up to the toolbar and press the button for 'Crop' once you've adjusted your selection area to your satisfaction.  If your source resolution is large you'll get this error message.

So be sure you're satisfied before continuing.

In the above screenshot, you can also see the selection lines for cropping, as thin lines.

To resize your source, select from the menu: 'Animation>Resize animation...'.  This might shrink your animation down in zoom.  To see it actual size, click the magnifying glass icon and click on your animation until you see the ratio change to '1:1'.

Now, you'll need to change the speed of your source.  To do this, select all your frames by pressing 'Ctrl+A' or going to 'Edit>Select All'.  Now select the pointer arrow from the toolbar and right-click on a frame of your source.  Select 'Frame properties...'.  In the tab that says 'Display Time' enter an integer.  It's '3' by default, usually.  Good times are 9, 10, and 12.  I usually use 9 if I want close to real time and 12 if I want it to be slow.  The more frames you remove the less smooth the motion of your gif will be.  If you start out at 12 and then remove every second gif, you might end up at something close to real time.  You'll need to adjust these parameters until you get something you like.  To test them, use preview, which is accessed by selecting 'View>Animation'.

Move on to culling frames from your animation. Go to 'Animation>Cull animation'. As you can see here, removing 1 frame for every 2 frames, leaves me with 36 frames in my animation.  My target was 24 or 26, so I have to do one of two things: remove frames by deleting them individually or culling again. Here's where I would preview my animation again, to see which option is best. In this case, I chose to cull again, but I adjusted how many frames were being removed to get close to my target, leaving me with 27 frames.

At this point I could choose to save.  

Go to 'File>Save as...'.  Since you've been working with uncompressed video, the program will automatically default to giving you the option to save as AVI.  Change the selection in the box for 'Save as type:' to 'CompuServe Graphics Interchange (*.gif)' and click 'Save'.  That will bring up this box:

Click 'Customize...' and change the settings as follows:

[Under 'Colors' tab] 255 colors/ Optimized Median Cut / Error Diffusions

[Under 'Optimizations' tab] Uncheck everything except for 'Remove Non Visible Animation Elements'

Click 'Next>'.  It will show progress of rendering and when finished prompt you to continue.  Press 'Next>' again twice.  The box will now show you Optimization Results, including the size of the file.  Click 'Finish' if it falls beneath the limitation for file size.

Mine has failed to fall beneath the 3MB limitation. Darn it.  Now I have to go back and remove some frames to try for the target of 24 frames. If you have this same problem, you can try that solution or you can attempt to modify some of the above parameters for file rendering (I ended up using this route to keep 26 frames). I changed 'Optimized Median Cut' to 'Optimized Octree'.  It gave me a final size of 2.5MB.

Congrats, for a gif without text, you're done.

Animation Shop 3 has the capability to save frames as individual images.  If you wished to not purchase Paint Shop Pro 7, you could conceivably download a free photo editor like Gimp, add text to each individual frame, and then use Animation Shop to build the gif by opening each frame with the wizard provided in the software itself.  That's straightforward process.

To create a gif with text by using Paint Shop Pro, what you need to do is open Paint Shop Pro 7.  Leave it open and switch to Animation Shop 3, while it still has your animation open.

Make sure you have not yet rendered your animation into a gif.  Also make sure you have all your frames selected.  Right-click in a frame of your source and select 'Export to Paint Shop Pro'.  Do not close either programs at any point during this process.

If the export goes correctly, PSP will open the gif as frames in layers.  Make sure you have the toolbar for the Layer Palette open, as well as the Tool Options palette. To access click ‘View>Toolbars’, which will open this dialogue, if you didn’t already set this up.

Select a font you wish to use on your gif.  Most gifs on Tumblrs use Corbel set as italicized for dialogue.  I make use of akFontViewer to choose from the fonts I have.

Choose the text entry dialogue by selecting the small 'A' icon on the Tool Palette. Adjust parameters to your liking.  Make sure the radio button in the section for 'Create as' is set to 'Floating' and 'Antialias' is checked. Press 'OK'.  Now it will show a dotted line around your text, because it is a floating selection, so press 'Ctrl+Shift+P' to change it to a raster layer.

Adjust the placement of your text by using the mover tool (the four-pointed cursor icon).  Use the grid tool to align it the way you wish. (View>Grid)

Make further adjustments to the look of your text, if you desire.  On gifs, this may mean adding a drop shadow to the text, so that it stands out a little more.  All image adjustments in PSP can be found under Effects or Colors, but I won't get into how I made the text look here in the final version, as that's not the focus of this tutorial.

Next, select your image by pressing 'Ctrl+A'.  This will put a dotted selection line around the entire image.

Here's where it gets painstaking in a series of repetitive actions.  It's necessary to make sure you follow these in the right order and not to skip or make mistakes, as these will affect your individual frames.  What you'll be doing is selecting a frame, then copying that frame with the text on it, then pasting into the same frame selection.

1. Place your cursor on your first frame.  They go in reverse order. Make sure it is highlighted (in blue is how it shows in my program). 2. Click on the title-bar of your image. Now, right-click. Select 'Copy Merged'. 3. Right-click again. Select 'Paste Into Selection'. 4. Expand your Layer Palette. Click on the glasses icon next to the frame and toggle it to invisible. (It will indicate it is so by red slashes through the glasses.) 5. Click on the next frame layer below the one you've already changed. You can hover over the invisible layer to see the change if you wish. 6. Repeat for each frame layer. 7. Click on the layers that contain your text and turn them invisible. 8. Click on the frame layers starting from the bottom and turn them visible. The last layer should already be visible.

Now, right-click on your image title-bar and select 'Update Back to Animation Shop'. (You can see the option in the above screenshot, as well as the ‘Paste Into Selection’ option, even though they are not highlighted.)

Return to Animation Shop to see if the frames have updated correctly. Move through the frames by clicking on the slider below the frames and check to make sure each frame now has text.

Right-click on the title-bar of your animation (while still in Animation Shop) and select 'Break Link With Exported Frames'.

Proceed to save your gif as outlined above.

Close everything if you're sure you're done.

Congrats!  Now you've made a gif with text, using Paint Shop Pro.

[best-delhi-call-girls]

How to Get a Girl's Phone Number - Flirting Tips and Techniques to Get Her Number

You approached a girl. She's kind of seems to like you and the discussion is moving towards you asking for her number. Do you start getting nervous just by imagining yourself in this situation? If yes don't be mortified. It's normal and it happens to a ton of guys from high school boys to adult men. The nervousness comes from not knowing how to properly ask for a Russian  girl's Call  number just go straight forward and simply put the question out there. Or maybe should you try to be clever about it and maybe make it a joke.

 The truth is that there's no universal bulletproof strategy that can teach you how to ask for a Russian girl's Call  number. However, there are several ways to approach this situation and in this site, I'm going to teach you the ones that have proven the most successful. I'm going to describe different scenarios so make sure to choose the one that fits your current situation but regardless of the strategy. Pick the one that is more likely to get her to agree and give you the number doesn't go for the elaborate strategies you see online.

 Keep it simple and be confident. So let's get on tip number one. Do not ask her for her number. The best way to get her phone number is not to ask for it. I know it's confusing but let me explain. If you say I was wondering maybe I could get your number and if you want maybe we could hang out sometime. Or maybe something like So can I get your phone number. It shows that you're not confident and maybe you're not even sure that you want her to give you her number.

 This is a huge turnoff for girls. The correct formulation should sound like a command. Of course without any aggressiveness, something like Here put your number in my phone or maybe something like That's really awesome I'd love to hang out with you sometime. Put your number in my phone and I'll give you a call if you don't like this approach you can play it cool and say you seem like a really cool person. Let me get your numbers we can hang out sometime. The trick is to look confident and casual when you formulate the question or command.

Keep eye contact smile and always have your phone ready. Make sure that you're out of incognito mode for whatever reason you don't want her to say sure and then try to find your phone or maybe have any awkward situations follow. Another thing I want to talk about is when to ask for the number. So there's no perfect moment. You have to feel it. The important thing is to never start the conversation by asking for her number. You shouldn't also wait till the end of the conversation either. It should be at a high point in the chat when you see that she likes your approach and maybe would be interested in learning more.

 Usually, a gut feeling is pretty precise. So if you feel the discussion reached a high point find a way to steer the conversation towards phone numbers. Here's a little hint. High Point in the interaction is when a girl is laughing. The energy is good and you're both having a great time. But before you ask for her no check if you should. Do you see that you guys are kind of having a connection? She may be closer to than you when you started talking. Also laughing is a really good sign.

 If all of these answers are yes and you would like to see more of her then sure go ahead and ask for her number. The idea here is that it's not just about how to ask for a girl's number. It's also to know if you should and when to ask for the number. After all, you wouldn't want to go through so much trouble and nervousness and not get something pleasant out of it right. Make it fun. Her phone number isn't necessarily a goal. I also want to mention some girls don't mind giving out their numbers.

 Some girls like to play it safe and don't give out their numbers but they have nothing against getting yours. In this case, you can play it safe. This means give her your number and wait for her to call. But let's say Safe is boring and there might be a better way to do it. Being confident and funny is always a winning combination. So keep things light and cozy. For example, if you feel that you're going to get a big fat no when you ask the first test the waters ask her for her phone and when she says Why to say I want to see if you have my number she will laugh and two things will happen here.

 She'll hand her your phone so that you can type in your number or she'll ask you for her phone and she will type in her number. This strategy works because it allows the girl to choose what she wants to do. Another approach here is to ask her for her phone in order to give her your number. Say something like I really enjoy talking to you I'll give you my number so we can chat sometime. Let me see your phone. If she likes you she'll handle your phone. If you think the situation allows it maybe she seems really into you.

 You can go to her message app and send yourself a cute funny text make it funny and flirty. So what happens if she goes ahead and says yes she likes you and wants to know more so, of course, she'll give you her number. Make sure that you have your phone ready the Contact App open and you can even input her number. All she has to do is type in the digits and hit save hinder your phone as you're saying you need her to introduce it. Also at this stage of the discussion, you can move closer to her as if you were to check what she's doing on your phone.

 It's a nice opportunity maybe to touch her maybe by accident and see how you feel in close proximity when she puts the number in her phone center of flirty texts maybe something like Hey it's Tim the guy with the killer smile at this moment in the discussion she has your number and you've already opened the new channel of communication texting. If you can't text right away don't wait too long for this. You should send her a text when you get home. Or on the second day. Some guys wonder Should I call or should I text.

 This is a big question. You've learned all about how to get a girl's phone number and what to do if you were successful. But what's the next step. Well, in my opinion, you should keep things casual into a little bit of texting. It shows that you're interested but confident enough to play cool for a little while. It's all good isn't it a text as soon as possible. If you're getting the number in order to make sure it's the right number and to establish a foundation however it's not OK to harasser with all kinds of messages all day long.

 Keep it funny and short. Finally when it comes to the time that you might want to ask her for a date. I'm a big believer in calling her. It gives a date deeper meaning and shows that you really want to spend time with her. A lot of people don't call anymore so calling really shows that you're different. It's more scarce and it's fun. I mean you're actually going to get an adrenaline rush and the blood pumping. Right. So something else I want to talk about in this site is a rejection.

 Let's learn how to deal with rejection. I'm sure you were expecting to hear about rejection at some point. I decided to address this topic at the end because you shouldn't start with the idea that you're going to get rejected. However, if it happens you need to know how to handle it. First, the idea of rejection is one of the reasons why you're so nervous in the first place. She says no. Well, that's about it. She says no and you move on to better things. You can find a girl who is actually interested in you.

 Nothing worse can happen at this stage. You also need to keep in mind that even if a girl agrees to give you her phone number it doesn't necessarily mean that you will be going out with her. Asking for someone's number is not a proposal towards a serious relationship. It's just a way to continue a pleasant interaction and see if it leads somewhere else. So keep it light and casual and be confident in your own strengths. It will give you that genocide quashes you won't be able to resist. So knowing how to ask for a Dating girls whatsapp number should be a skill in every modern man's arsenal.

 It doesn't require too much from you but it can be so rewarding if done correctly so don't be afraid to get yourself out there and test your power of attraction. You may get a few rejections on the line to behave that's how you grow. One more thing. That course I was talking about earlier. It's called The Psychology of attraction and it's your animated guide to how a girl thinks what she finds irresistibly attractive and how to use psychology to make her want you. Marketing headline aside it's an animated course I created by reading eight psychology textbooks and summarizing everything about attraction I know and I've coached.

 That teaches you stuff like texting tips reading body language rejection training and how to understand any girl I've helped so many guys with it and there's a ton of testimonials that I can't just share with you. So check out the link in the description for over half off today and see how you could transform your life by understanding the psychology of attraction. Thank you guys so much for Read. And until the next article.

[builder051]

Where’s the fun in doing what you’re told

For @sickandvomiting, because we could all use a little more Bruce in our lives.  And I all the sudden had a huge urge to write science bros.

Set between Avengers and Age of Ultron.

_____

The last thing Bruce remembers is JARVIS’s voice.

“Master Stark would like to see you in the lab,” the AI had said.  Or something like that.  Bruce isn’t sure of the specifics.  Things had already been shimmering green at that point.

When he wakes up flat on his back on the gym floor, Bruce still hears the familiar accented voice talking to him.  “Dr. Banner?”

“Hm, yeah?”  Bruce groans, pushing himself onto his side.  He’s surrounded by the shredded remnants of his t-shirt and shorts, plus a lot of sand and foam and other bits and pieces of the punching bag he’d been battling.  All in all, it’s not the worst thing he’s destroyed during an…incident.

“Would you like me to call for assistance, Dr.?”

“No, no, I’m fine,” Bruce mutters.  He gets up to a seated position, but has to bend forward and put his head between his knees until the dizziness lets up.

“Your heart rate appears to be elevated,” JARVIS reports.

“Yeah, no shit.”  Bruce breathes shakily.  As the adrenaline rush begins to die down, a throb blooms behind his eyes.  It doesn’t matter that the feeling is familiar.  It’s still terrible.

“How…how much time did I lose?” Bruce asks, pausing to take a hitching breath.

“Fourteen minutes, sir,” JARVIS replies.  “And Mr. Stark would still like you to join him in the lab.”

“Yeah.”  Bruce straightens up and slowly gets to his feet.  “Got it.”

He stumbles into the locker room and finds a spare t-shirt and sweats folded on a bench.  The must be Steve’s, he thinks as he pulls them on, because they’re too tight in some places and too loose everywhere else.  He really should keep some of his own clothes stashed here just in case, but that would be a little too logical.  Plus, it would dash his hope that, save any extenuating circumstances, this is the last time something like this will ever happen.

Bruce splashes water on his face and gulps some down straight from the tap, pretending that it’s going to make a difference in how he feels.  It’s the same vicious cycle every time, and he seems to get out of it by pure luck every time.  The transformation burns six or seven thousand calories and leaves him dehydrated to the point of nausea.  What he needs is a gallon of chocolate milk, but the thought of swallowing anything with flavor makes him salivate in a way that’s less than pleasant.

Bruce’s sinuses ache.  He spits out the water in his mouth and reaches for a towel.  It’s probably his mind playing tricks, but the white fabric looks like it’s tinged chartreuse when he pulls it away from his sweaty face.  “It’s fine.  You’re fine,” he murmurs to himself.

“Sorry to continue to bother you, Dr. Banner,” JARVIS pipes up again, “But Sir is insistent.”

“Of course he is.  Don’t worry about it.”  Bruce throws the towel into the laundry bin and heads for the door.  A couple of Tony’s bots are already cleaning up the mess of the busted punching bag, and Bruce pointedly doesn’t look at them as he crosses the gym.  He bypasses the elevator and starts down the stairs instead.  He’s steadier on his feet than he was a moment ago, but he still feels sick.  He hopes he’ll be able to dispense with Tony quickly and retire to his room with a box of saltines.

Bruce takes a measured breath before pushing open the door to the lab.  “Hey, Tony,” he says with as much gusto as he can muster.  It isn’t much.  Bruce cringes at his breathlessness.

“Hey…”  Tony doesn’t look up from the arc reactor he’s fiddling with.  “I’ve got a question for you…”

“Yeah, what?  JARVIS told me to come down here…”  Bruce suddenly has too much spit in his mouth, and he struggles to swallow it down.  “Like four times.”

Tony finally sets down his screwdriver.  He makes eye contact with Bruce across the lab.  “What’s wrong with you?” he asks.

“Nothing.  Just an occupational hazard, I guess.”  Bruce grabs the back of a chair and tries to suck in a breath.  His chest feels constricted, though, and fresh sweat breaks out over his brow.  His heart rate begins to quicken again.

“Are you gonna...?”

Tony’s voice gets quieter and further away.  Bruce feels himself sway on his feet as pressure and bitterness burst into his throat.

“Ok, I’m not letting you puke in the lab.”  Tony roughly pushes him into the bathroom and lifts the lid on the toilet just in time for Bruce to jolt forward and heave violently.  It’s just water first, then breakfast comes back in a torrential splash, and then more in a series of weaker retches that leave him struggling for control over his spasming stomach.

“I thought you burned through all your food when you did your mean and green thing,” Tony says, wrinkling his nose and handing Bruce a wad of toilet paper.

Bruce spits and wipes his mouth.  “I do,” he pants.  “But it’s a stressor, you know, like fight or flight.”  He flushes the toilet, then dabs at his sweaty forehead with his sleeve.  “It stops the digestive process…”

“Yeah, I don’t really want to know,” Tony says.  “Will water help?  Or will that make you hurl again?  Cause if you’re gonna do that, I think you should probably go somewhere else.”

Bruce struggles to catch his breath.  “I…I think I’m good.”

“You sure?  I mean, I’ve got hangover supplies down here, but I’m not wasting them on you if you’re just gonna keep…you know.”

Bruce gets shakily to his feet.  “I might be off for a while,” he admits, “But I think I’m ok.”  His headache’s dialed up, but the nausea’s tapering.

“Ok then,” Tony says, leaving the bathroom and opening the mini-fridge under his desk.  “Ginger ale or Gatorade?”

“God.  Both,” Bruce says, flopping down in a swivel chair.

“Thirsty much?”  Tony shuts the fridge, then offers a bottle in one hand and a can in the other.

“Dehydrated,” Bruce corrects him.  “And starving.  Literally.”

“Right.”

Bruce unscrews the cap on the Gatorade and takes a tentative sip while Tony settles back behind his desk.  He picks up the arc reactor and gives it a tap.  “See this?  See how it’s bigger than the ones I use?”  He looks at Bruce, barely containing a grin.

Bruce swallows.  “Uh.  Yeah?”

“What would you think about your own suit?”

“Huh?”  Bruce doesn’t trust himself to process the words correctly.  “Like, for the other guy?”

“It would be adaptable, of course,” Tony says.  “For you or, uh, him.  You know, to fight him or something, if you needed it.”  He shrugs.  “Just an idea.”

“Hm,” Bruce muses.  He takes another sip of the sports drink.  “Ok.”

Tony pulls a holographic screen out of midair.  “Here’s the design I worked up.  But I need your input, for all the special features and stuff.”

“Wow.  That’s…that’s really generous.”  Bruce quells a belch behind his hand.  “Sorry.”

“Naw, this is fun,” Tony says, grinning.  “As long as you’re not gonna puke on my keyboard or anything.”

“No,” Bruce laughs.  “I promise, I’m not gonna do that.”

“Alright, then.”  Tony pulls his chair up beside Bruce’s.  “Let’s get to work.”

[massive-mythopoetic-mashup]

is it ok if i ask you what your opinion is on the symbolism of red in the schnee family (each member having one article of clothing that is red- breaking away from the white- dark blue-grey aesthetic)? I personally have the theory that it is meant to be an allusion to the poisoned red apple in the Snow White fairy tale, but i would like to get your input if that's ok. Btw, i love this blog and your theories- theyre great!!!!

Of course it is okay!!!! The ask button is there for asking things so if you are asking something you are using it correctly and should feel a wave of positive feelings about yourself because you are a wonderful person who is using a thing for the purpose for which it was intended! No guarantees you are going to get a satisfactory answer, though, and also I’ve been under the weather a lot lately so I am sorry about slow replies.

Also, some people use the ask option to send me messages telling me I don’t know things and that is confusing because there is no question mark and I am not sure what sort of response those people are hoping to get. They don’t tend to get it, I don’t think, because I don’t tend to reply to those.

But anyway your question! I actually read your post about that earlier when I saw you liking my stuff and checked out your blog, and it was very interesting! I do not myself actually have any opinion on the significance of the usage of red in the Schnee family wardrobe generally. While costumes in RWBY tend to be filled with meaningful details that can be very subtle, my own style of investigation into the show rarely uses trying to guess at the meaning of such symbolism as its starting point. Instead I look to costume details as a way to further support connections and parallels already suggested by allusions, or less often I look at the themes of the entire ensemble of a character to try and generate ideas for where I should be looking outside of RWBY for allusions the creators have never declared. (For example, why does Yang dress in stylized western wear?) I haven’t yet seen anything in the allusions that the Schnee family makes which suggested to me that kind of coordinated use of red across multiple characters, so I haven’t looked at their collective usage of red as potentially representing something.

As for the inner red lining used in Weiss’s original combat outfit, I personally always took that as symbolism of how Weiss is cold on the outside but warm on the inside. I never saw it as anything deeper than that, and I don’t know why the red was removed from her outfit after the Fall of Beacon. This doesn’t mean that the red in her outfit doesn’t have other, deeper significance though! Just that I haven’t identified any myself.

As for Whitley’s lack of red- the one allusion I could point to that might have something to do with this is the character of Kai from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, who I am certain Whitley is heavily based upon. Kai is a cursed boy who has a tiny splinter of a shattered, evil magic mirror stuck in his eye, which makes it so he can only see ugliness and never beauty, and whose heart has been frozen by the kiss of the Snow Queen. Kai was once friendly and kind, but after being cursed he became cruel, and he was eventually kidnapped by the Snow Queen and taken away to be kept prisoner in her palace. But even though Kai is a cursed prisoner, because his heart is frozen he doesn’t feel anything, so he does not even want to be freed, and is content to remain with the Snow Queen as her pet, appreciating the pure mathematical geometry of the ice crystals in her palace, as math is the only thing he can still see beauty in. So, I think that Whitley’s lack of any red in his outfit may be in part an allusion to the frozen heart of Kai from The Snow Queen.

As for Winter and Willow- I don’t have a specific opinion on the color of the brooch they both wear on their collar, however, I think it is super significant that it appears to be the exact same brooch. In fact, if you compare adult Winter with the depiction of Willow in the family portrait, adult Winter seems to be wearing an identical shirt to the one her mother is wearing under her vest in that portrait. Furthermore, portrait Winter has very similar color layout to her mother in general, with similarly shaped vests with identical buttons arranged in a double breast. Adult Winter’s vest is a different color than her mother’s, but the cut is even more similar. I think the biggest tell though, is that Winter’s hairstyle is just a slight variation on her mother’s: her side bangs hang to the right instead of the left, she wears her bun high instead of low, and she only has a curly sidelock on one side instead of both. But that’s it; otherwise their hairstyles are identical. What do I think all this means? I think it’s symbolic foreshadowing that Winter, just like Ruby, is in many ways a carbon copy of her mother, and an inheritor of a heavy legacy. Weiss may be doing a great job of breaking free of her family’s negative influences right now, but I think we’re going to see as the story progresses that Winter is still set up to follow exactly in her mother’s fated footsteps- and that just as has been heavily foreshadowed for Ruby, Winter must also face a trial of not succumbing to the same fate as her mother did.