#not sure if I'm doing any new designs this year for patches but I would like to attempt at least one

[agent-gladhand]

Hello there from the ether!

I'm sure you've been asked this before, so sorry if I'm being annoying...but will you ever be making those cool Gear Station patches again?

I randomly came across them today, and I was wondering if there was such a thing out there (I'm trying to make a baller SUBMAS-themed jacket... >D>). I was excited to see the post yet then bummed to see its 2023 post date haha...

NBD if you don't! Just thought it wouldn't hurt to ask. 👍 Cheers!

Since the interest for restocked patches did really well (very surprising to me)! on the last interest check I ran, I'm hoping to include them on the next set of shop preorders in late September/October since it's been a while!

I'm still going back and forth on the idea to make the stock for patches limited since they take me quite a while to do by hand (well, embroidery machine that takes a lot of time to set up, ESPECIALLY the Joltik design having a lot of color switching that takes 25 minutes to do *one*). But for certain I want to have the gear station logo available!

Side not that I'm also considering making the digital pattern for the gear station patch available for a reduced price for those who have embroidery machines and want to make it themselves, but not sure if that would be too niche of a thing to offer... (psst psst, if people are interested and comment so, I shallst consider it more).

[janitorhutcherson]

Sacred Self Care (Mike Schmidt)

i'm 100% supposed to be cleaning my room up for family but i may go insane if i do not write RIGHT NOW!! so, this is something i've had in my mind for so long. i PROMISE after thanksgiving i'll give yall peeta and finnick content and get to more asks. i could not hold back on this one any longer though, so sit back, and enjoy!

summary: mike discovers self care, but what happens when his ritual becomes a little too intricate and he ends up in a silly predicament?

warnings: mentions of nudity, one or two innuendos

word count: 2,288

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

Mike Schmidt did not have time to take care of himself. This was a fact that was all too noticeable. His dry curls practically begged to be lathered in moisture, or at least in something that wasn’t a bar of soap that was also used on his face and body. His nails were dirty whenever he was busiest, the only time they were well groomed being when he was prepared to be knuckles deep inside of you. His eyebags were sunken in and his facial hair grew in patches, untrimmed. Mike did not care, nor did he think wasting time on such a meticulous thing would be beneficial to him. There were better things to do than to primp himself when he could be doing something more productive, such as getting to the bottom of his brother’s disappearance… thirteen years later. When he wasn’t obsessing over every minute detail in his dream that could lead him to the solution or fathering Abby in his own backwards but still productive way, he was admiring you and your glory.

While Mike may not have been someone for self-care, you most definitely were. You were constantly looking up new ways to better yourself, new hair masks to try and new ways to make your skin as smooth as butter. The water bill also certainly showed your love for self-care. Some nights, you’d prance into the bedroom after an intricate shower, throwing your leg up on the bed as you demanded for Mike’s rough hands to feel, every centimeter of hair gone, the smell of cocoa butter sifting in the air. He was amused when he’d walk in to you sitting on the couch, some new green goop slathered on your face, or some strange piece of paper stuck to your nose. On occasion, you’d convince Mike to join you and Abby, his desperation to spend more quality time with the two of you trumping his disdain for fifteen minutes of clay on his face. He’d peel away at chunks as they flaked into his lap, you and Abby giggling every few seconds as the pile would grow amusingly larger before Mike would give up, running to the bathroom to scrub his face clean before the timer went off.

He wasn’t sure when it clicked. Perhaps it was when Abby told him he’d looked rough lately (he attempted to take this with a grain of salt, as she was his little sister, scolding her and telling her that was not very nice) or perhaps it was when one morning after work, he’d noticed new wrinkles covering his forehead and increasingly pale skin with purple dips underneath his eyes. One day, he found himself in the shampoo aisle at Target. It started with something simple. He bought real shampoo and conditioner, specifically designed for curly dry hair. He enjoyed the scent it radiated as he lathered it through his locks in the warm shower, the aftermath amazing. He’d never seen his hair so fluffy as it dried, his once brittle strands now feeling smooth as he ran his fingertips through it. Then, there was skincare. Somehow, he ended up getting a free sample in the mail from one of those makeup subscription companies you subscribed to, the company accidentally sending you a made-for-men miniature face wash and eye cream set. You eagerly tossed it his way with a giggle, assuming he tossed it in the trash the moment he got it. Instead, that very night, Mike added it to his shower along with his brand-new hair products, patting the eye cream underneath his eyes once he got out. The next morning, the once deep reddish purple was now only tinted a light color. Before he knew it, underneath the cabinet tucked away in a corner were different hair oils, beard creams, moisturizers, and lotions. He’d gotten into different kinds of cologne, opting for scented deodorants as well.

Mike had to admit, he enjoyed this new routine of his. As it progressed, it became almost ritualistic. He’d get home from work at exactly 6:15, about 45 minutes before you’d wake up. He would hop into the shower, taking in the feeling of his fingertips massaging his scalp, his body feeling the tension flooding down as the water from the shower flooded down the drain. Then, the aromatic smell of musky body wash would fill his nose, cleansing his senses of the smell of ancient dusts from working at the pizzeria. He’d step out of the shower, his skin tinted pink from the hot water, his face freshly washed. He’d apply lotion, shape his beard and add his creams, he’d even gotten into grooming his nails every night, ensuring they were crisply clean and applying a protective clear coat on top.

He couldn’t quite figure out why he was so embarrassed by his ritual. Perhaps it was the way it made him feel less masculine, knowing damn well deep down that it didn’t make him any less of a man and it was just his years’ worth of built-up toxic masculinity that you were so desperately trying to get him to break down. Maybe it was the way he was splurging on things he simply didn’t feel he needed until now, until it suddenly felt like a necessity, something he’d go insane without. Most of all and the most likely of all the scenarios, it was admitting that he was wrong, that something you and Abby had so desperately attempted to beg him to get into was exactly what the two of you had explained to him. It was majestic and comforting. At least 45 minutes a day were dedicated to him and only himself, his whole body feeling renewed each time he stepped out of the shower. He felt rebirthed, imagining this was what religious people felt when they were deemed ‘saved’ at confessional. Even with that being said, he couldn’t let you and Abby in on his little ritual. No, he couldn’t possibly admit to it. It wasn’t because he wanted to hide something from you two but instead because his embarrassment seeped deep down into his skull every time he thought about revealing it. Instead, he would slowly creep himself into bed, wrapping his arms around you as he pressed a kiss to your forehead, pretending to sleepily open his eyes as your alarm went off.

You’d suspected he was hiding something, and you were worried. The new signature scents, the freshly groomed look, the way he seemed to care more about his clothing and the wrinkles that were shown. Your first thought was that there was somebody else, someone he had needed to impress, much like he once felt the need to impress you every time he was around you, suppressing his comfortable and more Mike-like fashion choices. In the mornings, you’d sense the lack of his presence after hearing the door creak open, feeling the bed dip right before your alarm went off, sirens ringing in your head each time as if to warn you something wasn’t right. You would spend some nights he was away at work after Abby was in bed evaluating who it could possibly be. There was Vanessa, the blonde police officer who would make occasional appearances in conversation. There was the waitress at the diner who’d taken a liking to Mike, but you weren’t sure who else it could be. Of course, women ogled over Mike all the time in public. There was something about a man with a slightly off putting aura and messy tussled hair. But regardless, you had always trusted him, and besides, Mike didn’t really talk to many people as is.

It wasn’t until Mike added in a peel off face mask into the mix that the jig was up. One week, he’d managed to get the entire week off, ensuring the pizzeria was boarded closed and begging Vanessa to keep an eye on things. You’d felt slightly better having him around more and at normal hours. He was very much still head over heels for you, following you around like a lost puppy, the two of you showering together, cooking together, and of course, having as much ‘alone time’ as you could possibly fit in when Abby was asleep or away at a friends. Even with that, in the back of your mind, you couldn’t shake the feeling. You were passed out on the couch after a movie night and it was late. Mike had crept away from the living room, tucking your sleeping body under a blanket, slipping into the shower. He followed his typical ritual, something he’d had to put off for a while in fear of getting caught, still unsure of what made him so anxious. After his shower, he applied his peel off mask, attempting to avoid his facial hair, but without thinking, he’d applied a layer over his entire chin. What would soon become a panic inducing issue in a short sum of ten minutes hadn’t occurred to him quite yet.

As the timer on his phone went off, he began slowly peeling the mask off, starting at his forehead before he froze, realizing more of his face was covered than usual. He brushed it off, continuing to peel before he noticed that not only was the thin, purple layer coming off, but multiple specks of hair were attached as well. Oh fuck, he thought to himself, unsure of how to proceed. No, he couldn’t just rip it off. He was attached to his facial hair. It made his baby face look mature and manly. No, of course it didn’t occur to him to just add water, simply wiping it away. There was only one option, and that was to waltz into the living room with his bright purple face and to wake you up, puppy dog eyes pleading for you to help him with his predicament.

You stirred away as you felt a hand shake your shoulder, your eyes widening as you sat up with a confused expression.

“Well, hello there,” you croaked out, your voice laced with gravel from exhaustion. He looked at you with embarrassment laced over his face, his eyebrows furrowed.

“Help, please. I…” he trailed off, gesturing his hands towards his face. “I just need it off,” he grumbled lowly, his fingertips holding the piece holding his facial hair tenderly, ensuring he didn’t rip anything else off.

You couldn’t help but let out a loud giggle, amused by the man standing in front of you. You grabbed his hand, leading him into the bathroom. You both sat on the ledge of the tub as you tenderly wiped his face clean with a warm washcloth, his reddened cheeks from both the mask being on too long and the embarrassment becoming more apparent by the second.

“Facial hair is saved,” you said triumphantly, pressing a kiss to his lips. “I do have to ask though, why the sudden liking to all of this? And why not just.. tell me?” you hummed curiously, shaking your head.

“I just.. I don’t know. I think I didn’t want to admit I was wrong or that I was spending so much money on such worthless stuff. It started out so small and then became so big, I just couldn’t,” he sighed, shaking his head. “I am really sorry for keeping it from you,” he hummed before he went into a further explanation, explaining the way it made him feel.

You let out a sigh of relief along with a content giggle, shaking your head. “I knew something was up, but I wasn’t sure what,” you said, cocking an eyebrow as you placed a hand on his knee, your cheeks now warming up.

“What, did you think I was getting all fancy schmancy for another girl?” he teased, bumping his elbow against your shoulder. Your eyes widened as your mouth opened and closed as you went to say something, his expression dropping into something more serious.

“Oh my god, Y/N, honey, no, I’d never,” he said, placing his warm hand on your exposed shoulder. “Baby, no,” he chuckled, happy he could reassure you but somewhat upset that you had to sit through that alone. “No, I love you very much, I promise you, there is no other woman... just, your silly grumpy man being too embarrassed to admit I like girly things,” he teased, leaning in to press a warm kiss to your lips. The kiss was all you needed for electrical sparks to be sent through your body, your brain buzzing as the anxious thoughts began to disappear.

For the rest of the night, Mike walked you through his entire routine, both for fun and for transparency. You two joked back and forth, you occasionally poking at him, telling him he should become an influencer. Afterwards, you both did a face mask together, this time ensuring the product did not cover his chin.

Yes, you and Mike most definitely had your own things to work on, but at the end of the day, you were happiest with him. Your heart felt warm. He had finally found a way to take care of himself, a way to feel more content in his own skin, and even though he had an odd way of going about it, you were pleased, happy he was also finally willing to share this with you. From now on, Mike would wait for his routine in the mornings until you woke up, instead crawling into bed and cradling you in his arms, thinking about how lucky he was to have such a sweet, loving, and accepting partner like you to share his life with, even if it was just skincare and Vaseline kisses.

[scarletsaphire]

For his entire nine years of life, Danny has had incredible dreams. Featured in every one is a patch of stars, staying just in the corner of his vision, just out of reach. It is only after his first nightmare that the stars appear as what they truly are; a ghost, here to make a deal.

--

This is my Big Boy fic I've been planning for over a year. I hope you guys enjoy.

Danny had always dreamed of stars. It wasn't necessarily that he always dreamed of the stars, but they were always there. Sometimes he'd dream that he was a pirate, fighting glowing green sea creatures that came up from the bottom of the ocean, tentacles grappling on the sides of his pirate ship. Sometimes he would dream of a world made entirely of smudges of color, and he had to save it from the evil people who wanted to erase it all. Sometimes he would dream of exploring other planets, of the taste of space dust on his tongue and a ground that made him bounce like a trampoline. Danny dreamed a lot of things, but no matter what he dreamed about, the stars were always there, just out of reach. They were different then the ones that appeared in the sky; they seemed to flow and ripple like water, and they always seemed to move to the corner of his vision no matter how hard he tried to see them.

For a while, Danny tried to catch the stars. Every time he got close, he'd wake up. But his parents had taught him that Fentons don't give up, and Danny wouldn't be the one to break that streak. So he swore to himself, after what felt like the millionth time waking up in the dead of night, that he'd get to hold those stars someday, even if he needed to go to space to get them. He spent every night that summer trying to catch them, every night waking up disappointed and going through the next day so tired his mom brought him to the doctor's for a check up.

Danny didn't try and catch the stars the night before third grade. In between teaching Danny the correct way to weld, his dad had talked all about how he'd need all his energy to learn the new things that tomorrow would bring. His mom had stolen Danny away to show him the new and improved Fenton Folders she'd finished for him, designed to be able to hold not only the papers for his class, but any textbooks or other supplies he might need as well. They were bulky, and the combination of metal and mesh wasn't the prettiest, but Danny loved them; he'd helped her make them, after all. Jazz had told him while helping him pack that he needed to prepare himself. 

"Third grade is where the real school starts," she said while trying to fit his pack of #2 pencils in the backpack without disrupting the spots she'd already put his other supplies. "I can help you prepare physically, because I'm the best big sister ever, but you've gotta make sure you're prepared mentally. It's a lot of responsibility."

"I don't know what that means," Danny admitted.

Jazz grinned at him, showing off the gap in her teeth. "Yeah, well you're gonna. That's something third grade will teach you."

Danny did not pout. He was nine now, which was basically double digits. He was above pouting. "Why don't you just tell me now?"

Jazz zipped up the backpack and left it on the hook next to the front door. "I can't do that, it's against the laws of third grade. Everyone has to go through a ritual at the start, to make sure they're fit to be a third grader."

Danny narrowed his eyes. "You're lying."

"Would I ever lie to you?"

"Yes."

Jazz stuck her tongue out at him, and Danny did it right back. "I'm surprised Mom and Dad didn't tell you about the third grade ritual. What else do you think they've been having us do those martial arts classes for?"

"Ghost fighting?" Danny said slowly.

"And who says the challenge isn't a ghost?" Jazz was smiling at him in the same way she had when she said she didn't hide his cookies on the top shelf.

"You're definitely lying."

Jazz shrugged and turned around towards the stairs. "Believe what you want. I just know that if I was you, I would listen to your big sister who’s already beaten the ghosts. You don't want to fight them by yourself, do you?" With that she went upstairs, leaving Danny by himself. Jazz was lying to him. She had to be. But...

Danny grabbed one of the half finished inventions laying on the end table in the living room and slipped it into the side pocket of his backpack. It was better safe than sorry.

That morning Danny woke well-rested, having slept better than he had all summer. He’d had a dream about constructing fish bowls out of clouds, wringing the water from them like you would a towel. It had been a good dream, even if the stars still hung in the corner of his vision, taunting him. It would have been a pleasant way to wake up, if the first thing he was aware of wasn't the bellowing of his name from the doorway.

"Danno!" Jack repeated at a volume that only made his ears ring a little bit. "Hurry up kiddo, you're gonna be late!"

Danny blinked the sleep out of his eyes as he tried to interpret the numbers on his clock. 7:10. "Dad, you were supposed to wake me up at 6:20!" Danny yelled, jumping out of his bed, blankets falling in a twisted knot to the floor. "The bus is going to be here in 10 minutes!"

"Sorry, son," Jack said. "You don't have to worry about the bus, your old man can drive you."

"No, I'm sure I can catch the bus."

---

Danny walked out of the GAV at precisely 7:24, with only his nine years of experience keeping him from vomiting. He'd missed the bus by thirty seconds at most. 

"You've got this, kiddo! Face those challenges head on!" Jack called from the open window. "Love you, good luck!"

Danny waved back, and Jack drove away. His mention of challenges reminded him of Jazz's words yesterday. Unfortunately, he hadn’t been able to take the unfinished device with him to school; his mom had ended up grabbing it to work on, and with how late he'd woken up, he didn't have a chance to grab a new one. That was okay. Jazz was just kidding. Probably. He tightened his grip on his backpack straps and made his way into the school yard.

Danny's plan was to find Tucker. His parents hadn't let him hang out the past week. They'd said something about summer reading stuff that Tucker still hadn't done, and that he was grounded until he got it finished or school started back up. It was completely unfair, and it meant that the couple minutes before they had to go inside were crucial for catching up about all the exciting things that they had done since the last time they'd hung out. Unfortunately, the first person Danny found was not Tucker. It was Dash.

"Are your parents still adding weapons to that hunk of junk you call a car?" he called out from his spot on the stairs. Dash was mean and a bully, and he had been since kindergarten, but he wasn't persistent. Danny had learned early on that the best thing to do was ignore him and walk away, ideally into the sight of a teacher. Danny tried to do this now, but Dash got up and started to follow him. "What are you running away from? Gonna go hunt down some ghosts to talk to? It’s not like any of us want to."

Danny's grip tightened around the straps of his backpack. "Leave me alone Dash."

"What are you gonna do if I don't?" Dash spat. Danny's next step was halted by Dash's grip on his backpack, forcing him to stumble backwards to keep from falling. "Are you gonna tell your weirdo parents? You'd probably have to lie to get them to care." 

Danny spun to face Dash, the force of his twist breaking the taller boy’s grasp. Despite their height difference, Danny didn't back down.

"Stop it," he spat.

Dash sneered. "Oh, I'm so scared." He leaned down until Danny could smell his breath, warm and gross on his face. "Your whole family is a joke, and everyone knows it. You're no different."

There were a number of things that happened in those few seconds. The first was that Danny realized that, whether intentional or not, Jazz had been right about needing to fight a monster. He wouldn't tell her that, of course. She was already insufferable. 

The second was that Danny's hand had let go of his backpack, clenched into a fist, and flew at Dash's jaw with all the speed and might Danny's nine year old body could muster. 

The third thing, which was by far the worst, was the door to the school yard flying open only a few feet from where Dash and Danny stood. This meant that the teacher got front row seats to Dash's tooth flying out of his mouth.

"Daniel James Fenton!" she called, but her voice sounded distant under the rush of Danny's blood in his ears and Dash's blubbering. He only fully processed that his name had been said when he felt her grab his arm. "Just what do you think you are doing?"

Danny flushed red from embarrassment as he realized that the teacher's yelling had attracted the attention of the whole school yard. "He started it," he mumbled under his breath.

"I don't care who started it, young man, that's no excuse for violence!" she snapped. "I'm going to need to call your parents, do you understand that? In all my years of teaching, I've never had to call anyone about something like this so early in the school year." She moved towards the building, Danny dragging along behind her. 

She stopped briefly near the door to point at a student Danny didn't recognize; a 5th grader, by the looks of it. "Would you be a dear and escort Dash to the nurse’s office?" The student nodded.

The teacher led Danny through the halls of the school to the main office. "You are going to sit right here," she said to Danny, leading him to one of the waiting chairs, "-and you aren't going to move a single muscle, do you understand? I'm going to talk to the principal, and then she is going to talk to you." Danny nodded, and the woman disappeared behind the adjacent door.

Danny would not cry. He wanted to, and his eyes burnt with hot, angry tears, but he did not cry. He was nine. That was almost double digits, and someone who is double digits doesn't cry. Danny focused on one spot on the worn, dirty, carpeted floors, trying to get the heat of his anger to burn a hole through it.

It didn't work. Danny cried quietly.

When the teacher walked back into the room, he wiped away his tears as quickly and discreetly as he could before getting out of his chair and following her into the principal's office. Danny had seen Principal Caulfield a couple of times before; she would give announcements in the cafeteria sometimes, and would lead fire drills. He'd never been called to her office before. He'd never wanted to.

She smiled at him warmly, a stark contrast to the teacher's steely gaze he could still feel burrowing into the back of his head like knives. "Hello, Daniel. I assume Mrs. Robertson explained why you're here." Danny nodded. "Mrs. Robertson explained what happened to me, but I want to hear it from your perspective. Can you do that for me?" 

Danny shifted from foot to foot, not meeting Principal Caulfield's eyes. "She can leave, if that would make you more comfortable." Principal Caulfield nodded to her, and Mrs. Robertson took her leave.

"Dash was making fun of my family," Danny mumbled. "I tried to walk away, but he grabbed me and wouldn't let me go."

Principal Caulfield nodded. "So you decided to hit him?" 

Danny nodded. 

"Why don't you take a seat?" Slowly, Danny sat down in the chair opposite of hers. "We try very hard to teach our students that violence isn't the answer here, and it never is. You should've called for a teacher, or tried to settle the issue with words. Do you understand that?" 

Danny nodded again. 

"Now, I'm going to call your parents. I'm going to have a long discussion with, and you will be sent home early. I know that the first day of school has a lot of fun activities, and with your behavior today, I think a fair punishment is missing out on them. If this happens again, however, you will be in far more trouble. Do I make myself clear?"

"Yes ma'am," Danny said. He focused on keeping his voice from wobbling.

"Good. Now, let me see here..." Principal Caulfield stood up and made her way over to her filing cabinet, rifling through one of the drawers and pulling out a folder with a label that read "D. J. Fenton." She flipped through it, traced her finger down one of the pages, and started dialing a number on the phone. Just as Danny had expected, it went to voicemail. A voicemail that was completely full.

Principal Caulfield frowned down at the phone. She looked through the file again, before looking up at Danny. "Are your parents busy right now?"

"My mom's down in the lab," he said. "If Dad's home by now, he's down there with her. If not, he's in the car."

Her face twisted in confusion, probably trying to figure out what Danny meant by lab, before it settled on an expression Danny had become very familiar with over the years. It was the mixed horror and understanding that most adults got when they realized that those two jumpsuit-wearing ghost hunting weirdos did in fact have children, and one of them was standing in front of them. Danny braced himself for the conversation that almost always followed, even as Principal Caulfield's expression faded into a professional veneer of kindness.

"I didn't realize that your parents had a laboratory in your house," she said. "What type of things do they do in the lab?"

"They build things, mostly," Danny said. That was a major simplification; even though Danny wasn't allowed to help with a lot of the things they did, he helped with enough to know a lot more than that they just 'built things.' More importantly, he knew that Principal Caulfield wasn't actually interested in hearing about his parents’ work, no matter how interesting it truly was. She was poking and prodding around the house to make sure Danny and Jazz were safe. He'd gone through it many times. It was never a pleasant conversation but it didn't normally bother Danny. "They don't let me or my sister into the lab unsupervised, they have all the proper PPE for both themselves and us, and anything they think will hurt us, or that they don't know whether it will or not is locked away where we can't get it," Danny recited.

Slowly, Principal Caulfield nodded. "It sounds like that's something you've practiced."

Danny shrugged. "I just get asked things like that a lot."

"Daniel." Her voice was hard. She cleared her throat and tried again. "Danny," she said, and her voice softer this time. She reached her hands out on her desk and folded them over each other. "You understand that that's not normal right? That you shouldn’t be in a house where your safety is questioned by everyone?"

That was also something he heard a lot. It wasn't like any of them were wrong. His parents weren't normal, and he knew that; what did it matter that everyone else knew that too? But Dash's words from before whirled in his head, mixing with Principal Caulfield's concern and the remaining whispers of the dozens of other people who'd said it. Danny bit his tongue to keep from either crying or shouting. He wasn't sure which was more likely. 

It took a few seconds before he managed to get out the response he wanted. "I am safe."

Principal Caulfield sighed. "Do you have any other way to get in contact with your parents?" Danny shook his head, and she pursed her lips. "Ok. Do they let you walk home alone?" Danny nodded. "Since I'm not going to be able to get in contact with them, what we're going to do instead is you're going to walk home. Straight home, no detours. You’re going to give them a letter explaining the whole situation, and then they are going to call me back. If I don't get a call back from them by -" she glanced at the clock on the wall next to her "- by nine o'clock, you are going to be in a lot more trouble. Do you understand?" Danny nodded again.

The next few minutes passed in tense silence as Principal Caulfield wrote out the note for Danny's parents. Finally, she handed the paper over to Danny. "You're free to leave." Danny shoved the note into his backpack and stood up. 

Just as he was about to walk out of the room, she spoke again. "Daniel?" He turned back to look at her. "Let's make sure this doesn't happen again, ok?" 

All he could do was nod.

---

It was almost 8:30 by the time he walked through the front door, his face red and puffy from anger, tears, and the rising August heat. As he had guessed, the sounds of clinking metal echoed up from the lab. He threw his backpack on the couch, and crouched to untie his shoes. He needed to gather his bravery to face his parents. He'd gotten in trouble in school before; even Jazz had gotten in trouble a couple of times, and she was as goody two shoes as they got. It was just that most of the time when he got in trouble, it was for something that his parents were more lenient about; they didn't care about him missing homework assignments when he had spent most of the time with them in the lab. They didn't care about him not paying attention in class because neither of them could pay attention to much of anything not related to ghosts or science; they claimed it was a Fenton Family trait. 

Danny knew that they would care about this.

He took a deep breath and started down the basement stairs. "Mom? Dad?" he called out as soon as he reached the bottom, peeking his head around the corner.

"Danny? Is it three o'clock already?" Maddie said, glancing over at him in confusion.

"I could've sworn that I only just got started!" Jack said, sitting upright from where he was hunched over his workbench. 

"Time sure flies when we're working," Maddie replied with a laugh.

"Um..." Danny shuffled from one foot to the other. "It's not."

"What was that sweetie?" Maddie asked. 

"It's not three yet. I got sent home from school early," Danny said. He started to explain everything, the words falling out of his mouth as he talked. When he finished explaining what Principal Caulfield had said to him, he pulled out the note and held it out to his parents. They'd both moved to stand next to Danny while he was talking. 

Maddie took the paper and opened it to begin reading, while Jack lowered himself to one knee to get on Danny's level. "I'm disappointed in you, son. I thought we had raised you to know better than resorting to violence."

"Unless it’s against a ghost," Maddie added quietly as she continued to read.

"Unless it’s a ghost," Jack amended. "Then your old man can show you how to shoot the sorry spook right between the eyes!" Jack bounced to his feet, pointing his hands into finger guns, and imitating the sounds of shooting and explosions. That went on until Maddie finished reading the note.

"Jack dear, you've gotten distracted again," she said, folding the note back up and slipping it into her jumpsuit pocket before turning to Danny. "What your father is trying to say is that we're proud of you for trying to stick up for us, but you should know better than to start fights."

"I'm sorry…" 

"You don't have to apologize to us," Maddie said. "You need to apologize to Dash. And that's what you're going to do, right now. You're going to go up to your room and write an apology note to him, and then you are going to go right to bed. No games, no TV, no books, no toys. I think that's a fair punishment, don't you honey?"

"Sounds right to me."

"But he started it!" Danny protested. 

"I don't want to hear it, young man," Maddie chided. "We can be a lot meaner about this if you make us."

Danny bit his lip. "Fine."

"Good. Now, you go upstairs, and I'll give your principal a call."

Danny and Maddie made their way out of the basement together. She stopped at the phone to wave Danny along. "And I'll be coming up to check on you soon, so don't think you can sneak out of the punishment." Danny gave a curt nod in response, not stopping his trek upstairs. 

Danny sat down at his desk in his bedroom, grabbing one of his new school notebooks. He and Jazz had talked their parents into buying a bunch of stickers, and the two of them had spent an entire afternoon customizing their new school notebooks. Danny had, of course, covered his in stars, rocket ships, planets, and astronauts. 

Danny’s lungs and eyes burned with anger as he realized that the very first thing he was going to have to put in his new notebooks was an apology letter to Dash, of all people. But he didn't have any of his notebooks from last year, so he didn't have much of a choice.

He flipped to the first page and lifted his pencil to start writing. The first couple of words were dark and shaky. The pencil tip snapped from the force he used. Danny let his head fall to the desk, and groaned into his arms. "Why do I have to apologize?" he complained to himself, not lifting his head from the desk. "He doesn't deserve it. He's been nothing but mean for years." 

The burning feeling in his throat got more intense. Hot tears ran down his eyes onto the notebook, smearing the few words he’d managed to write.

Danny turned over and glared at the door. His mom had said that she'd come and check on him, but he had grown up with her. There was the chance that she'd make good on her word, sure, but it was far more likely that something would call her back to the lab and she'd forget all about Danny, at least until Jazz got home. 

Danny didn't want to risk the offhand chance of her coming up and catching him doing something she said not to, but that didn't mean he had to write the letter. Not yet, anyway. Danny pushed his chair back from the desk with a squeak, and made his way over to his bed, flopping onto the mattress. With his pillow muffling him, Danny let the tears flow freely.

---

Danny sat in class, the teacher at the front of the room droning on about something. He wasn't paying attention. How could he, when he could feel the weight of his classmates’ stares on his shoulders? Their whispers joined together in a cacophony of noise, getting louder and louder with every passing moment until Danny couldn't even hear himself think. The sound persisted even when he covered his ears with his hands, pushing against his head until it hurt. "Please, stop," he begged. Like a switch, everyone stopped whispering. Danny opened his eyes to see the teacher from the playground standing above his desk. 

"What was that, Fenton?" she said, her voice dripping with venom. 

"I just..." Danny looked around at his classmates, but he couldn't focus on any of them, not under the heat of the teacher's gaze. "I wanted them to stop talking."

"How dare you interrupt their conversation!" Spittle flew from her mouth, bright green, and splattered against Danny's desk where it sizzled, chewing through the wood. He flinched back. "Apologize. To all of them. And then it's straight to the principal with you!" 

"But I didn't do anything!" Danny protested. 

"And you're talking back? If you're ever allowed back in this school again, you can apologize then. But I think the principal might put a stop to that."

Danny tried to stand up, but his legs were glued to the chair. He strained against the force holding him down until his muscles burned, but no matter what he did, he couldn't move. 

"What do you think you're doing, young man?" The teacher said, and she bared her glistening fangs at him. "You are about to be in a world of trouble!"

"What, are you too weak to get out of your chair, Fenturd?" Dash's voice overlapped the teacher’s. "Or is a ghost holding you down? We gonna have to call your crazy parents?"

They didn’t stop talking even as the rest of the class started again, an echoing cacophony of every horrible thing Danny had ever heard about him and his parents and his sister and his house and everything. All he could do was struggle against the chair even as his legs burned from the effort and his head pounded and his eyes leaked hot tears and- 

Danny sat upright in his bed, gasping for air. His school clothes, which he had fallen asleep in, stuck to the skin, and the blanket he'd been sleeping on top of was soaked with cold sweat. He grabbed at his chest, trying to slow down the frantic beating of his heart. 

"It was just a dream," he said to himself, still breathless. "It wasn't real."

Danny'd had nightmares before, but they'd always been full of fantastical beasts and monsters and ghosts. He’d never felt trapped; any time that he'd get too scared, he'd reach to the stars. Their ever-present shimmering would block out whatever terrors plagued his mind, and he'd wake up calm.

The stars weren’t there to save him this time, and that was almost scarier than the nightmare had been.

---

"Did you get the note finished like I asked?" Maddie asked over their Chinese takeout. (Surprisingly, Jack had tried to cook dinner. Emphasis on the tried. He claimed that the hot dogs started the fire in the kitchen, but they had been peaceful since the Great Toaster War, so Danny was pretty sure that Jack just burned the water he'd been boiling. And the stove he'd been boiling it on.)

"Mhm," Danny answered around his mouthful of pork fried rice. He hadn't even started the letter. Every time he did, the cutting words of his dream flooded his mind. It wasn't like she'd check it anyway.

"Good. Make sure to give it to him tomorrow when you go back to school," she said. 

"I still can't believe you got into a fight!" Jazz said. "I didn't get into any fights when I was your age."

"You're only two years older than me," Danny grumbled, shoveling another bite into his mouth.

"And those two years make quite the difference, obviously," she replied. She twirled the noodle around her fork. "I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that-"

Danny cut her off before she could get started. "Can I be excused?"

Maddie and Jack shared a look before Maddie nodded. "Don’t forget you’re still grounded, mister!" Jack called out after him as Danny shoveled one last spoonful into his mouth and retreated to his room. 

The day had passed slowly and painfully, with Danny spending a lot of time staring at his wall. He'd tried going down to the lab to help his parents, but they had made him go back upstairs to his room. It had taken an hour for them to remember to do so, in which they had told him all about the newest ecto-filtration system they were working on developing, but that hour hadn't done much to help with the other ten hours of extreme boredom. That, and the skin crawling grossness from the dream had yet to leave him.

Despite the fact that Danny had done less than nothing today, he was tired. He may have left the dinner table to avoid Jazz's rambling, but he probably would've done that anyway. In spite of the sun still streaming through the window, he made his way through his bedtime routine, before laying down in his bed, this time in his comfortable pajamas.

Apparently, it didn't matter that Danny's exhaustion seemed to run bone deep; no matter how he twisted and turned, he couldn't get comfortable. Every time he thought he'd found a nice position, his hand, head, or legs would throb. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the teacher from his nightmare with the venom filled fangs, or the disappointed faces of his parents and Principal Caulfield. 

Something told him that if he fell asleep, he would be met by similar dreams. No matter how tired he was, he didn't want to go through that again. He tried to keep his hands busy, and when he was too tired to move them with any more grace then a baby, he moved to keeping his mind occupied.

Despite how much he fought it, the soft ticking sound of his clock lulled him into an uneasy sleep.

—

Danny knew that he was dreaming because of the stars. The stars that had hovered at the edges of his vision in every dream but the last now covered everything, as if they were making up for lost time.

"Woah..." he whispered. He'd dreamed of standing in a field of stars before, but this felt...different. Before, there’d always been that one patch that stood out from the rest, his constant companion, a spot inconsistent with the rest of them. It had always felt more real, more physical, then the rest of them. This time, that patch made up everything around him. 

He dropped to his knees to touch one, an exceptionally bright star that pulsed with the beating of his heart. He cupped it in his hands, pulling it out from the inky blackness that surrounded it. It stayed where he held it, with most of the darkness dripping off like water, only a thin strand keeping it connected to the rest of the starscape. It wasn't warm like he'd expected; in fact, it was cold. So cold that it almost hurt to hold it, but he didn't put it down. He'd been dreaming of this moment, literally, for his entire life.

He stared down at the glowing ball, enraptured by its flickering lights, before he realized that it was… wrong. He knew stars; he had begged his parents to bring him to the space museum so often over the summer the people working there knew him by name. Stars were not just balls of light, they were balls of fire that moved and changed. Whatever he held in his hand was nothing but pure light, perfectly frozen, completely unchanging. 

He let the not-star fall from his hands, slipping back into its place in the inky void.

"Is it not living up to your expectations, little dreamer?" Danny whirled around to try and find the voice, but it seemed to come from everywhere, echoing endlessly. The sound traveled in ripples across the not-quite liquid floor, and the echoes only started to fade when the ripples did.

"Who are you?" Danny asked, continuing to scan his surroundings unsuccessfully. "Where are you?"

"You may call me Nocturne," the voice said. "And you already know the answer to the last question."

"I do?" Danny asked, confused. He spun around in a circle slowly. 

"You do. We're in a dream."

"This doesn't feel like my dreams..." Danny said. 

"That's because it isn't one of your dreams," Nocturne said. The surrounding darkness coalesced into one being, the starry cloak extending endlessly into the rest of the surroundings. One cluster of stars became a horned mask, with sunken eyes that seemed to be staring straight through Danny. "It's one of mine. I've brought you here to make a deal."

Nearly every alarm bell Danny had started ringing at once. Despite this, he did not feel scared, just wrong. Something was wrong. He tried to figure out what, but failed. Nocturne was still staring at him expectantly. He had to answer, even if he couldn’t figure it out. “My parents say I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”

Nocturne's laughter rang out through the dream, even though his mask remained perfectly stationary, his eyes never leaving Danny. "Dearest Daniel, I am many things, but I am no stranger." He moved closer to Danny. Or, Danny moved closer to him, the ground beneath his feet folding over itself as if the world was being moved around him.. "You've known me for many, many years now."

"I don't..." Danny started to say, but he cut himself off with a hard swallow. He did know Nocturne, even if he didn't understand how. "What are you?" Danny asked instead.

"I am a ghost," Nocturne said, and Danny’s alarm bells worsened as a cold dread settled on his shoulders. Maybe he was in danger. "You don't need to be afraid, little dreamer. If I wanted to hurt you, I would have done it a very long time ago." 

For some reason, that didn't make Danny any less afraid.

He tried to stumble backwards, only to find that the cold liquid of the pool had hardened around his ankles, locking him in place. "What do you want with me?" Danny said, and his voice was barely over a whisper.

Nocturne tilted his head to the side. "I think a better question is how can we help each other? As I said before, I am offering you a deal. All I want from you for now is to listen." Nocturne laughed again. "I suppose in this case your question ended up just as good as any other." He held his hand out to Danny. "Now, shall we?"

Danny struggled to tear his gaze away from Nocturne's piercing eyes, but he managed to. The ghost's hands were barely visible, blending in almost perfectly to the inky blackness surrounding them, but Danny could still make out the vague outline of claws connected to a hand nearly the size of his face. He knew he should say no; he'd spent his whole life listening to his parents talk about ghosts. They were heartless creatures, a sad mixture of energy and ectoplasm and nothing more. They were more dangerous than anything Danny could ever dream up, had the ability to kill him with nothing more than a thought, and may do something even worse with only a little bit more. He should not take Nocturne's hand.

He tried to move again, but his foot was still stuck in the pool, the cold liquid clinging to him like tar. It didn't look like Danny had much of a choice. Hesitantly, Danny reached out and took hold of one of Nocturne's claws, touching as little of him as he could. Nocturne's expression did not change, but Danny could still feel the satisfaction rolling off of him in waves.

Danny could not remember blinking, but he must have, because one second they were in the star-studded abyss, and the next they were standing at the rear end of Danny's classroom. Danny looked around, confused, and his confusion only grew when he saw himself sitting in the middle seat. His doppelganger was hunched in on himself, visibly uncomfortable.

"You recognize this scene, do you not?" Nocturne asked.

Slowly, Danny nodded. "My nightmare. From earlier today."

"Very good. Tell me, what do you think of it?"

"Um, I don't like it?" Danny answered.

"And why is that?"

Danny shrugged. "I mean, no one likes nightmares."

"Yes, but you've had plenty of nightmares before. Why was this one different?"

Danny bit his lip and took a shot in the dark. "It reminded me of my bad day?"

"Excellent, little dreamer," Nocturne said, his voice laced with pride. "The bad things that have happened, or the bad things that might. Everyone gets them, at some point or another. And yet, for a very long time, yours were special. You were never truly afraid of the things that might happen, but created new things to be afraid of. Isn't that right?"

Danny gave a small nod. It felt like the answer Nocturne was looking for.

"Tell me," Nocturne continued. "Do you want to have more dreams like this one? Do you want for them to be built on the ugly truth of your reality?"

This time, Danny shook his head.

"I didn't think you would," Nocturne said. "Which is why I am offering you an escape from it. I can make it so that you never have these dreams, or any like it, ever again. All you need to do is help me in turn."

Danny narrowed his eyes. He may not have been the smartest Fenton, but he wasn't an idiot. And he had grown up with an older sister. "How would I be helping you?" he asked. "Cause my parents have talked a lot about fairy stories, and they say it’s really bad to make a deal with a fairy, and that fairies are just ghosts that have been mislabeled."

"The details are somewhat complex."

Danny crossed his arms. "Well, I'm not making any deal unless I know what it’s about."

The stars in Nocturne's cloak twinkled brighter. "There is an issue within my home, the Infinite Realms, that requires someone special like you to fix. It is, of course, more complicated than that, but that is the important part."

"And what would I need to do to fix it?" Danny asked.

"It is my understanding that you would simply need to be present," Nocturne replied. "As for the how, that comes back to your side of the offer. Instead of having dreams like this," Nocturne swept his hand across the room. "...you would instead spend your dreaming nights in the Realms. In the morning, you would wake up in your bed as if nothing had happened."

"It won't be any kind of sleeping forever thing, right?" Danny asked.

"It could be if you would like," Nocturne said. "Unless you request it, however, no. It would last just as long as any of your other dreams."

"So you want me to agree to let you take me into the world of ghosts, every night, instead of having the occasional bad dream?" Danny asked slowly. "That doesn't seem very fair to me."

"It would not be the occasional bad dream," Nocturne said. "Dreams are my realm. I know them very, very well. And your dreams have been... tainted. It does not matter whether you take this deal or not, you will never return to the dreams you had for so long. I am simply offering you an alternative to this mundanity."

"Why should I trust you?" Danny asked.

"You shouldn't," Nocturne answered easily. "But you don't need to trust me to agree to the deal."

"And if I don't agree to it?"

"Then you will wake up with no memory of ever seeing me, and go back to a life where you can't escape the horrors of the real world even in the comfort of sleep."

Danny took a deep breath through his nose, and looked around the room. He couldn't hear anything that was happening, but his memory worked to fill in the gaps. The teacher was nearly frothing at the mouth with her green, acidic spit, the other kids in the class were either whispering or laughing at him, and the dream Danny was sitting at his desk. His face was a patchy red, tears streaming down his face. He remembered how helpless he had felt sitting there, and he couldn't imagine feeling like that for who knows how long.

Danny turned back to Nocturne, whose gaze had never once strayed from him. "Okay." His voice didn't shake, despite how nervous he felt. "I agree."

"Wonderful." Nocturne reached his hand out to Danny. This time Danny didn't hesitate to take it, and then the world shifted around him.

[interlockingpatches]

hi!! I was wondering if you would be uploading any patch designs for the holiday season? (Not just Christmas but Hanukkah and new years, or like other winter designs)

Sorry, I've been sitting on this ask for ages!

All my holiday plans went out the window this year (family, medical, immigration issues), but there's still time for a mad dash down the drug store gift aisle, isn't there?

Along with other things you've suggested, I'd love to do something for Hanukkah! I'm not Jewish (except by descent, several generations out), so I'd be grateful for feedback on what I have so far.

I've started on a set of patches that would add up to a working dreidel (more of a rolling die with dreidel faces, but with holes on the short end to accommodate a dowel?). Here's one:

Assuming a dreidel is okay (I think it's is? We made them in grade school but there are so many things to be wrong about), I could use guidance (or reassurance!) on the lettering and overall style:

These look alright to me, but I also don't read Hebrew.

My priorities were to keep the characters small and compatibly-sized, and to approximate calligraphy to the extent that i was able (and understood it), but I'd be happy for corrections/suggestions!

I think the open letterforms and slightly-ornamented, engaged borders on the left (and in the sample) look festive and pretty, but filled letters and plain borders (right) are equally doable, and unless I'm cautioned one way or another, I'll plan to include both.

I also have a few variations on a Hanukkah lamp, but I feel like I'm on even shakier ground with this one!

This motif is based (from hazy recollection) on my dad's family "menorah,"* but I'm not really sure how I feel about it. The shaded versions might be pretty in real life, but they're also all a bit… much?

Anyway, I always say "no judgment in brainstorming" but that does not in this instance rule out friendly words of advice! Nobody be weird about Hanukkah please and thank you byeeeeeee

*This is what we called it growing up, but ours only has seven branches, and I'm not sure if that's something 19th-Century American Jews would have in their homes especially? so I do wonder if it's not a lovely but random, misattributed candelabrum.

[oh-no-its-dragons]

2024 Fic Writer End of Year Roundup (Distrated Version)

aka only the ones I can do off the top of my head after the first few questions because otherwise I'll never get this done

1. How many words did you publish on AO3 in 2024?

On AO3, I've got 150,559 words for the year.

2. How many fics did you complete this year?

Oooh "complete" is not a thing I'm good at, but let me see...

Looks like there were three multichapter fics and about twenty one-shots. I've gotten better at making something a series instead of an open-ended multi-chapter fic when that's what makes more sense for it.

3. How many in progress or ongoing fics did you start this year?

Started posting? Only three. I've got a few more in my WIP files but they don't count until there's something posted somewhere.

4. What was your favorite thing you wrote?

This is a super hard question for me and not only because I forget everything exists once it's posted. Maybe Country Air? I'm enjoying The Cure Is Worse Than The Poison except for when I hate it. I had a lot more fun writing Defying Gravity than I expected, and Early Tyrrish Romantic Poetry was an act of love so it's especially close to my heart.

5. What piece was your most experimental or different from your usual style?

Gotta be the faux-translated ancient dramatic poems, lol.

6. Did any fics surprise you - either while writing or their reception?

Defying Gravity probably surprised me the most- there's probably two or three points in there where I had a good idea of what would happen and then when I got there it just. Didn't happen that way.

9. Who is an artist/author that inspired you?

Can I just list the entire Riders Quadrant discord? Because seriously I had so much fun writing fic and talking about it this year. @suebswrites helped me restructure both Poison and Defying Gravity in ways that made them better. @alexandia03 and @siobhanbooks and @essjaywrites and @tegantales all made me think a probably unhealthy amount about Imrrick. @yanny-77 and @siobhanbooks made me fall in love with Bodoc and Bodhi in general. @fantasywithkassidy's adorable Altitude Adjustment is directly responsible for the modern-with-magic AU Moth and I are starting. @lizardsrunfast and @saranova and @hockeyspiral23 are incredible writers who all inspired my design work which has been like a whole new bonus hobby. @illustratinghan and @essjaywrites and (ig)cuddlydevil1114 and (ig)mangaurania all make me want to be a better artist every time I pick up my tablet. I'm blanking on tumblr names for Mint and Mara_Leigh but both of them blew my mind too, and @overjoyedisland and @shipmistress9 and @caeli0306 all writing amazing stuff and @serahadmoni and @greeneyedwildthing killing me with the meta and... shit I'm sure I'm forgetting people too. This fandom is so fucking talented.

10. Who is a new author you discovered?

I mean, the whole fandom? I discovered the whole fandom. I'm endlessly impressed by how many people in this fandom wrote for the first time this year and are killing it right out of the gate, y'all are amazing.

11. Did you do any collaborations? How did it start?

@sarcasticmothwrites is my favorite person in the world

like how it started is they picked up Fourth Wing as a lucky day at the library and read it in less than a week and made me read it immediately and we couldn't stop talking about it. and then I made them join the discord, and we either co-write or beta everything for each other anyway because we're just that couple. lol.

14. What is your advice?

Write what makes you happy. Try things because they seem fun or because you always wanted to and haven't yet. If you told me a year ago I'd be designing t-shirts and making stickers I'd have laughed. I learned to make discord emotes! I got my first tattoo! In 2025 I'm going to try getting acrylic charms done and I'm going to try doing my own embroidered weapons patches for my denim jacket.

Just find time to do what brings you joy and celebrate with other people when they find their joy.

[blazehedgehog]

Why do newer pokemon look so offputting? Older games had tons of diverse designs but newer ones look unfinished/not well thought out.

They might be. I dunno. There's a lot people have said about Game Freak's competency at handling the Pokemon franchise and how they've added too many new Pokemon to some of these games and are basically running the well dry on good ideas.

But I also just see it as, like, an extension of the Mighty No. 9 problem. I remember when we were still all starry-eyed and hopeful about Mighty No. 9, Inafune revealed the design and mentioned it had "increased detail to suit HD displays."

So he's got all these colors and patterns and grooves and slots, when Mega Man was basically just a kid in his pajamas and three solid colors:

Light blue, dark blue, and skin tone. That's it. That's all you needed.

And Inafune further explained that was because Mega Man had to be this tiny little 24x24 NES sprite. I'd have to look it up, but it wouldn't surprise me if the sprite came first. I know it definitely did with Mario.

So this is like designing a character with the rawest, most basic building blocks you can get. You are not adapting the above character art into this sprite. Instead, you are making a character that has arms that are a separate color from his body, you are giving him pants to denote where his waist is, and you give him the biggest eyes on earth just so people can tell that's his face.

You have the smallest canvas imaginable and have to make sure people can understand they are not only looking at the shape of a human, but watching it animate in various different poses, all when it's run through somebody's crusty old RF patch cable on their 12" CRT TV:

Whereas, in theory, Mighty No. 9 is going to be played at its native resolution in crystal clarity on a 40" flat panel display, potentially allowing you to see and understand a lot more detail.

So now we circle back to Pokemon, and a lot of those first Pokemon look like this:

They had a box, 56x56 pixels wide, just over double the size of NES Mega Man, and four colors of grey to work with. When viewed on a Gameboy screen, these monsters weren't even two inches tall. Those limitations meant they still had to keep things simple.

Whereas now, increased resolutions and screen clarity allows designs like these:

Now the point I'm trying to make here is that simplicity and limitations give birth to clear, highly focused designs created to be instantly identifiable and recognizable at any distance or resolution. More detail does not necessarily make for a stronger character. You can absolutely get caught up in adding detail to compensate for a bad character design.

...At the same time, let's play devil's advocate here. Pokemon is a very different creature now than it was 25 years ago. A single new Pokemon design probably goes through this huge insane iteration process where all kinds of departments touch and approve the design so it can appear in the anime, it can appear in spinoffs, it can appear in merchandise, so on and so forth. We're miles away from the days where one guy comes up with all the Pokemon just because he thinks it would be funny to have a fat duck with a headache.

Maybe as much as anything, you could blame the increasingly complex production machine on why these Pokemon look like this. After all, even by the second generation of Pokemon games, they were constantly chasing the dragon of trying to find "the next Pikachu."

Everything has to be polished and smoothed down, while also showing the increased capabilities of the hardware, while also staying appealing to Pokemon's core demographics (there are multiples), while also being something they can sell toys and shirts and hats of, while also being noticeably new and different from existing Pokemon, so on and so forth, on and on and on again.

Having so many Pokemon in each new game probably gives them some leeway to experiment, but I'm sure some of these characters get beaten with creative hammers in the search of their next superstar.

On top of whatever qualms people might have with the state of Game Freak as it stands today.

[lightningzbolt]

Bring Me The Horizon Tees

See I like more than just two bands. I made a lot of swatches of these, like a looooooooot. 171 to be exact.

As you can see here, if I did that much more it would take over the screen. So I can't show them all off but I took a bunch more CAS screenshots to show some more off.

Some have back designs too. Which ones? Well you're gonna have to find out. :^) Since these are just recolors there's nothing special about them or anything extra needed. Some I made over five years ago as some of the first Sims 4 CC I ever made, and in Fact my Sim of Oliver, along with his brother and Kellin, were the first Sims I made in this game when I first started playing it on the last day of 2018. I started making CC less than a day in.

SimFileShare

Below the cut is my journey with updating and fixing my game for Life & Death in case you're interested as I have to tell someone.

So when it came to the Life & Death patches and pack, I was hyped, the pack looked amazing and exactly for me. And well, it is, but also, my game was in a bad state, immense lag when clicking on Sims ingame, and, okay, I was playing as Awsten last when he was my testing Sim, was was Jawn as I had him over at the time, so let me just tell you it took 27 seconds after clicking on Jawn to make the pie menu show up. 27 seconds! It was 17 earlier this year, which is also insane, but I grew used to it. It was not much better clicking on Awsten himself. Pets wasn't so bad, and younger Sims as they got younger were less bad. But. It was bad. So. I tested like every mod combination I could think of. logging down exact number of seconds the delay was every load in, every test. Without mods there was minimal delay, and WITH mods in a fresh save there was even less delay. But I could not seem to figure it out for my longstanding save. So. I did what I hate doing, asking other people. Those helper servers. Mainly as I'm paranoid of having mods they deem as evil and terrible and mad or whatever. But I'm good, I followed the rules of one to make sure any mods I had on the list were not in my game, only a couple. That's fine right? I can show them logs of my game without issue? WRONG! I had something 'bad' in there! That I did not know ahead of time! So fine, that's gone now, can you guys look? Nope, another bad. WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME AHEAD OF TIM- okay, it's gone. Now what? 'Oh those bad mods may cause residual damage to your save file so that may be an issue. Also start a new save." Bitch, what? That makes no sense and is unhelpful. So. I spend the next 7 hours just deleting every townie in my save. All of them, minus pets, and minus a few I spared prior for funny names or some other status, Any premades or Sims I made or got from the gallery were skipped, I only deleted randomized townies. Guess what? This helped, a lot. Residual damage from mods my ass. I brought the delay down by over half just by deleting townies. Got it down even more by deleting more mods. Now it's at the best it's been in awhile, 8-12 seconds, which isn't nothing, yes, but it is playable. And now I have a folder in my Mods folder that's called Forbidden Mods. :) And guess what those mods are fine. They don't cause issues. You know what did give me issue before? When I was recommended a mod to try from one of thee helper servers, THAT broke my game. Fucking ass. So lesson learned, rely on nobody, do everything myself, I can fix my game and saves better than anyone else can, and people policing what others can do in their own single player offline games experience is very very stupid. Why is baby grilling funny and okay to have as a mod in Sims 2 but not in Sims 4? Why is it bad in 4? It's all fiction in the end! Baby grilling in Sims 2 is seen as a funny memory of what modding used to be and no one gets offended by it. But I can't do the same in 4 unless I wanna get on a watchlist. Among other things, but damn, it's pixels, it's someone else's game. You can't abuse and hurt pixels, and Sims is a game series where everyone has played it like a monster before. That's part of the fun. But, anyway. Now Jawn is my designated testing Sim, I'm sure he's honored. And I've been in 'testing mode' for the past couple weeks since I got my game back up to snuff. He lives in Copperdale and that world is a lot of nothing so it's not laggy at least. It's a fine place to test. Honestly by testing I am trying to now prevent my game from making townies as much as possible, and it's not really working the way I want, so I'm also just deleting them from my households as I get to it so it won't take 7 hours again to delete 2 thousand again, as spoilers that was how many townies I had deleted. That was HALF the Sims in my save file. TWO THOUSAND TOWNIES.

[scarlet--wiccan]

This is about an old topic, but whatever. One thing I’ve always specifically hated about the Scarlet Witch & Quicksilver book is that to me it seems like a complete rip-off of Darker Than Scarlet (but way worse since it’s more shallow, surface-level, superficial, it’s not willing to take risks and everyone is ridiculously ooc), and it's so obviously a rip-off that it genuinely confuses me that no one’s pointed out the similarities yet:

- About a white man with black hair & a black beard, a thick purple metal costume and a big headpiece who’s a Fantastic Four villain trying to control Wanda because of her status as a Nexus to serve a higher being by at first subtly controlling her life and sewing division between her and the people around her

- Is surrounded by the concept of Nexus beings and Wanda (+ Pietro in SW&Q’s case) being the child/ren of science and magic

- It also includes Wanda turning ��evil” and getting more powerful because of that and getting a new design for it (her villain design in Darker Than Scarlet and her Chthon one in SW&Q)

I contemplated not answering this message, but I think it highlights the weird attitude and poor literacy I've been noticing in this fanbase over the last few years, which do go hand-in-hand with the inappropriate conduct I spoke about in this post. I'm not accusing you, the person who sent this, of anything-- but to be honest, I feel like I've been inundated with this kind of take since Scarlet Witch #1, and they're almost always unfounded and incorrect. I'm sorry, but I just think you're wrong, and I think you'd be a lot less miserable if you would approach this run in good faith-- which I believe it deserves, based on Wanda's character treatment-- and gave it a more thoughtful, informed reading.

The comparisons you are making are a big stretch, in my opinion. Immortus and the Wizard have little in common outside of general design elements, and their motives in these stories are not at all the same. Wanda struggling to control the Darkhold's full power is neither logistically nor thematically similar to what she went through in Darker Than Scarlet, nor does it turn her evil in any capacity. And revisiting established lore and recurring motifs with long-running characters is standard practice-- the story told in SW&Q and the last four issues of Scarlet Witch brought up existing concepts, yes, but it expanded on them with new ideas, pitched the twins against new villains, and sought to resolve several long-standing tensions and imbalances.

Whether or not you think the story achieved those goals or executed them well enough is one thing, but calling it a blatant rip-off is just false.

Orlando's dialogue and narration are sometimes difficult to get through, and SW&Q was absolutely rushed. I'm not sure if it was superficial, but it was certainly dissatisfying in many regards-- but I'm actually quite tired of hearing that Wanda, Pietro, or Max were "out of character." I will maintain that their personalities and emotional responses are completely in line with how they've been written over the last twenty years. These relationships are messy by design, and sometimes characters have to go through rough patches to reach the desired resolution. Again, it was rushed, and the ending was poorly executed, but I think it makes a lot more sense if you read it and Scarlet Witch (2024) as one long piece intead of two separate stories.

I'm not trying to be harsh or talk down to you. Everybody is entitled to their own opinions, and I'm not writing rave reviews, either. But I have found, time and time again, that most of the criticisms directed towards this run are poorly founded, and even more poorly delivered. I see emotional, incendiary reactions and out of hand dismissals far more often than genuine, honest critique of either the story or the technique with which it is told.

[thessalian]

Thess vs Progress

Not to say that things are necessarily going well in the grand scheme of things (I mean, shit, just look at ... all of that ... out there - or don't if you need a break from unrelenting horror), but from a personal-life perspective, there are good things to note.

For all I promised myself this week off was supposed to be about relaxing, I did Do Things. Well, I Made Things. So far - chicken stew, potato salad, and brownies. I have plans in the direction of cereal bars, potato soup, sweet potato soup, beef stew, and risotto. Need to get out to the shops soon, though, because I need courgette for bolognaise and some more vanilla extract for any further baking I may wish to do. Like I said - month of batch-cooking. Though my appetite's on the decline at the moment and I'm not doing great pain-wise, so today might be a tin of soup, some potato salad, and maybe a sandwich if I'm feeling up to it.

The better news, though, is about my living situation. Long story short: there are two flats in this building, and my mother owns both, and both require renovation in a major way. So I'm shuttling around like the ball in a shell game between the flats. Or ... that was the plan, anyway. I moved into this flat from the other flat ... a little more than four years ago, I think? And for most of those four years, very little seemed to be getting done. My stepfather didn't get near the place. So the longer he waited, the longer I was stuck in the flat I'm in now - the flat which, while better laid out than the old flat, has the most atrocious plumbing it has been my privilege to experience. By which I mean:

No shower pump (so it's been baths in a tiny-ass tub for four years and I would commit a minor felony for a shower)

Leaky tub, in the carpeted bathroom. (Well, I think it's just that the tub is this cheap, badly-installed piece of plastic crap and because the cold tap leaks when I turn it up higher than a trickle, it seeps through the very bad grouting and onto the floor. The carpeted floor. IN A BATHROOM. I don't know what the people who designed this place were smoking)

By "bad grouting", I mean that some of the wall tiles literally fell off the wall and into my bathwater when I was taking a bath a couple of years ago.

Wonky boiler (though at least my stepfather installed a working timer on the damn thing so I don't have to switch on the day boost for two hours to get enough hot water to bathe)

Leaky faucet in the kitchen which has been half-assedly patched with electrical tape. (Literally. My stepfather thought this was even a vague solution.)

The kitchen sink drain doesn't have a U-bend, so using drain cleaner on it is a waste of fucking time (which is great when it's the drain that probably sees the most overall debris and gunk of any drain but the toilet)

Also the place is just ... grungy in ways I can't fix. There are cracks in various of the walls. The carpet is well past its best. The light fixtures ... the only ones that give light worth a damn are the bare bulb in one end of the living room and the kitchen lighting that my stepfather put in when I told him I didn't have enough light to make sure I was washing the dishes well enough. The others are gaudy-ass chandeliers. The less said about the curtains, the better. I don't generally complain because, I mean, it's a roof over my head that I don't have to torture myself to pay for, and my stepfather replaced the non-functional heaters last year so I'm not freezing my ass off trying to be mindful of the electricity bill like I was during that cold snap in 2022. So I was willing to wait and cope with the problems of the place for as long as necessary because you don't go being a choosing beggar in this kind of situation.

My mother, however, has been over for dinner a few times, and while I try to downplay it, she knows I'm struggling with the whole thing. So I figure she's the one who lit a fire under him, and he's been working himself ragged on the other flat for a few months now. I've been gifting him with baked goods every so often, partly because I can never eat a full batch of anything on my own before it gets stale but mostly because I appreciate the work he's putting in, especially with his back issues.

Which is when we come to today. Despite a bad pain day (weird agony in my outer left thigh and some grip strength issues on top of the rest of the increased OW), I made brownies, and I brought him some while he was working. He showed me the work on the kitchen (SUCH an improvement over when I first lived there, you have no idea!) and told me the current plan. Apparently, the goal is to get that flat liveable - not necessarily finished, but just done enough for someone to be able to, like, cook and bathe and sleep and everything - and then move me into it so they can start doing this flat. No real timeframe given on the work here yet, but I figure it's going to be a lot because if nothing else, they want to move a whole wall to give me a kitchen worth the name, size-wise.

Point is that if everything continues according to plan, the other flat will be liveable in about a month. I could be living in a flat with access to regular showers by mid-August - early September at the latest. I give a little extra time on that because I'm going to need to be able to book time off around then, since my stepfather's going to want me to move all my stuff in one day again and I will hurt for days afterwards. That and I have to get my phone and internet transferred and that might take a day or so, and I obviously can't work without it. Thus, better to be sure it's all organised for maximum efficiency. Either way, actual showers soon.

It's a nice thing to think about to keep from dwelling too hard on the election tomorrow. I've already voted, and the final results won't be in until Friday morning, but ... honestly, given that Starmer's been making noises about how trans women don't belong in single-sex spaces and how he wants to meet with JK Rowling at some point and is actually trying to arrange that (like TERF-In-Chief is a front-bench cabinet position now or something), and how he's almost certainly going to win, it's depressing. That's ignoring the rest of his so-called policies. It's not as big a mess as what's going on in the US, but it's mess enough. The US still has a chance to turn its would-be dictator away; we have "meet the new boss; same as the old boss" - damn near literally.

I'mma play Tavern Talk or something for awhile. It's fun and cute and will probably cheer me up at least a bit.

[cidthesquid]

Character Creator Chat: The Sims 4!

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Yeah, it's kinda weird that I've never covered "The sims" in this series, From what I've heard, it's pretty much the GO-TO game for creativity. I have not touched the series in years, long before my design journey.

The gameplay of the sims has never really been for me, so today we're just going to have some fun with the character creator, we're not going to worry about setting up a family, or anything extra. And I'll probably again stick to just re-creating my style savvy avatar again, like normal. (I'm not very creative, so coming up with something new each time would be very difficult)

Right from the start, we're kinda blasted with information, first a kinda 'battle pass' type of progression system, then some informational videos, purchase suggestions, patch notes, and more. It was all a bit much for me tbh, so I just clicked 'New Game'.

Here we can either start building our sim character, or we have the 'create a story' option to have a pre-made sim based on a personality test. That actually sounds pretty neat, I'm sure some people would get lost in all the sliders and options, I'm glad they have the option to jump right in,without being force to select a default character/preset Let's give it a try, just to see what we get! (Feel free to skip)

Ok, so they ask a series of Questions, like "what's your age", "how do you inspire people", and "how do I cheer myself up?" they have some more humorous questions like: "What role would I play in a criminal heist?" There are a lot of interesting questions here, and you have the option for 'new question' if you don't think any of the answers fit. So I tried to fill them out in the way I thought my character would respond, it's a very interesting creative exercise, as I don't generally think this way. For example, one question was like "What would you like to be remembered for", with answers "The art I created", "My contributions to science", or "for everything I've collected" For me, the whole concept of 'legacy' is nebulous at best, It's kinda embarrassing to admit, but it every single one of these questions (side from age) were kinda difficult for me to parse:

I always had to kinda ask myself, why do they actually mean by that? And I had a hard time answering them for myself, let alone for a fictional character, it almost felt like solving a puzzle, thinking about the relation between the question and the answers to figure out what they were actually asking. Not because I needed to find the "Right Answer", nothing like that, Just because they're not really written in a format that I feel like I can answer accurately. like, "What do you mean, what do I do for fun?" "When? How do i feel that day? Where am I? What did I do prior?" I'm sure that just sounds like 'Overthinking' to some people, but that's just how I operate naturally, most (personal) questions for me can have multiple answers based on the context, It's like asking someone "what's your favorite...?"and expecting a reply They'll wonder, "what drink? food? or color?" and it would be hard to give an accurate answer. So in short, how I worked with these questions, was mainly focusing on the subject and keywords, and tried to figure out what answer seemed to most accurately fit the 'theming' of my character. Like picking choices that focused more on design/art, because of their affinity for style, rather than focusing in on what it really meant for their personality. ----------------------------------------------------------------

And here's what I got:

Ok, so I really don't know if these questions really affected the characters' appearance, or just their personality/outfit, But I was given: "bodybuilder", "high metabolism", "active", "creative", and "evil" (maybe because I said 'mastermind' on the 'heist' question) Well, that did not work out how I expected, I tried to answer them in a way that pushed a bit towards active, creative, and assertive. But clearly the quiz was not the right choice for me. so we'll start over ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ok, So I've manually set up the personality to manually be creative, (best-selling author, since fashion was not an option) She's also, Active, loyal and ambitious, I think they kinda covers the vibe my avatar is supposed to give off. Ok, on to character editing, starting at the top:

For hairstyles alone, there are tons of choices, with a great array of styles and filters, over 100 choices and I'm just a f2p player! I'd imagine you'd get even more if you bought a few dlc packs! You get a great selection of style and lengths, and a few good color choices (but no full color picker/slider tho) Ok, so Skintone was actually supposed to be above hair:

We have a good selection on display, with a lot of natural tones, With a brightness slider, so you can further dial in the exact tone. As well as some fantasy options as well! (Blue, green. bright red, etc) Skin Details is also a dedicated section:

You can apply multiple different effects or skin colorings, such as freckles, moles, or other types of skin coloring that I've not seen represented in any other game! It's a really great option for representation, you can even dial in the coloring for many of these too! Next up is teeth:

While there are not a ton of options here, I still think this offers a pretty crazy amount of variety, there are various presets, including braces, and less uniform layouts. I'm a little surprised theirs no 'color' option, just to make some of them look a little less 'perfect', but it's still a great showing! Next up is 'eye detail'

This allows you to add bags under your character's eyes, You have four different options, but oddly no further customization. So you can't blend them(no transparency) or adjust the coloring. And somehow I skipped another option 'faces',

This is a selection of 19 presets, that would offer a good variety of starting points. I'm not sure why, but I did have a little bit of trouble navigating these menus, they look very clean, and fairly well laid out. (Maybe it was the lack of a 'next' button, I'm not sure) I also found it a little strange that I'd run out of menu's for editing the face, no nose, eyes, or lips settings, and later clicked the face by accident to find out it's pretty much a 'hidden menu' I'm sure if I'd played any sims games in the last 6 years or so this would be easy to figure out. I'm not saying this creator is bad, just the opposite! It's just not really easy (for me personally) to navigate at times! I'm used to everything having it's own dedicated menu entry.

Eyebrows are next, again a very wide selection, but lacking filters or advanced settings, or labels. I kinda feel like I need to go in with a reference when looking at these, Without being able to have the character emote, it's a little hard to be able to see how they'd move with various facial expressions. And without labels or a way to 'pin' the choices you like, it's a bit hard to compare, and some advanced options to tweak maybe the angle or transparency/fullness would be nice, rather than having to pick a separate (unlabeled) choice, but some of these may be limitations of the engine. (But still with over 50 choices, you have a ton of variety)

Eyes are next:

Over 70 options with a variety of styles, sizes, and looks and I'm going to again assume this is just how the game engine works, because I kinda prefer other game's creator option where you start with a preset, and can kinda tweak and refined the design till you get what you're looking for, Rather than scrolling through a selection of presets that is this large, Sure's there's an 'undo button' but it kinda makes comparisons hard, especially when the eye options don't really seem to be sorted by anything in particular. Also, go presets for eye color options, overall, but I still would have preferred a full color picker, especially when the game lets us have blue skins, having more unnatural eye colors (or color contacts) would have been nice! Also, maybe it's just my PC being weird (running the game on Linux) But it looks like some eye options really mess up the eye lighting:

Next Up, is nose:

24 presets, and honestly, I don't think these previews are very helpful. It's mostly the angle, but just how they're framed as well, makes it kinda hard to tell what you're selecting, you just gotta manually rotate your character, and try a few out until you find one you like, no advanced options here either. Next up is cheek:

Over 35 options here, and again, I kinda found them a little hard to judge by the previews, but they have a good amount of variety. It's here that I also figured out, you can make some adjustments to the positioning of facial features, but only by clicking and grabbing.

It's not really the most precise way to adjust your character's features But, it's easy to understand when you find it, and the undo button makes it serviceable

Next up is mouth:

27 options here, and a bit easier to judge based on the preview. I really like the section on offer, it's really cool to see how a simple change can change the personality a lot, the first choice I picked, looked nice, but a little too 'standard' for the character I was looking to make, but one simple change really add a bit more personality!

Next up is chin:

This is something else, I really think I need to be looking up references for, so I can understand the styling concepts of better. They have some cute dimple options too, But just like with nose, I decided to keep thing simple. I thought I was done, and was about to go to makeup when I found that 'head shape' is also a option exclusive to clicking the face:

Only 14 options here, but they seem to most effect brow height, and a little bit of the shading on the forehead. Almost missed this one too, as there's only a small area to click on.

'Jaw' has 9 presets, and it's great for squaring up or rounding off the face, I went with a mostly longer design, but with a small bit of roundness at the end. Ideally, this will help with the more 'mature' look. And with that, we're done with the body shaping options! So now on to hats!

There's a pretty.. Interesting selection here, Baseball caps, cowboy hats, beanies, sunhats, and much more!

Accessories are next:

(What are with these wild emotes? D:) A pretty broad selection here too, glasses, earrings, and even hearing aids. Many offering alternet colors (but only a small, fixed selection) But I would love to see a little more option to customize these, like the feather earrings are super cute, But I think they're a little too bright. Same with the glasses frame, I would have loved to get them in flat black rather than dark gray. Next up is the makeup selection, first 'eye shadow.'

20 options, And it looks like we finally get some color sliders! We pick a base color, then we can tweak the hue, transparency, saturation, and brightness, and we can save our new custom color for future use! Next up is eyeliner:

Only 13 options here, a good selection of patterns, and the same color selection as before. Eyelashes are next:

Only two options, and not much in the say of color, I guess it mostly represents an option for eyelash thickness. though, it would be nice to have more granular options. Next up is cheek makeup,

Cheeks only have 3 patterns, but a fairly good selection of color choices, I picked something a little brighter than my character's skin tone in an attempt to lighten up their face a little. ---------------------------------------------------------- ...And I've now used up all 30 of my image slots, so looks like I'll have to divide this into two parts!

You can read the rest here: (CCC: The Sims 4 - Part 2)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------Thanks for reading! I had a lot of fun making this, so I hope you had fun reading it as well!

As always, comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome! And

And If I describe something 'objectively wrong', or use the wrong terminology, feel free to correct me, I'm always looking to improve! (But If it's feedback on my designs that's more subjective/personal preference, please let me figure it out myself,so I find my own style😄

[divineerdrick]

Metawatch Warhammer 40,000: January 2024

Alright! The long awaited Balance Dataslate for the start of 2024 is finally here! I'm glad they waited until after LVO this time. I'm so eager to see what's changing for this new season of 40K!

Currently, 40K balance is in a really nice spot. We have two contenders for the top army in the game with Craftworlds and CSM, both hovering just over the 55% win rate. At the same time, AdMech, Knights, Sisters, and Drukhari are struggling at or below the 45% mark. For Space Marines, Blood Angels and Deathwatch seem to be struggling the most, while Templars and Ultramarines are seeing success. Space Wolves are also doing really good, but they're not usually seen as Champions of Russ.

For mechanics, we're at a point where Indirect Fire weapons are either game changing or useless with no ground in between. Aircraft are near universally staying on shelves. Opinions on Battle-shock vary from player to player and army to army. I personally feel it's hard to argue that it's a very meaningful mechanic when it's basically Tyranids' whole schtick now, and they're one of the weaker armies.

There's also plenty of issues cropping up around internal balance. Now that we have more detachments available for some armies, some of them are clearly more powerful than others. This is particularly felt hard by Space Marine players, who almost universally are sticking with vanilla detachments. Only Templars seem to be regularly seen inside their unique detachment, and the temperature check for the new Dark Angels Codex suggests Deathwing might end up on tables . . . and that's about it.

Speaking of Codexes, we're genuinely not seeing any Codex Creep! GW seems to have legitimately focused on using Codexes to patch some of the problems the Indexes have had and provide players with more options. As I hinted above, this has had mixed results. But I definitely prefer this to the insane levels of creep that ruined 9th Edition.

So! With all that said, should I make any predictions? Well, I can't say anything about Drukhari, as the links call them out by name. But big surprise the current weakest army will be getting some love. I guess I'll predict that they will receive both points and rules changes. I'm predicting we'll see some rollbacks on nerfs to Knights and Custodes. I think we'll see one more focused rules change to Aeldari and probably some points bumps, especially for Night Spinners. I'm also expecting some form of rules nerf to CSM. The most obvious one will be something regarding how marks work and some of the crazy shenanigans that have been used. I'm also expecting a points buff to many of their most used pieces. For everyone else, I'm expecting GW will mostly focus on internal balance. I'm not expecting any rules changes for Detachments this time around, though it would be nice. I think all the other factions will mostly be focused around points.

I also think we need some mission changes. In particular, I think we're going to get changes to scoring Secondary Objectives. But I'm not sure if that will be addressed here, or if we're going to get something like a General's Handbook.

Alright! Enough preamble! Let's start with the article and video!

Video

Hello, Josh from the Design Studio! Apologies, Josh, but I can't help but feel the answer to "who better to do that with . . ." would be Stu. Still, it's nice to see more members of the team. It's also quite likely that Stu is now hard at work on 11th Edition, given GWs tight and frustrating schedule (three years between editions is too short, dammit!) So Josh might very well be the one in charge of 10th Edition balance right now.

We don't really know how GW gets their numbers, but 60+ percent for Aeldari's original win rate is . . . technically true. 70+ would have been more honest though . . . They're calling them at 57% now, which I think most stat keepers agree with.

We're getting a whole new Detachment for Drukhari! Well, now! I knew we were getting rules changes but I was expecting a patch to Realspace Raid. This doesn't mean that isn't happening, but that's still pretty big news!

And there's the rules change for Aeldari. Looks like we're getting another nerf to Phantasm. It very much needs it. Looks like they're making it random now. Wonder if it's going to be flat D6 or something like D6+1.

It sounds like Drukhari are still getting rules changes. So the new Detachment will be on top of this. Yep! They're buffing Realspace Raid! Congratulations Drukhari! And they're mentioning they might do this in the future too!

So they're using Daemons for the internal balance example. I'm still not sure how Daemons mostly stay off my radar, but I do know that Daemons are almost always focused around monster mash with a few units like Flamers and Nurglings thrown in. So it sounds like they're going to try and address this using points. As I suggested, I don't think they're going to use rules changes if they can avoid it. It's one thing to log into the app and see that your army has lost or gained points. It's another to be playing and get an, "Um, actually . . . that rule doesn't work like that anymore."

Yes! We're getting more rules clarifications and commentary! Please give us more FAQs too, I beg you! But it really sounds like they want to use the Commentary for this. It looks like they're finally addressing some of the Transport and Deepstrike questions, with these no longer count as moving for rules interactions.

They also say they're using standard color coding for points changes too. That'll make looking at these points changes so much easier! Balance Dataslate changes will be marked as new too. This sound very similar to how 9th Edition Dataslates worked, just with plus signs instead of colors.

They're covering a bit about LVO too, and in particular how they looked at it. It sounds like we're not going to see anything for Necrons this time around. This is another reason why I'm glad they waited for LVO. They can see a much larger pool of players and lists all interacting at once. I don't know if it caused them to change anything, but it gives them the opportunity at least. They do know to keep an eye on Necrons too.

I also like how they acknowledge that the tournament Aeldari list has really not change for at least three months.

Article

So the first thing in the article is that we're getting a change to the starting number of Fate Dice for Aeldari, in addition to Phantasm. Drukhari are getting changes to Power from Pain, and an all new downloadable Index! Their new detachment is the Skyplinter Assault.

It looks like many Battleline units are getting love, while the aforementioned Indirect Fire units are getting another nerf. They once again go over how they're showing changes in this dataslate.

Finally we're not seeing anything for Dark Angels this time around. Their new points will not be in this Munitorum Field Manual.

Oh, for the love of . . .

Please tell me this isn't what they're deciding balance with. I know they suggested they use other metrics, but this is not good at all.

They've got CSM at 54%! They're closer to 56-57%! They've got Deathwatch at 46%? Where are they possibly getting that number from?

Huh! Actually checking Stat Check, CSM has slipped a bit while Deathwatch is rising . . . Interesting! Looks like I'm the one who needs to pay better attention. Still, I hope they're making sure CSM isn't going to be the reigning champion with the new Aeldari nerfs.

Oh well. I guess I should have realized I would have slipped with how sick I've been lately. Let's dig into these and see what we've got. We'll start with Drukhari.

Index Drukhari

Power from Pain

So the first big change is to what happens to a unit you Empower in the Shooting or Fight phase. Now, melee weapons will get an additional pip of AP. This should help Drukhari melee finally hit the way it's supposed to!

The rule for Realspace Raiders remains unchanged. Maybe they're hoping the melee buff will mean Drukhari players will actually take their characters? Guess we'll have to wait and see. There don't seem to be any changes to the detachment that I can find. Let's look at the new one.

Skysplinter Assault

Oh. Oh nice!

The new detachment ability is Rain of Cruelty. This gives two meaningful buffs to any unit disembarking from a transport. The first is Ignores Cover, which in this edition might as well read "gain an AP." The second is Lance. Combined with the new Power from Pain, this will allow a melee unit Disembarking from a transport to hit really hard.

The catch here is that the unit needs to be able to Charge in order to get the full benefit from this rule. Normally, you can't charge if the Transport moved. So this means that most Transports have to move into position, then the unit has to wait to disembark. Let's take a look at the rest of the rules first, then we'll see if Drukhari have any transports with an Assault Ramp style rule.

Enhancements

Our first enhancement is Phantasmal Smoke. This grants the bearer's unit Cover and Stealth while wholly within 6" of a Transport. Cover is no big deal, but Stealth is a relevant buff. The problem is the "wholly within" part. That's gonna limit how you can use this enhancement. I'm not sure this even gets an, "if you have points left."

Next, we have Sadistic Fulcrum. This seems a lot more fun. If the whole goal is to run a bunch of units in Transports, then you can probably make pretty good use of this. I'm pretty sure at least one Transport has Dark Lances, so this might be auto-include if priced right.

Spiteful Raider provides some additional Pain token generation. It only triggers when you kill an enemy on an objective and only in the fight phase. But since Drukhari wants to do that, this could also be auto-include.

Finally, Nightmare Shroud provides one of the most relevant rules you can have in 10th Edition: preventing Overwatch! It's hard to oversell how clutch this can be. Especially if you're going to try and Disembark from a stationary transport to move and charge, this gives you two places where an opponent might try to gun you down. This might also be auto-include.

While Phantasmal smoke is a pretty big miss, the other three enhancements will probably all see use. This is all around a good start to this Detachment.

Stratagems

Vicious Blades is interesting. This is one of those rules that when you use it you're going to feel really good about it, but you probably won't use it very often. It's an interesting way to represent the Drukhari in a Transport striking and shooting out of it. If you've got 2CP, this combined with Tank Shock could just run over some units.

Wraithlike Retreat is awesome! Free moves are always good, especially during your opponents turn. There's a reason we're seeing a Phantasm nerf. Even if the target isn't a Wych unit, the whole theme of this Detachment is transports. This army wants to ride into combat, wipe out a target, then get back in and do it again. The fact you can make a Fall Back move is what really puts this over the edge. This means you don't even have to finish a unit off. You can cripple it and then move on, or just get your Unit out of potential danger for next turn.

But it's Pounce on the Prey that this Detachment will practically revolve around. If Drukhari doesn't have a transport that has an Assault Ramp rule, this gets around it. This allows you to use your favorite Transports to rush your units up the board and in your opponents face. Turn 1 charges are almost certainly a thing with this.

If charging isn't a good idea, Skyborne Annihilation can significantly up the damage from a shooting unit, especially if you empower them. I don't remember Kabalite Warriors being anything special. But if they see some love in the MFM, this could allow them to punch above their weight. It's also a Battle Tactic.

Again, we have some out of phase movement. Swooping Mockery allows Drukhari players to take some risks with their transports without needing to worry about easy reprisal. Like many of these rules, though, this only works if your opponent wants to come in close.

Finally Night Shield helps keep your Transports safe. Since you may want to have some units move up and not disembark, this will be essential.

Honestly the only problem with these Stratagems is CP generation. I can easily see Drukhari players basically always spending their CP on one of these each turn. They'll be wanting to use Pounce on the Prey or Skyborne Annihilation on their turn, then use Wraithlike Retreat or Swooping Mockery in their opponent's turn. Considering the potential mobility of this army, I'm guessing most players will want to take Tactical Missions.

Transports

The Raider makes for some serious reach and threat with its automatic 6" advance. With a 14" move, plus disembarking within 3", that's a guaranteed charge from 19" away. And its got Deep Strike to boot! It also has a Darklance and Firing Deck 11 to benefit from Sadistic Fulcrum.

Venoms come with that fun ability to split your units and Stealth. They can also swoop by and pick up units without needing to use Wraithlike Retreat.

And, um, that's it. Why did I think Drukhari had more Transports than this? Still, both are Dedicated Transports, which means you can take as many as you want providing you can start them with a Unit embarked. That's still not a lot of units to build an army around.

This is the first real sticking point for this. While it's mostly other units that will benefit from these rules, you'll need to make sure you have enough Raiders and Venoms for this to work. And you'll only be able to use your best tricks on one or two each turn (usually just one.) Making sure you've got the Transports you need while still having the units to punch and score objectives will be a real balancing act.

The Balance Dataslate

Adepta Sororitas

Wow! Sisters players are not going to be happy. They've recently seen an uptick as veteran players have learned to work with their unique rules to get increased performance out of their normally mediocre units. Acts of Faith are key to this. I'm sure the goal is to stop the Triumph from feeling so necessary to all of this, but the faction really didn't need nerfs.

Adeptus Custodes

This was extremely necessary. I'm still not sure what they're going to do to allow Custodes players to play other detachments, which was a huge issue in 9th, but for now they need Aegis to function against Dev Wounds to work. I predicted they might see one of the nerfs undone, but it looks like GW thinks this is all they need.

Aeldari

Six! They're only getting six Fate Dice now, and no re-rolls! Looks like GW has decided it's time for the nuclear option, because this is just the start.

Fates messenger now only affects the bearer, not the unit. Phantasm is D6, so it's not only less reliable but has lost an inch of movement. Night Spinners no longer stop a unit from Advancing. THANK YOU! The Yncarne can now only teleport once in each of the Aeldari player's turns. GET WRECKED! And Wraithguard can now only shoot back at what shot at them.

By the Goddess!

That's a lot of fixes. I'm actually hoping they didn't get much in the way of points increases, because damn! Surprised they didn't address Warp Spider in all of that, though.

Astra Militarum

Interesting! Officers can now issue Orders when they setup on the Battlefield. This will provide Guard players with a lot more flexibility as to when and how they deploy their Officers.

Blood Angels

Red Thirst now adds +2 to Strength, bringing the rule more in line with 10th Edition Toughness characteristics. Not sure this will bring Sons of Sanguinius to the the table, but it's a start.

Chaos Daemons

Honestly not much here. You now must include Battleline Daemons as allies if you take them. Since Nurglings were by far the most allied Daemons, I don't think this actually affects much.

Chaos Space Marines

GW did not ignore CSM. We've got a nerf to Transports, so you're no longer putting your Undivided Chosen in a Nurgle Transport just for Dark Obscuration. And that Stratagem has been nerfed to 18". Profane Zeal now only affects Chaos Undivided and only grants re-roll wounds. That's the better half, but still! Accursed Cultists are OC 1 now and only regenerate on your turn.

Again, it's a grab bag of problem units and stratagems fixed. It's nowhere near what Aeldari suffered, so unless there are more nerfs coming CSM are still in a good spot. But GW is not shying away from changing these rules!

Deathguard

You can now only use Grenade on one Biologus Putrifier per turn. Reasonable nerf.

Drukhari

We already know about Power from Pain, but we missed that Archons can now lead Incubi. They'll definitely welcome the re-roll wounds.

Grey Knights

Wow! We're really getting into it here! GW appears to be more than willing to actually change profiles and Datasheets! Did you think Dreadknights didn't hit hard enough? Well GW agrees with you! Enjoy your new psycannons and Nemesis weapons!

Imperial Knights

Just give them Bondsman back! Oh well. Code Chivalric is getting a buff and is now re-roll one hit roll and one wound roll.

Space Wolves

You can now claim a Saga at the end of any turn. This will make it much more easy to collect them, as you now have twice as many opportunities to do so. It's still the character model that has to perform the Saga, though, so this is still going to be a challenge.

World Eaters

Wow! Round of nerfs to World Eaters! Berzerker Glaive, Favored of Khorne, and Daemon princes were all nerfed! Somebody must be thinking World Eaters are in position to take the top spot with the nerfs to Aeldari and CSM.

That was a lot! GW really is willing to change rules when they need to, and they're willing to dig into the minutia. This was incredibly comprehensive, so with points the game stands to change a lot.

I don't know if the changes to Sons of Sanguinius and Champions of Russ are enough to get them on the board. But they're a start. For the factions themselves, we need to look at the point changes. Really worried for Aeldari here. They got sweeping changes! If the point changes are too severe, they might be where Tyranids were at the start of last year.

Biggest winner is Custodes though. That change is going to help them a lot!

Munitorum Field Manual

Adepta Sororitas

We've got a few nerfs here with increases to Arco-flagellants, Exorcists, and Morvenn Vahl. However, Paragon Warsuits have dropped 30 pts while Vahl went up 20 pts. So overall, that package actually went down 10 pts. But now Warsuits might be worth taking on their own. Other than that, a bunch of Sisters infantry got buffed.

Adeptus Custodes

It's all green! Some pretty substantial buffs to Allarus, Guard, and Wardens. Dawn Eagle Jetbikes have also gotten cheaper, though I don't know if it's enough. The Shield-Captain went down 40 pts though and now costs the same as the Allarus Shield-Captain. Custodes are in a good spot!

Adeptus Mechanicus

AdMech just go their Codex and GW doesn't seem ready to weigh in. While some dedicated players have had success, the general impression is they need some love. Hopefully they don't have to wait 6 months for it.

Aeldari

Almost no changes! GW decided they needed new rules and that's it! Night Spinners went up 30 pts while Wraithguard went up 4 pts a model. Warp Spiders remain untouched. This honestly leaves Aeldari with plenty of play. I don't think they're going to be in trouble, but they definitely won't be the top army anymore.

Of course I have said that before . . .

Astra Militarum

The Manticore has gone up 30 pts. While this won't kill Guard Indirect, it's still a nerf. GW does remember that Guard was at the bottom of it's stats, right?

Black Templars

Crusader Squads are now 15 pts per model and Grimaldus and Helbrecht have both gone up to 120. That's going to impact the Templars quite a bit! Those are substantial character nerfs, which always makes me wonder where GW gets these numbers from.

Chaos Daemons

That is a lot of green! Why do Daemons have that much green while Guard got nothing? And even though they talked about troops, there's a lot of characters grabbing buffs here. Great Unclean One, Kairos, Keeper of Secrets, Rotigus, Skarbrand . . . Nurglings and Blue Scribes got nerfed though.

Chaos Knights

Looks like GW is comfortable enough with Towering to start dishing out the buffs to Knights. Again, we've got a lot of green! Only the Brigand got nerfed, and only by 10 pts.

Chaos Space Marines

All the points nerfs Aeldari dodged hit CSM. If it was a tournament staple, it's been nerfed. Granted, I know there were some things here that people wanted pushed more, but I think this will do a good job of bringing CSM down just enough.

Dark Angels

Wait . . . I thought they weren't doing this here? Oh well, here are some buffs anyway! If these buffs carry through to the next MFM after Codex: Dark Angels is officially released, Deathwing could be in a good spot.

Death Guard

Got a few buffs, got a few nerfs. Deathshroud are now 40 pts per model, Bloat-drones are down 10, and the Lord of Virulence and Typhus are both down 20. But Plague Marines went from 16 pts bargains to more in line with other Space Marine profiles at 18 pts. The Plagueburst Crawler also went up 15 pts.

Deathwatch

Weird things are happening here recently, but I'm still surprised this is unchanged.

Drukhari

Was anyone actually taking a Voidraven Bomber? Other than this little bit of silliness, these buffs are some nice ones to go along with the new detachment. Also the cost for those Skyplinter Enhancements are very reasonable.

Genestealer Cults

GW says you are not bringing enough Genestealers in your Genestealer Cults armies! 16 pts a model is much more reasonable.

Grey Knights

Apparently, GW thinks they've fixed the baby carrier. So they're nerfing Librarians by 10 pts. And that's it!

Imperial Knights

Are you not a Warglaive, Gallant, or Atrapos? You got cheaper! It's all buffs for the chivalrous side of Knights!

Leagues of Votann

Apparently GW is worried the Kin are doing a little too good with their last set of buffs. To be fair, Sagitaurs needed a nerf. But they'd really like it if you ran fewer Thunderkyn and Hearthguard.

Necrons

Our soon to be overlords also escape any nerfs in lieu of their Codex having just dropped. If recent performances are predictive, get ready to serve your living metal masters. I know I said this last time, but that was before Canoptek Court and Hypercrypt Legion were a thing. Hopefully we won't have to deal with full power Necrons for 6 months.

Orks

Since the Boyz are still doing pretty well, it's time for more internal balance. Battlewagons are down 15 pts, but Trukks are up 5. Nobz have gone up to 22 pts a model and Squighog Boyz are up to just under 42 pts a model. But lots of vehicles have gone down, including the Morkanaut. Time to grab the red paint and wake up the Speed Freeks!

Space Marines

Oh boy! This is a lot of internal balance changes! Most stuff wasn't touched. But Aggressors, Devastator Centurions, Inceptors, Redemptors, Scouts, and Whirlwinds all went up. Infernus Marines, Outriders, Guilliman, Sternguard, and every variety of Intercessor went down. GW wants to see more Battle-line, dammit!

T'au Empire

With the new Tau box and book on the horizon, these won't matter for very long. Still it's mostly buffs. The lesser played Commanders, Crisis and Enforcers, went down 10 pts each. Riptides went down 15 pts. And Vespid went down to 13 pts a model. However your Crisis bricks just went up to 400 pts. I think Tau will be fine though.

Tyranids

Could we have waited until we weren't so close to the bottom before seeing the internal balance changes, please? Oh well. Big surprise, Deathleaper, Neurolictors, Pyrovores, and Gargoyles all went up in price. Those units were making nearly ever list, so we knew something had to change. In exchange we got buffs to the Broodlord and Genestealers to mirror GSC, Norns got significant buffs, the Screamer-Killer now has a reasonable cost, the Trygon got a little buff, and the Tyrannofex got a massive one to finally fit the rules nerf it took. Oh and the Toxicrene went down, but nobody cares.

World Eaters

GW must really be worried Khornes chosen were ready to claim Aeldari skulls! The Lord of Skulls and Forgefiends both got a buff, but Eightbound, Kharne, and the Master of Executions all got hit. Eighbound aren't back to the silly costs they had, but they're still at over 48 pts and 53 pts per model respectively.

The Rules Commentary

Wait, woah! Really? That's how they're ruling things? Wow! I just opened this and already we're off to a mind blowing start! You can stack the same buff/nerf on units multiple times! The only exception are for auras or for named effects like suppressed. This is potentially huge! Now I want to go through my book and see if there are any abilities I can do this with!

We get a quick clarification that if you add models to a unit on the battlefield, they must be in coherency. Don't think anyone ever played this differently. How models off the battlefield can ever be or not be in coherency, I don't know, but there's a clarification for that too.

We also get a clarification that says that if you can put a unit from Reserves on the table in Battle Round 1 as if it was Battle Round 2, the same unit doesn't act like it's Battle Round 3 if you do it the following round. Again, makes sense and I'm not sure anyone played it any other way.

We get some Battle-shock clarifications. Being destroyed doesn't end Battle-shock. So you can't bring a Battle-shocked unit back with a Stratagem, for example. I could have sworn they spelled this out before, but if a rule makes you take a Battle-shock test for being below Starting Strength in the Battle-shock step, you don't have to take another one for being Below Half-strength. Finally, destroyed units don't take Battel-shock tests.

They've clearly separated the Charge Bonus from other rules that trigger from charging. So if something kills your Charge Bonus, you still get any other rules. Doesn't looked like they've clarified charges when you can't get into Base-to-Base contact. Though again, I don't think anyone plays it so that you don't charge towards the enemy when you make a successful charge.

We get a slight change to the way Contested works to make sure that it applies at the end of a turn as well as the end of a phase. Again, makes sense.

They also clarify order of operations for scoring. Again, I don't think anyone was trying to score Victory points before checking objectives, but there it is.

Here's the first part of the clarification we were told about for Reserves and Transports. Basically unless you are physically moving your models, you don't get to count as having made any kind of move for any other rules. It just means you haven't Remained Stationary and don't get to move again.

Another one that I thought got clarified, if you have a rule that grants you CP in the Command phase, that is not part of CP gained at the start of the phase. So you can't gain anymore CP that battle round.

I could have sworn I saw this somewhere too, wonder if it was part of an event FAQ or something, but Dmg characteristics that have +1 or something in them are not being modified. That's just part of the characteristic.

Oh! Here's an interesting one and a new limit on rules stacking. You can't use two abilities that give you a flat Advance bonus to movement on the same Unit at the same time. Can't think of any faction that can do this off the top of my head, but again this makes sense.

And there it is! Finally! You can disembark from a Transport that arrives from reserves. Finally we get the clarification on this! This doesn't even affect me, and I'm still glad to finally see this!

Again, we have another common sense clarification. When you buy an Enhancement for a Character unit that has more than one model in it, only one model gets the Enhancement.

Oh! Here's an interesting one! Fight-on-death rules all trigger for the unit at once, you do not fight one at a time with each model by themselves. Additionally, all the models are still destroyed at once, so any abilities that are effected by unit strength apply.

Woah! Looks like we're getting some changes to Hazardous! Let's go through these point by point.

If you declare you're firing a Hazardous weapon, you take the test even if you destroy the target and don't fire the weapon.

You get to chose what models with Hazardous weapons suffer from failed tests. If a character fails a test, you can either destroy another model or have the Character take mortal wounds. It just has to be an eligible model with a hazardous weapon.

Mortals from Hazardous tests spill over to the unit normally.

If you allocate a Hazardous test to a Character, Monster, or Vehicle, you have to keep allocating Hazardous tests to that model until all the failed tests have been allocated or the model is destroyed.

When allocating Mortal wounds that have spilled over from a Character, Monster, or Vehicle in a unit, you have to allocate them first to another model with a Hazardous weapon. Once all models with Hazardous weapons are destroyed, you allocate any remaining failed tests or wounds to unit as normal.

Good good good! We now have some pretty clear steps for how to deal with this. Most of the time it's pretty easy, but again, it's nice to have it spelled out. Also, I don't really care much since Tyranids don't have any Hazardous weapons! Kekekek!

We get a little clarification for Objective Secured style abilities. Basically at the end of any phase, if your opponent has more OC on the objective than you do, they gain control as normal. Again, pretty sure everyone played it this way.

Wow! There's a clarification. Instead of trying to figure out or keep track of One Shot weapons and Firing Deck, you just can't use them! I did hear of people trying to cheese this, especially my GSC kin, and apparently GW decided they needed to stamp this down hard!

Redeploy has a quick clarification that yes, you can redeploy a unit with Infiltrators as Infiltrators. This was already there in the commentary, but apparently there was enough debate they needed to spell it out.

Really important with the new Drukhari detachment, we get some specific rules for splitting units. You can only split a unit once, and that split unit changes its Starting Strength to match.

We get some new exceptions to how Vehicles with bases work. You don't have to with 3" of a vehicles base to embark on it, you just have to be within range of the model itself. The same is also true for disembarking.

Finally, we get the much needed clarifications on Ignoring Modifiers. We get a list of characteristics that can ignore modifiers, which is very nice. Being able to ignore modifiers to rolls means all rolls for that unit. And again, they clarify this is not binary and you get to choose what modifiers you ignore.

New to this version is our first full Errata on the Core Rules. We only have three things here, but they're important. The first is the change to Command Re-Roll which rewords it so that it targets a unit and not a roll. This brings it in line with all other Stratagems.

Next we have a clarification on Rapid Ingress specifying the you can use Deep Strike, despite the fact it's not your Movement phase.

Finally, we have the updated wording for controlling objective markers that specify it occurs at the end of any phase or turn.

And that's it! Whew! That's a lot more than I was expecting all around!

Final Thoughts

This really was a lot! GW is not messing around here. However that doesn't mean there weren't any oversights. For some reason, Astra Militarum really didn't get much of anything. They're arguably worse off then they were before. Considering their competitive win rate is around 43%, this is really not good. But other than that, and what we were told not to expect, this is pretty comprehensive!

I guess with that mention of Guard, I should talk about winners and losers. Guard are one of the losers. They got a meaningful rules change, but nothing good enough to change their fortunes. In the mean time, they got a nerf to the Manticore and no buffs to any of their other units. I actually double checked that I didn't miss anything. This is so baffling!

Obviously Aeldari and CSM are also losers. Aeldari saw sweeping rules changes and CSM got a double tap in rules and points. I don't think it's enough to break either faction, but they're definitely not gonna hold their top spots anymore.

World Eaters also lost pretty big. Again, they got rules and points changes, though nothing like what the top dogs got. Still, they had only started to climb up the ranks last I checked. Again, I don't think this is going to drop them too much, but it's not gonna help them.

Templars also took a bit of gut punch. They only got hit in the points though. Many players will argue they were coasting on cheap Crusader Squads. I think Space Marine players will think twice about running them, but dedicated Templar players will probably be fine.

Finally, we have to acknowledge that the AdMech Codex just didn't give the faction the tools they needed. They've had no event wins since their codex dropped. While some of the higher tier players are having success, the faction as a whole needs love.

By contrast, Necrons are winning big for the same reason. With nothing addressing them in this Dataslate and two powerful new detachments, the Dynasties are ready to rise and claim their spot.

I think Drukhari will like their changes too. Their army can genuinely punch hard now, and their new detachment looks like a lot of fun. With the points changes they got, the faction probably got a bit more expensive to run, but a lot more tools to play with.

Orks are also looking good. They've so far managed to stick pretty close to the low 50s for most of this edition. While they saw some nerfs, I don't think they'll hurt most Ork lists. Now they may be able to take vehicles besides trukks with them. They can definitely benefit from the top dogs taking a krumpin.

I think Custodes will also like their changes. A Feel No Pain against Dev Wounds is going to help a lot. And they might be able to get a few more bodies on the board now too.

Knights are in tough spot. They got a lot of points buffs, but they really needed them. They also got a nice rules buff, though only to one of their Oaths. I think they should have just given them Bondsman back. We'll have to see if these change help reverse their fortunes.

Grey Knights are also probably grinding their teeth. The buff to Dreadknights is nice. This will help what should be their primary punching unit actually hit hard enough to matter. But I'm still not sure it's enough. Still, Grey Knights have a lot of room for skilled players to shine. Maybe that little nudge will help them.

All and all, it's going to be brand new meta starting today. It's a new season with new rules. My guess is we'll see something like a General's Handbook soon, and that might further shake things up. I'm excited to see how things pan out!

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

no problem!! honestly i love infodumping about this stuff and trying to explain it in terms that might be more accessible to people; tabletop can be intimidating if you're not familiar with how it goes, but if you try it and it clicks it is a really, truly special experience that's hard or downright impossible to capture with other forms of media, and the idea of making it available to people who might find joy in it when it's been such a gatekept form of storytelling for so long is something i'm really passionate about.

(i feel similarly about it to the way a lot of people feel about theatre, actually, now that i think of it.)

so yeah! it may take me a little while to draft up some proper in-depth answers (especially since i've been immersed in this for the better part of a year now, so i'm doing my best not to fall into this xkcd comic ashdhdjdhd), but it's no hardship to me to answer questions about this stuff and if anything i'm really grateful for the opportunity. :D

initial answer to the question re: D&D and Warhammer 40K (which will probably make more sense after the upcoming post going more in-depth on all this): they're both massive, extremely complicated systems which are almost entirely built around playing out combat in excruciating detail, and actual storytelling is kind of an afterthought in comparison. their communities have done a lot over time to try and compensate for that, but it's at the heart of those games and that's not really the kind of thing i'm interested in when i want to sit down and play/develop tabletop.

(seriously, the norm for D&D is for one (1) battle to take an entire 2-4 hour session. it's a game where unless you have a really good DM you could straight up take a short nap in between actually getting to do anything during combat, as long as people catch you up on what happened while you were out. it's a LOT.)

add that to the fact that D&D especially is a game people have been expanding and patching and adding onto, and making whole new editions of, for decades--and that there are a lot of worldbuilding things built into fundamental mechanics that Really Bother Me, like the alignment chart--and it's one that's just too overwhelming for me to want to get the hang of enough to design things for.

which, again, i'm not opposed to it on principle! if anyone who knows more about, and/or is more interested in working with, D&D or Warhammer than i am wants to give it a shot, that's totally cool and i'd love to see it. i just would rather not work with it myself, except maybe to take inspiration from some bits and pieces here and there.

(fun fact: the vatborn and trueborn were lifted straight out of warhammer uncredited, lmfao)

BUT YEAH, again some of this will probably make more sense with the followup i'm going to write out about the deal with systems + adapting things to them, and how it's relevant to LL in this case. i'm looking forward to it and i love talking about this stuff, so don't hesitate to ask questions if at any point you're still not sure about something! if anything it actually helps me think more solidly about the design and where to focus on it, so they're very much welcome. ✨️

hey there, LL fandom!

first off i have been gone for a while, whoops, hello

second, i have been on a huge tabletop dev kick lately, and i am considering whipping up something for lorien legacies! i'm not sure yet how much of it would be its own system vs how much of it would be a supplement for an existing, larger game, but LL has some worldbuilding that i think would adapt really well to RPG format and i thought it'd be neat to give it a shot.

right now the main things i'm planning on adapting in some form are:

legacies, Of Course

charms

the Goop, especially augments and vatborn

chimæra

garde vs non-garde

species (where relevant and appropriate)

whatever is going on with the entity, the spark, and how they relate to different planets' alive-or-dead status

staying undercover vs strategically revealing information

establishing bases, resources, and backup vs being ready to make a clean getaway

guidelines for making/tweaking new legacies, charms, etc while keeping them balanced and fun, as well as leaving room for people to use their own interpretations of the worldbuilding

And So On

it might take me a while to get around to it, and it might turn into a Huge Complex Thing of Its Own, or might just be good for some flavoring and small mechanical twists added on to an existing game. but i think it'd be a lot of fun to work on, and if anyone has suggestions for systems you think it might work well with or other things from the books to adapt, feel free to weigh in!

[leonwifey]

“𝑻𝑹𝑰𝑪𝑲𝑺 & 𝑻𝑹𝑬𝑨𝑻𝑺.” — halloween is way more fun with leon.

˚୨୧ genre — fluff, domestic au

˚୨୧ word count — 891

˚୨୧ note — yeah... i'm a wee bit excited for halloween and to act upon it, i wrote a lil something with hubby!leon. this was written with re6 leon in mind, but honestly he could be any leon. hehe, enjoy! as always, requests are open!

“Is this really necessary?” Your husband groans up at you, who is dabbing on the finishing touches to his makeup.

A small glare graces itself on your face before returning to your canvas of a man. “Yes, Leon. Yes it is,” You intentionally pat the sponge of white face paint a little harder onto his forehead. “Besides, the kids will be here any minute now.” 

“Yes ma’am.”

Halloween has always been your favorite time of the year. You absolutely relished in every one of the fall festivities, always dragging your husband to the pumpkin patch which ultimately ends with him carving every pumpkin with various designs and faces. Even when you asked him if you could take a stab at it, your husband would be very adamant about handling the knives himself. Sure, let the agent have his fun.

The perfected pumpkins now sit along your porch steps, accompanied by the surplus of Halloween decor you splurged on. Zombies and grave stones emerge from your lawn, spiders are sprawled all over your front door, and you’ve even taken the time to splatter fake blood on the windows. You admit it was a bit extra, but if you aren’t the spookiest house in the neighborhood, you’re not quite sure what you’d do with yourself.

Now, you have Leon sitting obediently in the bathroom, working on finishing his Halloween makeup. This year, the two of you have decided to go as a vampire and one helpless human. Him, dressed in a pleated Victorian blouse with a sickening cape to match and you, the tragic and foolish peasant girl who happens to also look rather ravishing in a bodice. A skit has also been devised for when the kids arrive, one that includes Leon biting your neck and your fake blood splatters in all directions. It’s honestly a win for everyone. Kids get king sized candy bars and you have a hot vampire husband sucking your neck. 

Stepping back to admire your finished work, you smile giddily before helping him up. “You ready for this, Count Leon?” 

The vampire grins, wrapping his arms around your corseted waist, facing you both towards the mirror. His nose presses against your neck and his painted lips are dangerously close, tickling you slightly. “I could just eat you up right about now.”

You try not to shudder at the awfully erotic sight before you, opting for a laugh and placing a hand on his chest instead. Leon with his hair slicked back is something you could never be immune to. “Well, you better save that for witching hour. And maybe keep those fangs on, too.”

“Is this a new kink I’ve uncovered?”

With a lighthearted scoff, you break out of his arms and head downstairs. “Whatever, Dorkula.”

Out the window, you can already spot little kids in all kinds of costumes walking the streets. The sight makes you smile, entertaining the thought of a life with a mini Leon by your side. It’s something you two have discussed on countless occasions and you’ve already bought the house to boost the thought, but you just could never pinpoint Leon’s actual thoughts on the matter. In any case, you spot a handful of kids make their trek onto your driveway, hesitant at the sight of all the spooks around them. Grabbing the bowl of candy, you hastily shut off the lights and ready yourself behind the front door.

The sound of the doorbell echoes through the house and you immediately pull open the door.

“Trick or treat! The group of children cheer excitedly.

“Wow! What awesome costumes you guys have! Here, choose y-”

And right on cue, Leon comes up from behind you to bite your neck, fake blood gushing out of his mouth staining your neck in crimson. The children shriek almost instantly, clutching their buckets in fear. You lean against your vampire husband's chest, feigning death as he takes the bowl from your hands and urges the children to grab some candy. “Would you children like some treats?”

To both of your surprise, the children stay stagnant and blink up at Leon in disbelief. 

“You killed that nice lady!” A little boy dressed up as ghost points. “We’re not taking candy from a murderer!”

“Yeah!” The rest of the kids cheer, ready to take on the vampire.

The giggle you try to stifle is unable to hide itself and you can feel how speechless Leon is, even in your dead state. “This wasn’t on the script…” Leon whispers, nudging you.

Because you enjoy seeing your dear husband struggle, you continue playing dead, anticipating his improv acting. Clearing his throat, the vampire speaks. “Um, fear not children! I've only just turned this woman into a vampire, so we can both live as immortals in love for the rest of our lives! Now, quickly! Take the candy!”

Finding some truth in his words, the children eagerly take their candy bars and drop them into their buckets, thanking Leon for the treats. With the shut of the door, you finally rise from the dead with another merry giggle. 

“Gosh Leon, that was quite the proposal. “ You exhale, ready to reenact the scene once more. “And those kids were certainly smart.” 

“Yeah, but you know... Ours will probably be smarter.”

It was your turn to be in disbelief. “Hold on, what?”

[cloud-ya]

Fellow elysia hater here

After elysian realm got main story chapters i quit playing since it felt like they cared more about breast size then character. Now that it’s back to the main trio i kind of want to start playing again but it’s just boring now, still

Only characters im still interested in are HoV/Sirin, kiana and Bronya. but the first two don’t get any content anymore unfortunately

oh fuck SAME I'm glad I'm not the only one not being able to feel joy when playing honkai story anymore. with every new chapter it feels more and more than just a chore to me that I eventually have to do rather than exploring a story. I wish I could genuinely enjoy trio reunion but I just. can't. first part of it was literally just "I'm glad we're all back together But Look What Elysia Showed Me". doesn't help that mei got caught in this unfortunate crossfire because of being in elysian realm and I just couldn't stand her voice at first because I associated it with this annoying part of the story

for sure the biggest flaw in execution of elysian realm and its characters is blatant jump on cash from thirsty fans. one character having bigger breasts than the other; oh, we can't make this character have boobs bigger than her head because she's a child? don't worry there are still ways to put some ~subtle~ fetish features in her design - just make her wear nothing on her feet, even in outfits. at that point male characters were the only ones designed somewhat sensibly because they would never end up as playable, so mihoyo wouldn't make some extra money on them anyway. it's so frustrating because the concept itself was great, but hoyo fucked it up with wanting more money

its another flaw is shoving it in the main story out of nowhere. it was good when it was its own mode, they could make some notification when finishing chapter 25 that "hey, mei's now in elysian realm so just for your information what's happening with her rn you can go to this new mode and check out its story!", but no, they just had to shove it along with that fucking open world there. and argue all you want, but I don't see any decent enough development value for it to be featured as part of main story. when they realized that there should be some better message at the end than "elysia is cool give us money" they just quickly came up with theme of memory or bearing knowledge about some random dead people or whatever. cool, mei bears this knowledge of thirteen dead people from 50k years ago, but what of it? what is she supposed to do with that knowledge further.

from what I know elysian realm is available before people even get to the chapter 25, which I don't like either because of fucking course people will try a new mode that opens at some captain level despite not knowing what's happening, who those characters are and in what part of the story this is supposed to be happening. it should be available after clearing certain mission/stage in the main story, not after reaching certain captain level

all that drop in quality makes me keep forgetting to check on honkai because there's just nothing that would keep me hooked really. I hope chrono navi patch and its main event will make me check on the game more often, but that would be just that

[meep-morp-s]

Febuwhump 1- head wound, Wolffe

So excited to be doing Febuwhump this year! Last year this event introduced to me so many amazing writers (and future friends!) and some heart wrenching fic. I thought I'd take a stab at it and stab some of my faves in the process ;)

I'm doing a new character for each prompt, no repeats, and starting off strong with Wolffe!

-

He comes to with the sound of footsteps. They’re heavy, like those of the SBDs that trail behind her, but not metallic. They’re faster, too, thundering louder and louder like the pounding in his own head.

Wolffe can feel his heartbeat in his eardrums, more on his right side where he’s sure there is also blood leaking out of his ear. He squints into the dim red lighting of his cell-slash-torture chamber and braces himself for whatever comes next.

His head hurts so much it makes him dizzy. The next thing he knows, Wolffe is collapsing onto the surprisingly warm and comforting ground. Finally out of manacles, his arms sting with pinpricks of sensation and hang limply. He couldn’t move them if he tried, but if he could he would cradle his aching face.

He doesn’t remember much of the torture he endured, but he remembers Ventress lashing out punishment on his face in particular during her latest attempt to extract intel.

“Wolffe,” a familiar voice rumbles. “Wolffe, can you hear me?”

“G- General?” he croaks. He tries to see what’s happening. His vision is spotty, but he can make out the silhouette of his General, and presumably his men behind him. He can’t make out their armor patterns, but he’d bet his life that it’s Sinker and Boost. Those two would never leave him behind or out of sight for long.

Time becomes muddy once again until a sharp noise makes him hiss. General Koon shifts him into a more comfortable position, still on his lap, so they lean against the wall. Wolffe thinks he hears him call for a medic, and he thinks his General’s voice might be shaking. Wolffe tries to speak, but nothing comes out. He tries again. “Wa- wat-”

“Here, my canteen,” he hears Sinker offer. A moment later cool and refreshing liquid makes its way to his mouth. He can still barely feel his arms but one raises up to grab the canteen and douse his entire face with water. It wakes him up. The sting of recent wounds to his head clears his mind a bit. He blinks and tilts his head to look at General Koon.

“I didn’t say anything, sir,” he reports. “All she ever heard was my rank and designation.”

Plo nods absentmindedly, but his shielded eyes are focused directly on him beneath worried brows. “You’re safe now. You don’t have to worry about any of that anymore.”

“Ventress learned her lesson. You can’t break a clone,” Boost says. “We ran her out of here like the loser she is.”

Wolffe is moved again. There is a medic above him now, looking between him and the General. He hears something about an eye. Thinking about it, thinking at all, makes his head hurt. The right side in particular again. He lifts his arm up to cover his face, maybe it’s the lights. He forgets he’s still holding Sinker’s canteen and drops it halfway to his face.

It catches Plo’s attention and the Kel Dor grabs Wolffe’s hand before he can rub at his right eye. But it hurts.

“I know, I know,” Plo comforts. Oh, he said that aloud. The hand on his arm and the warm chest behind him is comforting, but he can feel himself slipping into unconsciousness again because of it. Wolffe tries to stay awake and hear what his medic is saying.

“-clean out the wound. Clear out any debris before I can patch it up.”

“General, they need help finishing up on the East side of the compound,” Sinker says.

“Go, Cardio and I can look after Wolffe until med-evac can get here,” he pauses, then adds more forcefully, “Go. Both of you.”

“Yessir,” Boost and Sinker reply. Wolffe feels more hands on each of his shoulders and figures in helmets above him, though he can’t judge how close they are to him. “Good to see you again, Commander.”

“I-” He lifts his other arm to reach for his brothers but they’re already gone. He notices bacta around his wrist as his arm comes into view. Plo isn’t holding this arm down. Wolffe brings it to ghost over his face, to see what damage has been done to his right side.

Plo wraps his three fingers around Wolffe’s hand but it’s too late. He felt the burnt scarring around his eye. What used to be his eye.

The memory of Ventress slashing it out in rage returns. With it comes the searing pain his mind had been mercifully blocking out. “Ahh!”

Cardio is rinsing the wound out with something. He can feel every molecule of saline as it rinses out his empty eye socket. Plo grips him tighter as he writhes on the floor.

“I know, I know, just a little longer,” Plo tells him. Wolffe whimpers and he is glad Boost and Sinker aren’t seeing him like this. Luckily his General is right, and soon enough a bacta patch covers the right side of his face. Plo uses the sleeve of his robe to wipe sweat and blood off of his forehead and tears off of his cheeks.

Plo gathers Wolffe into his arms and places him gently onto a hoverstretcher. He stays in Wolffe’s limited line of sight at they pass through more red-lit hallways. Wolffe feels the familiar wave of Plo sending calm and peace into his mind, and while it usually helps at the end of a stressful battle, it does nothing for him now. All he feels is failure.

Because despite what Boost assured him, Wolffe thinks Ventress might have succeeded in breaking him. Without an eye, what use is he?

[rimouskis]

Hi!! Just wondering about your Rimouski jersey? I’ve been searching online for one and was wondering if yours is brand new or previously worn? And what size is it? I’m very confused over prices and descriptions. I would like an authentic one but not for a high price. I also don’t want one that will be Huge on me either so I’m very intimidated right now haha. It seems only men’s L and XL are available. Anyway, thanks in advance.

! I'd be happy to talk details about my rimouski jersey, for sure!

so here's the thing about getting a sid-accurate rimouski jersey: you can't get a new one, regrettably. they don't make that style anymore. the nics have altered their jersey design a ton over the last decade or so.

hell, it even changed during the two seasons Sid played for them (they swapped from CCM to Reebok)

so, that being said, even if you wrangled a custom "CROSBY 87" jersey from la boutique de l'océanic, it'd look like the modern design (which I also personally like less than the '05 or the '11 jerseys, but alas).

so you've gotta thrift one. you won't find any authentic(-looking) rimouski oceanic crosby jerseys that are new. everything will be previously owned, and your best bet is going to be eBay.

I spent, like, a solid year or two casually checking eBay to see if I found a listing I liked. you're going to have to compromise; one rarely finds anything smaller than a unisex L or XL jersey on there. mine is an XL and being that I am short, it does look a little silly on me, but you've gotta roll with it. I tend to wear mine over a hoodie, and I sort of tuck the hem of the jersey up into the bottom of the hoodie so I can sit down. We Do What We Must, haha.

the downside to eBay/secondhand sellers is the knockoffs. which... that may not be important to some people! that is a-okay. like, I know for some people, they refuse to buy women's jerseys because they're lower-quality than the men's jerseys (which is so frustrating), but I buy those because of my size, since I have difficulty using my arms with men's jerseys dimensions. so choosing what kind of jersey you want (authentic, replica, knockoff) is a personal choice.

that being said, because the sid rimouski jerseys are no longer in production, people do list fakes on eBay. I just went to look and found two. below I've pointed out how I can tell they're probably not actually thrifted pieces, or if they are, they were knockoffs to begin with:

so, depending on what these sellers are asking, they might be overcharging for a fake made on dhgate or something. that's up to personal choice if you don't care to try and suss out a more "authentic" looking one or not. if you're happy with a jersey you find and its price, you should get it.

so that being said, it was really important to me to get an "authentic" one, just because my attachment to rimouski era sid is based a lot in caring about his personal history, yadda yadda. so I bid my time [for about a year, ngl] until a listing popped up that I looked at and went, "yeah that looks pretty darn close/good/in good condition." that listing was the one I bought:

and I got it for a steal, haha. $150, and the seller refunded me $20 (which covered shipping) due to a small stain on the logo (...which I was able to remove with oxiclean once I received the jersey 😁).

the jersey was a little gross when I received it [if you want to relive the cleaning process, that is in my #jersey-talk tag], but after a good soak it was good as new, imo. I also bought a 2005 Memorial Cup patch off of eBay ($13), and then sunk an additional few bucks into the jersey to get the patch affixed ($8) and to get a custom replica twill A made and affixed ($35) by Pro Knitwear, the full-service apparel company the Penguins use to do all their jersey customization pieces. [Pro Knitwear was awesome to work with and I'd recommend them for sure for any customization work. 10/10.]

I'm really happy with my jersey. it's genuinely one of my most prized possessions and I'm really proud of it. but... it took some luck and elbow grease and compromise to make it work. I'm afraid you probably won't find anything smaller than a men's L or XL, and you might have to poke around the internet or be patient for a listing you're satisfied with to get posted. there are a handful of jersey customization companies to help get any details corrected, but finding that base jersey can be a waiting game.

so, tl;dr if you want an authentic/authentic-looking jersey, it will probably be very large and you might have to be patient. set up an alert on eBay and monitor it to see any new listings! and if you ever want to talk more about it, my ask and DMs are open :) the more rimouski-era sid fans, the better 😈