#posting this for context before updating everything xx

[rypnami]

Prewett Family

(headcanons/canon in the universe of my trans leander au!)

Members

Arthur: Father, 48 y/o, unlabelled, Gryffindor. Works as a Cursebreaker for Gringotts. Marie: Mother, 47 y/o, bisexual, Gryffindor. Had a brief stint as an Auror, now is a stay at home parent. Lily: 24 y/o, lesbian, Gryffindor. Professional chaser for the Holyhead Harpies. Phillip: 16 y/o, bisexual, Gryffindor. Prefect, will be Head Boy, future owner of Stitches and Draughts. Leander: 15 y/o, gay, trans, Gryffindor. Future Herbologist, kind of quiet, wants to play Quidditch for Gryffindor. Amelia: 10 y/o, aromantic asexual, will be a Gryffindor. The older of the twins. Aims to be top student, like Phillip. Penelope: 10 y/o, biromantic asexual, will be a Gryffindor. The younger twin. Also the shy one.

History

The Prewett family is one of the oldest Wizarding families in all of Britain. The oldest recorded member, Ignus Prewett, is from the time of the Hogwarts founders. Over the centuries, several members have risen to prominence in the Wizarding world, and they have amassed incredible wealth. For generations, both men and women of the family have been Curesebreakers, a tradition still continuing to this day. Even still, they have a good reputation, especially in comparison to most of the ancient pureblood families.

Current Day

The Prewett family (of 1890-91) lives in a sizable home near the centre of London. Despite the inherited wealth from their ancestors, they live somewhat modestly and don’t spend much more than they need to. After all, they currently have 2 kids attending Hogwarts, and soon it will be the twins’ first year. Arthur is a very respected and highly competent Cursebreaker for Gringotts, however his work keeps him away from home much more than he’d like. He somewhat hopes that one day at least one of his children will follow his footsteps as a Cursebreaker, but at the moment none of them seem terribly interested.

Marie was an accomplished Auror for a few years after graduation, however after having Lily she decided to retire to properly raise her. She is still an absolute force to be reckoned with, and it’s probably wise not to mess with her (and especially not her kids).

Like her mother, Lily was an Auror for a few years. However, she later found her passion to be Quidditch and is currently playing as Beater for the Holyhead Harpies.

Phillip and Leander are the only two currently attending Hogwarts. Phillip is a prefect and the top student among the 6th year Gryffindors. He is almost certain to be Head Boy as a 7th year, and will in the future run his own shop in Hogsmeade.

Leander often compares himself to his older brother, and doesn’t feel like he can measure up. Much of his imposter syndrome comes from the fact that he has only recently transitioned FtM, and isn’t quite sure if he’s ’enough of a boy.’ Despite his lack of coordination on a broom, he wants to play Quidditch for Gryffindor. Perhaps one day. He’s not sure what his true ambition for the future is just yet.

Last but not least are the twins. Amelia, the oldest (by all of 90 seconds) is your typical ‘girly girl.’ Very smart, loves her makeup and nice outfits, and is practically destined to be THE popular kid. She is deep down a bit insecure, but she’s good at hiding it.

Penelope is more likely to argue that 90 seconds doesn’t really count at being older at all. They were born the same day, after all. She’s the more shy of the two, and much prefers the company of her books and art to other people. Although she and her sister are completely different in almost every way, they are still very close and consider each other to be their best friend.

sooo. yeah, these are my headcanons for the whole family tee hee. each of them will play a role in the main trans!au fic, as well as appear in mini stories throughout! auri and penelope unlikely friendship duo we stan

i hope you love them 🫶

[jjheejz]

About Internet Water Army in the case

This is an ongoing update about the case from start to development. List of all related posts can be found on this blog's pinned post (link provided at bottom of each post as well).

19 August 2021 update: Added the scale of his success for reference, before bonus below

18 August 2021 update: Added timeline of events, orange title in post, found out the official English term for Immoral Media = Internet Water Army)

Major updates since first draft: Added bonus, added disclaimer, certain info details

Originally posted on 16 August 2021

[The purpose of this post is to provide a perspective as to why the Media is raised/blamed regarding the issue. Especially for international fans, as all the encounters happened on Weibo. Also, those who were on weibo, do read through if you will. So although it's lengthy, do try to read all, at least if not the last two parts].

The Media referred by most, is not the common perception of the Entertainment Industry (celebrities, directors, shows, channels, staff etc), but the dark side of the Entertainment industry: Antis, toxic fans, toxic marketing accounts. They are called Internet Water Army💧.

Toxic Marketing Accounts is one of the things they do, these accounts on Weibo has millions of followers, each of their post likes are in the hundred thousands (buyable) to give credibility to passer-bys. Some use similar names to Official accounts, some use similar logos. Their posts are usually subjective or aims to steer view points of a certain celebrity/movie/show. Before the latest update of this post (18.08.21), I just group them all together and term them as Immoral Media*.

*Below is my original post using my original term because at point of first draft, I did not know the official term (so have changed/added the term from Immoral Media to Internet Water Army in content below but retain the content based off first draft).

If you have chased before celebrities, or just simply passed by an article about certain celebrities, recall how some title that caught your attentions were like. Clickbaits is one of the many things they do. If GZ is your first and you do not have Weibo, then this read(link) is good enough.

Just as the term Immoral Media (Internet Water Army), it’s immoral and unethical, but they exists because they are paid to do so. Who pays them? Entertainment Companies, and maybe other Organisations

Normal Media/Marketing vs Immoral Media/Toxic Marketing/Internet Water Army

When a show or movie comes out, the normal Marketing department will generate outreach and buzz so that people know a show is airing soon/know the show exists etc. Official announcements are not enough, because there isn’t much context (limited content to put up as well) so having some other Marketing accounts do the buzz in a planned period to gain awareness through posts, some articles about the casts, the plot summary, the production details etc is normal. This is Marketing, bigger companies will probably have stronger Marketing departments (aka influence) and can hire more Marketing accounts to generate buzz. Celebrities (aka casts) themselves, are also Marketing point.

Then we have the Internet Water Army/Immoral Media, these are what they mainly do:

Create Fanfiction-rumors: Creating rumors about celebrities to shift audience perception of them. [eg. XX was seen with XX leaving a hotel, XX was drunk on Event Y and did ZZZ to AA, XX is dating BB and has been in a relationship for N years etc]

Honing their brain degrading skills: Come up with titled clickbait headings/ trending topics with negative written contents. For articles, exceptionally out of heading content related to the celebrity. [Refer to Baidu, it’s a winner of these, feel free to Google Translate]

Regressing their common sense and understanding skills: Take everything a celebrity does completely out of context in a negative way and create a topic out of it [eg. XX said AA is a ---, “XX raised his finger, a sign of ---?”, XX pushed BB aggressively on Variety Show Y - A competition variety show, XX is in beef with CC because XX was caught giving CC the eye]

Using their fingers to stir shit and bathe each other in it: Escalate all smallest form of possible tension created by fans/themselves into a huge thing by acting as the fandom's fans/lurk in fandom chat groups, and voicing their disguised opinion to spread tension/exaggerate severity of the issue [eg. XX fans mocked AA - in groupchats: tbh I've never liked AA before, AA just gives off a vibe that I dont like and now this? It just disgusts me even more > Yea, i feel this way too. AA has problems / XX Lurkers expressing views on XX about NN, slowly to NNMHFXW - XX did NNMHGT - I cannot accept NNmHfHw, I'm leaving = multiply by 1000++]

Epitome of a self-deteriorate: Creating something out of nothing and react to that something negatively to gain massive attention/reaction [eg. “XX raised his hand on show Y” - dk what XX fans are thinking, are they literally blind? XX fans are tasteless just like XX hahaha / “XX did community service” - they are acting / “XX breathed” - From the start, i thought XX was NN, but I am so ZZZ that XX breathed. Goodbye fandom, i’m leaving. Those who still want to stay I urge you to rethink your life choices] - if I may add, Xiao Zhan’s fanfiction case as well. 

Metaphor - Ability to use bare hands to collect paychecks from the urinal/toilet bowl where their boss/client peed in: Doing all of the above.

Apologies for any term offense, but not apologetic of the term context. This is what they do for a living. Any normal human being who do not like anything, will generally not be interested at anything about it in the first place, so to have some antis/toxic fans knowing certain things and inside jokes/references in their posts questions their goal.

On involved in Internet Water Army/Immoral Media 💧

Fans on weibo during these few months witnessed many of the above on GZ. From rumored girlfriend (spammed with articles) to mean and nasty comments on trending topics, to bouts of insults and fake emotional cryouts by certain fan accounts that GZ's office has to release a number of Lawyer’s letter to them. 

Aside from WOH there were also a few other BL adaptation films that were actually released this year but they did not reach exponential success like WOH. BL adaptations are so highly followed by because this is the key to wealth. Literally. Successful BLs like The Untamed and  Dao Mu Bi Ji saw the amount of wealth fans are willing to spend on the celebrity as compared to say BG or idols (younger fan groups). This is why when WOH shot up exponentially, Immoral Media start to sweat.

Major anticipated adaptations were supposed to air this year eg. Hao Yi Xing(HYX), Sha Po Lang(SPL) etc but was severely held back due to the stricter change in BL adaptations submitting their scripts for approval regulations (WOH manage to submit earlier before the change). Because of this, most final films were rejected and they have to keep re-editing, by then WOH was already months into reaping tonnes of major brand endorsements, shows/movie casting, variety show appearances etc, something that is seen as too successful in the Immoral Media’s eyes, because they have to create buzz for other celebrities, some are specific celebrity oriented and thus circulate rumors about having endorsement opportunities shifted from celebrity X to GZ (think fanfiction-rumors and shit stirrer) causes tension in celebrity fandoms. - A real event just in July:

The Untamed’s cp fandom is called BJYX which had always been in the Top 1 of Cps for 2 years dropped for awhile to Top 2, over taken by LLD. Both of them had a war and hated each fandom, one fandom is somehow not allowed to like the other fandom even casually after everything broke out because it started out with some BJYX toxics photoshopped GZ on of portraits .

Also another case of which he wore the same costume as WYB did in a previous photoshoot and it became a useless comparison of who wore better, who looks better, degrading the other. (Finger stirring shit).

Now apply all of the above things the Internet Water Army do and we have them earning money, while both fandom reacts and hate each other.

In LLD, our own fans started suspecting each other on who is a spy from BJYX and what not.

The first few months of Internet Water Army saw LLDs mostly mocking them because the average age is 30-40s, they know and see through all of their intentions so nothing was big. They were trumpeting and LLDs didn’t even care, what with all the doing tedious stats was not even important to them.

Over time, as the issues they create became more and more serious LLDs did start to care, reporting Toxic Marketing accounts/toxic fans became a daily task, go vote for GZ at certain polls etc, solo fans, and LLD fans also split apart. Solo fans think cp fans use GZ to furnish their fantasies, and cp fans thinks they are the ones furnishing their dreaming-girls fantasy with (aka my boyfriend).

There was also a period where LLD had a habit of continuously mentioning “we are in the 30-40s so we can see through everything about the media, we are all fans for the first time, we are good at spending money (because of purchase power compared to other fandoms)” it was prevalent for so long it felt odd, ‘chasing celebrities the first time’ in particular sounds more vulnerable as a weakness than a strength / sth to be proud of.

Gradually, more secretive/insider confirmed ‘sweets’ were flying around. Fans advised each other to not circulate, and the mindset of “if you know, you know, dont tell.” (This is a problematic mentality, of which fans will still be curious to know and search for it themselves, but this secretive hook is unhealthy. Over the long term, it becomes hard for existing fans to know a lot of things properly to judge for themselves, especially those who knew and publicly reacted, but blasting those who ask and telling those who know to keep quiet, this did not help some to understand why on certain things, even so for international fans, dont know and dont understand, causing misunderstandings. Yes, certain information should not be shared, so why should you react about it publicly in the first place? - Internet Water Army effect)

The last few months (for example the July fan war) created a tonne of seriousness and anger. A period even broke out with a tonne of ‘insider confirmed sweets’ (which is LLD’s daily dose of happiness), it was hard to tell what was real and what was fake. Trending topics became negative and everyone warned each other not to enter because it will give the trends ‘views’ and trend statistics, in reality entering there is to enter an exhibition by the self-deteriorates, collecting the fandom's traffic data (it's a sure lose for fans each time they enter the topic). Everyone even starts thinking that the trend’s popularity was caused by each other (it's true but it can be bought daily and not caused by fans). There was a raise in the number of fans who were getting emotional because they want to protect but Internet Water Army kept coming and got worse, because fans, tbh, not just GZ fans, every other celebrity’s fans are always fighting with an Army, getting played and plotted in that Army's calendar.

Even so, despite all of these, LLD is actually a fandom Internet Water Army may find the hardest to break because they understand GZ so much, they could tell what are fake news regarding GZ, because among everything above, there are still plenty of logical fans to stop many fans from drifting too far and debunking them. Why? 30-40s are grown up adults.

Why 13.8.21 and the Japan issue is plotted?

First of all, in the political climate of China, there are many political dates in a month that is NO-Entertainment news. Because it’s the honoring of certain important political events. It’s like Remembrance Day, thus the sensitivity is higher. On these days, there are usually no news and even the Internet Water Army zip their pants. This year also marks the 100th year of the Chinese Communist Party(link)

Secondly, he had no work schedule on 13 August 2021. A great full day to focus on any other news (because if he had schedules, everyone will turn their attention to his events, what trumpeting outside is just bird chirps). 

Thirdly, when the news broke out, especially about the shrine, the reception was actually quite serious within the fandom so the scale of this might be big but to what extent in reality?

Lastly, 15.8.21 marks the 76th anniversary of the announcement of surrender of Japanese in World War 2(link). Also a day of NO-Entertainment news. 

Timeline of events:

13.8.21 - [His rest day, Eve of Chinese Valentine's Day, Japan News broke out] His rest day, no schedules = increased attention about him online. Lowered guard among fans because they are getting ready for tomorrow's Chinese Valentine's sweets = Caught off guard = Huge break out of fans' reactions

14.8.21 - [Chinese Valentine's Day, Eve of the 75th Anniversary of the announcement of Japanese surrender] Keep a wishful and happy demenaor to not destroy the mood, suppressed thoughts about ZZH's Japan news

15.8.21 - [75th Anniversary of the announcement of Japanese surrender, Official announcement of ZZH's boycott and all China social media account ban] NO-Entertainment news day, Solemn day, not allowed to voice anything so the fandom can only wait for tomorrow to start voicing out/debunking but before they can wait out, the boycott and social media ban happened, every official accounts about him was gone overnight, fans had no time to react

17.8.21 - [All official fandom accounts related to ZZH and JunZhe were locked/removed]

Forced to be silent since the day his matter broke out, over the course of official news release with everything taken down in a day because of the Japan correspondence, his accounts banned overnight across the Chinese media and the overnight cancellation, fans could not speak anything about it. Overnight cancellation like this scale happened for the first time in China, leaving no time to react by the fandom, by the time they can, they are silenced.

When the period of events occured within a set of special dates, it’s not coincidence.

Conclusion

Because he was too successful and had many actually honorable past things, and a hard to influence fandom, Internet Water Army view him as a huge threat enough to want to destroy him, because it’s hard to defeat. With a chance they have, they will hold it till the end, bringing up this issue to the Government during this period also shows a sign of how scared they were of him and perhaps his fandom to plot something like this.

Updated on 19 August: Here's a screenshot of assumed calculation on the scale of GZ success for reference while chatting with a fellow fan, assuming GJ also has 27 brands, and there are 1000 brands. Rationale of numbers used: Only big brands can hire big celebrities.

Bonus

Mentioned in the first post, will mention again in case. After the news broke out within 2 days, there was a drop on his weibo followers from 18.9mil to 18.7mil. 200k+ drops, if the politics was such a big national issue, there should at least be a huge drop, even at least a million right? Because weibo is a China-Chinese majority right? Nope, we get a puny 200k drop.

What's funny? The self-deteroriates:

Translation: "Are his fans bought? Why didnt he drop fans? Those people got brainwashed to this point?" / "I've never entered his weibo and today i feel like having a look yet it showed I've followed him. All his fans were bought right? It disgusts me, i immediately unfollowed. This kind of process is worse than WYF..." / "i dropped fans because of him...no...I just reposted 2 posts and I've dropped 4 fans?"

Isn't the tone and regressing brain cells, all too familiar and same?

//

Added above, will remind again to read this link. It has an even more in-depth knowledge on who are paying them.

So what should we do? Link here

Related posts 🛏️:

[dappersheep]

Food Fantasy: An Analysis on what killed a Golden Goose (2/3)

Welcome back. Before we get started, disclaimers again! I do not own the game or its characters, nor do I claim to know the history and future of the game. What I am entitled to are the thoughts and opinions written within this post. You may or may not agree with the points spoken of here. This post also remains untagged from the main foofan tag. Only my followers will see this.

We are now on the second part, so let's go forward under the cut!

Elex

And here we have our beloved global publisher that most of seem to have Stockholm Syndrome for. Don't lie, at least half of us are still playing this damned game due to sunken cost fallacy, sunken time fallacy and the cute/hot jpegs.

In 2018, everything started out fine. Sure, maybe we had some translation mishaps here and there -coughwe'llgettothatwreckagelatercough- but overall, Elex was running the game fairly well. Rewards were on time, we had active social media and support, and a discord was set up!

Hint: Please note I use quite a bit of sarcasm in most everything I say.

And then somewhere along that road, things got derailed. And I mean it like, we're in the midst of a trainwreck in slow motion and we've only cleared the initial collision and still hurtling forward or backward into a steel wreckage ticking inferno.

Problems started cropping up as early as late 2018, just a few months after the game was launched in July.

⦁ Art contest mishaps. You know when you hold an art contest on Facebook out of all places with its shitty tagging system, you're bound to have entries lost to the void, people forced to register an FB account just to participate (seriously, who even has an FB account that isn't just there to appease family members?) and having to wrestle with figuring out how FB's tagging system works. Add to that the panel of judges happen to be Elex staff who don't have a good eye for good artwork (we actually had a kiddy figure drawing win over a well drawn one during the last contest!) and that they ALSO weren't very good at organizing such contests on FB... well, we had several grievances over that.

⦁ Region blocked FB announcements. Strangely enough, I stopped getting announcements around Father's Day of 2019 while everyone else outside of SEA kept getting updates. Turns out that someone on Elex's staff really didn't like SEA players or was just really bad at fixing the settings for the group and never bothered to revert it back. It didn't matter in the long run though, because...

⦁ Abandoned social media platforms. FooFan Twitter, FooFan Facebook... they all floated slowly into the void and was never heard from again. And this was before the 2020 pandemic.

⦁ Remember what I said about Discord? Yeah, apparently, they opened one up a little too early and the staff in charge of it knew zero about how to setup and mod a discord community, and didn't even have the manpower needed to mod the influx of members that came in! Suffice to say, they had to get help from top players and mods from the FB groups to come in and sort things out because someone kept pinging @ everyone every few seconds other than the usual chaos that comes from a server with no filters and people trying to turn the discord into Global Chat 2.0, minus Russian hours.

⦁ Also in line with the point about abandoned social media platforms, they've also mostly abandoned the discord too and only pop in once in a while to check the bug reports or lost accounts. You have a slightly better chance of response with the in-game support. Only slightly. And there's a running joke with several variations on the main discord that the Owner account of the discord server was manned by an intern-kun who never bothered to pass it on to the next unfortunate soul left to maintain this game.

⦁ Favoritism. Funtoy is also guilty of this but they don't publish the game for Global. If you're a top spender the likes of maxing out your cash rebates within the three months or so and you kept spending even beyond that, Elex could possibly invite you to a funky little club where your voice is more important than say... 99% of the playerbase. On top of that, if you keep spending, you could technically also ask for stuff like getting this frame over that frame, or well.... delay certain features from coming to Global for over a year. Now you can simp AND be heard! (Note: In 2021, it's possible that that club may be dead too, as all things shall be)

⦁ SJW Friendly. I don't know if Funtoy themselves have anything to also do with this particular decision... but it's saying something that after a certain little tiddy tantrum from the community side, Elex decided not to announce anything about a certain event's fate and when asked by it by other parties (not me) they either lie through their teeth, or beat around the bush with a non-answer.

⦁ Partial translations, mistranslations. Now, I understand that a lot of Chinese grammar and semantics are confusing to translate properly into several other languages, but you'd think Elex would have given their translators more context to the character or the mechanic to avoid such mistranslations that later set off gender debates or worded the skill/artifact description a little clearer. That is... unless Elex really is hands-off trying to get to know this IP from the start and only gave it the most bare minimum of English where they can cut costs for it, so people can understand it 'well enough' to throw money at an obviously not beta-read quality game.

⦁ No translations. Yes we do have certain parts of the game that are in Chinese since forever since xx patch. Some characters' voiceline texts are still in chinese, especially during the Pledge scenes. More recent artifacts are also in chinese with no announced translation in sight. And don't get me started on the Food Soul bios, or lack thereof.

⦁ Delayed events. Prime example? We had weeks of minor events/no events and still Elex managed to eff everything up for our second Anniversary in July 2020. We ended up getting the Croissant event in late August with barely any apologies and compensation for the delay... and this likely would have never arrived as 'early' as it did if people hadn't been railing about where our Anniversary event was. As it stands, we are several minor events behind CN, at least a year and a half's worth behind. I know Global had requested heavily for more spaced out events (to save resources, not that it actually worked with all the nerfed rewards we get) compared to CN but this is extremely ridiculous.

⦁ Delayed permanent features. Hm... Guild Wars, Sky Tower, Bar, that Wuchang Fish Showdown... several Quality of Life updates.... that new permanent pool update... Food Souls still missing their JP voice packs... Food Soul Bios... *slowly ticking off more than I have fingers and toes*

⦁ Customer Support is whack. You'd be lucky if you got someone who understood your problem/inquiry right off the bat AND did something about it efficiently. You'd be luckier if they answered you honestly if you were inquiring about event updates or other buggy features or reporting hackers.

⦁ The Great Turkey and Apple Incident of 2020. Well, if you were around for that little SNAFU during the Turkey re-run event, you'd know a percentage of people suddenly got logged out of their accounts and had a baller of a time trying to get their accounts back. You were especially unfortunate if you were playing on an iOS account because even if you did bind it (like a responsible player should be doing), you probably still wouldn't get it back in time to rank properly during Turkey. Some Android players also experienced this, but it wasn't as bad as what the iOS players experienced. And then there was the compensation mishap for that too.

⦁ Hacker-chan and not-so-uwu Hacker-teme. Hacker-chan is a meme. Hacker-chan was a harmless player who regularly topped in Top Showdown every week for a time to send a message to Elex just how easy it is to hack the game in certain rankings and invited Elex to ban them every time, just to test how competent Elex is. In the end, Elex has proven to be incompetent and also glaringly stupid about how their published game works. Hacker-teme is a collective of individuals over time who have cheated the game during important ranking events or in somewhat important permanent battles. If you tried to report a Hacker-teme with evidence to prove it -and trust me, people repeatedly have-, Elex would tell you that they're not cheating and/or lie through their teeth that they're 'investigating the case' and then not do anything about it and let them keep their event ranking and thus get the rewards while someone who actually worked hard/whaled hard to get the spot gets denied. In one case, they believe that if an account has rebate points and the player level is at least around level 80, then the hacker-teme is obviously playing the game fairly. Never mind that their units happened to have low to no artifact nodes opened, and not high in ascension.

And that is the end of the Elex saga. I'm aware there's likely more things about Elex that I've missed, but feel free to add on to this analysis post with your own thoughts.

The last part of this trilogy is probably what many of us are waiting for, for obvious reasons.

[rhysatsmith]

First Week Of Classes | Spring 2021

Hi y’all!

I just wrote out basically the entirety of this post, and then refreshed the page by instinct and lost everything. Lesson learned: save your posts as drafts consistently. Here we go again!

I’ve noticed a few more of you around here since my last post, and whether you’re current/prospective/not Smithies, I’d love to hear from y’all! My ask box is always open, same with my PMs. Like many of us, I’ll take almost any form of human interaction during these dystopian times.

Anyway, classes! Today is the Monday of my second week of classes, and I realized I hadn’t made a post about my first week of classes! Important context before I get there, though, is that so far throughout this pandemic, I haven’t really been able to just sit down and focus on my classes; there was always something else more urgent, whether it be Trump trying to deport all international students (a scare that happened twice over the summer!), me coming out to my parents, or dealing with some pretty terrible personal stuff towards the end of 2020.

I’m not saying this as an ‘oh my life is SO hard’ but as a way to show the reasons for which I was feeling like I was slipping on my academics. And so, I knew that going into my fourth Smith semester (that feels unreal to type, woah), I wanted/needed to change something, for my own mental stability.

For me, this ended up being a commitment to attending as many classes as possible (progress update: I’ve only slept through two morning classes! working on it), leaving my camera on for more than 95% of the time, as well as participating in all the ways I can: answering questions as often as possible, being active in Slack, Piazza, etc.

Something I’ve found REALLY helpful in the process has been something that I’ve personally known about for ages: the pomodoro technique (work cycles of 25 minutes followed by 5 minute breaks, and no more than 4 sessions consecutively). I haven’t really used this method previously because I had the skewed belief that my Romanian high school education cultivated in me: you just need to hammer away at a task, not getting up from your desk, until it’s done. Pair that with my previously untreated ADHD, and it suddenly makes sense why I was struggling (other than the whole, y’know, pandemic thing or whatever).

The most pressing deadline I have at the moment is a video project for Smith’s My Global Story event. It was technically due yesterday, but I was thankfully able to get an extension because I wasn’t quite done with it. I might upload it either here or on YouTube afterwards, but that’s a problem for future me to figure out.

Lastly, one thing I was considering recently is starting the 100 days of productivity challenge; I wouldn’t be aiming to do it every single day for the next 100 days, but to have it finished by the end of the calendar year. Maybe COVID will be done by then, huh?

Rhys (he/they) xx

[perpetually-jungshook]

EOPQ16 i think o/c is too caught up in her annoyance with... jingleshit lol... to even fathom he might like her. I lowkey screamed when jimin and jk started you know. !!!!!! For some reason i was not expecting that. Also i laughed the most at the sewer water episode with yoongi and the pants situation at the end LOL. Thank you for the amazinggg and entertaining update even tho you said you weren't even near ready before. Best way to end my week. Can i hugz you. Also have a good weekend!

[Y’all this is a really important Goldilocks 07 ask]

HELLO HELLO!!! 💖

Jingleshit. My favorite name for him. Being honest, Goldilocks wasn’t even something I was going to post at first 😂 it was my way to vent my frustration (I had written everything in 01, 02, and half of 03 before posting the first part). So yes... some strange, inside joke references will naturally appear :’)

But to address some of the other stuff, I’m going to copy and paste a conversation I had with @echo-writes​ (namely because the Jikook confusion seems to be a prevalent issue)

It’s a little long, so keep your pants on 😉😂 man I’m just so full of bad jokes/references today

“Oh ok. So. About that. The thing is, a lot of Goldilocks comes from the fact that there are pretty much... well let's just say a few stories going on at the same time. Like, the happenings in it don't revolve around the narrator 100% of the time. 

For instance, Jikook or the sub plot with Yoongi. 

While a lot of stories take an omnipotent approach where the narrator is privy to all sorts of information that hammers out into no loose ends, is that anything like real life? Not that I'm saying Goldilocks is ANYTHING like it either XD because that's preposterous. 

But I do think that it's a lot more organic than most stories. So MAYBE the narrator will find out later (like in 08 *cough*) what happened that [lead to Jikook] making out on the couch, but I'm not planning on conveniently placing her in settings/conversations to fill in context, yknow? 

(and I'll also subtly point at their first movie night with Jungkook- where he was comforting Jimin and later, during the second one, when he had his arm around him)”

^I hope that clears things up a little bit!! 😄 I know it’s weird... but there are a lot of things that I hide in my stories. Like, little easter eggs. They don’t really impact the plot too much, but they make a better, more rewarding, more comprehensive story if you find them 😉 hint: Yoongi isn’t just there for show

Anyway! I’m really, REALLY glad you liked it! Thank you for taking the time to read and send this to me. It made me smile (and laugh).

AND OF COURSE YOU CAN HUG ME. Provided... I’m still a little sick so you might want to wash your hands afterward 😂 Hope you have a stellar weekend too, honey-bun.

Much love ~🐰 xx