#posting this here b/c nobody follows this blog but it needs to be said

[fredricwertham]

I’m sorry but this whole Richard Siken situation is very guy who invited vampires into his house complaining that there are now vampires in his house

[kitkatopinions]

Me at some people right now

Here’s some tips for people who consider themselves anti-rw//de.

1. Filter out the RW//DE tag so you don’t see RW/DE posts. This is your responsibility. If it makes you feel attacked to see criticism of RW//BY then prevent yourself from seeing it. Nobody needs to shut up or soften their tone for your comfort. Sometimes even when you don’t seek out RW//DE posts and even when only the correct tags are used, posts will still show up in the main RW//BY tag if people do things like type ‘RW//BY’ without the dashes. That’s a bug in their system, that has nothing to do with us. So filter out the RW//DE tag and you’ll be much, much less likely to see those posts. I would also recommend filtering out tags like ‘RW//BY criticism,’ ‘anti-RW//BY,’ and ‘RW//BY bashing’ to further avoid these sort of posts.

2. Block RW//DE blogs. Sometimes Tumblr will show you ‘recommended blogs’ that are actually the opposite of the things you want even if you have tags filtered out. Once again, that’s a bug in their system, that has nothing to do with RW//DE blogs. However, sometimes RW//DE posters will post RW//DE content with the main ‘RW//BY’ tag or without using the ‘RW//DE’ tag or other filterables. That sucks and I think ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ tags should always be used so people can filter out. However, the response to that shouldn’t be ranting about how all RW//DE posters hate every single RW//BY fan and are trying to force people out of the fandom, when it takes you three seconds to block the person. There are like ten to twenty five frequent RW//DE posters at any given time, you will run out of blogs to ever even see. I personally have blocked likely over two hundred anti-RW//DE blogs and am still getting hate, so if I can do that and still not complain about every single RW//BY fan, then you guys can block the maybe twenty five of us that exist and then just go about your RW//DE free business please and thank you.

3. Don’t make puppet accounts to stalk the people that you claim are ‘trying to force everyone to hate RW//BY’ when they’ve already blocked you. If blogs have a. asked to be left alone. b. actively tried to avoid the fn//dm, c. said repeatedly that they don’t care if others like RW//BY, or d. specifically gone out of their way to try and make it so you personally can’t interact with their stuff, stop trying to interact with their stuff and stop claiming that they - included in statements like ‘RW//DE posters’ and ‘the HT//DM’ - are the ones seeking out members of the fn//dm and trying to force people to not praise RW//BY. How hard is it to just follow the literal tumblr rules and just let people block you? For people that claim to be harassed, some people out here are sure doing a lot of stalking. Please stop stalking.

4. One of the things with anti-rw//de people is that they claim that they’re fine with criticism and critique, but that the rw//de posters and ‘HT/DM are just all such evil cruel liars that they’re forced to defend poor sweet capitalist corporations and the majority straight, majority white, majority male writers who definitely never did anything bad or problematic at all. So here’s a hot tip; STOP TELLING PEOPLE TO USE THE RW//DE TAG if you’re going to immediately lump them in with those people you hate so much. If you see criticism that isn’t tagged as RW//DE, don’t get mad at people and order them to use the RW//DE tag.

5. STOP GANGING UP ON PEOPLE FOR EVEN THE BAREST FORM OF CRITICISM JUST BECAUSE YOU DON’T PERSONALLY AGREE WITH IT, which is something really evidenced in the fact that when RW//DE posters started doing a ‘nitpick November’ game where we posted a bunch of personal opinions or very small criticisms of stuff that didn’t matter that much, anti-rw//de people still harassed us and bullied us and called us ‘pathetic’ and told us to stop being such vile haters wasting our time. Y’all have people in your fandom who have out and out said that they’re ‘no longer taking criticism,’ if you’re so against hiveminds, make an active effort to make people feel comfortable criticizing the damn show even when you don’t personally agree with everything they say.

6. Take the L every once in awhile, for real. No, not every criticism people have against RW//BY or MK//EK is wrong. No, not every criticism people have against the FN//DM is wrong. If you can’t say “yeah, that was fucked up” about some of it, than you are just fooling yourself. If someone says that Miles Luna called Tifa Lockhart a prostitute in a clearly meant to be derogatory way, then said it was because of her outfit, and then lied about it, and your answer to that is either to completely ignore it or wrack your brain for a way to defend it, you are a clown. Take the L. If someone says that Miles Luna said that he wished he’d ‘stuck to his guns’ and did ‘bury your gays’ with Pilot Boi simply because he was popular, and your response is to either ignore it or wrack you brain for a way to defend it, you are a clown. Take the L. If someone points out that Kerry Shawcross said that Ironwood’s new prosthetic symbolized him losing his humanity, and your response is to either ignore it or to find a way to pretend that he actually said ‘Ironwood’s lack of thought and rushing into things is a reason he became a villain’ than you are a clown. Take the L. If someone says “it’s a bad thing that the ‘civil rights / racism allegory’ storyline focused much more on taking down ‘the bad kinds of Faunus’ and taking down ‘the bad civil rights groups’ and taking down the ‘people that fight for their rights in too radical of a way,’ than it ever did on actually showing people fight for their rights,” and your response is either to ignore it or get angry and call them Adam apologists and claim that there are other civil rights groups that we just don’t see that are actually great and that it’s not a problem at all that we never see them because Adam totally was just usurping the cause of the White Fang for his own power and yes for some reason that needed to be ninety percent of the ‘civil rights / racism allegory’ story... You are a clown. Take the L. If a Jewish person says “this fn//dm needs to stop throwing around words like ‘nazi’ or ‘genocide,’ they need to stop using the holocaust to prop up their hatred of a fictional character, they need to stop making light of the horror Jewish and Romani people faced in order to make a point, goyim do not get to ‘make jokes’ or ‘make satire’ about that suffering, and also Coco Adel being based off a nazi is messed up, and also Camp Camp is even more messed up,” and your response is to either ignore it or accuse the Jewish person of antisemitism for daring to point any of that out... You are worse than a clown. Take the damn L.

Some of you anti-rw//des are such overly-defensive people. You can like RW//BY. I have yet to see anyone tell you that you can’t. But by God, please just take note of the above. Because some of y’all fall hard into being horrible people and legit lean into bigotry sometimes in your haste to condemn any and all criticism and defend literally everything in this famously flawed show by famously flawed writers who work for a famously flawed company. Filter the RW//DE tag, block blogs you hate seeing, don’t stalk people, don’t tell people to use the RW//DE tag, actually let people criticize RW//BY even when you don’t agree, and learn to take a loss and say “Yeah, that was pretty fucked up.”

[redxblueihateloveyou]

You know it's always really funny to me when mhs say that had it not been for swimming Haru and Rin would've never become friends bc I'm like, that's how relationships work???? You initially connect bc of something you have in common and go from there???? In that case you can also apply it to mh bc if Haru and Makoto had not been neighbors since they were young they probably would've never become friends either, but nobody wants to mention that bc then their argument crumbles lol

Anyways, your blog is literally the best and your rh (and general) takes are always so nice to read

I'm... same, I just do not understand what’s new about this? Like my mom and dad met while they were both working at school, if I started talking with a guy cause he told me that he liked my chibi Akashi bag and anime, is this not allowed? This in no way means that that’s all we like about each other or smth, this means this one thing brought us together.

This is the reason why I dislike mh fans so much. Because the majority of them instead of posting some canon facts and truthful arguments, they either twist some words into something unrecognizable, either try to change a rh moment into mh. I just always thought ppl ship things for what they are, not what they are not...

And the main problem in this happening and the error in their equation is Haru. Cause they’re trying so hard to sew him into that but with everything he says and do he constantly falls off and they end up with mako-haha. It’s like they say that Makoto is the reason that Haru walks into his future, which is hilarious tbh, and the next movie airs and what do you know Haru is yelling at Rin’s face how “he only walks towards the future and wants it bc of him”, they say that s2 relay teams are what they truly want which everyone knows ain’t true and boom drama airs and Haru and Rin are talking how it’s not the same if they’re not together on the team. They air all the birthday stories and oh no, Rin is special again. I remember how they were running around after that frfr! episode, where Rin tries to make Haru laugh and Makoto says he actually already heard it before and turns out it was kid Haru’s evil laugh in his sleep at school. Like what is so special about that? And how is this mh related? Haru was cutely laughing watching Rin sleep and just reading his text.. that’s yeah, that’s the reason to fuss.

Their problem is always Haru, he never fits their mh plan like ever. But do they listen to him? No. Because we have a moment IN THE ANIME, where Haru says “RIN, I WANT TO BE LIKE YOU, TOO.” meaning he wants to be as brave/daring/passionate, etc. cause Rin represents freedom for him. Okay, I’d get why some needed me to post an arguments list for “Rin doesn’t like Haru only for his swimming”, which is still hilarious to me, but okay, he does have a kink in books about Haru moving in the water and goes about it for several pages, but with Haru this is actually not the case. 

I don’t know if anyone noticed it, but swimming is not what attracts Haru the most about Rin and never was. It’s his character and state of mind and the way he makes him feel aka free. It doesn’t matter what they do, like whether they eat their rolls or draw new years fortunes. Haru said his whole body is on fire just when he looks at Rin and he doesn’t even notice how he starts smiling when Rin talks to him. It’s just the way he makes him feel. And swimming has nothing to do with that. Sorry, guys lmao.

Did they seriously just erase this moment, when Rin writes how he wants swim as fast as Haru in his letter, but Haru looks at the sky and he has this kaleidoscope of Rin’s pic in his mind and what he says next is "Rin, I want to be like you, too.” 

And he means what he says. It’s not about the swimming truly, he admires the fact that Rin follows his dreams with such passionate determination. Mind the fact that moments of Rin that flash before his eyes in this moment a) when Rin openly gushes about Haru’s swimming in front of everyone; b) when he yells in front of the whole class that if he wants a relay with Haru, he will bloody get it; c) his swimming; d) when he tells Haru that he’s a sight he never saw before he’s gonna show him the sight he’s never seen before. It’s about how what Rin wants, Rin fights for until he gets it. Haru is in love with his passion, always was, always will be.

Haru doesn’t want to “swim like Rin” although they did compliment each other by saying “I find your strength amazing” “but I find your stamina amazing”, and Haru always drools about the power behind Rin’s strokes, but Haru swims in his own beautiful way. And while he adores the way Rin swims, that’s still not his favorite thing about Rin and never was. Every time he talks about Rin it’s always about his personality and surprisingly... it’s rarely about swimming. When he thinks about Rin it’s always stuff like... how he is so colorful and intense and full of life and passionate about his dreams and how he stands out among everyone else to him, not about his swimming skills. 

So this argument is dumb AF tbh. I’m like.. yeah, and Lan Zhan loves Wei Ying for his demonic cultivation skills. Not because of his strong character, daring heart and his incredible ability to tick him off and light his cold ass on fire.

P.S. Seriously tho this is the first shipping base I see who just always for some reason does this stupid thing with finding a crumb and actively trying to make it into a bread but then realise it’s realistically impossible so they just replace it with a plastic one and pretend it’s real. This in fact makes your ship ridiculous. You can’t try to push the line that Rin is abusive (thats still lol) and how Makoto is better for Haru, since Rin did everything to make Haru reach his dream and made him happy and he’s the only one who can help Haru, when he feels down like in s2 and then with Albert and etc. Makoto can’t. It’s the truth, just let it go. I know there are not much positives sides in mh relationships to be honest in my opinion, but there are still some (?). Why not base your arguments on truth? Like at least it’s gonna be mh, not some imaginary thing. Either love mh for mh or don’t. Like yeah, Haru doesn’t resiprocate, but maybe one-sided stuff is your kink, ok, explore this, fine, but don’t try to make Haru into somebody else. Then it’s not your ship anymore.

It’s just funny to me like that Rin here writes poems about Haru and openly flirts with him in restaurants and plans their future together and I don’t even need to exagerate anything, it’s just how it really is and meanwhile mh is like “remember how 7 years ago Utsumi said that Rin and Haru wouldn’t be friends if it wasn’t for swimming, so mh is the shit”.. like I’m sorry, but I think I’m allowed to laugh at this. Sometimes you just have to let it go, seriously. Or at least like idk think before you post (and I know that it has like 3 retweets and no one cares, but still 3 ppl agreed and it reached me somehow, so..). My policy is when I create posts about my ships is validation. Like my last Rinharu facts youtube post got 5K likes, I didn’t post my thoughts, just their moments and at the end I specifically said “I have links/translations to all of this, so name thing you want to read, I’ll link you” and I linked everyone whatever they wanted. 

This is how you tell ppl a story of why you love this ship and make them fall in love with it, too. Not by making up lies about what’s not there and twisting someone’s words (like this person wrote “thats what she really meant *adds complete nonsense*). And I know mh do not have any of this stuff that rh have, but if you really ship mh, find something real and go from there. Seriously, it’s better if you have smth small, but real, than a huge lie.

Also I still think ship is about two people, not just one. Why mh don’t want to listen to anything Haru says or wants like at all? That’s just sad. 

P.P.S. Thanks for liking my blog, this makes me so happy <3<3<3

[haxingthe-spectrumxd]

In Honor of @idk48562 who has earned and captivated our passions which burn...

Hey This is my first time posting and honestly, most of y'all probably don't know or give a fuck about who I am but I do have a few things to say b/c today I saw something truly terrible enough to bring my former bullied anti-social ass to post for the first time in a long time you don't know me but I know who y'all are and to those who have followed Tumblr recently I'm sure you all know @idk48562 and their fantastic blog they dedicated it to make us some of the most finely crafted Yandere scenarios and prompts to having conservations with us when we felt lonesome b/c I don't about y'all but @idk48562 did one hell of a job at including several different types of people in their blog they weren't afraid to be bold and be inclusive to people with other kinks and I think that's pretty significant not hating on other yandere blogs y'all should write what your comfortable with but @idk48562  was very open minded to new ideas and people that most would be uncomfortable to write or portray and even more so @idk48562 I know always made me feel at home and many others. Personally, my favorite was the hxh headcanons never was a big fan of Killua or Spider headcanons, but @idk48562 made me appreciate and see these characters in a new light and go back and look. At others content and find joy in their gems of writing drabbles one-shots etc. I only wish I hadn't been so shy and silent at first. I always wanted to send in a question to them but didn't have the guts. Which is why now after this I realize I need to declare how much they mean to me and other followers and yes a selfish part of me wants their blog back up but God what I really want to get across to y'all who may come across them is that there was nobody like @idk48562 here and for what it's worth their time here on tumblr made my lonely and miserable days in this year so much better bearable they put in a considerable influence and spark in me like I've never felt before which is why I need to say and you followers need to say @idk48562 we love you and we will always appreciate you your writing hospitality honesty you are so special and we like you and your writing just for being you so whether your reading this or not just no no matter what you decide to do just know I and many others support you I'll miss your blog and writing but you are so much more important than my and others entertainment even so just know these moments in time we had reaching out and connecting with your writing and asks it'll never go away or be meaningless not to me and several others and I know what it's like to be bullied and harassed and I'm so sorry you had to go through that to those people who did that to you , I just have to say I don't know they are or their names but I do know in comparison to you they mean nothing they are but a empty husk withering away at others while you have an incredible ember that never goes out you shine so I could see it in your writing and to all those who commented happily in your ask just wanting to bask in that shine of ember you hold no one will remember them you though I'll remember you till I die and others will to . And I want to thank @idk48562 for being there and having the courage to post, which is why I am proud to announce I'm gonna start posting my own writing blog b/c you inspired me and brought forth a fire into my fingers to dwell across page to page so that I may post and finally do what I have loved the most. I never used to think I could write I thought that door was closed. That I wasn't good enough, but that doesn't matter anymore. "What if" people getting up to tell me, no, I can't. I'm gonna say mainly b/c of your blog, yes. Yes, well, sorry for the spiel, but this is really how I feel, and it needed to be said that you @idk48562, matter so much, and your special, and we love you

So in their honor, feel free to comment here or on your blogs how much you love their writing and what pieces you enjoyed most b/c we need to stay strong and support each other in this community by lifting everyone up, so speak out from your phones, laptops devices and don't be shy!

And if anyone is at it, feel free to put in some asks to my inbox for drabbles or headcanons b/c @idk48562 inspired me, and no, I'm not shy about the stuff I write, so feel free I'm currently super into HXH right now so anything for that is automatically approved second I would do is Death note I'll add more so soon, but in the meantime, you have a nice day evening morning night and remember the good times we had with@ idk48562

[writing-mermaid]

Siren, part 2 : Concentrating my moves, I'm on a mission

Summary : Y/N is a mutant, a Siren, the last of her kind, with deadly dangerous powers and a hidden past. If most of the Avengers likes and get along with her, Steve doesn’t, and it’s getting worse when Y/N and Bucky become close. After all what can bring two broken souls together if it’s not a dark past.

Pairing : Bucky Barnes x reader

Warnings : Fight, mention of injuries and blood. 

Word Count : 1 643

Square Filled : @buckybarnesbingo : Free square

Author’s note : Second part, I hope you guys will still like it. Thanks for the few responses I had for first part and I hope this will not disappoint you. This story my entry for @sourpatchkidsandacokecan ‘s Little Darlin’s Mystery AU Challenge, the prompt I chose is Siren AU. I also made a library blog in case the tags don’t work, so feel free to follow @writing-mermaids-library and to turn the notifications to know when I post something new here. Don’t forget that feedback is appreciated and really important.

Song of the title : Bad Blood - Jess Glynne

Masterlist

Bucky Barnes Bingo masterlist

Siren masterlist

Buy me a ☕

A little more than an hour later, I make the plane land a few feet away from HYDRA's warehouse.

  “So, what's the plan ?”, Bucky asks, looking down at me.

“I don't really know”, I answer, tucking one of my blue strands, one of the results of my mutation, the only visible sign, behind my left ear. So, if you see a girl with Y/H/C hair scattered with blue hair, that's me. “Maybe we just get in, being careful that nobody sees us, take pictures and probably blow up whatever they're up to.”

“Sounds like a plan”, he answers, a half smile on his lips, pushing the button that opens the back of the Quinjet, before going outside, a gun in his hand.

  I grab my fight sticks, same kind as those as Natasha has, and follow him. It's a total wasteland. No sign of life except around the HYDRA facility. We silently move to the fence, once there, I take out of my belt a tiny scissor to cut it.

  “Lady's first”, Bucky whispers, holding it for me, and I lightly step through the opening I made.

  We slowly walk to one of the entries. Bucky slips behind one the guards and knocks him out, while I take care of the second guard, by poisoning him with my fingers with the sleeping poison I have in my body, just by wrapping my hand around his ankle. Well, I hope for him that it's the sleeping poison or in a few minutes, he’s going to be stone dead.

  “There are two locks for that door. They have to be open in sync.”

“And they need this”, I say, rising on my feet, with two opening cards in my hands.

“Well done, Siren”, he smirks at me.

“Please, don't call me that, Winter Soldier”, I answer, matching his facial expression.

  Siren, that’s the made-up name the Avengers, well Nat, gave me when I was recruited. And she’s right I’m a Siren, the literal definition, or almost. I literally can enchant men and women and kill them. I’m deadly dangerous, even if I look like an innocent and fragile thing, that’s why I have to take suppressors and why I don’t let anyone touch me. The only one that never were affected by my power were my parents and some members of my family, because we shared the same blood.

  “Ready ?”, he asks, and I nod, “one, two, three.”

  We slide the cards at the same time and the door opens. Bucky looks inside, before nodding towards me, a silent way to say that the pathway is clear. We both step inside and look around, Bucky with his assault gun between his hands, my glowing sticks in mine. We progress in the facility silently, trying to not get detected by HYDRA's henchmen. Bucky opens the path and I follow him, watching our back. We finally step into a huge room, full of alembics.

  “What the hell is that ?”, I hear Bucky whispering.

  We progress in the room, looking closer at the see-through containers. Some are full of a transparent liquid, the others of some kind of colored gaz.

  “I don't know”, I murmur back, “but I'm not really reassured by this.”

  A loud bang makes Bucky grab my arm and suddenly, I'm trapped between a wall and his toned, muscular body. I raise my head and my gaze crosses his bright blue eyes.

  “What...”

  He shushes me by putting a finger on his mouth, ordering me to stay silence. I hardly dare to breath.

  “Fuck, can't you be more careful with this ?”, a male voice yell.

“Sorry, it's heavier than I thought”, a second male voice answer. “Anyway, what's in that ? What's that gas ? Is it dangerous ?”

“I don't know, but look it's leaking, you might have unscrewed the plug”, the first one tells his comrade. “Seriously, we were just supposed to take this from point A to point B, but you had to drop it. Now put the cap back on and stop asking stupid question.”

  I breath heavily, afraid to be discovered, because, I'm less stealth than Bucky, when he's at least two or three times bigger than me. I can almost feel every muscles of his body against mine through my suit. Bucky must feel my panic because he takes one of my gloved hands in his, plunging his eyes into mine. The two HYDRA hands men finally leave, and he steps back.

  “It was a close call !”, he says.

“Yes, thanks.”

  I walk past him and try to see if something is written in front of the containers. I can hear Bucky sighing behind me.

  “This thing smells strange, don't you think ?”, he questions me.

“No, I don't think it smells weird”, I answer, trying to have a clue on what are the gas and liquid stocked here. “I don’t even smell anything, just HYDRA’s awful smell.”

  I continue to look around. There's no clue about anything. Suddenly, a pair of lips are attached to the nape of my neck.

  “What the hell are you doing Barnes ?!”

“You smell so good. You're intoxicating me”, he says, burying his nose in my hair.

“Let go of me”, I hiss, trying to unhook his arms that he snaked around me.

“Come on”, he adds, “I want it and I know you do too”, he slide his left hand to my arm in order to lift my sleeve to touch my skin.

“Stop it !”, I clench my teeth, knowing that I can’t get rid of the man who at least weight three or four times my own weight.

“You’re driving me crazy, that smell, of yours, I can’t resist it.”

  And it clicks in my head, the last time I heard this was before I had suppressors, before those who worked, a scientist said those exact words to me, and everything his clear. That gas is made of either my blood, either my cells. This has exactly the same power as I do, the one that makes everyone uncontrollably attracted to me. I try to make up a plan to get rid of Bucky without hurting, or worst, kill him. The dots of my brain connect quickly with an idea.

  “Actually”, I tell him, turning in his arms, “I think you have read my mind and you and I can have a little fun, don’t you think ?”, I wink at him seductively, sliding my hands on his strong arms. “So first, why don’t you kiss me”, I whisper, approaching my face to his, my lips grazing his.

  My left hand stays on his right arm while my left hand finds its way on the back of his neck. He leans towards me and I push a little on his nape to force him to lock his mouth to mine. His lips are soft against mine and I’m surprised about this, I never thought that Bucky Barnes would have such soft lips. His lips are moving against mine and as I did for the HYDRA hand man, I concentrate to make him sleep, or Steve Rogers will have one more reason to hate me. Well, I think that the fact that I put his best friend to sleep by a kiss during a mission might be one too. After a few seconds, I feel him stumble towards my body. I try my best to catch him before he falls flat on his face.

  “Sorry Barnes”, I murmur, “but you didn’t give me a choice.”

I manage to drag him behind one of the alembics, praying that no one will find him or that he will wake up too soon and try to jump on me again. I pull out of my pouches a few bombs and their detonators. I start to place them around the tanks, moving as fast as I can and program them. Five minutes should be enough for me to pull Bucky outside and go back to the Quinjet.

  “Ok, now let’s take care of you 1940’s man”, I state, turning to where I left Bucky before setting my bombs.

  I grab his metal arm and start to haul him to the Quinjet. He is heavy and I do this task as fast and as quietly as I can. I finally manage to go back to the fence and push the soldier through it. I take a look at the device connected to the bombs’ detonators, I have a few seconds now before the bombs explode. I go back to my burden and pull him again to the jet. I don’t see on the way back the two men we knocked out when we arrived, and to be honest, I don’t really have time to think about it. I don’t even reach the jet’s door when the warehouse explodes throwing me a few meters away from Bucky’s sleeping form. I land badly on my right hand felling it twist under my weight, and blood flowing from my left hand. Maybe I shouldn’t have put so many explosive blocs, but I wanted to be sure that everything would be destroyed. I can’t straggle, I have to put Bucky in the jet and leave that place before HYDRA’s men come after us. I go back on my feet and manage, clenching my teeth because of the pain, to pull the Winter Soldier again, the blood of my hand drenching his sleeve. I open the jet’s door with the button on my belt, bless Tony for that, and pull a little more my sleeping partner. I abandon him on the ramp, heavily panting while the door closes. I can’t even breathe for a second because I know that we have to leave now. I take back my place behind the commands and take off.

Taglist :

@the-geeky-engineer, @feelmyroarrrr, @winterschild999, @realgreglestrade, @hellomissmabel, @mandy19875, @howlingbarnes, @belleetlabeast, @theashhole, @sebbytrash, @crazychick010, @bionic-buckyb, @callamint, @just-another-fangirl777, @learisa, @hello-sweetie-get-the-salt, @mokacoconut, @marvelbase001-blog, @thefiregypsy, @snowyseba, @theycallmebucky, @buckysberrie, @speakcroissant, @fangirlwithasweettooth, @tequilavet, @iamwarrenspeace, @melconnor2007, @jamesbarnesappreciationclub, @mrshopkirk, @poealsobucky, @maiden-of-gondor, @jurassicbarnes, @abovethesmokestacks, @thisismysecrethappyplace, @arawynn, @sebbys-girl, @captainrogerss, @murdocksmartinis, @supersoldierslover, @totallynotashieldagent, @crazy-little-thing-called-buck, @4theluvofall, @supernaturaldean67, @prettyyoungtragedy, @papi-chulo-bucky, @just-a-kj-blog, @lenavonschweetz,  @forever-graphically-frozen,  @buckysglow, @winterscldicr, @whothehellisbella, @bethanystan​, @asirenscalling​, @after-avenging-hours​, @winchester-with-wings​, @angryschnauzer​,  @callingmrsbarnes​, @suz-123​, @writingruna​, @sugardaddytonystark​, @angelicthor​, @thatawkwardtinyperson​, @themistsofmyavalon​, @redgillan​, @loricameback​, @star-spangled-man-with-a-plan​, @farfromjustordinary​, @you-and-buckyb​, @bucky-made-me-do-it​, @lovelykhaleesiii​, @newmooneyfanfiction​, @lovely-geek​, @fanfictionjunkie1112​, @thefanficfaerie​, @littlemarvelfics​, @cordytriestowrite​, @firefly-in-darkness​, @caplanreads​, @my-emotional-self​, @searchingforbuckyfavs​, @buckybabybaby​, @i-alyssa​,

[finleyjayne]

EXTRA

Pairing: Bucky x Fem!Reader

A/N: Hey guys, I know y’all don’t know me but I’m going to be trying to post some of my fan-fiction. It’s both exciting and scary, please reblog, share. I’m going to be trying to write a little blurb every day for the month of April. If you have any requests please send them my way and I’ll try my best. Thank you in advance. If you want to follow me for ONLY writings my writing blog is @finleyjaynewriting. 

Warnings: Angst, Panic Attack, Self-deprecating thoughts

Summary: You are a part of the Avengers family but it’s sometimes hard to keep yourself from falling into bad habits that you thought you kicked when an essay question from your last college English class causes you to backslide. It’s a good thing your boyfriend Bucky is there to rally the troops and remind you that you are loved, even when you decide to run around the tower in a cape. 

picture credit goes to: Marwan & Khaled Couture Fall/Winter 2019 

Originally blogged by @fashion-runways​

You had been sitting here, staring at your outline notes, grading rubric, and notebook for over an hour. And you still hadn't a scrap of what to write. The list of adjectives on the page getting fuzzier as you tried to decide whether or not they fit you. Or if they were something that your friends, team-members, or family would use to describe you.

 If there was one word to describe you, you'd like to think that it was intelligent. But seeing as you live in a tower with not one but two geniuses and three supersoldiers who have heightened cognitive functions, it was terrifying how stupid you feel on the daily. Even with your triple-majored ass, you were on the lower end of intelligence. 

 Okay, so the people around you wouldn't call you the smart one in the group. What about determined. I mean, it takes a substantial amount of determination to get three master's degrees at the same time in five years. Tapping your pen against your chin as you think, you shake your head. Yeah, no, not when compared to Mr. I-can-do-this-all-day. 

 Sam is the compassionate and supportive one.

 Natasha is independent and fearless.

 Bucky is strong and loyal.

 Bruce is sweet and patient. 

 Wanda is attentive and courageous.

 Tony is eccentric and a genius.

 Steve is gentle and determined.

 Clint is funny and hardworking (even if he tries to play it off).

 Gods, this assignment is going to be the downfall of my perfect 4.0 GPA. You think to yourself, slamming your head onto your notebooks. Why did you have to take English? None of your majors were English oriented. Music, Engineering, and Chemistry. No  English, no need to know how to write a complete sentence. No need to write 2 pages on what your friends consider you using one word. You should know, you've made it 97% of the way through all three majors without taking a single English class. The most writing I had to do was my dissertations, which had nothing to do with this useless "self-expression piece."  The prompt doesn't even make sense! Write 1000+ words on a single word. How is that logically not just busy-work? 

 Just as your eyes and sinuses start filling with the feeling of hopelessness, Bucky comes waltzing into the tower's library with his book of the week. 

 "Heya dollface. Taking a nap?" He calls, the chuckle entwining into his voice in that perfect way it does. 

 And that's all it takes for your body to unleash the body-shaking sobs. The soulful wail that tore through your chest and out your trembling lips was nothing like you'd ever let anyone see. Especially not your team. You were already the weak one. You didn't need them to think anything less, but after comparing yourself to them for the last two and a half hours, you couldn't keep your self-deprecation locked in its cage anymore. 

 Seeing you this way was terrifying for Bucky. He had never seen you cry anywhere besides on stage. Not when you had been on the Mission from Hell. Not when you were hormonal, and Clint stole your heating stuffy. Not even when you were grieving the loss of your ex-girlfriend. So now having your usually bubbly, determined, happy-go-lucky self in a full breakdown was new territory for him. 

 "Woah," he said, eyes widening as he stared. "Hey, hey, hey, it's okay, doll. If anybody deserves a nap, it's you." He comforted as he took giant steps to your chair. Lifting you effortlessly and positioning you into the cradle of his arms as he took a seat in the large Papasan chair to the side of your chosen workspace. Holding you in a tight embrace like you did when he was having a hard time with his anxiety. 

 He focused on breathing evenly and keeping his heartbeat in check, knowing that if he didn't stay calm, the situation would escalate into something worse. Shushing you and rocking you as he observed the table for anything that could give away why you were crying. Bucky knew better than most about your anxiety and depression. He had asked you once how you knew so much about helping him during one of your many cuddle sessions. You had just said that you were working from your own encounters before you changed the subject.

 Though he didn't know everything, Bucky did try to help you as much as he could, especially as your friendship turned into something more. Still, he couldn't see anything that would cause you to become this upset. Usually, you would complain about your English assignments as you hyper-focused on them. Giving up on figuring it himself, he turned back to his distraught girlfriend, who was fighting to control her emotions in his arms. 

 "Babygirl, can you match your breaths to mine? Come on. Breathe in, hold, breathe out." He whispered, holding her tighter to him as she shakily followed him through the exercise a few more times. "Good, now what has my BAMF girlfriend distressed. Who do I need to take care of?" 

 You could feel the seriousness in his voice before you could see him through your tears. "Nobody, it's not a big deal. Just a stupid essay for English."

 "Don't give me that shit, Y/F/N Y/L/N." Bucky cuts off your excuses sternly. "You rarely cry, which, no matter how much you fight it, is unhealthy." Before you could even open your mouth to argue, he had a gentle, calloused finger on your lips. "Not going to remonstrate this. You are clearly upset, you are not okay, and that is okay. I just want to know why so I can help you more fully." He says, lifting his finger from your lips to tuck a few strands of your hair from your face.

 Sighing, you look down. "It's just this essay, I have to write about one word that my friends use to describe me. I ended up spiraling while trying to find a word that would be mine when all the ones I usually consider myself are more aptly displayed by somebody else. Honestly, I don't know why you keep me around. I'm pretty average." you admit, curling in on yourself as your tears gather again. 

 "Hey, none of that printsessa." He scolded you softly. "You are important to us. You are smart, fun, and inspirational. You are the reason we aren't at each other's throats. You are the instigator of too many of our team-building exercises. You single-handedly instigated the reconciliation between Steve and Tony." He started, giving you a smirk as you begin to scrunch your nose up. Tears were forgotten.

 You really didn't like it when he made sense when you were upset. It made feeling bad really hard. The worst part; Bucky damned well knew it. "But, you're biased, Bucky."

 "Maybe I am, but I also know you. And if I heard you correctly: It doesn't say one word YOU would choose to call yourself, but one word WE would define you as. Therefore, you shouldn't be wondering what words we would use. You should have gotten up and asked us. Or even better, you should've texted the group chat and asked! Then you wouldn't be here sending yourself into a hate-spiral, doll." Bucky reprimands softly. Determined to get rid of the lies that your mind is spewing at you, just like you do for him. 

 "I don't wanna bother you guys with my stupid homework. You guys didn't sign up to be pestered by my lack of self-mediation." You grumble huffily, knowing full well you are acting stubborn.

 "If you won't help yourself. I guess it's up to me to help you." Bucky states, standing up with you still cradled snugly in his arms. 

 "BUCKY!" You admonish, clinging to him at his sudden movement. "At least let me walk. I'm overwhelmed and sad, not crippled."

 "What's to say, I don't just wanna carry you? Huh? Also, you're holding me just as tightly love." He smiles brightly at you, kissing you briefly before turning back to the exit. Book, schoolwork, and his original objective forgotten for his new mission. He was going to find his doll her confidence again, with all the positive affirmations that should've been her first thoughts.

 Once settled in the elevator, Bucky looks up, "Hey, Friday, can you take us to Tony, please?" After confirmation from the resident AI, he sets your feet on the ground from the bridal carry he's holding you in but keeping you close to him. "So you need one word? What is your plan?" 

 Keeping your arms in their place around his neck, you lean your head against his secure warmth. "I don't really know, Buck. I kinda got stuck on the first step. If it was an analytical or critical styled piece, it would be a breeze, but it is supposed to be a descriptive essay. I don't know what to do with that. If it was a song, I'd be cuddled with you and my ukelele by now, putting finishing touches on the finished product. But no, there isn't any room for incomplete sentences. Maybe I'll make it a song just to spite the evil bat."

 "Hey, dollface, it's okay, I'm here to help you. Does it just have to be one word, or can it be structured for each person you know to have a different word? Remember what Peter said that one time he was working with you on Formatting? Your thesis could be something like 'I am many things to many different people and therefore have many different words that can be used to describe me. These things are A, B, C, and D. Then, you can use each term for a paragraph of fluff."

 Taking a deep breath, your lip twitches somewhere between a smile and a deep frown. "That does sound like a good idea. I don't really want to track down everyone, though. Can we get everyone into the same room and ask them as a group? It would be less hassle, and maybe we can decide on reasoning and stories to use to explain why? I really don't know how to do this without being really pessimistic and cynical about the whole thing."

 "Mr. Stark is in his lab, he is recommended that he is brought down to the commons, where I will page everyone else." Came Friday's disembodied voice. 

 "Thank you, Friday," you whispered. You weren't really sure that you were ready for this, but you know that this is the best way to finish this essay without spiraling into your self-pity again. It has to get done. Procrastination is not an option. After all, these are your friends. They don't have to know that you were bawling your eyes out about this stupid assignment. 

 Taking another steadying breath, you wipe the remainder of your tears off your make-up-less face onto Bucky's soft T-shirt, before turning out of his embrace to march confidently into Tony's Lab. "Hey Tones, your presence is required in the Commons." You call as you walk in the door. Knowing that Friday would've warned you if Tony had been in the middle of something delicate. 

 "What is it for? I want to get this sequence reconfigured. Can it wait?" Tony said, his full attention on a large display of Smalltalk equational programming floating off of his Holotable. 

 "Nope, if you don't come now, you don't get to participate, let Friday do the reconfiguration code. It will be done by the time you get back. If you come and keep your attitude to a minimum, I'll let you use me as a scapegoat for your next prank." You try to bribe when he looked offended that I'd suggest such a thing.

 "Any prank? Even if it's against loverboy?" Tony perked, throwing a truly roguish smirk over your shoulder. 

 "As long as no one is injured or harmed. But to make sure that I can cover your ass, you need to fill me in on the joke BEFORE you pull it." You say herding him away from the endless rows of code while he is occupied with his next plot. 

  When you finally make it to the Commons, The rest of the Avengers are gathered on the couches. All seemed to be in a decent enough mood. Taking a deep breath, you look to Bucky for direction on how to implement this plan of his. 

 He gives your hand a squeeze as he guides you to the middle of the sectional. Holding you from behind, he clears his throat. "Hey, guys. Thanks for coming to this impromptu meeting. I know you guys were probably doing nothing, anyway, but I appreciate you coming down here. Doll, here, needs some help from us. Well, you guys, since apparently, I am biased." His tone is light as he brings attention to us.

 You can't help but feel that knot of uncertainty come back as he speaks, though. You try your best to hide the shaking of your hands by holding onto Bucky's forarms that rest tightly around your middle, grounding you into the moment. Please just let this be quick. 

 "You are biased," you grumble. "You have to say the best things because you are my boyfriend. It makes for a skewed view on what my friends think of me." 

 "She does have a point, Buck. You tend to have neverending heart-eyes whenever anything is about her. Though that is reasonable, seeing as she is your girl. I'd be more concerned if you didn't have a shade or two of rose to your glasses." Steve said from his station in on the nearest end of the couch to the door. 

 "If his glasses are tinted any pinker, they won't be able to be seen through." Scoffed Sam from the other end of the couch. 

 "Doesn't matter," Bucky cut in before there could be any more railroading. "Y/N has an essay that she has to write but couldn't find the right inspiration for the prompt. Seeing as it pertains to our views on her, I felt it necessary to bring our expertise into the mix."

 "Oh, What's the prompt?" Bruce asked from the corner of the window seat. 

 "It's stupid, It's an essay on the word that your friends and family would use to describe you. Well, in this case, describe me." You say to the oak coffee table that separated the majority of them from you and Bucky. 

 "Doll, stop hating, and just accept the help." He whispered into your 

 "Well, you've definitely come to the right place. Come on, guys, what words describe Y/N?" Tony said enthusiastically, rubbing his hands together from the place he found next to Natasha.

 "Friday, can you make a list on the monitor, so we don't forget any?" Steve asked the AI helpfully.

 "Good idea, I'll start with eccentric," Nat stated.

 "Bubbly."

 "Funny."

 "Smart."

 "Out-going."

 "Playful."

 "Creative."

 "Hardworking."

 "resourceful, Multi-talented, Impressive."

 "Badass."

 "Stubborn." 

 Words just kept coming at incredible speed before there was a ding at the elevator. "Mrs. (Y/L/N), The package you ordered last night needs to be signed for if you wouldn't mind." Friday cut in. 

 As more words were being piled onto the TV screen, you turned toward the elevator. "It's here already??" you asked, making your way to the waiting delivery man. I quickly signed for the package before coming back to the group. Ripping into the box without care as Tony and Clint argued over positive and negative words on the list.

 Letting out an excited squeal while you pulled the long, sky-blue cape out of the box and swishing it over your shoulders, clasping it easily, and spinning in a circle to make it swish out. It was just as you imagined. Silky, soft, and absolutely perfect for everything. When you finally came back to the conversation you found yourself at the center of attention, everyone's eyes were on you in different mixes of amusement and exasperation. 

 "Where you going, Miss Bennet?" Tony laughed out.

 "What do you mean, where am I going? This is my house cape. Don't you have one? It's the latest fashion." You bite back, raising your head in indignation. "I love it, I am going to wear it. EVERYWHERE."

 As everyone's faces split into the biggest smiles, Peter walked into the room, tossing his backpack onto the floor as he took a seat between Sam and Steve. 

 "No Capes!" He said, lovingly referencing the Incredibles. Sending a ripple of laughs through the group of superheroes. "So what has you so Extra today, Y/N?"  

 "Nothing, I just saw this for sale while I was doing research for my recital dress and thought it would be nice." You respond fondly, feeling invincible in the cape. 

 "THAT'S IT! YOUR WORD IS EXTRA!" Clint said, springing from his perch. Everyone looked contemplative for a moment before nodding. 

 "Agreed. It's perfect. You give extra in everything you do." Steve said, not really getting the modern connotation.

 Even though it isn't any of the words that you thought they would choose, you can't really complain. Especially when it gives you the privilege of wearing your Couture Cape around the tower, just because you want to.

 Smiling at Bucky, you raised slightly on your toes to kiss his cheek, whispering a thank you. And with that, you whooshed off to write the worst essay in your academic career. Leaving the bickering and astounded Avengers in your wake.

[betterdaysareatoenailaway]

Random Review #3: Sleepwalkers (1992) and “Sleep Walk” (1959)

I. Sleepwalkers (1992) I couldn’t sleep last night so I started watching a trashy B-movie penned by Stephen King specifically for the screen called Sleepwalkers (1992). Simply put, the film is an unmitigated disaster. A piece of shit. But it didn’t need to be. That’s what’s so annoying about it. By 1992 King was a grizzled veteran of the silver screen, with more adaptations under his belt than any other author of his cohort. Puzo had the Godfather films (1972 and 1974, respectively), sure, but nothing else. Leonard Gardner had Fat City (1972), a movie I love, but Gardner got sucked into the Hollywood scene of cocaine and hot tub parties and never published another novel, focusing instead on screenplays for shitty TV shows like NYPD Blue. After Demon Seed (1977), a movie I have seen and disliked, nobody would touch Dean Koontz’s stuff with a ten foot pole, which is too bad because The Voice of the Night, a 1980 novel about two young pals, one of whom is a psychopath trying to convince the other to help him commit murder, would make a terrific movie. But Koontz’s adaptations have been uniformly awful. The made-for-TV film starring John C McGinley, 1997′s Intensity, is especially bad. There are exceptions, but Stephen King has been lucky enough to avoid the fate of his peers. Big name directors have tackled his work, from Stanley Kubrick to Brian De Palma. King even does a decent job of acting in Pet Semetary (1989), in his own Maximum Overdrive (1986) and in George Romero’s Creepshow (1982), where he plays a yokel named Jordy Verril who gets infected by a meteorite that causes green weeds to grow all over his body. Many have criticized King’s over-the-top performance in that flick, but for me King perfectly nails the campy and comical tone that Romero was going for. The dissolves in Creepshow literally come right off the pages of comics, so people expecting a subtle Ordinary People-style turn from King had clearly walked into the wrong theatre. Undoubtedly Creepshow succeeds at what it set out to do. I’m not sure Sleepwalkers succeeds though, unless the film’s goal was to get me to like cats even more than I already do. But I already love cats a great deal. Here’s my cat Cookie watching me edit this very blog post. 

And here’s one of my other cats, Church, named after the cat that reanimates and creeps out Louis and Ellie in Pet Sematary. Photo by @ScareAlex.

SPOILER ALERT: Do not keep reading if you plan on watching Sleepwalkers and want to find out for yourself what happens.

Stephen King saw many of his novels get adapted in the late 1970s and 80s: Carrie, The Shining, Firestarter, Christine, Cujo, and the movie that spawned the 1950s nostalgia industrial complex, Stand By Me, but Sleepwalkers was the first time he wrote a script specifically for the screen rather than adapting a novel that already existed. Maybe that’s why it’s so fucking bad. Stephen King is a novelist, gifted with a novelist’s rich imagination. He’s prone to giving backstories to even the most peripheral characters - think of Joe Chamber’s alcoholic neighbour Gary Pervier in the novel Cujo, who King follows for an unbelievable number of pages as the man stumbles drunkenly around his house spouting his catch phrase “I don’t give a shit,” drills a hole through his phone book so he can hang it from a string beside his phone, complains about his hemorrhoids getting “as big as golfballs” (I’m not joking), and just generally acts like an asshole until a rabid Cujo bounds over, rips his throat out, and he bleeds to death. In the novel Pervier’s death takes more than a few pages, but it makes for fun reading. You hate the man so fucking much that watching him die feels oddly satisfying. In the movie, though, his death occurs pretty quickly, and in a darkened hallway, so it’s hard to see what’s going on aside from Gary’s foot trembling. And Pervier’s “I don’t give a shit” makes sense when he’s drilling a hole in the phone book, not when he’s about to be savagely attacked by a rabid St Bernard. There’s just less room for back story in movies. In a medium that demands pruning and chiseling and the “less is more” dictum, King’s writing takes a marked turn for the worse. King is a prose maximalist, who freely admits to “writing to outrageous lengths” in his novels, listing It, The Stand, and The Tommyknockers as particularly egregious examples of literary logorrhea. He is not especially equipped to write concisely. This weakness is most apparent in Sleepwalkers’ dialogue, which sounds like it was supposed to be snappy and smart, like something Aaron Sorkin would write, but instead comes off like an even worse Tango & Cash, all bad jokes and shitty puns. More on those bad jokes later. First, the plot.

Sleepwalkers is about a boy named Charles and his mother Mary who travel around the United States killing and feeding off the lifeforce of various unfortunate people (if this sounds a little like The True Knot in Doctor Sleep, you’re not wrong. But self-plagiarism is not a crime). Charles and Mary are shapeshifting werewolf-type creatures called werecats, a species with its very own Wikipedia page. Wikipedia confers legitimacy dont’cha know, so lets assume werecats are real beings. According to said page, a werecat, “also written in a hyphenated form as were-cat) is an analogy to ‘werewolf’ for a feline therianthropic creature.” I’m gonna spell it with the hyphen from now on because “werecats” just looks like a typo. Okay? Okay.

Oddly enough, the were-cats in Sleepwalkers are terrified of cats. Actual cats. For the were-cats, cute kittens = kryptonite. When they see a cat or cats plural, this happens to them:

^ That is literally a scene from the movie. Charles is speeding when a cop pulls alongside him and bellows at him to pull over. Ever the rebel, Charles flips the cop the finger. But the cop has a cat named Clovis in his car, and when the cat pops up to have a look at the kid (see below), Charles shapeshifts first into a younger boy, then into whatever the fuck that is in the above screenshot.

Now, the were-cats aversion to normal cats is confusing because one would assume a were-cat to be a more evolved (or perhaps devolved?) version of the typical house kitty. The fact that these were-cats are bipedal alone suggests an advantage over our furry four-legged friends, no? Kinda like if humans were afraid of fucking gorillas. Wait...we are scared of gorillas. And chimpanzees. And all apes really. Okay, maybe the conceit of the film isn’t so silly after all. The film itself, however, is about as silly as a bad horror movie can get. When the policeman gets back to precinct and describes the incident above (”his face turned into a blur”) he is roundly ridiculed because in movies involving the supernatural nobody believes in the supernatural until it confronts them. It’s the law, sorry. Things don’t end well for the cop. Or for the guy who gets murdered when the mom stabs him with...an ear of corn. Yes, an ear of corn. Somehow, the mother is able to jam corn on the cob through a man’s body, without crushing the vegetable or turning it into yellow mash. It’s pretty amazing. Here is a sample of dialog from that scene: Cop About To Die On The Phone to Precinct: There’s blood everywhere! *STAB* Murderous Mother: No vegetables, no dessert. That is actually a line in the movie. “No vegetables, no dessert.” It’s no “let off some steam, Bennett” but it’s close. Told ya I’d get back to the bad jokes. See, Mary and Charles are new in town and therefore seeking to ingratiate themselves by killing everyone who suspects them of being weird, all while avoiding cats as best they can. At one point Charles yanks a man’s hand off and tells him to "keep [his] hands to [him]self," giving the man back his severed bloody hand. Later on Charles starts dating a girl who will gradually - and I do mean gradually - come to realize her boyfriend is not a real person but in fact a were-cat. Eventually our spunky young protagonist - Madchen Amick, who fans of Twin Peaks will recognize as Shelly - and a team of cats led by the adorable Clovis- kill the were-cat shapeshifting things and the sleepy small town (which is named Travis for some reason) goes back to normal, albeit with a slightly diminished population. For those keeping score, that’s Human/Cat Alliance 1, Shapeshifting Were-cats 0. It is clear triumph for the felis catus/people team! Unless we’re going by kill count, in which case it is closer to Human/Cat Alliance 2, Were-cats 26. I arrived at this figure through my own notes but also through a helpful video that takes a comprehensive and complete “carnage count” of all kills in Sleepwalkers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmt-DroK6uA

II. Santo & Johnny “Sleep Walk” (1959) Because Sleepwalkers is decidedly not known for its good acting or its well-written screenplay, it is perhaps best known for its liberal and sometimes contrapuntal use of Santo & Johnny’s classic steel guitar song “Sleep Walk,” possibly the most famous (and therefore best) instrumental of the 20th century. Some might say “Sleep Walk” is tied for the #1 spot with “Green Onions” by Booker T & the M.G.’s and/or “Wipe Out” by The Surfaris, but I disagree. The Santo & Johnny song is #1 because of its incalculable influence on all subsequent popular music. 

I’m not saying “Wipe Out” didn't inspire a million imitators, both contemporaneously and even decades later…for example here’s a surf rock instrumental from 1999 called “Giant Cow" by a Toronto band called The Urban Surf Kings. The video was one of the first to be animated using Flash (and it shows):

So there are no shortage of surf rock bands, even now, decades after its emergence from the shores of California to the jukeboxes of Middle America. My old band Sleep for the Nightlife used to regularly play Rancho Relaxo with a surf rock band called the Dildonics, who I liked a great deal. There's even a Danish surf rock band called Baby Woodrose, whose debut album is a favourite of mine. They apparently compete for the title of Denmark’s biggest surf pop band with a group called The Setting Son. When a country that has no surfing culture and no beaches has multiple surf rock bands, it is safe to say the genre has attained international reach. As far as I can tell, there aren’t many bands out there playing Booker T & the M.G.’s inspired instrumental rock. Link Wray’s “Rumble” was released four years before “Green Onions.” But the influence of Santo and Johnny’s “Sleep Walk” is so ubiquitous as to be almost immeasurable. The reason for this is the sheer popularity of the song’s chord progression. If Santo and Johnny hadn’t written it first, somebody else would have, simply because the progression is so beautiful and easy on the ears and resolvable in a satisfying way. Have a listen to “Sleep Walk” first and then let’s check out some songs it directly inspired. 

The chords are C, A minor, F and G. Minor variations sometimes reverse the last two chords, but if it begins with C to A minor, you can bet it’s following the “Sleep Walk” formula, almost as if musicians influenced by the song are in the titular trance. When it comes to playing guitar, Tom Waits once said “your hands are like dogs, going to the same places they’ve been. You have to be careful when playing is no longer in the mind but in the fingers, going to happy places. You have to break them of their habits or you don’t explore; you only play what is confident and pleasing.” Not only is it comforting to play and/or hear what we already know, studies have shown that our brains actively resist new music, because it takes work to understand the new information and assimilate it into a pattern we are cogent of. It isn’t until the brain recognizes the pattern that it gives us a dopamine rush. I’m not much for Pitchfork anymore, but a recent article they posted does a fine job of discussing this phenomenon in greater detail.

Led Zeppelin’s “D’Yer Maker” uses the “Sleep Walk” riff prominently, anchored by John Bonham and John Paul Jones’ white-boy reggae beat: 

Here it is again with Del Shannon’s classic “Little Town Flirt.” I love Shannon’s falsetto at the end when he goes “you better run and hide now bo-o-oy.”

The Beatles “Happiness is a Warm Gun” uses the Sleep Walk progression, though not for the whole song. It goes into the progression at the bridge at 1:34: 

Tumblr won’t let me embed any more videos, so you’ll to travel to another tab to hear these songs, but Neil Young gets in on the act with his overlooked classic “Winterlong:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV6r66n3TFI On their 1996 EP Interstate 8 Modest Mouse pay direct homage by singing over their own rendition of the original Santo & Johnny version, right down to the weeping steel guitar part: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT_PwXjCqqs The vocals are typical wispy whispered indie rock vocals, but I think they work, particularly the two different voices. They titled their version “Sleepwalking (Couples Only Dance Prom Night).”

Dwight Yoakam’s “Thousand Miles From Nowhere” makes cinematic use of it. This song plays over the credits of one of my all-time favourite movies, 1993′s Red Rock West feat. Nicolas Cage, Lara Flynn Boyle, Dennis Hopper, and J.T. Walsh https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tu3ypuKq8WE

“39″ is my favourite Queen song. I guess now I know why. It uses my fav chord progression: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE8kGMfXaFU 

Blink 182 scored their first hit “Dammit” with a minor variation on the Sleep Walk chord progression: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT0g16_LQaQ

Midwest beer drinkin bar rockers Connections scored a shoulda-been-a-hit with the fist-pumping “Beat the Sky:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSNRq0n_WYA You’d be hard pressed to find a weaker lead singer than this guy (save for me, natch), but they make it work. This one’s an anthem.

Spoon, who have made a career out of deconstructing rock n’ roll, so that their songs sometimes sound needlessly sparse (especially “The Ghost of You Lingers,” which takes minimalism to its most extreme...just a piano being bashed on staccato-style for four minutes), so it should surprise nobody that they re-arrange the Sleep Walk chords on their classic from Gimme Fiction, “I Summon You:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teXA8N3aF9M I love that opening line: remember the weight of the world was a sound that we used to buy? I think songwriter Britt Daniel is talking about buying albums from the likes of Pearl Jam or Smashing Pumpkins, any of those grunge bands with pessimistic worldviews. There are a million more examples. I remember seeing some YouTube video where a trio of gross douchebros keep playing the same progression while singing a bunch of hits over it. I don’t like the smarmy way they do it, making it seem like artists are lazy and deliberately stealing. I don’t think it’s plagiarism to use this progression. And furthermore, tempo and production make all the difference. Take “This Magic Moment” for example. There's a version by Jay & the Americans and one by Ben E King & the Drifters. I’ve never been a fan of those shrieking violins or fiddles that open the latter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bacBKKgc4Uo The Jay & the Americans version puts the guitar riff way in the forefront, which I like a lot more. The guitar plays the entire progression once before the singing starts and the band joins in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKfASw6qoag

Each version has its own distinctive feel. They are pretty much two different songs. Perhaps the most famous use of the Sleep Walk progression is “Unchained Melody” by the Righteous Brothers, which is one of my favourite songs ever. The guy who chose to let Bobby Hatfield sing this one by himself must have kicked himself afterwards when it became a hit, much bigger than "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling."https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiiyq2xrSI0

What can you say about “Unchained Melody” that hasn’t already been said? God, that miraculously strong vocal, the way the strings (and later on, brass horns) are panned way over to the furthest reaches the left speaker while the drums and guitar are way over in the right, with the singing smack dab in the middle creates a kind of distance and sharp clarity that has never been reproduced in popular music, like seeing the skyscrapers of some distant city after an endless stretch of highway. After listening to “Unchained Melody,” one has to wonder: can that progression ever be improved upon? Can any artist write something more haunting, more beautiful, more uplifting than that? The “need your love” crescendo hits so fucking hard, as both the emotional and the sonic climax of the song, which of course is no accident...the strings descending and crashing like a waterfall of sound, it gets me every fucking time. Legend has it that King George II was so moved by the “Hallelujah” section of Handel’s “Messiah” that he stood up, he couldn't help himself, couldn't believe what he was hearing. I get that feeling with all my favourite songs. "1979." "Unchained Melody." "In The Still of the Night." "Digital Bath." "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?" "Interstate." "Liar's Tale." “Gimme Shelter.” The list goes on and on. Music is supposed to move us.

King George II stood because he was moved to do so. Music may be our creation, but it isn't our subordinate. All those sci-fi stories warning about technology growing beyond our control aren’t that far-fetched. Music is our creation but its power lies beyond our control. We are subordinate to music, helpless against its power and might, its urgency and vitality and beauty. There have been many times in my life when I have been so obsessed with a particular song that I pretty much want to live inside of it forever. A house of sound. I remember detoxing from heroin and listening to Grimes “Realiti” on repeat for twelve hours. Detoxing from OxyContin and listening to The Beach Boys “Dont Worry Baby” over and over. Or just being young and listening to “Tonight Tonight” over and over and over, tears streaming from my eyes in that way you cry when you’re a kid because you just feel so much and you don’t know what to do with the intensity of those feelings. It is precisely because we are so moved by music that we keep creating it. And in the act of that creation we are free. There are no limits to that freedom, which is why bands time and time again return to the well-worn Sleep Walk chord progression and try to make something new from it. Back in 2006, soon after buying what was then the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, I found myself playing the album’s closing track over and over. I loved the chorus and I loved the way it collapses into a lo-fi demo at the very end, stripping away the studio sheen and...not to be too punny, showing its bones (the album title is Show Your Bones). Later on I would realize that the song, called “Turn Into,” uses the Sleep Walk chord progression. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exqCFoPiwpk

It’s just like, what Waits said, our hands goes to where we are familiar. And so do our ears, which is why jazz often sounds so unpleasant to us upon first listen. Or Captain Beefheart. But it’s worth the effort to discover new stuff, just as it’s worth the effort to try and write it. I recently lamented on this blog that music to me now is more about remembrance than discovery, but I’m still only 35 years old. I’m middle-aged right now (I don’t expect to live past 70, not with the lifestyle I’ve been living). There’s still a whole other half life to find new music and love and leave it for still newer stuff. It’s worth the challenge, that moment of inner resistance we feel when confronted with something new and challenging and strange sounding. The austere demands of adult life, rent and routine, take so much of our time. I still make time for creative pursuits, but I don’t really have much time for discovery, for seeking out new music. But I’ve resolved to start making more time. A few years ago I tried to listen to and like Trout Mask Replica but I couldn’t. I just didn’t get what was going on. It sounded like a bunch of mistakes piled on top of each other. But then a few days ago I was writing while listening to music, as I always do, and YouTube somehow landed on Lick My Decals Off, Baby. I didn’t love what I was hearing but I was intrigued enough to keep going. And now I really like this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMnd9dvb3sA&pbjreload=101 Another example I’ll give is the rare Robert Pollard gem “Prom Is Coming.” The first time I heard this song, it sounded like someone who can’t play guitar messing around, but the more I heard it the more I realized there’s a song there. It’s weird and strange, but it’s there. The lyrics are classic Pollard: Disregard injury and race madly out of the universe by sundown. Pollard obviously has a special place in his heart for this track. He named one of his many record labels Prom Is Coming Records and he titled the Boston Spaceships best-of collection Out of the Universe By Sundown. I don’t know if I’ll ever become a Captain Beefheart megafan but I can hear that the man was doing something very strange and, at times, beautiful. And anyway, why should everything be easy? Aren’t some challenges worth meeting for the experience waiting on the other side of comprehension or acceptance? I try to remember this now whenever I’m first confronted with new music, instead of vetoing it right away. Most of my favourite bands I was initially resistant to when I first heard them. Queens of the Stone Age, Kyuss, Guided by Voices, Spoon, Heavy Times. All bands I didn’t like at first.  I don’t wanna sleepwalk through life, surrounding myself only with things I have already experienced. I need to stay awake. Because soon enough I’ll be asleep forever. We need to try everything we can before the Big Sleep comes to take us back to the great blankness, the terrible question mark that bookends our lives.

[yaz-the-spaz]

here's the anon who said "for people who don't like her, you all focus way too much on Gigi. just ignore her." I don't like her. I am a Ziam, that is why I follow you. I try to ignore her but have to read about her constantly on Ziam blogs like yours. Why? If we ignore her she will go away. Don't you people understand that talking about her is exactly what she wants? Also think of this. If a tree in a forest falls over and nobody witnessed it, did it actually exist?

first off, i DO mostly ignore her. when i do talk about her, it’s minimally and pretty much mostly only when it’s something that’s been brought up by SOMEONE ELSE and/or something she’s said or done that affects zayn (whether directly or indirectly). like i’ve said multiple times before, i barely pay attention to anything she does myself, and what little i do know of what she does or says at any given time is mostly only b/c SOMEONE ELSE has told me about it, i rarely ever see it firsthand myself and rarely even bring it up unprompted. i am only responding to ppl’s comments and inquiries about her b/c ppl are curious and i’m not just gonna ignore them, but i’m also someone who likes to look at and consider things from all angles (including sometimes from perspectives involving her or her family). i’m sorry if you don’t like that but i’m not gonna change the way i blog b/c like it or not, she is an important part of the conversation in analyzing what is going with zayn and with ziam. if i’m going to analyze what’s going on with them, i can’t NOT talk about her or just pretend like she doesn’t exist or that what she’s saying and doing isn’t affecting zayn (and by extension, liam). and that’s especially true given the seriousness of the implications of this latest stunt. moreover, not talking about her is not just gonna make her go away or make the stunting stop, and i’m sorry but i don’t even really understand the rationale behind thinking/claiming anything like that. the fact is WE’RE (as in ziams) not the main ones giving her attention. we may talk about her occasionally yes, because again she is unfortunately an important part of the discussion surrounding ziam’s situations. but even if we ALL collectively completely stopped talking about her tomorrow, the fact is z*gi stans, g stans, het z stans, the tabloids, and the wider gp who believe in this shit are STILL gonna be talking about her and giving her attention. that’s not gonna stop just because a small group of ppl in some tiny subsection of internet and of the 1d fandom stopped talking about her. the stunt will go on as long as it still keeps making her money and getting her attention from all those other audiences (and also b/c of the fact that the contract is clearly still on-going), we as ziams are a negligible factor in that (esp the contractual aspect). so to use your example but modified in a way that would be more relevant to this specific situation: if a tree in a forest falls over and a bunch of people witnessed it while only a small select few did not (and that tree already had a contractual agreement with gravity to fall anyway), did it actually exist? the answer would ostensibly be yes.

second off, and more importantly, i feel like a broken record in the amount of times i’ve said this and the fact that i have to KEEP saying it but tumblr is a HIGHLY customizable site. so if you are seeing things you do not want to see, i’m sorry but that is just not my fault or my problem because you literally ALWAYS have the option to either just plain not read it (if you see it’s tagged as about her), or even to block/blacklist certain tags of mine entirely (b/c i tag everything that talks about her accordingly). just like you’re telling me to just ignore g, that is also an option that you have when it comes to me and my posts about her. so if you are still seeing it/reading it (at least on my blog cause i can’t speak to others’ tagging systems) i can only imagine that it’s because on some level you want to…otherwise why keep reading it? especially when you can clearly see it’s tagged as about her. if you don’t like the way i’m blogging about things or how often i’m blogging about things you are of course entitled to those feelings, but it is ALWAYS up to YOU whether you want to continue to see it or not. you don’t HAVE to ‘read about her constantly’ if you don’t want to (at least on my blog anyway) because you always have the option at any time to either block my tag for her or just ignore posts i’ve tagged under her name. you don’t even HAVE to come to my blog or even continue to follow me if you don’t wanna see this kind of content. that is precisely why tumblr is built the way it is, so that you don’t have to see anything you don’t want to or that makes you uncomfortable. i have always said that if the way i blog or the content of my blog is ever making you or anyone uncomfortable that is totally valid and understandable and i won’t feel bad or blame you at all if you or anyone decides that unfollowing and/or blacklisting or blocking me or my tags is something you feel you need to do to make your navigation and experience of this site and this fandom a more enjoyable one. but frankly i’m getting really tired of repeating this. i’m not sure if there’s this just THAT many people that are new to this site and just don’t know that those things are options, but when you come to my blog saying things like this and basically trying to dictate how i blog about things - esp things that are very clearly literally your choice to read or not - it really puts me in an awkward position cause i try very hard to be nice and respectful about these things but i also have my limits. i’m not here to post content expressly tailored to you or to anyone’s needs but my own, i’m here to post content for MYSELF to get my own thoughts out. the fact that others sometimes happen to see it and like it and/or reblog it is great!! but it is not the reason i started this blog, and while a great motivator, it is ultimately not even the reason i continue with this blog. this blog has always been and always will be primarily for ME first and foremost, as a place for me to share my thoughts (and occasionally others’ thoughts) and speak my mind about things that i can’t necessarily talk about elsewhere and a place for me to make observations and analyses in a space and a community where i feel comfortable and supported. you are welcome to tailor your own blog however you want, and to talk or not talk about whatever you choose there but when you’re on someone else’s blog - just like when you’re in someone else’s house or room - it’s important to remember that that’s THEIR space to do with what they choose and they have no obligation to you or to anyone else to change it to fit your needs or wants. it is up to you to do what you have to do to in order to feel comfortable (and/or protect your mental and emotional health), even if that means avoiding certain parts of their room/house, or avoiding the whole room/house altogether (i.e. their blog) and you are totally within your rights to do so.

anyway, sorry this got so long, i just have a lot of feelings about this and i hope none of this came off in too negative a way, as again i tried my utmost to be nice and respectful about it (despite my on-going frustration at having to repeat it) but i just really hope this get the point across to the people that keep sending asks like this

[buckyskorpion]

A). I didn't meant to be rude w the caps lock message about dsbt. Yes, I hit anonymous button but cuz I'm too scared of even write an ask to anyone (I hope u understand it, from what i see of your posts you deal with anxiety too). I'm sorry, truly, if I sounded rude or bad to you, never was my intention. I never knew it has some time since you wrote it cuz I've been following you for little time. Like a few weeks. And unfortunately, we don't exactly get the timin of the uploading of the posts +

B). I thought it was a recent fic and freshly new and I thought you'd be writing through time or had more chapters saved or anything, already pre scheduled to update. Not trying to impose anything, just expressing how my trail of thoughts were working. I know, I truly know, u share the stories because u want to share it and not for our satisfaction. And that's how it's suppose to be, imo as well. The thing with asks tho is that it gets very misunderstood how we all view them when we get them. +

C). I did caps lock with the only and unique intention of expressing excitement over it. Not to be rude, not to yell at you. Just to express how excited I am towards the next chapter, whenever it comes out. I felt bad how you and some of your followers thought of how that sounded and I'm sorry. I never intended to be rude. Ps: I did A, B & C so you can follow the asks, not to impose anything of like "first of all", don't get me wrong again please xx

D). I read the other ask you answered about how bad you feel. I'm truly sorry I made you feel that way. Truly. I read all your vents about your bad days and it makes me sad you deal with it. I have 3 personality disorders and it's horrible how we process things in our heads. Not trying to victimize, just trying to explain I know how awful our own brains can be to ourselves when it comes to process social interactions (asks, even. +

E). Again, I'm so sorry) without any mental issue or whatsoever. I want to add I'm excited for any work you do in the future and again, I'm sorry for failing showing it.

thank you for messaging me! believe me, i understand anxiety so thats fine and i also understand that you didn’t meant it in a rude or bad way - i did say that because i know most people dont intend to come across in a bad way. i admit that i responded quite emotionally because of a build up of similar messages i had gotten. however, in my opinion it doesnt matter what the intention is when you say something that hurts someone, because no matter how nicely you meant to say it (and i do understand you said it out of excitement! i really do) it still hurt. ya know? like i get that you meant it in a nice way but i still had a negative reaction and thats still valid. i hope that makes sense!

as someone who has anxiety as you have said, i would hope that you understand how a message like that - well intentioned or not - would trigger my anxiety and make me feel very pressured, stressed, and upset. and i understand that using anon protects you and helps ease your anxiety so i didnt mean to offend you by saying that, im sorry.

im grateful that you started following me so recently and are enjoying my fics. im not expecting everyone to understand that i took four years off tumblr and originally posted that fic in 2016, i understand people just come across my fics and dont read my blog so thats not what i was getting at. what i meant is that it doesn’t matter if i posted the fic last week or four years ago, if i have a posting schedule or not, if i posted the last chapter yesterday or months ago -- asking writers when they’re going to update and demanding new chapters is very upsetting to a lot of us!! and it is rude, whether its intended or not! not just you, but literally everyone who message me or any writer about updates. i dont know if i am getting my point across properly but im trying to say that i would never ask someone when they plan on updating a fic no matter the circumstances because i understand writing and posting is a very subjective, emotional, and mentally draining process. at the end of the day we are posting free content and its nobody’s business whether i post back to back updates or take years in between, because im doing it FOR FREE and owe nothing to no one.

at the end of the day this is also just tumblr, its just fic, and i dont want to come across super aggressive or mean. im just trying to get my point across and im glad you messaged me to get your point across too! we are all allowed to disagree and exist on the same platform. i am truly grateful you enjoy my writing, thats the reason why i write so i dont want to deter you from enjoying anyones fic or anything. im just trying to explain to not only you but anyone reading this why demanding updates makes me wanna die haha

im truly sorry for what you have to go through with your diagnoses, i know how difficult mental illness is and nobody deserves it. i really hope you’re doing ok and this interaction hasn’t upset you too deeply and i havent made you feel bad. if i have i truly am sorry. we’re all just trying to make our way in this shitty world and we gotta help each other when we can. if you ever feel confident enough to come off anon, or even if you want to continue sending me anons, i would be happy to talk to you if you ever need it - im always here for you! i used your ask as an example for the many people who message me similar things and maybe i shouldn’t have done that because that’s not fair to you, so im sorry. 

thank you so much for these messages, you really sound like a very mature and lovely person and im deeply sorry if this situation has caused you any pain. i hoep we can be friends! and i hope you keep enjoying my writing and i can keep providing things you like to read!

[clever-and-unique-name]

Alright so like, I’m being told to keep the swearing under control for this, but we’ll see how that goes because hey fam it’s Tristan and it’s time I got some stuff off my chest about my pals* in the end0//genic community! * We’re not pals. I’m being facetious.

Okay so first off, disclaimer: I’m totally aware that not every system knows the source of their trauma, and there are systems out there who have been misled to believe their trauma “wasn’t bad enough,” and all that fun dissociative stuff. Been there, bought the t-shirt. Some of my parts are still hanging out in denial-land, so we get to deal with bouts of that too. Like, daily. I get it. Really I do.

When I talk about “ end0//genic ” and “healthy multiplicity” folk, I am talking about the people who believe you can be multiple without trauma. That you can just be born this way, or form alters/parts later in life with no incidental trauma during the identity-forming years (which change depending on who you’re asking, don’t @me about what specific age range that is.)

Spoiler alert my dudes: none of that is true. Trauma causes multiplicity. Trauma that disrupts the formation of a stable identity is the entire gist of DID/OSDD. The brain basically goes “Aw hell I can’t deal with all of this at the same time” and sections itself into parts that are dissociated from each other so it doesn’t have to deal with like Trauma A, B, and C while also performing Role 1, 2, and 3.

It is terrifying to confront the idea that you have trauma in your past. Especially for the “apparently normal parts” who handle the day-to-day and are most likely to stumble upon the realization. First instinct is probably going to be “Trauma? Nah, not me.” Because in a lot of cases, they don’t hold those traumatic memories--other parts do.

So what’s a poor ANP to do? Well, go on a Google adventure, of course! There must be some explanation for the thoughts they have in their head that don’t belong to them, or the distinct “I don’t feel like me” feeling, or the periodic blackouts. And what do they find?

Thaaaat’s right! The end0//genic community! Where everyone can be multiple and nobody has to confront trauma!

 And look, like I said before, confronting trauma is hard. I know. I’m still working on it. I see good friends going through the hell that is confronting their own trauma. It’s scary, it’s distressing, it occasionally rips your life apart and leaves you sobbing in the bathtub (or is that just me?)

My beef with the end0//genic community, the people who spread the scientifically unfounded idea that a person can have multiple dissociated parts of self without trauma, is that they tempt people away from the hard truth. They’re like con artists peddling sugar water to people who need medicine. Of course they’re going to say it doesn’t hurt anybody--it’s just sugar water! There’s no harm in it! But there are people who desperately need medicine. (Medicine in this case would be mental health care, in case that analogy’s not clear.)

If there are people reading this right now who identify as end0//genic and feel all attacked, I’m not here to fight you. I’m not putting this in any multiplicity or plural tags--strictly DID/OSDD tags only. Because that’s my other gripe: I stick to my side of the fence. I don’t want anything to do with a community that believes in multiplicity outside of dissociated parts/alters. The extent of my dissociation is so much more than just having dissociated parts of self and I’m not interested in talking to people who just want to swap stories about their WaCkY hEaDmAtEs LOL. That’s not my experience. (That’s not an experience backed by science, but that’s beside the point.)

I have had people message me out of the blue, even though we’ve never interacted before, telling me to block them because they’re pro-end0//genic . (Which I will gladly do, by the way.) Why are you here? How did you find my blog? Are you following the DID tags I post in? Why? Why, when we’re not the same at all? Why are you in a trauma survivor’s community if you have no trauma?

I don’t know, my dudes. If you’ve read this far, kudos to you, because this has been a mess in my brain. I’m just tired of having this debate.

In case it’s not clear, if you identify as end0//genic , don’t touch this post.

-- Tristan ♥

[migleefulmoments]

Abby is the 1 who needs a reading comprehension lesson. An anonymous person said 'You're a narrow-minded fool if you actually put any stock in whether or not a married man is wearing his ring.' Abby's reply was 'Never once did I or anyone I know say that a married person has to wear a ring.' Am I crazy or is that totally 2 different things? Sometimes Abby is so blind it makes me crazy. Also, if u could do a follow up to her blatherings re her post it would be great. I'm just gobsmacked over it.

I see you wrote another post clarifying it was Cassie who made the comments you quoted but the entire coven’s comments after Cassie just get more ridiculous- “fact” after “fact” of lies and nonsense comparisons.  It’s batty that they believe any of the lies- but they believe them all! 

Anonymous asked: My grandpa doesn't wear his wedding ring because he used to work as an AC/heating repair man (he even taught college courses on fixing heaters at one point) and then was just not in the habit when he retired. That doesn't make his and grandma's marriage less valid. Rings are a symbolic thing that most cultures don't even do. You're a narrow-minded fool if you actually put any stock in whether or not a married man is wearing his ring.

cassie1022 answered: Oh yay, fun. (Cassie -always so charming)  My dear Nonnie, once again, reading comprehension eludes someone that believes in the Miarren myth. Never once did I or anyone I know say that a married person has to wear a ring (and yet Abby pops in below to claim the same but then argue that it IS the ring coming and going that looks suspicious. Let’s pretend that cc rings were real- he didn’t wear them every day regardless of what Abby claims.). Some people don’t wear them because they work with their hands, like your grandpa, and some just don’t feel comfortable wearing them. Let’s be real though. D has never shown an aversion to wearing rings. He’s worn them quite often, even while playing a show (yes, but he also took them off.  It’s his prerogative.  Until he says he’s getting divorced, it’s none of our business). There was a time when the only time he DIDN’T have a ring on was while he was in character (so what? He has had his wedding ring on most times we’ve seen him. You are counting individual photos as entire days and that isn’t accurate)

That being said, let’s examine. When was the last time you think D fixed a car, operated heavy machinery, or, like your grandpa, fixed an AC unit or heater?  (You have no idea what he does in his spare time.  This is a gross comment-some people do things with their hands -build things- because they enjoy it)  (Maybe if he could do that, people wouldn’t be making their own sweat gravy when they go to TSG.)(So now we start with the lies and mischaracterizations. FUN. There are two comments from TSG claiming A/C was broken. Since likely Mia doesn’t own the building, she has no control over the A/C being broken). 

As I’ve already said, rings aren’t for everyone, but I’ve also pointed out that D has been an avid ring wearer most of his life, and there is more than enough photographic evidence to support this. Also, most couples that exchange rings don’t usually stop wearing them in the first year of marriage.(And he hasn’t stopped wearing his now has he?) That’s when it’s usually a point of pride and you want the world to know you are someone’s spouse. (Does Darren seem like the kind of person who is worried about “the world knowing he’s someone’s spouse”? He’s pretty open about his relationship and taking his ring off for an hour or two isn’t indicative of anything).

You know what DOES make a marriage less valid? No legitimate officiant.(LIE)  There are only a handful of states where you can officiate your own marriage, and guess what? Louisiana isn’t one of them.(He didn’t, Joe did)  You need an ordained minister and in addition to that, the minister must register in the parish where the marriage is taking place.

So, if this makes me a “narrow-minded fool,” so be it. I’ve been called worse. (It definitely does).  

ajw720 I needed to laugh this morning, thank you nonnie.(I would imagine you need to laugh a hell of a lot more than you do Abby)  You people really don’t get it (Oh lord).  Also, it isn’t JUST the ring (which is very suspicious especially as he deliberately takes it off at random times, there one minute gone the next) (Here abby argues it isn’t the ring.... except it is the ring) , it is as @cassie1022 pointed out, no officiant (LIE) , weird wedding algorithm (the fact that Abby truly believes there was a guest algorithm says everything there is to say about Abby’s judgment and the cc nonsense)  is FAMILY HONEYMOON (a joke)  constant babysitters (LIE) d’s complete lack of enthusiasm (he practically said he was bored and realized at the last moment that that was bad) (Desperate Abby, you're so desperate) , talked about pooping exes as opposed to how life changed with his bride (and you don’t get that this is was keep from speaking about his personal life? How long have you been a fan? Joking about something to distract from having to answer something private is spot-on Darren), speaks more passionately about his jacket then his wedding (we done got hitched) (This means nothing Abby...NOTHING. He wrote a boring post about his jacket and you’ve been losing your shit over it ever since. IT meant nothing...it was a coat he wore to an event. You only like it because he was boring and serious. It was the farthest thing from Darren I’ve ever read.), announced the engagement using a reference to the wrong freaking franchise (I can’t...this is one of your dumbest arguments out of a lot of arguments. It was a JOKE Abby, a joke.  He used the franchise that made the joke funny. Darren doesnt’ own a franchise)   , FIVE FUCKING encagement rings (LIE), the last of which is an advertisement that she is paid to wear and they haven’t even tried to hide this fact (LIE), utter lack of chemistry (again desperate Abby) , the weirdness with his non-relationship but clear friendship of sorts with his ex co-star (It’s not “weirdness” it’s a nonrelationship-you said it yourself). , the way she is promoted that is beyond excessive for someone who isn’t famous (This entire rant is unhinged. Nobody is promoting her, he’s living his life with her.  Like we expect he would with his wife. There is nothing untoward with their behavior together.  The fact that you have to label it “promotion” says that it worries you a lot). the fact that the sold their entire wedding to about 100 sponsors )(LIE) (I am sure there are more than we even realize), the clear references to fandom at the sham mockery (OMG Abby, give it up. Nobody cares about you), and that this allegedly private couple also released 85% of their wedding for public consumption (They released 27 photos. That is HARDLY 85% of their wedding. You saw a lot of the same photos posted by their friends and it upset you but they didn’t release 85% of their wedding. It was a 4-day event and the wedding events started at around 3 pm and lasted until after midnight -27 is not 85% of 10-ish hours of celebration).  

If it was ONLY that he randomly took his ring off depending on how the wind is blowing, fine, that is evidence alone of nothing.  All of these things, and hundred and hundreds of other facts (which are ALL LIES). (inconsistent timelines (Darren doesn’t owe you a “consistent timeline��� that’s asinine)   they don’t know where they met each other RC handshakes (You know that isn’t a handshake- they were photographed together right before the “handshake’ you won’t let go of and he’s heard introducing her as his girlfriend ), D running from her every moment he can, etc, etc)(Whatever you tell yourself to sleep at night), are clear evidence it is fake that is beyond a reasonable doubt (Bwahahahahaha you are conning yourself Abby) .  Him kissing her in her bar is his job.  I suggest nonnie you pay attention to the details (Which ones- your lies or the real details?) And please pay attention to the captain, he hasn’t even been subtle lately, he has been fairly blatant (Le sigh, he isn’t the captain.  He’s a dude who loves his boyfriend Will and writes children’s books that are not cc Bibles) .

Happy Thanksgiving Nonnie!  I hope you can tear yourself away from reading blogs you disagree with long enough to enjoy your friends and family! Cheers!

notes-from-nowhere What love are you talking about, anon? M doesn’t love D and she makes this clear every chance she get (LIE- there is nothing that suggests MIa isn’t in love with Darren). Do I have to remind you how she denied to D’s mom one red carpet to celebrate her son? (LIE Abby fabricated)  Or to D’s dad to be honored for his military past?(another LIE Abby fabricated)  But why listing all of her actions when you know very well this is only the surface.

Btw, I still have to know a singer/actor lost a finger because of a wedding band. Anon, try again, this attempt failed. (SMH)

leka-1998 You know what I like about this instance in particular? Apart from the fact that the ring isn’t off the whole time, he’s still wearing the other one here.

After 284719 years, she should also know what the language D’s mom speaks is called. Seems she doesn’t care enough. (Another LIE that Abby fabricated) 

Also, former platonic roomie says hello. (LIE) 

ajw720

They still can’t explain away B/enny, the man D just praised for his new album yet D hasn’t even mentioned his brother’s (I can’t explain it but it has nothing to do with Darren and Mia.  You’re the one making it a problem) .  The man that mocked fandom on his IG by referring to M/oulin R/ouge when posting about the fraud in NOLA (Nobody-especially Ben Hudson- gives a shit about fandom Abby. You’re a nobody)  The man who seemingly officiated the wedding (Again a LIE)  And the one who appears to have a dog (yes he does, he lives with his girlfriend, Joanna, and their two dogs) . Hey remember just a few weeks ago when PBB dropped her teeth in the dog’s bowl? Funny as we know she and D don’t have a dog (Nope, they clearly don’t- stop trying so hard).…

[sun-to-my-luna]

#XVIII

― the time has come.

The focus of today is Camila’s self-titled album “Camila.” Depending on the person music has a variety of interpretation, and today we’ll be looking {into it}, and at other things.  Not from the average CS perspective. Not from the general public perspective, but from a totally different perspective.

ps. want to mention beforehand that I know I don’t usually talk about darker shit, but because it makes sense I feel like I should.

Anyways as we all know IHQ was placed in the intro of the “CITC” MV for promotional reasons, and they both  weren’t  put onto her album.  IHQ  was simply released as a single for the sole purpose of drama. It either left everyone wondering who it was really about, or confirmed the narrative that there was a nonexistent grudge.

When someone first listens to “I Have Questions” it sounds like a somber song aimed at a love interest, or possibly the girls of Fifth Harmony. Butー there’s one possibility no one seems to think about.

Maybe the song is towards multiple people, or at least for someone else. “Them” or those that control every aspect of her life except for what’s actually private.

This theoretical analysis will be divided into three parts.

When this was posted the “LAND vs. C” narrative had already been put into motion. Everyone else (GP) was lead to believe that the song was supposedly about the group when in fact it most likely wasn’t. The girls were out having fun...but Camila was stuck  in a hotel bathroom all day writing songs? It doesn’t make sense, unless she was actually being forced to work on her album...which was later delayed on purpose.

I.

I’ll start with this string of tweets.

The guy in the tweet above is the SND at Interscope Records, and he is giving a power statement in that tweet  that says, “ They work for you. You do as you’re told,” or “You don’t tell them how to do their job.”

That same day underneath that tweet he received a comment from Chippy who I completely agreed with, but “Marcus” here  seemed to disagree, and answered back sarcastically.

Then on May 27th he tweeted this. *cough* Are you referring to MJ? *cough*

I noticed this tweet on a different account run by someone else from the #E*** clan.

“ーThe Artist is doing mostly all of the work, & the label is just the #plug. The machine.. labels don’t even care if an artist doesn’t sell, they’re making money from streaming & singles & shenanigans (PR, Scandals, and Media..etc.)”

He’s right, but the thing I found the most interesting is he used the term “ machine” (similar to Chely Wright) to describe the big labels.

II.

***This next section is going to get a bit dark.***

All kinds of stuff has been mentioned on my blog before like “the dark web”, but nothing quite similar to the level of this. I’m going to explain it only briefly.

Commercial cult manipulation:

What is a cult? A cult is a group of people who organize around a strong authority figure in this case a multi-level marketing organization,  aka. “Major Label.”  Cults attempt to expand their influence for the purpose of money. They change someone’s old identity with a new one. The person may not have chosen that identity.

Before a celebrity becomes a“celebrity” in the entertainment industry they’re a normal person with a normal life under the radar.  After they get into a position of  known status they have to maintain  an image (that they don’t choose), and  they need to maintain their brand. 

Because that’s what they become, a brand that makes other  people money.

Edgar Schein described the process of “coercive persuasion” as a 3 stage process.

“an unfreezing of the identity” - breaking the person down

“changing” -  the change that should happen to the person

“refreezing” - Reinforcing the new identity.  

Everyone in Fifth Harmony had been assigned a certain role since the beginning, and if you watch interviews you’ll see that clearly enough. We’ve even mentioned here on tumblr before; how they break an artist down only to  build that artist’s image up again, and that’s a constant change.

a.

Mind Control:

Bare in mind:  mind control in a cult setting is a system that messes with someone’s identity

Mind control is not brainwashing

The people involved unwittingly participate, by cooperating with their controllers, and giving them private information that they don’t  know will be used against them.  Mind control in a commercial cult setting is achieved by placing a person in a social environment where in order to function, they have to replace their old identity, and adhere to the new identity.

Emotional Control:

Fear and guilt are central to any thought reform/mind control program. Cult tactics include:  inducing fears and phobias  in group members to allow the leadership to maintain control. Members can  believe that all sorts of horrible things may happen if they don't follow the  rules.

For example: If you come out, then you’ll lose fans or won’t have a career.

Alyson Stoner:

+ Plus many more.

They lose the freedom to choose for themselves, the freedom to do what they want, have the relationships they want or even eat what they like.

“Mind control may be largely understood by analysis of the three components described by Leon Festinger, a psychologist, in what has become known as the "cognitive dissonance theory.”“

These components are control of behavior, control of thoughts, and control of emo­tions.

b.

Behavior Control:

Behavior control is the regulation of an individual's physical reality. It includes the control of his environment— what clothing he wears, what food he eats, how much sleep he gets—as well as  other actions he performs.

This need for behavior control is the reason most cults give a very rigid schedule for their members.

We know they’re always over-working her.

 In addition, new diets and eating schedules also can have a disorienting effect. (Lost a little wight because I wasn’t eating.) After someone has been broken down, they must be built up again as the "new man" (or "new woman," as the case may be.)

In a mind control environment, freedom of choice is the first thing that one loses. The reason for that loss is  simple: the cult member is no longer themselves. Then, without warning, they seem to become their old self, with their old attitudes and mannerisms. Just as suddenly, they flip back to being a stranger.

Now obviously I’m not saying they’re a part of commercial cult manipulation. What I’m saying is there’s so much more shit that happens in the music industry  that we don’t know if they could be or not.   Cardi B has said it herself on instagram live, “ People have evil intentions around you. The Music Industry is more fucked up than the streets. The streets are way easier.” Anyways with that being:

III.

Lyrical  Analysis―

Why did you leave me here to burn?

 I’m way too young to be this hurt.

I feel doomed in hotel rooms staring straight up at the wall.

Camila was no longer a part of the Fifth Harmony partnership which means she was rarely getting paid for merch, and for preforming. They were forcibly making her a solo artist while she was still in the group, and they were most likely feeding her ideas  about it since 2015, even though she still wanted to be a part of  the group.  (Notice how Camila/Roger worded the statement. Not once were the girls mentioned, only the brand, aka Fifth Harmony.)

―“I was shocked to read the statement the Fifth Harmony account posted without my knowing. Saying that they were just informed through my representatives that I was “leaving the group” is simply not true.  I did not intend to end things with Fifth Harmony this way.”

She was probably working non-stop on her album all through out the 7/27 tour, and if that was the case it wouldn’t surprise me if she felt stressed, or tired.

One example is during the 7/27 tour in St. Louis when she had an anxiety attack, and couldn’t preform, but still preformed the next day. Panic attacks can happen because of demanding situations, or stress whether it be physical, emotional, or psychological.

Do you care,  Do you care?  Why don’t you care?

I gave you all of me

My blood my sweat  my heart and my tears

Why don’t you care?

{Camila}:  “They were actually working us to the fucking bone.”

{Lauren to Ally}: “ They’re making decisions on a regular basis to fuck us over, to make us literal slaves Ally.. we’re doing fucking labor everyday, and we see nothing.”

NUMBER 1  tell me who do you think you are?

You’ve got some nerve trying to tear my faith apart.

NUMBER 2  why would you try to play me for a fool?

I should've never trusted you.

The Camila from 2014 who was just a girl with big dreams, and the Camila from 2016 the girl that was feeling doomed inside hotel rooms... have two very different demeanors.

Yes, it’s true  bands never last a long time together, but they made the fans that she loved hate her. That way she wouldn’t have a choice, but to leave because they didn’t want her in the group anymore. They made her want to leave. They pushed the solo idea onto her.  They kicked her off of Fifth Harmony. They broke her down.  She was so tired, and you could tell.

NUMBER 3 why would you who you swore that you would be?

These people made it seem like she could trust them, and she believed that. Those people were supposed to be there for her. They were supposed to be her stepping stone. They were supposed to care. The only back they were looking out for though was their own. She would be the next rising “pop idol” and they did what they could to make it happen.

  Money is more important than someone else’s emotions, and health to them.

Don’t believe me? Ask Lauren Jauregui’s knee infection.

With that I leave you this:

No matter how successful someone is, or how happy someone looks it  doesn’t mean that they’re actually happy.  There’s a lot of things that go on behind the scenes that nobody knows about. You may think you know, but you don’t. They show you 10% of their life on social media, but that doesn’t mean you automatically know 90% of their life. You may talk to them for 5- 15 minutes, but that doesn’t mean you know what they’re going through. Make sure you show them love. Make sure you show them support. Make sure they know that no matter what they’re going through they have a fan base that won’t ever stop appreciating them even if they end up being  poor.   Show them you care no matter what. Show them you love them for them and not just because they’re “famous.” If you’re lucky enough give them the longest hug you can, because not everyone can.

[hedgehogsofasgard]

I have had an account on this website since 2009, and I’ve started this sideblog back in 2012. I’ve always enjoyed tumblr but I do notice I’ve been posting less and most importantly, enjoying it a bit less.

It doesn’t have anything to do with tumblrs new nsfw policy - I have never been here for the adult content so I personally couldn’t care less, although I acknowledge it has quite the impact on other blogs - but I miss the interaction I used to have. At first I thought my stuff just wasn’t interesting enough anymore. I have 40k followers, but the majority of my posts barely get to 100 notes lately. I don’t receive as many messages as I used to. I don’t know if it has anything to do with me being less active on here. I’ve never been on here “for the notes” but it does make me feel like my content simply isn’t good enough anymore sometimes. Over the years I’ve gotten more into tenrecs (besides hedgehogs) and I feel like a lot of people don’t get as excited about them as I do. I am really passionate about them but the majority of people just don’t seem to feel the same way, which I think is a shame (they are missing out big time!). I know I need a better camera to get some of the quality I got with my old dslr but I do not have the money for a new camera right now, so all I can offer are pics and videos taken with my phone, which simply isn’t good enough for fast moving animals so taking pictures can be a little frustrating.  With all the health problems I’ve had this year and the time it takes to maintain this blog I really need it to be a fun part of my life and not something that only drains the little energy I have, which doesn’t help. That being said - maybe it’s not (just?) me, maybe people have slowly been leaving this place. Maybe many of my followers are ghost followers who aren’t even on here anymore. I’m afraid that this new policy will cause more people to leave.

Out of the social media accounts I have, I’ve always enjoyed tumblr the most. It offers the perfect balance between posting pictures and longer written posts. Instagram is nice for the picture aspect of what I do and I like the option of posting stories (which I do quite often), little snaps of my animal’s lives that aren’t “high quality” enough to get posted on my feed; but it’s ill-suited for posting more informative stuff. 

Facebook is a bit better in that aspect, but still not as great for posting long written posts especially if you are using pictures in your articles. It’s also more difficult to keep track of your stuff and it feels less personal to me. This place has always felt more like my own little corner on the internet. With Facebook, it feels like nobody cares who originally posted something. Half of the people who comment on my posts don’t seem to be aware that I’m actually reading all those comments and they’re talking about my pets, not some random animals I don’t have a personal connection with.

Over the years I’ve tried several blogging platforms but never really liked any of them. I’m not even sure if there currently is something that’s similar to tumblr out there, and I don’t really feel like starting a new blog - I’ve been blogging for so long, I’m not looking to start over. I don’t think I will stop posting here, either. I might just be shifting my focus a bit. I am still working on the website, which will be the primary place for all my info/educational content regarding hedgehog husbandry. I’ve had plans for making a care website for years now - in fact I used to have one, in my native language - but didn’t start until a few months ago, and I hope to be able to finish it in early 2019.

If you want to follow my spiky friends on other social media platforms I can recommend my instagram, which is probably the platform I’m using the most right now (mainly insta stories, I do live vids occasionally as well). Facebook is another platform I use but the content is very similar to what I post on here. I also have a YT account, but I don’t use it a lot. TL;DR just a bunch of feelings about this place, I’m not planning on leaving anytime soon but you might wanna check out my other social media accounts b/c I might be more active on those. 

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[thewadapan]

It's Friday night.

You've locked yourself out.

The streets are empty.

> RETRACE STEPS

(I finished an MS Paint fan adventure.)

Creator’s Commentary

Normally, when I post stories on this blog, I throw the whole thing beneath the spoiler break - but that’s not really possible this time around. Click the link above if you haven’t read it yet - it only takes about ten minutes - then come back here if you want.

All done? Still with me? Okay, cool, because we’re going to be heading into spoiler territory here pretty quickly.

                               “RETRACE STEPS”

OPEN ON BLACK:

INT. – LATE AFTERNOON

A door opens on the right, spilling light into the threshold. The ceiling light automatically flickers on. Alice enters frame and heads to her door.

She tries the handle, but the door doesn’t budge. As her hand depresses the handle, the title briefly becomes visible.

We return to the original angle. Alice reaches into her left pocket, and finds nothing. She turns to lean against the door, facing the camera, and checks her right pocket, then the pockets of her hoodie. She tries the handle again, but the door is definitely locked. She leans, for a second, motionless.

           ALICE    Fuck.

She stalks out of the threshold, and the door closes behind her.

I. Making friends is harder than I thought.

When you’re a kid, people sorta make friends for you. Maybe your parents’ friends have kids, so suddenly those kids are your friends. Maybe you go to nursery or school, and then your classmates are kinda your friends too. At least some of those people will probably never stop being your friends. As you move through the education system, that cohort diffuses through the local schools - but chances are a few of your friends will stick with you all the way.

When you arrive at university, chances are you’re completely alone.

You’re thrown through the gauntlet of fresher’s week, forced to put yourself out there as you identify new friends and foes. One of the main attractions of university-managed accommodation - particularly catered accommodation - is that it places you with a huge amount of new people. Heck, part of the idea behind having a roommate is that they’re your “designated friend”.

(I didn’t have a roommate, and ended up going to university with two of my school friends, so these are less experiences and more observations - but that’s not to say I didn’t go out of my way to make new friends in those first weeks.)

After a month or so of the dreaded “three questions” (”What’s your name? Where are you from? What are you studying?”), the cliques have mostly solidified. The college relationships have crumbled, after one or both parties realised they were mostly in it for the sex. The cool people have long since stopped showing up to lectures. You haven’t gone back to any of the sports clubs and societies you signed up for. Maybe, just maybe, you’re occasionally glancing at your phone and wondering if you should finally give your parents a call to let them know you haven’t died.

If you’re lucky, you’ve met your new best friends. If you’re unlucky, then you’re very, very alone.

But of course, it’s not all down to luck.

She stalks out of the threshold, and the door closes behind her. Outside the threshold, there is a shot from the banister above of Alice walking down the stairs, facing away from the camera and typing on her phone.

Outside, Alice sits on the wall and stares at her phone. There is a brief montage of her slowly pacing up and down the path, leaning out into the road to check if anyone’s coming, checking her phone, peering into the downstairs window, kicking loose stones back into the gravel, and back to her sitting on the wall. After a few seconds, she puts her phone away and trudges out of frame across the stones.

II. Coming up with stories is harder than I thought.

I can’t exactly remember what I put my name down for during freshers’ week, but one way or another I ended up dragging a new friend to a writing workshop for my university’s filmmaking society. A bunch of strangers from all years were crammed around some tables that had been pushed together in our Student Union’s bar.

This guy, the head of the- president of the society? Sure, the President, let’s go with that. The President stands up and sorta fumbles his way through an introduction, before telling us to turn to the person next to us. I turn to my friend, because I don’t like talking to strangers. Then the President tells us (I might be misremembering here) that we’ve got one minute to come up with a story.

There’s a moment of awkward silence, because nobody wants to be the first person to start talking about the first dumb idea that’s popped into their head at those words.

Then the conversations start.

I went into that first minute expecting to come up with absolutely nothing. To be honest, I’m pretty sure we came up with nothing. I think there might’ve been some implication that they’d go around the table once time was up asking for quick summaries - this terrified me not just at the prospect of having to bluff my way through a pitch, but at the prospect of having to listen to everyone else do the same. Honestly, the moment that’s stuck in my mind most since was when I talked to the guy sitting on the other side of me, and he started trying to tell me about Lord of the Rings, which... okay, I don’t like Lord of the Rings, sue me, whatever. Someone else talked about the Batman movies at one point, and - actually, that might’ve been the same guy. Y’know what, I’ve gotten off track.

The point is that at some point during that meeting, Retrace Steps was born. I don’t remember when exactly, or how I came up with it - I suspect I’d locked myself out of accommodation at some point, or knew a friend who had, and thought it’d be funny to do a story where someone does that and can’t for the life of them get back in. In order to add complications, I decided that their roommate wouldn’t answer their texts, and that the residence office would be out of hours - and that was when the idea that everyone had disappeared came into my head.

INT. MAIN BUILDING – LATE AFTERNOON

Over-the-shoulder shot of Alice entering a corridor in the main building. The camera focuses on the sign saying ‘ON DUTY’, then pans across to the door to the general office. It focuses on another sign saying ‘The office is now closed...’, then across to another sign by the door with a phone number on it.

Foreground with Alice comes back into focus. She takes out her phone and dials.

           ALICE    Hello? I’ve locked myself out, do you have a spare...

She trails off, and puts the phone away. Clearly, someone’s answered but has hung up. Cut across for a close-up of her face, trying to figure out her next move.

SERIES OF BRIEF SHOTS:

Alice looks for her keys in:

A) a computer lab B) a library C) a laundry room D) a games room E) a bathroom

There are no keys, and no people. Alice goes to the kitchen and gets a mini-doughnut out from a box in a cupboard. She eats it thoughtfully. Once she’s finished, she reaches out to grab another, hesitates, and decides against it.

III. Making movies is harder than I thought.

A lot of the ideas being thrown around the table were for some pretty high-concept stuff, and I remember thinking - hang on, aren’t you supposed to actually be filming that? I’d approached the challenge from the angle of “what do I have, and what can I make with it”, not “what do I want to make, and how can I make it”. In an unfortunate twist of fate, my film - of all those that were conceived that day - would end up being far and away the worst. But I’ll get to that.

For a student film, the "everybody disappears and you’re locked out” concept made perfect sense - you could film it at your accommodation, you’d only need a single actor, and it’s a story that your audience will probably (if not immediately, then at least after another month or two) be able to relate to.

(Side note: I obviously hadn’t come up with this concept whole-cloth. Michael Grant’s Gone series of YA novels - which I’d finished reading midway through secondary school - is a superhero story about a bunch of kids on an island where all the adults have suddenly disappeared. More pertinently, Starscribe’s The Last Pony on Earth is the diary of someone who wakes up completely alone in their city, only in the body of a cartoon horse. Yes, Retrace Steps has its roots in My Little Pony fanfiction, and I’m very sorry about that.)

My friend wasn’t interested in sticking with the society - he mostly did it to back me up - but I guess I was. Knowing that most people would be angling for directorial roles, I signed up as a writer and threw together a script. An email came back the following day; apparently from el Presidente himself:

Thank you for sending the script Retrace Steps. As you have said in your original email, the script is quite short. But I do think it is a very intriguing concept nonetheless, one that is probably helped more so than hampered by its brevity. After all, the nature of your script would to a degree require an empty street, as well as a quiet hall, both of which are rare commodities indeed, especially during the weekends.

Anyways, since the script is well formatted, I will just offer a suggestion, one which I hope may help your final edit before the deadline, should you wish to do so.

Your script portrays excellently Sam's anxiety over the course of the narrative, from his inability to find his keys, then his inability to find anyone at all. I do however believe that you could make the final scene perhaps have more impact. How this is done depends on the overarching theme of the story you are telling, as what you would emphasize at the films' conclusion would depend on it.

Is it an allegory to the anxieties of the average student (Sam), who finds himself socially isolated by a sense of exile or ignorance of the larger community? Or is it perhaps more of an absurdist comedy, or even horror? Though I could wrong, I was under the impression that it was more likely to be the former than the latter. If so, could the story end with it emphasizing Sam's exclusion from society, such as a close up shot to the door and keyhole?

As with all feedback, you are under no obligation to take them to heart, and the things I pointed out are but small things to consider on an otherwise great piece of work. Thank you for making this piece available to the rest of the society.

It seemed that I’d successfully communicated the theme of isolation - less so the theme of entitlement. Bringing that theme to the fore would be my biggest challenge throughout subsequent drafts of the script (where I failed miserably) and the development of the fanventure (on which the jury’s still out).

(Those subsequent drafts would also see the characters “Sam” and “Chris” - those being the names of two friends I’d pegged as backup actors for the roles - get renamed as a more generic “Alice” and “Bob”.)

The Retrace Steps team consisted of a director, a producer, a cameraman/editor, and me. I met with the director only a couple of times - she seemed pretty competent, but decided that she couldn’t commit the time to the project and stepped down. Our producer was all too happy to take over the role.

Auditions started shortly after the teams were assigned - although I’d used male pronouns in the script, I’d anticipated that there’d be a greater demand for male actors (because most of the writers/directors would be male and most of the actors would be female) and planned to go into the auditions with no preference one way or another.

In truth, however, I think the gender of the story’s lead does have a noticeable impact on how it comes across - at least in film, where there’s no good means of narration. Speaking very broadly, when dealing with themes of isolation, I think the key question that comes to an audience’s mind is “why is this person isolated?” - and if the character is male, I feel like they’re more likely to assume the answer is a personal failure of some sort; there must surely be something wrong with him. If you’re reading this, chances are you’re in pretty deep on the internet, where I think these issues of perception are less pronounced - so if your instinct is to buck against those assumptions, well, I’m glad.

(The fanventure would end up using second-person narration, they/them pronouns and androgynous character designs to sidestep these issues entirely, while drawing the reader directly into the conflict.)

Our producer/director wasn’t able to make the callbacks (which felt like another red flag), so it was down to me to relay back to her what I thought of everyone. It was kind of a challenging process, because - as I’ve said - I don’t like talking to strangers and I certainly don’t like telling them what to do. Still, I was able to more-or-less settle into it, and eventually the director and I settled on a girl who seemed to know what she was doing. I feel a little bad for effectively putting her through the project, but the joke’s on us: within a year she’d been elected el Presidente of the entire students’ association. I can only assume that none of her opponents knew about the movie; it might’ve made for a pretty good smear campaign. Or not, nobody really cares about student politics anyway.

(The director couldn’t make it to the meeting where the society allocated the actors either. Basically, the President went through the actors one by one, and the teams would negotiate for each of them in turn. I’m fairly sure only one or two of the other teams were after the same actress as we were - I basically just said “we only need one cast member and we thought she’d do best,” and that was all it took; once that was settled I simply left and pretty much didn’t interact with any other members of the society in person until the screening. The other roles she could’ve got were minor anyway - although, in retrospect, she might’ve been better off.)

I think I’m not going to bother explaining exactly why the Retrace Steps short film turned out to be such a disaster. I’m pretty willing to pin the blame at the director’s feet - she’d arrange shoots at strange times with little notice, only to show up half an hour late herself. When she and I disagreed on part of the story, our cinematographer generally sided with her; she had the strongest personality of any of us, while I didn’t want to cause trouble. Our other team members - the actress and a lights guy who the society’d lumped with us (the lights ended up being a collaborative effort) - stayed out of it.

As the end of the semester approached, we were missing crucial swathes of footage. Our director pulled an ending out of her ass - a brief confrontation between myself-as-Bob and the actress, that... somehow involved custard creams? The script called for doughnuts, but we weren’t organised enough to have bought those in advance, and the biscuits were all we had at hand. I can’t actually remember exactly how it went, because it didn’t make any sense, but I remember enough to know that it actually ended up indirectly inspiring the execution of the revised ending present in the fanventure.

The end of the semester arrived. The society had hired out the small hall in the students’ union to screen all the movies. The screening started, and there was no sign of our director or cinematographer - they’d apparently been editing all afternoon. Eventually they arrived and sat down near myself and our actress.

I’m not gonna lie. What followed wasn’t the most embarrassing experience of my life. It probably wasn’t even in the top ten. But it was pretty embarrassing. All the movies were pretty awful in their own ways, but ours was uniquely terrible. To our director’s credit, she’d managed to cut the footage together into something we could maybe pass off as an absurdist comedy (which, to my own credit, had been kinda what I’d pictured in the first place - I’d just pictured something with a little more in the way of actual narrative). Even so, despite the awkward laughs - or perhaps because of them - it was atrocious.

I’ve only seen the movie once, at that screening, and I cringed the whole way through. Some time later, the director messaged me asking if I had a copy - apparently it hadn’t occurred to her to save one for herself, and our ex-cinematographer had gone AWOL - but I didn’t. Stupidly, I’d decided not to chase after one either, because in the moment I couldn’t imagine wanting to put myself through the experience of seeing it again. Almost half a year later, when I was almost done with the fanventure, I got back in touch with both the director and the society: I wanted to have the movie on hand so I could write about it in this commentary, but I didn’t say that, because I didn’t want to let on that I’d remade it as a frikkin’ webcomic. The person from the society said she knew someone who had a copy, and that she’d ask, but she never got back to me and by the time I remembered to chase her up it felt like it was too late to actually do so. It’s likely that the movie will never resurface - which I guess is good in a way, in that there’s no way in hell I’m gonna show it to any of you.

I was bitter. I wanted nothing to do with student societies. I wanted nothing to do with filmmaking, and haven’t made a film since - not unless you count Are You Happy, which I pretty much only made because I could do so entirely on my own. I’m much more leery about the prospect of collaborating with strangers, although I suspect that if an opportunity came my way I’d probably take it.

(Side note: last October, in an interaction which wound up being pretty excruciating in its own right, I contributed a satirical listicle to another society. This was a nightmare for a variety of reasons, but - suffice to say - it’s not particularly pleasant to discover that somebody’s made a bunch of edits to your work without telling you, especially if the changes are for the worse. I wish I had more positive things to say about collaboration, really, I do. Actually, I will say that my experiences working with others in the Transformers fandom have been pretty darn good - you can find details of that stuff over on the list of things I made.)

For a good while, I suspected that Retrace Steps would never see the light of day. I entertained the idea of rounding up a few of my friends and bashing the thing out myself over the course of a few weekends, but I ended up being pretty busy with other stuff. Besides, the society had the nice lights and cameras, and I didn’t want to go through the hassle of borrowing from them. Most of all, there was the tiny voice telling me that my script probably hadn’t ever been much good in the first place, and that I should switch back to pure prose - a medium with a much faster turnaround.

(That voice was right, as I’m sure you’re seeing for yourself. Look, it was a student film, there’s probably no such thing as a good student film - I’m just banking on fanventure-adaptation-of-a-bad-student-film still being fair game.)

EXT. STREET

Wide shot of Alice walking through the street, shouting. It is raining.

      ALICE   Hello? Is anybody there?

Overhead shot as she looks up and squints at the sky, then reaches back and lifts her hood.

Everything slows down. Cut to a side-on shot of Alice lifting her hood. A muted sound slowly turns into the jangle of keys as things speed up again. Cut across to medium shot face-on, as Alice looks confused. She reaches up with her other hand into her raised hood, and pulls out the keys. She holds them between two fingers, and the camera focuses on them.

      ALICE    Oh, for fuck’s sake.

IV. Talking about Retrace Steps without talking a little bit about Homestuck is harder than I thought.

Homestuck was this big multimedia webcomic that ran from 2009 to 2016. Homestuck was very good, and its unique “MS Paint Adventures” format inspired thousands of “MS Paint Fan Adventures” - some of which take Homestuck’s premise, but many of which are otherwise entirely original stories.

The oldest writing on this blog, in fact - presuming I haven’t hidden it out of mortification - is a rudimentary (and really god-awful) fanventure called You’ve Just Been FiRED. Don’t read it, it’s very, very bad, and I abandoned it after about thirty pages - some of which remain unpublished as of writing.

My second attempt at a fanventure, which - no joke - I wrote in the pages of my school planner during one exam season, is called SP00KY M4N0R; unlike traditional fanventures, which use the aesthetic of interactive fiction but none of the non-linear storytelling, this one was a fully-fledged choose-your-own-adventure story. In the following year’s planner, I started writing a spiritual successor called W1LT1NG (the setting of this one is slightly less self-evident: it took place inside an Egyptian pyramid). Neither of these stories have seen the light of day outside of a couple of my friends (and teachers) - but they might, so I’ll discuss them no further.

At some point in high school, I tried adapting SP00KY M4N0R for the web - first in MS Paint, then later in Photoshop CS2 - but put the project on the back burner and never really picked it back up again.

It wasn’t until after I joined the Homestuck Discord server that my interest in fanventures was rekindled. I became its 9615th member on the 6th of January, 2018 - in other words, a good while after we’d wrapped on Retrace Steps - but very quickly realised that its rate of activity was far to high for me to keep up with anything, duly muted it, and pretty much just forgot about it entirely.

Months later, something - presumably in either the Worth the Candle server or the Worm server - drew me back, and I found myself lurking there infrequently. On the 2nd of November, I briefly waded in - to ask some questions about Cordyceps - and after that, I think I lurked on-and-off for pretty much a whole month while I finished the remaining works on Makin’s List of Shills (if you’re wondering what all of these names in italics are, you might want to click that link). After that, I was pretty much there to stay.

A small but notable number of the server’s regulars ran fanventures of their own, and so I found myself becoming much more aware of the format than I ever had been while working on SP00KY M4N0R. Eventually, I decided I wanted to make something of my own - this was shortly after I’d finished working on Another Son, which had ended up being something of a mixed bag in a lot of ways - and hit upon the idea of adapting Retrace Steps as a fanventure.

You see, the thing about fanventures is that many of them begin with the same premise - “you are mysteriously alone”, and then things escalate as you learn more about the world the second-person protagonist has found themselves in. Retrace Steps has that same premise, with a very simple twist - the reason you are mysteriously alone is simply that nobody likes you.

SERIES OF SHOTS:

A) Alice re-enters the building B) She heads up the stairs, C) reaches the door to the threshold D) (a brief return to the original angle from the very beginning of the film) and enters the threshold. E) Extreme close-up of the key entering the lock. F) Over-the-shoulder shot as the door is unlocked and starts to open. G) (180-degree cut) She stares, dumbfounded at what she finds within. F) (Her POV) Her room is full of people, all holding red plastic cups and staring at her.

V. Drawing is harder than I thought.

Before I get into the meat of the work, I should probably give a broad overview of the process I used for creating the images - which, for the most part, was identical to the process I’d used for SP00KY M4N0R. The panels in Homestuck are 650px by 450px; in order to create a rougher (read: more forgiving) look, I halved these dimensions to 325px by 225px. I’d originally planned to scale the images back up to full size during publication, but ended up deciding that the negative space around the smaller frames helped create an atmosphere of isolation. Besides, I wasn’t sure if it’d be possible to scale the images back up without any anti-aliasing.

If you don’t know what anti-aliasing is, I’ll briefly explain - it’s when pixels at the edge of shapes in digital images get changed to a slightly different colour, to create smoother outlines. This works well at high resolutions, but at lower resolutions muddies detail and makes the image appear somewhat blurred - the effect is particularly pronounced if the images are entirely black and white. Homestuck avoids anti-aliasing pretty consistently, and doing so is a hallmark of the MSPA style.

Thankfully, Photoshop CS2 allows you to turn off antialiasing on pretty much every individual tool. I drew all the graphics using a 4px brush, but thanks to a beat-up old variable-pressure graphics tablet I could reduce this to 2px as needed. The 2px brush size was employed pretty heavily for detail in some of the busier environments, and at times I found myself using the selection tool to nudge stuff around at a pixel-by-pixel level.

Although Retrace Steps is adapted from a script, I’m pretty sure none of the dialogue from that script ended up making the jump into the second-person narration of the story. In fact, very few of the script’s locations remain either. The words and the artwork developed in tandem - I was rarely more than a few panels ahead in the script, and would generally let the physical on-panel action inform what was being written.

I occasionally looked up bits of reference - most notably to get some architectural details for the Tesco store - but otherwise winged it. Occasionally, in the more complicated images, I’d start out by drawing some perspective lines. For a couple of the images in the credits (specifically the cup and the Poké Ball) I went so far as to use autoshapes as guides, because I was struggling to draw passable circles freehand.

(No, those shapes on the right aren’t my attempts at circles, they’re the guide I used while drawing the doughnut.)

I’ll give more specific thoughts later, but broadly speaking I think my drawings suited the story I was trying to tell about as well as they could. I’m not an artist, and in the future I’m going to stray away from visual projects like this; the part I value most is the writing process, and I’d say that only a tiny fraction of the time I devoted to this project was actually spent writing. The flip side of that, of course, is that people generally much prefer stories with a visual aspect - it’s hard to convince them to read a webcomic, much less a prose story.

           ALICE    What the actual fuck are you all doing in my room?            BOB (somewhat passively)    Uhhh… didn’t you get my email?            ALICE    What email? Everyone in the room stares at her. Then, as one, they move to push her out of the room and shut the door. She protests, until-

           ALICE    This is my room!

           BOB (poking his head back into shot with mucho sass)    Yeah, but it’s not though, is it? He slams the door the rest of the way shut, and the lock clicks back into place.

Back to very first angle.

           ALICE (quietly, to herself)    What the actual fuck.

She knocks on the door loudly.

           ALICE (shouting, her face inches from the door)    This is my room!

Silence. She tilts her head forward, hitting the door with a sad thud. Then she turns and sits down, back to the door, and the camera cuts to join her at this new level.

She sits for a few seconds, thinking, then gets up again and leaves frame.

VI. Writing this commentary is harder than I thought.

Anyway, I figure the best way to get down into the details is to just start at the beginning and work my way through.

The first twenty panels take place in something of a liminal space - the corridor on which the reader’s room lies. I made sure never to show any of the other doors in the corridor; so far as the reader is concerned, they may as well not exist. The door is numbered “41″ - this being a truncation of “413″, the most ubiquitous of Homestuck’s so-called “meme numbers”. I kinda envisioned the room as being the first on the fourth floor of the building.

(If I’m feeling cheeky, I’ll say that the other doors are the ones up in the site’s navigation bar - they literally exist outside the scope of the panels.)

I probably didn’t spend as much time as I should’ve perfecting this environment - the door’s very wobbly. My first attempt placed it at the end of the corridor, but I didn’t like the way that looked at all.

Just in terms of the site itself, there’s a couple of things to take note of. The first is the solo cup sitting at the top of page, next to the advertisement, which is also the story’s icon on the site - and its only splash of colour (well, except in the ads, which I don’t have any control over). The second is that the link to the next panel is “->” - a slight variation on the command used by Homestuck, which was “==>”. The significance of this should be obvious to Homestuck readers, but I’ll comment no further on either of these details until later.

(Fun fact: I didn’t find out that those big red American plastic party cups had an actual proper name, and that that name was frikkin’ solo cup, until well into the fanventure’s development, if not after I’d finished it entirely. One of my friends used the term in passing conversation - I can’t remember what about, because I was too busy freaking out internally. It’s like pottery; it rhymes.)

On panel 3 - once they’ve walked into the corridor - the lights have turned on, and the entire colour scheme for the comic flips. The idea of having automatic lights was present in the original script, but it wasn’t until pretty late in the fanventure’s development that I decided to make them plot-relevant!

Out of all the images, it’s the close-up of the door on panels 5-7 that comes closest to matching a shot description in the script. The original idea was that the door being locked was the inciting incident that would lead the protagonist to go look for their keys - so the title/command “RETRACE STEPS” would literally appear as they pressed the handle. In the first draft of that panel, this was in fact the case - but my prereaders didn’t think it looked that great, and I was inclined to agree; besides, the title also appeared prominently on the title page and during the credits.

It’s not until panel 7 that we get any words at all - a simple “huh”. In the original script, I made relatively heavy use of profanity in Alice’s dialogue - this was supposed to signify hostility. I wasn’t happy with how this came across, and completely backpedalled in the fanventure - the second-person narration is entirely devoid of swears. I wanted to portray your inability to curse to as a deficiency: you’re unable to fully express yourself. Like most aspects of your character, this isn’t something you’re supposed to consciously notice or understand until after the story’s twist is revealed.

Panel 8 includes a command: “Try door again.” Generally speaking, the commands used in Retrace Steps are much more perfunctory than those in Homestuck - they’re almost entirely devoid of snark, with many being only a single word.

This entire sequence has a lot of legwork to do in terms of laying out the situation in a believable manner without giving too much away. On panel 14, the narration lists your inventory: a phone, a packet of tissues, and a wallet. The phone and the wallet both play direct roles in the narrative, but I consciously chose to include the tissues because I think the word itself has connotations with illness, sadness, and loneliness.

It’s worth noting that these items are those that I personally carry about in real life. Other than the abstract geography of the corridor, this is perhaps the clearest example of me drawing directly from my own day-to-day experiences. The word “self-insert” is kind of a dirty word in a lot of ways, but the truth is that I wanted the protagonist of Retrace Steps to serve as both a self-insert and an audience surrogate. This is why I felt like the MSPA format would serve the story well.

(None of that is to say that you should draw conclusions about me as a person based on the behaviour of the character in the story. Superficially, they share a lot of my tics, but their actual thought processes and motivations are different in many ways.)

Panels 17-19 are just repeated images of the empty corridor; the lights turn off on panel 20, and the site’s colours briefly flip again. Heading into this project, I had the rough idea that I wanted to tell the story in a “nice” number of pages - maybe a hundred, maybe less, maybe more. I decided that, if I repeated the door image, I’d have a buffer to use to shorten or lengthen the final page count as needed - but that turned out not to be necessary. This little span establishes that the lights in the corridor are on a timer, a fact which turns out to be relevant down the line.

The first scene change occurs on panel 21, which shows a stairwell. My original version of this sequence confused basically everyone who saw it - I’d envisioned the camera as being at the bottom, looking up, but everyone presumed I’d done it from the top down. The current approach makes much more sense, as all of the lines of action in the image point towards its centre.

As you descend the stairs and thinks about your roommate, the narration rambles much more. In this story, I decided that use of the internet would be a signifier for loneliness in some way - the roommate has an old-fashioned phone and communicates only by text. I wanted to give the impression that they’re bad at checking their messages; preferring instead just to talk to people face-to-face. That’s not the whole story, though - to a certain extent, they actively ghost you.

Once more, I’m drawing pretty heavily from my own life experiences for this sequence. For a long time in high school, I used to have a terrible flip phone - my parents didn’t want me to have anything better. I eventually upgraded to a terrible smartphone, which I mostly used to play Hill Climb Racing and Glow Hockey. Late in high school, I wound up using a bulky Kindle Fire as a portable computer, with my brother’s old terrible smartphone in case I needed to call anyone; the phone was pretty much always out of battery. It was only within the last six months - halfway through my second year of university - that I got an actual honest-to-god good smartphone. This stuff becomes relevant again later, during the Pokémon GO sequences.

(As I said earlier, I didn’t have a roommate, but my neighbour did - his roommate kept strange hours, and I’m pretty sure most nights he didn’t come back to accommodation to sleep. They got along, but there was an arrangement in place there.)

The image of seeing someone at meals but never speaking to them struck me as a fairly strong one - in student accommodation, you’re forced to interact with people because you use the same amenities, but the extent to which you actually communicate with those people is a matter of personal choice. The narration uses the word “sit”, which I think implies a lack of understanding of that element of choice - you don’t sit together, therefore you cannot speak. The idea that you totally could sit together just doesn’t occur to you.

Anyway, panels 25-33 take place immediately outside the building. With public buildings like this, people who smoke are unlikely to stray far from the door - and the smell lingers for a while after they’re finished. Public smoking has always been one of my pet hates - I’m asthmatic - but I consider the extent to which it bothers me to be something of a character flaw. The protagonist of Retrace Steps is kinda built of flaws like this: things which sound reasonable but are rooted in their lack of empathy.

The narration uses the word “ramble” to describe the text sent to your roommate - later on, we learn that the word “rant” might’ve been more accurate.

This is the point where the story itself notes that it’s a Friday night - a fact which was previously stated in the very first line of its description. The idea of not doing anything on a Friday night is a pretty common symbol for loneliness; it’s the night when most people go out with friends, at the conclusion of the workweek. Tropes are tools - if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

The other symbol for loneliness in this sequence is slightly less obvious, I think - it’s when the reader kicks a single stone out onto the path. The narration notes that they “don’t know” why they did that; this was intended to mirror the story’s central mystery. In the original version, they kicked the stone from the path back in amongst the rest - the idea being that they’d kinda fallen by the wayside, and wanted not to be alone. I kinda go back and forth on which version I prefer, but they get the same thing across.

Panels 34-35 are each “unique” images, in that they only recur in the credits. It felt like a waste to spend a long time drawing complicated images like this without reusing them in any capacity, but I’m glad I did.

The first of these unique images was supposed to convey the city’s emptiness in a clear way. It’s probably one of my favourites, even if it’s pretty rough in places. The forced perspective is more strongly felt in this image than in any other in the fanventure, and it led me to mess up the scale of the protagonist - this was something that I only fixed after the comic was otherwise pretty much done.

I was on the fence as to whether or not to include the billboard. A lot of the imagery in the fanventure is very on-the-nose, but the billboard is easily the most blatant in this respect - the protagonist completely ignores the concept of self-improvement so they can play Pokémon GO. I ended up showing the panel to an uncredited friend, and they convinced me it was a good idea to keep it in.

The Pokémon GO stuff is pretty much when the fanventure jumps the shark, to be honest. You can tell, because the command - “Pokemon GO on your phone” - is a reference to a dumb thing Hillary Clinton said during the 2016 American presidential election.

See, the thing is, the vast majority of the game’s mechanics are designed to encourage going outside and interacting with others - you can ignore or circumvent this, but it’ll cost you one way or another. Which is fascinating to me! The game is easiest if you go out of your way to make friends with other people who play the game. This is a common theme throughout much of Nintendo’s output - and it somehow usually feels less cynical than the kinds of forced interaction you find in many other mobile games.

The bit that’s really fascinating, however, is the lengths people go to avoid these inconveniences. They’ll buy both versions of each new Pokémon game, rather than trading with someone who has the version they didn’t buy! They’ll buy a second Nintendo DS, just so they can get the Pokémon from one game to another! I can’t begrudge them, because I’ve certainly done similar things myself in the past, but I think you can certainly frame it in a way where it looks like all these gamers treat social interaction as an obstacle to overcome. Who’d’ve thought?

The narration on panel 37 ended up going through several revisions, thanks to feedback from Gitaxian. Back when I was new to the Homestuck Discord, Gitaxian was one of the people who made me feel welcome - we both really like this one obscure essay about the live-action Transformers movies (and totally recommend that you should read it). He responded pretty positively to Everything Is Red Now, a Spider-Man comic I made over a year ago, and was my first choice for a prereader on Retrace Steps.

Gitaxian found the sequence in its original form to be a little over-detailed, and suggested that I change its tone from “explaining the game” to “complaining about the game”. He also noted that making it “rantier” would be a way of concretely validating the roommate’s perspective. I followed his advice, and I’m much happier with where the story ended up as a result.

Knowing I’d be revisiting these panels later in the story, I ended up taking the time to polish them up a little: I added details of a fence and path in the background, and tweaked the hand in the foreground. By this point, I was starting to get pretty tired of drawing; of the project in general. I’d put aside other things I was working on, and had academic assignments to deal with as well.

Panel 40 is one of a couple of panels that I feel would benefit from similar polishing. The idea was that it’d be a top-down view of the street, with two streetlamps providing light. The round shadows would give the impression of a pair of eyes or binoculars, with the lampposts themselves being pupils - tying into the paranoia described in the narration.

I thought that, by zooming out and letting the darkness creep into frame, I’d be able to force something of a tonal shift - and I think I was reasonably successful in this regard, particularly as the colours of the site itself flip once more. The prose also shifts slightly in tone, as the tail-end of the rant leads into the realisation that something’s wrong.

In its original form, people were confused by the image - the shading wasn’t nearly heavy enough, and the composition was unusual. This is where the art style works against me; I only have two colours to work with, and it can be hard to distinguish between detail and shadow at such a low resolution.

(There’s an animated music video for SIAMÉS’ “The Wolf” which uses a similar monochrome-plus-red palette to Retrace Steps - I saw it long before development on the story started and forgot about it until just now, so I don’t think it was an influence on the fanventure, but it’s definitely worth a watch!)

In the very first draft of the script, the protagonist found the key to their room in their hood. Seriously. Like, it’d start raining, they’d put their hood up and there’d be the key. I couldn’t think of a good ending, so I just came up with something daft and called it a day. The “doughnut offering” aspect of the story didn’t appear until I redrafted the script, a little ways into the film’s development (probably before we shot anything), but I can’t remember exactly how it came about. Originally, the script simply ended with the door getting slammed shut - the last line being a “what the actual fuck” from Sam/Alice.

(At the time when I was writing the story, I didn’t make a habit of buying mini doughnuts. I still don’t, except for on some occasions when I’m eating at a friend’s house and want to bring something low-commitment - even then, it’s usually cookies or muffins or full-sized doughnuts. Presumably, it was Retrace Steps which influenced that particular habit.)

On at least a literal level, the story’s message is “buy people doughnuts if you want them to be friends with you”. But naturally the actual message - and, I think, the reality - is that it’s not so transactional; really it’s just about assuming the best of people and being nice to them. Of course, there’s plenty of pitfalls in that approach - I’d be tempted to write a whole ‘nother story about them, if I didn’t think it’d end up being a little too dark and deconstructive. Be nice! That’s all I’m saying.

At least when I was writing the script, I’d actually planned for the protagonist to buy doughnuts from the local Sainsbury’s store. We have a Tesco store as well, plus a bunch of bigger supermarkets, but the Sainsbury’s is usually the quietest - it’s expensive and poorly-stocked. Plus, I just felt like it’d look better on-camera.

(If you’re not from the UK, all you need to know is that Tesco and Sainsbury’s are the two biggest supermarket chains. Well, apparently Asda overtook Sainsbury’s last month, but we’ll see how long that lasts. I’d say they’re generally pretty-much-indistinguishable, but at least in my mind I associate Sainsbury’s more closely with the middle classes - Tesco, meanwhile, is ubiquitous.)

When it came to adapting the script, I realised I could use any supermarket I wanted, and I picked Tesco. Specifically an “Express” store, which is a smaller shop found in town centres and the like. It fitted the story better - and besides, I’ve always liked the colloquialism “Tescos”. As in “aight mum I’m poppin off Tescos, our Jack says they’ve got a bogof on Lucozade, works out a quid for two litres so I’m buzzin, you after anythin or nah”.

(As part of let’s-call-it-research for the story, I found an eight-page thread on Mumsnet where a mum asks “am I being unreasonable to get really annoyed with people who call Tesco ‘Tescos’?” - this was immensely funny to me, and pretty much cemented my decision to use a real supermarket in the story as opposed to a made-up one.)

So yeah, panels 41-44 take place outside this Tescos. It was my brother - credited as “patipon” - who noted that I needed to use more solid black in the image. Most of what we discussed about the story took place in voice calls, which is a shame; historically, it’s been uncommon for me to solicit him for feedback on projects like this one. I consulted him on several of this story’s panels - he devotes much more time to graphics and artwork than I do - and his suggestions were always useful.

The prose on panel 43 is probably one of the bits I’m most proud of. It’s an awkward mix of metaphors coming from a character who isn’t used to being able to think when they’re at this particular place. I like the phrase “fumbled passes in the aisles” a lot.

(Gospar, one of my IRL friends and another prereader on Retrace Steps, occasionally graces us with the saying “ah, another day, another butchered social interaction”. Meanwhile, I went through a short-but-embarassing phase of butchering the trivial social interaction of “how are you?” by replying “I’m here” - something which I can’t excuse, but which I sure can immortalise in a webcomic.)

(All of this talk of Tescos reminds me of a draft I’ve had sitting around on my hard drive forever - the beginning of a first chapter which I wrote early in secondary school. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic snow-covered Britain where people travel around in sailboats on skis, and opens with some guy going into a buried Tescos for supplies. There, he runs into some orphan, who persuades the guy to let him hitch a ride on the snow-boat - snoat? Sure, whatever, snoat. The twist was going to be that the guy was planning to nuke some settlement, for reasons which I never wrote down and have since forgotten, and the kid would work this out and have to kill the guy to stop him. I note this simply to say that, while my stories may have gotten slightly less dumb and bad since I started writing, it seems that Tescos will be an enduring feature.)

(Wintry post-apocalyptic settings will also be an enduring feature, come to think of it: around the time I was writing Retrace Steps, I was also running a Dungeons & Dragons campaign for some friends which was basically standard fantasy - only it was set on an infinite-in-every-direction ski slope. I’m not a very good Dungeon Master, so I let the campaign die after a handful of sessions over the course of the year - which is a shame, because I’d planned a KILLER TWIST for that story too. Anyway, enough nonsense - back to Pokémon GO.)

I suppose at this point I should note that the two Pokémon you run into are Dugtrio and Magneton. These two are the evolved forms of Diglett and Magnemite, and are kinda-unique in that they’re literally just three of their previous stage grouped together. Hopefully, the symbolism of someone trying to obtain these Pokémon - and only succeeding after offering them a berry - should be clear enough.

(Note that the narration on panel 46 says you’re “not sure why this thing wants the berry” - at this point in the story, the protagonist doesn’t understand the significance of gestures like this.)

(I’ve yet to obtain either of these Pokémon in-game myself; Diglett and Magnemite are surprisingly hard to come by.)

The second half of the fanventure - from panel 51 all the way to panel 100 - takes place back inside the corridor. There’s a lot in the way of repeated panels with very little narration here - I was going for a more introspective tone, and this seemed like a good way to achieve that.

On panel 52, the narration notes that you plan to message your internet friends, then call your parents. It’s a little beat, but I felt like there was something kinda sad about the idea of having a closer connection with people you’ve never met than with your own parents. This is a pretty irrational way of looking at it - in my experience, most people on the internet who talk about their parents have pretty frayed relationships with them. Besides, there are plenty of cases where random peers will be better-equipped to help with specific problems - it’s just a case of balancing that against the fact that your own parents will probably care about you far more than any of those people.

I wanted to convey the image of someone who has the vast majority of their social interactions online. This theme is crucial to Homestuck itself, but while Homestuck demonstrates it by communicating its story pretty much entirely in chatlogs, in Retrace Steps I try to communicate it by showing everything except the chatlogs. Homestuck kills off everyone except a bunch of internet friends and their guardians; Retrace Steps just quietly omits everyone except a bunch of strangers standing in a room ha ha ha whoops spoilers.

Anyway, on panel 53, we start to see an environmental change caused by these strangers. For the first time, it seems like you’re not completely alone in this world.

The light's motion-activated - it turns on when you open the door, and then turns off again after around ten minutes. You've been gone much longer than that... meaning somebody else must have triggered it since then.

While working on this commentary, I decided that the original text of panel 55 - present in the story since its original release on 04/04/2019 and preserved in the above quote - was kinda overwrought and clumsy. Usually I’m pretty loathe to make edits to a story after it’s out on the internet, but this one felt acceptable - “Why was the light on when you arrived?” is much more succinct way of communicating what’s going on.

This panel’s artwork is also pretty clumsy - in case you’re having trouble parsing it, that’s supposed to be your head at the bottom. I tried to put a bit of light shading on it, but I’m not really happy with the result. Like I say, at this point I was getting pretty tired of drawing. Nah, I’m not changing it.

On panel 58, there’s a rare bit of onomatopoeia as you finally think to knock on the door. The negative space encroaches in from the right... but what does it hide?

Oh hey, it’s your roommate!

I think to a certain extent, this is another confusing image - Gitaxian observed that it didn’t really make much sense spatially. It’s kinda supposed to be a side-on cutaway, but that doesn’t really come across - I briefly tried adding a wood grain, to communicate that it’s the open door, but that didn’t make much sense at this scale and only confused matters further. In the end, I tweaked the boundary between the door and the corridor to give the impression of a couple of hinges and called it a day.

Panel 61 is, I guess, the big twist. You wanted to know where everyone is? Surprise! They’re in your room! Having a party! And you weren’t invited!

I wanted the reader to have a second to contemplate this, so the next couple of panels swap back-and-forth between you and the doorway. To underscore the silliness of the twist, one of the people in the back takes a big long sluuuurp from their solo cup - this breaks the spell, and you point for them all to leave.

It’s panel 67 that breaks the narration for the first time in the story. I wanted to present the roommate’s dialogue as a sharp contrast to the inner voice of the protagonist - it’s full of abbreviations, completely devoid of punctuation, and written entirely in solo-cup-red. The roommate simply sighs that you “never change”, and slams the door on you (with yet another cheeky bit of onomatopoeia appearing on-panel).

The idea that being around other people somehow supplants your inner thoughts is a very deliberate one - the commands cease entirely, the narration goes away. In these moments, we see you how everyone else sees you - as someone who’s pretty much entirely silent. On panels 69-70 there’s simply some ellipses, which kinda lengthen into a brief return of narration as you’re left on your own once more.

The reason this party’s taking place in “YOUR room” - as noted in the narration on panel 71 - is simply to show a feeling of entitlement. On the surface, you’re mad that you can’t get into your room - but you're also just feeling like people should invite you to parties.

Hopefully, the questions on panel 72 and panel 74 should be answering themselves by this point. You don’t know it at the time, but these will prove to be the last pieces of narration in the story.

After you’ve had some time to sit in the corridor and feel sorry for yourself, your roommate starts feeling bad and comes out to offer a sincere-but-backhanded apology. We’re into the last quarter of the comic now - starting with panel 76, there’s no text outside of what is spoken by your roommate.

The command used to advance to the next page has changed from “->” to “-->”. The story isn’t about just one person any more.

(This device is lifted directly from Homestuck, which switched from the command “==>” - used when the comic had four main characters - to “======>” when it swapped to a cast of twelve. Many fanventures - such as Oceanfalls - riff on this concept further, and mine is no exception.)

Out of all the text in the story, I’m probably happiest with the monologue on panel 79 and panel 80. I think it speaks for itself.

(As I always find myself saying, these commentaries kinda show that I don’t trust my stories to speak for themselves. I did hold off on writing this one for a couple of months, but there was lots of behind-the-scenes stuff I wanted to get on the record and I ultimately couldn’t help myself. The truth is that pretty much nobody reads these things - the commentaries, or the stories they’re for - and so the whole thing’s pretty much for my own benefit. I get to declare what I was going for, you get to decide whether or not I got it.)

Panels 81-95 are pretty much a frame-by-frame animation of you offering your roommate the doughnuts, and them leading you into the party. It’s basically two actions, but I try my best to draw them out as long as possible - by this point, the story’s said pretty much everything it needs to, and now it’s all just... emotional payoff? I feel like I’ve never been much good with character arcs, but I’m proud of how this turned out.

As promised, panels 96-99 are a straight repeat of panels 17-19 - the automatic lights turn off and the site’s colours flip for the last time, neatly mirroring the story’s first two panels in its last two.

Back in the kitchen, she opens the cupboard again and grabs the box of mini doughnuts.

She returns to her door and knocks again.

           ALICE    I bought doughnuts?

There is a long pause. The door suddenly opens and Bob pokes his head around, reaches out to grab like three doughnuts from the box, and then darts back inside. The door slams shut again.

           ALICE    Hey!

VII. Animation is harder than I thought.

This story is titled Retrace Steps because, in its original script form, it mostly focused on somebody retracing their steps in the hopes that they’d find their keys. The fanventure, however, drops this aspect of the plot entirely - leaving it with something of an artifact title. Maybe I should’ve come up with an alternate title, but I didn’t. On some level, it now simply refers to the trip to Tescos - on another, I think it implies that something’s been lost. I think it was the nagging feeling that the title no longer held enough significance that led me to create the story’s final flash.

If you haven’t read Homestuck, all you need to know is that pages with commands that are prefixed with an “[S]” are usually longer animations set to music, used for particularly important moments in the plot (or, just as often, for random chicanery). Having a flash of this sort is a point of prestige for fanventures - especially if it approaches any real length of complexity. I’d vaguely liked the idea of letting music play a fairly prominent role in the short film, and it felt right to return to those roots.

There wasn’t really any question as to which song I’d pick, either. See, back in college, I ran this terrible meme page called Summer Meme Sundae. It was absolute garbage. Please don’t click that link. Basically, its deal was that - for the latter half of its run - I tried to introduce something of a plot across the “memes”, wherein the page’s mascot got castaway and wound up in Australia. It was very silly and absolutely incomprehensible. Like I say, don’t look at it. This isn’t reverse psychology, it’s legitimately unfunny and bad. Anyway, the last post I made was something of a rudimentary flash in its own right - set to “Pizza for Breakfast” from The Meme Friends’ Last Week’s Pizza EP. I know basically nothing about The Meme Friends, but I thiiink they were some randos on 4chan’s /mu/ board.

It’s fair to say that the aesthetic of Last Week’s Pizza, which includes such tracks as “Cold Pizza”, “Everyone I Ever Loved is Now Dead”, and “Executive Pizza Party (Business)”, kinda appeals to me. If you’re reading Retrace Steps, the chances that you’ve heard the track before are next to nil - it comes with zero baggage. Moreover, it’s from a freely-distributed independent project created by a collective that hasn’t put out anything in years - it’s extremely unlikely that anybody’s going to come and tell me off for using it.

I specifically picked “No Forks, No Knives, It’s Pizza Time” because I felt like its tone was closest to that of the story, and because it has a relatively short runtime of just over two minutes - which still ended up being a little too long, but I don’t think it turned out too bad.

The flash opens on the image of the door in the corridor from the previous panel, which is gradually cut into smaller and smaller pieces by black lines until it disappears altogether. Cue title. One of the reasons I like the flash format - aside from the lack of antialiasing - is that you really have no way of telling how long the video’s going to be or what happens except by watching it. There’s none of YouTube’s functionality for skipping around - you’re forced to sit and watch the entire thing start-to-finish without stopping.

(I think Retrace Steps is definitely best read in a single sitting, and the final flash is a big part of that. My fourth prereader, Multivac of the Homestuck Discord server, was unable to watch the flash at first - I forget why - and found the story unclear. After watching the flash, he seemed to backpedal on this sentiment. Time will tell whether his initial assessment was correct; I picked Multivac because he’d previously responded positively to Everything Is Red Now, and because I’d usually consider his reaction to something to be a pretty decent rough baseline for the general reaction of the Homestuck Discord server.)

When stuff starts happening, it starts happening fast - you see the protagonist’s descent down the stairs again, but this time you see all three panels at once, as if there’s more than one person on the stairs. The minute you get outside, you start seeing entirely new people - many with red accents of some kind. Someone smoking, someone who’s been shopping, someone with a rucksack...

The people outside Tescos had a little more in the way of thought put into them. On the left, there’s a homeless person, and someone walking by with headphones on. Over on the far right, there’s someone holding their phone out in front of them - they’re wearing a hat famously worn by Ash Ketchum in the Pokémon anime, just in case there’s any doubt as to what game they’re playing. Someone sorta tired-looking crosses away from the rest. Everyone in the frame’s kinda collectively ignoring the two people holding hands.

(Textually, Retrace Steps is a story about... platonic fulfillment? If that’s a phrase that makes sense? My personal take is that the protagonist of this story struggles to create and maintain friendships. However, I tried to leave room for interpretation - particularly in terms of this section of the flash - and I think a reading definitely exists that brings in more romantic subtext.)

(Actually, I already kinda explored this last year - much less effectively - in Another Son. Like in that story, I wanted the audience to understand why the characters are lonely - but I used a much more sympathetic approach this time around, which crucially makes you actually want the story’s protagonist to stop being lonely. Something which bothers me about certain stories - and this is a really common failing of music videos, which lack the introspection of prose - is when the narrative takes its protagonist and frames things in a way which says “you should feel sorry for this person” while they proceed to do really unsympathetic things. If you’re going to give them a victory, the audience should feel like they actually deserve it!)

After a brief segment where you finally catch that Dugtrio, the flash cycles back through the various locations until we arrive back in the corridor. This sequence was added mostly to pad for time, but also serves to bring things full circle for the flash’s final shots. On the final beats of each bar - which fall on a higher note - the colours flip; this was purely an aesthetic choice.

The next section of the flash is just credits, which I kinda wanted to use to lull the audience into a false sense of security. See, the original plan was for the final image of the comic to just be you, standing completely alone, holding a solo cup - an ending which I think is much more ambiguous.

I still think this original ending provokes a much stronger emotional reaction - and indeed, it did at the time. As Gospar said, “also you sure you wanna keep the sad end / I think the fade out on others and the static / sort of implied they hadn’t changed?” Gitaxian agreed - “I think having the crowd fade to just the two of them, and then ending there, would be the best ending”. I’d already considered doing that, but had decided against it for reasons I’ve forgotten.

See, by this point in the story, you’ve made this connection with your roommate - but everyone else remains a stranger. I like this ending for its optimism: instead of saying “you're still alone”, it says “this is a good start”.

Oh, and remember the solo cup that’s been sitting up next to the ad? Yeah, that’s gone now.

She protests and knocks on the door again. Just before she kicks it, it suddenly opens again. Bob has like three doughnuts in his mouth.

           BOB    These are pretty good actually.

He grabs the whole box and opens the door fully, lightly beckoning for Alice to enter. She does so. The door closes.

We cut to inside the room. Everyone is standing in cramped, uncomfortable silence. Somebody hands Alice a red plastic cup.

CUT TO BLACK.

THE END

VIII. Knowing when to shut up is harder than I thought.

I just went to Tescos and bought a box of mini doughnuts.

(I didn’t set out to do that, but they were selling a single box for next to nothing and I felt like it was too serendipitous to ignore.)

It’s the end of the year. Classes finished over a month ago. I always end up staying for a good while after, because doing so gives me more time to work on projects like this, but most of my friends end up leaving before me - in other words, I don’t have anyone to share the doughnuts with.

(They have strawberry-flavoured icing and multicoloured sprinkles, and they taste frikkin’ great, so I can’t say I’m too beat up about that.)

I’ve played very little Pokémon GO since I started working on this fanventure. I... think I kinda ruined it for myself?

When I finished Retrace Steps, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to do the fanventure format for a while. That lasted all of about four days, after which I started Huskyquest. It seems silly to give away this new fanventure’s plot here, so all I’ll say is this: it’s got dogs in it, it’s got more than three colours, and you should definitely drop it a like because I’ll hopefully be picking it back up again pretty soon.

In the meantime, feel free to peruse all the other things I made on this blog! There should be another project coming out here very soon, so if you wanna be informed when that happens, drop me a follow either here or on twitter. And of course, if you have any questions, my ask box is always open. Thanks for reading!

...You’re still here?

It’s over.

Pokémon GO home.

> Go.

[the-serendipityblog-blog]

Instagram Without Moderation Is Unhealthy

You’re standing outside waiting for your ride to pick you up. They said they’d be there in five minutes. There’s no one you know around. What do you do?

a) Go to a random person and try to become their friend.

b) Pull out the book you’ve been reading.

c) Start scrolling through Instagram

Odds are, you chose C. (And if you didn’t then congratulations, you are in the minority.) In the twenty-first century, we humans have become so dependent on technology, maybe even addicted, and the worst one of them all is social media (in my opinion). At first, these websites and apps―Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc.― were created so people could stay in touch with more distant friends and family whom they couldn’t visit as often. Nowadays, it is a tool for stalking, comparing, starting fights, inducing jealousy, causing insecurities, and a lot more. Here are some ways social media, specifically Instagram, do more harm than good. These are all things I know from my own experience, another person’s experience, or through research.

Lowers self-esteem. This one is quite obvious since many people have talked about and experienced this before, but it really is a big deal. This study shows that social media use and depression are highly correlated. You must know about all the Instagram models, who literally get paid just to be pretty. (Okay, that was kind of an exaggeration, but you get the idea.) They are usually making a cute pose by the beach in their $300 bikini, showing off their flawless curves and tan skin as the sunlight hits their face perfectly. A photo like this would earn them around $3,000 to $5,000. Of course, the average female does not look like this. A study done by Clark University states that women who looked at images of slender models “produced lower self-esteem and satisfaction with their weight as compared to women viewing more robust models”. Constantly being bombarded with these supposedly “perfect” images of women will influence us to believe that this is how we are supposed to look. If we do not size 00, weighing 90 pounds, donning clear and glowing skin, and flashing a pearly white smile, then we are doing something wrong. Basically, this creates a false definition of beauty. One must look exactly like the models or celebrities on Instagram, or they are not pretty. If we check Instagram right when we wake up, right before we go to bed, and any other extra time in the day, that’s a couple hundred photos per day. Out of those, if about half of them are pictures of “perfect girls” that’s a lot of negative influence. (Unless you’re like me and only follow meme pages.) It’s basically becoming ingrained into our heads how we are supposed to look. Every picture of a girl with unattainable beauty standards is a message that says, “Look at this beautiful girl. It sucks you don’t look like that. Guess you’re not pretty.” I can say from my personal experience that after scrolling through Instagram for a few hours, I definitely feel a lot more insecure and unhappy with my life. It is very unhealthy to feel forced to conform to these false standards.

Causes jealousy. Another negative thing about Instagram is that it causes jealousy. “I can’t believe she went to the Maldives over spring break” or “Why did she get more likes than me? I’m way prettier than her.” The thing about social media is that you can see what everyone else is doing, what they have, who they hang out with, etc. Without social media, there isn’t much of a way to know these things unless someone actually brags about it. That’s what social media is. It’s just a socially acceptable way to brag about what you have or pretend to have. Just because someone is wearing an expensive outfit doesn’t mean they’re rich. They could just be trying on clothes in the dressing room and taking in a selfie in it with no intention of actually buying it. Just because they are constantly posting pictures of them with other people doesn’t mean they are popular or they have a lot of friends. A lot of it is staged. Yes, there are some genuine people and posts on Instagram, but from my experience, I can say that they are a minority. It sort of reminds me of KUWTK. A reality show that isn’t actually “real”. They act like it’s real, but actually, a lot of it is staged for attention. They don’t show you everything, they only show you what they want you to see. And obviously who wouldn’t want other people to think they are popular, pretty, and rich. Of course, I would like it if people thought of me like that. But that doesn’t necessarily mean I am actually like that. When you go on Instagram and see everyone having an amazing time, portraying a perfect life, that doesn’t mean their whole life is perfect. They are just showing random glimpses of when it is. Seeing all these false perceptions of perfect lives makes you feel worse about your own, and jealous of everyone you know. “Everyone’s lives are amazing. My life totally sucks compared to that.” If people posted everything that happened in their life, and not just what they want you to see, it wouldn’t be anything to be jealous of at all. Not everyone will look cute right when they wake up. Not everyone gets to constantly travel over the world. Not everyone gets to wear designer clothes with professionally done makeup. Everyone has insecurities and hardships. Nobody’s life is perfect, no matter how perfect it may seem.

Provides a distraction. I’m very sure you all know about this one without me having to explain it. Instagram is a distraction. So is all social media. The constant notifications of likes, follows, comments, direct messages, and more, the constant thinking about what your next post is going to be, the application just sitting there, constantly bugging you like a scratch that needs to be itched. You know that horrible feeling of regret you feel after scrolling through your feed for hours when you’re supposed to be doing something else. I remember when I was in middle school, being new to Instagram, I would come home from school and spend several hours scrolling through my feed, explore page, and stalking other blogs until I felt groggy and my eyes burned, not even starting my homework until after dinner. Now, I rarely ever check it, and I rarely ever want to check it. Partially because I’ve had it for a long time and it’s not as new and exciting anymore, but also because I made a conscious effort to take a detox from it after realizing this is such a horrible way to spend so many hours of my life. Not only is Instagram a distraction, but it is a bad distraction. Hanging out with friends, for example, is a distraction, but it is a way better distraction than scrolling through confidence-reducing, insecurity-producing, jealousy-causing Instagram. It’s like a lose-lose situation. You’re wasting time and feeling worse about yourself.

Defined by a number. Nowadays, people’s worth is measured by numbers on Instagram. How popular you are depends on the number of followers you have, how pretty you are depends on the number of likes you get on a selfie, how amazing your life is determined by how often you post, and this is absolutely false. I know for a fact that at least two-thirds of my current Instagram followers are totally random people who don’t know me in real life. And only about 10 percent of my followers actually “like” my photos. Does that mean I’m unpopular or ugly? Not necessarily. People are constantly checking their photo right after posting it to see how many likes it received and deleting it if it doesn’t get enough. They try so hard to gain followers by asking random people to follow them for a follow back or promoting their account in the comment section of a popular photo. Have you ever looked at someone’s profile and thought “Wow they don’t have many followers. They must be a loser who doesn’t have any friends,” or do you think “Wow they don’t have many followers. They must not use Instagram very often.”? This shows that this fear of being judged by a number is an irrational thought that isn’t very true at all.

Creates pressure. I’ve already partially covered this topic in the previous four topics because they are all forms of pressure. When a person has an active personal Instagram account, they tend to feel obligated to post constantly and update their followers with their lives. Now, with Instagram stories, users can give hourly updates on what they’re doing, similar to Snapchat. While experiencing a fun event or going to an aesthetic or picturesque place, they feel pressured to take a good picture to post. I am so guilty of this. Every time I go anywhere that has potential to make a nice Instagram photo I suddenly feel stressed out because I feel as if I have a 100-point homework assignment to take an Instagram worthy photo in five minutes and if I am not able to, I feel really disappointed like I wasted my opportunity. I have been making a conscious effort lately to relax a little more when it comes to Instagram photos and not stress out so much about visiting a place without taking a photo. Sometimes it’s healthy to just live in the moment instead of worrying about documenting it.

Those were a few of the many reasons why excessive Instagramming is unhealthy. Don’t get me wrong―Instagram is a great tool and it’s totally okay use it regularly, but in excess, it can be harmful. Moderating how much time we spend on this app, and how much we let it and the people on it affect us can help Instagram be just an app and not a source of stress and unhappiness.

[unnaturalcuriosity]

UnnaturalCuriousity’s Rules Post {For Mobile Users}

{icon art by @stoplickingthingsweird}

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Things to Know

🔬 Please respect my rules and boundaries. I will give polite warnings if someone breaks a minor rule, but if it's obvious that you're blatantly disregarding what I've said here and/or are breaking serious rules, then that shows a lack of respect. Therefore I reserve the right to take action by directly confronting you and/or ending further interactions IC and/or OOC.

🔬 Since Dr. Kantalo’s job is to know a lot about other alien species, and she is meant to be a highly intelligent character, she will know in depth information about canon alien races from Universe 7. (Saiyans, Namekians etc.) This will include things like what makes them weak in combat. (For Saiyans it’s having their tail pulled unless it’s been trained. For Namekians it’s whistling.) If your muse is an OC whose backstory includes any contact with the Planet Trade Organization/Frieza Force, it would make sense for her to learn/know moderate to advanced information about your OC’s alien race when we interact. However, in order to avoid making you feel like I’m godmodding/metagaming I will ask permission OOC to mention such details and plot with you before using such information in a response. If having my muse know things about your OC muse’s race that comes from your about page and headcanon posts bothers you, please let me know and we can come up with reasons for why she wouldn’t know them in that great of depth. Know that having Dr. Kantalo possessing knowledge about your muse’s race isn’t the same as knowing their personal history/background. Not unless we plot for them to have some existing relationship prior to the start of our first thread. 🔬 If you are a personal blog following me because you are interested in my original characters and the content I publish here, all I ask is that you don't reblog asks that involve my RP partners and don't reblog our roleplay threads. That's considered rude in the RPC as it can interfere with our activity feed and our ability to track threads. I would also prefer if people didn't reblog my headcanon posts that are specific to my roleplay portrayal of my muses. Reblogging posts of artwork done of my OC is fine, so long as you don't erase the credits of who drew it and you don't try to claim credit for making my OCs. 🔬 If you'd like to draw my OC/s I would be thrilled to see it! You can submit it or post the artwork and tag this blog (and if you want to my personal blog, @raxceni). Make sure to credit me as the person who owns/made the OC/s you drew. 🔬 I am 18+ and so is my muse. Topics that are Safe for Tumblr but are still better suited for a mature audience from the past and present are tagged as #lemon goodness or #touch of citrus if it's questionably mature. Past and present content that I believe needs a trigger warning are tagged with #tw; _____ for possible triggering content. If you have specific triggers let me know and I’ll do my best to remember and accommodate. {Trigger Warning Tags Master Post link} 🔬 I will never hold it against a person if they want to unfollow me or drop me as a roleplay partner for any reason. If you wish to speak to me about the reasons why, you may do so but please be civil. 🔬 I consider myself a Continuity Queen™ which means I remember things and want to keep relationships and serious rp threads consistent. The little things are important to me, but not to the point where it interferes with enjoyment of roleplaying. If your muse is struggling to interact with mine, you can talk to me about do-overs and re-plotting. I may discuss ways we can salvage the relationship with what we’ve already done, but if that doesn’t work out doing things over is fine. (But it must be communicated to me!!!) A do-over that won't guarantee that they'll get along the way you or I want though. If I see you trying and putting in effort, I'll return that effort on my end. Likewise, if you notice any inconsistencies in our thread on my end, let me know and we can correct the issue together.

Mun Activity & Selectivity

🔬 I am selective for this roleplay blog due to time. That means I’m not going to roleplay with anyone I’m not following/mutuals with.  I’m a busy/easy to tire tired person that tires easily due to some health issues I’ve been dealing with since 2018. I also run two other rp blogs. I won’t force myself to roleplay with people I don’t feel a strong enough interest with in terms of their muse, roleplay writing style, etc. I will always encourage people to talk to me, but know that it won’t guarantee anything. It’s nothing personal if I choose not to roleplay with you. Not everyone is a good roleplay partner for each other, and it’s not about being “better” or “worse” than someone else. I don’t mind telling you why I’m not interested, but don’t be rude or try to force interactions. 🔬 I ask that nobody tags me in serious roleplay or IC interaction threads without speaking with me first and getting my consent so we can plot things out. (Unless I reach out to you first IC or OOC.) Especially if we aren't following each other. Mutuals can send IC interaction asks if I reblog memes. If non-mutuals ignore this rule I will not respond to the starter and I may even block you because you haven't taken the time to read my rules or notice my header information that clearly states that this blog is selective. 🔬 If we start to/continue to roleplay together please be patient with me and keep in mind that I will be slow to respond to our threads. As you probably know I run two other canon muse blogs, and they are fairly active. You can always come talk with me about our thread/s and plot with me to give direction to our thread/s that engages both our muses mutually. If you feel like a thread got lost and/or it's been awhile since we last spoke or I last responded come talk to me. You can check if I'm keeping track of a thread by visiting my {Thread Tracker link.}

Unacceptable Roleplay Etiquette:

🔬 Various types of powerplay, godmoding, force shipping, etc. 🔬 Toxic behaviors and attitudes (like jealousy) that cause problems for yourself and others. 🔬 Muns projecting themselves into their character so much that muse = mun. 🔬 Muses and/or muns who are under 18 approaching me and my muse for shipping and/or smut. 🔬 Using me and my muse for any reason that isn’t for IC plot that’s planned. 🔬 Muns assuming that muse = mun and treating me poorly because of it. 🔬 Genuine lack of respect for muns as people who come first before our hobby. 🔬 Muns who create rp blogs on a whim and delete/abandon them with little to no notice frequently once they lose interest in that muse, and not because the mun is just busy IRL or having health issues. Depending on the offense, I will first speak with you about the issue. However, if the bad behavior doesn’t stop or I don’t like how you respond, I am well within my right to drop threads and not interact with you. I have a zero tolerance policy for toxic people and their abusive antics. If I find out you are guilty of being malicious towards anyone in the rp community presently or have in the past and continue to be toxic, I am not obligated to give you a second chance. I came here to have fun, not instruct adults on how to be decent human beings.

Writing Fight Threads With Me

🔬 I am selective with who I write fight scenes with. Some people make it awkward because of what they consider to be godmodding etc. and because of that I often lose interest in those threads. 🔬 You MUST SPEAK TO ME OOC if you're interested in doing a thread where our muses fight or spar.

How to Treat the Muse

🔬 DO NOT treat my muse like she's here to dote on and worship your muse, regardless of any connections/alliances she might have to other canon DBZ characters. She follows her orders, and respects her superiors and co-workers, but she's not here a push-over. 🔬 Dr. Kantalo may be a female OC, but she's not here for romance and smut. She's not that kind of woman. If you treat her like she's a sexual prize to own or win over, you're proving to me that you have no idea what she's really like, and that you haven't read my rules. 🔬 If you approach my muse with insults and an attitude, expect that she'll remember the things you say and do. While she's got a friendly disposition and she's not easily offended, Dr. Kantalo can be quite opportunistic. Even vindictive. Give her a reason not to like you, and your muse may regret it.

Stance on Shipping

🔬 In general, I am not interested in shipping with my OCs. Moya is a NPC kind of OC and Dr. Kantalo is Aro-Ace (meaning she doesn't experience either romantic attraction or sexual attraction to other people) and she’s physically unable to reproduce. Pursuing a ship with her seems pointless from my perspective. Emotionally she'd be weird to ship with too. In general I'm not interested in shipping with my OCs. 🔬 I have written her in a domestic partnership that lacked typical romantic dynamics and was not sexual with a friend of mine in the past. Neither labeled themselves as a "couple" either. While I doubt she'll be open to another domestic partnership, I wouldn't want to rule out the possibility of it happening either. 🔬 REMINDER: If there is any shipping stuff going on it won’t happen with muses or muns under 18 years of age.

Adult Themes

🔬 As of 12/17/18, it is supposedly alright to write erotica based on Tumblr’s guidelines, but I have no interest in writing smut on Tumblr. Nor am I keen about writing it with my OCs. 🔬 Dr. Kantalo isn't sex repulsed and she will speak of sex in a straightforward manner from a scientific point of view. If sex comes up as a topic in her posts, I will tag it with #lemon goodness or #touch of citrus. 🔬 While she's not repulsed by sex, Dr. Kantalo doesn’t feel sexual desires/urges. She may get curious about it and discuss it analytically. I would prefer it if you don't approach me and my muse for adult situations where she takes an active part in them. If you want to do so for the sake of comedy to get your muse rejected that's fine. But if I feel like you're getting pushy/forceful I will end things in a manner that makes you and your muse look foolish for not understanding that "no means no" along with ending communication and IC interactions with you.

If you've read these rules up to this point and want me to know, send me an ask saying, "I love science!" This isn't a password or requirement for me to interact with you. I just like knowing that people read my rules.