#probably should have put that first but I'm NOT reordering these tags

[makadragontamer]

okay. okay okay okay flying off the cuff several hours past bedtime because I need to Purge The Thoughts so I can sleep before my job (ugh) BUT I'm halfway through ep 22 of the Wizard the Witch and the Wild One (Suvi (my beloved) JUST rolled the seven to lie to the public transit and I went OKAY THAT FALLOUT IS FOR POST-SLEEP so no one say SHIT about anything past that) and I'm kind of obsessed with that horribly flubbed conversation with Steel about Ame needing to leave Right Now Immediately

Because Steel (sword of the citadel) (very tired) (three hours of sleep) so CLEARLY heard "threat" and went "I must protect Ame" and totally fucking missed (because Ame (young) (stressed) (unfamiliar with wizard thought patterns) did not articulate it very well rip) that it's MOSTLY (mostly, these witches are still INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS) that the threat is a METAPHYSICAL threat.

Steel they don't need you to protect them from being physically killed, they need you to give Ame a ride home so she can grab some shit before she accidentally no call/no shows her quarterly meeting and gets fucking fired!

Steel she just needs her incredibly well connected friend to get her past the police barricade so she can get to her job!! Steel!!!

[kaiasky]

Complete-ish Guide To Settings You Might Want to Change

These instructions will be for desktop, because the settings are easier to find there. You can do the same on mobile, but it might be in different places.

Dash settings

Your dashboard is broken down into several feeds, including "Following" and "For You".

"Following" is primarily the posts of people you follow, "For You" is algorithmic.

If you just joined, "For You" is default, if you're a longtime user it's "Following". You can change this in the settings on the right

A lot of longtime users will tell you that the Following feed is where we spend most of our time. But try out all the feeds, and see what you like most.

The settings that are settings:

To start, click the settings gear under the account icon (the abstract person head).

This should take you to the General tab. Key settings:

Community Labels: By default anything NSFW is silently hidden. You can change how each subtype is handled.

Hide Additional Mature Content: If you have an iPhone disable this or it'll hide every post from you on the off-chance it contains porn.

If you're under 18 as determined by the birthdate you entered on signup, you can't change these. (If you want them on, you'll have to make a new account and lie)

Under the "Dashboard" tab, you can enable timestamps, which is mostly just nice information to have. sometimes a post is from 2010 and you can be like wow.

The next four probably have the biggest impact on your tumblr experience, so I'm gonna do a breakdown.

Best Stuff First reorders your "Following" to have popular posts at the top. Disabling it makes your feed chronological. I like it off, but up to you.

Include Stuff In Your Orbit and Based On Your Likes put various content from "For You" into "Following". Personally, I disable them to keep "Following" purely posts by people I follow, and then switch between feeds to get what I want.

Followed Tag Posts will put content from the "Your Tags" feed into your "Following" feed. Since you can go to the separate tags feed, I usually turn this off (it tends to show me a lot of duplicate posts), but up to you.

Under the "Notifications" tab you can tell Tumblr to stop sending you emails.

I'd recommend disabling all the emails--if you get a bunch of replies, Tumblr will happily send you dozens of emails, and you don't need that.

Notifications is the push-notifications in-app/in-website. The mobile app, for some reason, has a much better interface for controlling these, including the option to only get activity-notifications for mutuals. You can leave these on, or turn them off if you find the flood of notifications is distracting.

Tumblr News is a newsletter, it usually just has content from @fandom and the other staff-run recap blogs.

Conversational notifications sends you more emails.

Under the "Tumblr Labs" tab you can enable a bunch of cool beta tests.

I particularly suggest Reblog Graphs, What you Missed tab, & Popular Reblogs tab, but they're all fun to try out. A lot of these are honestly better than the For You dashboard.

For each blog you have, you can customize it's Blog Settings. Beyond things like setting an avatar or description, there's a few settings that are fun.

Custom Theme gives you your own subdomain at [blogurl].tumblr.com.

This makes your blog easier to search, and a lot of 3rd party tools depend on you enabling it. It also makes it easier to link your posts to people who don't have tumblr accounts.

You can completely customize the CSS/HTML/Javascript. you can go legitimately crazy. It's not a requirement, but if you want unlimited flexibility, go wild.

On the contrary, if you wanna run a more private blog, you can disable this and then hide your blog from search results/non-registered users.

Likes and Following are public by default. I like to turn these off so I don't have to worry about like, "what will people think if they see i'm following [...] or liking [...]". But it's also fair to keep them public if you'd like.

The other Blog Settings are important but pretty self-explanatory I think.

Finally, there's some useful tools I like:

XKit Rewritten - A bunch of scripts (like RES for Reddit). The one I really like is "mutual checker", which shows at a glance which blogs you are in mutuals with. Which is such a good feature it's included in the mobile apps by default i think.

siikr.tumblr.com - Tumblr search is bad, and google's indexing of tumblr blogs is worse. Siikr will find any post you've made on your blog. Because disk space is limited, only use it to search your blog, and if you're tech savvy consider running a local copy from source.

[angelosearch]

Part 4: The Edge of Chaos | Aftermath

Chapter 29 of 36 (expected) Word Count: 5624

Summary:

Squall sets eyes on his father for the first time since he left for Garden.

I'm not terribly fond of how this chapter turned out. It jumps around a lot, it's disorganized. I like parts of it, but this is where I meet my limitations as a writer without an editor/publisher behind me. I know, objectively, that it should probably be reordered or broken up, but also that would mean killing darlings I am not interested in killing and adjusting the timeline in a way I don't want to. So consider this chapter In Which You Discover Why Reading Fanfiction is Free.

Also, because I did not finish this fic before grad school, this is probably the last chapter for about three weeks. I have the next one written but it has a hell of a cliffhanger at the end so I want to have the chapter after that mostly put together before posting.

All things considered, I am doing a piss-poor job marketing this chapter. Sorry friends!

More about Chaos Theory under the cut.

Chapters: 29/36 Fandom: Final Fantasy VIII Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death Relationships: Rinoa Heartilly/Squall Leonhart, Irvine Kinneas/Selphie Tilmitt, Laguna Loire/Raine Loire, Squall Leonhart & Laguna Loire, Ellone & Squall Leonhart, Laguna Loire & Kiros Seagill & Ward Zabac, Irvine Kinneas & Squall Leonhart, Seifer Almasy/Quistis Trepe, Zell Dincht & Squall Leonhart, Kiros Seagill/Ward Zabac Characters: Squall Leonhart, Ellone (Final Fantasy VIII), Raine Loire, Laguna Loire, Rinoa Heartilly, Seifer Almasy, Irvine Kinneas, Zell Dincht, Quistis Trepe, Selphie Tilmitt, Nida (Final Fantasy VIII), Angelo (Final Fantasy VIII), Xu (Final Fantasy VIII), Cid Kramer, Edea Kramer, Ultimecia (Final Fantasy VIII), Kiros Seagill, Ward Zabac, Original Characters Additional Tags: Time Travel, Retelling, What if Ellone changed the past?, Fate & Destiny, Family, Alternate Timelines, Domestic fluff only in part 1, Politics, Father-Son Relationship, Butterfly Effect, Second Chances, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Religious Fanaticism, Soul Bond, Slow Burn, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death, Somewhat Graphic Violence, Brother-Sister Relationships, Childhood Trauma, Estrangement Summary:

Ellone did it - she changed the past. Laguna returned to Winhill with Ellone and saw the birth of his son.

Who is Squall if he grows up in Winhill with a family? How is Balamb Garden, and the people who live there, different without him?

Of course, some events are fixed. Things have changed but the universe demands order. Fate has a strange gravity that pulls our heroes toward each other, and to the inevitable.