#significantly smaller than i thought they'd be

[witchstone]

dead man's fingers (xylaria polymorpha) in the garden today!

[do-you-ship-this-taz-ship]

this only kinda fits the blog theme i apologize, but i have thoughts on which set of the players PCs would function the best as a polycule and you asked for asks. (I am including all the main campaigns and very inconsistently some liveshow/smaller arc PCs if I feel like it.)

I think Justin's characters wouldn't have a lot in common, so that's a major hurdle. Duck and Taako might hook up, or Taako and Sebastian, and maybe Amber and Godwin, but besides them, it's hard to really pair anyone up. Maybe Pepsi Liberty and Opera Man, but it would have to be exclusively while Opera Man is in Opera Man form. And no one would want to fuck Augustus. (He would be into Godwin but it's unreciprocated). Bad polycule. There's no poly here.

Travis's characters would be better! I think Aubrey and Devo would clash a lot initially, but eventually they'd get along pretty well, I could see them dating. Aubrey is into Magnus this is fact, he is canonically her favorite podcast character and I know firsthand that means she would fuck him if given the opportunity. It's debatable if he would reciprocate, I can't decide -- the age gap might make him uncomfortable, but he definitely likes her, at least platonically, they're friends. Magnus Beef and Mutt would def get along. Maybe Shoots also. So at the very least we have one triad+ and one couple, maybe with a connection between them. Decent polycule!

Clint's characters would get along super well I think. Zoox and Argo would be significantly younger than the others, and I don't think either of them would really be into the old guys, but they'd be friends, and maybe they could get together. And by maybe I mean definitely for the purposes of this thought experiment. And then all the old dudes (Merle, Ned, debatably Thacker, Emerich, Phileaux, possibly Benny Gene) are together in whatever combination (Merle/Ned and Thacker/Emerich for sure, and I think Merle might find Phileaux annoying but he'd still hatefuck him) Old man yaoi polycule with two younger guys sitting it out. Pretty good!

Griffin has less characters, which is both an advantage and not. Fitzroy isn't fucking anyone (might be romancing someone, not that theres anyone for him to romance), but Errol Indrid and Montrose could for sure have something. Dell Kraven might be able to get in on that triad, it's debatable. And 48… dunno their pronouns theyre just a cube. Yeah I don't think they're into romance or sex or any sort of human relationship including friendship. 48 and Fitzroy hang out and Fitzroy tries to start up a conversation but 48 always brings it back to Tim McGraw who does not exist in Fitzroy's universe and it's a bad scene. Okay overall, but not great.

So in conclusion Clint's PCs win, Travis's get second place, then Griffin's, with Justin's coming dead last.

This was such a fun read even if I don't know a lot of the characters!! Thank you for sending it :) i'm glad to hear it confirmed, as i suspected, that clint makes the most fuckable PCs 🤍

What do you guys think?

[yippieitsarvensart]

Tweels hc doodles + notes!

Goodness me, I've not been working on these for very long but here's all of what I've thought of within 2 days of thinking about them!! I basically started writing about them the moment I finished drawing "the fuck you brothers" post (9/24) (and today, 9/26) I totally have been thinking about them more after I wrote all this, so I will be continuing on with my hcs right here, under the cut :3 (keep in mind I have not yet played twst! If I get anything gravely wrong correct me!) (9/28, edit: I downloaded twst y'all...)

Both of the twins are autistic, just being on very different ends of er... intensity? Idk how to word that. I just mean that Floyd is someone who has trouble regulating his emotions and stims a lot. Jade doesn't stim as often, he probably would if he were infodumping about mushrooms/his terrariums or whatever else. I think I mean. That Jade suppressed his autistic tendencies by a lot to seem more like a gentleman, while Floyd doesn't really give much of a shit and probably doesn't even know he's autistic.

on that note they both have ADHD. AuDHD brothers.

Anyways as I way saying abt Floyd stimmies; He stims a LOT. Just, all the damn time. It gets so annoying for a lot of people and everyone knows he can't control it. His clingyness is also stimming, he's very touchy. A lot of stim toys don't actually help him but he does calm down significantly more when he's wearing headphones and listening to loud music. That's what stimulates him the most.

Jade only stims when excited, yeah I mentioned that. But did I mention he also stims a lot when stressed. In front of costumers, if he was stressed he might only fiddle with his fingers behind his back. But as soon as he gets away it's full body stimming time baby. Mans is not okay but he cannot let that mask slip!! (I forgot the word before, but I meant to say in my first dotpoint that jade is better at masking than Floyd!!)

Floyd mcr liker >_< (songs about depression and drugs to think about violence to!) Floyd also likes shit like "41 mins of roblox music" or any spongebob music. skull emoji.

Jade Laufey liker :33 (calm songs to think about violence to!)

Floyd likes dancing around in his room to music. Like really getting into it. Putting one song on loop and doing the same dance moves over and over again. (stimming) (oh my god I'm PROJECTING AGAIN stop....)

Jade likes drawing mushrooms. He's really good at drawing nature and when I say "good" I mean if you looked at it, you'd think it was a picture. Like abnormally good for someone who used to not even have paper available...

I saw this from a moot once on twitter I think, but they both (+ Azul) probably had a hard time adjusting to walking around everywhere instead of swimming when they first came onto land. And I think there was something about holding on to bars on stairs WAYY too tight because they feel so wobbly going up them. Same with like, escalators? and elevators? didn't fucking trust them. And they still don't sometimes... Adding onto this I think that they'd both get really frustrated at first with it. Like genuinely really upset; Floyd dramatically falling to the floor and flailing around on the verge of tears while Jade punches the ground over and over... They obviously got better at land things after a long while but for a bit they were just so. not okay LOL

I think for casual/home clothes they'd both be really into big fluffy jumpers. massive fucking huge fluffy shits. They'd be all over the texture and it would be so so texture /pos drooling emoji

I had a little thing that I thought of where I would give Floyd Heart shaped eye shines PLUS an extra smaller not heart eye shine. And giving Jade a square shaped shine with no extra shines. It just makes so much sense to me. Like I can't explain it very well but if you get it, you get me. Do you get me...

WHICH leads me to say then that when Floyd gets MAD he would have NO eye shines. Do you get me. I totally make sense right/. And Jade getting happy about anything even if it doesn't show on his face it would totally show in his eyes... Which also brings me back to something I wrote in my doodle notes with the pupils being like cats... OUGH I'M GOING INSANE DO I MAKE SENSE

another thing my twt moot said !! Floyd would hate necklaces/rings/other accessories and jewelry! It relates back to my point about Floyd hating the feeling of tight clothes, and things touching his skin too much. I feel like if he had say, a necklace on for like 0.1s he would rip it the fuck off, destroying the necklace in the process

Floyd: :3 (aggressive)

Floyd loving to squeeze people but hurting them is 90% of the time on purpose hurting and 10% accidental hurting and when it IS accidental he gets so upset about it. I like to think Floyd is the more emotional out of the two... just so many emotions in that boy. like he just !! wants to give you love !!! but he's so strong he breaks ur ribs !!!! many of ur ribs!! ur honestly surprised you haven't punctured a lung yet!!!

On that note they BOTH are extremely touch starved. Floyd would fucking LOVE it if someone were to lay down on top of him for hours he would feel so squished!! and warm and nice!! and comfy!

Jade on the other hand, LOVES holding hands. holding ONTO something holding onto someONE.

Jade is a gift giver (love language) I bet you can't guess what Floyd is

His love language is Physical touch. Yeah

Jade getting people way too many gifts when it's a special occasion for them because he thinks they might think it's weird if he gets them a gift on any other day.

Floyd hyperpop liker (just overall really likes loud thrashy music or whatever)

Floyd also really got into those games where you have to beat the shit out of a dummy. He doesn't like ones where you have to TIME a hit to make it work (makes him annoyed bc he can't do it) Games like Pou I think....

While Jade enjoys colour by number or those hue games? just doing it in his free time.

[bluegekk0]

could you explain how you draw fpk? he looks like a very shaped beast /pos

Hm, I'm not sure how to explain it exactly. But I suppose I could talk about my thought process for his design and how I portray him.

My main sources of inspiration for him are reptiles and mammals, as time went on I definitely started to lean more into the latter. Because he's covered in skin instead of scales, his body is very soft, and I try my best to emphasize that in my art. With his additional fat, I also look at fat reference to make sure it has the proper shape, softness and physics.

It's also worth mentioning that his design changed over the year, he was a lot more reptilian and sharp when the AU started, so that also affected my drawing process for him. A big change was to his proportions - his head used to be a lot bigger, his legs shorter and his arms smaller. His tail was also quite thin, and his belly was closer to what you see on kittens than how I draw it now (which unfortunately also made him look swollen, or even pregnant, and since that wasn't my intention, I decided to change how I depict it). His proportions are a bit closer to a small person, and that also affected his posture. He's more upright now, has longer legs and arms, and a smaller head.

The tail is also much more thick now, he drags it behind him almost like the very old depictions of dinosaurs, and it's very important for counter-balancing his large head (even if the head is not actually very heavy). The tip is much more flexible and almost prehensile, so I make sure to put emphasis on it in my art. I imagine it would wiggle around a lot so I want to make that apparent when I draw him.

A big part of how I draw him is his crown. I make the horns very short compared to his canon design, and they're more spade like with round tips, they're also much closer to one another. This is both a stylistic choice and also part of his design, and it gives him a more streamlined look. The two spikes on the sides of his head are probably the only sharp part of his design, and they're very stylized. Realistically they make no sense, but he's a cartoon character so that's fine. If I were to draw him more realistically, they'd be positioned on his cheeks, I don't think they'd actually go all around (so you wouldn't see them on the top of his head in the profile view).

His face is salamander like, flatter at the bottom and rounder at the top, with a significantly more pronounced nose and snout than before. No nostrils or earholes though, he does have them but they blend in so well they're not visible in my art. And there's of course his eyes. Big and reflective, I pay extra attention to making them look alive and "wet".

His colors are also very important, I intentionally made him leucistic so that he has a pink undertone to his colors, which gives him this soft marshmallow look. The pink around the face, elbow/knee joints and at the tip of the tail really emphasize it.

I don't have any specific "guide" like images for this, so I'll just add my most recent drawing since it illustrates everything I said the best.

In short, the soft colors and the roundness are definitely the biggest factors to his design. He's meant to look very approachable, and the cushion-y marshmallow/dumpling vibe is definitely something I really enjoy about his design. So I pay attention to the weight distribution, the color palette, and all that, my goal is to make him look as if he was very soft to touch. It is a relatively recent direction, but one I'm much more satisfied with than his older, more gray/blueish design with sharper traits.

I hope this was somewhat informative, I wasn't sure how to approach this ask but hopefully you enjoy the answer!

[skaylanphear]

The Marauders and...

Summary: Heading to Hogwarts for the first time, Remus tries not to let his worries get him down. He has a lot on his plate—truths he can’t share with anyone—and none of it is helped by the bullies constantly casting jinxes and calling him nasty names. Despite it all, though, he has his three best friends—the first friends he’s ever made, in fact.

Yet, it doesn’t take long for Sirius to start getting suspicious, questioning what strange sickness could be keeping Remus in the hospital wing for days at a time. Ever nosy, Sirius takes it upon himself to unravel the mystery that is Remus Lupin, unaware of the tortured consequences that come with knowing such an intimate secret.

A story about the Marauders as they navigate their school years and set off into adulthood.

Year One: The Marauders and the Shrieking Shack - Chapters 1-25 Summer 1972 - Chapters 26 - 34 Year Two: The Marauders and the Counting Curse - Chapters 35 - 68

Start Reading Here

Chapter 25

Dumbledore had been quite friendly with them the following morning, after McGonagall had led them up to his office to await their parents. Dragging their trunks behind, they'd stood in full uniform and half-expected some kind of scolding from the headmaster. He'd merely offered them some lemon drops, however, and said he expected their parents to begin arriving at any moment.

He seemed… distracted.

Remus was not surprised his own parents were the first to get there. His father—tall and lanky as he was stern—had to bow his head as he came through, Remus' significantly smaller mother clinging to his arm as she walked out of the green flames beside him.

"Mr. and Mrs. Lupin," Dumbledore said as he stepped forward, hand outstretched to shake theirs. "A pleasure to see you, as always."

"Likewise," Lyall said simply. "Though I would prefer it be under different circumstances." He looked right at Remus as he said so, who flushed and stared down at his shoes.

"I'm sure we all would," Dumbledore agreed vaguely.

Lyall opened his mouth like he might say something more, but before he could, the fireplace flashed green again and out strutted an older man with thick gray hair, a matching mustache, and a very friendly smile.

"Dad!" James called and bolted forward to meet him.

"That's his dad," Sirius whispered to Remus. "He looks more like he could be his grandfather."

Remus was rather surprised as well. His own father, he'd always thought, looked older than he actually was, but he was nothing to James' father.

"My dear boy!" James' father said as he wrapped James up in his arms. He was wearing a very pristine set of bright blue robes over a matching pinstriped suit. "Your mother and I have missed you in spades!"

On cue, the fireplace flashed again and a women waltzed out. She was older as well, her tightly-pinned dark hair full of gray and white streaks. She shared in James' dark complexion, unlike his father, who was very much white, but she had the same sort of easy kindness about her smile. She was wearing similar blue robes to her husband, only hers were bedazzled with sparkling stars.

"James!" she cried at the sight of her son, who parted with his father to embrace his mother instead. "Why, you've grown so much since Easter! I hardly recognize you!"

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[jessicanjpa]

cottage

An excerpt from this chapter of 2003. The Cullens have just moved to Forks and Edward is exploring the woods behind the house.

I was surprised to find the remnants of an old trail not far from the river. It hadn't been used in a long time; for most of its length, the only sign was a winding track of evergreens that were significantly shorter than their neighbors. A rusted tin can was the only other evidence that a human had ever passed this way. Maybe this path led to an old deer stand or something like that.

I explored here and there, finally taking to the treetops so I could follow the "path" more easily. I was finally rewarded with the sight of a big rectangle so regular that it had to be manmade. It was partially obscured by the overgrowth and the rotted branches that had fallen on it in recent years, but it was definitely a building. I swung back down to the forest floor, surprised to see not a deer stand or a spartan hunting shack, but an adorable little stone cottage.

It was like stepping into a fairy tale. I had landed just far enough away to use the little path of flat stones that led the way home to the front door. The decaying, broken roof was an eyesore, but everything else was perfect... in a crumbling, half-reclaimed-by-nature sort of way. Wild, meandering honeysuckle had completely taken over one wall. Nearly every stone was outlined and softened with moss. The arched door wasn't in the best shape, but it was made of sturdy oak that had easily outlived the roof.

I walked a wide circle around the whole thing. A stone chimney crowned the southern corner, and there was a little door in the back that opened directly into what probably used to be a garden. Now, it was just a little outline of rotted miniature fencing, completely overrun by natural growth. Only a single climbing rose plant had survived to tell the story of the former inhabitants, clinging to the mossy stones as if to escape the encroaching wilderness.

I reached out and gently touched its petals. Stubborn rose, I thought with a smile. It was a good omen; Rosalie and Emmett were going to love it out here. It'd been a while since they'd really needed four walls of their own to knock down as they pleased, but it wasn't every day we found a house that came complete with a fairy tale cottage, either. I was almost jealous.

I carefully inspected the rest of the exterior before easing the door open. Esme would want to know every detail, though of course she would soon be out here to see it for herself. I stretched my gift back toward the main house to her mind abuzz with renovation plans. She might not be able to get to the cottage right away. I grimaced around the tiny living room. The beehive fireplace was in good enough condition, but the wallpaper was an affront to all that was good and holy. Hopefully the smell would get thrown out with it.

The kitchen was little more than a camper's stove and a sink, which was just as well. Two rickety chairs crowded up to a tiny breakfast table that had seen better days. I was far more interested in the old piano that took up the wall across from the fireplace. I didn't expect much, what with the exposure and the humidity it must have suffered over the years, but I still let out a disappointed sigh when the keys refused to be pushed, much less make any sound. I took a peek inside; the strings actually didn't look too bad. I already had the Steinway baby grand anyway, but it would be a shame to send it to a junkyard. Maybe I could find a local piano repair shop that enjoyed restoring hard luck cases.

Just like the main house, the cottage seemed bigger inside than out. I followed a little hallway—it was arched like the front door, as though I had wandered into a tiny castle—and found a generous bedroom matched against two smaller rooms. No signs of plumbing ever having been installed: that would give Esme a pleasant challenge.

The whole thing was perfect. Maybe if Rosalie and Emmett spent enough time out here, they would even agree to switch bedrooms with me. I didn't exactly need a full suite, but I wouldn't say no to my own shower and enough room for all my books to come out of their boxes. They were getting the better deal by far; this place was a jewel. And it felt right, somehow; it had been a shame to see the hunting cottage back at our old Hoquiam place fall into disrepair. Having this little find on our new property seemed to make up for it.

I headed back to the main house, wondering who had lived out at the cottage once upon a time, and why. I supposed it might be as old as the house, or even older; there could have been a whole line of occupants. The cottage had its own little story to tell. Perhaps it had been used as a mother-in-law unit once: a whimsical grandmother with plenty of cats and plenty of time to tend her roses. Then a little honeymoon retreat for a blushing couple who had set up house with a second-hand breakfast table, then a brooding pianist who needed solitude to work on his compositions.

And now it would house a pair of lovesick vampires who would hopefully leave it in one piece and pass it on to continue the story. The older we all got, the more distanced we felt from stories like these, no matter how picturesque the setting or how vivid an imprint our renovations left behind. But I supposed we were just stewards like the rest: here for a day, then nothing more than a fading memory.

[spaztastic-headcannons]

LAWYER UP

Ok! Side tangent to the how can they prove it thoughts!!

LAWYERS

Like it's shitty that there isn't due process for a trial (as corrupted as it would be) and that gives the Marines and Sengoku himself complete power as judge, jury, and executioner (literally). But what if there was???

Like a lawyer who had the absolute balls to call them on their bullshit and demand a fair and public trial for the crimes of Portgas D. Ace and to justify the public stunt they are trying to pull with his execution. To demand accountability!

I think they'd probably end up with their own bounty at the end of up but they'd have so much to work with!!

[Note I am not a lawyer! But I have a lot of questions to bring up reasonable doubt!]

This is going to also get a bit long so read more below!

So to start they don't bring up the Gol D. Roger part yet because confidential, yeah. But they why go through such a stunt for a pirate that is a commander of a yonko, but who has a significantly smaller reputation than some of the people currently locked up in Impel Down? You would lock up Shiki the Golden Lion instead of execution but you want to execute this kid? Powerhouse or not, that seems kinda skewed?? And Biased??

Oh it's to set up a war with Whitebeard, that you have no guarantee you'd win and would possibly waste resources and lives of good Marines that serve for the justice and protection of the people...

then get into why he became a pirate. He was a ward of Garp the Hero, right? So in theory Ace should have had full access to all the rights and privileges of being Garp's ward/grandson, including education and proper care. However, as far as our information can gather and that Ace could provide himself, he was raised by bandits! Criminals! So had Garp set him up for failure? there seems to be a pattern with Garp and children in his care: Dragon, leader of the revolution, Ace, second commander of Whitebeard, and this newest pirate, Luffy, already making a name for himself and defying the world government as he goes! Isn't there even a hint of responsibility that Garp should take for Ace being the way he is and for leniency and the chance at rehabilitation? (which obviously isn't what Ace would want or do but it'd get him out of the death penalty!)

And what are Ace's primary crimes? Piracy yes but he didn't really pillage, murder indiscriminately or civilians, rape, or cause revolutions! His greatest crimes are dine and dashing (which his bills for that are astronomical but not death worthy), fighting Marines (though more marines make it out of his sort of attacks than not unless they attack him or his crew first so self defense), and obviously raising a jolly roger.

No imagine that these are bringing up things that obviously the marines don't want aired and to shift public opinion. (Garp has been notably silent after a rather nasty look from Sengoku after the whole raising criminals point...) So they bring out their trump card...

Ace is the true son of Gol D. Roger!

....

Ok, prove it.

Is there any genetic testing to link Ace as a relative of Roger? If they can make clones and robots, they should be able to do some genetic testing to see relations between people right? But where is Roger's body to get a sample from? And how can we ensure that the samples aren't messed with to ensure Ace as a scapegoat?

Then you [the marines] state that his mother held onto him for 20 months but that sounds preposterous! How can you prove that's true and where did you get this information? Is the information source reliable? Has anyone been able to replicate those results? And hypothetically, if this were true, why would a mother be so desperate to save her child to take such measures? is it because she saw the slaughter of children and infants and pregnant mothers on her island just for the Marines to prove a point? To ensure that an innocent child, free of sin with the only crime is to exist, is annihilated? The Marines have already proven how terrified they can be of actual children (Nico Robin's long list of bounty posters starting as a young girl are a great example). [totally separate rant on how pathetic a whole system is afraid of literal children and infants as to headhunt and murder entire generations, because of what they could know or represent. How all that they are could crumble the entire castle of sand.]

anywho I'm sure there's more but that's all I can think up right now from my late night musings. I think a good lawyer could argue at least a lesser sentence for Ace, prove reasonable doubt on the certainty he's Roger's kid (at least to the government and populace), and in general cause mayhem! If the system allows it, and allows it to be public, as well as not be entirely corrupt.

I'd love to see someone with actual law experience write something about this!

[starpirateee]

For the drabbles, can I request Owen looking after Curt while he has a fever? (Pre-banana obv, and their in a safehouse)

I love you guys clarifying when something is pre-banana because, can you imagine Owen post fall feeling that instinct to look after Curt? He hates him, but he's got a fever, so what can you do?

And, on the record, I don't write actual fluff or domestic bliss that often, but I gave it an honest go? Honestly, though, I don't know how this reads

"Curt, I know you're incapable of understanding the concept of staying in one place, but for god's sake, you need to rest this off… That temperature isn't just going to blow over itself…"

For all it was worth, Owen was trying to keep his patience intact, but Curt had woken up shaking, claiming he felt needlessly hot when it was less than 10° outside. He had known Curt long enough to immediately know that something wasn't right, because Curt was one of those people who preferred to be warm, especially on a colder day… Normally, under circumstances like this, he would try and stay as long as possible in bed, and then he'd eventually resign and settle for a warm shower to keep him going for a little longer.

But, as it happened, Owen found that he was burning up, and when he spiked a temperature of almost 38.5, he put his foot down. He'd insisted in turn that Curt was to stay put and rest as much as he could, but he'd neglected to think about how the one thing everyone knew about Curt Mega was that he never stayed in one place for very long.

"How bad is it?"

"Almost thirty eight and a half."

"You make it sound like I should be dead from hypothermia," Curt complained. "And I can't be bothered to work it out… Just tell me plain, would ya?"

"That's what you get for using Fahrenheit..." Owen sighed, muttering something about stupid Yanks and their stupid measurement system, and then falling silent while he tried to work it out. Curt mustered a little focus from absolutely nowhere, and tried to watch him as he made an attempt to sound less like Curt was dying a violent death from being frozen. Eventually, his thoughtful expression passed, and his eyes met Curt's once again, as he registered just how expectant he looked. "A little over a hundred and one?"

Curt grimaced. "Where'd this come from?" Both he and Owen tried to work it out, but both of them came up blank. "God! I can't believe I got sick! This sucks!"

"It does mean you get a day off whatever it is Cynthia wants from you... What was it again?" He knew for a fact what it was. The two piles of reports on the dining room table was conclusive enough, even if Curt had never admitted outright what he had to do. Owen knew the system. Curt had to physically separate the work he had to do from that which he had already done, hence why one of the piles was significantly smaller than the other. So far, he'd been looking for any excuse not to do it, but this one was legitimate.

Curt shot him a look. "You know I'm a good month behind on the reports and shit I need to do from... uh, from France, I think. And then there was that one in Toronto, and... god, uh-"

"Copenhagen," Owen offered, helpfully.

"Yeah. Copenhagen. How the hell do you know that?"

"I saw the topmost file, that's all. You wrote the location on a slip of paper."

"... Huh. Wait wait wait, are you gonna be here today?"

"I have nothing better to be doing..." In truth, Owen wasn't going to let Curt try and handle himself, no matter how fine he tried to insist he was. It had been a little while since the last time he and Curt had been completely available like this, and thus he was grateful for every moment, no matter the context for it. This little life they'd built for themselves wasn't worth an awful lot if they were barely there to enjoy it, despite the fact that neither of them were really the domestic type.

"Besides," he added, as a little bit of an afterthought. "I don't want to be the one to just leave when you're like this."

Curt managed a small smile. "Never took you for a househusband..." He tried. The very idea of it was absurd. Owen wasn't the type for settling down and staying still as much as he wasn't, so to think of him like this was almost laughable, in it's own way. Thankfully, Owen found it amusing too, and chuckled softly.

"I dunno, Curt, I think I'd have the knack for it."

"Oh really?"

"You know fine well I know how to cook, and who knows," he leaned back on his hands and gave a wistful smile, "maybe I'd be willing to retire from our debonair old life and give in to the throws of... domestic bliss."

A wave of silence washed over them. Curt stared at Owen, but only because he'd reached a point where the response was that dramatically delivered that it was almost convincing. Owen— the most suave, capable man to ever have walked into his life— actually seemed for a moment to almost suit that idea of domesticity that he had brewed up.

The silence lasted only a moment before Owen started laughing, and Curt only had a second to cherish the sound of it before he was laughing too.

"No, you're quite right," he hummed, clearing his throat. "I don't suit it, but at least I'd suit the idea of it better than you would."

"I dunno, you've kinda convinced me... Maybe not in a traditional way, but god... Something about you being all blissful and-" he broke off with another chuckle when he tried to picture it again. "It's funny, but I dunno, you could probably make it work."

"But, to answer your question, yes. I'll be here all day."

And he stuck by that, too. For what it was worth, he was a little better at keeping himself busy than his companion could ever hope to be. He had about an hour's worth of documentation to catch up on, then there was the book he'd been meaning to finish for a while… And of course, there was always Curt. The first time he checked after as much productivity as he could muster on a busy mind, he was flat out. He seemed to have the whole temperature regulation sorted; or at least, he had it figured out for now.

Owen prepared a washcloth and a bowl of water that had started out as lukewarm, but was significantly less than that by the time Curt came around. He knelt by the bedside with the exact air of the drastic change in situationship they'd both imagined him in, and wrung out the towel before gently laying it across Curt's forehead. The latter took a sharp breath when the sudden cool hit his skin, and then managed a laugh. 

"What happened to not suiting it, huh?"

"I'm not saying I do, don't get used to it," Owen's tone was light, but he'd certainly thought about it enough in the last half hour. This was not up his alley by any means, and the idea of doing something like this constantly was somehow both something he could almost find himself doing, and the single most boring ending to his career that he could think of.

"I think it suits you..."

"Of course you do." Owen brushed the droplets from his fingertips onto the sleeve of his shirt, though smiling all the same. "You're the one of us being looked after. Speaking of, welcome back to the land of the living."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You were asleep for over three hours."

Curt's eyes went wide. "Huh? Really?"

"I did tell you that you sleep like the best of them, and I wasn't joking! I suppose it only matters depending on how it made you feel, though."

"I dunno... Better, I guess?"

"Well, you're still-" he could feel the heat of the cloth from the other side, and it hadn't been in place for longer than a minute. He made quick work of turning it over, and then really getting the chance to feel just how warm it had become. One reason why he was glad that water was no longer slightly warm. At least that was something to keep Curt cool while he battles this inner heat. "Way too warm to be normal. I assume nothing has really changed?"

"... Not really, no. But, uh, this feels kinda good."

[introvert-celeste]

The significance of Eclipse Lake

"After five years, I have finally found it. A power source so potent it can pierce through realms: Titan's Blood. There are old tales of lakes reflecting green trees and blue skies. The Titan's vein runs through the land, and many believe that these wild portals are created when a little of its blood leaks into the water. That is how I came here, so that is the first place I shall look. I will journey back to Eclipse Lake."

I have thought a lot about this for months and it makes me wonder: in spite of all the lies Philip has told, what if this has some truth to it?

The Tale of the Brothers Wittebane, as it is known in Gravesfield, states that Evelyn was the one who lured Caleb into the demon realm, and Philip went in to save him. When this takes place, they are both young men. In this memory from Philip's mind, however:

Philip looks significantly younger when they first encountered a real witch. Shorter hair, smaller, thinner, still toting around that wooden mask from his childhood. Despite the damage to the memory, it looks like they're standing in a cave, with the witch (who may or may not be Evelyn) lighting the way. Philip is scared, hiding behind a boulder, hardly the image of someone known for being a witch hunter, while Caleb appears to be fascinated.

What I'm considering is this: what if they originally came to the Boiling Isles by accident, via Eclipse Lake? As we saw in the episode "Eclipse Lake," the lake itself isn't always full. I assume, given the name, it only fills with water (probably from the human realm) during a lunar eclipse. Eclipses never last long, meaning the boys would have been trapped in the demon realm before they even realized what happened.

Given that they were orphans with no obvious adults in their lives, no one would have noticed they were gone, or at least cared enough to look for them, hence why this part of their story wouldn't have come up in the tale from Gravesfield.

They must have spent some time there, because this map that Philip has of Eclipse Lake has both of their profiles drawn into the corner, depicting both of them as young men. I assume they made this map, perhaps even built the portal door, together.

Of course, while no one probably cared that they'd disappeared, they certainly would have noticed them return, with tales of a strange land full of witches and demons. The brothers would quickly learn to keep things like that to themselves. They likely became witch hunters to protect themselves from scrutiny.

This is all speculation on my part, but I assume that Philip didn't hate the witches right off the bat. In some of his earliest memories, we see him and Caleb mimicking the adults and playing witch hunter together, but the mask that Philip wore doesn't exactly scream "good Puritan boy." If anything, it makes him look like a demon. The fact that he started carving glyphs into his skin and became wholely dependent on palisman souls just to maintain control of his body solidifies my belief that he wanted to be more than just human.

Basically, I believe that Philip became indoctrinated and grew to resent the demon realm, while Caleb continued to visit in secret, until finally he decided he'd had enough of the human realm. The brothers had a big falling out, Philip went out to look for Caleb, only to find that he'd already started a new life among the witches, a life without him. And we all know how that ended.

So yeah, I went off on a tangent here, but I think that it all started at Eclipse Lake.

[runonthewater]

Sometimes, on your fourth day on the road, you get so sick of the way the one pair of shorts you packed fit that when after a full day of driving, you go to the cheapest clothing store in Fort Nelson, buy a pair of patterened rayon jeans on clearance, and hack them off at the knees with the dull kitchen scissors that live in the van. Although these makeshift shorts do not necessarily fit you better than the ones you packed, they at least fit you differently.

Four days on the road. Temporally, this puts me halfway through the eight-day itinerary. At just over 1000 miles from Seattle (as the Google maps, not counting some side trips and the occasional back-tracking for a good view), and a little under 1000 from Tok, Fort Nelson puts me about halfway through the drive geographically, as well.

I started the morning in Dawson Creek, at Mile 0 of the Alaska Highway. (I met a nice Swiss couple at the mile marker who were, like me, getting their photo op in. They'd driven from Halifax and were planning to go all the way up the Dalton Highway! Because I am the kind of nerd that I am, as soon as I got back in the car, I turned on "The Last of Barret's Privateers" and belted about being a broken man on a Halifax pier in their honor.) Immediately outside Dawson Creek there was a lot of truck traffic, and I spent quite a while tailgating and being tailgated as steep grades and a lack of passing lanes kept us all stuck together.

By the time I reached my first rest stop in Wonowon, though, the driving had changed noticeably. In the first three days I spent a decent amount of time keeping an eye on my mirrors for people in smaller cars that would want to pass me. Once I was truly on the highway, the number of passing vehicles dwindled significantly. And the landscape spread out soon enough into rolling evergreen forests, bisected by the road. It's August, so fireweed dusts the cleared firebreaks on either side of the highway in a Barbie pink that looks unreal and is almost impossible to capture on my phone's camera. The deciduous trees flash the pale undersides of their leaves at the northbound traveler, revealing how windy it is.

This is what I think of when I think of the Highway: these long, straight stretches with big sky and no one around. The kind of wildlife I associate with the north is starting to appear, too. I saw a black bear galumph across the road around 4PM, and a little further on I saw a doe nursing a faun beside the road. Both obviously moved too fast for me to get pictures. The blackbirds scavenging on the highway are also clearly ravens, now: they're too fucking big to be crows. The other day I saw a black bird so big that I couldn't not spot it, despite the shade of the trees. Ravens are big.

The halfway point means I've been out here long enough to get a couple routines down. It also means I've been out here long enough to decide on problems -- e.g. the aforementioned shorts, the fit of which I am sick, or the buurned-on bits of fries I reheated in a pan without any oil the other nnight. But overall, as I told a local while I filled up today, the van treats me well.

Halfway also means I start thinking about the end of the trip. To be honest, today I thought about stopping earlier than Fort Nelson, partly because I was much more tired from yesterday's drive than expected, and partly because I don't want to rush. The lack of services between Dawson Creek and Fort Nelson ended up deciding me and I pushed on, but the possibility of extending the time on the road, letting the bubble of travel get just a little bigger, is tempting.

On the other hand, I miss my dog. And paying less than $150 per gas tank refill. Getting to Alaska, and then home, will be nice. When I get there.

A few less highfaluting thoughts (I blame Nabokov for the style): tonight I not only got to use the levelers to even out one side of the van for the night, I'm swatting skeeters like mad. The bugs are most definitely getting worse as I go north. The windshield is a war zone, and when I stopped earlier I found the van SURROUNDED by wasps and flies. Are they feasting on their fallen brethren? will they please leave me alone???

[veebs-hates-video-games]

Sure whatever, I can put ten game in a single post, because that's how many I managed to play since the last one. Only for like an hour each on average, but that was enough to finish multiple of them and decide the others weren't really doing it for me.

Clickolding was pretty good. I don't usually play stuff right when it comes out, but it was a couple bucks and I feel like I can trust Xalavier Nelson Jr./Strange Scaffold to do something interestingly weird at this point. It's the most about sex work anything's ever been without explicitly stating it's about sex work, and it will do its best to make you vaguely uncomfortable about that and the mundanity and boredom and desperation and detachment that can go along with it. It's also about the impact our actions have on the lives of people around us. A decent way to spend like an hour of your time.

I had a bit more mixed feelings about the first DLC for Voxelgram. On one hand it's good because more Voxelgram is good. On the other the larger puzzles don't really make it more challenging or anything, just more tedious. The last couple took me a bit over an hour each, and I saw someone else saying the last one took them significantly longer than that. I think I would've been happier if they were a bit smaller and didn't go on for so long, and they'd also fit on the screen better that way.

Something I didn't have mixed feelings about was Strawberry Vinegar, which was kind of disappointing because I tend to enjoy ebi-hime's stuff even if it's never my favorite stuff ever. This one I just got through the bad ending and stopped though because I had no interest in seeing what happens in any of the other routes. The way the characters were written just didn't feel right to me, like this is not a nine year old girl despite you telling me it is, and the vibes were definitely off. Oh well.

I have mostly positive things to say about Seraphim Slum though. It's very not afraid to get weird with things, and I mean Capital W Weird, not lolrandom rawr xd. A tagline/pitch like "Play as sapphic Lucifer and corrupt angels to fall...in love with you." is a good way to get my attention. It's at least initially on the surface "date cute angel girls", but it very quickly leans heavily into corruption = love = freedom/release/relief. Overall I definitely enjoyed the vibes and presentation and where it went with stuff, and I only have a couple issues with it: one is that some of the auto-advancing text is borderline unreadable on certain backgrounds, which is unfortunate but can be worked around by reading it in the log, and the other is that the routing/structure of it is pretty incomprehensible to me and I have no idea how to get to a couple parts of it I haven't seen yet. Maybe I'll check the DLC guide at some point when I can justify spending more money on stuff.

An Arcade Full of Cats was ok. Not my favorite Devcats game but fun enough that I finished it. As someone who remembers most of the eras it represents (not the DLC ones though) it was fun seeing the terrible cat puns on old arcade games and various other things they snuck in. There was definitely some artistic liberty taken with some of it, but they did a surprisingly good job capturing the feeling of a bunch of stuff I hadn't thought about in a long time in a hidden object game about cats. I feel no shame about using the cheat button for a few things in this one though because some of them were genuinely bullshit. Even after it pointed out a couple of them to me I could barely recognize them because they were so small they didn't look like anything. I don't remember having that problem in Building or Castle, at least not to that degree.

Gorogoa took me forever to finally try out. I really like the idea of it, and they do some clever stuff with the presentation and ways you interact with things that let them do fun stuff with how puzzles work. I don't really like actually playing it though. It does a bad job sometimes with letting you know which things are interactable or in what ways, and as a result I feel like it kept deteriorating into the typical point and click adventure game problem of rubbing every object on every other object until something happens. It's just not very enjoyable to know what the end goal of a puzzle sequence is but have no idea how to get there because it's looking for a very specific sequence of very specific events, and you tried something very slightly different that didn't work, and there's no useful feedback why.

TET's alright though, if a ten minute cooking game about preparing food for Vietnamese Lunar New Year sounds like your kind of thing. It's cute and funny and even includes recipes. Also it makes me want spring rolls. Also also it feels much better to play with a touchscreen.

I was extremely underwhelmed by Muse Dash, which also took me forever to get around to actually trying. The gameplay seems fine. What I saw in my brief time with it didn't really stand out to me, but there also wasn't really anything wrong with it either. What definitely is wrong with it though is that it kept pestering me to create an account even though I was just trying to play by myself offline, and also the UI seems completely unmanageable. Like the song picker would work but be mildly clunky if there were 20 songs in the game. It appears to have hundreds though, maybe more, and it's just really not suited for that. Yeah there appears to be a filter, but it's just a bunch of incomprehensible icons and very inaccessible for a new player. The art and music seemed ok though.

Speaking of ok, there's also Luna's Fishing Garden. It had some better than ok moments, but overall...it's ok. The default/challenging fishing minigame did not feel good to me at all, and the relaxed/easy mode was a bit boring, but I got over it because it turns out you don't actually have to do it all that much once the game gets going. It's pretty chill, and there's some cute pixel art and characters. Shout out to the "you caught a fish" animation in particular for being adorable. Most of the time I felt like progression was pretty well balanced, but toward the end there was definitely a significant amount of waiting around to get enough of certain resources that dragged it out longer than it really needed to. Aside from that though? It's ok!

And then since I said ten at the beginning, uh...Townscaper exists? Let's include that even though it wouldn't be hard to argue it's not a game. I'm pretty sure I got it in a game bundle though, and it's on Steam, so let's just go with that. It's fun to poke at for a little while and see what you can build with it. And that's about all there is to it.

Video games ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[glasshcvse]

I always thought Stupid Cupid would be on the same level as Red Velvet in terms of popularity! In your opinion which real group would you assign for your fic groups in those terms?

AINE ! ⠀ › ⠀ SAYS. omg you're being too nice anon!! i think red velvet is wayyy up the scale when looking at stupid cupid's popularity– took me a hot second to cook something up, but under the cut, you'll find all of my important groups / ocs ( including both npc & under co. groups! ) and their popularity based on irl kpop groups!

first, we have lilypad, aka the saviours of glasshouse! i'd definitely say that they're on par with kara! they've been releasing bops from the getgo, and have been doing so until their unfortunate ( or fortunate in this case ) disbandment, so kara would be the best group to mention in this case, especially when back in 2009, glasshouse only had crumbs and a handful of trainees to go with.

next on the list is raevil, aka the dead women walking! raevil = twice, and you can't prove me wrong!! the fact that each member comes from a different country just goes well with the public ( international more than domestic, bc we all know how knetz are about these types of things ), and they for sure know how to charm people to at least listen to their songs occasionally. their popularity grew as time passed, so raevil being on the same scale as twice right now would be a plausible answer!

sorry to disappoint you, anon, but stupid cupid's popularity goes lower than red velvet's– i'd say ive or kepler would be more of an appropriate answer, especially because everyone can clearly see the favouritism in stcp ( looking at tomie ). it's a good thing that their discography is full of mostly cute songs, otherwise, i don't think stupid cupid would've been supported this much if it their concept was anything else... i imagine them being compared to lilypad a lot if they had a different concept, and they'd kind of flop. yeah, their fandom is definitely smaller compared to raevil's, but they have some crazy ass fans out there ( think orbits during that twitter era )–

at the beginning of their career, i surely saw nextone go hand in hand with stray kids based on popularity, especially because prdx had a different concept from any other artists from the company, were their first bg and they were promoted a lot during their pre-debut era by stupid cupid. however, after the whole scandal happened with one of the members and they went on a hiatus for a year, the hype kind of died down, so now i'd say they're kinda like monsta x / the boyz!

hero is 4th generation's taemin! of course, his popularity slowly grew as he went through a shitty survival show, but once he actually debuted as a soloist, the fandom significantly grew, and it's still growing as time goes by. there's a reason why he's called an all-round and ace of kpop! although, if you asked him, he'd deny being that popular, but the receipts don't lie, nor do his album sales that get sold out after every comeback!

and last but definitely not least, we have crystyle! && just like everyone expected, i imagine them to have the same popularity as got the beat! they also have some similarities; as they're both project groups with members from different groups ( or are soloists ), so saying they have the same popularity as got would be true. not only that, but each member has their own fandom that just combined in the end to support the girls as a group!

and that's it ( for now )! come back later if there are any updates to this~

[mollusc-era]

octolings and suckers

when drawing splatoon characters, i initially drew inkfish tentacles as they appear in game, using a lot of the models as reference in order to get the shapes just right, but as i continued drawing, i decided that this didn't mesh too well with my style. instead of only looking at the in game models, i started looking at actual cephalopods for reference when it came to drawing inkfish "hair."

this immediately presented a bit of a problem when it came to octolings and the suckers on top of their tentacles.

my first thought when approaching the suckers was to interpret them as a sort of shorthand, and that there were a lot more suckers on the top of these tentacles than was depicted... and this immediately presented problems.

[ID: a picture of an octopus, positioned in a way that shows off the many suckers on the underside of its arms. End ID]

there are a LOT of suckers on an octopus's arms. while plenty of species have bright coloring on the skin around the suckers, there are just so many suckers that they'd wash out the tentacles pretty significantly if i drew them at this density.

it's also fair to assume that there are also suckers on the bottom side of an octoling's tentacles? it's just an off white down there, and aside from countershading, which i'm not sure would be particularly relevant when the tentacles are where hair would go on a human, i don't see why they'd be white otherwise. plus, there are actually suckers modeled on the bottom side of an octoling's swim form

[ID: a screenshot of the bottom of an octoling's swim form. There are two suckers modeled on the two largest arms. End ID]

while the inconsistency of how octoling swim forms are modeled in game is something i could (and might) write another entire post about, i feel like the fact that the suckers are modeled on this model implies that they do have suckers on the bottom side of their tentacles.

there's a whole slew of arguments that could be made about how practical having suckers on the top of tentacles would be, but i don't really want this to be a post about how octolings make no sense or whatever. looking at it from a design standpoint, i understand why octolings have suckers on the top side of their tentacles. it's a distinctive look that easily sets them apart from inklings, and it fits the splatoon style fairly well. what it doesn't particularly suit, however, is my art style.

it'd be fairly easy to say that there are only a few suckers on the top side of an octoling's tentacles and that the rest are underneath, but honestly i'm not a huge fan of how that looks, especially when drawing the suckers fairly realistically, i'm just not a huge fan of the shape when they're both fairly isolated and large.

[ID: a close up look of a Giant Pacific Octopus's suckers, showing their almost mushroom-like shape. End ID]

because of all this, instead of suckers, i've decided to interpret the spots on octoling tentacles as eye spots.

[ID: three images of octopus eye spots. They are black to dark brown spots with lighter rings of color in them. End ID]

many species of octopus irl have eye spots, and beyond the typical function of making the octopus look bigger, the eyes also mislead predators into attacking one of an octopus’s arms instead of its body. considering the fact that there is a fairly large population of sapient severed tentacles around, i feel like octolings having more adaptions relating to the loss and regrowth of tentacles would make sense.

[ID: a drawing of an octoling's eye spot from the top and the side. They have two dark rings, one encircling the entire spot and the other fitting quite snugly inside. Both rings are much thicker on one side, and the smaller ring is incomplete. The side view shows that the eye spot is slightly raised. End ID]

i tend to draw these eye spots like this, which resembles the original “suckers” a fair bit more than the eyespots on current octopuses. while this is definitely in part to preserve the general established look octolings have, i think there is at least some merit for the change.

like humans, it’s very likely that octolings evolved to have smaller irises in order to allow those in a social group to be able to tell where their peers are looking. they had also, of course, gotten their mask at some point, which would make their real eyes much more prominent than the often well camouflaged eyes on many species of octopus, especially those with eye spots.

though eye spots don’t inherently have to look anything like an animal’s actual eyes, since their actual eyes became more prominent, i think it makes sense that eye spots that look like their actual eyes (read: more white space), that instead of making a predator think that the eye spots are the one and only pair of eyes, the eye spots instead confuse the predator by giving them multiple targets, which also may be why there are often more than two eye spots on hair tentacles.

did i come up with all of this just to figure out how i wanted to draw octolings? maybe, but i thought it'd be interesting to others out there.

[elpickett]

Sense Her is out on AO3!

The first (and last) times Joel sees, hears, smells, touches, and tastes Tess.

This is the prequel of sorts to my new Tess Lives series, I wanted to explore Tess and Joel a bit more before I let them be happy and back together. It focuses on how they met and the very early part of the outbreak.

Rating: M

Words: 3k

Warnings: Major character death (does it count if she's not actually dead?), standard violence levels for TLOU.

Full fic below the cut if you'd rather read it here!

Joel Miller's first sight of Theresa Servopoulos was through a rifle scope, watching her dig a knife behind a man's knee cap until he began to speak. He and Tommy had been tailing her group of eight for a few days now, trying to work out where they were headed. In their experience, a group of that size moving purposefully meant some sort of settlement, and they desperately needed to trade for ammo that would actually fit their guns.

This, though, was a surprise. Tommy had clocked pretty fast that the group was divided into two or possibly three smaller groups, the tension rising steadily as time went on. They'd been expecting some shouting and the group splitting, not the only woman of the group, long auburn hair tied back with a bandanna, to stab someone in a way designed to maximise pain and avoid killing them. Joel should probably have found it less attractive than he did.

He turned to Tommy, who was still watching the scene through his rifle scope.

‘Any idea what's happening?’ he asked his brother, lifting the binoculars back up to his face.

‘Think one of the men made the mistake of coming onto her,’ Tommy answered, ‘definitely put hands on her at least, she didn't start it.’

‘As long as they still head towards the settlement,’ Joel responded, dropping the binoculars and picking up his rifle and heading back to the edge of the woods, ‘you keep watch, I'll sort dinner.’

~~~~~~~

The first time Joel heard Tess speak was three days later, when he was sitting on watch beside his and Tommy's stuff, rifle loose in his hands as his brother slept next to him. She slipped through the trees, silent as a ghost, gun loose at her side, and sat opposite him on the other side of the fire, ignoring the gun pointed at her chest entirely.

‘I’ll tell you where the nearest settlement is if you take me with you. I know you've been tailing the people I'm with, and the amount of firearms you have on you suggests you probably need ammo, as food doesn't seem to be an issue,’ she said, nodding towards the deer carcass hanging across the clearing. Her accent wasn’t local, Joel may have lost track of exactly where they were - Tennessee he thought, but he couldn’t be sure - but she was from significantly further north than whenever they were, most likely Midwestern.

‘How’d you know we were here?’ Joel responded brusquely, gun not wavering at all.

‘The rifle scope is reflective. First couple times I wrote it off, but by the third day it was clear someone was tailing us,’ she said, pulling a water bottle out of her pack.

‘Why wouldn't ya’ just go with your group?’

‘They aren't my group. I've been temporarily travelling with them, and that temporary period is now over, given I stabbed one of them. I'd really rather not travel alone, and since you and your brother haven't tried to kill us, rape me, or steal all our shit yet, you're my best option.’

‘We’re a shitty option.’

‘And that would be why I said best, not good. Try anything, I'll stab you too,’ she said, before picking a pinecone from beside her foot and lightly throwing it at Tommy, who sat up, gun loaded and pointed at her before he was fully awake. ‘Impressive,’ she mused, not reacting to the now pair of guns pointed at her.

‘Oh, it's you,’ Tommy said, blinking sleep from his eyes. ‘Wait, why are you here?’

‘We’re travelling to the next settlement together. I know where it is, you don't, and I would like not to go alone. I'm meeting the rest of my group there,’ Tess said coolly.

‘’Kay. D’ya have to wake me up early for that, though? I was hopin’ for more sleep,’ Tommy said, putting the gun down and going to roll over.

‘Tommy!’ Joel hissed, still holding the gun.

‘What? She knew we were followin’ her and she found us here so she's clearly competent, and besides if she wanted us dead she would have shot ya’ before I woke up. She's goin’ where we want to go and is willin’ to take us there. Plus this way we can split watches three ways, this is a win for all of us. Now pipe the fuck down, I'm sleepin’. We can leave at dawn,’ Tommy said, gesturing vaguely with the hand not holding a gun. Tess may not have had much experience with firearms (she hadn't learnt to use one before the outbreak, and hadn't found someone to teach her properly since. The one she carried was more for show than anything else, her words normally enough to keep her safe and a pair of daggers filling in when words weren't enough), but she knew just enough to be impressed by the younger man's trigger discipline even when half asleep.

‘Works for me,’ Tess said, shrugging and pulling a sleeping bag out her rucksack - a warm one, Joel noted, much thicker than his and Tommy's. She crawled inside (clothes and shoes still on, pack neatly fastened and ready to grab to leave at a moments notice, gun loaded and tucked next to her, same as Tommy's), rolled her eyes at the sight of Joel still staring at her, and rolled away from him.

~~~~~~~

The following morning, Joel learnt what she smelled like. He’d kept his gun on her the rest of the night, splitting his attention between her and the woods in case it was a trap. She’d woken with dawn by herself, slipping out of her sleeping bag and going to relieve herself (taking the gun, but leaving her gear, Joel noted), and had arrived back as Joel began prodding Tommy to wake up. Tommy hadn’t been good with mornings and getting up on time since he was teenager, and despite Joel's hopes time in the army had made that habit worse rather than better. She had pulled a granola bar out of her bag, and set up a pan of water over a small camping stove before heating water up, and pulling out a sachet of instant coffee. As Joel moved past her to get to the rest of their water supply to put out the remainder of the fire, he realised her gear apparently stretched to perfume, the scent of woodsmoke and coffee mixing with lavender and jasmine.

‘Ya’ got a good setup there,’ Tommy said, looking on jealously as she made up a large mug of coffee, adding several packets of sugar to it, as well as what looked rather a lot like long life milk.

‘Lots of stuff around if you know where to look,’ she shrugged, going to sip her drink before realising her coffee was definitely still too hot to not burn her mouth, putting it back down as she rolled up the sleeping bag and tucked it away. By the time her coffee was almost cool enough to drink and poured into a thermos to take with her, she had not only packed up but messed with the leaves and branches so you couldn’t tell anyone had been sleeping there.

They set off soon after, Tess pulling out a compass and a paper map (the same one Joel and Tommy had, not that it seemed to be doing them much good) and striding off past Joel to begin a long day of hiking, leaving nothing but the scent of jasmine in the air.

~~~~~~~

The first time Joel touched Tess beyond shoulders brushing as they walked or made dinner together (they had shared rations in Tess’ group so the food tasted better, plus it was much easier to justify having a decent selection of spices if everyone only had to carry the equivalent to one spice jar) was three weeks into knowing each other, when he ended up holding the skin of her stomach together as someone else stitched up a stab wound. This was certainly not how he wanted to first touch her skin and find out if it was as soft as it looked.

He was careful not to touch anything more than necessary or even look too closely at her mostly naked upper torso, to the point Tess would have thought the blood was making his queasy if she didn't know how little blood bothered him, or her, or Tommy, or the rest of their group. She thought it was funny, in a way, how respectful he was being while she was bleeding out. The group medic, an EMT before cordyceps, had cut her shirt down the front to get to her abdomen as fast as possible, then barked at Joel (the nearest person) to hold her still while he stitched her up, so Joel ended up with one hand on her hip bone, fingers brushing what he recognised as a C section scar, and the other spanning her entire rib cage, covering the pair of tattoos there and holding her still as she tried not to scream, the medic suturing as fast as could before tipping rubbing alcohol on the wound to try to sterilise it.

Tommy, still attempting to cover the four of them from the hunters firing at the them while the rest of their group picked them off one by one, glanced back in panic as Tess’ blood made its way across the floor in a river of blood towards him, soaking his trouser leg as he knelt. Joel, still trying to hold Tess still as she got stitched up, didn't move as her hand clung on to his arm hard enough to bruise, her eyes screwed shut with the pain. Even after the medic sat back on his heels, after Tommy and the others had dealt with the other group, Tess and Joel stayed as they were, his hands on her torso, her fingers digging into his elbow as her forehead moved to rest on his bicep as she breathed through the pain.

~~~~~~~

The first time he tasted Tess came a few weeks after she got stabbed, when the group found a liquor store. After drawing straws on who got to stay sober and on guard, everyone else had started drinking, enjoying spirits that most of them would never have been able to afford before cordyceps. Tommy was gleefully partaking in the drinking games (truth or dare, never have I ever, spin the bottle, and a bunch of other juvenile shit Joel was pretty sure people only did in college), whilst Joel and Tess passed a bottle of fancy gin between them, sitting next to each other a little further back from the bonfire.

‘God, I remember being young enough to think that was a good idea,’ Tess said, looking at the others playing games and swigging deeply before passing the bottle back to Joel.

‘Ya’ say that like it was a long time ago,’ Joel said, looking at her. She looked younger than him and Tommy, but he couldn't tell anything beyond late twenties.

‘Certainly feels like it, honestly felt like it before cordyceps too. Think I was done after I ended up getting a tattoo on a dare, then just started skipping straight to the drinking or drugs,’ she shrugged. ‘And besides, it's rude to ask a lady's age, Texas, didn't your Ma ever teach you manners?’

‘She did, hence why I didn't ask. Any information ya’ offer up in response to my statement is on you,’ he said, blushing slightly at being caught, his accent thickening.

Tess laughed, deep and full bodied, limbs heavy and loose from the alcohol.

‘I’m 27. Was born in ‘77. You?’

‘Thirty four,’ Joel responded, ‘Tommy turned 30 last month.’

‘Oh, so he's old now!’ Tess grinned.

‘The fuck does that make me?’

‘Distinguished. A silver fox. Han-’

‘I’m ain't going grey!’ Joel protested, cutting Tess off.

‘Oh?’ she said, rolling her eyes and carefully placing the gin bottle down, then twisting to straddle his lap, all her weight on top of him. He froze, before his arms quickly came up to hold her waist as she listed to one side, steadying her as best he could.

‘Then what, pray tell, is this?’ she said, hands finding a lock of hair and gently tugging, ‘because I hate to break it to you, Texas, but this ain't brown any more.’

Joel's breath caught in his throat as her hands gently combed through his her, their bodies pressed together, his mouth at the same height as her collarbone. He had a sudden impulse to lean forward and press his lips to it, and was halfway there before Tess tugged on his hair again, tilting his head up to look at her.

‘And what do you think you're doing?’ she asked, a twinkle in her eye that Joel was coming to realise meant she was fucking with someone (usually him).

‘I - nothing,’ he said, swallowing as one of her hands came down to his neck, her thumb pressing lightly on the side of his neck.

‘Well that won't do at all,’ Tess murmured, looking down at him, ‘if you aren’t doing anything you might have to think for once, and we can't have that.’ She bowed her head so their foreheads were touching, lips almost brushing his as she spoke.

‘Can I kiss ya’ now, darlin’?’ Joel asked, hands tightening slightly on her waist, carefully avoiding any pressure on the still healing knife wound. Tess smiled at him, a different smile to her usual fake one, and pressed their lips together softly for a few moments.

She tasted of the gin they'd been drinking for the last few hours, the stew they'd had for dinner, the spearmint gum she chewed while they walked. Her hand tangled in his hair as she pulled him back towards her, licking into his mouth as her other hand settled along his jaw, thumb brushing his cheek. And while their lips were pressed together, bodies tangling, laughing as they tried and failed to make it to where Tess was sleeping without falling over, Joel felt his world narrow until it contained only the woman in front of him, freckles barely visible and hair redder than normal in the firelight, Tess turned into flames set to burn him up in her wake. He welcomed it.

~~~~~~~

He realised, after he got Ellie to Lincoln, that he could barely remember all the last good times, not wanting those memories to belong to the ending they'd been dealt.

The last time her saw her remained in his head, the image on repeat of her begging him to take Ellie (as though he wouldn't, as though either of them would ever abandon a child, no matter how much it might hurt them to care for someone who wasn't the one child they wanted with them), arm shaking, the bite on her neck angry and fungus tendrils already snaking out from the wound. The scent of blood and dirt covering her jasmine lotion (the one luxury she afforded herself, always keeping it for herself if they found it or traded it), the shake in her voice as she spoke. She'd always had a way with words, a way of telling people what they wanted to hear and making them think her ideas were their own, so it killed him to hear her weakness, hear her losing what made him love her. The salt from the sweat on her forehead as he kissed her there, not wanting to risk pressing a kiss to her lips in goodbye. The feeling of her hand squeezing his as she told him to run.

Instead, he tried to focus on the good memories.

The last time he'd tasted her, a few days before they'd met Ellie, falling into bed together after a successful run, his head between her thighs as her hands tangled in his hair, holding him there until she was sated, kissing the taste of her off his lips.

The smell of her after she'd showered, making use of a rare period of hot water, the scent of her shampoo (rose scented, this time, a gift from Frank from last time they were in Lincoln) and lotion drifting into his nose as she curled around him in bed, her hair falling onto his chest.

The sight of her the morning before Robert’s men had beaten her up, perched on the kitchen counter and laughing at a joke, hair falling loose in waves around her shoulders in a way she never let it when they were working, wearing one of his shirts and a pair of long socks to combat the cold. He was attempting to cook eggs for breakfast, out of practice after so many years.

The sound of her talking to Ellie as they worked their way through Boston, trying to settle the girl (and him, Joel knew) and distract from the corpses littered around. Her voice as she spoke to Marlene, getting exactly what she wanted while Marlene thought she was getting a good deal. Her quiet words as they went to sleep the first night outside the walls, promises that they’d be okay, that the fireflies would take Ellie, that they’d go and find Tommy wherever he’d ended up.

The feel of her head on his thigh, using him as a pillow as he kept watch over her and Ellie, one of her hands curled around his leg as though to keep him close as one of his hands carded through her hair, gently working out the tangles as she slept, the skin on the back of her neck soft and smooth.

~~~~~~~

He clung to those memories later, sitting by the river, recounting them with each stone he added to her cairn - one for each sense, first and last, until ten stones sat neatly, one atop each other, the best grave he could give the woman he'd loved for so long. He briefly wished he would’ve been able to bury her properly, before remembering a long rant she’d gone on at one point about funerals being dumb and pointless. It made him feel better, at least, to know that she wouldn’t have wanted him to make a big deal of it. The way he mourned her was the same way he’d loved her: quiet, understanded, but always present, and always there.

[contaiinedarmageddon2]

CAPTOR CLOWN FIESTA: PART 3: the part where this thing ends no matter how much I have to hatchet it

all smut under cut. gratuitously so. hyper dick, heavily excessive cum, i'd say dubcon but it's my Sollux so I get to say he'd have agreed to it anyways because Captor's have no word for moderation.

"begin!"

Chahut had sounded off the contest. Sollux had the smallest hope nothing would come of this. Purplebloods were insane, everyone knew that, but some kind of weird sex contest, with a lowblood no less? They'd have to be drinking a lot more than faygo for that surely-

Thud, thud, thud, footsteps on stairs. Oh right, they had been.

"now There's our firsT conTesTant. i knew you weren'T no biTch krelah."

'Krelah' was another female purple. While tall and well built in her own right, she didn't have Chahut's immense early-molt height. She was however significantly more bottom heavy than the showrunner. Spandex clad hips flared out wider than her shoulders, carting around two immensely globular ass cheeks. Each step she took let her make an exaggerated sway of her heavyweight hips, and by the roll of her cheeks following up the movements perhaps the earlier thudding hadn't come from her feet.

Walking up to the still lightly twitching tower of yellowblood dick, Krelah gleefully draped her hands around the head of it and leaned in to plant a thick, wet kiss atop it. A dark splotch of lipstick now crowned it where she pulled away, and the soft press of her lips to the heavily primed lowblood forced another spurt of precum out and onto the front of her colorful shirt. Not that she seemed to mind. She plucked the condom out of Chahut's hand while the taller troll graciously stepped back to let the first contestant work. Krelah seemed to be able to locate the viewing slit to give Sollux a wink before sliding the somehow perfectly fitted condom down the throbbing pole with both hands.

Still somehow locking eyes with the disgruntled captive, the wide bodied purple leaned forward and down. For a moment Sollux thought she might be trying to get in close to speak to him, before the plot was revealed. Krelah was taking her pants off, and as she tugged and wiggled to get them over the incredible breadth of her hips, Sollux was treated to the view of another pair of moons. The magnificent set of twin hemispheres were large enough to frame her head from behind, looking to be almost setting over the horizon. A palpable weight was felt just by looking at those over-dense grey orbs.

She rose back to her full height, seeming to take in a deep breath of the potent pheromonal cocktail such a powerful organ produced. Not that any more was needed to dedicate her to the sacred task now entrusted. Krelah spun around again to face the crowd, the utter wagon behind her giving a resounding clap as it swung into itself. Then she thrust backwards in a motion that had probably felled many a smaller partner before and sandwiched Sollux's cock between the wall and her colossal ass. As the yellowblood wheezed in slight pain and a great deal of pleasure another spurt of cloyingly thick pre fired off, and would surely have hit the crowd had the condom not caught it. She started to move, rubbing, shaking, and grinding against the captive pole. Her hip movements were expert despite the incredible weight she carried, and soon Sollux found himself gasping as the absurdly weighty cheeks began slowly devouring his dick down between them into a cushioned vise.

Krelah had never had the pleasure of working with a bulge that could actually escape her giant cheeks, and was all too eager to put her all into working it over. Beneath the mounds of bubbly fat her lower body was all muscle, and she put it to work pumping his cock vigorously. Were he not protected by the glory hole's walls Sollux could imagine his lap being pummeled as her ass crashed into the stage with a meaty slap every time she squatted down then rose back up, sliding him against her again and again with a savage intensity. Behind the wall Sollux was almost pulled from the chair several times by the force of her buttjob, saved only by being tied to it. His nuts gurgled ferociously, swollen down to rest on the ground in front of him. Krelah could feel the hardened steel of his prick throbbing with need and decided to cap things off. "Oh yOu want tO paint these cheeks sO bad huh lOwbl00d? maybe if i catch yOu later. nOw give it tO me!" She called back down toward him and started to shake herself silly, forcing the immense gray globes to slam around him with mighty claps and try to and practically bludgeon an orgasm out of him. It worked, and with a cry Sollux began to unload the first fresh batch of the night. Whatever material the condom was made out of truly must've been miraculous to hold against the gushing torrent of overly thick seed. Krelah kept up her dance the entire while, tantalizing and tenderizing throughout each powerful throb and buck of his hips while Sollux's own wicked elixir stretched and bloated the purplish material until she finally had to step away and let it rest against the ground. When he was finally done the audience beheld a garbage bag sized condom fit to burst on the stage. Krelah gave a smirk of victory and hefted it up in her strong arms to cart it off to the side.

Sollux was nearly doubled over in the chair, a thin line of drool leaking from his mouth. Surely that would be all then? They had their fun, and clearly the first load being so large had to mean the rest would be smaller and thus not worth the trouble. Yet as he looked up, expecting to see a now bored crowd of purples dispersing to the next shiny thing, he could only groan. What he saw instead was his traitorous cock standing taller than ever, pulsing veins eagerly challenging the crowd while his bloated balls churned even more fiercely. And the purples answered the challenge, the crowd surging up in a wave onto the stage.

What followed was a dizzying array of debauchery. Sollux's mind was so overloaded with sensation that it seemed to go by in flashes. Every mirthful lady in attendance wanted a piece, and they got one. Breasts from the petite to the prodigious glided down and squeezed around him. More tongues than felt possible lapped, sucked, and lavished every inch of that behemoth on stage with endless coats of saliva. He barely felt the condoms going on and off repeatedly as people climbed his towering cock like a jungle gym to squeeze their whole bodies around it, or the boldest attempted to take the place of a condom themselves and tried to force what inches they could of the divine instrument into greedy holes. All the while he came, and came, and came. A seemingly never-ending torrent of overly potent, sticky gene slime pouring out of him into the endless receptacles, or over the starving crowd in the brief moments between sheathings. He felt that at some point Chahut or another attendant must've forced him to drink something, else surely even with his cock calling all the shots he'd have passed out from dehydration by now. Eventually, his penis smothered and lost amidst the writhing mass of horny clowns that had long ago turned this from a contest with a goal to a worshipful orgy, Sollux lost consciousness.

By the time he came to time had long since given up and turned in any hope at meaning. It felt as though his half of a soul had been fully filled in with lead instead as not one muscle outside of his eyelids could move, and those only at a meandering crawl. There was a real ceiling above him at least, not some tent canvas. So where was he? Unable to turn his head, the answer came with a voice.

"finally sTirring huh? Those girls did a number on you." The placid face of the long-horned purple loomed into place over him. A faint grin formed, as one large hand began trailing down his side.

"guess we'd beTTer check and make sure That promise of every lasT drop was fulfilled."

[zipstick]

How profitable are [tumblr] Checkmarks?

Hello. My name is Robin. Recently I ran two polls in order to calculate an estimate of how much money tumblr has made from checkmarks, because I'm a massive statistics nerd. Here are the results.

As shown above, the vast majority of tumblr users, as I had expected, have not purchased any checkmarks, myself included. 2.6% bought checkmarks for themselves, and a further 0.6% bought checkmarks for both their own blog and someone else's.

If we assume that the results of this poll are reflective of tumblr users as a whole, (unlikely, due to the small sample size, but this is just an estimate), then this means 3.6% of tumblr's users have bought at least two checkmarks.

According to Statistica.com, tumblr has 496 million users, so 3.6% of them is around 17,856,000. So, still an awful lot of people, even if it doesn't seem so proportionally.

I asked participants on this poll who voted yes to also vote on how many they had bought, across every blog they'd bought them for.

The sample size for this poll was significantly smaller, because the amount of users who voted yes is significantly smaller than the amount who voted no. However, it seems that some people who didn't vote on the first poll voted on the second, as 3.6% of 351 (351 being the total number of votes on the first poll) is 12.636, so it would have been reasonable to expect 12 or 13 votes. This won't have any effect on my estimate, but I thought it was interesting enough to metion.

Due to the limitation of polls having a maximum of 10 options, I will be counting every vote for 20+ as 20, for the sake of simplicity. Let me remind you that this is only an estimate, not an exact number.

Using our calculations from the first post, let's take the total number of users who have bought checkmarks to be 17,856,000.

All of the votes were on either end of the spectrum, which surprised me. I had assumed most would be around 2-8, with a couple of votes at most for 20+, which turned out not to be the case.

Now, on to the calculations. What i'm sure all two people reading this are here for.

64.7% of 17,856,000 is 11,552,832 people who bought checkmarks once.

5.9% of 17,856,000 is 1,053,504 people who bought checkmarks twice.

5.9% of 17,856,000 is 1,053,504 people who bought checkmarks three times.

5.9% of 17,856,000 is 1,053,504 people who bought checkmarks nine times.

17.6% of 17,856,000 is 3,142,656 people who bought checkmarks ten times.

(11,552,832 x 1 purchase) + (1,053,504 x 2 purchases) + (1,053,504 x 3 purchases) + (1,053,504 x 9 purchases) + (3,142,656 x 10 purchases) = 57,728,448 total purchases of Important Internet Checkmarks.

But finding out how many times checkmarks had been bought is not all we came here to do. We still need to find out how much money that is equivalent to.

Two checkmarks (one purchase) costs $7.99. Using this and the previous calculation that (approximately) 57,728,448 purchases of checkmarks have been made, we can deduce that the total amount of money (let me reiterate that this is only an estimate, and probably not the actual amount) tumblr has made thus far from checkmarks is a grand total of:

$461,250,299.52, aka four hundred and sixty-one million, two hundred and fifty thousand, two hundred and ninety-nine dollars, and fifty-two cents.

This has been some random kid on the internet called Robin being a nerd on your computer screens for ten minutes, thank you for coming to my TED talk.