#than the site with a thousand random people doing different things

[captain19cb97]

Stay (A/F) :: k.m

Synopsis: Sometimes distance doesn't make the heart grow fonder.

Pairing: Kim Mingyu x GN!Reader

Word Count: 3.6k

Genre: Angst and fluff.

Warnings: Allusions to online bullying but nothing is explicitly said. Arguing, crying, cursing.

You could feel tears welling up in your eyes the longer you stared down at your phone. The endless stream of hateful words - tweets, Instagram comments - every social media profile people could find of yours had been flooded the few days, technically since people figured out that you and Mingyu were actually dating, and you weren’t just some random staff member that seemed to always be around him for work reasons.

You hadn’t said anything to any of the guys about the comments and messages you’d been getting, and you certainly hadn’t said anything to Mingyu about them because you already knew how he was going to react once you did, but it was obvious to the guys that something was going on with you, and it wasn’t anything good.

The first one to truly notice it was Mingyu, but when he asked you if everything was okay, you told him that you’d been a lot busier at the company with different things- it wasn’t a total lie, you had just been promoted so it wasn’t much of a stretch for him to believe it. Then when the news of your relationship started appearing in the headlines of certain sites, both of you were stressed out and worried about a thousand things at once.

The next person to figure out something was wrong with you was Wonwoo. Since Mingyu and him lived together and you were over at the dorm all the time, with and without Mingyu, it wasn’t hard for Wonwoo to notice something was different with you. Sometimes when you weren’t really focused on anything, he would notice a far off look on your face or how sometimes you just acted a little more distant than you meant to before quickly covering it up with a joke or a flippant comment about something else.

Then slowly, one by one, the rest of the guys started noticing the way you were distancing yourself from all of them. They would constantly invite you out with them like they always had but they started noticing that you were declining more and more, saying you were too tired that night, or how you just wanted a quiet night in after such a busy day.

It got to the point that Seungcheol had suggested not inviting you for a bit, so you stopped feeling bad about telling them no every time, something he knew you did because he heard you say as much to one of the stylists that you were friends with one day after they had invited you to lunch with them that morning.

He didn’t mean to eavesdrop on the conversation, but he had been looking for you to talk about something that was part of their group schedule for the day, and as he turned a corner he saw you and once of their stylists standing a little ways away talking and he could tell that you were trying not to cry as you told her how awful you felt about how often you told them no to their invitations anymore.

“I barely see them outside of this stupid building anymore,” You sighed, wiping your eyes quickly. “I haven’t even slept at the dorm in almost a month because it’s easier to just go back to my apartment alone than to be there with Gyu. And I feel like screaming every single time I tell any of them no for something.”

The stylist frowned softly, as Seungcheol watched her rub your arm, “Then why do you keep saying no?”

He watched you give her a gut wrenchingly sad look, even from where he stood down the hall from you, he could see your eyes turning red as a tear rolled down your cheek. “You know why, Soo.”

Seungcheol hated seeing the look on your face, hearing the sadness in your voice, so he backed up a little bit around the corner and started walking around it like he hadn’t been listening, and headed straight for you with a giant smile on his face.

He pretended like he didn’t notice you wiping your face the second you saw him coming towards you, and his heart broke slightly when he saw the smile you plastered on your face as soon as his eyes met yours.

“Cheol! Hi,” You grinned up at him, as he stopped in front of you.

He offered you a quick nod, then one for the stylists, too, “Hi, Y/n, Sooyung-Noona, do you mind if I borrow them for a moment?” He asked her, “I just have a question about our schedule for today.”

The stylist smiled at him and nodded, giving you a soft look, too. “Of course, Y/n, if you have anything else you need, come see me later, okay?”

You nodded at her words, mouthing a quick thank you to her before she smiled at the both of you and turned away, heading back into the room you had pulled her from earlier.

Seungcheol waited until the door had closed behind her, before he easily pulled you into a tight hug, obviously catching you off guard by the surprised noise that sounded from you.

“What was that for?” You asked him softly, once he’d stepped back again.

“Your eyes are red; you’d obviously been crying about something.” He mumbled softly, lying softly as he looked down at you, “Figured you could use a hug and since Gyu isn’t here, I’m good in a pinch.” He smiled sweetly down at you.

You huffed softly, silently hating that he had noticed you crying, but also thankful that he hadn’t pressed about why. “I just feel bad that I keep saying no, every time you guys ask me to hang out with you all.”

He shrugged, still smiling at you, “Don’t worry about it. You’re incredibly busy, sometimes even more than we are. I feel bad that you have to keep saying no. When your schedule opens up a little more, tell me, or Gyu and then we’ll figure out something for all of us to do together, that sound okay?”

He let out a quiet sigh of relief at his understanding and nodded, “That sounds great. Maybe I’ll treat you guys to something this time, yeah?”

He let out a laugh and shook his head, “Not a chance, but nice try.”

You laughed softly at his words, and rolled your eyes, knowing none of them would ever let you pay for anything around them before you asked him what he had a question about.

That had been almost 2 months ago, and you still had yet to tell him or Mingyu that your schedule was never so busy that you couldn’t put something aside for even a little while to hang out with them once and a while. You didn’t think you were going to for a while, either. Mostly because you wanted to wait until all the comments and messages either died down, or they stopped bothering you as much, and since neither had happened yet, you didn’t want to go out to eat somewhere with the guys and have someone get more pictures of you with them. The last time that happened, the flood of messages you got still gave you nightmares.

You closed out every app on your phone and locked it, staring at your distorted reflection on the black screen and reached your hands up to your eyes to wipe them, then your phone started to ring.

My Heart❤️

Mingyu.

And it was a video call. You were happy the lights in your room were dimmed so he wouldn’t be able to see you that well as you answer the call, throwing up the same fake smile that you’d given Seungcheol all those weeks ago.

“Hi, baby!”

His beaming smile filled your chest with equal parts warmth and cold- warmth from love and the cold from the decision you’d made not even an hour ago.

“Love of my life,” He grinned at you through the phone. “Would you be so kind as to let me in, sweetheart?” He asked, “I’ll be at your door in a minute and my hands are pretty full.”

You froze, staring at him through the screen, “What?”

He gave you a quick confused look before his eyes focused back on where he was walking, “I know it’s kind of late, and very last minute, but I wanted to come see you. I feel like I haven’t gotten any time with you in weeks. Like proper time, and I thought tonight would be a good time since I know you’re off tomorrow and I’m also technically off tomorrow because I have an open schedule.” The words continued to pour out of his mouth, and quickly. “I’ve just really been missing you and you used to love when I’d come over unannounced when we first started seeing each other, I thought it’d be a nice surprise, ya know?”

You could tell he was almost at your door, so you couldn’t stall him or tell him it wasn’t a good time at the moment, so you quickly pushed yourself out of your bed and rushed towards your front door, while you hung up the call without saying anything, your eyes seeing the multiple notifications about more messages you’d gotten just since answering the phone call.

A thousand thoughts shot themselves through your mind in a panic, Was he followed? Do people know where I live now? Is someone going to try breaking into my apartment now when I’m not home- or worse, when I am?

You quickly unlocked the security lock and pulled your door open, just as he was stepping up to it.

He was frowning when you met his eyes.

“Why did you hang up?”

You didn’t reply, just grabbed two of the bags from his arms and turned to walk them into the kitchen while he pulled his shoes off before following behind you.

You heard your phone go off again – more messages.

“Baby?” He called softly, walking into the kitchen behind you.

You simply hummed, starting to pull things from the bags before he grabbed your hands and tried to get you to look up at him.

Another message.

“What’s going on,” He asked. “You always stay on the phone with me until you open the door.” You could hear the confusion in his voice as you continued to evade his stare, until he gently grabbed your chin and made you look at him.

The worry in his eyes broke your heart, and you could feel yourself trying to pull your hands from his before a sob clawed its way from your throat as your phone went off again, and again, and again.

The worry in his eyes flooded the rest of his body as he tried to calm you down, attempting to wrap his arms around you as you cried, yelling at him to let you go while trying with everything you had to push him away from you.

“Hey, hey, hey, what is going on? Y/n, please, calm down and talk to me, baby? What happened?”

You continued to struggle against him for a moment before you all but finally collapsed against his chest, tears streaming down your face.

He held you as close to his chest as he physically could, softly shushing you as he moved his fingers through your hair, as he mumbled gentle words, telling you it was okay, and that you were okay.

After a couple moments, when you’d finally calmed down enough that you were just softly hiccupping into his chest, he let out a soft sigh and tilted your head up, so you were looking at him. He gently cupped both of your cheeks and wiped his thumbs across them, trying his best to get rid of all traces of the tears that had tracked your face.

Then he offered you one of the softest smiles and easily leaned down and pressed his lips to your forehead. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Before you could even open your mouth, your phone sounded off from the counter again. You squeezed your eyes shut as you pushed away from him again, putting at least 2 feet between you. “I-I think you should go, Mingyu.” You whispered.

“What, why?” He asked, his voice no higher than yours.

You could feel the bile rising in your throat as you lied to him, “I don’t- I don’t want you here.”

His eyebrows couldn’t get any closer as he stared at you with an incredulous look. “Why not,” He asked. “Did I do something?”

You quickly shook your head, “No, of course not.” You told him easily.

He tried to take a step towards you, but you took another step back, and watched his face fall as soon as you did. “Then why?”

You could see his eyes beginning to slowly fill with tears as you both stared at each other. “Because I don’t.”

He shook his head, making the tears fall as he did, “That’s not an answer, Y/n. If I didn’t do anything wrong, tell me why you don’t want me here.”

You just kept shaking your head, “I just don’t Mingyu, I don’t-“

Another message.

He groaned, glaring at your phone on the counter. “Why is your phone blowing up so fucking much,” He yelled, reaching for it.

“No!” You panicked, yelling at him not to touch it as you quickly moved to take it from him before he could unlock it.

You stopped moving- almost frozen, watching as his eyes quickly filled with more tears as he scrolled through the hundreds of messages you’d gotten just tonight. The soft light of your phone screen lit up the tears in his eyes in a way that would be poetic, were it not so heartbreaking knowing the horrible things he was reading about you.

“Mingyu, please,” You cried, but unable to say anything else.

Finally he looked up at you, and you could feel your heart breaking into a thousand different pieces.

“Why didn’t you say anything,” He whispered. “Why didn’t you tell me this was happening?”

Your eyes trailed along his face as you tried to put into words what had been going through your mind this whole time. “How could I? What was I supposed to say to you?”

He dropped your phone back onto the counter and wrapped his arms around you, his voice cracking as he whispered that he was sorry.

You shook your head, trying to look up at him, “You have nothing to apologize for, Gyu. You couldn’t have known- I didn’t want you to know.” You cried, cupping his face. “I thought I could distance myself from you until it stopped, I thought that the space would help it not hurt so much but I was wrong. I was so wrong. I’m so sorry, baby.”

You buried your face into his chest as you both cried; Mingyu because he had no idea that this was the reason you’d been so distant lately, and you because you felt so terrible about having put him through it.

“Don’t give me space. That’s the last thing I ever want from you.” He whispered to you, doing everything he could to pull you even closer to him. “How did I not know you were dealing with this?”

You sniffled, “I blocked everything about our relationship on your phone so you couldn’t see it.” You admitted. “Every key word that I could think of that would let you see any of this stuff. Because I knew how you would react to it, and I didn’t want to put you in that position.”

He cradled your face in his hands, his cheeks streaked with tears, “That should’ve been my decision, sweetheart. Whatever position it would’ve put me in, should’ve been my choice. I’m your boyfriend, I’m supposed to protect you from things like this.”

For a long moment, you both stood in your kitchen, his arms wrapped tightly around your body as you both slowly started to calm down. The silence between you was broken every few seconds when your phone would ding once more from the counter and after about the fifth or sixth notification, Mingyu let out a deep, heavy sigh before grabbing your phone again.

“What are you doing?”

He quickly glanced at you as he scrolled and tapped away on your phone, not offering you an answer.

“Gyu, what are you doing?” You asked again, a soft lilt in your voice as the panic slowly started rising in your body at the pure angry look that had settled on his face.

“I’m doing what I should’ve done in the beginning.” He told you, pulling his phone off the counter as the text tone he’d set for you went off a number of times before he’d gotten it unlocked and pulled your tread up.

You looked down and saw that he had sent himself a bunch of screenshots of messages that people had sent to you before he handed your phone back to you. “I blocked everything on your phone, like you did to mine. And now, when someone comments on your stuff for everything, I’ll get a notification, too. And if it’s negative in any way, I’ll send it to the company.”

“What are they going to do about what people are saying about me,” You asked. “I’m not an Idol, what gets said about me doesn’t matter.”

A look flashed in his eyes, “It matters to me. And I’m going to make it matter to the company. I will not let anyone say shit about you and get away with it, and if I have to start suing people, or make the company sue people, I’ll fucking do it.”

A feeling filled your body, and your eyes began to fill with tears. Mingyu’s eyes softened before he gently cupped your cheek, “What’s the matter, sweetheart?”

You barely shook your head, sniffling softly as you quickly wiped your face, “Other than the fact that I feel like an idiot for having thought it would be better to not tell you about this in the first place, nothing.”

He let out a soft chuckle just as you collided with him in a tight hug, “You’re not an idiot, my love.”

You laughed softly, “No, for this, I was though.” You looked back up at him, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I just- I thought that I could handle it on my own, and that eventually it would stop, and things would be okay again. But then it didn’t stop, it just seemed to get worse the longer it went on.”

You sighed and shook your head, “And I don’t want you to think that I don’t trust you or anything, because I do, with everything I have in me. I didn’t want to burden you with this, because you’ve been so stressed out about all the performances and filming you guys have been doing lately, I was trying to not add more stress to your shoulders.”

“There is nothing you could do that would add stress to my life,” He smiled, his eyes flitted across your face for a moment before he let out a soft sigh, cupping your cheek again and gently rubbing his thumb along your skin. “I love you,” He said easily, like he’d said it a million times, but it wasn’t- it was the first time either of you had said it to the other.

Your eyes widened, and before you could even open your mouth, he continued.

“I’ve been wanting to tell you for a couple weeks, but you kept skipping out on spending time with me. And telling you over the phone or in a text wouldn’t do. Not for the first time.”

You chuckled, feeling your cheeks hurting from how much smiling you were doing.

“I’m sorry you felt like you couldn’t say anything to me and were dealing with this on your own, when you never should’ve had to deal with it to begin with,” A solemn look flashed through his eyes as he stared into yours. “I hope that you know there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that you can’t tell me, or talk to me about. Part of being your boyfriend is hearing about everything you’ve got going on, the good, the bad- all of it. I want to know it all, even when it’s painful.”

You nodded, blinking a couple times to try your best to clear the tears from your eyes before they fell. “I’ll try to be better about talking to you about things. But all of that applies to you with me, too, ya know. There is nothing that you can’t tell me, or confide in me about.”

He grinned, “I know.”

You smiled back at him, “Good, by the way, what was that thing you said a minute ago? Something you’d been wanting to tell me for a while?”

He chuckled, then gave you a look, “That first time thing?”

You simply nodded, smiling widely, “I think it was three words.”

“It couldn’t possibly be when I said, I love you, could it?” He teased.

You grinned wider somehow, “Yeah, that!” You giggled before setting your chin on his chest and looking up at him. “Say it again?”

He sighed softly, “I love you.”

“I love you, too, Gyu. So much.” You whispered back, before moving slightly to connect your lips to his in a soft kiss.

One he hummed gently into as he pressed you closer to him, splaying his hands across your back before he slowly pulled away, “So, do you still want me to leave?” He teased gently.

You giggled, shaking your head, “No, I want you to stay. For as long as you want to tonight.”

“Sleepover?” He asked, wiggling his eyebrows with a wide grin that made you laugh.

“Sleepover.” You grinned.

[love-and-monsters]

The Ship and the Alien

5,486 words, GN reader X M alien.

Humanity sends the last of their species in hibernation pods to the stars. When you wake up an unknown amount of time later, you are on a different ship. Surrounded by aliens.

Content warnings: mentions of death and discussions of medical procedures and illness.

The Ship never had a name. People tried to give it one quite a lot. There was a naming contest first, which was a bad idea. You’d think the bigwigs would learn not to give this kind of power to the internet, but it never seems to occur to them until the two top names are ‘SaveyMcSaviorface’ and ‘The Biggest Dick Ever’ and they have to scrap the whole thing. ‘Eden’ was an idea they tossed around, but there were people who said it wasn’t inclusive of other religions and a bunch of Christians who didn’t believe in the concept at all who were pissed about the connotations of the name, so that didn’t work. ‘Destiny’ was another idea, as were ‘Eternal’ and ‘Onward.’ In the end, by the time anyone had even started to come to a conclusion on the name, everyone had started getting used to calling it ‘The Ship’ and no one was willing to change that for whatever sappy shit they engraved on the side.

Maybe they did eventually name it. I don’t know. I don’t know if it mattered, really. Anybody aboard The Ship wasn’t going to be calling it anything on account of being in stasis, and anybody outside The Ship wasn’t going to be calling it anything on account of being dead very soon. So. The Ship was a fine name to me.

The Ship was not actually one ship, at the time- it was technically seven ships, six stationed on different continents and one stationed at the north pole. They were designed to all lock together in one massive structure, but to be able to function independently, in case of a system failure. There were redundancies, ways to transfer assets between different ships if necessary, and about a billion other things that I never understood, but were probably very important for a metal tube hurtling through space. In all honesty, I didn’t pay much attention to its construction. Crushing despair combined with a vicious fight for survival every day takes precedence, you know.

You don’t know how you ended up on The Ship. You know the basics- engineers, designers, and construction workers all got immediate entry. That took up a few thousand slots. Then were the ‘important people,’ the sorts you would want if you were setting up a colony. Doctors, agriculturalists, building designers, all the big thinkers who can make sure that things run smoothly and work like they’re supposed to. Quite a few military members as well. After that, there was some debate as to who else could come on. Limited number of slots, after all. You heard a lot of very right people tried to pay their way on the ship, but it didn’t work so well. Money’s useless to anyone on the ship, and will be useless to anyone left on Earth. Some people traded favors and influence to secure their spots, but a decent chunk of people couldn’t do that and had to subject themselves to the same system as everyone else.

The way they picked candidates for the civilian slots on the ship was the same way anyone picks anything they want to be at least somewhat random: they made a computer do it. All civilians who put their names in a hat, basically, and the computer system drew them. No one could accuse it of cheating, because it was a computer. Well, people could, and they did, but the idea was that at least less people would accuse it of being impartial than if a human picked.

You were one of the picks. Placed into section 3, chamber 2, pod 3247. You didn’t tell anyone- you’d been asked not to, out of fear of retaliation from those who hadn’t been picked. You just left the shelter you’d been living in and headed to the launch site.

There was a brief physical, involving being stripped, shoved onto and into a ton of machinery, drinking some kind of gross shit that purged your body of what felt like everything you’d ever eaten, getting your head shaved, and an IV port implanted into your arm. You saw other people on occasion, going through the same thing before they were whisked away again. There were no opportunities to talk. Everything was brutally efficient.

You were allowed to sleep for a few hours on a hospital-style cot. You ended up just lying there and staring up at the ceiling. There were other people there, also trying to sleep and failing, but nobody talked. Everyone just waited.

In the morning, you were all herded into the body of the ship. It was massive, bigger than any building you’d ever been in, and still quite cramped when you walked into it. The room was cylindrical, with pods lining the whole thing. The walls rotated, allowing the pods to be lowered to the ground, people to be strapped in and put to sleep, then rotated up to the ceiling, ferris-wheel-style.

You were toward the back, so you got a good view of the people in front of you being placed into the pods, injected with the combination of fluids that would knock them out, hooked into the machinery, and then sent into ‘hibernation mode.’ On your turn, you were pushed into the pod, the fluid-filled bags that supported your body adjusting automatically. The fluid was administered through your IV port and the chill of it made your eyelids droop almost immediately. Your eyelids drooped. The world grew colder and colder as the pod lid closed round you and you were left in the pitch blackness of the pod. You couldn’t tell the difference between your eyes being closed and open, but you must have closed them at some point, because you did drift into the dreamless hibernation of spaceflight.

It wasn’t quite like falling asleep. It was more like closing your eyes for a couple seconds and suddenly everything felt like garbage. Your muscles cramped, your mouth was dry as a bone, your arm throbbed where the IV port had been attached, and your eyes couldn’t open. You coughed furiously as soon as you took your first breath.

The air that touched your skin was horribly cold, but your body couldn’t shiver. Despite having basically nothing in your stomach, your body kept trying to retch. Your limbs were locked up, barely able to move from the slightly-uncomfortable position you’d been forced into in the pod.

Something touched your arm and you screamed. Or tried to- your lungs forced the air out with a sound more like a grating huff. The touch was warm, blazing against your bare skin, and even the texture of it was unbearable. Being without sensation for so long seemed to have magnified your senses a thousandfold.

It was hard to tell how much time had passed before moving became tolerable. You tried to open your eyes a few times, but even once you could physically do so, the room was too bright to look at. You flopped helplessly on your back, squeaking and complaining whenever you were touched.

As your brain grew used to processing sensory input once more, you got better at figuring out what was happening to you. You were lying in some sort of thick liquid, with your head supported so your face was free of it. The thing that kept touching you was alive, presumably, because it was moving. It felt like you were being gently massaged. Kind of the massage used to help encourage blood flow in a limb.

You tried your eyes again. They cracked open, just barely. The light wasn’t so bad this time. Not good, but not bad, either. It stung. You could see someone, probably a person, moving around you, although you could barely even make out the silhouette. It was mostly a blur.

The massage was nice. It was sort of a more pleasant awakening than you thought you’d have. They’d briefed you on the awakening procedures- the pods would gradually warm up so you woke up slowly before ejecting everyone all at once. No one should be awake to care for you.  Maybe something had gone wrong? But not so wrong that you’d died, so it couldn’t be something you needed to worry about too much.

You took your time to come back to yourself, slowly warming up to your body again. It still felt like you’d spent a week and a half completely sick with the flu, but you were otherwise not so bad.

The room was slowly drifting into focus around you. It was actually quite dim, you realized. There were a couple of pale blue lights set into the ceiling far above you providing illumination for the whole room, so everything was dark and shadowy. There was still the silhouette moving around you, but they were sort of dark and it was hard to make anything out about them.

The silhouette moved closer, still backlit too much to make out features. There was something slightly off about the shape of it, with the head and the shoulders or something, but maybe that was some weird eye effect of the hibernation. Hallucinations sometimes happened after hibernation, they’d said. Nothing to worry about.

And then the silhouette spoke. At least, you thought it was speaking. It wasn’t using words, though. It made a low, sort of thrumming noise with the occasional pop or creak. They weren’t quite noises a human could make, or at least, not without great effort.

You froze. That was… weird. More hallucinations, maybe? Had the hibernation fucked with your brain so bad you’d forgotten how words worked? That wasn’t good- maybe that’s why you were getting woken up separately?

Before you had a moment to ponder that any longer, there was a mechanical click and a voice, sort of neutral and male, said… something. You still couldn’t understand what it was saying, but there was some confirmation that it was, actually, saying something because you recognized the language: Chinese.

There was a pause. The mechanical click repeated, and then the voice spoke again, in English. “Are you conscious and able to respond? Please raise an arm if you can understand what I’m saying to you.”

You raised your arm automatically, though it was a struggle to lift it out of the thick substance you were submerged in. The thrumming and popping noise started up again, followed quickly by a mechanical click and a voice in English. It reminded you of when they dubbed over someone on the news while they were still talking. “Please remain calm. You suffered some injuries to your extremities, as well as hibernation sickness. We’re attempting to stabilize you, but you’re in a delicate condition.”

You tried to talk, but your mouth was so dry your tongue was trying to glue itself to the roof of your mouth. If the person was bothered by that, they didn’t show it. They moved closer to your head, walking alongside the tub you were resting in. Your eyes tracked them. They were moving weirdly. Were they hurt, maybe? Alarm bells kept going off in your head, the uncanny sense that something was wrong, but nothing in your conscious brain could put together what it was.

The person moved so they were in one of the brighter section of the room. You could see more than just their vague shape. Your heart stopped.

They were not a person.

That was why their shape was wrong. You could see their torso, from their head to nearly their waist, and it was human only in the vaguest of shapes. Sort of a vaguely oval head, with a sort of human-like face, except it was flatter, with pointed, almost horse-like ears. Their eyes were a little deeper-set and rounder. Their coloration reminded you of a Doberman, almost, with black across the top of their face and a paler color underneath. Their torso was longer and more slender than a human’s with narrower, more sloped shoulders and long arms that folded up close to their chest. They made a sort of humming or purring noise as they leaned over you.

You struggled to sit up or scramble away, but you couldn’t move much. You couldn’t even scream, just sort of moan helplessly. One of your legs managed to kick out sideways and connect with the side of the tank. It wasn’t much of a hit, but that, combined with you straining the rest of your pathetic muscles to get away from the thing next to you, meant that you partially slid off whatever was keeping your head supported and your face went under the water.

It was thicker than water, but not by too much, so your head slid under it with disconcerting slowness. It was then that you discovered another disadvantage of your weak muscles- the substance was just thick enough to make moving through it, even just enough to lift your head out of the water, impossible.

You thrashed, but not really, since you couldn’t move. There was only about two seconds of panic, though, before hands locked around you and pulled your head out back out. You sputtered as the hands placed your head back on the little platform.

“Stay still.” Something was beeping frantically in the background, and you could both hear and see the creature shifting around to check on some machines. “The fluid is warming you back to proper temperature. You need to remain still and calm to avoid going into shock.”

There was no way you were not going into shock. But you’d used up all your energy in your near-drowning, so you couldn’t do much but lie there. The creature seemed to relax.

“I understand that you’re frightened. I promise, I’m trying to help you.” When you didn’t move, just watched them, they relaxed further. “Remain still. I will conclude the treatment.”

They fussed around for a little while longer, checking on whatever monitors were giving readouts for your condition. You weren’t sure what indicated that your treatment was over, since you didn’t feel much better, but eventually, they pressed a button somewhere and the fluid drained out of the tub. It was cold after the fluid was gone, and you were completely nude and shivering, resting on some pads at the bottom of the tub. The creature, thankfully, offered you warm cloths that you could bury yourself underneath.

Before you could even properly enjoy the warmth, there was the sound of footsteps approaching. A lot of footsteps. Summoning all your strength, you heaved yourself up and looked over the edge of the tub.

There were more of them. Only three, not including your creature, which didn’t seem to match up with the amount of footsteps you’d heard. And then you looked down a little more and realized why.

They were centaurs.

Sort of- their limbs weren’t hooved, and they weren’t really like paws, either. A bit more like bird talons, if birds rested mostly on their fingertips. Talontips. Whatever. They walked with their torsos bent further forward than centaurs, too, and they had long tails. A couple of them had horns, pointing back off their heads. They were wearing clothes that were relatively close-fitting, like most spacesuits you’d seen.

The one in front, with the largest horns and a sort of fancy marker around its neck, stepped froward. “On behalf of the First Branch of the Agrenier, we would like to officially greet your species. And offer our condolences.” This one also had their words picked up by the machine and recited in a language you could understand, though the voice the machine used was different, a little more feminine. Maybe this one was a woman?

The blankets hadn’t really calmed your shivering, but you managed to speak in a semi-steady voice. “Condolences?”

She scuffed one of her forelimbs, her ears lowering to the sides of her head. “Your ship was found drifting, nearly without power. There was some sort of error with major mechanical functions in the ship, which caused serious damage to the inner workings. Upon investigation of the craft, we discovered several hibernation pods, the vast majority of which were damaged.” She paused, still tapping a forelimb against the ground. “Two contained living members of your species, but you were the only one to survive the initial reawakening process. You have our deepest condolences.”             You opened your mouth, but you couldn’t think of anything to say. Your brain struggled to process anything. Two pods with living people. Only one survived the reawakening. That was- that had to be you, right? You were- the only-

Dimly, you were aware of the robot speaking again. It seemed to be rapidly switching between two agitated voices. People were having an argument, maybe? You didn’t care. You buried yourself under the blankets and hid in the warm cocoon until everything was dark and floaty and your brain didn’t have any thoughts in it at all.

Someone tried to tug the blanket away. You weren’t sure how long it had been, but it was quieter and your limbs were stiff from being in the same position. You tried to keep the blanket over your body, but there was another firm tug and you lost your grip. Your muscles were pathetic. And, as embarrassing as it was, you couldn’t help but crying out when the blanket was taken away. It was the one thing you had in the world and you couldn’t even hold onto it.

“I’m sorry.” The other voice, the one from your centaur, came again from the robot. It did a very good job at adding emotion to the voices- it sounded anguished. “You’re overheating, I need to take it, but I’m sorry.” You curled up on the bottom of the tub, unmoving. The centaur patted your head. It was a small gesture, but you leaned into it. What else did you have?

The centaur patted your head a few more times before moving on. “I know you’re probably scared, but we’re not going to hurt you. I’m going to help you. Your hibernation pod was the least damaged of all of them, but it still had some minor malfunctions. It was hard to wake you up, and you’re not going to be all there for a little while.”

You racked your brains. It was easier to think about facts. When you���d gotten on the ship, there had been a big disclaimer about the dangers of hibernation pods. They were designed to keep a human in a state of suspended animation, with body functions slowed down to the bare minimum. The upper estimate was that it could keep a human asleep and alive for over half a million years. Not that anyone had ever tested them before you. But they were also risky- even minor malfunctions could lead to an early awakening, damage to the body, or the hibernation process just killing a person outright. Even when they’d gone over that part, though, no one had left. Why would they? Between a one hundred percent chance of death and a twenty percent chance, who would take the former?

So the malfunction had probably been in the sleep-wake system, the part that regulated how the machine knocked people out and woke them back up. It was supposed to run through a wakeup cycle on its own when the main computer signaled it was time, but if that system failed, it could be manually activated, and if the waking system failed entirely, there were ways to safely bring a person out of the hibernation without machine intervention. They were always riskier, though, and even if everything was done perfectly, it didn’t guarantee a successful revival.

That must have been what happened to the other person, the one in the other surviving pod. They’d tried to wake them up and…

Nope. Focus on facts. You took a deep breath. “What happened to the ship?”

“We boarded and searched it, and transferred the central computer system over to ours, as well as the supplies we could budget the space for,” the centaur said. “I’m afraid I don’t know any more specifics than that. I’m sorry.”

“How was it damaged? You said it was damaged.”

“An impact, I think?”

“That doesn’t make any sense. The ship was designed with rotator shields and plating and redundancies to keep everything secure. It was safe. It couldn’t be-” You paused. “How many people were on the ship?”

The centaur paused, then turned to one of the machines and tapped something in. “About 45,000 hibernation pods were recorded to be on the ship.”

That was too few for the main ship, but it had been designed with redundancies. If the impact had left a portion of the ship crippled, it was designed to eject the damaged portion and continue on without it.

Which meant your portion had been spit out and left to drift while the rest of the ship continued on toward its destination.

So everyone on the ship wasn’t dead. They were just continuing on to their destination. Without you.

That should make you feel better, right? That they weren’t dead? But you just felt very, very… lonely.

“I’m sorry about your fellow passengers,” the centaur said. He was leaning over the edge of the tub, sort of draped over it so he was resting his arm and his chin there. “For now, you should rest.” He glanced toward the door and his lips lifted into a bared-teeth expression. “Before our first officer comes back.”

He lifted your arm and slipped a tube into the shunt. It took only a few minutes before liquid sleep was coursing through your veins and you fell into a deep sleep.

The awakenings happened on a more or less regular schedule, at least from what you would tell. Often they would happen in that warm bath again, with your centaur rubbing your limbs to encourage bloodflow. Sometimes there was the other centaur there as well, the female one. You were pretty sure she and your centaur didn’t get along. The robot didn’t often translate for their conversations, but they had the tenor of arguments, and your centaur was always huffy and quiet after speaking with her. You ended up keeping time by the awakenings.

After two awakenings, your centaur gave you food. It was all prepackaged meal sludge, which was designed for people who had awoken from hibernation recently, and it made your stomach cramp, but you ate it. After four awakenings, the cramps stopped and you could move on to a combination of meal sludge and broth. Whenever you could, you engaged your centaur in conversation.

“How’d you know what medicines and foods to use?” you asked as he pulled the line administering some sort of medication out of your arm and closed the shunt.

“We transferred the existing data of your ship’s computer over to ours. I’m using your ship’s guide, translated into our own language, and improvising with our own equipment where yours was damaged- the hibernation pod you’ve been staying in is one of ours.”

“It seems too small to fit you,” you said. You weren’t a small person- you were actually pretty average- but the pod was only a bit too big for you to comfortably rest in. The centaurs were bigger than you by a pretty big margin, even your centaur, and he seemed to be the smallest one you’d seen so far.

“Oh, yes, that one’s for children.”

“You put children in hibernation?” You tried not to make the statement accusatory, but it came out like that anyway. There had been no children on The Ship, for multiple reasons. First was practicality- having a population that could breed and work right away upon making planetfall was paramount, and children wouldn’t be able to do either. The second was that no one knew how hibernation pods would affect children. Would it damage their bodies? Their ability to age properly? Hibernation had only been tested on adults- it was hard to convince people to put children in pods that might kill or cripple them, even when the same people had no issue with adults, especially prisoner populations.

Your centaur seemed unbothered. “For medical purposes. That’s what hibernation pods are used for. Slowing the spread of disease until the person can receive medical attention. It’s highly risky to use hibernation pods for long term space travel.” His ears flicked. “Though under your circumstances, I can’t say I can judge you.”

Ah. If they had the computer’s logs, they all knew what’s happening to Earth. What had probably already happened. The planet had a scant few years left by the time The Ship left, and if you’d traveled far enough to come across real aliens, then you’d been traveling for a while.

The centaur walked around the pod as the entire thing shifted from a horizontal position to a nearly vertical one. “I’m going to unlock the restraints,” he said. There was a faint click and the straps that were holding you in place retracted.

Your legs wobbled. It took all your strength to keep your body upright. It was a strain to stand, to walk, even to sit up sometimes. But your centaur insisted on making you move around.

“Hands in mine,” he said, extending his arms. You placed your hands in his and stepped out of the pod. He supported most of your weight with barely a tremble as you took a few shaky steps. His hands enveloped yours, though that was partially because of their strange shape. Unlike human hands, his were six-fingered and bilaterally symmetrical, with four ‘fingers’ and two ‘thumbs, both of which were positioned closer toward the wrist and pointed further backward than human thumbs. Despite their alien shape, holding his hands felt remarkably similar to just holding a human hand. It was a comfort.

Just as you were completing your second circuit of the room, your legs trembling like a baby deer’s, the door opened. Your centaur glanced up and his ears lowered instantly. The centaur that walked in was the first officer, the female that you’d seen when you’d first awoken.

“Officer,” your centaur said. The machine that translated everything was apparently quite accurate with tone, so you could tell that he was being both polite and annoyed. “Good to see you.” He was not happy about seeing her. “I am in the middle of something, so if this is not a pressing issue, perhaps we could continue this at a later date?” Please, please fuck off.

The veneer of politeness he was using didn’t let her be outright annoyed, but the machine’s tone when it spoke for her suggested she wasn’t very happy either. “It concerns our guest,” she said, turning her gaze to you. “And it is somewhat pressing.”

Your centaur shuffled his back legs and swung his tail. “Very well. Let’s get you back to the pod.” He ignored her, focusing his gaze on you as he assisted you back to the pod. You let out a sigh of relief as soon as you were in it. Your centaur rotated the pod back into the horizontal position and started to fill it with the thick fluid that let you float comfortably.

The first officer approached, claws clicking softly against the floor as she did so. “The human will want to be awake for this,” she said. “It’s important.”

Your centaur huffed a bit, but he didn’t move to put the sleeping drugs back in your system and just folded his arms up to his chest, in a way reminiscent of a praying mantis, and waited for her to speak.

She cleared her throat and turned her gaze to you. “We’re coming across one of our stations. You will be placed on a shuttle to the station, and then sent on another ship back to Tenso-bara.”

You blinked. What was Tenso-bara?

“In my opinion, that’s not a good idea,” your centaur said. His ears were still flattened, his lips curling back from his teeth just a little. “The hibernation causes weakness and sickness, so it may not be a good idea for travel at this point in the-”

“We are not going to come across another station for several-” The translation stuttered here, blocking the word out. “And we are not in compliance with the endangered species accords. We’re required to send endangered species to occupied worlds that hold to the accords for proper categorization and preservation.”

“Those accords aren’t for fellow intelligent species!” your centaur huffed.

“They were initially designed for non-sapient life, yes, but they do not exclude sapient species. Given what we know, we may be sheparding the last member of the human species.”

“There might be others!” you said. The first officer paused, her gaze going piercing-sharp. “The Ship was designed to separate damaged segments to protect the undamaged parts. The part of the ship I was on was only a small portion of the full thing! There are probably others!”

The first officer paused. “How many others?”

“Um. I think there were around two hundred and fifty thousand. Maybe as many as three hundred thousand? I’m not sure- they were trying to add additional pods at the end, but I was put to sleep before that happened.”

“But there is no guarantee that these other people did survive. Nor do you have any idea where the ship is now.” The first officer’s voice wasn’t cold or cruel, but it wasn’t gentle, either. You drooped a little.

“No. There might be information on the computer about where we were when the impact happened, but if it’s not there, then I don’t know where the ship could be.”

“Then I apologize, but unless we have other living members of the species or some confirmation that the others are alive, then you are under the accords and cannot stay on this ship. It is required for you to be returned to a planet.” She stamped her two front feet in a motion you assumed was like a shrug. “There is nothing I can do.”

“If that’s the case, then I want to make a request,” your centaur said. He stepped forward, practically shielding you from the first officer. “I would like to request a transfer.”

The first officer swung her tail back and forth across the floor, making a soft schff, schff, schff sound. “You wish to go with the human.”             Your centaur’s ears twitched and he rubbed his wrists together. Maybe he was embarrassed at having been so obvious. “Ah, well. Yes. I think it would be a good idea to stay, since I’m already aware of the medical conditions and-”

The first officer stomped one of her feet firmly against the ground. “I will submit the request. But I cannot guarantee it will be approved.” She turned back to you, expression neutral. That you could tell, anyway. Their faces didn’t seem as expressive as a human’s. Or maybe you just couldn’t understand their expressions as well. “You will be transferred in two days.”

Without another word, she left the room. Your centaur made a noise somewhere between a relieved sigh and an irritated huff. Then he turned back toward you. “I apologize about her.”

“What was she talking about?” you asked. He picked up an IV line of sleeping meds and for a moment you thought that he was going to knock you out so he wouldn’t have to answer your questions. But he just fiddled with it for a moment before speaking.

“There are many species in the known universe, and the gradual colonization of these planets has left many of these species  in critical danger, which led to environmental accords. Severely endangered species have laws regarding their transport in space and species in critical danger need to be taken to preserves in order to breed them back to proper levels. Or just keep them until their species naturally goes extinct. Whichever.”

“I’m going to be put on a nature preserve?” you said, trying to sit up. Your centaur immediately tried to usher you to lie back down.

“Probably not for long. I’m sure they’ll work to give you freedom and self-determination and all that. We’re just… required to follow regulations.” He rubbed his wrists together again. “I do want to advocate for you, though, hence why I elected to come with you. And to give you medical care.” He made a series of thumping noises in rapid succession, which the robot apparently interpreted as laughing. “I didn’t get my xenobiologist degree just to hand a medically delicate specimen over to some idiot government worker.” His voice got softer as he continued. “You’re going to be okay.”

It was comforting to hear that reassurance. He slipped the line into the shunt in your arm and you closed your eyes, feeling an unusually peaceful sleep drift over you.

Part 2 here.

[technically-a-kiwi]

Okay guys, time to correct and rewrite some stuff about the cosmic AU

I've read my older post developing on the story and this was basically my reaction

So yeah my older posts are full of off details and inconsistencies, brace yourself for some redcons and new concepts

Starting with :

Redcons:

• Cosmic entities are allowed to interact with other mortals ,because I'm sick of the trope of "powerful being who shape the universe must stay out of site at any cost or else it's the end of the world" or whatever, it's just drama for the sake of drama in my eyes and it doesn't add much of a mysterious vibe. Besides it adds more possibilities story wise :) .Let's say that it's something very discouraged among cosmic entities, it's okay if they fuel legends and folklore, but if an entity actively tries to get well known and mediatised in a universe, only then will they get in trouble.

• Stars are no longer needed for someone to turn into a Cosmic entity, basically I put stars in the mix to seem more cosmicy (if that's even a word...) and I didn't really knew what a star was myself, for now on stars are the sparkles you see floating around cosmic entities and are the physical manifestation of said entity's emotion, appearing in different shapes depending on how the cosmic entity feels.

•Cosmic entities are no longer bound to travel in the universes they're assign to, I put this to make their power not too OP. It's useless to restrict them to some universes and it doesn't really add much to anything relevant.

• The Noise is allowed to have more than his TV show as a form of media (such as journals, radio stations and more, although his most popular form of media is his TV show), limiting The Noise to only having a TV show really contradicted with the idea that he's his own boss, he's free, he can now do as he pleases and shoose what he wants to do in his show ( in his universe The Noise was forced to do what his higher ups told him to do, such as filming ads, promoting stuff he didn't necessarily like, and things that generaly bothers and annoys him), nonetheless his show is still limited to the cosmic realm (he does break this rule sometimes and bring random people in his show to torment them and satisfy his sadism but shhhh no one has to know this okay 🤫)

• There's no such thing as a title of ultimate prankster anymore, I just put this notion to solidify the idea that The Noise is an asshole, but does he really need an official title? The Noise is a little shit and his actions are enough to prove that.

• We don't know how old Peppino and The Noise are, honestly I shared their age to solidify the idea that they are older, more mature, and also to prevent people from thinking they were thousands of years old (seriously I hate this fucking trope. You're telling me you lived several times the age of the Earth yet you still act like a 10 years old, like do you live at the same paste of a snail for years to go this fast ?!!!) they both are very recent cosmic entities and are not super old, but you know, you can tell by how they act that they're more experienced and mature (the same goes for every cosmic entity by the way.)

And finally

• Cosmic entities don't have the power to manipulate their environment, this was the first thing that threw me of, like what? No they can't, that would be a huge loop hole ! I guess I put this in there to make them seem more powerful somehow? Cosmic entities can only travel between realms (mortal, cosmic etc, the afterlife is the only realm they are not allowed in) and between universes, they can stitch a ripe in reality but ONLY with a special thread provided by the court, they don't make it themselves. Only far more older and powerful cosmic entities have the ability to manipulate their environment as they pleases (more on older cosmic entities later)

Okay I think that's it for the redcons, if I want to redcon other stuff I'll reblog this post with those modifications.

Now brace yourself for

The new stuff :

• the difference of power and look depending on a Cosmic entity's age : there are three very distinct stage in a cosmic entity’s life: dwarf (they arbor a red color scheme in reference to young stars, it's the stage any cosmic entity starts at, only having the ability to travel between universes), minor ( in reference of smaller constellation, is the state our cosmic duo is at right now as well as most cosmic entities. After some years as a cosmic entity, roughly 20 years, they arbor a more colorful color palette and gain the ability to hear thoughts, feel what other beings feel and summon objects they own, that already exist.) and the last is major (reference to bigger constellations, idk they get bigger, sparklier and more colorful? I haven't figured that out yet... After several hundred years, cosmic entities gets tremendously stronger and gain several abilities, on the physical plain they can create or fix a ripe in reality through shear will, manipulate things around them, twisting and reshape reality as they pleases and create anything on commande [the only thing they can't create are living beings tho], on the spiritual plain, they can see things that are invisible for the average mortal being, that earlier stages couldn't see, such as ghosts, angels, demons and the soul of mortals, and also [this is the creepy part] they can manipulate not only other beings emotions [including their own] but also manipulate others memories, changing events in others mind, create new fake memories or erasing them completely. Basically they become a discount version of Discord from MLP... But they have more ✨✨✨ you know ?)

• How the Pizza Tower cast is seen in the cosmic realm : (Before I start this, keep into your mind that Pizza Tower is the only media in the multiverse, yes it brings down the idea of infinite universes, yes it restrict a lot of possibilities, but I think it's better to work with a smaller scale and focus on stuff that specifically interest me story wise, besides I really didn't want to go on a crossover kind of story 😓) When you think cosmic entity, you think of beings like you see in marvel comics right ? Huge menacing individuals, wise and intimidating, well that's exactly what were cosmic entities before the PT cast arrived. You see since most people in the tower absorbed cosmic particles, some of them became cosmic entities. At first the court didn't like this, what are those cartoon looking creatures doing in a society of grand powerful being? Of course they are some entities who are "cartoony" but not to the extent of Pizza Tower characters. Thankfully the first people of the tower were quite efficient as cosmic entities and set a good image for their "kind", so the court kept turning people of the tower into cosmic entities thinking they were still promising individuals (for most of them at least). In general the cast is considered like the babies of the realm, most of the other cosmic entities are completely fine and interact with them as if they were equals, it's only with the higher ups and oldest cosmic entities that you see they're kind of looked down upon, considered as not really inferiors, but kind of like idiots, not worthy of the title.

• The constellation system: After accomplishing several tasks, cosmic entities are rewarded with stars, but not any kind of stars, these stars appear directly onto the entity's body and serve as some kind of merit badge, gain enough stars and you get a constellation, gain enough constellations and you get your ticket to complete freedom and you can stop watching over universes, giving your spot to younger cosmic entities. It's kind of a retirement system, entities tend to get enough constellations around the end of their minor stage. You'll see on some designs that constellations are not the same depending on'the individual (it's gonna be a huge pain in the butt to keep track of who has what but anything for consistency ✊👁️👄👁️)

And finally and probably one of the darkest aspect of the AU

Loss of memory: To make sure cosmic entities eventually get rid of what attached them to their universe and former life, the court enabled a memory wiping system that will make all cosmic entities forget where they come from, who they knew and what experience they lived, only conserving memories regarding who they are and what they did in life. Things like memoirs and diaries are forbidden and if the court finds out an entity has any of this kind of things, it will be immediately destroyed an the entity will have their memories wiped even faster. Major cosmic entities all have forgotten who they used to know in their earlier life, family, friends, all experience that shaped them into the person they are, with who they are and what they do in life being the only memories they have left.

And that was it for the new stuff, if you made it this far congratulations ✨✨✨. Like for the redcon part if I want to modify this part I'll reblog the modifications.

And now comes the part I shall call

Random trivia ✨✨✨

Like the title suggest, it's literally just random trivia I couldn't efficiently put in the post, regarding anything and everything.

The way someone turns into a cosmic entity is simple, after death, the higher ups of the court propose you to either go to the afterlife or become a cosmic entity, only one version of a being can become an entity (to put that in practice, if Peppino from a random universe decides to become a cosmic entity, it won't be possible for other Peppinos to become a cosmic entity), there can only be two cosmic entities per universe, the entity will start off as a dwarf entity and as time goes on their body and power will evolve.

Cosmic entities may have the ability to hear others though, they generally don't use this power as often as you may think, most of them prefer not to do it because it's a huge violation of privacy and for entities that don't care about privacy, they often find out the "downgrade" of hearing others thoughts... If you know what I mean. Cosmic entities generally prefer just sensing the emotions of other beings around rather then hearing their thoughts expressively.

Here's the main PT cast as cosmic entities, in the chronological order of when they turned into cosmic entities

John & Gerome

Brick

Mr. Stick

The Vigilante & Pepperman

Gustavo

Pizzahead

Noisette

F. Peppino

Peppino & The Noise

( Beings after our cosmic duo will be shown later in the story)

Of course there are far more beings from the tower but this is why I call them the main cast, most of them have yet to be properly designed but they'll all appear eventually I swear.

All cosmic entities arbor a "scar" on their body hinting toward what killed them in their earlier life. For example the dark gradient you see flowing down cosmic Noise's head hints toward the fact he passed away from a head concussion, or if you were to look at Peppino's back you'd see a huge burn mark looking scar hinting toward the fact that he passed away from a bomb exploding inside of him. In most cases the scare is a warmer color than the rest of the skin ( Watch out tho, the color is warmer in the scientific definition, where red is the coldest and purple is the warmest ☝️.)

The cosmic realm is composed of multiple environment, expending as far as the eye can see, the most populated place is of course the main city : Cosmopolis, a city so huge it's surface equals our Moon ! It's basically your very populated cyberpunk city with huge buildings and bright light, with floating roads and boutiques at every corner. Outside of the city you have the Lux plain, very chill and on the country side, it's the perfect place if you like silence and stargazing, it's also where Peppino's pizzaria is located. Also outside the city you have the Firefly park, like the name suggests, it's a huge park with benches you can sit on of course, lakes you can admire or fish in, everywhere where the grass is a little high you'll see little fireflies fly by. And anything outside the plain and park is not mapped out, all we know is that it seems to go forever and there are several extraordinary places yet to be found and recorded.

Peppino can summon his scooter just by whistling and it will appear out of nowhere and go directly next to him, as if it had a mind of it's own, that goes for Noisette's umbrella too that she uses like a mode of transport like a witch's broom. The Noise tho has to snap his fingers and a limo will appear, crushing anything in it's way in a comically absurd way

Despite being forbidden, very few cosmic entities keep a record of their earlier life with everything they remember, for example Peppino keeps a diary with the name of everyone he knows, what's his relationship with said people and memories of his past life. As long as no one finds those records, he can keep what attaches him to his mortal life.

And finally

The only way to kill a cosmic entity is by saturating them with cosmic particles, too much cosmic particles is very dangerous, if an entity has too much cosmic particles inside of them, their body will slowly melt into a puddle of star and will eventually evaporate into cosmic particles. After that the soul of the entity will go to the afterlife, without the possibility to turn back into a cosmic entity.

And that's all folks!

Congratulations to all the mad lads who made it this far ! , I'm sorry this post has no illustration whatsoever, you had to eat consecutive paragraphs with no yummy colots, I am aware that most people like this AU because of the art, today was not an artsy day alright 😓 !

If you have any questions feel free to ask them,with that being said, remember that lasagnas are pasta cakes and see ya ✌️

[exeggcute]

just reread this piece from a couple years ago about a different rich guy who got the itch to get into deep sea diving and not only commissioned a new type of vehicle to do[1] but also set a bunch of records for reaching the deepest ocean trenches... which is interesting in that like, a random multi-millionaire[2] can pull off this kind of stunt, repeatedly, and not die. the oceangate guy was just a particular type of rich reckless idiot who endangered the lives of his passengers to pioneer a newer, shittier vehicle than the vehicles that other rich guys already use for these things.

also notable that over the course of his "reach the bottom of five of the deepest trenches on earth" mission, a shitload of things went wrong at first—there were snags! conditions were bad! parts failed unexpectedly! but they crew he hired wasn't full of yes-men, and they tested the shit out of everything, and there were plenty of failsafes built into the submersible itself. so no one died.[3] and eventually they got so good at diving to the bottom of trenches that it became more or less routine.

[1] a vehicle that gabe newell now owns, by the way.

[2] it's not super clear how much this guy (victor vescovo) was actually worth before he spent about fifty million dollars on deep-sea shit, but someone specifically says he was "wealthy, but not paul allen wealthy," so I think it's safe to say firmly south of a billion. in a similar vein I've seen a lot of people refer to the now-ex CEO of oceangate (stockton rush) as a billionaire, but it seems like he was also "only" a multi-millionaire. the only billionaire on board the titan when it imploded was one of its passengers (two at most if you count the billionaire's son).

[3] unless you count all the marine specimens that their resident marine biologist hauled up out of the water. I don't think they respond well to non-pressurized environments.

(non-paywall link, but I actually recommend trying to read this one in an incognito tab or something instead because there's a lot of interactive-y stuff that breaks if you're not on the new yorker's site)

[thechekhov]

I was trying to study buff anatomy, I was using pinterest, but then it started showing up some baka drawings and weird photoshopped photos and it makes me really uncomfortable. Do you know any site I could use to study that has at least an option to show only safe for work images?

Anon, I think I understand what you're asking but I just need to confirm one thing...

....bara?

Did you possibly mean bara drawings???

If you did indeed mean that you don't want to potentially be flipping through mildly sexual bara images and bad photoshop jobs wherein dudes give themselves too many abs to compensate for a lack of personality, then perhaps I might be able to help!

Keep in mind that if you want to study musculature and anatomy, you may need to put up with nudity no matter what. And no matter what way you spin it, many nude anatomy studies may be classified as 'nsfw' because unless you work in an art studio...... yes, it WILL be not safe for work, even if it's not sexual.

My first piece of advice - stop using Pinterest.

It's a good tool for collecting images, yes, but it will not be an adequate teacher for this sort of thing. It may also give you references which are not entirely realistic. Of course, un-realistic art and exaggeration in art are fine! But as a baseline to learn from, it isn't good.

Second - if you're looking for poses to reference for art, check out AdorkaStock, a long-time, famous photo-reference account that has thousands of human references for free!

Third... If you're looking specifically for BUFF references, it's going to be better to look for actors or famous people who you KNOW are well-muscled instead of searching for a random 'big buff guy' online.

For example, think of an actor you consider 'buff'. Search via google for candid photos of him - with safe search on. Chances are, you can get some references which are not uncomfortable for you.

Look, here's one of Jason Momoa!

For a beginner artist, this may be enough! You don't have to draw every single muscle bulging to give the idea to your viewers that a person is ripped. The proportions of his shoulders, the wideness of his arms, etc, is already enough, and it will go a LONG way to visually suggesting muscles than a rob liefield lookalike.

For anything more than that, you'll need to get comfortable with seeing people naked, or almost-naked, and simply seek out photos of athletes with the type of body you want to draw! Swimmers, triathletes, football players and rock climbers are all 'buff' but in different ways. Looking through photos of these athletes may give you a better idea of the variety that's out there.

And for any other anatomy lessons, I do recommend YouTube because there are many art teachers who offer their advice for free. For example this guy, who explains anatomical bone and muscle groups to help your illustration!

[tosahobi-if]

different anon, if it's okay with you, i'm interested in how you come up with the names! i've been using random generators but perhaps seeing a different approach is what i need...

this took me forever to answer and i'm so sorry about that, but this is about to be a lengthy post so strap in!

i'll give an overview of korean names and i'll explain some ideas for how you can go about naming your characters! for now i'll stick to korean names, but i've also done research into go-on kanji and chinese given names during the late three kingdoms period, so i can offer a little bit of help on those if people are curious about those as well! i can't promise it'll be as comprehensive tho hehe

a "brief" overview: modern korean names are made up of a surname followed by a given name. for the period tosahobi is set in it was exceedingly common to NOT have a last name. historical records state that last names typically only belonged to nobility and/or royalty, hence why certain characters have last names (jinwol) and other characters don't (yul). korean names are written with hangul, which was invented in 1443 however murim stories are an amalgamation of historical fact and fantasy, which is why i used the "modern" naming system.

korean was originally written using chinese characters. that's why there are typically two versions of a korean name, one in hangul and one in hanja. there are tens of thousands of characters in chinese and many of them have similar sounds which can be differentiated by intonation.

rather than being read logographically, korean is phonographic (modern korean no longer has intonations and different phonemes than chinese) so the same reading can be attached to different characters. (this is called sino-korean!)

hangul was designed to simplify the language to spread literacy to the population. each character represents a sound, and written together they form a syllable. for example, jin (진) has multiple hanja (進, ���, 眞, 振, etc.) and are all read as just jin, but in mandarin, they could be read as jìn, zhēn, chén, and so on.

thus korean names are chosen in hangul (ex; jinwol or 진월) then each syllable is assigned a hanja which carries the sound of the syllable used, but carries a corresponding meaning! i did a little breakdown of the hanja used in jinwol's name here!

some things to think about: if you take away anything here, it's that there's no single definition for any name! the components of a name make up the meaning. unless it's a name like yul with a singular character, the two syllables can be built to signify a wideeee variety of things. (that's why you shouldn't trust Name Your Baby sites that are like xyz means This Exactly HAHA!)

gender! hangul names are typically gender neutral, however, hanja can sometimes denote birth gender as there are masculine, feminine, and neutral character radicals. (ex the syllable "yeon" is gnc, but with the hanja 延 (to stretch, lengthen) it can be seen as masculine since that's a more "masculine" quality whereas the hanja 媛 (beauty) it is seen as feminine.)

there are indigenous korean names that come from native korean words being used as names. iseul is one such example! her name 이슬 means "dew" and does not have a corresponding hanja.

important!!! one can still assign arbitrary hanja to syllables, which is why in iseul's case i chose corresponding characters that i thought suited her personality! vibes are a really easy way to go about it. the hanja i chose for "i" (이) is 怡 for joy and 瑟 as in the guse, (known in korea as a seul) which is a type of zither. all together her name signifies "rejoicing at the pleasing sound of the guse".

how i make a name: names are usually one or two characters, for example, iseul is (怡 and 瑟) while yul (律) is one character. some nobility had three character given names, but since this already getting super long i won't be delving into those today.

typically i make the name in hangul first. i think you could do this in reverse (hanja -> hangul) but it'd probably be harder. most given names consist of sino-korean morphemes for each syllable, but you could def give your character a native name like iseul! (ex; garam, naro, roda)

you can theoretically choose any hanja you want (jsyk there's a korean law with a list of hanja you can't use in a name HAHAHA) parents, especially well-educated ones put together names with deep meanings and cultural references.

a common practice is to visit a naming-place where a fortune teller or a scholar (almost always a fortune teller, i've never met any naming scholars but they're out there!) they'll assist parents with hanja meanings for names after receiving information like due date estimations and personal details!

this is where elements of anthroponymy come in and they analyze things like stroke count and the five elements of nature to come up with a "beneficial" name for the child! (for example, if a child was lacking in the water element, the fortune teller could suggest a hanja related to water in some way -> balance achieved!)

vibes are a great way to name your character. one of the first things i consider is personality (are they happy? sad? thoughtful?) followed by things like birthplace (topographic names are popular!) and goals/achievements (what kind of person do i want them to become? brave? smart?) and then start looking up the hanja to attach to their name!

if this seems overwhelming, you're not alone! i take foreverrrrr to name my characters for that exact reason. names are considered very special and sacred (maybe not so much nowadays LOL) but back then they were thought to be a vital part of the soul and identity, which is why it's such a lengthy process!

anyways if you've somehow read to here, thank you so much for sticking through my (unedited) rambling. i'm really excited to be sharing this with you guys! and i'm also happy to help you guys come up with names if you send me asks or dms for your mc if you're having a hard time thinking of a name.

[wygolvillage]

a new year's resolution

well, as of 2024 i’ve decided i will no longer be posting on tumblr... this shouldnt be the hugest surprise since ive been pretty critical of staff, the over-monetization of the website, the site culture, and the user experience for the past year and gradually reducing my time spent scrolling the ol’ dashboard- ive even mentioned my intent to eventually leave; well, that eventually is now! gradually ive found myself analyzing the effect that using tumblr for 7+ years has had on me, and the effects of social media in general.

ive never had to write a goodbye letter like this before. while ive joined and left several online platforms over the years, its always been a gradual fade in interest rather than a conscious decision to stop. never have i used a platform as long as ive used tumblr, over 1/3 of my life. ive grown up with tumblr, for better or worse. how do you write a goodbye for that? i guess ill have to try my best. because as important as tumblr was for me, ive recognized the way its hurt me too.

finding other avenues of online self-expression particularly has made me think a lot about this. when i edit my website i feel accomplished, happy, and content, feeling i have put something of myself out into the world, my seed to grow and garden to tend. when i scroll through tumblr i feel as if my brain is mostly idle, and when i do emotionally respond its often out of anger or annoyance, because anger = engagement and social media sites like tumblr WANT engagement. particularly because i have OCD ive found myself upset by certain aspects of tumblr discourse culture, as well- it is basically the Scrupulosity Website and much of the way i react to and interact with media has been colored by my years spent absorbing the viewpoints of said Scrupulosity Website! i even used to look up discourse topics on tumblr just to anger myself on purpose, which is a dangerous road to go down, to build up Enemies and Factions in your mind- this is how discourse culture works. the culture of tumblr teaches you to see the world in black and white, and to feel like youre always in danger of compromising your moral purity or being attacked by the morally impure. If You Don’t Reblog This You Are A Bad Person. even as someone who nowadays tries to stay away from discourse entirely, its still there in the back of my mind, because the way we interact on this website is colored by this. when im online i dont actually want to be angry all the time! in fact i like putting my effort towards more positive stuff. but additionally: tumblr made me unhappy but it also made me an addict

and yeah social media addiction sounds like a silly boomer thing to complain about but one thing i noticed when i started trying to curb my time spent on tumblr was that opening the site was damn near compulsive. we all know those “open tumblr, close tumblr, open tumblr again immediately after” memes but that did describe my behavior pretty accurately. the draw and allure of social media feeds is powerful, if i accidentally click the youtubes short tab ill find myself a half hour later scrolling through random shit i don't care about and asking well how the hell did i get here? i dont even like that stuff! tumblr is no different no matter how much the site tries to coast on the reputation of being the last social media that's a “remnant of the old web” and “has no algorithm”. i like my chronological dash but it is equally as addicting to scroll through the thousands of people ive followed over the years, as it is to scroll through the algorithmic feeds of youtube shorts, because that's just social media!

and kicking addiction is pretty damn hard. before 2023, i made two separate attempts at reducing my tumblr usage and both fell through within a week due to that addiction. for reference this current bought of thoughts about reducing my tumblr usage and making my online/irl balance more healthy, around the start of 2023 when i began working on my website and its taken me an entire year to wean myself off of the hellsite, bit by bit. theres a point where it stopped being a conscious act, and even as i was carefully whittling down how often i use tumblr with extensions like leechblock i still had that compulsion go off multiple times every day, its a really strange feeling. but now that ive found so many more ways to express myself online, i just feel more whole now... i guess what im saying is that when i post on tumblr my first instinct is to complain or wallow about something, when i post on my own handmade blog on my website i always want to talk about things that excite me or make me happy! and its been such a tangible change in the way i think and act and im certain its because of the way social media and tumblr have their own “societal expectations” and structure that is built to feed on this negativity loop.

and a lot of the biggest shifts happened when i began immersing myself in the ideals of the web revival, while creating my own website. finding things that genuinely interested me and niches i want to occupy made me so much happier. i know we make a lot of jokes about having mutuals we never talk to that mean the world to us and i do think that is indicative of something. like, when i post on a forum full of strangers i am engaging with more “face to face” (or the digital equivalent) communication than i do with years-long mutuals. how genuine are these connections, this dashboard, the enjoyment i got from that meme post ill forget in 10 minutes? (not to say that i don’t genuinely care abt my followers and mutuals. ykwim?) i can still get all the things i enjoy out of tumblr in a more curated form via rss feeds; ive been so much more proud of what i post and create and code on my website. what am i here for? i gradually realized that i am losing absolutely nothing when i “miss out” or block tumblr on my phone or what have you.

since starting working on my neocities site ive felt so much creative drive. ive created whole interactive essays and worlds and games and writings and so many things i could never host on social media. my website is a place of my very own, and ive been learning the value of focusing on what i put out into the net compared to what i take from it. its made me feel so much more fulfilled when i spend time online.

and let's not forget about staff. i have broader issues with how automattic in particular has gone about running the site. the ads only took up more and more of the dashboard, and every month it felt like there was some new paid feature doomed to never take off. all while the user experience gradually degraded. using the site without browser extensions to fix the ui and block the ads and tumblr live and all the other shit they threw all over the place makes it look like its ridden with viruses, and i think the fact that its become so normalized to feel like we have to stay in spaces that become increasingly hostile to us, even while the internet is so vast, is really strange (i mean, i also thought that way at first). but Anyway. so much time and effort was spent on features no one liked or wanted in some desperate attempt to get a little extra money, while staff members get in public fights with users who complain about getting monetization shoved down their throat. its so openly pathetic. the merch store had mostly mediocre designs and the digital tumblrmart is absolutely full of useless digital goods with free alternatives. considering this is a userbase that gladly donates to other sites donation drives for hosting costs (i.e. ao3, wikipedia, internet archive), i am shocked that staff never considered the obvious answer of a fucking donation drive once a year or so! the ceo telling people with concerns about the ads being unsafe for epilepsy to “just pay the ad free subscription” is one of the most disgusting things ive ever heard from someone officially representing such a platform. do not be fooled by the reputation tumblr has cultivated: all that it cares about is making money from you. tumblr is “in danger” because it can't turn a profit- because a profit is all they care about!

so why stay here when im happier elsewhere, apart from the addictive compulsion? that's what ive been thinking through for nearly a year, realizing that i have no reason to, and that weaning myself off of the addiction is in my best interest. i can create and blog and have fun online and connect with others and follow other peoples work all without the need for tumblr anymore! and i think id be all the healthier for it.

over the past year ive truly fallen in love with the internet again and ive loved putting myself out there, unrestrained in ways i havent felt since i was very young. but nonetheless ive learned a lot on tumblr, ive had some of the worst and best experiences of my online life, and i dont doubt that i would be a much different person if i had never been a tumblr user for as long as i was. but i had to break out of this shell eventually.

i keep going over this wondering how i can express every feeling in my head, how i can word everything just a little better, how i can make the perfect goodbye. but i think this will have to suffice.

you can still keep up with me online here:

-explore my website: i keep it consistently updated and im always adding new things and writing new posts on my blog! you can even speak to me directly on the site! if you sign my guestbook or use my chatbox ill try to respond :) if theres anything on this list you do id like it to be this one! i worked hard on it! you can even send me chat messages on my homepage! just keep in mind it may not display everything right on most mobile browsers, but it should be mostly navigable...

you can also subscribe to my rss feed. if you don't know what rss is, it allows you to use a feed reader to keep up with updates from sites all over the internet! my rss feed will notify you whenever ive made a new post on my blog or made an interesting edit on my site id like you to take a peek at :0 convenient, right?

you can also email me at wygolvillage@gmail.com to message me directly. if you prefer im also “wygolvillage” on discord

thank you and happy new years :) thanks for seeing me off as i sail to a new sunrise <3

[silentstaresfanficandfanart]

thinking back now in nostalgic recollection of my times on amino, i wont share who i once was, i wont say where i was popular, but back then it was shockingly easy to become a popular artist on there, it was so cool being a part of a community, and how when you really put in a lot of effort other people could submit your art to be featured, and how everyone was so much more interactive since they were like ya know, grouped by fandom and or group

it was so fun fighting for the number one spot on the leaderboard its where i spent my earliest years of drawing...

its so strange being here on tumblr as some rando with a small handful of buddies who interact with me.

one funny thing is once you get popular enough people stop talking to you except the occasional really excited person whos *really* eager to talk to you (its so sweet...) but like everyone else is just...weirdly distant-

its a little like how i am now, but now its quiet because im so unpopular! its so neat seeing how much it changes, i wonder if it differs depending on the platform how popular people are treated? i love studying the like, psychological side of things. I dont think im likely to ever find out, but if anyone popular on here has some insight id love to hear your experiences with it, or how you felt on other sites, or people who were previously popular other places but find it really quiet here, etc.

though i would like to add a random note: while i may have had a few thousand followers on amino- they have a SERIOUS bot problem, i would be INCREDIBLY unsurprised if over half if not more of my followers were actually bots, i dont think that exactly counts as true popularity, but regardless other people viewed it as the same thing as genuine popularity and as such, treated me accordingly, i also managed to reach the top of one of the leaderboards, mostly by posting agressively- which probably helped matters. It was a very different system than most sites and i assure you i do not expect any sort of clout over it and frankly id rather not draw the attention of certain people from that time in my life who were...weird toward me in a way that made me uncomfortable and thus i will be keeping most details of it private. im happy to answer most questions if anyone has any especially on if i think amino is a good site or not to hang out on for artists but nothing revealing please , for my sense of safety and comfort-thank you-

on that note i do not suggest joining amino if you're a child, though i left in part because it is frankly, mostly children, ive had personal experiences (and so have my friends) with people who were very dangerous toward children on there though im not entirely sure if they knew i was a child regardless they pushed my boundaries in a very uncomfortable way and this was a VERY common complaint about amino when i was younger) I think it was a fun site and all, and with the right safety rules it was MOSTLY safe, but a LARGE part of why i wasnt as badly affected as some of my friends is because i was better at setting boundaries and I knew what was and wasnt appropriate and i blocked people that made me uncomfortable and my mom was careful to teach me internet safety rules. A lot of my friends didn't have that security and safety let alone parents they could tell comfortably "this person is making me uncomfortable and i need help from an adult"

so please do not take this as a reason to join amino ESPECIALLY if you are underage even though i know most of the userbase is quite young, it does not have safety protections in place for these children and its scary stuff. and remember to please trust the internet safety rules, i know it can be kind of annoying to have rules, but straight up ive had to scold my younger friends for randomly doxxing themselves to me and it scares the frick out of me that people would just tell me where they go to school-which yes is also doxxing yourself dONT DO THAT PLEASE I AM BEGGING YOU- no im not mad at you or scolding you JUST FREAKING WORRIED OKAY theres some really dangerous people who might have hurt me when i was younger if i Hadn't known better!!! and dont ask for that information of other people please! or share your real name! do! not! but im getting derailed now-and IF YOURE ONE OF MY FRIENDS

I LOVE YOU BUT I DO NOT NEED TO KNOW THAT INFORMATION PLEASE KEEP IT TO YOURSELF OR I AM GOING MOMMA MODE AND YOU ARE GETTING A LECTURE, EVEN IF YOURE NOT A CHILD I WILL SCOLD YOU- YES IM AWARE IM MILDLY A HIPOCRATE AS SOME OF MY (NOTE: **ADULT FRIENDS WHO ARE CAPABLE OF DRIVING AND MAKING CHOICES FOR THEMSELVES AND VOTE AND STUFF AND THEREFORE, ARE OLD ENOUGH TO MAKE SUCH DRASTIC DECISIONS AND GRASP THE DANGERS OF IT AND KNOW THE SAFETY RULES AND I HAVE KNOWN FOR MANY MANY YEARS TO BUILD THIS LEVEL OF TRUST**) FRIENDS HAVE COME TO VISIT ME , BUT THAT WAS STILL A VERY CAREFULLY DONE PROCESS AND THERES A LOT OF RULES YOU SHOULD FOLLOW WHEN DOING THAT, JUST FOR THE RECORD, YOU KNOW, SO YOU DONT GET SERIAL KILLERED OR SOMETHING ELSE HORRIBLE- i love you please stay safe- please do not just assume im not a serial killer, i didint even trust that nightowl and person werent serial killers untill theyd visited me at least once and did not do any serial killing

uhh i honestly kind of lost my train of thought and forgot what i was writing about this is just a ramble, toodloo stay safe ya little gremlins and remember popularity means nothing its just a random thing that happens to people sometimes, and is rarely based in pure skill alone and stuff, stay hydrated ,and maybe do some stretches or something or your bones will get all crunchy and pop rocky if you dont, love you guys!

[grangerfinallyhasanaccounthere]

Hello tumblr people

I do not know how this site works ;-; I am just using this account to do a fic giveaway on ao3

This is me btw:

If you are coming here from my fics "Making Friends," or "In a House by the Sea," please feel free to message me about participating in the thing. I'll choose someone randomly if I get a few people who are interested :) Some more details below...

To enter:

First, please make sure that you are following me on ao3. I obviously can't check, so we are on the honor system here.

Then, dm me with your ao3 username, and the fact that you would like to enter. I will put anyone who messages me on a numbered list, and then use a random number generator to select the 'winner' who will receive a fic as a 'gift' on ao3.

If you 'win':

I will dm you back, and you can give me a prompt/ship/vibe/etc. that you would like to see from me. I am happy to write a number of different things, and you are always welcome to ask, but for this giveaway I ask that people only make requests within the COD fandom.

I will write the fic (no more than a few thousand words), and I will post to ao3 as a 'gift' to the winner's username. Please make sure that your preferences are set on ao3 to receive gifts :)

Tentatively, I will leave this open until January 15th, 2024, and at that point, I will chose a winner if I have at least a few people to choose from.

Thank you all for your kindness and support!! I feel very honored to be able to do this sort of thing :') <3

[henarten]

Gay ramblings of someone who is very used to having a character limit

This is kinda very much trauma dumping in real but also idk figured its good for my mental health if I get it out in writing and maybe someone else will get a kick out of it who knows my most popular posts are just my sona. I don’t know why I’ve felt digitally illiterate my entire life. I mean, it *might* have had something to do with growing up in the middle of the woods and having actual dial up internet until I was 17 (4 and a half years ago damn). Or maybe not having a proper working phone until high school and no free time to figure out what I was doing. My parents always said I was the “tech wiz kid” of the family but what this really meant is I knew how to use google and had a history binging wikipedia on the computer. My first real introduction to social media that I actually bothered using was discord in 2017 and even then the most it was used for was the occasional meme browsing on a friend’s server or meeting up irl with said friends... and later on, finding out what RP stood for. I used discord rp to cope with my gender dysphoria at the time, initially joining a random big rp server (I think it was RP World or something I cant recall) to finding friends and enemies both figurative and literal in much smaller servers, to somehow running one of my own and watching it build up into something good and then burn to the ground. Twice. But that’s sorta different from the social media experience you get from Tumblr, Twitter, Mastodon, etc. You get these short little snippets that can be targeted towards a larger audience. It could be towards just yourself, or no one at all. The act of existing is such an open ended question that can barely be considered as such. I am staring at a white box. All the potential in the world, with little splashes of color and text, images, videos, songs. Struggling to find out what I can contribute. What is my niche? Do people like me for how I talk? I’m not a comedian, I’m just neurodivergent with a LOT of trauma. Do people like me for my fighting games clips? Am I really that good? Maybe they just like me for my sona? Do people like me at all, or is it just this online persona I’ve made for myself? I’d like to think people like me, but this nagging feeling has always existed in the back of my head telling me I’m not. It’s hard to ignore but it doesn’t mean I don’t try. Above all, Tumblr is from what I’ve seen a site that lets people be people. To find or even make their own niche, regardless of the popularity. A post could have a thousand notes or just ten but still mean something to someone and have an impact on their life far greater than the silly little image of a cartoon animal dancing was ever intending on. A random stranger turned me into a furry simply for having a pfp of their sona and look at me now. I’m so much more accepting of myself than I was in 2017 and its still gonna get better from here. So yeah, maybe I’ll make a post once in a while about my very ADHD spur of the moment interests like the time I made a wooden travel version of a board game or a paint program for the TRS-80 Color Computer or how I’ve accidentally transed at least 3 other people’s genders. Just silly things idk.

[kevin--of-desert-bluffs]

WTNV quick rundown - The Novel -

This is the post talking about randon Night Vale/King City and Man in the Tan Jacket facts!

Basic Plot of the Novel is here. Diane, Josh and Jackie random facts here. NV citizens random facts here.

The history of the town of Night Vale is long and complicated, reaching back thousands of years to the earliest indigenous people in the desert. We will cover none of this here. […] It is a friendly desert community, where the sun is hot, the moon is beautiful and mysterious lights past overhead while we all pretend to sleep. Welcome to Night Vale.

In NV, pharmacists wear gas masks and hip waders.

Hearts in NV are made of straw and clay and grow at age 9 or at least that's what they're taught.

Manual transmission works like this: 1 - whisper a secret into the cup holder, 2 - grab the clutch (a splintered wooden stake driven into the dashboard), 3 - shake it till something happens whilst taping a series of code numbers into a keyboard on the steering wheel.

Not yielding to a hooded figure will cause a mandatory city-wide ennui.

Encrypted radio pulses announce the opening of 'Lenny's Bargain House of Garden Wares'. As well as the titular function the government will also be unloading failed machines, tests and dangerous substances. The shop is being built on the site where the government was previously doing said tests. If you go to the grand opening sale and find 8 government secrets you get an 'free' government kidnapping and personality reassignment.

To protect against identity theft, Cecil recommends changing your passwords often, wearing a mask in public, blacking out your door number with black spraypaint and 'never ending up on a database'.

The 'Absurd Bowl' and 'Knife Ball' are events that happen in NV.

The NV job market is apparently very scarce as the hooded figures do most of the jobs in NV.

Here is what else we know about the MITTJ. He has a belt which is a darker brown than his shoes. His hair is recently cut. His face is clean and smooth. His teeth are almost white and his left upper bicuspid is a little further forward than the others.

The Moonlite diner has mugs from different sources, some of which leave strange sounds or hum. It has cracked red stools which smell of rubber and sawdust. It's pies are described as 'ok' and some are invisible. Food is served by a grey hand which extends from under the table and should not be acknowledged.

Most people in NV have no idea what doctors do only that it's rumoured to be beneficial. The hospital in NV is built next to the abandoned mine. Hospital rooms are full of cameras and speakers asking you to ask your doctor invasive questions. It was closed years ago and is no longer run by any recognised medical professionals or beings that are or were ever alive.

There are several spy satellites scanning citizens brains and revealing their thoughts. For some reason, Cecil has access to some of these.

'No country for old men' is a kids film in NV. They also have a 'popular animated franchise' about trees with human organs inside who are being cut down until vengeful arboreal spirits eviscerate the loggers. Lee Marvin is in it.

NV is confirmed to be somewhere in SW california.

Childrens friends are assigned by City Council decree based on the numerology of each child's name.

Hot milk drawers are a thing, also all avocados in NV are fake.

Metallic trees that change size each day are considered the plants most suited for a desert climate.

The NV cinema has nightly screenings of John Frankenheimes 1973 'the Iceman Cometh'. Popcorn prices are linked to the coal market.

There is a 'Top Secret Censorship Board' run by a guy called Luis who judges each film based on the risk of being shown a forbidden idea or gesture.

Having a regular police was see as too dangerous as knowledge of them could somehow be used against NV. The previous police were renamed the 'Secret Police', driving dark red sedans with gold racing stripes, black 7-pointed stars with the words 'Secret Police' on the cars side. They also wear capes and have a blowgun belt.

When writing tickets, these officers are required to describe the nature of the sunlight at the time of the infraction in verse.

You can only petition a speeding ticket if you go to city hall, so most people just pay the ticket, even if they're given one when they're not in a car.

Some magazine articles in NV; "10 ways to redecorate your bloodstone circle", "How to lose weight without losing sight of your own mortality" and "A cake recipe that only people who hate our government will want to try so mail us your best pictures of making it and we will take you away."

Some doors in NV require you to bleed on them to open.

There is an annual Imaginary Corn Festival and Fun Fair. There is a costume contest sponsored by the NV daily journal (dress as the decline of the printed word) where winners will not be forced to sign up for a several subscriptions to the journal.

The NV version of a Greek Salad is fruit and pumice stones.

The NV tourism board has a brochure with the tagline 'A town full of hidden evils and the secretly malevolent' featuring a picture of a diverse group of townfolk smiling and looking at the camera in the windowless prison they will be kept in until enough tourists visit NV to buy their release.

Aside from known eateries, there's also apparently places called 'Shame' and 'Pieces O' Grass' and 'Missing Frog Salad Bar' (which serves orangemilk and salad' in NV.

NV knowledges says the only known book on European history was a pamphlet on Svitz which was burnt by the 'Book Cleansers' because they mistook the giraffe on the front for a handgun.

It is illegal in NV to not have some kind of tracking device on you at all times. Most people choose a mobile phone but some still wear bulky tracking collars.

Most planes in NV are private, propeller, secret military drones and government planes used to make chemtrails.

The world government all wear blue headphones and horn-rimmed glasses.

Flamingos in NV are creatures that have six legs and double beaks.

Most bath gel or greeting card stores in NV have a full staff of bleeding saleclerks.

NV city hall is topped with ancient volcanic stone towers.

There is a service called 'Lifelock' in NV where they just lock you up and destroy all records of you existing to 'protect you from identity theft, impersonation, assassination, assignations and memory removal'.

Larry Leroy finds these things out in the desert: a metallic sphere that fell from the sky and whistles softly as if bored, his double, the body of the main in the pinstripe suit and a new way of breathing. The main in the pinstripe suit btw, goes through an existential crisis during the novel, cumulating in him trying to touch the planet of awesome size and then, death.

KC is a small town of little over 10,000 people in Monterey County. It's newspaper is called the KC rustler. Citizens include Wanda Nieves and Ynez.

The post office in KC is a one-storey stucco building with no front door, a splintered parapet walls with missing letters on it's marquee and a tree that has grown through the broken sidewalk and into one of the many shattered windows.

There's a 'video store' which only contains tall shelves full of loose tapes, some labelled and some not. Some shelves are densely packed, others nearly empty. The labels are handwritten and some simply have rows of x's, j's, p's etc. The walls at the back are made of mud and are easily pulled away to reveal a different room behind it. There's a music store containing a woman on a chair who pulls a face at Jackie/Diane. A bait shop where the empty jars keep exploding and cutting the man working there. A phone shop where the salesclerk doesn't remember ever having a customer before.

The flies that the MITTJ sells form a protective cloud in front of him whenever he is threatened.

The copier in the KC city hall is endlessly printing, so that there's stacks of paper everywhere. The receptionist is typing on a computer which is actually just a carved block of wood painted to look like a computer.

KC has a Taco Bell which people would stop off at on their way to either a town called Greenfield of a state wildlife area.

Stay tuned next for the sound of a creaking spine and the soft collapse of paper onto itself.

[myresellerhome]

Fastest Web Hosting Services for 2023

Hosting a website is an essential component of any website. While choosing web hosting, we must be careful. Web hosting providers affect multiple features of a website, like speed, performance, security, and more.

In this article, we will discuss the fastest web hosting services for 2023 and how web hosting providers impact website speed.

What is web hosting?

Web hosting services assist you in getting your website online. When someone enters your website's URL into web browsers or search engines, web hosting services accept the request and grant them access to your website's data.

Why is it so critical that a page loads quickly?

People don't like having to wait for sites to load, but there are other reasons why site speed is important. For SEO or search engine optimization, sites are put into groups based on how fast they load.

You'll get fewer visitors and less business if your site is slow. This will hurt your rank. SEO is made up of a lot of different parts, but keep your page's loading speed from hurting your rank.

A site that is simple to use and quick to load will improve the experience of your customers. Your website is often the first thing that people who might become customers think about your business. 88% of people will look up information about a company before they buy something, whether they're in a store or online.

People will think your business is good and professional if your website loads quickly and has professional features. These days, it's more important than ever to be online.

Web Hosting Provider Features That Influence Website Speed

Competitors: Other Websites

When you use a free one, thousands of sites are all trying to load at the same time. Servers can only handle a certain amount of data at once. This is the way that companies will give you the most trouble.

You should find out more about dedicated server hosting providers to get rid of this issue. Yes, you will need to pay for this, but there are different price points. It's well worth the extra money because your site will be the only one using the server, which speeds up loading times by a lot.

Hard Drive Size

The size of the hard drive is another thing that affects how a hosting service works. A server can work better if it has more space. If it takes too long for pages to load, it might be because your service is using a small or full hard drive.

Scalability

Adding to the last point, scalability is an important hosting feature for web speed.

When talking about web hosting, scalability means that a hosting system can handle more traffic without slowing down. Basically, it comes down to how well your server can adapt to the needs of your website.

Your content, number of users, and data will all grow as your business does. If you use a scalable hosting provider, your hosting environment will be able to grow with your business without needing big changes or moves.

A hosting option that can't be expanded, on the other hand, might make things easier for users when there is a lot of traffic. Pages that take a long time to load or website outages are not only annoying for users, but they can also hurt your search engine results.

Bandwidth 

Bandwidth, which is also called "data transfer rate," is the amount of data that can be sent over the internet at once. This has nothing to do with how fast the network is.

It's a bit like how a pipe would work. The bigger the hole, the more people can fit through it at once. Even if the internet is very fast, your hosting provider may not have a very big tube. This is because only a certain amount of data can be sent through.

Your website may need to load longer because of this, especially if it has a lot of information on it.

RAM

RAM is an acronym that stands for "random access memory." This is where the data is saved and sent from the browser to the website. It's measured in gigabytes and shows how quickly the information can be sent and handled.

Your site will load faster if it has more gigabytes. Each web server has a different amount of RAM. If your site is loading slowly, it's possible that your server doesn't have enough RAM.

Traffic volume

Your web host will have to work harder to send information to more than one place at the same time when a lot of people visit your site. If the computer can't handle it, this could be hard on it.

Sometimes, this can make your website load slowly, or for some people, it will start later. You can keep track of how many clicks you get, and your service provider needs to be able to do that.

Additional factors to think about when picking a hosting service

Locating the server, hosting tools, and the ability to grow are all very important factors to consider when picking the right web hosting provider and web hosting plan. But there are a few more things you should remember that will make sure your site works well overall.

Secure Protocols

A safe hosting environment is very important for both keeping your site's information safe and making sure it works at its best. Cyberattacks, like DDoS attacks, can make your site run slowly or not at all. Use a hosting company with strong security measures. These kinds of hacks won't be able to slow down your website or make the user experience worse.

Automated backups

Imagine losing everything on your website all at once. Backing up your information automatically protects you in case you lose it, your server crashes, or it is hacked. By making regular backups, you can quickly return your site to the way it was before, reducing downtime and making sure users don't lose their experience. With this feature, you can be sure that your information and settings will be safe, no matter what.

Customer Service

It can be hard to run a website sometimes, especially when problems come up out of the blue. A helpful customer service team that responds quickly can make all the difference. A good support team will fix problems quickly, whether they're related to speed, security, or technical glitches. This will keep your site's performance and user experience as good as possible.

Uptime

People need to get to your website to be able to do its job. Hosting companies promise that your site will be open and available for a certain percentage of the time. This is called an uptime guarantee. If your uptime rate is high, like 99.9%, your site is almost always online, giving users a steady experience. Even a 0.1% downtime can add up to hours a year that people who might come or buy from your site can't get to it. Always choose a service company that is sure to be up and running.

Fastest Web Hosting Providers

MyResellerHome

One of the most well-known web hosting companies is called MyResellerHome. Since 2006, this Florida-based company has been performing this type of work. MRH is also one of the few service providers that gives customers the option of using Linux or Windows as their platform.

MyResellerHome provides shared, VPS, dedicated, and reseller hosting services. Web hosting options include 24/7 customer assistance, cPanel/WHM, a free domain name for life, unmetered bandwidth, and other benefits.

M2Host

M2Host, another outstanding hosting provider on our list, has been in business since 2005. Since 2005, they have understandably offered cutting-edge answers. They have quickly risen to the top of the market since their major purpose is to provide reliable, easy-to-use, and not-too-difficult services. Their hardware has been carefully selected to offer the highest uptime and system performance for your projects. They provide features such as WHMCS, a free RV site builder, dedicated IP, 24/7 customer support, and server backup. 

WebHostingWorld

WebHostingWorld is a well-known name in the web hosting industry. This hosting company is based in California and has been around the longest on our list. They've grown to be one of the biggest companies in this field since they first opened for business in 2002. They offer customer service 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the newest SSD drives, cPanel and WHM, protection against DDoS attacks, and a 99.9% uptime guarantee.

Dollar2Host

Dollar2Host's main goal is to provide excellent services at an affordable cost. In this case, their prices are the lowest on the web. This was done so that your company can last for a long time. For Dollar2Host, the long term is at the heart of everything they do, from picking out hardware to apps. They offer features like the choice of almost unlimited storage space, free migration, high performance, Imunify antivirus solutions, and multiple operating system options.

Conclusion

Web hosting services have an impact on website speed, which can be a serious issue for website ranking. Web hosting companies provide services such as bandwidth, uptime, scalability, cost, and performance. Always select a web hosting provider with the fastest website speed. The fastest web hosting providers are MyResellerHome, M2Host, WebHostingWorld, and Dollar2Host.

Janet Watson MyResellerHome MyResellerhome.com We offer experienced web hosting services that are customized to your specific requirements.

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[doubleddenden]

Youtube's whole adblockblock bullshit really solidifies how we need to diversify our media selections without a subscription fee. Like YouTube nees SERIOUS competition that both respects its users and content creators.

Not to mention advertisers need a swift, righteous kick to the balls. I get that websites need money to operate, but CONSTANTLY ASSAULTING THE SENSES ON EVERY DAMN LEVEL is not the way to go.

In fact, any advertisers reading this: I will actively REFUSE to buy ANY of your bullshit just because you annoyed me. I refuse to buy premium anything because I refuse to reward a bunch of loser corporate nerds and absolutely pathetic jackasses suits for figuring out several thousand ways to annoy people.

If I could make a suggestion? Just 1. If no ads and ad block are truly that evil (they're not and actually the God damn FBfrickingI and most computer nerds recommend you use them to keep your information safer, and in general it makes your pc use less data and resources to load them):

Silent, non obtrusive ads to the side or bottom. Just those old squares again like in the late 2000s. No long 1080p videos that send you to 5 different sites for clicking somewhere wrong, just. Low data consumption pictures, with a single link you can click if you're interested in the product, or a large, easy to click or tap X button to make it go the fuck away if it's a stupid political ad, for instance. Every minute or so they slide out for a new ad. Take away the stupid, obnoxious, video and sound ads that drag on for longer than 5 seconds- ESPECIALLY the ones that don't let you skip- and replace them with that.

You may think "but then nobody would see my ads" TOUGH LUCK ASSHOLE, NOBODY WANTS TO ANYWAY, THAT'S WHY ADBLOCK IS A THING- see my above thing about refusing to buy from annoying brands.

But you know? Let's say you finish a non interrupted video, you're about to watch another- oh hey tho? There's a single, non obtrusive picture ad- The new Taco Bell Doritos Locos Ass Incinerator Burritochangalupa. It kinda looks good. It didn't interupt my vtuber clips and it didn’t get in the way of me listening to strange Columbo memes- I'm in a good mood! It just HAPPENED to catch my eye- I'm now voluntarily looking at your product you are advertising! In fact, I'm kinda hungry, and I hate myself! I think I just might go to Taco Bell!

Compare this. To this:

Oh boy I can't wait to watch monkeys being silly and- a 15 second unskippable ad for Claritin Allergy Meds playing the SAME GODFUCKINGDAMN CHRISTMAS CAROL OUTSIDE OF FUCKING GOD FORSAKEN CHRISTMAS LIKE IT HAS BEEN FOR CLOSE TO 36 FUCKING MONTHS WITHOUT! FUCKING! REST! And ANOTHER ad following! This one is for alt right lies brought to you by a far right misinformation group with fake credentials whose name rhymes with Hrager-Ew. Okay I am irritated now- I finally have monkeys!... and another ad- skip. Monkeys! Oh, now the damn youtuber is SPONSORED BY ISEKAI DEMON MOMMIES- the latest trashy mobile game that's shit and sells your personal data but they've been paid to tell you it's great and you'll finally get to have a harem of milfs at your command. You watch because hey, at least this is for the Monkey Man himself. Monkeys continue, andddd another ad. The video ends with more ads- at least now you can ignore Tord Fruck month since it's at the end.

All of these ads have annoyed you now- do you A. Go out and purchase these products? No, because that tells them it works. B. Subscribe to premium? It could help your favorite channels! No, it won't, the website pockets most of it and it just tells them it's okay to be this annoying. C. Find and research ways to avoid or turn off the ads. For free. DING DING MOTHER FUCKER.

Seriously. I'm tired of ads and I do not CONSENT to ads. No, me clicking the terms and conditions nobody reads- with EVIDENCE PROVING such- does not equate to my consent. I do not exist to consume advertisements. I exist to watch random videos that explain to me the production value and complicated struggles of a forgotten 2000s kid's sitcom from Nickelodeon- right after I watch a man create braided bacon rolls in some beautiful outdoor scenery as he cooks steaks to pink perfection in butter and herbs.

I exist to consume what I wish on my own terms. Not be subjected to endless advertisements

[exeggcute]

oh I know this one! it is about ads, but specifically that video ads are a lot more lucrative for publishers (i.e., the people selling ad space) and perceived as more valuable by advertisers (i.e., the people buying ad space), even though this... may not be the case.

digital ads are usually billed in bundles of a thousand, designated by the acronym CPM, or cost per mille: for example, if the CPM for an ad on a given site is $5, that means you're paying $5 for a thousand impressions (i.e., individual ad views). by comparing the CPM of various ad formats/environments, you can get a pretty consistent sense of what certain types of ads are "worth" to advertisers and the publishers trying to entice them.

getting specific CPM numbers on different ad formats is difficult because the actual CPM varies wildly by platform and environment, partly due to the fact that most ads are sold in mini real-time auctions where the price can fluctuate wildly based on any number of factors. but the general (and pretty much unwavering) trend is that in-video ads fetch a far, far higher CPM than basically any other format. to pluck some stats from a random source:

on android specifically, CPM rates in 2021 were

$1.96 to $14.5 for "rewarded video" ads (e.g., when you're playing a mobile game and it's like "watch an ad to receive more hearts!")

but merely $0.16 to $0.38 for good old banner ads (e.g., the long skinny guys you've been seeing since 2003).

so at least in this specific example of in-app mobile environments, video ads are worth anywhere from 12 to 38 times more than banner ads. it's highly unlikely that they're 12 to 38 times more effective than banner ads, especially since video ads in particular are a huge funnel for ad fraud and a huge chunk of the impressions you're paying for may not even get seen by real humans.

all of this culminated in a huge scandal a few years back when facebook basically enticed a bunch of companies to "pivot to video" with the promise of increased viewership and then inflated said viewership numbers by, depending on who you ask, up to 900%. some people have cited this fake-promise pivot as what killed collegehumor, among others. and ad metrics in general are screwy, and many people have gone on at length about how programmatic ads may or may not actually work (and certainly don't deliver the ROI they promise), so even when the publishers aren't blatantly lying the benefits of running video ads, as an advertiser, are uncertain at best.

TL;DR: assuming the goal is to monetize video via ads (which was definitely the case with facebook, genuinely unclear with tumblr's latest streaming thing), publishers make a LOT more money by running video ads than they do by running other kinds of ads, which means that any website that relies primarily on ad-based revenue is massively incentivized to promote video-based content because video-based content lets them $ell more ad $pace for the real lucrative shit.

why do platforms want to switch to video in the first place? (by "platforms" i mostly just mean facebook in the 2010's and tumblr now, not a lot but it's weird that it happened twice etc) like it seems to me that video would take way way more resources to host than text or still images, what's the motivation behind trying to force the switch in the first place

[lazyevaluationranch]

On a post about the Blue Haired Girlfriend's quixotic citrus breeding experiments, @voidingintotheshout​ asked:

I mean, if you wanted a hearty citrus relative, why didn’t you just grow Osage Orange? They can grow as far north as Michigan which is surely further north than anyone could reasonably expect to grow a citrus tree. They’re not edible but then hearty orange isn’t either. Osage Orange are so cool and such a interesting historical plant from the Shelterbelt era of American agriculture. Apparently they do smell like citrus.

This is part three of three. Part one. Part two.

Now you've done it! It's time for A Very Brief (But Also Insufficiently Brief) History of Twentieth Century Hardy Citrus Cultivation! Growing citrus trees this far north is kind of nuts, it's true, but I promise you it is not even close to the weirdest things people have done to grow citrus in places where the citrus doesn't think it should grow.

A note: This post will written using the Swingle citrus taxonomy system, including things that are definitely wrong. The citrus taxonomic tree looks like that one box of orphaned computer cords I keep moving with me to new houses "in case I need them" except some sort of adorable five-dimensional kitten has entertained herself with them and some of the resulting knots are not technically possible in our space-time continuum. 

The powers that be gave us citrus because nothing pleases them like seeing a geneticist cry.

1. The Migrant Trees

The Soviet Union wanted lemons for tea, and they wanted to be independent enough not to have to trade with anyone else to get them, which meant they wanted to grow their own citrus. That part of the world is not a great place to grow plants that die when the temperature goes below zero, but at the foundation of the Soviet Union, there were citrus orchards in the warmest part of Georgia, along the Black Sea. Specifically, there was about, uh, one and a half square kilometers of somewhat implausible citrus orchard.

Hang on, it is about to get way less plausible.

This is the great citrus migration: any tree that did well in one spot, they'd try planting its seeds a few kilometres further north, or a few kilometres further east. Prizes were offered for breeding hardier citrus. Slowly the orchards spread, but they were extremely weird orchards.

It's usually a few degrees warmer at ground level than up in the air, and there's way less wind. So as the trees grew, they were bent over and tied along the ground. Some of them had the central trunk run in a straight line along the ground, with branches spreading out from it like the leaves of a fern, like an espaliered tree on its side. Others were starfish shaped, with the central trunk looped down until it ended up next to the base, and the branches sprawling out along the ground from the centre like starfish legs. The citrus trees were no taller than particularly vigorous strawberry plants, but they survived the winters, and you could throw a blanket over them to help them stay warm.

None of that helped if the ground froze solid, so they needed Underground Citrus. You'd dig a ditch, down below the lowest area where the ground froze, and you'd plant flat Starfish Trees or Flat Frond Trees running along the bottom of it, too deep to freeze. In winter, you'd just cover the ditch with boards any time the temperature was expected to go below freezing - citrus would tolerate the lack of light, but not the cold. Mandarins (Citrus reticulata) seemed to do best, so that’s most of what was grown.

It is a nearly unimaginable amount of work to grow citrus this way, along the bottoms of pits and trenches. We are experimentally trying to grow a Soviet-developed mandarin breed of unknown parentage, Shirokolistvennyi, but we will definitely not be putting in that level of effort.

2. The Mixed Up Trees

There are a couple species of citrus that tolerate cold well, but taste awful. A lot of effort has gone into crossbreeding them with more edible citrus. The results are ... mixed.

The Ichang Papeda (Citrus cavaleriei) generally survives temperatures down to -18 degrees C. It is stoic and calm and has mastered emptiness. Unfortunately, it has mastered emptiness too well. The fruit smells like lemons, with maybe a hint of rose, but there's nothing to eat here. It has a rind and seeds. No juice, no flesh.

(Photo by Michael Saalfield)

The Ichang Papeda is the parent or grandparent to several delicious, extremely sour Asian citrus types. Yuzu/yuja smells like grapefruit and clean wet stones from the bottom of a fast-flowing stream. Sudachi smells like grapefruit and leaves with dew on them. (I haven't met kabosu or any other papeda hybrids personally, but they are numerous.)  They're all too sour to eat plain, unless you really need to turn your face inside out for some reason, but make for excellent flavouring. 

(We have a yuzu tree and a sudachi tree and they're surviving, but no fruit yet.)

Trifoliate orange (Poncirus trifoliata) can survive temperatures down to -30 degrees C. This may be partly because, uniquely amoung citrus, they can drop leaves in autumn or winter and regrow them in spring, like a maple tree. They also produce an internal antifreeze. They are angry, twisted, thorny little plants that yell swears when you walk past them. They make a great hedge. The fruit is furry, smells like flowers and pine trees and taste like burnt, bitter plastic. It may or may not be possible to breed the horrible taste completely out of trifoliate oranges without losing cold-hardiness, if it's due to their antifreeze chemicals. Here’s Stabby:

(Photo by Rob Hille)

Even the least terrible trifoliate crossbreeds are bitter enough to qualify as “acquired tastes.” There are recipes for trifoliate marmalade: put a dozen trifoliate oranges, a kilogram of sugar, and a kilogram of pebbles in a pot, cook until it gels, then sieve out the oranges and eat the pebbles. 

We are growing a trifoliate orange / minneola orange hybrid. And, of course, someday our own trifoliate hybrids. The Blue Haired Girlfriend planted 200 trifoliate oranges a couple years ago. There are fewer now, but the survivors have lived through two winters of snow and frost, and they might have somehow gotten more stabby. We're going to breed them, to each other or to less angry fruit, try and make something new and good from them.

I've limited this post to twentieth century hardy citrus breeding, but I have to give a shoutout to somatic hybridization, a decidedly twenty first century technique, where you take a cell from each of two different plants, remove their cell walls, put them next to eachother, and shock them with electricity until they merge into a single cell whose nucleus contains all genes from both plants. Then the new plant is like, "Wow, I guess these are all my genes? It seems like a lot, haha, but it's not like somebody made me from dismembered body parts and electricity, that is not how science works. Anyway I guess it's time to do some plant stuff now."

3. The Mutant Trees

In the 1950s, people started using radiation to randomly scramble the genes of plants. You'd irradiate seeds enough to change the genes somehow, and then you'd have to plant them to see what had happened. Maybe it was people horrified by the atomic bomb desperately wanting to find some life-supporting use for atomic fission, maybe it was government-supported cold war "atom bombs are good actually, look how many we have, USSR" propaganda. Probably both. 

This time period also saw serious plans for Orion, a spaceship with a huge metal plate for a butt, intended to be propelled by exploding atomic bombs under it, which I am not actually making up.

Thousands of people in Europe and the US signed up to receive seeds with random mutations in the mail, plant them, and report back on what they heck they grew into and if it had any useful weirdness. (The gamma radiation used to mutate the seeds did not make them radioactive themselves - the seeds were completely safe.) There were also more formal and carefully controlled university research programs in China, Japan, and the US, where plants where grown in a circular research garden with a coverable radiation source at the centre, so that the farther you got from the centre, the less radiation the plants got. Radiation breeding is less popular than it used to be, but Japan still has a very productive citrus radiation breeding program.

The most popular radiation-bred citrus is the "Rio Red" grapefruit and its offspring, which has a much deeper red than non-mutant red grapefruit.

There aren't many radiation-developed citrus breeds noted for cold-hardiness - with radiation you get whatever you get  - but there are a few, and I want one just because I think they're neat, a monument to that lovely human vision that looks at terrible weapons and somehow sees glossy-leaved trees with bright fruit.

4. The Monster Trees

Citrus are usually grown via grafting. That is, you plant a seed from a fast-growing sturdy breed, you let it grow roots and all that, and then you cut the top off and replace it with a branch from a more delicious breed. The two citruses grow together, and you end up with a tree that's disease and cold resistant in the roots, below the graft, but makes tasty fruit above the graft.

Occasionally, this process goes Wrong. 

The first recorded instance is the tree called Bizarria, discovered in 1640. Someone attempted to graft a sour orange branch onto a citron. But instead of a clean line between sour orange branches and citron roots, the graft was damaged somehow, and the two different species of cells got tangled and mixed through the whole tree. It has branches that produce citron fruit. It has branches that produce sour orange fruit. And it has branches that produce, uh ... these:

(Photo by Labrina)

Most graft chimeras are made accidentally, when the graft site is damaged. Trifoliate orange is often used as rootstock, so there are many reported chimeras involving trifoliate orange and a nicer fruit. The mixed-up cells can be arranged a lot of ways, but it's possible to have the outside layer of the tree be trifoliate orange, and the core of the tree be the other citrus (periclinal chimera). This means you could theoretically get a tree with frostproof trifoliate leaves and branches, but fruit that doesn’t taste like burnt plastic rolled in quinine.

This lucky monstrosity has, in fact, reportedly happened. Twice. There is the Prague Citsuma, discovered in a greenhouse in Prague and suspected to have been created by a Soviet breeding program. And then there is the Hormish, discovered in China and thought to have been made by frostbite messing up the clean lines of the graft. The Blue Haired Girlfriend has managed to track down budwood from the Prague Citsuma - I’m so excited! - so we'll see how the fierce thorny monster tree with a heart of gold, or at least heartwood of gold, does for us.

5. Conclusion

Humans have been trying to grow citrus trees where they don't belong for nearly two thousand years, at least since the Jewish Diaspora and people trying to grow holy etrog trees - trunks gnarled as barnacle stones and the whole tree scented like the best dream you can't remember - in Europe. Maybe longer.

The Blue Haired Girlfriend's citrus-breeding schemes aren't going to singlehandedly transform Canada into a net citrus exporter. But history shows us: it might be possible to have a little gleaming sweetness from the stony ground here, with the ravens and the fir trees and the auroras. A sweetness we made ourselves, that exists nowhere else. 

Or maybe we'll just have a bunch of weird inedible fruit. I don't know, but it's worth finding out, worth weaving together leaf and thorn and stone and the light of our hands as the years unwind. Worth it to have a quixotic project we can expect to spend decades on together, hands and hearts. This is how home is made, sometimes, with a balcony full of angry thorny little trees that shout swears at passerby.

[thewertsearch]

Thanks to morganwick for sending over the MSPA new reader page we were talking about earlier - you can check it out here!

Some interesting tidbits here. Hussie goes over the website’s reader-command system, and how it’s evolved over time.

Jailbreak: This was the first adventure, one I started well before the MSPA site existed. I created it on a forum, where people would post suggestions in replies to the thread. My policy was to always take the first suggestion no matter what, which naturally lead to a very haphazard feel to the story’s progression.

The unfinished Jailbreak was where it all began, back when commands were strictly first-come-first-served. I decided to finally give it a read, since it's barely 100 pages.

It's pretty much exactly what you'd expect from a comic with the above premise, controlled by an Internet forum in 2006. Lots of random nonsense that doesn't go anywhere, with grossout commands aplenty.

>Apologize to guard's body 

[...] You sever his head with your trusty pocket knife.

One thing to note is that even back then, Hussie was already twisting user commands into pretzels to mess with the readers. 

Even on day one, even when the author was committed to always letting the first commenter have their way, the control we had over the story was always a bit of an illusion, wasn’t it?

Jailbreak is also where the '-ifiers' make their mspaintadventures debut! We haven't seen the Hugeifier in Homestuck yet - I bet this one belongs to AR.

Bardquest: This was the first adventure I started after launching MSPA.com, back when I had the “choose your own adventure” format in mind for the site as the primary storying device, in addition to the reader-driven feature with a new on-site suggestion box. But the multiple paths turned out to be quite difficult for me to keep up with, and overall, probably pretty hard for readers to digest as well, especially with a longer story.

Bard Quest is less than 50 pages long. It emphasizes multiple paths, with almost every second page having a (usually immediately fatal) story branch. Unlike Jailbreak, it doesn’t even have a joke ‘ending’, it just kind of peters out. 

Mercifully, this one never made it that far. I chalk it up as an interesting failed experiment, and one that I surely won’t go back to finish. After halting BQ, I left the site to gather dust for about six months, then started it up again with Problem Sleuth. 

The impression I get is that Hussie wasn’t really feeling this one. It’s an interesting experiment, though, and one that I think had potential. 

Problem Sleuth toyed with branching paths once or twice, and I could easily see a version of the comic that really leaned into it, with instances of the Sleuths from different timelines interacting.

I also started being more selective with the suggestions [in Problem Sleuth], not necessarily always picking the first one in the box. This made for a more controlled style of action, allowing elements of planning and puzzle solving, while still creating a pretty whimsical feel to the adventure.

Problem Sleuth is where Hussie started cherry-picking suggestions, and I think it was probably a good call. Jailbreak was kinda silly and fun, but there’s only so far you can willfully misinterpret the reader command you’ve been assigned. 

To sustain a real story for any length of time, you need a little more control, and I think the balance struck here was good.

When a story begins to get thousands of suggestions, paradoxically, it becomes much harder to call it truly “reader-driven”. This is simply because there is so much available, the author can cherry-pick from what’s there to suit whatever he might have in mind, whether he’s deliberately planning ahead or not.

Makes sense. 

There is one other way I can imagine doing it - have a suggestion poll, to narrow down enormous lists of commands to the most popular ones, with a live discussion thread below to chat about what they should direct the characters to do next. 

Each individual reader would have less influence, but the will of the mob would still direct the story, and you could have great moments where the crowd is cheering John on as he beats all odds to fight his way up to Skaia...

Man, I miss Twitch Plays Pokemon.

I was planning ahead much more as the story neared its end, and I would tend to A) pick commands that suited what I had in mind, or B) just call a spade a spade and outright MAKE UP a command for an idea I had, which I did most often for many of the later attacks (like the Sleuth Diplomacy variations, Comb Raves, etc).

Ahaha! I knew it!!

You never really know where these commands are coming from. Hussie’s been putting in custom commands since Problem Sleuth, and is definitely still doing it now. 

Homestuck: [...] The adventure I’m currently working on, with a pretty radically different approach from the way the previous adventures started, mostly in the sense that many elements are already preplanned.

I think this is what really sets Homestuck apart from the other mspaintadventures, particularly Problem Sleuth. 

Godhead Pickle Inspector thinks you should just relax and have fun, and not worry too much about it.

You’re supposed to sit back and let Problem Sleuth take you for a ride. I wouldn’t have been able to write theoryposts for it, y’know? And you’re not really supposed to, anyway.

But Homestuck? Homestuck has a plot. Things are happening behind the scenes. Characters are talking to each other, learning about the situation they’ve been placed into, and reacting to it. Hussie has plans, and you can see that everywhere you look. You know you need to be paying attention.