#then the video took way too long to render and when it rendered i had to rewrite the post and it wouldn't upload two videos per post

[oh-saints]

Hi I don’t know if you’ll get this but I have an idea for Rúben Dias, he starrs crushing on the female photographer for Man City and his teammates start teasing him, he doesn’t want to admit his feelings because he thinks the photographer is dating someone ( but she’s actually single and is just introverted)

aaaaahh this feels close to home bcs i'd gotten mistaken so many times by men due to my introvert nature /sigh

silent

rúben should really stop interpreting things out of hand on his own and start asking the right questions instead.

rúben dias x photographer!you

wc: 2.7k

note: here's is my comback piece! (is that even a valid word?) i actually had this idea in mind for a while and i love writing this bcs i can see he could make this kind of cute mistake! this actually hits closer to home, too, considering that i'm an intovert as well LOL but as usual, I happen to write at dawn so this is not beta-read yet.

happy new year too, everyone! i wish you'll have a blessed year ahead <3

“cupcakes!”

you groaned inwardly, that must be jack grealish. only the 100-million man would call you with overly sweet pet names like that, and he did it so often no matter how many times you corrected him that you had a real name during the first month of your employment here. now entering your third month, you’ve long given up, but you’d renamed his contact to be jack greasy on your phone.

“come sit over with us!”

unlike your nickname, though, you hadn’t given up on his persistent request to sit amongst his set of friends because good lord could they be so boisterous their laughter sounded more like a boom in your ears sometimes. their energy simply went off the roof and your introvert self could never handle it well.

you’d have your time to photograph everyone in the bus later anyway, so you gave him a polite smile, without another word, and proceeded to sit down beside your fellow media team.

you could hear jack screaming protest “aw, come on, cupcakes!” as you took your seat. his friends were laughing on his face at your rejection.

if you have your way, though, you’d badly want to be assigned to the calmer tide of the bus. the likes of julian, kevin, bernardo were more suitable for your kind. but being the one responsible for the disposable camera and all of city’s short off-pitch videos, jack and his circus were more than a matchmade in heaven for a better result.

before you had more complaints to mull over, your colleagues turned to face you and started babbling about an upcoming short video the both of you would have to make. the plot, the script, down to deciding who’d be best to be asked for to star in the video.

“i think rúben dias would do just fine.”

being a newbie, you nodded along the names he mentioned because in all honesty, you didn’t exactly know who is who and which is which until now. two months splattered all over the men’s and the women’s team, as well as the academy, was pretty much a guarantee you’d missed out on someone.

but you always, no matter how busy you are, spared some time to browse on the player before you met them, in case it was someone you should be worried for, or someone you should be thankful of for their media-darling persona, or someone you should be working twice as hard because they didn’t know what to do. worse, someone you’d worked together before but you forgot.

for rúben dias, though… you didn’t know which one of the categories above fitted him best. you were rendered speechless at your search bar result. you could bet your entire month salary that he was someone you had yet the chance to create a content together because if he already did, you wouldn’t have that face of his wiped off your brain.

which was exactly why you should be worried.

you had never worked with someone that looks like adonis when he decides to ascend himself from olympus. or so you’d like to think rúben was what adonis would’ve looked like if greek mythology happens to be true.

sadly, nobody warned you that he was even more beautiful up close, as he strutted his way to your creator team, with a tousled hair he kept tussling against, as well as the bright smile and warm laugh he’d drop here as he went through pre-production brief. his voice was so melodic it soothed all the soreness to your eardrums—thanks to jack grealish—in one simple video production, and you mentally thought you could replay the edited video later whenever you needed to go to sleep, like an asmr or some sort, because it really felt like a blanket on a rainy day.

your heart ached at the sight because my goodness… he was simply too beautiful for your own good.

it shouldn’t be doing all that jumping and leaping and drumming, though, because those were the early signs of you getting biased.

and it could only mean one thing in every professional language possible: bad.

with your very generous pay check on the line, you couldn’t afford to fail. so that day, you made a promise to yourself to do what you had to do, and thankfully it was what your introvert self do best.

＊✿❀○❀✿＊＊✿❀○❀✿＊＊✿❀○❀✿＊

while you knew what to do, rúben—on the contrary—seemed lost.

no, the portugese was lost.

contrary to popular belief, footballers are actually smart. at least, if they are not book smart, they’re definitely street smart. rúben would like to think he’s got a bit of both worlds, so it could justify his own judgement of you.

his eyes were keen, as his job required him to do so, and he’s got an incredible sensing, enough to read a gigantic elephant in the room when there was one. the combination scanned your change in attitude on the day he first worked with you and the present time.

you were so friendly and eager to work with him, welcoming his extended hand as he introduced himself to you for the first time. he remembered your smile, blinding against the bleak manchester weather but instead of feeling cold, he only felt warmth and fuzzy all over his body.

but as the filming session went on, your smile was close to non-existent, just like the probability of the two of you running into each other again. he initially thought it was only because you got so many takes already and the job exhausted you, but he later realised you were avoiding him. as subtle as you could anyway.

at the beginning, he only thought you missed the way he waved at you. or the time when he thought you put his row of seat last for a mandatory picture in your disposable camera, for aesthetics’ sake.

the time when he offered you a ride home, though—that was the final confirmation. the weather had started snowing on some days, and you were certainly freezing by the look of your shivering shoulders and teetering teeth, so rúben offered you a ride home. but you turned down the offer, ever so politely like usual. yes, yes of course you had the rights but the most logical thing was to accept them instead of waiting for the next bus, no?

(oh, believe him, he knew she was waiting. he managed to parked far away from your sight but close enough to see that you did indeed wait for the next bus to arrive and take you to the nearest station. he knew, and he remembered that day because it was the only day he had to fight himself from running down the street just to give you another layer of coat.)

his first instinct was to think that he’d wronged you somehow during the filming. was he demanding? was he not up to your par of filming standard? was he not good enough for your cameras?

but james, your fellow co-worker, the one who worked together with you for this project, gave him an utterly confused look. “have you seen how the videos turned out? you were brilliant, rúben. and no, i don’t think i’ve heard any concerns from her about your ethics.”

so what did he still not do right that could’ve upset you?

rúben didn’t like where this was going because you’ve kept him intrigued. you kept him on his toes, bouncing lightly like a child full of curiosity. you kept him thirsty for more information about you and what makes you tick, lowkey in hope to bring out the smile rúben himself didn’t know he had missed seeing.

and if he discovered that he did indeed upset you somehow, and was somehow responsible for the disappearance of your shy smile, then he’d like to right them right away. he has to.

with that mentality, rúben took the chance to clock out earlier—which was like the seventh wonder of the world around etihad academy—in order to catch a glimpse of you on your off-work routine. he’d set himself resolved to only ask necessary questions, not more nor less, without any hidden agenda. no wishy washy, unlike his previous trials.

rúben did actually catch you for a split second. his beak was already opening, he’d only needed his voice box to produce the sound to the question in his mind, but the scene unravelled before him halted everything in him. every particle of his body, every molecule of his brain.

a black car swerved into the lane to the lobby, a pretty prestigious car at that, and the way your face lit up so brightly reminded him of the day you first worked together. it was a sight that rúben missed, it was a sight that rúben longed to see again.

he was so blinded by the ethereal view that he completely forgot his own plan, and watched as the black car swallowed his portion of small happiness of the day.

was that your boyfriend? if yes, then did you take rúben’s friendliness as a romantical advance to you? if yes, then was that the reason why you immediately put up a china wall between you two? if yes, then was he that protective or was he simply possessive?

rúben couldn’t deny his own infatuation of you. maybe it was why he was adamant to right things good between the two of you. but if you did in fact have a boyfriend, then he should find a way to reduce and silence this growing feeling—be it really infatuation or merely curiosity.

“does she have a boyfriend?”

but desperate times need desperate measures, and rúben saw ‘the black car incident’ was his sign to speed things up in order to find a concrete answer. even if it included asking jack grealish about you.

jack snorted, rather snobby. “how would i know, mate?”

“i thought you guys are close.”

“your definition of close is concerning,” jack replied as he shut his locker. “why don’t you ask her yourself? aren’t you the type to just charge at it first, think later?”

“i would’ve if she didn’t give me a cold shoulder.”

“have you tried?”

rúben was the one who didn’t hold back his snort this time. “of course i did.”

“then maybe you were asking the wrong question, mate.”

＊✿❀○❀✿＊＊✿❀○❀✿＊＊✿❀○❀✿＊

as much as rúben hated to confess that jack actually had a point, he had to give hands down. he might be asking the wrong question, he might be asking too much question, he might be asking the right question with the wrong approach.

bottom line, he’d concluded himself that he had to try until he succeeded. each time in different approach, different variables. logically speaking, it should take him somewhere for a clue. if it didn’t, it should at least tire you enough to have you spell the answer to his queries.

rúben had gathered enough information that you and your team had wrapped up filming for christmas and new year’s content, complete with kids involved and all. you were supposed to stay in the editing room, and working late on it because there was a teaser—which fell into your line of work under “short videos”—to be uploaded tomorrow evening.

he purposefully slowed his pace for anything that did not require physical activities and trainings, resulting in him also staying late to finish some of his homework—his affectionate nickname for video trainings he’d like to execute at home, in the comfort of his abode and plush suede pillows—so he could match your pace of work. he planned to catch you off guard the same way as ‘the black car’ incident.

at 8, you finally went out of your cave, precisely like his little rat had informed him before. so of course, you were startled to find rúben already standing against the railing in front of your office.

“rúben,” your voice got stuck in your throat but rúben thought it was a cute squeak. it was also a better response, rúben thought, too. you could’ve spat at him or shooed him away immediately. “what are you doing here?”

“i’m—” rúben thought about lying for a second, but he decided it’d contribute nothing to a start of a friendship. yes, friendship, because it was the bare minimum, no? “i’m waiting for you.”

your eyes widened, and that was when rúben noticed the golden specks on the orbs of your eyes. heartbreakingly stunning, solely because rúben only noticed this now.

you shifted the weight of your body from your right leg to your left one, and rúben found it endearing because he noticed that was an early sign an introvert—you, in this case—was starting to get nervous or uncomfortable. rúben hoped it was the former because that’d put you as cute as an awkward lone penguin.

“is there anything i can help you with?”

“yes, i’ve been meaning to ask you something.”

with his devastatingly beautiful look, his velvet voice and his intensely deep brown eyes, your heart palpitated so fast and so irregular that you were afraid rúben could see them falling and getting back into its designated place like a bungee jumper.

or maybe the rope snapped on its way down and never found its way up again, depending on the question about to be fired at you. at this point, your mind went funnily white, and you were ready to succumb into either pressure or temptation, depending on the question he’d fire you with.

“do you hate me?”

you seemed perplexed at his blatant question, but he’d take that reaction over anything else because it was something, especially compared to the invisible wall you’d put up since the first time you both had worked together.

“do you?” rúben pressed his voice gently, while he took a step closer to you. slowly but assertively.

the movement snapped you back to reality. you should not heed into pressure, but there was no use in lying because in reality, you really had no reason to hate him. if you had your chance, you would’ve done things the other way around.

“no, i don’t.”

another step closer. “but have you ever hated me?”

realising the 6-feet centre back was doing, you involuntarily moved backwards in the same amount of steps that he did, albeit the distance reached was certainly and significantly a huge gap you could never keep. “no, rúben—”

before you could finish your sentence, he obliterated every single space left in between the two of you and cornered you to the nearest wall. “then do you like me?”

you should be running, you should be fleeing, you should be screaming down the hill. you should be anywhere but here, trapped in between the long, strong and sturdy pair of his arms, the very same one he used to defend himself and the ball from the opponent. the very same one your eyes couldn’t lie but appreciate its masculinity.

rúben noticed the miniscule movement of your eyes, despite your tightened body language, and it brought a little smile on the corner of his lips. maybe he had indeed asked all the wrong question in all the previous times he’d had the chance.

“tell me,” rúben then pronounced your name in the way no one else could, so soft and velvet like a fine cashmere being caressed against your eardrums, that shivers ran down your entire body as if you were struck by a lightning. “please tell me that, at least.”

so paradoxic, you thought inwardly at the sensation. and you supposedly hated the way he confused you, but you didn’t this time—you didn’t even detest the way he seemed enjoying this whole thing, by the way he pulled of a subtle smirk that busted your knees slowly but surely—and it made you even more crazy because what the hell was this?

you tried to mask it off by looking him straight in the eyes. well, tried to, at least, because the moment your eyes were connected with the milkiest brown orbs that reminded you of a hot chocolate on a wintry day, you couldn’t help but look away. “what do you want me to say?”

rúben didn’t fight a full smile from blooming on his face, as the tip of his finger aligned your face gently to face his. he really likes the fact you gave him a fair fight to remain indifferent still, even when everything else of your body failed to be your auxiliary. “do you like me?”

“i do—”

“then would you like to have a dinner with me tonight?”

[eksvaized]

Simon 'Ghost' Riley x fem!reader render by: @661ave

part THREE

[ Previous 〡 Next ]

You start to think that you’re going mad, losing your mind bit by bit. You are constantly looking over your shoulder because you feel like someone’s gaze is glued to your back. Your eyes wander all the time, seeking to spot anyone who looks suspicious, who might stare at you for too long or linger nearby a lot, not letting you out of their sight.

The messages haven’t stopped and anytime you talk with someone for longer than five minutes, you receive another one. As a result, you begin to avoid everyone. You leave the conversation before it even starts. When someone approaches you, you excuse yourself, and if you can’t find a reason to disappear, you nervously grip your phone in your hand, waiting for it to buzz and alert you to yet another harassing text, telling you what you should and shouldn’t do.

However, after a full week of being alone, avoiding everyone and everything, your phone becomes silent. The anonymous texter ceases to send threats, luring you into a false sense of security.

Perhaps it’s all over. Maybe the stranger grew bored because they didn’t expect you to follow their rules, and since you do, they realised it’s no longer amusing to screw with you.

When another week goes by without the video being leaked, you convince yourself that it’s all really over. You even deleted the cursed conversation hoping it would also erase the entire incident from your mind and make you forget about it all.

Everything was getting back to normal. So when Vanessa, one of your friends, invited you to a small get-together before everyone leaves the base for the holidays, you gladly accepted the invite, eager to socialise with some people instead of spending yet another evening on your couch with a bowl of popcorn with eyes glued to the screen.

The small gathering turned out to be more of a small party. You all met up in the abandoned wing, where all the empty offices that nobody used anymore were, and where, across the hallway, in the other room, you and Ghost fucked. Though you tried not to think about it, refusing to let that video, and the memory of that night, consume your thoughts and stress you out when you came here tonight to unwind and have fun.

At first, you felt a little uncomfortable because you knew only a few people.

Vanessa kept bringing you drinks, which you never turned down, even if they were a touch too strong for your taste since you preferred sweet, colourful cocktails over some cheap booze. But you weren’t the one paying for the alcohol, so you didn’t complain.

Charles was also present, but you did everything possible to evade him, treating him as if he were a plague. Ever since your last conversation with him, you felt awful for running off and leaving him, and although he said nothing about it then, the following day, or even now, you’ve decided it’s best to stay out of his way.

When your phone buzzed, paranoia washed over you for a brief moment. Your heart dropped. And you had to take a deep breath before unlocking it, but when you saw that it was just a battery warning, you exhaled, scolding yourself for scaring yourself over some silly notification.

“Here’s another one.” Vanessa blocked your path as you attempted to shuffle to the corner of the room without being seen. “I noticed your cup is empty. Again.”

The corner of your lips lazily tugged upwards, and you offered her a smile, which continued to linger on your face.

You didn’t think it was a great idea to drink more because you were already dizzy. Your vision was blurry and your surroundings swayed. However, you savoured the carefree feeling that wrapped around your body, not wanting it to fade away, as you accepted the drink from her.

“Thanks.” You nodded and took a sip. Well, more like a big gulp. The drink was sweet, you could taste the pineapple juice, but it was also very strong, and whatever alcohol was mixed in, it burned the back of your throat, causing you to cough a little.

“Easy there.” Vanessa laughed, curling her fingers around your shoulder. Her hand then softly rubbed your back, dropping when you stopped coughing. “There’s no need to rush.”

“True.” You nodded, taking another sip. “But this one… is my last drink tonight.” You raised the cup a little. “I’m cutting myself off. I don't want my tomorrow's hangover to become even more unbearable than it already promises to be.”

You continued to chat with Vanessa. A few more people joined it, and you didn’t even realise how quickly the time started passing.

When your cup emptied again, you excused yourself and left the crowd behind to head to the bathroom.

You wandered down the empty hallway. The absence of noise was a balm for your pounding head, providing a much-needed moment of tranquillity.

As you rounded the corner, the sound of heavy footsteps reached your ears. You came to a halt far too quickly and had to steady yourself by placing your hand against the cold wall. After you looked over your shoulder, you noticed a figure approaching you.

Ghost.

He was walking fast. You instinctively stepped to the side, pressing your back to a closed door. You expected him to acknowledge you, to stop, and perhaps say something. But he strolled by you without sparing you a glance; his eyes didn’t settle on you once.

For some reason, you felt a little disappointed. You had no reason to be expecting anything. Just because you slept together quite a while ago, it didn’t mean he was required to talk to you. Even if you secretly wanted him to.

You couldn’t get Ghost, and him ignoring you, out of your mind. No matter how hard you tried to shift your thoughts, clear your head and think of something else, it didn’t work. So when you were making your way back, after deciding that another hour at the party wouldn’t hurt, you weren’t paying attention and bumped into someone.

“Shit. Sorry. I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going.” The words spilled out of you and you dropped to your knees when you realised the person had dropped a folder on the floor.

“It’s okay. I wasn’t paying attention either.”

You picked up a few pieces of paper and raised your head. Your eyes widened a little, and a heat rushed to your cheeks when you realised you had walked straight into Price.

You knew who he was, and that Ghost was in his squad, but you were very certain that Captain did not know who he was talking with. But that didn’t matter, and it didn’t change the fact that you had a silly crush on him. Almost every female soldier at the base did: he was a handsome, slightly older man with a British accent, who didn’t go out of his way to chastise soldiers in a harsh manner just because he could, and because no one would ever dare to say anything to him.

“Thank you, love.” He said when you handed him the folder. The colour of your cheeks deepened, becoming a brighter shade of red, and you had to sink your teeth into your bottom lip to keep yourself from grinning like an idiot.

You were drunk, blushing and desperately wanting to drag out the conversation, to make it last longer, and maybe hear him call you love again because the way the nickname rolled off his tongue made you melt and feel giddy.

Thankfully, Price didn’t appear to be in a hurry, either. You fiddled with your fingers anxiously, your tongue sliding across your bottom lip as you attempted to think of something to say. But it was difficult to put words into sentences and then actually utter them out loud, so silence crept in and you remained mute.

He observed your bright red cheeks as his eyes wandered over your face. His lips formed a smile. You were very sure he could smell the booze on your breath, so you were surprised when he didn’t say anything about it.

You exhaled disappointedly when he told you he had to go. You were still at a loss for words. And you kept your mouth shut to avoid embarrassment by saying something dumb.

“Have a nice evening, love. And watch where you’re going; you don’t want to run into anything else and end up hurt.”

He laughed, and you chuckled, nodding your head and stepping to the side, allowing him to pass and walk away.

You watched as he vanished out of your sight.

As you began to drag your feet down the hallway, silently humming to yourself and replaying your interaction with Price, wishing that alcohol would have turned you bolder and more confident instead of making you lose your ability to speak, your phone buzzed.

You groaned, thinking that it was another notification, alerting you about your low battery; you didn’t have a charger to remedy the annoying problem, so it probably would have been quite wise to turn off the sound.

However, when you unlocked your phone, you lost your balance and almost fell. Instantly, a wave of nausea surged through your stomach, causing it to churn uncomfortably. The familiar sensation of anxiety crept up, manifesting as a tightness in your chest that made it hard to breathe. Paranoia gripped your mind, while an overwhelming sense of being watched loomed over you. It felt as if invisible eyes were boring into your back. You felt paralyzed, your body was immobile, but your hands still trembled as your eyes scanned the words on your screen.

[deanwritings]

Flour, Flour Everywhere

Pairing: Dean x Reader

Warnings: Fluff.

Prompt: “…” “i can explain” “what did you do to my kitchen?”

Summary: Dean comes home to a very messy kitchen.

Word Count: 934

Gif:

A/N: Look at me writing fluff. Just a cute little piece based on a prompt I saw

Shit. This was not as easy as you thought it would be. 

You run the back of your forearm across your brow, wiping away the beads of sweat that had started to form. 

This looked so much easier in the Youtube video playing on your phone. 

It had come across your screen last night when you couldn’t sleep and were in the bowels of the internet trying to find something that would help you relax enough to finally pass out. 

But as “Apple Pie ASMR” played, not only was it deliciously relaxing, but it looked pretty easy. Which sparked the idea – why not bake a pie?

You tried your hand at baking over the years, never venturing outside of cookies, but you found baking relaxing, and figured there was a certain green-eyed hunter who would be very appreciative to have a freshly baked pie. 

So when Dean headed out for a supply run this morning, you popped into the kitchen and got to work. 

And boy, was it work. 

You had pulled out almost every pot, pan, and appliance as you worked to mix and form the crust and render the apples. It sounded so simple, but Jesus Christ you had been at this almost an hour now and you still haven’t even gotten the crust dough in the oven yet.

But you take a deep breath and dive back into it, putting all of your strength into the counter as you use the roller you found stashed in the far back of a cabinet as you attempt, again, to even out the dough beneath you, and you groan as it continues to stick to your rolling pin. 

More flour. Was what every website said if your dough was sticking, but every time you added more flour, it would just harden again, and you basically had to start over. 

But you were in too deep, and you weren’t the type of person to give up when it got tough. 

When the going got tough, the tough were going to make this god damn pie.

Dean wanderers down the hallway, grocery bags hanging from his fingertips as he takes heavy steps towards the kitchen. It was nice getting out of the bunker but sometimes it really sucked how long it took just to get some simple items since the bunker was so far out from town. 

As he takes his next step, he hears a grumbled “for fuck’s sake,” the voice clearly belonging to you. 

He picks up the pace, not worried, but curiosity carrying him the rest of the way to the kitchen as he approaches the entry, his steps faltering as he nearly loses his grip on the bags in his hands. 

When he left about two hours ago, it was a sparkling clean kitchen. Exactly how he liked it, especially since he was really the only one who cooked among the three of them. 

But now. Now it was a disaster. 

The counters, usually clean and free of clutter, were covered in what had to be every piece of cookware in the kitchen. In between the limited space of bowls and pans was flour, butter, Dean had no idea what else but holy shit was it a mess.

You’re bent over a counter, your back to Dean, not having noticed his presence. 

“What the hell did you do to my kitchen?” Dean roars as he finally steps into the catastrophe that is his kitchen. Yes, his kitchen. He spends the most time out of anyone in there, and prided himself on keeping it sparkling. 

You jump up at his voice and spin around, flour flying around you. 

He drops his bags on the table, being that there is no room anywhere else, keeping his hard gaze on you as he stalks closer. 

“I can explain,” you hold up your hands as he stops in front of you. 

He raises his eyebrows and nods, silently letting you know to continue.

Instead of answering, you spin around, and Dean frowns, but without any time to linger on his confusion, he takes a quick step back as you quickly twirl back, this time, with something in your hands.

Dean looks down in disbelief.

“Is that…” He points at it, his anger falling away.

You fold your lips and nod.

“Homemade apple pie.” You lift it up as a peace offering. “Fresh out of the oven.” You finish with a smirk.

Dean runs his tongue over his teeth, nodding as he decides if he’s going to accept your bribe.

“Fine,” he concedes, taking the tin from your hands. You reach behind you and return with a fork, with Dean grabs with an “ah.”

Dean hurries over to the table, pushing aside the grocery bags as he takes a seat, carefully placing the pie in front of him with the utmost care. 

He gives his hands a rub, taking in the golden lattices and glistening apples laying underneath, his mouth watering at the sight. 

He picks up the fork and digs in, steam billowing as he lifts the fork to his mouth, not waiting for it to cool before it shoves it in.

He takes a bite, the apples not mushing beneath his teeth, and an overwhelming taste of salt exploding over his tongue. 

“Soooo,” you come around the island and rest against it. “How is it?” You look at him with gleaming eyes. 

“Great, sweetheart,” he mumbles over uncooked apples, taking a hard swallow. 

“Does this mean I’m forgiven?” You plead.

Dean just raises his eyebrows with a tight smile and shoots you a thumbs up.

Forever Tags

@iprobablyshipit91  @likesiriusly @kittyque @findingfitnessforme @wonderange @deansgoddess @captainemwinchester @xtina2191 @smoothdogsgirl @mogaruke @chin-up-love @tsunadesenjuuchiha @lyarr24 @globetrotter28 @krazykelly 

[auroraeternal]

Written version of @thornowl's baking texture-based items for 4t3 conversion tutorial. (Part 1)

Yes, the original video is very useful and I think it's worth checking out for everyone who plans to do 4t3 conversions, especially in MM style. But, in my opinion, the realization is too messy, it took me a long time to understand what actually to do. So I made written tutorial, because many people prefer this format (and because my amazing mutual @nectar-cellar was interested in it). Hope you will find it useful. I had to split this tutorial into 2 parts because of the picture limit.

What You Will Need:

Knowing the basics of converting process: how to extract ts4 meshes and textures, how to make your own multiplier/mask/specular, how to import stuff to TSRW, etc. (@nightospheresims has a good tutorial for beginners: here or here, also don't forget about @sims3tutorialhub!).

Knowledge of basics blender controls and navigation: how to move and rotate the camera, basic shortcuts, how to change mode, editor type, viewport shading, rendering type, etc. (check Grennie's tutorial here, and "Helpful guides when you're a noob" from there too).

Required programs and resources: - Sims 4 Studio. - TS4 body mesh & texture(s), that you want to convert, I use @atomiclight's mix gloves for this tutorial. Also there will be some tip that I learned from converting Sentate's Audrey Corset Set. - Blender (I use version 2.79). - Photoshop (or any other 2D editor, that supports masks and .dds format). - TS3 Bodies template & UV map templates. - Plain normal & specular map, if you don't want to make your own. - TSRW.

STEP 1: ADDING MESHES AND TEXTURES IN BLENDER, PREPARING MESH FOR BAKING.

I already exported all the gloves presets that I want from S4S. And because they don`t have their own mesh, I exported base game swimsuit (you can also export mesh from any other stuff, that 100% is painted on body) I exported it like this: Open S4S → Create 3D mesh → Find it with filters→ Next → Save the package wherever you're want→ go to Meshes tab and press Export.

Open .blend file with ts4 swimsuit, delete the "rig" (you don't need it) and merge all other groups - Shift + click on them and press Ctrl+J on 3D viewport.

You need to export our gloves texture and remove swimsuit texture, go to Textures tab and in small window select "DiffuseMap": If you don't see DiffuseMap texture, switch type of texture data to "Show material textures" (brown-ish circle).

6. In the same way you need to remove skin texture, because you don't need it, only select BaseTexture instead of Diffuse:

7. Import your Sims 3 body, also I merged the top and bottom, because TS4 mesh is full body too:

Tip: if your stuff have 3D parts, separate them in their own group(s) and hide them from baking (you can bake them separately and/or tweak them in Photoshop):

STEP 2: SHRINKWRAPPING THE TS4 MESH.

In this case it would be really easy to adapt TS4 body mesh to TS3, because they are very similar, for stuff that partially 3D (like dresses) or in case with non-standard bodies (like Venus Curves by Venusprincess) it would be harder, so I don`t cover this in this tutorial.

Select TS4 body, go to Modifiers tab, usually there are already applied modifier "geom_skin", just ignore it and in the "Add Modifier" window select Shrinkwrap modifier.

2. In the Target tab select TS3 body group:

This is how TS4 mesh is supposed to look with this modifier, you may also apply modifier, but it's not necessary:

3. After that you need to hide TS3 Body mesh and now we're going to baking.

STEP 3: ASSIGNING MATERIALS.

First of all, you need 2 windows — with your 3D viewport and with Node Editor, also you need to switch rendering type to Cycles Render. After you set it, select TS4 mesh, open Materials tab and press Use Nodes button:

2. After that two small boxes should appear on the Node editor tab. Then press Shift+A and select Texture → Image texture:

3. Connect node that you already added with Diffuse BSDF node, by connecting yellow dot (socket) named Color of Image texture to the same socket of Diffuse BSDF node. After that click on the image icon and find your texture:

Don't worry about the black spots, we will fix that later.

4. Go to UV/Image editor and create new image for your bake, it must be 1024x1024 size or, if you want HQ texture - 2048x2048 or 4096x4096, but today I use non-HQ. After that, hide TS4 body and unhide TS3 body:

5. Go to Node Editor, create new material and assign our newly created image to ts3 body the same way, that we did with ts4 mesh and original texture:

6. Press Shift + Click on the TS4 body firstly, and TS3 body lastly. It`s an really important step, because without it baking wasn't work right way.

STEP 4: BAKING THE TEXTURE.

7. First of all, go to the Render tab and change default settings to the following:

Sampling Tab:

Bake Tab:

8.After that press Bake button and wait for it.

9. Look at the result, great, doesn't it?:

10. Save this texture as .png... But wait, that's not all! we need to bake alpha, so we can remove that black body texture in Photoshop later.

But that will come in part 2...

[steampaul]

i've started a little series of weekly posts documenting every MoC i made (digitally) over the last few years:

Week 9: 2022

some old MoCs returning, lego art, 90th anniversary toa team, video game stuff and more Rock Raiders (yay)

this one will be the penultimate week.

remember back in week 2 (2018) where i tested out the differences in rendering between stud.io 1 and 2? i tested out the mecabricks extention for Blender to render some digital bricks.

this took way too long to setup and render, so i decided to not use blender for rendering after that (escpecially after the win11 updated fucked with my graphics card)

another mandalorian s2 set MoC. din djarins N1 starfighter, based on the last N1 set we had back in 2015. i think these proportions aren't good, but a bit better than the official set. (its still too big though)

the Horizon: forbidden west set was also teased/revealed around that time, so i decided to make a diorama with just the watcher (and one with a corrupted one) that would be a bit more managable in both cost and size than the tallneck.

i still got the tallneck, becauce those robot dinos are cool as hell and i want to support video game based sets, even though i am a big supporter of the concept that LEGO should make more original themes instead of big and expensive licensed sets (like rivendell....)

some greebles inspired by the ones on the Icons (formerly master builder) "theme" of sets, also my header image for tumblr.

back in 2017 (week one) i made The Slugcat Portrait mosaic, and i decided in 2022 that i would remake it to be more in line with the way i would built with bricks at that time. i think i improved wuite a bit.

i like the 90 years of play tahu, even if his design was considered to be controversial, so i decided to make the full 2001 set lineup for bionicle. i think they turned out pretty good, but i find it a bit annoying that the maccaroni piece does not exist in tan or medium blue (a dicontinued colour)

anyone remeber Valley? the momentum-based FPS platformer? no? it wasn't really mind-blowing, but i still enjoyed the movement and flow of the game. i also always wanted to try out the Legoland Miniland style of character building. this was the perfect opportunity to combine both of these things.

i think the proportions might be a bit off, but i still like this little desk friend

someone asked me on twitter to send them the instructions for my marble machine MoC (as seen in week 7), but i didn't want to give them such and outdated build, so i re-designed it to be more up to date.

they ended up giving me about 14 $ for these instructions, which made me pretty happy.

i tried to make a micro-scale version of the exo-force set 7701 Grand Titan. i really dislike the way this one turned out.

Lego Ideas had yet another contest. this one was about designing a poster for the then new 21334 Jazz Quartet. i called this one "Golden Sounds" and it is the first mosaic-type MoC that i made where i first sketched it out to kinda figure out how i wanted it to look.

i like the way this one turned out, but i think i should've built it in such a way that the colours in the background wouldn't be as dim.

remember last week when i said i wanted to make more Rock raiders MoCs? turns out i did. a lot too.

this VTOL-style transport vehicle was kinda inspired by those industrial transport helicopters and was supposed to be some sort of reimagining of 4980 tunnel transport. i think it's a bit too clunky and a bit too skinny at the same time. not my favourite.

also there's a modular open container (is that what they're called?) that can be fixed under the vehicle. (as well as the room container that you'll see next)

Modular bases are so cool you guys. this one is inspired by 4990 Rock Raiders HQ and those big old moving platforms Nasa uses. it could be controlled with a motor, has a removable cockpit (with an access hatch) and the platform has a lot of room for modules. like the crystal refinery, the room container, the high platforms, the crane and the crane attachment holder.

here are a few variants for the room container: an artifact storage with workbench, a small break room and a laboratory. i like those and i might do more in some time in the future. idk yet.

my take on the rock monsters. some crystal infested/energized Fauna.

first some bipedal designs (the left one is a modded version of a deviant form an eternals sets) that could be more agressive carnivore types.

in the middle are some quadrupedal guys that could be a bit less agressive and even friendly. Left is a modded version of my SCP 860 creature from week 4 (which was based on either an legendary beast from Chima or a dragon from elves) and the right one is a recolour from the fluffy-tailed Hog from my satisfactory series from week 3

and lastly, some insectoid designs, a kind of beetly creature and two ants, one of them with wings. these could be some sort of neutral (like in minecraft) swarm that might be a problem for buildings and cocky miners.

this is probably my favourite of my Rock Raiders Builds from 2022. it's 4920 rapid rider built with modern pieces that has been overtaken by the energy crytals. it can be fully freed from crystal and reassebled, which is nice.

we'll see another rapid rider next week...

first week last week final week

[darnestdungeon]

Tumblr started turning gifs into webp when you try to save them, so here’s the link for the walking DD heroes from my previous post, in case you want them!

Put them under your email signature, it will sure look professional :)

I’ve got the idea to make those gifs after seeing this post, it just looked so cute! Little guys walking across your screen! What if I did the same with the gifs I ripped from Darkest Dungeon? My mind was set, I just needed to make a gif slide to the right, how hard could that be?

(…A lengthy backstage process after the read more...)

If you have an easy solution that could have ended my headache much sooner, please let me know, I'd love to learn. But yeah, it didn’t take long before I noticed I had no clue how to achieve my goal. The problem consisted in how to deal with two simultaneous but different types of movement in one gif (the walking animation + the sliding to the right animation), all while preserving the quality and transparency.

First thing that came into mind was manually moving each frame of the walking gifs a little to the right but it would take SO much time and it would be SO boring I refused to even consider it again. Even with automate actions it would take so fucking long, there have got to be a better way, I mean, it was literally just sliding a gif to the right.

I’ve tried searching for sites that could let me do it to no avail. I did find GIPHY’s gif editor though, it allowed me to edit the gifs in very pleasing ways, totally not vomit inducing (albeit not transparent, it lost some points on that front).

I’ve considered some screen capture gimmicks with an open source software called ScreenToGif but I already knew from experience that the background removal function leaves behind ugly artifacts in the borders of the gifs, same thing with OBS.

I’ve tried looking up in DragonBones, the very own software I’ve used to export the game assets, but I could not figure out a way to make the whole thing move together all while having the regular animation play on loop, if that makes sense? But then again, I didn’t look much into it because I’ve finally had an idea that would work!

I could use a video editing software to make it all happen! I even had a very good open source software installed already, kdenlive! There was an initial problem where I could not figure out how to preserve the transparency, kdenlive would always render the gifs with black backgrounds. But after some googling I’ve found out you could render a video with alpha, so all I would have to do in the end was to convert the video back into a gif!!

First, I’ve rendered a video consisting of 10 sequences in a row of the walking hero gif, so the loop was long enough so they could walk all the way across the borders of the video (the original gif only lasted 1 second). I’ve done that 18 times, one for each hero– NOT counting all the times I had to try and try again for some, ignore the rest of the paragraph, it’s all technical problems. Some kept turning out with white borders around the heroes for some unknown reason (anti, sb, crusader and arb). The problem went away after I used the original untrimmed gif for each of them but THEN I had to redo crusader’s gif from the DragonBones project up because there was too much empty space around his gif in particular and then it would look small in the end if I hadn’t redone it. Reynauld, always the problem boy.

Then I had to find out how to change kdenlive’s project resolution to fit each final gif dimensions. I guess I didn’t quite figured out how to change it in the end, but I did notice whenever you bring an image that’s not quite the size of the default project, the software would ask if you wanted to switch to that resolution. So I took note of each of their heights and then saved white rectangles measuring 2000px width x their respective heights. All I had to do now was drop the right rectangle into the project before editing said hero and we’re set!

I’ve chosen 2000px as width resolution because then the gifs would look very tiny when sized down in Tumblr’s dashboard! But afterwards I realized that choice meant I could not optimally use my convertor of choice (EZGIF.com, a free and excellent gif editing site) to turn the videos back into gifs, because there was a limit on the resolutions, the gifs with height higher than 300 would turn out all deformed, and the other option would make the quality way too shitty. Luckily by the end I found out Photoshop had an option to import videos as animation frames, and all I had to do was save them as gif directly from PS, with no resolution constraints!

Anyways, let’s wrap this up because I’m getting incredible tired just from recalling and typing it up everything that I’ve done yesterday. I’ve literally spent the entire day on this silly project.

After I had the alpha movs of their looping walk cycles, all I had to do was to drop the respective rectangle into the project (to change the project's resolution to match it to the hero’s height) and then drag the mov to the timeline and apply a transformation effect with two key frames: one at the start of the clip moving the clip so it starts from out of the left border of the screen, and the other key frame by the end of the clip, with the clip ending outside the right border. Doing it so would make the whole clip slide across the screen, appearing on the left and disappearing on the right!

I also had to figure out how to make it start with them already on the screen instead of the gif starting on an empty screen, but cutting the video would interfere with the transformation effects, so I had to render it first and edit it again later (I cut a little bit of the beginning of the video and pasted it back on the end). Luckily rendering those tiny gifs only took like 3 seconds each, because I basically had to do it thrice for each gifs.

After turning them all back into gifs in PS it was done!! I saved two versions, one original sized and one 50% smaller, just because I know there are people out there with internet connections that could not handle loading a gifset of 10 gifs at around 4MB each.

And that was it, I’ve learned a lot, I’m never doing anything like this again :)) thanks for reading it all if you did, I'm so so tired

[utterlyinevitable]

Becca/Ode is finishing her shift when Ethan surprises her with a mysterious date invitation, refusing to reveal any details. How does she react? What has Grumpsey planned for them? 👀💖

Amazing (1/2)

Pairing: Ethan x F!MC (Becca Lao) Rating: Teen+ Summary: Ethan doesn’t understand new workplace technologies. He does understand how to woo his unofficial girlfriend.   Trope: Fluff; Date; Secret Relationship 

A/N: Hilde my LOVE! thank you for sending me this a million years ago & so sorry it took so long to answer. also sorry that i’ve answered with a fic that is is old(er than the ask). like summer 2020 old. don’t hold it against me 😬

__________________

The last dregs of sunlight spills through the glass walls of Edenbrook’s diagnostic office, highlighting paragraphs and pages of paperwork Rebecca Lao was finishing off at the team table, all the while her boss huffed at the screen behind his desk.  

“I don’t understand this damn system!” Ethan groaned with a slap of his mouse down onto the sturdy wooden surface. 

The hospital board had just implemented an app called ‘PocketDoc’ to hopefully help drum up more patients by doing video appointments, and in hopes of freeing up the clinic. Every senior attending was required to hold 5 video appointments per shift. As a department head Ethan Ramsey also was required to oversee that his team did in fact meet their quotas. All-in-all a truly insufferable feat. 

“It’s a video chat, Ethan. What’s not to understand?” Becca asked incredulously from where she sat folded in her chair. 

He glared at her in the way he does when she is being far too insufferable. 

Becca could feel his eyes burning a hole into her cheek. So intense she had to bite back the snide smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth. 

“Haven’t you ever done this before?” she asked, ever the picture of professionalism, setting her pen down and closing the last file. “You must’ve if you’ve consulted across the country.”  

“If I am ever required to be visible, I use the ready set-up in one of the conference rooms. What am I supposed to do with this?” He motioned to the computer screen.  

“Your job.” She couldn’t keep the smile off her face. “Do you need me to walk you through it before I go?” 

“No,” Ethan’s quick to retort, eyes glancing at the clock and the overtime she’s already well into. And anyway, he’s an adult. The smartest man in Edenbrook. He can figure this out but it’s just taking so long and there’s so much other more beneficial things he could be doing than going through this software walkthrough. “But if you wanted to…” 

She rolled her eyes as she closed the space between them. Ethan’s eyes watching her as she saunters over with infernal pride and pink lips pulled knowingly. As she presses his shoulder, pushes just hard enough to roll him back so she could squeeze in and perch herself on his desk. It’s 6:17pm - the hospital is still buzzing, people everywhere with peering eyes landing their way at any minute, and Ethan knows it’s much too early to be playing these games. 

“This here is the camera,” she points, stretches across to tap the device at the top of the screen. “You look into it and the person on the other side can see you.”  

“I understand that,” he chides; and before Becca could continue her Training 101 session, added, “I know what a microphone is too.” 

That sweet smile she shoots him is all he can think about as she runs through all the relevant capabilities of the program. Cheeky, yet reserved, with sparkles in her brown eyes. The kind of smile he’s sure it’s just for him. He’s sure Becca knows that his heart beats just a bit faster every time she looks at him like that - that it renders him helpless. That every time she smiles like that he remembers all the times she’s done it before, when they’ve been happier than they’ve ever been.

“And here's where you can order a script,” she says with finality. “Got it, old man?” 

There’s that smile full of mirth. 

A short exhale and Ethan’s back in the workplace - “I think so. Thank you for your assistance, Rookie.”

He watches as that smile takes over her entire face at the pet name he so seldom uses since they’ve crossed the line.  

“Anytime.” Becca slides off the desk, smooths out the creases of her trousers to look anywhere but at the poorly concealed heat in his stare. “Wish I could be there for your first video call - that’d be a sight.” 

“What do you expect?” 

“A total disaster. Hopefully something embarrassing behind you.” 

He smiles back. “I’m glad you have such little faith in me.” 

Evening has firmly become night and the garden apartment is a full house - Becca’s roommates are settled among blankets and pillows camping out in front of the flat screen of their living room.   

“Becca,” Sienna calls as Becca shuffles back in juggling more snacks. With a regretful lilt and a wave of her phone, Sienna informs, “Dr. Ramsey wants you to answer your phone.” 

Oh the groan that crawls up Becca’s throat is a mix of emotions. Flabbergasted that he would be texting her friend. Annoyed for not wanting to deal with a case on her evening off, the only rational reason he’s texting Sienna about her. And happy, because she always is when his name is tied with hers. 

Everything ok? 

Not even a full heartbeat after she shoots off the text does Becca get a conference call notification through the PocketDoc app. 

“Really?” 

“You said I should practice.” That shitty smirk that shines through the screen and shows off his laugh lines nearly knock her knees. “You also failed to mention the conference call option between physicians.” 

“Maybe that was intentional.” 

He laughed. Low and jubilant and just for her. 

“Did you call for a reason or…” she asks, strolling through the apartment towards her room. 

“Sorry for interrupting your evening.”  

“That’s fine, we were just relaxing and watching reruns of Doctor Who. For a second I thought we got another case and I’d have to skip family night.”  

“Nothing of the sort,” he says, and she can tell that there’s more too it between the words he does say and the way he’s sitting in his living room. But instead, his eyes squint and he’s nodding towards something behind her. “What’s that?” 

With a frantic look over her shoulder, Becca hung up and logged out, leaving Ethan shocked at the curt informality. 

Seconds later a Facetime call took over his screen.  

“Hey. Sorry. Bit unprofessional to have a personal conversation on a work app.” 

Ethan’s eyes only rolled halfway into his head when some sort of deep violet fabric overtook the video screen. 

“That’s my new child,” Becca giddily explained. “Got it 75% off. No idea when or where I’ll ever get to wear it but I needed her in my lie. Look how pretty!” 

“It is quite nice,” he adds in between Becca’s excited camera panning in and out of every notable feature. The long lace sleeves, the deep v neckline, and the peep of a skirt slit. 

“Nice!? It is the most perfect piece of fashion I have ever come in contact with.” 

She flopped on her bed. The video going black and then turning so he could see her face. Laying on her stomach, her chin resting on her forearms. 

“What’s Jenner up to?” she asks, knowing he’s watching his dad’s dog for a few days.  

“Sleeping. What else does he do?” 

“Lemme see!”

And Ethan did show her the dog sleeping at his feet, even holding his phone so she could ask the animal about it’s day, winding him up until the old boy’s tail couldn’t wag no more and he fell right back to sleep. 

They talked for a while, Ethan and Becca. Long enough for her to strip down to her pajamas and tuck herself in bed, and for Ethan shred his shirt and relax with his feet up on the couch more comfortably.  

“What’s with the face?”  

“What face?”  

“You’re staring.” 

“Can’t prove it.” Her pink cheeks betrayed her, though neither were hiding their heated gazes. “Are you going to bed any time soon?” 

“Probably should - it is getting late.” 

“Yeah… it’s my day off tomorrow.” 

“I know. Do… you have any plans?” 

“No. Sleep in hopefully, maybe treat myself to brunch. The guys are all working so it’s just me.” The mention of sleep had Becca’s eyes closing and her body slumping further into the pillows. “What’re you doing?” 

“I planned on going over some paperwork I’ve been avoiding.” 

“Nerd. Get a life, Ramsey.”

The sound of his chuckle lulled her to sleep. 

___________________

a/n: sorry it’s garbage! but this trash can gets a part 2 soon!!

@choicesficwriterscreations @openheartfanfics

[hypnolurker]

The Lost Time Traveler

Editor's note: this story contains scenes of non-consensual or reluctant sex.

*****

When Maria stepped through the temporal rift she had no idea where it would take her or even if she would survive. She was a very inquisitive researcher and the only one in her department with no family tying her down and brave enough to actually go through this thing. They had already performed tests to determine that it was stable and theoretically she should be able to travel through the rift unharmed and end up in a different time period. There was no real way of knowing if it was true however until she courageously took the first steps through the rift.

Armed with a notebook and a camera to record her surroundings she headed through. It was nerve wracking, taking that first step forward into the unknown. She felt she should make a speech, one small step for man or some such spiel. However she found herself far too nervous and anyway only a couple of her coworkers from the research institute were there as the general public had been kept from the rift for safety concerns. She moved ahead, plunging into the rift and seeing nothing but pitch black void as her whole body started to get sucked further into the terrifying portal. Her heart raced so fast and she couldn't breath as her vision blurred for a second and all her senses were dimmed as reality around her warped and swirled like a freakish dream.

Then she was through. Almost instantly she was simply standing in a field that stretched as far as the eye could see. The sun beat down on her back as she stared blankly trying to compute what she had just experienced. Her mouth was agape and she simply shivered in excitement and relief. She actually made it!

What's that smoke? Oh god!

She threw the camera to the side as it seeped gray wispy smoke and crackled. The rift must have interfered with the electronics somehow. This was important to take note of, not to mention highly frustrating as there would be no video record of her groundbreaking first trip through time. She jotted down her observations in the notebook.

"Successfully passed through temporal rift. No injuries to report. Camera has been rendered unusable, presumably by interference from rift. I am in a field which appears to be part of some farmland, there is a small building in the distance which may be a farmstead or barn. I will approach and attempt to ascertain whether I have indeed achieved a temporal shift and, if so, determine the current year." She noted before marching off towards the building.

She knew that she had a limited time to investigate the area before she had to go back to the rift, which would only stay open for a certain amount of time before collapsing. Based on models her team had made using data from several similar rifts, they predicted that this one would remain stable for approximately one hour after she passed through. As a safety precaution, she had been instructed to return as soon as possible, and no later than 30 minutes after entry. While this information hung in the back of her mind, Maria had just arrived and intended to make the most of her time here. She began to explore and slowly approached the building.

When she reached what looked to be a not too shabby barn area she noted the architecture. This wasn't modern. When was it built? She wasn't a history buff and thinking about it, that was somewhat of an oversight in the planning of this expedition. Still it seemed judging by the cleanness of the air and the lack of any recognizable cities or landmarks in her vision that she had indeed traveled a significant amount backwards through time.

She wandered into the barn and looked through the stables. Inside there were horses braying and shifting their hooves and they quickly drew her attention as she took a moment to admire them. What a beautiful horse this one was, chestnut brown with a long dark mane and-

Shit! A creak from behind startled her but it was too late for her to react. In an instant, large arms reached out from behind and snatched her up. They wrapped tightly around her and crushed her chest as she struggled and screamed. A man's voice was yelling behind her but she couldn't understand what he was saying. Perhaps she was just unable to concentrate as she desperately fought for freedom. It was useless though. Maria was a petite and frail scientist and this man seemed brutish lay strong as he squeezed the air out of her lungs with his beastly, hairy, muscle bound arms.

Eventually she gave in and let her body relax in submission. She couldn't escape him and she realized that. Her notebook had dropped to the ground and she stared at it as the man dragged her to another part of the barn where he picked up an old, filthy looked brown sack and roughly yanked it over her head. He tied her arms with rope behind her back to a post and she heard his footsteps as he left the barn.

What the hell? She was sobbing in darkness as she tried to figure out what had happened. Who was that man? The farmer? Why did he just assault her and put a bag over her head? She pulled against her bindings but they were tight rather tightly and effectively and all she managed to do was work up a sweat as she wriggled around on the floor of the barn.

Then it struck her. She had to get out soon. The rift could close in less than an hour and if she didn't get back she would be trapped in this time zone. Permanently. Her thrashing grew more urgent and needy but it still failed to budge the thick rope around her wrists.

After some amount of time her heart sank as the man returned. She heard a distinct clunking as something metal dragged behind him. Then she found out what it was as she felt him grabbing her neck and clasping a massive, heavy iron collar around it and locking it up tightly. She felt the chain hanging from it sway as he shackled her to the barn.

"Please! Please stop! I have to get back to my time. You must have seen the rift in your field. It's important! You have to release me!" She begged, muffled somewhat by the sack which blocked her vision.

When the man replied she didn't know what to say. His dialect was so strange she could barely make out what he was saying but it was English. She must have gone further back than she realized if English sounded like that though. Through her hood she quietly shivered and listened as he rambled. Something about her trespassing. He thought she was...foreign maybe. Putting her in her place? She whimpered and continued to listen and poorly translate his confusing version of the language. He intended to keep her chained here and...oh god he was going to torture her. Then...sell her? That couldn't be legal even if she was in the past!

She continued to plead and beg but the farmer kicked her and told her to be quiet. He just assumed she was some kind of foreigner speaking another language and didn't attempt to understand or communicate with her. Instead her began cutting away at her clothes with a shape blade. Maria felt its cold edge grazing her skin as he carelessly tore away her clothing. He remarked something about them being inappropriate for a woman and her being better suited to sitting naked in the hey.

Maria could only sulk and whine as she felt the reality of her situation. The shackles were solid. She couldn't even see and there was just no way she could escape. No one would come through the rift after her and it would probably close soon. Then she would be trapped her in the past with this disgusting farmer to rape and abuse her. Then sold into sexual slavery, likely shipped off to some place around the world and then forced to live in filthy with no communication with her home country or chance to start a new life.

The farmer grunted and a confused Maria wasn't sure what was going on until she felt something hot and meaty rubbing up against her chest. She pulled away but that didn't stop the warm stream of piss flowing into her chest and cascading down her body as this disgusting farmer urinated on her like she was some kind of human toilet!

That was just the start though. He wasted no time in shoving her to the floor and forcibly spreading her legs. He held her down as she wriggled and begged, rubbing the tip of his throbbing cock against her opening for a while before sliding straight in with a grunt. She felt a glob of spit hit her crotch as he yelled something about her being defiled and a whore. About her natural place being a pathetic slut who serves men.

It would have just been offensive slurs that seemed insignificant compared to the way he was raping her vulnerable slit. Except that she couldn't help wondering if she was actually in a time when women were just slaves to men. Maybe he was right. Maybe in this period she would be seen as no more than a dumb, inferior piece of meat to be fucked and mocked. Even if she could escape she may never be treated like a person again.

There was something so disturbing about that as she felt him thrusting into her. He fucked her for hours, pumping cum into her pussy and ass as she laid there and accepted it. Her head was covered and she was reduced to a squirming set of holes as the farmer emptied himself into her. Slapping and beating her breasts until they were sore and bruised. Squeezing her throat until she choked to make her hips bounce on his cock. Using her as a pathetic doll to fuck and abuse.

The rift was closed. That old life in the future just a memory now as she began to adjust to her new life. It was degrading and filthy and dehumanizing but as she resigned to becoming a fucktoy for this farmer and whoever would buy her afterwards she felt like she could...learn to enjoy it. She could learn to like being pounded and coated in jizz. She could learn to like being pissed on and mocked and treated like an inferior cunt. She could...learn her place.

In this era, she wasn't a scientist or an adventurer or an equal member of society. She was a worthless cunt and it was really sinking in now. It didn't take long after that for the farmer to break her in. Teach her about what a woman was for. Fucking. Cleaning. Drinking cum and moaning like the horny idiots they are. She knew it was true. That was what she was for now. She was just his property. It actually made her excited now. Made her squirm and drip. Being his pathetic cum-dump. Something had snapped in her head and she found it easier to just embrace it. Take pleasure in being jizzed in and spat on and treated like a stupid little cunt.

In the future she was remembered as a pioneering scientist and explorer. A role model and brave woman. In this time she was a whining piece of meat for the amusement of men.

[fourseasonsfigs]

Longines Han

I missed this fig when it was first sold, but had been keeping my eye out for it for a long time. As far as I can tell, this fig maker only sold this one figure. I'd been waiting for her to sell any remainders (holding out hope that she had some), but when I saw this little guy on Xianyu I had to grab him!

This inspiration for this fig is this picture from Zhehan's appearance on January 4, 2018 for the opening ceremony of the 8th Longines Beijing International Equestrian Masters.

You may recognize this outfit, as it is a much beloved outfit by the fans!

Zhehan looks tall, sleek, and elegant in his riding wear.

I think everyone that follows me knows that I am Team Long Hair for Zhehan, but I admit that he looks amazing no matter how long or short his hair is!

Here's a video of this event. The videographer on this has pretty singular focus, it's true!

The seller I bought this figure from just sold it as is, already stuck to a stand, without the box or any of the cards or anything with it. That's not my favorite, but this fig doesn't come up very often, so I took what I could get. Can't afford to be too picky!

Luckily, he arrived safe and sound. I had the warehouse wrap him in some bubble wrap packaging, and it turned out he was only attached to his standee stand with fig stickers, so it was easy to pull him off. One soapy bath later, all the travel had been washed off of him and he was fresh and clean!

Longines, if you did not know, is a luxury Swiss watch brand. I did not know that (I had mixed it up with Longchamps, the French purse brand). But, this is why he's modeling the watch!

I love his long boots - the fig proportions are so small that even tall boots look tiny (and adorable)!

The fig maker made sure that fig Zhehan filled out his riding breeches just as well as the real Zhehan.

This fig maker is a Junzhe fan, so we have a cute looking Samoyed on the back of Zhehan's jacket!

The short buzz cut is so pebbly looking here! It makes me giggle, it's very cute. It's a smart way to render it - you get all the texture but none of the difficulties (and breakage concerns) of spikes.

As you can see, this fig stands perfectly. The boots may help, but they're not particularly large or anything. It's just a well modeled fig.

Speaking of good modeling, the pose is beautifully done!

The fig maker also did a great job on the shape of the eyes, not to mention the hearts in them. This is really a great fig all the way around.

This is a particularly cute angle of his smiling mouth!

I'm glad to have finally gotten this fig. I wish the fig maker had made more, since she did such a nice job on this one!

One last shot of our short-haired cutie.

And that's all - again, sorry for no box cards or any special bonuses, but happy to have him at all. Actually, I do have a bonus, of a different kind! I'll leave you with this extra picture - of Zhehan for Longines in this gorgeous suit. I love it - he's still looking so tall and slim and elegant, just with a gorgeous velvet blazer and some very cool matching shoes.

Material: Resin

Fig Count: 516

Scene Count: 36

Rating: Dashing!

[link to the Master Post Index]

[altamont498]

On The Sanitation of the Internet, the Importance of Trigger Tags and the Role of Responsible Adults.

[All tweets described in alt; original tweets available by clicking the above images]

TBH I really do miss the days of the internet when the responsibility was on both the reader/viewer and the author to look out for each-other.

Whereby the author had to provide due warnings (e.g. TW Suicide, TW Insects, etc.) whilst the reader had to heed and act on the warnings where appropriate.

Whereas nowadays instead, as TomSka has said in the above tweets, everything has to be totally cleaned and sanitized to a stupid extent, where there's little or no just even remotely adult-only content available online nowadays.

Because - really and truly - it's unnecessary and overcautious mollycoddling and really only there to keep advertisers and shareholders happy.

And besides, the same companies have been previously more than willing to advertise adult content like horror games or potentially harmful stuff like loud noises and strobe lighting in advertisements whilst at the same time all too eager to pull "NOOOOO! YOU CAN'T TALK ABOUT MURDER ON A PODCAST ABOUT JACK THE RIPPER!!111!! YOU HAVE TO SAY UNALIVE!!!111!"

It also entirely disregards the original context. For example, it's one thing to send someone a horrible message like "I'm going to murder you and your family", but it's another thing to talk about murder in my previous example, in a podcast about Jack the Ripper.

Or if someone is struggling with genuine suicidal thoughts, they can't even look up anything about that and get the help that they may be in desperate need of because any content mentioning/referencing suicide has been deemed "too inappropriate."

Instead, it should be on parents/guardians/responsible adults to have that conversation with kids to say that there could be stuff online that they don't like, and tell them that if there's a warning sign literally straight in-front of them saying that there's something they don't like, that they act on it immediately.

If someone with a nut allergy ate a jar of Nutella (accordingly marked with Allergy Warning: Contains hazelnuts), took an allergic reaction and tried to sue Nutella, they'd be laughed out of any reputable news source and laughed out of any court of law.

Meanwhile, parents/guardians/responsible adults don't teach their kids how age restrictions work or how to act on them, how to avoid trigger tags and trigger warnings (or even bypassing it for them - e.g. buying them an 18+ game) then turn around and shout about how little Johnny/Jenny got traumatized by seeing a zombie's head explode in Call of Duty (PEGI 18) or how they walked in on their 12 year-old getting a lap dance from a virtual lap-dancer on Grand Theft Auto (also PEGI 18).

It would be simple for most websites—YouTube, Twitter, even Tumblr—to implement.

An option for authors to flag stuff as and when they're uploading it and then a click-through for the reader, like:

WARNING: Per [the author]'s own indication, this video/post contains references to X, Y and Z which some viewers may find disturbing or upsetting. Do you wish to continue? > Yes > No

It's high-time we bring back The Mutual Onus.

"Where the reader has needs, the writer must act to warn; But when the writer warns, then the reader must heed and act accordingly."

It would definitely go a long way towards putting an end to the overcautious mollycoddling of kids with regards to online content and re-open large swathes of the internet that would otherwise have ended up being rendered uninhabitable.

As well as the fact that warnings and TWs aren't a modern concept. Even in our day-to-day lives we see warnings for the sake of mental and physical health.

E.g.

"This report by John Smith contains flashing images, and descriptions of child abuse that some people may find disturbing."

"Coming up next on ITV is Doc Martin, which contains scenes of a medical nature."

Definitely food for thought for many social media sites and platforms to consider.

[openvacant]

For three years in my early 20s I was in a 24//7 petplay relationship but I didn’t recognize it was that because we weren’t in the scene and didn’t explicitly name it as that. The dynamic just happened, just flowed naturally from how we interacted with one another and the qualities he perceived in me. 

Within a few weeks of dating he was calling me ‘munchkin’ and using a belittling/tender baby voice with me at nearly all times, keeping watch after my wellbeing when were in public in crowded or confusing/overwhelming situations, giving me frequent instructions and encouragement, and making nearly all of our decisions when it came to food, media consumption, and weekend activities. 

In return I was a bouncing, adoring, goofy, eager-to-please little pet, who would curl into his lap and wriggle with glee and speak with childlike wonder and naivete. I was already an oblivious, childish, animallike type, thanks Autism, but with his nurturance, my sweetest and most vulnerable side was given full room to bloom. I was his munchkin and he was my Keeper, or Keep for short. He kept and tended to me. 

we’d go to bed together weaving complex stories about how he’d found me in some fantasy wilderness and captured me for my own protection, stealing me away from a menacing world I could not comprehend and making me his own. in these stories I was eternally ageless and had always been his. 

eventually, the power dynamic took a slightly darker turn, because it had never been named or negotiated, just slid into thoughtlessly and easily like a pair of shoes tucked beneath the bed. he wanted me to fuck him on camera and i felt powerless to challenge it. in the video im dead eyed, slow moving, shoulders rolled forward in self protection and dysphoria, and he just keeps on forcefully ignoring these broadcasts of displeasure, and instructing me on what to do. any time i cried during or on the edges of sex he was angry with me, not concerned, because i had ruined the moment. 

i know i stayed with him far longer than i ought to have because i’d never known real love or attachment before. but also, looking back, it was because of the dynamic -- being his munchkin soothed anxieties in me that i’d previously believed i would always be living with, filled me up and expanded me into more of a human being than i’d thought i could be (which is a bit ironic, considering i spent those years pretending to be a little inhuman imp). i could not imagine being myself without him. dumping him would deprive me of a vital essence of who i was. without him i could not be a munchkin and could not know being Kept. and for a long time that was too much to rip from myself. 

after we broke up, i trained my next boyfriend to help scratch my itch for power dynamics. he’d only fucked one girl and one guy before me, and things had been vanilla. i begged him to choke me and he adored the way it flooded me. he started choking me on the train, in alleyways, in quiet public corners, watching my eyes spark with delight and knowing that he’d instantly rendered me wet and ready for him. we fought a few times, play fighting that then sometimes turned real, his strength and weight mastering me non-negotiably. when he gave me a painful stinging yeast infection he once held me down and fucked me through the pain while watching a documentary on philosophy that was a little too boring to take in without additional stimulation. 

i loved his violence and the compulsiveness of his sexuality, how he used me in my office at night at graduate school, spilled his sperm on my stomach and the office chair at midnight and midday and on the blow-up mattress in his mom’s den. he later became physically and sexually abusive with me and with other partners. he was a natural at the power dynamics even though again it was never negotiated, never named as such, never integrated into a life within the bdsm scene. i was drawn to him because he was imposing, intense, and had such bad boundaries. the core of me that craves being controlled identified potential him, but it was not a safe potential. 

the next guy that i engaged in power dynamics with was a stand up comedian / dominant / foot fetishist that i’d met on ok cupid. in our first messages together he asked me what my favorite kink was, and not wanting to reveal the hypnosis thing which still felt cringe at the time, i told him merely that i was into Dom/sub. he started demanding i sent him dirty messages and whispered explicit voice memos. we met on campus at 8pm on a sunday and he loved that i was shy. he fucked me in the ass with just spit in my office and in the experimental psychology lab and once, when i came, i looked in his eyes with such intensity he believed it must be love. it was not love. 

he got jealous when my other boyfriend walked in on the two of us fucking one day. being discovered and witnessed like that made my other relationship real. he made me pay for his last taxi back to lakeview and stole my copy of watchmen. he Gchatted me asking for the old archives of our sexts about a year later. a girlfriend had jealously made him delete them but now they were no longer together. he died of a heroin overdose in that same year. his funeral was a stand up comedy roast where his friends and family performed his emails on stage. i suppose they must have seen ones from me. 

i was a bit over the unspoken ill conceived bdsm thing after that. i found myself a sweet boy without the nerve to ever initiate. and so i initiated. and i guess we basically masturbated with one another’s bodies for the ensuing ten years. i got my taste for power dynamics back about halfway through that decade, and so i began seeing hypno doms in the spare time that i had a lot of. i had a lot of fun during that period, healed and reclaimed my sexuality a lot, and met partners who had a genuine awareness of negotiation and consent, and slowly through my writing and digital content created a position for myself within the hypnosis kink community. eventually i became so confident and cognizant of my real position and desires that the tepid 10 year psuedo marriage id been in ended. 

these days i finally have a dynamic that is enriching, tender, degrading, and most importantly, discussed. i am something like a person’s cherished, devoted, slightly mischievous pet, but i’m also their partner, and it feels very good. 

[tentajack]

Wrote a little thing for mermay, and while there's much more to the idea than presented in this oneshot, I hope everyone enjoys this little preview of the constant aquatic!

Tumblr version will be under the cut:

Hurried steps pounded the dirt by the cliffsides.

Wilson tried his best to catch his breath, but could see it was all for naught- he was too late.

He and a few other survivors were attempting to unravel the small timeloop the constant had tucked away in one of it’s many layers, quite aptly named ‘the gorge’, but their current attempt to satiate the cruel beast in the sky had already begun with rocky progress. They were hoping if they could satiate it in a way superior to their previous successful attempts, perhaps this loop could end and free the poor residents into the grater constant, but…

The looming Gnaw’s appetite had reached its limit before they could finish enough dishes, favor run out and time cut short. The ground and air rumbled with spite and ancient magic, and Wilson’s harried breathing started to turn into coughing fits, his lungs rendering themselves apart to transform into gills.

Despite the harsh circumstances, Wilson had a little surprise up his sleeve for such an occasion: a little life amulet and the broken shard of a tentacle spike he had brought with him in secret when traversing to the gorge. Had failure halted his process before? Many times, too many times. Wilson was quite keen on figuring out what would happen of a survivor should find themselves after the Gnaw’s point in time where it punished failure with mermification, though the process seemed to kick him out of his body once there was no trace of his humanity left, back into the blank nothingness when reforming a body in a new layer of the constant or starting the time loop over again. He had quite hoped that Wanda could help, but in her absence… well, Wilson had plenty of experience with practical suicides and timely revivals, he was willing and able to make do.

He looked over at the sea while he rushed to put the amulet on, unchanging in this particular area despite the moon rising the sea in every other area of the constant. The rocky cliffs remained high and impassable to attempt to sail. Never the less, it made for a serene sight to calm his mind for what he needed to do next.

He took up the tentacle spike’s remaining shard and raised it up for a quick pierce to the heart. He’s normally one to opt for draining a major artery, but time was of the essence while he felt his legs mutating and his skin turning to scales in patches.

The pierce was agonizing but the results were swift.

Wilson stumbled backwards while twisting the spike until he could feel his heart stop. His lung had gotten nicked in the violent act, spewing blood into his choking fits, but he was in so much pain he paid it no mind.

His heart stopped beating.

His last step back met air.

Wilson didn’t have enough oxygen left in his brain to fully realize he was falling, stony sea rocks out of perception in his blacked out vision.

He didn’t have anything else left in his brain once his skull hit the sharp shore, killing him a few seconds sooner than the lack of a functioning heart would have.

His partially mutated body was swept away by the waves, and under the surface where his amulet began to glow and activate.

Oo0o0oO

Wilson wasn’t sure what he was expecting when he become conscious after his revival, but it wasn’t a chestful of water when he took a breath. He opened his eyes in haste and was rewarded with the sting of salt water, hands grasping at his burning torso, unable to right himself to stand or push himself up.

His panic and flailing motions continued for a long moment. After all, why would he expect to wake up submerged? As the pain in his eyes grew to a more bearable level, the gentleman scientist was able to perceive his surroundings, as well as himself.

The light of the cloudy sky just barely illuminated the peaks of the waves from below, just enough for Wilson to know he was indeed under the waters surface. As baffling as it was to be underwater without blacking out, he could at least tell what direction ‘up’ should have been.

He made no hesitation to swim towards the surface, doing his best to ignore the small collection of air bubbles as he breathed out and the deformed scales jutting out of his gloves.

He breached the surface and tried his best to breathe in, but found himself exhaling water every time he tried to empty his lungs out. Despite having a strong breast stroke to fall back on, his thighs felt numb and difficult to move, leaving him unable to kick past moving his knees. He pushed himself with a stronger stroke upwards, and breathed in as hard as he could, only to spasm with pain once he receded under the waves.

He hacked and gagged as a burst of air bubbles came out of his mouth and his sides, the pain lessening as he involuntarily took in more batter between fits.

Wilson became weary with confusion and strain alike and decided it might be worth it to just let himself drown at this rate.

He let himself sink to the bottom, the little granules of sand floating up with the soft impact.

Letting himself go slack on the seabed, he couldn’t help but think of how peaceful this moment in time was despite drowning to death, the gloomy light of the gorge glistened above and the water around him was so much quieter in the depths away from the violent waves and whooshing winds. It was a shame he fell into the sea and wasted his chance to explore the gorge beyond the looping point, but he’s just have to try again the next time he could sneak some ‘extra items’ by in the portal. He closed his eyes and sighed, a few leftover bubbles rolling out of his throat, relishing the feeling of a rare, peaceful death.

…

He felt the current pick up, water gently flowing through his hair in a rather pleasant way.

Wilson didn’t feel any pain in his chest anymore and wondered why he wasn’t upright at the florid postern back at their current base yet.

He opened his eyes to the same underwater view, and a gentle breathing in of the sea water seemed to be like breathing thick air, his eyes didn’t even sting anymore. He took another deep breath to confirm it; he was breathing water, but something on the side of his ribs was sticking to his shirt. His mouth formed a line once it caught up to his brain that was was going to be in the here and now for some time.

He pushed his arms out in front of himself to properly investigate what happened to him; it was clear he wasn’t able to die quickly enough to prevent his lungs from turning to gills, and he could feel the wrongness throughout the rest of his body too. His arms retained a more human shape than the blobby merm appendage it was doomed to turn into, but his nails turned into sharp white claws at the end of his more angular fingers, and something felt like his skin might have been partially degloved beneath his actual finger-less gloves, though the rest of the gloves had been torn up with some prominent green scales lifting the fabric up and away in too many spots. Removing the gloves proved to be a small hassle, but once he got them off the pressure on his forearms and palms receded. He mostly has human skin where patched of various sized scales didn’t grow in, but between his fingers were thin growths of skin akin to webbing. He waved his right hand around, feeling the increased resistance of the water when his hand was outstretched. He simply observed and muttered “Huh.”

The mutter was something he felt vocalize in his throat, but he could also feel the subtle vibrations on the sides of his neck. He reached a hand up to touch, and the tips of his claws he could feel small ridges, just like a sharks gills. He kept his hand nearby while he yelled out “Hello, is anyone there?” into the distant kelp masses. Naturally there was no response, but Wilson took the time to look around the environment, finding himself in a little patch of fine sand between the high rocks reaching up and past the surface, a thick ‘field’ of an unknown kind of short kelp, and a clear stretch of water that seemed to go… somewhere.

Wilson had momentarily become distracted with all the new things to discover around him that he had neglected to finish inspecting the changes within him. As soon as he tried to swim over to the kelp, he had the strange sensation in his thighs again, not quite numbness but he couldn’t explain why he couldn’t feel them moving they way he was trying to. Looking down, he was that his trousers were in a precarious state, not just torn up but sucked into the mass patch of scales on his lap, spreading over each thigh and twisted into a mass of flesh that bridged the gap between his thighs. He put his hands over the mass and tried his best to spread his legs with a strenuous grunt, but to no avail- his thighs had become stuck together in the middle, possibly a healing error from the amulet mistaking the scales for a wound and trying to fix a body that had expired between states of being. He pulled his muscles so hard that the new skin formed over it began to tear and bleed slightly, but without a means of healing, Wilson wasn’t willing to try to cut his legs back apart just yet. He sighed and looked down at the rest of his legs, his calves were free and still human shaped though the scales had shredded the lower portion of his trousers completely, and his shoes had split at the tips to accommodate his longer toes, also with skin webbing added.

The changes to his body were novel and fascinating, but the rumble of hunger in his stomach was a familiar feeling, both a reminder and confirmation that he would still need to feed himself despite his physical state and new location.

He swam over to the seaweed growths he saw earlier, though to say ‘swim’ would undermine just how clumsy his movements were- he had not had a chance to practice such movements since he was a younger man, leaving him paddling and flailing and doing little incomplete kicks like a miserable creature going every which way in all directions until he remembered how to do a breast stroke. By the time he actually got to the seaweed patches, he had managed to regain some competency in his form, despite the atrocious changes to his body.

He started to grab at some of the kelp, noting small and short brown leaves next to bundles of grape-like growths that would bob up with a distinct translucent yellow tint. He picked at some of the leafy fronds, and taking a nibble out of one proved disappointing, empty of any value much like eating the leaves of a deciduous tree. He grabbed one of the ‘fruits’ off the bunch and popped into his mouth like a berry. The foul burst that came out of it was horrendous, like a concentrated sample of the most seal and seagull infested coastal pungency he had ever had the misfortune to experience, and the salty water around him was a stark relief as he clawed any remaining substance from his mouth.

As his frenzy died down, he fingertips and clawed nails brushed over his teeth more slowly- he could feel his teeth had become sharper, but at this point the shock of his mutations has dulled down. He still needed to find something to eat, and swam towards the more open water to explore.

The sand stretched far and long into the distance.

There was nothing but sand for a good while.

At this point, Wilson had to take an occasional break to look around for any distinguishing features, clutching his grumbling stomach to soothe the growing ache. Something seemed different not to far off from where he wound up, the long stretch of sand seemed just a little bit shorter, stopping abruptly where the water became brighter and the current became stronger.

Once he swan to the void in the ocean floor, he grasped the edge to keep himself steady and peered over.

The entire sea poured over into infinity, the water around him spilling over into a torrent and down onto a floating disk that looked an awful lot like the land masses and circular sea Wilson could easily recognize from any of the maps he made over the last however-many-cycles, in turn high above other disks of land and sea that poured into one another like overflowing goblets, going repeatedly into a black infinity. The sun over and under each disk looked like blurry stars in their own right, their lights beautiful and small through the refraction of the water spilling over from the high level of the gorge. Maxwell once mentioned the darkness that laid ‘out of bounds’ wherever the layer he would generate, the odd tranquility of quietly looking off to something beyond what even their eyes could not truly peer, and Wilson understood how breathtaking the whole system was and how interconnected each ‘world’ of the constant really was in ways he couldn’t perceive.

As much as he would have loved to stay where he was to observe, he knew his hunger was a clock ticking down, and he’d rather have a much better reward for the risk of death. There didn’t seem to be much in the way of edible or usable materials here, so that left the massive volume of water cascading over the edge and wherever that might lead; a much more exciting sort of death than starvation by any measure. Looking straight down, Wilson could see the water falling a great distance before forming a base of mist and cloud, and began to tip himself just a little further with each moment looking at it, lest he scare himself out going down preparing for a big leap over.

The pull of the current did the rest of the work once he had reached out far enough.

The sudden acceleration of being pulled down had caught Wilson off guard, but he had a long way to the bottom. He was swam under the pressure of the current towards the edge of the water, just enough to stick his head out but not far enough to risk a premature ejection, and was rewarded with the clarity of the beautiful sight he had sampled before. He could see each segment fly past him, most unfamiliar, but a few he had an odd recollection of, like a circle of rocks around a crab king right by where the sea poured over, just like the one he saw five ‘start-over’s ago, same placement and everything! He was swept down past a few more, but the one he could see that got his attention was another familiar world where he could see a boat.

He could see himself on the boat, with the same prime-mate killing him in the exact way he remembered dying that time.

Wilson extended a clawed hand to his chin in thought- the time issues the gorge experienced surely meant that time’s rules had different changes depending on where one was in the constant, and being between all the worlds and layers and sets and boards meant that for the briefest of moments, he too was between time itself, however long this ride would last.

Another world he was still high above was folding in onto itself, crumpled into a ragged ball like a failed blueprint before massive shadow hands flexed their fingers over the mass, forming trees and rocks and other things as the ball stretched out again into something new. Wilson could just barely see two little dots coming out of a flash in the center before that world passed him by entirely, only a deep sort of rock with it’s own little leaks visible from underne-

Wilson hit the end of the waterfall, but realized mid-air that the end wasn’t the splashing water against the surface but a storm absorbing all the water to rain down on everything below it.

Wilson flipped past the freezing cloud and through the sky, screaming all the water in his gills out and drowning in air for a brief moment until he landed hard into the sea on his belly with an impressive splash.

The pain of the landing caused Wilson to be dazed for a long while, only just being able to breathe to regain his composure. He left himself drift in the new current. He had plenty to mull over in his own brain, there would be no urgent need to see where he wound up, if not for the continuous hunger pains. He brought himself back upright (What he thought was upright? All he had to tell was the light on the surface and the slightest sense of buoyancy) to look around, and he found himself in a much more lush environment.

Far from a flat sand field, the would around him had too many things to note at once, lots of little rocks next to bigger ones, familiar stretches of bull kelp reaching high from their roots to the surface, and a variety of shells all across the seabed. Wilson went right for the kelp, knowing it to be edible even when raw, grabbing fistfuls and shoving into his mouth with haste. While the texture wasn’t particularly appetizing, the salty taste seemed mellow after getting used to breathing and swallowing salt water. Luckily for the scientist, there was plenty to harvest when one wasn’t restricted to the very top, though it was hard to say how much he had picked when most of it went right between his pearly whites to try to fill his stomach for the next while. He put the remaining amount after his feeding frenzy into what was left of his pockets for later, though he certainly wasn’t excited to eat it again if he had to.

Now that his immediate need for food had been taken care of, he could properly explore!

He began to grab at some of the shells, recognizing the familiar shellbells from his time on the surface, and raising some of them up to see if the tiny creatures inside behaved differently when underwater. The tiny green… snails? Crabs? Salamanders? seemed to be just as reclusive as on the surface, tucking themselves further into their shells. Wilson supposed he’d have to look into them later when he could get a hammer.

The thought of a hammer had Wilson reaching into his pockets for the materials. His hands met the distinct squish of kelp fronds and nothing else.

Wilson began to sober up from his need to explore. He had no materials, not even an axe or a spear to defend himself when the need would arise, and it would arise here in the constant, no matter his special circumstances.

He began to look around for things to gather, easily finding rocks and flint on the sandy bottom and pocketing them as well. He swam up closer to the surface and was able to grab a little bit of grass, but he felt his immediate findings would be inadequate, and so swam away from his landing zone.

Skimming the surface let him find some floating bundles of sticks and more grass, but with how much he had to swim between each find, he couldn’t help but be worried. He was at least able to make a regular spear, but… Making a few test thrusts with it let him know his mobility would be an issue when attacking, putting enough power behind the spear also forced his entire body to stiffen, and hitting a rock below had him pushing away without ground to properly stand on. Wilson sighed, making do and putting the spear on one of the loops on his pants, keeping it ready to grab the moment he felt he needed it.

He stroked a webbed hand though his hair whilst looking around for anything of use, swimming forward while his mind drifted. The fact his hair seemed to retain some of its shape rather than floating everywhere was nice, though it floated off his scalp just enough to make him feel the need to smooth it back down before it got in his face again. His fingers brushed by his ear, pointed and lengthened in various places like a merms head fins, though thankfully only on the edge of the helix, helping to keep the side of his magnificent hair in place.

The thought was interrupted when he got close to a pillar of white rock, and to the familiar shadows that made Wilson’s heart speed up with stress.

He hated cookie cutters and he was certain they hated him too. They seemed to always swim too close when it was most inconvenient, and today would be no exception as one plunged down from the surface and towards Wilson, jaws open for all the sticks Wilson had gone though the trouble of collecting. Wilson took his spear back out, jabbing it the things creepy creepy face, backing up as much as he could swim to make sure it didn’t try to eat his spear if it got too close. Sure, they were aggravating to fight on a boat, but at least they were face down and distracted eating rather than opening their empty maw and eyes right at him. After a few more unnerving blows and a lucky bite from the grey menace, the cutter began to twitch and turn belly up, Wilson did not hesitate to grab the purple meat before it could float to the surface, and swam away as fast as he could before the others drifted close enough to take an interest.

While swimming away, he lamented he could not collects their discarded shells to make a helmet, but he knew better than to take a risk with such foul little bastards close by. He rubbed the bite wound on his left arm and got as far away from the salt pillars as his stubby little flippers could bring him.

Wilson drifted off into darker water, concerned that it was already dusk, the seafloor fading from gritty white sands to murky grit and white roots. All sorts of silhouettes could be seen from below, faded with less sunlight to highlight them but still recognizable as tree tops and figs and hanging spiderwebs of the waterlogged environment. Wilson sighed with relief, the darkening skies above the sea merely the shade of the great massive knobbly tree, and all the boons that could be found under it. He swam over the larger looping roots of the tree and up to the surface, collecting a little haul of grasses and twigs and driftwood. He made an axe, a backpack, plus a torch by habit for later, and quickly got to work on cutting the smaller trees from the root up for some regular wood, eager to get back to being fully equipped.

A few sweetfish swam by during the cutting, Wilson made a mental note to invent some sort of sea-trap to harvest them later.

He was able to get plenty of wood, and quite a bit of entertainment watching the sea striding spiders comes down with nobody to find on the surface. Once Wilson felt confident he had the upper hand, he began to stab at them from below, completely safe as long as he remained under the surface. He felt satisfied for how much silk he was able to get from a little pest control, proud as he could be despite the circumstances, and almost wished Maxwell could be here to see how well he was doing with a new kind of environment to discover. He laughed to himself with a memory of the first time he brought Maxwell to a waterlogged forest like this. Maxwell had gotten into a bit of a sour mood once he realized the only thing easy to access were the figs, and hadn’t gotten into better spirits until Wilson showed him how to harvest the tree nuts by recklessly ramming the boat at top speed into the tree. Of course, Maxwell was furious whilst patching the many holes the boat had sprung open, but once they retrieved the nut he seemed to be quite amused with such a ridiculous harvesting method, even laughing about it until the fireflies came out and the lantern needed more fuel. Remembering that spontaneous laugh made Wilson feel warm all over, lights still all around him.

He looked up and realized the fireflies were already out again, and the darkness was starting to encroach.

His warm feelings halted immediately, he held his breath and swam up to breach, and lo and behold, the sun was already setting above the surface, and setting quickly.

Wilson supposed it was his own fault for not being more diligent about checking the conditions above sooner, but he did not panic. He pulled out his torch the same way he had thousands of times before, and stroked a stick over the main knob to ignite.

He remained in darkness.

Wilson slapped his clawed hand to his scalp, scales on the sides of his palms scraping down his stupid face. He forgot for the briefest of moments that he was underwater, and fire of any sort was out of the question.

Panic began to seep in as a familiar, distant hissing started to approach.

He swam up to the fireflies on the waters surface, kicking so hard that his thighs began to tear apart again, but there was no time to care about that, he needed light more than anything else!

The fireflies scattered within seconds of getting splashed, leaving Wilson in their fading memory of a glow.

Wilson took the torch and tried to hold it up over the surface, only to be defeated by the waves spilling over the highest point he could attempt to keep it up.

He was dragged down by claws before he could get another attempt.

While the scent of roses didn’t carry well in seawater, her touch was something Wilson could always remember.

It was not frequently that Wilson had the chance to hear Charlie speak, and less so that it did not fill him with dread.

“You thought you were so clever, didn’t you?”

Her voice echoed around him, full of venom and amusement alike. The claws around him and inside of him dug in. He was stunned- no words could come out of his mouth, not that they would be anything more than a stuttering plea made in pure terror.

A charming little laugh wasn’t quite fitting with the mood, but that didn’t stop Charlie, nothing could stop her in her own domain. Wilson could just barely see her face peering out from shadow.

“But this little detour of yours has given me some lovely… inspirations. We have some new plans for you. I wouldn’t trust anyone with my new little project more than you… Do you trust me?”

Wilson couldn’t muster an answer to that predatory smile. To Wilson, this was a loaded question; he didn’t have a choice. To Charlie, this was surely like a cat playing with the poor little bird it already began to mangle on the ground.

Wilson hesitantly nodded his head, figuring it was better to not resist whatever great and terrible thing Charlie was about to throw him into.

“Good.”

Charlies visage snapped into a terrorbeaks maw and around Wilson’s head, making quick work of the half-mutated form.

Charlies face returned to normal with a smile and she let what was left of his body sink down into the depths. She was excited to see what he would do at her new postern, and all the little things she had created.

The new plan had begun in earnest.

[steampaul]

i've started a little series of weekly posts documenting every MoC i made (digitally) over the last few years:

Week 3: the first part of 2019:

a movie reference, francis of the filth, that robot dog and set MoCups of The Forest and Satisfactory

making apocalypseburg Mod inspired me to make a Mod based on the thing it was referencing.

i also tried out the gif-maker for Stud.io at that time and even though i liked the result, i nevere really used it again because rendering took waaaaay too long.

i still like and use the rockwork in this, because its simple and effective.

ah yes. Boston dynamics' Spot. i had seen those first few videos and i liked the concept and almost immediately built a minifig-scale version of that adorable little robot dog. (i never anticipated that it would be used as a weapon.) we will revisit this one in the 2020 post.

these two are the SunCorp laboratory in Okinawa (based on absolutely nothing) and the sea of the wretched how i imagined it (featuring the basic rockwork i like so much)

i've never posted these anywhere. which is because they're pretty bad. i built them a bit after finishing Francis of the FIlth, the Book George Miller, aka Filthy Frank wrote before becoming Joji. it wasn't that well written, but i was a biiig fan and i loved it anyway.

here is wave 1 of the set MoCups i made for The Forest

i really wanted to make these feel like real lego sets. that's why i built the Trees a lot simpler and rendered the MoCs as PNGs and added a background based on a random screenshot from the game. i quickly realised that this was a bad idea and i only used it in wave 2 of this series.

this was also the first time where i built a whole series and posted those builds over a few weeks.

wave 2 of the Forest. i built these later on because the first series turned out to be really popular on reddit (and a lot of new episodes of the let's play i've been watching had come out)

i still like some of the ideas i had with these sets, but i think the idea of more simplistic builds = more realistic as a lego set is really stupid by todays standarts.

Satisfactory is a pretty cool game. still really like the way these turned out, especially the way i made the conveyor belts. i had to redo the cables for some of the machines in Paint.net, because some flexible parts had a rendering problem it that version of Stud.io.

this series was so popular that i got asked to give an interview for some french (or canadian?) magazine over discord.

i also got really salty when a similar but better version of the fabricator turned up on lego ideas, even though i had planned to post some of these over there myself. but whatever.

after the forest, SCP should technically be next. but i'll post those Sets next week because of tumblr's 30 images per post limit.

last week first week next week

[eemoo1o]

Shadow has never been stated to be 18 or 20 though, he has only ever been stated to be physically 15 /nm

(Long post ahead. Tags are also important in advance. I will admit this post spirals into a tangent on how this matter started as well as stuff about other characters, and despite all linking together under the same theme-gazebo, it kinda derails, so feel free to read at your own pace.)

I don’t know much about the games—and that may make you feel “oh then why are you..” yeah, I mean like I don’t check manuals or have played them but I watch analysis videos, avidly Google shit and revisit the wikis now and then.

Just putting that out there.

The Sonic News Network wiki page merely renders him as ageless, whereas the Sega Wiki wiki page (where I got my information from last post) stated three (kinda) ages for the character:

(Please note that the Wiki is themed in a darker grey to what the image is here. Same with the following. I turned the exposure up on each for visual clarity.)

Oh, look, they even included a canon birthdate!

Oh…

Well, I know Wikis aren’t always accurate, so to back up the apparent evidence I had, if I’m just to Google his age just to double check—

Hey! That’s the game, damnit.

Think this was my mistake in the previous reply, so I suppose I should apologise. And I do. I think my train of thought was: “He’s 18 years of age (y), with some range in other games (17-22y respectively)”, which isn’t right—but every source I could find on the character’s age came up with 18y and not 15y, so I stand by the claim that even though he’s “ageless” (immortal, basically) he’s physically 18.

It also doesn’t make much sense that he is “ageless”—perhaps due to his origins of being put into stasis like some sort of autobot, or something—when a physical age for him has been stated to be 18 (which makes sense, as Knuckles was, by technicality, the original Shadow, having been invented seven years before Shadow was, and as far as I remember is meant to be a year or two older (16 or 17) than Sonic (15)—it also makes sense because Rouge is also 18, apparently, and I’d have imagined them to be of very similar age). Technically that should just let him do an Edward Cullen and be 18 forever.

(I will note that I’ve never liked the prospect of Shadow being immortal. Or the duration it took for him to come out of stasis just to link to Dr. Robotnik somehow. Perhaps I’m just biased, but to me it feels heavily unjust—I wanted Shadow and Sonic carrying their rivalry all the way to the old folks’ home, damnit. And now that vision is ruined.)

Overall, being immortal really doesn’t suit Shadow’s character, in my opinion, and just feels like a plot point now simply discarded and forgotten. It really wasn’t necessary in the first place, and making him 18 (immortal or otherwise) would have been much easier, rather than the oh-so-enigmatic “ageless” genotype we all know and love today.

To remedy this, I like to think red-eyed Shadow is different to brown-eyed Shadow in the sense of age and therefore backstory. I made a post on it—in fact I think it’s probably the post right before this one on my blog—but currently my main focus is going to be on Prime, which is why I’m now so bitter about Shadow’s age, and Sonic character ages as a whole.

None of it really fits, and I think they all need to be updated (Sonic and Amy’s, especially). I mean, I know Amy’s was back in the day, but with how she’s depicted now as opposed to back then, even post-redesign (she went from an 8yo Sonic recolour to a 12yo what-we-know-now). I mean, I know her main, more “well regarded” character arc is learning how to mature, but with her literally being fucking 12 is just a pisstake.

Sonic’s age is less annoying as opposed to Shadow and Amy’s (respectively) because I don’t think too much into it until I notice it doesn’t suit him due to the situations he’s in. Yes, he’s young and he’s a teenager—a cocky one at that, which is one of the many good things Hardcore Sonic Fans (aka the “bronies” of this fandom, for lack of a more adequate word) praise Prime for depicting—so it’d make sense for him to be such (15yo), but to me it’s make much more sense for him to be like 16.

I’d be willing to say “maybe even 17”, but 16 just seems so perfect and on the nose. It’s such a nitpicky little detail but to me Sonic’s age wouldn’t seem so absurd if they just made him 16. It’d both make an immense difference and yet basically none at all that would force any impact on his characterisation.

Amy’s the most absurd—her age still hasn’t been updated from 12 and even though it’s an improvement from her being 8, it’s still ridiculous. If you’re (and by that, I mean the creators, not you, the anon) not going to change Sonic’s age, at least change hers. To me, she seems like she should be a year younger than Sonic at least.

Same could be said for Tails. To me he feels similar to Amy, or at least in the terms of arcs. He should be younger than Sonic, and either the same or younger than Amy, too. He’s still eight, and with how his character has evolved over the years, especially in the modern era, he needs to be just a mite older, like 12 or something.

I feel like Shadow’s age, I most have a problem with for literally being 50 (I don’t care if he’s “physically” 18 or whatever. He’s not Edward Cullen, although that too is also pretty creepy) and as for the coma thing, put it like this: if Timmy fell down the well at 8 years of age and woke up from his head-trauma-induced coma 50 years later, he isn’t automatically excused from picking fights or relationships with kids.

I added the “relationships” into it because this (the thing with the coma) seems to be the primary excuse for Sonadow shippers (I suppose with Rougeow it isn’t so bad because she’s canonically 18, probably to make her past sex appeal to humans somewhat legal, but still). I mean, I’ve seen the same being said for other ships, but not really. The primary ship seems to be for Sonadow, seeing as Amy’s age is always disregarded anyway, especially in the Sonamy side of the fandom.

Shadow was my favourite part in Prime, I’ll admit—I liked his banter with Sonic, and I liked his voice actor (oh, Ian Hanlin, how I love your vocal range so)—which is why my anger for Shadow’s age and backstory made a resurgence (it was either mid-last year or the one just before, where I went through a Sonic phase on my blog after revisiting Boom, and somewhere during that I’d said the same thing, although not to this much feedback from an anon/anons).

I also made the post about Shadow’s eyes because if noticed they were brown in Prime but didn’t really pick up on what exactly was off until I’d googled it. One could argue they’re red for TV as opposed to the games, but in Sonic X they’re red, like in the games, and in Sonic Boom they’re a more saturated colour, making them mostly dark red, borderline brown.

So, I assume as the modern era of Sonic-based media progresses/progressed, they’ve turned from brown to red. It’s subtle but I hope it says a lot. Mostly for his backstory, because god, do I hate Shadow’s backstory.

[arabellaflynn]

I went down a few rabbit holes while researching the Advent Calendar last year, that didn't make it into the queue because they got too long or went too far afield. Here's one of them!

One thing you notice when you watch a bazillion videos about old games consoles is how the design of circuitry has evolved. If someone says 'circuit board' today, you think a light piece of leafy green board, filled with parallel lines of copper at 45° and 90° angles, dotted with lots of tiny inscrutable plastic and metal doodads. But it took a long, long time for them to get that way.

If you look at really old circuit boards -- and I mean really, really old circuit boards, like from the beginning of the transistor era, they look completely different. They're brownish, for one thing. And kind of... wiggly?

Apologies for the transfer quality. It's not your connection, it just sucks. This piece appears to be some sort of promo-tainment thing from Tektronix themselves, from 1969. The rounded corners and bluish fuzz at the edges is an effect called 'vignetting', and it means this is originally from a 16mm film reel. There's no earthly reason for film to look this terrible. The uncentered picture means someone copied it by pointing a camera at a projection screen instead of bothering to get a proper kinescope setup, and the fact that it only goes up to 240p makes me feel like it was originally transferred over two decades ago for RealPlayer and nobody bothered to fix it for YouTube. VHS is about 240 lines, but if this were a crap transfer from a VHS tape you'd also see scanlines. It's possible there's a better copy at VintageTek, a museum dedicated to the history of Tektronix; they are an all-volunteer institution, and they probably have more important things to funnel funding to than updating their YouTube channel.

Point being, it looks like porridge and I'm sorry, but at least the content is interesting.

The brownish color, which is actually from an evolutionary stage earlier than what's covered here, is because many early boards were milled of bakelite rather than electrodeposited onto a glass or fiberglas backplane. If you want to see some of what that might have been like, you can hop over to Usagi Electric. He uses CAD to mill boards, rather than the photochemical process described by Tektronix, but it's pretty much the same idea. He does a lot of it in pursuit of his mad obsession with building a vacuum tube computer here. (If you're curious, his logo says うさぎ電気, "Usagi Denki". "Usagi" is Japanese for rabbit or bunny -- there is one who appears at the end of some videos -- and the spelling of "denki" here specifically means electrics, as opposed to 電機, which is usually rendered electronics. It still pops up in the names of some engineering or technology firms, but generally only the really old ones.)

The wiggly nature of early boards is neatly explained by watching the drafting process, starting about three minutes into the video. It was originally done by hand. The rest of the half-hour video goes through the whole multi-stage process, but the gist is that when you lay out the board, you draw dark lines where you want the conductive traces to be on the final product. To get a consistent size, tape is used for "holes" and tape lines are uses for the traces. If you've ever used stripe tape in nail art, it was apparently something like that -- vinyl tape with a bit of stretch, so you could curve it around. It was a methodical sort of art form. Ever solved one of those "connect the same-color dots without crossing lines" puzzles? It's basically that. If you can't find a topologically-appropriate solution on a single plane, you can produce boards with traces on both the front and the back, as Tektronix does here, and these days you can actually bury traces in internal layers as well. It's just a pain and makes the cost go up exponentially. 

The mention of "holes" is interesting. Early circuit boards were nothing but holes. Everything had legs and was soldered on from the underside. Today these are known as "through-hole mounted" components; the alternatives are "surface-mount" components, which are generally smaller and fiddlier to solder on by hand, but considerably easier to lay down and solder in place by machine. Surface-mount technology has been around since before this Tektronix piece, but remained NASA-grade esoterica until the automated assembly process became cost-effective in the 1990s. Today the conductive holes are referred to as "vias" and the little medal dots surface-mount things are soldered to are "pads".

I'll also note that they show the automatic soldering process for these boards late in the video. It involves skimming the boards across the surface of a pool of molten solder. Solder in the 1960s contained a lot of lead. I would not personally like to be in that room. Today a machine places little surface-mount doojiggers in place along with solder beads, and then melts it all very gently in a very hot oven until it all melds together, not unlike a pan of slightly too-runny cookies. If you do it right, the surface tension of the solder keeps it on the pads and out of the traces. This is particularly useful for placing CPUs, whose myriad tiny pins in a tight grid would be far too difficult to solder by hand, and the origin of "reflow" repairs for electronics that are exhibiting symptoms of flaky solder joints.

The "silkscreening" process here does not use silk, but originally it did -- it was invented in Asia, logically enough. The gist of it is that you take a piece of finely woven mesh, traditionally light silk but in modern times also metal or synthetic fiber, and you plug up all of the little holes in it in the areas where you don't want ink to get through it, usually with some sort of water-repellent substance. In the days of yore, you painted on some kind of sap or wax, but nowadays it's usually a light-sensitive plastic that's scraped across the whole mesh, topped with a stencil that is opaque where you want ink to flow, and exposed to UV light that sets the substance. The unset areas that were in shadow are rinsed clean, leaving the mesh permeable in those places. The ink emulsion is then applied to the printing surface beneath in the reverse process: Ink is spread across the mesh, then squeegeed through with enough force to push it through the holes in the weave and onto the surface beneath. The dots of ink bleed just enough to flow into one another, producing a solid area of pigment. The circuit board designs were originally drafted in black on a white background, then photographed and reduced to 1/4 their original size, and the film used as the stencil for the silkscreen.

Holes are drilled mostly by hand(!) in this clip, which is an error-prone process, as you can see from the Usagi Electrics guy. The worker uses what's called a pantograph drill. A pantograph is a device that translates motion from one place to another, often with a change in scale. Typically pantographs are mechanical in nature, based on the complimentary motion of opposite corners of a parallelogram, but you could make a pretty good argument that modern systems that accept movement inputs from a user and translate them elsewhere by computer are also members of the class. Robot-assisted surgery comes to mind. If you cared to have an even longer argument, you could also consider systems that scan items with laser photons in order to reproduce them on a lathe or CNC machine pantographs in spirit, if not in fact. 

A visual or optical comparator is just a device that projects a magnified view of something up on a screen, along with a point, grid, or profile it needs to match, not unlike a microfiche viewer with a targeting reticule. They're still used in some areas, although software image processing is steadily gaining ground. 

You'd be amazed at how many things still need a look-over by a human with a brain. The lack of human brains is how we got the sharply-angled board traces we have today, in fact. Computer-aided drafting was developed to a usable level in the 1980s, and predictably the people using it were mostly engineers. The kind of route-finding you do in those connect-the-dots puzzles, and that the electronics engineers did when drafting the boards, is one of those very slippery human things. You want to find the shortest path, to save on the precious metals you use as conductors, but the absolute shortest path (with reasonable tolerances) is often a very snaky curve that would require a large number of points to define. It's much simpler to work on a grid, hence the 45° and 90° angles -- this ensures that all trace paths can be defined exclusively by where their corners lie on a square coordinate system, and is much less calculation-intensive. This was a lot of what early graphics tablets (or digitizers) were used for, and some light pen systems. 

Having watched my father do a lot of this as a kid, I gather that at least in modern CAD software, you can just pick things up and put them wherever you want, but that the autopathing gets very confused if you do it too much -- mostly it's better to let the computer figure out where the traces go and tell you if you want something impossible in 3D space. And if you screw up anyway, there's always blue wire.

Circuit boards don't have to be the ubiquitous green, either. That's just the color of the solder mask, a lacquer painted all over the parts of the board you don't want solder to stick to. It's mostly tradition at this point, but you can get boards in pretty much any color you like -- the second most common I've see is a dark navy blue, probably because copper traces and white silkscreening stand out best on those two colors. You're welcome to get neon purple, if you can find anyone offering it.

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[broomballkraken]

Title: C'est la vie Chapter 1: Come What May

Fandom: Octopath Traveler 2

Pairing: Papp/Roque

Word count: 1308

Warnings: None

Fic Summary: C'est la vie is not only used as a descriptor for a pessimistic situation, but it can also be used to express something vital, essential, beautiful. Thus, it makes for a perfect descriptor for the tumultuous relationship between Papp Yellowil and Roque Brilliante.

Chapter Summary: Papp is devastated by the sudden passing of his wife, but he bottles up his feelings in order to be strong for Partitio. As the pain starts to become too much to handle, Papp luckily finds out that he has someone to be strong for him as well.

Even though he made sure to shut it as quietly as possible, the sound of Partitio’s door closing seemed deafening to Papp. It was well-past midnight, and after a long night of crying for his mom, Partitio had finally exhausted himself enough to fall asleep. Letting out a deep, weary sigh, Papp pressed his back against the door and slid down it slightly, cradling his head in his hands.

He was still trying to process that she was gone. His Maria, his starling, his beloved wife … It had all happened so fast. Only a week had passed between her collapsing out of nowhere due to an unknown illness that quickly rendered her bedridden, and using her last breath to tell Papp that she loved him and to take good care of their little chickadee. He didn’t understand why this had happened.

Papp felt tears start to prick at the corners of his eyes, but he clenched his jaw so hard that it popped and managed to blink them away. No, he couldn’t show how much he was hurting; he needed to be strong for Partitio. That was easier said than done, because every breath that he took was like razor sharp glass in his lungs, his heart hurt so much that he thought it might burst, and the perpetual nausea that festered in his gut had prevented him from having a proper meal in days.

“Papp.”

Jerking his head up, he swallowed thickly when he saw Roque standing before him. He had been a godsend during this horrific time, having taken over Papp’s share of their work to keep their business running, as well as bringing over hot meals for him and Partitio, and helping to keep the house clean. He truly could not have asked for a better business partner and friend.

“R-Roque…It’s late…” Papp said, trying and failing to keep his voice from cracking. Roque averted his gaze and worried his bottom lip between his teeth.

“I am aware, but…I’m worried about you, Papp.” Roque stepped closer to him and examined his face. “You look…pale. Have you been eating? Sleeping?”

“I-It doesn’t matter, I need to be strong for Partitio, above all else-” Papp was cut off when Roque took both of his hands and held them between his own. A lump had formed in Papp’s throat and he averted his gaze as his composure started to waver, causing him to tremble with the effort of keeping himself from breaking down.

“Papp, listen to me. Look at me.” Roque paused until Papp slowly lifted his head and their eyes locked. “You must be strong for Partitio, yes…but please, let me be strong for you .”

Papp felt his composure crumble even more, and his eyes welled up with tears when Roque gave his hands a gentle squeeze. “If you keep those feelings bottled up, they will eat you away from the inside out.”

“I lost a good friend in Maria, but Partitio lost a mother, and you lost the love of your life.” Roque lifted a hand to cup Papp’s face as the tears he tried so hard to hold back finally broke free. “I cannot fathom the pain that you are feeling right now, but even so, I want to help you in any way that I can. So let me do so, please . I…don’t want to lose you too.”

Something seemed to snap deep within Papp, and his legs gave out under him as he let out an anguished cry. Roque caught him by the arms before he could fall, and he slowly lowered them both to the floor as Papp clung to him and sobbed against his chest. He cried and cried and cried, and continued to cry, even when Roque helped him to his feet and led him safely downstairs.

Papp felt numb to his surroundings, and he barely noticed when Roque sat him down on the couch and draped a blanket over his shoulders. He cried into his hands as a few minutes ticked by, until he felt Roque’s arms wrap around him again, and Papp was pulled back into his comforting embrace. He didn’t know how long they sat there like that, but by the time Papp had stopped crying, his throat was raw and a dull pain had settled behind his eyes.

Taking in a deep breath, Papp let it out slowly, before rubbing at his red, swollen eyes. The smell of tea had filled his nose, and he looked at Roque, who was holding a steaming mug towards him.

“Here, drink it. I also have some stew heating up for you,” Roque said, and Papp gave him a slight nod in response as he took the mug from him. However, he couldn’t stop trembling, and Papp was grateful when Roque’s hands covered his and helped him to take a drink without spilling the hot liquid all over himself.

“...T-Thank you, Roque…” Papp managed to finally speak, and he winced at how hoarse his voice sounded. Roque nodded in response and helped Papp drink the rest of his tea. Taking the empty cup, he moved it to the end table and placed his hand on Papp’s back, rubbing it in a gentle, circular motion.

“...Better?” he asked, and Papp sighed and leaned over to lay his head against Roque’s shoulder.

“Eh…”

“Right, a foolish question on my part.” Roque hummed as he rest his head against Papp’s, and they sat in a comfortable silence for a while.

“I should never have let it get this bad,” Papp finally said, and Roque shook his head.

“Grief manifests itself differently for everyone, and it is hard to keep going as if your whole world wasn’t cruelly taken from you.”

Papp’s chest tightened painfully, and he bit his lip hard. “You’ve got that right…I miss her so much , Roque.”

“She was an incredible woman.” Roque turned to Papp and offered him a small, sad smile. “And I know that she loved you and Partitio more than anything.”

“Partitio…” Papp sighed and rubbed at his temples. “My poor chickadee’s cried himself to sleep every night since the funeral. Wish I could take his pain away…”

“You will help him get through this. The bond that you have is stronger than steel.” Roque’s smile grew as he placed a hand on Papp’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “And I will also be here, whenever and wherever you need me, come what may.”

A ghost of a smile crossed Papp’s lips, and he pulled Roque into a tight hug. “Thank you, Roque, for everything. I was a fool to keep my pain all bottled up like that. I couldn’t ask for a better friend.”

“Likewise, Papp. I will always be here for you both.”

“I’ll hold you to that, partner.”

Roque let out a chuckle and stood up, holding a hand out to Papp. “Come, the stew should be hot by now, and I don’t want you withering away to nothing on me. That’s bad for business.”

Papp finally managed to smile, and he placed his hand in Roque’s and let himself be pulled to his feet. “Hells, I doubt that would be enough to put a damper on your mercantile prowess, Mr. Rainbow Tongue.”

“Hmm, perhaps, but then who will do all of that pesky paperwork that I hate so much?”

“You ass.”

Papp delivered a playful swat to Roque’s chest as they made for the kitchen, hand-in-hand, to get a much needed meal in him. Papp knew that there were more downs than ups waiting for him as he navigated his own grief, and Partitio’s on top of that. With Roque by his side, however, Papp didn’t have to worry about stumbling, because he knew that he had someone to pick him up again should he fall.