#very not fun when a post breaches containment lmao

[something-about-sunflowers]

I got a few posts that have broken 10k too lmao so I can commiserate but unlike you, a reasonable person, I have not deleted or turned off replies to any of them. My notifs will never recover. I made a david tennant shitpost and it took months before it stopped blowing up. I still get the occasional like/rb on it. The most recent monster post is a bunch of memes about the car-centric built environment and it has over 50k notes and it's still exploding. I made that thing like 2 years ago and it is showing no signs of calming down. The trick is to not read or respond to any of the reblogs or replies because anything you have to add will eventually be said by someone else anyways. Very "don't read the comments" energy. Also turn off anons and non-mutual DMs whenever you have a post blowing up because I have gotten a few wackos in my inbox over the years

Oh rip, yeah this was. Not fun. My biggest post before this one was only like 4k. :')c

I haven't actually deleted any replies, though I've blocked one or two people (and a handful of people reblogging, just the people with the worst takes though). I'm probably going to turn reblogs and replies back on in a few days to be honest? I don't really mind all the notes it's just, all at once like that was. Anxiety inducing. Lol.

Personally, I'm a fan of reading the comments strictly for the sake of bitching privately like a decent human being blocking people who have opinions/attitudes that I don't like. Very nice to make sure I never have to cross paths with them! Preemptively!

I do appreciate the advice though, if I start getting any crazy asks or dm's I'll more than likely be taking it! (Along with reporting the crazier ones, and, what a wonder! That'll actually have a chance at doing something now!) o7

[ms--lobotomy]

Good addition :D

Repeat after me.

If you don't have anything nice to say about a fanfic, don't say anything at all. Read something else.

Thank you.

[midknitefox]

I keep seeing pressure oc posts so here's mine

it's kinda mid but . Meet Nova Bamon.

redesigning her very quickly lmao.

Things that will change: Posture, skin tone, expression, tail appearance

"Why don't you try... that door? that might end well... heheheh..."

-Nova, instructing an expendable to go the wrong way.

anyways I have a vision for something for her gimme like a week and I'll draw it maybe JSJSKSBDSKSN

info on her under the cut

Nova Bamon is a woman in her 20s. Her father was a scientist in the facility who conducted secret experiments on her in his free time, wanting to figure out gills before the company could. Ultimately he couldn't figure it out, but left his daughter a mess, which he quickly discarded. being kept in a large tank in a corner of the facility, locked by Dr Bamon, she was isolated for a long time before being discovered by staff shortly before the containment breach. She was very thin- underfed- and without being properly raised, and mutated with DNA of a mako shark, she was highly aggressive when first coming into contact with humans. as the breach happened, she escaped from her tank, watching from the shadows, and searching for a particular scientist... one she never found. She's 7 feet tall, and surprisingly fast despite her size, especially under water, able to propel herself with her webbed hands and feet easily through the water.

Now, she prefers staying in her tank, although it's a little small for her, as due to being in it for so long she's become accustomed to breathing underwater, and gets itchy and agitated while outside of it for too long.

She enjoys teasing any Expendables she may come across, and avoids killing them unless they say something that may trigger her. she's not picky, and will eat anything she comes across, including humans if they're dead, and is usually very thin.

She's very good at mimicry, and likes using it to mess with people.

Though generally harmless, if someone pisses her off (shes emotionally sensitive to insults or comments about her features/height) she's known to attack them, using sharp teeth to tear anyone to shreds. the best way to tell if a dead body had been attacked by her is to check what type of wounds they have, and if there's any shark teeth dislodged in them, as her teeth come out fairly easily.

She has a couple small fish tanks scattered around that she might be found sitting in. while they're not ideal for breathing in, she still enjoys the feeling of water over her gills even if she can't breathe it.

Shell be found giving tips or hints to people that pass her, helping them in a way, though shes known to also give false information. It's typically easy to figure out what's true or false, as she has trouble disguising her amusement up on lying.

She has a tendency to instruct people to flash Sebastian with a flash beacon. just for fun. She can be a bit snarky, and doesn't know how to regulate emotions, nor does she understand what is/isn't an appropriate reaction.

She often assumes people know when she points them the wrong way, and if they listen to her lying, she mocks / laughs at them.

sorry this is a bit of a mess this is me throwing my ideas up (I haven't written anything down it's all been stored in my brain)

[raitrolling]

some thoughts on pedestal arc (contains spoilers for The Art Of Believing, so read that first)

this was my first solo plot (well, 95% solo), and i am not a Plot Writer as it is probably obvious. but, for what it’s worth, i feel like i achieved exactly what i wanted to do: create a scenario for velour that has decent stakes for him, without being too melodramatic or spiralling too far out of my control that i couldn’t write my way out of it. maybe it’s not the most exciting thing someone has ever written and in the hands of a more capable writer this could have been something bigger, but i like what i’ve done and will probably go back and re-read some things like i do with my other favourite drabbles

i say 95% solo because cloud and I did have some rps going on discord that related to velour’s whole predicament. i didn’t post them like i did with Ripple Effect because the moments were much smaller than what happened in the previous plot, but you can see small nods towards them throughout. velour mentions a discussion that he had with jamie and jikiro in Some People Have Got Their Theories, and the hack/security breach that’s mentioned in both veruco’s callout post and The Art Of Believing was done by jamie. unfortunately for him, his grand plan to distract her did not work and instead made her angrier, because she was not the scheming mastermind he had expected. whoops!

i feel like a did a decent job writing veruco as an antagonist, as difficult as it was to do so. i knew i wanted to go with the ‘obsessive fan’ route as an obstacle for velour, but i always have a problem where a lot of the times ive seen this done have been very... mean-spirited? like, there’s some authors out there who write these sorts of characters and it’s very clear that they hate their own audience and are using this character to make fun of them. i have my opinions on fan culture, sure, but i didn’t want veruco to feel like a mouthpiece for some sort of Statement On People I Hate. what she did to velour was wrong, and her ways of getting revenge were equally as wrong, but i didn’t want her to be wholly unsympathetic. she was just a lonely girl who fell in love with a celebrity and felt scorned when he didn’t love her back, then resorted to uh. sending him and his other streamer friend envelopes full of razor blades as a warning, then used social media to publicly expose him for his misdeeds. so, probably not overly sympathetic in the end, but i don’t feel like she’s just a One-Note Evil Bitch Fan

i chose to make a tumblr blog for veruco because i thought that would be a fun way to reveal information, but also to humanise (trollianise?) her a bit more. yes, she was an entitled fan and a bit of a spoiled brat, but she was also a girl who loved lolita fashion and aesthetic pictures of tea and editing deviantart bases of her getting hugged by her favourite youtuber. there was originally a lot more posts in her queue (i’d queued up about 60 and was going back onto the blog every couple of hours to change how frequently it was posting), but then i ended up culling a lot when the art easter eggs were starting to get buried. i also didnt curate the queue as well as i could have, ideally i would have established what the red and blue heart tags meant and then have the combined tags start to post to make it obvious she was reblogging couple/relationship posts and imagining them to be her and velour. but i knew i was putting way too much effort into something that would only be relevant for about a week and only a handful of people would look at, and i’d already spent like an hour looking for a custom theme before i gave up and just used one of the default ones lmao

also, i had an idea to continue the sort-of-mixed-media approach i was taking with this plot by making velour’s apology written as a transcript, but i ended up writing it normally because i wanted to contrast his bold statements with his anxious inner thoughts. he’s very good at playing up the confidence on camera, but in this case he’s stumbling more than usual and very much aware of it

i purposely avoided reading any callout posts or watching any apology videos because i didn’t want to make any references to real-world events, intentional or otherwise. i didnt want people to think that i was making a commentary on a specific matter because i wasn’t, this format and arc happened to work well with velour being a content creator and having an extreme fear of his reputation being ruined. so i dont actually know if velour’s apology is a ‘good’ youtuber apology, i was writing what i thought he would say that also sounded pretty decent to me. he’s still carefully avoiding discussing certain things (mainly how heavily he was motivated by financial gain), and was also downplaying her behaviour a lot more than i personally think he should have, so it’s definitely not perfect

there were a couple things i had rewritten that i think ultimately worked out better in the end. originally veruco was going to lie more in her callout post to try and make velour look even worse (claiming that he got angry and acted violently so she could make it seem like his entire personality was a fabrication and this was his ‘true’ self), but i felt like that would have immediately ruined any of her credibility. viltau’s advice in Some People Have Got Their Theories was also going to be more along the lines of him telling velour no matter how far he fell he could always climb back up, but i got stuck trying to figure out how to end that drabble with that advice in mind. the concept of accepting inevitabilities to stop fearing failure felt like a more concrete tenet that velour could take with him as he continues to grow, and also it allowed him to think back to his feelings on viltau and jikiro’s actions in Ripple Effect which has been something that he has (rightfully) struggled with accepting. also, when aiolos messaged the callout post to velour he first said ‘what the actual hell is this’ but i changed it to ‘fuck’ because that was definitely more of a What The Actual Fuck moment

as for the ending, having veruco mysteriously die was one of the first things i wanted to do as a final twist, since i really did not want to go with the route that velour apologising magically fixes everything and as you’ve seen from me in the past i do not leave my npc antagonists alive. maybe it leans a bit too far into shock value and maybe it does feel a little unfair to velour, but eh. i left everything about her end to be up to interpretation so you can decide just how much he could be culpable for her death. was it murder, or was it something else? i think i left enough context clues for three different possibilities, but ‘viltau did it’ is a very obvious red herring LMAO

finally, this is just a little fun fact, but while i did listen to the song the arc name came from + each individual title was a lyric from (Pedestal by Charlie Lim) a couple times, i was mostly listening to Yellow Magic Orchestra, GHOST/Ghostandpals, and the new Fall Out Boy song while writing. i have literally no clue why those three bands in particular, i don’t choose the writing music it chooses me. through sheer force of will and cherrypicking lyrics like nobody’s business, Uncanny is a velour song now