#what the hell is happening with my html

[iressails]

I rarely have this giant structure for story, well never actually. It's four interconnected ones, some more there than others. Crime (light) storyline in the background that runs through all of them, but it's romance.

I don't think the four are full length novels unless I put it all my current disconnected scenes together and it's bare bones and adding scenery and inner thoughts might ratchet it up. All of them same place so it's easy to draw it out over the four stories, might cut it down.

(I haven't written anything more than 30k before so... yikes. But I rarely have more than a sex scene or two held together bit a spit of a plot. This is weird af for me.)

It's smut stuck together with story, and a bonkers bit of the environment (research black hole there). The sex is absolute fire (so I say and it is for me lol) but it's not erotica. My usual style, I guess.

No.1 is m/m, scenes scattered, but characters fixed and romance sort of fixed

no 2 is f/f, whole deal dot pointed from beginning to end, including how they change over time, what the impediments are, the sex scenes plotted but nothing written. Harder to flog from the mm. (Age gap, diverse)

no.3 m/m/f here is hazy but it's more the crime thing. Characters mostly there, the start (second chance romance, you left us! or then we were 2), the plot is there. the crime progresses, led by what the characters are doing. investigator/undercover and potential criminal (mafia type), plus clueless idiot drugs and law enforcement plot that's familiar (diverse)

no.4 m/nb I've got to solve the crime. I know it's solved roughly but who is going to solve it? One character on the crime and also in the setting, one works in admin overseeing that environment (we've one of them in the first story), romance light, characters light. I'm hoping with a bit more progress on the previous three it sort of falls into place .

There's sort of a historical element that's super light, maybe family members, needs a fair bit of work but easy to ditch. low reward.

ANYWAY! Job and fatigue and health stuff and family stuff is in the way and I get the space to write maybe 5k a week (garbage, scattered scenes I'm inspired by that day) not when my usual approach is to get everything down fast before I lost motivation 10k a day. 10k a day.

The medical professionals were "hmm have you learnt nothing about pacing during this intensive program where it's about pacing? 4k a week is good, sustainable."

NOOOOO I am 0 or 100 I know this. I am afraid it'll go before I get it down and it will nag at me forever more like my homicide happy end amongst others.

[xivu-arath]

god of clocks is still an experience (ambiguous and feeling as if I have run a marathon in strange territory) but deepgate really does feel like... you have been changed and it is horrible and irrevocable and you cannot ever go back. but there are ways to move forward despite this

[thatswhatsushesaid]

Honestly the empathy sequence makes NMJ kinda strike me as an entitled/abusive parental figure. Maybe I'm just drawing paralels that aren't there, but:

Feeling entitled to JGY's time and attention? He interrupts his conversations with LXC (twice, I think), one of said times because he was eavesdropping on them AND got angry about JGY expressing fear to LXC IN PRIVATE

Not letting JGY explain himself/ not listening when he tries. At the point of the staircase scene NMJ has been poisoned to hell and back by baxia, but I do believe it's not just that. He sees his moral code as absolute certainty and his inflexible nature makes it that he doesn't take well to deviance from that. Aka has to get his way or gets Angry

I think NMJ was an absolute idiot to let JGY ppay clarity for hin after the staircase thing! That draws more into the paralel because abusive people often hurt others and then act like nothing happened, as if their target doesn't have the right to be upset (see again: qi deviating over JGY expressing fear to LXC). NMJ does this to a degree that paints him as almost oblivious imo

I actually do quite like NMJ but he's. So many shades of fucked up, Christ alive

i am going to proceed cautiously here for several reasons, but primarily because:

i have been drawn into the "is nmj an evil abuser" discourse once before on discord (in defence of da-ge, believe it or not) and i Did Not Enjoy It At All, Actually, and

while i think the behaviour described above absolutely qualifies as abusive, nmj's intentions also matter, and i don't think what nmj is trying to do can be boiled down to simply exerting coercive control over jgy. initially on the hejian front when he eavesdrops on meng yao and lan xichen, he wants to help him; the second time he eavesdrops, it's because he straight up views jgy as a threat, and decides to kill him because of it.

imo their dynamic is dysfunctional and toxic and is a powder keg set to explode essentially from the moment nmj sees meng yao killing the jin commander on the langya front, but i think calling it abusive is an over-simplification of what is going on between them.

that said, i do think there is a character in the novel canon who nmj repeatedly tries to exert coercive control over, who is fully and unquestionably under his authority and influence, and who he treats with wildly vacillating levels of either patience or explosive anger depending on the canon point, and that character is nie huaisang.

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this post has been added to my dreamwidth meta archive here: https://thatswhatsushewrote.dreamwidth.org/7080.html

[m0r1bund]

"Lore, where have you been?"

In hell, probably. I remade M0R1BUND.com.

“For the love of god, why?”

Short answer: to save time and money.

Long answer: Sharing art was getting burdensome. Neocities hosts static websites built with html, css, and javascript—which is awesome for its mission, to encourage people to create future-proof websites. But this also means that every page is created and maintained by hand. I handle every little link and file and bit of code, and if I want to do site-wide changes, I have to push those by hand, too. This takes time, and so does writing image descriptions and cross-posting art to other websites. It became normal for sharing art to eat up an entire day.

I later created Basedt.net in WordPress, so that I didn’t have to worry about managing link hierarchies, which was a big timewaster on my old webcomic. I liked working in WordPress well enough, and I knew I would benefit from being able to use PHP to manage the sheer amount of stuff that’s on M0R1BUND.com. I was also paying double for webhosting through two different services, when I really didn’t need to…. So… I knew it was inevitable that I would consolidate the two at some point. It was time.

I do really love Neocities and I’m sorry to let it go. I encourage anyone who wants to learn web design and create their own website to start there.

Anyway, that’s how I ended up in hell for 6 months.

“What’s changed?”

Most things. I’m most excited about the quality-of-life stuff, like being able to sort art by character/location/world, or being able to move between individual pieces instead of having to return to the gallery landing page. There are lots of things I want to add, but my soft deadline for this was the new year, so I focused on recreating M0R1BUND.com as it existed before… well… this.

I’ve also edited most of my writing. This site is old, and the art is even older, it felt good to give it some TLC.

There are still a few things missing from the new site:

The Woods and RANSOM. They aren’t really representative of Basedt or Mercasor anymore, and I was not a competent writer in 2018. If I re-share them, it will be in the distant future.  

Some of my Those Who Went Missing stuff. I haven’t been playing TWWM publicly, so this is lower priority right now. It will happen when it happens.  

Some twines. They haven’t adjusted to the new filepath format yet. Killswitch is here, though :)

If you need them urgently for some reason, I can share them with you? but that seems doubtful haha.

Links to pages on the old M0R1BUND.com are broken and will remain broken until I set up redirections to the new M0R1BUND.com. I have no idea how long that will take! … Hopefully not long, given the new semester is here.

And of course... If you see anything weird, tell me! I test as much as I can, but I only have access to so many devices. Break this website within an inch of its miserable life so that I can fix it.

“How’s Basedt going?”

It’s going. Recreating my website took precedence for the above reasons, but I’ve been working concurrently on it in my spare time. We move like a glacier into the new year. ETA: ???

[habeascorpseus]

when i was in 7th grade, i had my first boyfriend. corny shit, i know. in many cases i dont think middle school relationships are enough to be classified as dating- but to this day, i do firmly believe our clumsy attempts at recreating the behavior of couples barely older than us did count. there was an emotional connection there. we had met in 6th grade and bonded over fnaf and minecraft 3 animations and all those other things that people still found found entertaining in 2014.

another notable thing in 7th grade that happened was that i had discovered i was transgender. well, i say "discovered", but it was honestly a long time coming. between my obsession with being seen as a "tomboy," my favorite song on the Kidz Bop 16 CD being Beyonce's "If I Were A Boy" (but sung in a way to make it so much less about cheating that it really became more of a call to action to imagine life as a man) to the point where i manually would loop it on my cd player for hours, and my growing love for mlm shipping— i had been a certified egg since i was in 4th grade. but despite being raised around and parented with about a dozen lesbian and gay couples since birth, i didnt know whether or not my parents were transphobic or not. so, after looking through a list of trans identities, i decided to just come out as genderfluid to my parents as sort of a compromise to the intimidating rigidity of being a trans boy. and even though it wasn't entirely fitting to what i'd ultimately figure out about myself, i grew pretty attached to it.

back to the middle school boyfriend.

at the end of 7th grade— like, a week before summer vacation— i publically came out as genderfluid. while my ex, who i will from now on refer to as Lou, had initially taken it well, albeit with some confusion, over the summer, a much different series of feelings began unfolding. unfortunately, as middle school boys are wont to do whenever one of them begins to act even slightly against the norm, his friends began asking him if he was gay. "if michael¹ is a boy sometimes, does that make you straight, or bisexual?" are some of the things i later heard them ask. and since i, phoneless till the age of 16, was unable to talk to him throughout this relentless picking apart of his own identity, by the time we got back to school, things were... different.

¹ Michael is the name i went by irl for 3 years from 7th-9th grade.

for one, there were the jokes. he was a big leafy fan (and i really did try even back then to steer him away from that but its hard when youre a cringe nerd middle schooler) and back then "attack helicopter" jokes were kind of all the rage, so he began jokingly identifying as a toaster. then he made a toaster mask out of a cardboard box, spray paint, and duct tape that he brought to school and began putting on whenever i walked by him in the hallway. and then, and possibly worst of all- a simple html website shared between his friends called "what gender is Michael today?" which lead to a random generator of options like, "boy", "girl", "toaster", and "attack helicopter." all of which is kind of a lot to deal with when youre a middle schooler with a pretty rough time of it already, and suddenly your main bully is the guy youve effectively been in a relationship with for 6 months.

and now you may be asking: hey habeas, why this sudden autobiographical deep dive into the most traumatic period of your life? what spawned this? how is this story relevant to literally anything going on? well, that's where the next part of the story comes in.

that year, our sex ed teacher was a 5ft transgender man named Mudd. Mudd had a buzzcut, and a higher pitched voice, and small hands, but beyond all of that, there was nothing visibly different about him than any other boy or man in the school. in fact, the boys thought he was cool as hell. they were fascinated by the idea of transformation of the self into an unrecognizable body. they never misgendered him, even after learning his status as a trans man. in fact, they were comfortable enough around him to be transphobic towards me. and Mudd, like a good trans mentor, told them to cut that shit out, and told me that regardless of how complicated and occasionally contradictory my identity was, it was still me, and i needed to stand up for who i was as a person.

a week later, Lou called me a tranny, and in response, i punched him in the nose and promptly stopped talking to him.

so again, why is this relevant? well, I'm not sure how terminally online (or specifically, on twitter) some of you are, but recently there's been a bit of a tiff in a certain fandom about bi lesbianism. specifically, how it, as an identity, is harmful to both the bisexual and lesbian communities. which, one: nooooo....??? bisexuality and lesbianism arent separate so much fraternal twins, and I've already talked too much to include further definitions to prove it. but my argument is really less about its validity as an identity and more about the principle of there being limits to acceptance, even within our community.

like with my experience, people were fine when they were faced with binary identities. a trans man like mudd is cool, or a trans girl like Jazz Jennings (we watched a lot of I Am Jazz in homeroom) could be seen as normal, and more so, inspiring. but when i came in with an identity people found to be contradictory or "too confusing," it resulted in backlash. the entire definition of being "queer" is to be abnormal to what general society finds acceptable, and even then, some things are "too weird" to be tolerated. even amongst "weird" people. which i find to be a pretty troubling trend amongst queer leftist young people who's only real experience with an "lgbt community" has been online. here, we prioritize and find catharsis in labels and categories to the point where the "queer community" has become instead split between identities- the gays, the lesbians, the bis, the transes, the aros and aces and the whatnot. in the real world, it doesnt matter what flavor of queer you are, nobody's going to stop and ask before they call you a groomer and then legislate your freedom away. which is why we, as an online queer community, have to get rid of the notion that some identities are "too contradictory" or "dont exist" enough to be worth giving support and love.

im saying all this here... because, well, one: nobody wants to read a 40+ tweet thread about my personal brush with irl homophobia and how that radicalized me against community separation in general, and two: i am deeply afraid of 14 year olds on twitter with too much time on their hands. but also im saying this because it was infuriating yesterday to watch my entire twitter feed suddenly turn into a puritanical campaign against the very concept of someones identity and have the ability to say nothing. it disgusted me how quickly we turn against our own simply because the way they are is confusing to our tiny fucking peanut brains. and i know none of those people who went on that tirade will read this, but i felt like it needed to be said anyways.

don't let society's impulse to ostracize the confusing and strange win out over human decency. don't do conservatives' strategy to divide and conquer us for them. a person's identity not being comprehensible to you is not inherently an attack on who you, yourself, are. you are your identity and you should stand up for it, and you should stand up for others' identities too. punch your bullies in the nose.

long live the confusing, the contradictory, and most importantly, the queer.

[moose-mousse]

So I made an app for PROTO. Written in Kotlin and runs on Android.

Next, I want to upgrade it with a controller mode. It should work so so I simply plug a wired xbox controller into my phone with a USB OTG adaptor… and bam, the phone does all the complex wireless communication and is a battery. Meaning that besides the controller, you only need the app and… any phone. Which anyone is rather likely to have Done.

Now THAT is convenient!

( Warning, the rest of the post turned into... a few rants. ) Why Android? Well I dislike Android less than IOS

So it is it better to be crawling in front of the alter of "We are making the apocalypse happen" Google than "5 Chinese child workers died while you read this" Apple?

Not much…

I really should which over to a better open source Linux distribution… But I do not have the willpower to research which one... So on Android I stay.

Kotlin is meant to be "Java, but better/more modern/More functional programming style" (Everyone realized a few years back that the 100% Object oriented programming paradigme is stupid as hell. And we already knew that about the functional programming paradigme. The best is a mix of everything, each used when it is the best option.) And for the most part, it succeeds. Java/Kotlin compiles its code down to "bytecode", which is essentially assembler but for the Java virtual machine. The virtual machine then runs the program. Like how javascript have the browser run it instead of compiling it to the specific machine your want it to run on… It makes them easy to port…

Except in the case of Kotlin on Android... there is not a snowflakes chance in hell that you can take your entire codebase and just run it on another linux distribution, Windows or IOS…

So... you do it for the performance right? The upside of compiling directly to the machine is that it does not waste power on middle management layers… This is why C and C++ are so fast!

Except… Android is… Clunky… It relies on design ideas that require EVERY SINGLE PROGRAM AND APP ON YOUR PHONE to behave nicely (Lots of "This system only works if every single app uses it sparingly and do not screw each-other over" paradigms .). And many distributions from Motorola like mine for example comes with software YOUR ARE NOT ALLOWED TO UNINSTALL... meaning that software on your phone is ALWAYS behaving badly. Because not a single person actually owns an Android phone. You own a brick of electronics that is worthless without its OS, and google does not sell that to you or even gift it to you. You are renting it for free, forever. Same with Motorola which added a few extra modifications onto Googles Android and then gave it to me.

That way, google does not have to give any rights to its costumers. So I cannot completely control what my phone does. Because it is not my phone. It is Googles phone.

That I am allowed to use. By the good graces of our corporate god emperors

"Moose stares blankly into space trying to stop being permanently angry at hoe everyone is choosing to run the world"

… Ok that turned dark… Anywho. TLDR There is a better option for 95% of apps (Which is "A GUI that interfaces with a database") "Just write a single HTML document with internal CSS and Javascript" Usually simpler, MUCH easier and smaller… And now your app works on any computer with a browser. Meaning all of them…

I made a GUI for my parents recently that works exactly like that. Soo this post:

It was frankly a mistake of me to learn Kotlin… Even more so since It is a… awful language… Clearly good ideas then ruined by marketing department people yelling "SUPPORT EVERYTHING! AND USE ALL THE BUZZWORD TECHNOLOGY! Like… If your language FORCES you to use exceptions for normal runtime behavior "Stares at CancellationException"... dear god that is horrible...

Made EVEN WORSE by being a really complicated way to re-invent the GOTO expression… You know... The thing every programmer is taught will eat your feet if you ever think about using it because it is SO dangerous, and SO bad form to use it? Yeah. It is that, hidden is a COMPLEATLY WRONG WAY to use exceptions…

goodie… I swear to Christ, every page or two of my Kotlin notes have me ranting how I learned how something works, and that it is terrible... Blaaa. But anyway now that I know it, I try to keep it fresh in my mind and use it from time to time. Might as well. It IS possible to run certain things more effective than a web page, and you can work much more directly with the file system. It is... hard-ish to get a webpage to "load" a file automatically... But believe me, it is good that this is the case.

Anywho. How does the app work and what is the next version going to do?

PROTO is meant to be a platform I test OTHER systems on, so he is optimized for simplicity. So how you control him is sending a HTTP 1.1 message of type Text/Plain… (This is a VERY fancy sounding way of saying "A string" in network speak). The string is 6 comma separated numbers. Linear movement XYZ and angular movement XYZ.

The app is simply 5 buttons that each sends a HTTP PUT request with fixed values. Specifically 0.5/-0.5 meter/second linear (Drive back or forward) 0.2/-0.2 radians/second angular (Turn right or turn left) Or all 0 for stop

(Yes, I just formatted normal text as code to make it more readable... I think I might be more infected by programming so much than I thought...)

Aaaaaanywho. That must be enough ranting. Time to make the app

[mountmortar]

do you happen to know any site building tutorials to follow and learn from? been having a hard time finding a place to start with my own neocity but the free reign and customization of them interests me a lot :0c

ABSOLUTELY! I do want to stress one thing if HTML/CSS is something you're not familiar with: It's okay if your website doesn't look like the most creative, eye-popping thing in the world! I've seen sooooooo many people get so discouraged because their beginner websites don't look like the flashier websites you see on Neocities' front page (by people who've been coding for a Long Time, mind you!) and like!!! That's fine!!! The code of my own site was quite possibly the worst thing you've ever seen thrown together into one big CSS soup before I Literally Just Rewrote It Today, After A Year Of Having A Neocities. And so, with that being said:

As anyone on the internet might do, w3schools is the absolute first place I'd recommend to beginners! There are videos, it's mostly a text-based learning site with lots of exercises to test your knowledge. If you'd prefer videos:

My personal favorite guy on Youtube to learn coding things from is Giraffe Academy: Here's his full course on HTML! The video itself is about two hours—I skimmed through it and everything seems to be perfectly oriented towards beginners (I haven't watched it in its entirety, but I have seen his videos on C# and Python [programming languages, don't worry about it] and they did a lot to help explain certain things to me that I didn't know previously!).

BroCode's HTML in 1 hour and CSS in 1 hour are pretty good! His videos do include a little bit on how to implement some JavaScript here and there, but nothing major or terrifying.

Here's a playlist of HTML/CSS tutorials in bite-sized videos, too! Think about 10-25 minutes per video.

I will say that searching for YouTube videos on HTML/CSS will always sort of gear more towards what people in the professional sphere are looking for rather than what you'd see on Neocities.

As for Neocities-specific things (which may be the actual point of your ask! Might've misinterpreted the hell out of it oops):

sadgrl.online is perhaps the most known website on Neocities, largely because the website itself not only has a layout maker you're free to use if you want to make a website now but the thought of writing HTML/CSS from scratch terrifies you, but also HTML/CSS guides themselves! There's also a bunch of links you can use to help fluff up your site a bit, generate HTML code for you, or just fluff up your site in general.

The Melonland Project is also dedicated to providing website development tools and tutorials for beginners: here is its guide to making a website on Neocities! It also provides a link to learnlayout.com, which I'll link here as well���a website for helping you learn CSS layouts!

And, once you've got the hang of how CSS works but are still feeling unable to code it yourself (no ideas? just not feeling up to it? FUCK MAN DO I UNDERSTAND THAT) Eggramen has free CSS pages you can use, and all you have to do is write the HTML for it!

But I would always focus more on learning HTML first before any CSS—and then learning how to integrate CSS into HTML via inline styling (which those video tutorials do!) before worrying about any external stylesheets or whatever. HTML is the actual building block—CSS just makes it look pretty.

[garyfischy]

I Log Off Of Neocities for a Couple Months And Shit Goes Down

what is going on in neocities. first yesterlinks goes down, then districts gets shut down (WHY?????? IS THERE MORE DRAMA SOMEHOW AROUND A FUCKING SITE DIRECTORY????) then dokodemo starts ranting abt how people stealing his code is bad (COMPLETELY REASONABLE) then goes on some rant about how Twitter Beef and #webcore users are ruining this site.

By God for a site that's been championed as the Era Of The New Old Web you guys sure love acting like little fucking babies over some kids making sites. If you really feel like the new generation of website makers are computer illiterate morons, that only care about style over substance, shouldn't you be trying to get them to understand/care instead of telling them they're too dumb to make sites? I started out like that! Now I code html/javascript for fun, and i took some classes at my local community center!

^i understand the OP's sentiment, but the internet just isn't like that anymore. You can't control others, sadly. if you really want a curated collection of hobbyist websites (i understand!) just use a webring. christ.

all the sites i joined for are just fucking gone because of some infighting that happened on some discord server somewhere or unrelated beef. what a wonderful platform. you guys SURE love acting like the social media users you love to talk shit about and denigrate

You just can't rewind the clock to a time before carrds and strawpages and the 'modern web'. the best you can do is curate your experience and try to coexist, instead of lashing out at newer users that didn't grow up in the same timeframe as you and have no idea what you're talking about. be glad they're even trying to make websites! they're trying to understand

idk man. im just confused about what the hell happened to the culture of this website. all my fav sites are gone and there's so much meaningless drama X_X

it just all feels so condescending

[hpdfag]

I didn’t get to see the pink theme sadly but this deeper red one is so cool?? It probably looks much better in dark mode but I have too many eye problems too use it all the time ngl…I’ll check it out later!

How have you been doing? I recently got a bit too BPD and now I’m in this little stage where I really wanna improve as a person, getting into self care and all that shit. It’s a bit silly, and I’m sure it’s something akin to mania, but I think it’s good for me to feel so stimulated to take care of myself! For me, it’ll get me a compliment or two from my FP and overall I’ll feel better for them. And I end up feeling good for myself so…happiness for the whole family!

Tell me a bit about how you’ve been doing and all, stuff that happened (if anything!) or anything on your mind. We’re always open-eared around you :}

- 🧶

THANK U THANK U !!!!!! ive been on an editing kick again so ive been messing w/ the themes on basically all of my blogs .. im glad u like this one :D

i've been doing really well!! it's similar for me actually, i'm finally doing some really hard work with my therapist and it sucks but it's making me want to get better. i really do believe that it's what i'm here to do, and it feels wonderful to have a purpose again. i always say that the meaning of life is something you have to find for yourself, but i never really bothered with it. i always considered myself a lost cause. but maybe i can get out of this. maybe one day i won't feel so small and scared ... it feels wonderful to feel wonderful :]

and it is good !! even if it's just mania, it's always good to take care of yourself. i always relearn some unfortunate truths whenever i bother with self care like "i feel more like a person when i bother to shower and eat breakfast" LOLOL

overall i've been doing a lot better i think :] im finally starting to break out of the mindset i worked myself into with my ex and im feeling much better for it. i've actually had several people irl tell me that im looking visibly better completely unprompted and it catches me off gaurd every time haha

i haven't been doing much but !! im hoping to get back into the swing of things, especially with school coming up in september ... but it's gonna be the last year before college!! im a senior!! wtf!! it feels weird going into senior year at 16 but i did start kindergarten at like 4 years old so i guess it tracks /silly

right now the project i want to get back on is my neocities ... it's a total mess right now while i figure out html and css, but hopefully eventually i can make it my own !! it's very vaguely space themed right now but eventually i wanna theme it off of myself since like. all of our interests come and go but unfortunately i remain /silly .. it'll be difficult but lots of fun !! (i have it linked here if u wanna poke around it in its current laughably unfinished state, itll look best on google chrome on desktop!)

ive been spending a bit more time with my mom recently too, ive been rewatching some of my favorite anime with her and we're gonna watch some newer ones too!! (we've gotten thru evangelion and madoka magica so far, and we're gonna start cowboy bebop next ^_^)

auauauaua ive started rambling like hell but !! im glad to be able 2 chat with u, it's always one of the highlights of our day :]

[xpc-web-dev]

Updates: I was self-sabotaging and in the end I almost missed two good opportunities.

How are you? I hope well.

I've had more instabilities in the last few days (if you follow me around here, you already know that this seems to be routine HEHUEHEH)

But things are improving and I've set some goals that have helped me feel more confident about where to go next.

Now I wanted to share news, what I learned in this process and what I will share from now on.

The prints above are from processes/scholarships that I was accepted.

The first is the Big data Engineer training proposed by a startup in the state where I live.

The second is training focused on the front-end (from Html to React.js and other soft skills)

The second one I applied for in February and I didn't even expect to be accepted, I took a simple question test and sent it on. This month I received acceptance and I was like "look how cool, I think I can learn well and the bank that sponsors it is famous in my country, so it will be nice to have it on my resume".

This is just a training, no possibility of hiring.

The first is precisely the point of self sabotage that I want to talk about.

Everything involving Data/AI is complex and a hell of a responsibility for me, so it's for everyone, but you have to put in a lot of effort. First I did the test there was SQL (I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW ANYTHING UHEUHEUE, Only with google searches and logic I got it) . And then there were issues with Matrix and Vectors AND I HAVE NEVER BEEN SO GRATEFUL TO NOVEMBER/DECEMBER BEA.

Thanks to all those exercises I managed to do (I just don't know how many I got right and how many I got wrong).

BUT here comes the self-sabotage I applied or signed up for this vacancy more than 3 times (the good and bad thing is that the platform kept the test, so it was only the first one I took) I was ALWAYS like: "I won't make it." "It's going to be too long for me", "I don't even have a background in math (they don't ask for math as a requirement, just a language and sql)", "I won't be approved", " I'm horrible at logic, even if I pass it will go wrong."

And so this week, before they reveal who passed, I wrote to myself again, with the feeling of "Whatever happens and that's it".

The result was yesterday but as nothing appeared in my email I thought,"I didn't pass and it's ok, let's continue with java"

-Yes, I started Java because I signed up for a Kotlin bootcamp sponsored by a good company. The best of this bootcamp could participate in their selection process. They don't pay well, but it would be enough to keep me going, so I just went.-

When I saw the notification in the email today I was in shock for many minutes, before and after HUEUEHUUE. "Did I really pass?"

In this program you can also have access to participate in the company's selection process. But no guarantee 100% work at the end.

I will try to focus more on the issue of doing my best in training and having it on my curriculum. (Strategy to regulate my anxiety). I want to work there, but I don't control the future, so I'll just focus on doing my best.

And this is where I wanted to encourage anyone reading this to try even if they don't think they can.

If I hadn't written myself again for the 4th time this week I wouldn't be in this training that will be good for my CV since I want to go to Artificial Intelligence.

Is afraid? Go scared! You can cross good doors and achieve things you never imagined. So for your future and also past versions, always try to believe or pretend to believe in yourself.I'm still trying, believe me

NOW WHAT WILL I POST?

I will post my routine with each of the classes.

First I'll need to level up my Python and SQL. So even though the big data training starts this week (it will be every day) the first week along with that I'm finishing that python course and practicing SQL.

While Big data will be every day from 19:00 2 hours each class, but I don't know how many classes a day yet. The Front-end are recorded classes and only 1 day a week we have live meetings and I'll probably have to reconcile both, but that's a problem for the future UHEHUEUE.

Maybe I'll separate it into 2 posts so I don't get so confused since they are different things.

I'm excited and wish those of you who are reading and trying to learn code to get good learning opportunities or jobs in the midst of everything that's going on.

Drink water and have a great weekend.

[gekidasa]

20 questions for fic writers

Thank you for tagging me, @jaimebluesq!

1. How many works do you have on AO3? 50!

2. What's your total AO3 word count? 133,410

3. What fandoms do you write for? MDZS, fairly exclusively right now. Aside from that: Cardcaptor Sakura is the fandom I first wrote fanfic for. I’ve written some X/TB, Tenipuri, Kamen Rider, some others. But to be honest, in most fandoms I don’t write much, if at all.

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

And I will stay with you / And you will keep me close, which I just call the Sangcheng Roommates AU. This has stalled for reasons, but I do want to finish it. It’s a fun concept.

When a secret isn’t really secret, a Touya/Yuki fic! It’s actually just Yukito and Fujitaka talking about Yukito and Touya’s relationship, Touya is barely in it 😂

Heart-opening flow, my sangcheng yoga au, the first sangcheng fic I ever wrote.

The Half-Eaten Peach Longs to be Filled with Cream. Okay, I love this one. It’s sangcheng, and it’s porn.

Stay, also sangcheng. Modern au, first time they have sex. Technically it has the same rating as number 4, but it’s nowhere near as filthy.

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not? Yes, I try to, because while I write fic for me, the reason I share it is in the hope of getting to have conversations with others that like the characters and ship as much as I do.

6. What is a fic you wrote with the angstiest ending? I mean, I don’t really do angst, but I suppose Yaguruma’s Hell because it’s Yaguruma thinking about how he’ll take Kageyama away and they’ll be together, and that’s just before, well. Spoilers for Yaguruma and Kageyama’s story in Kamen Rider Kabuto. It doesn’t actually go into the ending, it relies on you knowing what happens.

7. What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending? I really don’t know. I mostly write fluff, and most of them have happy endings.

8. Do you get hate on fics? I never have. I feel like mostly you don’t get hate if you don’t write for particularly popular ships in popular fandoms. Although, if I’d gotten into MDZS just 6 months or so earlier, I might have gotten hate by the infamous troll that went around harassing sangcheng fans.

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind? Sure do! And well… I suppose you could say I often write FLUFFY smut, because it’s about characters that have strong feelings about each other, but I’d also like to think I write fairly dirty smutty (but not particularly kinky). Probably the best example of what I mean is Hold the doors, which is a nielan fic about Lan Xichen giving his neighbor that he just met, Nie Mingjue, a blowjob. It has been described as both filthy and soft.

10. Do you write crossovers? What's the craziest one you've written? Nope, not my thing, as a writer or reader.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen? Not that I know of.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated? Nope.

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before? Also nope.

14. What's your all-time favorite ship? Probably Touya/Yukito, because it’s about than the ship itself for me at this point. They’re what got me into CLAMP, and also what got me into shipping, and I made a fansite for them that was the first site I made of any kind and that is still online. They’re the reason I learned to code.

Or sangcheng. It maybe recency bias, but they've certainly gotten me to produce more fic than any other ship.

15. What's a wip you want to finish, but doubt you ever will? Isolated Incidents, a fic about Touya and Yukito kissing. It would have been fine if I had just made it a one shot about their first kiss, but instead I decided that it would have MORE, and that I'd explore the evolution of their relationship through different kisses. It was a good idea at the time, I'd just gotten actively back into CLAMP fandom, had recoded the Touya/Yukito shrine in modern HTML and CSS, and was rewatching Cardcaptor Sakura and writting short little fics for them again. But then December 2020 came, and I decided to read MDZS... and that pretty much took over my fandom life. There's MDZS fics I haven't worked on in quite a while, but since I'm still actively in this fandom, they aren't in "probably won't finish" territory.

16. What are your writing strengths? I think I write amusing stories, and I’m not embarrassed to write smut. Also, I think I tend to have fairly defined voices for characters.

17. What are your writing weaknesses? Consistency in the sense of sticking with writing a thing. Actual plot. Those go hand in hand. It’s very hard for me to write long fics for those reasons. I often have IDEAS for fics I really like, and I might sort of… loosely plot them out, but in no way enough to actually write most of them.

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic? Unless you actually KNOW something of the language, just avoid it. You’ll probably make a fool of yourself otherwise.

19. First fandom you wrote for? Cardcaptor Sakura, Touya/Yukito.

20. Favorite fic you've written? I don’t have a favorite. Unsatisfying, I know.

Not tagging anyone,

Changed my mind! Tagging @mulberrylotus @telperintal @angie-s-g @revesdelimonade

Anyone else do it if you want to!

[kevinsreviewcatalogue]

Review: Eight Legged Freaks (2002)

Eight Legged Freaks (2002)

Rated PG-13 for sci-fi violence, brief sexuality and language

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/03/review-eight-legged-freaks-2002.html>

Score: 3 out of 5

Eight Legged Freaks is a self-conscious throwback to '50s monster movies that does the job it sets out to do perhaps a little too well. It's the kind of movie you'd imagine American International Pictures themselves (the Blumhouse of the '50s and '60s) would've made back then if they had a big budget and modern CGI technology to spare, a film that gets right up in your face with all manner of icky arachnid goodness that it takes every opportunity it can to throw at the screen, and even though the effects may be dated now, it still works in the context of the lighthearted B-movie that this movie is trying to be. It's a movie where, as gross as it often is, going for an R rating probably would've hurt the campy tone it was going for. Its throwback to old monster movie tropes is a warts-and-all one, admittedly, especially where its paper-thin characters are concerned, such that it starts to wear out its welcome by the end and could've stood to be a bit shorter. That said, it's never not a fun movie, especially if you're not normally into horror, and it's the kind of film that I can easily throw on in the background to improve my mood.

Set in the struggling mining town of Perfection, Arizona, the film opens with an accident involving a truck carrying toxic waste accidentally dumping a barrel of the stuff into a pond that happens to be located right next to the home of a man named Joshua who runs an exotic spider farm. He starts feeding his spiders insects that he sourced from the pond, and before long the spiders start growing to enormous size, eating Joshua and eventually threatening the town, forcing its residents to start banding together for survival. I could go into more detail on the characters, but most of them fall into stock, one-note archetypes and exist mainly to supply the jokes and the yucks, elevated chiefly by the film's surprisingly solid cast. David Arquette's oddly disaffected performance as Chris, the drifter whose father owned the now-shuttered mines and returns to town in order to reopen them, manages to work with the tone the movie is going for, feeling like he doesn't wanna be in this town to begin with and wondering what the hell he got himself into by returning to the dump he grew up in. Kari Wuhrer makes for a compelling action hero as Sam, the hot sheriff who instructs her teenage daughter Ashley (played by a young Scarlett Johansson) how to deal with pervy boys and looks like a badass slaughtering giant spiders throughout the film. Doug E. Doug got some of the funniest moments in the movie as Harlan, a conspiracy radio host who believes that aliens are invading the town. Every one of the actors here knew that they were in a comedy first and a horror movie second, and so they played it broad and had fun with the roles. There are various subplots concerning things like the town's corrupt mayor and his financial schemes, the mayor's douchebag son Bret, and Sam's nerdy son Mike whose interest in spiders winds up saving the day, and they all go in exactly the directions you think, none of them really having much impact on the story but all of them doing their part to make me laugh.

The movie was perhaps a bit too long for its own good, especially in the third act. Normally, this is the part where a movie like this is supposed to "get good" as we have giant monsters running around terrorizing the town, and to the film's credit, the effects still hold up in their own weird way. You can easily tell what's CGI at a glance, but in a movie where the spiders are played as much for a laugh as anything else, especially with the chattering sound they constantly make that makes it sound like they're constantly giggling, it only added to the "live-action cartoon" feel of the movie. The problem is, there are only so many ways you can show people getting merked by giant spiders before they all start to blend together, and the third act is thoroughly devoted to throwing non-stop monster mayhem at the screen even after it started to run out of ideas on that front. There are admittedly a lot of cool spider scenes in this movie, from giant leaping spiders snatching young punks off of dirt bikes to people getting spun up in webs to a tarantula the size of a truck flipping a trailer to a hilarious, Looney Tunes-style fight between a spider and a cat, and the humans themselves also get some good licks in, but towards the end, the film seemed to settle into a routine of just spiders jumping onto people. It was here where the threadbare characters really started to hurt the film. If I had more investment in the people getting killed and fighting to survive, I might have cared more, but eventually, I was just watching a special effects showcase. The poster prominently advertises that this movie is from Dean Devlin, one of the producers and writers of Independence Day and the 1998 American Godzilla adaptation, and while he otherwise had no creative involvement, I did feel that influence in a way that the marketing team probably didn't intend.

The Bottom Line

Eight Legged Freaks is a great movie with which to introduce somebody young or squeamish to horror, especially monster movies. It's shallow and doesn't have much to offer beyond a good cast, a great sense of humor, and a whole lot of CGI spider mayhem without a lot of graphic violence. Overall, it's a fun throwback to old-school monster movies.

[nokingsonlyfooles]

The menus don't work, the menus don't work, the menus DON'T WORK...

OK, my few readers. I took a break, I went back to fix the navigation, it's unfixable as-written.

I need some complex stuff in places, I was willing to forgive WP for putting out a new site editing interface that barely works - as long as it has the basic features someone would use on a storefront. I'm an outlier. I know this.

BUT IT IS NO LONGER POSSIBLE TO CREATE A MENU WITH A WORKING SUB-MENU IN IT. IF YOU TRY, THE SUB-MENU LINKS ARE UNCLICKABLE.

I am using their site editor and their 2024 theme, I should say.

I crossed my fingers and looked for the (now liable to vanish from anything more complicated than a paragraph) "edit as html" option. Nope! It's gone! I can't fix it. I would have to hack the interface somehow to fix this for WordPress, within WordPress.

I had to go looking for plugins. I HAD TO GO LOOKING FOR 3RD PARTY SOFTWARE TO GET A FUNCTIONAL MENU. And, of course, they paywall features I need. I found a "floating" menu that actually does work well enough (it's a little cramped on mobile unless you put the screen in landscape mode, but at this point you should really do that anyway, I can only format so much) but the sub-menu function is paywalled. And I'm actually fucking tempted to buy (haha, I mean "rent") it. Because the damn thing works in dark mode and across devices. And it sticks to the side in a fairly unobtrusive way, which WP's menu will not. It won't stick anywhere. And it sure as hell won't do that thing where you scroll up and it plops down for your convenience.

But if I use that floating menu without sub-menus, it's gonna get longer, and longer, and longer, until it doesn't fit on your mobile screen anymore, or potentially your tablet or desktop, and then I dunno what happens. Also, in order to keep it small, everything is a cryptic icon that displays a title when you tap it (on mobile) or hover over it (on desktop). That's kinda counterintuitive, I don't know if I want my one working menu to be like that.

I might keep looking and find another plugin that also works that well but... it's not likely. Or, if I do, I may run into another paywall. They gotta get their rent somehow!

This is a stupid problem and so far I am unable to come with with a non-stupid solution. I can:

Put all the links in the header menu, and you'll have to scroll through EVERYTHING to find the actual content every time.

Put all the links in the content area, in different places and different combinations depending on the page. (And this would mean doing some reformatting on every instalment AGAIN.)

Start fucking around with the sidebar - I don't know if it works and I'd have to rip up every template I've already made to add it.

Put all the links in the footer menu, and nobody will notice them.

Put all the links in the floating menu (see above for the issues with that).

Make sub-pages for Misc/Notes and similar that are just lists of links and serve the function of a sub-menu.

Actually put the content on the sub-page and have it navigable via anchors (this seems like it would be a bitch to load, but most of my content is just text).

Make a list of links that isn't actually tagged as a menu, thus losing the collapsible function for small screens.

Kill God.

That last one is probably the most doable but I feel like someone would get mad at me. Like, Hazbin Hotel finally got its first season on Amazon, and if God dies they might have to rewrite some shit.

If I don't lay out the money for the cryptic icon menu, we're probably going to end up with three or four accordions that are not technically menus at the top of every page. And I'll hafta check back every once in a while to see if WP fixed their shit yet.

If they don't stick with that site editor and make it useable, all this work is going to vanish like chalk marks in the rain.

I WANTED to put up another six-pack in February. I have it ready to go! But the site doesn't work. If I can't fix it this week, I won't even be able to put things up without illustrations. And forget having time to fill in the missing artwork. I got enough to do trying to kill God!

[theradicalscrivener]

Good gnus bad gnus time.

I pulled an all nighter earlier this week and knocked out the finale for CDE. All totalled it's like 13 or 14 chapters plus an epilogue. It was def a labor of love and I'm glad to be done with it. Now I can go back to writing other topics that people enjoy.

Life update: everything's fucked.

The parentals have been dragging me out of bed early all week with random demands. Drive my mom to the doctor. Deal with a repair guy they hired but weren't able to be there for the visit. Sometimes they just call me at ass early o clock to tell me to wake up because no one should sleep so late even tho I sleep so late because nighttime is the only time I feel safe to be active. It's when I do all my writing and gaming because a) work actually leaves me alone and b) I don't (normally) have family barging into my room without knocking at 3 am.

I'm currently kinda stressed about funds ATM. I blew all my savings and my last months paycheck repairing my car. Over the past few months I've been sinking more and more money into it to get it running. What started as a small warning light Digivolves into needing massive electrical work.as well as getting the entire ABS system replaced. All totaled I spent over 10k on it. I did some shopping for a new(?) Car but with interests rates as they are most dealers were offering 15% apr which is insane. So I decided to get my car running and see if I can keep it alive long enough for the market to turn around.

The good gnus is that I got it running and it seems to be working fine. Just in time for me to have to go on a road trip for work which will require me having to pay for mileage and room and board out of pocket with the hopes of maybe getting refunded some of it.

On top of that I've been paying for more and more stuff for work out of pocket with the promise that I will be reimbursed, but there's no telling when or if that will happen. So there's a few k there. Also my work hasn't paid me for May yet because the big boss is upset about the way the sites are being run and has not approved payroll until he finishes his inspection which will take a few weeks.

On top of this, I had a $3k tax bill due which I paid back in April. In may the gummint sent me almost all of it back as a tax refund. I used this money to pay for the aforementioned car. Earlier this month they sent me a notice saying that the refund was an error and now I owe all the money they refunded plus late fees and interest for not paying my taxes on time.

This is all on the tail end of surviving the semester from hell. I can't remember if I mentioned this here but I was in a class that the one entire course was structured around "group work". Well I got stuck with a group that didn't do anything and so I had to do it all by myself. I did the work of five people while holding down a full time job+.

Anyways on the writing front. I have a few chapters of CDE to post and a new Lumen chapter. But I realize those stories arent the kinda thing my core audience cares about. I've been struggling to find the time and energy to actually post anything because even after I finish writing and edits it's still at least an hour of work to format stuff for html and then share them online.

[tea-with-evan-and-me]

The fans of Emma Roberts are never going to acknowledge the actual facts of what happened because it ruins the image of the woman they idolize and who they thought she is. The fact that the arrest was made because there were witnesses that gave statements to the police in addition to the statements from Evan and Emma that were given separately is something that refutes the claims her fans make about mutual abuse or Emma defending herself so they refuse to address it and will continue to spread lies. Not only did the police take statements from Evan, Emma, and witnesses, but they also examined the injuries on both Emma and Evan (and Evan had way more serious injuries) and with all of the evidence and info made the decision to arrest Emma. Rather than take this information in and reexamine whether Emma is someone they should really support, her fans choose to attack her victim and spread misinformation and lies. They ask for articles that state that emma was the aggressor ( I'll link one here for you all :) https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/07/17/emma-roberts-arrested-attack-boyfriend-evan-peters_n_3608932.html) but they can't give an article that states that Evan says he was abusive too nor can they give a link to the police report that some of them like to bring up. Because those things don't actually exist. They are lies. But Emma being abusive to the point where she got arrested is a fact that cannot be changed or rewritten.

Hi, I just wrote a really long message about Emma and also wanted to provide this article which reiterates that she was arrested because of witness statements and that the police did examine injuries on both Emma and Evan yet they arrested her. https://www.eonline.com/news/439736/emma-roberts-arrested-after-fight-with-boyfriend-evan-peters

sorry for the long rant but I am so over the lies and misinformation.

-

no need to apologize, you're absolutely right. emma's morally bankrupt minions lie when facts are readily available. they add in ''details'' that never happened and basically rewrite the history of that night to paint emma as the victim, or at least to make evan an equally guilty party, when there is no proof of this whatsoever. also, if you look at the huffington post article, it literally links you to the TMZ post which states:

Sources close to Emma tell TMZ ... Emma and Evan were hitting each other and she was arrested because he had obvious physical injuries. The sources deny Emma bit Evan.

-

the only, ONLY source that states evan and emma were ''hitting each other'' was from someone on EMMA's team. aka, a PR person trying to save face for their client. not an eye-witness account from that night, not an objective bystander at all. period. in fact, the fight took place in a hotel room in the wee hours of the early morning - who the hell do they think was visually witnessing emma and evan fighting? as the huffpost article states, they were OVERHEARD fighting. i know emma and her minions are dumb, but just a quick refresher: you hear with your ears, and you see with your eyes. i guess it would help if you had a brain somewhere beyond that but i can't help them there. so nobody saw evan pimp slapping emma and told the police who turned a blind eye and arrested her instead of him. just a personal anecdote but i find it worth sharing: i had a next door neighbor in my apartment several years back who was being physically attacked by her boyfriend, and it was not hard to guess who the aggressor was based on the words exchanged.

so that leaves us with this: hotel guests heard a fight taking place in emma and evan's room. police were called, they came into said hotel room, spoke to them, and i'm sure also interviewed the guests surrounding them. police visually observed that evan was the only one who had physical injuries indicative of being attacked and determined emma to be the aggressor. due to this, she was arrested and her saving grace was evan not pressing charges against her.

[dontcallmecarrie]

For anyone wondering what’s going on with BDEL, Darth Calamity and...basically 99% of my AUs: every time I write, stuff going on in my life keeps coming out. Which normally isn’t bad, but we’re talking soap opera levels here. Like, ‘any more and I might as well write a biography’, and that’s Not Fun on a number of levels.

So, status update/ my internal narration on what keeps running through my head on the AUs you guys may or may not be wanting to hear about. Heads up for some minor spoilers, but way less than the outlines linked on my pinned post.

By Dawn’s Early Light:

...I have all of one (1) scene I’m eager to see, and that’s Howard Stark getting punched by Bucky in front of Steve Rogers. And maybe reassess how realistic this AU is, but tbh that feels more like something to tackle in the Coding Nightmare Fic I Have Yet To Finish because like hell I’m rewriting this fic.

By Myself But Not Alone:

look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair! Sing, oh muse, of the hubris of the fool who thought they could make their overly-complicated vision into a reality while only knowing the bare-bones basics of HTML.

...okay, but really, my main problem is that I’ve got several dozen pages of handwritten notes and outlines of potential Bad Endings to spice things up, but. Completely and utterly blocked on actually writing it out. Kinda debating on just posting what I’ve got and calling it a day because my brain refuses to expand on anything right now.

Live Through The Rain AU:

First off, I really want to brush up on Welcome to Night Vale to make sure I’ve got the tone right. Secondly, this one’s slated for Howard Stark redemption/character development boot camp via ‘yeah your world was just completely upended by one of the people you trusted most, no, that was just the first of many curveballs coming your way’, which I write when I’m trying to tackle a sympathetic and nuanced perspective of a very, very complicated man with a lot of issues.

...which means I have to be in the frame of mind to be sympathetic. Which, right now, I am not.

Incidentally, if you’ve noticed a sharp uptick in the levels of family drama in NHDD, this is why. Justin’s father is what happens when I am not inclined towards trying to be sympathetic towards parents who don’t have their shit together and insist on dragging everyone else down with them, Howard Stark is what happens when I’m not venting my issues onto fictional characters. [...apologies, btw, for anyone reading this. I try to keep personal stuff personal, but. This stuff keeps leaking into everything I touch, no matter how hard I try.]

Blurred Lines:

...this was my first fanfic, really. I’m kinda torn on how to approach it, really, because I started it out as an exhausted aspiring pre-med student who was not in a great place.

It’s been years since then; I am not where I’d once expected to be. It’s been over a decade since I’ve been up to date on what’s going on in Doctor Who, and noped out of Sherlock after the hot mess that happened after Season 2. On top of that, my writing’s all over the place because my teenage self had a long way to go when it came to storytelling, and part of me wants to go back and edit but the rest of me can’t help but think, ‘no, this fic has literally grown with you,’ even if it sounds cheesy as all get out.

All I know is, I want to finish this fic. I have a bullet point outline, next to no knowledge of Doctor Who lore and probably need to do a lot of research to do it, but it is going to happen. Eventually.

Ere The World Falls/The Lullaby of Obliteration:

Writer’s block hit me like a battering ram because ETWF was supposed to be finished in a week.

Look, this is what happens when all you have is a single scene you desperately want in the next chapter, but absolutely nothing else. Specifically, this snippet:

“Oh, I like you,” Hela laughed, something as cold and sharp as the rest of her and Tony didn’t know if he was imagining the goosebumps he felt right now.

Also, ETWF’s meant to be chaos incarnate and found family and end with hope for a better future for everyone, but... I kinda wrote myself into a corner on some things, and found a great way to tie Norse mythology and Marvel comics lore that would require either a lot of heavy editing, or a grimdark remix that I don’t actually have the energy to tackle, because I really kinda need happy endings right now.

Darth Calamity/The Man Who Sold The World:

you know what? I’ve been up to my ears in rl family drama, I am not up to writing fictional angst right now. The remix with more identity shenanigans? Maybe, but first I have to wade through Skywalker family drama to get there. Hmm. Where’s inspiration when you need it?

No Hero [Downward Descending]:

yes, I know Justin Hammer doesn’t come across as being good at this supervillain thing. No, I don’t know how we got here either, this was supposed to be my stab at writing a SI-OC [emphasis on the OC] that got a tad bit out of hand. Especially when it came to the family drama, because I originally had zero intention of expanding on it beyond ‘Justin’s life went on Hard Mode from an early age, and it’s part of why they are Like That now’, but turns out Hammer Senior is a great heat sink for some things. Apologies for that, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ turns out I really needed to vent.

...in retrospect, I missed a golden opportunity for said OC to make a comment about vaguely expecting to see everyone running around in spandex, and that is one of the few regrets I have. Just as a metacommentary on how desaturated the movies got later on, compared to what little I know of the comics.

Beyond that, though, I’m having a lot of fun with a protagonist who accidentally weaponized the power of friendship.

The War is Far From Over Now AU:

Main fic’s finished, still too burned out to consider tackling the sidefic.

The plan currently is to take all the ‘Stuff I Couldn’t Quite Fit In’ posts I made- aka all the plot points that ended up getting cut for my sanity, because my heart had been set on finishing TWiFFON before graduating undergrad and even that ended up going sideways- and playing by ear from there.

Specific plot points I’d once been eager to tackle had included stuff like ‘The Curious Case of James ‘Bucky’ Barnes’ [aka SI Legal’s freakout over the files they end up having to sort through in the aftermath of the Civil War arc], and ‘Vision’s Adventures In Trying To Become a Psychiatrist’ because multiple commenters basically went ‘wow JARVIS really needs therapy, and no one on Earth really is equipped to help Skynet here’ and I remember thinking, “lol yeah, that’s kinda the point, but also that’s a great idea!!!” and had been planning to write something to that effect. Only, things hit the fan in my life not long after, and then burnout on top of that, and next thing I know it’s been years since I last touched this AU but still feel no inclination to do so.