#which would guarantee them not selling very well
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nellynee · 3 days ago
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Dear Hazbin Hotel Fandom (with special note for reader insert fic writers at bottom)
Been thinking about Hazbin and like, economy, and infrastructure, and fucking culture in hell. And I like to imagine that earth is like, modern age if not a bit further into the future, and Hell is just so far behind
And I see most writers attribute this to old powers that be more or less forcing people to adhere to their affections, but I feel like it's so much more complex than that.
Like if there's any kind of infrastructure in place, like say, oh IDK utilities, that infrastructure in modern times relies very heavily on established modern infrastructure built before it, and a certain degree of cultural niceties to leave it alone, as well as all the means in terms of sourcing labor, resources, and cold hard cash for its construction and continued upkeep.
Which is near impossible in a place like hell. A place where at least once a year, the ritual killing of the masses leads to huge turf wars set to destroy said infrastructure. In such a every man for himself society, who's making sure these roads aren't full of potholes and the lights stay on?
Which leads to a very easy answer, Overlords. This is why Overlords own millions of souls. It's the expected currency for stability. Overlords oversee a certain degree of infrastructure, normalization of life. Depending on your deal, Overlords might guarantee a base degree of normalcy in exchange for souls. Like you might get better rental opportunities in areas where the buildings aren't likely to be torn down regularly. You get running water and electricity, books and other entertainment, access to better food, security during large scale danger events (including the exterminations) ect. And refusing to sell your soul could severely limit opportunities. Imagine if everyone is born into poverty, and you are only allowed the chance to access middle class jobs, houses, ect if you cut off a finger. Everyone does it, you aren't using it anyways, and your life gets significantly easier if you do....
But yeah I think people who write for the fandom are seriously understating the actual affects the lack of a central government probably has on the different areas of the city, and what it actually means to be an Overlord, and why things work the way they do.
Like I am 1000% sure there's no mail in hell. Like mailmen and carriers and an organization system. Unless an Overlord was particularly invested in it... No I think for a very long time long distance communication took place through hired help. People specifically paid for or in one's employ to carry personal missives on an immediate basis as needed. Delivery men. This is why Vox's electronics are such a hit. It provides a degree of luxury unknown to the masses before this; or known of and since lost and have nostalgia for.
I also firmly believe that this is still how Overlords and influentials communicate. Vox's infrastructure is convenient, but it would require seceeding a degree of independence powerful people can't afford to give up. You can order one of your souls to take a message and others to protect them, but to use a phone is to put your communication network in the hands of someone else, and a potential enemy at that.
Lack of infrastructure aside, I also don't want to understate the effects of only a certain percentage of the populace being present has. 100% of the people dropping into hell can know what a blender is, but if not a single souls who drops down knows how one works, then hell just straight up doesn't have blenders. Which is another factor into a lot of the lingering old timey feel of Hell. Technology has to be invented on earth, then become popularized enough that the knowledge of its creation beats out the numbers dropping into hell and it can be made. Not to mention someone has to be interested enough to let it be made in the first place. This is why some Overlords center around such singular niches. They were passionate enough to teach themselves in life the knowledge needed to build that particular luxury from scratch. Even if it had been decades since development in earth, the knowledge just doesn't migrate well.
I also imagine this having a huge impact on the entertainment industry. Lots of writers go on about old songs but not one has the guts to claim an artists is in hell and still making their art in hell
Can you imagine the cutthroat industry developed around having to claw your way up through hundreds of years of new music and nostalgia when your own fan base is still mostly on earth and the other artists have had centuries or decades to establish themselves?
Which brings me to my last and most important point..... Shoes. Well, shoes and clothing, and mass production.
It just ain't fucking happening in Hell.
One, in sure the Pride ring is getting some of their commerce from other rings. I'm talking consumables. Textiles and food. This is also a city spanning millions of people, and what hydroponics isn't used to grow pot is probably being sponsored by Overlords to grow produce for their souls. Which means some production but not nearly enough to feed the city. Which means food probably looks like a large majority of people eating hell based produce from outside the ring, with dedicated smuggling rings (like what we see with IMP, travelers who bring earth commerce home, I'm guessing Lust ring Incu/Sucubi looking for side gigs) bringing back seeds, cuttings, and cultural touchstones like movies, books, and music to be mass copied and distributed. Those living in certain areas or with the right amount of cash can pay for produce grown from that smuggled earth produce.
Meat is predominantly hell born in nature, probably produced from Wrath, and Sloth's oceans, with an uncomfortably large supplemental of cannibalistic meat being corpses harvested by street folk and sold to butchers for cheap, cooked and sold Sweeney Todd style. I do think Cannibalism is far more widespread and normalized than most are comfortable thinking, for practical reasons. There are just so many dedicated cannibals in the colony alone...look, there is neither space for cows nor a means to get them down there.
In any case, clothing.
This is a huge pet peeve for me in fics because I don't think anyone really thinks this one through, the sheer volume of the fashion industry in its infrastructure and how much of that Hell is lacking
Not to even mention that everyone is hell is shaped weird. Head to toe. Weird bodies all the time. Everywhere.
I just don't think mass produced clothing is a thing. Or at least nearly a refined as earth. Off the rack shit is probably very plain, and very vaguely shaped. Lots of missing sleeves, wide arm holes, drawstrings and buttons. The bare minimum. The cloth equivalent of fig leaves. Pride based clothing outlets, if there is any mass production, probably base their shapes a lot of Imps and Hellhounds and mostly humanoid with four limb, just to have a consistent customer base and hope they get lucky with hellborn. You probably have to pay to have a pattern made for your body and then have basic shit seen up from there or learn to do it yourself. Lots of people earning side cash sewing garbage clothes for cheap. Dudes with a bunch of ink and a screen printing custom graphic tees from their apartment making bank.
And don't even get me started on shoes. Most people have hooves or paws, and if they don't have that, there's a sizable chance they won't even have feet. There just isn't mass produced shoes. There physically can't be. There is no consistency in size. It is literally not possible.
All to say, sewing is probably a pretty valuable skill to have. Tailors and cobblers are probably both valued jobs and incredibly necessary. It's also probably pretty damn expensive. Which is actually why we don't see a lot of shoes, and why some folks are strange about clothes. It's just not practical anymore. And it's wildly expensive. Why go through the bother of getting a tailor or cobbler to make time and then get charged through the nose for something that might get destroyed or stolen soon anyways?
Which brings me to my special comment
Dear Reader insert writers. Specifically the Reader/Alastor crew, but this is pretty blanket
Unless your OC, or the clothing, is a very specific shape, Angel is not loaning your OC nothing in terms of textiles. Think real hard about whether your OC's feet will fit into one of his custom made boots... Really think about it. The love is there, but it's Hell. Let your OC struggle with everything. They can't get housing because everywhere outside an Overlord's domain is full and they can't rent without trading their soul to an overlord. They have trouble finding non human meat or palatable produce or even coffee. Their clothes are coming apart at the seams and laundry mats don't exist. Its hell, it's hard, and it's not made for them. If Angel ends them anything, it's gonna fit like a nightmare or be secondhand from another hooker and look like it. And it's going to be expensive AF
This is especially for you Alastor shippers. Textiles work a lot closer to how it functioned in his time than ours. In fact it probably functions closer to Rosie's time than his. And something I need you to remember is courting etiquette. Because I often see this overlooked. The best example I have for this is the song "baby it's cold outside", which viewed through the modern lense sounds like a creepy preamble to that poor woman being accosted, but in the lense of the time period it was written, is seen a feminine strong song, a woman using the tools available of her time to openly flirt and accept an offer to stay overnight. And while most people remember that Al comes from a time where gifting is used to show affection, I don't think they remember why that is. Like yes, there can be, and probably should be, a certain degree of possessiveness involved, given where we are and who we are talking about. But we must remember that this was a time period before women could divorce their husbands in the US. These gifts had social meaning. Women couldn't own property, were discouraged from jobs after settling down, and just didn't have the means to care for themselves. Expensive clothing and jewels were a statement. It told the community that the husband could, and did, provide for his wife financially. It gave the woman tangible items that, if properly cared for, would provide her with capital enough that should her husband die before her, he could be her only husband, that she wouldn't be forced to remarry. It a statement of of societal expectation, but also of how much he cared for her well being. And this is an aspect I see missing from Alastor's commentary. Yes there is a magical aspect of protection often employed, but he doesn't lavish his beau with Fur coats and hand crafted hats with obnoxiously bejeweled pins and easily displayed but hard to care for items that are as much a declaration of love in value as they are in attention. The closest I've ever seen is the fics by corruptedteacups, in which the flapper set gifted to the MC is described just as much in its beauty as the sheer quality of the fabric and beading involved. It feels substantial and expensive.
Just a small fandom peeve of mine, but some desperately needed context and depth I hope people think on.
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sergle · 1 year ago
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aauAUAUUGHHHH I keep wanting to make stickers of the floral portrait series:
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but I Keep Avoiding It whenever the thought comes up again, bc stocking all 12 pieces in any meaningful quantity would be like... ~1k all at once
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nientedal · 1 year ago
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What progress at home has biden enacted? What policies of his show that he is making progress that prove he is actually different than trump?
I like to pretend I have faith in humanity, so I'll answer as if you're asking this in good faith.
Biden's DEA has lifted restrictions on telehealth prescriptions to make appointments and assistance more accessible.
He put a funding package into place to help unhoused people get access to mental and physical healthcare, as well as short-term and long-term housing.
He has attempted and is still attempting to get student debt relief through - this was blocked by Republican judges appointed by Trump, but he's still working on it.
Infrastructure repair - his administration has budgeted funds to actually fix some severely-damaged and frequently-traveled bridges.
Trying to expand access to healthcare to include undocumented immigrants who came to the USA as children (Dreamers) under the Affordable Care Act. Support for Navigator programs and outreach has also been increased.
He has vetoed Republican-led bills that were attempting to overturn environmental protections - one that would have forbidden investment fund managers to consider climate change in their portfolios (I have two degrees in accounting and this is actually huge), and another that would have overturned restrictions on agricultural runoff into our waterways.
He and his administration worked for ages to get rail workers paid sick days.
This is just some of what he's been doing. Meanwhile, Trump and other Republicans want to criminalize the lives of LGBT people like you and me. They want to eliminate no-fault divorce and force births that will kill parents or devastate them financially. They have stated flat out that they want to install a military dictatorship in the USA. They attempted to put that in motion on January 6th, 2021. They failed once. They will do better next time.
One party wants to house the homeless and expand social safety nets, while the other one wants to criminalize homelessness. One of them wants a future in which I might be able to vote to change how much of a war machine my country is, while the other one wants to eliminate my ability to vote entirely. Those are not the same. Those literally are opposites.
At the end of the day, all you and I can do is choose to do the least amount of harm possible. You and I cannot choose to do no harm. This is the USA, we sell war, you and I cannot choose to do no harm. I wish we could, my god do I wish we could, but that is not an option. So we grieve for the harm we couldn't eliminate and work to minimize the harm that is done. Despite all the crap they support, Democrats are the minimum amount of harm right now. Acting like they aren't is exactly what brought us to an election where our options are a future where we are either wading in blood or drowning in it.
Not voting for Biden will not help Palestine. Not voting for Biden will guarantee a Republican president who will make the situation in Palestine WORSE. AND it'll hurt a lot of other places as well, both at home and abroad, because Republicans are about business and the USA is in the business of war! And I would very much like that to change someday! I would very much like to someday be able to choose to do no harm! And I know what I have to do to try for that future, so what are YOU going to do? There is no standing off to the side in this. If you aren't helping pull, you're the dead weight we're pulling. Are you going to dig your feet into the mud and blood and drown us there? Or are you going to get the fuck off your ass, grit your teeth, and help us pull free?
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capslocked · 1 year ago
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DIPLOMACY
male reader x kim minju
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For those not paying attention - of which there seems to be an increasing number - it’s not that she doesn’t have the pedigree. But just shy of getting into that storied history or into the nitty-gritty of her curriculum vitae, the only thing that really matters is:
"This all seems a little beneath me." 
It’s another day of this. Of you, of her, of trying to gather the mien of someone who isn’t utterly disarmed by Minju’s usual, beautiful, challenging self. Which, let’s be honest, is always an uphill battle.
Minju nearly pouts, flipping through a copy of the dossier idly from the other side of the desk in a gesture that reads both bored and dismissive and every little thing it needs to annoy you.
"Look," you offer up, graciously diplomatic all things considered, "it's about finding the right springboard, to something else more… substantial."
"Or to something else, you know, beneath me." Her red lips turn down ever so slightly. She doesn't seem so interested in playing ball on this one. And, for you, amounts to something of a huge problem.
See, Minju doesn't quite understand how the working world really, actually works. That the carrot that's dangled in front of her is your carrot just as much as it is hers - that you stand to lose out just as badly. That it's both of your asses on the line if things fall apart and Minju's shortsighted insistence to only work those certain roles befitting a name like hers puts that all at risk.
"Maybe you can tell me something,” you start, coming across more curt than you possibly intended - but not by much, “how many of your former cohorts have had their career aspirations line up with reality, Miss Kim?"
“I’m picky, not naive,” she sighs, not missing a beat, and you watch her dark hair cascade gently down her shoulder when she reaches a hand back to unfix her loose ponytail from its hair clip.
“You might see how I can get the two confused.”
“Then spare me the lecture,” says Minju.
Though she says nothing else, an unspoken you already get paid too much for that hangs in the air.
The tricky part is that no matter what else Minju does, her contract has some non-negotiable clauses to them that no talent has before, or will likely get afterwards. Things that cannot be broken. Like the requirement of her making x number of media appearances, and she gets to approve all of them.
Or that her agent's take home comes from a fixed fifteen percent of her gross earnings, with further incentives when her roles hit specific milestones. But with her refusing projects like the ones in the dossier before you, it leaves you in the unenviable position of losing out on your guaranteed fixed income or trying to convince your diva talent to do what it is she ought to be doing.
The truth is that there’s quite a long list of things no one has had the guts to say ‘no’ to yet.
And, well, it's rather simple and obvious when you look at her:
Minju is that particular blend of A-lister gorgeous. The special look that’s all kinds of mesmerizing and magnetizing, in full bloom - that makes you feel like you're suffocating in beauty. Like if she said come here, you would go; the type where a single look is all it takes and then - just like that - she's got your number forever.
Because everything about her is tailored - from her clothes to her perfect porcelain features. And they made her that way for a purpose: to sell records. (Which, that's exactly what they did.) You can hardly blame the people in power over there, wanting what's best, in a position where everyone would kill for a taste, or even just a glimmer of possibility.
"I don't suppose the part of the governor’s neglected wife is capturing your imagination.” You push the dossier closer, and she doesn’t so much as look at it. “It’s this year’s big budget political thriller, a shoo-in for awards.”
“You mean the one who ends up in a lot of very steamy shots on the apartment’s rooftop pool. Maybe I’m mistaken, but you can’t really unshow your tits.”
"This isn't about being above, Miss Kim, it's about being well regarded; it’s about proving you’re easy to work with,” you argue. “We could-"
"Find a better use of my time?" she cuts in, closing the dossier shut. There's a long moment in which she's looking you over, her gaze sizing up every little inch.
"Your big break won't happen just because you ask for it." You grimace a bit, hating to tell it like it is, but not really wanting to just coddle her either. "But listen - we work together, one project at a time - we can build up to it."
Minju crosses her arms with a loud hmph. "And what are you going to do if I decide not to accept these projects?"
There’s enough edge in her voice that it gives you pause.
"If," she says again pointedly, a teasing little grin tugging at her lips.
So - actually, another thing: when you start digging into the details, there’s more problems than just what can be seen at the surface. Which perhaps it’s too reductive, but essentially everything between you and the talent sitting on the other side of your desk is not quite so straightforward. It was never about Minju doing the best she could for either of your careers; it was about Minju making sure her needs were taken care of, no matter what.
Months ago, thanks in part to the way Minju filled out this tiny black excuse of a cocktail dress, and as a compromise of sorts, there’s an uncharacteristic mistake you ended up making. Or two or maybe a couple.
Because there’d been the perfect backdrop - an end of year party, beautiful dresses and suits, lots and lots of champagne, the kind of jovial mood that inspired one drink too many - and then you and her, taking off down one of the hallways, towards the exit.
Of course, you ended up exactly where neither of you should have ever been - where the snow was falling gracefully and melting into the pavement, behind a private accessway at the back of the venue, somewhere dark and dingy and dripping with a smell reminiscent of garbage; somewhere your hands had gripped firm fistfuls of Minju’s waist before you shoved her up against the back of the building. 
In short:
You remember how she gasped when her palms hit the brickwork, how you figured you may as well give her everything she wants.
(So what, it was one time, you hear yourself explaining, mildly repentant, and to say that it’s complicated the matter is a massive fucking understatement.)
In the interest of full disclosure, you tell her, “what exactly did you have in mind?”
"That maybe," she hums, tongue flicking out over her lips before she purses them thoughtfully. "You should persuade me a little better."
"And let’s suppose, I don’t do any of that," you persist.
"It'd be a shame, wouldn't it, having such a promising future cut short so early? If word got out. From such a respectable agency too, of all places. Couldn't live with yourself," Minju remarks, leaning forward on her elbows until her eyes are level with your own. “Come to think of it, it’s the kind of thing that could totally, like, end your career.”
But as she sits there, arching that perfect brow again, you don't feel so good about the whole thing. You take another look at her - which, your mistakes start there, if nowhere else - at the girl that is somehow not the airheaded starlet she’s supposed to be. No, she’s calculating. A rarity, though you do know the type: here’s a girl who just happened to take her brains for granted in the years she was pampered by the industry - the same one that fattened on her only to later spit her out. And that thought, the look of cold intellect in her eyes and the slight upward curl at the corner of her mouth, has you frozen just a bit stiff.
She takes a key card from her clutch, and throws it onto the desk in front of you.
“Minju,” you caution, and there’s a taste of danger on each syllable of her name - more of a warning for yourself than you can conceive of it ever being for her.
"I'm only suggesting" - she’s watching you nearly fucking choke, amused - "what's best."
And when the lines get muddied between the two of you, that's exactly the issue. What's best. As though this was always Minju's aim. Maybe you've read it wrong, maybe you've gotten too lost in your own delusions, maybe - maybe, it doesn’t matter -
"For work," she adds, at which point her knee bumps yours playfully beneath the desk, leaving the suggestion open, and the implication unmistakable. "Whatever's required."
Here, you should definitely tell Minju no. Say no. Say: you're a professional, and getting involved with her, romantically, officially, personally - whatever - would lead to nothing but disaster. That’d be the responsible thing probably. It’d be generous to say you end up getting even halfway there:
"There's rules against this, you know."
Minju tips her head. “Why ever would there be rules in place against doing your job?”
She thinks that if she feigns being clueless, you'll bite, which -
“Against me folding you over this desk and fucking you until your forget your name.”
"My apologies," she practically coos, knowing that she’s not only made progress, but that she’s wrapping you around her finger. She is a bright girl after all. “You might see how I can get the two confused.”
At that, you figure, the only real move, to be perfectly blunt, is to play Minju at her own game -
To convince her to bend, just a little. To persuade her. So you lean closer, you start to promise, with your face just next to hers:
"You want me to show you how I might handle an uncooperative talent? Would that do it for you, huh?"
And now if that isn’t enough to earn you a whole look, one that’s equally a challenge and a triumph; you watch as she bites the inside of her cheek, not that she can help the smirk creeping across her pretty mouth, a grin full of want and need and all those dangerous, thrilling thoughts that're probably too predictable given your unique sliver of history you’ve already carved out.
She arches that perfect brow of hers once more, toying with the corner of her lip between her teeth. 
You navigate around your desk to hand her your pen, with instructions that are perfectly clear: "then for once in your life, be useful, and sign on the fucking dotted line."
And her whole act falls apart just like that.
She’s humming almost pleasantly to herself as you settle in flush behind her, sinking into you just a little when your hand arrives at her waist, another carding through her hair. “Here,” you point out, watching her name materialize in ink on the document - pressing your lips to the nape of her neck each time she finishes penning out an exaggerated curl of a u.
“And here.”
“And here.”
“And here."
She signs again - and again - and that merits a reward; she’s good when she wants to be. Persuasive when she needs to be.
You can hear her murmur your name when your mouth slips just beneath her jaw, when you mark your next path across the bare skin of her shoulder and when she gets started on the last page of the documents, it happens just like this -
The pen drops from her fingers at some point, tumbling onto the desktop with a clack that might as well be a round leaving the chamber of a starting pistol. The office door isn't even locked and you have half a mind to check on the blinds, but the idea of some desperate executive running face first into this scene - where you’re smoothing your hands down the fabric of Minju’s top, down the rise of her jeans, fiddling slowly with the button at her waist - it holds an unfortunate sort of appeal; those blinds, they're mostly closed anyway. And at this hour of the afternoon, well - maybe it’s a little more clear why Minju asked to reschedule this meeting in the first place.
At first, it’s just a  few of your fingers dipping under the waistband of her pants, following the curve of her hip, her thigh, then inward, and when you reach down to find her already burning up in anticipation, she inhales sharp, a noise that makes you groan in turn, low, right into the hollow behind her ear. Minju, to her credit, is absolutely willing, so very helpful and - as you pinch the soft, tender skin at her hip, she's saying something but you haven't quite paid it a moment's mind.
Her head turns, eyes looking up at you ever-so-slightly-more-vulnerable than their usual mischief and calculation, and there’s a hint of a demand dancing on her tongue, ready and waiting; she moves her leg upwards just a few inches, settling to rest her knee on top of the tabletop, a calculated little pose, angling her hips so you can sink your hand lower, closer, press your fingers into the lace over her hot cunt even deeper.
Here you figure you're probably ruining the fabric, drenching it in her own slick as you work two, then three fingertips in tight circles. You’ll ruin it, and you’ll ruin more - ruin everything and take what you're owed. As her breath hitches again, in some way that makes your senses come to life: you can feel her skin become taut and tense, gooseflesh rising when your hand untangles from her hair and slides up under her shirt, can hear the steady rush of blood in your ears, her pulse quickening, the heart in her chest beating rapid -
(She can pretend all she wants that this was an attempt at extortion. She can pretend she’s not an easy read; that she doesn’t like being easy for you, when she’s hot and whimpering and aching so wet, creaming on your fingers when you haven’t even gotten her pants off.)
- as if every part of her wasn't made for this, as you lay out your first real proposal:
“Do you remember what I asked you? The first time, right after you signed on, when you were so good for me up against the bricks in the alley?”
Minju chokes out an affirmative when you toy with her pussy where she’s craving the shape of anything, but, boy, are the rough pads of your fingers more than up to the task.
"I remember you almost couldn't answer, you didn't dare want to admit that it's what you needed - isn't that right?"
She moans with a voice thick as honey when a couple more fingers brush up against her wet lips and fuck, she does look breathtakingly good; she's exquisite, she's irresistible - the image of a living wet dream.
"Say it, baby," you croon, her voice beginning to melt a bit at the edges, her own heat burning her resolve up from the bottom up as you tug sharply at a string on her lace.
Minju sighs. Arches into your touch.
Because you’re settling into this torturous pattern, where you draw inwards, closer, so close to the little bundle of nerves, her cunt flexing and rippling hungrily when your fingers flick once or twice around it, only for her to wince just slightly as your fingers trace down towards her entrance to start all over again -
Minju steels herself, drawing in a heavy breath past her teeth. “You asked how rough you could be.”
There's something so painfully wicked, how her voice falters there - but then your own voice is rasping right back in a similar caliber of depravity.
“Hm. That’s pretty close to how I remember it.” After all, you are always taking care of Minju - her concerns, her contracts, her needs. So if she was interested, why the fuck would you hold back on providing exactly what she wants. “But help me out, what did you tell me?”
Another twist - another catch. Another push - another pull. She's going to break so sweetly if you're patient - and, ahh, patience - she's shuddering underneath your touch, squirming against you so nicely that you've already gotten away with a bit too much, this much, these fingers and you and Minju's breathy gasps.
"M-that you could be. That you could-" she stutters, all as you feel her folds start to swell, then quiver, as your thumb drags painfully over her clit again - 
And in that moment Minju starts to consider if this were a good idea or not, but her back is already arching against your chest. She's gripping your arm to get you right where she wants you, and the reality of this hits her - a rush of cold clarity through her head just as everything else threatens to spiral into something else, something frantic, something hot and animal and making the muscles at her core begin to clench up.
But you just ease out of her completely, a whine coming out from the back of Minju's throat - her thighs parting further in desperation.
And oh, the disappointment, the sound, it’s incredible - a high pitch - almost a sob -
You slide your other hand in her hair to make sure she's got an earful of your words:
"What was it you said, hm?" you whisper, nipping at the skin on her neck, the side of her jaw - she's shuddering with it when your mouth lingers so close -
“As rough as you fucking want.”
God, the little things that her voice does to you. “Exactly, sweetheart.”
And how's that boundary supposed to hold up and remain uncrossed then, really, if you just give her whatever the fuck she asks for - especially if you have your mouth working it's way around her pulse-point, toying with her as she starts to tense and soften all at once.
In fact, Minju can only stutter out an okay or two as you grind forward, the hard suggestion of your cock nestling up against her rear, just shy of the perfect spot between her legs, and even with still a few layers of clothes between you, the feeling - fuck, the friction, the sight - it’s enough to get you grinning.
Enough to form this near-half-coherent thought: that it’s what's always had you on edge with this girl. She is absolutely every bit your type. Everything about her, right down to the way that she was put together.
All her hard edges and soft curves that should've never really been yours to covet and now, somehow, have become exactly that. Oh, she's the kind of temptation that's better suited for the life of glitz and glamor and the time it requires for indulging in it. You never thought that you would actually ever get here, even as the years have begun to stack up and time starts to grind everything in the back of your head and turn it all over into something like resentment.
If only Minju weren't so good at making you a sucker for those pouty lips and big doe eyes.
Particularly when she's turned around - face to face now - she's the epitome of gorgeous, equal parts aphrodite and adonis; a fucking knockout, her body sculpted and lithe and athletic. Those lines curving out and away like they might tell time, like her thighs could count the minutes and seconds until she's straddling you in your lap with her ankles locked in at the small of your back and you're rutting up into her without reservation, without doubt.
(So what, really, is your goddamned excuse? Your pride? The nature of the beast in you that demands that you must have some degree of control over yourself? The power that your position, here, now, provides? But you can hardly be blamed, even when it's wrong and filthy and so fucking good.)
"You’re stalling." Minju’s leaning back against the desk, tilting her chin up, blinking lazily, and there’s a bit of bite in her voice again.
It takes a minute for it to dawn on you that it must be intentional, trying to get a further rise out of you, the same way your hands have risen up to trace the dips and elevations of her spine, her every vertebra, your fingertips mapping the hollows and rounds of her back. To learn the geography of her shoulders and where, and when, and how to get her breath catching in her lungs, each labored intake of air a little harsher, hastier, hotter than the last.
"You know," you start, spreading your palm across a soft plane of denim, fingers pulling onto the cheek of her ass, dragging her even tighter against you, "I always figured your reputation was a little overdramatized. Most everyone's bound to have a story or two."
She laughs, full of mirth. When the mood strikes, she's the picture of perfection, and she knows it. "Well? Were you disappointed?"
As she coils an arm around your waist to slide your shirt free from the confines of your pants, and as a deft hand slips its way in, you stop asking yourself about right or wrong, good or bad, or about the kisses that land playfully at the corner of your mouth - until you hold her tight and seize her lips, hard, like you mean it - it isn't long before she's fumbling and scrambling with the zipper at your waist. 
"That depends," you’re pulling yourself away long enough to say.
"I think I know the answer." 
And by the way she shivers a little when you shove up the bottom of her top, the way she's melting into your mouth and demanding more and more and more, Minju does. You think she probably has since the first night that your threads got all tangled up. Especially when she slides off her top - her bra - her jeans - leaving them in a pile that lasts barely a second where it started once you sweep everything off of your desk in one broad, efficient gesture -
There's a thud when a pair of binders and a couple of books hit the floor. Someone exclaiming in recognition, the muffled noise drifting through the office door, and, oh, this would probably be the best moment to remember how painfully thin the walls are; you consider whether to walk over and lock the office door, and when Minju’s fingers run up your sides, you decide you won’t.
Too little too late, you figure.
And before you can take a second to give it the more congruent thought it deserves, Minju opens her mouth: "which, in your professional opinion," a hum and a slur as her nails find their way to your collar, "is well, that the thing I should take," she gets out, unbuttoning you at the cuffs, loosening the last of your shirt, "really," her hands palming over the fabric on either side of the lapels, working their way downwards, "how - how do you think this goes?"
“Oh, Minju.” She’s all but begging you to fuck her and still has the wherewithal to be asking for terms.
Like her fingers aren’t completely down your pants, locking around your hard cock - pumping you with soft, lazy strokes - not too different from how you have her chewing on her lip every time your fingers circle over the entrance to her cunt, tenting the last of her lace all slow and careful.
It’s driving her crazy. She just bites into the edge of her thumb in response.
"Fine. Alright. Let me explain it clearly." You dip a finger into her cunt; the whimper is short-lived when she tightens around you and it hits home, the pressure so delicious that she can barely stutter to keep up.
“A negotiation, of sorts-”
“Yeah, sure, we can call it that.”
The mental picture you have of your length outlined against Minju's tiny fist - as she works it into her hand, steady - it's all almost more than you can possibly bear: the way her long legs stretch out so pretty in front of you, the way her wrist twists with each pass and every bump at the veins of her forearm that is such a damn perfect shade of porcelain white in the dim glow of the desk lamp.
This girl with her pert pink mouth and those lips, the ones that aren't quite touching yours but rather smirking the whole time. (If only you were to make her scream loud enough, because you know she could be so much prettier.)
The thought flits through your brain, unbidden and treacherous -
"Think, fuck - think of this, as a one-way track into your career. Think of me, a guiding hand - if you want to. The key to all this," you continue, spacing the words carefully so you don't falter under the pace Minju is picking up, "is that you're going to need to be compliant. Easy."
"Mm. And in exchange?" she bites, choking down an embarrassing moan.
"Here's the basics." And there, there's no fucking reason for you not to dip the tips of your fingers right on downwards, tap into her soft heat until her hips are arching away from the flat of the desk, searching for more. “Whenever you need me to take care of you, I’m there, however you need it: on my fingers, my tongue, my cock - I’ll make you fucking cum over and over.”
"That sounds," she gasps, losing track of the end of her sentence, rolling herself along the pads of your fingers, taking them deeper into her, "very-very-oh fuck-”
Her grip around your cock releases, arms throwing themselves around your shoulders, holding on tight as she starts to trust you implicitly - to give her exactly what she wants, what she needs - and give herself over to you, to your fingers, circling and circling and circling.
“See, tomorrow,” you start, “there’s an audition,” and when you pull your finger out of her cunt, Minju lets out this sound that’s between a whimper and a whine. Her pretty mouth has dropped open, like she's all out of words, lost somewhere, chasing this. Getting dire.
“It’s this teen soap; they need someone young, someone pretty, do you think you can do that for me?”
She doesn’t answer so much as grab and tug and pull you even closer as the heel of your hand pushes and presses over her clit, just about enough force behind it that, eventually, you begin to feel a certain rigidity through her limbs, how the lines of her face and her faultless features grow more and more focused, fixed and concentrated; her voice reduced to the high-pitched huffs and half-formed syllables of pure and utter desperation.
I can, I can - she’s murmuring - please, yes, I will - putting herself right into your capable hands.
When you feel Minju tightening, flexing around nothing, then seizing and shivering, her pussy throbbing hot and wet and clenching around your finger as it again works deeper inside her, an anguished groan finds its way out from her throat.
And from yours, well -
"Show up," you command, giving her another knuckle, curling it just right - watching as her expression contorts and twists up for all her worth. "Make a good impression. Don't make me fucking beg. Show up, Unreserved. Understood?"
And if her body wasn't making her pleas utterly transparent, she's screaming in agreement. It takes you barely a couple seconds, working up inside her cunt until she's all full-body, fully, blissfully spent. She starts to nod, needy, eyes screwing shut.
“And let’s say, something else pops up. A little racy, a little more gravure, just the right amount scandalous, I need you to keep an open mind.”
When it sinks in what you've said, Minju gives this wail, low and perfect - her cunt throbbing over the pulse at your palm - inches away from cumming and shaking and creaming on your hand. You could ask for anything, you think, and she’d give it to you -
“My PR team,” she gasps out, the consonants of her words fraying at the seams, “it’s up to my PR team.”
“Minju,” you say, priming a loaded question and a half. “Do you trust me?”
She nods, expression readable and open like a book. It starts to set in just about then, how you’re going to fucking ruin this girl.
Your breath runs hot, right against her temple, and you whisper the slightest affirmation, “good girl, I’ll take care of it.”
Because to be fair, you’ve not made it this long in your career without learning how to pull a string - how you might pull up on the sensitive skin straddling Minju’s clit and get her reeling; her pussy flutters in the tight, wet heat, muscles clamping, demanding as you work yourself in deeper and then, when the timing's right, pull out to slide a second finger past the slip of lace she has covering her cunt.
She's this tight, dripping, overwhelming fit - even more than you have yet to discover, to tease and then take, the heel of your wrist landing on her clit in a heavy pattern, circles - circles - circles -
- so you figure: fuck the PR team.
If only they knew how well and thorough you were going to fuck the rules right out of Minju.
That you were going to remind her who's the one in the driver’s seat of her life, of her career, that you would make sure she stays in her lane - the proper lane - that this, you think to yourself, might become a recurring sort of negotiation, the kind she's so shockingly eager to accept.
You'd be doing her a favor, fucking a couple good lines into her head, into her skin, into her cunt.
And soon, before long -
She's gritting her teeth around the shape of your name and giving one last heave against the hard wood of the desk underneath her. It's almost beautiful to watch how Minju crumbles into herself; the way she grinds back onto the digits in her cunt. How you’re dragging her underwear down her thigh, pulling your cock into your fist and twisting her leg around your waist until finally, you press yourself right up against the heat radiating from her cunt.
“I’m going to take good care of you, Minju, don’t worry, I’ll fuck this pussy of yours just right. I'm going to make you shake and cum all over me.”
“Please.” Fuck, she looks at you sincerely - no games, no bullshit - pupils so very blown out with want, with need. You watch her adorable mouth uptick into this faint lazy smile as she tilts her head into your collarbone, lips parting slightly to remind you: “as rough as you fucking want-” 
And you sink right in. 
It’s all skin-on-skin as Minju practically collapses in your arms; pushing deep past her soaking entrance - your hips slotting together just so, cock engulfed by her tight heat. Minju fucking wails when you drag back from her cunt, slow - so, so agonizingly slow.
You let her recover just a bit, watching her breathing quicken and shallow.
And the word on her lips becomes something reverent, the most indecent prayer, pleading please, please, please let me have it, please fuck me with your cock- 
You brace yourself, thrusting back in, and she doesn't wince this time, holding fast to you like you aren’t the one fucking her open and taking her apart.
“God, I - look, this perfect little fucking cunt, look at how you’re stretching around me, Minju,” you’re telling her - promising her really - all of which doesn't count for shit when, once, and then again, and a couple more times after that, your hips meet hers and she starts to break just so slightly around you. “I can’t believe - it’s like you were fucking made for my cock, baby, you’re taking me so fucking well.”
"Now, show me why - why the fuck everyone wants you - wants you to be their-" she's trying, in a fashion  all to her credit and her fault. She should probably care more about that raw, unhinged noise you’re making right into the crook of her neck when you bury yourself deeper into her pussy. But in the next moment, with another wild crash of your hips, the tables start to turn.
Slowly at first, and then all at once.
Because the sound you’re ripping from her chest when you start fucking her - truly fucking her - becomes far, far filthier than anything you've ever heard a girl like her make. All of it coaxed out from you working the edge of her pussy open, stretching her, hitting each and every sensitive spot inside her.
Minju tips her head back to stare at the popcorn ceiling and fluorescent lights, brow creasing in the middle, mouth gaping open. You find you might have missed something, when she moves to hold you down, hold you in place with an insistent leg, the back of her heel digging into your ass. As though there were somewhere you might possibly want to go.
It all comes down to something she's murmuring, quietly, harboring this smug lilt like you aren’t fucking her raw and senseless: how maybe the key to unlocking the rest of her potential isn’t all that dissimilar, not as off-brand as you may have been initially worried about. And the notion that both of you might actually be profiting off of this - how it shouldn’t sound as incredible as it does - is doing absolutely fucking nothing to slow the brutal pace you fall into.
"Fuck, just like that," and she's smiling, grinning really, nails biting into your nape - your name and curses and a fuck you or two falling out of her mouth as you pound each short breath right out of her chest. 
"The only talent I'm gonna need to show," she manages, dizzy, and with one arm hooking around your waist, she pulls the two of you close, right up against each other. The sound your skin makes, clapping against hers - her cunt tight, pulsing, quivering around you - "is my, my, my-"
Your thumb should have never left her clit, you realize, pressing down on where your cock is disappearing between her legs, pushing up against that bundle of nerves that can get her screaming. That’s how you’ll punctuate your end of the bargain, how you’ll make her cum and cum and cum -
"-talent for being such a-"
There's something ungovernable in you, something fumbling, as you find yourself drawn to her lips like a magnet - claiming them in a kiss that has you both growling with all the intensity you can muster, groaning as her jaw goes slack, surrendering to the fucking. To this hard, solid snap of your hips, a raw fuck forward that pushes Minju against the edge of the tabletop.
It doesn’t matter what she had wanted to say, though it must be evident how easy she can wind you up, and you do your best not to be too gentle. Pushing into her so rough that her breasts, oh-so-delicate, bounce up and down along her chest, nipples tight and rosy, begging to be tasted and played with.
You’re pressing your mouth on hers hard, fucking her harder - fingers digging into the flesh around her thighs and leaving marks and memories, all these reminders you’ll be sure to come back to.
But the fact is that this is your girl in so many ways: needy and a dream in all her curves, and how her waist rocks back, her body fitting so perfectly against yours - you're hooked on all of it. On her - she is temptation made real, in blood and bone and soft, supple skin, so exquisitely touchable, just like the sound that she makes, high and tittering when your thumb starts to work her clit over; each swirl and figure eight sending a jolt through her nerves and straight back into your own spine. It's difficult - hard to focus, you find - when all her exposed skin has these drops of sweat standing in saltwater relief, how it rolls down the plane of her chest and disappears where her waist flares wide.
Minju turns her cheek, mouthing falling open, and asks with a certain helpless pleading, “yes, can you-”
she sighs,
“right there,”
she hiccups,
“please, again,”
she begs,
“again, harder, i’m so close-”
Not before long, the desk is scraping loudly across the carpet, moving right into the next office over, all from where you have your hand trapping her voice back in her throat, palm over where she’s practically sobbing for you to let her cum. 
From where you’ve got her locked in tight, lifting her up into your arms, into some perverse, unspoken promise to carry her the rest of the way. To do with her whatever you want.
"I'm going to show you," you're gritting out, "exactly how a professional handles their star, the girl at the center of it all, their top draw - and it's so easy, isn't it? This is - fuck, sweetheart - you're nothing more than a - just a desperate little cockslut who's aching to cum, and it's good - oh so, fucking-"
When that next shiver courses down the length of her perfect form, it's entirely because of you, when her legs are still locked and clamped over you like this, as she sputters and babbles, totally cock-addled and barely managing a coherent thought. “Please, sir, please, fuck-”
And then a keening, sounding low, lost.
“Sir. Please, sir, please just - I just wanna-" Her lips are shaping all these words that never quite materialize - because her cunt is slick, the whole of it hotter and softer than anything else in this goddamn room. Maybe anything else in this whole building. Or in the entire world. It makes her whimper and ache, her voice rising and rising, belting out, need it, need it, please let me cum -
Which -
Minju, oh god, Minju cums, and you are fucked sideways to hell and beyond when her whole body convulses, shakes, every single part of her contracting, contracting - all at once - the way her hands claw desperately onto the blades of your shoulders as the room gets taken up with the scent of her; the sounds she's making are fucked and filthy. She starts to become undone as you double your pace, aiming true - thrusting, pounding, nailing Minju right into the finish.
“Minju, sweetheart, I’m going to cum in you,” you tell her, and it’s not even a question, or a concern. You’re dictating, not negotiating when you say it to her again, when you tell her you’re going to fill her perfect pussy so full with your cum, she'll be hung up on it for weeks.
One long, stretched out moan is all it could ever take; a split second, where everything runs blindingly hot, and you bury yourself as deep into her pussy as you possibly can.
Cumming so much, spilling out deep inside - this heavy flood of cum that pools warmly at the back of her cunt and fills every corner of Minju - she whines and sobs and tells you it's too much, please, all this hot and thick white cum pumping right into her -
As you throb into her, she's having a hard time saying anything beyond your name, actually, because if anyone can, if anyone would, if Minju can trust anyone and anything in this world more, it would be you.
Her chest shudders and shudders, and she kisses you in a vain effort to quiet her own body, to quiet yours. She has all this faith she's pouring right down your throat as you rock the last of your orgasm into her twitching heat, spilling and spilling and spilling, not caring about the wetness leaking onto the carpet. Not bothering to mask the obscene slickness, how everything gets completely fucking sopping between the two of you.
When she's practically drooling over you, eyelids growing heavy and fluttering, Minju sags heavily into the bend of your arms. In that shallow heaving and gasping for air that bathes the both of you - blissed the hell out, a lazy tangle of limbs - and without warning she turns to speak into your neck, her breath cooling, like a whisper of a dream:
“Okay, and already… I guess this isn’t entirely-”
“Completely terrible,” you offer after you swallow the dryness in your mouth.
Minju smiles into your shoulder. “And sir, in the spirit of honesty and transparency, I think I - I think I really did want - this - you - the entire thing…”
You stop her there, right in the middle of that particular train wreck. A drop in your voice, and the message is clear, when your mouth works its way to hers.
(No more of her talking like that.
Besides, she looks even better on your lips like this, and fuck, doesn’t Minju taste like you will have to remember, like a little bit like desperation, but only in the way that it has you both completely hopeless, hanging on to every whimper as your cock slides lazily about her well-fucked pussy, a bit deeper, a bit further.)
Like there is something far beyond professionalism guiding the hand with which you hold her hip and let her ass spill through the gaps of your fingers.
It’s all mixed up, how in this exact moment you figure this is a terrible, terrible idea, the worst kind of agreement, this pact - because no one could look at you, could look at either of you and have any doubts in mind now. But you can see it, how you’ll both wear this little agreement like the most beautiful stain in your histories. Even though it might, conceivably, cost one or both of you dearly at some point in time. 
And yet, still.
"Will you - can I - can you..."
She's clinging onto you with all her remaining energy, like she wants to see it through.
But her eyes - the poor thing - her expression is melting into this haze, her face contorted in something like pain and something else entirely: a different kind of satisfied glimmer. It's almost unreadable how that sharp mouth softens at the edges as her cunt gives this small flutter over the head of your cock, as you pump her so full, threatening to overflow.
And in your ear, you catch this little whisper. It says, “please, let me show you,” she's practically purring, “let me, let me - I'm gonna clean you up now, lick my cum right off you.”
It's true. Minju can act and perform and pose and make faces, for a shit ton of people - but she’ll play-act any facade you might ask her to, and she'll do it for you - because, this time around, all you ask her is this:
To be yours.
To be a good girl for you, an obedient little thing, in your private audience, away from the cameras and the lights, away from everyone.
When her knees hit the carpet, she is perfectly between your legs, palms on your hips and fingers splaying out against you.
And when she tries her damnedest like this, no one should bother ever pretending to think differently - least of all, you - and certainly, not while your cock is hardening again in the wet heat of her mouth, under the curl of her tongue, the gentle touches of her fingers -
How can anyone ever bring themselves to tell her that she isn't completely, indisputably the greatest.
(The very, fucking best.
And in every other way: the woman of your dreams. A woman, you realize, you ought to endeavor to keep, in all manners, and forever.
Minju, who could probably do anything, and you, who just might be able to give it to her.)
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post-punk-revival · 4 months ago
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Hi this is a positivity post regarding alterhuman diet dysphoria versus actual biology
(unless you already know these things)
To herbivore nonhumans who don't want to/can't do a vegan or vegetarian diet but feel dysphoric about being able to digest meat:
Herbivorous animals are not unable to digest meat.
Animal matter is actually easier for a body to process than plant matter, and herbivorous species need very complex digestive systems in order to support their lifestyles. This is why cows have four stomachs; why horses practically go into critical system failure if they get even a little bit sick. Animals that live mostly by grazing actually still do need nutrients that carnivores and omnivores get through their natural diets, which is why farming supply stores sell salt licks for animals. In the wild herbivores will quite often find ways to sneak some meat into their diets by eating bugs or small vertebrates, if you didn't already know about the fun fact of deer eating baby birds. "Obligate herbivore" meaning an animal that can ONLY physically digest plants is not a real ecological term the way "obligate carnivore" meaning animal that can ONLY physically digest meat is, though you might see it in other usages (i.e., referring to an animal that relies on a plant-based diet for all of its nutrients).
If a wild deer was given access to human society, they would probably not opt for veganism for connection with their true species; they would more likely appreciate having a way to get sodium so easily. This isn't to shame anyone who does choose a vegan/vegetarian diet for species euphoria reasons, but more to reassure folks who can't, you aren't less of an herbivore.
To carnivore nonhumans who feel dysphoric that their body can't digest raw meat like wild carnivores can:
It can!
The reason you don't want to be eating raw meat like a wolf or stoat or monitor lizard is because you will get sick or you will contract a parasite, which might sound like just a different reason to feel disconnected from your species, but here's the main two things:
1. The actuality is that wild wolves and stoats and monitor lizards DO get sick and contract parasites. This is often how wolves and stoats and monitor lizards die in the wild and why ones in captivity, being fed parasite-free meat and having illnesses treated, live longer. There are raw meats you can eat safely, you just have to know where they're sourced from and that they're guaranteed not to have risks! That's why sushi is a thing, and why people say you can technically eat raw cut (not ground) beef but not pork or chicken. Cooked meat is also often tastier and easier for the body to process (cit.: Grug et al. 780,000 BCE) so that's why humans have loved their medium-well steak since they came up with it. And 2. wild predators are "able to eat raw meat" mostly because they killed it, so it's fresh and hasn't been sitting around able to pick up bacteria, the way raw meat you get at a grocery store would have. This is why a lot of prey animals have a "play dead" defense mechanism: most predators do not want to eat something that's already dead, because it might get them sick.
If a wild owl was given access to human society, they would probably not desire only the rawest of meats for connection with their true species; they would more likely appreciate having access to food that had all the pathogens cleaned and/or scorched out of it.
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devsgames · 9 months ago
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"Is Tumblr Blaze Worth It For Promoting My Indie Game?" - a Postmortem
Lately I've been thinking about marketing and promotion of my games and wanting to explore new avenues. Tumblr Blaze was one of those things I wanted to dip my toes into a bit to understand how it works and if it has potential for advertising my sort of stuff. Like as not, there's no point in making games if nobody actually plays them after all!
Conversely I have also heard bad things about Tumblr Blaze; that it's not very targeted, the reach is fairly limited, and people on this site generally hate anything that is Blazed to them.
I wanted to test all these waters a bit to see if it's something worth investing in, and share what I found for my own benefit and the benefit of others. Finding various info on topics like this for indie dev can be a pain, so why not share my findings?
The Plan and Goal
While Centauri Dark is still in development and is the thing I actually want to advertise more of right now, Bombing!! 2 is already out and is much more marketable with some cool art made by community members. I think as a first impression it tends to show well, so I decided to make my test post with that to get exposure to it and see how it goes.
My goal was mostly to see what a Blaze post does for advertising a launched indie game and how much "eyes on" it actually gets in terms of actual engagement.
Posting
From the outset I knew I wanted to make a post that 1) wasn't annoying to people just looking at the webbed site 2) featured a call to action of some kind I could measure 3) wouldn't break the bank.
Here's what I came up with:
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The intention was to flash some cool looking art to grab their attention, explain what they're looking at, and then link the game a couple of times while mentioning "Buy or Wishlist" for good measure as a call to action.
Since Bombing!! 2 is such an art-forward game, I found the coolest art pieces made by community members that felt the most "Tumblr" to match the audience, and would also show off the range of art you could make in the game. I also wanted to make it personal, like me writing a message to whoever would read it instead of something that sounded like a standard ad. Generally I think it was a fairly reasonable little post that catches some interest and doesn't overstay too much of a welcome. What I think also helps is it's explicitly a "hey this might interest you" sort of framing (as opposed to a more "why am I even seeing this" sort of post you tend to get from Blaze sometimes).
I also think it's worth emphasizing that writing a posted explicitly intending to be Blazed was a much stronger approach than just Blazing some random post I had made for my own followers months ago, because I could align it to my promotional goals. It also assumed that random people on the Internet would be the ones seeing my post, and not the followers and friends who already know me and my work.
Blazing
As I looked into Blaze early on there was actually a few key things I wasn't fully aware of about the system.
It guarantees a minimum amount of views
It guarantees it will be Blazed for a minimum of 24 hours no matter how many views
You pay a single base rate for the whole campaign (great compared to some ads which tend to price based on views/engagement).
You can define an audience explicitly (some info that was floating around lead me to believe this wasn't the case).
Campaigns come in a few amounts:
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I paid for the 2nd tier; $17 USD for a campaign, which amounts to $25 CDN. I wanted to go a little more into it than the lowest tier offered, since I figured the lowest wouldn't give me as much data as I would've liked and I wanted to know what to reasonably expect should I decide to do it again in the future.
Since Bombing!! 2 sells for ~$20USD I also figure if the Blaze campaign prompts at least two people to buy the game then the Blaze would have paid for itself.
Blaze lets you use tags to define which audiences you want to reach. Unfortunately it doesn't let you view that data after you've applied it, but the tags I chose were generally anyone who spoke English and has an interest in Digital Artist or Video Game circles.
The campaign ran for 24 Hours, starting yesterday and ending today.
The Results
I definitely noticed a sharp uptick in engagement during the campaign! It hit the target audience of ~7k around one hour into the campaign, after which point I noticed engagement take a sharp decline.
Here's the Blaze campaign analytics provided by Tumblr (which was also very helpful to have):
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So it seems ~12.5k views from Blaze, ~370 likes, ~80 reblogs, 5 shares elsewhere. The post itself has ~520 notes, so I assume there's some reblogging and liking happening from beyond the Blaze campaign that isn't pictured here. The good thing is that despite having reached its 7k target after only 1 hour, it continued to circulate and be Blazed until 24 hours later. Eventually the post made it to ~12k views overall, which was nearly double the amount promised by the campaign - I attribute this mostly to a strong post/target audience/subject matter and I'm sure it's not standard.
Here's the general velocity of engagement around when the post was Blazed:
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It jumped much more than I honestly expected, but you can tell Blaze seemed to put it in front of people's faces more than my regular posts do. You can see it drops off sharply as I hit the quoted amount as well, back down to the normal amount of engagement I get on Tumblr.
But this stuff isn't really what I was looking for; I was looking for sales and keeping an eye on 'conversions' - or how many users followed my call to action because of the post. Likes and stuff are fine and cool, but how many people bought or wishlisted the game on Steam as a result of seeing the post on Tumblr?
Tumblr and Blaze obviously have no way of telling me this, so I'm looking to Steam to show me changes there.
Here's what Steam shows me happened to the Bombing!! 2 views yesterday:
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That's not nothing! This shows the last month's worth of traffic to the Bombing!! 2 page, and that number was at least double yesterday as it was regularly. It's very cool to know a number of people did actually click through to the game page in order to view the game from the Blaze post.
But the real REAL question is how many bought or wishlisted the game because of this post?
I'll start with Sales, on a graph of 1 month of data:
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Flat line :( Which is fine though, as the game wasn't on Sale and was just reaching people for the first time. I didn't honestly expect any immediate sales from this, and was more focused on other engagement anyways. Honestly I would be surprised if someone saw the game on a Blaze post and bought it immediately. I mean it's good but it's probably not THAT good!
Now to Wishlists, which can be a good indicator of who might likely buy your game in the future. Basically if someone has added a game to their wishlist, there's reason to believe they might buy it in the future, which is good for your game.
Here's the Wishlists for Bombing!! 2 from the last month:
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That's 23 Wishlists in one day! That's roughly ~18 Wishlists more than an average day!
It's hard to know if some of these are because of the post or just a statistical fluke. However, when compared to previous trends on the game page that's quite a noticeable difference. It means even if no one bought it now, they were interested enough to add it to their shortlist. Looking at it another way, if two people who Wishlisted decided to buy the game in the future the campaign will have paid for itself.
Conclusions
I think like any advertising if you go into it with a plan in mind and try to build something around a specific action, Blaze seems pretty worth it to me especially if I just want to get eyes on something. On top of the obvious data telling me people were interested in the game, there was a few folks who just plain complemented the game or acknowledged it 'was the first Blaze post they were actually interested in', which felt worth it in it's own qualitative sort of way. It's also worth noting my game sells for $20USD, so the margins are large enough that making it back isn't too challenging.
I think having an idea of the message I wanted to send really helped, and I'm sure I'd happily do this again with a larger audience and another plan (and probably will do it for when Centauri Dark releases).
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vampirejuno · 22 days ago
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Remember that discworld dream I had the other day? Well, lads.... I wrote it. At the encouragement of @catstrophysics, @lilenariinpink and @theygotlost, I present to you...
Something Fishy
His Grace, His Excellency, Sir Samuel Vimes the Duke of Ankh, Blackboard Monitor, sighed emphatically and tried to shoulder his way through the throng. Sator Square was packed with people. Never before in his life, he reflected, had he ever seen such a crowd turn up at six in the bloody morning to watch what was, essentially, a man tossing a dead fish onto the ground. Is this what passes for entertainment these days? he thought bitterly. We used to be a great city when it came to entertainment. After some further consideration of past greatness, he stopped, shook his head, and silently offered praise to whatever god was responsible for making sure it stayed in the past.
It had been a little over a month since the Fish Craze, and already Vimes wished he could permanently ban the import of all seafood into the city. Nobody remembered what had started it, but the fad had spread faster than wildfire, with no fashion-brigade to stop the madness. Everyone had taken it up. Even perfectly reasonable people, the kind that sneered at their grannies for fretting over a broken mirror, would, in all sincerity, say things like, “Thank goodness for another Right Day, I could use the luck”, or, more frequently, “No wonder it all went tits up, it was a Left Day”.
Vimes failed to see the appeal. The whole process consisted of taking a fish (preferably a sardine, though most made do with herring or, in desperate times, even anchovies), tossing it in the air, and checking which side up it landed. At first, everyone did it individually. This had led to much disagreement and, eventually, an event that would go down in history as “Most Organic Weapons Riot”. The watchmen who’d been on duty that night were given two days off to try and wash the smell out of their uniforms.
The following day, the Patrician had announced the instatement of an Official Fish Thrower, which soon turned into “the Offishal Tosser”, or simply “the Tosser”, and whose entire job it was to go into Sator Square every morning, toss a sardine for the city, and announce to the enraptured masses what sort of day they were going to have. It was rumored that the Tosser was a retired magician who had specialized in sleight of hand, and that he ensured the fish always landed precisely according to the Patrician’s specifications. Knowing Vetinari, Vimes thought, the man probably has a spreadsheet planned out for a month in advance.
His musings were interrupted by a current of movement in the crowd, which parted hastily to reveal a figure with a tray.
“Right Fish! Get your Right Fish! Guaranteed Day goes Right! Turn your day ‘round with just one toss!”
Vimes sighed. Only one man would try to sell you fish at the Offishal Tossing.
“Morning, Throat,” he said distantly. There was a commotion at the front of the crowd as people tried to dislodge someone from the Tosser’s podium. It looked like an Omnian preacher had taken advantage of the audience to spread the good word to the unenlightened masses, whether they liked it or not.
“A good morning to you, Commander! Can I interest you in some nice sardines? Three for tuppence, and that’s cutting my own throat!”
Vimes risked a glance at the tray as Ankh-Morpork’s least successful merchant approached him in a hopeful sidle. It was laden with row upon row of little strangely misshapen fish. Picking one up and turning it over in his fingers, Vimes saw the reason for this. Someone had taken some pains to cut them in two lengthwise, discarded all the left halves, and rejoined the things by gluing two right halves together with some mysterious sticky substance. He put it back down and inconspicuously wiped his hand on his trousers. Like many of Dibbler’s products, it was precisely what you paid for.
“Sardine? Seems more like smelt to me.”
“Yes, very fragrant, indeed,” said the merchant without missing a beat. “Perhaps some fish’n’chips, then, Commander? Only ten pence for our brave lads in the Watch!”
I don’t think I’m that brave, Vimes thought. Aloud, he said, “Is that where the left halves go, then?”
“I don’t know what you mean, sir. Ah, hello, miss, you look like you could do with a nice nourishing breakfast! Some delicious fish’n’chips to start the day off right, how about it?”
The crowd was so packed now – hah, like sardines in a can – that Vimes gave up all hopes of pushing through it. Most of these people had turned up early to get a good spot and were now whiling the minutes away until the much-awaited Tossing. There was a conversation taking place just behind him, where an argument of Morporkians was standing around, doing what it did best. The current object of ire appeared to be a young man’s drawling voice, which was questioning Tradition.
“-don’t see why we couldn’t put a new spin on it. This is…too restrictive, like.”
“How’s that, then?”
“It’s just awfully specific, is all I’m saying.”
“What are you babbling about, Harold?” responded a higher, slightly irritated voice that instantly filed itself away as “unhappy wife” in Vimes’s copper brain.
“I mean, why’s it got to be a sardine? Why not a, uh,” the young man cast around for seafood-related ideas, “a crab, or something?”
“Come now, that’d never work,” a stout little man next to him laughed good-naturedly. He was smoking a pipe and had the look of someone who used words like “indubitably” and “perfunctory” despite only having a very approximate idea of what they meant. “Crabs are not remotely suitable for the task.”
“Oh, is that right?”
“Well-known fact,” nodded the crustacean connoisseur. “Divination is congenitally tied to the noble art of fishing, you know. It’s called forecasting, after all.”
There were more nods and approving laughs. The man puffed on his pipe with a chuckle, clearly satisfied with the pun. Vimes managed not to punch him.
“Y’know, that sounds about right. Never ‘eard of someone telling the future with a crab,” an old woman nodded wisely. “You never know where you are with crabs. Now, fish, that’s reliable.”
The group pondered this.
“Look at it this way. We’ve had, what, twenty-three Left Days so far – not counting Floppy Friday* – and every single time, somethin’ bad happened.”
The others murmured their agreement. There were several thoughtful comments recounting various misfortunes that the participants had suffered on past Left Days. Vimes pinched the bridge of his nose.
“This is Ankh-Morpork, something bad is always happening.”
“Right, that’s what I’m saying,” nodded the young man, who hadn’t been saying that. “Besides, plenty of perfectly good fortune tellers in the city. A man tossing a sardine on the cobbles is not a valid method of divination, in my humble opinion.”
“Harold, you are embarrassing me.”
“Oh, come off it, Mathilda, you got by just fine without any of this business for thirty years of your life. Now it’s all Sardines this, Herring that, Why don’t we get an ornamental trout lake-”
At that moment, the Offishal Tosser stepped onto his little podium, and the couple was shushed into outraged silence. 
* * *
“Come on, before ol’ Stoneface gets here. You know he doesn’t approve of this sort of thing.”
The Pseudopolis Yard watch house was buzzing with excitement uncharacteristic for six in the morning on a Wednesday. Most of the night shift had signed off and the day guard were trickling one by one into the main room. An ever-growing group was clustered in a vague circle, in the center of which Corporal Nobbs could just be made out (if that was your idea of a good time). The men all had the vague air of middle school students asking their teacher about his dog in order to delay math class by another five minutes.
“Might that have anything to do with the fact that, last time, it took three hours and a bucket of armour polish to get the smell out of the floorboards?” Angua smiled. It was a very friendly smile.
“Right, sarge, but… We-ell, you’re…”
“Yes?” The smile widened.
Constable Fernsby shifted uncomfortably. There were a few sniggers. It was true that werewolves had considerably sharper senses than humans and would therefore be able to smell a fish long after it had departed the material plane, but, the sniggers seemed to indicate from a safe distance, you didn’t go around pointing this out to them. Fortunately for the boy, he was saved from any further smiles by a very timely interruption in the form of the Captain.
“Good morning! Everyone had a nice rest, I hope? Ready for another day of work?”
Carrot strutted in, wearing his usual genuine smile and gleaming armor. There was a not-so-subtle change in the atmosphere; a sudden nonchalantness enveloped the room. All around him, the squad commenced their very best impression of the Walls And Ceiling Inspection Division. One or two of the simpler lads even clasped their hands behind their backs and started to whistle**. Carrot sighed.
“Alright, what did you do?... And don’t look at me like that, I can see something smells fishy here.”
This was greeted with one or two coughs and a sudden interest in last night’s heaps of paperwork. Only Lance-Constable Whippet, who had joined three days ago and was, therefore, not yet acquainted with the minutiae of his commanding officers’ tempers, and sergeant Detritus, who could be a little slow on the uptake, met the captain’s inquisitive gaze. Finally, he looked to Angua for help. She shrugged meaningfully.
“Well… er,” said Sergeant Colon, who felt obliged to make some sort of contribution on behalf of his insubordinates, “we was just…engaging in some…cultural activities, captain. To boost morale for the day, like. Er.”
Carrot sniffed at the air – never a very good idea in a watch house, where, at any given point in time, half the men had just returned from patrolling and the other half were emerging from the locker room – and understanding began to dawn.
“Ah, I see. And I expect, Sergeant, that such…team-building activities are best carried out without the involvement or presence of, say, senior officers?”
“Could be, sir. I’m sure you’d know best, sir.” Colon’s big round face was a picture of cherubic innocence.
“Well, in that case, I believe Sergeant Angua and I have a case to attend to. Corporal Thighbiter up at Dolly Sisters needed some help with that Money Trap Lane break-in...”
“Actually, he just sent word the other day – it turned out Mister Mason had got drunk and lost his key again and crashed through the oomph-” Constable Ping bent over slightly from several democratic elbows in the ribs. With a true officer’s tact, Carrot feigned temporary deafness. He held the door for Angua, who detached herself from the wall with one last pleasant smile that could’ve cut steel, and the two stepped out briskly into the safety of fresh air***.
After they had gone, the squad waited a few moments and then turned back to the center of the room, where someone had dragged a mysteriously stained stool from the canteen when the kitchen lady wasn’t looking. Corporal Nobbs was shuffled towards it with extreme care.
The little man**** dusted himself off and scrambled onto the rickety stool. As the other watchmen leaned in closer, he reached into the unspeakable depths of his inner pockets and, with a certain air of ceremony, produced…
“A sardine!”
“Cor, is that real?”
“Dat a very small fish.”
“Where did you get it, corp?”
Nobby basked in the approving murmurs of his colleagues. It had, indeed, been a challenge to find – sardines were very rare these days, outside of the occasional coveted freak shower – but he was nothing if not resourceful.
“We-ell, it weren’t easy, that’s true,” he rolled a dog-end from one corner of the mouth to the other, savoring the moment. He rarely commanded so much attention without attracting a variety of insults and the occasional ballistic eel. “Pays to know the right people, o’course. I have connections, me. Contacts. Ties, even.”
“Aye, but that floral one you nicked last week really don’t suit you very well.”
“Oh, that’s rich coming from you, Stronginthearm. All your accessories are made of chainmail! Everyone knows jewel tones are for winter, anyway.”
Colon raised a placating hand. “All right, all right, lads, no need to get all up in arms just ‘cos some folks are a little…stylistically challenged.”
“Thanks, sarge.”
“I meant you, Nobby.”
The corporal threw up his arms. “I go to all this trouble,” he wailed, “I talk to people, I find a contraband seafood shipment from Klatch, I explain matters to the fishmonger – on my day off, too, might I add – I procure a real, genuine, only-slightly-nibbled actual sardine, and this is the thanks I get?”
The watchmen watched, transfixed, as he flourished the fabled fish in their faces. It had, indeed, already been chewed on; the tail was sticking out rigidly and the whole thing smelled as if it was a few weeks beyond consumption, but it was a sardine nonetheless. Most of the lads, coming from humble (and sometimes humbling) backgrounds, felt slightly awed at the idea of Tossing a fish that these days was available only to the very richest observers of the fad. It was, they felt, unbecoming to wave it around like a paper flag at a parade. The damn things tended to be slippery. Probably would be bad luck, they figured, if it was flung down by accident; who knew what sort of fortune that would foretell?
“Where’s the appreciation, I ask you?” Nobby continued in woeful tones. “Every time I’ve Tossed a fish for you lot, it’s landed Right! Now, how many of you can say that, eh?”
The watchmen exchanged doubtful glances.
“Er… Well, you never let anyone else do it, corp,” Ping reasoned. “You just nicks the fish and eats it afterwards.”
“Oh, now, that does it! I won’t stand here and be slandered at!”
“Woah there, Nobby, watch that sardine-”
“If you’re gonna be like that, then I’m not doing it. And good luck finding someone who’ll do it as well as me!”
“Careful with that-”
“And I’m taking the sardine.”
“-not the tail-”
 “You can beg, but I won’t change my mind, and that’s that!” Nobby flung out his hand in a grandiose gesture. Unfortunately, it was the wrong hand.
Time slowed to a crawl. Every head in the room swiveled as one, following the trajectory of the airborne fish. It sailed head first towards the front door, which was creaking, doorknob turning, and slowly, slowly opening…
* * *
The Offishal Tosser tossed the fish, which landed damply. There was a satisfying splat. The crowd held its breath as the first few rows near the podium craned to see.
“Today is the fourth of April in the year of the Significant Woodlouse, and it is a… Left Wednesday!” the man proclaimed.
A disappointed groan spread through the crowd. Slowly, people started dispersing with occasional complaints, casting sour looks at the offending fish. Here and there, members of the Gamblers’ Guild were exchanging coins.
Vimes shook his head again as the grumbling current carried him through the square, into the Plaza of Broken Moons, and out to the Patrician’s palace. At last he disengaged himself from the throng and elbowed his way towards the Brass Bridge. It wasn’t far to the watch house from here, but he still picked up the pace. Despite not having official working hours, Vimes liked to get there early in the morning, just as the day shift was coming in, to get a headstart on ignoring his paperwork.
As he walked, his copper mind took over and he mentally leafed through the agenda of the day. Let’s see, what was there… He had that audience with Vetinari at eleven, probably concerning last night’s diplomatic dinner – not that it was Vimes’s fault that he saw the unlicensed thief and that the Klatchian ambassador happened to be standing there, and anyway who drinks red wine while wearing a white robe… Then the interview with the Times at noon… Then briefing the lads on the unsolved contraband seafood case… Then he’d have to do something about the river division, they can’t just keep sinking the damn boat, this is getting ridiculous…
A distant glint caught Vimes’ eye as he stepped off the bridge. Carrot’s shiny breastplate could be seen from a mile away on a clear day, and the captain was, indeed, proceeding along the river with Angua in tow. 
What the hell are they doing out? They’re not on patrol today…
Briefly, he considered catching up to them, but then dismissed the idea. They were only a couple streets away from the watch house, and Carrot seemed relaxed enough, stopping to chat with every other passer-by in his usual manner. No emergency, then. On the other hand, they had a batch of new recruits at the main office, the gods alone knew what those yahoos would be getting up to without a senior officer present. And under Colon’s command…
A few minutes later, Vimes was rounding the corner of Lower Broadway and trotting up the steps of Pseudopolis Yard. There seemed to be quite a commotion going on inside; he’d heard the shouting from half a block away. With his hand on the doorknob, mentally preparing his best Not Yelling Voice, he pushed the door open…
…and very briefly saw something shiny flying full speed at his head. Before he could react, the thing clanked off his helmet, bounced on a nearby desk and, finally, lodged itself between the floorboards with a sproinnnng.
Silence fell like a gavel. A dozen horrified watchmen gaped at their Commander, the life quickly draining out of their eyes*****. Sergeant Colon’s face, pale as the moon and just as round, tried unsuccessfully to hide behind his high collar.
Wordlessly, Vimes approached the thing stuck between the floorboards. He crouched down. He examined it. He gave it a tentative flick. It made a noise not unlike a ruler twanging off the side of a table, or a very thin sheet of metal being shaken vigorously. After a moment’s contemplation, he felt moved to speak.
“Well, lads, I don’t think Left and Right suffices anymore. Seems we ought to add a third Day to the list.”
Ahhh. Relief rose off the squad like morning mist. Their laughter had the strained quality that came with trying very hard to pretend that whatever was happening was entirely intentional. At this point, they’d have laughed at anything, as long as it meant Ol’ Stoneface was Not Yelling At Them. Whatever they may think to themselves, the one motivation that all coppers in all the worlds have in common is to Not Get Yelled At.
“Bottom Day, sir?” someone suggested. There was another bout of slightly forceful sniggers.
“Er… Perhaps not.” Vimes gave the fish a few fruitless tugs and gave up. “Alright, someone get this damn thing out of there and, uh…”
“Throw it away, sir?”
“No, good gods, you could hurt someone… Look, just get rid of the…fish and we’ll say no more about it. Fred, a word upstairs?”
With the watch house returning slowly to its normal daily bustle, Vimes went up to his office and sat down wearily at his desk, which was hidden underneath an impressive pile of paper. He’d signed a few dozen forms and…dealt with half a fireplace’s worth of complaint letters last night, but the stacks looked suspiciously bigger this morning. They entirely refused to melt away under his glare.
“Alright, what is this bloody nonsense? I thought I’d made it clear I don’t want any Tossing in the watch house,” he said to Colon, once the man had huffed and puffed his way up the stairs.
“Well, Mister Vimes, I just thought I’d indulge the lads this once. Raise their spirits with some good ol’ cultural team building. For tradition’s sake and all.”
“Tradition? It’s not been two months, Fred!”
“We-ell, they’ve taken to it, sir. Besides, you can’t deny we’ve had crimes happen on every single Left Day since the Offishal Tossings started.”
“Good grief, you could say that about every bloody day since the founding of the city! I thought you weren’t a superstitious man, Fred.”
“No, sir, but the fish don’t lie,” said Colon fervently.
“Ugh. Next thing you know, the bloody Times will be printing it alongside the bloody date in their bloody papers.”
There was a guilty silence.
Vimes stared at the sergeant’s carefully blank face. A single droplet of sweat was slowly making its way down the man’s forehead. The beady little eyes flickered momentarily to a relatively unoccupied corner of the desk.
With a sinking dread, Vimes followed his gaze and beheld a newspaper lying there on top of the forlorn paperwork, all neatly rolled and still crisp from the press. Belatedly, he noticed the smell of fresh ink. At the top of the front page, a small print line proclaimed today’s date to be April 4th, Left Wednesday.
Five minutes later, sergeant Colon walked down the stairs and into a perfectly silent room full of watchmen. His face had the distant look of someone who had just seen a ghost, and was fairly sure everybody else had, too, but would be damned if he’d mention it first.
With nothing else to do, he cleared his throat. This seemed to break the spell; all at once, the room regained its normal level of noise as the coppers went back to their coppery activities. Only Nobby sidled closer and offered up a slightly bent cigar.
“What’s up with ol’ Stoneface today, sarge?”
“Dunno what’s gotten into him.” Colon took the cigar gratefully and lit it, trying not to think too hard about where it came from. “It’s this job, I expect. All this responsibility is wearing on his nerves.”
“Ah, right.”
“I mean, what’s so wrong with a little tradition once in a while, eh?”
“Beats me, sarge.”
“Doesn’t hurt no one, having some mores and values ‘round the place.”
“You never said a truer thing.”
“Ah, anyway, Mister Vimes is just overworked. Not his fault he’s got a bit of a cultural blind spot when he’s cranky,” Colon concluded magnanimously. “Maybe he could do with a coffee and a nice meal. I know I could… Say, Nobby, what’ve we got for breakfast in the cantine today?”
“Fish’n’chips, I think. Er… You alright there, sarge? …Sarge?”
* An unfortunate misunderstanding at the fishmonger’s that had led to the Offishal Tosser being handed a very live fish, foreboding a day of extreme mood swings for the populace.
** This is the social cue equivalent of climbing onto the roof at three in the morning and setting off a barrage of fireworks while waving an enormous fluorescent red flag. Not even a 6’6’’ dwarf could remain oblivious.
*** Only comparatively. This was Ankh-Morpork, after all.
**** Allegedly.
***** Except for Corporal Shoe, for whom it was a little late******.
****** heh.
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rhysdarbinizedarby · 1 year ago
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Our Flag Means Death season 2 shot a crucial scene in the Avatar 2 tank
A behind-the-scenes look at how Taika Waititi and Rhys Darby shot their big merman moment
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Our Flag Means Death, Season 2, Episodes 3]
Season 2 of David Jenkins’ pirate comedy-romance-drama Our Flag Means Death has finally premiered on Max, with an opening three-episode arc that’s guaranteed to get the series’ fandom buzzing. The third episode in particular ends with a sequence that feels like it was intentionally crafted to inspire the crowds of fan artists who have turned the series into an obsession. Polygon talked to the series’ VFX supervisor, David Van Dyke, about what went into shooting that sequence — and how James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water helped out.
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At the end of episode 3, Ed “Blackbeard” Teach (Taika Waititi) is in limbo after being assaulted and nearly killed by his crew. There, he meets his former captain Benjamin Hornigold (another of the series’ historical pirate characters, played by Mark Mitchinson), who tries to help him through his emotional crisis over being abandoned by Stede Bonnet (Rhys Darby). Except Hornigold mostly helps by pointing out Blackbeard’s failings, then tying a stone to his waist and throwing him off a cliff into the sea — where he sees a vision of Stede as a fish-tailed merman, coming to save him.
“Just so you know, Rhys and Taika did very well underwater,” Van Dyke told Polygon about shooting the scene. “Rhys is not an Olympic synchronized swimmer, but he’s a strong swimmer. They were both very comfortable underwater. They both did a really good job of being mermen.”
Van Dyke says he was originally asked whether he could do the scene with CG versions of the two men, for safety reasons. He explained that it was possible, “but that’ll cost millions and millions of dollars, and we don’t really have that.”
Instead, he ended up shooting the scene practically. Season 1 of Our Flag Means Death was shot on a soundstage in Los Angeles, but for season 2, production moved to New Zealand. That gave Van Dyke a lot of advantages in terms of shooting natural backdrops to use on the production’s giant virtual environment screen, and in using experienced crews from past special-effects-heavy productions, from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies to James Cameron’s Avatar movies.
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“There were definitely a few pieces that were serendipitously to our advantage,” Van Dyke says. “New Zealand was where they shot a lot of Avatar stuff, and there just so happens to be an enormous tank on the lot. There are a bunch of Avatar crew who are SCUBA certified, because they’ve been shooting in that tank forever. This was not something we had to figure out — we didn’t have to send a bunch of grips and lighting technicians off to SCUBA school. So they were there, they had really amazing underwater photography teams, and obviously a really good stunt team that was able to train up Taika and Rhys to make sure the scene was working.”
Van Dyke points to New Zealand’s thriving mermaid freediving community as a boon when it came to designing Darby’s merman outfit. “There are a lot of incredible mer-tails out there,” he said. “We were able to take those, and [costume designer Gypsy Taylor] and her team brought them together to make these beautiful physical pieces, so Rhys was able to actually sell it and do the performance underwater.”
For Van Dyke, the sequence really started with the cliff-jump sequence, which actually used considerably more CG than the underwater shots. “That cliff sequence was a great culmination of effects, merging physical photography and our LED wall, because you can’t really put those two guys on a thousand-foot cliff,” he said. “The insurance alone would be out of control. Also, we’re not really in the business of having people fall to their deaths.”
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The cliff sequence began with sequences shot off New Zealand’s Bethells Beach, using drones to capture images looking inward from the ocean and photogrammetry of a specific ledge for production designer Ra Vincent and the art department to reproduce in the studio.
“The wide shots use production plates of those cliffs, and the tighter shots use photography we shot specifically to build out the stitching of the cliff sequence,” Van Dyke said. “Hornigold and Blackbeard are standing on a cliff set. We tied in drone plates of the actual cliffs so we can see the ocean and really set up how terrifying [the drop would be]. Then he falls into the ocean, falls into our tank.”
Once Waititi was in the tank, the next step was the shot where the stone tied to a rope around his waist pulls him deep underwater. That part of the scene required more conventional, practical production trickery than the rest of the sequence.
“The tank is massive, but it’s not 300 feet deep. It’s pretty darn big, but it’s never big enough, as they say,” Van Dyke says. “So when Taika is being tugged by the rock, we actually shot that sideways. By turning the camera sideways, you get more length to the shot. The problem is the bubbles — they should be streaming off him and then rising to the surface, but if you’re going sideways, they’re going to come off him and then go up, perpendicular to him. So we took over with CG to make sure our bubbles were traveling toward where the surface was supposed to be.”
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The CG in the underwater sequence was mostly used to hide the lighting and rigging necessary to shoot it, Van Dyke says. “Anytime you’re shooting anything underwater, there’s gonna be a lot of gear. There’s no way you can get around that. So we’re making sure we have [convincing deep-sea] lighting and the bubbles. And then there’s his performance — that’s a real performance.”
For Van Dyke, the real complication was the costuming and makeup for both Darby and Waititi. “Taika’s wig — I was amazed that thing stayed on so long. It’s a long shoot. He was shooting all day, all weekend. But things stayed on. It’s a heavy weight. And Rhys is really working underwater, so his tail has to be working, so it all feels seamless.”
The shot in the underwater sequence that seems most likely to be a CG creation has both men just floating deep in the sea, facing each other above a seemingly endless abyss. Again, Van Dyke says, he used very little CG for that shot, and it was mostly to hide the tank walls.
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“In that case, we were not shooting sideways,” he said. “It’s essentially a locked shot. It was about getting them at the right depth underwater, and making sure the shafts of light above them were working properly. We don’t have to track as much, we don’t have all these moving elements, we don’t have to worry about where the bubbles are going. That one was really just about cleaning up the tank, doctoring out the sides of the shot, where we can see the water receding into blackness, then giving the base of the tank true depth, so it really feels like they’re suspended a hundred feet below the surface.
“Obviously, a fair amount of CGI and visual effects had to go into it. But at the same time, it was a moment where we really needed to let the story take over, and have the visual effects just get out of the way, man.”
The first three episodes of Our Flag Means Death season 2 are now streaming on Max.
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Source: Polygon
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chrolloluvr · 11 months ago
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May I request Mammon angst HCs please? Like the reader is possibly breaking up with him or something? (i love your HCs for mammon<3)
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Mammon Breaking Up Hcs
note: Thank you i'm so glad you like them pookie!! also yes i love this idea ❤️❤️
warnings: Cursing, creepy behavior, unbalanced power dynamic, killing. Not proofread!
Female!Reader, (no specific gender, so can be GenderNeutral!Reader)
It would be best to tell him over text, since he is guaranteed to throw a toddler like temper tantrum if you ever told him in person.
So you text him over text, what happens? He 100% thinks you're joking at first. He thinks you aren't being serious at all, and that wow babe, you might even be a bigger clown than I am.
But when he realized that you were being serious, he gets angry. How dare you? Why would you ever break up with him? He is the king of greed, he has trillions of dollars in the bank, so why don't you want to stay by his side? Did he do something? Did he hurt you? What happened? Baby, we can sort this out-
In a way, still doesn't think you are being serious, which is what he tries to tell himself. So he will let you leave, and will act like he doesn't need you.
Another author said this already, but he will 100% go through the stages of grief, (he will never go through acceptance, because in his mind, you will always come crawling back to him.)
He will be in denial for a very long time. Let's say you move out, and even start residing in another ring. He will send you texts. All. The. Time.
Your phone will mods likely have 103 Missed Calls, 986 Messages, and 37 Voicemails. He is crazy, and especially crazy for you. So when you don't respond to him, he does not understand why. He likes to think that you were just going on vacation for a while. He genuinely thinks you two are still together.
Anger- Once he sees that you have indeed moved on, and that he is no longer living in fantasy land, he gets extremely angry. His general mood spikes, he lashes out (wayyy more than he used to), and a-lot of his servants are scared to talk to him. Will absolutely keep bombarding you with texts every day. He will even get his servants to start texting you on his 100's of extra HellPhones.
Mamm 🕸️💚 11:34
Come hone ygu little cungt
Mamm 🕸️💚 11:35
ANSWERF ME.
Mamm 🕸️💚 11:35
Do ygu knoe how easily i can replaece yu
Mamm🕸️💚 11:36
Fine go shack uo with sorm dirty hoboes you little slut
Mamm 🕸️💚 11:36
I dont kneed u and youir mediocar holes
So yeah... thats just one example. He has so many spelling mistakes because he is typing so fast, and practically brekaing his phone from how angry he is.
But in reality he does need you. You are. the one thing that keeps him running. However he will never, over his dead body, ever admit that.
Bargaining- He will send things to your... new home... in gift baskets. Fizzarolli plushies, flowers, tickets to his live events, expensive jewelry, the list goes on. It gets to a point where (if you live in an apartment complex) People start stealing his gifts and start putting them up online to sell. (And they go for 10s of thousands of dollars.)
He send these to you so that you can hopefully come crawling back into his life, so that he can control you again.
At this point, you have most likely made it public about your distance between you and the sin. Your relationship was extremely public, and known by everybody.
He refuses to speak publicly, because he wants people to think he still controls you. And when i say your relationship was big, it was definitely the most talked about relationship in all of Hell. People will go nuts about you two breaking up. Another author said this as well, but people will go crazy with the comments.
"L Mammon fumbled so bad its actually wild."
"Bros got plenty other options 💀"
"Why tf would she/they break up w/ HIM???🤰"
"Now that hes single I call dibs 🙌"
You try your best to ignore the comments, but eventually you cant, its not just online, but in real life you feel cornered as well. You might even start to reconsider your departure with him. Which is exactly where he wants you.
Depression- He spirals into somewhat of an insecure man. He strives to be better. He ups his game for his big pageants, soon to be bigger, just to impress you.
He maaaay or may not have killed people in your favor. This is known, obviously, but his obsession along with his newfound insecurity has left him no choice but to show that if you dont want to come home, he will show you its safer than anywhere else.
Overall, if you do end up coming back to him, he is overjoyed with happiness, and will take extra precautions to ensure you wont ever walk out on him and his warm embrace again.
However if you end up never wanting anything to do with him, he will be devastated, but he will force himself to get over it. He is Mammon, he truly does not need you. In reality, you were somebody he felt an unexplainable feeling to protect. He absolutely can live without you, but for some reason, he feels like he cant. If somebody were to ever bring you up, he would lash out, and make his anger everybody's problem. He may get over you after a while, but he will never fully accept the fact that you left him.
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starcurtain · 1 year ago
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The Kinda Unhinged Ratiorine Fic I Want to Read
In an (admittedly very contrived) AU situation, Dr. Ratio finds out he's about to be cut out of his (mostly estranged) family's inheritance forever because of his complete lack of interest in continuing the family line. Which, all factors considered, does make perfectly logical sense. Investment of capital should go to the branch of the lineage most likely to benefit from it, and Cousin Tiberius has five sons and daughters already. Let the house and the trust fund go to them.
But the library.
There's absolutely no way Veritas could bear to be permanently parted from the staggering assemblage of paper volumes under his collected family's auspices. Not only would being separated from tomes so full of memories be heart-wrenching, but think of the devastating blow to his research! There are records in those archives that no other mortal eyes have ever gazed upon!
So there's only one solution for it: He needs to pass on his family name, immediately.
(Andddd the rest is under a read more because what is brevity?)
Problem 1: Veritas Ratio is very gay.
Problem 2: Statistically, single men have the lowest chance of being selected for adoption placement, and this Child Welfare Agent is looking at his alabaster head very, very strangely.
Think, Ratio, think. What is the most efficient way to solve such a tedious quandary?
The obvious first step is to increase his likelihood of being selected by the adoption agency, and the quickest way to do that is... Eureka! How elegant a design! He just needs to enter into a (temporary) committed and stable partnership to demonstrate a degree of domestic dedication and home-building prowess!
Problem 3: ...Where in the universe is he going to find a stable and committed man willing to marry him?
Ratio does not exactly possess the world's most endearing personality. He might... never have had any form of romantic relationship lasting past a one-night stand even, because it turns out most people don't like being scored a 2/10 on their technique during intercourse.
So he's probably not going to find a stable and committed man.
But... He might at least find someone willing--for the right price.
Enter Aventurine (stage left). He's as expensive as they come, the greatest reward saved for the highest bidder, but despite his festering ambitions, he's still trapped as nothing more than a high-class escort, owned by a company the IPC has on the books as selling everything but what they actually trade in: Avgin slaves.
Sigonians... The reputation--and sleazy men's curiosity--precedes him, and though he only has to get on his knees for the truly bold nowadays, he hasn't yet been able to make the ultimate gamble, pull the last string needed to finally gain his freedom: the freedom to live his life as he pleases--and to enact every ounce of vengeance he's been storing for decades like cards up his sleeves.
Until now.
Until an absolute madman shows up at the underground headquarters waving around an offer that no average person would possibly make: He wants to buy Aventurine and wed him.
(Because marrying a Sigonian thrall is a safe and sane thing that safe and sane people do.)
The offer is far too good to be trusted: A real marriage certificate but a perfectly fake marriage, a no-fault divorce once an adoption is finalized, and a guaranteed sponsor for his citizenship documents. A year or two of fake homemaking, this Veritas Ratio claims, and then Aventurine can walk away a completely free man, no strings--no chains--attached.
Well, Aventurine of the Myriad Stratagems has always held one skill dearer to his heart than any other: a crystal clear knowledge of when to fold--and when to go all in.
(...Problem 4: Amber Lord help him, Aventurine's new husband is the most irritating man in the entire universe.)
Alas, if only that was their biggest problem. Somewhere between learning to navigate the citizenship process, the adoption process, a truly unacceptable level of systemic racism, and also, increasingly, each other, Ratio and Aventurine discover that the circumstances of their lives might be far more entangled than they ever could have imagined from the beginning, and the same shadowy parties that profited off Aventurine's existence might have a vested interest in parting Ratio from valuable research secrets--permanently.
While struggling to maintain a charming and loving facade and struggling not to kill each other behind the scenes, Aventurine and Ratio also end up having to out-roll and out-plan a particularly dangerous enemy; something they can really only do together.
Or, tl;dr: Dr. Ratio chooses the most efficient but most unhinged method of finding a husband that intelligence could possibly contrive, only to determine that marrying a guy whose track record for unexplained deaths matches his track record for card counting really is the encyclopedic opposite of "committed and stable." Ridiculously enough, the trouble they get into is almost entirely Ratio's fault, the only one who is remotely convincing in front of the Child Welfare Agency is Aventurine, and sometimes it turns out the guy you married for the library ends up being the guy you married for life.
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canmom · 1 year ago
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Hypothetical Decentralised Social Media Protocol Stack
if we were to dream up the Next Social Media from first principles we face three problems. one is scaling hosting, the second is discovery/aggregation, the third is moderation.
hosting
hosting for millions of users is very very expensive. you have to have a network of datacentres around the world and mechanisms to sync the data between them. you probably use something like AWS, and they will charge you an eye-watering amount of money for it. since it's so expensive, there's no way to break even except by either charging users to access your service (which people generally hate to do) or selling ads, the ability to intrude on their attention to the highest bidder (which people also hate, and go out of their way to filter out). unless you have a lot of money to burn, this is a major barrier.
the traditional internet hosts everything on different servers, and you use addresses that point you to that server. the problem with this is that it responds poorly to sudden spikes in attention. if you self-host your blog, you can get DDOSed entirely by accident. you can use a service like cloudflare to protect you but that's $$$. you can host a blog on a service like wordpress, or a static site on a service like Github Pages or Neocities, often for free, but that broadly limits interaction to people leaving comments on your blog and doesn't have the off-the-cuff passing-thought sort of interaction that social media does.
the middle ground is forums, which used to be the primary form of social interaction before social media eclipsed them, typically running on one or a few servers with a database + frontend. these are viable enough, often they can be run with fairly minimal ads or by user subscriptions (the SomethingAwful model), but they can't scale indefinitely, and each one is a separate bubble. mastodon is a semi-return to this model, with the addition of a means to use your account on one bubble to interact with another ('federation').
the issue with everything so far is that it's an all-eggs-in-one-basket approach. you depend on the forum, instance, or service paying its bills to stay up. if it goes down, it's just gone. and database-backend models often interact poorly with the internet archive's scraping, so huge chunks won't be preserved.
scaling hosting could theoretically be solved by a model like torrents or IPFS, in which every user becomes a 'server' for all the posts they download, and you look up files using hashes of the content. if a post gets popular, it also gets better seeded! an issue with that design is archival: there is no guarantee that stuff will stay on the network, so if nobody is downloading a post, it is likely to get flushed out by newer stuff. it's like link rot, but it happens automatically.
IPFS solves this by 'pinning': you order an IPFS node (e.g. your server) not to flush a certain file so it will always be available from at least one source. they've sadly mixed this up in cryptocurrency, with 'pinning services' which will take payment in crypto to pin your data. my distaste for a technology designed around red queen races aside, I don't know how pinning costs compare to regular hosting costs.
theoretically you could build a social network on a backbone of content-based addressing. it would come with some drawbacks (posts would be immutable, unless you use some indirection to a traditional address-based hosting) but i think you could make it work (a mix of location-based addressing for low-bandwidth stuff like text, and content-based addressing for inline media). in fact, IPFS has the ability to mix in a bit of address-based lookup into its content-based approach, used for hosting blogs and the like.
as for videos - well, BitTorrent is great for distributing video files. though I don't know how well that scales to something like Youtube. you'd need a lot of hard drive space to handle the amount of Youtube that people typically watch and continue seeding it.
aggregation/discovery
the next problem is aggregation/discovery. social media sites approach this problem in various ways. early social media sites like LiveJournal had a somewhat newsgroup-like approach, you'd join a 'community' and people would post stuff to that community. this got replaced by the subscription model of sites like Twitter and Tumblr, where every user is simultaneously an author and a curator, and you subscribe to someone to see what posts they want to share.
this in turn got replaced by neural network-driven algorithms which attempt to guess what you'll want to see and show you stuff that's popular with whatever it thinks your demographic is. that's gotta go, or at least not be an intrinsic part of the social network anymore.
it would be easy enough to replicate the 'subscribe to see someone's recommended stuff' model, you just need a protocol for pointing people at stuff. (getting analytics such as like/reblog counts would be more difficult!) it would probably look similar to RSS feeds: you upload a list of suitably formatted data, and programs which speak that protocol can download it.
the problem of discovery - ways to find strangers who are interested in the same stuff you are - is more tricky. if we're trying to design this as a fully decentralised, censorship-resistant network, we face the spam problem. any means you use to broadcast 'hi, i exist and i like to talk about this thing, come interact with me' can be subverted by spammers. either you restrict yourself entirely to spreading across a network of curated recommendations, or you have to have moderation.
moderation
moderation is one of the hardest problems of social networks as they currently exist. it's both a problem of spam (the posts that users want to see getting swamped by porn bots or whatever) and legality (they're obliged to remove child porn, beheading videos and the like). the usual solution is a combination of AI shit - does the robot think this looks like a naked person - and outsourcing it to poorly paid workers in (typically) African countries, whose job is to look at reports of the most traumatic shit humans can come up with all day and confirm whether it's bad or not.
for our purposes, the hypothetical decentralised network is a protocol to help computers find stuff, not a platform. we can't control how people use it, and if we're not hosting any of the bad shit, it's not on us. but spam moderation is a problem any time that people can insert content you did not request into your feed.
possibly this is where you could have something like Mastodon instances, with their own moderation rules, but crucially, which don't host the content they aggregate. so instead of having 'an account on an instance', you have a stable address on the network, and you submit it to various directories so people can find you. by keeping each one limited in scale, it makes moderation more feasible. this is basically Reddit's model: you have topic-based hubs which people can subscribe to, and submit stuff to.
the other moderation issue is that there is no mechanism in this design to protect from mass harassment. if someone put you on the K*w*f*rms List of Degenerate Trannies To Suicidebait, there'd be fuck all you can do except refuse to receive contact from strangers. though... that's kind of already true of the internet as it stands. nobody has solved this problem.
to sum up
primarily static sites 'hosted' partly or fully on IPFS and BitTorrent
a protocol for sharing content you want to promote, similar to RSS, that you can aggregate into a 'feed'
directories you can submit posts to which handle their own moderation
no ads, nobody makes money off this
honestly, the biggest problem with all this is mostly just... getting it going in the first place. because let's be real, who but tech nerds is going to use a system that requires you to understand fuckin IPFS? until it's already up and running, this idea's got about as much hope as getting people to sign each others' GPG keys. it would have to have the sharp edges sanded down, so it's as easy to get on the Hypothetical Decentralised Social Network Protocol Stack as it is to register an account on tumblr.
but running over it like this... I don't think it's actually impossible in principle. a lot of the technical hurdles have already been solved. and that's what I want the Next Place to look like.
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triscuitsandspraycheese · 2 months ago
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what kibble do you recommend for cats?
Oh man, I don't think anyone's asked me this stuff on here before lol. This is a big question with a lot of correct answers. I'm gonna provide some context before listing brands.
Warning: it's long (but thorough!)
The goal when choosing a diet for your pet should be to target the companies that do the most regular testing of their diets as well as the most regular, consistent involvement with board-certified veterinary nutritionists.
A lot of "mid tier" companies can pay a board-certified veterinary nutritionist to formulate the original recipes, and then they go ahead and sell them with the Nutritional Adequacy Statement that the diet is formulated to meet AAFCO standards for adult maintenance. But in reality, when the recipe is tested, it might not be identical to the formulation, so some aspects of the diet might not be perfectly as they were intended. Basically... testing is important. The gold standard is to look for diets that say they were TESTED to meet AAFCO standards for adult maintenance, not just formulated to meet AAFCO standards.
This Nutritional Adequacy Statement must be present on ALL pet food bags, cans, pouches, treats, chews, literally any pet food product that is intended for consumption of any kind in the US. It will be one sentence long and clarify who this product is intended for as well as what qualifications it meets. If it says it's appropriate per AAFCO standards for adult maintenance, it means it meets the requirements for a healthy adult dog to eat that product regularly without being deficient in any nutrients. This is the BARE MINIMUM.
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(Pro tip: You can just ask companies for their nutrient testing data for diets. The really good ones will be able to give you the full AAFCO panel with all the nutrients you can test for. Some companies might be like "nah that's too many, you can ask about a few ingredients at a time", and that's fine. If they have data to share, it means they've run at least one test recently. If they won't share any of their testing data other than what is legally required by the FDA, which is called the "Guaranteed Analysis", then they probably haven't run any real testing beyond that. Be wary of those companies.)
2. Companies that have a lot of money have time to run more tests to make sure their product doesn't have excessive levels of heavy metals, mycobacterium, required nutrients that can become toxic (think Vitamin D), etc. They also have money to buy facilities that can safely produce food and be regularly cleaned and sanitized daily.
Companies that are just starting out or are trying to work their way up won't have the money to buy the enormous facilities and kitchens required to mass produce their product for consumers. I know it's very tempting to support small businesses, but pet food is not one I would recommend. Think about the last time your local mom and pop diner had their paint tested for lead or their ice machine deeply sanitized and checked for mold. And then think about the overkill protocols in place by the monster fast food corporations like Taco Bell or In n Out who have more money than god and write you up for not adhering to their insane cleaning protocols.
When corporations have reputations to lose, legacies in place, they go above and beyond to make sure they are legally protected in every single aspect of their business. This applies to cleanliness, but also to things like recalls from toxic levels of a nutrient in the diet, testing for bone fragments or other foreign objects in food, removing the possibility of human error from the feeding process for your pet. Corporations above all else want to avoid legal problems, which means they will go above and beyond (I can't believe I'm saying this) to uphold the safety measures in place for their final product.
Basically, the more money they have, the more money they can spend on safety protocols so they can't get sued for something bad like accidentally making hundreds of dogs sick and having their reputation destroyed.
3. Marketing. My god, marketing has become such a shit show in the last few years with influencers and social media. Listen, if a pet food company is spending its hard earned dollars trying to scare the shit out of you by demonizing some random thing or another company, it's probably not real and they're just grasping at straws. If they're desperately trying to convince you that kibble is evil, or that Company B sucks for reasons X, Y, Z, or that you've been feeding your pet wrong this whole time and it's going to KILL THEM unless you feed *our product*, know that they are most definitely full of shit.
There is no magic diet for things like making your pet live twice as long or for curing cancer. It just doesn't exist yet, and trust me when I say companies are trying. The first pet food company that can prove their product makes pets live longer in a repeatable research study is going to be a gazillionaire.
But I digress. I don't recommend giving money to companies who spend money on incendiary marketing campaigns. If a company is trying to upset you, that's weird. A good product speaks for itself and/or has the backing of licensed (key word: licensed) professionals in that specialty making that recommendation.
"Certified Pet Nutritionist" and "Certified Animal Nutritionist" are NOT LICENSED MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS. There is no license required to call yourself that. They watch videos online for like six hours and then get emailed a pdf certificate. They are not licensed medical professionals, despite their best intentions. Be wary of any medical or nutrition advice you get from someone who calls themselves that.
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Finally, the fucking list:
My cats both have medical problems so they're on prescription diets, but here are the regular brands I highly recommend if you have money to burn.
Top Tier
Royal Canin, Hills, Purina
Okay, I know what you must be saying. "That shit is expensive, dude. I'm not buying that."
But listen to me... these parent companies that make the expensive pet foods also make the mid tier pet foods and the affordable pet foods. MARS (who owns Royal Canin) is the biggest pet food manufacturer in the world has might actually have more money than god. Purina is owned by Nestle. Hills is partially owned by Colgate and is rollin in dough enough to make an affordable version of their top tier product.
ANY pet food company that is under the umbrella of one of these monster corporations will have the same testing and sanitation protocols as the "top tier" fancy ass pet food companies.
So all you have to do is see what pet food companies are owned by MARS or Nestle or Hills and pick what's in your price range.
This is MARS:
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This is Purina:
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And Hills just has Science Diet, I believe.
If it makes you feel better, I fed my cats Fancy Feast for literally a decade, and they loved it and had killer blood work results until they reached their older years.
Also, just a caveat: There are literally hundreds of pet food companies out there, more growing by the minute, so I'm sure there are also a lot of other great companies who make kibble for cats. You can use the info above to ask the right questions to the poor, overworked customer service agents who will hopefully be able to provide the info you need to make an informed decision.
Oh, and make sure to talk to your veterinarian before making any dietary changes for your pet! Seriously! None of this is intended to be a substitution for medical advice.
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ryan-sometimes · 10 months ago
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hi! you're the only biochemist i know so i have to ask this
my aunt recently got really into this holistic-sounding thing called healing immunity by transfer factors, tied to a very fishy company, 4life. in my understanding, they're preying on the lack of scientific proof that something /doesnt/ work to convince people that it /does/, based on reports of 'clients' that miraculously healed from various conditions from minor allergies to literally cancer, as well as preventing/curing >autism< 💀 problem is, she totally believes this bulshit and is giving them tons of money and trying to get the whole family to try it too
as a biochemist, I was wondering if you ever stumbled across transfer factors, know about any recent research on this field, or know the scientific explanation for why this is a load of baloney
thank you!
I’m familiar with transfer factors. A transfer factor is a chemical compound (often a protein) that is taken from an organism after it develops immunity against a disease. It’s part of immune cell signaling- it’s how your immune cells talk to each other.
But that’s the issue with pseudoscience. Oftentimes, they take something that has a small fraction of truth to it and then completely invent the rest.
Here’s the rest: transfer factors are often incredibly specific. So specific, in fact, that just two strains of the exact same bacteria could lead to two completely different factors being generated in response to them. Also, two different people infected by the exact same illness could generate different antibodies/transfer factors in response. Your immune system is as unique as your fingerprints.
Even if you took the antibodies/transfer factors from one person immune to a disease and injected them into someone currently afflicted by the disease, there’s no guarantee that it’ll make them immune as well. Cell signaling compounds are essentially words in the language your body uses to communicate with itself- and who knows if other people’s cells speak the same language?
For all you know, that transfer factor is telling your body something it might misunderstand completely. What if it “mishears” what that factor is trying to say? You could trigger an unwanted immune response! And that could potentially be even worse than just developing immunity naturally through exposure.
The field of transfer factors is still rudimentary- all of the real (actually scientific) research on injecting people with transfer factors to boost immunity is still very much in its experimental phase. Any company alleging to sell transfer factors to boost immunity is scamming you. Not even real medical companies are doing that yet, and if they could, they would. You know how money hungry pharmaceutical companies are.
Here’s one thing that’s certain: transfer factors cannot cure non immunity/infection related issues. Autism isn’t caused by a pathogen, how can your body develop an immune response to it when there’s nothing to fight? And regarding cancer, there’s already an existing field to treat cancer using your immune system: it’s called immunotherapy. And that will be given to you by a doctor, not some random company trying to sell glorified supplements. And for allergies? Get some antihistamines and an EpiPen.
The best way to boost your immune system is already available: vaccines. Vaccines prompt your body to make ITS OWN transfer factors and antibodies, which guarantees your cells will understand what those factors mean. And the transfer factors your body makes for itself will always be safer and more effective.
Real science beats pseudoscience.
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decepti-thots · 3 days ago
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Do you know of anywhere to get the mtmte paperbacks I've looked everywhere and can't find any of them.
So. The MTMTE physical paperbacks have been out of print since IDW lost the license and between the fact they never sold that well for a variety of reasons (and IDW, anecdotally, seemingly did not do more repeat printings than they had to; some comics may have only had one printing) and the fact that MTMTE's continuing cult popularity meaning there's very high demand, they are notoriously price gouged these days and very expensive. You can find them on ebay, but especially later volumes can go for over fifty dollars a trade. Sometimes far more. I've seen individual sales of some of the later trades in MTMTE and especially Lost Light go for over a hundred bucks for one paperback. I have to this day never seen an ebay listing for the final collected edition of Lost Light, which I suspect had a very, very small print.
Historically, I have said that weirdly the easiest way to get them at a halfway accessible price is actually to find second hand copies on Japanese sites and use a proxy service to buy several trades at once to reduce the cost of shipping overall and make it worth it. Since Japanese fandom often imported them so there's often a decent chunk of the trades available and due to the fact that secondhand comics on the Japanese aftermarket are usually much cheaper generally, since secondhand comics as a market in Japan expect things to be reasonably priced, this has often been the most cost effective way to buy those trades even considering the cost of importing them. But I gather that prices have even been ticking upwards on JP sites in the last year, so. It may not be as viable as it was five years ago, unfortunately. And I still never see Lost Light stuff on there! Worth a shot, but no longer a guarantee, I fear.
It's just very difficult to get ahold of the physical trade collections for MTMTE, unfortunately. Anyone selling them online is gonna google what they last went for, realize it was A Lot, and price them accordingly. Even charity shops in the UK that sell books have been known to get donations of them and realize they are worth a lot and put them up for over fifty quid a book, lmao. If you set up alerts on sites like ebay and regularly check, sometimes you'll find a normal listing you can snap up for RRP kinda prices, if you're quick, but it is a notoriously hard series to collect that has only gotten worse over the years.
Your best bet might be, if you are in TF collector circles on socmedia, to put out there that you would like to buy them for a reasonable price. I know of some people who on twitter/etc did so and were privately contacted like 'i wanna unload my collection, and will do so for a reasonable cost'. But it's just genuinely really hard to collect these comics physically, unfortunately. And only getting harder. Of all the IDW comics, MTMTE is the one that's hardest to get because it's the one so many people want to buy. People spend a lot of money on them these days. My personal hope is that Skybound will eventually do a reissue, as they have said they would consider doing in the past. Because right now, a full collection secondhand is just extraordinarily expensive, and likely to require months of effort, if not years.
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shankss-magnificent-ass · 2 years ago
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Imagine the beast pirates learning you are a criminal mastermind
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Kaido: *going over a cargo manifest* we will sell these in Port Chugal, prepare them for shipment.
King: Port Chugal won't buy pirate goods anymore, the world government found out they've been trading with us, so they replaced the king there.
Kaido: That's the third distribution market I've had to change in the last month. First the Bourgeois Kingdom, then Ballywood, and now Port Chugal. How are they finding my warehouses?
Queen: we don't know at the moment, but we're working on it
You: *King's assistant* I would like to point out something that all three have in common.
King: Silence.
Kaido: let em talk, I want to hear what they have to say.
You: they were all common stops on Captain Rondow's transport route, who was captured almost three months ago by the world government.
Kaido: You think the poor bastard broke under torture?
You: It appears so, and from the other reports we're getting I'm guessing they have figured out how you conduct your exportation operation. *Hands King the reports*
King: *Skims them* we spent years building this system.
You: which means building another will be faster this time. I'm guessing how they're locating our goods is by the fact that while it's labeled under a company that doesn't have any paperwork officially filed in countries we claim it's from.
Kaido: what are we supposed to do, get a business permit?
You: yes, but actually no. Now any new businesses from any nations in your territory will come under scrutiny by the world government. So I think we should find any failing, but long-established companies, and bail them out in exchange for slipping our illicit cargo into their product distribution.
King: that... might actually work, but there's no way we can guarantee their loyalty.
You: that's why you give them a small percentage of the profits and gather blackmail material. Most rich people are sick fucks will have skeletons in their closet, you just have to look for it.
Kaido: I'll entrust the task to you, and in the meantime we'll have Yamato fill in for you with King.
King: what! No! Your son is... not great at paperwork.
Kaido: Sorry bud, but I'd like to see what they can do on their own, so I'm setting them loose.
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Returns from setting up the new network seven months later
Kaido: I just got the finance report for the last quarter
You: *literally just got off the boat* Sir?
King: Your network is more efficient than what we had set up.
Kaido: you're getting promoted, so you can manage it from here.
You: But I was really looking forward to working with King again.
Kaido: then you'll work under him not me.
You: I'm keeping my desk in your office.
King: For someone who ruthlessly castrated a man to get him to do what they wanted, you are very clingy and sentimental.
You: I was well within my rights to revoke that man's dick privilege, you had no idea how man people he's assaulted. I did that town a fucking favor by pickling that man's junk
Kaido: you pickled it!
You: Yes I did, how else, so you think I got an entire town to look the other way about our ships coming into the harbor?
Kaido: I never would have thought of that... You know when I met you I never would have guessed you'd be an asset to my operations. You seemed too soft and naive, too kind.
You: *shrugs* Well thank you for thinking I'm kind, but I just so happen to hate you less than the world government, and you have more money than the revolutionary army. And Lin Lin and her family freaks me out.
King: don't forget Akagami and Whitebeard won't hire you since you've worked with us.
You: *clicks your tongue* and I regret it every day.
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ghoulfuckersincorporated · 1 month ago
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Sorry if you’ve answered anything like this before, but what are your thoughts on sex toys in the wasteland?
I feel like a fair amount of ghouls would use them considering limb and extremity loss, as well as possibly being safer with non ghoul partners.
I've touched on this topic a bit before in response to an ask about how Cooper/The Ghoul, specifically, feels about sex toys (a blurb I enjoy, definitely check it out if you haven't), but I'd love to offer some additional, more general thoughts, as always.
Sex toys are a bit of an enigma in the wasteland.
Old sex toys, stuff that was manufactured before the bombs dropped, are by and large decrepit, unsafe, or literally turned to dust in the modern day. Silicone and latex hold up terribly against very basic exposure to air/temperature changes/UV already, and that's to say nothing about all the additional radiation. Electronics rust and corrode, not that you'd be able to easily find a private place to plug anything in. However, sex toys are also sometimes manufactured from glass (mostly just basic penetrative items like dildos and plugs), as I touched on in the previously mentioned blurb, and those things would theoretically hold up fine against the environment as long as they weren't physically damaged. Use with caution. Outside of things like that, people are stuck with what they can figure out themselves.
In terms of what the average person has access to, the lack of "vintage" prefabricated marital aids would almost certainly inspire the widespread use of DIY sex toys…you know, using beer bottles and vegetables and such. If you're into object insertion, you'd be in hog heaven, frankly. Well, as long as you have proper access to any kind of lube, which isn't a guarantee. But at the same time, I'm sure there's also no shortage of at-home engineers rigging up all sorts of baubles that vibrate, or re-inventing the fucking machine.
Naturally, those who can't invent shop instead.
I really am quite smitten with the idea of a wasteland merchant who sells sex toys made of junk and scrap. I don't think there are many other businesses that fit the grungy, skeevy aesthetic that so many of the merchants in the Fallout universe have as perfectly, save for maybe places that do real harm like a payday loan place or an opium den (and those things basically still exist in Fallout). You know, the kind of business that's tucked away in an alley or hidden away in the back room of a more reputable place. Granted, people have a lot less shame and embarrassment about things like going into a sex shop postwar, but there will always be a contingency of people who are embarrassed to discuss or admit they even have sex. Brotherhood wannabes and straggling bible-thumpers and such.
However, despite the fact that sex is infinitely less taboo than it once was, sex toys themselves have taken on a much different reputation. A fair number of people either own one or have used one before (though not nearly as many as in the pre-war days), but they aren't openly discussed or joked about as they once were. This isn't because of the sexual aspect of them. No, it's moreso the implication that you're either:
a. so well-off that you can afford to spend your caps on such things, and so bragging about having them is gauche
or
b. so prissy and fussy in bed that you'll spend what little you have on something most people would call "beyond non-essential".
Neither is exactly seen as a "good look" by certain members of the general public who often worry where their next meal will come from and have also never had a real orgasm. Needless to say, envious busybodies who hate sexy fun have always existed and continue to exist into the future. Still, that doesn't change the fact that some people can't finish without a vibrating friend, or that others want to prep for anal with something you won't lose up your ass.
Not all modern toys are made of junk, though; there are some rare craftspeople of a special breed who still have the ability to work with glass and plastics (despite how difficult some of the supplies can be to obtain) to produce what people want. Of course, the old standard is dildos; sometimes you need a teammate! Cock rings are easy to manufacture and remain popular, especially with ghouls (pre-war ghouls like them in particular as their bodies work against them more frequently). Be careful picking out a plug, as, like today, they aren't all designed with body-safe use in mind. Lots of these people are engineering what they make out of sheer horniness and not a lot of real knowledge about safe sex play. New manufactured toys that vibrate aren't impossible to find, but they cost an arm and a leg and maybe an eyeball on top of that. There's also an entire underground market for various pieces of armor and clothing converted into specialized bondage gear, but you've gotta know the right people to gain access to it.
You're absolutely right that most ghouls are big fans of sex toys. Like you mentioned in your ask, and like I elaborated on a few days ago when I talked about the potential of higher rates of impotence with ghouls, it wouldn't be all that unexpected for someone afflicted by ghoulification to have trouble when it comes to their intimate life. Serious radiation burns can cause intense nerve damage and perpetually high rads level causes havoc on soft tissues. The fact that the toys have a fair amount of social stigma attached to them is a nonissue, as their very existence as people is one of the more scandalous things out there. Plus, sex shop owners are generally more than fine with ghouls; why turn away perfectly good clientele?
As for the safety aspect of it, I've always mentioned outercourse/non-penetrative sex as a safe way to get off with your ghoul partner if you're impacted harshly by rads, but any sex toy is also a great alternative. If you've got a low endurance stat or just can't handle much radiation exposure overall, maybe the pair of you can find something to help you out...just be prepared to pay more than you might think is reasonable.
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