#y2k tranquil moments

[y2kbeautyandother2000sstuff]

Avon Tranquil Moments Set

2002-2003

Found on worthpoint.com

[roobiedo]

oc-tober 2024 day 7 & 8: likes and dislikes

they are talking to each other like sims c:

On the left is Axis, a serial hater girlbossfailure who leaves scathing reviews on everything she sees for 'enrichment'. On the right is Clyde, who has learnt to weaponize his 'cursed fuckboi energy' in order to taunt miserable people with whimsy. they both hate each other's guts /affectionate <3

—

Clyde likes...

crafting handmade jewelry! mostly friendship bracelets for some reason, how this passion came about is lost in his memory though

collecting knickknacks for aforementioned jewelry (he's a junk hoarder)

batik, aloha shirts, or any regional equivalent

singing and dancing and dashing and prancing

traveling! seeing the world!

running! as a sport

running! movie marathons

running! from commitments and responsibilities

destroying everyone with a chain of UNO draw fours card games!

ttrpgs too probably. he'd max out whatever the system equivalent for the Charisma stat is at character creation without doubt

entertaining people generally, he knows he's funny

helping people too! he's got a big heart with so so so much to give

so so so much

Clyde dislikes...

Axis

wet blanket people in general

desk jobs or being locked into any committed position

not having space to stretch his legs

schedules and deadlines

feeling trapped or stuck or silenced he just needs to MOVE, man

yeah yeah. adhd

hard labor. he's a big strong guy and can handle it, but he'd much rather be relaxing

sour candy

tangled threads

memory loss

not being able to help. helplessness. no sense of direction or purpose or destination in life

socks

—

Axis likes...

hoodies

being curled up in bed

the smell of fresh laundry

windy days

colourful fruity mocktails

bell-bottom jeans and y2k fashion

physics! worked as a lab assistant (the experience was awful but the science was fun!)

fixing things! worked as an apprentice mechanic (fun!)

bragging about her skills and expertise

her on-and-off adorable girlfriend Simmer <3

fluffy pastries and decadent desserts

moments to herself. quiet. silence. peace and tranquility

...

company

Axis dislikes...

Clyde

people who talk too loudly, too much, too quickly (Clyde)

people who get all up in her personal space (Clyde)

people who get over-invested in personal issues that does not concern them at all (Clyde)

people

crowded markets

rain

✨depression ✨

cooking. augh. Disaster

unfulfilling lesbian situationships (and yet...)

being in tall places where there's a risk of falling

owing debts

company (the capitalism kind)

[monkey-network]

World Building w/ Monkey

There can be many series in general where the world it takes place in struggles to leave a lasting impact on you (pic above unrelated). That perfect balance between immersion and comprehension.

Ideally, you want to land right in the middle, next to Donkey Kong, where you’re given a world to think about but you aren’t loaded with questions the product purposefully won’t answer. But where this can get muddled up is with the addition of consistency, memorability, logic, whether it all mattered. It no doubt gets messy when you start examining what made sense, what didn’t add up, why were certain things in certain places, what importance does the world have. There can be so many variables, and it’s largely subjective to each viewer’s critical and investment levels that I don’t even know where to begin with this rant. How about...

Steven Universe. I of course didn’t go into this series expecting a lot of exploration, but at the same time I visibly cannot give a rat’s ass about the settings for this show. Beach City is a white noise backdrop that can leave you begging for a change in scenery. I can see the personal influence that came with this, it can look beautiful, but it doesn’t help that very little actually happens in Beach City to where things would’ve probably been a whole lot cooler if the show took place in a metropolis or somewhere busier. You can casually remember certain locations, sure, but there is little to no overall memorable history and it makes the beach location feel mostly interchangeable rather than a place Steven genuinely calls his home. This is a problem for a lot of shows, ones I love included. You can have locations that in the back of your mind go, “Hey I know that place,” but unless it’s a location that actually has some weight on your mind, you’ll remember it but you won’t probably care as much.

I hardly believe Beach City is for Steven what literal Hell is for Doomguy

And one might say, “Monkey, SU is mostly character focused, the world is supposed to be secondary.” To this, I gotta ask, what makes the town important to Steven? Exploring Steven’s character crisis among everything else is fine, but where SU staggers internally is that it could’ve given us better insight as to why Steven bothers to stay in this one place when he has the option to freely explore the world beyond having the dangers come to him at supposedly inconvenient times but doesn’t. It's like Beach City is this isolated trouble magnet that never shares why problems only happen in this one place or random, equally isolated and forgettable locations. This is where I gotta bring Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.

Diamond is Unbreakable’s Morioh-cho is more than just Josuke’s hometown, it’s a place where impromptu phenomena happen and gives the town that adventurous livelihood while giving us a simple explanation as to why we’re staying here instead of traveling the globe like its predecessors. Every place, from Tonio’s restaurant, the docks, the ghost alley, to the transmission tower Superfly, adds to both the town’s history and the overall Jojo universe, even when this story is isolated in it of itself. Additionally, even when you could change the location to a metropolis or whatever, the anime especially gives Morioh that memorable style to where it can be difficult imagining the story taking place anywhere else. The biggest factor is the main villain Yoshikage Kira, a man whose entire existence is to live among the small town citizens as a stand wielding serial killer. He is that looming threat, killing and evading exposure, and adds to the value of Josuke and his squad being the protectors of the place they call home. Diamond is Unbreakable is a character focused story like Steven Universe, but JOJO does a better job making its fixed location matter in the long run. Good world building shouldn’t just be about what a place looks like, but what do the characters make in them.

This isn’t to say Beach City is a terrible world, it’s far better than what games like Destiny, Anthem, World of Warcraft, and such have to where you honestly have to read a bunch of wikis and in game logs to understand why you should give a fuck. This is where lore comes in and lore does not and should not equal world building. A golden rule for me when it comes to media is that the best media is easily accessible media, and lore complicates that accessibility; lore should be complimentary and not obligatory or important to understanding things. It’s like seeing a desk covered with school supplies, if world building is expressing the details of said supplies like whether the owner has a habit of biting his pencils or folding his books a certain way, lore is unnecessarily explaining why the pencils and books were made. That isn’t to say that the rules of what exists shouldn’t matter, but lore is that extra step that you shouldn’t try to worry about when it comes to expressing/understanding your rules organically. 

Take Beastars, a definitive series where the rules of society are highly beneficial to the story. It never feels like Paru skimmed through how the animal characters function, and any questions that come up either are or can be fairly explainable. Like, why aren’t insects considered citizens when even fish get privileges? You can look at the series and go, “Maybe since insects are tiny and can live on their own, Itagaki considers them the wild animals of this society,” without feeling like you’re pretentiously speaking for the author. The universe of carnivores and herbivores not only are what pushes our protagonists to essentially break the known expectations and limits of their birth right, but you can have an entire chapter where Legosi or the others are barely in it, & the story details with the character you’re reading about, say Sebun, Yafya, or Legom, are so captivating that it feels just as organic when we see the MCs again. The city itself is much a character in this story and like the titular Abyss from Made in Abyss, Far Far Away from Shrek 2, or the Land of Ooo from Adventure Time, you can probably imagine wanting to be in that world yourself or seeing yourself comfortably in that world without even thinking about it. Good rules adds depth to a world that can keep your focus but makes you think. Too little trivializes your investment because there’s no stakes, too many feels like a college course and fuck that. 

Like Minecraft, the main character isn’t really Steve or whoever you control, but the world that you’re able to create and warp to your hearts’ content. You are grounded to the aesthetic and format of the game, but what you do in the game adds unique character to the experience each and every time. Once you jump on, sometimes it all just clicks to you and that can be the best feeling. To close this rant out, I wanted to express my two favorite worlds that to this day stuck with me.

These places are generally opposites, but they do an amazing job in showing you everything without hardly telling you anything. Treasure Town is this busy and complex theme park looking place and you’re essentially with the characters as we roam the notable sites filled with details that can clue you in on what’s what. Does it all at a good, brisk pace and the colorful environment plays a major part in the story where the city is a symbolic extension of our main duo Black & White and the main struggle they go through in the film.

Yokohama does this but in a more subdued way. The whole story is centered around living in what you could imagine a generally realistic post apocalyptic earth. Not a whole deserted wasteland like what you’ve seen from Mad Max and the like, but one where it’s says civilization has begun anew; a vast landscape that means the world to our lead. And as life reset, we take things easy as relationships grow and seemingly one off moments can reappear as significant turns later on. The mangaka of Y2K leaves you mysteries, but you never feel lost as the main character Alpha is a compelling protagonist to journey with and it kinda makes you wish you were in her shoes, enjoying life in a world pretty barren but full of tranquil hope and easy adventuring.

In the end, I find these to be the best because they 110% commit to the main idea that makes world building such a meaningful concept to think about and invest in:

Escapism

[shaugahaga-blog]

All Teeth

Erin was always an odd little girl. Even by the age of five, folks could see she was strange. She didn’t seem too interested in making friends with other kids. She was to wrapped up in her own imagination. She could clearly see creatures and characters that no one else could. Her father joked about his imaginative daughter but as the years went on, he began to worry. He didn’t want her to go nuts like her mother did.

Erin was born in County Claire, Ireland in April 12, 1985. There were no complications for the first child of Sean and Maureen Dwyer. It was a small hospital. Maureen stayed in an adjacent room to the small nursery. The two rooms were separated by a large window. Maureen was grateful that she could keep an eye on her new born.

When Sean came to pick up his family in the morning, Maureen was in histerics.

“It took her! It took her!” She screamed over and over! Panicked, Sean ran into the nursery where he found little Erin smiling up at him. The hospital staff eventually gave Maureen a tranquilizer. She was never the same after that.

She would insist that the beautiful little girl living with them was an imposter. In her more lucid moments she would describe the horrible creature that crawled into the nursery. It had a human body but it wore no clothes over it’s grey skin. It had unnaturally long fingers and a face that was “all teeth”. She would describe the sack it dragged into it that was black as night. As if one could carve out a piece of the night and make it into a bag.

The beast simply stepped out of a shadow. Soon it was looming over her baby. She gasped and the creature’s head turned towards her. She saw a gaping hole where it’s face should be, filled with therethrough in various shapes and sizes. As soon as she gazed upon it she was frozen. She couldn’t move or speak. Or scream as she watched the horror reach into her baby’s crib, lift the child out, and place her into it’s sack.

When the creature withdrew it’s arm it was holding a new baby. This baby had the same great skin, the same long fingers, and the same horrid maw in place of a face. As the monster stepped back into the shadows Maureen began to scream. And scream.

Everyone knew this was nonsense, of course. The security footage of the night showed nothing out of the ordinary. But Maureen couldn’t accept that she was simply the victim of a nightmare. She never touched her daughter. She refused to acknowledge her at home. Eventually, Maureen tried to kill Erin.

Shortly after Erin’s third birthday, Sean felt Maureen leave his bed. He groggily got up to check on her. He found Maureen in Erin’s room with a pillow over Erin’s sleeping face. Sean saved Erin just in time. Maureen had to go away after that.

Erin loved her father Sean. By all accounts he was the only real friend she had. He would listen to her go on all day about the strange faeries and arrange folk she could see. But the kids in school were starting to make fun of her. Sean slowly became less and less encouraging of these fantasies until he would simply say,

“Erin, don’t tell lies.”

Erin caught on and stopped talking about her strange friends that no one could see. Eventually she stopped seeing them too. This was an immense relief to Sean. Around the age of ten, Erin began making friends at school and seemed to all a normal girl. Except when Sean would take pictures of her. Whenever Sean would shake a Polaroid photo, he could swear he saw a different face on his daughter through the developing image. A face that was all teeth.

The years went on. Erin made friends and good grades. She had forgotten about the strange folk she used to see. Until she slept. Her dreams were filled with horrors that felt bizarrely familiar to her. But morning would come and they would be forgotten again.

When Erin was fifteen, a new term had entered her and everyone else’s lexicon. “Y2k bug”. The kids in her school could talk of nothing else. Erin didn’t fully understand what it was. From what she could gather from other fifteen year old students, the year 2000 was going to bring some sort of global catastrophe. Some kids said it was the end of the world.

Erin was terrified. For some reason none of the other kids seemed as scared of the prospect of global annihilation as her and this upset her. started spending more time with her father. Sean didn’t know why his teenage daughter wanted to spend time with him all of the sudden but he wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. For months, every weekend was a father daughter excursion. Picnics, parks, and pony rides. It was a happy time.

On Christmas, Sean took his daughter ice skating. It was Erin’s first time. She fell a lot but she didn’t seem to mind. She had a smile on her face the whole time. Sean wanted to capture that smile so he took a picture.

When it developed he dropped his camera. The camera hit the ice with a loud crack.

“Da, are yeh ok?” Erin shouted.

Sean had already crumpled up the photo in his hands.

“Just slipped, love.” Sean called back. He picketed the photo. Later he threw it in his fire place. He could never let his daughter see that picture. A picture of a grey creature in his daughter’s clothes. Looking towards the camera with a face full of monstrous fangs.

Erin knew something happened out on the ice that night. The following week she felt her father withdraw from her. This broke her heart. The new year was coming and for reasons she didn’t understand, she couldn’t face the new year alone.

On the morning of new years eve, she saw footage on the news of people claiming the end of the world was here. She started to cry. This got Sean’s attention. He appeared next to her and hugged her. Erin felt herself enveloped in strength. Sean felt his strength melt away. The two were locked in a silent embrace for longer than either one could tell. Sean promised Erin he would be by her side until the new year arrived.

True to his word, the two spent the entire day together playing board games. But the clock marched the two of them closer and closer to midnight.

The TV was broadcasting the crowds gathered in Dublin. Sean held Erin’s hand as the countdown began.

“5…4…3…

"Da, I love yeh!” Erin squeezed nervously. Sean squeezed her hand.

“…1!”

The world went black. Erin looked around. The TV, her house, her father even the floor were all gone. She was surrounded by a tangible blackness.

“Da?”

“I’m here child.” Hissed an unfamiliar voice.

Erin spun around. From the darkness stepped a tall grey figure. It towered above Erin who only stood up to it’s navel. It’s gangly arms hung by it’s thighs. One of its massive hands held a black sack. But Erin didn’t notice any of this. All she saw was it’s face.

The head seemed like it was looking at her. It was hard to tell as the beast had no eyes. No ears. No nose. Only a mouth. A wide circle that nearly encompassed it’s entire head. Within this maw were rows of gums and rows of teeth that seemed to go on forever in an oblivion contained in one skull.

Erin immediately remembered. She remembered the fairies that use to play with her. She remembered the cranky headless dulluhuns that juggled their own blood. She remembered the small imps that told her dirty jokes. She felt no fear. She simply asked.

“What am I?”

“My daughter.” Answered her father. And Erin wept. She cried harder than she ever cried before.

“What happened?” She managed to sob.

“The world ended.” There was a long pause before he continued. “Not the end of the world of man, but the world of the Folk will not see the next century.”

“What am I?” Erin asked in a squeak.

“You are a changeling. We you were switched at birth with a human baby that I’ve kept in my sack for fifteen years.”

“You are not my father!” Erin shouted through her own disbelief.

“Look at your hands.” Responded the monster in a fatherly tone. Her hands her grey and long like his. She stood silently staring at her hands.

“Normally we would not have met till you were eighteen. You would have brought me the corpse of the man who raised you and we would have eaten him together.” The beast said casually.

“No!” Erin protested

“Yes” he said simply “you would have.”

“Then why?!” Erin screeched, “why am I meeting you now?!”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Because the world ended.”

Erin collapsed. “So, what happens now?”

Erin wasn’t sure, but she thought the face/hole smiled at her. “We come back. You…” He pointed at her, “will bring us back.”

He reached into his sack and pulled out Erin. The real Erin who was still an infant. “You have a choice. You can take this child and return it to it’s father, or you can kill the father and give us another century on earth. And not just changelings. The Pucas, the leprechauns, the banshees, and faeries of all kinds will return to the world of man. The fate of the Folk is in your hands.” Erin’s father spoke with gaining intensity until the infinite loops of teeth began to shake with fury. Erin didn’t have a chance to respond. In an instant she was sitting with Sean again. He was still holding her hand.

Her other arm held his baby. He turned his head towards her and a confused expression invaded his face.

“Erin, where did that baby come from?”

Erin didn’t answer. A ravenous hunger filled her belly. Sean’s apparent confusion turned to terror.

Erin’s hunger combatted her shame. She knew why her adopted father was frightened. She knew exactly what she looked like right now. She placed the child on the floor. She would save that for later.

After she bit her stepfather’s head off she saw them. The faeries, the sprites, the ogres and elementals. Her old friends. Her Folk. Finally she saw her father as he erupted from the remains of Sean. Together they ate Erin, and welcomed in a new millennium of magic.

[y2kbeautyandother2000sstuff]

Avon Tranquil Moments Moisturizing Body Lotion

2003

Found on Ebay, user warnine

[y2kbeautyandother2000sstuff]

Avon Tranquil Moments Moisturizing Body Lotion, Shower Gel and Room Spray

2002

Found on Ebay, user frugal_fort

[y2kbeautyandother2000sstuff]

Avon Tranquil Moments Relaxation Foam Bath

2003

Found on Ebay, user maresol

[y2kbeautyandother2000sstuff]

Avon Tranquil Moments Fragrance Mist

2003

Found on Ebay, user jskurko

[y2kbeautyandother2000sstuff]

Avon Tranquil Moments Stuffed Animal

2003

Found on Ebay, user ramcycle2010

this is precious!!!

[y2kbeautyandother2000sstuff]

Avon Tranquil Moments Shower Gel

2002

Found on Ebay, user gmoneysales21

[y2kbeautyandother2000sstuff]

Avon Tranquil Moments Relaxation Foam Bath

2003

Found on Ebay, user stone_mountain_market