"You’ve met the Fools of Fate"~

@pure-plum Latest Weal and Woe chapter was so sweet I swear my soul melted a bit from reading it :'3 Honestly Eclipse seems so nervous there, I genuinely just want to hug that anxiousness out of him xD

Tho here I made him look a little more malicious. Gotta think twice about that hug hehe :>

And some process under the cut cuz why not x)

i love my go to method to making a place look cluttered and Lived In in my illustrations is to have papers tacked on the wall or on corkboards and shit

Kissing Their Forehead

Genre: Fluff, a tiny bit of angst

Pairings: Xiao, Welt, Kafka, Wanderer/Scaramouche, Kaveh, Blade x gn!reader (Seperate)

Warnings: Spoilers for both Genshin and HSR, Established relationship, Slightly Suggestive (Kafka), mentions of blood/wounds (Xiao + Blade), Kissing, some have more plot than others (╥﹏╥) - If I missed any, please let me know!

Word count: 400 - 600 words per character

Xiao

Nights like these were common for you and Xiao. The two of you meet up on the roof of Wangshu Inn every night, catching up on whatever you missed in each other’s absence during the day. This is also the time when Xiao listens to his heart, and allows you to get closer to him. Even after you’ve spent so much time together, he still isn’t used to the flurries of affection you throw at him, and tonight was no different.

When you lovingly press your lips to the diamond on Xiao’s forehead mid-conversation, his mind goes entirely blank. Surprise reflects in his amber gaze, and a wave of gut wrenching emotion surges through him. It’s a mix of joy, confusion, and grief- almost as if he’s experiencing both his terrifying past and his peaceful present at the same time. He had been alone for so long, keeping himself away from humanity unless absolutely necessary, to avoid the risk of hurting anyone should he lose control. He knows things aren't like that anymore- not with you around. He loves you and you love him in return, but he can’t help but feel guilty for being able to experience such affection. After what he had done over the course of his past, after he had stained his hands with so much blood, how could he ever deserve love? He views himself as dangerous- as a monster, and deep down, he thinks you deserve so much better than him. He had voiced this to you before, but you just cupped his face in your hands and smiled sadly at him, whispering that you wished he would think better of himself and that you wouldn’t trade him for the world.

Xiao couldn’t begin to understand why you felt this way, but at the same time, he is eternally grateful to have you with him. Your presence soothes him and illuminates the darkness of his heart- even if it feels selfish, he can’t help but melt whenever your lips meet his forehead. Xiao closes his eyes, leaning into your touch, pushing his spiral of insecurity to the side for now. When you pull away and look at him with your shining, lovestruck eyes, he can’t help but flush and move closer to you. His hand comes to rest on your cheek as his forehead comes to rest gently on your own. The world seems to stand still as you make eye contact, your lips only inches away from his. Xiao’s shoulders relax and the intolerable screams of dying demons he usually grapples with fade into serene silence. The Yaksha’s touch is careful and light, and his expression displays how deeply he longs to stay in this moment for as long as possible. However, he knows well that this desire is nothing but an empty fantasy, rendered impossible at the hands of time. Soon, danger and duty would cruelly pierce through the veil of peace, tearing you away from each other. So Xiao holds you and leans further into your warmth, cherishing the moment before it slips away once more.

Welt

Welt is a kind, tired old soul. He’s been through a lot, he’s seen a lot, and he’s lost a lot- two examples being his old friends and his home planet. He knows how quickly a once peaceful life can fade due to the dangers of the universe, and he knows how irreplaceable loved ones are. Unfortunately, he learned that the hard way. So, he wastes no time in showing you how precious you are to him. Luckily, you accept his displays of affection with excitement and return it back tenfold.

The two of you are going about your regular duties on the express when you catch Welt’s eye from across the train car. No one else is around, so you sidle over to him, trying not to be too obvious. Welt gives you a side eye as you do this, not knowing what to expect from the cheeky grin that’s making its way across your face. Only a minute later, Welt feels your presence next to him, and he swears that the smile you have plastered on is contagious. His own lips quirk up into a smile, and before he knows it, your body is pressed up against his, your arms constricting around him like there's no tomorrow. He lets out a sigh of endearment, his own arms gently moving to envelop you. Honestly, what was he going to do with you?

However, his infatuation quickly changes to confusion as you pull away slightly and rest your hands on his shoulders. You raise yourself a bit, attempting to reach his forehead, brows furrowing slightly in frustration due to his height. Soon enough, you manage to reach his forehead and your lips quickly make gentle contact with his skin. Welt chuckles softly, moving his hands to your waist, pulling you against him a second time. A massive grin breaks out on his face, and you swear you’ve never seen him happier in your life. Welt then cups your face and drowns you in a flurry of kisses, his own cheeks flushing profusely as he watches you become more and more flustered. The sounds of lovestruck giggles and playful remarks bounce off the walls of the train car, hours passing before the two of you remember your duties. Undoubtedly, the whole exchange ends with Welt fondly clinging to you with one of his hands carding through your hair, work entirely forgotten, as you wait for the rest of the crew to return.

Kafka

As expected, Kafka loves to tease. Her demeanor is alluring, drawing people to her in both hatred and love. While most disapprove of her title as a Stellaron Hunter, you seem to be an exception. In fact, it’s become very clear to her that she’s got you eternally and willingly caught in her web. She watches your every movement with immense amusement, her gaze dark yet loving as you fall apart from the products of her captivating existence. Often, she was the one initiating affection through words and subtle touches, adoring the way you choke on your words and desperately fumble for a half-decent response. More often than not, these interactions result in bolder acts of physical affection. Whether that’s innocent acts like allowing Kafka to tilt your chin up to kiss you, or you quickly embracing her as a way to hide your hopelessly heated face, or acts that are more… risque, you love every second you get to spend with her. And although Kafka wears a mask of cold, calm deceit, you know that when it comes to you, she doesn’t think twice about showing how genuine her love is.

Even if Kafka was skilled in making you flustered, you had been itching to initiate something on your own for weeks. To watch her get thrown off balance instead of you, all because of something you had said or done- it seemed like an impossible fantasy. Yet you persist in building up your courage, determined to express your love for her and pay her back for all the times she set butterflies off in your stomach. So, you carefully mapped out how you would go about your initiation, knowing that you would have to surprise your beloved in order to elicit any kind of reaction. The next day, you keep your eyes peeled for a moment when she’s idle and unaware of your presence. You manage to catch her while she’s reading, legs crossed casually as she sinks into the cushioning of her chair, eyes glinting with amusement at the book’s contents. Quietly, you enter the room, seemingly ignoring her- that is, until you reach her chair and swoop down to kiss her forehead before she can say anything. Afterward, you turn away and speed walk out of the room, internally reveling in the surprise that overtook Kafka’s features. Her eyes shot open wide, lips slightly parted, eyebrows raised. However, in your absence after the kiss, you didn’t see the fierce blush that spread over Kafka’s cheeks or hear the lovestruck giggle that involuntarily escaped her lips. And you definitely didn’t find out about Silverwolf walking in a few minutes later, only to find the woman folded over in her chair with her face in her hands, giggling like a schoolgirl and entirely refusing to look up. You had caused the most calm Stellaron Hunter to break her collected facade for once, which was incredibly hard to do. After making her feel so lovestruck, there’s no way she could just leave you alone. She would have to get back at you somehow- expect nothing less than to be smothered with her love over the next few days.

Wanderer/Scaramouche

Scaramouche had been going about his day as normal, bored out of his mind, desperately trying to find something interesting to do while vivid thoughts of you plagued his mind. Nahida had attempted to immerse him in different human activities, yet none of them seemed to take- he was either pretty bad at them, or he just gave up on them because he lost interest. Even the few battles he encountered during his day weren’t enough to take his mind off your absence. Needless to say, when you arrive home he’s all over you, trying to hide his longing for you behind a false mask of annoyance. But you can see right through him, adoration reflecting in your eyes as you quickly grab his face and press a firm kiss to his forehead. As you do so, a confused protest escapes his throat, the poor man startled by your sudden loving gesture. Afterward, you take his hand and drag him further into Sumeru to go get some food, but Scaramouche’s mind is entirely elsewhere. His pace is much slower than yours, making it slightly hard to lead him into the city, but he really can’t help it. Even now, even after the two of you have known each other for so long, you still manage to surprise him. He shields his face with one hand to hide his reddening cheeks and uses the other to tether you to him, picking up his pace so that you’re the one who’s being pulled. The giggle that this elicits from you doesn’t help either, as it only causes the butterflies in his stomach to burst even more.

After all, Scara wasn’t used to this. All his life, he’s been alone- always being left behind, always being used. He had become so accustomed to the feeling of anger and resentment that he didn’t realize how lonely he had indeed become. After he had the Electro Gnosis taken from him and his identity erased from Irminsul, his anger morphed into an overwhelming feeling of emptiness. Sure, erasing himself gave him a second chance at life, but his own loss of identity left him feeling void of any purpose or desire. That quickly changed when you were introduced to him though. As time went on, as he got to know you better, the void in his chest slowly became filled with the undying urge to protect you. The puppet didn’t understand what these emotions were or why he felt like this, but that didn’t matter to him. As long as you were safe, as long as he got to see your smile at the end of the day, he would be content. As you both reach your destination, Scara turns back to look at you, his heart immediately starting to hammer in his chest. You were beaming at him, a playful glint in your eyes- it was painfully clear that you were about to start teasing him for getting so flustered. Before you can say anything, Scaramouche gently takes your face in his hands and kisses you, gaze hopelessly soft. His gentle expression then turns into a devious smirk, amused by the way your eyes widen, entirely unsure of what to say. Now he can see the appeal of surprise kisses, and he’ll definitely be using them more often if this is the reaction he’ll get.

Kaveh

Kaveh cares for you more than anyone else. His passion for you is immense, so much so that it makes his passion for architecture pale in comparison- which is saying a lot because he loves architecture. In fact, it was practically his life until he met you, (aside from bickering with Alhaitham), and in his eyes, you're the greatest work of art to ever exist. Even the glistening walls and windows of the Palace of Alcazarzaray couldn’t match your glory. His genuine admiration for you often makes it hard for him to communicate how he feels- only one look is enough to get him red faced and stuttering. He does try though, he tries incredibly hard, but it just doesn’t work. The architect is constantly fighting with his own mind, wanting to spill out every ounce of love he’s feeling but not wanting to say the wrong thing. This internal conflict only intensifies during big projects, when all he can think of is you. He doesn’t get to see you often during these periods of time, which only makes him long for you more. So, when you pass by his desk, leaning over to see what he’s working on, you can imagine how deeply sidetracked he gets. When you ask what he’s doing, he starts explaining the details of the project, but quickly trails off as he sees the gentle smile on your face. Oh archons, you’re stunning, he thinks, fighting to find his words once more.

When he does, he quickly finishes his explanation, clearing his throat to try and cover up how deeply flustered he is. You nod and raise your eyebrows, impressed by his ambition and talent. Needing to get on with your own work, you wish him luck, brushing his bangs back and kissing him delicately on the forehead. Kaveh’s face explodes with red and suddenly he feels like the room is far too hot. He fans himself off with his hands, attempting to focus, but the feeling of your lips on his skin keeps replaying in his head. His thoughts are scattered all over the place, each stream of thought overlapping to become an insufferable cacophony of noise and feelings, to the point where he just can't take it anymore. Throwing his pencil down, Kaveh quickly gets up from his seat and somewhat aggressively hurries into the other room, where he finds you sitting on the couch, peacefully flipping through a book. He takes your hand, pulling you up toward his chest. His arms wrap around you tightly and he buries his face into your neck, your confused exclamations completely unheard by him. The architect’s resolve to continue working shatters as soon as you hug him back, his attitude clearly indicating that he doesn’t plan on letting go of you any time soon- not that you mind, of course.

Blade

Blade doesn’t understand why you like him so much. He doesn’t understand you, and how you keep going despite everything you’ve been through already. Though he doesn’t openly show his admiration for you, it's definitely there, despite the cold expression on his face. If you look just closely enough, you can see the way his gaze softens slightly whenever you enter the same room as him. You take this as permission for you to get near him and a confirmation that you aren’t being a burden by physically displaying your fondness for him. One way you show your infatuation with him is by patching him up after missions or fights, and unsurprisingly, he doesn’t understand why you do this either. He can heal himself for the most part, so why would you go through the trouble? Despite his lack of comprehension, he never fights back. The feeling of your gentle, loving hands on his skin soothes him, even if he has an abundance of painful gashes all over his body. The feeling of your lips on each of his wounds after you’ve tended to them is enough to get his heart beating faster, which is something that he thought was impossible to achieve.

Each time, just before you finish patching him up, you take his face in your hands, so carefully that you may as well be handling porcelain. From there, you guide his head slightly forward to almost meet your lips. Blade closes his eyes, his bandaged hand lifting to rest on top of one of your own, wanting to keep your warmth on his skin for as long as possible. A relaxed exhale slips past his lips as the tension in his shoulders deflates. When you finally press your lips to the soft expanse of Blade’s forehead, you can feel his hand start to shake slightly, his brows furrowing in confusion. You pull away, smiling warmly at him, washing away any confusion or sadness that lingers in his gaze. Your eyes meet and Blade’s mind becomes consumed by your touch. It’s been centuries since he’s felt this way- since he’s felt safe, since he’s felt like he has a home. Blade moves back, pulling you forward and into his lap. His hands carefully support your back, your chest pressing against him tightly while your head falls onto his shoulder. His breathing syncs up with yours as you shift to shyly return his embrace. Blade’s lips upturn into a small smile as you gently chastise him for moving so suddenly, warning that it may reopen his wounds. His chest grows tight in appreciation, his love for you growing with every breath he takes. No matter what tomorrow may bring, no matter how much pain he must endure, he knows it will all be alright as long as you’re safe.

the main thing that "leftist" goyim need to understand is that there isn't one definition of the word "zionism." "zionist" is not an insult, and it does not beget genocide or colonialism, because zionism for jews has many different meanings, each with their own interpretations of the state of israel and action points regarding palestine, with only a tiny portion of those advocating for any sort of violence against palestinians. if i had to boil everything down to brass tacks, i'd say zionism is the feeling that jews have a connection with eretz israel.* but there's so much that falls under that umbrella. there's christian zionism (which jewitches just did a wonderful episode discussing it and its genocidal roots with a very good bibliography [link here]), there's theodore herzl's definition that's like "yes i love colonialism let's do that!!!" (but also he was also toying with the idea of all the jews moving to argentina?). there's some (very few of whom are jewish) zionists who are uncritical of the israeli govt, there are some that want to see it dismantled immediately, and obviously there are many that lie somewhere in between the two. there are some jewish zionists who see medinas israel* as a miracle, and there are others who see it as blasphemy (either because of the belief that am israel* should not return from diaspora until the arrival of the moshiach (messiah), or because medinas israel has been doing a lot of monstrous, heinous, honestly un-jewish shit supposedly in the name of jews and judaism)

it is impossible to quickly sum up the wide scope of zionisms that exist today within judaism, not to mention those outside of it. however, it is important to note that for many jews, zionism is a word that merely describes longing, or even a longing for the ability to long. to quote my rabbi: "for me, zionism means i wish eretz israel was a place i longed to live." (the reasons why it isn't are the same reasons why any one of us critiques medinas israel—it is a horrid state doing horrifying, unspeakable things. to my rabbi and to many others, zionism means the eradication of medinas israel as it exists.)

there is currently a problem of people talking past each other, where some say anti-zionism is antisemitism and others say all zionists have blood on their hands. many of those in the camp of the former are often so broad in their definition of anti-zionism that that phrase is rendered nothing but unhelpful (at best), and many of those in the camp of the latter have such a narrow understanding of what zionism is that it completely turns off anybody who does have a more complete understanding of that word

this post is not intended to even scratch the surface of describing the meanings of all the different zionist movements and beliefs that haven't coalesced into any movement on any wikipedia page. rather, this post is to show non-jews who identify as leftists that are still open to learning about jewish experiences that zionism is not what the snappy, tens of thousands of note posts will lead you to believe. to those who say "death to zionists" please know that jews will not trust you, because you're calling for the deaths of a lot more jews than you think

eretz israel = the land of israel

medinas/medinat israel = the state of israel

am israel = the people of israel (jews)

these are all terms that are frequently used in jewish spaces and liturgy, especially the first and third. i have made the personal decision to use them in my daily conversations, because in liturgy that i interact with daily, "israel" means the third one, and i am very conscious to delineate the three, and especially to draw a distinction between the state of israel, the land that is so central to jewish liturgy, and the jewish people

HOW MANY DIMENSIONS EXIST??

Blog#347

Wednesday, November 8th, 2023

Welcome back,

The world as we know it has three dimensions of space—length, width and depth—and one dimension of time. But there’s the mind-bending possibility that many more dimensions exist out there. According to string theory, one of the leading physics model of the last half century, the universe operates with 10 dimensions.

But that raises a big question: If there are 10 dimensions, then why don’t we experience all of them or haven’t detected them? Lisa Grossman at ScienceNews reports that a new paper suggests an answer, showing that those dimensions are so tiny and so fleeting that we currently can’t detect them.

It’s difficult to completely explain the mathematics behind string theory without putting on a graduate seminar or two, but in essence dimensions five through ten have to do with possibility and include all possible futures and all possible pasts including realities with a totally different physics than those in our universe.

If two protons smash together at high enough speeds, they have the ability to create a tiny black hole that would exist for just a fraction of a second before disappearing, according to a new study, which hasn't been peer-reviewed, on the preprint server arXiv.org. The collision would open up a little bubble of interdimensional space where the laws of physics are different than ours, leading to an event known as vacuum decay. In quantum physics, vacuum decay implies that if the interdimensional space was large enough, we’d be toast.

With enough gravity to interact with our world, the newly formed “Cosmic Death Bubble” would grow at the speed of light, rapidly change the physics of our universe, render it uninhabitable and effectively zap us out of existence.

“If you’re standing nearby when the bubble starts to expand, you don’t see it coming,” the study’s co-author, physicist Katie Mack of North Carolina State University, tells Grossman. “If it’s coming at you from below, your feet stop existing before your mind realizes that.”

Ultrahigh energy cosmic rays are bashing into each other all the time with enough energy to start this process. If extra dimensions were large enough to allow the death bubble to form, the researchers found, it would have happened thousands of times already. The fact that we still exist is one circumstantial piece of evidence that other dimensions are ultra-tiny. The team calculated that they must be smaller than 16 nanometers, too small for their gravity to influence much in our world and hundreds of times smaller than previous calculations, Grossman reports.

The new study comes on the tail of another study about extra dimensions published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics published in July. Mara Johnson-Groh at LiveScience reports that one of the big questions in physics is why the expansion of the universe is accelerating. One theory is that gravity is leaking out of our universe into other dimensions. To test this idea, researchers looked at data from recently discovered gravitational waves.

our universe was leaking gravity through these other dimensions, the researchers reasoned, then the gravitational waves would be weaker than expected after traveling across the universe.

But the researchers found they didn’t lose any energy on their long journey, meaning other dimensions either don’t exist or are so tiny they don’t affect gravity very much, if at all.

“General relativity says gravity should be working in three dimensions, and [the results] show that that’s what we see,” physicist Kris Pardo of Princeton, lead author of the July study, tells Johnson-Groh. The latest study also concludes that the size of extra dimensions is so small that it precludes many theories about gravity leaking out of our universe.

Originally published on www.smithsonianmag.com

COMING UP!!

(Saturday, November 11th, 2023)

"WHAT IS THE FURTHEST THING WE CAN SEE IN SPACE??"

comics and animation have a lot in common, but one interesting difference is that arranging pictures in space rather than time means there's a tradeoff between the amount of drawings you use to show an action, the amount of space each drawing is given, and the amount of pages you cover which determines the 'pacing' of the comic.

if you slice the page up into a lot of tiny boxes to show many stages of a motion like an animation, then each panel has correspondingly less space for background details, and it may affect the aspect ratio of panels. if you give yourself space for a large splash panel, then the pace will slow.

one solution to this problem is to break the convention that a panel is a single 'frame' of action and show multiple images of a character in the same background. Kentaro Miura did this sometimes, and Tradd Moore (on here - @traddmoore) is an expert who uses it frequently (I'll reblog his spiderman comic in a minute). Kamome Shirahama, a genius at creative paneling, also uses it in a couple of places.

a similar trick will have a single background continuous across multiple panels, showing a static 'camera shot' at different times.

the limitation of these methods is that breaking convention makes the panel a little harder to process - you need to make absolutely sure you cue the reader clearly about where to enter the panel. and it requires action that involves a large movement so the drawings don't overlap. so most authors use it as a 'once in a while' thing.

an opposite approach, used in early parts of Superpose by Seosamh and Anka and Goodbye, Eri by Tatsuki Fujimoto, is to go even harder with the cinematic convention and give each panel the aspect ratio and detailed backgrounds of a film camera, taking all the space you need - Superpose opens with about two panels per page which may be very similar to each other, creating a very deliberate sense of pacing. to pull this off you need to be either extremely fast at drawing like Fujimoto, or accept your comic taking a long time to get anywhere - and you also need to be very good at placing the camera in space. you're basically drawing fully rendered storyboards at that point.

one of the interesting difficulties of comic-making is controlling pacing. if you draw many very similar panels it will convey a sense of high concentration and intensity, or a heavy atmosphere, like a long take in a film. much like in prose, if you spend a lot of pictures on something it draws attention to it. so you want to use the 'slow down' sparingly for effect.

as in animation, you're also limited by your own capacity to draw all those pictures, and moreover the space to put them. this is one reason why comics in magazines tend to be sharply limited in page count, and webcomics tend to be very slow compared to other forms of serial fiction. (perhaps manga can make heavier use of pacing tricks by virtue of cheaper printing and endemic overwork. i don't think that's the full story though.) meanwhile, when Transmetropolitan started to experiment with manga-style pacing, apparently it upset fans who felt the story progression was being diluted. when reading Transmet in one go, though, you don't even notice. what works well in an anthology of hundreds of pages may work poorly in a serial.

i think the pace of the reader is often controlled primarily by the text - at least for me I find I sometimes have a tendency to jump very quickly over panels to get to the next bit of the story and have to consciously slow myself down to make sure I don't fail to appreciate the art. so while a series of text-less panels is effective artistically, you might want some words to act as speed bumps. but too much text per picture and your comic becomes exhausting to read, like Subnormality. and you don't want to over-explain what's conveyed perfectly well by the pictures, as many older comics do.

ideally, you use your text, small panels and large panels to create a sense of rhythm. a big splash panel can act as the full stop in a sentence, or a longer take after a series of rapid cuts. negative space is an especially powerful device in the right hands: when you hit a page of Chainsaw Man or Berserk that is almost entirely white after several pages of dense illustration, a character bursting into the void, there's an immediate 'wow' effect before you even process what's happening in the illustration. (i can't seem to find the chainsaw man example i had in mind, so here's one from berserk.)

and on that note, the other thing that comics have that animation doesn't is the impact of being confronted with the whole gestalt page. in the manga I was helping Fall translate when she died, We Are Magical Boys (Bokura wa Mahou Shounen), Fukushima Teppei frequently puts one panel much larger than the others so it dominates the page, usually a close-up or full length character portrait, allowing the cuteness of their unique art style to treasure centre stage. Sandman, which I'm currently rereading, is full of elaborate page compositions, where a drawing might not even be a panel per se, but a visual element. Witch Hat Atelier is full of elaborate borders and clever compositions. just look at this...

how did she come up with that! the absolute madwoman! the right side is relatively standard Atelier (establishing shots, the main cast eagerly stepping out of their panel) but on the left, we have a set of panels falling down from above onto a large splash panel. even though this image is concurrent, the panels invite us to appreciate it in chunks, and the page as a whole has this great visual of the pages of a book, continuing the image of the previous page. (more of this on upcoming post on Atelier)

a character emerging from their panel to overlap others, breaking up the monotony of the grid and adding a sense of depth to the page as a whole, is a reliably appealing motif. also, drawing one panel borderless, so it implicitly continues behind the other panels. large areas of black and white and choices of colour saturation can convey a mood to the page as a whole.

the danger you run is always the loss of clarity. the reader must be able to tell what panels to read in what order without thinking about it. Sandman will sometimes do a double page spread where you're supposed to read across both pages, and this consistently trips me up. Dresden Codak is by an adhd author and her drive to give every page an elaborate layout is very familiar to me, but especially in Hob, it messes with the flow of the comic overall.

so every comic page, every comic, is a fascinating balance of all these factors. how to create a strong, visually interesting composition, control the pacing appropriate to tone, create a thrilling sense of rhythm... all without sacrificing clarity.

not much more to say about this as yet, it's just something I'm thinking about while trying to lay out a page of Ghost Barrier. my tendency is to generally use larger panels, and try to be creative with layouts, but you have to consider not just each page in isolation but how they relate to other pages. so to make the splash panel land, I need to contrast with a denser page immediately beforehand.

the more I make comics the more of a feel I'll get. cool medium!

@sensei-venus here's some Robby for ya

I had an idea, but be aware this involves mentioned drug use, the selling of drugs, and smut. Also dom!Robby with a soft side, s1 Robby, rough sex, probably more.

So y'all know how in season one Robby was in trouble for selling drugs at school. I had the idea of Reader being one of his buyers.

She isn't a frequent user or anything, she just likes the high from time to time. She's usually good for her money and Robby doesn't have a problem selling to her usually, when he has something to sell or she asks him to get her something. He always seems to know where to get stuff when he needs some cash.

One day she wants something to feel good, but doesn't have the money for it. As she's asking Robby for it, she's trying to tell him she'll pay him back for it later, but he just can't take that. If he's gonna sell to anyone, he kind of needs the money right then.

"What if I make it worth your while?" she asks. She takes a step closer to him, though they were already pretty close using hushed voices. Her hand cups his crotch and she palms him, biting her lip as she gives him bedroom eyes. "Take it as my promise to get the money back to you or something like that."

He groans, unable to hold it in because her touch is somehow firm and delicate at the same time. He pushes his hip forward, thing her by the arm. She squeezes him and he kisses her.

"This is the only time," he tells her when he pulls away.

Then they're stuffing themselves into a stuffy broom closet that has little to no room for them. He's undoing his pants while she bunches her skirt up on her hips. His cock is half hard and he starts pumping himself while she plays with her folds, getting them nice and wet for him. When she holds herself open for him, he lines his cock up with her hole and grabs her hip right, then pushes into her slowly.

He shoves her against the wall, making her slightly bend forward so she's more exposed to him. Then he takes hold of both her hips and thrusts into her to the hilt. She moans loudly and he grunts harshly. "Shut up! Can't have you being so loud. Can't get caught selling you Molly and fucking this fat cunt."

She nods and bites her lip, barely havinf enough time to adjust to the feeling of his heavy cock buried in her cunt. It was so thick and rubbed up against the best places, she was squirming under him. He took it as the sign to pull back and thrust back into her, snapping his hips into her fat ass so hard that it might bruise. She finds herself clawing at the wall, moaning deeply as she gushes around the girth of his cock. He keeps a tight grip on her hips in the meantime, his nails digging into her skin and sure to leave little crescents indented there.

They're making a mess, trying to be as quiet as possible while knocking over brooms and cleaning supplies. At one point he has to brace himself on the wall over her head as he continues to pound her because her velvet walls squeeze him so finely. He's rendered speechless as he groans and grunts lowly in her ear, the rhythmic smacking of their bodies meeting filling the tiny room. She's gushing arousal down her thighs and his balls are slapping her clit, making her eyes roll up as she can only quiver and shake under him, taking the glorious beating from his cock.

"Fuck, you really wanted it today, huh," he manages to grunt out, making her shudder at the deep gravel in his voice. She tries to look at him and speaks, but she only let's out a pitched moan as he aims for her g-spot. "I thought I told you to be quiet."

He leans off of the wall and uses his hand to cover her mouth, pulling her back to him so her head is on his shoulder. As he fucks up into her, he smirks down at her. Her moans are far more muffled behind his hands, the cool strip of his rings pressed against her lips a sensation she never knew she needed to experience in her life until now.

"You're so tight. Almost seems funny how today of all days you couldn't pay up," he says, almost accusingly. She tries to shake her head, to tell him that wasn't the case at all, but his hold simply doesn't let her. He chuckles. "If you wanted me to fuck this pretty little cunt, all you had to do was ask, Reader."

He hits another spot deep inside her and watches her eyes roll up. Her cunt walls clench around him and he grunts, feeling the way her walls just keep pulling him into her, stronger, needier.

"You're gonna come, aren't you? I know you are because I can feel it. Your needy cunt is practically suffocating my cock." He starts moving faster, slamming into her with quick and rapid thrusts to get her to come so that he can pull out. He just wants her to finish first.

However, as she starts to come, she creams all over his cock. It cascades down the base of his cock and over his balls. Her walls squeeze him for dear life, milking him as she moans and squirms in his arms, and his mind becomes too hazy as suddenly comes. He forgets to pull out and just fucks his hot cream into.

He quiets his own moans of please by sucking on her neck. When he can't possibly fuck her anymore, he presses her against the wall again, his hips tightly against her ass. He cock still throbs, letting out the last few spurts of hot cum he has, and he stands there sucking on her neck for what feels like forever.

When he pulls out, only a little leaks out of her frothy, creamy hole. She fingers it back in because she's not looking to make a bigger mess than they've already made. She puts her panties back on quick, but she can't stop squirming. She feels so full, it's almost uncomfortable. Add in the pooling cum in her panties and she's set to be a squirming mess for the rest of the day.

Robby sees and thinks the worst. "I'm sorry, Reader. I really meant to pull out and finish in your mouth or something."

She looks at him, still fixing her clothes to be somewhat presentable when they walk out of that closet. "Oh, don't worry about it. I can handle that."

He feels a sense of relief wash over him, which is quickly overwhelmed by heat due to what she says next.

"Ya know, I'd you ever wanna do this again or your need somewhere to unload those heavy balls of yours, I'm always available."

She then puts her cum covered fingers in her mouth and hums as she sucks them clean. The blush on his cheeks deepens and he has to keep himself from ripping her panties off against. He settles for kissing her rather hungrily and pressing her body tightly against his, satiating himself until they can have each other again.

Before they slip out of the closet, he gives her a little baggie with two pills in it. What they originally entered that closet for but will never be the reason they decide to meet up again.

Hob, drunkenly going into raptures about the magnificence of Dream and Dream’s abilities and forms and the sheer enthusiastic wonder of getting to experience his attention in all its shapes.

Matthew, his unimpressed corvid drinking buddy: only you could make being a monsterfucker for the boss sound holy.

Hob: it’s a calling!

Matthew: it’s thirst. Calm down, chucklefuck.

Funnily enough, if Hob had been told by some enterprising young soul a hundred years ago that his best drinking buddy would one day be a large raven with an American accent, he wouldn't have thought it the strangest thing he'd ever heard. Then again, about a hundred years ago (or so -- he's really, fantastically, marvelously pissed, and remembering dates is the furthest thing from his mind) he'd been quite into LSD, and so there hasn't been a lot of things since then that have struck him as odd.

Perhaps all the acid had done something to his brain. Rewired some vital part of him that's never quite slipped back into place. He remembers, when he was young, having a fairly healthy respect for monsters, having believed wholeheartedly in the devil, and nixies, and all manner of fey creatures, and wanting no part of them.

Or maybe it's just Dream. Dream, whose skin glows like the moon in October, Dream whose teeth are straight and white and sometimes sharp as knives, Dream whose nails are the glossy black umbra of the sea at midnight, Dream, Dream, Dream.

He hums a few bars of the song -- whenever I want you, all I have to do is dream -- and Matthew, who is also truly, incredibly pissed, dips his beak into his glass of Jose Cuervo. Hob has to trust that he's not going to drink himself into liver failure -- can birds get liver failure? -- because anything smaller than a pint glass renders it too difficult for Matthew to drink at all.

"You're singing," Matthew says, and Hob hums a few more notes, sliding tunefully into the words, his voice thick with drink and thick with an accent that only comes out when he's in his cups, or when he's in Dream.

"Dream, dream, dream," he croons, "I can make you mine, taste your lips of wine, any time…night or day…"

"Aw, Christ."

Hob shuffles his pack of cigarettes closer to Matthew, a peace offering. "S…S'not. You know. S'not like that."

Matthew tilts his head, blearily watching the approaching fags. "Then what's it like? Loverboy? You dumb sap."

"He's just perfect." Hob fumbles a cigarette from the pack, holds it up, conciliatory, for Matthew to take into his beak. Then comes the monumental task of locating the lighter, which it takes Hob several seconds of restless patting to realize is in his pocket. Actually working the lighter takes almost no effort -- it's such a memorized motion. Between World Wars one and two, he reckons he's smoked more than any single living human on the planet.

Matthew doesn't inhale. He hasn't got the cheeks for it. Instead he just sort of…lets the smoke infuse him, like trying to sage a new apartment.

"Perfect," Matthew says, only slightly muffled by the cigarette. "Yeah, but you just fuck. You don't have to work with him."

"We don't just fuck." This seems, to Hob's light-blurred senses, the most heinous of simplifications. "We're. I love him. And he's so, so good to me. C'mere. Matthew. Come here." He ducks his head down, intending to tell Matthew a secret -- there's no one else in the flat to hear, but it's the principle of the thing. Matthew, obligingly, tips up his head, smoke wreathing him like a tiny dragon.

"D'you know," Hob says, "that he's. That he can change how he looks."

"I mean. One of his names is Lord Shaper. So I guess…"

"And do you know…" Hob pauses, losing himself briefly in reminiscence. If he twists just right, he can still feel the subtle throb of bruises on his hips, on his thighs. "Do you know how many. How many hands you can fit on a body at once."

"What the fuck."

"A lot," Hob sighs. "A lot. An'. An' him at the center of it all. Shining like a lighthouse. Over the sea. Like, like the sun through ah. Stained glass. At the, what's it called."

"Church?"

"Bigger. More."

"Cathedral."

"Yeah. That."

Matthew eyes him with blatant disrespect. "You're one of those," he says, and Hob tilts his glass to try and get a look into the bottom, measuring if there's enough cider left for a mouthful, or if he needs to open a new bottle. He's got some lovely lavender-infused cider somewhere around the place.

"One of," he says, and Matthew fluffs his feathers out so densely that he looks like a large, black cottonball.

"One of those monsterfucker people. Gets off on tentacles and shit."

"Tentacles," Hob says, affronted. "There's never been any tentacles."

"Have you asked?"

Hob's not entirely sure what to say to this. He hasn't asked. He hasn't thought about it, because up until a few months ago, all of his sexual encounters had been of the decidedly human variety. Dream has laid out a feast of possibilities for him, and so far Hob has been content to eat what's been offered up. Dream sees him, after all -- when they're in his realm, in the Dreaming, it's so easy for him to skim the surface of Hob's sleeping wants and let them shape him. More than once, Hob has had to tell his lover that no, Dream doesn't have to be seven foot tall with a cock to match, doesn't have to have breasts as soft and pale as featherdown. That most of the time, what Hob wants more than anything is just him. His centennial stranger. Less strange, now, even considering the dozens of handprints that litter Hob's thighs.

"D'you think." He swallows. "D'you think he'd be keen on it?"

"I'm not gonna have this. This conversation with you, dude."

"You started it. You bloody well have to finish it. Tentacles, Matthew."

"Fuck. I mean. Maybe? He's fuckin' smitten with you. You know the. The Dreaming's had more heat waves in the past two months. Than it has in the past thousand years."

Hob's not listening to the, admittedly fascinating, weather report. He's contemplating the inside of his glass, no longer thinking about cider, but about Dream. Again. Always. Dream.

Dream coming into his bedroom at night, something he's gotten into the habit of doing lately, appearing at the window and slinking under the sheets as smooth and slippery as an eel. Dream cool against his back, the notches of his ribcage pressing indents into Hob's torso, a hand skating down the tender skin of his side. Imagines, in the curve of his pint glass, how the light would cast on Dream's skin with just the moon shining through the window, how it might make him look wet and shiny as a darting silver fish, or one of those deep sea creatures, nudibranches dainty and ghostlike where no sun ever touches.

He imagines what it would feel like for that cool and vaguely slippery touch to split, to wind around his legs in sodden tendrils, pulling him open, hefting him up with barely any effort. How Dream could plaster himself to Hob's back, and at the same time there'd be a riotous movement across his front, half a dozen limbs soft and pale as lilies sliding through his chest hair, curling around his throat, how he'd open his mouth and let them rest on his tongue, and he'd taste the sea on them, salt-sweet and alive…

"Hob?"

"Fuck," Matthew says again. "Boss. Boss man. Hi. Hiiiii."

Hob looks up at Dream, who has, true to form, appeared in front of the window, a few glints of golden sand falling in psychedelic little swirls from his shoulders, vanishing before they ever hit the ground. He's looking back and forth between Hob and Matthew, taking in the two glasses, the five empty bottles of cider, the half-empty bottle of Cuervo.

"I am…interrupting," he says, and Hob realizes that if Dream leaves, right this moment, he may very well die. So he holds out his arm, making a vague come here motion that somehow Dream interprets correctly. When he presses himself against Hob's side, it feels like some missing piece of him has finally been returned.

"We were drinking," Matthew says, and Dream nods slowly.

"I see. And everything is…fine?"

"Fine! Dandy!" Matthew sounds like he would rather be anywhere but here, but also, his drink and his cigarette are here, and so he's stuck. Hob hums softly, pushes his face into Dream's side, between coat and grey tee. Here, he feels the bumps of each individual rib with his lips, rubs his cheek back and forth against cotton that was pulled whole cloth from the ether, having never known loom or field. He's gotten to the point that everything feels smeared and bright and lovely, and he's in love, and it's grand. He plants a smacking, open-mouthed kiss to Dream's side, and feels the man shiver underneath him like a twitching horse.

"You were daydreaming."

"Mhm," Hob says.

"About me."

"Mhm."

"Oh my God," Matthew croaks.

"I see." A kiss simply isn't enough. Hob puts his mouth back to where it belongs, along the slide of that stark ribcage, and touches his tongue to the cotton. He can feel all the lovely flesh underneath, but there's something almost as good about the barrier, and how the wet fabric moves against Dream's skin. "You are very drunk."

"Take me to bed then," he murmurs. "I've got. Ideas."

There's a quiet huff above him, and then Hob is being removed from his most comfortable position, which he protests at first, but stops when he realizes that Dream is pulling him up from sitting, and then neatly and carefully picking him up. It is, quite possibly, one of the sexiest things Dream has ever done. He struggles to comprehend the lean, neatly corded arms actually lifting him -- he's got to be about eighteen stone, give or take -- but trying to think about it for too long makes sparklers go off behind his eyes, and so he stops.

"Please return to your drinking."

"I fuckin' intend to. Jesus."

"You may…wish to stay here. In the Waking. For a time."

"Boss, please."

There's a low, rolling chuckle, not quite a laugh, that has Hob tilting up his head to mouth insistently along the shelf of Dream's jaw. Licking the curve of his chin is like touching his tongue to a battery, a sharp and pleasant buzz.

"Ideas," he reminds, and Dream bends his head down, and gently kisses Hob's forehead.

"Yes. Tell me of them. And we shall sleep."

"Matthew had just. A brilliant. Ah. Concept. Thought. Tentacles."

Dream huffs against the crown of his head, and Hob is vaguely aware that he is being carried, out of the sitting room and down the hall to his bedroom, the familiar, comforting smell of it, his clothes, his bed, his deodorant and cologne. Tobacco and woodsmoke and vetiver.

"You will have to show me, lover." He's laid down without fanfare into the embrace of his own clean sheets, and Dream crawls alongside him, tucking neatly along his front, butting his head up underneath Hob's jaw. "Sleep, Hob. I will wait there for you."

"You'd better," Hob mutters. His eyes are already heavy, and all the light in the room has gone spotty and haloed with blurry arcs of color. "Lots of ideas. Love. Love you. Christ, I love you."

He feels another rumble against his throat, gentle laughter, and Hob, feeling like he's quite come out ahead of this particular drinking session, closes his eyes and lets the Dreaming claim him.

The Science of Ki

This ficlet is inspired by this illustration by the amazing @grsl-xo and is named after it as well. I encourage you to check it out and reblog. It deserves to be shared with everyone. I hope the ficlet can convey a tiny bit of the illustration's beauty.

Rated G. Can also be read here on AO3.

-------------

It wasn't often that she was rendered speechless. Therefore, Vegeta felt especially smug as Bulma stared transfixed on the glowing orb of ki between her hands, no words leaving her usually loquacious mouth.

He was surprised when she'd revealed to him that she'd never been given the chance to come close to a concentrated mass of life force, despite her close relationships with several who could wield its power. She revealed that her friends had deemed it too dangerous for her to examine and experiment with, let alone try to hold, as though they wouldn't be able to control their ki if she came close to it.

It made no sense to Vegeta. The condensed ki was only dangerous if treated as a weapon. But just as it could be used for flight, so could it be useful for other mundane things. He used it to dry his hair, warm his food and - as Bulma had recently experienced firsthand - even more pleasurable matters.

Apparently, Earth’s defenders hadn't thought to utilize their ki in such ways. Perhaps they couldn't control theirs fully; it wouldn't be much of a surprise if that was the case. Fortunately for Vegeta, it meant that he got to be the one to show Bulma. And, although he would never reveal it to another soul, he was thankful for the chance.

He stood behind her and held the harmless ball of swirling ki in front of her. There was just enough force in the orb that it felt slightly hot and he saw her cheeks redden a little with the warmth of it as it shone like a small contained sun before her eyes.

Her hands molted themselves around it, but not touching. Were she to touch, she might get a second degree burn at most, but only if he failed to make the ki dissipate before she came too close. He would never make such a novice mistake.

He felt the soft, miniscule flicker of her ki naturally trying to respond to the orb in front of her. She was weak, but still held enough life force that he would feel. When she became angry, her ki would blaze like a flame and shimmer like a bright miniature star within her. The beauty of it always stunned him.

Her unpracticed ki wanted to manipulate the glowing orb between her hands. He knew it was her inquisitive nature compelling her own ki to try to control the energy, but she wouldn't be able to. Not yet at least. As he stood there with her and felt her life force flow fiercely through her, he began to think that she might even be able to hold the ball for short periods at a time if he taught her how.

He had no reason to do so. There would be nothing to gain for him, besides her favor which he could attain in other ways.

But as he looked at her amazed eyes, so blue and wondrous, he felt that it might be worth it anyway.

2024 X-Men #35 cover by Pepe Larraz

2019-2024 - RIP Krakoa Era X-Men

I love this cover. The art is amazing. It marks the end of the Krakoa era X-Men. It's been on my mind a lot lately and I had to get some thoughts out on it. If you know me, if you ever followed me or my comics site or whatever, you know I was a very loud, very big fan of the Krakoa era at the start, basically up until X of Swords and Hickman's decision to leave. It's finally ending.

2019-2024 - RIP Krakoa Era X-Men

But truthfully it may as well be 2019-2019 -RIP Krakoa Era X-Men. It pretty much failed from the start. I loved HoxPox when it dropped. It was, embarrassing to say now, life changing for me. I thought Hickman was a genius and had found a way to reinvigorate the line and render death as a cheap storytelling gimmick useless. A bunch of my faves were being used and ressurected. I was happier than a pig in shit. I joined Twitter and all the insane X-Fans on there. I started a website and a podcast dedicated to comics. Soon the Covid pandemic started. I was terminally online, my brain rot started and grew worse by the day. It was an insane wild ride that started high and died soon thereafter.

It's hard for me to separate my pretentious Comfort Food Comic media brand time with the pretentious Krakoan Era. Both started out so happily, so full of potential and optimism. To run a site or a podcast in these hellish times you must also play the social media game. Constantly be on there, constantly push your product. Being on Twitter during that time and being part of the X-Community, you start to see how much being on social media fucks you up. You constantly feel like you need to have an opinion on everything, and that it actually matters. You need to be a critic to every piece of media, every decision, every little thing someone says or posts. You lose your grasp on reality, the real world, how to function and interact like a normal human being not stuck hidden behind a screen with your dual public twitter profile and private locked one (something I'm glad to say I never stooped to). It brings you attention. It brings you friends. It pushes your product or brand. It gives you validation and the dopamine rush. It's an addicting, disgusting, fake as hell experience. I was fully caught up in it. It didn't help that I was quarantining and barely leaving my house for a few years. It got me through the pandemic but it also left me so much worse than when I started. Much like how the Krakoan Era treated the X-Men franchise.

Why am I talking about social media so much when I started with X-Men? Well, it felt like this era of publishing went hand in hand with what was being put into the comics. Every creator was constantly on Twitter interacting with fans, always seeing what they had to say. Even Hickman was on there. Dude just wanted to post photos from movies and talk about like what Gen X members he liked. He eventually left because insane X-Men fans wanted him to talk about George Floyd and compare real world race issues with some superhero comics and weigh in, OH GOD WHY ISNT HE WEIGHING IN PUBLICALLY??. It was really weird how fans dealt with that one. Vita Ayala, Tini Howard, Leah Williams - constantly interacting with fans, friends with many of them. A pretty cool thing really, but that shit started influencing their comics throwing in characters or scenes specifically to make some X-Men fan they know on Twitter squee real loud. Shatterstar is not your favorite AEW wrestler. We do not need a book of human X-Men fans who pretend to be mutants influenced by dorky X-Men fans online. We do not need longtime villain Apocalypse to become our "Blue Dad". Jordan White should be editing or at the very least reading any old X-Men comics instead of being on Twitter. We don't need to know what the X-Writers do on their Slack, or worse, what X-fans do on their own incestuous Slack. Gerry Duggan, a writer I loved and thought could do no wrong, joined this group and upped his Twitter usage and the brain rot commenced and his work was so influenced by it. I'll never forget when white people started using fuck around and find out on Twitter and then it was in like 3 of his books the next month. My point in this ramble is the books were being influenced by and written for the loudest X-Men fans on Twitter. The art was dead. The books were a product made in that echo chamber for that echo chamber. They got bad real fast because of our society's addiction to social media these days.

Now that the honeymoon phase is over and I've revisited a lot of these books I do still feel HoXPoX was a wonderful series, one of the best X-Men series, masterfully executed and a perfect jumping off point with so much to explore. I also see the usual Hickman faults. The my series starts some time later, not really addressing anything prior to it that all his books share, the insanely detailed long term plans that he nor the comics business machine will actually follow through on after a year or so, and the shadowy superior group of power that exists in all of his comics. The Moira retcon, while brilliant, quickly falls apart when they never develop her further, or deal with the fact Xavier and Magneto went on to have an entire publishing history knowing what amounts to their entire future until the Krakoa Age must be established. That never really worked and was ignored by the creators and fans alike, including me. So it never really worked from the jump.

Rather than keep the line condensed and maybe just let Hickman write his own story, they expand it out from there involving a bunch of different creators and new ongoings. Plenty of series to explore the ramifications of these retcons, the perceived ethnostate the mutants have established and their abandoning of the coexistent dream the X-Men always fought for, grappling with identity and what it means when death no longer matters, and the conflicts that would arise from having all these villains live with them now. Sadly we instead basically just got Utopia 2.0. Surface level shit where the mutants are on an island surviving that rarely ever went in on all the amazing story ideas we could have explored. But hey certain fans were happy because they could go "Hey Synch is here for a few panels!" or "this horrific out of character gladiator death ceremony is TOTALLY the same thing as my real life transitional phase". Nobody really wanted to question any of this in the comics or in real life. And hey sour grapes aside, we did get some cool stories and some fun character interactions and moments, mostly in the Hickman books. But even from the start, some of it is horrible, more of the same schlock - Fallen Angels a great example, or Hickman's more boring Giant Size issues or his Shi'ar issue, or half of every other title. What should have been being explored or dealt with in the text often went ignored and we got X-Men being superheroes or Otherworld nonsense, which at the time I ate up because I'm such a fan of the old Captain Britain material. Sadly that never really went anywhere either, just making nebulous dimensions that were out there somewhere, don't question it LOOK IT'S JIM JASPERS! ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED! Even things that should have been celebrated like Betsy and Rachel pushing through Gal Pals territory to being together felt largely flat and hollow and forced rather than natural or fun. And that was a common theme as it kept going. Everything felt forced, felt wrong, the writing felt amateurish and simple as it ignored more major issues or reasons to exist. Things just seemed to start happening for no real story reasons. No real further development or exploration. A ton of plots don't make sense as established history and characterization is thrown out the window. Nothing really matters. Rockslide is ruined forever just because. Arrako will never REALLY make sense, Loa and Mercury are psychopathic sex fiends, Pixie of all people is a callous death pervert, Banshee is a Ghost Rider, Warlock's doing something, Colossus joins the Quiet Council and just sits there, Children of the Atom is designated a "red" important book and does nothing of value or import, Moira gets pissy so she turns into a no shades of gray villain robot who skins her soul mate and wears his skin and joins Orchis, mutants are fucking so much and I guess just quickly going to term and they just abandon countless babies in the forest, Anole and a few others are brainless dolts who love the Shadow King, Onslaught is bouncing around, there's an old X-23, Synch is now the best and can recall any power ever magically but never talks to any member of his old team or deals with his death, Inferno as a whole essentially just didn't happen or matter, Sinister isn't Sinister at all he's a clone and there's 3 more of them, Casandra Nova is on a team, Doug knows secrets, Magneto buys a lighthouse, characters are randomly and indiscriminately put into The Pit, Shaw and Selene are maybe the only two villains ever that get examined in a way where maybe they shouldn't be buddy buddy with the X-Men - I need to stop now before I get more angry and depressed but I could go on and on and on. Point is things got bad. Like a ton of this was just bad writing and bad comics. I'm sorry. I get it. I was blinded too. I ignored things. I made my own head canons. I focused on the good stuff.

By the time Hickman actually announces he is leaving, things are already falling apart due to him and Marvel deciding to expand and stretch this shit out instead of just letting him do his shit and end it as a complete story or era. He does Inferno which as I said did nothing and didn't matter. It's good but it's a big ball of nothing. From there the books get worse and worse. Duggan's superhero X-Men book is fluff. Nearly every other series declines more and more. Hellions is a fun dark comedy, but sloppy and lacking that depth and exploration. Al Ewing's work tries hard to reach those Hickman highs and I found myself quite enjoying his work on SWORD and later on X-Men Red but mainly because it all ends up divorced from Krakoa as part of his larger Marvel Cosmic work, with great characterization. I really dig that work and it's common theme is really how off to the side not involved it is.

Later writers, including some real Literal Whos? and pretentious "novel authors" further dilute the line with their less talented work(I like Steve Orlando as a person but I desperately wish he'd try harder to write actual stories instead of being a human youtube video that summarizes obscure 90's comic characters for modern day zoomers). Kieron Gillen, bless him, tries to be the new Hickman and he does have some of the best Krakoa era material, but even he starts failing pretty badly. Sins of Sinister was a clusterfuck of boring nonsense for people who want to seem or sound smart, same goes for this current Dominion plot.

Looking at the art now I'm struck by how none of these characters are TRULY changed from this era, let alone had a lasting or defining story. It's crazy to me we went 5 whole years with this and really what has changed, ESPECIALLY with the current Orchis wrap-up story. X-Men fight some nasty humans who don't like them. We're back to that ALREADY. We aren't getting to the end of the Krakoan Era, we've been in it for quite some time. As I look at this art I see only 3 wholly new characters, which they'll be lucky if they are used after this. One of them is Pogg-Ur Pogg, a perfect example of this era. A big Aligator man, not much thought behind it, that fans LOVED. Sadly, he wasn't actually an alligator man. It was all a fakeout. That was some suit a little boring gremlin wore. A little boring gremlin. Nothing unique, nothing fun. Same old shit you've seen in thousands of comics. That's what the Krakoa Era was. Something that seemed SO DAMN COOL, SO DAMN THOUGHT OUT, but really it didn't have much thought behind it. It was a flashy suit of potential hiding the same old gremlin you've always seen. Even after the eternally online creators saw how popular he got, they didn't change any of this, they just thought we've got it. The suit/gremlin thing is good. It wasn't and they tried to bring it back for further stories but it was so lame at this point it was pathetic. Much like the repeated attempts to salvage and course correct after Hickman.

So here we are at the end. I can't believe I'm actually THANKFUL it is ending. That I actually want to regress and return to the X-Men as superheroes fighting their villains again. I've been rereading old X-books and I crave that big, bold excitement of what truly made the X-Men superhero team work. It's such a bummer and such a failure of execution with so many to blame. What DISGUSTS me so much is already seeing fans eulogize this era as perfection that was cut short by Marvel and not a fun experiment that was botched from the start. I'm with you, I was the biggest believer and supporter at the start. I joined Twitter, I examined every panel, made countless threads of discussion, debated and discussed every little thing with fellow fans. I wanted so much for this to be what it could be. Please, examine it honestly and critically. It's a failure. It's time to pull the plug.

It's ironic to me that I deleted my Twitter this year, the Krakoan age having the same amount of life my Twitter fandom life did. It went from such excitement and fun to soul sucking everyday nonsense. It seems fitting and emblematic of what this age was and turned into. This era, just like Twitter which influenced it so much, is/was a stupid, ugly, brain rotted mess dotted with sparing gold with the unrealized potential for so much more. I for one, welcome it.

Peace Out Krakoa Era, you won't be missed.

Oh and as promised, cool LotRO screenshots from when I could fly.

The Hall of Vernozal

Glinghant. As I said before, I had to get extremely high in this instance before the illusion started to come apart and it became clear that you're never supposed to see most of this. Aside from the relatively minor detail that many of the trees here are growing out of solid stone, it looks just like there could potentially be a tower or balcony that players could legitimately stand on here to see the view.

The Ost Dunhoth foyer.

Suri-kyla's Great Lodge. I love the way the shadows flare out from the fire down there.

The one screenshot I got of the Last Homely house before being ejected from it.

The nighttime skybox used in the cell the Last Homely House is in. This goes hard, considering you can only see it in a tiny strip across the ceiling and it's heavily obscured by trees.

The Boar Fountain from above.

Minas Morgul from ~200 feet above Estolad Lan. Tragically, I didn't seem to be able to get any higher than this in this area. I ought to have experimented a bit, grabbed a milestone at Echad Uial or Taen Orwath to see if I could get any higher up, but I was very focused, and this isn't half bad in the meantime.

Couple of shots of Barad Curonn. Unfortunately I was unable to get to the Vandessar, as there was no way I could get low enough to get through the gate to the stairs. Perhaps with the help of a high-level captain I would have been able to, but alas. Also there would probably have been a totally arbitrary rule against summoning in that area for some reason.

Fallen Kings. Last screenshot I got before I rose so high the Nazgul actually stopped rendering in for me. Also the room stops being red any higher than this, which is weird.

Some aerial shots of Osgiliath from the beginning of Dome of Stars. This instance was really weird about the glitch and kept on insisting that I was falling instead of swimming. Also whereas with most other parts of the game I was able to simply float over invisible walls, this instance had invisible walls that rose higher than my flight level and which limited exploration considerably.

Tinnudir Keep. Many thanks to hallothere for getting me here! I was unable to get here myself on account of the lintel on the doorway at the end of the hall. Many such lintels in the game prevented me from seeing things that I really wanted to. (I promise you I put my nose into every single dragon lair in the game, but I guess lintels are all the rage in dragon home design circles these days. And as they're all instanced, the only way a player could have summoned me past it would be if I was a Guardian -- and I'm not even positive that would work TBH.)

Udun.

Haerondir. This was another place with massively tall invisible walls and I cannot for the life of me imagine why.

Entry hall of Barad-dur. Thanks to hallothere for getting me here as well, and helping me reposition myself. The ceiling in this room is Made of Lintels.

Overhead of the Jacked-up Murder Gazebo Ondoher's Folly.

Mask o' Flight Bohrok design

The highlight of MoF is the several frames where you can see some frozen Bohrok, it was the part of the movie I was always the most interested in, and would pause and rewind constantly trying to make out any details. Well now there's the HD version on youtube you can actually do that much more reasonably, and I noticed some really interesting details with the shields.

Back when watching it on DVD on a CRT television, all I could ever make out was this one, which seemed to be a simplified Kohrak shield.

But looking at it today I noticed these two, one which looks more like a Nuhvok shield and one that's mid way between the two.

That's when I realised: They were actually articulated! I did a quick sketch of how the would most likely function.

Now you may notice the fire, and wonder why, since it looks like a cross between the Kohrak and Nuhvok shields, but in the movie you can see the slightest hint of red under the ice.

And in a deleted scene you can see Terry showing off a carving of the Bohrok, and the flame shooting one clearly has the same shield design.

Also worth pointing out that the central prong with two flame jets on either side is reminiscent of Tahnok-Kal's shield design. (So maybe it was actually a hoard of Tahnok-Kals...)

So yeah. MoF Bohrok are Tahnok, and their shield does this cool unfolding thing to reveal the flame jets, maybe they could even function as pincers? We may never know.

The tiny robot in Mask o' Flight 2 which used a barely modified version of the Bohrok model features the same shield design as well.

Also possibly shows that if the Bohrok had moved they would have had a single neck, instead of the double one (which I can say from first hand experience is a pain to rig). He's an odd little guy, he moves very awkwardly and somehow looks like he was greenscreened in in a cgi movie.

The Bohrok in MoF are quite odd, they appear for a few frames, are mostly obscured, and for the most part seem to be practically using the 3d model from the renders, but there's little things like this that show that some work did go in to them. It makes their barely being in the movie more of a shame really.

This was going to be a tweet but it was too complicated.

"Oh what a night" – The case of the BBC Sherlock transmasc aesthetics: Relating to problematic masculinities in search for identity

So I sat down and rewrote this silly essay I wrote one day after returning from my trip to the US. Flaneurism at its best (or at its worst, idk). Please bear with me but definitely send in your feedback if you read and feel like it, it means the world to me and it will definitely help me unpack some of my problematicness! Thank you <3

I take a deep drag of my American Spirit cigarette whilst the tail ofmy long black coat swishes behind me dramatically. Dusk-time Boston is lit up. The skyscrapers towering over my tiny figure are glittering against the dark through the blurry lens of my camera phone.

I am consciously imitating the aesthetic of the modern but also always Victorian BBC Sherlock, in the scene following John and Mary’s wedding, in which the world’s only consulting detective surrenders to his noble, quiet pining for his not-gay best friend.

What even is masculinity, anyway? What would I like it to be?

The creators of the series, Gatiss and Moffat, spent 10 years religiously denying the possibility of a romantic or sexual relationship between the two protagonists, while driving the hordes of fans into delirium every time that Sherlock (Benedict Cumberbatch) and John (Martin Freeman) made love with their eyes or confessed their devotion to one another. Despite the queerbaiting, the homophobia and the sexism in the Moftis series, despite the 4th season fiasco, despite the actors denying the possibility of their characters ever running together into the sunset, Sherlock himself never denied being queer. Gay, asexual, demisexual, the interpretations are many, a breath of representation in the relative democracy of fandom. And as if that wasn’t enough, Sherlock and John end up canonically raising John’s daughter together at their 221B Baker Street apartment.

The modernized urban Victorian aesthetic, the provocatively coded dialogues, the deep homosociality, and the simple, pure bitterness towards the creators, renders the community of Johnlock fans more alive than ever almost 10 years after the series’ finale. In some hidden, bright corners of the internet, like fanfiction.net and archiveofourown.com, women and queers publish analyses and fanfiction in which they explore the endless galaxy of human genders, sexualities, and forms of kinship, writing the insufferably British male characters as women, non-binary, FTM, Alpha and Omega, pregnant, high, and always together - two human animals exploring bodies and experiences that belong to us in the shelter of Baker Street, with their landlady, Mrs. Hudson, being their most ardent shipper. We write entire full-length novels for free, with our sole motive being the exploration, the practice in writing, and the communication with other queers, other women, other people who feel like us and live in different sides of the earth which, despite Sherlock not remembering, keeps on orbiting the sun with the certainty born by a Johnlocker for their OTP being endgame.

Back to Boston now, which looks like Glasgow on steroids, with its red brick buildings and the glass towers that pierce the skies - it doesn’t feel as cozy and familiar to me as European cities, but it is big enough to swallow and hide me, safely, away from the suffocating and often murderous, homotransphobic gaze of my motherland, Greece. Boston feels big enough to make me feel free, invisible, and at the same time more visible than ever.

Here’s how I made it happen: in the name of an egotistical but seductive flaneurism, in the idea that here I can be non-binary and roaming the streets while smoking without thinking that, at any given moment, I might be spotted by the people from whom I’m hiding both facts, I end up romanticizing a stroll on stolen land, as well as the tar in my lungs. I feel the need to wander around, heavily perfumed, with a hanful of product in my hair, dressed androgynously in a way that my mother only accepts because she doesn’t understand the meaning of it, smoking as the soundtrack of Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons’ December 1963 (Oh What a Night) blasts through my old headphones. As a queer person living in Greece, I never felt that the streets belonged to me. I’ve always felt like a pariah looking for somewhere to belong to, and the irony of going after that feeling in America as a white European tourist brings a certain sourness to my mouth. Is that how Columbus felt? Was he a sissy who didn’t feel accepted by his mum in their suffocating mediterranean society? No, fuck that thought. Fuck that circle, fuck everything I've been taught by the writers of history. I decide to leave these streets to their people, without it meaning that I’ve suddenly found the courage to reclaim my own back in motherland.

Exhaustion, flight, cowardice? Survival.

Later I will learn that the American Spirits with the Native American on their turquoise box are anything but native-owned. What’s certain is that, in this trip, I found solace while smoking stolen land.

What does that make me? A citizen of the world?

After all, in the entire trip, I pretend I’m Sherlock, the whitest man to ever white man. It’s not as if I don’t have my own personality - at least I hope that I do. It is that through relating (to fictional characters, actors, role models who remind me of an aesthetic I had to build from scratch for my trans self, with the help of other queer people who created fanart or fanfiction, moulding new arhetypes) I find a vehicle for the exploration of my existence more easily, I see my reflection (or the one I’d like to have) in the mirror. In the fandom nobody tells you how to imagine your favourite characters and how not to. Nobody tells you how to write yourself, and nobody blames you for doing it. You create with self-indulgence, and you’re applauded for it. And that saved my life.

For years I related to a genderfluid Tonks, a trans Remus Lupin, a fanon Jean Prouvaire from Les Mis. Through all those experimentations and games, the changing of clothes in the dark, the opening and closing of the closet door, I found a name for myself: Sam. And Sam, like every other trans masculinity with the name Sam, Skye, Noah, and Eliott, contains multitudes. 

For the timebeing, my persona of choice is that of Sherlock, perhaps the most insufferable (and one of the most privileged) characters in the history of British TV (which says a lot). “What do you have in common with that emotionally constipated man?” you ask me because you know that my own sentiments are constantly dancing naked before me. I wonder why that is. Indeed, what do I have in common with that guy and end up projecting so much on him? Me, who hesitates to even cancel a doctor’s appointment in pursuit of constant politeness and people-pleasing (AFAB, you see).

When Sherlock’s landlady, Mrs. Hudson, disapproves of his manners and threatens him with a tete-a-tete with his mother, Sherlock gives her his blessing, saying: “You can if you like, she understands very little”.

Sherlock and his turbulent relationship to his parents. Sherlock who always observes everything while staying outside, because he doesn’t know how to get in. Sherlock, always so different that he’s used to people laughing at him, gaping at him with awe, or wanting to punch him in the face. Sherlock who always attracts attention simply because he functions the way he functions, constantly failing to be a normal human being. Neurodivergent Sherlock, camp Sherlock, forgotten-in-another-era, flaneur Sherlock, who even in the Gatiss series (especially in the Gatiss series) is desperate to love, but he never manages to get it right. And finally, Sherlock the logical, the detached, the cynic: masculine elements that I never managed - and was never allowed to - acquire, and which I desperately, problematically craved, because in society and inside me they have been coded as masc.

I am the opposite Sherlock, and that makes me even more of a Sherlock, I decide, and if that helps me sleep at night, then so be it, for now. 

As Hil Malatino writes in the chapter Fall Out Boy is Trans Culture of his essay Surviving Trans Antagonism: “The boy at the center of a [Fall Out Boy track, brackets mine] is [...] being eminently braggadocious and narcissistic [...]. He’s stationed directly at the center of a completely solipsistic universe. No matter how insufferable this kind of guy is in reality, I would have killed for a fraction of his swaggering self-confidence as a kid” (Malatino 2020, 17).

What even is masculinity, anyway? What would I like it to be?

“Do I look like Sherlock?” I ask you, hopeful and doe-eyed as I prance around in my black suit inside the house while packing for the trip. “Sherlock is gender, you know.”

“Do you really want to know how I see your gender? 100% honest-to-God?” you ask mischievously.

“Yes, I do,” I’m hanging from your lips.

“You are, deep inside your soul, in this tartan robe of yours, Bananas in Pyjamas.”

I think about it. Not exactly Sherlock. I smile though. I see my gender in your words. Goofy, boyish, vintage, loud, sleepy, badly dressed: Me. Headcanon accepted.

If headcanon and fanon - that is, reclaimed - Holmes played by (problematic) Cumberbatch teaches me how to be a boy or a man, then so be it, because I hope that my performance will be filtered, as much as possible, through my “girlish” (though still white) sensibilities. That, and the fact that there is a child inside me who never got to live as an openly, unashamedly neurodivergent, inquisitive little boy. Because there is a masculine side inside me that I must hide every day when I go to work. So I put together a playlist, I put on my scruffy headphones, and I tar my lungs, just a little more, a little longer until I’m able to finally leave my country for good and feel ready to love myself as I am. My coat swishes behind me as I dance alone on the street, invisible among the crowd, yet feeling more visible than ever before.

CITATIONS: Malatino, H. (2020). Trans care, University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctv17mrv14

actually this is a good chance to get to know you a bit better. top 3 animals, top 3 colors, top 3 games

Top 3 Animals

1) Crocodiles — There used to be many saltwater crocodiles back in my mom's province. These are the largest reptiles in the world so just seeing them (from a very far, safe distance away) is pretty awe-inspiring. One of these was so gargantuan we put a replica of its skeleton on display in the national museum in Manila, hung over the lobby. We also have Philippine Crocodiles which are endemic to the country, but I've only seen juvenile ones at a zoo since they're endangered and all.

2) Turtles — There are very few experiences like being on the beach and seeing a sea turtle in the wild. One time we were on a fishing boat and someone screamed, I thought for sure it meant someone spotted a shark, but when I leaned over to look, there was a sea turtle poking its head out right above the coral reefs to watch us. There's not many perks to living in the tropics, but this is one of them.

3) Kulasisi — These are very tiny parrots (I think the smallest in the world even?) that aren't common, but can be found virtually anywhere. One of my favorite classes back in college was birdwatching, where one of our sessions found a couple nesting pairs right outside one of the buildings. It was because of that class that I realized it was a Kulasisi that was making the bird calls I would hear when getting up in the morning to go to class

Top 3 Colors

1) Purple — My grandmother's favorite color, and mine eventually. I used to be a blue person until I shifted to darker purple and violet as I got older

2) Blue — I still like it

3) Black — I really liked the Matrix

Top 3 Games

I'm a big gamer (enough that I went into gamedev for a living despite everything) so this is probably the most malleable list. I'm not difficult to please and generally like a lot of stuff, so a top 3 favorite games list could look very different each time, barring one game.

1) Dota 2 — I have over 5000 hours in my favorite game of all time. Picked it up in 2012, and then it was all over for me. I can go stretches of up to 6 months without touching the game, but when I reopen it, the hype comes flooding back.

2) Devil May Cry 5 — I continue to hold the opinion that DMC5 hit the platonic ideal of stylish action game design, V's lack of depth notwithstanding. The game has been out for 5 years and people are still uploading new runs, finding all these tricks and secrets in the game just as they did with DMC3 and 4 before it. If Dante only got wall running and Wild Stomp back from 3, it might be as close to perfect as you can get. Devil Trigger and Bury The Light are also among my favorite video game songs of all time, among the likes of Killer Instinct's or Metal Gear Rising's

3) Metal Gear Solid 4 — MGS3 is the better game, MGS1 and 2 are more iconic, but MGS4 rescued the PS3 from irrelevancy before Uncharted 2 made it big. Holy shit that game looked unbelievably good when it first came out. The way Snake would lie still and camouflage into the floor while bullets sprayed the ground right in front of him while mooing mechs and soldiers were mere feet away blew my mind.

Games like Resident Evil 4 three years earlier really popularized making cinematic cutscenes that were rendered in-game rather than pre-rendered, but I didn't realize the possibilities behind it until MGS4's Raiden vs Vamp. A complex action scene where Raiden and Vamp had a sword duel would always be cool, but what pushed it over the top was that you kept playing the whole time it was happening. MGS4 would split the screen, playing the cutscene in one half, while in the other you had to carry on with your mission, and goddamn that sure was a moment of thinking "Wow this really is next gen"

Some scholars have claimed that translating these centuries-old poems is essentially impossible. These ancient poets stripped their language down so much that poems were akin to impressionistic paintings. The first line of “Luan Family Rapids” has just five Chinese characters: 颯颯秋雨中. If you were to render them literally, it would be something like: Whoosh whoosh autumn rain midst. What do you do with that?

Deep humility infused the work of these old poets. They recognized that a poem would never be experienced as they felt it or as they intended it, distilled as it inevitably would be through the experiences and the filters of each reader. A poem was a poem, yes, but really, it was a prompt: What do you see? Will you notice even the smallest, seemingly most insignificant things? What is happening in this moment? Where to from here?

So while it might be impossible to create an English facsimile of the Chinese poem, it’s not at all impossible to translate—to convey something of the original’s beauty, to stir a wonder that might be similar but never exactly the same. In the spare wording, there’s lavish hospitality—so much room to imagine how to evoke a similar feeling, so many options to invite the reader to pause, to receive, to perceive, to imagine.

In this tumultuous world, in these unsteady times, I crave things that inspire possibility and point us to ways forward. Of course beauty can be a diversion or an escape or even a sedative, but it doesn’t have to be. Indeed, it shouldn’t be. To notice beauty is not necessarily to ignore ugliness—not at all. Rather, I want to know what we’re working toward and what we’re hoping in, not just what we’re opposed to and what we’re against. There’s plenty in this world that stokes my anger. What then?

I’ve been accused of naïveté—of course you, with your privileged life, can afford to focus on beauty. But nobody who really knows me has ever accused me of being a glass-half-full person. And there’s nothing naïve about beauty or its steadfast companion, hope. A spirit soft enough to feel deeply the world’s sorrow and suckage is also one that acknowledges the potential for something better—something healthier, something more joyous, something more nourishing. To be grounded in the reality of our lives is to recognize not just the devastation and the doom but also the goodness and the grace.

Beauty helps keep us tender. It protects us against the calcification of the heart and it gentles the soul, which is so often in danger of crusting into cynicism and scurrying into despair. To be wholly human is, I think, to be able to hold the both/and, never yielding to the constant temptation to overweight one or the other.

I need beauty that takes the shape of invitation—the nudge toward noticing, the prod toward possibility. Sometimes all it takes, because it’s already there, waiting to be perceived, is a tiny shift in perspective.

Jeff Chu

How would the Ro's and Dad's react to Mc telling them they are pregnant? Also, with twins 😋

Oh goodness, I've never done one of these asks before. I had to think on it a bit. I also have no aspirations or nature for parenthood so forgive me if I'm a little off the mark, lol.

Let's see...MC's parents are easier for me...

Papa would cry, for sure. He would be overjoyed and overwhelmed with emotion. *weep - look at MC - smile - weep again* Guaranteed, MC will not want for furniture. He'll make cribs, baby sized chairs, tiny spoons, a house, whatever MC needs. (can you imagine his huge hands carving tiny baby spoons? lol)

I imagine Da would be in shock for a moment - just frozen, staring at MC. After that he may just run - bolt out the door, run down the road through town and yell at everyone. He would return later with gifts for MC, and extra smile lines around his eyes. (also, he'll be digging out MC's old baby things he has safely tucked away in a cedar chest)

Now, for the RO's...

Oswin would have so many conflicting emotions. He'd be ecstatic, but scared. I imagine the shock would render him to his knees, and I think he'd tear up and want to hold MC close. He'll have trouble sleeping for a while, I think. Between nerves and excitement, expect him to be pacing at night, maybe while cradling a wrapped bundle of blankets to practice...(MC is also getting pampered, for sure - twins run in the family and they can be hard on the body)

Zahn would lose themselves to excitement. They're already planning toys, games, tiny bows and arrows. They're also asking MC a million questions wanting to know what it's like, how they feel, if they can do anything. Above all, they're cheering MC on and not leaving their side for anything, completely smitten with how strong and wonderful they are. Their mind is going a mile a minute thinking of all the things a kid needs for a perfect childhood.

Duri is freaking out a bit. It will take them a little longer to be excited, but it will happen. They're mostly scared about what sort of parent they can be. This is a lot of responsibility. Are they good enough for a child, let alone 2? Are they good enough for MC? Will MC be okay? Before you know it, MC is getting offers for every manner of massage that Duri can think of, and they're off asking MC's parents for advice.

Rune takes the news stoically - well, it at least looks that way. Like Oswin, there are a lot of conflicts happening. There's pride and hope, but fear too. Above all, they will be a better parent than what they had. MC can expect them to begin researching anything and everything pregnancy and baby. Nearly every day, Rune's finding things MC might need for themselves or for the little ones. They may secretly take up knitting.

??? is frozen. He's in shock. Him? A dad? Wait, did MC say TWINS!? He gets very happy-scared, and is just plain shocked that this has even happened. It doesn't feel real. He's going to need a long snuggle with MC to absorb all of this.

Thank you for the question, Anon! It was neat to think on how their personalities and experiences would factor into something big like this. There's a couple things on Zahn and Duri especially that I can't totally reveal, since it may spoil their backstories a bit, but you may be able to infer a good deal from them.