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kedreeva · 2 years

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When I was a kid, maybe 14 or so (which is, you know, 20+ years ago), I belonged to a Yahoo! mailing list for an anime called Gundam Wing. It was mostly populated by other teens, of varying ages, as it was started by a teen and her friends. Eventually it migrated, when Yahoo! groups started as forums, and even branched off into non-GW related stuff in a second forum.

One of the things I remember the most clearly is the oldest person in the group. Her name was Steelsong. She was a 40-something Dom with a sub whose name we knew even though we knew nothing else. She ran her own fanfic archive because the web was still handmade HTML and navigated in webrings and I’m pretty sure Google didn’t exist or was only barely, barely launched and not well known. She was kind and patient and we loved her. She treated everyone on the group with the respect given any adult, even though most of the rest of the world was still treating us like we were children. Not teenagers even, but children. She never once condescended to any of us, never made our youth a barrier to her respect, never treated us like we were incapable of being full people or like we were less than her because we were young.

I remember that she hosted our fanfiction, as absolutely terrible as it was (and I still have some of it, I am WELL aware of how cringingly terrible it is, just absolute nonsense garbage), right there alongside of other fic that was soul-achingly beautiful. Not a separate section for her friends or for kids, just right there like we were good enough to feature alongside other authors. I never once received crit from her that I didn’t ask for, only support. Only love. I am still writing today partly because Steel was so kind about our fic, fanfic and original.

I remember that when I started doing clay sculpture, she commissioned a tiny pair of dragons from me, to support me doing artwork. She sent a check my mom cashed for me, and my mom helped me mail it when it was finished. It broke in transit, and Steel assured me that she mended it and that it was still beautiful. It was a small gold dragon curled up with a small silver dragon.

I remember that her patience knew no bounds. I remember that she was there for us, regardless of reason. When we wanted to know silly things like what to do with a single AA battery, she answered. When we had serious questions about sex, she answered. When we had questions about writing, she taught us. When one of our group members, a young gay teen in Australia, ended up in the hospital and then stopped making posts, and we all knew what had happened, she let us talk to her about it because we couldn’t go to our own parents, even though we had just lost a friend.

She was not a replacement to my parents, but she was an extra parent, in some ways. A friend, certainly, but someone that had been through more life than we had and was willing to pass on knowledge if we asked for it. Someone older that we trusted with things that were too uncomfortable to go to our parents or teachers or whatever about, because we already knew she wasn’t going to judge us or something, and that we would get an honest answer.

I don’t know why I’m remembering this so hard tonight, and I’m not sure if there’s a point to sharing this, except that I know she’s gone now. She was ill the last time we spoke, and her site went down a long time ago, and I miss her. She was a huge influence on my life, then and now. She was hope, for me, that life as an adult didn’t have to be boring, it wouldn’t have to mean giving up the things I loved and Becoming Only Responsible With No Fun. Her presence meant I had hope I could still write and play with friends even when I wasn’t ‘a kid’ anymore. And she’s gone, and I miss her, and I wanted to share her from the perspective of youth, and the perspective over twenty years later has provided me.

And I think of her, when people go off about older folks being in fandom with younger folks. I’m an older folks now, or at least middle aged folks because there are certainly folks older than me still, but I wasn’t always. I’ve been here since i was a younger folks, and I know how much Steel’s presence and support meant to me, how much she helped not just me but everyone on that group. And I think of the people saying older folks don’t belong in fandom, and that they shouldn’t interact with younger folks at all, and I just think... I can’t agree. I needed that kind of solid presence in my life back then and even at the age I am now, I need the folks older than me to stay. I want them here.

So I guess, like, if you’re here and you’re 40 or 50 or 60 or 70 or 80 or whatever, I want you here in fandom with me, still. Your presence here is a comfort. It is hope. It is a reminder that life will continue to be fun, even as I get older, myself. And if you’re younger and you have this sort of elder in your groups, I hope that they are like Steel. I hope they are kind and patient and supportive, and that knowing them gives you hope for your own future. I hope in twenty years you look back and remember them fondly.

#steelsong #personal #stories about ked's life #dash stretcher #fandom #god she would have loved ao3 so much #i wish i could tell her about the good things that have become

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soleminisanction · 6 months

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There are very few ""headcanons"" out there that get a bigger side-eye from me than people who try to make Stephanie Brown into a Black girl.

Firstly because that is not a headcanon. That's just a whole-ass retcon created out of thin air. A headcanon would be saying she's a natural redhead like how Morgan Kohan played her on Batwoman, or that she's mixed-race because of the curly way some artist draw her hair. There's definitely flexibility in race interpretations for comics but looking at the blue-eyed blonde-hair white girl and declaring her "actually Black" is not one of them.

Secondly, because I have seen (and sometimes gotten) a lot of harassment from Steph fans aimed specifically at Tim's actual, canon Black love interests and teammates. I still seethe at the memory of this one CBR interview I read back when YJ2019 was running, where Brian Michael Bendis and David F. Walker were clearly there to talk up Naomi and Teen Lantern, and in the middle of their heart-felt conversation about the importance of representation for young Black girls, the interviewer butted in to interject, "But you know who I want to see more of?? Stephanie!!!" This going on while Steph fans on Twitter were going on racist tirades because the book dared to highlight the history of Teen Lantern, a character who was actually advertised to be a part of the book and a new member of the team, instead of giving them more of their white-blonde fav who had never been affiliated with YJ and was never part of the advertising.

Thirdly, she was created and so often written by Chuck Dixon, a blatant racist, and as a result there are so many little scenes of her that have uncomfortable racial elements to them. Like the one where he created a pair of Black girls just so Stephanie could call them "raging morons" to their faces and then later talk about how stupid and immature they are compared to her. (Which I am still convinced was Dixon directly criticizing the much better teen pregnancy subplot from Icon & Rocket). Or the borderline-blackface white savior ""demon"" where she wears a dead gnu and maybe accidentally calls herself a bitch in Swahili. (Disclaimer: I do not speak Swahili, and thus do not know how a sentence structure that should read "I am thorn" turns into "I'm a bitch" or "I'm crazy," but I checked that translation with three different robo-translators and got the same results so, shrug.)

And finally -- god, Steph is just, such a walking avatar of white women's privilege. Her entire thing is demanding that she get her way, never letting anyone tell her no, and still being treated by the narrative as a pure-hearted ""beacon of hope"" that everybody needs to protect and nurture at all times.

The inciting incident of War Games can be boiled down to, "A white girl got told no, and made it everybody else's problem." The first attempted Black member of the Batfamly fucking died during that event and got almost entirely forgotten because people only went to bat for the white girl who caused the whole mess and the white woman who got character assassinated to kill her off.

If Stephanie were Black, she wouldn't exist anymore. Fuck, if she were a brunette or just as butch as Carrie Kelly, she probably wouldn't exist anymore. She certainly wouldn't be Batgirl, I can't imagine Dan Didio replacing Cass with another woman of color.

And it's not even just her? Her father is also a very white character. It is incredibly easy to summarize Arthur Brown as a mediocre white man lashing out at the world for not handing him the success he felt entitled to. Take that petulant entitlement away from him and you lose his entire character.

I'm ranting about it on my own blog instead of picking a fight because everybody's entitled to their own fandom experience and blah blah, but this is just. Yeah. Ugh.

#I almost want to label this a squick but that's not entirely right #what actually squicks me out in the Bat-fandom is people feminizing Jason Todd #because there's objectively nothing wrong with that it just sets off my dysphoria #whereas I am not going to attack anybody for this one but it doesn't disgust or weird me out it just makes me frustrated or mad #please appreciate the representation of actual black girls in comics instead of projecting onto the whitest white girl in gotham plz & thx #try milestone milestone is really good even if they do need more female heroes #stephanie brown critical #ranting #racism tw #race talk tw #chuck dixon critical #your friendly reminder that chuck dixon is a racist #long post #dash stretcher #sorry

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snarp · 1 year

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Results from Bing Image Creator DALL-E prompt "Sesshu's "Winter Landscape."":

The images produced resemble generic wilderness winter landscape paintings with no obvious influence from Sesshu's style! It doesn't know who Sesshu is.

Results from Bing DALL-E prompt ""Winter Landscape" by Sesshū Tōyō.":

The images resemble generic winter landscape paintings, with stylistic quirks in the foreground elements (trees, stones, and water) influenced by ukiyo-e, not by ink painting. Mountains and foliage seen in some backgrounds resemble ink painting - but not Sesshu's style.

Conclusion: DALL-E's dataset contains enough information to allow it to categorize "Sesshu Toyo" as a Japanese name; its text parsing presumably tells it that it's a painter's name; it adds up "Japanese painter" and "landscape" to "probably ukiyo-e."

Results from Bing DALL-E prompt "The famous Zen ink painting "Winter Landscape" (c. 1470s) by Sesshū Tōyō.":

The images are clearly based on ink landscape paintings, one having what appears to be an attempt to design an artist's signature seal in the corner. However, none of the four employs the angular lines, abruptness, gritty texturing, and "paradoxical" sense of vagueness which distinguish Sesshu's style. Too round and soft.

Implicitly, DALL-E's dataset contains examples of the phrase "(Zen) ink painting," but either it has nothing by Sesshu specifically (???) - or the data doesn't just doesn't actually associate his work with his name.

Here's the original painting for comparison:

#dall-e #sesshu toyo #sesshu #ml #long post #dash stretcher #ai

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thoroughlycollected · 1 year

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i’mmm thinkin bout lan wangji. in the donghua and cql specifically, from the events of the wen indoctrination through the sunshot campaign even more specifically. [spoilers below]

like. dad-he-never-really-met’s dead, brother’s in charge now but also missing with all the sect’s books, home’s burned down, fellow disciples dead maimed in disarray, leg broken – in his fanciest white robes and a big ass guan like war regalia marching his way to and through the indoctrination refusing to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing the last lan heir (and possibly acting sect leader???) crack.

and then like, cool: false xuanwu is dead, the other hostages made it out, jin zixuan and jiang wanyin came back, wei ying is safe with his family, cool cool cool time to leg it back to gusu – no sword (leg still broken?) – to help rebuild cloud recesses and hold it down til lan xichen comes back. and lotus pier falls! war is coming! and he’s like. coordinating search parties looking for the missing yunmeng children and the elders don’t like it. that one elder (donghua) comes to him to ask him to chill lest he brings the wrath of the wen back down on them; lwj’s like “but righteousness? not bowing to tyranny?” (v nice lan qiren comes in with the assist and say’s he’s correct). lan wangji doesn’t have much success with finding the yunmeng children in either adaption but he has major success visiting the leaders of smaller clans and sects and rallying them to the cause; lxc comes back with a force of 200+ men ready to fight because lwj went and met them and asked nicely. and now he’s got more free time because his brother’s back and in charge but not a ton of free time because there’s still a war on; what’s he do with all his extra hours? he’s night hunting for the civilians who can’t rely on cultivators anymore because they’re all at war he’s earning a title about it. he’s helping jiang wanyin take out supervisory offices like he’s supposed to he’s also sneaking around with jiang wanyin looking for wei ying.

just a busy busy lad so busy. so responsible! he sees something needs to be done, he goes and he does it. he’s just there ready to work all the time ready, willing, capable, doing his best and it happens that his best is often very good.

#this is assuming i'm remembering all the plot points right in my musings but! i'm musing #i'm musing about my boy #lan wangji is my dude that's my guy that's my beloved that's my bro that's my darling #i get that characters doing things is like . how stories work. that's what a narrative is #but so much about what he was doing during wwx’s first life is so peripheral to the main plot that i guess #i mean i know about it but every now and then i Think about it and it’s like OH! he’s booking it #he’s just got this deep sense of Responsibility to every living being and he works very hard to honor it without comment or prompting #(much like a certain someone else hmmmmmm)#but this is about wangji rn!!!#i think him going back to cloud recess at the end of cql makes sense like i wish he would've invited wei ying to go with him.#but like cql!lxc is going into seclusion because he's heartsore of course wangji is going to take the helm so he can rest a bit #cql spoilers #mdzs spoilers #mdzs donghua #lan wangji #the untamed lwj #long post #lwj #dash stretcher #lan posting #cql

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cameoappearance · 2 years

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IC Server Adventures: Untriumphant WX-78 @quackadero gets cursed for monkey grave robbing and has a super great time with it

Wilson wants to find out how this works scientifically. Wilson will not find out how this works scientifically. Both because WX doesn’t trust him enough to let him look, and because It Does Not.

also featuring: me as Wilson, @20andyrumi02 as Wormwood, @rookiebotwx78 as the other WX, @fooligandan as Woodie, @knowledgeable-atlas as Abigail In Wendy’s Body, @doggofactory as Warly, and Tin Can as Webber

#don't starve #dont starve #dst #don't starve together #dash stretcher #the curse of moon quay #wrist injury #mystery monkey death #which is probably a bug #but we don't know what in

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misttiddies · 2 years

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Breaking down the Boruto manga art style

When I first saw the Boruto manga style I thought it was ugly to the point of being unreadable. I have since come around to kind of liking it, but I think it’s interesting enough to kind of dissect, especially at this point in Boruto where the man is drawing key frames for the anime, whose style is morphing more and more to look like his with the introduction of more characters who were originally drawn in Ikemoto’s style (as opposed to a lot of the original gen characters and Boruto-age kids, who were designed by Kishimoto first.)

I want to make it clear that, other than point 5, none of these are supposed to be criticisms. This is ‘what makes this style different from all the other ones out there’ not ‘why it sucks’. Whether this style looks good or bad is in the eye of the beholder as my first statement proves. i am the beholder and i have thought it is both good and bad

1. There is a lot of definition in the eyes, and people generally have more eyelid than usual in anime. In a lot of anime, either the eyes are big enough or the irises are small enough that there’s white space between the iris and the lids on all sides. The characters who don’t have this usually don’t for a reason, like Kakashi, who’s meant to look bored and closed-off. Ikemoto really seems to favor a half-lidded look, as almost all of Kara, except Daemon most of the time, have half-closed-looking lids unless something extreme is going on.

This is in the middle of him lunging at Sarada and his eyes are still drooping down.

(Having said that, half-lidded characters are almost always adults, to the point where it looks jarring on a lot of the kids who aren’t Kawaki. Think abt how Boruto is usually only half-lidded when Momoshiki is taking over.) And in addition to just having a lot more lid, they’re very defined. Everyone has a waterline if they’re drawn decently big on the page. There are often multiple lines indicating lid creases, and multiple lines in eyebrows.

^ this one is very zoomed in, the width of a whole page, and this one v is like a fifth of the page big

which makes eyebrow less characters like Jigen look even more uhh?? strange? It’s an inordinate amount of detail even for people who don’t have dojutsu. There’s not a whole lot of variety in shape either. There’s a lot of variety in pupils and irises, but the shape is generally the same within categories (men, women, children.)

2. Almost everyone has defined noses and lips too. Kind of an addendum to point 1, but I wanted eyes to be their own point because they get so much focus. I think that the rest of the face being as detailed as the eyes is a good thing, it’s more balanced, but I feel the need to remark on it because it’s another thing that’s different from a typical anime style.

This panel shows how the eye and lip detail is balanced by detail in the rest of the body. There’s a lot of thought put into how the clothing droops, to the point where it’s obvious that the shirt and the jacket are different fabrics. Fascinating. That is to say, the way Ikemoto draws faces goes well with the clothing he puts the characters in. In fact, take this Mitsuki too.

Mitsuki doesn’t have nearly as much going on in his face: his eyebrows are very small, he doesn’t have a lot of eyelid definition, and his clothes are drawn much simpler. It’s all balance. (and admittedly this is a smaller picture of Mitsuki but I had a hard time finding a bigger one. He’s not a super featured character like he is in the show.) It should be noted that most of the time the only characters who consistently have upper lips, to my memory, are Delta, Eida and Yodo. Everyone else kind of only has them when they’re being zoomed in on, but most of the time most people have a bottom lip line.

3. The facial hair/shaved hair hatching. I feel like facial hair is hard to come by in general in anime/manga, but it tends to be either one colored shape, like Asuma and Shikamaru’s beards or Armstrong’s mustache in FMA, or scruff indicated by vertical lines, like Aizawa from MHA. Ikemoto puts a lot of hatching in his facial hair, and there are a Lot of characters who have light-colored beards and mustaches, and the one guy who had lambchops?? shojoji? it is such a bizarre choice. Looking back at pics of him all of his hair is very puzzling.

But all that extra hatching, at least to me, makes these guys look so filthy. You could not convince me that Amado or Shojoji have taken a shower in months. It’s a little less grimy-feeling with Boro and KK, for some reason, but maybe that’s just me. Kawaki doesn’t look unwashed so much as he looks like a raccoon crawling out of a dumpster, with the threads coming off his jacket. He’s very punk and I love it for him.

Point 3.5 there’re a lot of extra lines in people’s hair in general. I’m putting this in at the last second so I’m just going to let you notice it as you go through the post instead of providing specific examples because it’s there for everyone with light hair longer than Hinata’s.

4. There’s not a lot of mid-tone shading in this manga. If there’s any shading it’s done with hatching, which isn’t bad, but somehow a lot of manga feels really stark.

I’m having a hard time finding an example of something this pervasive, it’s just everything.

5. And then there’s the way that almost all of the female characters, at least at some point, look like preschoolers, with big chubby cheeks and gangly stick legs, especially when contrasted with the overly-mature clothes the children wear. Sarada and Sumire look like little children trying on their big sisters’ clothes. Hinata yo-yos between looking like someone in her mid-twenties and looking like a strange baby-faced teenager.

adult!

14 year old??

(these examples are not the most egregious, but those are in the very first chapter when sasuke had curly hair so I’ve decided they are no longer part of the art style and part of the growing pains.)

Yodo suffers the opposite; she looks like she has the face of an adult on a child’s body.

Her bellybutton also doesn’t seem to be in the right place in either of these.

Cho Cho isn’t that bad except that one splash page with Sarada, and Himawari is spared by being an actual little girl. As well, sometimes the 12-13 year olds and Kawaki have proportions that make them look very young, but that’s common for anime and manga styles so I’m not going to gripe about it. I’m not going to get into the clothes right now, that’s for the fashion rating post I have in the works. I’m just going to say that the way Sarada’s thighs are drawn sometimes is concerning.

That is a grown woman’s leg. Why is it attached to a child?

this is nauseating. Ikemoto if you want to quit Boruto and draw pinup calendars I support you, but please make the figures adults. This is a 13 year old and you know it.

And something I had forgotten during drafting this post, this phenomenon is not girl exclusive!

why is boruto so cut here? i know that 13 year olds can be that muscular, because my former therapist had a 13 year old son who was a bodybuilder and for some reason she was okay with that, but is it still suspicious that, with all these other offenses, Ikemoto’s drawing Boruto with a defined hip line and abs? I think yes. From the neck up this is such a sweet picture of him too.

6. Time to wash your eyes out! The colored splash pages are almost all at maximum saturation. I don’t know why. Often people have different colored versions of the same clothes too, which I think is kind of fun. Very Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.

In looking for an example of this I notice it’s died down a little with the most recent chapters.

7. Also like JJBA, the characters on the splash pages, especially Delta, Code and Eida, are often posed like fashion models. I just think that’s neat, esp with the really distinctive fashion going on in this series.

8. Often in fight scenes the entire background turns to motion lines. I don’t actually know how common this is in manga.

This is the seventh uninterrupted panel of motion line background. There’s one panel with mountain and tree background, then six more with just motion lines.

9. I can’t believe I almost forgot about this; there are lines on almost every page that are just the slightest bit wiggly. It has a pen-drawn feel, which in this world of digital drawing and stabilizer-smoothed lines creates a distinct look. Check out the lines on Code’s sleeve here, and the whole way his hand looks. It’s just a little fucked up!

You can also see it in his eyes (even professional mangaka struggle with the other eye.) Lines are also not the same width from one end to the other, especially thicker lines like glasses. As well, sometimes solid lines will not be filled in all the way.

I think that’s all the thoughts I have right now.

#bort posting #boruto manga #misttiddies posts #dash stretcher #boruto meta

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kedreeva · 1 year

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I would love to hear about the otherworld marketplace

oh right!

Okay, so the REASON I went the expo yesterday, when we weren't planning on it previously because it is Distant, is because my friend that takes me had to exchange some caging, and the crafters were going to be at the show, so why not vend as long as we're out there if we're driving 2+ hours each way anyway. So we vend the show, it goes well, we have fun, everyone's packing up... except the vendor she's exchanging caging with, who tell her they're going to be at least another hour packing up etc and also they don't have the cages with them, we'll have to drive to their brick and mortar shop.

Well, whatever, that means we can go grab some food. We look up sushi places, grab the first/closest one, and drive out. GPS takes us to a mexican restaurant. we fiddle with the GPS and when swapped to "walking" it tells us actually it's across the street. We can't see across the street because of trees, so we drive across the street, and there's a Mall. Like a legit, old mall- and I realize with a bit of dawning horror that I KNOW this mall, it was built a couple of years before I went to college, it was shiny and new when I first visited it, we used to come here often. I did not recognize it because it looked like it at been through some kind of apocalypse. So I turn to my friend and say, we have a choice, we either go in and get Mall Sushi from a food court, or we pick someplace else. She stops her car in the middle of a road, not a parking spot, and we both look at the list of sushi places nearby. I see one just plainly called "sushi market" and it looks normal and there's a picture of its storefront indicating it is, perhaps, not Mall Food Court Sushi, and we take off.

I am expecting a Hole In The Wall sort of strip mall place like the two near my childhood home, but instead we enter The City.

The City, if you do not know, is the same place. You enter into it and you may or may not have been to this city before but you have been to The City and it all looks the same, really. The shops maybe have different names, but it's unclear if that is because time has passed and the coral reef of storefronts has grown/exchanged inhabitants or if this is a different place entirely and actually it doesn't matter. Which street you entered from may determine which stores you see, but you are always entering The City.

This place we are going is a hundred yards outside of The City, and looks like it. It is the same 100 yards outside of The City that exists down by my little sister. If the air had tasted a little different, I would have told you for sure I was in North Carolina visiting my sister, not a little bit lost in northwestern Michigan. We park in a little street parking place and look around hesitantly. There's a storefront for a bagel shop. There's a storefront for a local barbeque (local to ME, not this place, or at least I thought that was the case until I looked it up at home.... they don't have a shop local to me. I have eaten there a dozen times, at work, with others. it does not exist near me. this is how The City works though, sometimes you have to accept that). The parking lot is almost empty. The street is vacant. it's quiet. Nothing is happening in this location. The building indicated is unmarked, plain brick. No windows except at the bagel shop and barbeque's storefront windows. They do not have doors of their own, only a set of unmarked, double doors between them.

But, the GPS insists it is here, so we go through those blank doors, and step into an Otherworld. Inside, is a busy marketplace.

The floors are all dark, smooth concrete. Above is all grubby, teal-grey steel and wood, the walls are covered in bright-colored artwork. There are stalls that don't look permanent fashioning the interior into a maze. This is the bible belt of michigan. There's Thai food, sushi, a mochi donut shop. There's a stall devoted to popcorns, both in different flavors but also from specialty kinds of kernels. There's a wall of soda in glass bottles from companies I've never heard of. There were four shelves devoted to black cherry sodas. Floor to ceiling shelves of ginger beer, birch beer, root beer. There's a pastry shop around a corner where I stood and watched someone slicing a cheesecake six inches tall, decorated in strawberries like a painting. We pass a charcuterie shop to reach a wine and cheese bar, which is across from a seafood shop peddling fresh catch from the great lakes, which is next to a deli of local meats, across from a shop exclusively dedicated to seasoning rubs for meat. Tucked into a back corner is a chocolaterie selling bonbons and hand scooped michigan-made ice cream. There's some kind of reunion taking place up at the front of the place. There are old ladies buying popcorn. There's a guy looking at the soda walls, dressed like it's 3am and he couldn't sleep.

The place is packed, but there's hardly any cars in the parking lot so I have to assume people walked here. We dodge people and make it to the sushi counter, where we are greeted by a young woman who has sparkles glittering across the bridge of her nose instead of freckles. She takes our order and welcomes us to sit at the bartop to eat (we don't), and we find a quiet corner to sit and eat. It was the best sushi I've had in my life- the rice was actual sushi rice which is a good start, it was slightly warm still, it was melt-in-your-mouth good. We stopped by the chocolaterie to get a small scoop of ice cream (cashew caramel) and a couple of chocolates to bring home. They're tiny, with local strawberry/cherry fruits, with little things painted on their tops. They were delicious.

My friend took photos of some of the inside of the place. I don't know if she waited for the right moments or what, but there's almost no people in her photos. I cannot express to you enough that this place was FULL. I waited in lines to get food. That's me at the chocolate/ice cream shop counter and there were several people in front of me in line.

There was a second story we didn't make it to, because we had to leave to go get the caging. We exited back to a normal Michigan spring a hundred yards outside The City. The parking lot was mostly empty. The building was plain brick. There was no one on the street. The bagel shop and the barbeque storefronts had no people past the windows. There was no storefront for the sushi shop, because it was in the very heart of the place, it shared no walls with the building walls at all, there was no door to it.

#surely we just somehow went in a back door or something #on accident #but this was well and truly a strange experience #mostly because it was completely unexpected #where did it come from #how long has it been there #why does it look exactly like the shop center near my sister's house #I'm not complaining I'm just baffled #asks #stories about ked's life #personal #horror #how did I avoid mall sushi and still end up eating food court sushi #maybe this would have been a different experience #if I had not gone to school nearby #this didn't exist then #dash stretcher

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