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zelkams-art · 3 years

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#ShowYourProcess

From planning to posting, share your process for making creative content!

To continue supporting content makers, this tag game is meant to show the entire process of making creative content: this can be for any creation.

RULES — When your work is tagged, show the process of its creation from planning to posting, then tag 5 people with a specific link to one of their creative works you’d like to see the process of. Use the tag #showyourprocess so we can find yours!

I was tagged by @milkcrates, who showed her process of making this gorgeous piece with Wei Wuxian and little A-Yuan!! It was awesome to see how it came to life - and thank you for tagging me! ✨

So I got tagged to show how this Yunmeng brothers + golden core art happened! I already included the digital sketch for it in my sketch vs final compilation, but I guess I can show some more!

This is gonna be long because I like talking a lot, so putting the rest under a cut!

1. Planning

SO. A golden core pic was on my to-draw list as soon as I finished watching the show. I had a WIP of a different pic for that waiting, but actually I noticed that a very similar thing has already been drawn, so that was kinda dropped. But I’m glad I waited until the idea for this one slapped me! It was pretty much a moment of “w a i t a second” and I had to grab a random piece of paper to sketch it while I still had it in my head.

This is the sketch - as you can see from the coffee stains, it has been through some stuff. On the left I actually tried out some different ideas for the golden core - the 1st one was the winner and led to the whole leaking/water/rain theme. I ended up mirroring the whole sketch because I didn’t want Wei Wuxian’s hand to cover Jiang Cheng’s front hair wisp, as that would make that area too crowded.

Meta-wise: I wanted to show that the whole thing was kept as a secret from Jiang Cheng. But we also knew about it - so Wei Wuxian is breaking the 4th wall and looking at us [the audience] directly, shushing to keep it a secret as well. Then there’s his hand hovering over the blindfold - it was included in the show, but also sprinkles in that extra symbolism. Then there’s the rain - the sky crying for the two brothers, so you’re not sure if those are raindrops or tears on their faces + lotus pond for the Yunmeng vibes. As for the golden core, I wanted to make it kinda messy and leaking like blood + shining and make it the main light source of the piece. Also kinda like a glow stick liquid.

I also like finding fitting music to go with my art and this one was actually supposed to go with Avicii’s Hey Brother, but when I was looking it up on Spotify I saw Kodaline’s Brother right above, gave it a listen and then the lyrics hit me. So I already knew that they’re gonna go in the caption. Also apparently it’s like The Song for them and yeah, makes sense.

2. Creating

2.1 Set up and tools

I use Paint Tool SAI + Wacom Intuos S to do all my art! The entire pic was made on a 2000 x 3000 px canvas, since I don’t like to work too big because of limited brush sizes in SAI + I don’t want to torture my laptop, as my art takes up quite a lot of processing power with a lot of layers and modes and sometimes things like to crash at the final steps 😬.

2.2 Planning and composition

So I started off by doing a digital sketch and focusing on the composition a bit more - I wanted something geometrical, so I went for the diamond shape with Wei Wuxian’s silhouette and the placement of the lotuses. Also the composition is vertical, all the important info is in the middle column - you could cut off 2/3 of the picture and it would still tell the story.

2.3 Lineart

Then I did the lineart over the sketch layer (there was a more detailed one than the “planning” sketch, but it looks like I deleted it once I finished). I usually draw more than I have to and on separate layers, so that I can move/modify things easily later - for example JC’s headpiece here didn’t really make it that much into the final piece but It Was There. Once I was satisfied with the lineart, I cleaned it by erasing overlapping things, like Wei Wuxian’s clothes behind Jiang Cheng’s head.

2.4 Planning the lighting

After doing the lineart I blocked the characters with a single color and planned the lighting. The golden core is the main light source here, so it dictates which parts are gonna be lighter and which darker (although there is gonna some ambient occlusion from the background + reflected light from the water). I also added water and lotuses in the foreground + painted the background.

2.5 Shading the characters

After that, I started shading the pic. I usually do two steps here - one with “base” shading - focusing on the details and values based on the light source, then the mood shading with more coloring - based on the setting the characters are in. The first one is mostly done with the Multiply tool and base layer blending/painting, the second mostly with layer modes like Overlay and Luminosity. I also colored some parts of the lineart to make the shapes stand out (see: wwx’s front hairs)

2.6 Environment and touch-up details

Then it was time for the water and lotuses + the “special effects” for the rain and all the stuff associated with it - water splashes, mist, sparkling drops! Also some more mood lighting. Lots of new layers to keep everything organized and separated.

2.7 Finished pic

And done! After finishing I usually adjust the contrast/gamma/saturation of my art (or just edit it all in curves) + sometimes sharpen it to bring out details → I make a few different versions and pick the one that works the best. Although with this pic I was satisfied with the raw result so no major changes happened.

3. Posting

For posting I always scale down the pictures and upload them as a draft on this art blog. Then I check if things look okay on mobile as well - from what I’ve noticed my phone makes everything more warm-toned. Depending on the time I finish drawing, I either post it right away or wait until the next day, when there is more traffic on tumblr. I finished this one around 8PM of my local time, which is fine - so I posted it right away (also I was just excited, couldn’t wait 😅)!

As caption I used the lyrics from Brother by Kodaline, as mentioned before!

So yeah, that would be it!

If you made it till this part - thank you and I hope you have an awesome day! ✨

Let’s keep the artist vibes here - I’m gonna tag (not 5 ppl but shh) @still-snowing and this piece that still breaks my heart @driszol and this Song Jiyang pic that lives in my head to this day @kushexi and this pic with fox Wei Wuxian and A-Yuan bc it still makes me melt → no pressure of course! or if you want to do some other piece that’s awesome as well!

#showyourprocess #[and now tags for my own blog →]#not art #art process #oh this was fun - thank you for tagging me!!#always crying abt those self-sacrificial siblings :'')

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fu-yao · 3 years

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#showyourprocess

From planning to posting, share your process for making creative content!

To continue supporting content makers, this tag game is meant to show the entire process of making creative content: this can be for any creation.

Thank you so much for tagging me @lan-xichens, I’ll try my best to explain how I made this set from start to finish hehe ♡ and also a big thank you to @suibianjie @highwarlockkareena @nyx4 @aheartfullofjolllly and you as well Kris for putting this all together! Content creators get a lot less recognition than they deserve for all the time they put into their content, so getting everyone to see the (sometimes excessive) process we all go through to put our content in our blog, I hope it creates a positive change!! 💖

1. Planning

The set in question was actually requested by someone so they could celebrate their friend’s birthday! At first I wasn’t entirely sure if I was going to be able to finish it on time (college is very hectic right now) but I was able to finish it three days before the deadline which was may 1st! ^-^

The first thing I did was decide what characters I wanted to use in the set, I first reached out to the person who requested the set if there were certain characters they wanted me to use but they said they didn’t know enough to really give me any directives outside of the quote. I decided, since the quote is applicable to the entirety of the show, that I would try to put in as many characters as possible.

Thus, of course, came the hunting for scenes. Those of you in the net discord surely know I came into the content help channel a few times to ask for certain scenes here and there, and eventually I had to download an additional 10 episodes to the back then 20 or so episodes I had in my CQL episodes folder.

As you can see I have 30 random episodes of CQL downloaded (slowly but surely getting to the point where I have all 50 episodes downloaded) and I think I ended up using scenes out of at least 20 of those episodes.

I planned out beforehand what characters I would use per gif. I knew obviously I would start out with Wangxian, them being the main characters of the show, and then would work my way down the list. The second gif consists of Nie Huaisang, Nie Mingjue, Jin Zixuan, Jiang Yanli, Wen Qing, and Wen Ning. They’re all family pairings, two being siblings and one being a married couple. The next gifset consists of the Yi City characters, then the fourth gif consists of the juniors, and the final gif has Jin Guangyao, Mianmian, Jiang Cheng, and Lan Xichen in it.

I have to admit though that when I had made the first four gifs I’d forgotten who I would put in the last gif and the when I thought about it the first time around I could only think of Lan Qiren and the very cursed Yaoyang ship 😭 it was only at dinner time that same day that I remembered I hadn’t put Jiang Cheng in my gifset yet and that’s when I thought of the other characters as well.

I had already made my first two gifs when I went to check Hanyi’s blog for layout inspo and eventually I decided I wanted to try a triangle-ish layout, which I doodled below. I eventually ended up changing the layout of the last gif in the final design. It was also the first time I would work with a triangle-ish layout so I was a bit nervous as I was scared it wasn’t going to work out...

2. Creating

I use Avisynth 2.5 and Adobe Photoshop 2021 (the paid version, unfortunately, I need it for school except I didn’t need it this year but I wanted it so I paid for it with my own money ouch) to make my gifsets! I always start out with trimming down all the scenes I’m going to use into three to five second videos and putting them through Avisynth. This time around I did it separately for each gif I made, simply because I needed so many scenes. I would include a screenshot of my “gif vids” and “temp” folders but I’ve already deleted all the videos, which is what I usually do immediately after a set is posted.

I’ll try my best explaining this gif by gif since each one had a different layout!

2.1 Wangxian

I think I had up to five different designs of this gif 😭 it started out with the gif on the left originally being more centered and the quote right smack in the center but somehow it felt a bit too... empty? I changed up the design and pulled the gif over to the right and put the two closeups on the left, the exact opposite of the gif I eventually ended up with. I switched things around one more time and saved the gif as you can see it right now, except I didn’t include the lines yet. It was only as I finished up my fourth gif that I decided this gif needed lines as well so I added them ^-^

2.2 Nie Huaisang, Nie Mingjue, Jin Zixuan, Jiang Yanli, Wen Qing, and Wen Ning

I got the inspiration for the font layout on this gif from this Wenzhou post! I hadn’t tried it before and when I did for this gif I was very happy with the way it turned out :D I wanted to portray that life is a pile of good and bad things, as the quote says, in CQL by mirroring these happy scenes side by side with the sad scenes

2.3 Yi CIty

My first time working with the triangle layout!! Putting in the lines and making sure they would line up with the second gif took me the longest of all actually 😭 I think once I got the line on the left in I just copy pasted it and flipped it horizontally so I didn’t have to fiddle around with angling it anymore :’) my original idea was to get a happy Song Lan scene and a sad A-Qing scene, but when I stumbled upon this A-Qing scene in ep38 I just had to put it in there because her smile is so precious 🥺 Xue Yang and Xiao Xingchen in the center are also supposed to be mirrored, with Xue Yang embodying the “bad things” and Xiao Xingchen the “good things” ! I also think the Yi City characters fit this part of the quote very well!!

2.4 The Juniors

Ah yes, the junior quartet!! :D I had this planned out from the very beginning, that I would include happy versus sad juniors in the “vice versa” part of the quote, and I think it worked out quite well! My first idea was to put the “vice versa” completely in the special font and have it typed out over the gifs like I did with the “vice” but as I typed out the “versa” I realized it had one letter too much to be able to do that 😭😭 it took me a while to come up with how I would position the “but” and “versa” and after some moving around I decided to just place them the way I did in the final gif! For the font, I duplicated the “vice” and added a stroke to the duplicate, then I changed the fill setting to 0% so I could slightly drag the duplicate away from the original layer to create the effect that’s in the gif — also, finding a scene in which Jin Ling smiles is really difficult.... he barely even smiles in the scene I ended up using :(

2.5 Jin Guangyao, Mianmian, Jiang Cheng, and Lan Xichen

The final gif!! I feel like this might come a little across as “I promise I didn’t forget these characters” because they’re a very odd quadruplet to put together, but they were the most important characters left to put in the set! I was thinking of putting Nie Mingjue in here together with Jin Guangyao and Lan Xichen, but I did feel he fit more with his brother up in the second gif. Mei @mylastbraincql cheered me on making this gif for which I was very grateful :D <3 the layout came to be after I googled “how to evenly split a rectangle in four” because I didn’t want a repeat layout in the set (*/∇＼*)

2.6 Coloring

For the coloring I pretty much did all of the tweaking on the first gif and then copy pasted all of it onto the second, third, fourth, and fifth gif. This is usually the way I go about my coloring, I will always edit certain gifs if necessary but I don’t think I had to change the coloring much on any of these gifs? Maybe I added in a curve layer here and there, but nothing major! This is really one of my preferred coloring styles, even though I try to step outside of my comfort zones with other sets ^-^

3. Posting

I will always upload sets into my drafts and edit the caption in there as well, clicking on “preview post” a couple times to check everything looks good on my blog as well, before I post a set. However, this time, since there was a deadline and I finished before the deadline, I put this set in the queue so it would automatically post on the 1st of may! Knowing myself, I would’ve forgotten to do so </3

Whew that was... a lot 😭 did it make any sense? Probably not, but it was fun to ramble （ ´∀｀）

I’ll tag

@blinkplnk with this set !

@wuxien with this set !

@wendashanren with this set !

@wanyinxichen with this set !

@yibobibo with this set !

@mylastbraincql with this set !

@sugarbabywenkexing with this set !

@yiling-recesses with this set !

@jiancheng with this set !

Please feel totally free to ignore this if you’ve already been tagged and don’t want to do it again!! <3

#showyourprocess #tag game #this got so long i'm sorry ;-;#very curious to see everyone else's processes!!#thank you for the tag kris <3

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olivia-anderson-fanfic · 3 years

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A Miraculous TikTok Account

Part 14

First

The next day was The Day.

It had been a full month since they had moved into the house.

Tensions had settled somewhat, people had more or less grown used to each other’s presence… but, on that one particular day, the five of them were on edge.

It was the day to begin posting.

Chat bit his lip, scrolling through all the different videos he had taken on patrols. Should he just go in the order that he had taken them in? That would certainly be easier than any arbitrary system he put out.

Then again, if he actually figured out a system it would make what he was doing feel like it had more effort. Out of all the account themes that he knew (Chloe was still refusing to answer any questions about hers), his definitely required the lowest amount of effort.

It fit him, but still.

He decided to schedule a little bit. It would go dogs, then cats, then more unusual animals, then repeat.

There. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

Hopefully, Fu wouldn’t take issue with it --.

He tore through the skin of his lip and hissed in pain. He dropped his phone on the bed next to him and brought his hands up to stem the bleeding until he found a tissue.

He walked to the mirror and snickered to himself when he saw his reflection.

Thank the kwamis he wasn’t home anymore. His dad would have thrown a fit about him ‘ruining’ his perfect face.

The door opened and he looked over to see Chloe. “Bonjour --.”

He groaned a little. “Bonjour. You’re not taking tonight’s patrols from me, but you can come along if you want.”

“What? No. I need more time to edit a video for my account so I’m going to be announcing the start of our accounts.”

“You had a month and you’re still not done?” He teased, tossing the bloodied tissue in the trash.

She scoffed. “Not like I owe you an explanation, but I have an hour of footage to go through and edit down to a few minutes at most.”

Ah. Yeah. That would be hard.

He followed her to where everyone had congregated on the couch.

Well, actually, Ladybug and Carapace were the only ones on the couch, Rena was standing behind it, peering over the other miraculous holder’s shoulders as they scrolled through their phones.

Rena looked up when she heard their footsteps and gasped. “What happened to your lip?”

“I lost a fight...” … with his own mouth, but that was beside the point.

Carapace raised his eyebrows. “You lost a fight without leaving your room?”

Rena’s lips twitched into a mischievous grin. “Who knows, with all the stuff in his room something could be living in there and no one would know.”

He fought the urge to sink into the fabric of his turtleneck (which he now felt weird wearing considering the actual turtle in the group never wore turtlenecks). “Shut up.”

“Nice comeback,” commented Carapace.

“Thanks,” he muttered, dropping down onto the couch beside him and resting his head on his shoulder.

Chloe hummed as she set up her phone to take a video of them all and then she paused, looking at everyone. “Costumes? Since this is the announcement video?”

Ladybug set her phone in her pocket. “Sure.”

“Oh, what if we start in costume and then we detransform?” Said Carapace.

“Why?” Questioned Rena.

“For the drama. Obviously.”

No one bothered to reply to that, instead they all called their kwamis to transform.

Chloe pressed to start recording and then waltzed over to take a seat on Ladybug’s lap. To Ladybug’s credit, her face remained neutral. They all knew she blinked behind her mask even if they couldn’t see it.

Rena snickered a little behind her hand.

Ladybug’s skin flared bright red. There it was. She’d finally finished processing.

“Was… was the spot beside me not good enough?”

“Nope!” Chloe said brightly before turning her attention to the camera. “Hello, Paris… and others, though I don’t know why you’d bother with our accounts if you aren’t Parisian. We’re the miraculous team!”

They went in a line from left to right introducing themselves and then detransforming to show off their civilian clothes.

“Now, you might be wondering: what’s going on?”

“A good question. Not even we really know,” Chat muttered.

(Carapace, the only one close enough to really hear, was now smiling more sincerely.)

“We’ve started TikTok accounts that we’re going to be maintaining until we defeat Hawkmoth. Why’d we decide to do this?”

Everyone’s gazes briefly pulled away from the camera to send Chloe looks that varied from slight exasperation (Carapace) to amusement (Rena).

“No reason! Just convenience!”

Chat rolled his eyes a little.

Chloe went on to explain what each of their accounts would be about, except...

“You forgot your own niche, Queenie,” said Ladybug gently.

“I didn’t forget.”

They waited for her to go on and say what she was going to be doing, but she didn’t.

The other miraculous holders exchanged wary looks.

“All their accounts are going to be in the caption. Follow them!”

The video cut.

A day passed, but no one was really getting picked up by the algorithm, it seemed.

They had all convened in the living room again to discuss what to do.

Chat had the most followers, which wasn’t a surprise considering he was just posting cute animals.

Ladybug actually had quite a few as well. A few of them were actual Parisians, but most just seemed to be random French speakers who wanted to get their lives together. Good for them.

Everyone else was having trouble getting their videos seen.

Chloe was taking this especially hard. She had flung herself over the sofa and buried her face in the cushions.

Ladybug didn’t seem all that concerned about the possible impending akuma as she sat down on the arm of the couch. “It would probably help if you had actual content,” she commented.

The other barely lifted her head to send her a glare.

Carapace sat down in the armchair with some chips and salsa. “Maybe we should just use all the trending tags to get people to see us.”

“We could tag our videos as cosplay and then see how long it takes them to figure it out,” said Rena, grinning as she stole some chips.

(Carapace sent her a tired, halfhearted glare but apparently decided it wasn’t worth the effort to keep his food away from her.)

Chat wasn’t really concerned about all of this. He sat in the window, smiling as the sun beamed down on his back. “I don’t know. If we want we can get some blogger to report on it.”

“If we do that one, how about the Ladyblogger? I’m pretty sure she’s the most popular one,” offered Ladybug absently. “And her blog has the option to send in stuff anonymously, too.”

Chloe pushed herself up to a sitting position, apparently done sulking. “Nope, she’s been inactive for a few months. Said something about her schedule getting too hectic, I think.”

“Oh! Is that why I haven’t seen her around?” Said Chat, trying to hide his relief. “I thought I’d done something to offend her or something.”

He noticed, vaguely, that Rena was now bright red. His brain struggled to figure out why and then it clicked. The Ladyblogger stopped showing up a little while before Rena had appeared… she must be feeling left out!

He gave her a tiny smile. “There’s still other blogs, though, so we could try that.”

“You know, I always thought it was weird that the Ladyblogger had always chosen Ladybug for her name when Chat was there first,” mused Carapace.

“Do you know any good puns for Chat Noir that has to do with blogging?” Said Ladybug, a little defensive.

“Fair.”

“She also had a different name originally, she just changed it when Ladybug came on because of the pun,” muttered Rena.

Ah, so Chat had been wrong about Rena’s feelings about the Ladyblogger. Clearly she was just a fan of her work. That made sense, that seemed like the kind of content she would enjoy --.

Chloe was the one to pull everyone on track: “Who cares? If she’s been inactive no one’s checking her page, so we need a new plan.”

The five of them lapsed into silence as they considered the options.

“I could get Nadia Chamack to report on it?” Offered Ladybug.

“No one under thirty really watches the news. Wrong demographic,” Rena pointed out.

Chat hesitated slightly before raising his hand to get everyone’s attention. “Can’t we just use Chloe’s dad? I mean… everyone follows him to find out what insane thing he did for his daughter this week.”

Chloe sent him a glare.

“No offense,” he added quickly. “That’s definitely on the people of Paris for their… judgementalness and tendency to --.”

“Chat, do yourself a favor and shut up,” advised Rena.

“Okay.”

There was a moment as they all thought about it.

Chloe pulled her phone out. She dialled a number and there was hardly a beat before she smiled and said: “Daddy! Hi!”

There was a collective wince that the mayor’s daughter opted to ignore.

“I was wondering if you could -- oh. Thanks! I’ll text you the info to tell everyone, then...”

~~~

Taglist

@nathleigh @mialuvscats @sassakitty @th1s-1s-my-aesthet1c @blueslushgueen @woe-is-me0 @ladybug-182 @cas-and-their-refusal-to-write

#a miraculous tiktok account #chat noir #adrien agreste #chloe bourgeois #queen bee #rena rouge #alya cesaire #nino lahiffe #carapace #ladybug #marinette dupain cheng #miraculous team #miraculous fic #ml fic #chloenette #chlonette #adrino

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indomies · 3 years

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#showyourprocess

From planning to posting, share your process for making creative content!

To continue supporting content makers, this tag game is meant to show the entire process of making creative content: this can be for any creation.

RULES - When your work is tagged, show the process of its creation from planning to posting, then tag up to 5 people with a specific link to one of their creative works you’d like to see the process of. Use the tag #showyourprocess so we can find yours.

sabrina @lanwangiji tagged me to show how i made my zayn’s birthday edit! check out her explanation on this mesmerizing zayn’s edit

1. PLANNING

It’s Zayn’s birthday, I ought to make something because so far I have made birthday posts for Louis, Niall and Liam. I didn’t participate in his birthday challenge so I had more time to create something for his birthday. I saw this post by @spaceniall and instantly fell in love with it. It's so clean, so neat, an amazing edit. I had that post tagged for inspo and because my Louis’s birthday edit was a bit “grand”, I thought I should make something simple.

I went to look for some photos of Zayn everywhere. Literally e v e r y w h e r e. I saved every photo I found beautiful and there were a LOT. I asked my friends for adjectives that describe Louis best and added them on my Louis’s birthday post, and I followed that approach for this edit. I asked several friends what they think of Zayn and collected the adjectives.

This was a time where I haven’t used trello board, so I put all the adjectives in a google doc. Seriously I swear by trello board, they make my life easier.

After I had all the photos and the adjectives, I went to pinterest to look for the color palette. I forgot how and why I came up with this color scheme, but I believed I wanted something pastel and muted color.

I had this idea to make an evergreen birthday post. I didn’t want to state any “happy birthday zayn” or his age on the graphic. I didn’t want to make all the edits to have his face because I wanted to showcase my graphics and typography style lmao. So I came up with 2 pictures with Zayn’s face and one central picture with his name. And I’m obsessed with space stuffs so this birthday edit is space themed.

2. PROCESSING

This is one of my earliest edits that I made in Illustrator, though I used Photoshop as well.

2.1 REMOVING PICTURES BACKGROUND

Remember I saved a LOT of Zayn’s photos? Yeah? Well I had a hard time choosing the right one. I asked Sabrina to help lmao. After I agreed with myself which photos I would use, I opened Photoshop and prayed it won’t crash after 5 min.

I uploaded the 2 photos and then I used selection on Zayn and then clicked inverse and deleted the background. Recently I found this website who can delete your background in 1 min, tbh that’s a life saver. I recommend using them, if you hate removing backgrounds with Photoshop.

I saved the backgroundless Zayn’s photos as png. And we’re moving on to the next step

2.2 THE TYPOGRAPHY

I only used Photoshop to remove the backgrounds. Now onto Illustrator. Always pray it won’t close by itself every 5 min.

I don’t really remember which dimension I used, but I suspect it’s 600x700 px. I made 3 artboards and loaded the color palette I found from Pinterest. I made 3 rectangles as the backgrounds for each picture and filled them with my desired colors, 2 pink and 1 green. Green being the standalone was put in the middle.

A bit of excursion based on my experience

When you open an artboard in Illustrator, you’ll see a white background. When you save the file you’ve worked on, it’ll actually be transparent. That’s why I always draw a rectangle as a background so it has a solid color.

I focused on ZAYN (middle pic) first because I wanted that to be the main focus. I don’t remember the font I used and I already deleted all files. I followed this tutorial to make the text. Basically you write your text first and choose effect > 3d > extrude and bevel > isometric top. Changed the colors according to my color palette.

I moved on to the first picture, Zayn and the adjectives. I uploaded his photo to the artboard and put it in the middle. I wanted the adjectives to encircle him. I just followed this tutorial on how to make the effect. I made that text effect because that reminded me of the saturn ring lmao.

2.3 THE GRAPHIC DETAILS

Once I got the typography done, I made stars and moon to make the edits merrier and more space themed.

For the stars you can follow this tutorials. For the moon I made 2 circles, one of them was bigger. I put the smaller one in front and click minus front (I think). For the saturn planet, I made a circle with filling and an oval with stroke only, putting the oval infront of the circle and delete the back part of the ring (I hope this makes sense).

I have these lines around Zayn, my intention was to make Zayn pop and kind of crown him or give him a glowy effect sort-of.

All I did was follow this tutorial and delete the lines at the top, because I didn’t want it to be too crowded. Then I put some stars and planets at the top to balance it.

2.4 FINISHING TOUCHES & EXPORTING

I rearranged some things, zoomed out the artboard so I could see everything as one post and picked and deleted some unwanted things. After I was satisfied, I added my watermark and it was my old url, I just typed louistomlinboo. (Now I made a logo-ish and use that as my watermark and the logo is not dependent on my url)

Ok I lied I used Photoshop again… so I had these adjectives in 2.1 that encircled him right but some parts of the texts are above him. I exported my Illustrator file as a psd, uploaded it on Photoshop and used layer mask magic to delete the texts that were above him to create an illusion that the texts went around and under him you know. See the picture below, some texts are beneath him.

For this picture I exported the png file from Photoshop, the rest directly from Illustrator.

This was when I learned I needed to scale up, because on Illustrator they all look good in terms of quality. But when I posted it, the quality was reduced. That time I just exported as big as the dimensions and I was disappointed with the quality when it’s on tumblr.

3. POSTING

I uploaded the 3 pictures I have on tumblr and chose “happy birthday zayn” with star symbols/emojis to keep up with the space theme.

So I always write out what my caption will be with the “rich text” option.

Then I go to this color html website to add the gradient color in the caption and remove the “;” with “ “ in here. Once I have everything, I change rich text to html so I can put the text with color in html mode.

Put some tags related to Zayn. (self promotion time lol. i have compiled tags for 1d creators check them out here)

I finished I think a week earlier before Zayn's birthday so I saved it on draft. I posted around midnight (my timezone is CET), because oh boy it is a competition with birthday post lmao. That’s what I feel like at least. You know, everyone wants to make a birthday post, I feel I have a better chance If I post something first. Whenever I have something done earlier before a certain due date, I either save it on draft or schedule it so it’ll be posted automatically.

Yeah that’s it! It’s not as detailed as before I think because the files are deleted sorry!

i’m tagging:

@spaceniall for this wonderful niall’s birthday edit

@she-fearlesss for this magnificent louis’s birthday gifset

@finewalls for this mesmerizing animation

@louitomlinson (i know you’re not that active but if you want and can!) for this amazing edit

and @tomlinsun for this cool edit

#showyourprocess #bacotan belle

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susuwatari-kompeito · 3 years

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#showyourprocess

I was tagged by the wonderful @wangxianbunnydoodles for this gifset. This tag game was started by @lan-xichens (starting post here).

From planning to posting, share your process for making creative content!

To continue supporting content makers, this tag game is meant to show the entire process of making creative content: this can be for any creation.

RULES: When your work is tagged, show the process of its creation from planning to posting, then tag 5 people with a specific link to one of their creative works you’d like to see the process of. Use the tag #showyourprocess so we can find yours!

Process will be underneath the cut!

1. Planning

This was the very first post I put a considerable amount of time into, and I’m really proud of it. I wanted to make a set showcasing the Twin Prides, which is my favorite character dynamic of MDZS due to Jiang Cheng. I knew that I wanted to use the scene from CQL episode 14 because that’s where the quote “Yunmeng Jiang will have its Twin Prides” comes from. I also wanted to include the scene from the MDZS donghua episode 10 because it was different visually, and I wanted to incorporate both visual adaptations of MDZS.

I was really happy that the scenes in both the live-action and the donghua are visually captivating. I don’t really know how to explain it very well, but the scenes are just interesting to look at and I’m glad that JC and WWX are in the same frame for every single frame of the gifs.

I took a few notes on paper to organize the layout and decide how I wanted to break up the text.

2. Creation

I choose to gif by using screenshots. I use MPlayer OSX Extended to pull the screenshots and use Adobe Photoshop 2021 to create. I like using screenshots because it allows me to control the exact frames I want to use, so once I open photoshop, I can just load the screenshots and start the actual editing process. I organize the screenshots into folders based on which gif, which makes it easier to load into the stacks.

Step 1: Coloring

I don’t really have a specific process for coloring my gifs. I approach it from the process of “click until it looks good,” but I do like making some colors pop. In the CQL gifs, I wanted to make sure WWX’s red ribbon stood out. I also adjusted the hue/saturation of some of the colors to make the lotus seed pods more green. Here are the hue/saturation levels I used:

Blue: Hue (+24); Saturation (+24)

Red: Hue (+18); Saturation (+18)

Green: Hue (+39); Saturation (+36)

Magenta: Hue (+24); Saturation (+24)

Step 2: Text

Because of the text effect, I knew I needed a blockier type of font. I’m also a fan of simpler fonts, and I didn’t want something that would be too distracting. I tried a couple different fonts until I settled on Forta (downloaded from dafont[dot]com).

Placing the text was a little tricky. If the background was too light, than the text would be too hard to read. I used the setting “soft light” (you can set it to this using the dropdown menu directly to the left of the opacity setting where the layers listed) for the text and moved it around and adjusted the size until I was happy with the placement and I could read the words.

After I was happy with the placement, I used the following steps:

CTRL + click on the text layer to select

Select --> Inverse (or Shift + CTRL + I)

Step 3: Adding more color

This is a continuation of the previous steps, and these steps will get that overall purple/pink color. I chose that color because I thought it matched Yunmeng colors and the color of the scene the most.

Create a new solid fill layer (I chose white first, then adjusted later)

Set opacity to 40%

Play around with the color until you find something you’re happy with! For this set, I used #e67af3.

Done!

This is what my layers look like. Ignore the second Hue/Saturation layer, I don’t know why its there haha.

I used the same coloring and font for each of the CQL gifs on my set. As for the donghua gifs, I just played around with the hue/saturation as well as the exposure until I liked how it looked.

3. Posting

For the caption, I used a gradient text generator. I went with the purple gradient text because that is Yunmeng Jiang colors. I chose WWX’s quote as the other part of the caption because I believe that is part of what makes the “Twin Prides” promise so important to Jiang Cheng, and it is also very important when understanding the relationship between Wei Wuxian and the Yunmeng Jiang Clan.

I saved the post as a draft first, so I could see how it would look, then I posted it!

Anyway, I hope that makes sense at least a little bit, and I apologize for this being so text-heavy. I had a really fun time making this set and it was my first time playing around with different elements outside of basic editing.

I am tagging:

@mylastbraincql for this beautiful Lan Wangji color palette edit

@marquisguyun for this awesome WangXian video edit

@perkynurples for this lovely WangXian fanfiction

@blinkplnk for this stunning WangXian waterfall fight edit

@wendashanren for this amazing WangXian lyric edit

Please don’t feel pressured to complete this! Or if you wish to talk about something else, feel free to do so! If anyone else sees this and wants to do it, consider yourself tagged!

Thank you for reading so far. <3

#showyourprocess #tag game #thank you for the tag!#i hope this makes sense #the untamed #cql #mdzs #mylastbraincql #mine*#mymdzsthings #if you have any more questions feel free to send me an ask!#(don't mind me sneaking in commentary on my favorite character)

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favefandomimagines · 4 years

Text

Goodbye Love (t.h.)

Summary: Tom doesn’t realize how much being shipped with another woman hurts you, until you leave.

AN: i did a concept like this with a ben hardy imagine so I thought I’d do it with Tom. This is old and is one of the 41 drafts i have saved but too scared to post lol SO i hope you enjoy (using hailey bieber as a face claim cause i felt weird having a faceless photo of someone on a red carpet) xx

Ever since Tom had finished filming Spider-Man: Far From Home, the tomdaya shippers have been in full swing.

Shipping them ten times as hard as they did the first time. It was easy to ignore but now it was getting hard. Especially when Tom isn’t doing anything to make it stop.

His fans found an interview of him, being asked if he found his Liz Allen in real life and when he answered yes, the video was edited to show videos and pictures of him and Zendaya. Even though in that interview he was talking about you.

Currently in Atlanta, you sat on the bed you shared with Tom, Tessa laying close to you, almost as if she knew that you were upset. You were waiting for Tom to come home, though you were a nervous wreck. How were you supposed to tell him how you felt and that you were going home for a little bit?

“Love, I’m home!” Tom called from the living room. You didn’t move and neither did Tessa. Which was odd because she always left to go greet Tom when he got home.

He entered the room and saw you two on the bed. “There are my girls.” He greeted with a smile on his face. He walked over and tried to kiss your lips but you moved your head so his lips landed on your cheek instead.

Tom looked at you for a moment, a curious look falling on his face. “What’s wrong?” He asked. Tom knew you inside and out and he could tell something was wrong with you.

You didn’t look up at him, just handed him your phone with the screenshots and screen recordings, of people praising him and Zendaya’s nonexistent relationship and degrading you and your real one.

“Two years, Tom. I’ve been going through this for two years.” You finally spoke. “At first, I ignored it. Knowing I could put up with it for a few months while the movie was out and you were doing press. Then it just kept getting worse. Seeing people call me terrible names and wanting you to break up with me and wanting me to-” You started but stopping yourself, the more intense comments being worse than most. “Y/N-“ He tried to speak. “And you know what the worst part is? You haven’t done a single thing to end it.” You cut him off.

You still hadn’t looked at him when you got off the bed and grabbed the two bags you packed.

Tom watched you place them on the bed and his heart started to beat faster and his eyes widened. “W-What are you doing?” He asked. “I think, I should go back to LA for a little bit and just let you think things through. Is letting your fans have some fun with the idea of tomdaya worth losing me?” You replied.

“Y/N, please don’t do this. Please don’t leave me.” Tom begged, tears welling up in his eyes. “We’re just taking a break, Tom. But if you decide that I’m not worth it, that’s going to be it.” You told him. You picked up the bags and headed towards the door when Tom grabbed your wrist. “Please don’t leave.” Tom whispered.

You looked at him for a moment before leaning in and pressing a soft kiss on the corner of his mouth. “I have too.” You whispered back. Tom reluctantly let go of your wrist as you opened the door.

Tessa got down off the bed and began to follow you out the bedroom door. The dog began to cry softly as you headed towards the front door of the airbnb. “Goodbye, love.” You said to Tom before exiting the house.

Tom watched you leave, the tears falling freely at that point. He didn’t know it had gotten so bad for you. He’s ignored the shipping a million times knowing it was you he loved but he never knew you were second guessing everything about your relationship and yourself.

He ran his hands through his hair out of frustration before retreating back to the bedroom.

***

It had been three weeks. Three weeks since he had seen you. Of course he’d seen the photos of you in LA. Just because you’re going through something emotionally, doesn’t mean your career stops.

You had been doing a bunch of press for the TV season you had just wrapped before you went to Atlanta with Tom. It was the best idea you could think of to get your mind off of Tom.

He wasn’t having such luck. Everything reminded him of you and he wasn’t the same knowing that your relationship was in the balance. And everyone around him noticed.

“Tom, what’s going on?” Zendaya asked him one day. “Y/N didn’t leave for work, she left because of the fans shipping you and I. She couldn’t take it anymore.” Tom answered. “What do you mean?” She asked. “I’m supposed to be her boyfriend and you’re supposed to be her friend and yet we let thousands of people ship us together, without even thinking of how that could make Y/N feel.” Tom ranted.

Zendaya had never thought of that before. She didn’t realize just how cruel the fans were until she checked while she was talking to Tom.

“Oh yeah. This is, uh, very bad.” Zendaya said. Tom looked at her phone and noticed that there were new comments.

‘Y/N is so beneath Tom. Zendaya is a queen’

‘Y/N should just kill herself.’

‘Y/N’s show is gonna flop and then tom will see how much better zendaya is’

‘tomdaya is better.’

Tom’s stomach twisted seeing all the negative comments about his girlfriend and one wanting her to end her life. If they were really his fans, they��d support him 100%. “How could they be so cruel?” Tom asked. “I don’t know but maybe we do need to say something.” Zendaya replied.

“I need to get her to come back.” He muttered. “You setting your fans straight will do that.” Zendaya told him. Tom nodded his head before taking out his phone and posting an old picture of you at the Infinity War premiere.

@tomholland2013: i am going to be blunt and i’ve never done this before so bear with me. but the constant shipping of Zendaya and I, had gotten out of hand. I am in a happy and loving relationship with the woman in this photo. You don’t have to like it but you have to respect it. Y/N is the love of my life and seeing her being brought down my total strangers, breaks my heart. No fan of mine brings her down. And that’s that. @y/f/n_y/l/n

You got the notification that Tom had tagged you in a photo. Swiping your phone, you read the caption carefully. “He finally did it.” You said to yourself. But why now, two weeks later?

That conversation wasn’t one to have over the phone so you had your agent get you the next flight to Atlanta.

“Are you sure you want to leave half way through press?” She asked you. “I have too. Everyone will understand, they know how much Tom means to me.” You answered. “Okay. Your flight lands at 9:45 and pack an umbrella. There’s supposed to be a huge storm when you land.” She told you. You gave her a gracious smile before getting in your Uber.

***

Tom sat on the couch, quietly watching whatever soccer game was on, only wishing you were there next to him. You hated watched soccer with him because of how competitive he got but whenever he asked, you watched with him.

He was knocked out of his reminiscing by the sound of his phone vibrating. Seeing it was Harrison, he sighed but picked it up. “Hello?” He answered. “Are you still sulking?” Harrison asked his best friend. “What do you think?” Tom retorted. “You have to stop that, Tom. She’ll come back when she’s ready.” Harrison told him.

Tom sighed, knowing well that Harrison could hear. “Look, you saw the comments. They’re terrible. Telling her to kill herself so that you and Zendaya can finally be together. You don’t get over something like that over a few nights.” He added. “I know, but I just wish I could make it better. It’s been three weeks.” Tom said. “I know but you did all you can do. It’s all up to her now.” Harrison said.

Tom knew his best friend was right. He knew you needed time to yourself, to make sure you were fully ready to come back to him. “But, if it’s any consolation, I had a surprise sent to your doorstep.” Harrison added. “What?” Tom questioned. “And you might wanna hurry up and bring it inside before it gets absolutely soaked.” He said.

With furrowed eyebrows Tom got off the couch with his phone still pressed to his ear. “What are you on about?” Tom asked him. “Just do it.” Harrison ordered. Tom rolled his eyes and walked towards the door. He opened it up to reveal a soaking wet you.

“Hi, love.” You greeted him, the sound of the rain nearly drowning out your voice. “Y/N, w-wha- you’re here.” Tom stammered. “Yes, I am now can you please let me inside before I get pneumonia?” You asked with a small laugh.

Tom didn’t let you inside but instead hung up the phone and walked outside to pull you into him. He didn’t care if you were soaked from the rain or the fact that he was also getting wet as well. The only thing that mattered to him was you.

“Tom, you’re going to get sick.” You told him, breaking the silence. “I don’t care. That’s the last thing I care about. I just need to hold you.” He replied.

You let go and looked up at him for a moment. “Y/N, I was a mess without you. You are everything to me and not having you here was hell.” Tom told you. “I love you, I am so in love with you. And I’m so sorry.” He added.

You didn’t say anything at first but wrap your arms around his neck and pull him down closer to you, to place a deep kiss on his lips.

Pulling apart, he rested his forehead on yours. “Let’s get inside before you catch a cold.” You told him, pushing him inside the house.

Tessa barked and ran to you and a large smile made it’s way to your face. “Tess! I missed you!” You greeted the dog, crouching down to her level. Tom smiled at the sight, feeling as if everything was back to normal.

“Y/N,” Tom started, causing you to turn to face him. He offered you his hand, which you took, to help you up from your crouched position. “I will never make you feel unimportant again. I am so sorry.” He said. You gave him a warm smile before kissing him gently.

“I know. It’s okay.” You replied. “I love you, Y/N. With everything I have.” He told you. “And I love you.” You said, the two of you plus Tessa cuddling on the couch for the night.

#tom holland #tom holland x reader #tom holland imagine #peter parker imagine #peter parker #spiderman #marvel #zendaya #imagine #Avengers infinity war

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blackbutterfliescal · 4 years

Text

With Eyes To Hear

A Michael Clifford One Shot

Pairing: Barista!Michael Clifford x Deaf!Reader

Word count: 3.4K

Rating: Fluff

Requested by: N/A

Content: second person POV, gender neutral reader insert, Deaf!reader (uses sign language & lip reading primarily), first date, singular mention of smoking

A/N: The Deaf community is very near and dear to my heart. I’ve been taking ASL classes for just over 2 years but I’m not Deaf/HoH. I will not claim to be a voice for this community but if you are Deaf/HoH, I welcome any thoughts you want to share with me. If you want to read a really sweet Luke fic by someone who is hearing impaired, check out Can You Hear Me? and Valentine by Frankie. 💕 Also!! big big shout-out to my bby Adri for making this pretty moodboard for me 😇😘

✨ Masterlist ✨

Get added to my taglist here 🌺

AO3 Link

Feedback is always appreciated! 😊

———

This afternoon was proving to be the longest in recorded history. At least that’s what it felt like to Michael. The cafe had been dead since he got there after lunch and it was nearing closing time. He felt like he could count this shift’s customers on one hand. Rainy days were always slow, but today seemed never ending.

Michael could hear the rain falling outside the door, which Calum left propped open for one last smoke break. As he moved around the pastry case to sweep the small seating area, Michael glanced out the windows to see that any hint of daylight was gone. The street lights had flickered on outside the cafe and reflected brightly off the rain-slick pavement.

He resumed his sweeping, determined to leave on time today. He broke out of his cleaning trance at the jingle of the bell above the front door. He did his best to plaster on a smile, knowing he had less than ten minutes until close.

“Oh, sorry we’re-” He stopped short.

Heavy boots hit the floor repeatedly in an effort to knock the water off on the welcome mat. The door slammed shut behind you and, though you didn’t seem to notice him, Michael winced slightly at the sound. You shrugged the oversized rain jacket off your shoulders and hung it on the coat rack by the door.

So much for leaving on time tonight,he thought.

He made his way to the register as you approached. You gave him a small smile and wave and he couldn’t help the tired grin on his face. “Sorry,” you mouthed, eyebrows furrowed. You really wouldn’t be out for coffee so late if you weren’t desperate. And you were trying hard not to track the rain all over his clean floor.

“What can I get you?” he asked. The exhaustion was evident on his face.

“Do you have a pen and paper?” you signed.

“Ummmm…” Michael dug in the pockets of his apron quickly for the notepad and pencil he usually kept. He handed them over to you in a hurry and you let out a giggle at his frantic actions. Michael’s stomach picked up with butterflies and his face cracked into a smile at the sound. You slid the notepad back across the counter with your order and your name scrawled at the bottom. When he looked up to meet your face, you gave him a timid smile.

He read out your name as he leaned down to grab a to-go cup and started to make your coffee “I used to go to have a babysitter with the same name. They were so strict! I remember this one time….” He trailed off as he turned to the machine behind him. Michael always rambled when he got nervous. And he was always nervous around people he thought were cute. When he faced toward you again, you noticed his lips moving and waved your hand to get his attention.

“I’m deaf. I can’t hear you. But I’m pretty good at reading lips! Just face me when you talk.” You kept the polite smile on your face as his cheeks flushed red. This wasn’t new territory for you by any means and you had become an expert at navigating situations like this, unfortunately.

“Oh! I’m sorry! I wasn’t thinking.” he sighed and looked at his feet.

You waved again to draw his gaze back to you. “It’s fine! Just remember to look at me when you speak.” Michael smiled at you sheepishly with a small nod. “Okay.” He wasn’t familiar with the signs you were using, but he could piece together what you needed from him.

He quickly finished the order and placed the coffee on the counter, telling you not to worry about paying for it. Besides, he’d already counted the money drawer and didn’t want to have to do it again for a single coffee. You held his gaze with a toothy grin for a few beats before pointing at the door awkwardly.

“I’m...going to go. Thank you very much! I’ll see you around,” you signed.

You pulled the raincoat on again and wrapped your hands around the warm coffee before disappearing into the rain, letting the door slam behind you.

Michael stared at the door long after you’d gone. It wasn’t until Calum came back in to do some last minute clean-up that he snapped out of it.

———

That night when Michael got home, he sat in his usual spot at the computer. His phone buzzed on the table next to him, lighting up briefly to show a text from Calum.

Are you joining the game or not, man? We’re getting our asses kicked.

Michael had been at this for hours and could probably use a break to play. After a moment of thought, he shot back a quick reply.

Not tonight.I’ve got something else going on.

He sat his phone face down, causing him to miss Calum’s cheeky response, and glanced at the clock at the bottom of his computer screen. He’d been researching for hours. He decided to watch one more video before calling it a night. A yawn that stretched across his face as he clicked play on yet another video titled Deaf Culture 101.

———

It had been almost a week and Michael was still hoping to see you come back into the cafe. He’d been working on signs for anything he thought might be helpful but practicing your name was his favorite. He made Calum quiz him every day when the mid-afternoon lull hit. Calum completely understood where his friend was coming from but sometimes Michael got on a soapbox about inaccessibility for hours and that always made Calum roll his eyes, regretting his decision to be helpful.

When you appeared in the cafe that morning, Calum threw a wink at Michael and watched as a nervous blush crept across his face and neck. Calum gave him a small thumbs up and made sure to stay out of his way as you got closer to the front of the line.

“Good morning!” He spelled your name out at an agonizingly slow pace. “How….are you…..today?”

A wide smile took over your face and you suddenly felt a little embarrassed that you didn’t get his name last time you came in. You quickly found the name tag pinned to his apron and let out a sigh of relief before replying politely. You did your best to use signs you thought he might recognize and give him time to register them.

It took a lot of concentration for him to remember the right signs now that you were here and you could tell that he was panicking and clearly flustered. He remembered your order and your smile reached your eyes at his thoughtfulness.

“And one of these!” you said, leaning forward to point at your favorite treat in the pastry case for clarity. When you looked up from the baked goods, you met Michael’s light eyes. He must be the sweetest thing in here, you thought while holding his gaze. Your eyes went wide with shock at your own mind, causing you to glance around the rest of the shop before realizing the two of you were holding up the line.You quickly shuffled to the cash register where Michael rang up your breakfast.

As he gathered the change in his hand, you motioned for him to keep it and he slid it into the tip jar. “Thank you!” he signed with a smile. His nervous brain got ahead of him and he couldn’t come up with the right signs before he blurted out, “I wanted to ask if you’d want to hang out this weekend? I’m available Sunday afternoon?” You smiled again, reading the question on his lips. “Sure! That sounds great! Do you want to text me and make plans?” you asked, looking around for a pen and paper to write down your cell number.

Shock and excitement ran across his features as he picked up your coffee cup from the counter. He scribbled his phone number on the cardboard protector and handed it to you. Michael always felt so awkward making small talk and a new language made him even more nervous. He genuinely couldn’t believe you had agreed to a date with him. You gave him a small wave as you pivoted toward the door, giving him another smile over your shoulder before making it outside.

Michael was stuck in the same place with a goofy grin on his face until the next customer made their way to the register. Calum clapped his hand across his friend's shoulders to pull him back to reality but he didn’t come down from cloud nine for the rest of the day.

———

The two of you exchanged constant messages until Sunday rolled around. Your conversations were effortless and, most of the time, about nothing. You’d discussed every favorite you could think of, the strangest orders he’d taken each day, the interesting people you saw on your commutes, and he’d even snapped you hilariously edited candids of Calum. Poor guy had no idea his friend was turning him into a pirate or a pilot or a heavy metal rockstar.

You’d gotten a slow start to your morning as you made breakfast and sat down to watch the news until it switched to local programming around eleven o’clock. As you were getting ready for your afternoon with Michael, you realized the two of you had never decided what you were doing. He did ask you to hang out after all, so you hoped he had something in mind. When you messaged him to ask, you felt the tiniest bit guilty nixing a couple of his ideas immediately. Movies just weren’t practical since captioning devices were notoriously bad and, though a nice restaurant sounded lovely, the lighting was almost always too dim to read lips. He was throwing ideas around pretty quickly, so you thought it a little odd when he disappeared for a few minutes after a couple of rejected ideas. You knew he wouldn’t just leave you hanging, so you sat your phone down and continued your routine, deciding that if you didn’t hear from him by the time you were done, you would pitch a few plans of your own. After about ten minutes of silence, just as you picked it up to propose a place to go, your phone buzzed and lit up with Michael's name at the top of the screen.

I have a plan but it’s a surprise. I’ll send you the address but promise me you won’t look it up! Oh, and wear sunscreen 😎

You can’t help the amused smile that took over your face as you promised not to ruin his surprise. You wondered what in the world you’ve gotten yourself into but knew you’d have a good time with Michael no matter what.

After another half hour, Michael texted you that he’s ready when you are. He sent you the address and you couldn’t help trying to piece it together. You were somewhat familiar with the part of town where you were meeting, but not enough to figure out what he had planned. You let him know that you were on your way, sunscreen and sunglasses in tow.

After a short drive across town, you pulled into a fairly empty parking lot. Panic started to creep into your stomach until you spotted Michael standing outside his car at the other end, waving happily with a big grin on his face. As you parked, he came to the side of your door to help you out. He was always so sweet and thoughtful that it caused a permanent blush on your cheeks.

“Hi! How are you? I’m excited to see you again,” he signed, much improved from the last time you’d seen him. The smile on your face always seemed to accompany the warm blush when you were with Michael. “Me too!” you said as you looked around to see where he’d brought you. Your brows furrowed as you turned back to meet his gaze, “What are we doing here?” Determined to keep it a surprise, he told you that you would just have to be patient and wait.

Patience is a virtue but not one you were known to possess, so you quickly pulled the things you needed out of your car and locked it up. Michael took your hand and led you down the sidewalk. You knew you were near the banks and you could smell the water but you still were at a loss for what you were doing.

The two of you strolled hand-in-hand for a few blocks, content with the silence between you. You had only known each other for a short time, but it made you happy to see that he had so quickly become comfortable with you. He wasn’t the same nervous, rambling man you first met, though you will admit you found him charming either way. When it came to navigating the hearing world, you were almost always outside of conversations and it made you feel warm that Michael didn’t see the need for mindless jabber. He was waiting until he could properly sign with you and that meant more than you could let him know. Instead, as you made your way wherever, you both watched the sparse tourists out and about the area for the afternoon.

As you came upon a small path toward the banks, he motioned to the side to let you know that’s where you were headed. After a few more steps, you cleared the last row of buildings and saw the pier stretched out in front of you. Of course it was the pier and you couldn’t believe you didn’t realize sooner! You stopped for a second to take it in. It had been a while since you had gone to the pier because it was always a draw for visitors and you tended to avoid the large crowds. You took in the rows of carnival games and fried food stands outfitted in flashing lights before seeing a pair of tourists flying from one end to the other on a giant zipline. Your eyes went wide with shock and you shot a quick, worried glance at Michael. He began to laugh before he replied, “don’t worry - we’re just here for games and food!” He barely finished signing to reassure you before he wrapped your hand in his again and he took off, pulling you toward a pair of whack-a-mole seats.

The light crowd that afternoon meant that you could walk up to any stand without a wait to play and you were convinced Michael wanted to play every game there. When you were both beat out at whack-a-mole by the ten-year old next to you, you decided buzzer games probably weren’t your strong suit. The two of you raced between game stands in a never-ending fit of laughter. Some games had you competing against each other and the playful trash-talk amused the game attendants. Then, just as quickly as you’d started your banter, you’d find a single player game and become each other’s biggest cheerleader.

After losing at the cat rack, tin can alley, and the balloon bust, Michael wanted to try his hand at a game of chance, since clearly precision was not for him. His pace between games had slowed down considerably since you’d arrived and he was determined to win something to take home. He just hadn’t found much luck. The two of you wandered down the wooden platform with your fingers lazily entwined until you found the ring toss booth. You dropped his hand and signed excitedly to him that you’d find another game to try.

When he came very close to winning on several rings from the first bucket, Michael decided to give it a second go. The two of you tossed one red ring after another, almost making it many times but always watching them bounce off to the side. You picked up the last two rings in the bucket and handed one to Michael. His eyes met yours and you both nodded before turning back toward the game. He used his free hand to count down from three and you both sent the rings sailing through the air. You watched intently as they bounced around the bottle tops before Michael’s landed squarely around the golden glass bottle in the center.

He threw his arms up in the arm in victory as you looked at him with surprise and celebration on your face. His arms came down around your shoulders in a quick hug before the game attendant came over to help him claim a prize. Without hesitation, he turned to you and asked “Which one do you want?” You glanced up at the options and pointed out a small stuffed animal hanging right above you. As if on instinct, you hugged it to your chest when the attendant handed it over and thanked them and Michael. Smile on your face, stuffed animal in one hand, and Michael in the other hand, you couldn’t have been happier as you wandered between stalls.

The smell of something sweet caught your attention as you looked around to find the source. Michael must have read your mind because he began guiding you in the direction of the food stand without warning. To your surprise, the person inside the booth knew enough sign language to take your order without needing a pen and paper. Michael beamed from ear to ear watching your happiness as you were able to order treats for both of you. He only caught every second or third word, but he could see the elated smile on your face. Michael had needed to step in at most of the games throughout the afternoon, so you felt very excited to find someone who spoke your language.

Once you’d retrieved your treats and thanked the worker again, you began to walk back toward the parking lot leisurely. Just as you finished your snacks and were about to approach the end of the pier, you spotted a small photo booth kiosk. You grabbed Michael’s hand and tugged him off in that direction without much of a choice.The two of you piled onto the narrow seat and closed the curtain before you fed money into the machine. You selected a decorative frame with the date in the corner and the onscreen countdown began.

For the first pose, you held up the prize Michael won you with a toothy grin and he threw up a thumbs up, earning a laugh from you. You both pulled a funny face in the next pose and when it popped up on screen, you noticed that Michael had the tiniest bit of food stuck on the outside corner of his lips. You turned toward him and reached your hand up to rest on his cheek as your thumb swiped away the residue. Michael let out a small gasp as his face turned to you. The camera flash for the third picture caught you off guard and caused you to pull away as heat flushed over your cheeks. Before his confidence faltered, Michael cupped your face and brought his lips to meet yours. Your eyes fluttered closed briefly before he pulled away and looked into your eyes. You could read the hesitance in his expression until you placed a peck on his lips to tell him that it was okay. His mouth stretched into a wide smile and you felt your cheeks burn even hotter as you pulled back and glanced timidly at the stuffed animal in your lap.

Michael reached for the copies of the printed film strip at the bottom of the machine and flushed as he realized the last picture was of your kiss. He handed you a copy as he signed “cute” with a smile before opening the curtain and stepping out of the kiosk. You carried the photo strip in the same hand as your ring toss prize so you could hold Michael’s hand in the other. As you made your way back down the sidewalk to your parked cars, you leaned your head against his shoulder. He placed a sweet kiss to the top of your head with a smile, earning a contented hum from you before you fell back into silence for the next few blocks. You had known you would have a good afternoon with Michael, but it had exceeded all expectations.

———

taglist: @easierlftv @haikucal @kingcals @youngblood199456 @bookercth @atlcalm @another-lonely-heart @ashtonsos @castaway-cashton @itsjen223 @softbabiestan

#can you tell that I hate writing dialogue???#anyway happy soft!michael tuesday #michael clifford #michael x reader #michael one shot #michael fluff #my writing

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imagesbyele · 3 years

Text

don’t reblog, this is a redirect post from here (the post with the old version with all its features, which are still present in this one).

the remastered 'Emma - light and dark' theme

pastebin here - preview of the free version - preview of the premium one which is the same whether you look at this post or at the old one, it was automatically revamped

like or reblog if you use or even just if you like. Reminder I have a ko-fi if you want to support me <3 Edit as you like, don’t change the credit.

what I added to the the old version (which got a bit revamped too with video scripts and semi-transparent controls, but doesn't have these): -lightbox (click on one photo and it shows you the image on hover instead of moving to the ugly blue tumblr page), pixel union photosets (you pick the margins) between images changing ‘gutter’) all by shythemes + the little fix to their script by chloethemes. -npf fix by glenthemes (now present in the original version too) -unnested captions by annasthms, which you can toggle on and off depending on what you prefer, one for textposts and one for all others (in case you use xkit to edit textposts and you don’t like the final result).

Example:

-slightly shorter container so it’s not cut off in small screens -asks you reblog from other people have now their own style instead of just looking like a question and a blockquoted comment under it.

+ obviously everything the old version has.

do NOT look at it through your preview in the editor page, it messes plenty things up and you can’t even see the npf photosets. Keep a tab with your blog open to see the real changes there.

added features for “premium” which is a gift if you buy me a coffee (just send me a message with your url/email for the link), and you can see in the preview:

-ability to add a message on top of your regular askbox, where people are redirected when they send you asks from the dash -your usual dropdown box, what I call 'updates tab’ in the sidebar (you can add more if you go in the html and simply copy-paste what’s in the body section as needed) -popup links for you to customize in the html, and, to give you what I call a “template” so you know where to start, I made it so that in one link (or box2) you will already find tabs, divided in rules, bio, verses and navi. In the bio tab you also will find slide-down boxes again, adjusted to fit there. In the navi tab you’ll get navi buttons, and in the verses tag a potential template of image-name of the verse with link to it-description. Then a separated popup with an askbox and a submission box, both with a frame with gradients like the container. You can take the html and move things around, remove or add more as you please. -optional glow around your container, description and updates tab you can switch on and off. -your popups are styled so that you can remove the background color of the popup_block and add an image (on the corner/make a frame) with transparent background (500x640px right now), the content of the popup will have its own background behind, of a color you’ll pick, of 460x520px. But you can obviously modify sizes as you please -optional ‘not allowing people to right click on your blog’ which if you don’t want is very easy to delete (just go in the editor and delete the script, the label is on top)

#redirect post #my themes #mine #free themes #contained themes #rp themes #theme 02b #rp theme

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maleksrami · 4 years

Photo

ORIGINAL → EDITED gif making process tag

I wasn’t sure if this was something anyone wanted to see from me specifically, but I’ve been tagged by @cuddlerlouis @ltwalls2020 and @finewalls to do it so!!! okay sure!!!

LEFT: animated, cropped, resized from a 1080p video RIGHT: sharpened, colored, text added (optional)

Listen...I’ve been making gifs since the dawn of time. I think I first taught myself how to gif when I was 11 with Windows Movie Maker and a program called Paint Shop Pro 9 and the only social media that existed were fandom message boards. I’d have to manually screenshot the video frame by frame. Nowadays, (and for the last decade on tumblr) I’ve used KMPlayer to screencap and Photoshop CS3 to make the gifs because the “load files into stack” extension doesn’t work in my version of CS5 and that’s how I like to do it lol. My entire experience of making gifs on this site is still documented on my blog, and you can absolutely see how I’ve improved over the years and discovered my own style and stuck with it. But I am STILL constantly learning and adapting!!! so it’s quite fun. anyways, onward.

I load the screencap files into a stack. Then, I use an action I made myself of my basic giffing steps to speed up the process once my files are imported—make frames from layers, reverse frames, flatten frames into layers, set time delay to 0.04. Time delay is a personal preference but I like smooth gifs, especially when I have a lot of frames. I run this action before I crop so I can see exactly where my subject moves around and compare where they are in the first frame vs. the last frame, so I don’t accidentally cut them off somewhere when I crop. Once it’s cropped how I want, I run a sharpening action.

Then I color it from scratch! I used to be big on finding PSDs and altering them to fit the look I was going for, but I find that doing it yourself layer by layer is how you really learn about coloring. I specifically chose clips for this that were gonna need more editing than your average gif that is already well lit with a decent white balance (rip to every person who has ever filmed Harry and Louis but I’m different) so you can see the difference and how I work around inconsistent lighting or unstable concert footage with ever-changing colors and shadows. I usually go in the same order:

curves - (I only JUST recently discovered what the eyedroppers in this tool can do for a gif’s white balance, so....*clown music*....glad I know that now) and do a minor adjustment to lighten the gif a tiny bit.

levels - to further crisp up the black and white points and brighten

brightness/contrast - ya know

selective color - I bump up the black in every gif to avoid any noise and this also helps lower the gif size by the time I save. it helps make a gif pop a little more and gives it some good contrast. Then I’ll fuss a bit with the red and yellows and take out any unwanted tones I don’t want like the blues/cyans in the background or the yellows in the original color grading (why the FUCK is the Lights Up video this way). BUT! This is not always necessary and there are times where it should be avoided. I included a gif of Rami here because I notice a lot of gif makers go ham on the selective coloring and brightening, that he’ll look pretty whitewashed in their final gifs because they take out a lot of reds/yellows and his skin loses color. so it’s important to pay attention to your subject’s skin tone especially if you’re giffing a POC, pay attention that your editing doesn’t wash their gorgeous skin out ok!!!! you can brighten a gif without brightening their whole being!!! moving on!!!!

color balance - this is a fun layer to play with and a very crucial step to how my final gif looks in terms of color. I gave the Lights Up video a reddish tone with this, but you could also go with more blue-ish look here too.

text/captioning - I have my font settings saved as a PSD file so I just pull that up and drag and drop the text, and edit the layer to whatever my caption is. I’ve been using the same font settings for YEARS and I think that is one of the main things that differentiate your gifs from others is having your own style of captioning. It’s fun to experiment with this!

I might add a couple more brightness layers or a black and white gradient map set to soft light at a very low opacity!!! or play with the exposure tool!!! it depends on what I’m working on, but those are my basic steps!!!!! then I save them set to Pattern or Adaptive (whichever looks better) and that’s pretty much it :) i’m happy to answer any questions or help if you’re starting out!!!

Idk who else has done this yet but I’m gonna tag some of my favorite gif makers in other fandoms to spread the love @summercohen @joewright @barrysberkman annnd @s-k-y-w-a-l-k-e-r but no worries if you don’t wanna share all your tips and secrets, fam. We totally get it xx

#...very sorry about how long this is #this is why!!!! gif makers get frustrated about stolen gifs or lack of notes...it's a lot of work

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ommsims · 3 years

Text

story process challenge

i was tagged by @xldkx to do this challenge, created by @herpixels , like a month? a month and a half? ago and it’s been sitting half finished in my drafts for nearly as long. *sigh* (regardless, i love stuff like this so even if it takes me forever to get to it, i appreciate the tags! 💕).

i decided to answer all the qs because it took me damn long enough to get to this, so i might as well put some extra elbow grease into it (plus it was fun!). btw it’s all going under a cut b/c it is long. i apologize in advance.

1. My Writing Process - used to be a hot damn mess. literally word docs strewn throughout my pc. However, I recently switched to using Onenote (it’s what i use to organize my d&d campaign notes) and hoo-boy is it so much nicer. this is how it’s set up and it’s honestly night and day. i can have a page with outlines, a page to organize & order screenshots, and a separate page for drafting text, and i can easily toggle though them without having to switch windows? a big thumbs up from me.

When it comes to actual writing- I used to write my drafts in novel format, which i enjoyed but it made “converting” them into tumblr posts time consuming and frustrating. I ended up scrapping most of the text in the process, retaining pretty much only the dialogue.

Anyway, nowadays I write in more of a screenplay format: dialogue only + key scene information with the occasional note to self.

I do keep a master “arcs” page with key events and each individual character’s arc from beginning to end and secondary “outline” pages with slightly more detailed outline for each leg of the project. No screencaps b/c spoilers galore!

My typical work flow process for a scene goes: (1) brainstorm scene ideas, (2) take screenshots, (3) organize screenshots into a rough storyboard, (4) add 1st draft of text, (5) edit photos, (6) edit text, (7) upload to "drafts” here on tumblr, (8) let sit for a bit (9) take a final look at things/proofread and edit as needed. It may sound counterintuitive, but i find it much easier to write dialogue for a set of images rather than attempt to take images based on prewritten text. I feel more comfortable editing and tweaking tone and content in the text this way. Otherwise, I get frustrated when I “can’t” shoot a scene exactly as it appeared in my head.

2. How I build my scenes - A lot of what i do is rooted in gameplay, therefore my sets are usually (a) play-tested and (b) not super pretty. I’ve certainly improved at decorating & building over the years but more often than not I download lots off tumblr and the gallery because I don’t have the patience, aptitude, or time to build all of my own sets. That being said, I frequently gut builds only to build a number of completely unrelated mini sets inside to reduce the number of times i have to replace lots. I also keep a list of “important locations” and where certain characters live / will move to, to help keep this all straight as there aren’t nearly enough lots per neighborhood or even per world in this damn game...

my least favorite part of scene building is actually decorating. lol. Don’t get me wrong, I love clutter. I honestly do. but fuck me if i expect myself to spend hours meticulously decorating a set, spend another 3 hours toggling back and forth b/w BB & live modes adjusting things to get rid of the damn routing errors. (yeah, yeah, i know i could ignore them, they’re not important, especially in those scenarios where i’m using a set for screenshots and nothing else, but idk. it really grinds my gears.) and then have to replace the lot like a week later because there aren’t enough lots in the game. *sigh*

3. CC/Pose Making - i do not consider myself to be a cc creator nor a pose maker but i do dabble occasionally. And to be completely honest i’d much rather spend my time doing other stuff, so it’s not high on my list of priorities atm. plus there are so many talented cc creators in this community; i can usually get by with what’s already out there.

4. Getting in the zone - Honestly, I do a lot of brainstorming for plot & dialogue in the shower. I don’t have any particular playlists to get me “in the writing mood” but I do enjoy listening to music as I work. Either instrumental stuff or simply artists/songs I like. If something just so happens to “fit” a scene I’m working on, one i’ve got planned, or even just gives me vibes for a certain character or group, I add a quick note to the top of said scene’s draft. Most of the time I stick it in the recesses of my brain and add a quick link when I finally get to the point of posting the draft to tumblr. For whatever reason, when I have one of those “oh this song is perfect for X” moments it’s essentially ingrained in my mind for the rest of eternity.

5. The screenshot folder - this will most likely give some of you out there major anxiety. but i swear it’s an organized chaos. :)

yep. 32.9gb of screenshots & related things...

So with the raws from a single random scene selected, you can see i take roughly 10 screenshots per image posted. not terrible i guess but i’m working on it. Typically I take screenshots and once I’m done editing a scene I’ll move them from the general folder to a more specific project folder.

6. Captions - I’ll answer this in three parts:

for my townie story. not really. I prefer using the text box. I tend to write (& re-write) the dialogue for each one of these scenes several times over as I add more “scenes” into my drafts. It would be incredibly inefficient, time consuming, and would waste a lot more space on my pc to have to save .psds of each image just so i could edit dialogue when I decide: “oh hey maybe so and so needs to bring up X in this scene” and then change my mind an hour later.

for niko, noor, & co. I’m a text on image type gal here. don’t really know why, but it gives the project a different energy. ironically it makes it feel more laid-back to me. which i guess makes sense, it’s a much more light-hearted “story” than my townie project. which is, imo, very soapy haha.

for legacy stuff. all text goes below the images in the text box. reasoning: it’s gameplay, I don’t brainstorm, outline, or pre-write for this. I play the game, take screenshots, plug ‘em into my drafts and write some commentary / dialogue to go along with it.

7. Editing - i am a creature of habit and have not majorly changed my editing process in probably a year and a half (when I began using reshade and had to adjust my color correcting psd). it’s a super basic system:

drag & drop my “color correction” psd.

run actions in ps. (i made my own “all-in-one” actions to really streamline the process; i have different “actions sets” for my premades’ story and for other things that get posted to tumblr. even if no one else notices it, i like the little details that keep my projects separate and “identifiable”.

voila. all set to upload.

sometimes i crop images, add “text effects”, or do more in depth editing (i.e. editing a phone screen or adding rain etc.) but overall i try and keep it simple for myself.

8. Throwback - i posted an image of one of the first (but never posted) scenes I’d written for my townie project up above. but as for how would i redo a scene i’d already posted. well i’m currently re-doing my townie story so i guess i’ll just say you’ll see how it’s redone when i get to part 1! 😉

anyway, no tags because i’m so embarrassingly late to this party but if you hadn’t gotten around to this tag, wanted to do it but didn’t get a tag, or started it and left it to sit and now you’re thinking “oh god that was months ago should i even post this anymore?!?” consider yourself tagged by me and go ahead and post it for all to see!

#tag train #story process challenge #it's long. it's rambly. but that's me.#this one was a challenge! a challenge but fun.

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arofili · 3 years

Text

Line of Elros Edit Series: Appendix B

Continued from Appendix A. This section will contain information on the House of Andúnië and the Royalty of Arnor.

~~~

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Appendix A: Royalty of Númenor Appendix B: House of Andúnië, Royalty of Arnor (you are here!) Appendix C: Royalty of Gondor Appendix D: Princes of Dol Amroth, Chieftains of the Dúnedain Appendix E: Stewards of Gondor

~~~

HOUSE OF ANDÚNIË

Silmariën ft. Silmariën, Elatan, Valandil of Andúnië It is canonical that Silmariën was passed over for inheritance, that she received the Ring of Barahir, and that she had a mithril fillet (a kind of medieval headband); the story of her making the fillet herself with the aid of her cousin is an embellishment. Technically it was not Silmariën or Elatan who first led the House of Andúnië, but their son Valandil, but I altered the story to give it more feminist themes. The details of Elatan’s life are all headcanon.

Valandil of Andúnië ft. Valandil of Andúnië, Vairanatsë (OC), Ulmondil (OC) Save for the names and professions of his wife and son, Valandil’s story is canonical.

Ulmondil ft. Ulmondil (OC), Hyamindë (OC), Elvëanna (OC), Tintilárë (OC), Lilómëo (OC), Malwacilin (OC), Irmondil (OC), Lelyárë (OC), Moruinë (OC), Ortólorë (OC) Here we get to the long stretch of “unnamed lords.” Since we know nothing about these people or their spouses, I’ve had some fun with gender and sexuality here. Literally everything here is headcanon (except that Tar-Minastir did canonically build a tower on Oromet).

Vóreäla ft. Vóreäla (OC), Tyulussë (OC), Vilwarindo (OC), Rómandur (OC), Roquendië (OC), Vasaryamarto (OC), Failaher (OC), Pirucendëa (OC), Canyahondë (OC), Elwenára (OC), Ilcarion (OC), Morilindië (OC) All details about my OCs are pure headcanon. Check Appendix A for information on whether the details about the kings they interact with are canon or not. ETA 3/31/21: Fixed some minor timeline discrepancies.

Vóromir ft. Vóromir (OC), Arphazêl (OC), Aulendur (OC), Istimiel (OC), Lindórië, Eärendur of Andúnië Gimilzagar (and thus his hypothetical child) is canonically possibly the ancestor of Inzilbêth; I decided to go with that, and wrote a narrative around how the daughter of one of the King’s Men married into the House of Andúnië. Lindórië and Eärendur are both canon characters who are indeed siblings. Everything else is headcanon.

Lindórië ft. Lindórië, Tulcatio (OC), Inzilbêth, Eärendur of Andúnië, Aranyo (OC), Minasdil (OC) The politics of Andúnië and Gimilzôr are all headcanon, though it is canon that Gimilzôr married Inzilbêth. That’s pretty much the only canon part of this story, though. Eärendur is canonically the fifteenth Lord of Andúnië; I changed it so Lindórië was the leader instead. The Adûnaic versions of Lindórië and Eärendur’s names are my own translations, as is Inzilbêth’s Quenya name. ETA 3/31/21: Made some fairly significant changes in order to reconcile some timeline errors, though the core story remains.

Minasdil ft. Minasdil (OC), Tiristiel (OC), Númendil, Vailimion (OC), Narwalótë (OC) Everything here is headcanon, except that the Faithful did indeed move to Rómenna around this time. The leader of Andúnië between Eärendur and Númendil is unnamed, so I made them nonbinary because I could. Númendil is not mentioned to have any siblings, but I gave him some because I felt like it. ETA 3/31/21: Completely rewrote the last paragraph to reconcile it with the canon timeline. Apparently I originally had Minasdil getting married around the time that their grandson Elendil was supposed to be born!! ...except that doesn’t make sense at all either, so I changed things so it’s Amandil being born at that time. Still - I had Minasdil marrying too late, and that’s fixed now.

Númendil ft. Númendil, Lómiel (OC), Amandil, Elenyë (OC), Elentír, Elendil Númendil was canonically a friend of Tar-Palantír, and Amandil was canonically a friend of Ar-Pharazôn. For the canonicity of Pharazôn’s life details, see Appendix A. We know nothing about the wives of Númendil or Amandil; I made that all up. Elentír is a discarded character from drafts of the Akallabêth; he and Míriel were to be wed before Míriel fell in love with Pharazôn. I kept the published Silm version where Míriel married Pharazôn against her will, but I liked the detail of her having a boyfriend before him, so I kept it. (I definitely queercoded her though, she wasn’t in love with Elentír either in my mind...) Amandil’s fate and final journey west are canon, though Elentír didn’t stick around in Tolkien’s writings long enough for him to get an ending. I had him tag along with his brother. The Adûnaic names of Númendil and Elentír are my own translation; the Adûnaic names of Amandil and Elendil are both canon.

Elendil ft. Elendil, Lauriel (OC), Isildur, Anárion Everything about Elendil’s wife is headcanon. The story of Isildur stealing the fruit is canon, but has been embellished a bit for dramatic effect. The rest of this is canon, with a few minor details added here and there. Elendil’s Adûnaic name is canon; Isildur and Anárion’s Adûnaic names are my own translation.

~~~

ROYALTY OF ARNOR

Isildur ft. Isildur, Cemniel (OC), Elendur, Aratan, Círyon, Valandil of Arnor Almost everything here is canon, though Isildur overhearing his father about the White Tree is an embellishment, and we don’t know the exact reason there was such a long gap between the birth of Elendur and his next two sons. My guess is he knocked up his wife before they were married, and then didn’t want to have kids in the dangerous times of Númenor...though that didn’t stop them from having a son in the dangerous times of the Last Alliance.

Valandil of Arnor ft. Valandil of Arnor, Ahyarë (OC), Eldacar of Arnor, Culalmë (OC), Arantar, Vistariel (OC), Tarcil, Niëlinyë (OC), Tarondor of Arnor, Lossëa (OC), Valandur, Tasarwen (OC), Elendur of Arnor, Luinaivë (OC) Aside from the timing of Valandil’s inheritance, all of this is headcanon.

Eärendur of Arnor ft. Eärendur of Arnor, Quildaraumë (OC), Amlaith of Arthedain, Adanamarth of Cardolan (OC), Anorhír of Rhudaur (OC) The basic details of Arnor’s split into three kingdoms is canon, but everything else is headcanon, including the names of Amlaith’s brothers.

Amlaith ft. Amlaith, Linnoril (OC), Beleg of Arthedain, Ferieth (OC), Mallor, Cidinnor (OC), Celepharn, Glasdil (OC), Celebrindor, Sídhiel (OC), Malvegil, Hwinior (OC) Amlaith did indeed move the capital from Annúminas to Fornost, and his kingdom of Arthedain had border disputes with Cardolan and Rhudaur for as long as they all stood. Angmar canonically began to move against disunified Arnor during Malvegil’s reign. All other details are headcanon.

Argeleb I ft. Argeleb I, Edlenniel (OC), Arveleg I, Eithruin (OC), Araphor, Elweth (OC), Argeleb II, Lithuies (OC), Arvegil, Calaear (OC), Arveleg II, Tavoriel (OC), Araval, Halloth (OC) Save for his wife being a princess of Cardolan and that being the reason the people of Cardolan accepted his rule, Argeleb I’s story is canon. The story of Arveleg I’s brother being the last prince of Cardolan is entirely made up (even that he had a brother), though it is true that the last prince of Cardolan died in battle alongside Arveleg I. Araphor’s story is canon, save for the details about his OC wife. Argeleb II’s story is mostly canon, though I made up the bit about two of his children dying in the Great Plague. There is also an inconsistency around here: earlier the “last” prince of Cardolan died beside Arveleg I, but apparently the “last” prince of Cardolan died in the Plague? I picked the story I liked better and just emphasized Cardolan’s desolation in this time period. Arveleg II’s story is canon with a bit of embellishment. Araval’s story is canon, but everything with his spouse is made up (though the barrow-wights did scare the Dúnedain back to Arthedain in canon).

The Last Prince of Cardolan ft. Mallor (OC; the Last Prince of Cardolan), Gwileth (OC; the Lady of the Blue Brooch) I made this edit for OC week, and it wasn’t really intended to be a late addition to this series, but since I didn’t get to do much with Mallor in the edit featuring his brother I was happy to expand on him, and even more excited when I realized that I could tie in the Lady of the Blue Brooch to this story as well! The Last Prince of Cardolan is a real (unnamed) figure mentioned in the Legendarium; the Lady of the Blue Brooch was mentioned only by Tom Bombadil as someone “fair...long ago [who] wore this on her shoulder” when he took it for Goldberry to wear. We don’t know for sure how the prince knew the lady, but come on, that’s just a story begging to be told! The tie-in with Merry’s sword is a slight liberty from canon: we don’t know who the dagger originally belonged to, but given that Merry quiet possibly dreamed of the prince’s final moments, I think it would be poetic for his sword to be the one who helped to kill the Witch-king in the end. Overall, there’s a LOT of headcanon here that I had fun developing from the scraps Tolkien gave us in canon! Also, I didn’t mention it in the main post, but Mallor’s name means “golden,” and Gwileth’s is a contraction of “gwilwileth,” the Sindarin word for “butterfly.” Since Arveleg is a name taken from Ar+Beleg (meaning he was named for his ancestor King Beleg of Arthedain), I thought it would make sense for Arveleg’s brother to be named for King Beleg’s son, King Mallor. Gwileth’s brooch is described in canon as being “set with blue stones, many-shaded like flax-flowers or the wings of blue butterflies,” so I leaned on that for inspiration when it came to her name.

Araphant ft. Araphant, Laerdil (OC), Arvedui, Fíriel This is mostly canon with some embellishments, such as Laerdil orchestrating Arvedui and Fíriel’s marriage. ETA 3/20/21: Tweaked this caption because of an inaccuracy I noticed.

~~~

CONTINUED IN APPENDIX C

#line of elros #headcanons #andunie #numenor #arnor #my meta #tefain nin #loe appendices #house of andunie #royalty of arnor #peoples of arda

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mysteryofren · 4 years

Text

The Most Of It

part 20 of So Happy Together

19: https://mysteryofren.tumblr.com/post/617393400455512064/the-best-date-ever

note: wow part 20! sorry it took a while to get out i had to edit it a bit before putting it up.

It felt like you were living in a movie. Everything was so perfect. You stayed in the street for a bit after he left you. Smiling like an idiot. Walking down the road swaying around like a sucker in love. He was perfect. He was sweet, caring, funny, and he was communicative. As good as you felt there was still an ache in your heart. Over the man you really loved. The man who you tried to convince yourself at the moment didn't exist. You didn't even want to think of his name. You pushed thoughts of him out of your mind, and focused on Cal. you looked on your phone and saw a notification. He had posted something. You opened your phone to see what it was. He tagged you.

‘All that art, but she was the only thing I was staring at.’ was the caption.

You looked through, and they were all photos of you and him. The first one was the one you guys took in front of the gallery. You were smiling and he had his arm wrapped around you while he made a goofy face. The next one was you looking at a painting. He took it from behind you, and it actually looked pretty good. The last one you took. You smiled at the camera while he was kissing your cheek. You decided you liked that one best. You liked the post, and commented under it.

‘Best day ever!’ it wasn't much, but you didn't know what else to say. You shared the post on your story knowing a certain someone might see it. A breeze went by, and you decided to head to the hotel.

Once you made your way to the room you were excited to tell your grandfather all about your day. You walked in, and went to his room to talk to him. You opened the door, and saw him lying in bed. Glasses on, book in hand. There was always tomorrow. Quietly you walked to his bed, and took his glasses off. The book in his hands was one he had read many times. ‘Gone With The Wind’ by Margret Mitchell. It was one both of you loved a lot. Slowly you slipped it out of his hand, and placed it on the bedside table. When he slept he looked normal. Not so put together like he always is. He had one leg sticking out of the blanket and over the edge of the bed. He slept in a slant, letting his whole body take up the bed. His hair was a mess, and he had some strands in his face. It was way different from his usual prim, and proper aesthetic.

You kissed his forehead, and gently pulled the covers over his body a little bit more. You turned off the lamp on the bed side table, and walked out quietly. He really was tired. You couldn't blame him though. After all he's lived a pretty exciting life. He raised kids, and you. At least he got to have the love of his life around for most of it. You opened the small door to your room, and threw yourself out of the bed. You wish Gideon was here. You liked telling him about your day before bed. It was comforting. You messaged Cal, and you both talked. Without even realizing it. You had fallen asleep just the way you were.

Morning came, and you were awoken by your grandfather coming into your room.

“I thought you would have never come home.” he said while sitting on the bed next to you.

“I got in pretty late. I wanted to tell you about the day, but you were already asleep.” you said sitting up, and yawning.

“Well i'm here now, but I think i'd like to hear about it over breakfast, what do you say?”

“Sounds good to me. Where do you wanna go?”

“Well I figured we are on vacation. So I ordered room service. We can have breakfast in bed, and you can tell me all about the boy.”

Soon the food came. You changed out of last night's outfit, and went to your grandfather's room. You sat at the foot of the bed, and he sat opposite of you. He placed the different plates in front of you, and you both just started picking at them.

“So about this boy. Tell me about him.” he said after he drank some coffee.

“Ok so,” you started. “I really like him. He’s super smart, and he's just so goofy, and carefree.”

“Where is he from?”

“Bracca. Father has some business there, so Cal knew who he was.”

“And Cal is the boy?”

“Yes. he's in college to be an engineer, you know.”

“An engineer. He must be smart then, that's quite a hard job.”

“I really would like you to meet him. Maybe we can do something today?”

“That would be quite nice. I could get to know him myself.” he said before eating a piece of pancake.

“Yeah. You'll love him. He reminds me of Hux a bit. Just not as uptight.”

“Do you think you will end up with Cal?”

“I dont know. I mean I like him, but Bracca is pretty far.”

“Do you want my advice, dear?”

“Yes. always.”

“Are you sure you like him, or are you just distracting yourself from the person you really like?”

You stayed quiet for a moment. Unsure of what to say.

“I haven't thought about him since we left. I won't start now. I think I really do like Cal. I mean he's respectful, funny, caring. What's not to like about him?”

“I am just saying. Seeing you be so upset over him made me upset. I had not seen you that sad since Satine died.”

Satine. Mama. you haven't heard her name in so long. It felt like a forbidden word almost. Like it was wrong to hear it be said.

‘I know. Im sorry. This time I know nothing can happen. So i'm not getting my hopes up.”

“He likes you.”

“Who does?”

“Ben. He told me he did.”

“He's got a funny way of showing it.”

“He's just confused. I am in no way justifying his actions, but he is. Quite frankly, he is also a bit of an idiot.”

You laughed at that. “Yeah. he is isn't he?”

He smiled at you. You both continued eating. When you were done you cleared the bed of plates, and he got dressed. You messaged Cal to see if he wanted to come hang out with you, and your grandfather. He agreed, and you both talked about meeting in the lobby again. Today you dressed for comfort. You quickly did some makeup, and styled your hair again. Once your grandfather changed you talked to him about what you wanted to do. He decided he wanted to see the statue. Luckily he was okay with you inviting Cal along so you messaged him about what you guys were going to do. Once you felt cute enough to see him you walked out of your room. Your grandfather was in his usual button down shirt, and khakis. He had his book in his hand. Probably to read while you guys were resting. You grabbed his hand, and you both went downstairs.

Once you see Cal he smiles at you, and you can't help, but smile back. You get your grandfather's attention, and look towards Cal. he looks with you, and you make your way over to him. You hug him once you see him. It had only been hours, but it felt like you haven't seen him in years. Once you let go of him you introduce him to your grandfather.

“Hello sir, im Cal. sorry to steal her yesterday.”

Your grandfather gave him a smile. “It's no issue. Especially with how happy she was this morning.”

“Well I hope you don't mind if I steal her tonight for dinner?”

“Well I don't see the harm in it. Is that alright with you?” your grandfather asked.

“Yeah that's fine with me.” you said with a smile. You tried to keep yourself from looking like a complete fool. You all talked for a moment before the cab your grandfather called was outside. Once you reach the gallery with the statue. You all spent the day walking around and taking pictures. Your grandfather somehow found himself joined in a tour group that was going over the history of a statue. You could tell your grandfather wasn't completely sold on Cal, but he was getting to know him. That meant something at least.

You all spent the day following the tour group around. Once you saw the statue of David your grandfather started telling you and Cal a story about how he had brought your grandmother to see the statue too. You could tell the thing he liked most about Cal was he was a listener. Your grandfather loved telling stories, and Cal loved hearing about them. From there all they did was talk. Cal said he wanted to hear his most exciting stories, and your grandfather delivered. He talked about his time in college, and all the trouble him and his friends would get into. Cal told a few stories about him, Cere, and Greeze. Apparently they’re not allowed in a few places.

They talked about college stories through lunch. You sat there listening to them prattle on. Part of you felt bad. You didn't have many stories to contribute. You went to school with sheltered rich kids. You were a sheltered rich kid. You didn't do much to get in trouble.

“You've been really quiet. You got any stories Y/N?” Cal asked.

“I'm not really the mischief type.”

“I'm sure you have one. If I have some, surely you must have one.” your grandfather added.

“I mean. I almost got into a fight with some girl over her boyfriend. My friend kept it from escalating.”

“Alright! Look at you Kenobi!” Cal cheered.

“Why would you not tell me about that? When was this?” your grandfather said with a laugh.

“Remember when me and my friends went skating a few months ago? It happened that night.”

Your grandfather looked like he was thinking.

“Was it over Ben?” Why did he have to bring him up again?

“Uhh yeah, but Rey was the one who started it!”

“Who's Ben?” Cal asked. You weren't sure how to respond. You didn't even want to talk about him. Luckily your grandfather knew you well, and spoke for you.

“He's nobody really. Just some guy.” Cal just looked at you. You stayed quiet not wanting to talk about it anymore. Your grandfather quickly changed the subject to Cals family. You joined in, and were able to move on from talking about Him.

Soon your grandfather got tired, and decided he wanted to head back to the hotel. He called a cab for all of you. You continued your conversation in the car. You were glad your grandfather at least tried to get to know him. Now you can see that he likes him. When the car dropped you off in front of the hotel your grandfather took the time to say goodbye to Cal. He went upstairs to give you a chance to talk to him.

“So you still down for our date tonight?” Cal asked

“Oh so it is a date.”

“Yeah. So was yesterday, but I wasn't sure if I was too subtle, so I figured why not be outright, and say it is.” SO YESTERDAY WAS A DATE.

“Well, I enjoyed our date yesterday, and I look forward to our second one tonight.” you said with a smile.

“Good,” he gave you a quick wink, and a smile. “Meet me down here in 3 hours. Bring a jacket cause we're eating outside.”

“I'll be here.”

He kissed you on the cheek. “Can't wait.”

You watched him walk away. You felt like your heart was about to explode. You haven't felt this happy in so long. You made your way to your room. Daydreams of staying here forever with Cal took over your mind. Part of you wishes you had the nerve to just stay. You loved Italy. It was filled with endless beauty. Something you didn't think of when you think of home. You could have a fresh start. A clean slate. No Rey. No school. No parents. Best of all he wouldn't be there. It's best not to think of that kind of stuff. You have good things at home. You walk into the hotel room,and see your grandfather on the small couch looking out the window across from it. You walk over, and sit down next to him. While laying your head on his shoulder you looked out the window with him.

Neither of you spoke. Both of you just sat, and looked out at the sun beaming over the buildings. You paid attention to what was in front of you. Trying to memorize it all.

“I like him you know,” your grandfather said. “I just think there's someone else I like for you better.”

“I know pop pop.” you whispered. He kissed your head, and wrapped an arm around you. He gave you a squeeze before getting up.

“I'll be in my bed reading. When you leave for your date let me know.” he turned to walk to his room when you just called out to him.

“I love you.”

“I know my dear. I love you too.” he said before turning back and walking into his room.

Soon you were getting ready. You curled your hair, making it look a little nicer than usual. You also took the time to make sure your makeup was perfect. When you didn't know it was a date it was easier. Now you had anxiety. You had the pressure of trying to impress someone on your mind. It was killing you, because now none of your outfits looked good enough. You decided on a casual dress. You put some sheer tights on incase it got cold, and grabbed a jacket.once you felt confident enough you headed out.

You sat in the lobby nervously bouncing your leg when you spotted him getting off the elevator. When he saw you he smiled, and made his way over to you.

“Hey, ready to go?” he asked

“Yeah, definitely.”

You two walked out of the hotel, and he led you to a nearby restaurant. Once you arrive they take you up the stairs, and out to a balcony area. There were vines wrapped around the railing, along with some christmas lights. You sat at a table close to the edge of the balcony, and was taken back by the view. You were able to look over the buildings, and out to the cathedral. It was perfect.

“I had to fight to get us this table. I figured the view was good enough we would have something to talk about if things got awkward.” he said with a smile.

“It's perfect. I dont think I’ve ever seen something so beautiful in my life.”

“I have.” he said as he stared at you. You turned away so he wasn't able to see the red creeping over your face.

“So,” he started. “Today was fun. I like your grandpa. He's cool.”

“Yeah, he is pretty cool. He liked you a lot.” you were exaggerating, but who cares.

“I don't think he did. I mean he liked me, but I don't think he liked me too much.”

“He just wants what's best for me, can you blame him?”

“Does it have anything to do with that Ben guy?”

You looked out at the cathedral. You should have known he was going to bring it up. Better act dumb.

“So that uh, view is really nice.”

“Hey.” he said, reaching across the table, putting his hand on yours.

“I don't care who he is. I know much cant happen between us. I mean I live hundreds of miles away from you.”

“I know. Im sorry.” you hold his hand, and run your thumb across it. A waiter came by, and took your drink orders. Once he left to retrieve them Cal continued.

“Don't be. I have you now. I want to make the most of it. We might never see eachother again, and I wanna make sure the memories we do have are unforgettable.”

“They already are.” you replied looking in his eyes.

“Good. I want them to be as important to you as they are to me.”

“Today, and yesterday have been the best days of my life. That means the world to me Cal. I wanna make the most of our time together too.”

The waiter came, and put your drinks down. Cal grabbed his, and lifted it towards you.

“Here's to making the most of it.” he said

You lifted your drink to his. Hearing a soft clink as they touched. With a smile you replied.

“To making the most of it.”

Tags: @wumboho @pylopenpolo @duty-isnt-always-honour @wondering-wishing-well

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princeanxious · 5 years

Text

“Egg-celent” TSS- Patceit

Warnings: Aphobia, sympathetic deceit

I was requested to write this prompt with anyship, i gave it a shot xD , all errors are mine, and i hope ya’ll like it bc it’s almost 1 am for me.

Prompt: “You’re famous and I jokingly left a comment on your social media post asking if you’ll go egg my ex-partner’s house with me this weekend, and I never actually expected you to respond, let alone show up Friday night with dark sweatshirts, toilet paper rolls, and three egg cartons tucked under your arm” AU

Prior/extra info: Patceit AU where Patton is Famous(and has a youtube and uses it for good) and just moved into Dimitri’s hometown, and Dimitri is also a youtuber but a much smaller one, known for amazing stage/costume makeup artistry and the peculiar way that one side of his face is covered in freckles and the fact that his eyes have heterochromia. Patton is also really tall(6’4) and Dimitri is really short(5’2).

———

‘Hey, /PatPuffballSanders, wanna help me go egg my ex’s house this weekend? I’d bet it’d be sp-egg-tacular.’

-posted at 10:23 pm, by /BoopDiSnek

The short makeup artist hadn’t expected things to escalate this far, and well, in all honesty, he hadn’t expected anything to happen at all. Perhaps it was the fact that Patton Sanders was famous, known well for his pretty voice, sneaky puns, dad humor, and growing popularity as a voice actor.

He was a ray of sunshine, and readily used that talent on every social platform he could to make people smile, but primarily on Youtube. The tall puppy of a man had a pun of the day, animal shelter promo of the week, and a monthly charity stream where he’d invite his friends and other youtubers of all kinds to play games and skits and challenges to raise money for all sorts of causes.

The puffball has a moral streak a mile wide, and has a segment for ‘Dad Chats’ in his videos with his viewers about how they should choose go about certain issues, and how their choices and feelings would affect their decisions, among other topics. He wasn’t good at words, but he tries to be the best influence he can, and that much was evident in any of his videos.

Perhaps it was the fact that Dimitri was still heartbroken, his boyfriend dumping him a week ago for someone else after a year and a half of dating. All because he was a ‘killjoy’ for not feeling sexually attracted to the man. It wasn’t even that Dimitri didn’t want it, he just hadn’t felt any of the sort towards his ex yet and didn’t feel the need to fake an act. It hadn’t sat well with his ex-boyfriends ego, apparently, as was evident in their last fight leading towards their breakup.

The words ‘freak’ and ‘prude’ had indeed stung, but not more than ‘unlovable’ had, the sentence burned into the forefront of his thoughts as his ex exclaimed it.

And maybe Dimitri had been a little out of it, typing the sarcastic message through his angry tears.

Even when pressing the post button had sent a jolt of nervousness through him, having tagged his favorite ball of sunshine, he’d never expected a response. It was evident in the comments his followers added to his post, concerned about his full week of silence, that the question had been silly. Patton? Patton Hart Sanders? The Patton Hart Sanders, egging a house? Sure, Patton had just moved into Dimitri’s hometown, but their hometown was big enough that he’d probably never run into the voice actor anyhow. And Patton just wasn’t that kind of person.

In any case, his phone had been left on the charger as he went to make some tea, and had almost spilled it everywhere when he returned 10 minutes later. A single notification from Patton Sanders himself sat, waiting to be read.

‘Now, I don’t know about eggin’ a house, Kiddo, but you sure have got me on the ‘Egg’ of my seat, ‘fryin’ to know whats eating at you. You feeling okay, Di?’’ It was a private message, sent two minutes ago, and Dimitri was barely breathing.

Okay, so maybe Dimitri was pretty gay for Patton, it was a popular type of crush, nothing very real, and that was all. He looked up to the man, definitely. However, there was no way in heaven that Patton Sanders had privately dm’d him. He could scarcely believe it, even after triple checking that this was an official Patton Sanders account. Perhaps it was unprofessional, but Patton seemed genuinely worried and was trying to reach out, and that made Dimitri feel guilty.

“Hey Pat! Don’t worry about it, I was just joking around.” He squinted at the sentence, scrutinizing it for any particular error before sending it, Patton’s response was almost immediate.

“Something tells me you weren’t, but i’ll let it slide for now, kiddo. The question remains, are you feeling okay?”

“Honestly? No, but i will be. Aphobia sucks, though. Some dude my ex turned out to be.”

It took Patton three extra minutes to respond, a hesitance present in his response. “Oh goodness, that sounds bad.. on second thought, that egging his house idea doesn’t sound so mean after all, Di!” Dimitri snorted, gently waving off the others suggestion through another message.

Back and forth they went for another hour, talking about video ideas and plans and possible collab ideas. Perhaps Dimitri was in over his head, he’d never collabed with anyone before, but he wasn’t going to turn Patton's suggestion for a stage makeup challenge for a charity livestream down.

Eventually they both went to bed, and time moved on.

Dimitri picked himself back up and threw himself back into his videos, breaking the silence with a short explanation video followed by his regularly scheduled videos. By the time Friday rolled around, Dimitri had all but forgotten about his question to Patton. Over the course of the week, both of them had gotten closer, talking about their town and suggestions of places to go, and promises to meet up that hopefully would not become empty.

It was mid-afternoon when Dimitri, who was currently mid-edit thankfully and not mid-makeup mode, got a knock on his door. Confused, he wandered to his front door and opened it, peering through his glasses at the outside world.

Well, attempting to peer, as suddenly Dimitri is met with a blue sweater-clad chest and a happy squeal of excitement coming from the man standing at his door. It takes two seconds for Dimitri to blink upwards at the taller man and recognize him as Patton Sanders, it takes Dimitri two more minutes for his brain to catch up with Patton’s excited rambling.

And to catch up with the fact that Patton is hugging him.

He notices Patton has a few things in one arm, most notably, a couple cartons of eggs. He can’t help but crack a smile, completely flabbergasted that Patton actually thought of going through with this.

Dimitri’s thoughts are going wild, and he’s pretty sure he has a headache coming on, but instead of addressing it, he plays it cool and invites the other in and decides to make tea for the both of them.

When Patton pulls out two black sweaters, one turned inside out,along with a mask and some toilet paper, Dimitri can’t hold back his giggles. He misses the way Patton lights up at the sound, and lets Patton know that they really weren’t going to egg his ex’s house. The relief is evident in Patton’s voice, “Thank goodness! I don’t think we’d fair too well in the dark!”

Dimitri can’t help but agree, adjusting his glasses. No, not even his contacts could save him for the depth perception nightmare that was aiming in the dark, plus, they’d easily get caught. Absently, Dimitri moves to hand the inside out sweater back, flipping it right side out now that the dark interior wasn’t needed, only to pause. His eyes caught on the graphic print on the front of the sweater, adjusting it in his hands so he could see it fully. He paused again, squinting at the familiar design.

It held a cute albino snake curled around a small round ornament, blepping contently with the words ‘It cold’ next to her. Under the graphic, the name of the snake was presented in pretty cursive lettering, ‘Nova.’

“Pat.. is this?? My winter merch??” Dimitri could barely hold back his disbelief, glancing up at a flustered Patton. Patton owned the merch of his pet albino python, Nova, and goodness gracious Dimitri needed to sit down.

“In my defence!! Nova is cute!! And she's even cuter when happily curled around you!” Patton huffed, arms crossed as he blushed, though unashamed at his remark. Dimitri’s mind went a hundred different ways at that, before just putting his face in his hands and sighing.

After calming down a bit, he had an idea, and glanced up at Patton who blinked at him nervously, afraid he’d messed up somehow.

“Wanna hold her?” Patton’s bright grin was worth the brief stuttering of Dimitri’s thoughts.

With permission, a picture was taken of Patton with Nova wrapped around his shoulders, captioned ‘Nova found her #1 fan, it seems!’ and posted on both of their social accounts.

And if the media went a little shipping crazy at the two’s meeting, that was fine by them.

(The End?)

I might draw somethink for this but idk yet.)

#sanders sides #patton sanders #sympathetic deceit #patceit #luka writes #luka’s aus

790 notes · View notes

st-crylo · 4 years

Text

Rebound

Part 6

A/N: Sorry this took a little bit longer to get out, I’ve had a really busy couple of days. I hope you guys like this chapter, it’s filled with some drama!

Warnings: Swearing

Word Count: 5.2K

Tagging: @nankstasty @haylaansmi @thomasscresswell

Masterlist

Going home the next afternoon sucked. It was like plunging into ice cold water after being wrapped in warm blankets, and the moment you stepped through your front door that Sunday afternoon, you felt alone again.

Your mom had given you a lecture about having not messaged her after the movie, but she seemed to get over it quickly. It was clear to you that she was simply content in seeing you do something other than hiding in your room in your sorrows. You couldn’t say you blamed her. Even as the feelings of sadness and loneliness crept back into you, you could recognize that your refusal to interact with the outside world following the receiving of the picture was nothing short of sad.

However, as you sat in your room that night after dinner, looking for something to keep you occupied, you began to scheme. You and Kylo were “official” now, so you needed to cement suspicion in the student body before going to school tomorrow. Just as your friendship had come to a shock to the student body, so would this, and if the student body knew, Shawn would know.

Looking through your phone, you browsed the pictures you’d taken over the weekend. Seeing a picture you’d tried to take of Kylo that morning at breakfast, an idea came to mind. Closing out of your camera roll, you opened up Instagram, creating a new post. The first picture you used was a picture of the waterfall at Endor State Park. The second was the picture of Kylo at breakfast, his hand covering most of his face as he reached for the camera. You quickly typed out a caption before pressing the word “post.” Then, you decided to move over to your bio. For an extra bit of spice, you quickly edited your bio, adding the word “taken” in the space it had once been when you’d been dating Shawn. Then, you put today’s date and saved. Now all there was left to do was wait.

It took maybe fifteen minutes before you’d gotten a message in your DM’s. You opened up the message request, and much to your content, the message was exactly what you wanted.

Are you dating Ben Solo?

You responded with a quick yes before your phone began to ring. Kylo’s name flashed across the screen, and you picked up, putting the phone to your ear.

“Y’know, I’m hurt you used that picture,” came Kylo’s voice with feigned annoyance. You laughed before letting out a sigh.

“I figured that picture would be a little more mysterious. Besides, the other picture I have of you, you were making that stupid face. I figured you would hate that picture more,” you responded, leaning against your bed frame as you stared out the window.

“Fair point. This is gonna cause a shit storm tomorrow, you know that, right?” he asked.

“That’s the idea. Gotta get the people talking.”

“Alright, well, I’ll see you in the morning. Later.”

“Later,” you responded before hanging up the phone. As soon as you put the phone down, though, you felt the buzz of a message coming through. Bringing your phone back up from your lap, you saw you had a message from Poe.

Please tell me you’re joking.

You couldn’t lie and say you didn’t know this was coming. After all, none of them liked Kylo, especially Rey. You knew Rey would have a lot to say about it eventually, but you really weren’t expecting an almost instantaneous message from someone. A part of you wished you could tell them about the plan, how you weren’t really interested in Kylo that way, but you knew they would hate that too. The idea of you even hanging around Kylo was hard for any of them to understand, you weren’t naive enough to think otherwise. If you told them about the plan, they’d say something about how Kylo had put you up to it, and how it wasn’t really you. So, as hard as it was, you had to keep the facade up with them as well.

What do you mean? You responded before looking at a notification from instagram. Sami had commented a number of emojis underneath your post. Just as you were about to respond, you were receiving another call.

“Hello?” you asked as you answered the phone.

“Cut the shit, (y/n). Are you really dating Ben Solo? Of all people?” came Poe’s voice from the other end of the receiver. You let out a sigh before answering.

“Yes, I’m dating Kylo,” was all you said. You didn’t need to justify the reason. Even if the relationship was real, you would hope that your friends would respect your choice, or at least not be so up front about it. To be fair, though, Poe was the only one to say anything so far, but you knew more was coming your way.

“I get that you’re hurt from what Shawn did, but that doesn’t make it okay to jump to the next shitty guy who will have you. He’s a piece of shit, (y/n), he’s always getting into trouble, and he’s probably going nowhere with his life!” The words stung. You knew Poe was mad, but that didn’t justify his cruel words. Now, you were starting to boil over with rage.

“Fuck you, Dameron.”

“C’mon, (y/n), you know I didn’t mean it like that, it’s just that-”

“That I’m going for the next shitty guy that will have me? Grow the fuck up. When was the last time you bothered to talk to him, or even know the person he is now? And how the fuck dare you say something like that to me? What the fuck else was it supposed to mean? I know you might not agree with all of my decisions, but I at least hoped you would respect me enough to not degrade me for the decisions I make.”

“But this isn’t who you are! We’ve all been thinking about it, but this really just proved it. You’re not like Solo’s group of friends, and you’re trying too hard to reinvent yourself after what happened,” Poe fought back.

“Sorry that I can’t just go back to the person I was before I got cheated on. Sorry I can’t be the perfect little girlfriend I was to Shawn and never do anything but study and chat all day long! The person I was with Shawn wasn’t really me, and the fact that you expect me to still be that person really fucking hurts. It tells me that you can’t understand how something like that can change everything about a person. Even so, that’s not why I’m dating Kylo. I’m dating Kylo because for once, someone doesn’t expect me to be what they want me to be, and it’s so goddamn refreshing. So go fuck yourself, Dameron, and don’t talk to me until you get your head out of your ass,” you all but screamed into the phone. Once you finished, you hung up, tossing your phone onto your bed. You grabbed the nearest pillow and screamed into it, infuriated. Tears streaked down your face as you steeped in your anger, trying to process the conversation you’d just had.

The next shitty guy who would have you? He made it sound as if you had been jumping to relationships over the years, as opposed to the reality that you’d been stuck in a relationship for three years that ended in nothing. Poe hadn’t even bothered to ask what it was about Kylo that made you want to date him, he simply assumed the worst and decided to share his assumptions with you. Through all your anger, you felt a pang in your chest from the hurt of what had just been said to you.

You were grateful that your relationship wasn’t actually real though. If it was, this conversation would have crushed you. Even so, you weren’t sure you could ever look Poe in the eye the same way again.

The next morning you tried your hardest not to think about your conversation with Poe, at least until you could tell Kylo about it. You knew Kylo would be furious- rightfully so in your opinion- but you knew that talking to him about it would make you feel a lot better. You rushed out of your house, only barely remembering to grab your lunch from the counter before heading outside and meeting Kylo in his driveway.

As soon as you caught sight of Kylo, you felt your eyes well up with tears. Kylo smiled at you when he spotted you, but it faded to a frown when he realized you were on the verge of tears. As you approached him, you wrapped your arms around him, burying your face in his chest as you let out a few sobs. He wrapped his arms around you as well, letting you expel your tears before wiping a few of them away. Once you cried all you could, you walked over to the passenger side, climbing into the car.

Once Kylo had climbed in and started the ignition, he turned to look at you while backing out of the driveway and into the cul de sac.

“So, are you gonna tell me what happened?” he asked before beginning the route out of the neighborhood.

You explained the whole conversation with Poe, trying to hold in anymore tears of mixed rage and sadness so you could properly explain. As you expected, Kylo was furious. His knuckles turned white as they gripped onto the steering wheel.

“What the fuck kind of friend even says that?” he said, teeth grit and voice dangerously soft.

“I don’t know. I don’t understand why he thought that was an okay thing to say to me,” you said, wiping away the tears threatening to spill.

“On the bright side, I don’t think anything anyone else will say to you could be any worse,” Kylo said with a small bit of optimism in his voice. You smiled up at him, truly thankful for his patience with you. Kylo was certainly a friend that could never be replaced.

Upon arriving at school, the two of you sat in the car so you could take some extra time to regain any composure you’d lost on the way here. You knew you had to prepare yourself for the eyes that would be following the two of you, but that was the easy part. The hard part was, and would always be, the whispers. If Poe’s reaction to the news was bad, you were afraid to see the reaction of everyone else at Mos Eisley High.

Sure enough, the eyes were everywhere. Of course, it didn’t help that Kylo chose to make a spectacle about it by wrapping an arm around your shoulders as he walked with you through the halls. It also didn’t help when, at the part of the hall where the two of you usually departed, Kylo leaned down close to you, placing a kiss on your cheek. Despite the incessant chatter in the halls that had the volume of a dull roar, you knew that everyone had just seen Kylo do it, and you couldn’t help the fierce blush that rose to your cheeks as you waved a goodbye to Kylo before he disappeared within the crowd of gossiping people.

The whispers, however, weren’t as bad as you had feared. It seemed that a lot more people were sympathetic to you, even though they all seemed to disapprove of your choice in man.

“I just can’t believe she’s in another relationship so soon.”

“Can you blame her? I would be moving on quickly too, if I’d gone through the same thing.”

“I just don’t understand why it’s with him.”

Kylo’s reputation simply couldn’t be helped. You could live with that, as long as you didn’t get anymore of what you’d gotten yesterday. The more you thought about it, you kind of liked the idea of dating the bad boy of the school. Maybe it was cliche, but it was kind of thrilling, not to mention the whole construct of your “relationship” was as well. Not only was it a pretty devious revenge scheme, but you’d now have a new reputation of your own, instead of the subservient girlfriend you had always been. It was a nice change, and gave you more of an opportunity to explore who you really were.

Once you’d gotten to math, everything seemed to calm down a little more. There were still whispers, but the amount had decreased, which was something you could honestly work with. You were sure to be the subject of many a lunchroom gossip for a while, but the less you had to hear it, the better it was. As you pulled out your notebook to begin taking notes, you felt your phone buzz from your pocket. You discreetly pulled it out to see a message from Kylo.

Dickhead Dylan won’t stop staring at me. You held in a laugh as you texted back your reply.

Give him an air kiss. This man is so homophobic, his brain might split in half if you do.

What a sight that would be.

Letting out a soft chuckle, you shoved your phone back into your pocket before continuing with your note taking. So far, the day seemed to be flying by, which you were actually quite thankful for. It was certainly better than last week's feeling of each block being an eternity.

Though the whispers had followed you all the way to the cafeteria, you were grateful for the break. Heading out to the courtyard, you spotted your lunch group. As always, Sami and Alan were already there, Sami sketching in her sketchbook and Alan doing his normal routine of pushing the food around on his plate. As you sat down, you pulled out the oreos your mom had packed for your lunch and tossed it Alan’s way. His face lit up as he looked at it.

“(y/n), you’re the best,” Alan said before digging into one of the oreos.

“I try,” you said with a smile.

“You don’t even have to,” came Kylo’s voice from behind you. You turned around to see him standing behind you, a smirk on his face as he looked down at you. Then, he took his spot beside you, making sure to sit close so that the wandering eyes in the courtyard could witness the two of you together. It was a spectacle to them, and you figured you might as well give them a show. As soon as Kylo settled down beside you, you leaned your head against his shoulder while taking a bite of your sandwich.

“You two are really the talk of the town,” Sami said, not looking up from her sketchbook.

“Can’t say I’m surprised. People love getting involved in business that isn’t their own,” Kylo said before biting into an apple.

“That was the whole point though, wasn’t it?” Sami asked, looking up and glancing back and forth between the two of you.

“She’s right, that is the point. Though, if the soccer players think about it too hard, their brains may implode,” you quipped. Kylo let out a chuckle before taking another bite from his apple.

“I thought Dylan might have an aneurysm, his blood vessel was popping on his head like some kind of cartoon character,” he remarked.

“Has anyone seen Phasma today?” Alan suddenly chipped in with a mouth full of oreos. You had only just noticed Phasma’s absence.

“She went to help Jordan move into her dorm,” Sami answered, looking back down at her sketchbook. Alan nodded at her response, shoving the last oreo into his mouth as he did so.

Once lunch had ended, you and Kylo continued your routine of holding hands on the way to physics. It was a simple way to be affectionate, and the most comfortable in your opinion. The way Kylo’s hands seemed to dwarf your own just made holding his hand feel so natural.

The classroom went silent when the two of you walked in. You didn’t bother to look and see if Shawn was already present. Instead, you simply walked over to your seat and pulled your notebook out, ready to take notes the moment Mr. Windu began lecturing.

The silence in the classroom did not lift after that. The only sounds that really penetrated the blanket of soundlessness were the occasional whispers, but they were too soft for you to make out what exactly they were saying. You decided though that you didn’t really care what they were saying, at least in this class. You didn’t want to overhear whatever nasty thoughts Shawn or Dylan might have about you.

“Well this is a nice surprise,” Mr. Windu said as he walked in the classroom and over to his desk. Once he began his lecture, you could feel the eyes staring into the back of your head, as if the glance was murderous. Though you hadn’t even looked him in the eye yet, you already knew you had pissed Shawn off. It was as if you could feel the hatred oozing from his body, creating a miasma all over the physics room. It penetrated every crevice, and poisoned the very air.

Good. Now he had even the slightest inkling of understanding what you felt. It gave you satisfaction that he was so angry, you couldn’t lie about that. He deserved it, after all, with what he’d put you through. Though you knew there was no way he would truly ever feel what you had felt, this was good enough. In fact it was wonderful, knowing that you had sent him a silent fuck you, and that you’d given him proof that you would never be with him again.

Throughout class, you tried to do little things you knew would annoy him- not that the way you and Kylo had been acting before wasn’t annoying him already. Every once in a while, you would mess with Kylo’s hand under the table, or put your leg flush against his. It truly proved the advantage of sitting closer towards the front of the class.

At the end of class, you gathered all of your things, shoving them into your backpack so you could be ready to head out the door as soon as the bell rang. When it did, Kylo stood first, waiting for you before continuing out of the classroom. When you fell in place next to Kylo, he wrapped his arm around your shoulder as the two of you walked to English.

“You could’ve cut the tension in there with a knife,” Kylo remarked. “Thought a dagger might materialize into my back with the way he was staring.”

“No kidding. Do you think he’s mad?” you joked, causing Kylo to laugh.

“Maybe a little,” he responded as the two of you walked into English. When you first walked in, the first person you saw was Poe. The two of you made eye contact for a brief second before you turned away, taking your seat next to Kylo. You could feel Poe’s gaze linger for a moment before you saw him turn towards the front from your peripherals. It was incredible how the site of him brought back even the smallest portion of your rage.

Trying to calm yourself down, you pulled out everything you needed for class before leaning back in your seat. You then watched as Sami came in the door, sitting in front of you like usual.

“Can you believe that Mr. Plo is assigning a five page paper on the party system? It’s the second week of school!” Sami said with exacerbation, placing her backpack on Phasma’s empty seat.

“That’s bullshit. When’s it due?” Kylo asked.

“Friday! I have to have a five page paper done in less than a week! Sometimes I seriously consider dropping out,” Sami huffed.

“Can’t say I blame you. I have 3 pages worth of math homework to do, and they’re due tomorrow,” you added.

“Why is it that now that it’s not the first week, teachers decided it’s okay to give mountains of homework?” She said, pulling out her stuff from her backpack.

“Because we’re seniors, and they’re ‘preparing us for college,’” Kylo answered. He brought up a good point. All of your teachers had mentioned at one point that they were preparing you for college, the hidden specter in the not so distant future. Though it was exciting to think about graduating, college was definitely a daunting thought. You shook the thought out of your mind, though, as Mr. Skywalker stood from his desk.

Maybe it was the fact that you were in the same room with all of your old friends, but English seemed to move horrendously slow. Every word that came out of Mr. Skywalker’s mouth seemed to move at half the speed, and the ticking of the clock on the wall almost seemed like it was taunting you, showing you the futility of hoping for time to pass more quickly.

“Alright, the essay isn’t due for another two weeks, but I’m going to go ahead and hand you the rubric. It would probably be within your best interest to go ahead and start gathering any quotes you want to use, and any outside sources too. I know a lot of your teachers are assigning you a lot of homework, that’s why I’m giving you the rubric this far in advance. Any questions?” Mr. Skywalker looked around the room to confirm that no one had any questions. When the class remained silent, he let out a sigh. “Alright, go ahead and pack up, I’m going to pass these around.”

Without any further prompting, the whole class moved to put their things away in their respective bags while Mr. Skywalker handed out rubrics to each table. After he’d gotten to yours, you also rushed to put your things away, ready to get home. This day had used up a lot of your energy, and you were ready to lie down for a while. Standing from your desk, you slipped your arm through one of the straps of your backpack, and slung your backpack over your shoulder. Sami and Kylo soon followed, standing and waiting for the crowd to pass by before the three of you made your way out of the school. You made a point of looking down at your phone while your old friends passed by.

When most of the people left the classroom, the three of you walked out, heading towards the entrance of the school. You all walked side by side, moving past the last remnants of the crowd in the halls, everyone just ready to get home for the day. Once you’d stepped outside of the doors of the school, you let out a sigh as the sun warmed up your whole body with its light.

“You two drive safe,” Sami said to you and Kylo.

“We’re just going down the road,” Kylo said, rolling his eyes. You let out a small laugh at the sight of him doing so.

“Well, you should still be safe anyways,” Sami said, sticking out her tongue at Kylo playfully before waving goodbye to the two of you and heading for the buses. You waved back at her, and then followed Kylo to his car.

“Well, that’s day one of our arrangement,” Kylo said with a sigh as soon as the two of you had gotten inside the car. You let out a deep breath you didn’t know you’d been holding in.

“I don’t know if I can handle being around my old friends for a while. I couldn’t even look at any of them earlier,” you confessed to Kylo as he turned the key in the ignition.

“I’m gonna be honest with you. If they really care about you, they’ll eventually come around. Unless I very openly was treating you like shit, they should learn to respect your decision,” Kylo said as he pulled out of the parking spot. You frowned as you thought about his words. You had thought the same way, but another person confirming it just made it hit home. You didn’t want to lose your friends, you loved them dearly, but if they couldn’t accept your choices, you may just have to take a break from being friends with them, at least until they came around. It wasn’t even just about you “dating” Kylo. It was about your need to discover who you really are, and the fact that they would need to accept whoever it was you decided you truly are.

Poe had said that the way you were acting wasn’t you, but if you didn’t really know who you were, they definitely didn’t. If they didn’t like the person you became, you feared you would have to leave them behind with all of your memories from before Shawn cheated on you, and from before you became friends with Kylo again. It was a hard thing to think about, so you decided to put it out of mind for now.

“On the brightside, Gran likes you. She says you’re ‘a really sweet girl,’” Kylo said, changing the subject, for which you were thankful.

“Oh, really? Have you told them yet?” you asked, turning to look at Kylo. The afternoon sun hit his eyes just right, making them look amber.

“No, but I was going to tonight. Might as well, I’m sure they’ll hear it from my uncle soon enough,” he said, running a hand through his black hair before letting out a sigh. “It’s telling my mom that’s gonna be a little more difficult.”

“Why’s that?”

“She asks way too many questions. She wants to know every little detail about it, like how I asked, why I wanted to ask, have we gone on any dates yet. It’s just a lot to handle at one time. I’ll let Gran tell her, I’m sure she will almost immediately afterwards,” Kylo responded. You could understand that, especially in this context. You couldn’t blame her, though, it wasn’t like Kylo really talked to her all that much.

“Why don’t you talk to your mom more?”

The question prompted silence, and for a few seconds, the two of you were stewing in your question. You watched as Kylo’s face turned to one of thought as he pondered over how to answer your question. You worried that maybe you’d asked too personal a question, until Kylo began to talk.

“I don’t know. I just don't feel like I can tell her anything. I used to be able to, we used to be really close, but over the years, I guess it became harder to be open. I don’t hate her, like Rey seems to think I do, I just...can’t really talk to her anymore.”

You turned to look forward as you thought about his answer. In a way, it made sense. Most teenage boys felt they couldn’t talk to their parents about things, and you knew for a fact Kylo wasn’t really on speaking terms with his father. It still made you sad, though. You wondered if something like that could really ever be the same.

The rest of the ride home, you changed the subject to more lighthearted conversation. Soon, the heavy conversations of earlier were merely memories in the back of your minds. As Kylo pulled into the driveway, he let out a laugh at a joke you’d made, causing you to laugh as well. When he put the car in park, the two of you both let out sighs.

“Alright, well I’ll see you tomorrow. Try not to drown in your math homework,” Kylo said as he turned off the engine. You smiled and shook your head.

“Try I definitely will, but I can’t make any promises,” you said before stepping out of the car, and heading to your house.

Once inside, you made your way up the stairs, wanting to go ahead and get your homework out of the way. At almost the exact moment you sat down at your desk in your room, your phone began to ring. Great. With a glance at the screen, you saw that it was Rey, and a chill filled your chest. Though Poe’s response had been disappointing enough, you were more afraid of how Rey would feel. With a deep breath, you picked up the phone and put it to your ear.

“Hello?”

“I was really hoping this was a joke, so I’m asking you now whether it’s real or not,” came Rey’s voice from the other side of the receiver. With a sigh, you rubbed your forehead before answering her.

“Yes, it’s real. Are you gonna lecture me, too?” you asked, already losing your patience.

“Look, I had the sense to wait a day before saying anything to you, and what Poe said was really shitty.”

“At least someone thinks so,” you said, rolling your eyes.

“But he’s not entirely wrong. First of all, you are rushing into a whole new relationship, you have to know how that looks-”

“No, Rey, I don’t know how it looks, why don’t you educate me?”

“C’mon, (y/n), don’t play dumb. There are people who are thinking that you were talking to Kylo before you and Shawn broke up, which in their eyes, makes you no better than him. I know you weren’t, but it doesn’t change the fact that people are thinking that way. On top of that, Ben is shitty. He’s shitty to his parents, and he’s shitty to our grandparents. I have no doubt that in the end, he’ll be shitty to you, too,” Rey combated. You took in a deep breath, because if you didn’t, you would run off at the mouth. Instead, you took a moment to collect your thoughts.

“I’m curious Rey, when was the last time you bothered to talk to your cousin? Like, really talk to him? You don’t even bother to know the person he is before you believe everything that everyone else says. Does he make mistakes, yes, but if you actually talked to him, you might realize that he’s trying to learn from them, but people like you and everyone else in this goddamn town won’t let him. You know what, if all of you are planning to lecture me this week, just tell everyone else not to fucking bother.”

“(y/n), we’re only looking out for you. I think you’re giving Ben too much credit, he spent the summer under house arrest for God’s sake! He’s a loser, and you know it. He isn’t going to go anywhere in his life,” Rey said with finality.

“You know what, one day I hope you can learn to respect my decisions, even if you don’t like them, but until then, don’t bother to call or text. I don’t need you trying to convince me I don’t know who my own damn boyfriend is,” you said. Without any hesitation afterwards, you hung up the phone.

You knew it was coming, but that didn’t make it any less disappointing. As tears threatened to be released from your eyes for the second time today, you pulled out your homework and began working, trying to keep yourself distracted from the fact that you may lose your friends over something so stupid.

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