the goober gets an ssr baby!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

continuing on my "Lup and Barry get married every cycle and the ensuing weddings encompass a very wide range of tones" bullshit: consider, if you will, a cycle where they mean to get married early on, they really do. but the hunt for the Light is just so intense, and the time flies by so fast, that they still haven't done it by the time the end is closing in...

and in the final fight for the Light, a little under a month out from the Hunger's arrival, Lup is grievously wounded. she lies in Barry's arms, bleeding out, and with her dying breath, she whispers her final wish:

"reanimate my corpse and put her in a nice dress for the wedding"

and who is Barry to turn down a dying wish from his wife, let alone a dying wish that's that fucking funny, so Barry loyally throws some wedding plans and some necromancy spells together so that Zombie Lup can attend the ceremony. her soul doesn't reside in her body anymore because no one was willing to burn the spell slots on True Resurrection (it's only a month out from resets, come on), but she's very well-behaved as Barry very sincerely declares his eternal love and wiggles this cycle's ring onto her finger.

Taako hates it so much. the energy in the studio is incredibly uncomfortable. Lucretia takes a bunch of photographs of every moment so that Lup can enjoy it later upon respawn. most of the crew eventually looks back and recognizes this instance as the start of the slippery slope that lead to lichdom, but Lup and Barry refuse to acknowledge how fucking weird it was. they will treasure those pictures forever

Literally had to pause my game so I could be unhinged about this for a second. Not only do you get +4 (PLUS!!! FOUR!!!!!) from Kim being with you, but you ALSO get +1 from HAVING HIS HANDKERCHIEF!?

Harrier, you are out of your mind in love with this man and I am right there with you.

huge shoutout to rejection sensitive dysphoria and the attorney who mentioned that I'd misspelled "forfeiture" in my notes, ensuring that I will literally never misspell that word ever again. Thanks, it's just what I needed. I would have rather been shot, but this works also.

Cattonquick boarding school sweethearts/romeo & Juliet AU

In which Oliver also comes from old money and he and Felix fall in love in boarding school(?). The Quicks and the Cattons have been business partners since Queen Victoria was still kicking so Ollie and Felix have known each other their whole lives (summers and holidays always spent together) but when their family ties are suddenly severed after a hostile fight between their fathers, the boys’ last year at Eton is irrevocably ruined. As a reaction they decide (it was Felix’s idea and he succeeded in cajoling Oliver to agree) to elope run away on the first day of the Christmas holidays (imagine their respective chauffeurs endlessly waiting for them at the school gates lmao) and get married on a whim (also Felix’s idea to somehow "fix" things like ta-da! Can’t separate us now dad, we’re fucking married. Oliver is now a Catton. Family peace restored! No, not really Felix lmao.)

the neurologist i shadow is so funny bc she has a valley girl accent and yet she's the smartest person in the room. this woman was casually doing case consenus ab a man w frontotemporal dementia in the highest girliest voice imaginable. i want to be her i think

hello :) could you maybe explain a little bit how dan wootton blackmailed louis?

ugh sorry for taking a while to get to this. The problem is I feel like the only two ways to answer this are by spending a week and a half of full time labor sifting through old posts and evidence to get every detail right and lay out an airtight case, or to halfass something very serious, and so I felt a little stuck. So since I can't seem to find a good halfway point, apologies but here is the half assed version, if you want to get into it more I invite you to do your own deep dive or talk to other people, but here's how I remember things. Louis has almost never on video explicitly said things about Larry not being real and/or anything negative about fans and their theories (mostly the opposite), up until the last couple years when he obviously decided to make a major change he didn't talk about Freddie much at all let alone saying he was his kid, honestly not that much about Eleanor even; except for in two major interviews with Dan Wootton, each of which lined up with a serious traumatic Tomlinson family event that they managed to keep out of the tabloids until the very end (Jay's illness and Fizzy's struggles with substance abuse). After the fact of those events a lot of small things that didn't make sense at the time came together to look very much like Louis traded those interviews (and those answers) for having his family's private matters kept private. Story trading of this kind is a publicly known real thing that happens, and there were various clues that suggested he was being leaned on about those stories to lend legitimacy to the idea that it was something that happened in these cases. Given what we know about Dan Wootton and how he operates even before the recent flood of information and even more now, I think it's more than likely that he has been holding the threat of outing Louis (as he has done to many other public figures) over his head for over a decade, and has used his family's tragic struggles to get Louis to dance like a fucking puppet for him and I will REJOICE at his downfall when it comes whether it is now or 20 years from now... because someday it will, he has made too many enemies to stay above it forever

Come on guess who my favorite SCP doctor (and author) is, Bonus

Tiny bug

Neelix is an absolute madman for leaving so many empty carafes out

WHAT DO YOU MEAN FANTASY AU HOME FINDS WALLY A LOVER AND THAT ITS COMPLICATED?????

AM I SNIFFING SOME LORE????

OK LISTEN YES AND NO YES AND NO it's not so cut and dry!

most if not all of my decisions in au-crafting stems from the source, my understanding of it, and my interpretations. so warlock!Wally & patron!Home's relationship is how i view their relationship in ~canon~(albeit slightly more intense due to the change in situation). in short: devoted, codependent, intimate, a little strange, and unable to be labeled

so i wouldn't say that Home looks at Wally with outright/explicit romantic feelings, because it's more complicated than that. plus i'm an aro Wally truther. i actually have a ramble post queued up about exactly this so i won't say anything more on the matter rn

my cancelled-able trait from the queer community would be that i really apparently love messy endings. i love u happy endings and i also love u such sad, messy, ambiguous endings . . . i love u endings where u have this weird pit in the bottom of your stomach because you know that there's love here but u have no idea what to do with it and u just have to deal with the fact that someone is profoundly affecting your life and you're not gonna get closure from it anytime soon . . . i love u queer love stories where it's really just "u don't always get to see the sunshine and rainbows at the end of it . . . sometimes all that's left is just one big question mark and the quiet hope that they get their shit together" . . .

Roger Delgado makes a brief appearance as an unnamed but helpful Argentine diplomat, in Overseas Press Club - Exclusive!: Two Against the Kremlin (1.13, ABPC, 1957)

I forgot I can just post random shit on here without it being an ask.

Behold: a visual representation of me, just done doing random shit to my hair because I was bored and searching a quote trying to remember what it’s from, and the Microsoft AI spitting out this bullshit at me.

Like. Like why. Why did it do that. I was running on so little sleep. It was like 2 in the morning. This was Sunday night. Why did this happen. Microsoft Edge why are you built like this.

Anyway “You are both tinder and torchbearer” goes hard as FUCK and will be sticking with me for a very long time.

not to generalize but there's a very specific type of really loud and aggressive middle aged usually-white woman who collects funko pops and is married to an ex-military guy & never shuts up about his duty tours and is an Adult Disney Enjoyer who likes the live action remakes and who obviously votes deep red that i did not think I would have to encounter, much less share a coffee pot with, so often in nonprofit social service work and yet.

Some important stuff in regards to the harassment of developers came from Bungie today. They won a lawsuit against a guy who repeatedly harassed a community manager and his family (not fully confirmed in the official document, but people are fairly certain this is about A_dmg and his family). This is a twitter thread from the lawyer who went into some details about the situation. The court document is also available to read (featuring some of the horrific harassment tactics that were motivated by racism and also used racism as part of the harassment so be advised if you want to read).

This isn't just a win for the individual community manager and Bungie, but also has potential to set a bigger precedent in the future. It's basically the first time this has been done to this extent and some ruling in this case made it clear that companies can pursue this sort of legal action in the future if their employees are harassed and threatened. This is HUGE because the protection of employees in the gaming industry has been abysmal otherwise. This case will allow for the company to file a lawsuit on behalf of their employees in cases of harassment.

Before I add some of the more heinous stuff about this situation below, I want to say that the majority of reactions to this are positive. People are happy that this happened as it did and a lot of people are excited about potential big influence this will have in the future to combatting harassment of this type in the gaming industry.

Extra details and thoughts below (racism tw):

This started because the community manager highlighted a black content creator, Uhmayyze, who is himself a victim of harassment more often than not (usually of racist nature). He is most often harassed because he is unapologetically positive for which people have continuously sent him awful shit and comments. Because he enjoys the game and isn't jumping on the hate train. Just recently he commended Bungie for a ban wave and had hundreds of people hound him on twitter for his comment, including Gladd who started it by specifically replying to Uhmayyze and putting him on blast (warning for a lot of gross comments, including photoshopped screenshots of fake discord texts to make Uhmayyze look bigoted, nsfw images, r slur, suicide baiting and so on). This is important because the incident of real life harassment was fuelled over a community manager highlighting a content creator that is himself being harassed and despised online for the crime of... being positive. And you know, for being black. This situation isn't an isolated incident. The community, including other content creators, are absolutely horrible towards this one person that they feel, I guess, does not follow the content creator NPC questline of hating Bungie and Destiny.

So of course, at some point, someone from that crowd will feel confident and justified taking things further. How dare Bungie promote this person they hate. How dare they focus on a positive creator. They're clearly biased and don't want to listen to criticism, only to "toxic positivity" streamer. How dare a community manager highlight this creator. It's a personal slight to them, and "proof" that Bungie is bad and evil and "ignoring criticism." There's someone out there (and probably not the only one) that hates this creator and the game so much they were willing to harass and threaten a community manager and his family in real life.

The community manager was first harassed by phone with text messages and voice mails featuring racist bile, including apparently a voice mail telling him to "convince Bungie to create options in its game in which only persons of color would be killed." This is the worst part for me and super concerning in general, as well as showing the dedication of this person to racism, motivated by his hatred of a black creator (which also, by proxy, technically makes the streamer being harassed as well). Absolutely ghoulish behaviour.

This escalated to also harassing the CM's wife and resulted in doxing them; the harasser somehow found their address. Most of the reports on this will say that the asshole "sent them pizza" which doesn't truly capture how horrific the incident was. First, it's a random guy who has your address which is concerning enough given that he harasses you by phone already. Apparently the pizza was made to be "inedible" and the delivery was instructed to bang loudly on the door upon arrival to maximise discomfort. The order was also deliberately made to be paid on delivery to create as much pain for the victims as possible. The harasser also kept track of the delivery and then called the family again when it was done to tell them to "enjoy the pizza." The family immediately contacted Bungie who contacted the police and provided the family with protection. There's no telling how this would've escalated had they not been in the position to call Bungie and had Bungie not reacted to them asking for help. It's absolutely crucial here that Bungie is the type of a company willing to immediately assist in this situation.

Immediately following that, Bungie organised a long and expensive manhunt to identify the harasser and bring them court. That's where most of the expenses went; finding the culprit and protecting the employee and his family. This is the money Bungie earned back by this court decision because they could prove that the expenses were caused by a person harassing and threatening their employee.

This is a big win overall for the whole industry. It's Bungie setting a precedent on how a company should protect its employees. No matter what people think about Bungie or big corporations or whatever, this is how you can use a lot of money and power to make sure that your workers have rights to decency and safety. That's huge for the rights of workers and worker protections. I hope it becomes a standard and that any future harassment is prevented altogether or at least punished accordingly.

Naturally, the commentary on the news from a big part of the community is super positive. Unfortunately, there's also a part of the community that has a lot of really awful shit to say about this. The comments on twitter are littered with people who are using THIS specific moment to yell about Bungie being a greedy corporation, how the money they won should be used to "fix the servers" and "make more pvp maps" or how Bungie will greedily put this money "into Eververse" or "into Marathon." There's comments about how time was uselessly spent protecting an employee who should expect harassment anyway, instead of working on "fixing the game."

This is what I mean when I talk about how impossible it is in the current situation to have a meaningful discussion about any sort of criticism or feedback. There's thousands of comments from people who think that this specific instance shows how Bungie is greedy. This is what I mean when I say that none of these people actually understand what they're talking about. You can't make proper criticism when you can't separate game development with a company's legal effort to stop an escalating harassment campaign of an employee. The majority of gamers are simply not fit to offer any criticism or feedback. The idea that we all have something useful to say and that employees at Bungie are obliged to give us their time of the day is simply incorrect.

I genuinely 100% stand by the claim that the recent barrage of content creators promoting the idea that Bungie is "the greediest company in the world that's scamming players and increasing costs out of greed" as well as the idea that Bungie is "abandoning Destiny for Marathon, isn't working on the game anymore and is deliberately ruining it" is the reason for these comments existing. If a big streamer said that Bungie is getting too much money but also not doing anything "good" with it, then any money that Bungie receives (including compensation for expenses they took to protect an employee from active harm) is a result of greed. The nuance of any situation is lost; when you only learn the mantra of "company has money therefore company bad" you WILL end up causing harm for people and you will most definitely not be an advocate of workers rights. That's where we're at right now.

The dehumanisation of people who work at Bungie (and the harassment itself) is a consequence of this crap and other similar crap that's been thrown into the ether for the past year, disguised as "we're just offering feedback." People heard that Bungie is a "microtransaction hell" and that Bungie is only investing in Eververse and Marathon and they feel like this story reflects that; they feel like an employee being harassed is not deserving of proper condemnation and that this isn't important enough and that Bungie is a greedy corpo anyway so who cares about that. They do not understand how companies work, how games are made, the state of the industry as a whole (or the world as a whole), the treatment of employees or workers' rights, and you cannot meaningfully critique a company's business practices without understanding that. And they don't because they think that legal expenses used to protect victims, finding a culprit and bringing their ass to court is money that is being used for game development and that Bungie receiving this money should result in... new pvp maps or "fixed servers."

And there's even seemingly good commentary where people recognise how this is good, but they initiate the comment with "As much as I hate Bungie and Destiny and I think they're awful and greedy and destroying gaming as a whole..." : that's not the time and place. You don't have to excuse your support of a big win for potential new employee protection policies just because those policies are done by a company. Of course it is. Companies are the only ones capable of pursuing this sort of legal action. It's one good way a big company can put their power and money into a good place to actually help people and bring forth positive change. And like, you don't have to tell us how much you despise Bungie before you're "allowed" to admit that this is good news. Sometimes companies do good stuff. It's literally not that complicated.

I hope that this situation will help other employees demand the same protection, that other companies will follow suit and that this will also make potential other harassers rethink whether or not they will engage in this or similar type of behaviour. In the meantime, know that the community is largely positive about this, but that there are still absolutely detestable human beings who should feel ashamed of their reaction to this. They shouldn't feel welcome here. And there's still people doing this to the devs and I hope Bungie takes their asses to court too.