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dreamteamspace · 3 years

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We hit 400 so here’s a- ✨ DREAM APPRECIATION ESSAY ✨

(by Yours Truly. Much thanks to the one, innocent anon who just wanted to ask a small talk question but hit my serotonin-providing hyperfixation.)

1. Self-esteem

I love the way he’s confident in his abilities when it’s become such a “trend” to either be completely and utterly self-depricating about your own skills out of fear of being labelled an asshole or overconfident nowadays.

At the same time you can still tell he doesn’t want to pull anyone down ever, and will always be really careful with that and take every oppertunity to lift up the people around him. Dream has a very emotional voice that gives him away a lot, so you can really tell he genuinely admires the people around him and he’s never afraid to say that they could totally easily beat him in something if he doesn’t have practice with it.

He tends to be a bit too hard on himself, so his friends always encourage him in his abilities, and that’s just. So nice. He celebrates his victories! He gets so so excited and happy when he wins in the manhunts, and I think celebrating your hard-earned victories isn’t something that should be villanized.

He won, and we should KNOW by now that doesn’t mean he thinks he’s somehow better than everyone. He has a pretty good eye on his abilities, and that allows him to really use them to the max.

2. Morality

He isn’t afraid to change the game! His adhd picks out a Cool New Thing and he just goes, You know what? Why not! His adhd goes “do this thing repeatedly another 3847 times” and he’s like, yeah sure!

Nobody expected him to release a song, but he just went for it! He’s been speedrunning so much, but he isn’t afraid to stream it every day 5 days in a row for hours while his friends bicker in the background.

Dream genuinely does the things he finds fun, but at the same time puts in so much effort to make them good and entertaining to watch and never forgets about his viewers.

He’s kidfriendly because he wants to be! Fame-wise, at this point he could definitly swear more if he wanted to (and he does when in other people’s content who don’t care about swearing), but despite that he doesn’t swear on his main because he wants his content to be accessable for everyone.

Sure, on one hand it could be for clout/money, but consider: Dream doesn’t stream the DSMP because he doesn’t want to take attention away from other people. He participates in the videos of his friends. He lets compilation channels and the like do whatever they want and even monetize his content. He lets his friends stream Road Trip on twitch as much as they want for free.

Dream doesn’t not swear just for his fanbase, but he does it because he has so so much respect for people. No matter how high he goes, he’s always consciously focused on respecting and admiring the people around him.

He has genuine respect for creators so much smaller than him, and he has respect for people in his fanbase that are younger than him. He isn’t afraid to go against the norm and STAND for that, either (see the video where he defends his stans).

And he defends his friends so much too! So much so it could almost be a little bit of a flaw sometimes, but I feel like he truly wants to learn from his mistakes. He apologizes for things even when nobody asked him to, and that just shows that he does it out of genuine guilt and fear of hurting someone.

He’s always seemed like someone who is genuinely willing to change to be a better version of himself, who isn’t afraid to challenge what he thinks and what other people think and what the norm thinks in order to improve everything for everyone.

Dream also doesn’t let any of the fame get to his head! As I said before - he’s confident in the things he’s good at, but in a way that doesn’t pull other people down, and he still remains firmly admirable of other people.

And even when OTHER people let fame get to their head (it was a while ago, but there was a video he made about five block jumps, where he added in a clip of a video of another guy doing it complete with credit and link etc. The guy was 100% alright with it at first, but when his video started getting more views because Dream’s video blew up, he started accusing Dream of “stealing” his content (when dozens of other videos of the 5 block jump already existed, and Dream could’ve just put in a clip of himself doing the jump)),,, but he insisted in his reponse that fame gets to people’s heads sometimes, nobody should blame anybody, he genuinely was never upset at him and just said that this just... happens sometimes.

He’s a very forgiving person all around, in part due to being willing to challenge his own norms and give people the benefit of the doubt JUST in case he’s wrong. He lets people enjoy things so long as they aren’t hurting anybody, like allowing people to ship him w people who are also alright with shipping, but at the same time taking a hard stance on, say, how shipping minors is absolutely wrong and should not be done ever (and he’s right).

3. Fandom

He appreciates said fanart and fanworks as well! He thinks dnf fanart is cool and he even appreciates the fanfic part of his fandom, something many ccs wish to ignore or forget it exists altogether (and it IS ofc in their right to do so or be uncomfortable with such content!), but Dream sees the work put into it and how people find connections and friendships through the fandom and appreciates it all the same.

He loves his fandom. So much. But not in the overdone, fake-feeling way I’ve seen other ccs be,,,, he’s just. Quiet and shy and genuine about it but not afraid to defend it.

He’s said before - and I QUOTE - “If you send hate to people or have sent hate to people, in the form of hateful comments or DMs, you aren’t welcome in my fandom. You’re no fan of mine”, which is the HOTTEST take he’s ever uttered and I love that. He really just went and said that. And he’s right. I like that despite how he’s usually more held back and waits things out before taking a stance, he chose this topic to really take a hard stance on and not budge and stick to it.

Pmbata has also said that he believes his fans have his back no matter what!! And that he really loves them a lot!!! And I am!! Emotional!!!!

4. ND/Adhd

He has adhd which is something I relate to personally (I have it as well sdlkfj). He gets excited sometimes!! I love how he shows being fidgety in mc, always pacing and parcouring around,, the way that in manhunts you can SEE when he’s thinking or bouncing back and forth between two options,,, or the way he gets close to people in mc to laugh with them.... He shows so much with his movements by them being quick and daring and calculated (and it’s especially hilarious to watch other people react to it in the video “mc but three people control one player”, where he’s the one moving and Sapnap and George will gasp or go “Dream!!” in surprise when Dream was THIS close to falling off a ledge, but he just laughs sdlkfjsdf).

When he’s not moving around he stands perfectly, perfectly still (which, idk if thats what all adhd ppl have, but I know I have something similar? Like when I’m nervous I’ll sometimes just. Freeze in place. No movement at all). He’s just relatable sdkjf.

There was one Manhunt extra scenes where he,,,,, stims by clapping,,,,,, the lil excited clap in the background,,, I’m gonna cry. I’m so soft for excited Dream that one is such a comfort clip for me!

He also tends to stim by getting under trap doors and then jumping back out of them, or jumping up a block and then walking back down over and over (especially noticable in The Village Went Mad tftsmp episode, where they were all discussing who the murderer could be and he was the only one moving, hopping up the log and then running back down again).

Also it is. Really Soft when he starts rambling and overexplaining something. What’s even better is that George, who is usually present at such moments, will laugh a little at his antics, and Dream will automatically laugh with him.

5. Rp/Uplifting other ccs

Dream wasn’t all THAT into the rp at first, but his server has been so strongly supporting and giving attention to smaller creators that he’s since completely rolled along with it. Being a villain in the RP is a difficult role because you will, inevitable, as much as it is just roleplay and all scripted, always get some amount of dislike from people for it.

Despite that, he’s basicly the main big villain on his own server where he let a bunch of theater kids beat him up in character and imprison him on his OWN SERVER. He wasn’t as into the rp at first, but has obviously been practicing and joins every Tales of the SMP when he can, despite getting zero clout for it.

What Dream also tends to do is find small content creators, see their talent and lift them high. His entire discord server is dedicated to give smaller ccs a place to grow, and when he first found Tubbo, Tommy, Ranboo, etc., they were much much smaller than they are now. He truly wanted to help them make it big.

He’s also added Foolish Shark and Hannah onto the SMP, both much smaller ccs (not tiny, but you get what I mean), allowing them to grow. He doesn’t stream on his OWN SERVER. He let himself get imprisoned to let the good guys win on his OWN. SERVER. He’s willing to play the villain and everything.

An interesting thing though! A lot of people used to/still do clown on Dream a bit for his sometimes uncertain acting,,, but when he’s around people he knows well (Sapnap and George, Tubbo and Tommy) we’ve seen him go ALL OUT. I have the theory Dream might be genuinely afraid to accidentally be mean to someone in character and have them misinterpret it sldkfjsdf,,, so he’s rly careful when he goes into the rp, and sometimes even when he’s in it he goes quiet, especially with other people around.

But also the fact that he needs time to feel comfortable around ppl is,, a mood,,, and adorable,,, sdlfkjsdf-

Apparently he’s also shared his youtube algorithm secrets with Tommy?? Which he had only shared with Sapnap and George before?? Dream took one look at that chaotic kid and immedietly adopted him as his little brother. He literally got up super early to rp the prison visit. Idk about ya’ll but I would die for someone first and get up horribly early for them second-

6. Friends!!

Dream?? Considers so so many people his friends?? And despite having so many friends, he also has his few closest friends (George and Sapnap) whom he would absolutely die for in a heartbeat. He WILL defend them with everything he has and loves them so so much.

He listens to them and really, truly wants them to succeed. He respects them so much and will go OFF about how good they actually are and how talented they are and how important they are to him.

I can’t even COVER everything about how much he is SOULMATES with Gorg. They live in each others heads rent-free. He mentions him all the time. They get!! So happy when they’re around each other!!! Their voices get so soft,,

And I can’t even BEGIN to explain the energy of Sapnap and Dream just moving together permanently. Imagine moving together with your best friend. Like, permanently. Into one house. They’re best friends Your Honor,,,,

Also,, remember the Techno and Dream rivalry? And Dream has recently said that he’s hesitant to make a serious manhunt against Techno because he doesn’t want there to be any feud between them or have them be compared to each other. He said that while he absolutely wanted nothing more than to beat Techno at first, now that he knows him better he just wants to be friends with him. He wants to be FRIENDS. With his, essentially, mc RIVAL. Friendly rival, but still. He doesn’t even wanna fight Techno or have ppl compare them cause he,,, wants to be friends with him,,,,

7. Vulnerability

What I feel like really sets Dream apart from some other ccs for me is that he’s willing to be vulnerable. He will tell George he loves him. He defends his friends. He sounds so, so genuine when he tells his fandom that he loves them.

What’s just really rare to see, especially in male ccs, is that vulnerability. It’s becoming more acceptable as time goes on, but it’s certainly not easy, and a lot of people become and stay long-term fans BECAUSE they can see how genuine he is.

I know Dream looks up to Mr. Beast a lot, for example, but honestly? I think he’s a little better than Mr. Beast. Because he feels more genuine, more bound to what he believes is right. I’m sure Mr. Beast isn’t a bad content creator! But ultimately they have different target audiences and I’m very glad Dream is the way he is.

Less of that insecure masculinity and more willing to be vulnerable, to care about things, to get emotional and to encourage and uplift the people around him.

8. Pure Brainrot

Green boi has nice deep calm soothing voice. Little shy laugh. Wheeze laugh. Gorg live in his head rent-free. He lov friends. He lov block game. He good at block game,,, a little shy but confident,,, big heart,,,, soft voice,,,,, rambles sometimes....

He also Gender. He’s so gender. I don’t know how else to describe it. I want That. Whatever That is. My gender is Dreamwastaken

#mcyt #mcytblr #dreamwastaken #dream #dream appreciation #long post #dreamteamspace speaks #space writes #yes this goes in my writing tag #this is Way too many words to only be in my normal tag #but how many dream apreciation essays have you written fear huh? Huh?? /lh #mr beast critical #adhd tw #adhd #just in case?

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becomewings · 3 years

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BTS Universe Timeline

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INTRODUCTION

The goal of this guide is to chronologically map the major plot points of BTS Universe (BU), a fictional transmedia narrative centered on the lives of seven young men who share names with the members portraying them. The complexity of the timeline is magnified by the time loops that begin and reset on 11 April Year 22, so careful attention will be given to tracing how the loops diverge from one another after that date. The guide will be published over multiple posts.

Most of the information in the timeline is drawn from the official English-version publications of The Notes: The Most Beautiful Moment in Life 1 and The Notes: The Most Beautiful Moment in Life 2 (hereafter shortened to Notes 1 and Notes 2). Other resources are referenced as necessary, including the Notes released with certain physical albums, the Save Me webtoon, the official BU content in the BTS Universe Story mobile game, and BU music videos/short films. Summaries from the album Notes are based on translations by twitter user @/origamifirefly. Character names are abbreviated in parentheses next to the print sources to indicate the perspective from which the original entries are written.

Dates are presented as they appear in the texts. The single or double-digit year number most likely corresponds with SeokJin’s age rather than a calendar year. (In Korea’s age-calculating system, everyone’s age increases by one year on January 1st regardless of when their birthday falls in the calendar.) There are enough clues scattered throughout the text to suggest that the characters’ ages reflect the real-life age differences of the members. For example, JungKook is five years younger than SeokJin; they overlap in high school because SeokJin is held back a grade after returning from the American school system. Ages that are explicitly stated in official sources will be included in the timeline whenever possible.

BTS Universe deals with many difficult and potentially triggering themes, so please read the content warning in the Timeline Guide before proceeding. The Guide section will be included on all future posts for quick reference.

TIMELINE GUIDE

Content warning: contains references to death, suicide, suicidal ideation, child abuse, domestic violence, blood, homicide, depression, trauma, PTSD

This guide contains major spoilers from all BU media

Revisions and additions will be made as necessary, so please visit the original post for the most up-to-date version (update log is included at bottom of post)

All names are provided as fully as known

Bracketed dates are inferred or calculated from references in the text

While the timeline is presented here as objectively as possible, I acknowledge that there is a level of subjectivity in choosing which information is significant enough for inclusion and in certain connections drawn between entries

Please inform me of any suspected errors; I will investigate and correct them

Do not repost, copy, or quote without permission

Shadows of Our Childhoods

- Beginning through Year 18 -

[Year 9]

Jung HoSeok (age 7) is abandoned by his mother at an amusement park and moves into an orphanage. His age is referenced in his 31 May Year 22 entry from Notes: Her.

The earliest entry of the Notes published so far is HoSeok’s 30 August Year 9 (Notes: 7). Some older boys wake him up at night, and he reluctantly sneaks up to the rooftop with them. Fireworks explode in the sky. HoSeok is shocked at first and then entranced. The older boys tease him for crying, but he can’t stop the tears.

Note: It’s reasonable to assume that this unidentified rooftop location is the orphanage HoSeok grows up in. Therefore, his mother left him sometime before 30 August—possibly that summer, due to his unexplained tears.

10 October Year 9 Notes 1 (SJ)

Kim SeokJin (age 9) runs away from school with a friend to protect him from men who want to use him as leverage to get money from his father, Mr. Choi, who disappeared after his company shut down. SeokJin tries to hide the friend in his room at home, but his father, Kim ChangJun, arrives with one of the men and allows him to take the boy away. ChangJun tells SeokJin to be a “good kid.” The friend never returns to school.

Note: SeokJin’s age is specified in BTS Universe Story: The Boy on the Threshold, ep.3.

28 February Year 10 Notes: 7 (TH)

Kim TaeHyung encounters an older boy feeding the dog that he frequently plays with outside of the supermarket. He tells the boy that when his father earns a lot of money and moves their family into a big house, he can take the dog and raise him. After TaeHyung presses him a second time, the boy reveals that his name is Kim SeokJin.

23 July Year 10 Notes 1 (HS)

While counting in front of his class, HoSeok recalls the day at the amusement park when his mother handed him a chocolate bar and told him to close his eyes and count to ten. He feels like she will never come looking for him if he finishes counting to ten, and then he collapses.

Note: His mother abandoned him at the amusement park when he was seven (Year 9).

29 December Year 10 Notes 1 (TH)

TaeHyung’s father returns home drunk and disheveled after an absence and abuses him for the first time.

6 April Year 11 Related post: The Arboretum Notes 1 (JM)

Park JiMin (age 8) visits the Grass Flower Arboretum on a school picnic day. While his classmates are all accompanied by their mothers, his own parents are too busy to make it. At the end of the trip, he ignores his teacher’s call to wait and tries to walk home alone. With only his backpack in hand, he is caught in a torrential downpour and seeks shelter in a small warehouse near the back gate. JiMin wakes up in a hospital after he is found unconscious in the arboretum with no memory of what happened. He develops seizures as a result of this unnamed trauma and is frequently hospitalized as he grows up.

Note: This day is also referenced in his entries for 11 May, 19 May, and 4 July of Year 22; the lattermost specifies his age.

Notes 2 (JM)

JiMin reflects on what really transpired at the arboretum in his 12 August Year 22 entry, which also reveals that his memory returned due to a chance encounter on 15 September Year 20. Inside the dark and cluttered warehouse, young JiMin falls asleep and is awoken by an iron door clanging shut and the sound of someone breathing. He discovers an interior room and creeps closer. A small, pale hand appears on the other side, startling him. Someone whistles outside and opens the warehouse door. He hides under a desk and watches a man enter the interior room. Through the man’s legs, JiMin can see a small boy lying on the floor with bruised arms and legs and scars on his wrists from being tied up too long. Their eyes briefly meet. JiMin senses that he is asking for help. The man turns around, and the boy stabs his thigh with a boxcutter before he notices JiMin hiding. The man disarms the boy and slams the door shut. JiMin escapes the warehouse under the cover of the violent noises within. No one is around to help. He runs through the pouring rain and mud, frequently falling and scraping his knees. He collapses at the back gate with an image of the boy’s bleeding hand in his mind. He wakes up at the hospital surrounded by his parents, a doctor, and a nurse. They question him about what happened, but JiMin does not remember.

Note: In the same 12 August Year 22 entry, JiMin explains that he conducted research online into the incident. He learned that the boy’s family name is Choi, he was five at the time, and he was discovered near Hwayong Mountain on April 10 suffering from temporary amnesia caused by shock. JiMin could not find any follow-up articles on the police investigation. Additionally, he reveals the real cause of his seizure at the bus stop on 15 September Year 20: he saw the same boy in the window of the Grass Flower Arboretum shuttle bus. “His empty eyes no longer spoke” to JiMin.

21 July Year 12 Notes 1 (SJ)

After his mother’s death, SeokJin is sent by his father to live with his maternal grandmother in the U.S. (The city is specified as Los Angeles in his 1 February Year 22 entry from Notes: 7.) His father breaks his promise to see him off at the airport.

30 September Year 12 Notes: 7 (JK)

Jeon JungKook (age 7) slips through a crowd of people surrounding a massive sinkhole, wanting to see what’s inside of it. Dirt crumbles beneath his sneaker and he almost loses his balance at the edge. When he steps back, he sees something that is both like a light and another hole inside the hole.

Note: Compare to his Notes 2 Epilogue, XX XX Year XX, when he sees a bottomless hole below and the moon (or “a big hole in the sky”) above where he floats.

[Winter Year 12] Notes 1 (JK)

JungKook (age 7) overhears his father telling his mother that the world “was too heavy for him to bear” and that “there’s nothing he can do for JungKook.” He leaves their family forever.

Note: I calculated this season/year from his 11 September Year 17 entry, in which JungKook has waited ten days to receive a birthday card from his father; he has four cards saved in a drawer. (This also matches his real-life age difference with Jin.) He reflects on his father leaving him during the winter when he was 7 years old. He believes: “I was the world that was too heavy for him to bear—that world that he gave up on. A child who can never be the reason to endure it all. That was me.”

21 May Year 15 Notes: 7 (NJ)

Kim NamJoon returns home late from playing with his friends. The house is unusually dark and empty, giving him a chilling sense of foreboding. The phone rings and he senses that if he answers it, his life will forever change.

Note: It is likely that this is one of the times, if not the first time, his father is hospitalized due to a serious illness. About a year later, in his 21 June Year 16 entry of Notes 1, NamJoon describes how he coaxed his boss to hire a middle school student to post flyers. His family struggles financially with his father’s hospital bills and their overdue utilities.

19 September Year 16 Notes 1 (YG)

Min YoonGi arrives home and finds it devoured by flames. Frozen, he thinks of his mom and watches the house collapse. A neighbor asks him if his mom is inside, and he answers “no” without thinking. YoonGi’s mother dies in the fire.

Note: Some people suspect that YoonGi’s mother set the fire deliberately. In episode 6 of the Save Me webtoon, YoonGi recalls his father warning him against pursuing music unless he wants to “go crazy and kill [himself] like [his] mom did.”

2 May Year 18 Notes: Persona (NJ)

NamJoon and his father return home from the hospital to see the family’s belongings piled outside. They were evicted after his younger brother NamHyeon got in a fight with the landlord’s son who came to collect their overdue rent. The owner of the local supermarket allows them to move into its storage room. Exhausted, NamJoon snaps when his mother frets and asks where his brother is. The supermarket owner gives him a can of beer. In a later Notes 2 entry, he reflects that he was probably 16 at the time.

Note: On 18 June Year 22 in the Notes 2 timeline, NamJoon recounts this story to SeokJin at a street pub as a preface to asking when SeokJin drank alcohol for the first time, testing his memory.

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

Update Log

Posted January 13, 2021

Linked to next part added May 5, 2021

Do not repost.

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potatoof69 · 3 years

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alternatives for honey impact because fuck them

I know a lot of the genshin community know that honey impact was being taken down and now is back up on another server, but I haven’t seen a lot of people that are actually taking Honey’s response seriously and not like it’s just a harmless joke:

Yeah, no. This is literally so disgusting. Fuck honey impact, seriously. If you can still defend them after this, or even laugh at it, then you better ask yourself why you’re fine with defending someone who steals shit and profits “5 digit numbers” off of it, and then proceeds to throw a tantrum with ablest and racist insults to target game devs, not even the owners who actually call the shots. Why are you yelling at people who live off of coffee and fix bugs in their code all day? I doubt they give a shit about company revenue, they’re just trying to fix stupid bugs and remember to stick in semicolons. I know that hating on big companies is all the rage these days, but Honey isn’t even talking about Mihoyo’s greed or anything; they chose to target their ability to speak English and use mental illnesses as an insult.

Honey Impact seems like the best place to find info on genshin chars rn, but here are some alternatives to use so we aren’t giving these assholes even more money:

1. Paimon.moe. This is pretty much the best alternative I’ve found so far, even beating honey in my opinion. It has a wish counter for you to keep track of your wishes past the six month mark on Genshin’s history page, a page to see characters’ ascension materials, scalings, base stats, constellations, talents, and even a quick little guide for each character. It has calculators to find how many resources you’ll need to ascend a weapon or build a character, and even for friendship farming. It has a database with materials (and what day to farm them), weapons, furnishings (including which are the special ones for which chars), and artifacts. It’s got an achievements checklist so you can keep track on what you have to do next. It also has a reminders tab to remind you about stuff like the parametric transformer or logging into Hoyolab to get the daily rewards. It has a timeline that keeps track of all the genshin events in a neat format. Also, no ads at all on this site, yoohoo! Honestly, I’m surprised I haven’t been using this earlier.

2. KeqingMains. This has base stats and scalings from level 6 onwards for each character along with their constellations and passive talents. It also has damage calculators and even lots of in depth theorycrafting guides and pages for each character. It has info on combat mechanics, artifact sets, weapons, world environment, and each enemy in the game. If you want to know all the meta about playing Genshin, here’s the site to go to. Also no ads here, so you aren’t bombarded with “i just fucked my stepmother” manga ads all the time.

3. Genshin Wiki. This has a ton of stuff, like voicelines, stories, base stats, and ascension materials for all the characters. It also has lore and scaling for all the weapons. If you want to see Artifact and book lore, it’s got that too. This is basically the go-to site for all the lore.

4. Hoyolab. Yeah, Mihoyo’s actual legal forum. They have an interactive map on the site, which actually shows a ton of useful stuff. It shows chests, oculi, world quests, NPCs, fishing spots, monsters, wood, local specialties, puzzles (sorted by what kind, too), ores, books, recipes, and even heat sources if you’re ever stuck in Dragonspine with sheer cold chasing your ass down. Along with all the puzzles, chests, and oculi are also videos on how to solve them.

5. Finally, Adblocker. If you really have to use Honeyhunter (to look at leaked chars, I guess), use adblocker. Using Adblocker makes it so the website can’t load ads and therefore owners don’t earn revenue from their ads when you’re looking at the website. So if you really have to use Honey hunter, fuck them up with adblocker. Don’t give more money to their 5 digit earnings that they’re getting by literally stealing data. The person running this site definitely makes more money than the low level employees at Mihoyo so don’t feel bad about fucking them over.

In the end, outside of leaks, Honey Impact is not that useful, nor is it particularly impressive after all. They have no content other than the shit they datamined. Everything on that website is stolen info, and now they even removed watermarks and are literally mocking the people who created all that shit in the first place. Who, by the way, aren’t the ones calling the big shots about main company policies that everyone’s upset about.

Paimon.moe made to-do lists and wish trackers, and is definitely more user-friendly. KeqingMains have better guides and people actually do contribute their own guides and stuff along with the data. Genshin Wiki is a whole database for lore, and Hoyolab has the actual interactive map.

There will always be other leakers. This entire community loves the hell out of leaks. Hell, I like leaks bc I can know ahead of time which characters are coming so my f2p ass doesn’t suffer. I used honeyhunter before all this shit happened, because I thought they genuinely liked the game and it was useful. I also didn��t know they made money off the site, which in hindsight should’ve been obvious bc of all the ads. Yeah, after this, I don’t think they’re doing this for the game or the community, it’s for the money and the clout. Hell if I’m going to contribute to the thousands they make every month after this.

What I don’t like is pretending that leakers are somehow the Robin Hoods, going around generously giving us info bc of course they have no other hidden agenda, right. Yeah, Honeyhunter made thousands off of that site and tons of internet clout, no wonder they’re trying to keep it afloat. Honey Impact won’t always be the only site that goes datamining, others are eventually going to surface and do it themselves. Hopefully those others won’t be racist, ablest, money hungry little bitches. Or Mihoyo might take another step forward and release roadmaps for the characters and render Honey Impact completely useless, who knows.

TLDR; please don’t continue to support Honey Impact. There are lots of better alternatives out there for character and weapon information that you can use. Or install adblocker. Or get your info about leaked chars’ ascension stuff through secondhand sources that repost Honey’s info, bc that way you aren’t actually accessing their site. Because going onto that website does give them money; it isn’t harmless.

#honey impact #honey hunter #genshin impact #genshin leaks #fuck honey impact #i am #supremely pissed off #you know how many ppl tried to tell me that honey's joke was actually funny and that everyone upset was just making drama?#literally the entitlement of the ppl jesus #you get a couple leaks from them and suddenly theyre jesus #theyre like a goddamn child throwing a tantrum now that they've been caught stealing #like you got caught stealing and instead of reacting maturely you try to act like the victim and pretend like youre even slightly right #and the most annoying thing is people are taking their side??#rant #long post #get their asses mihoyo #i look forward to next week when they've been sued out of their pants for copyright infrignment libel and all kinds of shit

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queenlua · 3 years

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hey, i started following you recently and ur bio says ur a hacker? any tips on where to start? hacking seems like a v cool/fun way to learn more abt coding and cybersecurity/infrastructure and i'd like to explore it but there's so much on the internet and like, i'm not trying to get into anything illegal. thanks!

huh, an interesting question, ty!

i can give more tailored advice if you hit me up on chat with more specifics on your background/interests.

given what you've written here, though, i'll just assume you don't have any immediate professional aspirations (e.g. you just want to learn some things, and you aren't necessarily trying to get A Cyber Security Job TM within the next three months or w/e), and that you don't know much about any specific programming/computering domain yet.

(stuff under cut because long)

first i'd probably just try to pick some interesting problem that you think you can solve with tech. this doesn't need to be a "hacking" project at first; i was just messing around with computers for ages before i did anything involving security/exploitation.

if you don't already know how to program, you should ideally pick a problem you can solve via programming. for instance: i learned a lot back in the 2000s, when play-by-post forum RPGs were in vogue. see, i'd already been messing around, building my own personal sites, first just with HTML & CSS, and later on with Javascript and PHP. and i knew the forum software everyone used (InvisionPowerBoard) was written in PHP. so when one of the admins at my RPG complained that they'd like the ability to set multiple profile pictures, i was like, "hey i'm good at programming, want me to create a mod to do that," and then i just... did. so then they asked me to program more features, and i got all the sexy nerd cred for being Forum Mod Queen, and it was a good time, i learned a lot.

(i also got to be the person who was frantically IMed at 2am because wtf the forum is down and there's an inscrutable error, what do??? basically sysadmining! also, much less sexy! still, i learned a lot!)

the key thing is that it's gotta be a problem that's interesting to you: as much as i love making dorky sites in PHP, half the fun was seeing other people using my stuff, and i think the era of forum-based RPGs has passed. but maybe you can apply some programming talents to something that you are interested in—maybe you want to make a silly Chrome extension to make people laugh, a la Cloud to Butt, or maybe you'd like to make a program that converts pixel art into cross-stitching patterns, maybe you want to just make a cool adventure game on those annoying graphing calculators they make you use in class, or make a script for some online game you play, or make something silly with Arduino (i once made a trash can that rolled toward me when i clapped my hands; it was fun, and way easier than you'd think!), whatever.

i know a lot of hacker-types who got their start doing ROM hacking for video games—replacing the character art or animations or whatever in old NES games. that's probably more relevant than the PHP websites, at least, and is probably a solid place to get started; in my experience those communities tend to be reasonably friendly to questions. pick a small thing you want to do & ask how to do it.

also, a somewhat unconventional path, but—once i knew how to program a bit of Python, i started doing goofy junk, like, "hey can i implemented NamedTuple from scratch,” which tends to lead to Python metaprogramming, which leads to surprising shit like "oh, stack frames are literally just Python objects and you can manually edit them in the interpreter to do deliberately horrendous/silly things, my god this language allows too much reflection and i'm having too much fun"... since Python is a lot of folks' first language these days, i thought i'd point that out, since i think this is a pretty accessible start to thinking about How Programs Actually Work under the hood. allison kaptur has some specific recommendations on how to poke around, if you wanna go that route.

it's reasonably likely you'll end up doing something "hackery" in the natural course of just working on stuff. for instance, while i was working on the IPB forum software mods, i became distressed to learn that everyone was using an INSECURE version of the software! no one was patching their shit!! i yelled at the admins about it, and they were like "well we haven't been hacked yet so it's not a problem," so i uh, decided to demonstrate a proof of concept? i downloaded some sketchy perl script, kicked it until it worked, logged in as the admins, and shitposted a bit before i logged out, y'know, to prove my point.

(they responded by banning me for two weeks, and did not patch their software. which, y'know, rip to them; they got hacked by an unrelated Turkish group two months later, and those dudes just straight-up deleted the whole website. i was a merciful god by comparison!)

anyway, even though downloading a perl script and just pointing it at a website isn't really "hacking" (it's the literal definition of script kiddie, heh)—the point is i was just experimenting a lot and trying a lot of stuff, which meant i was getting comfortable with thinking of software as not just some immutable relic, but something you can touch and prod in unexpected ways.

this dovetails into the next thing, which is like, just learn a lot of stuff. a boring conventional computer science degree will teach you a lot (provided you take it seriously and actually try to learn shit); alternatively, just taking the same classes as a boring conventional computer science degree, via edX or whatever free online thingy, will also teach you a lot. ("contributing to open source" also teaches you a lot but... hngh... is a whole can of worms; send a follow-up ask if you want that rant.)

here's where i should note that "hacking" is an impossibly broad category: the kind of person who knows how to fuck with website authentication tokens is very different than someone who writes a fuzzer, who is often quite different than someone who looks at the bug a fuzzer produces and actually writes a program that can exploit that bug... so what you focus on depends on what you're interested in. i imagine classes with names like "compilers," "operating systems," and "networking" will teach you a lot. but, like, idk, all knowledge is god-breathed and good for teaching. hell, i hear some universities these days have actual computer security classes? that's probably a good thing to look at, just to get a sense of what's out there, if you already know how to program.

also be comfortable with not knowing everything, but also, learn as you go. the bulk of my security knowledge came when i got kinda airdropped into a work team that basically hired me entirely on "potential" (lmao), and uh, prior to joining i only had the faintest idea what a hypervisor was? or the whole protection ring concept? or ioctls or sandboxing or threat models or, fuck, anything? i mostly just pestered people with like 800 questions and slowly built up a knowledge base, and remember being surprised & delighted when i went to a security conference a year later and could follow most of the talks, and when i wound up at a bar with a guy on the xbox security team and we compared our security models a bunch, and so on. there wasn't a magic moment when i "got it", i was just like, "okay huh this dude says he found a ring-0 exploit... what does that mean... okay i think i got that... why is that a big deal though... better ask somebody.." (also: reading an occasional dead tree book is a good idea. i owe my firstborn to Robert Love's Linux Kernel Development, as outdated as it is, and also O'Reilly's kookaburra book gave me a great overview of web programming back in the day, etc. you can learn a lot by just clicking around random blogs, but you’ll often end up with a lot of random little facts and no good mental scaffolding for holding it together; often, a decent book will give you that scaffolding.)

(also, it's pretty useful if you can find a knowledgable someone to pepper with random questions as you go. finding someone who will actively mentor you is tricky, but most working computery folks are happy to tell you things like "what you're doing is actually impossible, here's why," or "here's a tutorial someone told me was good for learning how to write a linux kernel module," or "here's my vague understanding of this concept you know nothing about," or "here's how you automate something to click on a link on a webpage," which tends to be handier than just google on its own.)

if you're reading this and you're like "ok cool but where's the part where i'm handed a computer and i gotta break in while going all hacker typer”—that's not the bulk of the work, alas! like, for sure, we do have fun pranking each other by trying dumb ways of stealing each other's passwords or whatever (once i stuck a keylogger in a dude's keyboard, fun times). but a lot of my security jobs have involved stuff like, "stare at this disassembly a long fuckin' time to figure out how the program pointer got all fucked up," or, "write a fuzzer that feeds a lot of randomized input to some C++ program, watch the program crash because C++ is a horrible language for writing software, go fix all the bugs," or "think Really Hard TM about all the settings and doohickeys this OS/GPU/whatever has, think about all the awful things someone could do with it, threat model and sandbox accordingly." occasionally i have done cool proof-of-concept hacks but honestly writing exploits can kinda be tedious, lol, so like, i'm only doing that if it's the only way i can get people to believe that Yes This Is Actually A Problem, Fix Your Code

"lua that's cool and all but i wanted, like, actual links and recommendations and stuff" okay, fair. here's some ideas:

microcorruption: very fun embedded security CTF; teaches you everything you need to know as you're doing it.

cryptopals crypto challenges: very fun little programming exercises that teach you a lot of fundamental cryptography concepts as you're going along! you can do these even as a bit of a n00b; i did them in Python for the lulz

the binary bomb lab is hilariously copied by, like, so many CS programs, lol, but for good reason. it's accessible and fun and is the first time most people get to feel like a real hacker! (requires you know a bit of C beforehand)

ctftime is a good way to see when new CTFs ("capture the flag"s; security-focused competitions) are coming up. or, sometimes CTFs post their source code, so you can continue trying them after the CTF is over. i liked Stripe's CTFs when they were going, because they focused on "web stuff", and "web stuff" was all i really knew at the time. if you're more interested in staring at disassembly, there's CTFs focused on that sort of thing too.

azeria has good ARM assembly & exploitation tutorials

also, like, lots of good talks out there; just watching defcon/cansecwest/etc talks until something piques your interest is very fun. i'd die on a battlefield for any of Christopher Domas's talks, but he assumes a lot of specific x86/OS knowledge, lol, so maybe don’t start with that. oh, Julia Evans's blog is honestly probably pretty good for just learning a lot of stuff and really beginner-friendly?

oh and wrt legality... idk, i haven't addressed it here since it hasn't come up in my own work much, tbh. if you're just getting started you're kind of unlikely to Break The Law without, y'know, realizing maybe you're doing something a bit gray-area? and you can cross that bridge when you come to it? Real Hacking TM is way more of a pain-in-the-ass than doing CTFs and such, and you'll learn way more with the latter, so who cares lol just do the fun thing

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ill-go-with-that-then · 5 years

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A NEW ERASERMIC AU I'LL NEVER WRITE!

Imagine Aizawa works at Buzzfeed, and gets the idea to write an article about how Twitch streaming is stupid and pointless (because he’s a video game snob.) He chooses Present Mic’s channel to watch at random, because he’s super popular, but Aizawa immediately goes from undercover reporter to absolute fan. No middle ground. Just “huh, okay i was wrong” and subscribes.

He tunes in to all the live streams, because Mic is very funny and also very good at video games, and it’s cool to watch him play. He has skills, his commentary is A+, and Aizawa develops a little crush. But it’s not a big deal!! Mic is a celeb, Aizawa knows they’ll never meet, it’s harmless.

Sometimes the chat for the stream gets assholes in it, as you’d expect. Mic can’t monitor the chat too much, but Aizawa has no problems telling jerks where to stick it. And once, after a particularly egregious incident where some moron said something crude about women in gaming and Aizawa ripped him a new asshole, Mic sends him a personal message thanking him and asking him if he wants to be a mod, which of course, he does. He doesn’t know how to reply - this is his big chance to talk to Mic!! So of course he just says “sure” - no further conversation.

Aizawa has, of course, zero personal details on his Twitch account. No info, no icon, his screen name is a random string of numbers, he’s a ghost. The Ron Swanson of video game enthusiasts.

So Aizawa is working at Buzzfeed, living his best life writing articles like “10 Video Game Themed Products You Can’t Live Without” because journalism is in shambles and he drinks to forget, and one day his editor is like “hey, we’re gonna do a feature on Twitch streamers. Everybody is gonna go sit and watch a stream in person and get the behind the scenes info. Here’s a list of people who agreed.” And PRESENT MIC IS ON THE LIST

One of his colleagues reaches for Mic’s info sheet, rolling his eyes and sighing. “I can’t believe these are considered celebrities. Have you ever heard of any of them?”

Aizawa practically slaps the paper out of his hand. “Present Mic is a consummate professional and his content is high-quality and entertaining. I wouldn’t expect you to understand it since it involves technology more current than a compact disc.”

The room goes silent. Nobody’s heard Aizawa say anything nice about... maybe anything? Ever? But his editor, Kayama, pounces immediately. “WELL if you like him so much, Aizawa, that can be your interview!!”

Aizawa panics. On the one hand, he wasn’t going to let anyone else take that assignment. But on the other hand, now he’s going to meet Mic IN PERSON. During a LIVE STREAM. Is he supposed to tell him he’s a fan? Is that tacky? Will his crush be obvious? What if Mic sucks in person?? This is a double edged sword.

He only gets more nervous on the day of the interview. He’s tempted to dress up a little, look his best. Mic is a good-looking guy after all, and he’s always well put together when he streams. And even though Aizawa knows, knows he really doesn’t have a chance, he still doesn’t want to embarrass himself.

BUT he also doesn’t want to look like he’s trying too hard. That’s not who he is, and dressing up would be admitting to himself that he DOES want something more than a simple interview, even if it’s as little as Mic’s good opinion or positive attention.

He debates too long. While he’s still thinking about it, the alarm on his phone goes off, alerting him that it’s time to leave. He’s still in his pink sweatpants and he hasn’t shaved, and he realizes, just at that moment, that he probably should have tried harder at least for the sake of professionalism. But it’s too late. He has to go.

Mic actually doesn’t live all that far away. Just a short train ride, less than 20 minutes, and Aizawa is standing in front of his nondescript apartment. It’s a little odd - Mic is a very popular streamer, theoretically with income to match, and his style seems flashy. Aizawa had expected something a little more over the top. But this place is simple. Storing that information away for later, he knocks.

“COMING!!” He hears from inside the apartment, followed by the thud of footsteps. Aizawa just has one moment to brace himself because this is it before the door opens and there he is. Present Mic himself, all smiles. “Come in, come in!! You’re from buzzfeed right? Wow, this is so exciting!!” Mic ushers him in the door, taking his jacket and hustling him into a tidy living room before Aizawa can even respond. And of course, when he finally gets himself together enough to say something, the first words out of his mouth are “You’re... tall.”

He wants to smack himself. Yes, Mic is taller than Aizawa had realized from the stream, even a little taller than Aizawa himself. But those are thinking words, not speaking words. Certainly not the first words you use to introduce yourself to your celebrity crush. But Aizawa, a champion moment-ruiner, has made his bed, and now he must cry in it.

But Mic just laughs. “Yeah,” he says, bringing a hand to the back of his neck. “I get that a lot. Sorry?”

“Don’t apologize,” Aizawa says immediately, then wonders if he is, in fact, under some sort of curse. “Shouta Aizawa,” he introduces himself.

“Hizashi Yamada, also known as Present Mic!” Yamada’s smile is friendly, like Aizawa hasn’t made an absolute fool of himself so far, and Aizawa has to look away from it. He glances around the room, which is tidy and clean, but cluttered with various objects that seem to have no connection to each other. There are books in a variety of languages, musical instruments, shelves of CDs, and an assortment of other things that have nothing to do with video games.

“Quite a collection you have,” Aizawa says, because it is, and because he’s curious.

“Yeah! I have too many hobbies but what can you do? Come on, I’m sure you’d rather see my workspace.” It’s not true, Aizawa has seen the office where Yamada streams before, and he’d much rather stay here and poke around, build up his mental picture about who Yamada is outside his Present Mic persona. But he’s not here for that. This is business.

But the streaming room is also not what Aizawa expects. Some things are familiar - the area visible to the camera is the same, set up and ready for tonight’s stream, but the rest of the room, the part that isn’t on screen, is PACKED. There’s a wobbly desk in the corner, covered in neatly stacked papers and binders labeled by month and year. The wall over the desk is a massive whiteboard filled with notes and ideas for upcoming streams. And there, in the lower right corner of the whiteboard, right where it would be even with Hizashi’s eyes as he sits at his desk, is a familiar string of numbers - his own Twitch username. And next to it is a little note - don’t forget. Good dude.

Aizawa sees his username and just - freezes. It hadn’t occurred to him that Mic thought of him at all outside of that one occasion he DM’d him, let alone that he considered Aizawa important enough not to forget. And the idea that Mic thinks he’s a “good dude” makes his face BURN in pleased embarrassment. He wants to say something but what? Is it weird? It’s weird, it’s too weird, and before he can think of how to do it, Mic is talking again.

“Okay, this is where the magic happens!! Actually, it’s more like weeks of frustration and repetition followed by 3-4 hours of intensely stressful streaming, but hey! People seem to like it!!” Aizawa wants to say something here - Mic is being a little too self-deprecating for his taste, but he stops himself. He can’t defend Mic’s honor to Mic himself - can he? The moment passes while he debates.

“I wasn’t sure if you’d want to be on camera or not?” Mic says, tentatively.

“I’d rather not, if it’s all the same to you,” says Aizawa. “I’m more the behind the scenes type.”

“Totally, no problem!” Mic says, gesturing to his desk. “You can sit there, if that’s okay? The only other seat is by me.”

Aizawa looks at the chair, then back to the small couch where Mic will be streaming from. “I think I’ll have to be closer to get photos for the article, if that’s all right.”

“You’ll be on camera,” Mic bites his lip. “I mean, maybe i could re-angle it, but then the screen-“

“It’s fine,” Aizawa says. “Journalism is about hardship.”

Mic snorts, and Aizawa can’t keep a little smirk off his face, proud that he got a laugh.

The stream goes smoothly - Aizawa likes it even more like this, without the chat to distract him, and close enough to notice things he’s never seen before. Mic’s feet twitch when he’s focusing hard, and his socks have cats on them. It’s adorable. Aizawa takes no notes - he doesn’t really need to, he’s seen enough streams to write this article in his sleep, and anyway, it’s not like he’s going to forget a minute of this.

Afterwards, once they’ve signed off, Mic talks him through his post show routine, everything from calculating how much he made and comparing it to previous weeks in a spreadsheet to going over the chat. “Huh,” Mic’s eyebrows crease as he looks at the chat logs. “Things got a little out of hand tonight.”

“Oh?” Aizawa says, shuffling uncomfortably. He suspects he knows why that is.

“Yeah, one of my regular mods wasn’t on tonight. I hope he’s all right - it’s not like him to miss.”

“You have a lot of viewers,” Aizawa says, tentative now. “Do you know them all so well?”

Mic shrugs, embarrassed. “No, i wish I did! But this guy’s special, he’s really funny and he keeps all the trolls in line. I’d DM him to see if he’s okay but that’s weird, right? That’s weird. And anyway I tried to talk to him once before but he shot me down.”

“I didn’t-“ Aizawa says before he can stop himself. The curse is real. Mic stares at him, open mouthed, confused at first but then his eyes widen as he realizes what must have happened. Before he can say anything, Aizawa cuts him off. “Sorry. That i couldn’t mod tonight.” He mumbles, hand buried in his hair. He can’t meet Mic’s eyes anymore. “I’ll be back next week.”

Mic opens his mouth to speak, but Aizawa interrupts again, before he can. “And I didn’t - I didn’t shoot you down. I just didn’t think you’d want to talk to me. Why would you?”

Mic blinks, and Aizawa isn’t sure what he’s going to say. Will he be mad? Aizawa kind of lied to him. Is he disappointed? Does Aizawa not look like he expected? Has he been too silent? Too unfriendly? Does Mic not want to get to know him anymore? But when Mic finally speaks, what comes out is

“I can’t believe you made me memorize that stupid fucking username, we’re picking you a new one right now.”

#erasermic #maizawa #my writing #my ramblings #I have no explanation for anything I do ever

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queen-of-my-goofball-army · 3 years

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I Think There's Something You Should Know DuckTales Fic~

A double post?! In what kind of fresh hell world is this?! All joking aside, this is a fic that my best friend @i-want-a-donut DM about via my recent discord account making! She want a soft fic with Sabrina and Ludwig so that is what I'm here to bestow upon all of you!

I paced around the bedroom that I had recently been given at McDuck manor. I knew that this day had to come but I hadn’t expected for it to be so soon. It was the deadline for something that I had promised myself that I would do.

“It’s just uncle Ludwig, has he ever hated you?” I muttered to myself just not wanting to get this done. This was not something that I had ever wanted to do.

“You can’t help this. It’s not like when you were born somebody bestowed the gay upon you. It’s something that you have to discover for yourself. Whether or not he accepts that is not up to you. He’ll still love me. Through everything he’s been the one person that has ever stood by my side and vouched for my decision making. He would never, ever reject me for being who I truly am inside. Right Ji?” I asked my cat who was sitting on the floor looking up at me with his big green eyes as if to convey human I have no idea what you just said to me.

“I know, you’re just a cat. You’re lucky, these kinds of things can’t bother you because the only thing that matters to you is pets, cuddles and food. You’ll still love me right Jiji?” He meowed softly at me and I couldn’t help but chuckle lightly at him.

“Of course you will. I’m the human that looks after you so you’ll have to always care about me. I’ve pushed this out already way longer than it needs to be. Everyone else in the family already knows and still loves me. But if he doesn’t… if he can’t accept me this way…” I chocked on the sob that threatened to leave me just trying to calm down and think about this rationally. My phone buzzed next to me and I hesitantly picked it up.

Gosalyn <3: Love, I know you’re nervous about this but this is kooky uncle Ludwig that you’re going to tell. This is the person that you’ve always wanted to be. This is the same person that taught you the colors of the spectrum through freaking song, you’ll be fine babe. I believe in you!! Through Gosalyn’s encouraging words I took severally deep breaths.

“Thanks Gos, you always know just what to say to make me feel better.” I laughed a little bit when she sent me a picture of her skating on her Darkwing Duck board.

Me: Thanks gorgeous, I’m just panicking that’s all. Sure, my family accepts me but there’s no opinion in this whole world that I value more than uncle Ludwig even if he is kooky. I sighed adjusting my ponytail for what felt like the millionth time that day.

“Sabrina?” I heard my uncle Donald knock lightly on my bedroom door and I sighed a little bit playing with the ends of my hair.

“It’s time to go and meet uncle Ludwig for your weekly lessons.” I sighed a little bit looking over at the calendar and seeing that it was the day that I thought it was. I had to do it today if I wanted to treat myself to that trip to St. Canard for my birthday at the end of next month.

“Sabrina, just because you set a deadline for something doesn’t mean that it has to be done that specific day. You make these promises to yourself that if you can’t do this one specific thing by this one day that you’ll panic if you haven’t done it yet. Whatever you have to tell us I’m sure that it’s not as bad as you think it is inside your head.” He reminded me patiently and I nodded my head looking down at my webbed feet.

“You can do it Brina. I know that you can. It might seem difficult at first especially because your uncle is your biggest hero in the whole world but you’ll see. Everything will work itself out in the end.” My mom got down so that she could easier talk to me.

“But what if you all hate me? I couldn’t live with myself if all of you hated me…” My mom just thumbed my tears away from my eye.

“Oh honey, we could never ever hate you. No matter what it is that you feel that you need to tell us, we’ll understand. We’ll listen and we’ll be here for you no matter what happens. I know that your brain has probably been running around in circles these last few weeks trying to tell us something. I want you to tell us when you come back with uncle Ludwig for dinner.” My mom reasoned and I hugged her tightly. I took a couple of deep breaths knowing that she made, as usual, a decent argument.

“You’ve been hiding things from us too sis so I know that whatever you’ve got going on in your personal life that you’re scared to admit it. It’s okay to keep shit to yourself. But it’s also okay to talk about whatever you’re afraid of as well.” Louie reminded me and I looked over at my green hoodie wearing brother.

“I think what Lou is trying to tell you is that we have your back Brina. Everyone in this family sticks together no matter what it is that we’re struggling with. Whatever is going on in your life we’ll be there for that as well.” Huey reminded me and I looked over at my brother with tears in my eyes and he just wound his arms around my neck in a tight hug.

“I’ve always got your back sis. No matter what that secret is that you’ve been keeping I’ll always fight with you. You’re not alone in your battle. You have so many people out there backing you up.” He encouraged me and I smiled softly at my brother knowing that he was already in my corner. He’d probably already figured out what I was going to tell them all over dinner tonight. I was planning on telling uncle Ludwig before I told the rest of the family anyways.

“Sabrina, it’s time to go.” I nodded my head retracting from my brother’s hug and ruffling Louie’s tuft on his head.

“I’ll see you later Lou, send me cute Animal Crossing pics.” I picked up my over the shoulder bag checking to make sure that my laptop and my homework from the last week was inside of it.

“You’ve got it, if I see Dora in my village I’ll send you cute screenshots.” I saw my brother instantly log onto his switch and flip upside down so that he could play the cute game that he had gotten me into in the first place. I buckled my seatbelt and spent the rest of the car ride over in silence my brain still running laps around itself trying to figure out the best way to possibly tell my favorite family member that I was a lesbian.

“Have a good lesson okay Brina?” I nodded my head kissing my uncle’s cheek with a small smile on my face that instantly relaxed when I saw my uncle Ludwig at the front of his stoop.

“Mien starchen!! So happy to see you, are you ready to get ze learning on?” I nodded my head with a bright smile on my face.

“I’m always ready to get my learn on Uncle Ludwig. Bye uncle Donald!” I waved to my uncle who was driving the old family car back to the manor.

“How have you been this last week? Ze homework wasn’t too difficult for you was it?” I shook my head with a small smile on my face.

“I could figure everything out! I had an amazing teacher after all and you’ve alway made sure that everything was crystal clear before you sent me off on my own. I did have to ask Lou for help with calculous but math has never been my best subject other than algebra.” I explained the homework that I had struggled with and he just lightly patted my head.

“You’ll understand ze calculus eventually it’ll be like chemistry where at first it just looks like a bunch of gobbly gook until you understand ze mechanics.” He reasoned and I smiled softly as I saw that my uncle was wearing one of the vests that I had knitted for him. Uncle Ludwig had always been encouraging of my passions and my interests and always wore the designs that I made for him.

“I know uncle. Thanks again for taking time out of your busy schedule.” He looked at me his eyes soft but at the same time sad.

“Oh hush ze sad thoughts, this is ze highlight of my week. You know zis.” Ludwig’s eyes were filled with the varying emotions and I just looked down at my webbed feet.

“I’m sorry uncle Ludwig… I’m so sorry…” I chocked on a sob and he just took my hands in his running comforting circles into them.

“What ever are you sorry for mein starchen? What is up with ze crocodile tears all of the ze sudden?” He thumbed away as many as he could and I just shook my head.

“I’ll tell you once I can be calm enough. I’m telling the-the rest of the family at dinner tonight.” I chocked out and he just smiled sadly at me.

“Oh starchen come here my little one…” He hugged me tightly to his body nearly lifting me off the ground but I couldn’t help but cling to him just as hard.

“It’ll be okay, whatever it is that you have to tell I will promise you right now that there is no reason to be sorry. You could never do anything that would make me hate you Sabrina. There is nothing wrong with you whether it be ze mental or ze emotional. You just need help to understand things sometimes and zere is nothing with asking for ze help every now and again. I wanted to sign you two new books for today anyways. Shall we talk zis talk to ze library where you can be comfortable? I’ll get you a cup of hot chocolate from ze machine and some breakfast while I am at it.” His soothing voice brought me out of my own head and I found myself slowly melting into the warmth of the affection of it. There was so much there that I could get lost in. I found his library easily because that was where most of our lessons were held. I looked around me at all the huge stacks of bookshelves seeing two that were in front of his desk. Brave New World and Slaughterhouse Five.

“Oh you have found them already!! Those will be your next book reports zat I want by ze end of ze month. Both of ze books I would highly recommend for somebody like you. They are very unique and I think zat you will love zem both.” He encouraged me and I nodded my head with a small smile on my face picking up one of them.

“I have heard of both of them, isn’t this where you took your If you had a bad day, take a soma. If you want to forget that you even had that day, take two poster from that’s in your office?” He nodded his head coming to sit next to me. He took my hand in his and I wrapped one of them around the hot chocolate. I saw the toasted breakfast sandwich in front of me as well.

“What has been bothering you as of late mien starchen? You have been pulling away from me and it is very troublesome.” I sighed a little bit knowing that it was now or never. I couldn’t keep living like this, where I was hiding who I truly was inside of me.

“Uncle Ludwig, I think there’s something you should know about me… I’m gay. Gosalyn is my girlfriend. We’ve been dating for the past month and a half.” He slowly set down his cup of cocoa that he had made for himself and turned to me.

“Zat’s what all ze crocodile tears were for? Oh starchen I already knew that. Why else do you think I have been giving you so much reading material based upon things that aren’t straight laced? I wanted you to tell me on your own terms and you did. I am so proud of you, my little shining star…” He praised and I looked up at him with my eyes full of tears.

“You aren’t angry with me?” He shook his head fervently putting my cup down for me so I could bury my head into his shoulder.

“Sabrina I have never once in my entire life been angry with you. Zat’s just not humanly possible. You are far too lovable for me to ever hate you. I first picked out Fun Home because I thought zat you would find it to be interesting. I knew when I read your report on that book how true to you it really was.” He reminded me of the graphic novel that he had given me earlier on in the year. That was before Gosalyn and I had even officially started dating. I had known that I was very much gay for her but had no way of knowing if she actually felt the same way about me or not.

“You knew even then? That was when I had just figured out that my brother’s teasing me about Gos being my girlfriend hit a little bit too close to home for me. I thought that you’d be angry with me. You were always encouraging me to find myself but I was just so scared that I’d lose you for good.” I chocked back a sob and he just thumbed along my cheek with a small smile on his face.

“I’ve never not told you to be anything other than yourself. That’s ze reason that you continued to amaze me starchen. I’ve been calling you my star since you were a newly hatched egg. You were always uniquely your own person. Somebody zat continued to amaze me every day that she spent with me.” He nuzzled his beak against mine in a loving gesture. His eyes full of determination to make me believe that he was telling me what he truly felt.

“Th-Thank you uncle Ludwig, for always being there for me…” He laughed softly, that same laugh that always sent warmth and happiness down to my bones.

“I should be the one thanking you starchen. What’s about we go shopping a little bit later? I’m supposed to pick up ze dessert for tonight and I have an idea.” He told me and I blinked in confusion as he got out his computer and pulled up the local bakery.

“Ze colors of the lesbian flag are dark purple, a lighter shade of purple, an even lighter shade of purple, white, light orange, orange, and red correct?” I nodded my head as he plugged in all the numbers into the bakery website and I saw the beautiful cake that he had inside of his head.

“Uncle Ludwig…” I trailed off and he just smiled softly at me squeezing my hand with a small smile on his face.

“It is ze least that I could do for my amazing niece. I am so proud of you for coming to me about this starchen. I know how scary and how nerve-racking that must have been for you.” He encouraged me and I melted into the affectionate touch of his warm and soothing presence. This library always felt like my second home. I picked up my two books that were on his desk and read the descriptions on the back of them.

“Slaughterhouse Five? What’s that mean? Wasn’t Vonngeunt a prisoner in WWII?” Uncle Ludwig nodded his head since I had remembered that from last week’s lecture that he had given to me about the author.

“Zat’s what inspired zat novel. He was trying to make sense of humanity.” My heart broke for the poor man that had been through so much.

“Now I remember you telling me about that when I asked about the other poster in your room.” I nodded my head at the memory and he just smiled softly at me taking the books from me.

“How about we have ze free day of ze month today?” Every month he would give me one free day to either research something that I was interested in or we would just spend it together.

“But that’s supposed to be next week…” He just laughed at me, that laugh that I loved so much for how open and unique it was.

“It might be next week officially on your calendar but I would much rather do something fun with you today. If you want to do something productive with your day with me then I do have an assignment for you to research for next week. I want you to make me a powerpoint.” He went over to the front of the room and struggled to pull down his projector.

“Do you need help?” I asked him through my giggles but he just gave one final pull that left him flat on his face and his glasses askew.

“If it means anything I asked.” I joked and he just sighed heavily at me as he adjusted his glasses and I looked at the projector seeing a powerpoint about Marie Curie.

“I want you to make me a presentation about your hero. I know zat you have many like I do but I decided eventually to just go with the one that I knew the most about so Marie Curie was the one I chose.” I looked up at him and his powerpoint about the woman that discovered radiation.

“It doesn’t have to be a woman but I would prefer for it to be. It also doesn’t need to be science related but I was trying to find one for my special interest.” I listened to the criteria that my uncle was looking for when I made this powerpoint. Every month he would have me do one on a topic that he was interested in.

“Ursula K Le Guin…” I trailed off and he just smiled softly at me kissing my forehead with a small smile on his face.

“Of course you would pick the author of your favorite books. I would prefer it if you did it based off of things that you already know about her so that you won’t have to waste too much time on zis. I just thought that it would make you happy because you’ve been so stressed and anxious lately.” He encouraged me and I looked at his powerpoint going through the slides.

“I’ve got it! Thank you for this uncle, this means a lot to me. I’ll make an amazing powerpoint.” He laughed at me taking his cup of coco.

“I know you will starchen you always do. Here you go, these are also going to be your assignments for the rest of the week. There is extra calculous but I know zat you’ll also do the ze best you can.” Uncle Ludwig sat down next to me and clinked his cup with mine.

“I’ll have Hue help me if I need it. I need help with math usually it’s just a struggle for me most of the time. I prefer algebra because that’s more like doing a puzzle.” I reasoned and he stood up going over to his puzzle shelf.

“I recently got a new puzzle and I wanted to do it with you.” He stood up on his ladder getting what he was looking for and he waved his new puzzle around.

“Oh that sounds like fun! I’d love to make that one with you.” I smiled softly at my uncle as he dragged a clean table over and I took my sandwich. I looked over at the front of the box and smiled softly when I realized that it was an outdoor one with a waterfall. I always preferred the outdoor puzzles as opposed to ones that were themed to indoors.

“Hold on, let me get some music.” He went over to his old fashioned record player as I looked at the front cover of the puzzle box and set it up so that I could easily look back up at the object.

“Zat’s better now we can have some background noise. Good job getting it all set up starchen!!” He encouraged me and I smiled softly at him shaking my head.

“I just did what you would have done and what you taught me to do when dealing with puzzles.” He leaned his head against my shoulder and I just sighed a little bit. No matter how exhausting he could be I still loved my uncle more than anything in the entire world.

“I think zat we should glue this one and zen hang it up.” I nodded my head. It looked like it would be a really beautiful picture when it was all finished so I knew that he made a good point.

“I’ll help you to find the perfect place for it. This library is getting really busy with lots of things going on.” I teased him lightly as I found the perfect spot for the puzzle piece in front of me pressing it lightly into the square next to it.

“Excuse you, zis library is perfectly organized.” I quirked an eyebrow up at him gesturing with my wings to the room around me.

“What part of this is organized? I just helped you organize this chaos last month during free day how is it already like this?” My uncle just laughed a little bit to himself and I sighed. He would continue to have his library be an organized disaster where nobody knew where anything was but him. I was amazed that he still remembered where things were half of the time.

“I know it’s a problem starchen but I like my library the way that it is. Even if it’s messy and unorganized it feels more lived in this way.” He reasoned and I sighed a little bit knowing that there was no way that I’d make him feel any different.

“Zis one goes here I think…” My uncle pressed the piece against the one where he thought that it fit and it slid perfectly into place.

“I started another anime with Lou. It’s a science show, it’s really, really good.” I mentioned off handedly to my uncle. He was always interested in what I was watching and we had watched FullMetal Alchemist together in German something that was actually a lot of fun.

“What’s it called?” I could tell that he was genuinely excited, as he always was when the idea of science was brought up.

“It’s called Dr Stone. The story is about how one day the entire world turned to stone. 30,000 years into the future the main character Senku unfroze and he’s trying to get the world back to where it was in the modern society. He finds this village of people that are already living there and dubs that his kingdom of science and that’s how he gets society back onto it’s feet.” I explained the plot of the show and he listened to me intrigued.

“Zat sounds extremely interesting!! I will have to give it a watch and see if it can apply to what we are learning together.” My heart melted at the idea that he wanted to make some of the science that we did based on the show that had recently captured my interest. We had studied alchemy for months for fun after I had finished FullMetal and he got me all the volumes of the manga for my birthday.

“Thank you uncle Ludwig. That sounds like fun. There are experiments that Senku makes and explains how he does on the show so we’ll have to see if they work in the real world.” I melted into the warmth of the atmosphere that I was in at the moment.

“What else have you been doing with your siblings?” He asked me curiously and I got out my phone showing me the latest science project that I had helped Dewey make.

“Dew is going out for basketball again this year he’s getting really genuinely good at it. I love practicing with him he’s been teaching me how to play and everything. It’s a lot of fun! Plus you’re always going on about how I need to exercise more and that’s a fun way to do it. Hue is working to be a camp counselor this year for the Junior Woodchucks. Louie and I have been mostly playing Animal Crossing together.” Uncle Ludwig put his arm around my shoulders with a small smile on his face. He listened to me and paid attention to everything that was going on in my life.

“Animal Crossing is ze cute one right?” I nodded my head with a small smile on my face showing him a screen shot of my favorite villager.

“This is Dora. My brother and I both got lucky enough to have her on our islands. She’s a bookworm but is adorable. Every one of the characters has a little catchphrase that they use, her’s is squeaky.” I tried to explain to him but he just blinked at me in confusion.

“Hold on, I’ll show you! I already logged on this morning.” I turned on my yellow switch with a small smile on my face doing the familiar three taps and running around my island.

“Your island is called Magnolia?” I nodded my head with a small laugh rubbing the back of my neck a little bit.

“It’s a guilty pleasure show that my brother watches with me sometimes, it’s a fantasy magic anime called Fairy Tail. I thought that the name of the town was just adorable so I took it for the name of my island.” I kicked my webbed feet back and forth and found Dora.

“This is Dora, she’s a dorm mouse. She’s not the serious social type but she loves reading books and other things like that.” I went over to her and she did her catchphrase and I saw the realization go off on his face.

“Oh zat is quite adorable!! I can see why your brother and you have been so bonkers over this game.” I laughed a little bit because that was a way of describing things that only my uncle could do.

“Alright sorry for that little distraction let’s get back to work.” I cheered and he just smiled softly at me when I leaned against his side.

“We shall have to go out to ze mall later zis afternoon because I want to pick up a little something for you. A little surprise.” My heart started to beat more rapidly as I texted Gosalyn to let her know that everything had gone according to my plan that I made.

“What is it? What is it? What is it?” I asked him rapidly and he just laughed at me. He shook his head pressing a wing to his beck.

“That is for me to be knowing and for you to find out in a few hours. I still want to spend time with you in my own home.” He reminded me lightly squeezing my arm lightly where his was linked through. I pressed another piece of the puzzle into it’s rightful spot.

“Good job starchen!! You truly are a master of puzzles and thinking things through. I used to really struggle with zis when I was your age. They annoyed me because they took too much of my time.” I laughed a little bit at the idea of my uncle’s frustration. He used to be annoyed by a lot of things when he was younger before thankfully mellowing out as the years went on.

“I like things that help my brain to work. It’s why I love algebra, puzzles, and knitting so much. It’s busywork for my brain and it appreciates being used the way that it was intended.” I leaned a little bit further into his side just enjoying the quieter moments between us.

“Can I ask you a question starchen?” I made a soft sound that I was listening to him as I put another piece into it’s spot.

“Did you always feel zis way about Gosalyn? Or was it recent?” So, we were going to talk about the massive elephant in the room.

“It wasn’t the second I met her if that’s what you’re wondering. It was more of something that happened over time. If I had to put a specific time on my feelings for her I’d say New Years. Something changed around the holiday when I went to go and visit her with Launchpad. There was always just something about her that was different for me. I realized after that trip it was that she was just beautiful. There was no other rhyme or reason about it she just was. I feel like I can be myself around her and she won’t judge me for it or anything like that. I love her uncle…” My uncle looked at me with tears in his eyes and he wiped them away.

“Look at me, getting all emotional over my niece’s first brush with ze feelings. I knew zat there was something between ze two of you from the first second you told me about her. Your eyes just sort of went all soft and sparkly.” I handed him a handkerchief and he just smiled gratefully at me drying his eyes with the object.

“Zis is what I’ve always wanted for you. For you to feel comfortable enough to be with somebody else and to be happy.” He reminded me lightly and I looked up at him with a surprised expression on my face. I put my arm supportively around his shoulders.

“I didn’t think that it would ever happen to me if I’m being entirely honest. I have never felt this way about anyone else before. Not man, not woman, just Gosalyn. I know that I’m a lesbian because boys have just never done it for me. All of my fictional crushes have been on the same gender. Ever since I was little so there was always that little thing about me that was different. I just want to make her happy uncle. She’s everything that I’ve ever wanted.” He lightly kissed my forehead in understanding. I drank the rest of my hot chocolate that was in front of me.

“Do you want ze refill?” I nodded my head knowing that it would be too much sugar for me but I still wanted the extra pep anyways. I checked my phone seeing the encouraging response from Gosalyn that she was proud of me and that she loved me.

“There’s the happy smile that I was talking about. It lights up ze room. That’s how I had a feeling of what you were keeping from me.” I smiled a little bit sheepishly rubbing the back of my neck. The feeling of comfort and family always remained when I was here. It never failed to bring me back to my childhood since I spent so much of it sitting in these chairs, doing puzzles, drinking homemade hot chocolate, and just learning all that I could from my uncle in these chairs. I had spent my whole childhood coming here on the weekends and reading with him.

“I think that my brothers already know as well. They know me a bit too well, especially Louie. He’s definitely onto me and my attitude changes as of late. They’ve always called Gosalyn my girlfriend anyways as a joke.” My uncle thumbed a finger around my shoulder with an understanding smile on his face.

“But to you, zis is not a joking matter. You’re afraid zat they will make jokes about it.” I nodded my head and he just smiled at me.

“They won’t. Your brothers care about you more than anything in ze whole world. They do try and make jokes but they will see how important this is to you.” He reasoned and I smiled softly at my uncle who had only ever tried to encourage me to be myself.

“Thanks uncle, for helping me. That means more than you can ever know. You’ve always been so patient with me whenever my brain was running a million miles an hour.” I thanked him and he just kissed my forehead understandingly.

“You’ll always have me by your side starchen I promise. Nothing could ever tear me from it. Especially not a silly little nothing like what sexuality you would prefer to date. This is just another part of you that makes you wonderful. Zere is nothing wrong with it. You are perfectly normal.” Uncle Ludwig reminded me lightly pressing another piece into the puzzle as tears filled my eyes.

“You have no idea how much I needed to hear those words from you… to hear that you still accepted me even as this person that I am.” He just thumbed my tears away lightly making sure that there wasn’t anything that was wrong with me.

“Oh starchen don’t you start ze crying. Because if you start crying zen I’m going to start crying and then we’ll just have one big old mess.” I laughed watery at my uncle as I shook my head and just tried to stop the tears that badly wanted to flow like rain water.

“What other series have you been watching with Louie?” He asked me and I pressed another piece of the puzzle together.

“That’s really about it lately, it’s just been a lot of Dr Stone. I’m rewatching FullMetal for what feels like the trillionth time though. That’s been helping me out a lot through this whole process. I want to show it to Gosalyn.” I mentioned off handedly and my uncle nodded his head in understanding at the mention of my favorite show.

“Zat show is a big part of who you are. I recommend zat you do it because it’ll make her happy. Your sharing that part of your life with her.” I smiled softly thinking about how my girlfriend would react to me wanting to show her my favorite show.

“I think that she’d enjoy it. I’m still trying to get her through the whole Miyazaki library.” I laughed rubbing the back of my ponytail.

“Understandable, zos are some of your favorite movies. How many has she seen so far?” He asked me and I got out my phone to show him my list of movies.

“She’s gotten all the way through Howl’s Moving Castle. The next one that I want to show her is Ponyo. It’s okay, you took me to see that one remember? It was his rendition of The Little Mermaid.” I reminded him lightly of the fairy tale that he had taken me to see.

“I remember zat one… zat was a weird one.” I laughed a little bit at him as he pressed another into it’s rightful spot.

“It was a little bit strange but I don’t know. I still enjoyed it and thought that it was really cute. The first brush with love between the two younger main characters made it easier for me to swallow and less weird.” I reasoned since I would always have a soft spot for anything that he made. His movies had this ability to take me into another world and the older that I got the more I found myself getting lost in it.

“Your favorite is still ze Moving Castle yes?” I nodded my head getting out my sketchbook and showing him the latest painting that I had made.

“Oh starchen… it’s the most beautiful thing zat I have ever seen. You painted this all from your own memory?” I nodded my head playing with the hem of my ponytail ribbon a little bit nervously. I always got self conscious when I was showing something that I made, especially when that something was artwork.

“I figured that I’ve seen the movie enough times that I should know it like the back of my hand by now. I’ve always loved Howl’s secret garden and there was something about that always called out to me. I decided to paint it a few days ago and I just finished it last night.” My uncle carefully tore the page out of my sketchbook and scurried around his library.

“Where is zat empty frame…” He muttered to himself and he found the offending object that was hiding from his line of sight.

“I shall help you hang this when we go to McDuck manor for dinner tonight. This is something that you should be very proud of Sabrina. It is obvious that you worked extremely hard on it and long hours as well. I love it.” He praised and I just smiled softly at him looking at the frame. For the first time in a long time I thought proud of something that I had accomplished.

“I do too. It was fun for the first time in a while I enjoyed the painting process. It’s also one of the largest paintings that I’ve probably ever made as well.” He held it up in front of him and he just lightly thumbed over my shoulder.

“Then zat is progress!! I know zis is not something that you are very good at, taking ze praise. I’m often too good at it and my head gets too big.” I smiled softly adjusting my uncle’s spectacles on his face with a small smile.

“You do but that’s just a part of your lovable charm uncle. I know that you’ve worked on getting your ego trimmed down to size these last few years and I’m proud of you.” I reminded him for all the hard work that I knew he had done in order to get everything squared away.

“I think the last few inventions going slightly off the rails have rather helped to trim down my ego.” I smiled sadly at him squeezing his hand.

“You’re getting a little bit older and that’s okay. You have enough money to live comfortably. It doesn’t matter that the instant bandaid dispenser bit you in the ass metaphorically speaking. The apple peeler and hot chocolate maker still work!” I pushed a little bit further trying to hear that ho-ho-ho laugh that I loved so dearly. When I heard I instantly felt better.

“You are right starchen everything that I’ve made that worked these last few years has been something for you.” I settled against the back of the couch putting my cup of finished hot chocolate onto his table and taking the small side of fruit that was next to my sandwich.

“I put some nectarines into zat, it should be good. I got zem from ze farmers market ze other day. I also got you ze kettle corn. You can have it when I drop you off back at the manor.” I cheered at the mention of my favorite sweet/salty treat that I always shared with Dewey for our movie nights.

“Thanks uncle Ludwig, your contribution for me and Dew’s movie nights will be greatly appreciated.” I teased lightly and he just huffed a small sigh.

“Have you two been getting along better still?” I nodded my head getting out my phone and showing him the picture that Huey had taken of me asleep on my brother’s shoulder from yesterday’s movie night.

“We meet up once a week for movie nights still. They’re going rather well we switch off weeks so he just went yesterday. I get to go next week to have my movies that I want to watch. I still have no idea what I want to watch.” I shrugged my shoulders and my uncle just listened to me talk about the further development with the brother that had given me the most grief growing up.

“I’m glad zat you two seem to have worked out your issues as you got older. I told you zat he just needed to grow up and into himself before he realized what a mistake zat he was making.” I leaned against the couch kicking my legs back and forth.

“It’s the little things that he does that surprise me. Things like remembering my drink preference, my snack preference, and things like that. He used to not care about me at all so the little signs that he does now, they make me happy.” My relationship with my blue clad brother had come a long way from where it started.

“I am proud of you for working so hard to fix things with your brother. I know zat he hasn’t always made things easier for you to deal with. Zat’s why I’m proud of him for working so hard to mend what was broken.” My uncle reasoned with an understanding smile on his face and I looked over at him with a small question in my gaze.

“Now we’re talking about you and uncle Scrooge. I know that you two have had your disagreements and that he can be awful a lot of the time but deep down he cares about everyone in his life. Including you.” I reminded him lightly nudging his shoulder with a small smile on my face.

“You are right starchen I was referring to your other uncle. We’ve disagreed a lot over the course of my marriage to his sister but through it all he’s at least tried to be there for me since you came into his life.” I listened to him talk about my other uncle that was sitting back at home in his mansion.

“He’s been trying to get to know me a little bit better over these last years. I’m happy living with him I really am. Adventure is always right around the corner for me and that’s part of the fun of the thing for me. I love adventure and I’ve always wanted to have my own. When I was younger I was satisfied with just reading fantasy novels but then I wanted to have my own.” I leaned my head against his side lightly as I talked about the dream that I had when I was younger.

“I know zat was your ultimate goal in life was ago lead your own adventure. I’m just happy zat you were able to achieve it.” He encouraged me the same way that he always had but with that kindhearted edge that he did everything else.

“I think that I’ve learned a lot underneath uncle Scrooge. About how to handle myself and get myself out of a bad situation. I admired that a lot about Webby at first.” My uncle got up from the sofa taking the plates downstairs and came back checking his pocket watch.

“We shall need to go in a little while to hit everything that we want to. The bakery said zat the cake wouldn’t take too long actually. Zey have done that sort of thing before I presume.” I couldn’t help the tears in my eyes as I quickly dried them away.

“Thank you again uncle Ludwig, for the cake and for everything else that you’ve done for me.” I thanked him and he just lightly ruffled my hair with a small smile.

“It is no need for ze thanking. Not if I wanted to do it and if I wanted to see your little face light up with happiness.” He reasoned with a small smile on his face as he sat down next to me and I put one last piece into the puzzle.

“So where exactly are we going on this extravaganza?” I asked him and he just smiled softly at me gathering his own satchel that matched my own.

“Just to ze mall. Zere are some things that I want to pick out for you.” I cocked my head to the side but shrugged it off just wanting to see where this day would get me.

“I’ll take these books with me as well. I’ll probably start reading one of them in the car.” I saw my uncle smile softly at me kissing my forehead.

“Don’t give yourself ze migraine. Zat will not help you out in ze future. You need to be on your best health for dinner tonight.” I sighed a little bit knowing my uncle was right but not wanting to admit defeat. I didn’t want to have this talk with my other uncles, Daisy, or my brothers. What if they didn’t like what they saw or what they heard?

“I know zat you are nervous about it. But sometimes ze things that we are most nervous about are ze things that we need to ze most. You can do zis. I know zat you can.” He encouraged me with an understanding smile on his face. He squeezed my hand softly and I just sighed.

“Okay you’re right as usual.” He laughed at me in his typical fashion that lit me up inside. I grabbed my yellow satchel that had everything that I needed inside of it.

“You forget starchen I’m right all the time. It’s just zat you and I think about things in a different way than everybody else.” I laughed a little bit at him taking the books anyways and finding them a safe spot inside of my backpack.

“Yeah, yeah I know. I’ll remind you of that the next time that you wear those crazy goggles.” I teased a little bit and he just stuck his tongue childishly at me.

“Zey protect me from ze sparks we’ve talked about zis.” I laughed openly at him as he held the door to the library for me.

“I know I’m just messing with you uncle. Come on, it’s already nearly afternoon and the mall is kinda far from here.” I reminded him lightly knowing not knowing where in the world he had planned on taking the two of us yet.

“It’s just a few errands some things for tonight that I can help you hang up in your bedroom.” I got into his old car that smelled like so many afternoons spent together. I remembered when I was younger and he would take me to the aquarium and teach me about all the fish that were out there in the world.

“I haven’t taken you on an outing in a really long time. Not since you started your lessons with me.” He carefully pulled out of the driveway and I still wondered where in the world we were going and why it was to the mall.

“I missed our old outings. I remember when you used to take me to the aquarium and taught me about all the different kinds of fish that they have there.” I laughed a little bit at the memory since it was of something that seemed so simple.

“You were so cute when you were zat age. Not that you aren’t adorable now but it was different when you were younger. You used to look at everything with little stars in your eyes.” I smiled softly at my best friend and the uncle that had been there for me when I was younger. He was always there for me whenever I needed for him to be.

“I love you uncle Ludwig…” He smiled softly at me running a hand through the fringe that was at the front of my ponytail.

“I love you too so very much mein starchen.” He reminded me lightly as the red light turned green and I watched the rest of the world go by outside my car door. When I saw our large mall and I quickly was led behind him to a store that I had only ever seen before when I looked around with my brother’s.

“Uncle Ludwig… this is…” Pride store was written in bright booming colors at the top. I saw all the colors that were on the flags.

“Come on Sabrina, let’s get you some things for your bedroom.” He put his arm around my shoulders encouragingly.

“Hi! How can I help you both?” I heard the familiar sounds of Freedom ’90 instantly playing inside of the store.

“Hello ‘dere this is my great niece. She just came out to me and I wanted to get her some zings for her bedroom.” My uncle explained to her and I saw the worker’s eyes fill with tears as she looked away from me and a man sighed.

“Forgive my girlfriend, she can be a lot and very emotional. What exactly were you both looking for?” I saw a trans pin on his jacket and I instantly took a deep breath.

“I have a girlfriend in St. Canard. I’m a lesbian and I just came out to him earlier today. I’m doing the rest of my family over dinner tonight. He’s my great uncle and has been my teacher since I was younger.” I mentioned my relation to my uncle who was already looking at everything that he could.

“Is he, a lot?” I nodded my head with a small laugh just looking around my surroundings. The first thing that stood out to me was a lesbian pride flag that I could hang above my bed.

“Oh that’s a really popular pride flag! We make all our pride flags here in house if you wanted something unique written on it I can sew it on or my girlfriend can.” He told me with a small understanding smile getting the material down for me as I looked at it.

“It’s beautiful…” I trailed off but the worker got down another flag with a small smile on his face as he unwoven it in front of me.

“This one is for the feminine presenting lesbians out there. People like my girlfriend, it’s called femme. You look to be the type that puts a lot of care into your appearance so that’s why I think that this one suits you best.” He reasoned and I nodded my head feeling the texture of the flag. Even though I knew that nobody would know what this flag meant, I would. I’d have to explain it a lot more but I’d like that. I wanted to be open about my sexuality and the way that it made me feel personally.

“What’s that you zere?” My uncle asked me and I showed him the two flags that I had found for my bedroom.

“That’s the stereotypical lesbian flag right there and that’s the femme flag sir. What that means is that’s what my girlfriend identifies as. It’s the lesbians that put a lot of care and love into their appearance. She can’t leave the house and come to the store if she’s not looking her absolute best.” The woman in question put her hands on her hips.

“I see how it is, you’re just going to trash talk me. Well I’m not falling for it mister. Come here sweetie, let’s see if we can’t find some other things that you’ll enjoy.” The woman took my hand while my uncle looked at the flags before nodding his head.

“You’re very lucky, to have somebody who loves you that much. He’s willing to work to understand somebody that he’s not even that closely related to. He’s your great uncle?” I nodded my head with a small smile on my face.

“I know zat I’m lucky to have him. He’s taught me so much about understanding others and he’s always tried to understand me as well. He works really hard, he’s an inventor even if he’s way past his prime.” I explained about what he did for a living and she just listened to me.

“I think that’s amazing that he cares so much about his great niece. A lot of older people don’t really take the time to understand us youngsters and our orientations. I wanted to show you this! If I know a good femme when I see one you love stuffed animals right?” I nodded my head enthusiastically and she brought down a rainbow bear and a lesbian colored one.

“We also have really soft sweaters and long sleeved shirts for all the sexualities.” I looked at the lesbian one picking it up off the rack.

“I want this one, it’s really pretty.” The worker just smiled at me as I picked up that one and the femme bear that was soft to the touch.

“I think that your great uncle is getting both of those flags for you.” My heart melted seeing him at the cash register waving his hands around as he told eccentric stories.

“He can pretty much talk to anyone for three minutes and they’ll be friends. It’s one of the things that I’ve always admired about him.” I went over to him and he just lightly picked up the two things that I had found not even batting an eye as he paid for everything.

“Now zat’s out of ze way, let’s go to ze bakery and zen to ze manor.” I smiled softly at him as we went back to the car.

“You didn’t have to get me both of those flags uncle Ludwig…” I trailed off and he just smiled at me brightly.

“I did too, zey made you happy and what makes my niece happy I have to purchase. Zat’s the motto for today.” I smiled softly at him as we drove down to the bakery. The smell of sugar cookies, brownies and baked goods instantly hit my nose as I took a picture of the flag cookie to send to Gosalyn. I told myself that I would need to stop her before my flight next month to St. Conard so that me and her could try some.

“Starchen? I got ze goods, come along. It is time to meet up at the manor. Ze sun is nearly setting, time really does fly when you’re having fun.” I took the cake from him lightly carrying it out to the car where all the rest of the items were.

“Well we did spend most of the day shopping at the mall and doing that puzzle. We didn’t even come close to getting the puzzle a quarter of the way done. More for next time?” I offered and he nodded his head getting the car door for me.

“We will definitely do more of ze puzzle next time. I think zat you need a little bit of a break. We don’t want to tire your poor little brain out.” I chuckled lightly at him blowing the fringe out of my eyes. The drive to the manor was spent mostly in companionable silence. I saw Dewey practicing his basketball on the front driveway again.

“Hey Dew!” I waved to my younger brother and I watched as the ball went into the basket when my brother turned around.

“Hey!! How was your day, learn anything cool?” He asked me enthusiastically and I smiled softly at him. Recently his favorite thing had been me second hand teaching him things that would help him on his own homework.

“Sorry to say zat today was one of her free days where I don’t teach her anything. We have zem once a month so zat she can get a break and not overwork herself.” Dewey took the cake from my hands and tried to open it when I glared at him.

“No peaking at the dessert I see you. Stop that right now, the dessert is a surprise.” I warned him lightly taking it from him knowing that the curiosity would only make him want to look more.

“What could be so secret about cake?” I sighed a little bit playing with the hem of my dress skirt and he just put his arm around my shoulders.

“Want to tell me what’s been going on with you? You’re doing it again, closing yourself up into your own little shell. I thought that you weren’t going to do that again?” He reminded me and I just sighed heavily nodding my head.

“I’ll tell you once we’ve all seated for dinner. I want to tell this to everyone at one time. Uncle Ludwig already knows since I spent the day with him. The cake has something to do with that since I couldn’t stop him from buying it.” Dewey nodded his head in understanding lightly shoving my shoulder with a small smile.

“I think I already have a decent idea of what it is and I’m totally fine with it. If she makes you happy then that’s great. You deserve somebody that could make you happy. I’ve been questioning lately myself which sex I prefer as well. You might not be the only queer sibling.” He joked a little bit and I blinked at my brother as we went inside the manor. I saw uncle Ludwig get everything out of the car and discreetly carry it up to my bedroom.

“He bought you a bunch of things didn’t he?” I nodded my head with a small laugh rubbing the back of my neck with a small smile.

“Yeah that’s pretty much what happened. We spent hours at the mall today and he pretty much bought me an entire store. He spoils me a lot more than I deserve.” Dewey just laughed a little bit at me helping me to carry the cake into the kitchen.

“Hey Lou! I’m back you lazy bum, have you even moved today?” I teased lightly and he just flipped me off from the couch.

“How was your day?” I sat down next to him and I put my feet over his lap with a small smile on my face.

“It was good! I spent the day with uncle Ludwig and we did a lot of fun things together. Are you hungry yet?” He nodded his head putting up his switch for the day and stretching his arms with a small sigh as the joints popped.

“Dinner is ready family.” Uncle Donald called from the dining room and I just sighed a little bit. It was better to just do it now and get it over with. Ripping it off like a bandaid and then having their ridicule and judgement for the rest of my life if that’s what happened.

“Sabrina are you hungry?” Mrs. Beckley asked me and I nodded my head with a small smile on my my face.

“Yes I am! I haven’t eaten truly since breakfast today.” She led all of us into the dining room where my uncle Scrooge was sitting at the front of the table. I kissed his cheek with a small smile on my face.

“Hello lass, how was your day?” I nodded my head just sitting at the his right side with uncle Ludwig next to me.

“Do you want to hold my hand starchen?” My uncle murmured with a small smile in his face. I leaned my head against his shoulder with a small smile back.

“I know that a lot of you have been worried about me for the last month or so. I just want to let you know that there isn’t anything wrong with me living here. That’s not the problem. It has nothing to do with any of you. Family, I’m a lesbian. I’ve been dating Gosalyn for the last month and a half.” I admitted the thing that I had been hiding from everyone and I saw Dewey make a small fist bump.

“That’s it? That’s all that you wanted to tell us? Lass, we already figured that you had more than friendship feelings for your best friend. At least I did. What about you Donald?” My uncle Donald swept me into a big hug.

“Sabrina I’ve always loved you just the way that you were. The you that would hide herself away and read her books, the you that would play her violin only in the privacy of her own room, and the you that looked at Gosalyn like she hung you the moon stars. She makes you happy. I am so proud of you for telling me.” He encouraged me thumbing away the tears and my mom just wrapped her arms around the two of us tightly.

“I love you, so much Sabrina. There isn’t a thing wrong with you for feeling the way that you do about Gosalyn. Everyone in the world has someone that can match them. I genuinely think that she is yours.” My heart warmed into my chest and I looked over at Louie who had an understanding look in his eyes.

“I get why you kept it from us. You were scared that you would be rejected.” I nodded my head and Huey just ran to give me a tight hug.

“You’re still my favorite sibling sis, I’ll always think that you are. This is just another thing that I can add to the list of things about you that are amazing!” Huey had always been the brother that was closest to me and I watched Dewey bite his lower lip.

“She’s not the only one that’s not straight. I’m still trying to figure my sexuality out but I know that it isn’t just girls that I like.” Webby just squeezed my hand with a small smile. I knew that this was the happiest that I would ever be. Everyone in my family had accepted me the way that I wanted to be and the way that I was. And what in the world could have been better than that?

#DuckTales fic #ludwig von drake #ocs #writing #fanfic #requests

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ranmanjuu · 4 years

Note

not a request but can you imagine oda forces trying to play smash against the anti-oda or they all play minecraft together

i’ll expose myself here. i have never ever played smash (although minecraft steve being announced is super pog) so i can’t tell ya that part bud. but i can with the blok game. (disclaimer that this request was made after i closed it yet my heart said No, you actually Want to do this so here i am. most probably will be short).

‎

welcome folks, to SengokuSMP.

oda forces:

—nobunaga:

would be the one that steals your iron and shit. commits thefts willy nilly, and no one is exempt from this. if he needs it, he’ll get it with or without your consent.

would kill an iron golem for the few iron it gives

before he got his own base (cause i think he’d just spend most of his time mining and getting materials to protect himself) he’s probably just barge in the nearest bed and sleep in it, regardless of the owner.

his base would probably be built by hideyoshi or sumthn.

he prefers playing pvp more than just survival. since mc placed a kind of restriction for the end (and therefore blocking them from completing the game), he goes onto servers and practice his battles even in a block game.

1.9 axe-shield pvp. he’s tactical in knowing when to strike and block and to back down, and is immaculate with his crits.

—hideyoshi:

probably spends the first few days around nobunaga to protect him. he always fights off the mobs near him even if nobunaga can handle himself.

always reminds people to sleep every night, so that the phantoms don’t come. even though a lot of the players prefer to just stay up.

built a base for nobunaga near his mine cause he needs A Place and not just mooch furnaces and beds from other people.

spawned iron golems for “protection” but nobunaga keeps killing them cause it just gets in the way

would be the one to make mines 4 blocks high so you don’t Bump your head thing, probably like 3 block width and even staircases. would also be the one to make a safety railing across any bridges he finds.

if an ally, he’d greet new players and give them some extra stuff so that they have Something to start off with

i feel like he’d be a pve player idk why

—mitsuhide:

no one knows where he is most of the time. nor his base.

unless you see his nametag (which, most of the time, he’ll see yours first) it’s kinda hard to find him when he’s off and alone.

mf is the black market of the server. whatever potions, potion ingredients, or shit like that, he has. he probably owns like several wither skulls enough to summon a wither.

he would sneak around when mc is mining and just like. scare the shit out of them. the cave noises don’t help.

(the newest screenshot hasn’t been released yet but,) y’all know the warden? the new mob? cause it’s reliant on sounds, if anyone is ever in its proximity he’d throw like snowballs at them so that it goes after them. little shit.

bow skills?? perfect. even in a game his accuracy is spot on. you know those obstacles people make with like slime blocks and maybe mlg 360s? mf can do that

he probably knows enough redstone to make traps, too.

somehow knows what everyone has/doesn’t have.

—masamune:

prank ass bitch.

he probably has like a Source of tnts in his base or something. if anyone is moving out of their old base, he’ll either blow it up or burn it, whether they wanted to or not.

fuck it. he’ll do it even if you’re not moving.

probably doesn’t often sleep and would rather fight off the phantoms than anything.

he probably wants to defeat the dragon quick, cause it’s supposed to be the game’s ultimate goal. but because of the previous restrictions you put, he just goes off and fights other players (cough kenshin, nobunaga)

and when he does kill you, expect like half of your items to not be returned.

also one of the casual thieves in the server. he just doesn’t care that it Belongs to someone and just yoinks

also a pvp player, although i find him leaning more to 1.8 style. he will jitter click you out of existence.

has dogs because idk he gives off that vibe also they Attack.

—ieyasu:

does not log on much lol. he got on once and then Never Again. it’s only when you ask him that he begrudgingly does get in in his own contrarian way.

definitely goes wayy far out for more isolation cause he doesn’t want to get caught up with whatever shit masamune has.

the only major thing he did besides mining and everything was that he got a cat. and almost no one knows about it, other than you because:

“ieyasu has made the advancement [Best Friends Forever]!”

“mc: :OOOOO!!!!”

yeah, you never told anyone.

the longest time that he logged in at first was probably when he found out that cats sleep in beds and just. sat there as the night goes by in his bunker just watching and hearing it purr. he’s a bit irritated when the others tell him to sleep, but then see that the cat went and slept on him that secretly made his heart soft.

and then you insisted on going to his base which took a considerable amount of time, and even with his denying, you decide to decorate and expand his base! you also got to name the cat, but you never knew since you just said like “i’d name it [...]!” and later ieyasu found a name tag and actually did name it that.

—mitsunari:

he doesn’t run a lot i don’t feel. primarily because he was wonky with the controls from the start.

i feel like he’d have the brain to be a redstone engineer. he spends more time like, making those cool machines than anything (probably those that’d help out everyone like an automated farm, etc.)

thing is he forgot that he could die, so most of the time he’s just starve to death without even noticing it.

much like in real life, he always forgets to sleep. and that’s why phantoms are his number 2 in his cause of deaths.

doesn’t have an actual base. hideyoshi built a small one for him, but mitsunari kind of never uses it and just logs off on the spot. at this point it just became a part of the main buildings for everyone or something.

he doesn’t do an awful a lot of collecting and often asks others for some. and when he is given it, he goes “thank you ^^ <3″ and does like the happy-shift thing. it’s honestly too cute for it to be just pixels.

probably knows a lot about minecraft stuff too, it’s just that he never uses any of it.

—ranmaru:

he was so excited the first time you told him that he was invited to the smp of sengoku warlords! would probably frequent the most.

i think he’d just vibe really. not exactly going extremely into pve or pvp or redstone or building, he plays it at a very slow place and more like an animal crossing player would.

like, he builds a small farm and stuff. it isn’t as efficient as mitsunari’s, but it is what it is. also has an animal pen with loads of one animal category and he tends to let people use it with the exclusion of some (coughs masamune) as long as they breed them again or something.

and while he doesn’t go for the big projects, he is kind of a builder? he has the Aesthetic sense while building his house and stuff yk. would maybe lean into the cute, cottagecore stuff.

favorite food in game is probably cake! it takes more effort than most other foods and it just looks cute so he likes making them.

totally has shaders on.

is scared shitless of cave noises at times. you could play 11 near him and he’d just straight up panic and log off.

‎

uesugi-takeda forces:

—shingen:

i find him to be maybe one of those builders that stick to large projects and stuff idk why

he does other things too, mainly pvp (he likes to just head over to nobunaga’s base and kill him sometimes. not that the man doesn’t accept the challenge). would probably also be more into 1.9 pvp because he’s a very calculative person in fighting. yes even in block game.

but the first thing he built once he’s set from collecting materials, was a “restaurant”. for what, you ask? why of course he takes you on a minecraft date. that was the top of his list the moment you even told him about the smp

once the others found out (which was not that long) he just started bragging. kenshin burnt down the building later on.

but he always escorts mc or some shit while spewing out his Lines in chat, sometimes doing the bow in game thing. in response, there are several barfs in chat, and a list of people coming to kill him.

mf likes to combat log on kenshin when he’s on a Killing Spree for the shits and giggles.

—kenshin:

first time you told him about it, he was very happy to learn something about mc’s modern times, even if it’s a children’s game. unfortunately, he didn’t know what an ‘smp’ meant.

so when he logged on and saw that there were Other people, his smile turned into a deadly frown as he just began punching them to death. he only stopped when they ran off and you intervened.

he tried having you stick around longer when you were giving him a tutorial of how to play the game.

at first he only collected material to get stronger. and by that only sword because he sees no need in getting armor (he doesn’t die in battle irl, he can’t die in a simple game). but WRONG cause he got killed by shingen who, even though he had a stone axe, had iron armor while kenshin got nothing but an iron sword.

he doesn’t make a base (why do so many here don’t make bases istg). in fact, he doesn’t log on much.

at first, he only goes on if mc is on. it’s only when he sees that mc appreciates some of the work the others have put into things (like shingen’s builds, mitsunari’s redstone, etc.) is when kenshin tries to Do Things Too and kinda fail.

this man kinda has no aesthetic sense in the block game. but you give him a for effort.

1.8 pvper. he can definitely do 1.9, but more the former mostly cause his deadly anger makes him jitter click like crazy. often challenges others (consented or not) which mostly includes masamune and nobunaga, and he often surprise attacks shingen and sasuke.

—yukimura:

honestly a normal player in survival.

he makes a decent house, has some pretty strong gear, and just helps around his allies a lot (mostly {try to} drag kenshin away from trouble, scold shingen for being too close to mc {though it’s a him problem ngl} and just being a messy caretaker).

i feel like he’d enjoy tekkit tbh. sasuke would probably introduce it to him and he’d just generally enjoy it.

but this is about the smp

he got lucky the first drowned he killed dropped a trident and it’s been his favorite weapon.

probably tried at one point to build kenshin a small base but he wouldn’t listen so like. shrugs.

he’s a bit iffy with playing alongside the enemies in the same server, but they are kind of divided into two. and mc did say it was just for fun and games and they didn’t want to see actual wars be dragged into this, so he just lets it go and has fun.

he looks forward to beating the enderdragon a lot, when the end is available.

—sasuke:

oh Boy he’s having a field day. his adored sengoku warlords? playing minecraft, his childhood game??? absolute pog.

even though it was you who proposed the idea, the one who set up the server in the first place was sasuke, since he has more knowledge on that stuff.

since he got his bearings quicker than the rest from experience, and he was earlier to log on due to testing and stuff, he mostly helps you with building like the main hub, like the center place for everyone and generally things that involve helping the overall smp.

can mlg water bucket, through a lot of trial and error. he uses it mostly to make dramatic entrances where he drops from a hill and just not take damage.

^ speaking of Dramatic Entrances, he probably has a chest full of ender pearls for those specifically.

although he helps a lot with guiding everyone, at times, he pulls out the ol’ “sleep in the nether :)” suggestion just to troll

ngl he’d stick to his ninja thing and successfully make a redstone-wired door and has his banger secret base in it

—yoshimoto:

the s in smp doesn’t exist to him.

he’s just a collector, really. one of his first priority isn’t even materials like stone, the moment he finds any kind of flowers he’ll pick it up. it’s only when yukimura and sasuke actually Give him shit does he start living a not broke life.

probably dies a lot to mobs and stuff

but like legit, this man spent a long time collecting all 13 discs and almost every flower (yes, even the biome only ones) because he wants to take it all in. nevermind the fact that he can just listen to the discs online and all.

he’s immaculate in his aesthetics. even with just wood he makes his base look really cool ngl.

some parts of it are plastered with every painting there is in minecraft, or just item frames, or flowers in their pots. every decoration you can think of, lamps, campfires, even armor stands, he has them.

you gotta give him credit, it’s a lot of effort.

he often afks just to listen to the music even though, again, he could just listen to it online.

got into a bit of a spiel with ranmaru, since he unknowingly dyed a lot of his sheep (he did categorize it with color though). and so they made an agreement to just have every color sheep, and put them in different pens. so they just shared it now

he saw the cave updates and went silently bonkers because how pretty some look (like the lush caves? hello??)

he has like. 14+ texture packs and 4 different shaders ready at his settings.

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matildaofoz · 4 years

Text

Memento Mori Pt. 2 (Michael Langdon x Fem!Death!Reader)

Summary: After having sent Michael on his merry way to The Church of Satan, Death believes it's time to reveal herself before Jeff and Mutt can screw up the one good plan they came up with between them with their last remaining brain cell.

°°°

Your black stiletto heals clicked along the shiny white floors in the entry hall of Kineros Robotics, your equally black cape dress swished with every calculated step you took. What could you say, you loved the color.

It had been incredibly easy to enter the building and make it past the security guards. You didn't even have to slip into their minds, they were so entranced by your outward appearance alone, eating up your words while your invisible hands logged a private meeting at the same time Jeff and Mutt were meeting with Michael into the system.

You were so incredibly seductive to mere mortals, you mused, one corner of your lip quirking upward. Admittedly, the form you chose was nothing short of show-stopping. The (Y/C/H) glossy hair and (Y/C/E) eyes, paired with a feminine figure, graceful valleys and hills only accentuated by the form fitting dress you were currently wearing was your favorite out of all them. You glanced sideways at yourself in one of the countless full floor glass panes along the corridor as you made your way to the reception. You looked so wonderfully alive and the paradox wasn't lost on you.

You turned the corner and laid eyes on the figure sitting in front of a desk, devoid of any individualism and even you couldn't shove the proverbial stick up her backside further if you tried. Your gaze leveled at the red-haired woman, you approached the podium she resided on, coming to stand right at the edge of the table. She sensed you before she saw you, yet she refused to look up from whatever menial task she was currently engrossed in.

You remained silent, looming over her, still as stone. In a fight of wills, you always won. She finally glanced up over sickeningly purple rimmed glasses and took you in.

"Who are you and how did you get up here?" her voice condescending as she mustered you. You let her eyes glide over your black ensemble, baring teeth disguised as a bright smile.

"I have an appointment with Mr. Nutter and Mr. Pfister," you replied matter-of-fact. The irony of their names wasn't lost on you.

"No, you don't. I am in charge of all their appointments and I would have remembered you," she countered, distaste on her tongue.

"Oh, but I do. The reason you weren't made aware is because it's...well, classified," you retorted punctuating the last word, slowly but surely losing your patience with the woman. You watched as her nostrils flared ever so slightly at the remark. It was too easy to rile somebody like her up. Underachieving, overzealous and desperate to be taken seriously.

"Do check your calendar. I'm sure you'll find it," you encouraged her, now smiling coyly.

With a huff, she dragged her mouse on the screen to open the calendar. A moment of confusion flitted across her face that quickly passed to anger and finally trepidation. She cleared her throat in a desperate attempt to compose herself.

"Y-yes...you are right. Ms. (Y/L/N)?" she asked, suddenly so unsure of herself. If that was all it took to shake her tough exterior, there was little hope. Quicker than you had expected, she stood, producing a cane from behind her chair.

"Please, follow me," she said, her back rigid and it wasn't from her scoliosis that you could make out beneath her pressed blazer but embarrassment.

"Lead the way," you replied, motioning her to walk in front of you with a cocked eyebrow and a smile. If only she knew who she was sassing a moment earlier. Time and place you, reminded yourself as there were more pressing matters at hand. The impending apocalypse to be exact.

"Oh, before I forget, what's your name? I didn't catch it earlier," you inquired, walking a few steps behind her, hands clasped loosely behind your back as you sauntered down the long hallway.

"I-I never told you. I am Ms. Venable," she replied, her cane missing a beat at the question. She stopped in her tracks at the fault, clearly becoming more and more flustered by your presence. Good, you thought. She may not know it, but she could feel it.

"I think I can take it from here, it's the door on the right I presume?" you asked, stopping but a foot behind her. You may have been a little shorter than her in this human form, yet your presence towered over her, like an impending thunderstorm about to break.

"Y-yes, that's the one,"she confirmed, turning around to face you. There it was, clear as day on her face. The hint of recognition. Fear crept up her arms. She didn't know why she felt it, yet you did. You had met her before, caressed her cheek with invisible fingers when she was barely 12 years old, after the third operation to fix her spine left her flat- lining on the operating table. In that state between life and death she had seen your true form and she recognized it now in a dark crevice of her mind.

"Thank you, Ms. Venable, you are too kind. I can take it from here," you chided, your eyes looking past hers and into her soul. You wouldn't claim it today, no, that day way still a ways off but you enjoyed seeing it under these circumstances nonetheless.

Wordlessly she past you, her cane shaking slightly as she stalked off back to her throne. You felt the tears prick at her eyes.

“They've been waiting for the Antichrist. You just tell them what you want and when you want it and they have to do it. They're basically like your army, dude," you heard one of the men who didn't yet know they had an impromptu meeting with you, exclaim.

You walked closer to the big glass doors, listening.

"Well what am I supposed to do with them? If magic wasn't enough to bring around the end times-“ Michael began but Mutt interrupted him.

"No, no,no ,no you don't need magic to destroy the world bro, not when you have science,“ he explained gleefully.

"And humanity," Jeff intercepted. "People suck. They're selfish and short-sighted, all anyone cares about is immediate gratification,“ Jeff continued, snorting a line of cocaine to enunciate his point. All you could do was roll your eyes. These two were so laughable cliché and couldn't help but scoff as you overheard that last tidbit of their conversation. Dumb and dumber weren't ideal but despite their coked-out brains, they had actually managed to come up with a half decent plan. Michael at the head of the Cooperative would give him disposal of everything necessary. Deciding to make your presence known, you waltzed through the open doors, clapping slowly as you walked down the steps.

"Great job boys, you really outdid yourselves. Who would've thought two snow ploughs like you even have enough brain cells left to remember how to breathe, let alone come up with a half decent plan. I'm impressed."

At your footsteps, Jeff and Mutt had perked up, alarm in their face, looking from you, to each other and to Michael who still sat leaned back in his chair with his back to you.

“Who the fuck are you?" Mutt said, a scowl on his face at the insult, glancing at Jeff who looked just as perplexed at you showing up in their lab uninvited. You came to stand beside Michael's chair, your close proximity making him look up.

"Consider me...a stakeholder," you replied matter-of-factly, your fingers grazing the beveled glass edge of the table.

"You're no stakeholder. We own the entire company down to the last urine cake'" Jeff shot back with a shit-eating grin.

“Fucking right on, bro!” Mutt yelled, fist bumping the blonde.

"Not in your abysmally piss-poor sex-doll workshop disguised as a robotics company," you scoffed, disgust in your voice. Their shoulders slumped at your clap-back.

"The Apocalypse." You looked down at Michael then, winking. He seemed less confused about why you were here and more with what you where. You could feel him trying to slither into your mind, barely scratching at the surface, a mere tickle. He had so much to learn. With a flick, you shoved him off. His eyes narrowed then, clearly not used to somebody beating him at his own game.

“Who are you?” he asked low.

“Excellent question!” you answered him, walking around the back of his chair to place your hands on the backrest. Effortlessly, you swiveled him around to face you, as you began to pace.

"How about we make this fun, a riddle perhaps?" you mused looking down at your perfectly manicured nails as you stopped in the middle of the lab, a saccharine smile on your lips.

"I am alive yet to not breathe. I am ancient yet seductive to all men. You fear me and yet you crave me in your darkest hour. I am inevitable."

Your words hung in the air and you watched their faces, the cogs turning inside their heads. Michael watched you, his icy blue eyes searching your (Y/E/C) ones. Play along, you sing-sang mentally, staring him down with a mischievous glint.

"Thanos...You're Thanos?" Jeff muttered incredulously after a while and looked at Mutt for confirmation and the little stare-off between you and Michael was broken. Your smile dropped, your eyes snapping to the blonde muppet with a deadpan expression. What had you expected from somebody with a haircut like his. Clearly too much.

"Think again, peabrain," you retorted. The lights in the room began to flicker, the halogen bulb directly above you cracking, threatening to explode. You closed your eyes, taking a deep breath to compose yourself.

Jeff gulped audibly at your display and began furiously whispering with Mutt behind his hand, both of them wracking their brain for the obvious solution. Definitely too much coke, you thought.

“Death,” Michael said and solved your little riddle with a satisfied smirk, eyes lit up. Smart boy, you praised him, unspoken. A tiny blush crept up to bloom over his marvelous cheekbones at your words of praise. Over the past couple of months he had matured, the last remaining fat in his cheeks dissolving to give way to chiseled features. He was beautiful, you had to admit but then again, he was the son of Lucifer. You'd expected nothing short of awe-inspiring.

“It wasn't hard,” he remarked, the smirk spreading over his plump lips as he lent back in the chair, knees falling outward. Man-spreading, were we, you chuckled at his cocky display. He still had so much to learn.

“So clever, hmm?” you lulled, striding up to him to stand between his knees in a blink. Michael didn't flinch at your sudden proximity.

“Perhaps a little too much for your own good, boy wonder,” you berated, bending at the waist to whisper in his ear, sending chills flitting down his spine. You lifted you hand from behind your back, your index finger coming to rest under his angular chin, tilting it up so he would look you in the eyes, bare inches from his. Jeff and Mutt, utterly flabbergasted on the other side of the table completely forgotten by both you and him.

“I think it's high time we had a little chat. After all, the last time we met, you weren't in the best shape, crying for daddy dereast on the cold forest floor, were you now?” Michael's eyes widened at your words, finally recognizing your aura from the woods. He wasn't sure what he had felt that day the visions came, ultimately leading him to the Church of Satan. He was taken aback momentarily, drawing in a deep breath, bewildered, then his face morphed into a scowl at your revelation. How dare you make him look weak in front of his followers.

“Now, now, Michael. You'll get wrinkles and you're far too pretty for that,” you remarked, looking down at him through thick lashes, your fingers smoothing over the deep lines furrowed between his brows. So soft. He really was a sight to behold, all riled up and flustered. You stood back up, smoothing over your skirt.

“I don't know about you but all this talk about the apocalypse has me positively starving. Let's continue this over dinner, shall we?” you asked without waiting for an awsner from him and sauntered over to the glass doors, your hand coming to rest on the handle as you waited, patiently, yet again, for Michael to catch on.

“Go, dude! You heard the Lady...errr Death,” Jeff urged Michael, who was taken aback by your brazen display of power. He didn't like it when people made him look weak and yet he needed to know more about you and why you were in the woods that day.

Curiousity finally killed the cat and he stood to walk up to you.

“Fine. But you owe me awsners,” he bit, hands clenched at his sides. You laughed, loud.

“I don't owe you jack shit sweety, but keep telling yourself that. Now get a move one, we are on the clock.” Without looking back at the blonde antichrist, you walked out the door, spring in your step, your heels clicking on the ground in staccato. Michael turned to look back at the two men briefly, their mouths agape before huffing and jogging after you.

°°°

Tag list:

@sexwon131 @leatherduncan @rocketgirl2410

#michael langdon x reader #michael langdon x you #michael langdon #ahs apocalypse

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nutty1005 · 4 years

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The Gamer Monster Xiao Zhan – It’s not that I am afraid of losing, I just want to win.

Original Article: https://www.weibo.com/ttarticle/p/show?id=2309404484936814952856#_0 Original Author: 小胖子 (Published by: 爱战DAYTOY_1005)

(TN: This is more related to physical games as opposed to video games.)

The highlights of Xiao Zhan in games…

From hopscotch of our childhood, to table top games, to even ice breaker games in working life, games can be considered as a common activity in our lives. Where do all the fun in games come from? A part of it comes from the interaction among friends, and a big part of it comes from competition and the joy of victory. In order to obtain victory in games, you need to find the shortest path to the goal, and that is like problem solving – you need analysis and understanding to find the crux, and you need effective techniques to solve it. Different games have different requirements – some need you to have swift reactions, some need strategies, some would need logical thinking, some needs endurance and patience, some require teamwork, some require physical strength…

When we speak of “Gamer Monster”, I feel that this person would at least be outstanding in most of the above mentioned requirements, so when I saw some comments that Xiao Zhan is a “Gamer Monster”, my first thought was to ask – what qualities does Xiao Zhan have to be called a “Gamer Monster”? After doing some research into his history, I appeared to have found my answer.

Top 2 Moments of Gamer Xiao Zhan

When we speak of the top moments in Xiao Zhan’s game history, we would have to praise the two “45° Inclined Soda” and “Who’s on the Shiatsu Pad”. After watching these two, all I have to say is – intelligence is a good thing.

45° Inclined Soda

Game Mission: To drink the soda in the can down to a specific amount such that the can is able to stand inclined at 45° on the table, as shown in the image below, balanced on a corner:

Xiao Zhan was the first of the eight to complete the mission – what seemed like random chance was actually calculated.

At the end of the game, Xiao Zhan spoke about the secret to this game – “It’s just the principle of equilateral triangle, so you have to drink until the bottom becomes an equilateral triangle, then the corner will be stable.”

In fact, this is a very simple theory, we just need to ensure that the center of gravity of the can is above the corner, and we will be able to ensure the can’s stability; when this happens, we would have an equilateral triangle. For Xiao Zhan, as an art student, to quickly react to with this physics and math theory, we should be quite glad to know that we do not really forget what we learn in school after all.

Who’s on the Shiatsu Pad?

Game Mission: One of the five members of Group A is standing on the shiatsu pad, only their upper bodies are visible. Group B will need to guess who is standing on the shiatsu pad by giving them specific instructions to complete.

From the first look of this mission, most of us would probably have the same idea – let the 5 of them jump on the spot, the one who is jumping on the shiatsu pad is probably in pain. But after understanding Xiao Zhan’s strategy, you might feel that your idea might be a bit too flimsy, after all, people can be acting.

So, what did Xiao Zhan do?

First, he let each of them hop past each position. (It seemed logical, since someone’s expression is bound to slip.)

But! At the end, Xiao Zhan said that he was not looking at the expression of the person jumping, but at the expressions of those at the side – when the person jumps on the location of the shiatsu pad, the surrounding 4 persons would unintentionally look at position, and he used that location to determine the person who was standing on it.

Shocking! We did not know that you’re Mr. Xiao-Calculated-Psychiatrist-Zhan!

Full Marks on Skills, Full Marks on Attitude Sporting:

What is idol image? I don’t know

There are those with idol-worthy looks, but tosses his image away like trash.

There is this game that both guys are tied together with a long rubber robe and they would need to bring items from the basket to their respective tables. Xiao Zhan, in order to increase friction with the ground, took off his shoes and socks, totally ignoring his idol image.

In addition, there is this game where they were to put on pants without hands, and all kinds of weird positions were used.

The only thing we can see in all his expression and his casually tossed away image is – I! Want! To! Win!

Memory Power: I am a lines robot with emotion

When it comes to games that require memory power, Xiao Zhan’s teammates would unanimously nominate him to participate. In the lines memorization game, both teams were to reenact classic scenes from Chinese Drama, and the team with the most number of correct lines would win.

The first scene is a classic scene from “Romance in the Rain” (TN: This scene is already a meme in China.):

(TN: This is the meme edit, where Wang Xueqin would be relentlessly pounding on a door and yelling at the people behind the door.)

Xiao Zhan was acting as … the door, but he is not an ordinary door – he is not only a talking door, he can also remind his teammates of his lines. It’s a door with lines prompting and lines correction.

The second scene is a classic scene from “My Fair Princess”, a conversation between Meng Dan and Han Xiang.

This part was slightly longer, Xiao Zhan not only had to memorize the lines for two persons, he also acted as both roles, and in the end he won the victory for the team, unlocking the title “The Lines King”.

Self Control: A real man will not smile if he does not want to

From many of Xiao Zhan’s interviews we could see that he has a lot of self control – he spoke of dieting and his strict self discipline in his work and daily life. We can see this once again in his performance in the game.

This game required the other participants to try to make him smile/laugh, whereas he will need to control his emotions and not smile/laugh. Xiao Zhan was the only one in the entire session to not only maintain his emotions, he was actually attempting to cry, and in the end he made the other participants laugh instead.

Reflexes: As fast as a rabbit

This is a game where the participants were assigned values, such as 1 dollar or 50 cents. When the game master calls for a specific amount (e.g. 2 dollars), the participants will need to quickly gather together to form the called amount. If you are not part of any group, you would be eliminated. This game required fast reflexes, and Xiao Zhan displayed his quick reflexes by ending the game before anyone else has realized.

In the trash segregation segment for his “Happy Camp” episode, Xiao Zhan not only reacted fast, he also used his actions to prove that “if you change your answers fast enough, you can’t be wrong”.

Using his own advantage: With my looks, I can be whimsical

In the challenge “send a Weibo post without using hands”, Xiao Zhan chose to use his nose, and only spent 52 seconds to sent a 9 worded (TN: Chinese words) Weibo post, winning the challenge.

In the background and in the comments were full of “Zhan Zhan’s nose is so good looking!” You can say that he does whatever he wants with his looks.

Serious challenger: Let’s play well together, shall we?

During team games, we can observe that Xiao Zhan would always be patiently explaining his ideas to his teammates, and suggesting on how to cooperate in order to meet the goal more effectively.

Not only he does this to his teammates, he is also very serious and respectful to his opponents. In this game, where both of them were to cross a log bridge in a sack, and if you were to fall, you would have to start from the beginning. In the whole process, as long as the opponent fell off, he would push Xiao Zhan off the bridge, so that both of them would have to restart together. Despite all these, Xiao Zhan did not get angry, but instead after noticing his opponent’s frustrations, he calmly said “Let me teach how to play this game, let’s play this round well shall we?”

In this, we not only see his serious attitude for fair play, we also see his good nature and good upbringing.

After reviewing so many of his exciting moments, do you want to play a game with Xiao Zhan?

Easter Eggs!

Try to guess what Xiao Zhan is gesturing! (Answers at the end.)

1. Guess an item used during Chinese New Year

2. Guess a plant/flower

3. Guess something that flies

4. Guess an activity that the elderly like to gather and do

5. Guess a cartoon character

Answers:

Firecracker

Sunflower

Rocket / Space Shuttle

Square Dance

Teletubbies

Follow 爱战DAYTOY on WeChat for more articles.

#xiao zhan #sean xiao #xiaozhan #肖战

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blubberquark · 4 years

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Things To Think About Before You Implement Online Multiplayer

Sometimes people ask “how do I make an online multiplayer game?“ and then somebody answers “you don’t, you haven’t even made a game as simple Tetris yet“, and somebody else answers: “I never made an online game, but you should use TCP/IP. Here’s a link to the socket documentation.”

That’s just terrible. Sockets are low-level and tricky to get right.

Or maybe somebody links that poor sod to this YouTube video about how modern 3D shooter games do netcode. That’s also bad, but slightly less so. Game netcode is complicated, but not every game needs real-time shooting action.

Maybe you use Unity3D, and you just use the standard Unity networking tools that let a player host a game and automagically synchronise the state of game objects between all players. I think they changed that recently. Maybe the Unity3D multiplayer features are not at all what you need. Maybe you are in luck and you need something much simpler.

If you’re an experienced programmer, you already know how much of a hassle low-level networking can be, or you’re a beginner and would rather use a readymade networking layer for your engine. How do you evaluate which system is right for your game?

Sometimes a game can be easily made into an online multiplayer game, except for one or two features. It can help if you think about how game mechanics are interacting with online multiplayer while you design the game. If you design your game from the ground up to be easy to adapt to online multiplayer, you will have an easier time later. Multiplayer is like AI in that regard. Rather than making your AI smarter, you can also make your game world easier for simple algorithms to navigate.

This post will not teach you how to make multiplayer games. That is very much on purpose. It’s more general than that. This post is meant to make you think about what kind of multiplayer system your game needs. If you understand that, you can look at tutorials, protocols, libraries for networking, or prefab high-level multiplayer systems, and evaluate whether these are a good fit for your game.

Time Scale, Turn Structure

Real-Time: All players are in the game at the same time, seeing and interacting with each other. Waiting/standing around thinking might mean losing the initiative. Examples: Quake, StarCraft.

Turn-Based: Whichever way the turn order is decided - alternating players, active time battle, simultaneously, alternating units a la Worms - players have time to think their turn through, and don’t need to have fast reaction times. Players need for their opponents to finish their turns, but there can be a turn timer or a chess clock/byoyomi. Example: Advance Wars, Hearthstone.

Turn-Based (Play By E-Mail): This is like turn-based, except players don’t actually wait their turn inside the game. Instead they get an e-mail notification that their opponent made a move, have a couple of days to make their move, start the game, make their move, close the game, and wait for another e-mail. Example: Chess 2: the Sequel, Laser Squad Nemesis, Frozen Cortex.

Slow Real-Time: The game happens in real-time, but there is no real bad consequence for taking hours to perform an action. When you attack another player, it takes a day or so for the army to arrive. When you build a house, construction takes two hours. Many actions are instantaneous, but have half-hour cool-downs. You cannot really lose. It’s long-term and low-stakes in the short term. Examples: BattleNations, OGame, Pokemon Go.

If you’re doing real-time multiplayer, you might have to use UDP or a UDP-based networking system like ENet. If you’re making a turn-based game, you can get away with TCP, and if you’re making a slow or play-by-email game, you will be more concerned with saving game state to a database than with optimising network latency, so you can use a high-level RPC library on top of TCP or even a REST API on top of HTTPS.

This stuff is really important to figure out early: If your game is slow real-time, you probably need a database, but you don’t need any client-side prediction. It’s fine if some actions, like building a house in a city-building game, take half a second. You can hide the delay pretty easily. And when the actions by other players arrive ten seconds late and out of order, it doesn’t matter either. If you make an online city-builder game for the iPad, you don’t need the lag-reducing tricks used in Halo, but you will need to worry about saving the cities somewhere when users log off.

But imagine a one-second lag in a tennis game, or imagine your game nice and responsive, but then you hit the ball from your perspective only, and not in the view of the other player! In that case, you need something that’s both fast and accurate.

Related links:

https://gafferongames.com/post/networked_physics_2004/

https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/synchronous_rts_engines_and_a_tale_of_desyncs/

https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/synchronous_rts_engines_2_sync_harder/

Metagame/Save State

Persistent State: When the players log off, the state is kept, or saved on the server, to be loaded again in the next play session. (as opposed to ephemeral state: When the game ends, ephemeral data is discarded)

Replays: Players can save and re-watch game replays.

Ladder: The server maintains win/loss stats and skill estimates for players.

Lobby, Server Browser: There is a UI to choose a server, start a game, and find or talk to players before the actual game starts.

This is not important to implement right away, but worth keeping in mind.

If your game world is living on the server, and the server is running all the time, you need to use some kind of ACID database to store the game state, or a method to regularly save savegames on the server, in case somebody in the data centre trips over the cable, or, far more likely, your server code crashes. You probably don’t need to save everything, but again, probably things like currency, XP, inventory and quest state are important, mob positions, health, mana and animation state less so.

You might want to have a “lobby“ client that lets you browse and connect to servers, chat with other players, and look up ladder statistics. Sometimes the “lobby“ client doesn’t load the full game engine, but is a regular desktop program built using a normal GUI toolkit, that lets you configure the game and find other players, before the actual game engine is started. SpringLobby is such a “lobby client“.

If your game engine is deterministic, you can just store actions or input data, and if you feed that into the engine again at the right times you have a working replay system. Otherwise you need to think about how replay would work, and what to save in a replay file.

It is especially important to keep such metagame features in mind because if you simplify your game design or deliberately cut some corners in your game design, implementing server-side persistence becomes much easier.

If your game is play-by-email, or has a significant ladder/social component, you need some server-side persistence, to store player profiles, replays of finished games, win/loss statistics, or game states of unfinished games.

It might make sense to have a lobby client while you’re developing an online game, even when you will later want to have everything in one process, one GUI toolkit, and one engine: When you’re using PyGame, you could have one TkInter program that connects to the server browser and chat system, which then launches another process that uses PyGame and no Tk.

There are advanced topics, like detecting de-synchronisation, host migration and streaming game state to late joiners, that you probably won’t need to worry about in your first game. What you need to do is to think about what kind of game you are making, and what kind of networking your game would need.

Would it be a big deal if two players see different things? How badly will lag affect gameplay? Can lag be hidden by starting actions locally before the server confirmed then? What must be computed on the server, and what can be done on the clients?

Then, and only then, can you decide to just use whatever networking comes with your game engine.

#programming #networking #online multiplayer #game development

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rotzaprachim · 5 years

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марсианка (KOS The Martian AU)

This started with me thinking SPACE PIRATE NIKOLAI, and then not wanting to have to google a bunch of Star Wars shit to write that AU, and then remembering Mark Watney Space Pirate, and then writing that convo out, and then this whole mess grew from that one scene, and it’s almost 2000 words. So: Space Pirate Zoya.

I know nothing about space or space agencies. I apologise so much.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/17714387 - AO3 link

----

He talks to her in Russian, over the coms. English is the main language of communication with Earth; it’s what she leaves her logs in, it’s what she got her climatology doctorate in even if, for the most elemental things, she looks out at the night sky and thinks, כוכב, kochav, before she hears the English. نجم, звезда, those come easily, too. And তারকা, she reminds herself. Najim, zvezda, tārakā. You play such games with your mind to keep from losing your grasp on earth, all the way up here.

Russian, though, it’s what her aunt spoke to her in, after she saved her life, in a tiny flat in a smoggy bloc of Petah Tikvah. The current pulls her home.

“Nazyalenskaya,” he drawls over the fritzy connection system, “I want to kill Rietveld.”

She quirks a smile at that; everyone has wanted to kill Rietveld. She would give a lot to want to kill Rietveld right now.

“I think you can spare him another day. If only for all the Van Halen tapes he left behind. And the ridiculous quantity of Indonesian rap.”

“I’m never going to forget about that.”

“Hmmmm, I’d be careful about talking, considering the number of romance novels I’ve found on the system, downloaded by one N. Lantsov.”

“In the face of oblivion,” she tells the crew of the Терешко́ва, “the only course of action left is to science the shit out of this.”

How does it feel to be the dying goddess of your own planet?

Sometimes, that’s what she feels like, when she pulls water from Rocket fuel. No one around to hear her swear.

It may be on Mars, but growing potatoes in a literal field of shit pulls her from that revery, into some kind of ancestral, rain-soaked Russian field.

She wonders, absentmindedly and only half-jokingly, if she’s gonna be here long enough that attempting to distil some vodka for the pain would be worth it.

No. She’ll pull herself out of this on pure spite alone, if she has to. It’s gotten her out of other tough places. She’ll pull herself out of this mess, and above a dust clogged atmosphere to the sky above, and all the way home. She’ll buy a cheap- no, an expensive one, it’s what Earth owes her- an expensive bottle of wine from a corner store and uncork it with her eyes out to the sea and she’ll drink life down to the dregs.

I am not going to die here.

Look at the stars she tells herself, and try not to feel the fear.

The first English poem she memorised through to the end. Sarah Williams, the full version, not the one chopped to a fridge-magnet length quote. Reach me down my Tycho Brahe, -- I would know him when we meet. Considering that in its entirety it’s about a scientist comprehending his own imminent mortality, it is perhaps not the best choice of reading material. You may tell the German college that their honour comes too./But they must not waste repentance on the grizzled savant’s fate; Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.”

She was a girl, once, and she wanted to get away and leave her old life in flames behind her, and she did. She ran and ran and ran, past national borders and past agencies with long acronyms and past the fiery bounds of earth herself. She ran until, quite literally, she could go no further, until she was a woman in a duct-taped house in a place no thing can live, like some kind of mid 21st century Slavic witch.

“Not only am I the best meterologist on earth, I’m the best fucking botanist on this planet. Best surgeon, best cook, best-” she isn’t one to lighten the mood, usually, but what else is there- “best lover.”

She points up, through the palm branches of the sukkah’s roof and to the night sky above.

“You can see Mars, right there? See, you can see me. It’s not that far away.”

Lada doesn’t seem convinced.

“You might not come back-”

“You think a few million kilometers is gonna stop me from getting back to my best research partner? Huh. Thought you knew me better than that.”

“A few million?”

“Closer than the nearest bus stop.”

“It’s gonna be years.”

“And so? I’ll expect you to be a proper scientist, when I get back. Or a proper poet, or painter, or chicken farmer.”

“But you’ll come back?”

“There’s nothing that can stop me.”

“Nazyalenskaya,” he asks, and in her name is the universe. “How are you?” is not the question to ask a lone crew member stranded literally on Mars. “We got a letter from your family. Gonna patch it through to you.”

“What do you suppose the requirements for building a sukkah on Mars are?”

Not that there’s much of a rule book for this kind of thing, but it’s something she thinks about. Humans, they look at the void and the unlivable planet, and they make it theirs. Genya’s calculations for the direction to face Mecca. The whole crew’s World Cup fervor. The solid week she and Rietveld spent in a subtle face off with the rest of the crew about using the big screen to keep up with Eurovision. The constant, unending, awkwardness of Ghafa and Rietveld, though both were far too professional to act on it.

“Red wire to the green and-”

“Lotta fucking duct tape, I know.”

Repairing the rover- that’s a lot of fun. She never really learned how to fix cars, back home. But it gives her something to do, something active, besides staring at potato plants.

She opens another one of her precious rovers for the parts. A weather probe. Says a silent prayer for the death of science.

It’s a long way to Schiaparelli crater. Zoya’s hated road trips for as long as she can remember, both in the environmentalist, fume-hating way, and also in the traffic-hating kind of way. So, she tells herself. Channel that spite into doing what scares you.

“Nazyalenskaya,” he says, “I’ve been thinking about the international implications of what you’re trying to do.”

“Mhmm” she says

“First off, I’d like to thank you for being possibly the most diplomatically complicated climatologist alive. Got Roscosmos, ISRO, and the ISA all breathing down my necks.”

“Good. Use it. Play ‘em against each other. This is either the biggest propaganda win or worst failure of their fucking lives.”

“The other thing is law on Mars. There’s an international treaty saying no country can claim anything that’s not on earth. By another treaty, if you’re not in any country’s territory, maritime law applies. So, Mars is international waters.”

Treaties, red tape, diplomatic stuff- that was never her job. Her job was making sure that six other people could breathe in space. Maintaining, linking the systems of the Hab to be survivable.

The storms, though, that was why she was really there. Or at least, that’s what pulled her from earth. The kinds of weather this galaxy had, beyond the limits of earth.

(Once upon a time, Mars had a viable atmosphere. Once upon a time. She looks out at the orange hellscape and wonders: will this be us?)

And then a storm had been her death. She was just biding her time until it happened.

Pessimism. What else was left?

“So?”

“So, Nazyalenskaya, the Hab’s a tripartite effort. ESA, Roscosmos, CNSA. Non-military, but you know as well as I do there’s enough earth-based bitching about who owns it. The second you walk outside, though, you’re in international waters. Soon-”

“No-”

“Soon you’re gonna leave it for the Schiaparelli crater, and you’re gonna commandeer the Ares lV lander. No one on earth gave you explicit permission to do this, and they can’t until you’re back with us on Терешко́ва .”

She realises where this is going. “Fucking hell, Lantsov, not more with the-”

“So you’re going to be taking a craft into international waters without permission, which by definition makes you a pirate. “

Even she cracks a smile.

“DOCTOR ZOYA NAZYALENSKAYA, SPACE PIRATE!”

She can feel the excitement down the line.

“I better get an eye patch at the end of all this.”

“Nothing less for the best meteorologist on the planet.”

“A ship. Commandeered Spanish galleon.”

“Of course.”

“Crate full of gold bullion.”

“I promise you. I think the rest of the crew’s been planning their first meal back on earth for the last year.”

“Shut the fuck up. You’re not the ones living off potatoes and protein bars.” She’d found a few secreted-away bottles of kecap manis and a jar of sambal oelek in Rietveld’s luggage, which- completely against regulations for cargo by weight, but it’s inadvertently the best thing he’s ever done for her. At least when she eats her dwindling space rations, she can burn her fucking tongue off, due to Rietveld’s stubborn Dutch insistance to never listen to any rules, ever.

“Yes, but. We’ve heard all the drafts of the epic-length poem Yul-Bataar’s written to herald you with on your return.”

“Almost makes me want to die alone on Mars.”

“Hush up. We’ve already had to watch your funeral once. I even wrote a speech.”

“I better get a recording of that when I get back,” she says. “You better have cried. You better have wept over the untimely demise of Earth’s best meteorologist.”

“You better believe it was a speech for the ages. Wait, i can find a draft and read it-”

“Save it. I want to savour my death, after I know I’m gonna live.”

“This is next level Slav gallows humour. How many people get to watch their own funerals?”

Zoya Nazyalenskaya does not giggle, but the thought of all those puffed-up world leaders saying things about her importance, her intelligence, her beauty. (Will men see anything else?) Shedding a few tears about a brown, Jewish, Russo-Bengali meteorologist who’d they’d barely cared to listen to in her life, but here, dead, she’s the ultimate pawn in their games. . . .

It might make her laugh. Slightly.

And then she thinks about Aunt Liliyana and Lada sitting shiva for her in that flat in Haifa. The first thing she’d bought with her earnings after the ESA had taken her on was a nicer flat for the two of them, in walking distance to the sea.

“Lantsov,” she says, although it feels like exposing some part of herself she doesn’t want to recognise. “Lantsov, keep talking. Please.”

“Of course. What about?” “The crew’s first meal. Back on earth. What is it?”

“Zenik said red-velvet waffles with, quote, “a fuckton of whipped cream. An entire can of whipped cream.” Andreyev like a good Moldovan says it’s gotta be sarmale, and I swore Rietveld lives off coffee and the destruction of his enemies but I know he’s got a thing for nasi goreng and. . ..”

This is a dumbass long-shot solution that will probably get them all killed.

It takes a certain kind of long-shot nihilistic self-destruction to enter the airless murder void in the first place, but this is. ..

“The only thing that might work.”

Bo nods and then glares at him to shut up.

The ship’s got a big whiteboard, and Bo’s hands move almost as fast as his mouth does as he sketches, scribbles, draws, talks. They’ve got a direct, illegal, verboten, unknown, lifesaving link through to the CNSA, and as Kuwei’s the only native Mandarin speaker aboard, he’s the main one doing the talking. He’s a chemist, though, - Ghafa’s the pilot, Zhabin’s the chief navigator, and it’s a controlled frenzy of different langauges and disciplines as the crew hashes out the most wild rescue plan in human history.

“How do we know-”

“He’s the best astrodynamacist alive. Also, my dad, but-”

He, Zhabin, Ghafa and Rietveld all independently run the calculations.

Да, Да, हाँ, Ja.

“Who’s ready to go against the explicit instructions of five space agencies to bring the best space pirate alive back home?”

It was never even a choice.

“Zoya,” he says, over the link. “We’ll get you home.”

#zoya nazyalensky #nikolai lantsov #zoyalai #grishaverse #grishaverse modern au #the martian au #the martian #zoyalai fic #my writings #grishaverse fics #gen

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saizoswifey · 5 years

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Thank you so much! Would you be able to do a character analysis for slbp's Hideyoshi? I just can't get a grip of him for some reason >.

Sure thing!

I’m always down to talk about Hide. You’re not alone, anon. I’ve heard a lot of people say that Hideyoshi is a bit tough to understand, or they don’t truly grasp his character and route. I’ll admit, I was a die-hard Inuchihoe early on and I had a bit of a sour taste in my mouth from Inuchiyo’s route when I went into Hideyoshi the first time, and therefore I didn’t give him the chance he deserved. The second time I played him, my eyes were really opened to his character!

If you understand Hideyoshi and how he operates, you can start to see that his event stories (and even his route story) are some of the best writing in the game.

I’m doing this while sick, so hopefully, my ramblings will make sense. I’m putting this under a cut because of length. (this is…..pretty damn long lol)

And at the risk of going all ‘heart-eyes Mitsunari rant’ about Hide, here we go~

So, Hideyoshi’s past is a bit of a mystery. I don’t know if we will ever get answers for some stuff (kind of like Kenshin). However, we do know that he was born a commoner. In several event stories, we’ve seen him and his connection with kids in the area. Whether just playing with them or helping to educate them, he’s an incredibly kind person with a big heart at the root of everything he does.

Hideyoshi is great because of his humble beginnings. As a character that has seen poverty, he is not only better equipped to be comfortable among a wider variety of people but he has a better understanding of how the ‘everyman’ operates. This makes him a much better general and negotiator. Because of this, often times we see Hideyoshi sent out to settle uproars in villages, offering insight into how villages will react to things and solutions to handle it. This is one of the qualities I think Nobu recognizes and prizes in him.

And that’s not all. His background allows him to see people for their talents and heart instead of their rank in life, unlike some other samurai who put their trust based on birthright, wealth, and rank. Hideyoshi’s trust and faith are not bought, it’s earned. Because of this, when he believes in you, he believes with everything he has. This, in turn, brings intense loyalty back towards him, because his retainers feel special and chosen. It creates a very intense bond and you can see why Mitsunari and the rest treasure him so much.

I also think this is a reason Nobunaga enjoys Hideyoshi so much. Hide may be more of a “blind follower” compared to Mitsuhide, (who operates on a moral compass and actively speaks against Nobu), this is another example of how far Hideyoshi is willing to push himself for those he truly believes in, and how much he trusts that even if he has to do some unsavory things, it’s for the greater good and Nobu knows what he is doing.

This extends to MC as well. When Hide comes to bat for you, it’s because of you, and nothing will change his mind, no matter where or what you come from.

He’s a very complex character.

While he is a kind person, a good majority of his outward appearance is a persona. A mask of what he thinks he should act like. He doesn’t show his heart or his true intentions to anybody. It’s clear he’s been hurt and betrayed before, and he believes that the majority of people pretend to be kind and good while hiding their true evil intents. That people are willing to turn on you at a moments notice.

He’s gotten to where he is in life by understanding what people want to see in him and transforming himself into that image. But he is only able to do that because he possesses a very intelligent understanding of exactly how people work. Hideyoshi’s understanding of people is among the best in the game, up there with ninja like Saizo.

He’s extremely perceptive at all times, and his ability to see through a persons mask into their true intentions and desires has made it very easy for him to manipulate them and also climb the ranks.

However, I say he is complex because I don’t think he is always manipulative. It’s true that less than a handful of people have actually seen Hideyoshi being himself. But. His quest to be where he is at the side of Nobunaga, I think, is very much honorable and about making life, in general, better for the place he lives and the people in it. He knows better than most the hardships that life in a tumultuous world can bring, he’s lived it first hand. And he truly cares about making it better. We even see that one of his favorite places, a place he’s never taken or spoken about to anyone but MC, is a place he can look out over the town.

This is another Hideyoshi trait Nobunaga understands and appreciates, and a reason he cherishes Hideyoshi so much.

What is a bit comical to me is the fact that people often dismiss Hideyoshi as a simple flirt/funny character/goofball, and forget how seriously intelligent he actually is. And that’s honestly a huge theme in his MS and a lot of ES, lol!

He’s a character with a TON of internal struggle. We see it hard in his MS, and although it may not have been the most romantic MS out there (a part of why I think a lot of people dislike it), it was packed with a lot of character development.

We often see him grapple with the fact that he’s moved up in the ranks from nothing while being looked down on by many for not being born in the Samurai class. People around him write him off as Nobunaga’s “stupid monkey,” the guy who dances and acts like a silly fool to entertain the lord of fools, and chalk up his closeness to Nobu as nothing more than that. They don’t see how calculated and perceptive he actually is. Sometimes, it works to his benefit. He can outfox opponents, and he’s even been known to get the jump on “genji” a few times.

But on the flip side, we see that this has Hideyoshi doubting himself, a LOT. He struggles with the idea that perhaps that IS the only reason he is kept around, and therefore pushes himself over and over again to be worthy of where he is. He holds a lot inside of him, and takes on tasks alone instead of asking for help when he truly needs it. We see my favorite example of this in the ES where he tries to move those logs in the rain all by himself. And when MC finds him and helps, he breaks down and admits that he has a very hard time showing and admitting that he needs help and is struggling. He is so afraid of looking like he is worth nothing that he would take the weight of the world on his shoulders alone to hide even the tiniest shred of weakness in himself.

He is an intensely jealous character, as much as he tries not to be. Not just in love but in what he sees in those around him. I think that aside from believing in them, he keeps those around him close because they have traits he envies.

He’s a nice middle ground between Mitsunari and Inuchiyo. He’s intelligent and loyal like Mitsun, willing to follow orders, but he takes more direct approaches at times although he’s not as hot-headed as Inuchiyo.

I think he wishes he could take more risks without care like Inuchiyo does. Inuchiyo has a well-off family and can afford to screw up. I think that’s a big part of his friendship-rivalry with Inuchiyo. Hideyoshi feels like he has everything to lose, and because of that, he is constantly trying to sell himself to everyone, including himself!

He truly feels that he is unworthy of his life and position and that no one accepts him because he was born poor. He has to work his ass off for every bit of credit and acknowledgment he is given. His wins are a result of that hard work, and he acts on a principle that if he fucks up it could be the end for him. He has nowhere else to go. So he takes things very seriously and of course gets upset when people like Inuchiyo act rashly or when someone takes their high birth for granted because he’s had to work at least twice as hard to even be on equal footing.

So, long story short. He is a kind-hearted character, an insanely intelligent man who acts goofy and puts on the thick charm because he’s not only trying to convince you but everyone around him that he is worthy of your time and trust, and that he is worthy to be alive and standing where he is. And nothing puts him at ease more than feeling like he can let his guard down because he’s been accepted as he is.

#slbp #samurai love ballad party #toyotomi hideyoshi #hideyoshi slbp #hideyoshi character analysis #my writing #little lady speaks #Anonymous

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caitos-corner · 2 years

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I was tasked with logging my use of social media and technology. I am not a big Facebook user, I don't have social media accounts that I use at all. I have Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Gab, etc. The only one I use is Facebook. No problem, I don't use social media much. However, I do use technology. I find myself surfing the net several times a day just to look up information, read current events, or to pass the time. I like to text and if time permits, I get into a texting conversation, I find myself using talk to text and give quite lengthy soliloquies. I don't proof read, so after I hit send, I have to send more texts to correct my mistakes. My friends have a laugh about that.

I do know my weaknesses though, and it is not text. In so much as I don't like to admit it, I like to play games on my phone. The problem is that I allowed them to take up so much of my time that I had to uninstall some of them. Which ones? Clash of Clans and Merge Dragons. I was wasting too much time. Regarding Merge Dragons, they frequently have three day events. If you don't spend money, it will take three full days and you MIGHT reach the end of the event and get your bonuses. I was finding myself zombified, staring at my screen, getting headaches and neckaches. I did nothing but get frustrated, angry at not finishing, and generally disappointed in myself as I would like to think I am a grown up. So once I decided these games are not healthy for me, I uninstalled them. Max Stossel would be proud.

I gave this background information because I was excited to see my progress as I don't spend much time on my phone or using technology or social media. I still like to play games, but I have shorter games on my phone such as solitaire. I logged my time for 24 hours. I start the day out with Facebook...7 minutes...so far so good. Throughout the day, and I am not including technology used for school assignments, I logged my time I spend playing games, texting, surfing the net, social media, Youtube, Netflix, Kindle, checking bank and credit card balances. No problem, a moment here and a moment there. When I got to the end of the day and tallied my time, I calculated 300 minutes. Wait, that's five hours?! I was shocked. Five hours? If I spend five hours, and I don't think I am as bad as many people I know who cannot pry their eyes away from their phones.

The lesson I learned is that I am just as bad as others, I just use technology a little differently.

So next, was going cold turkey... 24 hours. I turned off all notifications (I usually just have bank account, credit card, and text notifications active), except text notifications from my daughter who lives out of state. I had to put my phone, computer, and tablet in a place where it would take effort to get them. This way I could not mindlessly reach for them.

What I found was something quite interesting. It is not so much that I missed the social media or technology, I could not use it as a distraction. If I can use an analogy here, it is similar to a smoker. A smoker will have a cigarette when they wake up, before and after each meal, before leaving to go somewhere, after arriving somewhere, before doing a task they do not want to do, and after the task is done as a reward. I did find other things to do: laundry, cleaning, homework. If I could provide a little more insight into myself, I get upset when tasks are not complete, I get upset when I spend so much time with technology, but I use technology as a distraction, so I am actually compounding the problem. I am not sure how I can resolve this, but I think I may have to figure out why I feel the need to be distracted because it will end up making things worse. I need to ask myself the $64,000 question:

What would it feel like not to have things hanging over my head, and why is it so scary to be happy and productive?

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patriotsnet · 3 years

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Why Are Democrats And Republicans So Divided

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-are-democrats-and-republicans-so-divided/

Why Are Democrats And Republicans So Divided

Us Election Shows Perilous Divide Between Republicans And Democrats: Experts

The fascinating psychology behind why we’re so divided right now.

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Presidential elections can be revealing moments that convey the wishes of the American people to the next wave of elected officials. So far, the big reveal in the contest between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden is the extent of the cavernous divide between Republican and Democratic America, one that defines the nation, no matter which candidate ultimately wins.

Voters from both parties turned out in droves to pick the next president, but as they did so, they found little agreement about what that president should do. Democrats and Republicans prioritized different issues, lived in different communities and even voted on different kinds of ballots.

Read more: Trump makes baseless allegations over U.S. election, prompting Republican rebukes

Whoever emerges as the winner, that division ensures that the next president will face significant gridlock in Congress, skepticism about the integrity of the vote and an agitated electorate increasingly divided by race, education and geography. Even the vote count itself threatens to further split Americans.

Two days after polls closed, neither Trump nor Biden has earned;the 270 electoral votes;needed to win the presidency. The Republican incumbent is encouraging his supporters to protest outside counting locations still sorting through mail ballots the method of voting preferred by many Democrats while pursuing an aggressive;legal strategy;that could lead to further delays.

America’s Political Divide Intensified During Trump’s First Year As President

Republicans and Democrats have grown further apart in their political views during the first year of the administration, the Pew Research Center finds.

Disagreement among Republican and Democratic voters on a range of political issues has risen sharply in recent years, a political divide that intensified during the first year of President Trumps administration, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center.

The divisions between Republicans and Democrats on fundamental political valueson government, race, immigration, national security, environmental protection, and other areasreached record levels during Barack Obamas presidency, Pews report states. In Donald Trumps first year as president, these gaps have grown even larger.

Political Parties: What Is Divided Government

In a rare instance of united rather than divided government, members of both major political parties put aside partisan differences to show support for those injured at the Republican party practice session earlier in the week. Republicans and Democrats came together. Not just for a baseball game. We came together to express our gratitude to law enforcement, show our support for those who were injured, and also to unite as a nation in the face of such tragedy, wrote Speaker Paul Ryan about the 2017 Congressional Baseball Game on June 16, 2017. He is seen in this photo thanking Special Agent Crystal Griner of the Capitol Police.

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The 2016 Rebellion Is Ongoing

With the 2016 political primaries looming, I asked which candidates they found most attractive. At the time, the leaders of the Democratic party favored Hillary Clinton and Republican leaders favored Jeb Bush. Yet no one I spoke with mentioned Clinton or Bush.

They talked instead about Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. When I asked why, they said Sanders or Trump would shake things up or make the system work again or stop the corruption or end the rigging.

In the following year, Sanders a 74-year-old Jew from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist and wasnt even a Democrat until the primaries came within a whisker of beating Clinton in Iowa, routed her in New Hampshire, and ended up with 46% of the pledged delegates from Democratic primaries and caucuses.

Trump a 69-year-old egomaniacal billionaire reality-TV star who had never held elective office or had anything to do with the Republican party and who lied compulsively about everything won the primaries and went on to beat Clinton, one of the most experienced and well-connected politicians in modern America .

Something very big had happened, and it wasnt due to Sanders magnetism or Trumps likability. It was a rebellion against the establishment. That rebellion is still going on, although much of the establishment still denies it. They prefer to attribute Trumps rise solely to racism.

Television And The Internet

A 2013 review concluded that there is no firm evidence that media institutions are contributing to the polarization of average Americans. No evidence supports the idea that longstanding news outlets are becoming increasingly partisan. Analyses confirm that the tone of evening news broadcasts remained unchanged from 1968 to 1996: largely centrist, with a small but constant bias towards Democratic Party positions. However, more partisan media pockets have emerged in blogs, talk radio, websites, and cable news channels, which are much more likely to use insulting language, mockery, and extremely dramatic reactions, collectively referred to as “outrage”. People who have strongly partisan viewpoints are more likely to watch partisan news.

Furthermore, a 2018 study highlights that there is no correlation between increased media and Internet consumption and increased political polarization. The data confirms a larger increase in polarization among individuals over 65 compared to those aged 18â39, revealing that Internet consumption is only a small factor in calculating the cause of political polarization.

Also Check: How Do Republicans Really Feel About Trump

Healing The Political Divide

How did we become such a divided nation, and how can psychologists help us bridge the gap?

Vol. 52 No. 1

Monitor on Psychology52

With votes now tallied, and in some cases, electoral outcomes having been determined by extremely narrow margins and marked by legal challenges, there is no doubt that the political divide in the United States is a central trait of the country. And as this divide seems likely to continue to grow, for many of us it feels uncrossable. Yet psychological science suggests that it is both possible and imperative for members of our society to find common ground.

Why We Should Not Tolerate Any Voting Errors

Nonetheless, the refrain seems to run that any problems seen in 2020 would not have changed the outcome of the election. First, that is not necessarily true.

Second, so what? Every fraudulent and illegal vote disenfranchises a legal voter, and just as we as a country would not tolerate the disenfranchisement of any voters by locking the ballot box to them, we should not tolerate the disenfranchisement of any legal voter by acquiescing to the stuffing of the ballot box by a non-dispositive number of voters.

Third and most importantly, our country is too divided to survive unless both the right and the left trust the outcome of the election. Here, we are not merely talking about the presidency. Since Republicans victory in 1994 gaining control of the House for the first time in 40 years, a slim margin has separated the majority and minority parties in both the House and the Senate.

Further, with enough individual House and Senate races to flip the majority having been by narrow margins of victory, confidence in election results is imperative. Such trust in election results proves especially important given the deep divide on not just matters of policy and priority, but core American values.

Elections are too tight and the populace too divided for close enough for government work to cut it anymore. The American voting system must be reformed to ensure security, transparency, replicability, and election officials uniform compliance with state election law.

Recommended Reading: Did Any Republicans Vote To Impeach Trump

The Big Lie Claim Is A Dodge

Before these filings, Biden had attacked Georgias voting-integrity law as Jim Crow in the 21st century. While Democrats current focus is Georgia, the talking-point of the party is that voting rights are under attack by GOP-controlled states after Republicans seized on former President Donald Trumps false claim of massive voter fraud in the 2020 election as a pretext for passing new legislation curtailing ballot access.

Biden later repeated the Jim Crow canard in pushing H.R. 1, the so-called For the People Act, which could gut many mainstream state statutes designed to ensure voting integrity, such as voter ID laws. In a speech in Philadelphia earlier this month, after branding state election-integrity laws a 21st-century Jim Crow assault, the president sought to connect Trumps attacks on the validity of the 2020 electioncalling it both the Big Lie and the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil Warthe January 6, 2021 storming of the capitol, and the supposed imperative for passage of H.R. 1.

There is a dangerous confluence of factors at play here that has permeated the press coverage of election-related matters. By coloring all criticism of the 2020 election as part of The Big Lie, the left allows itself to ignore evidence of actual fraud, widespread illegal voting, violations of the Electors Clause, and, frankly, just plain incompetence.

From Republicans To Democrats: America Is Deeply Divided

Schumer: Republicans Are ‘So Divided’ They Cannot Come Up With A Coronavirus Plan | MSNBC

The past week of news has shown just how entrenched the state of polarization is in the United States today

The early 20th-century American entertainer and social commentator Will Rogers once observed: Im not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat. Rarely has that aphorism seemed as appropriate as in the wake of this weeks botched Iowa Democratic caucuses.

I stayed up half the night waiting for the Iowa election results, only to find that none would be forthcoming, largely on account of a faulty app. With the results still trickling in days after they should have been tabulated, it appears that Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders are in a virtual dead heat for the lead, with Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden and Amy Klobuchar rounding out the second tier.

The reception of Trumps address illustrated the almost complete polarization that prevails in America today. Republicans considered the address a thoroughly appropriate perfect, one might say extended boast about the economic success under his watch. Democrats considered it a divisive, mean-spirited barrage of lies and slander. By the same token, your partisan affiliation will probably determine whether you thought Pelosis tearing Trumps speech text apart was an outrageous and disrespectful breach of decorum or a dissent against demagoguery.

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Cpac And The Broader Republican Party Agree: Its Trumps Party For Now

Its part of our long era of partisan stalemate. The question, of course, is how much longer can this last? And is there any resolution in sight?

History holds, at best, a half lesson here. This current period of partisan stalemate stands out in a few respects when we consider Americas long history with partisan conflict. For starters, the period we find ourselves in now is unique in that the national partisan balance of power is extremely close , even as most states and most voters are either solidly Democratic or Republican. Whats more, the national outcome often hinges on just a few swing states and districts. This period is also unique in the extent to which America is divided. Hatred toward the other party drives our politics. This produces a deeply polarizing and highly destructive form of partisan trench warfare that threatens to erode the very legitimacy of American democracy.

Consider just a few record-setting patterns in the last several elections:

Nine presidential elections in a row without either party experiencing a landslide , eclipsing the previous record of seven in a row .

Seven presidential elections in a row where fewer than a quarter of states changed parties, well eclipsing the previous record of three in a row.

And now the question is, how do we get out of this current stalemate? Once again, we can turn to the hyper-partisanship of the Gilded Age for clues.

Why Democrats Massive Effort To Suppress Election Concerns Is Dangerous

Americans should see 2020 and the January 6 riots as a wake-up call to the future our nation faces should election integrity not be restored.

By: The Federalist, January 35, 2021:

This man was elected president of the United States of America, Joe Biden of Al Gore during a 2013 campaign event when introducing George W. Bushs Democrat opponent.

Theres no doubt that the Russians did interfere in the election, and I think the interference, although not yet quantified, if fully investigated would show that Trump didnt actually win the election in 2016, former President Jimmy Carter proclaimed during a 2019 panel discussion sponsored by his nonprofit organization.

He knows hes an illegitimate president, Hillary Clinton seethed when asked about Donald Trump during a CBS interview nearly two years ago, later telling the audience the election was stolen from her.

Rush thought we won, and so do I, Trump said in an interview with Fox News following radio personality Rush Limbaughs death in February 2021, later the contest the fraudulent presidential election of 2020.

Three different presidential elections and four different presidential candidates all claimed the man inaugurated commander-in-chief stole the election. Yet while tolerating claims that Clinton and Gore actually won the White House, the corrupt media immediately co-opted the Nazi comparison Joe Biden deployed in response to Trumps claims of fraud, branding his charges The Big Lie.

Also Check: What Republicans Are Voting Against Trump

Why America Should Suddenly Prepare For A Billion

The problem is that previous models fail to take in proper empirical data and do not account for voters picking candidates that are good enough without obsessing over details. Furthermore, they do not take into account misinformation, missing information, decision fatigue and other things that can stand in the way of an optimal decision.

Yang and her team,;which includes Daniel Abrams, Associate Professor of Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics at Northwestern University, Adilson Motter, Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Physics at Northwestern University, and Georgia Kernell, Assistant Professor in the Departments of Communication and Political Science at UCLA,;created a model that works a little differently. They took all of those factors into account along with 150 years-worth of U.S. Congressional voting data from the American Nation Election Study. They then compiled all of this information using complex mathematical formulas and came out with something that explains why politicians are becoming more polarized.

How it Works

First, we must understand the shape of the American political system and how parties shape themselves to function within it. The graphic below sheds some light on this subject.

Kander10 Designs

With this information and a lot more the model created by Yang and her team have been able to predict the movement of the parties away from the center.

KAnder10 Designs

My two cents

Why Democrats Share The Blame For The Rise Of Donald Trump

I was part of a Democratic administration that failed to fix a rigged system I know our current president is a symptom of our disunion, not its only cause

An impeached president who is up for re-election will this week deliver a State of the Union address to the most divided union in living memory.

But why are we so divided? Were not fighting a hugely unpopular war on the scale of Vietnam. Were not in a deep economic crisis like the Great Depression. Yes, we disagree about guns, gays, abortion and immigration, but weve disagreed about them for decades. Why are we so divided now?

Part of the answer is Trump himself. The Great Divider knows how to pit native-born Americans against immigrants, the working class against the poor, whites against blacks and Latinos, evangelicals against secularists, keeping almost everyone stirred up by vilifying, disparaging, denouncing, defaming and accusing others of the worst. Trump thrives off disruption and division.

But that begs the question of why we have been so ready to be divided by Trump. The answer derives in large part from what has happened to wealth and power.

In the fall of 2015, I visited Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Missouri and North Carolina, for a research project on the changing nature of work. I spoke with many of the people I had met 20 years before when I was secretary of labor, as well as with some of their grown children.

Also Check: Do Republicans Support The Death Penalty

What Is Political Polarization And Is The United States Becoming More Polarized

The United States has two main political parties, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. In the early 1990s, the two parties had more similar policy agendas than they do today. Over the last 25 years, the Democratic Party has moved more to the left, while the Republican Party has moved more to the right.1

Building Back Better: Bipartisanship In A Divided Nation Is An Attractive Mirage

With Donald Trump now largely absent from the national stage, there has been greater talk of the potential for a return to;bipartisanship;between Democrats and Republicans in Congress. As part of our;Building Back Better;series,;David T. Smith;writes that while there has been a brief revival of;bipartisanship;in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise in partisan polarization over the last three decades means that cooperation in Congress on;anything;else is very unlikely.

Joe Biden;repeatedly;promised;a return to;bipartisanship;in his 2020;presidential election;campaign. Claiming decades of experience in negotiating with his Republican opponents;in the US Senate, Biden appealed to;people;exhausted;by political polarisation.;He urged Republicans;along with other Americans;to reject Trumps re-election;and return to;political normality, where civility reigns and cooperation is possible.

But polarisation;in;the Trump era wasnt an anomaly. It was a continuation of trends that have been visible for decades, and;it;wont be reversed by;Trumps exit from the White House.;Polarisation is;even;worse;in Congress than outside it, and;with the;smallest Congressional majorities now operating;since the 1930s, there;is;acute;pressure on both sides not to break ranks.

Figure 1 ;Liberal-conservative partisan polarization by chamber

Source:;Voteview;

P20210223AS-0017 by;The White House;is United States Government Work

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