thought i'd share some photos of this little book i started picking around with for fun in my 'offline' time!

admittedly i'm not very good at this sorta thing, but i'm trying to get back into it (it is impossible not to be inspired by my gf's journalling work, oh my god). i found this unused planner with nice creamy pages, and i thought it might make a nice 'gallery' for starstruck dee giftart!

i'm so touched by all the artwork folks have drawn of her for events or gifts or trades, and i thought this would be a nice way to honour them while also giving me something fun to flick through!! it's also a really soothing way to spend a good chunk of time looking at and thinking about each piece while i design a layout around them! i write the occasional little notes, or i copy in tags or other little relevant bits so that i can remember them for longer than my weak memory would actually allow!

it's roughly chronological (though the 'cover' page is from the hnkss event in december), so here's the first few pages!

🎨 art credits 🎨 cover spread: @chaotixcowboy (santa for the hnkss 2023 event) page 1: @kamalemons (first ever gift art! + tags for context) page 2: @veveisveryuncool & @jojo-schmo (halloween interaction pieces!) pages 3-4: @moon-mage-ex (an entire spread just for you because you've actually done so many!!! wow!)

Scarlet Hollow characters I DO trust with my life and love: the demon stalking you, your cousin everyone hates who has likely committed murder, the abomination of changing flesh and bones that hangs out in the morgue, the possums in my drawer

Scarlet Hollow characters I DO NOT TRUST and never will: sybil. fucking. Local Town Grandma

(Also accurate small town representation)

I honestly love your depiction of Slenderman and the mansion. As much as I love the whole Slenderman treating everyone with love and being a found family with the residents of the mansion, it feels so refreshing seeing Slenderman act similar to how you portray him! Also, I’m very curious hearing more about slender and Sally’s relationship in the future (or now lol)!!

i'm glad to hear that!! i feel like i've never really given slender much thought or attention before so i feel like my depiction of it is rusty compared to a lot of the other creepypastas so i'm glad to hear that you enjoy it <3

as for slender's relationship with sally:

we all know that slender does Not like children. it goes out of its way to harm them, and actively avoids them in the case that it can't. that's what it did with sally for a really long time.

it avoided her, and treated her mostly like a pest it couldn't get rid of. seeing as she was a permanent resident of the mansion, it can't exactly get rid of her. and the mansion enjoys her company too, so alas. it was stuck dealing with her.

like i said, it took a lot of time and patience for slender to even view sally as something worth its time and attention. it took even longer for it to grow to care about her.

but sally is stubborn when she wants to be, and when she decided she wanted to befriend the strange, faceless, tall man well buddy pal there was nothing that could stop her. she had a goal in mind, and she was determined to achieve it.

and the mansion helped out, of course. because the mansion was, at this point, the only real 'companion' that slender had. she wanted it to make bonds with people it could actually communicate with.

and in the beginning, slender hated that everywhere it went when visiting the mansion, sally would be there with a bright smile on her face, eagerly asking questions about its existence and asking whether or not it wanted to join her for tea and even going as far as to introduce it to her toys one by one.

it was annoyed, at first. it would brush her off, maybe even vanish the moment it saw sally approaching.

honestly, slender wouldn't be able to tell you when it started to care for her. maybe it was the first time it saw her crying, or maybe she had worn it down so much that it just didn't have the energy to ignore and avoid her anymore. but at some point, it did grow to care for her.

it stopped vanishing whenever it saw her. it answered her questions when she asked it. it started to remember all the names and titles of her plushies. and one day, it had even hesitantly agreed to accompany her for tea. she was ecstatic at this, and thus the tea parties became a frequent whenever it was around.

sally is the only child that slender cares about. it tolerates ben and lazari, but every other child? no. it will more than likely never grow to care for one the way it cares for sally.

sally is basically slender's daughter now.

not to be another donations post but you may remember how over the summer we had massive amounts of plumbing problems and other unexpected moving costs? well. after proceeding to work every single hour available to me for six months, take no holidays whatsoever, and budget the hell out of every aspect of my life, I was actually on track to pay everything back and maybe have a little bit of wiggle room by the time summer came around!

and then we got a call from the vet about routine labs saying that if we didn't take Suzy in to an emergency specialty hospital immediately, she would die within in a week, she might die anyways if we took her there, but it was our only chance to have a few more months with her. after an extremely difficult household discussion, we decided that we needed to do as much as we could for her. she's been a beloved member of the family for 18 years. we were not going to abandon her in her hour of need.

with two days at the specialty hospital, the prognosis was better than we could have possibly hoped! the most important thing is she does not have heart problems at all, which means that we can treat her chronic kidney disease with normal IV fluids and with careful treatment she could easily be with us for years to come. the timely intervention also may or may not have saved her from acute kidney failure too, we'll know when we go back to the vet on Wednesday to get her blood checked where her levels have stabilized at.

two days at the specialty hospital means we are also down $3652 , and no longer are on track to pay back everything by July when it comes due unless a couple of uncertain things going forward Go Right, I do not trust everything to Go Right, and we're also still uncertain about what long-term treatment going forward is going to cost.

I still have my ko-fi and my patreon, but honestly, I'm aware that everything is tight for everyone always and there are also a lot of causes that need money right now and in the face of that "hey my family went super out on a limb to try to save our cat and would love some help not falling off" feels kind of shallow. but like. not to sound dumb or like a youtuber or podcaster, but, like. honestly I think the Most Helpful Thing that anyone could do for me right now is take a fucking HelloFresh link that will send you a "free" box for cost-of-shipping ($7ish?) if you Sign Up For An Account that you can then cancel Immediately After The Box Has Shipped and Never Give Them Any More Money Than That and get Six To Ten Meals Out Of It, and for getting someone to "sign up", they will give me a free box too. like. if 13 people are willing to take a link then I don't need to worry about food for the next three months. which would be. HUGE.

so I guess.... dm me if you want a link? otherwise expect to see a lot of promotion of my writing/ patreon as I scramble the hell to try to make this money up

mulder and diana literally have the most intense divorced energy anyone could ever have...they have the chemistry of two people who've been married for decades and maybe don't wanna be married anymore, maybe aren't married anymore, but once you're married you're grandfathered in. you're always married. haven't touched each other in years, go most days not even considering the other, but owe each other something, and aren't sure of what it is. diana lies and lies and lies to his face, and then dies to save him. she feels entitled to him, she knows what's best for him, what's his is theirs. always. she was there when he got it. she helped him build it. (she tells him herself: "don't forget that"). so much of what she does appears as she's trying to establish a claim over him, but she doesn't have to try. she just is. she's irreproachable. you don't talk about the wife. (and you don't talk to her, as scully and diana arguing is met only with mulder's impatient, "scully...scully...scully.")

any time she comes up in conversation, his friends are uncomfortable. i love the way byers goes "well....yeah?" when scully asks if he knows diana. he says it like he's surprised that scully didn't know about her. when scully won't stop pressing mulder about diana in one son, all three of the boys tense up. the camera keeps going to their reactions. (you don't talk about the wife. they were there. "i always wondered why they split up.")

scully says "special agent diana fowley" as though maybe if she had one more title to throw in, she would disappear. diana says "fox" like she has something to prove. mulder says "diana" like it communicates everything he doesn't say. and in a way, it does. the first time scully heard him call agent fowley "diana," she knew.

a fair number of people are adding to my post "but only trans people should play trans characters" and like. I still disagree, because we run into the same problem, and we HAVE run into that problem e.g. people getting on John Cameron Mitchell's case for starring in Hedwig (which he wrote and directed??) forcing him to come out as non-binary in an interview.

unless there is something inherently physical to a role (race) for which an imitation has been historically fraught and meant to demean (blackface, yellowface) a character expressing gender fluidity / breaking gender norms and an actor exploring that from a place of respect is fine.

there is a conversation to be had about equity in hiring practices across the board for actors from minority backgrounds...but I guarantee it predates this entire discourse by decades and all of hollywood needs to change.

Baldur's Gate 3 just sorta fizzles out wetly at the end there huh

"if you think that kryptos was from flatland and you believe bill genuinely cared about him, meaning he had some fort of actual human connection to another flatlander, why did bill still end up destroying the place? wouldn't kryptos trying to stop him have either made him reconsider his actions, or made him get rid of kryptos entirely?" well you see when bill was burning flatland, kryptos was whooping and hollering and breaking out the champagne

.

If Disney bought Fox and Disney has a part of Doctor Who now........................DR. GRACE HOLLOWAY RETURN WHEN!?!?!?!

I know I've thought about this plenty of times before, but it really sucks being someone who likes things very intensely and defines themselves by their interests a lot, when you were/are always surrounded by people who do nothing but make fun of everything you like.

probably my least trad trait ever is how irrationally annoyed the idea of changing my name on marriage/giving my children someone else's name makes me

it's hard to love myself when nobody else does, or ever really has, you know?

anyway if you're ever wondering who chose fight on your polls... I'll give u one guess