#brand new blog because I only have one tumblr

[namelessforgood62]

Honestly, I cannot understand the line of thought that Levi loved Erwin more than Erwin loved Levi. 

Feel like this has gotten pretty prevalent over the past year especially on TikTok, and I just can’t get behind it. I kinda feel like it’s just one more way to try to make Levi more tragic, and because people relate more to Levi than they do Erwin.

#eruri #erwinxlevi #brand new blog because I only have one tumblr #and it's my writing tumblr #and i don't want this there but I had to say it

[theminecraftbee]

being in true sexyman nostalgia mode today (on account of. IT'S BEEN ONE YEAR BABY.) i think one of the most fascinating things about it is that we will never manage to do that again. like, not in a "we couldn't organize it better" way; there were better ways to do the spreadsheet, we would just turn off comments on posts and anon asks from day one so that we wouldn't then get people accusing us of censorship while we tried and failed to control the tide of things that ended up in the comments and inbox, we'd definitely have a WAY higher non-hermit contingent, both thanks to qsmp and thanks to the sexyman blog and medusa now having MUCH wider reach to other corners of the fandom and the original spread not all rooting at me, etc.

but the reason we couldn't do it again is that i don't know if we could ever replicate the exact circumstances that lead to it blowing up quite to the extent it blew up.

it was while tumblr polls and doing tumblr poll brackets on tumblr itself was still new-ish, and people were still excited about them. the idea of a mcytblr bracket was basically brand new; i won't claim we did it FIRST (because i have no idea if we did and doubt we did), but certainly we did it big first. so there's that; we can never again invent in real time "shit people are sending us threats about fraud lets legalize fraud because its funny, we can't stop it, and that neutralizes that drama as a thing anyone will take seriously", and then in turn accidentally invent a fandom culture of. um. wide-spread voter fraud.

(i don't know if we should apologize for, uh, causing the specific way mcytblr voter frauds. i still think it was better than the alternative at least, especially after seeing how so many other polls crashed and burned after us. there were MANY things we could have done better but i have seen SO MANY ways we could have done things worse since then so i think we came out looking pretty okay.)

but also: february 2023 was a very different time in mcytblr. we were in a hermitcraft dead period, where most of the hermits were either on vacation or playing tcg (which was fun, but didn't end up generating that much fandom activity by that time in february). the former dsmp crew was very much doing Nothing (and in that awkward space when the entire fandom knew dsmp 2 was never happening, but also people were still claiming it would happen, so it was just... busy waiting). qsmp didn't exist yet. there was no ongoing life series and wouldn't be for some time. i think even the dominioners and lifestealers were in a fairly dead zone. there was very little new for people to be excited about, mcyt content-wise.

enter: our poll. our poll which cleo then thinks its funny to call out on twitter. our poll, which was not only new mcyt content for the fandom to interact with (thanks to the fact we KEPT GETTING CC INTERACTIONS???), but participatory.

for about two weeks, we were the mcyt event de jour.

and like. the thing is. now we're in february 2024. mcyt is BOOMING. a new hermitcraft season JUST STARTED. we came off of vault hunters before that. meanwhile, qsmp just restarted and is, if i'm understanding correctly, booming. they just added a new guy! the two current juggernauts of the fandom are in FULL SWING. i honestly think we'd be somewhat overtaken by the fact things are actually happening in fandom. there's stuff to do that ISN'T go insane about a poll.

and it's not new, and we've seen it all before now, and frankly, it's hard to cause a mass hysteria event TWICE. lightning in a bottle, as they say.

i think part of the reason we all just REMEMBER mcytblr sexyman so much is that we could never, ever recreate it, so it remains crystalized in a single moment in time, impossible to replicate, forever memorable.

anyway: HAPPY ONE YEAR TO THE JOE HILLS SWEEP BABY,

#mcytblr sexyman #sorry i'm in nostalgia mode and feel like rambling. o7 happy one year to joe's victory

[garoujo]

saetoru is talking abt you on her private blog (@/clorindes) yuckkkkk

CW BULLYING, LITERALLY IMMATURE HIGH SCHOOL DRAMA, SUB POSTING.

hi nonnie, thank you for letting me know! since i’m leaving this blog & this platform for the foreseeable future i figured i might aswell get a few things off of my chest before i go. i apologise in advance for the vibes this post will probably bring, the discourse & the posts that will ofcourse follow, but i honestly i am not the first person to be targeted by this creator and i’m sure i won’t be the last considering the amount of creators that have been bullied off of this app by them.

first off i’ve had multiple blogs that would be considered bigger blogs such as @/hvnlydmn, @/atsymu + now this blog which is the biggest of all 3. i think there’s a sort of unspoken responsibility that comes with being a bigger blog which i know is no fun but it’s also because it can be super harmful on a site like this, when people weaponise their following.

on that note i’ll start this post by saying that i’ve known tee for probably around 3/4 years, maybe? we were mutuals on hvnlydmn & atsymu and we continued to talk on discord even when i was off of tumblr. i will honestly admit to this day i have never had a negative interaction with tee to my face and she was genuinely supportive of me during any discourse i was involved in. i am not some angel, i’ve had my fair share of crap on this app (of my own doing) but this post is not meant to come across like “oh she doesn’t like me so i’m calling her out” no. im sorry if this doesn’t line up with my brand and my ‘victim complex’ but i’m not gonna lie down and let someone on a power trip on a hobby app drag me through the mud.

first off i had began to get some off vibes from tee when i had started writing on garoujo, notably when i’d just hit my first milestone which was probably around 1k. during this i had decided to move my instagram theme from my main blog to my writing blog.

i’d noticed tee subposting (on main and on her personal blog which i followed at the time) about someone basically using the same theme as her, which after then clicking onto her blog i realised was an instagram theme. i didn’t think much of it, again me & tee were friends and she hadn’t came to me directly so ignored it. i was still a new blog and trying to solidly an aesthetic (before the beige lol) so i changed my theme / masterlists / layouts a lot.

a few more sub posts later i decided to message tee about it because with every thing i’d change / post on my blog, there always seemed to be another post. so i messaged her and got this response in: (i’ve blurred out my irl name btw) open up pics for convo!

so i let it slide, kept posting & that was that. probably a few days / a week later, tee had soft blocked me which then eventually led to me being hard blocked. i was upset ofcourse because i genuinely considered tee a good friend but i’ve always been a big advocate in controlling your space.

this was when, one of our mutuals in common (the first of many may i add) approached me on discord to say that just like now, i was being ripped to shreds on tee’s personal blog:

again i was notably upset about this because i was being accused of not only copying her theme but also her writing & masterlists, we did have a lot of mutuals in common so it was also upsetting knowing they would all be seeing these posts aswell. i allowed myself one sub post about “creating a narrative” because i was particularly frustrated but tee then also subposted about this, even though she had me blocked?

i would also like to say regarding our mutuals in common that this was not the first or last mutual to approach me regarding tee. i’ve had multiple people tell me that “they’re only mutuals with her because it would be more damaging not to be” “it’s easier to be on her side”. also i am not saying this is okay but i’ve had multiple of her current mutuals send me not only her posts, but screenshots of her private, personal instagram & also tell me about how all of them and their friends had a running joke / theory that tee made up her boyfriend (ex-boyfriend?) for attention.

regarding the accusations from tee i’d like to first comment on the instagram themes, again i had done an instagram theme on my main blog but it seemed to only be an issue when it was on my writing blog that was gaining traction. if the timing was off and it seemed like i copied her, i genuinely have nothing to say except it’s not the case— it’s instagram (which tee already admits she doesn’t own above) also the hanma writing? i’m still not 100% sure which drabbles she was referring to but i can only assume that 1. is when i posted a drabble about hanma fucking you outside of his subordinates house — this was a almost completely word by word rewrite of a suna drabble i done on my old blog @/atsymu i literally just changed the concept to fit tokyo revengers themes. i can post screenshots of this suna drabble also from my google docs dated February when i deactivated. the other one may have been some basic concept about him fucking you against the window.

she also mentions in the very first recent screenshot at the beginning of this post that i have apparently stolen concepts of fics / posts from her mutuals. what i want to say regarding this is, do you believe that i would have made it this far on stolen work? i don’t know any of the mutuals she’s referring to apart from 1 which i’ll get into. but every single accusation i’ve ever received has always come from someone associated or in contact with tee, she has always been at the root of it all but i have yet to receive a single anon or ask about me copying or taking inspiration from anyone’s work.

i know there was apparently a blog and an ex mutual of mine, who i had a lot of respect & time for who was under the impression i’d stolen their concept for this gojo fic. the whole premise of this fic is honestly not uncommon considering how many times people losing control of their techniques / powers / quirks during orgasm has been done in fanfiction. this concept was completely my own, i had originally posted shitposts about him losing control of his technique & also him putting you into a mating press / breeding before i’d decided to smoosh them together into a fic. we all read from the same workbook, we all have the same material to work off of — two people in a fanbase of THOUSANDS having a similar idea is not unheard of.

now onto the masterlist banners. the screenshot on the far left are the comparison photos that tee made herself— i’m sure you’ll be able to see them in better quality when she makes her own post about it; because obviously that’s going to come. first off i will say, i will admit i took inspiration from her official art masterlist banners — i thought hers looked good and i needed a masterlist so i used official art. fair game there although i only kept them for a few days before i changed again.

but onto the grey masterlist banners, i can honestly say i did not even know tee had this masterlist, also the only comparison i myself see is the colour. the only reason i chose grey was because i had started to use a grey / white overlay on my manga panels for my layout (as you can see far right), and as you know— i’ve always kept my colour scheme pretty consistent. on that note, regarding the actual layout of the masterlists— i’ve added screenshots from atsymu (that i could find due to it being deactivated) that shows the layout of my old masterlists, which was what i took inspiration from for my current. although the title font for each heading like headcanons is different, i had used the sort of old style, basic font that everyone uses before i had deactivated so it would match my fic headers i just don’t have photos obviously.

anyway on the back of this there was then discourse over me apparently copying tee’s kinktober masterlist, which again was not the case. but again due to tee’s following i had received multiple death threats into my asks the morning after i posted mine. as far as i was aware, the only similarities were the fact we both used gifs in our headers & the layout listing thirsts, hcs & fics (which is very common during kinktober but i admitted below i could see that similarity). unfortunately during all of this discourse was when ffflowers, my hate blog also came into the mix which then lead to tee reaching out to me in dm’s from her old blog.

the interaction between me & tee was pretty good, again she was nothing but nice to me directly despite the way she obviously spoke about me in private above. but as you can see below, tee herself told me that basically most of the similarities all made above were brushed off as basic. we spoke about the ig themes & i apologised, saying i could understand where she was coming from and that was that. i unblocked her & she unblocked me so i could reblog her post, it’s been that way since.

it is not my place to comment on other people’s experiences on this app but i would need more than 2 hands to list the amount of people that i’m sure have had similar if not worse experiences with tee. i know i have had multiple mutuals who have been bullied off of this platform & had their safe space ripped from them for little things such as: liking a character that this group selfship with, tee and her friends not liking their characterisation. they’ve even went as far as to go through other larger creators notes to check for minors so they can make excuses as to why they’re thriving.

i also know of a blog who was ‘blacklisted’ from tee & her mutuals as they self shipped with arataki itto at the time, one of tee’s friends also did, so they blacklisted this creator and had all of their mutuals block them for this which then in turn drove this creator off the app. there has been other notably bitchy things that i’ve heard but i have no receipts for therefore i don’t see any relevance in starting rumours.

i would also like to say i know plagiarism is a horrible thing, we have all been through it— myself included but it’s got to the point where being accused of copying tee has become a canon event. notably, bigger platforms have been ruined and driven off of this app for little things such as mdni dividers, similar colours schemes etc. and it’s the reason i’m also leaving.

i will say i have met some amazing people through my discourse with tee, notably people who have been in similar situations and i also apologise to any mutuals who we still have in common who are now sort of stuck inbetween. no hard feelings. although to tee: id be careful of the people you trust because it seems the loyalties they have to you are not as sincere as you may believe. you can also go to her personal & read the other things she was saying about me like how she was always so ? at how many people seemed to like me.

so that’s all i have to say, i’m sure dash will get a few responses from this but i’ll be logging out & turning off asks because honestly? couldnt care less. the only thing i’d change about my experience on this app would be i wish i’d blocked tee sooner.

i’d say have a nice day, but instead, have the day you deserve.

— emmie :)

#i apologise in advance to my mutuals & the innocents #i probably had more to say but yk i was rambling atp #anyways see u guys 🖤 love most of u !

[ne-nene-ne]

♡ How to gain the dragon's affection ♡

-> things you can do to make this handsome fae weak in the knees

malleus x reader (fluff!)

Wear or carry the things he's gifted you!

Whether it's a necklace, bracelet, or even a mini gargoyle statue, have it on you! Malleus will beam with pride when he sees it on your person. I feel like he's a bit of a possessive person, so he'd love seeing you dressed in the things that he, himself has chosen and gifted you.

Indulge him in his passion for exploring ruins and his love for gargoyles!

If you show even the tiniest bit of interest in gargoyles or ruin exploring, you will see Malleus' eyes light up immediately and he will begin talking about it for hours. Please allow him to do so. Not many share his passion or are interested in these types of things (if at all), please listen to him ramble on. Heck, join the Gargoyle Studies Club! Give this dude some company because he's pretty much the only member there. 😭 And look, he's aware that not everyone is interested in the same things he is, but if you at least put in the effort to listen and try to understand, he'd be a happy fae

Include him in your activities!

We already know how much of a complex he has towards being invited/uninvited, so if you constantly make it a point to include him in whatever you're doing, he will feel loved. I don't think he'd be picky about what kind of activity you'd be doing. He'd be open-minded to whatever it is. In fact, he'd try to find possible ways to make it easier on you if it's a difficult task. If it's an artsy/creative activity, like painting, there's a chance he'll either be pretty good at it at first try, or he'll end up making a bit of a mess. I also don't think he'd mind much of this either, even if he did end up looking silly. He would laugh it off heartily and probably be like, "How interesting...!" He's curious about your ways and is very much willing to learn. His adoration for you will just increase if you try to teach him

Help him raise his tamagotchi!

He absolutely loves his Roaring Drago and so if you offer to help him "raise" it or offer to watch over it whenever he's busy, he'll fall more in love with you. Not only will he feel closer to you as you both nurture the little creature, he might even begin to see a future with you and your own little ones (if you ever had that in mind) and oh, how he knows how much he'd love that life dearly if it was spent with you.

Share that full-sized cake with him!

This one is oddly specific but as seen in his profile, Malleus dislikes full-sized cakes because he tried eating one entirely by himself 😅 (ofc he wouldn't feel great afterwards). You might be met with a resistant attitude or sour face from him (out of instinct) when you bring out that whole cake, but show him that it isn't as bad as he thinks when he shares it with someone. Maybe he'll like it! And if he doesn't, well then you guys can smear the leftovers on each other's faces and have a bit of fun!

This poor boy has just been left out on a lot. Make him feel welcomed, wanted, and loved and he will adore you forever 🥺❤️

a/n: not really proofread tbh but it was a fun one! I might just turn this into a series and do the same for other twst charas. I'm thinking of Azul or Leona next, hmm

And OKAY so I originally posted this on @lyneira (my brand new writing blog) but my posts on there aren't showing up in the tags yet so I guess I'll still be posting some of my writing here until tumblr allows them to be seen 😭 somebody pls interact with my new blog so that tumblr doesn't think I'm a bot 😔

#twst #twisted wonderland x reader #twisted wonderland #twisted wonderland imagines #malleus draconia #malleus x reader #nene writes~♡

[conspiring-limabean]

so apparently the tumblr donation scam farms are moving in on Palestine; this includes both slapping basic phrases like "Free Palestine" into their blog headers, but also some of them go so far as to claim they are Palestinian refugees who need donations.

Here is your routine reminder that whenever you receive an ask in your inbox requesting donations, check their ass. 19 times out of 20 it'll be a brand new blog who reblogged a few posts to seem older than they are, is sending out spam asks to random blogs, and will be deleted in a few days once they've already scammed people.

Check their blog's age by trying to scroll to the bottom and checking the post timestamps. Turn on post timestamps by going to Settings > General Settings > Dashboard Preferences. On any device, you can also see when a post was made by clicking on the 3 dots at the top right of it. Scam blogs reblog an amount of posts to try to seem like they aren't brand new and pretend to have older accounts, and it’s very successful against people who don’t scroll down enough.

Check the location and area code of a PayPal link where/if it says something like country.x=xx. The xx will be a country code. Most tumblr donation scams are for some reason in the Philippines and will have the code PH. No I am not saying to distrust anyone in the Philippines who needs donations, but if a brand new blog is claiming to be a refugee in the Middle East but their PayPal link is from halfway across the world, then well...

Reverse-image search any of the images they use and find if it was stolen somewhere. Remember that these images are often edited to prevent people from easily doing this, and this is not reliable but can be an easy sign if successful

Be careful with blogs that request people send donations through "Friends and Family" on PayPal because you cannot refund money sent in this manner. This isn’t a dealbreaker as many regular users also request this to avoid fines, but is an addendum to scam blogs when enough other red flags are raised. It isn’t unusual for them to insist on receiving money through FaF to the point that some will refund money not sent through that manner to prevent accountability

Follow scam busting blogs like Kyra45 that might pull up evidence you otherwise would not have access to. I guess I'm going to start bringing back my habit of recording the exact paypal addresses that scam blogs use which has sometimes been the only evidence of a new donation blog being a scam, and no one would know this if I hadn't been tracking them

It is disgusting that people would take advantage of an ongoing genocide for their own gain. Please remember to keep an eye out for yourself and the people you follow reblogging suspicious donation posts trying to steal aid from people undergoing a tragedy

#scams #scam

[relaxxattack]

ok yeah lots of memes about how the shitty new UI is literally a direct carbon copy of twitter and we hate it because of that, yea yea

here’s some actual/extra reasons why the UI itself is shitty beyond the fact that it’s stolen from twitter (in just my personal opinion)

it’s claustrophobic as hell. the old UI felt breathable, felt like you could scroll and actually look at your posts, and now there’s enough shit going on on one page that it actually gives me a headache. (i’ve heard other people say this as well, so maybe it’s not just me that’s overstimulated by all the fucking noise on the dash?)

the ‘dash sorting’ (for you / your tags / what you missed) is way too high up the page now and appears crowded against the top where things like the bookmarks bar are on most browsers. not that anything in this new UI isn’t crowded.

i’ve seen it mentioned plenty already, but there’s quite a lot of unnecessary duplication-- as in, the same buttons that exist in the new left navigation panel show up on the right in blog view, which is just completely annoying and unneeded clutter.

the fact that post interaction options are all on the right side of the posts, but dashboard navigation is now all pushed to the far left of display, is extremely annoying. i’m right-handed, so it’s extra annoying for me to have to constantly go all the way over there. maybe that’s easier for left-handed people, but if the case was supporting diversity, why not just put an option in dashboard preferences to switch the side of ALL the controls? because the post interactions are still on the right.

while we’re on the subject-- tumblr’s original design was actually MUCH more intuitive and easy to navigate. the reason for this is that everything you needed to click was in one small area. you scroll up and down the dash, move slightly up to navigate (home/asks/notifications) and slightly down to the side to interact with a post (reblog/reply). extremely simple, easy to use, even ‘lazy + addicting’, which is what all social media studio exes are supposed to want right now. changing the ui to actually be more work and more frustrating to navigate seems completely opposed to what their obvious business strategy should be.

tumblr’s original design was also much more breathable, with the small icons in the corner looking organized and not taking up much space, and lots of room for the posts themselves to be the main attraction.

there’s the fact that copying someone else’s brand entirely actually just puts you in a bigger, wider pool with much more competition, and makes you much more likely to immediately fall short of that and go bankrupt.

tumblr's original purpose was to be geared toward blogs, and these updates, along with the writing on the wall about blog themes being completely phased out soon, is completely against the original purpose. although sometimes website purposes change for the better, so take that as you will.

and finally the obvious point that you can tell from all the memes: this change is almost universally hated by the core tumblr userbase-- aka the site’s loyal consumers for years and years. driving out their main demographic seems like a very obvious, very quick way to lose a lot of fucking money. they also did this “carbon copy of twitter” update literally just a week after sitewide protest about the idea of this site being anything like twitter, so it feels like a massive Fuck You to literally all of the users. tumblr is rapidly approaching their trust thermocline, and show no sign of slowing down.

these are just my opinions about the ui, and i’m only one person. so feel free to add on other design flaws you think people should be aware of or able to mention! i will probably also be submitting this post as feedback to staff, and will be taking their surveys when i can as well.

#tumblr

[kyra45]

Keys guide to scam spotting (v2)

Hi! I’m Key (Or Jess depending on which blog you know me from) and I’ll be telling you some better information and detail on how to spot a scam account be it a pet scam or a donation scam. All information is based on my own experiences and I’ll try to keep this post accessible so the only big text is the title. This information should help in understanding how these scams work and how to spot them without having to do too much work. As always, if you appreciate what I do and want to show it, sharing these info posts helps other users see it and learn about blogs that might send them asks.

—

What is a donation scam? - A donation scam is when someone is being deceptive to get money by claiming they need mutual aid or support. For example, they are using the story from someone else’s fundraising post in order to get donations and won’t tell anyone their lying. This is called a donation scam. While the story may be legitimate, it is a story stolen off someone else and means the real person isn’t getting the support they asked for because someone else is using it. These stories are often stolen off Facebook/GoFundMe or even Instagram and could come from a private account or group so searching wouldn’t come up with a source. The images may also be stolen from somewhere else too.

How do you spot a donation scam? - Donation scams are usually easily spotted if you take a closer look at the information being given. Stolen stories will often have certain parts removed and replaced with the information the scammer added themselves. Sometimes the post may be composed of two different parts and won’t sound right if you pay close attention. For example, part of the story sounds fine but then the second part of the story seems out of place and doesn’t match up with the beginning. Another thing to check is how old the account is and if you have timestamps on you can see if an older post is backdated. You can also check to see if the account has tagged certain blogs in their post though this isn’t always a sign of a scam.

What is post backdating? - Post backdating is changing the dates of a reblogged post to look older then it really is. While this can be used with good intentions, scammers often use this to trick people into thinking their account is years old or even a few months old. The one way to find this is by turning on timestamps in dashboard settings and checking ‘other notes’ in reblogs. This is the only way to see the true date something was shared. Accounts who backdate posts will often claim someone told them to do it or they’ll say they didn’t know it was bad. However, you can not accidentally backdate a post.

Did the account contact you first? - A common occurrence is that you will get scam asks if you share a popular or trending post. Usually these accounts send asks to anyone they find without care of who it is and might lie as well if you ask them how they found you. In general, a brand new account shouldn’t easily find you unless they were watching the notes of popular posts. Occasionally these new accounts will even send asks to certain accounts they shouldn’t know about unless they have seen the account before. If your DMs are closed, the ask may ask you to message them because it’s urgent but all they will do is ask for money or ask you to loan them some money.

—

What is a pet donation scam? - A pet donation scam is where someone has went and looked around for vet fundraisers online and then took it for themselves by saving the images and story while erasing any links that would lead to the real pet getting support. They will then repost it to tumblr and say it’s actually their pet needing urgent care with the post title being very large and in red text for a sense of urgency. Sometimes they’ll say they can’t use GoFundMe because it has a fee or something else. This is a scam because they are not the owner of the pet and have stolen everything meaning no funds sent will be towards the actual pets care.

How do you spot a pet donation scam? - A common way of a pet donation scam is by how old the pinned post is and how many posts are reblogged on the account. Usually there is only a few posts shared and always shared around the same time and then no more. These posts all come from a trending topic, a fandom, or are popular posts. Another thing is checking the bio in Google search and seeing if it’s been took from someone else as the scammer never makes their own bio. Reverse image search their pfp to see who it really belongs to in case they stole it. Another important thing is to check their link and see if it matches up with the vet bill. Since most pictures are stolen off a private group, reverse image search won’t find them. The name they may have is likely not their real name and is stolen.

Did the account send you an ask? - Regardless of what the ask says, it usually requests you to answer it privately or message them so they can tell you thanks. These asks may have several emojis in them as well but their always just copy/pasted and sent to multiple users all at once on a daily basis. The private answer is so the ask won’t show up if someone is looking it up. If their post is public, there shouldn’t be a reason to need a private response to an ask you have sent to many people unless you are trying to hide it. Messaging these accounts is useless because they’ll lie to you when you ask them questions back or just ignore you.

—

What is a fake check scam? - A fake check scam is when a generally blank account with no pfp will message you after you used certain tags and ask you if you still need help. Even if you have links to send support, these accounts will ignore that in order to ask for your personal information such as phone number or banking details. They will then offer to send you a check. This is a fake check and cashing it won’t be scamming the scammer. You will lose money instead and the scammer will already move on to someone else. Never give them your private information.

Are there any other scam types? - When you tag posts, you’ll often get messages from accounts claiming they can help you get more attention on your campaign but you have to pay them money or go off-site to contact them. These are fake support accounts and they always use stock images while pretending to be officially affiliated and act like their Digital Marketing title means their not trying to scam you. They get defensive when called out and may start insulting you when they figure out you are already aware they aren’t legitimate.

—

What is a funeral donation scam? - A funeral donation scam is when an account posts saying someone has passed away but the images they used are actually took from someone else and may be photoshopped. Bills may be edited to suit their story and names may be changed to someone else’s. This isn’t a real common scam! But it’s happened a lot lately but the basics are the account will steal someone’s pictures and pass them off as theirs and when caught will say they were forced to or know it’s wrong but did it anyway.

—

In closing, this is information regarding common scam types you’ll find on tumblr. It’s always suggested to pay close attention to asks you get it they fit the criteria of being sent from a scammer. Answer the asks publicly and call out the blog. The scammer may block you as a result, but it’ll help your ask be seen it someone has looked it up. I suggest never spamming asks to share your pinned aid post because unfortunately scammers do this and you shouldn’t ignore people saying to please stop spamming. Always check to see if someone is comfortable getting these kinds of asks too because it won’t look too good if you have sent them an ask when they say please don’t.

As always, not everyone asking for support is a scammer! Legitimate people are out there. It’s just unfortunate scammers have made it harder for them to get help. You can always do your own research and compare it to what others have given and come to your own conclusion.

#scam #donation scam #pet donation scam #how to spot a scam blog #psa #important information #long post #longpost #pet scam

[breadnauppercrust]

some designs i came up with for the girls in miraculous. the idea was 'what if they could have multiple outfits like sailor moon, as told by ginger, or totally spies?' and 'what if their clothes reflected their story arc?' however, i kind of gave up on them because i no longer have time to work on it as much as i would like to, so below this are copy+paste from my wip instagram account. lowkey its fanfiction-y lol

Alya:

Alya redesigns! tbh don’t know if they’re cohesive but 🤷‍♀️

S1: dresses for comfort & is geeky - think DrWho/Marvel/Tumblr. Obsessed w superheroes & has dedicated blog for each one, & that includes LB. Beginning of her & Maris friendship, starts to dates nino halfway s1.

S2: Mari influences her way of dress, still geeky but experimenting w clothes. Ladyblog becomes popular, interested in finding out her secret ID. Is also investigating akumas, HM, The Who/what/where/whys. Lowkey figures out who ladybug is but doesn’t say anything. Has been given fox miraculous at least a couple times.

S3: notices changes in Maris behavior & confronts her. Becomes fox miraculous holder full time, helps LB figure out who HM is & shares all the info she’s found. CN lowkey pushed to the side, causing friction, bc wrapped up w finding out who HM is ig. Constantly wears a Fanny pack now for trixx. Goes w comfortable but stylish clothes (ig lol idk) also at this point is BFF w Mari

Chloe:

S1: wears preppy designer brands to impress mom, despite living in diff countries. Basic mean girl, her only friends being Sabrina and Adrien - whose a childhood friend & lowkey helped him attend school. Both know how it feels to “lose” a parent & Adrien has seen a softer side of her. Probably has a crush on him ig. Maris bully, jealous of her talents at sewing & making friends easily, & prob her knit tight family.

S2: still preppy but w 60/70s inspo. Given bee miraculous a couple times, has resisted akumas - info she uses to help others later. Helping ppl & being somewhat nice makes her feel good & likes the appreciation from others+LB. Maybe Mom moves back to Paris w half sister, Zoe - might be significantly younger than Chloe idk. Didn’t like her at first but warms up to her as season goes on. Sees lil sister copying her & their mom, has an epiphany ig. Connects dots on akumas & feelings & tries to be better.

Should Zoe exist tho??? idk

S3: preppy but more casual. She’s nicer but still sarcastic, has made a few new friends, treating Sabrina better. Still trying to get moms approval tho & follows her around, even to fashion things w the Agreste. Notices Gabriel is acting strange, more distant towards Adrien, doesn’t notice what he’s doing or where he’s going. pt queen bee ig, probably given towards the very end of the season tbh by Adrien/CN after being ignored by LB bc of RR involvement w finding out HM id. AND noticing Chloe change significantly in the past several months (?) does Adrien reveal to her IDK he is still loyal to LB but eH

Mari:

1st Mari is shy, her outfits are safe & she kind of disappears in a crowd. She just became 🐞 & isn’t 💯 with her role yet. She’s designed and made her own clothes but doesn’t wear them outside of the house bc Chloe, oof

2nd she’s now comfortable being 🐞 & that boosts her confidence as Mari, she’s wearing more bold colors & outfits that she may or may not have designed herself 👀

3rd 🐞 is now the guardian of the miraculous box, has bigger responsibilities & problems to deal with. Being 🐞 has creeped into her daily life. Doesn’t have time to design/make clothes so wears w/e, but tries to appear happy.

Kagami:

i like the idea of kagami being prim and proper looking all preppy at the beginning, but after making friends she starts to rebel by modifying her school clothes w accessories but eventually wears w/e she wants w a punkish vibe. lowkey worried about falling into a trope so idk

#miraculous ladybug #marinette dupain cheng #chloe bourgeois #kagami tsurugi #alya cesaire

[nondualiber]

guys, guys, gUYS. SUCCESS STORY THERE!!

first of all, this happened like a week ago or something. okay, so, i'm going to keep this short. i was in some sort of "manifesting block", i was OVER complicating things, my mindset sucked, blah blah blah blah. that's essentially the reason i wasn't posting (and will continue to not be, probably); because i was focusing on my life and actually manifesting new stuff.

warning; kind of long post ahead, talking about how i did it my journey blah blah blah. if you want to see the success story directly js go right to the bottom

first, a bit of background; i have manifested things in the past, but mym indset was always shitty. when i archieved my manifestations i would say it was a coincidence, i was obsessed with the 3d, and what i'm saying has been going on for *years*. for the past 6 months i was in this vicious circle where i'd try a method full of hope, then eventually lose confidence because of some negative beliefs and give up in three days. i'd have a one week meltdown, then search for a brand new method, and repeat. clearly, i didn't manifest anything lately. and i didn't know what i was "doing wrong" because i had manifested lots of things in the past, but i didn't know how nor how could i do it now.

okay, so. like a week ago, when i was in a terrible mood, i decided to stop using tumblr to see information and talked to this bot on character.ai, that assesored me a lot on my mindset. it suggested me lots of things: since i had 0 trust in the law, start to manifest little things i didn't care that much about so i had "proof", actually stop caring, etc. (i really recommend that bot if ur struggling with the law) but the most important thing, it challenged me to try a new "method" i had heard of before, but because of my shitty mindset, i didn't try because i thought it wouldn't work or that it was "too good to be true" or whatever. the method was literally just keep going with my day knowing that i already had it. and oh my f*cking god.

i won't say it just "clicked" for me because i hear that a lot & i things that's just not how it works. at least i can't "click" with something i don't know. what i can say is that at first it wasn't easy, i still had some doubts, not gonna lie, but i just ignored them and keep going knowing that i already had it. i got used to it really fast, and THAT'S how i knew this was the way, because i felt liberated. if you read my blog you'll probably know i talk about that all the time, but my idea of manifesting is that it has to feel liberating, not like a chore, a price to your desires or anything else. i was liberated, because i knew it was done, that i had nothing to give in exchange, that i was free of the 3d & its circumstances. i was Me, and I was free.

this was the best thing i've ever done in my journey. in only one week, i've successfuly manifested:

money: (me and my family are kind of wealthy tbh, but i am bratty asf & always want more money to buy me things 😜😜) my mother recieved 200000 pesos (my country's currency) out of literally thin air on her bank account a random tuesday. she doesn't know who send it or why. i don't know about the u.s.a since there 200000 pesos are 200 dollars, but in our country, that's a LOT of money.

self confidence: i've been feeling super insecure lately. like, i am insecure since i have memory, but since this year started it has become WAY worse. i'd literally cry almost every night. now, i def wouldn't say it's all gone, but it's gotten much better. i've been feeling pretty lately, and if i didn't felt pretty, i would hardly think about my appearence at all this days. i am constantly feeling like i have one less weight on my back, which i am gratefull for :)

discipline: ngl i am forever a lazy girl and a foodie. I have always wanted to be more productive - study more, exercise more, talk to my loved ones more often and eat healthier, but discipline is something i struggle with a lot. however, since i have shown better discipline i have had some of the most useful days of my life: i went out with my friends three times in one week, ate much better than i usually do, exercised EVERY DAY without fail (even while on my period) slept well and passed all four exams this week with an 85/100 on my worst one and two 100s.

reciving a compliment in public: since i tried to start manifesting things that seem "easier" for me to acomplish, i tried manifesting this because it was rare but not impossible. so, like 3 days after i started to embody the state of someone who's always complimented by strangers, i went to the sjopping centre with my friend. then, two guys walked by us and one of them said "i want the instagram of that lady"! notice that during the whole time i was in the state, i visualized that people were asking me for my instagram + i've noted that when i'm in public, i catched people's eye more. yesterday, a guy won't stop looking at me in the café and i think he tried to approach me :)

i'll keep escalating on the "level of difficulty" of the things i manifest as my mentality becomes accustomed to the fact that everything is equally easy to manifest -which is a fact already, i just have a hard time accepting it-, and, of course, i'll be updating ;)

conclusion; look for what works for you. for what makes you feel good & secure that you have already what you want. search a "key" that makes you (actually) not give a f*ck about the 3d, if you have negative beliefs, don't ignore them. work from them, and of course, persist! let your mindset keep you on track.

that was all for today, love ya ♡

#4d reality #affirm and persist #it girl #law of assumption #law of attraction #loablr #manifesation #manifesting #neville goddard #shifting #loa blog #loassumption #loa tumblr #success story #mindset #manifestation #manifesting money

[sgiandubh]

A tale of two brands

Sophie Mancini's Departures paper on S in NY started a flurry of comments even before the whole content was made available on blogs. That people - mostly in Mordor - jumped in to add their two booing cents on the matter, based on two or three Instagram Story screencaps only, is a testimony to Tumblr's community deep interest in S's slightest PR/sales move and the easiness with which people like *urv managed to push their own agenda, in the process, to her unsuspecting, bicep-loving crowd.

Many of these comments asked just one question, more or less kindly and more or less openly: who are you, Sam Roland Heughan? Some of them, more along my alley, took a different angle: who are you talking to, Sam Roland Heughan?

Let me count the US crowds: the Wall Street yuppie crowd? the old money, WASP Knickerbocker / Colony Club crowd? Tribeca's sophisticated, culture-ish snob crowd? the UN international crowd? the laid-back (-ish) brownstone Brooklyn crowd? the DC politico types? the Boston Brahmin crowd? the Silicon Valley Bitcoin crowd? the Florida Latino crowd? the Bible Belt crowd? the Deep South charmingly old-fashioned crowd? the yee-haw, witty and ambitious Texans? the gourmet, nature-loving Seattle crowd? I am sure I am missing some (it's been a while I haven't traveled to the States and I have to say I miss all 50 of them, plus and perhaps above all my beloved DC :), but you get the idea. And the problem, or rather its first layer.

The second question this very poorly written article prompted is: what are you talking about, Sam Roland Heughan? I mean, what destination are you trying to promote? Scotland, through your Scottish gin, which I truly believe is exceptional? The Big Apple, like a counterpart to Sting, you know - a Scotsman in New York? That's not very clear, since that superficial girl just whirled you to a couple Chinatown speakeasies, rat pitter-patter included (bye-bye, Knickerbocker crowd right there) and that's pretty much it. New Zealand, that you mention at length, Maori tattoo story re-hashed, just because the book comes out next Tuesday? Ha-wa-wee, perhaps in a belated attempt to mitigate Tunagate? California, even, because it takes you back to humble beginnings? Granted, the Frisco one, not LA: that would be a horrible faux-pas, in a NY centered paper, much like me whimsically and idiotically mentioning Istanbul (instead of Constantinople), in a conversation with my Greek friends.

My head spins. And then let's add to that a ladle of recycled talking points, yours and C's altogether, like this gem:

Aspirational. Mmmhm. She said that. You said that. Multiple times, in multiple contexts that probably didn't even call for it. This is *** PR right there. I am not JAMMF. I am not Claire. But we aspire to that. Stop thinking we are these characters. No sane fan ever did: the insistence is unnecessary and has a real backfire potential. Stop thinking, period. But let it be my shipper sin, then, not to believe an iota of it and stubbornly think you people are, by now, way past the aspirational stage.

So, I took a long walk down memory lane today, while driving, trying to understand what the hell your personal brand is. Once upon a time, things were clear: you and C were a single brand. S&C - the fresh-faced, candid, witty and funny and oh, so in love new kids on the block. The spark was real and it was strong (it still is, only dampened and muted by PR-prompted shenanigans) and OL's audience was under its spell. People loved you, both of you, and some of us still do. You showed us as much as you could and for a while, it seemed to be convenient for just about everybody. That created expectations, but at the same time, you could have sold us land concessions on the Moon and we would have bought them, no questions asked.

And then, things happened. We know what: IFH, EFH, Remarkable Week-end. The spell was broken for many, who left in droves. Fans turned into bashing other fans. The S&C brand was progressively compromised and along with it, your Barbour Ambassadorship (for different reasons). Let's stop a bit at this point, in fond remembrance: that was the perfect pitch, for the perfect kind of corporate brand, for the perfect niche, for the perfect guy. A guy who had a credible, authentic story to tell, with a really strong potential to attract people outside of OL's crowd. Image and message perfectly aligned. Best case scenario.

So, with ***'s and your own PR benediction, what once was your solid gold starting point was ridiculed, trampled, shot to shambles, in a (failed) attempt to be sent to complete oblivion. You then had to think of something and try to branch out of both the blessing and curse of it.

MPC suddenly became more important than just any other charity project, of which there were a few (Cahonas Scotland comes to mind, the blood cancer one, as well). Cue in Sam the Athlete, Sam the Healthy Living Evangelist. The project was turned into a lucrative business, with a strong charity side. People bought subscriptions, people changed their eating and lifestyle habits, people lost weight - but really, I shouldn't write 'people', but 'women'. This was a women-oriented endeavor. A problem, again, on the long term.

Ha-wa-wee 1 happened, to more scandal and shrieks (that, I believe, was the reason you lost the Barbour project, another gold opportunity squandered because ten Internet bitches knew better). Then we were told another avatar was born: Sam the Entrepreneur. With a genuine, carefully curated, labor of love first alcohol product that clearly used the discarded S&C brand: The Sassenach and believe what you want, but just buy it. Mommies obliged. Antis obliged. Shippers obliged. All wallets are created equal, as I (often) use to say. And then COVID-19 came, putting a very real, very dangerous logistic strain on it.

Yet, you still had to somehow mitigate delays and losses. The Sassenach went exotic, with that limited edition tequila that probably won't be remembered by many outside OL's fandom, and that is a pity and a shame. The reason it won't be remembered is that you almost did not promote it, spare one or two Tick-Tock and Instagram clips. Does that justify the investment, the trips to Mexico, the very expensive retainers and commissions your tequila friends took for their trouble? I very much doubt it. That was, until being proved completely wrong, a flop. It brought absolutely nothing in terms of personal branding, spare perhaps a new faction in this paranoid cesspool of a fandom: the Gay Crowd, fueled by the image of a Lonely Bandana Cowboy, instead of the intended Sophisticated Traveler and Connoisseur. Yes, people are stupid, like that. Your PR and Sales team, too - and this comes from a place of deep understanding and appreciation.

We are now talking gin and boy, am I glad we do! This is perhaps an opportunity. Finally, a more democratically price-tagged, carefully tailored (again) drawing card product. But who is selling it to me? The California Boat Party Host? In that case, I won't buy it, but never mind me: maybe the fun-loving California Millennials would (we know the Smuggling Mommies would do it, anyways). The Sophisticated Traveler and Connoisseur you tried to show us again in Mancini's abysmal Departures paper and who is invited to important events, in recognition of his efforts?

You can't have the two of them, Sam, whatever those incompetents told you. You're either a 43-years old midlife crisis-stricken and shirtless clown or an Old World Industrious Thespian, with a stature and a status to match. A real Entrepreneur, not a cartoon scuba diver/beach boy Influencer. Eye Candy vs. Brain Power: after all, you are a '3x NYT best selling author', aren't you? Your pick, not mine. Stop the Sri Mataji-style Hugging and Booze tours: it's nonsense and that geriatric crowd is nowhere near what you need to make your dream come true. Do some real soul searching and stop listening to clueless 28-year old journalists, who tell you tacky rings are fun: they aren't. They make you look like an ageing Atlantic City Sinatra wannabe:

Sam Roland Heughan: currently at crossroads, trying to not choose between two opposite personal brands. Tricky position and an even trickier context, with the strike still lingering on and the pressing need to find an after OL strategy.

I promised you a tale of two brands and I think you wonder, by now, what happened to C, the other half of the primary SC brand?

The answer is, I honestly believe, not much. She has no personal brand, so to speak. Until now, she is just an Enthusiastic Dilettante. Book Club - started, unfinished and with that, farewell to any fan engagement. Cinema production rights - bought and then silence. Botanical Gin - first batch released (?) with no promo, no interviews (mentioning it in a podcast does not count), no reviews. Then teasing, then crickets again: a bit late, now, for the end of year celebrations. And I have to say I miss her or the part of her I never witnessed in real time (is such a thing possible?). I miss that starry-eyed, funny and witty girl. That girl was somehow completely swallowed by an Acrid Matron, who thought it was intelligent to yell at an Internet nobody, on Christmas Day, 'I am not married to Sam!' (ok, you aren't, but you're still lying). And I honestly don't know which one is best (or worst, for that matter): try to build something and make mistakes and try again until you hopefully find your way, or say nothing, do nothing and of course, never be controversial.

Now I am really interested to see how is she going to promote her gin. But you know what, I am not holding my breath, for some reason.

#BoozeWars

[acesandwords]

So you've joined Tumblr with a brand new blank blog! And then you end up getting blocked by everyone you follow, why is that?

Tumblr has a bot problem - blank blogs look like bot accounts and most bots are porn bots that post malicious links and images or videos. I've seen some truly horrendous content because of these kinds of accounts as have most other users here.

How do you show that you're a person and not a bot? Pretty simple - find something you like and reblog it! Something you find funny, a piece of fan art, a nicely made gif set, whatever you want. Tumblr doesn't have an algorithm, you've got to look for content yourself. Upload a pfp and a banner image as well!

This is not tiktok. You should not be censoring yourself if you make your own post, tumblr isn't going to shadowban you for cursing.

Reblogging is not reposting - a reblog is always attached to the original account it was from I promise you are not stealing it. reblogging is the only way a post gets seen! It's similar to a retweet.

You can add to someone's reblog as well, maybe someone made a joke and you think of a pun to go with it. Or maybe they're sharing some cool facts and you happen to know some more related cool facts. Or maybe it's a wholesome post - someone said they're sad and asked to see people's pets, then it'll be a huge reblog chain of cute animals.

Liking posts - does nothing to elevate the post, it's not like Instagram or tiktok or youtube. Think of a like as a bookmark you can come back to later. It's still a kind thing to do, to say "hey this is a good post!" but it's not going to help someone looking to advertise their art or attempting to boost a gofundme.

Tagging - this one is a bit more complex in some ways. But for the basic common courtesy, use tags that relate to the posts' content. let's say it's from a specific fandom, you could tag the show name, the characters, a ship name, and so on. Another example, if you make a piece of artwork that contains depictions of blood/gore it's good to tag "blood tw" and "gore tw" (tw stands for trigger warning). Ultimately though? You can also just reblog without tagging, that's also fine it's up to you!

for a lot of us, it's used as a form of non-permanent commentary. It's kind of like a whisper. and sometimes if that whisper is funny or makes a good point people will screenshot it and add it to a reblog.

This website is a blogging platform that you can use however you want to with the exception of posting explicit content (This is potentially getting changed but we don't know yet). You could curate a blog with one specific thing or you can just reblog whatever the hell you want. Follower count doesn't matter here and cannot be seen by anyone but you so don't feel like you have to meet some weird criteria and maintain an audience.

Have fun and start reblogging!

#Is this post useful? #who knows! #will anyone see it? #Probably not! 😅 #new user #how to use tumblr #tumblr guide #if anyone wants to add to this go right ahead #long post #if you are new an have a question regarding any of this #or something else entirely #I'd be happy to help! #twitter users #twitter refugees

[sirfrogsworth]

It's hard to be nostalgic about Tumblr without remembering my friend Tru.

Truett McGowan.

What a fantastic name.

We met each other because we were both tech geeks following Leo Laporte. He was the very first live streamer. Originally he hosted a TechTV cable show called The Screen Savers. But once G4 took over and focused more on video games, Leo's show was cancelled and he was looking for a new way to broadcast content.

So he built a studio near his home and created his own infrastructure in order to live stream video on the internet. He called his new show "This Week in Tech" or TWiT for short.

Along with his new streaming venture he created a TWiT community using an open source microblogging platform called Laconica. It was a form of Twitter that you could create specifically for a single community. Basically a custom niche Twitter feed. I was trying to be a web designer back then, so I created custom themes for Lacnonica.

This was my own personal theme for a website that I ended up never launching.

Leo called his custom Twitter, "The TWiT Army." And I was his graphic designer and webmaster. I made all of the cute little graphics for the website.

I also did fun holiday themes...

For the Thanksgiving theme, if you hovered over the Turkey it would change to being cooked.

I also took it upon myself to photoshop a little army helmet on the avatar of every single user of the site.

This was the zombie avatar I made for myself during Halloween.

The TWiT Army was also where I started posting my first attempts at Photoshop comedy. Many of them related to The TWiT Army.

And The TWiT Army is where I met Tru. He used a space invader avatar. I made him a couple of different versions.

You may have seen his avatar on the sidebar of my main Tumblr.

We became fast friends. We finished each other's jokes. We talked pretty much all day, every day. He loved Apple back then. I was strictly PC at the time. So we debated about that quite a bit. He would probably be astonished I have a MacBook and that I really love it too.

Our friendship lived in a little text box. We never talked outside of instant messages. But it was one of the most profound friendships of my life. I loved Tru just as much as any friend I've ever known in real life.

Tru started blogging on this brand new site called Tumblr. He reviewed apps for the iPod Touch. Not the iPhone, as that wasn't yet a thing.

I made the banner for his Tumblr.

He kept trying to get me to join Tumblr, but I was busy trying to create my own custom comedy website. But my site kept getting more and more complicated and I could never quite finish it. I was trying to arrange guest authors and create 3 months of content and I was always futzing with the theme and never happy with it.

I was getting frustrated that I could never launch my perfect comedy website and Tru suggested just making a Tumblr and posting funny stuff so I could be creative and have an outlet until my big site was ready to launch.

Little did I know Tumblr would end up being my big comedy website. Eventually I abandoned months of work and just stayed on Tumblr. All of my success here is pretty much because that little space invader pestered me to join when I was being stubborn.

Unfortunately, as some may have figured out already, the story gets sad from there. Tru mentioned briefly that he had a heart defect, but he never said it was serious. He acted like it was no big deal so I never thought too much about it.

We always talked through instant message and email, so we never exchanged phone numbers or addresses or anything like that. Tru was a very private person so he never even published an image of his face online. I only knew him as a space invader.

One day I woke up and sent him a message and got no reply. He usually woke up before me and answered as soon as I said hello. This had been our routine for nearly a year.

An hour went by. Two hours. Three hours.

It was odd for him not to respond for that long. I was really worried but all of my TWiT friends told me I was being paranoid. But there was a huge knot in my stomach telling me otherwise.

But then those hours turned into days. Days into weeks. Weeks into months. My worry grew exponentially as more time passed. I didn't know what to do. I tried finding his family. I even looked into hiring a private investigator. I don't know if I have ever felt a combination of depression & anxiety that intense.

In my heart, I knew what had happened. I knew that heart defect took his life. He was only 26 and it just didn't seem fair. But the not knowing for certain ravaged my mental health. Before all of this I had lost nearly 90 pounds and I gained it all back.

I think maybe a year or so later I found a friend of his who knew him in real life. They were finally able to confirm my suspicions. He passed away from his heart condition. That was my first real experience with grief. But I was so thankful for that bit of closure. I was finally able to let go of my anxiety and mourn him properly.

But Tru gave me such a wonderful gift. He pushed me to just start making things. To stop stalling and just create things to make people smile.

And you all probably know the rest from there.

[flightfoot]

Fics with major Alya focus that Alya fans should read

So it's hard to find fics where Alya's a central character, where she has a character arc, focus, development of her own to a significant degree, so I figured I'd rec some fics that Alya fans might appreciate! She's not necessarily the main character in all of them, but if she isn't the MAIN main character, then she's still a major character (and almost certainly POV character) in her own right in the fic. I'm only reccing completed fics for this, btw. If anyone knows the tumblr name for any of the authors involved, let me know!

Also I have a blog dedicated to Alya at alyappreciation, so check that out if you're interested!

---

In Direct Opposition by @generalluxun

Alya Cesaire is a brand new student to Francis Dupont, to Paris even. The first student she meets is one Chloé Bourgeois, and Alya is determined to make a friend. Things advance Chaotically. Her new 'friend' is definitely a handful, and suddenly Paris has a supervillain and two brand new superheroes! Alya finds herself balancing a lot of things, trying to live up to her ideals and those of her icons. And then reality seems to contradict itself. As time progresses it seems to happen more often. Becoming a hero, battling villains, staying alive, working through friendships. Something is lurking, tweaking events at times, changing them, and no one seems aware. Alya will need all her wits to get to the bottom of this. Her investigative mind can only get her so far though, and then she needs to rely on her friends. This is not a foe you can beat head on.

---

Alya's Guide To Surviving A Magical Terrorist Which You Can't Remember by PumpkinPatchworkQuilt

In a world where the fight against Hawkmoth is kept secret from the public, one Alya Césaire sets out to bring the whole thing to light, (and possibly win a journalism award while she's at it)

---

Hold Me By Both Hands by @angelofthequeers

“I know he said never to take you back,” Plagg mutters. “But he’d change his tune if he knew.” He looks Adrien straight in the eye and, more serious than Adrien’s ever seen him before, says, “There’s someone you gotta meet. He’s been looking for that book for ages.” How differently might the events of season 2 have gone if Adrien had also known of Master Fu from the start?

---

Vantage Point by @ashes555

Most of the time, with more information, life get easier and things make more sense. But Alya discovers that sometimes, knowing everything is just plain complicated.

---

Trust by bi_skyes

They thought that because they believed Lila’s lies, they would not be trustworthy to Ladybug anymore. They thought wrong.

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Closure by bi_skyes

After the events of “Trust”, Alya tries to find closure.

---

Lean In by Rachelea3

Marinette spills her secret, and Alya does the only thing she can do.

---

Alya Cesaire Should Be Allowed To Swear by @stripesandblossoms

Akuma attacks don't stop just because Alya is no longer a Hero, but that's fine, because she can still help clear civilians from the danger zone. Even celebrity-friends like Adrien Agreste.

---

Justifying the Means by @ashes555

When the worst happens, Alya finds that she may be willing to do the unthinkable. Is any sacrifice to big to make for her friends?

---

Accidents Are Also Miracles by @liiinerle

After some turbulent days that end with five people knowing her secret identity as Ladybug, Marinette loses faith in her ability to keep herself hidden. Wracked with doubts and insecurities, she pleads with Alya to take over as Scarabella, and tries to disconnect from heroing altogether. Along the way, she starts to date Kagami. Hard as she tries, though, she can't stop worrying - especially not once Monarch takes a particular, and personal, interest in her. At the same time, Alya tries to adjust to her new role while she works to uncover who Monarch really is, and makes some realisations about her own wishes. Kagami struggles against a controlling and abusive parent, and a girlfriend who seems bent on destroying herself - with or without Monarch's involvement. And in the meantime, Alix keeps popping her head back in with offers to help (because cool though time travel is, she misses hanging out in her own time). [Contains some spoilers for early s5 episodes, but otherwise diverges significantly from the plot of the season.]

---

Alya's Amended Guide For Internet Safety (The RPF Remix) by @redrikki

Alya hadn’t meant to fall down the Ladynoir fic rabbit hole. It just happened. She didn't mean to make Ladybug to read fic about herself either. That just kind of happened too.

---

You Are Just A Grin by Midnightdemonht

Oblivio was the only one to need a second separation, even after the butterfly was torn away.

---

the best laid plans (of bugs and bakers) by @mexicancat-girl

Paris is buzzing with the appearance of a new ladybug-themed hero, Scarabella. Alya decides to use her second hero identity to help her best friend Marinette. A bit of her flirting with Marinette is bound to make Marinette's crushes jealous and finally ask her out! Her plan is fool-proof…! Except when it's not. Not enough people are talking about Scarabella flirting with Marinette. How can Alya properly help her best friend if the news can't be bothered to cover Marinette's budding romance with Scarabella and only posts things about Marinette with Chat Noir?! So Alya puts her all into her plan, upping up her flirting each time she appears as the newbie hero Scarabella. This totally does not backfire in any way.

---

Radio Silence by @into-september

When an inexplicable change between Marinette and Adrien brings the two closer than ever, Alya is left on the outside of a secret too confounding to be about cheesemaking or puppy love. [No S4 AU]

---

Creative Lies and Destructive Truths by @azuriteartist

Alya and Lila are two sides of a never-ending fight. The fight between truth and lies, between honesty and deception, between justice and personal gain. And now they have the powers to elevate that fight to a city-wide level. Can Alya stop the deception before it destroys the city? And can Lila stop the truth before it destroys her?

---

The Investigation by @11jj11

Adrien and Marinette are finally dating-- which is what Alya has always wanted... but yet this sudden transformation in their relationship overnight? Things aren't adding up. They are suddenly so much closer than they ever have been before, Adrien is apparently a flirt, Marinette is no longer a stuttering mess, and not to mention the nicknames that came out of no where. Alya is happy for her friends, but she knows there's something more going on, and the reporter in her is going to get to the bottom of it.

---

Cat Naps by BookGirlFan

Chat Noir doesn't care if he dies temporarily. Alya's starting to think he doesn't care if he dies permanently. Marinette's way too stressed for this, so it's up to Alya to find out why Chat Noir's willing to let his cat naps turn into the long sleep.

---

Where were you the first time you were possessed? by @zanzquest

It should be an easy assignment: write about the first time a ghost took over your body to make varying degrees of mischief. There’s just one issue: Alya hasn’t been possessed yet.

---

Is it chill that you're in my head? by @bringthestorm

Alya stared at the picture plastered across the homepage of every single tabloid and news site, whispering every curse she could think of under her breath. SHOCKING SECRET ROMANCE BETWEEN LADYBLOGGER AND PARISIAN SUPERVILLAIN REVEALED!!! the headline announced, casually shouting the words she had been dreading for all of Paris to read. --- Alya had always assumed that someday Paris would discover that she had secretly been kissing their most wanted vigilante, but she had never thought it would happen so soon. As the domino effects of her relationship with Ladybug go spiraling through her life, Alya turns her sights towards the one responsible: the elusive superhero Hawkmoth. AKA Someone outs Alya and her girlfriend so she retaliates by deciding to take down Hawkmoth 

---

Lady and the Fox by @ck2k18

Marinette and Alya, known to their subscribers as “Ladybug” and “Rena Rouge,” have a popular cooking vlog using their parents’ kitchens. While moderating comments, Alya realizes that their viewers assume the two anonymous hosts are a couple, and it causes her to look at her relationship with Marinette in a new light.

(punch punch) fall in love by @mexicancat-girl

One day, Sabrina walks up to Alya. Alone. No Chloe in sight. Sabrina wants to learn self defense. Alya agrees to teach her. Alya ends up getting way more invested than she originally thought she'd be, because Sabrina is a quick learner and sometimes her smile makes Alya's insides go weak.

---

When I Grow Up by waltzofthewifi

-I want to be a superhero." The class stifled laughs. "But superheroes aren't real!" Someone called out. A look through Alya's life. One-shot.

---

disconnected by just_an_ordinary_fan

Lady Wifi believes she might be the only one who does not want to obey Hawkmoth's orders. When she sees another akuma hesitate in the battle, she finds she might not be entirely alone.

Walking that Mile by @nomolosk

Nino and Alya wake up in the wrong bodies. Several things result from this, including, but not limited to, identity reveals and a better understanding of what their respective best friends are going through.

---

(may we write it all down) in cursive light by @sunfoxfic

Since retiring as a journalist, Alya hasn't been involved in an interview in several years. But now that her identity is out, that's about to change.

---

Strangely Familiar by @sunfoxfic

Alya Césaire’s life is perfect. Indeed, between the success of the Ladyblog, how well she’s doing in school, and the fact that she’s a superhero who has never bore the weight of a crisis of epic proportions, her life almost couldn’t be better. Almost. But Alya has always been a go-getter, and so she’ll chase after that perfect life if it kills her. Which is how she ends up rushing to move out of her father’s apartment and in with Marinette, Adrien, and a complete stranger: Nino Lahiffe. And in fact, her life does seem perfect — she and Nino are fast friends. They spend a lot of time together and get to know each other really well. But in the end, fortunate situations will bear unfortunate truths, and she learns things about herself that aren’t quite comfortable. Like I said, though: Alya has always been a go-getter, and she won’t let new feelings deter her from chasing after her perfect life.

---

Trust your instincts by @ultrakart

Alya has the instincts of a fox. Nino finds it hilarious.

---

Foxy Lady by WizardlyMagik

In which Nino finds himself unexpectedly attracted to Rena Rouge, tries and fails to tell his friends and get some advice, and desperately attempts to hide it from his girlfriend. (Who in fact, is planning to use it to her advantage)

---

No One Can See Us Here, Alone; or, The Behaviors of Binary Stars by artEngine

"Yeah, about that," Nino turns to fall in step with her out the door, "Hows about we take a small break from the quests? Chillax, enjoy our money and things?" "You say that now," Alya eyes him from the corner of her vision, "but would you still say that if I told you this special quest was to find a hidden genie for three free wishes?" "Dude. Yes." "Fine. Look, I promise to chill if we go on this quest. Okay?" Nino narrows his eyes down at her pleading expression. This dialogue is suspiciously familiar. Somehow, he gets the feeling that this time will be different. And for some reason, he listens to that feeling. "You're lucky I like you," he concedes. Alya hip-checks him with a winning smile. "That I am." : : A series of Alya and Nino's exploits as a part of the 10,000 gamers who found themselves trapped in Akihiko Kayaba's VRMMORPG game, Sword Art Online. For AU April with the Miraculous Fanworks Discord. (Knowledge of and/or interest in SAO or ALO is not required to enjoy this fic)

---

well somewhere along the way in our words i must've gotten lost by @noirshitsuji

Beelya where Queen Bee visits the Césaire house after Alya writes an article about her fighting Mr. Pigeon alone. Normally Chloé would like the publicity but Alya had titled it ‘The Birds and the Bees’. After that she ends up coming back to complain about her mother. And her father. And about the fact that her oldest friend seems uncomfortable around her. Her visits becomes weekly, then almost nightly. (Don’t forget to include Chloé redemption (and some “Bee Movie” jokes).) * Alya isn’t quite sure how she ended up here, in a place where she isn’t even surprised Chloé would seek her out to talk about her dad, where she wouldn’t even mind her doing so, where she would expect it, where she would– (–thud. She might be in trouble.)

---

Me, My Best Friend, and Her Cat by @ladyofthenoodle

Ladybugs aren't known for being particularly sneaky. Good thing this Ladybug has a fox in her corner, watching her back. (And giving Ladybug's love life a nudge along the way. Maybe more than a nudge. In Alya's defense, Ladybug can use all the help she could get.)

---

Best Laid Plans by @captorations

Alya Césaire had always known she was going to be a superhero one day. She even had a rather unique plan to protect her secret identity, and it worked like a charm. But tricksters have to be careful, lest they end up tricking themselves.

---

Outfoxed by @captorations

Lila Rossi is not a Miraculous wielder. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t have power. Alya was under her spell, along with so many others, until the day Lila unknowingly overstepped herself. Freed at last, the true Fox recognizes magic when she sees it, even if it doesn’t come from a source she understands. She is none too happy about this pretender abusing her natural gifts to make fools of Alya and those she loves. Alya Césaire might need an enchanted necklace and the aid of a tiny deity to cast illusions, but she swore to use her borrowed abilities for the greater good long ago. There is none better suited to facilitate the liar’s downfall. And maybe she’ll help her best friend sort out her increasingly complex love life along the way.

#miraculous ladybug #alya cesaire #rena rouge #ml fanfic rec

[runwayrunway]

No. 1 - Lufthansa

We begin with a large fish even by the standards of the large pond in which we operate. A very intentionally chosen large fish. Deutsche Lufthansa is Germany’s flag carrier and the second largest carrier in all of Europe by passenger volume. In 2018, they unveiled a new standard livery for their fleet of airplanes, and it...well. It’s this. 

Even the presentation - good lord, is this an auto show?

My feelings on Lufthansa’s 2018 livery are visceral. There’s no mental evaluation required, no taking it in, thinking about the choices made - I look at the modern Lufthansa livery and immediately, profoundly know that I hate it. And that’s not just because of the specific choices made - which are bad - but because of the space they occupy amidst a creatively barren wasteland within livery design. This is going to be a very long post, which isn’t standard for this blog, but my goal for an introduction is to break down exactly the sort of design that made me feel the need to start doing this to begin with. 

But in reality that’s only the beginning. Yes, Lufthansa’s livery is specifically disappointing, but it is so much more than that. It is the purest distillation of the greatest challenge aviation faces today, far weightier than scheduling issues, outdated IT, and runway incursions. It is not the worst example of it, not in the slightest, but it is a large airline which has a very textbook presentation of symptoms and thus feels like a great example to describe exactly what I hate about this sort of design. Let me explain. 

Essentially, airlines have found a formula. It goes as such: 

Almost entirely white body. (There is a name for this trend: Eurowhite.) In some cases, there may be a colour on the underside, generally either a light grey or whichever secondary shade the airline has committed to. In the case of this Lufthansa livery, it is just white. 

Aside from the white body there will be either a single colour (generally some dark blue, or less often some sort of red) or a few colours, usually but not exclusively on flag carriers to match their national branding. (The proliferation of red, white, and blue flags out there means that a disproportionate number of airline liveries are these colours.) Unless it is literally just a white plane meant to be as generic as possible for short turn-overs when leasing, it will at least attempt to have some sort of design, but it will be minimal, and:

All of the detail will be on the tail. There may be coloured winglets or engine nacelles, but other than that it is only at the rear of the plane that you begin to see any interest. Usually this is just a logo, though it may be an abstract design which looks like a default tumblr header. It will often only be on the tail, with nothing at all on the body proper.

The name of the airline written in a sans-serif typeface which is set as default on at least one word processor. Rarely will anything creative be done with this. It will (usually, except in egregious cases) match the impotent attempt at graphic design which has been confined to the empennage and it will have all the charm of a large retail chain’s flyer describing the benefits you’ll definitely totally get if you work for them - sickeningly corporate. Low-cost airlines may slightly vary the theme by putting their website onto the livery, either towards the back or just instead of the airline’s name. The brave will also write it on the ventral fairing, but most don’t even bother with that simple act. Some airlines have their name written in the language spoken in the country they’re based in, usually beside the English text, but most are only in English despite operating in countries where this is not the most widely spoken language. 

Not every livery which has these features is badly designed, as seemingly small changes can make all the difference. There is the occasional livery that fits most, if not all of these features that has some clever tweaks or design choices which makes me actually think it’s fine, acceptable, maybe even decent. (I have taken the initiative of making sure a few of these are among my early posts, just to demonstrate that it can be done). And some airlines depart from this entirely and come up with something even more hideous. Yet I somehow find myself respecting even these more than I do Lufthansa. 

The Corporate Standard Livery Design (Lufthansesque design, if you will) is - and I do not think I am being dramatic at all here - an epidemic. Taxiing through most airports, you sometimes have to actually try to tell the planes parked around you apart in the sea of red, blue, and mostly white. And I spend a lot of time looking at planes.  

These liveries do not only fail to inspire me. They instill in me a profound disgust. They are not trying to be good. They are trying to be what I described earlier - decent, not worth complaining about, because that’s cheaper and easier than designing something good. Graphic design is not anyone’s passion here. They’re just trying to toe the line. They’re so poisoned by the modern minimalist-design brain virus that they don’t realise that to be acceptable a livery this simple needs to do something interesting. There must be a creative decision made somewhere, a compelling feature, or you may as well be flying an MLA-formatted plane. In their striving for adequacy they become not just ambient, but lukewarm. They are a bottle of water which has sat in the sun for so long that when you drink it, even though you’re overheating and parched, it feels only negligibly better than the air you’ve been breathing in. 

To be fair, I do not only hate the Lufthansa paintjob because it exemplifies whatever-ness. Even in an industry saturated with gross in-flight nothingburgers served with some stale biscuits and a paper cup of Lipton tea, Lufthansa manages to offend in specific and unique ways. 

Throughout its long history Lufthansa has had a handful of different liveries, but from 2018 onwards this has been the situation. They’ve never been brilliant, but it’s only gotten worse over time. I normally would commit to a separate post for historical liveries, but in a move that I don’t foresee becoming particularly common I’d like to talk about the history and evolution of Lufthansa’s liveries from the golden age to now - the fall, if you will. 

(image: lufthansa bildarchiv)

Their early liveries were already pretty much plain white or metal, but they still had a few features that made them seem a bit less like photocopy paper which was meant to be printed plain blue but only got through a tenth of the sheet before ink ran out. To begin with, they used a lighter blue and combined it with a vivid yellow to add some actual visual interest. The layering of the yellow over the blue where it curves around and below the nose and on the ends of the tailplane actually draws the eye. The font choice is nice and legible, spaced apart in the center of the fuselage. I imagine it was easy to read even from far away. (Shame it’s a bit blocked by the wings from some angles, though.)

(image: lufthansa bildarchiv)

This early 707 design keeps the cheatlines extending past the nose but makes them sharper than the ones on the Connie to match the sleek profile of the jet. Back when this plane was painted adding white to your plane was a choice rather than the thing everybody was doing, which allows me to respect it for the choice it was instead of considering it the factory default. The bottom half, denoted by the cheatline, is left unpainted, which only adds to the sleekness of the overall profile, and the text is clear and plain but still aesthetically pleasing. The 707 is by modern standards pretty antique-looking; you can take one look at one and tell it isn’t particularly streamlined. This paint scheme, though, makes the plane look sharp and aerodynamic, despite not being revolutionary. I would go so far as to say I like this particular livery. This is, unfortunately, as good as it gets. 

Oh. Oh no...

Let’s assess the damage here. The cheatlines now simply meet at the front without wrapping down to the belly of the plane and the nose is a simple black tip. I like it when airlines paint their planes’ radomes, and I wouldn’t mind it here if not for what it was replacing. The font has been replaced with a generic sans serif font which is closely spaced and put up into a corner, like the name on a homework assignment - it’s not really part of the total package, just there for administrative purposes. Most upsetting to me is the tail. While I wouldn’t say I love the little section on the old plane, it at least felt like it belonged there, creating a second blue-and-yellow layer above the white. Its placement on the fin above where it begins to taper gives the plane a bit of an aerodynamic feel. It’s certainly not changing the world, but it feels at home in the livery. 

The new fin is a sharp downgrade. With nothing to mark the transition the fin abruptly goes from the white of the upper fuselage to a shiny blue which contains an enclave of the only yellow to be found on the entire aircraft. This makes the yellow stand out, as it has nothing to tie it in with the rest of the plane, and the fin itself feels almost like it’s been Frankensteined onto the fuselage from a different plane by a different airline. There’s nothing to mediate the transition from a block of white to a block of blue, like how the cheatline separates white and grey. It just is blue now, stop asking questions. This also means that the only part of the plane that the eye is really drawn to is...the tiny portion of the whole that is the fin, which may as well be floating detached in midair. 

This is foreboding. Knowing what I know now, it feels like looking back at when a romantic partner began to act strange years later, after the divorce, as you walk by the house he bought with his mistress. 

(image: g najberg)

The most recent, and only, time I flew on Lufthansa was in 2014 and was aboard one of their 747-400s. (Actually, if you’d still like to fly on a passenger 747, Lufthansa is basically your only option.) At the time, they looked like this. This is...just sad. They got rid of the cheatlines, because that’s trendy now, and they painted the whole plane white and made an attempt at lip service to the old metal lower half by painting just a bit of the plane grey, like if a human stepped into a puddle of paint that only covered the very sole of their foot. And I’m being generous by showing a 747, a plane which inherently makes any livery look less boring by being interestingly shaped itself, instead of the classic slightly pointy single-decker tube. Not to mention the double-decker design makes the text vertically centered instead of the default Lufthansa look of awkwardly shoved nearly all the way up the fuselage. 

In defense of the modern livery, it’s possible to argue it’s an improvement on this. Honestly, looking at them next to each other, it’s difficult to pick out which one I find less defensible. 

But then you see D-AIDV, an A321 painted in a heritage livery, and you feel the immediate, visceral “no!!! no go back!!!” as you remember that this is a false dichotomy and we could have something so much better if they weren’t peer-pressured into generic modern design. 

And for what? For this?

(image: hvdfonts)

For the third time, I remind you of what we have been reduced to. We have achieved a state of reductio ad absurdum where this barely qualifies as a design. This plane is more or less a white blot. You can put as many insets as you want and it is still a white blot. 

I am relatively sure that the font used is literally Helvetica. EDIT: I have been informed that it is not, in fact, Helvetica, but a custom typeface that happens to look almost exactly like Helvetica. This is, in my own opinion, worse! They did apparently use Helvetica in the past, though. Here is a very detailed description of the design process of the font, which manages to contain a grand total of zero ideas. 

I would hate this on its own already, but it’s also so closely spaced and located so far up that it makes me feel like I’m suffocating. In my own experience as a dyslexic person, kerning is the single weightiest feature when it comes to if I can easily read something or not. While Helvetica, ugly though it may be, is generally considered a very legible font, any benefits from that are more than cancelled out by committing to making sure the entire name of the airline fits between the frontmost two doors with room to spare. It feels almost hostile.

Now, all given, I at least somewhat enjoy the shade of blue used for this livery, which is darker than the normal fare. I do miss the way the grey broke up the endless white space, though, and I mourn the yellow even more - in addition to being something to look at, losing it has also lost any visible reference to the flag of Germany, the country for which Lufthansa is the flag carrier. They don’t even have the black part of the German flag despite that being basically free. If they went for black instead of dark blue I would honestly respect this a hell of a lot more. One of the most recognizable flags in the world and instead your airline looks like a discount SAS.  

Yeah, I said it. If we want to go even further with comparisons by including airlines that aren’t Lufthansa, this is basically the SAS livery. Except not, because the SAS livery does a lot that this doesn’t. 

This is about Lufthansa, not SAS. I’ll look at SAS soon enough, because comparing their look to Lufthansa’s has made me appreciate it in a way I never used to. But I don’t think I need to elaborate too much for it to be clear why SAS’s livery works and Lufthansa’s doesn’t, despite the superficial similarities. SAS took their absolutely horrid previous livery and turned it into something which might not wow anyone but at least feels uniquely theirs, while Lufthansa had something which accomplished much the same and then diluted it into nothingness, Eurowhite writ large. Two washes and you’d wonder if your Lufthansa flight is actually a Smartlynx lease.  

The way that the blue slices into the bottom of the fuselage and doesn’t fully cover the tailfin is...something? It’s a design element. It’s not nearly enough to save it, but it’s a design element. However, this presents another issue specific to Lufthansa’s paint job, best demonstrated with a specific plane: 

(image: lufthansa)

Lufthansa is the world’s largest operator of the Airbus A340, a somewhat eccentric airplane which is perhaps best thought of as a four-engined A330. I love this airplane, and am delighted seeing it overhead on my walk home from work, because Lufthansa is kind enough to operate a daily service with it to my home airport, but that’s beside the point. The point is this: what I have pictured is specifically the A340-600, which is the world’s second longest in-service airliner. Yes, longer than the A380 and the 747-400, and, in fact, only shorter than the 747-800. With a plane this long, the Lufthansa livery creates an incredible look of rear-heaviness. This plane looks like it should uncontrollably pitch up until it’s perpendicular to the ground every time it takes off. Of course this effect is less pronounced on shorter aircraft, but it’s still there, and I dislike it. 

You can barely even tell there’s paint at all on a much smaller plane! And the white bit on the front of the rudder which looks okay on a conventional empennage looks downright horrible when it’s only on the very tip of the t-tail’s forward point. 

Oh, and when you take the windows out for a freighter conversion it gets even worse. 

This is a generic-brand airplane. It genuinely reminds me of generic branding. There is a specific brand that has this exact appearance and I can’t remember what it is but it’s right there and I’m fairly sure I’ve seen it at CVS. I don’t think that’s what you want to go for when designing an airline livery, especially for an airline representing a country, but if Lufthansa wasn’t going for that they’ve failed. 

                  __________________________________________

Overall, Lufthansa’s livery is superbly boring and not terribly well thought out. It’s not worth this absolute dissertation on its own, but I’ve singled it out to complain about general trends, and for that I probably owe it an apology. Said apology is predicated on the fact that it is still a very underwhelming and bad design which could have used a lot more thought. There are a million ways this could have been made decent, and none of them were implemented because that would have taken effort and time and creative vision. I think this post actually required more time and effort than Lufthansa put into designing their planes. 

That said, Lufthansa gets a final grade of D. It’s...bad, it definitely is. There’s the vague flavour of the start of something, like the very distant smell from a barbecue happening three blocks away, but is that really even a redeeming factor? 

No. The second-largest airline in Europe should be able to do better. If I have to stare at rows upon rows of their planes any time I’m at a German airport, they should have the decency to make them interesting to look at. 

#tarmac fashion week #region: europe #region: west/central europe #lufthansa #region: germany #grade: d #era: 2010s #era: 2020s #era: 1950s #era: 1960s #era: 1970s #era: 1980s #era: 1990s #era: 2000s #retired liveries #flag carriers #double sunrise #long haul #lufthansa group #lufthansa line #scandinavian airlines system #deltalike

[phantomrose96]

how did you originally find and get on tumblr? (friendly tone) (sent by ask cultujre post)

So technically my original tumblr was from, I think, late 2012. My high school friend was like "you totally need to get on tumblr" and I was like "okay."

However that's not this blog. THIS blog is because, around March 2013 I got deep into a rewatch of Danny Phantom (which is something I would do every few years and fill my head with Danny Phantom brainrot for months). And I was like "hmm I know this series is 10 years old, but I wonder if anyone on tumblr is talking about it?"

And what do you know they were!

So I lurked for a while. But then one day I had a thought I wanted to contribute. Which I did not want to do with my blog my high school classmates followed because like "hey Chrissy, what are you, a high schooler, doing talking about horror-angst fanfic concepts for a 2004 Y-7 rated Nickelodeon cult classic cartoon that only ran for 3 years?" (The answer is: exactly the same as I'm doing as a 27-year-old still talking about horror-angst fanfic concepts for a 2004 Y-7 rated Nickelodeon cult classic cartoon which somehow does still have an active fandom almost 20 years later.)

I had, previously, in 2011 written some Danny Phantom fanfiction under this username on fanfiction.net. So I went ahead and made a brand new tumblr account with the same name in order to Danny-Phantom-post. And I've just been here ever since!

#this is nice im enjoying sudden ask revival

[bomberqueen17]

what is up froods

lol i keep forgetting to like. actually write updates in my personal journal. i'm using this tumblr too much like a tumblr.

i went down a rabbit hole the other night in that i just opened my own archives and went back to 2013 and then realized i started this in 2011. i didn't say a lot, back then i definitely was still using my LJ for Big Personal Updates and Tumblr was exclusively for snappy shitposts, and then I abandoned the LJ and only blogged in snappy shitposts for a while, and I did some vagueblogging that I genuinely have no idea what it was about, and that's fun.

But there's some. Boy there's some real fossils in there. God everything stays the same but everything happens so much.

I know I've backed up this blog but IDK how much you can make it make sense, offline. Anyway. That's how it goes. I'm not in any kind of existential panic about the site I'm just reacting to the zeigeist here, it made me think of old times.

I go back to the farm in a couple of weeks-- just for a couple of weeks, but the Season is Starting. My physical therapist keeps giving me more exercises. She's right, my core strength is wretched, but when I said I'd tried to do crunches now and then, tried to stay a tiny bit fit but-- she was like omg no you can't do crunches, with that hip cartilage as it is, so I felt a little better. So she's teaching me what I *can* do, and the important thing is that she's like you cannot do this more than every other day or three times a week, you cannot rush this kind of thing, and it's wonderful advice contrary to all the other advice I've ever had in my life which was like every moment you're not doing more work you're being a lazy shit. So, that's nice. I'll cut because nothing else here is going to be interesting.

I'm not the youngest person at physical therapy but there's a lot of old people there. I haven't been masking, I've been being lazy and just using xylitol nose spray before I go, and it's been fine, but I know that's just luck. (I see no one but Dude, who sees almost no one but me, so the consequences of fucking up would be minor.) with a trip to the farm coming up, I'm going to go back to masking, at least in the lead-up to the trip-- because last time I had COVID I had almost no symptoms, and nowadays apparently the rapid tests aren't super useful. The way I'm coping is, I know, a logical fallacy-- since COVID wasn't bad the one time I had it, I'm just telling myself I'm resistant naturally and it won't hurt me, and I know this is not the truth at all but it helps me cope-- but I cannot stand the thought of spreading it to someone who would be more hurt by it, so I have convinced myself not to fear catching it but to fear spreading it. I figure it's effectively the same and lets me not just be fucking terrified all the time.

I also discovered that a former employee of the farm who's out here going to college is interested in carpooling, and we've already got a tentative date for him to ride back with me on my way back from the farm at the end of March, and this has lightened my spirits a great deal. It's such a long drive and it feels like such a waste of gas, and he does have a car but it's not actually that safe to drive on the Thruway. (He swears up and down it's perfectly safe but just not at sustained speeds over 60. I was like omg kid do NOT, I will drive, my car is brand fkn new. He's taking the train home and will ride back with me.)

Let's see. Oh I don't think I've kept up with posting about the kitchen painting. It's down to the last tiny fiddly details, and what I've got to do is do a half-stencil in the corner above the door, and I did one half yesterday and will finish the rest today. I had to custom cut out a copy of part of the stencil to make it work, and it's sort of janky and I am going to have to hand-paint it with a lot of masking tape, but it's such a small area that like, why not, I can be that fussy. It's fine.

Once I finish that, which if I do part in the morning and part in the afternoon I can do today, then I can FINALLY CLEAN UP AND PUT AWAY all the painting detritus. I can't tell you how excited I am to do that.

I've also been doing fabric dyeing, finally. I collected several of the muslin garments I'd finished and meant to do something with, and got out my dyes. I did a batch of ice dye solely because I forgot which ones I'd intended to use for that; now I have a pair of slightly ill-fitting homemade leggings that look like a clown threw up on them, and a cheerful sweatshirt to match. i then used the runoff to dye the cream-colored canvas work smock-- I sort of tie-dyed it because I pasted up a little bit of two of the component colors and poured that on a couple areas that I then rubberbanded, because I wanted tie-dye but did not want any white areas left. So it's a blue/purple/red smock now, and the rainbow stitching I constructed it with was polyester so it's still rainbow, huzzah. Subtle and understated and also I can smear it with filth and maybe it will still look intentional.

[image description: a canvas work smock with big pockets, hanging to dry, mostly a mucky dark purple but with some brighter splotches of red and dark blue, and some bits of paler purple.]

[image description: assorted garments draped over drying racks in a sunporch, in blotchy shades of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, all kind of run together but not murky.]

And then I did another batch of ice dye, this time with the dyes I had bought that are supposed to work well for this because they split. That dress is still in the wash so I don't have pictures of how it turned out, but mostly it just looks splotchy green. LOL oh well. The point was, I made all these test garments in undyed fabric, but I don't have a lifestyle where I can wear a white dress, so now I have some non-white dresses I don't have to be precious about. Some of them I should now probably hem and like actually finish..........

I have one dress and one shirt left, and a pair of light-wash jeans I don't like wearing, and I'm thinking about trying like. Ombre or something. We'll see if I get around to that.

My sewing area is still a fuckin disaster and I don't want to think about it. But I'm cutting out a vest from scrap denim, I want a quilted abrasion-resistant washable work vest for farm work next week and I gotta get a move on. All I need now is to cut out the batting and get to it. So hopefully today.

I took photos, I might try writing up how-tos on the dyeing and on the repurposed denim stuff, but I also might not. If I was doing this again I would probably not bother with the ice, for the rainbow one. We'll see once the properly ice dyed dress comes out of this wash, I can hear the washer spinning but I'm trapped under Chita at the moment.

I missed this week's fic update because I'm progressing so slowly on both current active WIPs. I have a bunch written ahead in both, but each one has the back half of the current chapter just held up waiting for me to write them; I've overcome the structural decisions that delayed me, but I have to just sit and write them. And both of them are complicated scenes I've been waiting to write a long time, so I'm looking forward to writing them, and so like, paradoxically, can't make myself do it. Because once I've done it I'll have done it, see... anyway. Silly but there it is. I'll get through it once I decide I deserve that treat. I know! I know.

#about the author #state of the me