#artists or have One thing missing and its driving me insane

[alebrijediscordico]

*thinks abt wings* *thinks abt wings* *thinks abt wings* *thinks abt wings* *thinks abt wings* *thinks abt wings* *thinks abt wings* *thinks abt wings* *thinks abt wings* *thinks abt wi-

#there's so many shapes and forms but most ppl dont get em right bc the structure is sublime unless u pay a Fuck ton of attention #and unless u Really study how wings open move close etc is So Hard to get right but once u do u Cant stop doing them in a certain way #but even Great artists who understand and use brilliantly shapes color theory etc etc either make the same mistake as barely starting- #artists or have One thing missing and its driving me insane #but also ive notice artists who have the best wings and even stylize em right have Such a good understanding of how to paste 3d into a 2d #space or just have such eye to add little things that many others skip or erase even when is an everyday thing n feels strange without once #you notice. #and maybe thats why my personal wing tutorial is getting so long? bc i feel unless u know or are aware of every single little thing the #wings Will come out wonky or missing something important- i feel kinda crazy tbh. i just see so many drawn wings all the time n yet 97% of #em could be fixed with One (1) itty little change- #anyways to anyone who might read this ty for readin but also if u feel like your wings might be lacking smth do let me know i wanna see em #i probably know whats The Thing that might be wrong #n if ure wondering why im like this <- has been cursed by the gods n is always starved for a peculiar kind of knowledge (special interest) #zach barks

[dreadnotau]

Its been a decent couple of months of productive work, so it's sadly time for a schedule change. I'll be posting pages two weeks apart again. Details provided below if you're curious as to why.

In all honesty there's no big dramatic reason this time around. I've just slowly lost drive to work on Dread Not as often and as thoroughly as I used to be able to. As I said in one of my previous posts (that sounded suspiciously like this one), I want to focus on other projects as well. One of those is my personal art blog, which I've neglected even though I've had art on the backburner that I've been meaning to post for AGES. Kingdomrune is another one of those, where I have shit I could post that I just... never did. Dread Not takes a lot of time and I miss being able to dedicate that time to consuming media instead of just grinding and trying to produce my own. One of the most important things to do as an artist is to broaden your horizons and take in as much art as you can, to diversify and expand what you know and what you can make. But, when all day every day I'm just sitting and drawing my own thing, it's like I have tunnel vision and my creative resources run dry. It's starting to feel weirdly soulless on my end, because I don't feel nearly half the inspiration to make the pages as I did when the big hiatus ended. It's all dependent on time and exposure, and I can only crunch for so long before it starts to feel damaging to me instead of fun and creatively fulfilling.

So what does this mean, practically speaking? Well, for one, I'm spacing out the page upload for the rest of Act 1, as previously mentioned. I'm well aware this will kill the pacing and it'll drag out longer than it theoretically needs to, but I'd even rather that than trying to rush out a page in the Two Days I have free this week (yeah, ONLY two days free out of the ENTIRE week. Don't ask me why it's not even my fuckin' fault this time). If pages become even more scarce than 1 page per 2 weeks, blame it on college. I'm getting new subjects and I don't even know the class schedule yet. Concerning Act 2 though, I'll be changing the structure of the pages from their core. I'll be switching to a different drawing software (probably Krita, suck my dick Photoshop) so it'll take some getting used to. I can't even promise bonus content or anything during the necessary break between acts because of that shift in software happening, I've never done a massive technical move like this. However, it'll allow me to, not only work on Dread Not better, but expand my art overall, so it's definitely worth it. I've wanted to get into animation for YEARS and Krita seems like an okay place to start (the gif on this post WAS made with Photoshop, but shitty gifs are about all I can make as animations in Photoshop). Act 2's style will, predictably, differ heavily from Act 1 and (with how long writing the dialogue alone for it is taking), it might end up being Longer than Act 1, too. Visually, it'll probably be something like cleaned up and coloured sketches, with simpler colour palettes and simpler (big airquotes) visuals overall, and it'll speed up the process and possibly allow me to post more than one page at a time. Possibly. That's not a promise.

I'm sorry if that's disappointing to anyone, but I physically can't make myself continue the current artstyle across all acts. It's just not feasible.

For those curious about the FARTHER future of Dread Not, I have plans to turn Act 3 into a series of fics rather than full comic pages, and something maybe a bit more insane for Act 4. I don't have everything figured out yet, and I don't want to make any false promises or give any grand ideas I won't be able to commit to, since only time will tell how my creativity will flow years from now. If you all want more content from me specifically, again I'm planning on reviving my art tumblr like a half buried zombie, and you'll probably see more there than you bargained for once I actually get into the habit of posting things. If you're mayhaps interested in my original stuff, keep your eyes peeled for a guy called Duro, I might start posting about him some time soon.

As always, thank you for your patience, and apologies again if this news was disappointing to anyone. I'm just one guy and this comic is a titan of biblical proportions. I'll keep you all posted on any further developments and plans for the future! Stay tuned!

#dread not #dreadnot #dread not au #dreadnotau #not comic #kris #schedule update #i was supposed to post this yesterday but then i got fucking sick #spent all day in bed hardly awake #so those two free days i mentioned in the post? #gone. just like that. #fuckin pray for me

[probablygoat]

Some Random 3:47 AM Thoughts

I've been playing and replaying Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy a ton recently. It's fun, genuinely. I enjoy its physics, its movement, the authentic feeling of improvement, and above all, I enjoy its philosophy and the things it has to say about the media we consume.

For a long time, I've gently prodded at my own means of media-related consumption. I love to branch out and have new experiences, but something that always gets in the way of me doing that (and probably always will) is the inevitable retread of an already-lived experience. Replaying favorite games, rewatching favorite movies and TV shows, listening to favorite albums and artists ad-nauseum until it's reached levels of proverbial insanity.

There's a personal sense of comfort that comes with the engagement of familiar settings and ideas, but I think there's more to it than that.

There's a quote from Getting Over It that I think about a lot since I first heard it: "For years now, people have been predicting that games would soon be made out of prefabricated objects, bought in a store and assembled into a world. And for the most part that hasn't happened, because the objects in the store are trash. I don't mean that they look bad or that they're badly made, although a lot of them are -- I mean that they're trash in the way that food becomes trash as soon as you put it in a sink. Things are made to be consumed and used in a certain context, and once the moment is gone, they transform into garbage."

Initially, this postulation read to me as something highly negative—pessimistic even. But the more I spin this idea in my mind, the more sense it makes, and the more I can relate it to my personal habits.

I massively enjoy replaying video games. But not all video games; certain ones that appeal to those fundamental aspects of myself that scream for and want and desire unforgettable experiences. Those experiences, for me, come in all forms: challenge, narrative, mechanics, depth, character, mood, ideas, atmosphere, variety, or a combination of these things or more.

"When games were new, they wanted a lot from you. Daunting you, taunting you, resetting and delaying you. Players played stoically. Now everyone's turned off by that. They want to burn through it quickly, a quick fix for the fickle, some tricks for the clicks of the feckless."

I've come to really appreciate video games that are built with this sort of replayability in mind. Games that dare you to improve after each playthrough, games that encourage you to keep coming back for an increasingly rewarding experience. Said experience can even change drastically, depending on the game. It can change for better or for worse, but through that encouragement they've made an active effort to avoid becoming trash.

I don't actually like using the word "trash" to describe media, but for the sake of categorizing my thoughts, I will. It doesn't mean that they look bad or that they're badly made, it means that they're trash in the same way food becomes trash as soon as you put it in the sink. If an experience you've had is amazing—and I mean honestly, truly amazing—then why only experience it once? I would even argue that the lack of a recurrent experience, in a lot of cases, narrowly misses the full and complete picture of what a lot of things have to offer.

If that call to action is ignored, it becomes trash. Disposable and light—like a wad of paper being thrown across the room. A thing that you did, and will likely not do again.

Of course, like any philosophy, I don't genuinely believe this can hold 100% true in every case. It's different for everyone. But I do think it opens up an interesting discussion. How much do you truly value each new experience you consume? Do you have the drive and the time to appreciate its every crevice, pore, wrinkle, crack, high, and low? It can be video games, music, TV shows, movies, anything. Chances are it comes down to either personal preference or circumstance, and that's definitely okay. Some don't have time, some don't have the patience, some just want to get their money's worth, others simply don't care one way or another. And that's perfectly fine, because this sort of cultural waste is inherently recyclable.

What I mean by this is: something may become trash to someone out there. It may even become trash to an incredibly large amount of people. But human beings, as a collective, love to preserve. We don't exactly have a 100% success rate with all of our preservation efforts, but the effort is always there nonetheless. A video game that very few play or talk about anymore could come coupled with pages of important resources for those who wish to experience it retroactively. To that person, in that exact moment, they likely don't see trash. They see a new experience. And under the right circumstances, this new experience could blossom into something special. It could lead to inspiration—new ideas being created and subsequently introduced into the world.

An experience like this can stem from just about anything. So, if you can, take the time to replay, re-listen, rewatch, whatever it is you do. You might be surprised how different a second experience can be from the first.

:)

#goat thought

[angrypedestrian]

My good pal @explosionshark tagged me asking my top 5 impactful bands/artists, and I am happy to oblige. These are vaguely in chronological order, but also time is soup, so.

1. Sum 41 - This could probably be swapped with Simple Plan or Good Charlotte too, but I think Sum 41 is the least embarrassing (?), so we'll go with that. But basically they were my introduction to pop-punk and, like, subculture in general. I was 12/13-ish when All Killer, No Filler came out, and Fat Lip alone got me out of a rut of just listening to country music and whatever was on the radio, and made me start having my own opinions about what music I wanted to listen to outside of what was being played AT me. And from there it was a direct line to stuff like AFI, and then eventually emo and everything else in its wake.

2. Saaa - You may recall, one of my biggest Brands is being a ska lover and appreciator. It all starts with Saaa. They were a group of kids from my high school (I went to a school with an insanely successful marching band, we subsequently had A LOT of ska bands with really talented horn sections), who were seniors when I was a freshman, and they were the first actual show, not A Concert, that I went to. I had so much fun dancing with my friends, learning to be in a pit, learning that music can be a real community, not just listening to stuff on your CD player alone. Honestly there may not be a more impactful band for who I am now and what I stand for. The link for this one is from my personal google drive, because I have carted the three Saaa demo mp3s I have with me from computer to computer for almost 20 years. They are one of my most prized possessions, and if I ever lose them, I WILL cry.

3. Circle Takes The Square - My memory is terrible, so I may be wrong about this, but CTTS was the first heavy band that made me actually, seriously interested in heavy music. I liked Slipknot and Linkin Park and shit when I was a kid (and don't get me wrong, they still rule), but it was very surface level angry teen stuff. CTTS was my gateway into understanding why screamo and hardcore and things on that side of the spectrum were actually good. As you may recall I grew up in ground zero for militant vegan straight edge hardcore, and all those dudes were so FUCKING annoying so I dismissed several whole genres of music in the process of hating them. But I was wrong about that, hardcore and screamo and metal all are good, actually. Also, my first tattoo was a lyric from Crowquill. But I was 18 and definitely misconstrued a line that was sarcastic as being sincere. Whoops! It is large and dark and takes up a whole inner bicep, double whoops!!!

4. Team Dresch - This is the one that changed everything, like really and truly. Team Dresch was my intro into queercore, and inspired me to start Fuck Yeah! Queer Music over a decade ago. I found Team Dresch as a newly gay punk kid who loved to be a pretentious little shit about being into 90s emo, and learning that there was a band of queer women making the music all the bands full of cis men I loved to listen to (and making it better!!) blew my mind wide fucking open, and I haven't looked back since. Personal Best is one of my most listened to records, and I still can't believe sometimes that I have gotten to see them twice! If you're gay and punk and play in a band, you probably have Team Dresch to thank.

5. RVIVR - I don't know how to put into words how important RVIVR is to me. Suffice it to say, this is a band that actually kept me from killing myself in a very very real way. I wouldn't be here typing this without them, and I miss them every single fucking day. But as long as I can hope that maybe one day I'll get to see them one last time, I'll be here. (Fun fact: not only are they the only band I've seen twice in one day, I've seen them twice in one day on two separate occasions! Second fun fact: I also saw them one (1) week after I got top surgery and still had my drains in! That was stupid, but I'm glad I did because it was the last time I ever got to see them)

(Gotta give an honorable mention to Ace of Base though, my first favorite band, whose first record came out in the US when I was 5 or 6, and it was the first cassette I ever owned. I listened to it CONSTANTLY and it is absolutely the reason I am gay today).

Curious to hear anyone else's top five influential bands or albums! @pivitor @piratejenne @unsungfury @whatthehelliswrongwithhim pop to mind, but truly anyone else reading this I love hearing about shit like this from people.

#thanks bri! #i gotta figure out what to do with this tattoo tho #might have to make it black out poetry y'all

[memes-saved-me]

15 Questions

Tagged by @lovebillyhargrove & @neonponders ❤️

Are you named after anyone?

Nope. My mum just liked the name but we do joke that she subconsciously named me and my sister after a Dracula hammer house horror where the two women are named Alice and Lucy because she was a goth lol

When was the last time you cried?

Last night when I was thinking about Joel Miller (tlou) 🤭

Do you have kids?

Nope.

Do you use sarcasm?

Yes. I think it's honestly like a regional dialect thing because everyone takes the piss out of each other where I'm from and sarcasm is one of the way of doing so

What is the first thing you notice about someone?

Normally their voice but I'm shit at recognising accents so not the best thing haha but also hair. Not necessarily as a judgement but I just notice that first and I always remember someone by their hair

What is your eye colour?

Blue.

Scary movies or happy endings?

Scary movies but I prefer bittersweet endings that make me sob and stick with me for a week over happy endings

Any special talents?

I can hear plugs and shit. Like the high pitched squeal some electronics give out that others can't and it drives me insane but is handy knowing when something needs unplugged

Where were you born?

The north of England, baby. North north. Like near Scotland north.

What are your hobbies?

Everything I post on here and like video games and the usual.

Do you have any pets?

Yep.

What sports do you play/have played?

I used to be really into badminton and was pretty good at it but my school never had any clubs and we couldn't afford for like private clubs so I just stopped playing after primary school other than the odd lesson in secondary

Favourite subject in school?

Media Studies because I'd just argue with my teacher about their ridiculous opinions on movies lol

Dream job?

To not have a job. I adore getting up and doing nothing but my hobbies. I work for my days off. There isn't a specific thing I'd love to do but I do love doing artist liaison at events because its stressful but fun and I've met some amazing people through it so yeah I do that on occasion but I couldn't handle it as a full-time thing

@peanut-booi @deedoop @vhagar-apologist @ratbastardbilly @scoobydoo-ghoulschool @thediktatortot @nogitsunbae @imsodishy @dragonflylady77 (I'm busy sorry if I missed you!)

[graysbullshit]

Ok, what the fuck is going on with this new "anti intellectualism" trend? I keep seeing the most obtuse takes laced with lack of nuance on twitter. Suddently it is as if everyone is determined into making everything a part of "good guy" versus "bad guy". Especially when it comes to "cancel culture". People seem to have an issue differenciating "mistake" and "pattern of behavior". It applies to real people, to characters, to SONGS???? It's insane.

Like, with the realease of HOTD I keep seing people saying the wildest things. People have been treating luke's death with a type of seriousness that isn't warranted. Like, I understand he is your favorite character, but why are people acting as if Almond is the devil? Also, the opposite is also true. Why do people insist in trying to take the blame away from almod as if he ISN'T an antagonist? Including the authors! He IS bad and he has done BAD THINGS and he will probably do WORSE things. It's the whole purpose of the character. It's not surprising, it doesn't reflect the character of almod's fans, it should not be excused and it's annoying me so fucking much that I'm starting to wish he'd kill Jake too istg.

Or the Antihero video clip from Taylor. I've seen people say that the word "fat" was being used as a derrogatory insult in the video, and yes. It has been used as a derrogatory insult in the video, on real life, on video games, on books and on other songs. The movement to turn "fat" a positive word is great! But you can't pretend as if the prospect of "becoming fat" hasn't been the biggest fear of any woman for the past 20 years. Taylor was representing this fear, that was caused by the big media, by putting a word that has been used as an insult against her. What is the problem? Did she say that you should be scared of becoming fat? Did she say being fat is a bad thing? No, she simply showed a fear she had that is related to a EATING DISORDER. She is talking about her personal experience people, how ignorant do you have to be to miss this? It's not even a opnion she has, its literally an artistic expression of a personal experience she went through.

Then there's the whole doctor who thing, which I'm not even going to get into because I'll get angry and not be able to articulate my thoughts in a concise manner. In general, my thoughts are [insert angry emoji here].

Then there's all the crazy discussions of my country's politics, which I won't get into because there is A LOT to discuss.

Then there's Tiktok and OH MY FUCKING GOD I HAVE NEVER SEEN A PLACE SO FULLED BY STUPID PEOPLE IN MY ENTIRE LIFE. No one does any research, no one even googles anything, no one fact checks. It drives me insane. Tho, I really like tiktok when you ignore this factor.

Anyway, sorry for the rant. It was weighting on my chest and I had to get all of this out of my system.

#anti intellectualism #doctor who #taylor swift #hotd thoughts #i will have an aneurism before i'm thirty #anyway

[caluski]

Depression stuff under the readmore nothing interesting as usual

I miss the time when I wouldn't feel suicidal every single day, it truly sounds so heavenly when I look back at it, I can't even remember whether I was medicated back then or no, I think it might have been the anti-anxiety meds which weren't even that strong antidepressants and yet they still worked at least for soothing my suicidal thoughts, other than my anxiety and a bit of ocd of course.... My doctor once said, don't apologize for when your medication doesn't work!, and yet I still felt guilty and left and it feels like an eternity has passed since. My brain doesn't work the way it used to, I know that... I hate that I have damaged my life irreversibly. And if I fail to kill myself again i know i will look back at the past and shake my head regretfully and think, why did I do this to myself. I feel guilty for being the one who's ruining my own life, but also I can tell that I am not meant to live a long life.. So what's the point? And even if I will live long, I know I will live an empty life devoid of meaning and love, I can tell, I really really mean it, it's weird to describe but I am absolutely sure that this is what I'm facing... And I know people won't believe me if I say it, but it's really true: the unfortunate truth is that even if I do get out to grasp onto others desperately, best option is, I will go back to being that shadow of a person in others lives, I will never be anyone's "most important", i will go back to being the one that's accepted more or less but somehow is on a very thin ice...

Are others being fought for? Is it an actual experience people do have? Is it okay to want to be loved by someone enough that they will try to get to you? I feel like at this point, every single thing that I want is the most impossible thing in the world. Everything feels so beyond my reach that I might as well die now, without experiencing anything.. It feels so hopeless, it drives me insane every day, every waking hour, I look at my 2 year old nephew and the only thought I have is "you won't remember me-- I will die before you get older. I will die and you won't have photos of me to look back on".

I keep having the urges to delete this blog. It doesn't mean much, it's just a blog, in the end I don't keep any significant archives in here... Every time I log out, my finger keeps hovering over "delete blog" button for a little while. It's meaningless and I know it - if I delete it, I will be forgotten soon enough, perhaps many people won't even notice I'm gone anyway - and im sorry I'm talking about it, because I really don't want to sound like I'm begging for more attention, or something.... "give me more followers and reblogs, so I don't delete", or whatever... Just the feeling of meaninglessness overwhelming me. What am I doing here, really - I'm not an artist, I'm not a funny blogger, I'm someone people look at and think, my god, he's so old and yet so childishly miserable. Sorry about that. I know its nothing but tiring to watch me getting worse and worse; I shouldn't be crying about it so publicly in the first place... I wish I could die instead, silent and dignified, unaware of whether anyone shows up to my funeral or no. Why do I keep worrying about it? Every single time I cut myself, I wonder, how humiliating will it be when my family realizes there is no one to come to say their farewells to me? Won't it feel the worst in the world? But I wouldn't be around for that anymore. So why do I think about it?

I don't know what else can I say. Goodnight

#pogaduchy

[livingasaghost]

september was not great folks, but we're trying <3

in the saddest realization of the season i discovered that my favorite part of the day is my 40m drive to work because it's chilly and i can see a lot of trees and the morning light and i also am in the perfect headspace to listen to Good Music and it's like when i used to make my morning playlists for opening the coffeeshop except soooo much more enjoyable

been listening to lots of holly humberstone and NF's new album and justin vernon stuff (bon iver, BRM, etc) and unfortunately gracie abrams - there's just something about all these artists being like "I AM THE PROBLEM ITS ME IM SORRY" that just speaks to me! that's not concerning at all!

laura and i talked for like two hours last night and it was like old times and god i really do miss when we'd just ride the same bus home and i could walk to her house ):

i've been trying to make taylor's chai cookies for like a week and i realized i absolutely have time to make them today so i'm trying to buck up the energy to do that in the next two hours before i have to be a person and go to a photoshoot

"good day" by olivia barton

i'm trying to get back into crying in h mart because mom finished reading it and we're supposedly buddy reading it so we can discuss it but i haven't felt like reading all month because i've been depressed...but like damn cancer sucks guys

in other news, i think because i've had such a shitty brain month this september i've almost pushed myself so far that halloween season sounds really fun!!! i'm trying to work through my halloween hate bc i think it's kind of silly and all my friends love halloween so i should love it too! and like i wanna watch spooky movies and be chilly and have FUN! god!

i kinda forgot a vital piece of jennalore which is that when i was a kid my mom's college roommate used to send us frosted sugar cookies shaped like bats every halloween and it was actually kinda the best thing ever? so i'm trying to channel that energy this season

work is batshit insane and i'm so exhausted by it i literally slept for 11hrs on like wednesday night bc i was so tired but also......when we're busy i always feel like i'm actually Doing Something and my bosses are so happy with the work i do so like.....it's good even though it's bad!

therapy has actually been really really good? like it Sucks bc it's therapy and i hate talking about my feelings but my therapist is the sweetest NB person ever and they're always just like "uhhh that's emotional abuse my dude!" and i'm so fucking excited bc at the end of october they're gonna have saturday openings which means i can finally go talk to them in person and not on my lunch break in our tiny break room!!!! at this point i have to pretend like my coworker can't hear everything i say during therapy otherwise i'd go insane so i always leave my sessions being like ......did max hear that i'm aroace and i have depression and i might be neurodivergent??? idk!!!

which speaking of, even though max and i definitely aren't like friends by any sense of the word....we are also just like having a time together! it's wild i see him most out of all the people i know but i think we're both going a little insane from the workload and being Depressed so we just spend all day being kinda wacky and for whatever reason i've reached a point where i stopped having a filter with him so i just start talking about the most random shit and he's cool with it lol

i think i might maybe be a little lonely! idk! i've been struggling to figure out what i need or who to talk to and i generally just want to talk to like two or three of my friends or my gc and everyone's just busy ): but then when i have the chance to talk to anyone and i Sit Down to try to interact bc i know some people are probably around i just get a little overwhelmed idk make it make sense!!!

and i realized i don't have a lot of IRL friends anymore bc a lot of the ones i had from the coffeeshop are Not My Friend and the ones i met on instagram are also Not My Friend and the ones i used to live with are Not My Friend and so my list of people to hang with is teeny tiny and idek what i need or want anymore so it's just my brain screaming .

the most frustrating thing rn is that i know i'm in a bad mental place however i cannot distinguish what i need! but when someone asks me what i need i get this intense panic/dread and i spiral real bad and if anyone tries to be kind to me it makes me feel worse and so it's like....i'm stuck in this stand still where i can't get what i need but i don't know what i need so i just eat cereal, listen to music, and go to bed early!!!

i don't wanna watch anything, i still haven't finished this season of only murders, i need a DVD player bc i want to watch the director's commentary of hill house, there's a bunch of shows and movies coming out soon that i feel overwhelmed by at the moment and it's just like !!! this is all so unfair

and i need to make all these appointments like getting my oil changed and going to the doctor for my annual but i cannot bring myself to do those things but also like should i ask my doctor about medication for depression??? surely it isn't that serious but like maybe it is idk!!!!

the depression isn't as bad as it's been in the past (i think?) like i felt a lot more hopeless in 2017 and i think a lot of that is because i do have a support system and a therapist and a good paying job and things to look forward to but like i'm very aware that many days i do just feel that feeling of "everything is meaningless and nothing will bring me joy ever again" so it's like !!! idk!!!! maybe i'm gaslighting myself into thinking i'm not that bad when in actuality i am!!!

i've just been stuck in that space of middle limbo with all my "diagnoses" that i cannot rationally understand if i'm allowing myself to see myself the way i am? like i always felt like i wasn't depressed enough to be Depressed bc i'm not suicidal but like ??? that's silly !!! maybe i am Depressed!!!!! but i don't even know how to go about getting meds and what they would do and it's almost more overwhelming to think about that than to just be depressed ): bc i still am convinced a lot of it comes down to the heat and the lingering effects of summer

but now i'm thinking about 2021 when it was the bad times and i stopped working on creative stuff or literally any year from 2017-2020 when i just spent the early fall Not Creating and having a crisis that i'd never create again and it's like.............is that bc i'm always depressed around this time? it's comforting bc i know life is seasons and i will come back around to making things and doing my silly projects but it's just sort of making me wonder how it would be different if i tried to find a way to get meds ....like would that Fix Me....would that Solve the Problem....what if it doesn't! what if i'm not depressed enough for that!

(this is all just thoughts, i'm fine, etc, just haven't let myself fully think about the depression this month bc i don't think there's a solution rn i'm just trying to get through it)

anyway, "good day" by olivia barton

#personal #it really is not that bad!!! #and yet...the horrors

[swinterr]

fic rec vi ♡

hi!

this is a another new set of fic rec and i’ll probably do a compilation of genre (?) just like the first ones.

made some changes like tidying up a bit and adding summary, for those that doesn’t have any summary i’ll try my best to add my own summary (it will probably be shit tho, i ain’t making a smut summary guys, i’m not confident in my describing a fic ability but i’ll try my best. if its in italic it means i made the summary hehez )  if the summary is shit, i made it okay.

read and support the fic and authors here: the fic rec ♡

a for angst

f for fluff

s for smut

// for series or list

nct 

jeno

no title by @tyongf-nct | s

- smut blurb.

body guards and boyfriend by @pastelsicheng | f

-  sometimes the only way you can really get some alone time with your boyfriend is by making his job hard.

lipstick smears by @kopikokun | f

-  jeno never thought trying to get his makeup artist’s attention would be this hard.

jaehyun

[10:30] by @moonttaeil | 

- a lockdown moment.

[2:40] by @nct-jungjaehyun | f a

- cute quality fluff time with bf!jae with a dash of angst.

[11:41] by @jeongvision | f 

- family time with apples.

just like magic by @starryhyuck | f s

-  jung jaehyun’s body count is almost as high as yours. however, after yuta spreads a nasty rumor, you learn that jaehyun’s always imagined those girls to be you instead.

love to hate me by @moonctzeny | s a 

-  you and jaehyun meet as sm trainees, developing a friendship until he debuts and you decided to leave the company and pursue a solo career. when you reunite again in a music show and he acts like he barely knows you, you stubbornly begin a series of hate-brimmed sex rendez-vous. your touch-and-go relationship continues on, until a song collaboration will force you both to deal with all your repressed feelings for each other.

moving on by @ddeonghwaa | f a

- reader has been chasing jae for some time but when she moved on jae suddenly enter the picture.

sun&moon by @ppangjae | f a

-  asking jeong jaehyun to accompany you to your family’s 1-week christmas vacation as your boyfriend has its consequences. one can surely get through 1 week of pretending to be in love with an enemy, right?

snack run with a snack by @kopikokun | f 

-  on your usual movie night with the members, they assign you sudden snack collecting duty. you’re a little peeved, but at least jaehyun offers to tag along. Unfortunately for you, things really aren’t going in your favour tonight.

lover boy by @neoct-zen | f s

- bunch fics of lover boy jae and reader.

jungwoo

one more time, please by @haequarius | f s

-  you don’t know what you and Jungwoo are, but you are certainly weak for him.

jealous by @whiplashsan | s 

-  jungwoo is all smiles and sunshine until he gets jealous, and he just so happens to get jealous over the smallest things when it comes to you.

doyoung

sugar, spice and everything not nice by @alreadyblondenow | s

-  doyoung getting your ring size wrong, unprotected sex, kitchen sex, slight fingering, wedding tragedies.

no title by @ncteaxhoe | s

- dom!doyoung, rough? i need holy water.

the little one by @ethaeriyeol | f 

-  a gift of life; female reader x husband!Doyoung; fluff, light angst, married au

lucas

exquisite taste by @weishenkonbini | s f

- smut but with a fluffy ending.

for you always by @labyrinthsofyou | f

-  in which you surprise yukhei when he forgets about your date.

6:19 by @cozykpopblurbs | f

- a cute fluff ft kun and winwin.

10:18 pm by @nctsoftarchives | f

- reader supports lucas at his superm debut stage. 

16:47 by @sichengssmile | f s 

- a fluffy smut. lucas a big boi.

missed you by @tokyobts | a f

-  after you and yukhei broke up, yukhei still has feelings for you. he reaches out to you at school and tries to get you back. at first you avoid him but later his actions manage to make your heart flutter. you’ve come to a sudden conclusion that you maybe still want him in your life.

johnny

34 + 35 by @domjaehyun | s 

- you and your husband johnny decide to take your marriage to the next step.

i couldn’t wait a little longer by @alreadyblondenow | s f a

-  you two were never together longer than two days, but the feelings, oh the feelings that you have for each other is clear as the day. it was a never-ending try of making the relationship official. johnny tried, you tried but it never happens.

what happens in korea, not stays in korea by @alreadyblondenow | f s 

-  a week vacation in korea for your sister’s wedding became even more exciting when a famous dj had a crush on you. johnny was sure that it’s love at first sight. not putting both of your careers on the line, you two had no regrets when the time comes and you finally leave.

laundry day by @immabiteyou | s

- a domestic fluffy smut.

make a wish by @sluttyten | s f a

-  you’re jungwoo’s sister, and he’s made it clear he wants you and Johnny to have nothing to do with each other. so you and johnny start fake dating to piss him off.

want it all by @sluttyten | f s 

-  you are entirely innocent to the point of being naive. johnny is not innocent, but he loves that you are because it means he can teach you everything you don’t know.

sungchan

wish i was her by @softsungchan | f a 

-  you wished you were her, laying in Sungchan’s arms and feeling his warm breath on your neck, giggling about sweet nothings whispered into the starry night. You wished for it to be you, the girl he liked.

2:21 am by @the32ndbeat | f 

- sungchan being whipped, thru a text message.

haechan

14:52 by @ukiyoexo | f

- a cute haechan and reader ft the reader’s baby sister moment.

prince’s order by @nsheetee | f

-  prince haechan nurses you after you faint, and orders you to stay with him until you feel better.

sweet treat by @markresonates | s

-  haechan takes you for ice cream but all you can think about is sex with him.  when you act like a brat, eventually you end up in the bathroom. with no panties. 

clingy by @love-mi | f 

-  I’m not clingy! I just love your company and constantly want to be around you and have your full attention at all times

mark

hyuck is always right by @luvrenjun00 | f 

- ceo!mark x reader ft baby donghyuck. a tooth-rotting fluff.

taeyong

snow storm by @whereisten | f s 

- a fluffy smut whilst a snow storm.

1:59 by @smoll-tangerine | f

- reader and taeyong ft my favorite game (where i always die first) among us!

bts

taehyung

is this allowed 1 2 by @seokiie  | f s

- how were you supposed to know bts would be filming at your coffee shop today? how were you supposed to know a certain curly-haired boy would take a liking  to you?

cabin pressure | f by @jiminrings | f 

-  pilot!y/n who accidentally became famous bc of a viral post about her, best friend!jimin!, taehyung having a shy lil crush on you aND ot7 being meanies for a tad bit :((

art major!tae and biochem major!yn | f by @jiminrings | f

-  tae’s cold and probably needs a friend more than he needs a model, y/n feels this nEED to take care of him, a term of enderment then a dash of emotional constipation and a sprinkle of jealousy :D

gank mid lane by @kimtaehyunq | f s 

- gank / verb: (in a video game) use underhand means to defeat or kill (a less experienced opponent)

birthday surprise by @ephemeralkookie |

-  like every year, you prepare a little surprise for your boyfriend’s birthday, one that you’ve been preparing for days. and after a very tiring day, taehyung only wants to spend the night in your loving arms.

jungkook

cookies & cream | s by @1kook | f s 

-  jungkook will watch a thousand cheesy christmas movies if it meant making you happy. (and maybe having his dick sucked.)

unholy night | s by @ephemeralkookie | f s

-  after a christmas day passed with the Jeon’s family, Jungkook decides to transform the holy night into an unholy one.

‘a short’ abstinence | s a by @seokiie | s a

-  maybe blue-balling you boyfriend (who has an insanely high sexual drive) wasn’t the best.

in which she’s done with him by @minstrivia | a

-  jungkook angst/fluff where he always pushes oc away (who confesses her feelings but was cruelly rejected) and insults her but she always comes back to take care of him when he’s drunk or picks him up from his one night stands and she finally decides to leave him alone.

bad influence by @noteguk | s 

-  in which you know jungkook is a bad influence on you, but you can’t avoid falling for him every time.

jock!jk and shy art major!yn by @jiminrings | f

-  established relationship ft. jock!jk and shy art major!y/n, y/n gets an unexpected pep talk and jungkook doubts himself, and either so much tears or so much dUST according to kook

special affair by @1oserjk | f

-  sugar daddy au except it’s just jk spoiling u thru animal crossing

fairy of shampoo by @ironicarmy | f s

-  sundays are for relaxation, house cleaning, and happiness.

abstract ft bob ross by @mimithings97 | f

-  paintbrush in one hand, joint in the other and you sitting on his dick is what jeongguk wants. and what jeongguk wants, jeongguk gets.

badboy!jungkook by @jungshookz | f 

- badboy!jungkook falls for good girl reader ft the boys and the reader’s apple. 

growing by @lesgetittkookie | f

- dad!jungkook teacher his daughter how to walk. super super cute family/domestic fluff.

quiet, baby by @bratkook | s 

- i don’t how to write a summary on smuts so imma just put this. reader and jungkook doing something in the subway.

still want that by @whatifyoulivelikethat | s

-  fucking min yoongi ex-girlfriend? a terrible idea. being hopelessly in love with her at the same time? an even worse idea. knowing he was being used and still doing it anyway? ah, Jeon Jungkook, what are you doing? part 2 of savage love.

desiderium by @jeonggukingdom | f s 

-  “we’ve been at it like rabbits, how are you still so horny?”. a newlyweds!au smut.

chapstick by @softyoongiionly | f s

- based on the time Jungkook said he needed someone to scold him so he’d remember to put lip balm on. or jungkook’s had a really long day and the only that can make it better, is seeing you. 

lover boy by @jingukk | f 

-  jungkook likes you. a lot.

unexpected confession by @sunkissedjk | f

-  you gathered up the courage to confess your feelings, but it seems everyone in school knows about it before you could even find him.

string attached by @ephemeralkookie | s

-  jungkook is what we can call your sexfriend. No strings attached, just you and him having fun and releasing the huge pressure and stress of being idols. But after spending an entire day together, you realize that maybe he’s not just your sexfriend.

no title by @himbojk | f s 

- dilf jk.

astro

eunwoo

ceo!eunwoo by @m0onbean

no title by @yutopiada | f

- a cute idol!reader and eunwoo moment at a music show.

disney by @bangchan-sonyeondan | f

- a cute date with eunwoo at disney. reader likes vintage things hence using a disposable camera.

baby, it’s cold outside by @fresh-outta-jams | f 

- a cute cold christmas fluff with eunwoo ft. the boys. reader went to the boys’ place for a sweater and cocoa gift exchange.

got7

yugyeom

cruel brothers by @imsarabum | f

-  jackson and jaebum have always acted as if they were your big, overprotective brothers. so when they both walk in on you and yugyeom in a very intimate position, things get a little tense!

txt

soobin

a special night by @gyuluster | f

-  an intimate insight on the first night of choi soobin’s wedding, consisting of kitchen floors, witches and an eternity of love.

boughs & branches by @jeogiyall | f 

-  decorating the tree with boyfriend! choi soobin from txt! fluffity fluff fluff with a lot of cute fluff thrown in and a dash of christmastime fluff. 

sleepy binnie by @immabiteyou | s

-  “i’ll let you do anything if you just touch me now. “ a sleepy soobin smut.

cake by @immabiteyou | s

- reading waiting for mc soobin with the guys. a cute fluffy smut moment.

kpop oc/s

seri by @ggukkiedae

anyway, thank you again for the writers please take care and be safe!

please free to recommend your favorite fic that i haven’t feature yet.

if the links won’t work and i labelled some fics wrong please let me know and i’ll try to fix it as soon as possible!

support the fic and the writers!

#nct #nct fic rec #jeno fluff #jeno angst #jeno smut #jaehyun fluff #jaehyun smut #jaehyun angst #jungwoo fluff #jungwoo smut #doyoung fluff #doyoung smut #lucas fluff #lucas smut #johnny smut #johnny fluff #sungchan fluff #haechan fluff #haechan smut #mark fluff #taeyong fluff #taeyong smut #taehyung fluff #taehyung smut #jungkook fluff #jungkook smut #eunwoo fluff #soobin fluff #swinterr: fic rec

[onebizarrekai]

v3′s art is comically terrible for a professionally distributed game in a series: a compilation

in this not-essay I will list all of the mistakes and problems I have spotted in v3′s art. don’t worry, it’s entirely for fun and I’m doing this on a whim, so please feel free to not take this seriously but also it’s hilarious and embarrassing how ridiculous this is like what happened did they speedrun the whole production or what

see, there are some things you can take as meta like “they made it bad on purpose to allude to the downfall of tv shows that have been on air for much too long” but I have a very strong feeling this is not the case due to the nature of some of these errors

disclaimer, the more I study this art, the more I fear that the artists were underpaid and underslept, so if this is in fact the case, I am so sorry to all of them but also I’m going to make fun of the art anyway

anyway let’s get started!

if you study this image for longer than 5 seconds, you will see that kaede is the only one fully shaded and keebo is literally just his normal sprite pasted into the image. every other character is just an ordinary ref, hence most of them facing the exact same direction with neutral expressions on their faces. it looks like a bad edit, and is probably one of the worst pieces of art in the game. it kind of gets better from here on, but my roasting will not.

with that out of the way, here’s the problem that officially bothers me the most and clarifies my viewpoint of “this is not meta and an actual lack of company communication”

this freaking cg, which seems normal at a glance, but some wiseass was like “oh, kaede is a girl, so obviously she’s going to be shorter than the Male Protagonist™” ah, that’s funny. because if you look at the character bios, kaede is, in fact, one inch taller than shuichi and not like 6 inches shorter as she is shown here.

also shuichi’s shoulder is disproportionate and horrendous and he looks vaguely like a jojo character, but I wasn’t even thinking about that until right now.

thanks guys, 50% of the fandom who has never bothered to check these bios thinks that kaede is like 5′3 (did the developers really put so little thought into her to the point where drawing her correctly in the game didn’t even matter??)

also I would like to point out that, even though this isn’t related to the art itself, yes, a character kaede’s size being only 117 lbs is unfeasible, but this applies to literally every character in danganronpa ever and it’s not new news that it’s unrealistic

update: someone in the tags informed me that in versions of the game that use centimeters, like the japanese version, kaede is actually shorter than shuichi, which just adds another thing to the list of weird decisions the localization team made for no reason. that said, after confirming this, kaede is 167 cm in the original, while shuichi is 171 cm, which are approximately 5′6 and 5′7 respectively, but one inch is still nowhere near as drastic as it is depicted above. (in spite of this, I would rather depict kaede as slightly taller, so I’m probably going to keep doing that.)

the journey continues!

bro if you want kaede to have shoulder length hair then stick to it to begin with

you can pretend this is at an angle all you want but they definitely committed the shorter kaede sin a second time

wait a goddamn second.

DO YOU SEE THIS

no………… it wasn’t kaede who shrank. it was shuichi who got taller

speaking of which, can we talk about how shady the perspective is in this elevator pic? look at shuichi and kokichi in comparison to kaede. kokichi, who is canonically 7 inches (edit: or 5, if you’re loyal to the original) shorter than kaede, looks taller than kaede. he’s growing too. what steroids are these gays taking

running into the room, electric boogaloo: I don’t think tsumugi is supposed to be the same height as kokichi

gonta… gonta you’re lookin a bit like a jojo character there

I love how kaito’s head looks kind of like it was pasted onto his body. why is he the same size as shuichi? shouldn’t he be high school bully size or something? his torso is teensy

ah yes, white angie.

I love this cg but why is shuichi’s right hand so much bigger than his left hand

I also love how this cg looks like they literally took pictures of trees and pasted them into the background, especially on the left. the shadows are so weird, especially closer to the ceiling, it’s difficult for me to believe they didn’t do exactly that.

return of Enlarged shuichi

puberty update: kokichi is now taller than shuichi in spite of shuichi never missing leg day. what crimes will he commit

I have to mention it, guys. this has to be one of the worst danganronpa cgs. kokichi’s facial proportions look atrocious. look at the way his face sticks out like his jaw is in the wrong place. his scarf is a pasted texture. that’s it. this moment was so iconic but the cg just looks so… so… off. like something is terribly wrong, but you can’t put your finger on it.

you know what? let’s get into that ‘pasted texture’ thing.

let’s imagine you’re an artist working on a professional game. you’re assigned to draw cgs of kokichi ouma, who has a checkered scarf from hell. sure, it will be terrible to draw, but you only have to draw it once at a time! plus, perspective is pretty important, right? can you be bothered? nah, actually. let’s just copy paste a checkered pattern into the cg, because I’m sure nobody will notice. it’ll blend right in with the other cgs that someone actually put effort into drawing his scarf in, right?

no. the answer is no and I very much noticed. this genuinely looks terrible and I would understand taking a shortcut like that in fanart or even an indie game but this is a full price pc and console distributed game

(an addition: look at kokichi’s TINY HANDS in that last one)

meanwhile, they straight up forgot to color in kokichi’s scarf in this cg.

dude. I forgot about whatever the hell this cg was. anyway look at keebo please just look at him

lovin kaito’s baby arms

real talk, maybe you could argue that he’s missing muscle because he’s deathly sick, but most of his cgs don’t line up with this, and his arms just look disproportionate to his torso size (granted this is a consistent problem across all danganronpa games and a lot of characters have this weird problem, like hajime, but also kaito is bigger than hajime so I kind of have higher expectations of him) maybe it’s his stupid goatee and the way he reminds me of yasuhiro?? it creates this illusion that he’s older than he is and so I keep expecting him to look more like an adult

oh, also rantaro is missing some of his accessories in that video he made–you know the one–but I don’t wanna go back and screenshot it

also you may have noticed that I’m skipping all of the monokub cgs because I literally do not care about them and I’m not even bothering to check and see if they have artistic mistakes in them

JIMMY NEUTRON???

hey um uh kaito you seem to be missing your neck

hey guys do you like my pregame fanart

so, that done, the sprites are also pretty terrible at times. they’re not as interesting to go through, however, and downloading the full sprite sets for every character and studying every single one of them will drive me insane, so I’ll just sum some of the ones I noticed up. I made things for kaede and shuichi before deciding I wasn’t going to get into it, so here are these.

that said, other mistakes include kokichi missing his purple highlights in all of the sprites encompassing a specific pose, stray pixels all over the place on everyone, and everyone also has heavily inconsistent shading, but literally all I think about is how pregame shuichi is unshaded and two of kaede’s pregame sprites have glaring outfit change mistakes in them

anyway, thank you for taking the time to read my ridiculous ramble. in all seriousness, there’s this looming presence of some lack of communication in the development team, like with all the art and design inconsistencies, pieces and sprites that look rushed, stray pixels, and missing basic proportional stuff. these are the kinds of things that you supposedly have to pretty much have in the bag in order to get jobs in professional businesses, so it’s really weird to me that this game suffers from so many of these problems. it’s like they tried to make the art so much more crisp than the other games, but it fell on its face as they realized it was going to take longer to draw everything and they started to rush. it’s weird, because the coloring itself looks normal–it’s just sloppily drawn, and the proportions are a mess once put into the context of perspective. many of the cgs look like they were drawn by different people, and I’m still not over the fact that half of kokichi’s cgs have his scarf pasted in as a texture.

the moral of the story is that if you’re selling a game at full price that also happens to be in a series that has had 3 very good games in it already the stakes should probably be higher than this. v3 has been out for more than 3 years and it’s still $40 (did it cost more than that before? I sure hope not), and the overarching quality of the game is just not as high as the other games. I’m not saying that the other games don’t have any problems with their art at all, they’re just not as glaringly obvious and every artistic choice in those games feels intentional.

regardless, I had a blast roasting the art at 2am, so maybe you got a kick out of all this chaos.

#god I keep telling myself I'm gonna stop rambling about v3 #v3 spoilers #drv3 spoilers #ndrv3 #random stuff #but making this… it sounded so fun #danganronpa

[thefirsttree]

A personal update + my next game

OK, time to do this. I’ve been meaning to do a big DAVID WEHLE™ update for a while now and explain why I haven’t released a new game yet, but you know how life gets in the way. Especially when life is a quarantine hellscape, you have three beautiful, amazing, exhausting kids to raise, a spouse’s job you support, a viral YouTube channel that turns your brain to mush, a thousand emails waiting in your inbox since your game is free on the Epic Games Store (with an impressive number of redemptions too! … meaning lots of emails and customer support issues), etc., etc. What also contributes to my lack of updates is because… I just don’t really like posting online. Fascinating correlation, I know!

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a venting/ranting blog post (well, maybe a bit), because my life is seriously AMAZING and INSANELY BLESSED and LUCKY. I can’t believe how many dreams keep coming true, so much so that I feel I don’t deserve it and I really pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes… but I did want to at least be honest, because I owe that to myself.

Wow, where do I even begin? Well, how about we start with the reason I’m even a full-time indie game dev now: The First Tree. This small hobby project I worked on at night morphed into this gargantuan beast (or fox) that took over my life the past 5 years. Which is great! I’m living the dream! And yet, I really didn’t expect it to do as well as it did. At its core, my game is a slow-paced, sad walking simulator (ahem, I prefer the term “exploration game,” but you know what I mean) that somehow seemed to launch at the right time to the right audience. It resonated deeply with some of you, and for that I’m eternally grateful. I still get emails almost daily how my game changed their lives in some formative way. I’m beyond honored.

However, with that spotlight came criticism and demands from the ever-present, insatiable internet. I would randomly be surfing the gamedev subreddit trying to decompress, and I would see a comment by some rando saying how much I didn’t deserve my success, and how it was all one huge lucky fluke. And I believed them!

And to add to it, some devs considered me an indie marketing “guru”, which I was uncomfortable with. I worked hard to market my game every week, and after my GDC talk, people assumed marketing was my passion; the reason I got up every morning. Just to clarify… NO, I don’t like marketing, and I hate being the center of attention. I don’t like asking people for money and wishlists. But I did what was necessary because I was passionate about telling stories, and I wanted to give my story a fighting chance to be seen on the crowded pages of Steam.

So now, you’re probably wondering “well then David, why did you make fancy YouTube videos showing off your success? Not very modest if you ask me.” This honestly could be a long blog post all on its own, because my experience of putting myself in the spotlight and becoming a “content creator” is… complicated. It was an unusual step for me, especially since I never even showed my face online (as a game developer) until my GDC talk.

First off, I always wanted to teach and start a YouTube channel. I love video editing, especially since I’ve been doing it longer than making games! It’s a huge passion of mine. And teaching people who didn’t know they could make and finish games was a huge motivator (and it’s been so rewarding already). But the second reason is, I was scared. I was self-employed, and I was riding the success of a “huge lucky fluke” that would probably not happen again. I wanted to make sure I could provide for my amazing family, and give them food and health insurance and security in these tumultuous times. I was turning my lifelong passions and hobbies into a business, and it wasn’t as simple of a mental transition as I thought.

So, I went all in on YouTube and the accompanying online course called Game Dev Unlocked. I spent years editing the scripts and videos, and polishing them to a shine. At first, no one watched my videos, no one was buying… and in the blink of an eye, the YouTube algorithm picked up my main autobiographical video (“How Making Indie Games Changed My Life”), and I started getting 5,000 subscribers a day. Right now, I’m at 150,000 subs, which is still hard for me to believe. I always had a dream of earning 100k subs on YouTube, so I was pretty happy with the whole thing. Sales were OK, but mostly people didn’t want to buy the course. Then the emails came in…

Something you should know about me: I am a textbook “people pleaser,” and if someone asks for my help, I take it very seriously. If someone is mad at me, even if I didn’t do anything wrong, it’s all I can think about, and it ruins my day. So, taking an onslaught of people begging for help and multiplying that by an impossible amount of people for my brain to truly comprehend thanks to the internet… and let’s just say it wasn’t a healthy mix.

I received thousands of emails from people who were begging me for some kind of reassurance that everything would be OK. That their dreams would come true too. And I wanted to help every single one of them. I went from a nobody working on a game for fun to becoming a spokesperson for the indie game dream. I couldn’t even get a shake from the Chick-Fil-A drive-thru without someone recognizing me and asking for game dev advice. And it didn’t stop there… I would get emails from suicidal kids asking for help, teenagers from Afghanistan asking me to get them out of their country, and on one occasion I received an email from a hopeful game developer in a war-torn country who had just experienced a bomb blowing up their neighboring village. His friends were dead, and he was hoping he could finish a game before he died too, and he needed my help. How do you say no to something like that? Didn’t I owe it to everyone because I was lucky with my hit game and I needed to “pay it forward”? (Something people constantly reminded me of)

And then to top it off, after you’ve given everything you’ve got to other people in need… you get hate mail in your inbox. You spend the whole day serving your children and strangers on the internet, then when the kids are finally asleep, you hit the bed to relax and take a look at your phone to decompress, and you randomly come across an angry gamer in your Twitter mentions telling you your game they got for free sucks, and that you took away a potentially great game from them and that your apology isn’t good enough.

Long story short, I went to a mental therapist for the first time in my life. I was broken trying to care for two toddlers and a new baby in a pandemic (which is very, very hard), taking care of my course students who gave me their hard-earned money and demanded results, and the countless people begging for help on the internet. I was this introverted, internet-lurker trying to take on the weight of the world. I was so tired and hurt that no one cared about me and my needs… only what I could do for them.

Quitting my day job and making this hobby my full-time job has stirred up… mixed emotions. This statement may disturb some of you, but I was definitely 100% happier when I had a full-time job and I was working on my game at night. I missed working with the amazing team at The VOID, working on Star Wars… back when the success of my game was this abstract thing I could only daydream about. Mostly, I was making my game for me with no outside expectations to pay the bills or satisfy the ever-demanding internet, and that brought me a lot of joy.

It’s not all doom and gloom though! I’m actually very happy now and in the best shape I’ve been since the pandemic started. I’ve had to confront my weaknesses and personality quirks, but I’m a better person for it (and I’m sure these issues would’ve come out eventually). I hired an awesome community manager for Game Dev Unlocked who is helping SO MUCH with the emails, I can’t even tell you the mental burden it alleviates. I even leased a co-working office to help separate work from my home, and that’s been a huge help too. I’ve decided to work with my old friends from The VOID on a cool, new VR experience. It will take me away from my projects a bit, but I’m ecstatic to work with a great team again (and not manage anything, whew).

These are all things I would’ve never guessed I needed, because I thought I knew myself pretty well… turns out I didn’t.

The reality is: running a business is HARD. Running it solo is even harder. You have to remember, I was burnt out on The First Tree well into the Steam release in 2017, but I kept working on it for 4 more years due to my fears of failing again and not earning enough money for my family.

So, I was wrestling with the age-old concept of commercialism and art. There was this dichotomy of doing whatever I wanted and being true to my vision (what most people assume the indie dev dream is like), and doing only what customers wanted to buy. This is something that has killed me with YouTube… in one specific instance, I was super excited to make the exact video I wanted to make. I loved every part of its creation, and I thought it had a message that would inspire everyone. I lovingly edited it over several weeks, posted it, and excitedly waited for the stats… and it was by far my worst performing video.

This is not a new problem. Even the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo was a commission forced upon him by the very violent Pope Julius II. My wife and I regularly talk about the fine balance between artistic integrity and commercialism, a problem she is very familiar with as an artist who constantly needs to balance what she wants to make with what the customer wants to hang up in their home.

For The First Tree, I was lucky. It was pretty much what I wanted to make (I had to compromise a lot of things of course), and it turned out millions of people wanted it too. Recently, I thought the safe business decision would be to do it all over again, so I started work on a spiritual successor to The First Tree (an idea that I may revisit one day since I do love the story idea). But that isn’t happening anytime soon. Trust me when I say I am now currently burnt out on animal exploration games.

So that realization left me with a question: what do I do next?

I’ve decided I need to make a game that I want to make, for me. It will be a bit different and I’m almost certain most fans of The First Tree will not love it… but it’s an idea that gets me super excited. It’s an idea that could help me fall in love with game development again.

A few more details: this game will be story-driven, first-person, and will use the Unreal Engine. That means development is gonna be slow going, because I have to learn a whole new tool. The “smart business” decision would be to make something quickly in Unity which I’m already familiar with… but I want to do this for me, and UE5 looks like a lot of fun. I’m also shooting for an early-ish release date so I avoid burn out and I keep the game short: I want to release it in Fall 2022, but knowing game development, it will probably take longer.

With the help of my therapist, I’ve also concluded that I’ve been too accessible on the internet and that my self-worth isn’t determined by the amount of people I try to help online. Of course, I love helping people and seeing them succeed, but I need to step back and focus on my family and myself. I will delete my social media apps on my phone (I will still post big updates occasionally) and stop responding to most emails, tweets, DMs, etc. It’s not that I’m ungrateful… in fact, if I don’t say thank you or at least acknowledge the incredibly nice people who share a sweet message about my game or want to tell me how I inspire them (still hard for me to believe, lol), I feel a ton of guilt… but I need to let that go. Please know I’m extremely grateful to all the fans who follow my work, so even if I don’t thank you directly, I truly mean it: thank you.

I will still post and stream occasionally on YouTube when I want to (and I still do live Q&A’s for my GDU students). The online course sales will help support my family as I work on a potentially risky game idea (and my new job will help alleviate the risk too). I’m gonna try one more marketing experiment and sell a mini-course soon (and add an Unreal section), and after that I’m done working on it. A gigantic thank you to the people who bought my course and are part of the amazing community, it has helped me and my family tremendously, and it’s inspiring seeing the games you make!

I’m a bit worried about the whole thing since this new game idea could flop, which could definitely affect my family. But a sappy, high-school yearbook quote is coming to mind…  I think it applies here: “A ship in harbor is safe—but that is not what ships are built for.”

Thanks for reading,

David

#gamedev #indie games #the first tree

[alkcomics]

Been making an effort to listen to at least one new album every month for a while now. The first year anniversary of the pandemic hitting felt like as good a time as ever to take stock of what I’ve been digging and share it with y’all.

Seeing this all helps me really feel the passing of time, which has been difficult with the lockdown isolation and depression. Album names link to a choice song on Bandcamp (when I can) or YouTube (when I can’t) in case anyone else out there feeling like a sad zoo animal wants to spice up the cage for a few minutes.

Hope y’all dig. Cheers!

2019 New Music

September | Ahmed Fakroun | “Did you like the musical texture of the Land Down Under song but wished it were sad Libyan disco instead? Well have I got the album for you.” Seriously though, Njoom Al Leyel is probably the most gorgeous song in existence

November | Patience by Mannequin Pussy | All the feels of the Joan of Arc/Kinsella bros Philly emo scene; rad female vocalist and one of the last live shows I saw before the shutdown

December | Devil is Fine by Zeal & Ardor | High concept music project mixing American Black folk with black metal; totally delivers on the premise

2020 New Music

January | Jaago by Lifafa | Vernacular electronic music project of Suryakant Sawhney; chill vibes and gorgeous lyrics

February | On by Altın Gün | The 70s psychedelic revival in Turkish rock music right now is my jam, and I’d be wearing lines in the vinyl if I had a physical copy of this album (waiting til next Bandcamp day to order)

March | Grab that Gun by the Organ | This album fell neatly into my life from the first driving bass line. Dunno how I missed it when it came out. Equal thirds Screaming Females, Joy Division, and it’s own dang thing

April | Dust by I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness | The dark indie pop post rock of your dreams

May | Savage Times by Hanni El Khatib | Come for the punk bangers, stay for the disco tear-jerkers. Hanni El Khatib delivers again

June | Antiphon by Alpha Mist | My cousin rec’d Kamasi Washington and I realized I was woefully illiterate in modern jazz. Very chill jazz sophisticated through the lens of hip-hop; echoings of J Dilla

July | Windflower by Herb Ellis & Remo Palmier | Jazz guitar album from the late 70s I’d never heard; melodic and exuding the feelings of death and renewal that come with spring

August | Space Echo: The Mystery Behind the Cosmic Sound of Cabo Verde Finally Revealed! by Various (collected by Analog Africa) | So much good 70s electronica from Africa, and this is a fantastic compilation of different artists with a very insane backstory

September | Drowner’s Wives by Monte Luna | Old school garage heavy feeling; just some good dark psych metal

October | Conference of the Birds by OM | Not my favorite OM album but one I’d never gotten to hear before and perfectly emblematic of why I fucking love them. Search the reddit thread of stoned grad students pouring over the lyrics to add the cherry on top

November | The June Frost by Mournful Congregation | Textured metal outfit from Australia with the range of black metal but the tone of doom

December | Life Metal by Sun O))) | As someone put it recently, this album is the soundtrack to the big bang. Monoliths & Dimensions always overshadowed it before, but after really giving it the time of day I say why pit two kings against each other. I think actually they were talking about M&D with that quote. Y’all ever been sent that meme with Sunn O))) and a vacuum cleaner that’s all “where’s the difference?” Not to take the funny seriously, but the difference is my cats lose their g-damn minds when the vacuum is on but absolutely vibe when Sunn O))) blasts through the airwaves -- which, luckily for them, is much more often than when I vacuum

2021 New Music

January | Liberty Bell by DARKSIDE | Dark electrowave - not a genre of music I generally flock to but I could and have listened to this song on repeat for days

February | What’s Your Pleasure by Jessie Ware | 2021 is about trying to branch out more, and I also don’t usually gravitate toward pop... but you give me a new disco record titled from a Hellraiser quote and I’ll fucking stan

March | Veils of Winter by Blackwater Holylight | ‘Motorcycle’ starts out doom, then gets stoner psych, then goes full dark hippy butt rock guitar riff with dreamy vocal goodness. The rest of the album loses the butt rock but you bet your butts my neighbors are tired of hearing it

April | Celestial by ISIS | A standby of post-metal glory that I’d never really heard in its entirety til now. ‘C.F.T’ is my favorite, but as an avid Earth fan it’s the easy choice. Perfect soundtrack to the warming spring nights, which in the words of a dear friend, are ‘for acid and metal’

---

Ask box is always open if anyone’s got some good jams they want to share my way. Love y’all

#playlist #alkcomics

[james-joyces-right-eyeball]

Absolute Favorite Books I’d Recommend to Anyone

This is a list of my top-tier favorite books that I would recommend/talk about endlessly to pretty much anyone (in no particular order). I know people probably don’t care but I just like talking about books I love so here we are.

Beloved - Toni Morrison

~ Based off the real story of Margaret Garner, a slave woman who escaped slavery and when captured killed her child in order to prevent them from ever being enslaved again, Beloved tells the story of a mother named Sethe, born in slavery who eventually escaped and is haunted by the figurative demons of her trauma and the literal (arguably) ghost of her dead daughter, who she herself killed. It is an excellent exploration of the horrors of slavery and of the haunting legacy of the institution for those who were subjected to it.

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

~ If you’ve been on Tumblr for a while, you probably know what Lolita is. The story of the predatory Humbert Humbert who lusts after, rapes, and kidnaps the “nymphet” Dolores Haze. An excellent construction of how predators, unreliable narrators in their own right, hide behind fabrications, almost-believable excuses, and pretty words to make their actions seem maybe not so bad. In the words of the book itself, “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”

Ulysses - James Joyce

~ Notoriously one of the most difficult books in the English language, Ulysses lifts its structure from Homer’s Odyssey to tell the story of a common man, Leopold Bloom, as he goes about his day. Yes, this book takes place over the course of only one day. We follow Bloom as well as Joyce’s literary counterpart Stephen Daedalus through their thoughts and actions, gathering details of their lives previous throughout. It’s a book that, in my own words, “is life”. It is sad, funny, strange, vulgar, disgusting, beautiful, revelatory, sensual, and nonsensical all at once. Joyce aimed to create a reflection of life through his stream-of-consciousness style which some people might find confusing, but I personally find absolutely beautiful and honest and realistic. The prose is also gorgeous, but that could be applied to everything Joyce wrote. 

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

~ The classic gothic book that tells the tale of Heathcliff and his ultimately destructive love of Catherine Earnshaw, whose eventual marriage to someone else and the general mistreatment of him by her family drives Heathcliff insane and he spends the rest of his life trying to take revenge by abusing and torturing the next Earnshaw and Linton (the family into which Catherine marries) generations. If I’m being honest, I like this book mostly because of how wild and dark it is, but the writing is also genius and beautiful. I think the book also carries an interesting view of the destructive nature of revenge, overzealous love, and othering.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith

~ A coming-of-age story at the turn of the century that tells the story of Francie Nolan, a young bookish girl growing up in a lower class family in New York City. It tells about her father’s struggles with alcoholism as well as her mother’s struggles to deal with that and at the same time raise Francie and her brother. Francie is confronted with a strange, uncertain world as a young girl, but tries to face it with bravery throughout childhood

Little Women - Louisa May Alcott

~ Another coming-of-age story, this time about four young sisters: Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March. You are probably familiar with this book already; it’s had more movie adaptations then I can possibly remember off the top of my head. It’s the story of four sisters as they try to navigate growing up, love, and loss during the mid to late 1800s.

The Color Purple - Alice Walker

~ A novel that tells the story of Celie, a young black woman who is raped and then married young to a man who will go on to use and abuse her, through her letters to God. Throughout the novel she meets Shug Avery, a woman with whom she eventually falls in love and begins a relationship with. Through this and her eventual freedom from her abusive husband, she is able to gain at last her own sense of self and take back control over her life, a life no longer ruled by the abusive men around her.

The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison

~ The tragic story of young black girl Pecola Breedlove, who wants nothing more than to have blonde hair and blue eyes just like the women she sees in the movies. Both a deconstruction of the whiteness of beauty standards as well as how these standards can utterly destroy vulnerable young girls, it is also an exploration of the people who allow these sorts of things to happen, including Pecola’s mother and father. The Bluest Eye, I think, showcases one of the aspects of Toni Morrison that I like the most, that I aspire to the most: her ability to enter the minds of all people, even people who you might despise at first. Her characters, especially Cholly in The Bluest Eye, are ones you might not entirely sympathize with, but they will always be ones you understand.

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

~ Based off of the author’s own experiences as a young college student, The Bell Jar tells the story of Esther Greenwood, whose depression over her place as a woman in a patriarchal society as well as her inability to choose a life path for herself leads to a suicide attempt and a subsequent stay in a mental hospital. A very nuanced portrayal of mental illness, especially anxiety and depression, The Bell Jar is an extremely moving and relatable story for me and clearly is as well for others. It is a classic for a reason.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou

~ A memoir of Angelou’s childhood, this book tells the story of her experiences living as a black girl in the south with her grandmother and brother as well as her later years living with her mother. It also tells of how she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend when she was around eight or nine, and how she struggled to live with that and find her voice, both literally and figuratively. A wonderful book about overcoming struggles and the power of words and literature in such times.

Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison

~ Ellison’s novel tells the story of a young black man, never getting a name in the text, and his feelings of invisibility and his struggles to find a place in society to belong. His struggles only lead him further into despair, until he decides to “become invisible” as people seem not to see him as a person anyway. Invisible Man is an exploration of American mid-century racism and the isolation it causes to those subjected to it. Not only that, but it is surprisingly relevant to our times now, especially on the subject of police violence. (Personal anecdote: When I first read this book, when I got to the aforementioned police violence part it was right in the middle of the BLM resurgence last summer and I cried for a good twenty minutes while reading that chapter over how nothing had changed and it still hurts me to think about it. Embarrassingly, my dad walked in on me while I was crying, and I had to quickly explain it away.)

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce

~ The title basically says it all lol. This book tells of the coming-of-age of Stephen Daedalus (the same one from the later-written Ulysses). His sensitive childhood, his awkward and lustful adolescence, his feelings of Irish nationality and Catholic guilt, and his struggles to fully realize himself, both as an artist and a human being. It is a very hopeful story, and one that I love mostly because I relate so much to Stephen Daedalus as an artist and as a person.

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

~ A magical-realist intergenerational family drama, Marquez’s book traces the various lives and loves of the Buendia family over the course of (you guessed it!) one hundred years. A beautifully written, at times extremely emotionally moving and chilling masterpiece, Marquez in a way retells the history of Colombia, of its colonization and exploitation.  

Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

~ A classic Russian novel of society and love, Tolstoy tells the story of Anna Karenina, married, wealthy woman with a child she adores. However, she falls in love with another man, Count Vronsky, and comes to a tragic end for her love. The parallel story of the novel is that of Konstantin Levin, a wealthy landowner who also struggles to find fulfillment in his life and understand his place in society.

The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner

~ A novel that features an entire family of unreliable narrators, The Sound and the Fury details the fall of a once-prominent southern Compson family and always-present place of the past. There are four different narratives: Benjy Compson, a mentally disabled man who is unsure of his surroundings and of time and only knows that he misses his older sister Caddy; Quintin Compson, the eldest son and a Harvard man both obsessed with his sister retaining her “purity” and the fact that she failed to do so and had a baby out of wedlock, going as far to claim it is his baby in an attempt to preserve something of the family reputation; Jason Compson, who is the caretaker of Caddy’s daughter and believes her to be going down her mother’s “sinful” path; and Dilsey, the black maid of the Compson’s who unlike the people she cares for is not weighed down by their history. The narratives take place in different time periods and is in a stream-of-consciousness style. It’s a deeply dark and disturbing novel about the haunting nature of the past, a common theme in Faulkner’s work (see Absalom, Absalom! for more of this).

Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison

~ It is the story of Milkman Dead, a young black man growing up in the south and his relationship with his very complicated family. To say anymore would be to spoil the novel, but I will say that it is an excellent book about family, self-fulfillment in a world that tries to deny you that, and, like The Bluest Eye, exhibits Morrison’s excellent character work.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - Tennessee Williams

~ A play which takes place on the patriarch of a family’s birthday in the oppressive heat of the midsummer south, Williams’ play explores lies, secrets, and how repression only results in anger, frustration, and sadness. It’s a tragic but brilliant play that I think was very ahead of its time. If you’ve read it (or do read it) then you know what I mean.

Giovanni’s Room - James Baldwin

~ This book tells the story of a young man and his love of another man named Giovanni while he is in Paris. It is a book about love, queer guilt, and has what I would call an ambiguous ending. There is uncertainty at the end, but there does seem to be some kind of acceptance. It is a bit of a coming-out story, but more than that it is a story of personal acceptance and at the same time a sad, tragic love story.

HERmione - H.D.

~ An underrated modernist masterpiece, HERmione is a somewhat fictionalized account of the author, Hilda Doolittle’s, experience as a young aspiring poet dating another poet (in real life Ezra Pound in this book named George Lowndes) who is a threat to her both physically and emotionally. It explores her own mental state, as she considers herself a failure and falls in love with a woman for the first time (Fayne Rabb in the book, Frances Gregg in real life). 

To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

~ People think about going to a lighthouse. They do not. A couple years and a war passes then they do. That may seem like a boring plot, and you may be right. However, To the Lighthouse is not much about plot. It is more about the inner lives of its characters, a family and their friends, on two different occasions of their lives: one before WWI and one after WWI. Woolf explores in this novel the trauma that results from such a massive loss of life and security. Not only that, she also explores the nature of art (especially in female artists) in the character of Lily Briscoe and her struggles to complete a painting. It’s a short novel, but it contains so much about life, love, and loss within these few pages.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers

~ A southern gothic novel about isolation and loneliness in a small town. Every character has something to separate them from wider society, and often find solace and companionship in a deaf man, John Singer, who himself experiences a loneliness that they cannot understand. There are various forms of social isolation explored in this novel: by race, disability, age, gender, etc. A wonderful, heart-wrenching book about loneliness and the depths it can potentially drag people to.

The Waste Land - T.S. Eliot

~ A modernist masterpiece of a poem, Eliot describes feeling emptiness and isolation. The brilliance of it can only be shown by an excerpt:

“Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence.”

“The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed. Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed. And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors; Departed, have left no addresses. By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept . . . Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song, Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long. But at my back in a cold blast I hear The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear. “

(My personal favorite line from this poem is, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”)

The Trial - Franz Kafka

~ The protagonist of the novel, Josef K., wakes up one morning to find that he has been placed under arrest for reasons that are kept from him. Kafka creates throughout the novel a scathing satire of bureaucracy, as K. tries to find out more about his case, more about his trial, but only becomes more confused as he digs deeper. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to the world he lives in, and the more tries to explain it the further the more that proves to be the case. An excellently constructed novel and a great one to read if you would like to be depressed about the state of the world because, though Kafka’s work is a satire, like a lot of his other work, it manages to strike a strangely real note.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead - Tom Stoppard

~ An absurdist play that is a retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet from the perspective of minor characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who in the broad overview of the original play, do not matter. Throughout the play, they question their existence and the purpose of it and through that Stoppard dissects not only the absurdity of life, but how fiction and theater reflect that absurdity inadvertently.

As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner

~ The novel details the journey the Bundren family makes after the death of the family matriarch, Addie, to bury her. Each chapter offers a different narrative from the family members and those who surround them, revealing some ulterior motives to them “going to town” to bury Addie. The patriarch Anse desires a pair of false teeth, and the daughter Dewey Dell is pregnant and needs an abortion, as there is no way for her or her family to support it. It’s about the powerlessness of people in the impoverished south. The Bundrens are constantly subject to forces beyond their control, struggles which would be easily solved if they had the money to spare for it. There is more to the book, but that is my favorite reading of it, that of class. Faulkner’s ability to create distinct voices for every one of his characters shines through here.

And, last but not least:

The Collected Poems - Sylvia Plath

~ All the poems Plath wrote during her tragically short lifetime. The best way to demonstrate or summarize the book’s brilliance is just to show you. This is her poem “Edge”, which appears in the book:

“The woman is perfected.   Her dead Body wears the smile of accomplishment,   The illusion of a Greek necessity Flows in the scrolls of her toga,   Her bare Feet seem to be saying: We have come so far, it is over. Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,   One at each little Pitcher of milk, now empty.   She has folded Them back into her body as petals   Of a rose close when the garden Stiffens and odors bleed From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower. The moon has nothing to be sad about,   Staring from her hood of bone. She is used to this sort of thing. Her blacks crackle and drag.”

HOPE YOU ENJOYED! HAPPY READING TO ALL!

#dark academia #books and literature #toni morrison #james joyce #tennessee williams #virginia woolf #william faulkner #sylvia plath #plays #poetry #can you tell i like southern and modernist lit lol?

[thefossilwhale]

i filled out this super cool button character profile by @extraordinarymage for sabrina! thank you for making this, it was a lot of fun to fill out <3 the bulk of it is under a cut and oh boy is it long !!!

Short, Quick Reference

Name: Sabrina Wiseman

Pronouns: She/her

Sexuality: Bisexual

Love Interest: Kent

Main personality trait: Confidence

Secondary personality trait: Morbidity

Relationship with Nick: Full of love, haunted by unaddressed guilt and frustration. But mostly full of love.

Nickname for Nick: Saint Nick (used sparingly)

Resentful or accepting?: Slightly resentful

Main strategy (interpersonal, insightful, innovative?): Insightful

Ethical or expedient?: Expedient

GENERAL

Name: Sabrina Larkspur Wiseman

Nickname(s): Sab, used by anyone; Sabby, only Nick and Sally; and, of course, Button for Nick.

Birthday: I think I made her an October Libra for the purpose of a template I did months ago, but I’m not sure! No concrete birthday yet, I’m always very slow to nail down details like this.

Age: 20

Pronouns: She/her

Sexuality: Bisexual

Hair color + style: Blonde. A little past shoulder length, sometimes wavy. Usually a middle part. For Aeon, tied back in a bun.

Eye color: Blue, entirely because of the section of Frank O’Hara’s “Meditations in an Emergency” that goes, “My eyes are vague blue, like the sky...”

Height: 5′5

Piercings: Multiple in each ear, but a couple have started to close.

Tattoos: None yet! Sab likes the idea of a tattoo but is worried about finding the perfect design, whether she’d end up hating it, that the pain might be greater than she expects and she’ll look like a baby in front of her tattoo artist. I’d like to think she eventually consults Sally and/or Glitch to come up with an idea that she falls in love with, but I haven’t come up with what that would be!

Clothing style: Mostly solid colors, not a lot of patterns. Nothing super bright, but a fairly varied mix of pastels, neutrals, dark colors, black. Partial to denim skirts and sweater tops. Ankle boots. Likes a good turtleneck. She’s bolder when it comes to formal wear, and especially loves suits. Big fan of silk and satin.

Since she has a pretty accurate face claim, I’ll link some gifsets I’ve rb’d for appearance ref if you are so inclined.

STATS

I’m always adjusting minor things and swapping scenes around, but these are from my most recent Sab run! Most scores hover somewhere around these values.

Personality:

Confidence: 53%

Humor: 5%

Morbidity: 22%

Resentful: 57% | Accepting: 43%

Strategy:

Interpersonal: 12%

Insightful: 50%

Innovative: 10%

Ethical: 43% | Expedient: 57%

KEY DECISIONS:

What is Nick’s nickname and why?: Saint Nick, used very rarely. It’s a joking reference to the time she thought Santa was an evil Ment out to ruin Christmas, and a point about Nick overdoing it with the cheer. “Saint Nick” is usually code for “I know you mean well, but please mind your own business.” Otherwise, she just calls him Nick.

What is their favorite type of cookie (and its name and why?): Salted caramel chocolate chip! No special name.

What was their initial reaction to Sally hugging them, as kids?: She just froze. That could just be me projecting adult Sabrina onto her childhood self; I don’t imagine that she was as uncomfortable around strangers or quite as cautious back then. But that’s what I’ll stick with.

How did they ace the ASE test?: The in-game option she takes is “My entire life has revolved around strategic avoidance,” but the one about being just plain smart also sounds like her. If Sab has the chance to thoroughly (over)prepare for something, she will do it. Her mind blindness also has her constantly (over)analyzing situations. So, hard work and relentless anxiety!

Did they manage to win their first assignment? How?: Yes, by having Sally block the door. I’ve headcanoned some slight differences in how it plays out, which I wrote about in-depth here. To summarize, Sab thinks of blocking the door as a desperate last resort, not a clever loophole, and she pushes back against Rosy’s praise because she wishes she could have done it the “real” way. Rosy goes from being impressed to being annoyed that she’s willfully missing the point.

What was the primary emotion Button felt during the Aeon bombing (love, gratitude, etc?): Guilt. She feels very guilty about how much Nick has given up for her in general, but I think that in the moment, it’s on a smaller scale. The fact that Nick was on the phone with her when it happened, coming to her rescue like always, becomes emblematic of their whole relationship for her, and she really fixates on that.

Who drove them home from the hospital from and why?: Glitch. Sab responds to her initial text with “Are you sure?”, and is relieved when Glitch takes that as “Yes, please.” She doesn’t relish the idea of being around someone more connected to her family or Nick at that point.

How do they feel about Nick riding around in their mind?: Worried, at first. Just because it’s so unknown and absolutely insane. After seeing Doctor Amari, she’s excited! Sab is thrilled to be a Pollard Five and intends to take full advantage of it. I am not looking forward to seeing how she reacts when that’s taken away from her.

Why did Button agree to do the undercover mission?: To prove she still deserves to be an MIV. Sabrina feels stupid and reckless for putting herself, Nick, and Aeon in this position, but she knows she’s smart, and she hasn’t worked this hard for nothing. She wants to prove what she could do with a normal Pollard Score and make herself too valuable to give up even when she’s back to Zero.

Told Glitch about your mind blindness?: Depends on the playthrough. I’m constantly going back and forth on whether Sab meets Glitch for coffee or wanders the city with Nick in her second chapter 5 slot (after trying to track down Kent). If she does meet Glitch, though, she absolutely tells her; with how touchy Sab is about privacy, she couldn’t stomach not warning Glitch that Nick could hear everything they said.

Figured out K’s secret?: Nope. She finds enough of the clues to be given the “I knew it!” option in-game, but she didn’t actually put it together. Sab is too angry and embarrassed by learning that Kent is an AMO to find any reason to interrogate it. “The random guy I met before school just happens to be a jerk” is a perfectly sound explanation to her.

Found Noh’s clues?: Not at the metro station. Sometimes she sees the Vengeance brooms in chapter 5 (again, depending on the playthrough), but that’s it.

ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIP:

Love Interest: Kent

Why them?: Sab feels an immediate kinship with Kent after learning about the NPO program. It’s kind of funny how quickly he moves from the least sympathetic position in her eyes (Ment who got past me and read my mind without my knowledge) to the most sympathetic (non-powered child of a prominent family aiming a league above where he “belongs”). A lot of new respect for his competence. Her fate is sealed when she realizes that his kindness at the hospital wasn’t him trying to make up for some wrongdoing, but just him being very sweet. (She had scoffed over “You needed help.” But now she’s like, “Oh. He meant that?! Fuck.”)

As they spend more time together, Sab realizes how weirdly similar they are in other ways, too. And she starts to feel safe/secure around him in a way that she’s extremely not used to. Growing up surrounded by Ments, Sab has a lot of issues about being too much, too difficult, needing to “be worthy” of love. So someone like Kent who is not a Ment, who has no “obligation” to care about her, and whose judgement she trusts implicitly? Being around him and being loved by him mean a lot, and I think will go a long way towards helping her reflect on her other relationships!

What are their first impressions of each other?: Okay, there are like 3 first impressions with Kent. First: he’s tall and handsome and secretly adorable, and they have similar career goals, so she’s drafting a five-month plan to woo him and get his number. Second: he’s a lying, self-obsessed loser who owes her many explanations. Third: oh no, the first impression was true! And he’s been continually, selflessly kind to her in spite of her overt hostility. Scratch the five-month plan, because the crush was only fun when it was entirely superficial; now she really, really likes him and that just sucks.

We know that Button makes a good impression on K by stopping for their dogs, but apart from that... I mean, the “we confused each other” from chapter 7 is very apt. Sab has lots of shifting personas, and Kent sees pretty much every one within 24 hours. The prevailing impression before everything gets cleared up is probably just that she cares a lot? About everything? Her stopping for the dogs, how seriously she takes the first assignment, the way she seems so deeply affected by something he said or did that morning. It’s a rare side of her to meet first because she usually pretends to be above everything.

What feature does your Button find most attractive in their RO (ex. appearance, personality, etc.)?: Probably his composure. And his... steadfastness? The way he seems unruffled by anything, his soothing presence. She really admires that about him and finds the calm contagious.

What do they do to spend time together?: Going on drives together! Kent driving while Sab plays songs she thinks he’ll like, talking or not talking. Cuddling on the couch while reading their own separate books. Museum dates. Walking the dogs together.

Do they argue? How do they handle arguments and disagreements? How do they make up?: I imagine that the first month or so of their relationship would be difficult, just because they’re both bad at expressing themselves and not used to relying on other people. Kent kind of negates a lot of Sab’s impulses to get defensive or hostile, so instead of arguments, I think there are more likely to be awkward periods where she’s just stewing in something without addressing it. Most of their fights would be, like, one of them becoming really distant for a concerning number of days until the other tries to awkwardly check in on them.

What does their future look like?: Uhh some random lore: I think eventually they do get married, despite neither of them caring that much about it. Sabrina would be excited to have something to plan, and she knows it would make the people around her happy. They have a long engagement; there’s never really an “official” proposal, just an acknowledgement that yeah, they’ll get married one day, and then eventually they get rings. The engagement is almost Sab’s favorite part, honestly. She likes planning and showing off her ring and calling Kent her fiancé, a lot of fanfare on her part for a wedding that ends up being very modest and chill.

OTHER RELATIONSHIPS (Feel free to go in depth!)

Relationship with Nick: When I first started developing Sab, I thought that with as difficult/prickly as she can be, her relationship with Nick would be worse than it is. Never bad, but certainly strained, with more jealousy/resentment on her side. However, she rejected this. She is resentful, but never towards Nick—she internalizes the negative parts of their relationship so they manifest as guilt instead. And that’s the problem, not resentment. Sab thinks he’s overprotective, but that doesn’t make her angry; it just makes her sad. She wishes things were different and he didn’t feel so responsible for her, but she also doesn’t know how she could manage without him taking on so many of her burdens. So, guilt! So much love, but always looming guilt.

Having Nick in her head has helped. It’s added a new kind of guilt (“I’m a horrible person for being so giddy that people can’t hear my thoughts even though that requires my brother to be in a coma”), but getting inside Nick’s head for once and really feeling his love for her changes things. Makes her feel way more secure, I guess? It’s easier to see her brother as human person, a friend who loves her, rather than a perfect selfless paragon who sacrificed everything to raise her, which is an important shift.

There are also Things happening with self-presentation in the fact that they’re both models, and flirts, and pretend to be shallow. And the ways that they’ve responded to vastly different expectations. And selflessness versus selfishness. But I have no idea how to talk about that yet.

Relationship with Father: Strained and distant. Sabrina doesn’t necessarily blame him for leaving, but she hates how he’s handled it. She’s incredibly frustrated that John insists on keeping them in this miserable limbo of uncomfortable visits, even though moving away was (to her) a tacit acknowledgement that she and her parents are better off without each other. He’s trying to force a relationship that Sab thinks is ultimately harmful for everyone involved. For Nick’s sake, she’s willing to grin and bear the visits, but it never works because John can obviously tell it’s an act. He pushes her, she gets defensive, and so on to infinity.

Relationship with Mother: Like with John, Sab doesn’t resent Hope for the incident itself, or for leaving afterward. It was terrifying, and the idea of being around Hope makes her panic—but she thinks of that as just another irrational anxiety symptom, and she’s trying to work through it. What she does resent Hope for is letting it get to that point at all. Sab is incredibly bitter that Hope will suffer silently to the point of almost killing her (during the incident) and potentially herself (with the BRS), while Sab has no choice but to be completely open. Especially because they’re so similar in that way—she’s almost jealous. “Oh, so your silence is allowed to almost kill me and it’s ‘nobody’s fault’ but I can’t pretend to enjoy a single lunch with Dad without him calling me out for lying?”

And even though she doesn’t hold the incident itself against her, Sab is very hung up on “Why are you never quiet? Why are you always there?” She knows, on some level, that this was not a Personal Judgement against her. But because Hope keeps so much quiet, this is the only honest expression of her mother’s feelings that she can remember! It would take a lot for Sab to believe that Hope was really, genuinely interested in reconnecting with her, rather than just pretending to love her "enough” this time because to do otherwise would reflect poorly on Hope as a mother.

Relationship with Sally: Besties <3 Sally is the only member of the Wiseman inner circle that Sab doesn’t have complicated feelings about. They both have hidden morbid streaks that they bring out in each other, and can laugh about. They both have competitive streaks that work well together because they’re always on the same team. And their wants/needs from the relationship complement each other well, I think. Sally has always felt valued because she’s useful and not because she’s loved, while Sab has always felt smothered by love/care without feeling like she genuinely adds value to other people’s lives. So it means a lot to both of them that they’re able to help each other practically, while also genuinely loving and supporting each other outside of that.

Relationship with Gray: Full of trust and genuine care, but predicated on distance. Sab loves him a lot for being so careful not to cross any boundaries, physical or emotional, with her. She’s grateful that he’s there for Nick in a way that she doesn’t feel she can be. But "I like Gray because he doesn’t push me and is good to Nick” means that any hand he extend makes her defensive, because she’ll either view him as an emissary of Nick or start to panic because their normal routine is being disrupted (she doesn’t tell him about Hope in ch 3, for example).

They get along very well in a friend-of-a-friend sort of way, and bond over being cautious counterparts to Nick. Also, Sab never had a crush on Gray, but she is not immune to tall superhero and thinks it’s fun to fake flirt with him. (You know Isabela’s “You have pretty eyes” routine from DA2? Sab does that to Gray when conversations steer towards things she’d rather not talk about.)

Relationship with Glitch: I’m really excited about these two! They click from the start, and Sabrina feels immediately comfortable around Glitch, which makes her feel distinctly uncomfortable whenever she catches herself. Externally, they have pretty different personalities, but they’re both perceptive and... socially manipulative? aware of their self-presentation?... in ways that they both pick up on right away. So it’s a lot of conversational maneuvering and trying to figure out what the other’s game is, while also genuinely enjoying each other’s company.

Relationship with Kent/Kenna: I could go truly insane here. See the romance section above instead.

Relationship with Kim: Sab wants him to like her sooooo bad. He’s one of the only people to ever really get through to her, re: my headcanon conversation after the first assignment. Authority figures tend to treat her as special, whether that’s negatively because of her mind blindness or positively because she’s such an overachiever. She had no idea how to respond to that not being the case (and didn’t handle it well at first), but chapter 6 solidifies her respect for him.

It also turns Rosy’s opinion of Sab around; he was impressed by her in class but left his office thinking she was self-absorbed and naive. But the bombing is a reality check, and her response is very measured and practical in a way that surprises him.

Relationship with Lev: She doesn’t mind the comparisons to Nick or the “maybe one day they’ll fix you” comments as much as you might think. They aren’t her favorite, but she prefers that sort of thing to the inspirational platitudes belied by coddling that she got from her family growing up. Sab has fond memories of Lev and is grateful that he’s always been kind to her, but doesn’t have any particular feelings apart from that.

Relationship with Clarence: Holds a grudge against him for causing a scene, making her late, and generally being a jerk. But she can’t fault him for being right, after what happened! Mostly she just wants to avoid him, but she’ll be thrilled to lord her success over him if/when she proves herself.

Relationship with Dean Branham: Like Rosy, another authority figure that Sab desperately wants to impress. But without the personal investment she has in Rosy’s validation, more “Oh, this person is in charge, so I should make her like me!” Despite Nick’s and Rosy’s reservations, Sabrina doesn’t really have a problem with being “strongarmed” or manipulated into cooperating; for now, she figures Branham was just doing her job and respects her tactics.

Relationship/attitude towards Ments in general: Mostly just uncomfortable and wary around them. Sab doesn’t want her mind read, and she figures that no Ment wants to be forced to read it either. So she has a pretty strict “no Ments” rule for close personal relationships (excluding Nick, Sally, and Gray, of course. But only Nick really counts because he’s the only one who can hear her thoughts whenever she’s nearby). Not out of hatred or resentment, just because she knows it will be easier for everyone in the long run.

Do they have any other important relationships, past or present? (Relatives, friends, etc.?): Not many, but yes! Sab dated around a lot in the 2 years before Aeon (more like year and a half, because she completely shut it down once she was more focused on preparing for the MIV program), but there are 2 relationships that were formative/important for her. A high school sweetheart, and someone Sab met through modeling. She doesn’t keep up with her high school ex, but the model is her best friend outside of Sally and Nick, and they still keep in touch! I’m still developing them/the relationships, and I’ll probably post more about them someday. They’re fun!

PERSONAL BIO

Describe their personality: Confusing and contradictory. She has two main modes that confuse people who meet both (e.g., Kent). She’s either cold, stuck-up, and sometimes hostile, OR she’s charming, frivolous, and sometimes flirty. Mode 1 is tense but stoic and inexpressive; mode 2 is seemingly relaxed but very posed and insincere. Mode 1 is for when she feels uncertain or has no agenda apart from “get to point B”; mode 2 is for when she’s more comfortable or trying to manipulate someone. Her actual personality is a bit closer to the second, but she doesn’t pretend not take things seriously or hide when she’s annoyed.

Strengths: Analytical, methodical, detail-oriented. Very driven and hardworking. May not always act like it, but does have social skills/charisma; a great liar, if you can’t read her mind. Unfailingly loyal and loving to her favorite people, so so so warm and affectionate and supportive if she really loves you. Very perceptive.

Weaknesses: Way too proud. Can be petty and vindictive. Self-absorbed (she doesn’t mean anything by it, but it’s hard for her to see past herself sometimes). Stubborn, hates being wrong. And... emotional isn’t the word, but strong negative emotions can really cloud her judgement. It ties into her being proud, petty, and stubborn; if she’s really upset about something, she can cling to that emotion instead of re-evaluating it or moving forward.

Phobias: From this ask about the phobias that are planned to show up in-game, there are a few that I could see fitting Sab, but I want to wait to see how they’re implemented before I fully commit. Which is very metagame-y, I know (and I am very metagame-y about IF), but “fear of X” is so broad that it really does depend on when/how it manifests in the text.

That being said, agoraphobia is almost a lock; crowds do make Sab very anxious if she can’t keep track of everyone within a certain distance, and if she can’t leave when she starts feeling antsy. Claustrophobia is a maybe. The choice that triggers it (in chapter 4, about hating MRI machines) suits Sab, but I’m not sure if she hates MRI machines because she hates tight spaces, or if it’s more related to her general anxiety about hospitals, medical tests, etc. Which she definitely has!

What activities/club did they do in school?: She avoided anything group-oriented as far as possible. She took piano (maybe violin?) lessons and did recitals, but wasn’t in orchestra. The one exception was maybe National Honor Society or some equivalent, which she would have joined for her resume’s sake. And I think she would have tutored!

Where do they escape to when they need space?: A little used library corner, where she can people watch without being seen/heard.

How do they feel about/cope with their mind blindness?: Sab hates it but tries not to dwell on it. She knows that it’s no one’s fault, and she mainly just tries to... minimize it? Drown out her thoughts, limit her contact with Ments. And, least healthily, very rigidly managing herself. Because there’s so much of her that exists outside of herself, without her control, she tries to either filter or completely suppress everything else. Part of why she got into modeling, she can perform and be perfect and have total control over the final product of her body in the photographs for whatever campaign. Some Day This Will Be Better. But definitely not where she is in current canon.

How has your Button changed since the Incident with Hope?: Developed many new anxieties and disorders and syndromes :) She also became way more self-conscious, as in literally conscious of and way more tightly monitoring herself, what she’s thinking, what she’s expressing, how she’s sitting, etc. Less emotive face, more rigid posture.

If they weren’t an Aeon student, what would they be doing?: Sab would have beaten herself up forever if she “proved everyone right” by avoiding Unity/Ments entirely, so she’d want to stay in the family business somehow. She probably would have ended up doing scientific research on mental agility. Maybe even working for Mirrortech or some other biotech company, which I imagine would have been an interesting conversation to have with the family.

RANDOM FACTS:

Zodiac sign: Like I said, I assigned her Libra months ago for the sake of a template. But I don’t know enough about astrology to commit. Libra or Leo, probably.

Hobbies: Music, reading poetry, “cooking” (i.e., sitting on the counter and not helping while Nick makes dinner)

Likes: Watching other people (Nick) play video games, dressing up, taking long showers/baths, dark chocolate with caramel, back hugs

Dislikes: Being patronized, hot weather, going to the doctor, driving, doing anything she is not good at

Type of bedsheets: Bamboo.

Drink of choice: Cucumber mint lemonade! For hot drinks, some kind of caramel coffee. For alcohol, she refuses to get drunk because she’s terrified of having even less control of her mental broadcast, but at home/around people she trusts she’ll have a glass or two of wine. Doesn’t know enough to be picky, but doesn’t like it too sweet.

Favorite food: Probably some pasta dish Nick makes with asparagus and tomatoes and a lot of garlic.

Favorite color: Like a light turquoise!

Favorite music: Music to her was another mind-shielding tactic before anything else, so she tends to like upbeat-ish electronic/pop stuff. Catchy and repetitive, and/or with lots of personality to drown out her own thoughts. On the other end of the spectrum, she does have a soft spot for crackly, lo-fi, old or old-sounding slow songs—something about fuzzy recordings simulating a weak telepathic signal.

Favorite season: Hmm, spring and autumn are both good. She likes either side of winter.

Anything else you’d like to share: My heart and a long, fulfilling marriage, with anyone who reads all this 💍

#wow this is so long. insanity luv lit ral insanity #this was super helpful for articulating certain things about sab's character so it's already done its job #pls do not feel pressured to read Thousands of words about sabrina my beloved. but if you read all or even some of this <333 a kiss for you #why am i embarrassed to overshare about my own ocs on my own blog. i live here #oc: sabrina wiseman #also this was very much a stream of consciousness deal but i tried to go back and make it comprehensible. good luck all ye who enter here

[ezrasarm]

take what’s broken, make it whole

[ day 4 | angstageddon masterlist ]

pairing: Marcus Pike x reader

summary: Love. It’s messy and confusing. It’s painful yet thrilling. It’s also absolutely terrifying. But maybe what you need is someone to brave your fears with you.

warnings: mild angst, hurt/comfort, fear of commitment/relationships

"a/n”: THIS WAS WRITTEN BY THE WICKEDLY TALENTED @chaotic-noceur!!! I am posting it here with permission from the original author. Please go check out her posts and give them some love!

Actual a/n: this piece hits very close to home for all 3 of us so we hope it could bring you the same sort of comfort that it did us 💕💕- @chaotic-noceur

credits: shout out to my loves @din-damn-djarin and @ezrasarm for beta reading and being absolute sweethearts about me being a disaster! very loose references to Come Home With Me from Hadestown. - @chaotic-noceur

Gif by @pedropascalito

The whispers of Special Agent Marcus Pike’s failed love affairs had spread like wildfire as soon as his transfer had been confirmed. Men and women alike were eager to meet the broken man who had fallen too hard, too fast. Instead, they were met with gentle smiles and a loving heart.

If the rumours were true, they did nothing to explain the hidden glimmer of hope in his eyes. If the office gossip held any weight, it did nothing to explain the deep-seated warmth in his aura. If the hearsay was anything more than it claimed to be, it did everything to explain the masked sadness that threatened his every move.

He wasn’t like any man you’ve met. You watched him with quiet curiosity.

Several weeks later, you had found yourself partnered with the office enigma. Within a month, the pair of you had fallen into a comfortable routine of early morning coffee trips and late-night takeout meals.

There was something about him that made you want to let down your guard, to unveil the parts of you that were fractured and broken. But he didn’t need to know of the pieces of you that weren’t quite whole.

So you lie.

You lie when he asks the difficult questions. You lie when he nudges at the splintered fragments. You lie as you have been trained to do all those years ago.

Your little traditions, if you could even call them that, had slowly wound their way into becoming an integral part of your day. You hadn’t even realised just how habitual they had become until he’d left for an undercover mission.

In the early days of his departure, you’d catch yourself flicking through delivery menus before remembering that your partner wasn’t there. You’d find yourself instinctively making the turn to his apartment on your way to work. You’d send him messages of things he’d find funny only to be met with a mocking grey tick.

You missed him. And you couldn’t explain why.

●●●●

This wasn’t his first undercover mission, but this one felt different… and he couldn’t explain why.

As the mission progressed, the desire to call you and talk to you about everything and nothing grew with every passing day. He’d catch himself longing for your occasional Starbucks trips where you’d conspire about the poorly spelt names on your cups. He’d find himself missing the way you’d laugh at all his jokes, no matter how bad. He saw your face in the crowd of strangers even though he knew you weren’t there.

He missed you. And he couldn’t explain why.

When he’s reunited with you once again, he thinks he’s figured it out. The more time the two of you spend together, the more he's convinced that there's something between the two of you. He’s hesitant to put a label on it, after everything he’s been through. Still, he knows it isn’t nothing. It’s unlike anything he’s ever felt before and he wants to pursue it. But he needs his instincts to be right this time. He’s not ready to face the alternative.

So, he pushes his feelings away. He shoves them into the darkest corners of his mind where its destructive claws can shred them like they had his dreams.

Months go by before thoughts of his feelings for you resurface. He catches you doodling on a napkin with the straw from your drink and he can’t help but fall. Deep down, he knows that it’s a bad idea, but there’s an affectionate lilt to your smile that makes his heart falter and he knows he’s in trouble.

You’re stowing pieces of evidence into their respective locations when he’s overcome with an overwhelming urge to tell you how he feels. He isn’t sure if it's the lack of sleep or the residual successful-arrest adrenaline that makes him throw caution to the wind, but he pops the question before his sudden spur of confidence leaves him. Your shoulders tense as you turn to look at him, eyebrows raised in shock.

“I-what?” you stammered, uncertain if you’d misheard him.

“I asked if you’d like to get dinner sometime?” He feels his heart hammering against his chest. “If you don’t want to, it’s cool, we’re cool.” He raises his arms in defence. “But what we have-” he takes a step closer as he gestures to the space between you, “this feels...different.” He lets his arms fall and he crosses his fingers behind his back.

He doesn’t consider himself a religious man. But in the here and now, he’s praying to anything out there listening that the answer he gets is a yes.

Your breath hitches at his sudden outburst. The wishful twinge in his voice and hopeful glimmer in his eyes makes your heart clench in your chest. It baffles you that a man with his experience was still so willing to wear his heart on his sleeve. You almost admire that about him. Almost.

“That’s- I-” you clear your throat awkwardly as you search for the right words. “I’m flattered Marcus, but I’m not really looking for anything right now.” Your voice grows quieter with each word, as though the strength of your voice would lessen the force of your words.

You watch in silent agony as the corners of his eyes dip downwards at the rejection. The way he forces a smile to hide the wave of disappointment that crashes into him makes your stomach churn. It takes all your self-control not to reach out for him, to take back your words and spare him the pain. But you can’t do that to him. You can’t give him false hope for a future you don’t want.

For as long as you’ve known him, he’s never shied away from questions about his past. He’d told you about his failed marriage, the broken engagement and everything in between. He’d told you about the life he had wanted and the future he’d pictured. It was the fairytale life that every child dreamt of having.

Every child except you.

You don’t know what exactly it is that you want, but you know one thing. Marriage? Starting a family? That's not you. It never has been and it never will be. The future that Marcus so desperately wants, the happily-ever-after that he’s risked so much for… it’s never going to be something you can give him.

So you push him away. You push him away even when every fibre of your body screams for you to pull him close, to take the pain away. You push him away because he deserves someone who can make all his dreams come true. Someone who isn’t broken like you...

“I’m sorry. You’re a great guy Marcus and I’m sure-” You take a hesitant step towards him but stop in your tracks when he withdraws from you.

“No, no. Don’t be. It’s fine. Like I said, we’re cool. I- I understand.” And he does. He understands perfectly well. He understands that sometimes he comes off a little too strong, but it’s only because he wants to believe in true love. He understands that it’s wishful to think that he deserves another chance at love, that there is such a thing as soulmates. He understands that no matter how hard he tries, he never seems to be good enough.

In the months that follow his initial confession, his affections for you only seem to grow despite his best efforts. He knows that continuing down this path would only lead to more hurt. But in the moments when he thinks no one is looking, he allows himself to fall a little harder.

Why? He does not know. But he knows the following are true: you’re the person he wants to go on aimless adventures with because it isn’t about the destination but the journey. You’re the person whom he wants to be held by when the days are long and the night is dark. You’re the person that he wants to be able to call home. You’re the only person that’s ever made him feel so alive.

Little did he know, you felt the same way too.

You’re both sharing a box of ‘case-closed pizza’ while he tells you about this young artist he’d discovered online. There’s a softness in your eyes that sparks a fire in his gut. Something nags at him to ask you just one more time. He pushes the thought away. He knows it’s a stupid idea. But then you’re laughing at something he says and the question leaves his mouth before his brain can stop it.

“Give me a chance,” he says. “Please? Just one date.” You blink at him a few times, dumbfounded. He’s preparing an apology when you speak up.

“Marcus-” he hates the way you say his name like it’s a melody, “listen, I- I don’t-” you huff in frustration. You contemplate your options in your mind. He deserves to know the truth. You want him to know the truth. You just didn’t think it’d be this hard to say out loud.

“It’s okay. I’m sorry I asked…” The defeat in his voice makes your stomach turn.

“It’s not you. I just- Well, okay it’s kind of you but it's mostly me.” You falter. “It’s definitely me.” You force yourself to look into his eyes before declaring what you’ve been afraid to say.

“The life that you picture in your future? The one where you’re happily married, maybe a couple of kids who drive you insane but-” you exhale sharply, masking your scoff, “you wouldn’t have it any other way because the love of your life is there with you? That’s not something I-” He’s looking at you with so much love and you have no idea what to do with it. It takes everything in you to not look away.

“That’s not something I want, ever. I don’t see myself getting married, or having kids, or -” you purse your lips as the thought occurs to you, “or loving someone so much that even when they break my heart, I want to hold them close in my arms so they can never leave.” Tears prick at your eyes and your voice falls to a whisper when you say, “I don’t know how to love and be loved back and the thought of it, I-” you gaze falls onto the half-empty box on the table. You can’t look him in the eyes when you admit it out loud for the first time, can’t look him in the eyes as you admit it to yourself.

“I’m terrified, Marcus.”

A lone tear rolls down your cheek and he brings a shaky hand up to wipe it away gently. He almost laughs at the irony. The man who loved too much is in love with one who loved too little. There’s a pain in his chest that feels almost like someone had driven a knife through his heart and twisted.

“I’m scared too,” his voice is soft as he speaks, as if he’s afraid that you’ll shatter at the sound. “I’ve let my heart be beaten, bruised and broken more times than I care to admit.” He sighs as he takes his hand in yours. “That life you think I picture? Maybe that’s what I wanted once but that's not who I am anymore.” He shakes his head gently as he tugs at your hand, drawing your gaze up to meet his. “After Teresa, I swore I’d never let anyone in again. I didn’t think I would survive the pain, but then you walked into my life and,” he gives you a crooked smile as he whispers, “something about you made me want to love again. So, if you’ll have me,” he brings his other hand up to cup your cheek, “it’d be an honour to have my heart broken by you.”

Tears are streaming openly down your face at his declaration. It never occurred to you that he was afraid too. He’d seemed so.. carefree. Despite all the heartbreak, he’d found the courage to put himself out there one more time, to let himself love one more time. It occurs to you then that maybe what you admire about him most wasn’t his ability to make you laugh when you felt like crying. Or the way he always knew when you needed a hug. It was that he made you want to look fear in the eye and say ‘not anymore’.

Slowly, you let your head fall into a nod. “I promise to be gentle.” He chuckles softly and he pulls you into his chest. You melt into his embrace and relish in his warmth. You feel a hopeful smile tug at the corner of your lip and you bury further into him.

Maybe part of loving means being afraid, together.

[ angstageddon masterlist | chaotic-noceur’s masterlist ]

——angstageddon tag list

@din-damn-djarin @chaotic-noceur @chaoticspaceidiot​ @engineeredfiction​ @pedropascalito​ @dreamgirl-67 @hillarymurray4​ @wille-zarr​ @oloreaa​ @this-cat-is-dea​ @marydjarin​ @roxypeanut​ @cryptkeepersoul​ @mrschiltoncat​ @agirllovespasta​ @wickedfrsgrl​ @dindisneydjarin​  @opheliaelysia​ @aeryntheofficial​ @adikaofmandalore​ @goldafterglow​ @yespolkadotkitty​ @chibi-liz05​ @scarlettvonsass​ @rpcvliz​ @cinewhore @basura2319​ @theravenreads​ @mxndoscyarika​ @jaime1110​ @f0rever15elf​ @pancakepike​ @phoenixhalliwell​ @ahopelessromanticwritersworld​

#marcus pike x reader #marcus pike #the mentalist #angstageddon #angst week

[maybedefinitely404]

American Dream

Genre: angst with a happy ending/fluff

Pairing: romantic Dukexiety 

World: just-out-of-high-school AU

Content: homophobia, threatened abuse from parents (no actual violence), extreme cold, getting kicked out, minor religious talk, getting outed, AIDS and death mention, fluffy Dukexiety because my heart needs it.

Word count: 2.3k

Comments: She doesn’t have Tumblr, but I need to give a shout out to my kiddo for proof reading and beta-ing most of my fics. She pushes me to write more, and even if she won’t see this, I just need to say it.  

This fic is inspired by the song American Dream by MKTO.

Please pick up, please pick up, please pick up… 

The night coolness spread through Virgil like a sickness. It was unforgiving, toxic, seeped with the memories of the evening that curled through his stomach in dark tendrils. Below his bare feet, the sidewalk burned in the way that only ice does, small pebbles digging into his soles. He would do anything for socks. God, why hadn’t he grabbed socks? 

Probably for the same reason he hadn’t grabbed shoes. 

Please pick up, please pick up, c’mon, pick up already!

His eyes hurt. They already burned with unshed tears that he’d still been too scared to release, and the cool air didn’t help. Crying on the street was a vulnerability he wasn’t ready to face. His lungs burned. He’d been sprinting non-stop for who knows how long. His own panicked gulps for air and the all-too-loud hum of a blinking streetlight were the only sound on the silent street. Virgil had been watching the moths swarm at the fixture for who knows how long, finding odd solace in the fact that at least there was still some life in the darkness. They were still alive, untouched, same as they were yesterday and probably the same as they would be tomorrow, unfazed by the complete turmoil his life had become. And that was somewhat comforting. 

“Virgie, you okay? It’s almost midnight!”

Thank fucking god. He opened his mouth to speak, to explain to Remus what had happened. Obviously, Remus would care. That wasn’t a doubt in his mind; that was the only reason he wasn’t anxious as all fuck right now… about the call, that is. He was anxious about approximately everything else. But as soon as the first noise made its way past his lips, the first utterance of a plea for help, everything that he’d been holding back burst forth like a broken dam. He clamped his hand over his mouth, trying to muffle the loud sobbing that he suddenly couldn’t contain.

“Shit. Virgil, what happened? I’m coming over. Are you at home?”

That’s the issue. “No,” he gasped, mildly surprised he hadn’t crushed the phone with the way his grip tightened, “I got kicked out.”

“What the fuck?!”

Virgil flinched. “Can… can you come p-pick me up? I’m at the corner of Jackson and Pullard. Please, please, come get me…”

“Yes. Absolutely. I’m on my way. Stay there, okay?”

Virgil hung up reluctantly after agreeing, not wanting his boyfriend to drive while on the phone, even if Remus gladly would have done it. In fact, he’d used to do it all the time; text, eat, do his makeup, all while cruising down the freeway. He’d only put a stop to it when he saw how much it affected Virgil.  

He counted down the minutes on his phone, always having been nitpicky with times, knowing that it shouldn’t take Remus more than ten minutes to get there. If he remembered correctly where he was at the moment, that is. Remus had gotten kicked out of his parents’ house in his senior year of high school after a bad fight. They’d never really been great parents, always showing favoritism towards his brother (amongst other things), and he was more than willing to leave. Virgil had tried to beg his parents to let Remus stay with them, but they’d downright refused, calling him a bad influence and a string of other insults that Virgil didn’t even like to think about. God forbid what would happen if they found out the two were dating.

…Well, they did now. And God hadn’t exactly forbidden what they’d done. 

But Remus hadn’t had a solid place to live since it had happened almost a year ago. He couch surfed for a while, bouncing between some old friends who had now gone off to college, or just lived in his car. He’d made it work, and had claimed to Virgil that he actually didn’t mind it that much. If he was telling the truth, Virgil wasn’t sure. He’d saved up some money and bought an inflatable mattress that filled up his back seat area, and Virgil was able to give him his family’s old camping stove by convincing them they lost it. It’s not like they’d gone camping since he was a kid, anyways. Last he’d checked, Janus was home for break and Remus was staying with him for the two weeks he was in town, but those two weeks were probably pretty close to done. Unfortunately, Virgil and Janus had never gotten along, so Remus didn’t bring him up. It was a mutual understanding. 

As soon as Remus’ car pulled up to the curb, ten minutes on the dot, Virgil basically flung himself into the passenger seat. The car was warm, so so warm, he almost cried again, this time in relief. Remus pulled back onto the road as soon as he was buckled on. 

“Vee, what happened?” It wasn’t hard to guess, there were only so many reasons his parents would have to kick him out. He’d narrowed it down to his parent’s finally having it with Virgil’s tattoo artist dream, or… well… 

“Someone at my mom’s work found my Instagram. She went up to my mom, basically started gushing about ‘how handsome I was with my boyfriend’. Specifically the picture of us at Pride from a couple years ago.”

“Ah.” Remus knew the picture well. He’d printed it out and it was pinned to the inside of his sun visor. 

“Yeah. Mom called my dad, they were both waiting when I got home. Had screenshots and everything. They grilled me about ‘dishonoring God’ and ‘throwing away my life’. Said I was gonna get AIDS. Die before twenty five. Ya know. The whole lecture.”

Remus didn’t. Surprisingly, him being gay was not a concern of his parent’s. His brother was gay too, and they didn’t give a rat’s ass about that. He nodded along anyways.

“They went on for so long. It was insane. Then they dropped the whole ‘you’re not our son’ thing-” Virgil’s voice cracked, but he swallowed around the lump in his throat and continued, “I figured this is where it was leading to, them kicking me out? I thought they’d give me time to pack, though. Except my dad started getting physical-”

“HE WHAT?!” Remus was tempted to turn the fucking car around and drive to Virgil’s house, just to give his parents a piece of his mind. He was fuming; fuck, he hadn’t been this mad in a while.

“Relax, Rem. I got out before he could actually land a hit. That’s why I don’t have anything with me. I had to run.”

“Doesn’t make it any better.”

“I know.” Virgil pulled his feet up onto the seat cross legged, trying to rub some feeling back into them. Luckily, they weren’t bleeding, just cold as hell. That was one less thing to worry about. “Thanks for picking me up.”

“Of course, Vi,” Remus’ voice had taken on a softer edge that he rarely allowed anyone to see, and he reached over to take one of Virgil’s hands into his own, “Speaking of which, why were you on Jackson? That’s, what, three miles away from your house?”

“When I say I ran, I mean literally. I was scared they would follow me.” Virgil shrugged, as if the statement wasn’t the most heartbreaking thing Remus had ever heard. “I wasn’t thinking clearly, I just ran. That’s why it took me so long to realize I should call you.”

Remus sighed, letting his thumb run against Virgil’s knuckles. “You don’t have to act all brave, Vi.”

“I don’t think I ever saw you cry when you got kicked out.”

“That’s because I didn’t love my parents. I honestly didn’t. I know your parents mean a lot to you. And I’m sorry it went down like it did.”

It was the truth, but he honestly didn’t want to think about it right now. What kind of loving family kicks out their child? Virgil took a shaky breath in and mumbled, “Can we talk about it tomorrow?”

“Okay. Let’s talk about something else. What’s our plan?”

Virgil was quiet for a long moment, as if deep in thought. He watched the scenery fade from his suburban area of town to the darker, rural parts of the town’s edge, not knowing or caring where they were driving. The escape from street lights was nice. “Why do we need a plan?”

Remus’ eyebrows shot up at the sudden playful tone in Virgil’s words. “Oh?”

“I mean, is anything really holding us here?” 

“My, my,” Remus crooned, pulling into an empty lot and parking in the furthest spot from the street, “I thought I was the impulsive one.”

“I’m serious, Rem!” Virgil laughed, swatting lightly at Remus’ hand. The happy sound was like music to his ears. “I’m dead serious! What’s keeping us here?”

“Patton? Logan?”

“Both across the country. And you know they’re considering staying there when they graduate.” Janus’ name was an understood thing. They both knew his school was barely an hour from the other two. Even if Virgil couldn’t stand the guy, he knew that Remus and Janus went far back. Judging by Remus’ slowly brightening expression, he could assume that Janus would probably be down to stay there as well. 

“Work?”

“I work at Walmart. They won’t miss me. Try again.”

Remus scrunched his eyebrows almost thoughtfully, even though this was maybe the easiest decision he’d ever had to make. Plus, they both knew Remus didn’t really ‘think’ in general. “It almost sounds like you want to take a roadtrip, my little emo.”

Virgil scrunched his nose at the nickname, but let a wider smile spread across his tear stained cheeks. “I kind of do.”

Remus shut the car off, turning to his boyfriend with a shit eating grin. “I like this new side of you.”

“Well…” Virgil’s voice turned sheepish under the almost cheshire cat level expression, “Should we?”

“Let’s make up our minds tomorrow.” Remus stated, gesturing to the mattress behind him, “Sleep for tonight. You must be exhausted, coming up with ideas like this.”

Virgil grumbled under his breath, something about ‘not being a baby’, but clambered into the backseat after Remus, double checking the locks on the doors as he went. The air mattress was comfier than he thought it would be, and it was only made better when Remus pulled him in like a teddy bear, tugging a blanket over them. They both sighed in contentment, then promptly burst out laughing at the synchronicity.  

“Oh my god, what have we become?” Remus gasped, pulling Virgil in closer nonetheless. Virgil snorted in response, looking up to meet Remus’ eyes through a haze of sudden exhaustion and amusement. The laughter died down slowly as they both gave in to their fatigue, finishing the day with a slow kiss that left them both breathless. Virgil fell asleep with plans forming and circulating through his mind, the rest of the evening almost forgotten.

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

His parents were at work, and Virgil knew their kitchen window didn’t lock properly, which was what led to him stuffing everything he could into a black duffel bag while Remus kept watch from his car. He wasn’t too concerned about the parents coming home, but it gave him ample time to look over the map he’d bought from the gas station that morning and plan a route. He didn’t want to admit that his leg was shaking from pure excitement. This idea had been somewhere in the back of his mind for a long time, but he knew Virgil valued his relationship with his family and liked being near them, so he never brought it up. Granted, the situation wasn’t great, but he considered this ‘making the best of it’. A twisted paradise. 

He barely flinched as his trunk was thrown open and Virgil threw his bag inside before hopping back into his seat.

“Okay, so how about we drive up to Maine, apparently the sea food is legendary! Then we cut back through Ohio. There’s literally nothing in Ohio, but we can cross it off the list at least! And then-”

Virgil laughed, cutting him off, “I thought we weren’t planning!”

“Well, we need at least a rough idea,” Remus said with a pout, “What we do there and how long we stay, that’s up to impulse. I was thinking we should try to get through all the states, wouldn’t that be cool?”

Virgil could only nod, leaning forward to kiss Remus again. “Sounds amazing,” he murmured, so close they were almost touching. They’d talked to Logan and Patton earlier that morning, and they were equally as excited for the two of them. Remus had called Janus while Virgil was packing, quickly explaining the situation (and also why Remus had disappeared in the middle of the night), and Janus supported it. Made sense, since he was almost as impulsive as Remus. Plus, he was going back to school in a couple days, so it didn’t make much of a difference. That said, they still didn’t have a time limit. Their friends were just starting second semester, meaning they could schedule themselves to arrive in California for summer break, or they could spend longer on the road. But schedules are for chumps. 

As they rolled out of the quaint neighborhood Virgil had grown up in, Remus reached down and took his hand again. “Say goodbye to white picket fences.” And god, the joyful expression on Virgil’s face was enough to make him melt.

By the time they hit the freeway, they were both nearly shaking with anticipation. Virgil stuck his hands out the sunroof, the wind whipping through his hair, and let out a whoop that was almost contagious. This was the start of something amazing, they both felt it. 

Cali, here we come.

#lywrites #sanderssidesfanfiction #sanderssides #dukexiety