#but i had a lot of fun writing this aa

[rosedom]

AHHHH HELLOOO sorry i usually dont request much, haha this is actually my second request in all of my tumblr story ever but...i saw you decided to write for gaming and i just couldnt resist, i love your writing a lot and i just think its so immaculate hahaa. Could you write an scenario where male reader is stressed from work (imagine he has an important job like a doctor or something whatever you want is fine :)) because he has been working days nonstop, so much that his boyfriend is all worked up and horny for him so when reader comes back he finds himself straddled by him while hes begging for fucking? With cockwarming, breeding kink and cowgirl position. Could that be with Gaming, Lyney and Gorou? SORRY IF IM ASKING MUCH I DONT WANT TO BE A BOTHER😭😭 i just dont know how to request but thanks for reading all of rant. And again, thank you and sorry for bothering😔 have a nice day/afternoon/night!

"an unnamed player has invited GA-MING, LYNEY, and GOROU to play . . . an apple a day

✦ㅤㅤ 【 CW 】 dom!top!male!reader, sub!bottom!ftm!characters, vaginal sex & riding, breeding kink + creampies, creaming (lyney), gratuitous praise + petnames .

A/N : aa u are never a bother !! i am SO SORRY this took so long for me to get to, omg . . . but i had sm fun with this (´▽`ʃ♡ƪ)

"do you want to watch, [PLAYER]? press KEEP READING to spectate the match."

Patient after patient after patient, each one with a more downright stupid trouble than the last. Your day had started with a young man, clearly fresh out of Millelith training, complaining of a tummy ache, of all things! He had clutched his stomach and moaned and groaned, and all you could prescribe him was bedrest. It’s not like you were going to waste medicine—medicine that some people needed—on someone who ached because he didn't eat fucking breakfast. 

The next patient was an older woman, here only for her biannual check up. You'd greeted her, said a sweet, “Good morning, madame,” but all she did was turn her snobby nose up at you and demand you not waste her time.

“Madame, you have a serious—” 

“I know, young man.” You had heaved a sigh, letting her boss you around for the length of her appointment before sending her off with the exact same specifications as last time: take vitamins, get ample rest, stop talking back to people just doing their jobs. (Though, that last one there was merely something you wished you had said.

Too bad the customer—in this case, patient—is always right, huh?)

But, by the end of the day, you wish, instead, that you had simply elderly after elderly; their disrespect pales to the absolute headache that the rest of your patients put behind your eyes, pounding at your skull—bam, bam, bam.

Wham bam-thank-you-ma'am, all throbbing incessantly behind your eyes and making you wanna hurl—except, god, you’re the fucking doctor, and who’s there to take care of him when he’s a little under the weather? You’ve got your boyfriend, of course—your perfect boyfriend, light of your life, apple of your eye, yet he’s home, and you’re here, and you’re bloody exhausted. 

“I need to go home,” you murmur—quiet, lest your own voice make you lose the last of your thin-threaded sanity—, already stripping yourself of the itchy scrubs you wear during the long days. 

“But sir—” the nurse asks, meak, but her voice is still too loud, too shrill for right now. 

You huff. “I’ve worked for fourteen hours.” The tired gruff to your own voice makes you cringe. You can feel the way it tumbles from your chest, rattling you, your overly sensitive eyes and brain and head and fuckin’ everything, at this point. “Refer to the doc on duty, now.” 

The nurse nods, once. “Have a good night, doctor.”

You bid farewell—a kind apology with a promise to make it up to them, to bring them coffee, maybe, or some cookies—, and you take the slow walk home. The sky is dark and the fireflies are out, the gentle glow illuminating the path. With nothing but your own thoughts and the night to accompany you, you feel your headache gradually ease. It throbs, still; but each bump in your skull is gentler, now: it’s easier to ignore. 

Although the porch light is too strong—the lantern bright and attracting the nighttime bugs and moths—, the foyer of your home is dark. Your aching head is grateful for the reprieve—for the silence that envelops you in totality the second the door clicks quietly shut behind you—, but something other than tiredness pulls at your heartstrings: your sweet boyfriend, clad in only a shirt of yours, toeing into the entryway. 

“Honey?” He wipes the sleep from his eyes, softly smiling at you. “Hi.”

“Ga-ming, honey—” honey, because Ga-ming unabashedly stole the pet name from you, first, “—you didn’t have to stay up for me.” 

As if on cue, his jaw cracks open in a yawn: this, you do not need the lights on to see. Your heart aches with your head, knowing that he had stayed up just for you. “Honey,” you repeat, sliding off your jacket and stepping up to him. You take his waist in your hands, bunching up the shirt he stole from your closet.

“Quit with that,” he murmurs, tilting up his head for a soft kiss. You grant it; but when you go to pull back, to keep the kiss gentle and chaste, Ga-ming presses forward, darting that little tongue out to lick at the seam of your lips; his hips, too, come bumping against yours, pressing into your thigh, pant to skin—

“Ga-ming?” you repeat, breath leaving you in a low huff. “You’re—” bare. 

Utterly, wholly bare: an expanse of warm, slick skin against your clothed leg. “‘m ready,” he mumbles while he takes to mouthing at your throat. His lips soothe you, somehow; it’s a reprieve, a stark contrast, to the pounding at your skull. 

“Ready?” you whisper, tilting your head back, letting your hands guide the steady roll of his hips onto your lap. 

He nods. “Ready for you,” he enunciates as he softly whines. 

Ga-ming—your Ga-ming—, your boyfriend, your love and light of your life: right here in front of you, on you, all needy for you, offering himself to you, wholly ready for the taking. 

“So please,” he continues, his cock dragging heavy across the seam of your pant; “fuck me.”

“Oh, honey,” you murmur; then again, an “oh, honey,” because you’re still half-dressed up in your clothes—though they’re only soft and bland, made to fit under the rough scrubs you had abandoned at the office—, and Ga-ming is naked save for the shirt draping across him, the low hemline covering the absolutely sinful way he grinds down. It’s a dirty move, a down, down, down that gives his sensitive cock friction against your pelvis. 

“Please, please, ‘m ready, I said—” his words abruptly drop off, a high cry in his throat that sends him to hide his overly-warm face in your neck. His skin burns against you, a feverish-hot that makes you chuckle, makes the throb in your head go away, just-so. “I said I-I was ready, so, please!”

You coo, quiet, bumping your hips up once. The jerking motion makes him cry out, but he manages to keep himself upright, right-side up but entirely unmoored on your cock. “Go on then, little lion. Take what you need, yeah?”

Whimpering a quiet, “Y-yeah,” he begins riding you, slow, steady—but slightly off-balanced—rolls of his hips that makes him whine, makes you groan low n’ deep in your chest. You let your hands rest on his hips, the fabric of his shirt falling over your wrists, and gently guide his motions. Once you’ve helped him establish himself, he begins riding you harder, more desperate.

Silent tears—though, are they truly silent, loud as he is moaning out for you?—dribble down his cheeks, falling to his shirt and soaking the collar of it in salty evidence of his abject pleasure. His abdomen is tensing and relaxing and tensing and relaxing again, all in a rapid loop, in and out and in n’ out, and then there’s a fucking bulge right below his navel when he sinks down hard n’ deep on your cock; and you’re sent over the edge at the sight, moaning through your teeth as you fill Ga-ming up with hot, sticky cum.

“Oh, oh—” he cries, grinding down harsh to get all your cum in as deep as possible, deep ‘nuff to breed him— “bred me, bred me so well, oh—” You groan at his desperate babbling as his thighs jerk around your hips, just before they give out on him entirely. He falls bodily into your chest, heaving through his own orgasm as weak mewls tumble from his prettily parted lips. Each sound is smeared into your throat while you laugh, light and breathless, jostling his overly-sensitized body and making him flinch. 

“Sorry, honey.” You kiss at his temple, and, the whole while, his small cunt is left to unconsciously milk your cock, left to assure that loud, insecure part of his brain that he’s wanted, that he’s bred all nice n’ full because he is loved. You’re long done, now, but the undulations make your body warm, soft, safe—just like Ga-ming is, comfy in your lap and wholly protected. “Thank you.”

He shakes his head against you, nuzzling into your throat with a heavy sigh. “You don’t have—hafta thank me,” he mumbles, a lick at your Adam’s apple to seal the deal. “I wanted ta.”

Tucking up the blankets around him, you grin. “Then can you warm my cock, lil’ dragon? Just for me?” You run your fingers lightly up his clothed spine, delighting in the shiver you can feel, one that runs the length of your cock as he’s snug on it. “Since earlier was all about you?” You raise the end of your sentence in a lilting tone, meant to tease, and Ga-ming huffs at you. 

And, n further retaliation, he clenches around you; the soft squeeze—all wet n’ warm, smearing your own cum across the base of your cock and leaving the mess of both of yours to dribble down the minute space between your bodies—forces you to calm your breathing, to take in the delicate scent of what is undeniably Ga-ming mixed with the smell of your own shirt, your own cologne. 

You laugh, then. “‘m sorry,” you say again amidst giggles, ones you’re careful you confine only to your upper chest lest the movement be too uncomfortable on both of your oversensitive groins. 

He doesn't reply, snuggled up comfy on your lap and stuffed full of your cock n’ cum both. Instead, he only noses into your neck further before his breathing steadies, lulling you to sleep, too.

It’s in your final moments of consciousness that you realize your head no longer hurts. 

(You suppose you now have the evidence that, yes, an orgasm is sufficient enough a cure for headaches.)

Under Lyney’s palm, a small floor lamp clicks silently on. The light is admittedly dim, but, to your sensitive eyes, the bulb is blinding. You cringe and cover your eyes; but it only serves to shield you slightly, because you’re still upright in the foyer, and your body is rather weak. “Lyney,” you tiredly murmur, lifting your palm just enough to see the ground lest you trip. 

You bump into him, laughing lightly, but his worried hands jump to your arm. “Hey—”

“I’m okay.” You’re quick to calm him, placing your free hand on his in a tender gesture as you make way to the living room. “Just a headache, ‘s all. Ya shouldn't have stayed up f’r me.” Earlier, it hurt to even think; but here, with him, the pain is easy to ignore, in the face of his own self destruction.

He grumbles at you, though, says something you can’t quite catch and drops his hands, pads over to the lamp to flick it off. The return of darkness is soothing. 

He smiles at you, then; or, at least, you think he does. It’s difficult to see in the dark, and you can’t strain your eyes without hurting yourself. “I wanted to!” He takes three long strides before he’s standing in front of you, draping his arms across your shoulders. The position makes his (your) shirt ride up on his belly, and— ”I missed you, y’know,” he murmurs, suddenly all soft n’ deep, looking up at you and bumping his forehead against your chin. “A lot, really.” 

“Lyn—” 

He quickly silences you with a kiss. Against your lips, he pulls back, murmurs, “I missed your cock, especially.”

Laughing against him, you lean up ‘til he can no longer reach you. He pouts at you when you reply, faux-snark, “only my cock, huh?” Your bottom lip juts out—a mirror of Lyney’s own, a magic trick of his you took for your own; it’s a devilish trick, one you play right alongside puppy-dog eyes you know he’s soft to. “How cruel.” 

He huffs at you, pulling you down by the collar of your shirt to kiss the mirth off your lips. “I was tryin’ to be seductive,” he grumbles, knocking against your chin and beginning to push you backwards into the living room. “But nevermind!”

You want to say, “Hey, now:” disagree with him and keep on pouting and go, “hey, hey, hey,” all offended, but the backs of your knees come into contact with the edge of the sofa, and you’re well and sufficiently distracted from that idea.

“Sit,” he gently commands you—merely the illusion of choice—, giving you no choice in the matter with the way he’s pressing you down into the cushions. You go easily; you sigh in relief when the softness begins enveloping you—a pillow’s snug right in the middle of your back, and you briefly wonder if Lyney had planned this. He murmurs, “there you go,” quiet n’ soft, and you’re taken by the way this man gives to you. 

He wears his heart on his sleeve, truly; except, right now, the sleeve is yours (just like his heart belongs to you and yours to him in turn), and it's bare, and so is the expanse of his long, pale thighs, the hem of his boxers peeking out beneath the shirt. He stands in front of you, between your legs, makes sure you’re down and that you’re gonna stay down, but your eyes aren’t really tired, not anymore, staring at Luney—your Lyney—before he huffs and sits bodily onto you, straddling your lap with his knees sinking into the cushions on either side of you.

“Lyney,” you murmur, reaching out to take hold of his thighs. The position makes the shirt rise up on his belly, exposing the soft, rippling muscles there; but, in the dark, all you can go by is what you feel against your own stomach, his bare skin pressed to your thin shirt. “I was kiddin’, sweetheart.”

“I know you were,” he snaps at you, mean-like, but he brings his arms around your shoulders all sweetly and nuzzles into the side of your head. “But I wasn’t. I—I really did miss you; and your cock. If you—if you wanna, of course.” 

“Of course I want to, Lyn,” you mutter, tilting your head up to kiss beneath his chin. “I’m just a little tired.”

“A little?” He huffs, again, before sighing. “Just—let me do the work, alright? I’m already...” he pauses, tilts his head to the side, breathes in and out sharply.

You hum at him to go on. 

“‘m already prepped.” Oh. 

“Oh?” You grin, bringing your tired arm up to cup his cheek. He leans into your palm and his eyelashes flutter, brushing against your skin. “Go ahead then, sweet thing.”

And go ahead he does, smiling into you before he abruptly leans back ‘nuff to chuck off the shirt. You whine, say, “hey!” but there isn’t any bite left on your tongue when Lyney starts tugging his boxers down, too. He’s impatient, pulling at the seam and groaning curses at the fabric—as if it’s the damn boxers’ fault that he’s in a position that prevents him from taking them off. 

He relents, tilting this way and that and finally—after painstaking minutes later, ones that, under no circumstance, should be arousing, but the anticipation, the wait: it all makes your dick chub up in your own pants—Lyney’s left naked in your lap. The fabric hangs off his foot, and you reach down to tug it the rest of the way off for your sweet boyfriend as he busies himself unbuckling your own belt, loosening the tough leather enough for your pants to droop and enough for him to reach a hot hand into your briefs. 

“Eager, huh?” you tease, lifting your hips—and, subsequently, him—to let him get your dick out of your pants. Neither of you bother pulling down your own pants, not after Lyney spent so long on his boxers alone. He doesn’t dally. “My sweet Lyney.”

He sighs, again—he’s rather dramatic tonight; but, then again, when isn’t he? It wouldn’t quite be your Lyney without some theatrics—, spitting into his palm and lathering up your cock with it while he makes to straddle you more fully. “Thought you were tired,” he grumbles, hovering his, indeed, wet n’ slicked up and entirely prepped cunt over your thick cockhead.

“Mhm.” You set your hands on his plush thighs once he hooks the head of you into his loosened hole, groaning low and pleased in your throat while he softly whimpers at the barely-there stretch. He prepared himself well. “But when you’re lookin’ so pretty for me, I can’t help being wide awake. Wouldn’t wanna miss this sight for the world.”

With your eyes now adjusted to the light—and, oh, you consider how the throb of your head is a bygone memory now—, you can see the way his cheeks darken just-so, puffed up in exertion as his groin meets yours. You’ve got your cock stuffed up balls-deep in him, and he leans into you once he’s fully settled. 

He moans, less out of outright pleasure and more out of total contentment, comfy and warm on your lap as your arms knead at his thighs. His arms squeeze around your shoulders, and he quietly asks, “Gimme a minute.”

Nodding, you simply bask in the steady heat of him, letting him adjust and recognize that, yes, you’re home, now, and you hadn’t really left him at all. “I missed you,” you murmur rather suddenly, your voice quiet but still stark in the silence of the night. “Thought about you durin’ my shift.”

“You did?” His voice is rough but wispy, a little out-there and entirely gone. He’s slipping into that mindset he always does when he’s left to warm your cock—regardless of if it were by his volition or your own—, but he begins to subtly grind his hips against you, mewling at the hot sparks of rapture from his cock rubbing just right against you. 

“‘Course I did,” you continue, moving your hands to his hips instead to help move him along. His arms tighten around you and he moans directly into your ear.

From then on, it’s quiet: quiet, that is, save from the obscene slick noises of the lube Lyney used to prep himself earlier with his own slick, your pre-cum mixing up and making a mess of thick liquid between both of your thighs. His moans are barely audible, these soft, gentle lil’ uh, uh, uh’s punched out of him with each tender grind down. 

You think, even, that you’ll both cum like this: quiet, nothing but the sounds of your connection and heavy breaths, moans, groans as you fall over the edge. But then Lyney starts bumping his groin against yours even harder, grinding down deep on your cock and rubbing against your full balls, and he starts babbling for you to “breed me! Please—”

“I-I’ll breed you,” you groan, leaning your head back into the sofa cushions and chasing your release, chasing the release you both want, the one he wants so desperately stuffed up deep inside him. “Gonna fill you right up, just like you want, sweetheart.” 

He babbles more—a mix of syllables and words, more pleas for you to breed him—until he’s silenced by his own high-pitched whine, cumming around you and slathering you in creamy-white. The steady clench and release of his cunt forces you to your own end, thick cum slowly leaking out from the edges of his cunt and your cock. (You can hardly tell what’s your leaking cum and what is his own.)

“Thank you,” he mumbles, already beginning to doze. “Th’nk you:” quieter, more muddled against your ear.

You grab the throw you have across the sofa’s armrest, rucking it up around the two of you; you cocoon Lyney safe in your arms and on your softened cock. He’s nodded off, now, and he misses your words: “You don’t have to thank me,” you say anyway, even if he doesn’t hear you, “I love you.”

The cum’ll be sticky, later, when you wake up; but for now, it’s perfect. It’s perfectly warm and entirely cozy, wholly snuggled up with the love of your life. Your headache, the stressors of the day—they’re all forgotten in his presence. 

You’re so, so glad to love him. 

“Hi, puppy,” you coo. The sound of your own voice grates you, but you ignore it to sweetly smile at your beloved. He stands there, motionless for a moment right there at the threshold before the foyer, until he shakes his head with a barely-there laugh. “Gorou?” 

He tilts his head to the side—this you can see, the silhouette of him in the moonlight—before he takes a tentative step forward. 

Then another. And another. Another, another, another, ‘till he’s standing in front of you and leans up to kiss your jaw. “Hi,” he repeats, voice ruff (hah!) and hoarse, a little too much so. “Missed ya.”

You tilt your head back to let him mouth at you, and your hands subconsciously come to clutch at his hips, and— “Oh, Gorou,” you mumble, pleasantly aghast, because your hands come into contact with bare, slick skin. “Pent up?”

With a quiet whimper, he tilts his hips forward, into you, pressing against the contact of your fingers on him. You slowly slide your one hand around, sneaking a large handful of his ass before you dip into his cleft, shuddering when your fingertip easily glides across his slicked, open cunt. 

“I-I wanted you, so bad,” he starts to mumble, shy, tucking his head into the meat where your shoulder meets your neck. Without any prompting, you adjust your stance, pressing your knee into his cock and making him jerk forward with another whimper high in his throat. “Oh!”

Slowly, his hips begin grinding—it’s a weak movement, testing, making sure you're really okay with this, right now. He moves unsure against you until you begin bumping your knee, letting his slick make a mess of your pant leg. “Go on,” you goad him on, soft, holding him snug against you. You can feel his cunt clench even through the fabric of your pants, a rapid rat-a-tat-tat against you that is oddly reminiscent of the headache you can feel begin to dissipate. “Take your pleasure, pup.”

He nods vehemently against you, beginning to hump as his tail swishes side to side, side to side, hypnotizing you just slightly. It’s hard to parse it out in the dark, but the shadow of it is undeniable behind him. Each bounce of your leg makes Gorou whimper, and he’s quick to crane his neck up for a kiss to muffle himself. You grant his request easily, but only for a minute; after, you gently part from him to murmur, so quiet that only he could possibly hear, those big, soft ears of his twitching as he strains, “What else do you want, honey?” 

“Want you,” he whines, grinding harshly once, twice. “Want you inside me, want you to breed me.” 

You didn’t expect that, but you’re a doctor, after all; it’s kinda in the job description to roll with the punches, so you do. “You wanna get fucked full of pups?” you ask, teasing and light, but Gorou’s mouth parts as a loud whine crawls out of his chest.

“Yes! Please.” Thick tears begin to drop from his eyes, saltwater dribbling onto the bare skin of your throat. “Now, now—breed me now,” he begs, and you coo at him, bringing your hands to curl into his hair, rubbing soothing circles into the base of one puppydog ear. 

“Patience, pup.” 

And, because he’s Gorou, and Gorou is nothing but a good boy, he nods, rapid-quick movements of his head, and begins to slow on your thigh. Heat shimmers low in your belly as he steps back from you on shaky legs, a wet splotch across your leg from his cunt. You bring a hand down, meaning to scoop it up off your pant, but your finger brushes two distinctly different textures: his natural slick, and fuckin’ lube. “Did you prepare yourself for me?”

“Y-yeah,” he mutters, tail tucking itself between his legs. You almost cringe at that, knowing he’s smearing himself into his own fur, but if he doesn’t mind, then you won’t either; besides, it’s hard to truly care when your boyfriend is so bashful in front of you. “I—I missed you, ‘nd wanted to be ready for you.”

The image of Gorou, ass up on the bed with four of his fingers stuffed up inside of himself flitters across your mind, makes your cock throb in your britches. Your erection was easy to ignore, earlier; but now it’s abject torture. 

However, it’s not nearly as torturous as it was for your boyfriend, and you know this. You know he didn’t cum, know his fingers are far too short to truly reach in deep and press against his g-spot, know his wrist can’t comfortably bend to jerk himself off and finger himself at the same time. So you coo, soft, “Sweet boy. Where’s your toy?”

“Charging,” he mutters. 

You grin at that: it’s perfect. “Can you go get it then, puppy?” 

With an audible swallow, he nods, rushing for your bedroom. You follow behind him, lethargic but so, so turned on; and while he’s grabbing the vibrator from the corner, you shuck off the rest of your clothes and plop yourself down on the edge of your bed. 

He must not expect you to have followed him, however, because once he turns around, he jumps, ears flattening to his head in embarrassment. You only laugh and pat your lap. “C’mere.”

Quickly—and toy in tow—, he shuffles over to you. He stands awkwardly in front of you for a moment before you murmur, “I said c’mere,” and tug him to straddle your lap. The position immediately forces his cock—slick n’ thick, out of its hood and throbbing incessantly—against yours, and he mewls helplessly for a moment, grinds once, twice again, before he grabs the lube to the side of you. 

You hadn’t even noticed it there, but now that he’s grabbed it, pointed it out, you feel other wet spots beneath you. He fuckin’ masturbated here, right on the duvet you both sleep under, thinkin’ about you and only you. You’re taking out of your musings when he slathers up your cock in lube, messy and sloppy, and then he’s rising, positioning you, and sinking right on down.

“Mm!” he cries out, swiveling his hips to take you in deeper, deeper, deeper. You groan at the lube-slick combination that smothers your cock in Gorou, Gorou, Gorou. “Breed me, breed me!” Each meak plea makes your cock pulse inside him, and he mewls at each throb inside him. “Please!”

“I got you, pup,” you murmur, your edge so close you can taste it on the tip of your tongue. “Just make yourself feel good, and I’ll breed you, okay? Okay, puppy?”

“Okay, okay—” 

You grin. “Good boy,” you say, and then he’s tumbling over the edge and bringing you right down with him. You groan into his throat, feeling the vibrations of his whimpers n’ whining moans as he’s getting thoroughly bred. Your hands ruck up his shirt to hold his sides and soothe him down from his high. “You did so good for me, sweetheart. Bred you just like I promised I would, hm?”

He weakly nods. “Thank you,” he mumbles, nosing at your throat. 

And, well. You’re bloody exhausted, and you promised to breed him, and he can’t keep on being bred if you pull out. You tell yourself you’re only upholding your promise as Gorou falls asleep on your cock, breathing deep on your lap: tell yourself that it’s the lingering tiredness that suddenly seems to hit you in full-force that keeps him warm and snug on you. 

Really, clean-up can wait. 

i got a lil' carried away on lyney's part ,, o(*^＠^*)o also, none of these were really cowgirl 'cos reader was sitting up for it . . . i couldn't think of how to have him lay flat in these scenarios LOLL

13 MAR. 2024, @rosedom, rosey .

#ㅤ✦【 ASKS 】 #i used to have very frequent headaches and the only way i could abate them was: #1) midol (god's gift to earth i stg) #and 2) jrking off. #so !! #sub genshin #genshin smut #genshin x reader #sub gaming #gaming x reader #sub lyney #lyney x reader #sub gorou #gorou x reader #lord . #top reader #dom reader #amab reader #male reader

[breachverse]

Breach: Chicago War Zone - WIP Update 18 - 26th of August 2023

... This one's actually been brewing for 6 months, so... 1 Million Words folks!

Update 21 has been released! Last public upload was pretty much a year ago so, I'm very sorry for the long silence, a lot of the updates have been mostly in the private testing phase on Patreon, but I am here with a bunch of fixes and hangout updates.

But most importantly... We've passed the 1 Million Words mark... My fingers are tired. ❤

You may play it on the link below.

Breach: Chicago War Zone (Updated)

DEVELOPMENT LOG#21 (15-April-2024)

(B2.1.1.24.4.15)

Alpha - 21

Fixed something here, fixed something there, fixed something everywhere

SideModule: Fixed Justin's hangout background

SideModule: Fixed Hayne's hangout background

SideModule: Added Anna's 1st hangout

SideModule: Added Charlie's 1st hangout

SideModule: Added Kaz's 1st hangout

SideModule: Added Carly's 1st hangout

Stats_Page: Added Archangel crew background notes

UniModule: Added 7 new weapons to the shop

MISC: Added AA-12

MISC: Added FAMAS G2

MISC: Added HK G36C

MISC: Added SIG MPX

MISC: Added PP-19 Vityaz

MISC: Added Ultimax 100

MISC: Added SR-25

COMPLETED: Chapter 3 Part 1 of The ARC branch (100%) (PT only) W.I.P.: AA Hangout Part 1 (86%) W.I.P.: AA Store system (85%) W.I.P.: FBI Hangout Part 1 (46%) W.I.P.: FBI Store system (65%) W.I.P.: Stat screen upgrade (40%) Word Count: 1,007,622 words including codes (Last update was 971,142)

I'll be completely honest, when I started Breach 2 I knew it was going to surpass 1 million words. I just didn't think it would take this long. Through numerous challenges, both in writing and in real life. Through numerous ups and downs, I'm absolutely surprised and grateful to know that there are people out there who still support me. I've had many thoughts, numerous times, to give up and move on to other things in life, but I didn't want to disappoint, so I kept writing.

I bring to you, the 1 million milestone update. It's really not much, but it is one step closer to completion. This update has been in the works for the past 6 months mostly due to the weapons rework and also story changes for the crew members that I apparently couldn't keep track of without a giant excel spreadsheet. This update finalizes the Archangel's Gamma Crew hangouts, which is Kaz and Carly's hangout as well as Anna and Charlie's hangout.

As before, they share the same storyline so they will both share the same hangout. If you choose to go out with one, you cannot go out with the other. Kaz shares it with Carly, and Anna shares it with Charlie. Keep that in mind. Oh, and there's 7 new guns to play with. Have fun, Ian.

This update does not include the new Chapters. Chapter 3 will still be Patreon exclusive until Breach 2 finishes and I can send the demo to the public testing, and to CoG for the full release.

I really cannot reiterate how grateful I am to have an amazing array of readers and supporters who are still here after numerous hiccups and fuck ups. Thank you all, so very much.

Much, much love. - Max ❤

Link to the CoG Forums

I also have a Discord server!

As always feel free to drop however many screenshot feedbacks you'd like, either in the forums or in our Discord channel!

#breachverse #breach update #breach: chicago warzone #choice of games #interactive fiction #bcwz #breach the archangel job #if wip #choicescript #hosted games #cyoa #dashingdon #if game #interactive novel #breachverse news #btaj

[makeyoumine69]

For the celebration- could you do daddy kink & breeding?👀

Lust

◥ PAIRING: Patrick Bateman x Fem!Reader

◥ SUMMARY: When you woke up at night from a sudden heat inside your body, Patrick was here to settle your most carnal needs.

◥ WARNINGS: NSFW │HEAVY breeding kink, passionate sideways & prone sex, extremely needy reader, fingering, implied masturbation, a lot of sensual touches, creampie and some more.

◥ WORDCOUNT: 1.7k

◥ A/N: To be honest, I didn't expect breeding kink to become so popular among my prompts, but I really enjoy writing it! Thank you so much for your request, I hope you like it!

◥ LINKS: │Bingo Writing Challange Masterlist│ │Main Masterlist│

A big thanks to @spaghettificationandpretzels for amazing banners! 🥰

It was the middle of the night when you suddenly woke up, feeling the longing heat in your lower body, which was flowing like lava. Fidgeting on your back, you looked at Patrick, who was dreaming sweetly next to you, his broad chest rising and falling at a steady pace. That burning feeling seemed to increase with each second, inducing you to think you were going to burn alive unless you do something soon. 

Turning on your other side, you removed the blanket to cool yourself a bit, but almost right away–you heard him moving behind your back as he pressed himself against you, wrapping his brawny arms around your tiny frame and nuzzling at the crook of your neck. The tight proximity between your bodies almost compelled you to cry out from need; a million shivers ran down your spine just from one brisk contact with his groin and damn, he was so hard. 

Trembling, you had to bite your lip before you took his big palm and traced it down along your abdomen, as you couldn’t resist this unbearable urge anymore. As soon as you pressed his hand against your mound, you heard his muffled groan near your ear; it scared you a bit, but by that moment you couldn’t hold back yourself anymore, moving his palm even lower to your wet panties–the last barrier that had left.

“Mm-mmh…” you whimpered against the pillow to shush yourself when you pushed his palm under your damp underwear. “P-Patrick…”

Gulping, you put your legs together to make the physical contact even more intense, and then you moved yourself against his hand, grinding on it as you were losing your mind from a ravenous hunger inside your lower belly. Inflamed, you gave Bateman a quick glance to check if he was still sleeping, and it seemed like he was—his breathing was steady and deep.

Soon, his perfect white sheets became damp beneath you as you set up the pace, sliding his hand shamelessly along your wet folds and paying special attention to your blushing clit. Sobbing against the pillow, you hoped he wouldn’t be angry about this little fun of yours; last evening Patrick came back from work so exhausted and tired, you didn’t want to bother him with your sexual needs, although you knew–he would fuck you into oblivion by your one word.

“Aa-aaww...” Accidentally, you moaned louder than before but you didn’t really notice that as you were drowning in the ocean of pleasure, brushing his thumb against your little tip.

Panting, you nearly wrapped your legs around his arm like a snake, closing your eyes from the blissful sensation when you suddenly felt his fingers moving alongside your palm, sneaky poking at your moist entrance. 

“What a pleasant, wet beginning of the day,” he purred into your ear, tickling the soft skin around it. “I like it...”

“A-aah, Daddy…” you arched your back against his solid body from how his thin fingers were playing with your moist clit, rubbing it between them and then massaging intense circular motions into it, inducing your toes to curl. “I… I didn’t want to w-wake you up…”

“It’s okay, Sweetheart.”

“N-need you, Daddy…” you gulped, covering his palm with yours once again, patting it and encouraging him to stuff your pussy with his experienced digits. “I’m so… So sensitive right now because of the hormones… Aa-aww…”

With a quiet growl, Patrick encircled your boobies with his strong arm, rolling on his side to be closer, so he could pump your inner channel deeper. “I can tell…Don’t worry, Daddy will take care of you.”

Licking your neck, he lifted your leg, and that sudden new angle of penetration caused a pitiful wail to escape your mouth as you could feel his fingers, slipping in and out your cunt with slick nasty sounds, as they were stimulating the spot you needed him the most.

“O-ohhh, mm-mm Gosh,” you had to grab a pillow, jolting along his muscular frame. “You m-make me… Feel so good… Pat… Patrick.”

“Baby girl,” he snarled in a low voice, twisting your hard nipple between his fingers and curling his digits inside your feverish cleft. “You’re clenching so tightly already, you wanna cum?”

“Mmm… Yes, b-but…”

“But you want me to fuck you?” he murmured, tugging on your earlobe and sucking it after. “And fill you with my seed, drown your pussy in it?”

Trembling as if an electric shock hit you, you covered his hand with yours, sinking your nails into his perfect skin and whimpering your words like a plea: “Yeah-h! Oh, please, Daddy… Wanna feel you inside-mmm, I can’t wait for you to knock me up.”

“Fuck, babe,” grumping, Bateman left a sensible mark on your neck before he shoved his fingers nearly till his knuckles, forcing you to cry out in delight. “You drive me crazy when ya talk dirty, you know that?”

“I just want to give you as many children as you want, Daddy,” you looked at him and it seemed like his eyes were glowing in the darkness with a wild lust, which was consuming him by the second. “P-please…I….”

You didn’t even finish your sentence as almost right away you felt his swollen tip, rubbing against your soaked little hole as he was smearing your slickness all around it. And then, he sheathed himself into your spasming inner channel, in a slow but possessive push.

When Patrick bottomed out completely, you both gasped and twitched from the feeling of your bodies finally bonded, losing yourselves with each second, especially when he slammed into you, with his tip brushing against your cervix. 

Huffing, Bateman kissed your shoulder before he sneered: “Mmm-my dear little girl…You can’t imagine how much I want to see you-aaarghh...Pregnant...”

Speeding up the tempo, he raised your leg higher together with his to make a friction even more sensual, his heavy balls were pleasurably hitting your ass and right now you wanted nothing more than to be claimed by this man and pumped with his fertile seed till it would leak out your pussy.   

“P-Patrick… Aw-ww, I’m so close…”

“I got you, babe,” Patrick breathed out as his own body yearned for a sweet release, but at that moment, his full focus was on helping you to crest your high. “Spread your legs wider for Daddy… Mm-mm, yes… Just like that, good girl…” His low groan pierced through your head like a hurricane, forcing all of your thoughts to vanish and your mind to become cloudy. 

“Aahh…I think I feel you in my b-belly…”

“I bet…” Holding you tightly, Bateman placed his large palm between your legs once again, stimulating your throbbing clit with gentle motions, but soon they turned into persistent rough strokes, which left you no choice but to sink into the ocean of pleasure.

“D-Daddy…” A stifled moan broke out from your heated mouth when you turned to face him, desperately searching for his brown eyes. 

One innocent look of yours, was enough for him to unriddle everything you wanted, saying nothing else; right away, Patrick pulled your face closer to his and kissed your soft lips, a little harsher than he planned to, but it didn’t stop you from falling into the ravishing forgetfulness, feeling the pure ecstasy flowing through your veins. Quivering, you moaned against his mouth, whilst your hands were desperately tracing all over his body, not knowing what to clutch, but then he suddenly grabbed one of them with confidence, inducing you to wrap it around his neck. 

“My little beautiful Angel,” Bateman crooned in a sensual voice, clinging you securely as he was thrusting into your shaking little form sideways, fucking you through your orgasm. “Cumming so hard around Daddy’s cock… Aaf-fuck…”

Patrick cursed to himself as he was about to lose it right now, as your inner walls were embracing his beefy girth, milking it so deliciously, but he still needed more. With a careful motion, he flipped you on your belly, making you gasp from an unexpected change of position, but then you turned into a whimpering mess once again as Bateman climbed on you from above, pressing against the bed with his powerful body; his solid hips were ramming into you like a jackhammer.

“(Y/N),” he growled in a raspy voice before he planted a wet kiss on the nape of your neck. “I wanna hear you… Angel, I’m gonna cum in your little pussy, so you can have my baby inside of you… Soon, everyone will know who you belong to!”

“Mm-please, claim me, Daddy… Ah, mm-love you…” Hiccupping each time his thick cock was brushing against the neck of your womb, you were laying obediently beneath his massive muscles as you were ready to take anything he was going to give you. 

“Say it… Say it again!” Patrick snarled, wrapping his hands around your shoulders and snuggling into you even harder as he was trying to be as closer to you as possible.

“I love you…Pat-mmm, Patrick….Aw-ww!”

Bateman didn’t expect your words affect him that much, at one moment he even thought he would literally crush you with his rough pounds, but when he felt your hands gently petting his, and your legs opened wider–he couldn't hold back it anymore, as your devoting submission sent him over the edge. 

Pulling on the sensitive skin of your neck, Patrick shot his warm seed into your overstimulated pussy, fucking you with sloppy ragged thrusts and pressing you down with his full weight. Wailing miserably, you didn’t dare to move, even though you felt yourself uncomfortable from how he was pushing you against the sheets. 

When the delirious sensation let him go, Patrick heard you sobbing beneath him and almost straight away, he carefully touched your face, stroking your cheek as if he was asking you to look at him, whispering nearly notable: “I love you too, my Angel.”

With a sharp breath, you allowed him to press his lips against yours, sensing your heart about to make a flip inside your chest from the unbearable strong feeling you had for this man and nothing in this world would prove the opposite. 

#american psycho #patrick bateman x reader #patrick bateman imagine #patrick bateman #patrick bateman x female reader #patrick bateman x you #slasher x reader #slashers x reader #slasher x you #slasher smut #patrick bateman smut #patrick bateman headcanon #christian bale smut #christian bale x reader

[lesbianslvt666]

hunger

Musician!R x artist!guitarrist!E

In which Ellie sees how much you want to make your dreams come true so she helps you as much as she can.

but being a rockstar comes with a lot of fun, and a lot of pain…

TW: not proof read 😔👎

CW: mentions of gore, in the future mean Ellie, a bit of angst, some fluff, whiped!Ellie, a bit of loser Ellie lol, mentions of the U.K!! And a lot of fucking cursing, mentions or descriptions of drugs and alcohol, and smoking, a lot lol.

Smut in the future of course 

you couldn’t afford to continue with your studies.

not that you cared about college either, you knew you had a greater purpose since you were a child, writing songs as soon as you learned your ABC's, and singing as soon as were out of the womb.

music school was WAY out of budget.

The original plan was the U.K… too expensive to get there…

Then it was of course New York… you know the drill…

When you moved to Brooklyn you were expecting to get a closer insight on the music industry.

to be where the majority of your favourite artists grew up in.

However, you were greeted with a guy trying to mug you but getting mugged by an older woman while you flee the scene, and an extremely expensive rent for an apartment the size of a sock.

L shaped. a room, a very small study, a bathroom that didn’t had a separation between the shower head and the toilet and the smallest kitchen to ever exist.

However, the view was like no other, the big window pointing to the walls marked in art to the bone, people on the nearby basketball court, playing live music, skating or, of course, playing basketball.

Working two side jobs to pay for your needs and your pretty black cat named tuna.

still, working during day time as a receptionist and playing in ugly shit holes of bars at night wasn’t easy to maintain.

You needed a roommate fast.

and as today calls, with Mia storming out of the pub.

bruised lip after fighting a creep, guitar hanging from her shoulder and both middle fingers pointing at you and your band, while walking backwards to the exit and screaming.

"I quit you cunts! this aint going anywhere!"

you also needed a guitarist…

That’s when you started to talk with your friends, you needed someone that wouldn’t kill you in your sleep, or worse… steal all your shit and run away, or even lamer…. that would get you in a pyramid scheme.

So you called your best girl, the most precious sunshine in the world. Dina, who by now was sitting across your bed, feet on your lap while you massaged them.

for fucks sake, poor Dina worked as a hostess in a very expensive restaurant, working on high heels for six hours a day. She needed the relive.

"so I told him that if he ever came closer to me I was going to yank the little three hairs left in his receding balding stupid head of his, smash his skull hard against the pavement and make him clean his brain splattered with his tongue" her soft demeanour and relaxed body contrasting her poison laced words, however, all you could see was flowers and rainbows clouding around her.

"Dina, I need a roommate, like now, or I'll have to go back to Michigan with my dad…" you changed the subject as soon as she stopped talking, her eyes darting to you and her body lifting from the mattress.

She already had two roomies and her rent was way too good to be located in new York, you didn’t wanted her to leave such a good opportunity of a place.

"do you perhaps have a friend that would be waling to take the smallest of rooms aka aa fucking 2x2 meters study? And very small bathroom and shower that leaks and I haven't been able to fix, in this very shitty part of Brooklyn and-"

your rant was interrupted by Dina's hand on your thigh, cleaning the tears that were falling from your eyes without you noticing.

 this was your chance to prove to yourself you could make your dreams come true and money wasn’t helping…

"I have a friend… I mean she is not like,  rich, but she has financial aid in NYU in visual arts, she just enrolled a few months ago and her landlord is a fucking weirdo, also… I guess she would like to live the Brooklyn experience?, you know, all Basquiat and shit…" she said almost not paying attention to her own words while looking for her friends contact on her phone.

The pencil Ellie had on her hand was hammering the table in front of her, this lecture too boring for her to even care.

She had to add it to her schedule for extra points after missing too many classes.

Her early morning classes were a pain in her ass, she had to work night shifts to pay her "fucking new York rent" as she told her best friend Jesse.

"bzzz, bzzzz…" the sudden messages scaring the shit out of Ellie, she wasn’t dealing right now, so who was messaging her? Both Joel and Jesse knew she was in class, her last hook up stood her up after a night at a party and she had no other friends… perhaps an emergency?

She unlocked her phone, hiding it behind her sketchbook, (she was doing homework for another class)

@Dina_beatchlvr

Hey, Ellie, sorry the time.

Jesse told me u in class, but I am.

I am here with my friend, she has this free studio down here in Brooklyn, great location and pretty view from the main window.

@ells69

Sup, umm, I already have an apartment tho?

@Dina_beatchlvr

Yeah, I mean… thought you wanted to get away from your landlord as possible? 🤷🏽‍♀️

@ells69

What's the catch? How much? And who is your friend? Iont wanna die before 27 :))

@Dina_beatchlvr

 the catch is that she needs a roomie and I don’t want wtvr weirdo in her personal space.

I also happen to know that you need to renew the contract with your creep of a landord, anddddd, the place is smoke and pet frendly :)) (she has a pretty cattt)

Also this her @dyk34u

Think about it ;)

Of course Dina knew what she was doing, she knew that your insta would call her attention.

Hell she knew you was her type. (and the bikini pics work wonders for her plan)

Without a thought Ellie moved in with you, no time to check the actual location before leaving her new York apartment and took off everything with her.

You didn’t knew her aside from that one pic Dina showed you from like three years ago, yet you trusted Dina with your life, you knew she wouldn’t let you get killed or robed.

Dina and her boyfriend came with Ellie to help with the unpacking, the two being the first ones to enter the "house"

Behind them, a woman mumbling obscenities about how small the house was and how actual of a shit hole this was and how she was tricked to live there.

she looked a bit taller than you, a bit muscular but skinny, freckles dusting all over her face and shoulders as she was wearing a wife pleaser, perky boobs that displayed against the white thin fabric of her shirt and some skinny jeans, however, the most important part.

A guitar case hanged in one of her shoulders.

Perfect.

When her eyes landed on you she shut her mouth.

"sorry, ummhh, I am Ellie, you must be…" she extended her hand to you and you took it while telling her your name.

that evening was rather uneventful. really just helping her unpacking and putting things away, it was your free day at your day job. Still… you were playing almost two shows every night.

You weren't the best at playing guitar, you and the girls were enduring these shows.

all of you looking for a new guitarist.

Holding auditions with pretentious shits or men denigrating your job for being "a bunch of dykes in a whiny band"

So, a few hours prior to going to your first gig of the night you took all of your courage to ask her.

"from one to ten, how good are you at playing? Guitar, i mean…" Ellie was sitting across from you, finishing to place the headboard.

Her sight puncturing to your face as soon as you asked that.

She took it a s a challenge, squint eyes eyeing you up and down, a small smirk glowing.

"oh I am shit, a two out of ten if you count one being a new born."

her hand grabbing for her guitar nearby, you laughed at her dry sarcasm, although your laugh was short lived as soon as she started to play.

veiny and tatted hands strumming and playing a jazz melody.

her fingers waltzing smoothly like she was just a breeze on top of the strings, making it look so easy.

her eyes connecting with yours, her face relaxed and a pretty shit eating grin all over her features.

She didn’t knew how you manage to convince her to go and watch you guys play, (only at the first pub of the night.) even though she had a test the next day seven am sharp.

She was in a trance as soon as you started to sing, lyrics soul puncturing and music enticing, easy to hear, hard not to take heartfelt.

The way you moved on stage, your body contorting and dancing, music guiding you like a puppet, she wanted to see you like this for ever, it was like a spell put on her, nothing else in her mind, clouded completely by you.

You.

She knew you would make it big.

you mention coming here to make your goals come true and she didn’t had a doubt you would make it.

I mean, Look at you! Everyone around you bewitched.

When the first gig ended Ellie couldn’t think of anything else, she needed to be there when you make it big, to be beside you.

"what'ya think?" you asked her out of breath, clothes tight on your body (she was looking at your tits) from all the sweat while you took your hair up.

The veins on you neck popping out, flush skin shimmering with sweat.

"can I kiss you?"

She wasn’t thinking at all, only you all over her, you.

your mind thought a hundred thoughts in less than a second, pros and cons and then landed on "we are in 2023 girl, a kiss is like a hug now a days" right? Like, this is only friendly and of course I wouldn’t make anything weird? Right?

Right…

So you took her by the hair and pressed your lips to hers.

Her strong hands groping your ass and yours moving to her waist to feel her closer, caressing the small of her back, open mouths and the taste of liquor from Ellie, clashed with the taste of cigarettes form you.

She sent you a message when she arrived to the apartment, after that…

You didn’t saw her when you arrived.

you didn’t saw her when she left.

when you left she wasn’t home already.

you didn’t saw her when you came back from day work.

So you went to the store, out of nowhere craving noodles to eat before you could sleep a bit and then go to play.

Certainly no to entertain your wondering mind, Ellie fogging all of it, like you where walking down an infinite path down Ellie lane.

The growing anxiety quivering in you head, what if she thought it was a mistake?

However, when you came back you saw Ellie sitting.

crossed legged on the living room.

guitar on.

and a bunch of papers scattered around her.

She was learning your songs…

let me know if you wanna be on the tag list

remember that my requests are open <3

#ellie williams #ellie williams fanfic #ellie williams x reader #ellie williams x you #ellie x fem reader #ellie williams headcanons #ellie williams smut #ellie williams x female reader #lesbian #the last of us #modern au #rockstar au #ellie x you #ellie x y/n #ellie x reader #ellie williams angst #ellie tlou #mean!ellie #loser lesbian #loser ellie #wlw ns/fw #wlw pride #sapphic #lesbians #wlw love #wlw post

[glitchadeli]

Alrighty, I've been meaning to upload this to Tumblr for a WHILE but I knew it was gonna be a lot of texting / explaining so I had to brace myself for all of it LMAO! Get ready for a LONG explanation about all these guys!! ^^

~

These are the 'main' next gens for my TAWoG AU, which I dubbed a long time ago the "String of Fate" AU (SoF) - if you saw my 'intro' post to my AU you'd know that my AU started differently - that is true!

When I first started my AU I had a whole story planned, I wanted to write it like a full on fanfiction with chapters 'n storylines!! However I.. am not confident in my writing. Over time I got less and less confident in my ability to write the stories - I found the medium of making a timeline to be MUCH more simple so that's what I started doing! It made it easier to say "hey this event happens here" and it just became my preferred way of telling the 'story'.

So eventually I will have a whole post explaining the entire timeline of my AU but that's still in the works if I'm being honest. I still have some storylines that need to be finished. (They're not big elaborate storylines btw, some of them are just mini arcs that some characters go through. My AU isn't super serious, it has its moments, but for the most part I wanted it to be fun!! Ya know?)

For now I at least wanna introduce everyone since my AU has tons of characters. (Lots of next gens lol) so starting off with the Watterson boy's kiddos. (Anais has her own family too but they'll get their own chart / explanation eventually!) I just think it's easier to stick to Gum and Dar's kids first anyway!! Gumball ends up with Rob and they have 6 kids, 1 of them biologically being Penny's but Rob sees Cas as his own. (and Cas see's Rob as more of a parent than Penny (something to be explored later) so yeah!) Lemme introduce everyone properly ~

-

There's Caspian (Cas), Zipper (Zip), Cosette (Cos/Cozy), Elliot (Eli) and then the twins - Roe and Rem! (Cas and Zip joke that they're twins too because they're 3 days apart in age.)

I explained how Cas came to be in this post - so I won't go over it too much, what I WILL explain is Zip since his existence has confused a few people. "How is he 3 days younger than Cas?" / "How did 2 males have a kid?" / ect.

I won't explain the story aspects juuuust yet so all you need to know is - Rob went all science-y and took some of Gum's DNA. Mixing it with his own to create a kid - which is Zip. Zip was born from an 'artificial womb' / incubator for anyone wondering. I know that's not realistic but this is TAWoG we're talking about.. I could literally say Rob sneezed which caused Zip appeared and it could be canon. It doesn't matter if 'two males can't have kids' - they can in this fictional universe!! So get over it ~

Anyway, Cas was born on November 10th (1992 - yes my AU even has the years figured out LOL) and Zip was born 3 days later on November 13th. Skipping some story stuff; Rob and Gum have their first child together / after marriage, which is Cosette. She's born when Cas/Zip are 7. (Gum is 24 and Rob's 25 for anyone who was wondering.) Then Elliot was born 3 years later and then 2 years after that were the twins! Gum and Rob love their little big family very much <33

-

Then we get to Darwin's family - he's a single dad and his kids are Pearlene (Pearl), Lilith and Kid.

Pearl was just like him - a sentient pet who grew a connection in order to 'grow legs' (except she already had legs.. being a lotl so.. she grew lungs LOL). Her connection is to both Cas AND Zip! (Unlike Darwin being 2 years younger than Gum, Pearl is only 1 year younger than Cas/Zip.)

Then there's Lilith. She… oh man she's a weird creature. I don't even know how to explain her.. so she'll get her own post eventually!! (Cause Echo was the one who created the idea of her species so I'll try to have Echo's help in explaining them - Echo has one in their AU too!! His name is Kevin. I love Kevin. ANYWAY-) Lilith is just a creature™ and we love her :)

Aaaand finally there's Kid - a puppet come to life - situation. His whole story is still being finalized but let's just say.. certain puppets were involved. A certain purple one. A certain blue/green/yellow one. And a certain clown-based one. If you know you know. Darwin loves his babies very very much! <33

"Glitch, why is Darwin not with anyone / Carrie?" - Honestly that's just because… I don't know who I ship him with..?

Darwin was my first ever true comfort character but when I got into the show literally the Halloween episode (1st indication he ever liked Carrie) was still a NEW episode so I wasn't sure how I felt about the ship. And now as an adult… the age gap really throws me off. I'm sure 'ghost years' might be different or the show was just joking about the 300+ thing but… being 327 and dating a 10 year old… it just… makes me feel uncomfortable. So in my AU - Darwin and Carrie break up at some point in their early teen years. (er well.. Darwin's anyway.) They're still good friends and there's no bad blood whatsoever!!

As for why Darwin doesn't end up with anyone - I just don't have anyone in mind. As a joke I did wanna set him up with Hot Dog Guy but that doesn't really work for reasons I'll explain later. and I know some people ship Dar and Julius but the age gap there made it worse for me too. (In my AU Julius is like.. 6 years older than Darwin. I just always felt he was much older so I could see them being friends, but nothing more. Sorry Julwin shippers.) - but yeah, honestly I think Darwin's fine as a single dad - he's great and having Gum 'n Rob's support they're like a team, it all works out!!

-

"Glitch, what did you mean you couldn't have Guy and Darwin together?" … There’s a character limit here so I.. have to make a 2nd post about the partners!! I’ll link it here though!! ^^

Link to the explanation about the partners is here <- !!

#the amazing world of gumball #tawog #tawog gumball #tawog rob #gumball watterson #gumrob #my tawog art #rob tawog #tawog fanart #darwin watterson #glitch's next gen tawog #my next gen #my tawog next gen

[journalsouppe]

I started and beat this within like 4 days in July 2023, and I just completely forgot to take photos of this spread T-T.

BUT I loved Tunic so much, one of my all time favorite games I've ever played. If this was a Zelda game, it might've been my favorite Zelda game. This was only beat out by Ace Attorney: Apollo Justice bc my aa brainrot is that bad hfjdkal.

All of the stickers come with ordering the physical version of the game on fangamer!! There's also a freebie fox sticker I got from TheLittleBirdeeCo thats below keep reading.

My writing is typed below as well as my game notes. I will not type out my game notes and I also don't recommend looking at them unless you have played the game.

Game notes^ Plus a little blurb after rewatching a playthrough that I won't type out either since these are more just for fun.

Rating: 9.5 Played: Su 2023 Port: Nintendo Switch Favorite? Y Replayable? Y Recommend? Y

Comments

similar opening to links awakening

the start screen is gorgeous

THE POT SHARDS ARE MOVEABLE - i love the clay feel

tons of hidden paths and secrets

oooo you find the instruction booklet in the game

I KILLED MYSELF?

GIANT SKELETON SHOPKEEPER SCARED ME T-T he's chill tho

oooo you can hear the wind chimes

LOVE the mechanics of the draw bridge

what are the small tuner/bells for

i am apparently really good at finding hidden chests

i love that the fairies are stone versions of the oot/mm fairies

ENEMIES CAN FOLLOW YOU INTO NEW ROOMS?

it's hard to get acclimated since I'm so used to 2d zelda strategies and patterns

the statues of the hero perfectly encapsulate my view of oot link, i really love the design

the garden boss is hard T-T

the bell towers are so pretty

THE POTIONS REGENERATE? WISH I KNEW THAT

the west garden is so pretty omg

I FINALLY DID IT T-T-T-T-T-T-T-T-T-

IM SO TINY T^T

idrk what to do at the heros grave

the librarian fight reminds me of the links awakening nightmare fight

frogs domain music reminds me of the forest temple

A GUN?

who am i?

why is the cathedral filled with ... me?

the boss rush was fun but hard

I DONT LIKE THAT ELEVATOR WHERE DID THE CRUCIFIED THING GO

i don't think there's a set order to do "dungeons" so i'm not locked to doing only the siege engine

i thought cat man was pissing

why do i have the power to activate the boxes?

librarian's ghost?

COLOR CHANGE?

was the heir me?

Game Notes:

beautiful 3D animation and modeling - very pleasing

wide attacking range - don't just attack straight forward

incredible environmental design and path making

two endings - exploration and collection for good end

diverse attack patterns and learning curve + boss rush

Summary

What a phenomenal game. I loved playing this game so much. It was challenging and I wasn't used to the souls mechanics, but I learned fast and had so much fun fighting the bosses. I love the two endings. The Bad where you replace your former self as the heir, continuing the cruel cycle. The Good where you free the Heir and find out it's you, older, someone who is no longer stuck in the cycle, and you get to be friends together. The music is absolutely gorgeous. I listened to it while falling asleep and was just sobbing from it. I love how mysterious the lore is and how everything still hasn't been answered. I love the designs of the environments and enemies and how the game can go from nice and serene to dark and creepy. I loved how this game was a perfect blend of 2D zelda plus monument valley plus a souls game, it forced me to think outside of the box and use my journal to takes notes on all the little secrets and surprises. I can def see myself play this game again, it's such a charming game that has a lot of nostalgia despite being a fairly new game. I am so happy I bought the deluxe edition, I truly cherish this game so much and love the stickers and artbooks I received. I highly recommend this game to anyone, it is such an incredible journey to go through. I'm gonna be spending a lot of time watching and reading about the lore and digging deeper into this game. Truly what a phenomenal game with such a cute yet tragic main character, ough i love tunic.

#journalsouppe #bullet journal #journal #video game journal #tunic #tunic game

[lazuliquetzal]

Fic Stats Game

Ohoho thank you @tavina-writes for the tag!! Pretty sure this is gonna be the same 3 fics over and over but we'll see :)

rules: give us the links to your fic with the most hits, second most kudos, third most comments, fourth most bookmarks, fifth most words, and fic with the fewest words.

1) Most Hits

It's AA Batteries (Daiya no Ace). I know this without even looking, it's AAB 100% and by... not a significant, but a decent lead. That thing breached containment. I'm glad that it did, because I had fun writing it, but it always surprises me because sports anime twin OC fic? Really?

But I'm glad it's my most popular fic, even if I don't consider it my best, because even if it's a canon rewrite, I finished a 100K+ fic and I am proud. I'm literally never over it, I could talk about it all day.

Like, I usually don't ship things very strongly, but Misawa is insane to me. Also, do you know how embarrassing it is to relate to Miyuki Kazuya? And not even in a 'generic repressed character' way, I'm talking in a Hey I Literally Was In His Shoes And Made The Same Exact Fucking Mistakes And Decisions way. Nobody gets Miyuki Kazuya like I do. I'm fucking Miyuki kin. I didn't ask for this. I didn't--

2) Second Most Kudos

This one is also AAB, so I'll go with first place: Reflection (The Magnus Archives). A classic. A nice and simple time travel fix-it comedy.

I remember the writing of this one because I had been utterly obsessed with TMA. It would not let me go. I drafted the early chapters on my phone while walking across my college campus. I almost got ran over by a bike when I was writing the "Martin witnesses Jon have a mild breakdown in the break room" scene.

3) Third Most Comments

Dawn of the Fourth (Linked Universe). The LU fandom is super giving with their comments! Probably the most comment-friendly fandom I've been in.

I think it also helped that DotF is one of those stories where every chapter is a punch to the throat lol. If you didn't comment after ch7, it's probably because you zoomed through haha.

4) Fourth Most Bookmarks

It's DotF again, so I'll go with third place: ain't no rest for the wicked (Naruto).

Ah, this one... I'm fond of it, in the way I'm fond of all my writing, but also I was in high school. There's a lot about it that I would do differently now. But I learned a lot from writing it, and actually Chie, Issei, and Riku are still my children and I love them all. I'm proud of the color test. :)

5) Fewest Words

If you ignore the Zelda comic and the CSS formatting test and the anonymous April Fool's fic that I will not be claiming ownership of publicly, my shortest fic is Blackout Blues (Daiya no Ace) at 1101 words. If you subscribe to the belief that a picture is worth a thousand words, then that bumps the word count up to 4101 words.

I should draw more art for my fanfic. I have the power. It's fun.

tagging (if you want!): @yellowocaballero @xxsolar-writesxx @ellie-tarts @zarvasace @dottie-wan-kenobi and anyone else who wants to!

#tag game #thanks for tagging me tav!!! #ain't no rest haunts me honestly. like yeah I am proud but also. fifteen year old lazuli writing. #I'd die for Chie though all the OCs in ain't no rest were So Good #lazuli talks

[pliablehead]

I guess if I want to write a travelogue/write up post about my 4-stop journey following the first chunk of Everything Everything's 2023 US tour then I have to just... do it!! If this is of interest to anyone other than me then GREAT and if not then it's still special to me to try to write down and remember everything I can uwu

FIRST STOP WASHINGTO-- wait, no, actually, first stop, on my way out of town, the local donut shop in my neighborhood, a place that I absolutely adore and patronize all the time with staff who mostly know me by now/some of whom are my instagram friends/etc. i'd checked with the Pittsburgh venue ahead of time to see if it was okay to send in outside food as a gift to the band even though they have a cafe/bar in their own right, and whoever I corresponded with said it would be totally fine, so I talked to the donut shop manager and set up a delivery of a dozen for the lads for Saturday before their show here. advance paid for that, as well as getting my own breakfast and coffee hehe, and then hit the road. OKAY FOR REAL FIRST STOP WASHINGTON DC!!! This was the second-longest leg of my Car Driving and it was definitely a wee bit exhausting but I had a podcast or two and a ton of E E on shuffle to bolster me through and I made it to my mom's friends' house, where I was staying, with relative ease. The venue was within a not-too-unreasonable walking distance too so after a change of clothes (I had very distinct and deliberate Show Outfits for each night that were fully separate from my travelin' clothes) and a bunch of fussing with the bracelets™ I headed over!! stopped for empanadas and a smoothie on the way and then queued up!!

aaaaahh this was such a nice fun queue. I was maybe about a dozen-ish people back from the front, down about half a block, and once I finished scarfing down my food this was my first real experience with doling out the bracelets. so fun! I'm glad it was basically an instant hit! AND I even got a few trades in this queue--one person gave me a Man Alive / Tin / E E bracelet with teeny tiny beads, super fun, and one person with a SHITTON of kandi stuff gave me one that had the name of a flower genus on it?? i think they said it was?? I love the colors on this one! And one person traded me a Blow Pop. lmao. I should eat that before it sits in my fanny pack for too long. I also really enjoyed chatting with the two guys right in front of me (Nick and Alex?), who were from south-central PA and had a couple other fandom touchstones in common with me (mcelroys/dnd/BDG! I love this Venn diagram!!) as well as a big love for E E. We didn't really see much of each other beyond the point of getting inside but I liked y'all a lot!! Hope you had as great a time as I did!!

Black Cat is where I saw E E the first time I EVER SAW THEM, which was almost exactly six years ago from this gig, which is insaaaane. The space is kind of narrow so there's not a huge amount of stage barrier space right at the front, so Becky and I ended up pretty much at the front but almost aa-all the way stage left/Jeremy-side. coulda been worse hehehe. We kind of loitered and chatted with nearby folks, I think maybe becky checked out merch ahead of the show ? but I kind of just held down the fort, enjoying setup stuff, pete running around etc hehe. getting BLASTED by the AC, which was nice.

the ummmm the opener! our first experience with Pierre! I gotta say his general style is not for me, despite the fact that I do think he's very talented and good at the thing he's doing. this first night especially he was SO sweaty and I felt bad for him lmao, you could like see it dripping off him. i am so curious as to why/how he got paired with the boys for this tour, like, what aligned in such a way that this match was made, because my general vibe on the crowd/his audience/etc was that we the fans of the nerdy white english mathy rocker guys were not exactly his demo LOL. BUT i will say in DC I do think he had one little pocket of strong-contingency fans because I kept hearing big whoops and cheers coming from one specific audience spot and I loved that for him lmao. for some reason i cannot explain I actually almost found his backing/support musician guy (the guy who was basically his version of peter) more compelling. I wanna know THAT dude's story lol.

so when he finished up we had a little interlude aaaannndd the setlist appeared... hehe. I could def have peered up to look at it from where I was, but I was telling myself I wanted to be surprised, and was deliberately looking away........ until suddenly everyone around me was gasping and going HOLY SHIT and I was like, ugghhh okay, I will check JUST enough to figure out what that's all about, and what that was all about was immediately apparent because smack in the middle of the set were a Man Alive track (which we never get in the states bar MY KZ) and something that just said "New Song." AND LIKE, OKAY, THAT'S A JUSTIFIED HOLY SHIT. new song????? so now we had THAT to contend with coming up, and aaaaaaah. ahh. yeah holy shit indeed.

it's also while we're standing there that AG pops into view, (or maybe I first spotted him during Pierre's set? Chronology is irrelevant), back off behind Becky from me in the other direction, and we waved over at him to say hi and he says to us, "All four of them are bleached blond." And my gut instinct was to be like, I DON'T BELIEVE YOU, but also the truth in my heart was that there was absolutely no justification for not believing them, because of course they would, and sure enough these bozos roll out onto the stage and they are all four draco malfoy-ass bleach blond. God it looks a mess on Jeremy LOL and while the color/dye job wasn't bad on Alex, it was clear his finer hair wasn't holding up as well against the chemicals because it was just a fluffy riot mess. BUT GOD IT WAS REALLY SO INCREDIBLY STRIKING OF A VISUAL for them to be all be wearing all pure white/beige clothes and then to have this bleach-white hair and all of it catching and glowing under the stage lights... god... clearly the effect they were going for and it WORKED, IT REALLY DID. I think it looks so damn goofy (mostly on jez) out of context but it's ABSOLUTELY nailing the Everything Everything Gig Costumes energy/uniform thing that I felt like they'd drifted away from a little the past couple tour cycles, I'm so incredibly here for it

The set!!!! The gig!!!!!!! it wasn't a wildly different set from what we'd seen in CA last year, obviously RDF-heavy supplemented with a heaping helping of singles from the other albums too, but I remember thinking Leviathan and Pizza Boy were especially excellent aaaah. And Schoolin'! And the NEW SONG! The two pieces of it I IMMEDIATELY absorbed and retained were 'the image of a little yellow face to tell you that I'm sorry' and 'I love you like an atom bomb,' and I was spouting those two pieces back to anyone who wanted to talk to me about it for the rest of the night. I'm so lyrics-pilled/vocalist-biased. Which was.... Unfortunate, for this DC gig, because I do think the audio mix was pretty rough - at least from where we were standing so close to the front, I wonder if it was at least a tiny bit better further back into the crowd in the area the sound system was probably primarily calibrated for - and we were REALLY losing Jon in the mix, especially underneath how enthusiastically the crowd was singing along a lot of the time. We were on Jeremy's side of the stage and we were really just getting a LOT of Jeremy. (Which, the bass did sound absolutely fantastic, so hard to complain about that, at least, but still.) I was very thankful to be going to a few more gigs beyond this one so that this wasn't my only experience with it, especially New Song!!! Plus there were a bunch of other little tech difficulties too? Near the beginning of the new song, Jon's guitar strap came detached and wouldn't reconnect, and after struggling a bit with that he decided to just drift back and pass it off the stage to their tech guy--but he was still kind of singing/holding the mic, so as he moved on stage, the mic cable yanked the microphone stand straight over, too. Then the rest of the night that stand was pretty precarious and nearly fell two other times, only caught at the last minute by a true homie who was standing directly in front of it in the audience lmao. I think Becky yelled HIRE HIM! at one point. Annnnd also for like a whole verse of NOTLK jez's bass boards just kind of Gave Up. He tried switching to his other instrument but that wasn't working either, and then finally it all sort of came back online, so he played a little stretch with the wrong bass and then was able to switch back to the right bass when there was a lull in his part. SHAMBLES. lmfao. god it was a great gig though. SO FUCKING GOOD TO BE BACK I LOVE BAND UWAAAAAHH I WAS SO SWEATY AND HAPPY

afterrrr da gig, we needed very badly to drink water and so we managed to do that I believe, and we kind of loitered in the Merch Line Situation trying to figure out what was going on. I had kind of resolved not to buy merch until at least NY, part because I really didn't want to be lugging anything around with me for too much of my trip (esp on this night where I walked) and part because I'd read a post that Irving Plaza was among the venues who'd committed to not taking a cut of band merch sales and letting them keep it all, and I was like, well obvi that's where I want to spend my money. Plus it was cash only in DC and since I'd kind of told myself NY I didn't even have cash out, so it was nothing. BUT!!! homie Adrian whomst I had met at the DC Foals show last December had been there, a few people ahead of me in the queue and also rocking out yaayyy, and he was trying to get merch but the ATM inside the venue literally did not have any more cash left inside it to dispense because everyone was taking out so much of it to buy merch AAAH. so he reached out to me like 'you're going to more shows than just this one right?' and asked if I'd pick him up the stuff he wanted later and then mail it to him so he didn't have to contend with international shipping and I was like aaaah absolutely! yay gig comradeship!

so I think becky finally committed to getting in the merch line and I was mostly just waiting With Becky and there weren't a ton of people left because the venue was trying to clear out, but the handful of us who were still there, a wild Alex Robertshaw appeared up near the stage/bar. we vibed out whether he was receptive to Fan Bothering at this time but it seemed legit, so a bunch of us went over and socialized with him and took some pics, got some signatures, etc, woooo. We tried to vibe out from him also if the other guys were gonna be coming out, and when and where, but y'all know Alex is the awkwardest member of this band by a country mile and we didn't really have too coherent of a discourse at this point in time lmao. Not sure who talked to him about what at this point as I was just trying to hold down the fort and be Normal. I was able to give Alex the bracelet I'd made for him at this point (he was so cute studying on it and reading it ahaha - "rave-- kevin-- kevins rave KEVIN'S RAVE" and he smiled and I felt cool), and also meanwhile Pete was still running around stage doing roadietech type stuff and I sort of politely flagged him down like "do what you need to do if you need to do it but also: Hi lol" and I got to give him his bracelet as well! yay ♥. He complimented my shirt--I'd been getting a lot of compliments on it honestly, it's their Yellow Bird Project shirt that Jon designed some time ago, only I replaced the plain white sleeves of the original unisex tee with some sort of vermilion "girly fit" sleeves that are more comfy to me and kind of give the shirt a different look haha--and I sort of joked on that, said as much, oh, I swapped the sleeves out, "It's to cover up how sweaty I get." and Pete gave me a deadpan look and went "You don't even want to go there with me" and I was like "YEP I FEEL MUCH THE SAME" and I think we both enjoyed a moment of feeling very Seen about the sweatiness hehehehehe. I love Pete he is my heckin Friend With no additional merch purchases (merchases) (hm, no) the venue was finally for realsies ejecting us so we drifted back out into the streets and just like... okay... now what........ this was the point at which I think our Band Groupie-ing Crew became me, Becky, Danielle in the fox ears/tail, and a lanky youth named S.P. whom I'd talked to in line earlier while doling out bracelets (he had the good E E baseball cap; he asked for an Arc bracelet and I commended him for being an Arc fan, since I feel like they are a dwindling/rarer breed, and then I offered up my hot take that Violent Sun is just the second coming and second pass at Duet, which he thought was spicy, and then he asked for my most controversial E E take and I told him that I don't really like Tin very much and he told me he doesn't really like Shark Week very much and we agreed to disagree and have a good night LOL) (anyway I digress !). It was a warm enough night and none of us really had places to be so we didn't mind just loitering and trying to suss out some more Guys other than just Alex and Pete, but slowly but surely we became basically the only fans left sticking it out. so we stuck together! We split up to try to find if there was a rear stage door at the back and SP and I went one way (the long way RIP) and Becky and Danielle went the other way and it turns out the way that SP and I went was an alleyway just FULL of rats. Too many rats in DC!! People like to talk about rats in NYC but I saw WAY more in Washington just vibing out on the sidewalks and eating trash. I'm not anti-rat, they live there and deserve to live, but oh man it was just. I did not especially want a rat encounter LOL. The rat alley DID actually lead us to where the bus was though!!, but there was also a venue security guy there who was immediately like "Nope, back up, leave, bye" and we were like. understood have a nice day, and doubled around a different way to meet back up with the other two. wwwwelp.

We loitered a bunch more and eventually saw Alex and his homies like, AT LEAST two more times, but we ultimately never saw anyone else. They p much confirmed for us that because this was the first night of the tour, they had a really intense load-out, and everyone was jetlagged to all fuck, that they probably wouldn't ever make it out, even though at least once Alex had said something ambiguous/optimistic enough to imply that they might yet, but really it just got SO late that we couldn't justify still being there for nothing instead of being like. asleep. lol. SP and Danielle got rideshares, Becky and I walked back as far as her hotel together, and then I hiked the rest of my way back too and went the fuck to SLEEP!!! FIRST GIG IN THE BOOKS!! WHAT A LOVELY NIGHT GOD IT WAS JUST SO BEAUTIFUL TO BE SEEING THEM AGAIN ngl I think the blond is really attractive on Mike with his darker brows/beard and I'm always a sl*t for jonathan so like. beautiful. finally some delicious fucking food

it was super nice of my mom's friend to let me stay with him!!! I was so delighted to see his cats again, I remembered them from the last time I was there like six or so years ago, they're sooooo floofy and beautiful aahh. he also provided me with a white noise fan without me even asking which was SO choice. zzzzz. My plan was to get up in the morning, get coffee someplace nearby at wherever he recommended, and then hit the road forrrr... Philadelphia!!! Night two!!!! I got some breakfast tacos at a hella legit place, messed up my coffee/milk/sugar ratio ever so slightly but not in an undrinkable way, and then frickin. autobot rolled out. This drive was not bad at ALL, I timed it pretty much exactly like I planned it to, which was to: get to my friend's place where I was crashing in philly with, ideally, enough time to take a small nap before I had to do anything else, because, god, despite being pretty exhausted and sleeping okay on the nice guest bed in DC, I had BARELY slept the night before I left just from Travel Antsiness and from both staying up way later and waking up way earlier than I meant to unintentionally, and a second little recharge zzz before I went and did it all over again really hit the spot.

It was soooo nice to see Mads again and to see Mr. Angus and also meet BENNY!! More host cats!! They are suuuch silly good little lads, Mads and I had a ton of Kitty Chat and just vibing out and talking about concerts and fandom and stuff, I was so thankful she let me stay with her and getting to hang out was icing on the cake of this trip! She pointed me toward the trolley I'd need to take to get to the venue, and after my baby snzzz and drinking a ton of water and suiting up in my Arc-inspired look (literally just a sweatshirt dress I bought specifically because it was color-blocked very very much like the jackets/outfits they toured Arc in, I saw it and bought it immediately lmfao) I journeyed into the city, hoping to just find a place to eat in the vicinity of the gig! I was way closer up in the queue this time, the people in front of me were really just like.... the usual suspects, Annika+squad and David+squad (incl. Becky, who'd apparently already been there when I got there but wasn't there when I arrived), and also a super-nice woman immediately in front of me named Robin who I MEGA hit it off with!!! Hanging out with her was such an awesome part of my experience at this gig!!! she's COMPLETELY Offline which is so powerful for her but I hope there's some capacity in which we can continue to be friends because she ruled.

There was a Dominican(? I think) place like one block down from the venue where a couple in front of me had gotten some stuff and so I ran down there to snag food too and holy shit this man gave me so much goddamn food. Just a HUGE pile of rice and beans and some pork ribs, and I got a pineapple fanta, and I just popped a squat on the sidewalk and ate as much of it as I could which was probably not even half of what he gave me but it wasn't even that expensive so god bless. Once I wasn't dealing with my food sitch any more I was freed up to pass out a bunch of bracelets again, and I even got a couple more trades, one that was just a bunch of black beads and a bunch of Xs and one that says 'BUSSY' which I am elated about, thank you so fucking much lmao. Also someone offered to trade me an ibuprofen LOL and I was like no that's fine the bracelet can be free... for now, but I will keep that in mind if I change my mind later LOL aaahhh i was just so excited to give the bracelets out it was such a good vector for socializing and making Friends and Gig Buddies. I did learn p quickly at Philly that I should have made way more Man Alive, GTH, and Raw Data feel bracelets because those were basically the first to go every night and then I got stuck with just sad unloved Re-Animators and AFDs :( I was trying to like! do equal amounts of everything to give everything the love because I love them all! but people got favorites out there damn lmao. I was happy to be able to give Robin the MY KZ one because she said that's the first song she ever heard by them and it's special to her because of that (and then also it's been in the touring set and she got to hear them perform it too yay!!! I don't remember if she said she'd seen them before but it had just been a very very long time, or what, idk, aaaah).

We were R I G H T on the stage at this venue, slightly more to Alex's side this time, and the lip/rise of the stage was not very high at ALL and it felt almost like... intimidating, or like it shouldn't have been ALLOWED, for us to be that close to the stage. :flushed emoji: jeez lmao. I didn't fuck w merch here either but some people around me did I think and I held their spots, and a nice kid from right behind me in the queue brought me a Liquid Death which was so incredibly sweet. Pierre's set passed much as it had in DC, lmao; his other musician guy had a sweet fit on, though, this like two-piece set that was a really really dark/muted camo, a blazer over a black top and then matching like athleisure-fit pants and black boots, it was a fuckin look. They had a song at the very end of Pierre's Philly set that I don't think they'd done in DC (and that I didn't get in PGH either, it turned out), and ironically that was actually probably far and away the song of his I enjoyed the most, so I got kind of into it there at the end! but MAN was I ready to see the boys instead. hnnnn.

LADS SO CLOSE TO ME. JUST RIGHT THERE AND SINGING AND ROCKING. the set was aaaalmost exactly the same as DC, but in Philly they shifted Bad Friday up out of the encore and back into the set proper, and then replaced it in the encore with Violent Sun, which I admit I'd been bummed to not see in DC because I think the Violent Sun/No Reptiles encore double whammy is so incredibly crucial to the vibe. Warmed me to have it back in. Obviously Pittsburgh had so many other contributing factors that put it over the edge, but if it weren't for all of those, I think Philly would've been my favorite/best experience of these four gigs. Jon was spicy (he sang so many of the Original Rejected naughty lyrics, this is where we got 'he's a vegetable now' for the first and only time and also the only gig of the four where he leaned into the 'Arch Jeremy' gag in Arch Enemy, hehehehe, plus also motherfuckin' distant past which is not uncommon), and we got way more of the New Song-- through the whisper network of Becky, AG, David, etc., etc., we'd pieced together enough info to know by now that apparently the title of the song was in the lyrics of the chorus, and so I think it was in Philly that we all pretty much determined/decided that this was Cold Reactor. I love you like an atom bomb and I've become a cold reactor. I wasn't diving as DEEP into SONG DECIPHERING as some other folks were, but I did like kind of working on it at my own pace and absorbing it into my heart and my understanding of the band and what they're about to start doing, and so this was really great, for me, here, beautiful, beautiful. I took almost NO pics and vids at this one because my phone was kind of dying but also mostly just because I was honestly having such an enormously great time and I didn't feel the need to try to do anything other than be present in my body at the gig and experience it live. you KNOW?? LIKE!! MUSIC. man. EDIT TO ADD: I forgot to mention a small tech flub that was actually so charming, where near the very end of Arch Enemy jon seemed to be having trouble with his guitar board in the front, and he spent so long in the outro squinting down at it and trying to resolve the issue that he didn't fully come in on the It's time to show your face! bit at the proper time, and he ended up just saying "It's time to show your face." right into the mic very unaffected and straight-up in his regular speaking voice at the very, very end when the song was basically over. lol. he is cute. everyone is cute.

(I WILL ALSO SAY I got the giggles SO BAD at david and amanda's gudetama they slipped onto the stage, oh my god--I was going to take a joke video just dramatically zooming in on it, as one does, except right when I went to do that it got caught up in jon's mic cable and just TUMBLED AND JOSTLED ALL OVER THE PLACE and that fucking GOT me and I was DYING and it was right at like. the serious, heartstring-tugging, fuck-yeah parts of No Reptiles where I'm supposed to be at CHURCH and instead I'm losing my shit into hysterics over this poor gudetama just rolling everywhere alksdhjglaksd, I had to bury my face in Becky's shoulder for a measure or more and try to recover, oh my godddd. EGGS!) -- (OH ALSO I LMAO I HAVE SEVERAL AUDIENCE MEMBER ~BITS THAT I AM DOING just like, clapping here or there, participating actively in certain parts of things, and one that I kept doing for some asshole clown reason was singing along with/lampshading Alex's quick backing vox on the second verse of Spring Sun Winter Dread-- Philly was probably the place where I was the most prominent/obvious/easy to see doing it, and it made both him and Jeremy REALLY snicker, ahahaha I'm sorryyyyyyy for being obnoxioussssss)

The merch/loitering sitch was sli-iiightly more locked down, in here; there was only so long Marty and I could pretend to be thinking about merch/hanging out with people who were actually in line but not actually being in line before they really truly wanted us to leave, and they were pretty pissed that I even left the venue with an empty/ice-only water cup, never mind any dreams of re-entry. The militant energy of the security at this venue compared to how relatively chill and normal DC had been (for two venues I would say of comparable size/seriousness) was def my least favorite part of the Philly experience. I was outside, finishing my water and chitchatting with some artsy youths who were also unimpressed with security, and Becky's messaging me like "they're in here!" and I'm like "well I'm not and I can't come back so you gotta tell them to come out here!" lmao. But they did!!! All the guys came out before too long and I very delightfully got to talk to everyone. I gave Mike and Jeremy the bracelets I'd made for them - THEY both apologized to ME outright for not coming out to chat the night before?? like hello you’re the band we’re the fans you don’t owe us anything - they kind of came toward my side of the door first, and talked and chatted some, vs Jon sort of peeling the other way to the other half of the loiterers - I honestly have lost track of the sequence of events here and what happened when, but it was largely unimportant hehe. (Gosh, but then I keep randomly remembering other unrelated details. Like, for example, Black Cat gave me their big ol' signature black cat hand stamp, and I'd been thinking, oh this will be fun to watch my four hand stamps stack from these four gigs, the way I got two together from The Altogether/Matt Duncan double feature back in July, and then Underground Arts put theirs on the INSIDE OF MY WRIST and not the back of my hand, and both Irving and T-Bird just did wristbands. BUMMER.) But mostly just Seeing Band, Talking To Band. This was when I overheard Alex definitely confirm to someone that the new song is called Cold Reactor, and he sort of half-seriously half-not said they just didn't call it that on the setlist in case there was another "New Song" they might want to decide to start playing there instead at the last minute, even though the longer this goes on the more confident we are that they're not going to do that and that Cold Reactor is gonna be a new single that probably drops once this tour is over <___< eyes emoji. Also, between Wednesday and Thursday we also knew that the bleach-blond hair is for Lore Reasons, which we assume are to do with Cold Reactor and the album it will be on, because of course it is. stupid. jonathan higgs I want to crawl inside your deranged pisces mind and meld with it vulcan style.

anyway, as far as my short term memory can be relied upon/will tell me is the truth, I think Jon was actually the last person I ended up in contact with on this night; I was drifting over toward him but someone else was still engaged in an active conversation with him, so I was like, well obviously I will wait my turn and let other people have jonathan time even though I'm the biggest jonathan girlie, I can just hang and go in when he frees up, and so I was turned slightly away from him listening in on other convos and talking to Becky and maybe Annika or a couple other people, and then suddenly there's a delicate hand on the back of my shoulder and Jon's right in my fucking ear ominously going "hello." askdjhgka. He was soooo cute and nice, I gave him the bracelet I made him as well (which was "I wanna be there" from Violent Sun and shades of re-animator orange) and he was immediately like Oh, of course you, are the bracelet distributor, and I was like hehehe yes, and he asked if I also had to do with the gudetama and I was like absolutely not I have no idea what is going on there lmfao. and I think amanda and david did take credit for it at that time of course so yes hehe. Ended up in a fun casual chitchat with Jon and Becky for most of the rest of the time here, with her trying to squeeze him for info about the new song and album and lore hehehe and him being his typical cryptic trolly cagey Jon, and it was all in incredibly good fun; he noticed her bracelet too, and she pointed it out like Yes I got the one that says This Is The Prophecy from big climb because it hearkens back to that bit they were doing on twitter from way before that song even came out so I gave her that one on purpose duh lol, and Jon says "Oooh yep I forgot about that. .. Album..." and mimed swiping his hair back like whoopsie lmao and it was such a silly little half-self-neg on Re-Animator lol, and so I said "WELP too bad! because the one I made from you is one of those too haha!" and he took another look at it as if to remind himself about it and then went "Well yeah that one's good" with a wryer wickeder laugh and I was like lmao tell us how you really feel. But like he's right violent sun is perfect and I actually labored so long over what I was going to have jon's say because he was the only person I didn't have a really solid concrete idea of what to make for and ALSO he was the only one I REALLY wanted to get PERFECT because it's important to me and yeah. so it was. reassuring for him to like the violent sun one. idk anyway.

The woman we'd seen running around doing a lot for them, including merch, who recognized us from DC the night before and was fun and glib about it, and who turns out to be: Tour Manager Sam, finally had enough of our fucking about and started very efficiently organizing us all into "everyone who wants a pic with themself + all four guys come get in Now and I'm gonna play photographer and then we all gotta go the fuck home" and I respected it SO much lmao, so we had sort of a rotating queue of group picture taking and then the guys all went back inside the venue (I kind of fingerguns'd Jon like "New York :D?" and he looked at me just SO Put Out and just deadpanned "Of course you're going to be there." of course!! lmfao) and we started talking amongst ourselves just out of reluctance to let the night end/social energy we still wanted to wallow in and that was cute and nice. I said goodbye to some folks who weren't going any further on the tour. I had such a wonderful night. Then, lo and behold, we turn around and Jeremy's up on the stoop of the venue, and he's like, I think I've locked myself out. I am locked out and I also don't have my phone on me. lmfao jez. he goes "I am going to blame jonathan" and we allowed him that. I was like, do you want me to TWEET AT SOMEONE LOL and he was like good god no they'll come back for me eventually, and then yes they did, and THEN we all left hahahaha. becky insisted on sticking with me part of the way to the trolley but I was like, it is coming in 14 minutes and it says it's gonna take me 12 minutes to get there I gotta GO!, and I freaking missed it anyway!!! and then I had to wait like OVER HALF AN HOUR MORE for the next one and i didn't even get ON the trolley till like 12:50 and it was soooo late before I was back at mads's place aiyaa. But, all in all, TRULY SUCH A GOOD NIGHT I JUST LOVE BEING IN AN ACTIVE BUZZY FANDOM SPACE AND MEETING FANS AND PARASOCIALING AND DANCING AND SINGING AND DOING ARTS N CRAFTS. you KNOW?? you know. you're on tumblr you get it.

The Philly to Jersey (pre-NYC) leg of my road tripping was set to be Thee shortest drive I had to make the whole time, so I let myself have time in the morning to keep snoozing and fucking about, even though I once again woke up way earlier than I'd hoped to and didn't ever make it back to sleep after that. But the tradeoff was still super nice and relaxing vibing with Madeline--I offered to buy her breakfast in exchange for the couch-crashin' and we got hella bagel sandwiches and cold brew from a place real close by her apartment, and scarfed 'em down while watching the most recent ep of Make Some Noise and just shooting the shit (again, largely about either fandom or kitty cats. We are simple folk). My sandwich contained salmon, a fried egg, and the most incredible sloppy caramelized onions, what a banger. The last truly good food I truly enjoyed before my mega super Travel Tummy set in and wrecked my whole shop metabolically speaking, rip. I took a little rinsy-rinse shower at her place too, and then finally made myself get up and Go to do the runaround silly business of driving to and parking in NJ, taking the ferry in to Manhattan, and then taking the subway to Allegra's place for NIGHT THREE IN NEW YORK CITY WOOOOO. I LOVE going to E E with Allegra!!!!! Once again I used her place primarily as a spot to change out of my car clothes and into my gig clothes (it's RDF night; I wore an oversized pale beige button-up shirt, actually left over from my Foals Antidotes costume from last halloween hahaha, gussied up with E E pins and jewelry) and to fuck about with bracelets. I made Allegra a special In Birdsong bracelet, the only one I did from that song :) because allegra is my special E E friend!! and she needs one of her special song!!! Fandom... is good. Allegra also had a kickass outfit. We stopped in at a tex-mex place she really wanted to try that was nearby the venue, and i got pretty nervous that it was gonna be a little late before doors for us to be hitting a sit-down dinner spot, but we rushed it along pretty well on the food and got our slice of dessert cake to go in a box and everything was A-OK. And I had time to hit a bodega for merch cash from the ATM and a pineapple soda for fortitude! let's GOOO irving plaza.

God, Irving was kind of a shitshow when it came to queuing and security though. There were a fair few people in line ahead of us, maybe just as many or slightly more than what I'd had in DC (definitely further back than Philly, although in line near us were the same also-eating-Dominican-food couple from the Philly gig, and I recognized them and was glad to see them again-- I FULLY DO NOT REMEMBER/DID NOT CATCH Y'ALL'S NAMES, AND I FEEL TERRIBLE BECAUSE WE HUNG OUT AND WORKED TOGETHER SO MUCH, i am so sorryyyyy), but then because it's not a sweet local friendly indie venue but is in fact Livenation As Hell, there's some person affiliated with the venue wandering up front offering some sort of VIP/fast pass line experience where you can just cough up some extra cash and get in your own special line and get to go in first regardless of how long other people have been queuing--you know the deal. Wack as hell. I think David and Amanda opted for this in some capacity, so I was happy for them about it, but a lot of the other people who ended up doing it had kind of rancid vibes of just like "concert-going" and not the very lovely communal sardine megafan energy everyone else had had thusfar. Also it put us where we were at in the queue standing in a place that just had a really terrible smell of sewage, which persisted almost the entire time we were there only to suddenly be replaced by a very powerful smell of bleach, as if whatever it was was suddenly being cleaned/sanitized. ICKY!! Annika was enough further ahead of us in line that I thought it might have only been over where we were but she said no she was definitely getting it too. new york city babey

Bracelet distribution got a little silly here, too, since the queue was wrapping SO far back and was being policed a little more stringently, but I had kind of figured I may need some kind of additional plan, especially since I'd decided not to wear my fanny pack (bum bag--fanny pack, says Jonathan Higgs in a derisive American accent, even as he's telling me he likes mine a lot, skdjshgalkj smh) since my shorts under my shirt had really capacious pockets and that just made for one less thing to worry about--I snagged a sheet of paper at Allegra's place, along with a gallon-size ziploc bag, and I put all the bracelets in there with a note that said to just take one if you wanted one and pass it back through the queue while we waited. It was kind of a crapshoot how effective I thought this was going to be, especially since I had to kind of wait to deploy it once there was a substantial queue BUT by the time there was a big queue it meant that I couldn't see exactly HOW big from where I was near-ish enough to the front, so I didn't know how far the bag was going to make it, if someone was going to end up stuck with my whole big bag at the back of the line (esp since I had a fair number of extra Philly bracelets left over that I lumped in with the NYC ones just because I still Had them).... whew...! BUT by the time Marty was there, he was further enough back from me that I asked him to kind of check up on it when it made it to him and keep passing it; and, by the time we were going inside, I could see zero sign of the bag itself but I DID catch a lot of people milling around me wearing bracelets, and one or two of them did stop me to thank me (since I'd indicated on my note in the bag that I was the person with green hair hahaha), and then I never saw 'em again, so I guess it was a relative success!! Yayyyyy!! WAY less conducive to making New Line Friends than the DC/Philly setup had been, but incredibly effective at making sure that all my bracelets found new homes rather than me having to take a huge handful home with me again and them just sitting in my house forever LOL. success! :)

tl;dr about the bracelets. not important compared to concert and band. WE GO INSIDE!! They have such dumb security/bag check. a gender-split process where the men get patted down by a dude guard and the women get patted down by a lady guard? In TYOOL 2023? you hate to see it. She felt the Sharpie in my back pocket and made me take it out and surrender it???? MY METALLIC BRONZE SHARPIE ? ? no sharpies in the venue I guess. Talked to at least one other person who got sharpie-confiscated too, but also at least two people who fully didn't and still had markers just fine. Absolute shenanigans. Allegra and I didn't quite get barrier due in part to fastpass line nonsense but we did end up right exactly behind Annika &co. with perfect sightlines, once again stage-left/Jeremy-ward-of-center. we don't hate it! my Philly pals to my left with David, Becky et al in front of them. Me fully surrounded by redheads. LOL.

this was the laaaatest show of my whole run, a whole lot of standing around just waiting for Band, and also definitely the energy of "trying to politely vibe to pierre kwenders's set because he can clearly see me and look straight at me even though I would much rather just skip to the bit I actually came for and don't necessarily need to see his set" just slowly increasing every night RIP lol. BUT WE MADE IT! ohhhh new york. EXACT same set as Philly but I couldn't even be mad about it because I was still so grateful to get a Man Alive song that wasn't just MY KZ (not that I don't love my kz obviously, but it HAS been in the set literally all eight times that I have seen E E live as of this Irving Plaza gig, and something else from that album is fun fresh delicious) (OH, SWEET THREEP OF FRIDAY EVENING, YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW) and to be getting COLD REACTOR again, especially becaussseee by this point I knew just enough of the lyrics that I felt confident singing/mouthing along conspicuously with the parts that I Did know, aka I See You Sir I'm Doing The Thing Just Watch Me, god I wish I knew how to be not so fucking extra but then again no I don't. we did get saddled with some Rather Annoying audience members in our near vicinity--a couple I'd spotted in the fastpass line earlier wedged themselves hard between me and my tall redhead/mask-wearing homie from Philly, all like "ummm we're short :)" because they. were, but that didn't give them a right to be pushy and rude, and their vibes were kind of shit because the sense I got was they were mostly there because the girl really loved the band and the dude didn't know much about them at all, and also they were already drunk so early on in the set, and they were talking loudly with some other fans they'd just met and getting Lore™ explained to them and it was just a lot of. loud talking and shoving. in my vicinity. when I would have preferred for there to. not be. BUT Also materializing behind me was someone who said "I saw your bracelets on twitter do you still have any!!" and I had to be like UHHHH FUCK, NO, I turned them loose into the queue, did they not make it as far as you..?? and she sadly said no, and I was like, well the only one I have left is this one I just left on for tradesies/advertising purposes, and it says "akon in the butterfly house" so that's kind of a deep cut, if you're familiar-- and she went WAIT REALLY and seemed SUPER jazzed to get a Dave Sardine-ass bracelet and I was like OKAY YOU KNOW WHAT, GOOD, ACTUALLY, because I'd made four of these and I knew they were going to be the deepest cut/hardest sell and I was really really hoping that whoever ended up with them would actually get and appreciate them. so thank you, andrea, for being that person, and for appearing exactly when the bracelet needed it most. so glad to have hung with you this night. sorry that you too found yourself among the ranks of the sharpie-confiscatees.

ANYWAY, OTHER THAN THAT, THIS AUDIENCE WAS FIRE AND THIS GIG SLAPPED. We were finally in a space and an environment that REALLY lent itself to the crowd actually full on bouncing/dancing instead of just kind of wobbling and vibing and everyone in my immediate zone was really going hard. I LOVE this fucking BAND. I love every song by this band. I love when Jon just points the mic at the crowd and the entire crowd sings the whole song word for word and note for note. I love that Jon was still desperately trying to cram the name of the host city into the start of My Kz, despite the fact that "Washington" subs for "Lucifer" perfectly (he has done this both times I've seen them in DC lol) but "Philadelphia" is WAY too stupid long and "New York City," while a syllable shorter, scans metrically in an extremely busted way and you could have just said EN WHY CEE or. y'know. lucifer. but okay man you do you. Jon was just as rowdy as the rest of us lmfao. he was like, climbing up and down off Mike's riser, he was finding people who were taking photos/videos and staring directly into their cameras (me fucking included--I'm sorry, Jon, you can't make eye contact with me while singing the "When I saw you, I fell in love" part of Leviathan, I am pretty sure that is illegal and a crime against my humanity), and basically all the tracks from Get To Heaven (plus like, Cough Cough and NOTLK) blew the fucking roof off the place. I think he donked some My Kz lyrics hehehe he just skipped to the alt lyrics of the chorus too early without completing the standard chorus first at the end, and a little flubbo in NOTLK and a tiny stutter in No Reptiles too, everyone was just TOO ROWDY and he's THROWN LOOPY and man did we not care. I said multiple times to people on this tour that pretty much the closest things I've ever experienced to true Religion are a) being in an E E audience for No Reptiles and b) being in a Hedwig audience for Midnight Radio. they're the same spiritually in my heart and also like do people who love Jesus feel this way and is this why. insane. the cult leader imagery was Not Wrong!!!!!

I wanna MERCH! I got in the line not too long after the show wrapped, but true to reports I'd heard about the pre-show merch line, it was moving verrryy slowly, with just one guy manning it who was not exactly quick and a card reader that seemed pretty chuggy too (but hey, at least NY was taking card). I'd known I wanted the poster--it's got my favorite neon orange on it, it really really slaps, and I wanted something to get signed--but I let myself talk myself into a t-shirt too, mostly because I was REALLY excited to buy E E merch apparel that wasn't black or white. Yellow!! a really freaking good yellow!! I wish the yellow ones had actually had the tour dates on them like the black and white ones did but the yellow branding has been pretty exclusive to this leg of tour (i.e. vs the red branding of the west coast one last year) and it looks soooo good with my hair that I don't especially mind. I also knew that Adrian wanted a copy of Caps Lock On, but that he also wanted a shirt, but I hadn't heard back from him about which shirt or what size so I just got the book and my stuff and then bounced. Communique from outside was that Alex had surfaced but no one else, but that Alex had promised appearances by the rest of them, but that also Alex was already gone and unlikely to return by the time I made it outside. I posted up with all my friends from inside, god this was SUCH a good sardine squad this night, and it took some waiting but eventually the promises came true! All the other boys surfaced and we had some REALLY great fan chats and mingling this tiimmmmee. oh my gosh. A guy came with a Modern Bison CD that Jon and Jeremy were really truly overjoyed to see and to sign and take pictures with; I talked to Jeremy about the bracelets some more because he'd been wearing the one I gave him the WHOLE GIG IN NEW YORK SO LIKE THAT'S GONNA BE IN ANY PHOTOS THAT WERE TAKEN PROFESSIONALLY SPEAKING, oh my gosshhh, he was so nice about it and enjoyed that his Arch Jeremy matched my Arch Emily, the vibes were impeccable; and then I got everyone to sign my poster, but of course Alex was gone already, so Jon offers to forge Alex's signature and goes "look it's like this" and draws some loopy scribble on there and I'm like, lmao, sure.

thing was... I had absolutely heard Jeremy signing something for someone else the night before talking about how he was getting really good at forging Alex's signature for him, since I guess it's normal for him to be the one that disappears the sneakiest (god he really is just the Justin Craig of this band, it's 1:1, huh), and so when I told Jeremy this, he was like "I'll do it" and I was like "no Jon did already do it" and he was going to just leave it then, like, oh, well, okay, but then he saw the mess Jon had made and he was like "--that's quite dreadful actually-- the trick is to not overthink it--" and so now my poster has two forged Alex Robertshaw signatures and zero authentic ones. l m f a o. (To be fair, I do have other things they've all four signed, and Jeremy's fake Alex is at least passable, and Jon's fake Alex is Absolute Dogshit Nothing. I am obsessed.) I even got Peter to sign! He was talking with another fan about a gift she'd given them in the past that had sadly been part of what they lost in their studio fire, it was really heartbreaking to hear. He also thanked me again for his bracelet and told me he planned to give it to his daughter and that she would love it. We took a pic together! Pete the GOAT.

While I was making the rounds with the other boys and other fans, Allegra mostly in tow, swapping sharpies among those of us who still had them, Becky was back with Jon, taking a couple videos for people who weren't there in NY to talk about stuff that they were curious about--I think in the context of Maria, Becky said something like, she thinks the hair is crazy, and Jon said into the camera something like, "If you think it's crazy Now, give it like two or three more weeks, and you're really gonna think it's crazy." SIR WHAT. If the blond is a precursor to something else happening I'm gonna be so the opposite of normal about it, and if the bleach is a stepping stone toward the boys dyeing their hair Other colors I am going to be PROFOUNDLY NOT NORMAL ABOUT IT, AND IF ANY MEMBER OF THE MANCUNIAN ROCK BAND EVERYTHING EVERYTHING HAS THEIR HAIR DYED GREEN ANY TIME IN THE NEAR FUTURE I AM GOING TO BE ABSOLUTELY COMPLETELY INSUFFERABLE. tyler the creator unfollow me right now etc. etc. etc. The more I've thought about it I don't THINK this is what's up--my sense is that any Cold Reactor music video is probably already filmed and ready to drop alongside the single pretty quick after the tour ends, rather than being something they're going to film/put together entirely post-tour, so they probably needed the bleachblond for some energy similar to how I felt about them when they first walked on stage in DC, but Oh man...... OH MAN............ I digress. anyway.

following up from that, Allegra (I think? Or maybe still Becky and allegra was just Present) addressed the notion of the hair being related to the Lore, and like, did that mean lore for the single/the upcoming album ? ? which was what we were assuming, and Jon said some demented and ominous and extremely exciting phrase like, "The lore for this one is.... b o t t o m l e s s" in his always-startling real deep Jon voice, and that was the fucking sound bite of the evening, folks. FOLKS. ALLEGRA AND I WENT ALL THE WAY BACK TO HER APARTMENT JUST CONTINUALLY SAYING "THE LORE IS BOTTOMLESS!" my body is so god damn ready.

We bid farewells to all our friends for whom NYC was their final stop on this tour!! SAD!!!!!! Going to miss all the homies T___T it's not fair that we're not just all going to every single stop on this tour I don't think? it should actually be illegal for us not to be present when the band is performing?? the hugest RIP. Hugs exchanged all around. Me trying to say bye to Jon but he's engaged with someone else so I think I just awkwardly said "See you tomorrow" twice and then we left. becky maaaybe trying to last minute scramble to also come to pgh now despite not really having accounted for it in her plans originally ? ? I was not certain what she intended here but I supported her. yes. me, annika and AG for sure being there at least. we ride. Back to allegra's where I did, unfortunately, sleep ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLY/BASICALLY NOT AT ALL due to being so hot and stuffy in my little nest on the floor that it was making me nauseated, I think I got maybe 2.5 hours tops, but I didn't really have a choice because if I wanted to be back home in time to do ANYTHING other than just rock straight over to the queue for Thunderbird then I knew I was going to have to leave so GOD DAMN early in the morning to haul ass back to where my car was and then drive the seven hours to pgh. But I did exactly that!!!! bitch!!!!! Other than some issues like, managing to make a timely pit stop for gas/potty/coffee, I endured the miserable long roadtrip despite myself, raging my way through the poconos, downing the largest cold brew Wawa would sell me, having a truly tragic car vs quesadilla incident, etc. My BFF Francis even got on the phone with me for the last hour or so and we chatted and I got to give them the whole update on the tour thus far, so fun! They MIGHT try to go to the Chicago stop next week!!! if they feel like they can swing it, and I was like ok no pressure but also it's been an extraordinary experience for me thusfar and I highly recommend. So if you see Francis at E E Chicago please holler at them kindly from me!!! :) But at the very least they said they did want a T-shirt and venmo'd me money to buy them one, since I was already still gonna have to get one for Adrian. woooooo

I got home with, yeah, basically exactly enough time to shower, get my outfit together, and regroup before heading to the venue !!! I JUST BARELY missed the bus that would've gotten me there the most promptly, largely due to not being able to find another fucking Sharpie since irving plaza took my first one lmfao, and it ended up being quicker to walk there than to wait the 36 minutes it would've been for another bus or whatever. I still had MEGA travel tummy so I just snagged an apple and scarfed it down on the walk over. Annika was already there queuing! so we hung out in line together and waited and drank the waters we had definitely brought in from outside the bar and just vibed lol. and she was like, I heard them checking two new songs that haven't been in the setlist yet, and I was like ha ha lol like what, and she said, kevin's car and leave the engine room.

and listen, I was optimistic. that my social media obnoxiousness and well-known, easily observable public desires might yet sway them, because come on it's my hometown and it's the last show i'm gonna see on this tour and I sent them donuts, and those were MEANT as a KINDNESS and an ENTHUSIASM FOR DONUTS and not as a bribe, but if anyone wanted to interpret them as a bribe anyway whomst was I to say no, but like. just because I want the band i like to do a thing absolutely does not mean that they have to fucking do it. I want to be crystal clear that i have never at any point EXPECTED them to do this. i just. hoped. yearned in my heart of hearts. and also had very sound rationale for how possible/likely it was. Here's How Engie Room Can Still Win. yfm. but the soundcheck all but confirmed it in my soul for me. and I was like... glad, that she'd been there and caught it and could tell me about it, because it gave me time to like, come to terms with the reality of it, emotionally. AAH. AAAAAHHH, OKAY. BITCH, PLIABLE HEAD, IT'S ALL HAPPENING.

we lingered and watched the queue form behind us-- I spotted a kid I'd seen at the Philly show, god bless. Everywhere we turn, repeat customers. I was telling my work friend today, I feel like the US fanbase for E E is significantly smaller than the UK audience, but we make up for it in that we go fucking hard. Every US fan is a superfan. there are no half-assed american sardines. and that has been so BEAUTIFUL and means the WORLD to me to be sharing it with the other ones of you. Bracelet sharing rocked at this gig!! I had exactly as many as I'd set aside for Pittsburgh and no more, since all my spares had evaporated up at Irving, A new person ALSO HAD BRACELETS!!! LIKE, for realsies Made For Trading At This Show Specifically bracelets, it was suuuuch a delight, so in addition to my eclectic collection from the previous gigs I now also have one that says RAW DATA FEEL with some truly choice glow in the dark bric-a-brac on there as well, and my heart was so warm aaaaaah. fwiendship :) Also spotted in the pre-doors queue were the Pizza Boy costumed guy and a woman I met at Foals in 2019?? who I guess automatically recognizes me because of the green hair, but just. omg. the community!!!! I'm dying!!!!!!

There was a slight will-call kerfuffle that nevertheless did not stop me from being dead center dead at the front right in front of where jonathan's mic was destined to be, and I was like. god. here we go. the home stretch. This was ABSOLUTELY the WORST place to be to be pretending to be interested in pierre's set, because he kept looking straight at me and dog I gotta admit four shows in I was feeling pretty tired. like, the energy of E E Itself was going to fully reinvigorate me, but nearly everything else on the planet was like totally disinteresting and I wasn't really up for it, especially when it's my semi-sex-repulsed ace-spectrum ass being just really put off by the suggestive gyrations of a performer that is not to my tastes. UM SORRY BYE HAHA. they didn't even play the one song I kind of liked. I managed to miss like two and a half songs of his set being still locked in the merch line at least lmao. literally WHILE I WAS STANDING IN THE MERCH LINE they sold out of the yellow shirt and I couldn't get me and francis matchies so I had to get them the black instead :( but thankfully they still had the one Adrian wanted because idk what I would have done if I had to scramble for a plan B with him on short notice haha. and I had EXACTLY enough cash for the two shirts left from the day before and I was paying Tour Manager Sam with it like oh my gosh I'm so sorry this is like my sweaty pocket cash from last night this is kinda gross and she was just like, No actually that's honestly exactly how I've been rolling as well and it is kind of gross so like agreed hahaha. She's the best. Idk how long she'll be tenured to them but I'd love to see her continue to exist in like their coterie moving forward. impeccable vibes.

also used merch waiting as a way to distribute more bracelets and get a drink of water! WOOHOO NOW I AM READY TO RECEIVE MY COMMUNION THANK YOU. they put the setlists down and there was a very small fraction of me that wanted to avert my eyes but like I. I had to know. and annika said yes there are new songs in the list. and I peered into the list and my song was there.

hey guys. hey guys? look, this was for me. I have to be honest with you. i manifested this. by being annoying on twitter. by being god's specialest costume-making donut-gifting bracelet-slinging weirdo. I'm owning it and it's mine. I was exactly EXACTLY right with "well, if they put Engine Room in they'll probably take Leviathan out, because they'd kind of fill the same role of slow moody song in the set, and then they'll probably swap in a different non-Man Alive song to compensate for Engine Room being there instead," and this is exactly what happened, and so then not only did I get Engine Room but I also got REGRET, WHICH IS ALSO AN EMILY THREEPWILLOW PLIABLE HEAD SONG, BECAUSE HERE THESE NERDLORD KINGSHIT BANDBOYS ARE IN MY GODDAMN BACK YARD, they're in my house and god it took me the whole fucking set up to then to just prepare, like I had to try not to think about it so I could enjoy what was right in front of me. God it was so fucking, fucking good. our position along the stage had Alex's stuff REALLY forward in the mix which was kind of new for me, but jon was just right there and every time I lifted my hands to dance and to yearn it was like, the only thing stopping me from touching you is my own sense of propriety and not any kind of physical barrier or distance, and the person immediately behind me was seeing the band for the first time and felt similarly about NOTLK as I did to Engine Room and those two songs were literally back to back in the set so we kind of screamed and cried and died together, I gave her a huge hug, and LOL SORRY NOT SORRY THAT I GOT MY KZ AND LEVIATHAN TAKEN OUT OF THE SETLIST FOR Y'ALL, PITTSBURGH, I DO FEEL KIND OF BAD BUT THIS WAS UMMM IMPORTANT TO ME, THANK YOU, goodbye. goodbye I left the planet. I thought I was going to cry and I nearly did but I didn't, but I did actually maybe start hyperventilating. like I'm glad I knew it was coming ahead of time because if it had been a full surprise I think whatever was happening to my lungs would have been exponentially worse and I may have even fainted.

(which, btw: jonathan. jon. when he came out on stage, he almost immediately got his mic cable caught on the edge of where his setlist was taped down, and in jerking it around, he whipped the setlist up off the floor and way upstage toward where Pete was; when he finally put it to rights and taped it back down, he just left it where it was at, far enough away from me that I definitely could not read it anymore; and like DID YOU DO THAT ON PURPOSE? TO MOVE IT OUT OF MY LINE OF SIGHT, TO MAYBE KEEP ME FROM READING IT? SURELY YOU HAVE TO KNOW THAT I'D ALREADY SEEN IT LIKE 15 MINUTES AGO. NICE TRY BUT IT'S TOO LATE I SAW EVERYTHING. i love him. i'm in physical pain.)

knowing this was my final one, I went so, so, incredibly hard, I let myself dance and mosh and scream and take way more pics and videos than I had before, I leaned on the lip of the stage, I had an absolute fucking blast. When the set was over a few other people who were more strategically positioned (i.e. people who had not had their most easily accessible setlists unceremoniously yoinked several feet away) snatched up the closest ones way quick; there was a general tension in the crowd at being able to see jon's, but it being further away out of reach, and one ballsy-ass kid (the "Kevin" person who'd accompanied the pizza boy person) actually clambored up onto the stage and ninja'd over and took it for himself, which inspired two copycats to do the same for some discarded guitar picks (and all of which definitely provoked a very loud, unimpressed, authoritative barking of "HEY!!!" from some security somewhere, like, they definitely shouldn't have done that!! yikes!!!!). I, instead, very patiently waited for an opportune moment to get the attention of their short king guitar tech as he was running around doing teardown, and someone else flagged him first and got pete's setlist, and in my final moments I got him to get me mike's. Gang, I'm gonna be real with you, I was not leaving my Pittsburgh hometown show in which they played Leave The fucking Engine Room without a setlist. there would've been blood or at the very least tears. so like. thank god lmao. Satisfied, we got some water and then headed out!!!

It was a long, chilly wait for the boys outside--god, the chilliness was REFRESHING, though, it's October for crying out loud, and DC and Philly and NY had all been muggy sweaty hot with no need for even long pants, much less a jacket, but I was glad I'd had the forethought to wear my flannel around my waist to cover up the YOU'RE GODDAMN RIGHT printed around the ass of my shorts on my walk over to deter questions, lmfao. We easily identified the spot on the side of the venue where we assumed the guys were coming out, it was all just a matter of time. (AG and I getting some confusing-to-parse messages from Becky? Idk my phone was SUPER dying so I was trying to leave it on airplane as much as possible, I didn't even make it to the end of the night, RIP needing to use my map all day in the car and even with it plugged in spending more than I was juicing of the battery. Listen i needed PICS and VIDEOS!!) I saw Jon first, and he almost looked past me before spotting me there because I was pretty close to the corner of the block, and I just stared at him, and said, May I hug you. and he said, of course! and I hugged him so long and so hard just like, thank you, I was extremely emotional then and I'm also getting extremely emotional now just typing about it, and he was like omg haha what for? Coming to your town? and I was like coming to my town and playing my SONG!!! And then he said something with the tone of a snarky teasy joke but that was like flusteringly truthful underneath about them legitimately rearranging the set quite a lot for me, and I have not stopped screaming internally since then, and Jeremy joked that I'd just seen the exact same set three times and they felt they ought to give me at least something new ha ha ha but like it wasn't entirely a joke, and I just don't even know how to process this. i am perishèd in the soil. anyhow.

I wanted both my setlist and my Supernormal EP vinyl signed by all the boys, and I managed this with relatively little doing ("A deep cut!" jeremy remarks of the supernormal, haha), but I didn't want to be crowding them and getting in the way of other people getting lad time, so I kind of took a backseat and just talked when the time was right, but Jon did kind of keep wanting to talk to me. We talked about the new song, and we talked about the donuts I sent over--oh my GOD, because I was like, they're from that place over there, you can see the big neon donut sign from here! haha, and he was like dyou know what, I knew that's where they were from, because I went over there earlier in the day and got one for myself, I got a huckleberry one and I came back with it and everyone was like, what's that, they were very jealous, and then not too long after that this box of loads of them just shows up-- And like I am a donut fairy psychic wizard. Also everyone who is ever in Pittsburgh should go to Oliver's donuts and eat their fabulously good products. I will shill for them literally any day of the week. This is the second band I have given Oliver's to this year. I cannot be stopped. ANYWAY. i honestly almost could have written that prediction on an envelope and sealed it, that they'd end up wandering in there on their own only for me to send them some too. i was so tickled that jon got the huckleberry one because it's their signature flavor and it's SO PINK and allegra and I had just decided the night before that jon higgs is hot pink coded. like, in the universe where they are dyeing their hair multicolors for the lore. anyhow. it's good shit.

i had SO much fun after this show, even though it was so chilly and dark and we were scrungling around on a literal street corner outside a wine and spirits store, I was like holding people's things so they could get pics and signatures, I was showing off my supernormal booty shorts, I was talking to Jon about lore----- ohhh, my god, I had exactly two bracelets left when the night was over, literally the end of my stash, and it was one Final Form FIRST BODY LAST BODY that I said, y'know, I'm going to save this for my bestie francis when I send them the shirt, because that's the lyric I wanna get a tattoo of, and it'll match with my PLIABLE HEAD bracelet, and it'll be another sort of besties matching thing; and my one lone AKON IN THE BUTTERFLY HOUSE bracelet that remained, where I'd kind of said, well, if this one doesn't find the right home tonight, then at the end of the night I'm going to give it to Jon too. So I dug in my bag and passed it off, and he was like "what does this one say.... kon... Akon... Akon in the house--what is--OH AND THERE'S A LITTLE BUTTERFLY ON THERE, God--" and he was GRINNING and he was SO TICKLED BY IT and Jez chimed in with just like "The attention to detail--" and Jon was like "this is my favorite one actually," he LOVED IT AND I WAS SO CHARMED AND EMOTIONAL ABOUT IT, and then he offered me up something like "you kno-ow, this, the song, of this, there's actually a reference to it in something, something you've never heard-- and--that you never will," doing his cryptic Jon troll grin, "the one thing that didn't make it," with the implied end of that sentence being "onto the album," and 'album' in this case being implied to be Raw Data Feel, which they have very publicly said that for once was an album where they just put everything on and didn't cull any songs or reserve any bonus tracks to release later or whatever. So I said, "Oh, from the one that we've been told had no cuts...?" also not explicitly saying RDF, and his answer to that was vague/nondescript enough but was probably an affirmative, but then he did follow that up with "that's lore that's SO far down the line, WAY WAY out there," and god, just, how deep does this man's brain and nonsense even fucking go. how far into the future is there LORE. BOTTOMLESS!!! I am obsessed with him. i cannot stress enough how blorbo he is to me.

The shorts came back up in conversation too ("Sorry, let me just look quite closely at your ass for a moment--" "It's okay, the shorts are designed that way--") and him saying, yeah, we do talk about some of the costumes still, and then segueing into asking if I had plans for this year and what I was doing, and I said, maybe, I'm not sure if I want to tell you, and he said, Is it to do with us, and I said, Neither confirm nor deny, and he said, Well if it's not, then, I want to know, with kind of a 'duh' tone ahahaha because like true there would be no reason to be coy if it was nothing to do with E E at all, and I explained that like I kind of have to have two costumes ("of course you do."), WELL because y'know the E E ones don't really play to or land with the general populace (a very cheeky "No!") so I have, just, one that's for going to parties, and one that's for fucking around on the internet. He seemed to find that acceptable hahaha.

Anyway what I REALLY wanted with wearing the Supernormal shorts was a group pic of all five of us normal frontways, and then a group pic of all five of us facing backward/ass to the camera a la the picture of them outside the White House, where you could see the goof of my shorts but also all of their butts, but this was an ABSOLUTE DISASTER TO DO when it was so dark that phone cameras were taking everything long-exposure, and also they'd all had just enough beer to not really be following on what the bit was. Absolute shit results on the backwards pic because I couldn't, y'know, see to coordinate it, because I had my back turned. (Me yelling, "Not just MY butt, EVERYONE'S butts, come on!!" into the streets of Lawrenceville.) Utter failure. Didn't care. I love these fucking guys. The vibe was finally kind of winding down, closing-time energy, the guys still had to get on the bus to Boston right away even with tomorrow being their day off, it was a Boston day off and not a Pittsburgh day off where I could offer them free ice cream sadly, so they all sort of bowed sweetly out. Jon gave me his like, I Am Part Of The Band clearance ID badge from the venue, kind of out of nowhere, he was like "sorry this is all I have to give you, it's the least I could do," and I was like WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU'VE ALREADY GIVEN ME SO M-- YOU COULD DO WAY LESS ??? but I guess now I have that, too. I tried to give him the King Of Oil sign from my fatberg costume, which I'd initially brought because I thought it would be a fun photo taking prop but the photo situation was the aforementioned disaster so that never really came to any fruition at all, so I was just going to gift it to them, and he said "My suitcase is already so full of so much random shit-- that you've given us--" and then right as he was leaving he just said "Thank you for being such a weirdo" with a voice full of all the kindness and affection in the world and I just yelled "ANY TIME!!" and then oh so tragically the night had to be over.

it's been nice, though, because I'm so used to driving the long drive home at the end of an adventure and having that signify the end, of getting to the end of the car ride and having nothing beyond that but the rest of my regular life; and this time, I drove all the way home, but when I got there, the adventure was still happening, right in my neighborhood, right down the street, and all I had to do was walk back home alone in the dark and climb into my own bed at the end of a long and beautiful night. i can already tell that this is going to be one of my most special memories basically forever, and now every time I drive or ride the bus to and from work each day I will be passing by the place where Everything Everything performed Leave The Engine Room for me, and that's so profoundly special that I don't even have words to describe it. I love this band, I love the people in it and I love the people its gravity pulls in to orbit around it, I'm just so goddamn happy. I don't even know what to say or how to end this.

#everything everything #e e #RDF US tour 2023 #this has been a post #jonathan fucking higgs. #god. #they all just like. referred to me plainly by my name a lot more than i was expecting in a way that was overwhelming #like to one another/other people and not just to me directly #i exist???? sounds fake #i will be thinking about this week for a hundred thousand years #my pliable head IS a walking hope thank you so much for NOTICING!!!!!! #pics to follow maybe on here but maybe just on twitter #where I am yes you guessed it @pliablehead if people want to lurk and see #ok fucking goodnight

[o-uncle-newt]

Cabin Pressure Advent Day 16: Paris

PAAAAAARRRRRRIIIISSSS!

There are not words for how much I love this episode, there really aren't. I actually listened to it early this morning because I was so excited, and then had to deal with a difficult personal situation and was like "oh dang I wish I hadn't listened to it yet so I could cheer up from it now!" But I had, so I listened to Hot Desk (from Double Acts) instead. Also very effective.

Anyway- I love everything about this episode, because I LOVE Golden Age mysteries! I'm not super well read on all the different authors, but I've had a lot of fun over the years reading Conan Doyle (and Poe and Wilkie Collins, if we're going that far back), Chesterton, Christie, and more recently Sayers, and even more recently have read a smattering as well of John Dickson Carr, Margery Allingham, Anthony Berkeley, and a bunch of others. To digress a little, I highly highly recommend Martin Edwards's excellent book The Golden Age of Murder and his wonderful short-story anthology compilations and reprints- it really got me on a kick of trying to read a bit more broadly in the genre after discovering how much I loved reading a few specific authors growing up. It's been really rewarding and I highly recommend it!

Now, the thing with Paris is that the popular backstory is "John Finnemore had Benedict Cumberbatch on the show, he became famous as Sherlock on Sherlock, Finnemore thought it would be funny to do a mystery themed one as a result, and so we have Marin Crieff as "Miss Marple." Which is apparently not UNtrue per se, but JF himself has said that he always planned to do a mystery episode. Which makes sense, as in the first link just now JF makes clear that Golden Age mysteries are his "trashy fiction of choice," about which I can only say amen!

Which is what makes the episode so great- because it's super clear what kind of love for the genre he put into the episode as a result. There's the Christie- obviously the Miss Marple references but also the "gathering everyone together in the parlor" thing (which she doesn't do ALL the time... but she does PRETTY often lol). There's obviously the Conan Doyle reference, which is "snappily put," as Douglas says. There's a fun reference to Raffles- who may not be a detective himself but is definitely a cousin to the whodunnit genre (or shall we say brother-in-law, as he was Conan Doyle's...), and there's "Crieff of the Yard," which is a phrase that I'm confident has a basis in detective writing but that I'm not able to pinpoint, which is annoying. Arthur's example of the monkey at the circus also evokes a few stories of MASSIVELY varying quality involving unlikely murderous animals, which is always fun. (And parenthetically, while there are no Sayers references that I can find, I will say that I continue to be confident that the dog-collar plotline in Here's What We Do from Double Acts is a reference to the dog-collar plotline in Gaudy Night. He has never confirmed it but like, how could it not be? Or at least so I tell myself.)

But all of that is window dressing- the episode itself is a beautifully written impossible crime mystery, and I love that about it. JF has mentioned that he likes John Dickson Carr, who was big for locked room mysteries/impossible crimes- though loads of writers wrote them (including, incidentally, AA Milne, who you likely know better from Winnie the Pooh, who wrote a fun early example of the genre that you can read here for free because of that magical phenomenon, copyright expiration). And this episode is just such a good example of one that it makes me wish that JF would get into the whodunnit-writing game more broadly (beyond his Cain's Jawbone sequel). If Richard Osman can do it...!

In one of the above-linked blogposts, JF mentions that it's "pleasing how naturally my main cast fitted into familiar roles from the detective fiction genre - the meticulous detective, his devoted assistant, his no nonsense boss… and his nemesis, the Napoleon of crime." Which is awesome, but I think there's even more there. I particularly love that it's an impossible crime mystery in a closed circle. While there's a genre of whodunnit where you have the corpse or whatever and have to cast a wide net to find witnesses and clues, writers there often either have to make the potential dead ends in the detective work REALLY interesting or rely a lot on coincidence. Closed circle crimes (like ones at a country house or within a workplace or somewhere with guards at all the doors or something like that) can help mystery writers focus in on the story without having to worry too much about the logistics of "why these people?" and it's why you get so many mysteries set on trains or ships or islands or whatever. And an airplane is one of the best closed circles there is, because unless you're DB Cooper you're not getting out. Agatha Christie did an early one in Death in the Clouds which is a lot of fun, and this episode is a great example.

The fun thing about closed circle whodunnits and impossible crime mysteries is that the whole point of them is that usually, the author is just straight up lying to you. There's a vent for a snake to go through, or a secret doorway to the outside, or the time when the door was locked or the circle was closed isn't actually when the crime took place, but a fake gunshot makes you think it was. And that's why I love this so much- because the author/liar of the mystery is Douglas. He's the genre savvy one. He's the one who's lying, he's the one who's turning it all into a whodunnit, and he's waiting to see if he can get away with it. He's the Napoleon of Crime- and a Columbo villain setting up the false trail that he hopes Columbo will fall for.

Because... and JF notes this in both blog posts... there's no mystery here! Obviously Douglas did it. The point here is that this episode is like if Columbo was as dumb as he seemed and the criminal managed to lead him down the garden path and got away with it. It's "what if Poirot were a moron but still had to solve the murder of Roger Ackroyd." Douglas is the one who creates an impossible crime scheme, anticipates that he'll still be suspected because, well, he's him, and manages to come up with alternative scenarios- including ones that open the seemingly closed circle of the crime- that are convincing enough to throw Martin off the scent. Without him, it would just be "so how did Douglas do it this time?"

Now, the impossible crime is still important, because while we all kind of know that Douglas did it, we still don't know how he did it. And from that perspective alone, JF's impossible crime puzzle is genius. The clues that he drops are really interesting (I'm not 100% sure I see the nail polish bottle as being fair play, but plenty of whodunnits aren't so I don't really care) and it's something that, even as we see Douglas writing a whole separate decoy mystery (reminiscent of his decoy apple juice?) on top of his own scheme, keeps us intrigued throughout even once it becomes pretty clear that Douglas has been snowing all of them. So all of that is fun- but it's far more fun with all the other tropes and schemes and false trails laid on top of it, giving it so many more dimensions.

And then, at the end, nobody solves it- the detective's reveal, after all the carefully left false trails, comes from the thief himself.

It's just... so beautiful. Ahhhh.

I feel like (and one of the blog posts mentions this) that there's a question of whether Douglas actually pulled it off, particularly in the context of whether Martin would really need to pay Carolyn at the end. My opinion is: practically, yes, Douglas stole the whiskey. If Birling hadn't offered them the cufflinks, he'd never have revealed his trick and he'd have had ample opportunity the rest of the trip to empty his decoy apple juice in the sink, replace it with whiskey, and fill up the bottle with cheap whiskey from the plane's bar or the Paris airport duty free. (Or whatever his plan was- but that seems plausible.) Carolyn would have never known once they returned. And the episode leaves open whether practically speaking Martin actually does have to pay Carolyn, but thematically... yes, of course he does, the whole question here is "is Douglas the organ grinder" and the answer is that he obviously is. The monkey's gotta pay up!

I love, incidentally, so many more things about this episode- the humor, Mr Birling, the ways in which everything is so true to character, basically everything about Arthur... but I've already gone on long enough.

#cabin pressure #cabin pressure advent 2023 #cabin pressure advent #john finnemore #paris

[notmoreflippingelves]

Personally I feel Kristoph just regrets having killed Zak so suddenly on an impulse. Reminder that the locks appeared when asked why he killed Zak specifically. He hated him for turning him down and probably never saw himself capable of murder. Once he killed him he probably felt glad he got revenge and didn't get exposed, but then had that sudden clarity of "oh shit, I actually killed someone", which combined with his paranoia, stressed him out immensely. He tragically traumatized himself.

Zak's murder has always screamed unplanned, desperate "crime of passion" to me, given how dramatically different to the other murder we know Kristoph committed (and set in motion 7 years earlier). Criminology-wise, it's already very unusual for a criminal to change their modus operandi so dramatically without a good reason. And it becomes immediately more striking when we look at the weapons: blunt object in Zak's case vs. poison for the Mishams'.

Poison has long held the stereotype of being a "woman's weapon" rather than a man's. Which yeah, it is a pretty unnecessarily gendered and heteronormative way to look at it. But like what the stereotype is actually saying by this is that poison--regardless of the gender(s) of the person using it--is almost always the method preferred by people who would prefer not to use psychical forms of violence even once they have determined that they "need" to enact violent ends.

These sorts of killers may lack the physical strength or athletic skill to wield a gun/sword/bat/spear,/blunt instrument, they may not be able to summon the adequate aggression to do so, they may want to avoid a bigger "mess" w/ more pieces of evidence, or they may just lack the "sadistic urge" to directly use their hands to enact another's pain. All of the above seem that they could apply to Kristoph given what we know of him.

Even though he has determined that he's going to go through with the murder plot, Kristoph vastly prefers a more detached, less messy, and (in his mind) quicker and less cruel method. Because his heart may not really be in it in the long run. Like do you really think he'd want to get actual blood on his pretty little nails if he didn't have to? He's not killing for the fun of it like some of the other AA killers; he's killing because he's convinced himself he has to.

(Unlike a lot of other fans, I tend to hc that Zak and Drew were actually the *only* deaths that Kristoph was responsible for. Because I maintain that that there was something much more specific and important about the Gramarye case to Kris than simply "wah, I was fired from my first big case and now I'm gonna be petty af about it." No like, this case in particular--besides just "an important case that could make my career"-- was personal to Kris for reasons we may never know).

Even though he knew that this could very well come back to bite him in the derriere, Kristoph was probably secretly relieved that the poison didn't work right away for the Mishams--or that if it had worked, he wouldn't have to find out about it. Out of sight, out of mind and he wouldn't have to face his conscience. And in the worst case scenario, the murder plan was still in place should Kristoph need to enact it later. (Which he did by writing to Drew *during* (and not before) Kristoph's incarceration following Zak's murder.)

So with all that in mind, Kristoph's murder of Zak just seems more and more of a desperate, impulsive act. It's not his style at all, and yet he did it. He saw Zak, realized he was at risk, and panicked.

And yeah, I would imagine that even if we assume he had no regrets/second thoughts about Drew Misham's murder, Zak's murder would psychologically feel really really different to Kris. And I imagine that it could potentially prove even more psychologically damaging to him.

Because braining "Shadi Smith" with a grape juice bottle is an act that is sudden, violent, impulsive and totally out-of-character for Kristoph Gavin--coolest defense in the West ,whose intellect is his weapon of choice and who prefers to keep his pretty nails (if not his soul) clean.

#kristoph gavin #ace attorney #this ask has been in half-written and unanswered in my drafts for over a year #but given my sudden desire to word vomit re: omitb and elena of avalor earlier this week #i guess i'm in the right headspace for meta #shu takumi; show me the forbidden gavin backstory please and thank you #aa meta #ace attorney meta

[abidethetempest]

Eliksni Conlang Progress

Velask! this is my first progress post, hopefully the first of many! i have been really waffling on whether or not i wanted to even share any early content yet, but then i realized that was really just me being scared to show off my art and i'm not about that shit (plus i want to have a record of my progress to look back on)!!! so i'm gonna show off my art >:DDDD

so here's most of what i have now! beware, very long post below the cut:

Phonology

i hope to god tumblr didn't totally cronch that image. so yeah this is the rough phonology, emphasis on rough. full disclosure, everything i know about the IPA i learned for this project like a week ago. i'm a total noob, and i'm sure an experienced conlanger or linguist would look at this and their soul would exit their body in horror or smth equally dramatic. but in my defense, i did have to work backwards to build this based on existing material instead of making it all myself, so it was a lot more restrictive and difficult.

Short Vowels

ɪ: i

e: e

æ: a

ə: e or a (always unstressed)

ʊ: u

ɑ: aa

Long Vowels

i: ii

ɔ: o (primarily used before r)

Diphthongs:

eɪ: written as “ey” or “eh”

eə, written as “eyr” (pretty much exclusively seen paired with r, which is the reason for that spelling)

aɪ, written as “ei”

oʊ, written as “oh”

these diphthongs are used to represent a number of sounds that canonical sources do not differentiate between in writing. There might have been a way to do this using rules for pronounciation instead, but it was honestly so frustrating to think i had nailed down a good rule only to find one or two exceptions that i just decided to chuck canon out the window and make some damn diphthongs.

(if you don't know/understand the IPA, I highly recommend checking out this video for a great overview)

Phonotactics

this is also a very rough draft version, doubly so since the only person who has to care abt writing/speaking Eliksni rn is me. but this is my current basis for how i make, pronounce, and write words. i will definitely clean this up if/when i start making guides on using Eliksni, but it makes do for now.

C^3VC^3

Onset: all phonemes

Nucleus: all vowels/diphthongs

Coda: all consonants including clusters

stress on first syllable in most two syllable words

in three syllable words, stress on second syllable if it contains a k or a long vowel/diphthong

stress never on prefix

single "i" is short if surrounded by other letters and long if left open on either side. "ii" is always long and is written that way in words where it is surrounded by letters. Words that start with single i will be spelled with ii if they are compounded with another word. ex) ikrim (time), draiikrim (forever, lit. “all time”)

Consonant Cluster Rules

I only have rules for clusters of two so far, but I am going to flesh out the rules for three-consonant clusters soon since a few of those have cropped up in my lexicon building exercises. The chart for these is in an earlier post if you want to see it all color-coded and whatnot

C: can only pair with H to for CH, all romanizations using C in place of K are done so for aesthetic purposes (i only preserved the use of C as an occassional K because I like how it looks in romanizations, the actual Eliksni alphabet will never substitute C for K)

H: can only precede another consonant as part of the vowel in the nucleus, except for Y (functionally, H being attached to a vowel makes it part of that vowel, but i wanted to highlight this feature to make it very clear that H cannot precede another consonant on its own)

J: never pairs with another consonant. (i wasnt even going to include J as a sound in Eliksni, but there had to be two (2) damn canon names w J in them so i felt a little obligated)

Y: functioning as a consonant, Y cannot pair with any other consonant.

Z: never pairs with another consonant at beginning

Making this bigass chart was unironically so fun. i love you spreadsheets <3 i love you color coding <3 no i am not neurotypical why do you ask

Syntax

VSO 

verb-adverb

adposition-noun

possessor-possessee

Noun-adjective

thats it lmao! i'm not even sure if this is gonna stay the same, the only sentences i've written so far have been very basic and all like 3 words long. this is definitely an aspect i am expecting to change a lot over time as I refine how i want things to flow.

Stop! Grammar Time!

(i've waited three years to make that dumb joke lol sorry)

unfortunately grammar itself is no joke.

these are the affixes for conjugating verbs in Eliksni. There are 3 tenses currently (if anyone saw that post I made a few days ago abt the second past tense, i do still plan to implement it, just haven't had the time to think of affixes for it or decide how i really want it to work)

For the sake of time and bc this post is,,,, really damn long already, I won't be including the example conjugations i did here. might make a separate post with that so i can also show off how the mood markers work.

speaking of...

Mood time! i will readily admit this shit kinda confuses the heck outta me, though i understand the basics at least in theory. Some are more intuitive for me, like the imperative and interrogative. i might even drop the subjunctive, although i do want to at least try to grasp it first. Also shout out to the imperative for being irregular bc of ✨worldbuilding reasons✨, we love to see it.

and FINALLY

Noun case markers! Something my time learning German actually prepared me for!

There are only two cases in Eliksni, nominative and accusative. All other situations where other cases like dative or genitive would be used will be done periphrastically using prepositions and such. I was inspired by the lack of gendered third-person-pronoun in Mando'a, which is why there is one pronoun to refer to someone in the third person regardless of gender. If gender absolutely need be specificed, an adjective corresponding to their gender (ie: masculine, feminine, nonbinary, etc) is used.

and that's what i've got after about a week's worth of progress! for the sake of good recordkeeping, the date at the time of writing this post is 7-12-23.

feel free leave any thoughts (but please be gentle! i'm very new to this)!

#destiny #destiny 2 #eliksni #conlang #indee's eliksni conlang adventure

[attorneys-against-court-violence]

The Magical Turnabout: Cleared!

Whoo! I haven't had a shot of the old AA charm in a while, but something about Case 6-2 clicked for me in that front! I suppose I should go through the old bullet points then, shall I? Let's do this!

(Cutting this off here because GOOD GRIEF are there a lot of thinks about this case)

TRUCYYYYYYYY! I'm so sorry for what DD has done to you, but I really liked her and Apollo here! Who knew that giving your character a stake in the plot and room to breathe actually makes them an interesting person to watch and root for? The legacy of the Gramaryes weighing on her shoulders, her dedication to her magic, her wonderful bond with Apollo... it all shines through, giving me a lot more to grab on to emotionally than in the prior game. In Trucy We Trust!

APOLLO JUSTICE IS DOING FINE! He's got something of a legacy to hold up himself, being the only one alongside Athena to hold the fort while Wright's away. And they were under serious attack, too - losing out on the office and a dear friend & daughter of Wright is a hefty thing to deal with. And yes, he's as jaded and snarky as he ever has been.

Athena's here. That's pretty cool. I'm not going to complain much about her not getting too much here, since this isn't really her story. She's still a god-damn riot and keeps up a charming dynamic with Apollo, and her righteous indignation at Retinz's shenanigans is pretty cathartic.

Ema gets a nice look here too! Showing her in a much happier tune after achieving her dream job - a little reminiscent of her younger years - while still keeping the snide built up from AJ. I do like the conflict of interest her with Trucy on the line. Seems detectives can't go a trilogy without someone they actually like being put in the slammer, but it's a nice crumb.

Case 2-3 was pretty fun in how it faked a magic trick to hide the real murder, but a lot problems got in the way of fully appreciating it. This doesn't have nearly the same issues and manages to make use of the inherent mysteries and mechanics of the magic tricks performed to its advantage. Even the main villain had a grander illusion to unravel at the very end - that being the mystery of how the victim truly perished. It was fun following along & seeing the show behind-the-scenes!

Bonny & Betty are fine. Both are sympathetic enough being admirers tricked into being accomplices in muder. Betty in particular seems scorned to all get-out, having to pretend to be the other for so long. Bonny has to deal with self-esteem issues and a slightly controlling twin sister. I liked them!

Roger. Motherfucking. Retinz. The man's got intelligence up the wazoo but that's about the only admirable trait I can assign to him. This man is easily the most despisable AA villain I've seen in a long time - not counting ones that are hateable due to bad writing, Dual Destinies - who almost managed to get one last cut in on Trucy before he vanished for good. He doesn't make his grudge a secret and his actions - both in setting up his schemes and his general behaviour - make him one awful son of a bitch. A mistrusting, dishonest, egocentric magician who stands in stark contrast to Trucy. Pretty dang good for a one-off villain!

Now then... you're probably wondering what I think of Nahyuta Sahdmadhi. While I'm not going to make sweeping judgements until I see the whole story, I do have some thoughts. Just bare with me.

Khura'in is a country that hasn't seen a Not Guilty verdict in over 20 years. Nahyuta didn't oversee Phoenix's first trial there and the next has yet to come. They have a poor opinion of defense attorneys and a deeply religious reason to want justice for the victim in order to bring them peace. Nahyuta is an asshole. I will make no illusions to the contrary. He is the product of a country that has - at this point - not had any reason to believe the accused isn't the culprit. It's probably not a fair system at all; Manfred's perfect record didn't come about by playing fair, after all. But that's the environment Nahyuta practices and was likely raised in as well. He's got good reason to be an insufferable prat at this point and it's clear we haven't seen the full extent of his character. His cultrue may have largely informed this side of him, but I do enjoy him being in conflict with Ema over indicting someone she knows and cares about. Ones duty taking priority over ones emotions seems like a hint at something... tragic. This is a man who's probably had to push similar feelings down and is well practiced in that, to the point where he's completely shut-off from someone he used to know. We have seen, however, that he is very open to learning about different cultures when the need arises. He went so far as to wait an hour to sample something as simple to L.A. as a burger - enough to be able to recommend a particular flavour. He's researched television programs, social customs, and is even willing to admit that cultrual differences means he might not carry things out as expected. It's one of the more charming parts of his character and I really do enjoy it.

His connection to Apollo... I don't really know what to say at this point. It feels like he occupies an odd middle-ground between Edgeworth and Simon in their debuts. Edgeworth because he actually bothers to talk with Apollo in the lobby, Simon because he's so closed-off that nothing really comes of that. I get what they're doing here - telling us that the prosecutor is someone from the attorney's past and telling us they used to be different - though it's missing something from Phoenix's and Edgeworth's spat in Case 1-2 that gave that scene more to chew on.

Frankly, I think I'll have to check out the rest of SoJ just to figure out if I like the guy or not. Dual Destinies - for as many mistakes it made at the end - did manage to get me to give a hoot about Simon, so maybe SoJ can do something nice with this guy. I've heard the contrary enough times to be cautious but I can't let outside opinion and heresay sway me on these things. Not anymore, at any rate. As before, I want to be damn sure my feelings are my own.

But first! Case 6-4. I've heard many a divisive thing about it - from the wonderful cast to the unfortunate treatment of its leading lady. I'll let you know what side of the coin I land on when I get to the end there.

Until next time! In justice we trust!

#case 6 2 watchthrough #spirit of justice spoilers #ace attorney spoilers

[axolotlsupremacyowo]

Questions for Writers...Characters Edition!

Hi ho what's the dealio! We're back again....with another tag game? I'm outrageous XD! Kidding kidding! But seriously, I'm bored and have a lot to do but no spoons to do them...so I'm doing a tag game instead! Woop woop! And this time, it's a question for writers...characters edition!

As always, I will be tagging my besties @bleepbloopbotz @udaberriwrites @mrsmungus @sliebman10 @fattybattysblog @tsunderesalty @aislinnstanaka @justanotherpersonwhowrites @0nelittlebirdtoldme @mikaharuka @oceangirl24 @lena-hills @kayedium-writes @bees-and-sunshine @danceswithdarkspawn! And of course, open tag to whoever wants to join in!

Now! On to the questions!

🌹 Who is your favorite character? And why?

Trucy! I love Trucy, she is my darling baby. I love her because not only is she silly and chaotic and optimistic, but she's also emotionally complex and intelligent. In my honest opinion, she's the perfect assistant/co counsel for the WAA. Don't get me wrong, I love Ema and Maya! But they really perfected it when they made Trucy.

🌹 Go to all your works on AO3, and on the filters side bar, click the drop-down arrow for “Characters.” Who are your top 5 most written characters?

Naruhodou Ryuuichi | Phoenix Wright (41)

Mitsurugi Reiji | Miles Edgeworth (37)

Ayasato Mayoi | Maya Fey (33)

Karuma Mei | Franziska von Karma (32)

Odoroki Housuke | Apollo Justice (23)

Huh! I expected Trucy to be much higher on that list. Legitimately surprised that Apollo had her beat XD. But yep! These are my top five written characters! Phoenix in the lead damn. You go Phoenix!!

🌹 What characters do you wish you wrote more?

Honestly? A lot! But the two I'll be choosing are Maggey Byrde and Adrian Andrews. Idk why I don't write them much, I do like them enough and they're friends with the characters. I've only written Adrian in one fic and Maggey...never? Which is a shame! Cause these characters rock!

🌹 Which characters do you think you write well?

None. I'm bad at writing all of them

Ahem, I mean. Maya and Franziska, definitely. I think I've written these two so many times that I subconsciously get them, and excuse me if that sounds like bragging XD.

🌹 Which characters do you think you could improve on writing?

Honestly? Klavier. I do like how I write him, but I feel that I write him...too sane? If that makes any sense? I definitely don't write the more absurd parts of his character too much. And I also don't leverage his popularity/rockstar status enough. Idk, XD.

🌹 What character did you at first hate/dislike, but then grew to like/love?

Franziska. I thought she was kinda mean at first. But then I wrote her some more, fleshed her out and got to know her more as a person...and I grew to love her. Yours Truly, Franziska von Karma did accelerate how much I loved her. It was so fun getting into her psyche in that fic, and dear god did it make me love her more XD.

🌹 Which character did you immediately like/love the moment you saw them?

We all know who this is. Trucy, of course! I knew the moment I saw that little ray of sunshine that I'd love her, and I have! She is so amazing and cute and smart and funny and AAA! I just love her so much! Idk what it is about her, I just adore Trucy.

🌹 Which character voice do you have the most fun writing?

Franziska and Maya's. (These two really come in a package, don't they? XD). I like writing Franziska's dialogue cause I like her blunt and formal way of speaking, that's always fun! And I like writing Maya's dialogue cause it's casual and friendly, but never takes away from seriousness if she needs to be serious. If that makes sense XD.

🌹 What character voice do you have the least fun writing?

Any of the AA characters with obnoxiously "smart" or "deep" vocabularies. So Wesley Stickler, Richard Wellington, and Redd White. I swear, I hated writing White's dialogue in Turnabout Camaraderie, and I know I'll hate writing Wellington and Stickler's dialogue.

🌹 Which character do you feel like you’re the most similar to?

Hmmm. None? XD. But if I had to pick, I'd pick Maya. Maya I feel matches my excitable energy, though I don't usually steal from crime scenes XD or get accused of murder. If I ever get a spiky haired lawyer friend then I'll let y'all know!

🌹 Which character do you feel like you’re the least similar to?

Apollo. Apollo is detail oriented and perceptive and I am the...opposite of that lol. He's also very snarky, and while I love that for him, I feel I'm too excitable to be snarky XD.

🌹 Quick! Pick a character and then have them make an AITA post on Reddit, why did they make it and are they the asshole?

UUUUUUHHHH

MILES

And he's asking if he's the asshole for trying to get Phoenix thrown in jail for the murder of his mentor.

(Spoiler alert, he's the asshole)

That's all! To all my besties answering this game and to all the potential players who I didn't tag...have fun!

#tag game #fanfiction tag game #writers tag game #writers question #fanfic tag game

[transathenacykes]

TOP TEN GAMES I BEAT THIS YEAR

In 2023, I completed 34 games, from Final Fantasy VII to Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion to PaRappa the Rapper. These are my ten favorite, in order, and a little writeup of each I had a LOT of fun doing. Enjoy!

10. DARK SOULS

It’s a game I had to want to like, and maybe more than any of the others on the list, I had to meet it halfway. I’m a fan of challenging games, and - stop me if you’ve heard this one before - Dark Souls is pretty hard. But it’s not bullshit. Mostly. I ran into some hard walls here and there, but those walls turned into my favorite fights in the game once I finally mastered them. The reason it’s so low on the list is because the back half is… Well, it’s not very good, folks. Of the four bosses you need to defeat to open the door to the final area, I could call two of them good fights, and I could only do one of those without hesitating. 

9. THE CASE OF THE GOLDEN IDOL

I love a detective game, and what makes Golden Idol really stand out is its incredible format and mechanics. Given a series of still* images, and the contents of a bunch of random people’s pockets, can you determine what happened? It feels cheap to compare games and not just speak about what I enjoyed of a game of its own merits, but I can’t talk about this game without talking about Return of the Obra Dinn, which had a similar sort of ‘fill in the blank’ approach to its mysteries. Golden Idol’s supernatural elements, twists and reveals, and charmingly off-putting art style lend themselves well to one of the most unique games I played this year.

8. SIFU

This is the best rhythm game I played this year. Finding the flow of Sifu’s combat felt like a dance, going from a steady beat to a frenetic scramble in the span of a single missed step. I’ve never hidden the fact that I’m a massive sucker for good movement in games, and Sifu’s jives extraordinarily well with its combat and environments. Really, the only problem I had with Sifu was that it felt a bit short - well, and it didn’t quite deliver the challenge I was looking for, but that’s the fault of whoever described it to me as a Soulslike first just because it has, like… a revival mechanic? Also, the first time it transitioned to a side view for a hallway fight, it basically secured a spot on this list.

7. GHOST TRICK

I tried to play through this game in high school, but got stalled out on some puzzle or another. I honestly don’t remember which, but I’m SO glad I came back to it. I’ve always loved Shu Takumi’s writing and character work in the Ace Attorney series; Ghost Trick is just as good, if not better than any individual AA game in that regard. Really, the characters feel like the ones in the AA spinoffs like Investigations, Great Ace Attorney, or the Layton crossover, which are some of the best characters in the series - but with none of the self-defeating energy of having to be largely unimportant to the mainline games. Also, Missile might be the greatest character in video games ever.

6. PARADISE KILLER

Some games make you fervently pitch their merits to friends, hoping that they’ll play it so you can chat with someone who gets it. This is the fate of many detective games, which live and die in the territory of spoilers. There are detective games that try to get around this by having procedurally generated cases or multiple endings with multiple ‘real’ culprits, which can often be antithetical to what makes a detective game truly sing. Paradise Killer’s answer is that not only is it never going to tell you what the truth is, but that ambiguity is the point. The clues never change, and the only objective is to find a truth that satisfies you. All that is made even better by the premise being steeped in synths and neon, with a vibrantly occult cast who are all just the absolute fucking worst.

5. TEARS OF THE KINGDOM

I mean, come on. It’s Tears of the Kingdom. While I’d really hoped for playable Zelda, what we did get of the character was far more moving than whatever her deal usually is. The chasm was an incredible surprise, and since Skyward Sword is one of my favorite Zelda games, I had a ton of fun with the skydive mechanics. There’s also the building system, which managed the near impossible feat of having things control basically how you’d expect them to once you slapped a steering wheel on them. It felt like there was just so much love for the previous games in the series, without being overly reliant on them. If I had to pick a favorite moment in the game, it would have to be during the Wind Temple’s boss fight, when the Dragon Roost Island theme from Wind Waker cut through the track and made me feel like I could have taken on Ganondorf with a tree branch in that moment.

4. PERSONA 5 ROYAL/PERSONA 5 STRIKERS/PERSONA Q2

Is this cheating? Yes. But hear me out. I knew Royal was going to be on the list, and then it turned out that I liked Strikers and Q2 as much, if not more than Royal. While Royal has higher highs, it also has much lower lows - Strikers and Q2 don’t engage in nearly as much of the weak parts of Royal. But they also don’t function even a little bit without it. Strikers dragged in the gameplay department a little bit, but I loved being able to play as every Phantom Thief - and Q2 was such a vast improvement over Q1 in pretty much every department. So my number four spot on my top ten games of the year is ‘every game I played this year that has Akira Kurusu in it.’ So, since I started Tactica, maybe that counts too… and if you want to be technical, I think I played a few rounds of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate in June, so I guess that has the number four spot too.

3. ARMORED CORE 6

In 2023, I really and truly entered my mech era. I built Gunpla this year, I started playing in a really fun new Lancer campaign, and I played the shit out of Armored Core 6. I’d never played one before, but I was hooked from the tutorial boss alone. I beat the game once and, at the advice of a few friends, started a new game plus run - and before I knew it, I’d already beaten it again. I’ll do a third run too, at some point. Once I learned the all-consuming power of the pile bunker, I was out there decimating the arena foes like nothing else - and, once I figured out how to time out my missile strikes, I managed to slam through 75% of the final boss’ health in a single blow. That was the single most satisfying hit of this year across any game. Oh, and - keep an eye out, because I have a hankering to write some Maeterlinck-focused fic at some point. Because I sure do love me my one-off characters.

2. SCARLET NEXUS

Up until the final entry swung through and claimed the top spot, Scarlet Nexus seemed like a complete and total shoo-in for number one. Very few games have ever motivated me to complete them to the degree I did this one, including getting all Steam achievements and a ton of the optional content in game you don’t need for that. Kasane and Yuito are endearing protagonists with cool powers, genuine flaws, and vastly different outlooks. There were some plot threads from chapter one I thought had been dropped, but as it turns out they were only really dropped in Kasane’s story, and were far more focused on in Yuito’s, while he didn’t engage with most of her whole deal until the endgame. She spends most of her story dealing with causality and time travel, and he doesn’t even know time travel is a thing at all until there’s maybe 25% of the game left. And at the end, it still manages to feel complete coming from either side. The supporting cast is extremely strong, too, and the way powers flow together make the fights feel dynamic, fun, and tie to the themes of combining disparate people to make things better for everyone - to stop holding onto the past and strive for a better future, no matter how much work it takes.

1. 13 SENTINELS: AEGIS RIM

You should play this game. There’s no two ways about it. It’s a severely underrated title with incredible art, writing, gameplay, voice acting - 13 Sentinels fires on all cylinders. It’s half visual novel walkarounds with the occasional puzzle, exploring the individual stories of the thirteen protagonists across a variety of genres. One character is doing 80s high school movie hijinks with his exposition-loving best friend, while another is trying to solve the disappearance of her best friend. Said best friend is engaging in escapades with a small alien just like her favorite UFO movies, and a fourth guy entirely is doing Blade Runner shit. At one point, there’s a character who has appeared fairly infrequently and finally becomes available to play, and when he appears on the select screen, he’s standing in front of a sea of flames while the other characters typically appear in front of schoolrooms, city streets, their own homes. The emotional beat when you click through and hear him start talking about how he’s proud to be enlisting as a Japanese soldier in 1944 is one of the strongest in the game. Each story weaves around another and provides further depth to events you’ve already seen, while the entire chronological story is combined into a single timeline of events you’re free to look at whenever. But then, on the other side of the game from the character stories, you have the fights - or, rather, the fight. Because the combat side of things all takes place within  pretty much a single day - a grueling, nonstop battle where the characters must drive away wave after wave after wave of invaders without letting even a single one through. Each has their own mechs and certain special abilities that gear them for different scenarios, and if you want to experience everything, you have to bounce back and forth between the stories and the fighting, constantly unlocking aspects of the other. The biggest problem with the game is just choice paralysis - there’s so much to do, it’s hard to know where to start. But once you’re able to bite into it, chipping away at the Gordian plot rewards you with a deeply moving story about the plight of a generation thrust into a ceaseless strife, burdened by the heavy expectations of their predecessors to finally solve it and the even heavier feeling that there just are no answers to find in the first place. And also, there are sick as fuck giant mechs. I told you I was in my mech era this year.

#i don't really know what to tag this or if i really even should but #i really liked writing these and i'll probably write a little for every game i beat in the upcoming year #i do a thread on twitter chronicling the games i beat #with the state of twitter as it is i'm gonna move that to here and cohost #but enjoy!

[talkingattumble]

oh no another post about something I like

okay here goes

So most people think that, in ace attorney, wright and edgeworth or shipped together due to like. Being two young men in the same franchise. But there’s a whole bunch of other stuff and I have made a handy dandy list of the main reasons, because I love making lists. Also for my non AA fan viewers after reading this list how gay would you say they are? Curious how this looks from an outside view. Okay list time

- well I’m going to be bringing out the big guns first and saying they they’re the only AA characters to have matching wedding rings as their merch (every other character got necklaces)

- edgeworth is noted by the creator to apparently not be interested in women, and also apparently finds phoenix attractive (in a romantic way)

- phoenix changed his entire career and centered his life around meeting edgeworth

- art for ace attorney was done by kumiko suekane, who not only used to write BL but also was very adamant on phoenix and edgeworth being the same/similar age

- that line. Yknow the one. In the first trial where edgeworth makes an appearance, he has a talk with phoenix anout how seeing phoenix again has given him “unnecessary…..feelings”. That’s the quote. It’s gayer in the game.

- edgeworth is noted by gumshoe to repeat phoenixs name for some reason??

- the uh. One game where phoenix calls edgeworth daddy. That was something.

- other gay lines, I csnt include them all but I highly recommend experiencing the games firsthand.

- the second game was purposefully written to make it seem gay. Not like actually, most queerbaiting, but hey.

- the voice actors for the English AA dub have tons of bloopers where they just mess around, and a bunch of that is just them ammong jokes about edgeworth and phoenix being gay

- apparently there’s something about a really gay looking piece of official art? I haven’t seen it nor do I know what it is but I do see it mentioned a lot so. Thought I’d put it down here because it could be significant, what with the artist being a former BL writer.

Alright that’s all the reasons I can think of for now. I also find it important to mention that many people also headcanon edgeworth as being aromantic and/or asexual, which is also an interpretation I like, but that’s another topic and would make a shorter list (in fact, I’ll list the main reasons right here: he’s said to “not want to marry a woman”, he isn’t swayed at all by the attractive women in court when even the judge is, and is the kind of guy who’s “married to his work”, as they say).

Anyways I’ll add a poll too for fun.

Wow that’s a lot of options, even though my posts aren’t really seen by anyone. Still had fun with it though. And that’s what matters.

#ace attorney #phoenix wright #miles edgeworth #polls #I should create a tag to separate my fandom stuff from my other posting #idk what to call it though #curse my uncreative username that limits me from cute variations of my name to use as a tag #whatever

[loregoddess]

14, 15, 25 for the Love your fandom ask

14) the ship that always makes you smile Hmm, for long-running media, probably Midna x Link from LoZ:TP, bc that's basically the oldest ship in my fleet and it still brings me lots of joy. For mid-running media, probably Kay x Franziska for AA (my first rarepair), Rinea x Faye for FE:SoV (rarepair I wasn't expecting to see others ship), and Ashe x Dedue (literally got me to go out of my comfort zone to figure out how to draw cute ship art, when I was really bad and afraid of drawing people interacting). For stuff that I've gotten into over the past year, probably Alear x Pandreo from FE:Engage, and Mineru x Purah from LoZ:TotK (also I'm kinda silly goofy happy about Jin x Xiaoyu finally getting some development in Tekken 8, but that's bc I had to suffer watching it come to fruition over like, 20 years of my life, slowest goddamned slowburn I've ever had to endure).

15) the character that always makes you smile Oh, lots and lots. Long-running media would be Shad LoZ:TP, love that guy, I get excited anytime I see him. For mid-running, Satoru Hosonaga, my beloved from DGS/tGAA, a decent number of FE characters (Kurthnaga, Rhys, Libra, Flora, Lukas, Faye, Dedue, Ashe, and Ferdinand come to mind off the top of my head), most of the FF7 cast but esp. Red XIII/Nanaki. For more recent things, Alear and literally any of the Engage characters actually, the Octo2 crew (and also the Octo1 crew, and a fair amount of NPCs from both games); I also read Dungeon Meshi recently and I gotta say one of the most casts of all time, I haven't settled on favorites yet but damn were there some good characters.

25) a piece of advice for taking care of yourself in fandom spaces Block button is your bestie, don't feel bad for blocking people for any reason whatsoever so that you can peruse the fandom tag in peace. But also, if you find other fans who are making stuff you enjoy, support them by reblogging their art or headcanons or writing or whatever, or even just liking their stuff.

Do what you want to see in your fandom if you have the energy. I like to see people excited about things they love, whether that's a character or a ship or something about the story or their OCs or their own headcanons, like, doesn't even matter if it's not my Thing, I genuinely enjoy seeing people happy and brave enough to share that happiness in the main tag, so I try to also share stuff that brings me joy when I engage with fandom stuff too. Share joy when you can.

This is not to say you should never be negative ever like, you should also give yourself space somewhere to be a petty snob about things that tick you off. You don't have to make it public, but at the very least give yourself an outlet to let the negative move through and out of you. Believe me there are so many things that tick me off so much about either fandom spaces or various media that I could rant about for hours, but I just choose Not To Share It after I've written it out bc writing it often makes me feel better--or I go and find a trusted friend who I can be like, "Hey I gotta vent about something stupid real fast, will you hear me out?"

Lots of things in life are never all positive or negative feelings, but no emotion is inherently good or bad, so it's important to let yourself feel those emotions and let them pass without bottling them up. Otherwise they stagnate or explode, and neither is fun to deal with the aftermath for. But like, it's okay to be pissy about things from time to time.

Have fun, but never feel like you have to engage with a fandom just because you used to be a part of it, or you got into a new thing. I treat fandom like a public park, I can go there when I want to enjoy myself but I can also leave anytime I want. If a bunch of mean people are hanging around the park I know there are other parks, and I can just go to those instead and cultivate my own little garden to make up for the park I won't go to anymore. I might even get to invite some friends to that garden. Honestly, most of the time I'm some weird forest hermit who only comes out sometimes to haunt the park, and I think that's just fine as well. Engage with fandom in a way that makes you comfortable.

#there were uh...actually quite a few ships and characters I left out #bc I either felt like I needed a 5-page explanation or didn't feel like bogging down my already-long answers #like I don't consider myself a shippy person per se but I do enjoy my fleet #as for characters I just love a lot of characters and we'd be here for days and days if I tried to list them all #for whatever spite and pettiness I have in me it is always outweighed by love for something else by 100 times #alynnl #ask game #I still don't have an ask tag