Luz sometimes wearing a dress and Amity sometimes wearing a suit. Thoughts?
100%. you could close your eyes and point to pretty much anyone in toh and say “gender non-conforming” and you’d be correct. i feel like it’s genuinely just anything goes on the boiling isles
i think hunter loves flowy dresses and he and gus both love cute skirts. hunter is uuuusually more masc but happily has more feminine days, while gus gives me masc or andro vibes. willow wears whatever’s comfortable or aerodynamic, she’s not picky, and probably wears a suit to her wedding or at least part of it. and vee is generally pretty androgynous but will lean in either direction without issue. eda has also canonically worn a suit and king has worn a skirt, so they feel pretty flexible too. the thought of raine in a dress fills me with joy and i don’t think they’re afraid to branch out, but i feel like they’re generally sticking closer to androgynous or vaguely masculine outside of sporadic occasions
luz will genuinely wear just about anything. some days she’ll look like a 12yo skater boy and some days she’ll look like a princess. i don’t see her being really big on makeup or anything particularly frilly/poofy, but i can see her with a sundress as one of her summer go-tos (when she isn’t limited on options like she is during s1-2). her caveat is that whatever it is has to be comfy though. her gender is “whatever” on her passport /hj and her style is purely based on vibes. the entire stereotypical bisexual fashion range is luz noceda basically
amity i think dresses more feminine in her day to day out of the house fits, but her work fits are very Buff Butch coded. white tank tops, baggy pants with a bunch of pockets all stained with abomination goo and oil, and big old steampunky goggles. while luz will dress on any level of the fem-masc spectrum amity is usually more one or the other, it just depends on the occasion and how much effort she feels like putting in. i think comfort is her priority on calmer days at home, comfort/practicality are her priorities for work, but she does like to look good on off days when she’s out and about.
back before the show ended and we had the timeskip grom photo for reference, i fully had my own designs for lumity’s next grom fits where luz was in a dress and amity was in a suit. they’re super old now (probably like 2022?) but maybe i’ll rework them someday and finish the colors and everything this time (fun fact for those who don’t know, one of the concept grom fits for amity was a suit 💔 maybe i’ll rework my new design around that one)
Those last weeks before release are the worst. No, not exactly the worst; (that's the long tired slog of editing), but it's certainly the most tingly and frustrating. What bugs have not been found (already found one in the demo), what things have been forgotten (so many, thank you Jason for having my back), what have I missed (oh no, my custom colors), and so on. Were things this chaotic last time? No, because my brain was still in shape back then, but they were chaotic in a different way due to my inexperience.
And now the countdown is here. Like going on vacation and heading to the airport (in those days before the pandemic), it's out of my hands now, and everything that can go wrong keeps playing in my head. Will it be too expensive? It will still be cheaper than other games of that length, but I know people don't have much money, especially outside Europe and the US where the exchange rate just eats everything. And the sad truth is that if I am going to try to write full-time, I can't afford to give everything away.
Capitalism sucks; it really does.
Funnily enough reviews and what people think are the least of my worries; I'm satisfied, and that's what matters. I didn't skimp on content like I did in Rebirth, where I was unsure if anybody would like it. I could afford to have fun. Maybe a bit too much fun since I had to split it in two, and my trilogy is now 4 books. Oh well. There are worse fates.
I could never have done this without my playtesters and editors. I really couldn't. There is so much in this book that would not have been there unless someone suggested it.
A year ago I was sitting on this couch writing a scene set in the South Downs, and here I am, on the same couch, writing another scene set in the South Downs.
am at work. i went in at 8am because it was that or, like, kill an hour. i was up, i was ready, why the fuck not.
unemployment asks how many days you worked, not how many hours. so there’s no point going in a few hours for several days, which had been my original thought. i’m so much more productive that way? but no. so i’m going to see if i can’t knock out nine hours’ worth of work today.
my position ideally should be done by somebody who comes in three hours a day three or four days a week. this doesn’t work with my schedule of traveling. they ought to replace me. it would be for the best for both of us. sadly, they cannot find someone, i am certain, to do the work for the pittance they pay me. (for the last six years at least the only time I have been given raises have been because NYS has raised the minimum wage so it’d be illegal not to give me a raise. i know, right? well.) so they accomodate my schedule, but that means that I can’t possibly really do the work in a way that makes sense. so it piles up while I’m not there, and then I do a bunch and get ahead and nobody touches it while I’m gone, so I come back and have to redo it. We’re trying to work out ways around it but it’s ridiculous, they should get someone else, but nobody else will do it, but why do I do it? why do i think I’m not worth more money?
well isn’t that a question for the ages, hm?
anyway, in two days off, I did get a lot of cooking stuff done that I’d wanted to, but no cleaning or sewing, which were the things I really wanted to do.
One entirely stupid thing I did, well, that wasn’t entirely stupid-- I got a giftcard from work like a year ago for the sales commission on some cameras, you’re not supposed to get it for online sales but my supervisor worked out a way, and anyhow, it was three hundred bucks and that’s not nothing. But I couldn’t use it for gas, and that’s literally the only thing I’ve bought since March. I had been saving it to buy myself a treat or something, but. No.
So I went to the grocery store and bought a bunch of beer with it, and then restocked my travel first aid kit. I had a good one, but it got burnt up in the yurt fire. So I bought all the band-aids in the world, and some assorted other shit, and then I sat at the table and packaged it nicely into this sweet stiff-sided nylon case I got at work-- someone traded it in with camera equipment in it but it’s red and has a white cross on it and has mesh and vinyl pockets inside, it’s clearly meant to be a first-aid kit. So I cleaned it really well and threw it in my closet and like a year later here I am putting it together.
As I was doing so, I used a knife to open the shrink-wrapping on a bottle of ibuprofen and cut myself with the knife, so I put neosporin and a band-aid on it like a competent human and laughed at myself. Normally, I would’ve just wrapped it in a bit of paper towel and gone about my business until the paper towel fell off.
Dude came in and saw All The Band-Aids and was like “as an adult I go through like, one of those every five years,” and wordlessly I held up my hand and he started laughing.
I hadn’t been in a grocery store since like April, not really. I didn’t know where to stand. I have just... I mean, I’ve been freeloading, living at various people’s houses and eating their food and moving through the world like a ghost, living as an accessory to other people’s lives, unpaid and not paying. If my credit card company is selling my data they must think I died; I bought my last tank of gas in cash because BIL occasionally slips me cash and guess what, Stewarts still lets you select “pay inside” and then get gas, good old Stewarts. Nobody here in Buffalo lets you do that, you gotta prepay and then go in for change or go without a full fill-up.
Oh, weird observation-- it’s a long-term fact of life I’ve known for years that gas is cheaper the farther East you go on the Thruway. Like, gas on the Thruway is usually a few cents more expensive, not enough to get off an exit but you’re not getting a deal, but as you go east it climbs, and it’s as much as thirty cents more a gallon in Troy than it is in Buffalo?
Well, currently, that’s the opposite. I got it at $2.29/gal and when I got off in Buffalo it was $2.09. Been like this the whole pandemic, give or take fifty cents across the board. Couldn’t begin to tell you why. Did the supply chain reverse? I don’t know! It’s weird!
Anyway, I had cause to pull a jar off a basement shelf that said “med containers” on it in my handwriting and discovered it was full of medium-sized containers in leather, plastic, or glass that I’d saved from various things. Delightful! One was a latching hinged plastic waterproof case with the name of one of the products at work we distribute, and it was perfectly sized to fit a tube of neosporin and a bunch of assorted band-aids, so now i have a purse first aid kit too. Good for me, I’ll lose it shortly but I feel prepared now. I also found a plastic box embroidery thread had come in, and with a rubber band around it to keep it shut it’s perfect to hold Q-tips in my travel toiletries bag, so that’s another win. (I had a great tin for that purpose but yurt fire, shrug, I’ve just been doing without Q-tips this whole time and I mean, you can get by using a washcloth and it’s probably better for you but I do like a good Q-tip now and then.)
I also wrote a bunch of porn yesterday. I’m not done. The chapter is over eight thousand fucking words long, and it’s almost entirely porn, I mean it about the “fucking” words-- I mean, I guess there’s more than one bit where nobody’s fucking but they’re reading porn, and I’m not going nearly as much into detail with that as I’d expected from the brainstorm sessions, but the actual fucking itself is a completely different dynamic than I had intended all along. I really really had a plan, and it’s not doing any of that, at all. F’rex I thought they’d do dramatic readings of the pornography but Jaskier said it was too filthy for him to read aloud, so he’s just gasping and giving Geralt judgy eyes. Yennefer was going to be in charge but she is falling down on the job. Jaskier just got a glass of wine and is sitting and keeping score in a notebook while the other two fuck. Geralt thinks he’s hilarious and is doing a more-terrible-than-usual job at hiding this. Yennefer is beyond caring about anything except orgasms.
I feel like I have to let them do whatever they want, though, because I was figuring on having this be the last chapter of that particular story, and I wanted to wrap it all up. Which begs the question-- you can re-order series on AO3, and while MDS-->Sisterhood-->Innermost Depths --> Ancient Sea makes coherent sense, it sort of doesn’t because most of the other stories are earlier in the timeline, so how the hell do I arrange that???
Anyway Ancient Sea isn’t the end of the series, anyway, I just.
also I’ve already written an epilogue but I might post it as a separate story because it’s got a Ten Years Later tag on it that I don’t entirely want to take seriously as I’m not committing to any timeline beyond 1263 really. But that’s a lot of thinking.
Anyhow I’m working as I write this but I should go focus more on really getting work done, since I’ve got to cram a couple of months of work into today.
A few people have asked me for my thoughts on the Battle for Azeroth expansion announcement now, so here are a couple of random thoughts. In no particular order of importance, or with any particular semblance of coherence...
Story
I will admit that I didn’t call an all out faction war expansion. Like a lot of people, I thought an Old Gods expansion was definitely in the cards, but I’m keen to see where Blizzard takes things. It will be interesting to see how everyone deals with being on opposite sides after we’ve been united under the banner of class order halls, and I hope they don’t just gloss over that and suddenly have everyone foaming at the mouth for a faction war (especially from characters who have trended more towards neutrality in the past).
I’m happy for whispers of the Old Gods to show up in this expansion, and it would be cool to find out that N’Zoth is pulling a lot of strings to make this war happen. That said, I hope that they don’t just shoehorn him (it?) in as a patch at the end of the Battle for Azeroth. Tentacle homeboy deserves his own expansion.
Jaina is back! This really excited me, and I was really pleased about Blizzard’s answers regarding her in the Warcraft Q&A. She’s finally going to get some (non-dreadlord) love, and I think there’s a lot of interesting directions they could take her story. With that in mind, however, I do think they need to give us a plausible, in-character reason for why she was so absent during Legion as a foundation for any further storytelling. Maybe she was at the salon all that time. Girl looks fabulous.
Anduin stepped it up in the cinematic, which was nice to see. I love that he was clearly trying so hard to be a Strong King (TM) and live up to his father’s legend, only to realise that’s not who he is. It looks like Blizzard have some fantastic stuff for him in store. His model’s good, too. The “I’m 1990s Brad Pitt who covered himself in glue and rolled around in a pit of metal lions” look is totally working for him.
I’m generally ‘eh’ about Sylvanas, though that’s admittedly less to do with her as a character and more to do with some of the interactions I’ve had with her fanbase. Her banshee scream was pretty cool to see in HD. I hope she doesn’t get a ‘redemption’ arc. She’s always been an interesting character precisely because she’s an anti-hero with a strong sense of self interest. The Horde have always been a means to an end for her, and I really hope that doesn’t change. One of the best character exchanges in Warcraft is between her and Garrosh when he asks how she differs from the Lich King, and she replies “Isn’t it obvious, Warchief? I serve the Horde”. Her character is perfectly summed up by that one line of sweet sarcastic dialogue, and I hope Blizzard don’t lose sight of who she really is.
Gameplay
I nearly cried when they announced the changes to realms for world PVP purposes. I’ve been on the same server for about twelve years, and have slowly seen the Alliance population dwindle to the point where we’re outnumbered nearly 30:1 (not a joke). I have no problems playing on a PVP server, but having twenty people steamroll you every time you step out of a city is not PVP. I’m firmly of the belief that world PVP should involve some measure of skill, not just showing up and winning by default cause you have more guys. At the same time, my server is my home, and it’s become a point of pride to be one of the last Alliance hold outs. I think Ion summed it up perfectly when he said some people feel “trapped” on their servers, and I’m glad to see this problem finally getting some recognition from Blizzard. It might not be a perfect solution, but you can’t force people to change factions or servers if they don’t want to, so I will take what I can get. The start of the new expansion will no longer be a waking nightmare!
Warfronts look super cool. I suck at RTS, but it is really cool to see those kind of gameplay elements being updated for an MMO.
I hope they make some changes to titanforging. They touched on this briefly during the Q&A, but it’s a system that needs some definite reworks. You should not be able to get mythic raid level gear simply because you have amazing luck, when you’ve never even stepped inside a mythic raid. Or a heroic raid. Or even a normal raid. Higher risk/higher skill content should consistently and reliably offer higher rewards, and titanforging really screwed with that concept in Legion in a way that I didn’t like.
There’s totally going to be a troll raid. I love troll raids. There’s also a dungeon boss with sharks for arms.
Give me that long necked dinosaur mount and I actually don’t care what else happens in game. That thing was bitchin’.
Community
I almost didn’t add this bit on to the end, but I’ve been a bit disappointed by the nasty faction dickwaving that’s been going on in the Warcraft community since the announcement. I’m Alliance, I always have been. I bleed blue. My living room looks like the Stormwind decorating committee threw up on it... but that doesn’t mean I get to be a colossal fucknut to other people. There’s a big difference between being proud of your faction, and shitting on other people for liking theirs, and sadly in the last week I’ve seen a lot more of the latter than the former. At the end of the day, it’s a video game, and if you’re calling someone else a garbage human being because they happened to pick blue instead of red, or they like a certain character, or they don’t want to pick a side at all, you need to take a long hard look at your life. Faction pride is great. Douchebaggery is not.
I’m sure I have more thoughts, but this thing ended up way longer than I thought it would. Apologies to the people who made it this far. At the end of the day, I’m super excited to have a new expansion on the horizon, and I hope you all are too. See you in Azeroth!
hiii!!! my name is ky (she/they), and [edit] i turned 22 in february. i’m several flavors of neurodivergent, if that wasn’t obvious after 3 seconds on my page. and to keep it extremely vague, i’m tired of meta so i’m trying to move a bunch of my stuff onto less hellish platforms! and i never associated tumblr as non-hellish but it has been surprisingly pleasant in comparison!
DNI in case anyone still listens to those:
zionists, proshippers, magats, homophobes, terfs/transphobes, islamophobes, antisemites, ai users, ppl that think it’s ok to sexualize characters that were minors for 99% of their run, otherwise bigoted or gross ppl. i want nothing to do with you and you’re not welcome here <3 my art is not for you so fuck off
i also do NOT allow reposts to other platforms or my work used/scraped for ai in any way.
if you’re still here thank you for being normal!! anyway!
current hyperfixations are the owl house and amphibia and have consistently been around for 4 years now so those probably aren’t going anywhere. the one in the forefront of my mind rotates every several months, so the one i talk about most often goes back and forth.
other interests/past hyperfixations that i may talk about/reblog on occasion, are warrior cats, kpop demon hunters, mlp:fim and eqg, musicals (i.e. dear evan hansen mostly, with maybe some heathers, be more chill, hamilton, wicked, six, mean girls, beetlejuice, hadestown), IT chapters 1 & 2, star vs the forces of evil (beating the finale with a shovel), she-ra and the princesses of power, tangled: the series (and kind of v&t7k but like very loosely. that fandom scares me), sex education (THE NETFLIX SHOW. and not season 4), percy jackson & the olympians (haven’t finished the show yet tho), and the lion king
and i’m sure there’s more but that’s the stuff i thought of off the top of my head 💀
uhh what else can i say. i’m a nonbinary aroace lesbian in a long distance qpr with my partner alex (they/them), i have two guinea pigs named juniper (black and orange) and thistle (gray), and a goldendoodle mutt named oliver! if i post about the pets i’ll probably tag it #potato time or #snickerdoodle time.
UPDATE: i lost juniper on april 29 but dont have the heart to replace his picture. newest boy is maple, so i’ll add on one of him :)
if my art interests you, it’ll all be tagged #armadillo art and with the respective fandoms/ships/whatever. feel free to stick around! i’m not posting a ton of art rn because life is putting me Through the Fucking Wringer tho so just bear with me.
today is day seven so it’s not technically over yet, but if i don’t say this now i won’t have time 💀 so thank you guys for an awesome sashannarcy week!!
this was the worst possible time for me to host and participate, but i didn’t know just how hectic life would be when i picked the dates. so if you haven’t noticed i haven’t posted my pieces for it yet, nor are they even finished. i am in probably the deepest throes of chaos in my personal life that i’ve been in a while, and i am mentally and physically burnt out on every level from dealing with that. i am largely not even talking to friends right now that i usually talk to every day because i do not have ANY excess capacity outside of The Situation and Sleeping. it cannot be overstated how burnt out i am
as soon as things level out, hopefully within the next few weeks give or take, i will have more to give again and be able to finish my own entries so keep an eye out for those!! i will also be making sure to go through and share all the entries we got this year when i have little pockets of time!
thank you to those that participated/interacted with sashannarcy week, i love that there’s still a little pocket of the fandom that still holds as much passion for amphibia as i do <3 everyone’s entries are incredible and i’m so excited to finish my own as well once i can relax!!
TLDR: thank you guys for a great sashannarcy week!! i’m dealing with a lot in my personal life rn so i will share all the entries asap and finish/post my own entries once things have settled down a bit :))
i want to make it exceptionally clear since i’ve barely been here a week and this is already happening:
i do NOT allow reposts.
not to other accounts, and not to other platforms. reblogs are fine, but you are not allowed to take my art and post it elsewhere, even with credit.
not to reddit, pinterest, twitter, etc. or to any of the platforms i do have. nowhere.
i pour hours and days and weeks of my life into my work. i do not appreciate other people posting it and receiving the interaction that should be going to me, the creator. i do not take it as a compliment, or as a positive in any way. it is massively insulting and discouraging to me to see my art reposted.
this is something i don’t negotiate on.
if you have reposted any of my art on any platform, take it down.
if you see my art reposted anywhere, they do not have my permission. let me know and leave a comment telling the reposter to remove it.
i am aware that a large portion of repost accounts are run by younger people who may not know any better. so, i am now teaching you:
stop. stop assuming you’re allowed to do whatever you want with other peoples’ art just because it’s on the internet.
if you do not have express permission to repost, if you don’t know the artist, do not repost. it is basic respect.
the art is not yours. you do not get to take the attention away from the person who actually made it. you cannot assume they will view it as “doing them a favor.” ASK first. if they say no, respect it.
there are other ways to interact with your community. reposts are not the way to do it.
(if you have asked before reposting, been told no, and respected it, this is not about you. i’m referring to people who simply assume i won’t mind)
