#follower chat

[formerlyashkatom]

@daemoninwhiteround2 replied to your photo: when ya excitement about ya secret project finally...

I’M EXCITED

;_; <3 it’s too dang late for this; heck knows what I did to deserve the supportive community I lucked into but I’m so so glad.

[formerlyashkatom]

@manyblinkinglights replied to your photoset “i present to you: a tale of christmas triumph, and also the reason...”

I Fear cleaning my current one

real talk tho, the results are the best reward:effort ratio I have experienced in a long time, typing is now so luxurious, would recommend this to everyone who needs a boost of ‘I did the thing!!!’ before the end of the year.

[formerlyashkatom]

Seeing your hella makeup selfies makes me want to try make up again, and I must tell you, that is *hard*

awwww! makeup is a pretty fraught activity, in that somehow AFAB people are meant to be born knowing how to apply it, and you’re meant to be #flawless and #onpoint but also super natural but also if your wing can’t cut a hater then what’s the point, and I think a lot of people get super intimidated by these hugely intricate looks (especially when tutorials make them look so effortless), and like, boo. boooooooo. 

I started doing makeup more seriously well after high school, because I was in a Bad Place mentally and pretty colours made me feel better. it’s taken me a long time to build up to the level of skill I have now, and I still don’t really feel like I’m that great at it! there’s always someone better at anything you do, but with makeup it’s so easy to look at the results on yourself and tie them in with your self-esteem, assume that this garish caricature of yourself is something that other people will always be laughing at. depression has not done a lot for me, but I will say that the ‘who gives a fuck, nothing matters anyway, might as well be sparkly’ attitude did carry me through a lot of the early makeup I-hate-this feels. (and the other thing is that all makeup feels garish if you’re not used to regularly wearing it, because it does make such a marked difference in appearance, and it always seems like other people are going to JUMP on those differences and use them to mock you. they don’t, it turns out! I’ve been through entire days on a uni campus filled with people that look like a fashion shoot with my eyeliner melting down my face and people generally just go ‘:O I LOVE YOUR LIPSTICK!’ so if makeup has taught me anything, it’s that people are so much nicer to us than we are to ourselves, both in appreciating our good points and not even noticing our glaring flaws.)

but it’s a learning process! and sometimes it’s gonna suck! and I think it’s a disservice we do to a lot of people who want to fidget with self-expression, pretending that it’s easy, that it doesn’t take practice. I wish I could give people who are wary of makeup but want to try it the happiness that it gave me, the joy in being bad at something and continuing to try it anyway because it is such a small thing, a playground to play in with so few repercussions for being bad at it. some of the more practical advice I’ve seen in that regard is to apply makeup before you shower, when you have the time - get the practice in without resigning yourself to Having To Wear It because you went through all the effort of putting it on. and try new things! try things that shouldn’t work! try things that look cool! try your favourite colours (or your ship colours!) in weird and nauseating combinations! build in a reward structure, like listening to your favourite music during the process or hassling your pals with selfies of you looking bomb as hell! do whatever makes it fun, because it’s already enough of a cultural burden, and making it into a chore or a punishment because you’re Not Good Enough at it is a painful thing. in the end it should be making yourself sparkly and colourful because it makes you happy, and if you’ve done that, you’ve succeeded, no matter how objectively ‘bad’ it looks.

really this is advice for a lot of hobbies.

[formerlyashkatom]

okay let’s do the thign

it has been a while since I’ve done a big Responding to Comments post on tumblr, but i feel the need! so:

@logicalframework​: #best worst ship <3 #this is... sweet? #i mean #as sweet as any shuu fic's going to be #shuu does not murder anyone == shuu fluff fic #happy endings for birbs who don't deserve happy endings #thank you ash :) #ironically this fic makes me less want to stab people than I did this afternoon 

I am very glad that I made your day better, or at least less stab-inducing <3 Also, you continue your streak of being able to pick my favourite line. 

@darkveracity: Ash, this is /really/ good. I think it’s one of my favorite things you’ve ever written

UM WOW WHAT. I already flailed about this but I was very enh about my writing in this fic, and I just. Goodness. With how long you’ve been around, that really means something. I have been getting the happy warm feelings all day about this comment <3

aaaaaand the big one, which is under the cut, because length, but I expect there will be some hitori meta there:

@auburn-haired-sadist Wow. Just…wow. I have so many things I want to say about this fic but not the words to do so. Wonderful isn’t enough of a word to describe it.

Hitori is such a complicated character, and you’ve done such a fantastic job of capturing him. I think it’s easy for some fans to forget that, fucked-up murderer he is, this is a man/bird who has care-giving ingrained into his very being, who spent years nurturing younger siblings, who lived a good portion of his life essentially as a parent. All he ever wanted was to take care of his siblings, and losing that, Nageki, his last link to that happy time.

Sleepy math daddy is a character that I very desperately want to…not like per se, but respect. And it’s hard after Holiday Star, because Kazoo is so innocent, so trusting. Hitori has no place to judge Shuu for directing  his pain outwards, because he did the same. He found the most vulnerable party, someone he honestly could have used to fulfill is craving to take care of someone (because Lord knows Kazoo needed someone to take care of him), and instead he not just killed him, but did so with unnecessary cruelness. I can’t count the number of times hindre and I have discussed this with each other, asked “why couldn’t he have just stayed until Kazoo was gone?” And in truth I could write paragraphs about Hitori and his resentment towards Kazoo’s suicidal idealization when poor Nageki never had a chance at life but that’s not my point here. My point is, I feel the utmost sympathy for Hitori but lack most other feelings, and this fic really helped me with that. To see him in a light that’s not entirely negative. Because if nothing else, by post-BBL he’s not much more than an exhausted man trying to move past his regrets.

“You get to shape whoever you are, now, and it turns out that who you are is mostly someone who wants to sleep and eat, cook and get groceries, balance a budget and do the laundry and all the thousand little things that make up life when your life is not a sword weighing over someone else’s head.”

This line. There are many lines in this fic that took my breath away but this one here. My poor heart. What a sad, sad bird we have here. Unlucky enough to be from a universe ruled by the cruel goddess known as Moa.

(I didn’t say much about Shuu here but also feel you did a perfect job of portraying his neglectfulness towards himself.

You sigh and tilt your head back, letting it rest on Shuu’s shoulder without making eye contact. “You have another appointment for physical therapy this afternoon.”

“I have experiments,” Shuu says, after a moment.

You put a little steel into your tone when you say, “You also have physical therapy.” Shuu makes another, more defeated disgruntled noise after a moment, and you continue on, airy again. “I think I’ll take a nap before, but I’ve booked a taxi anyway. Don’t ignore it.” Like Kazoo, Shuu is someone who needs a caregiver, though for different reasons. His entire world is research and he seems to forget that there’s a world at present, that he himself has needs that need to be met. Man’s only vanity is clearly his ribbon, smh.) tl;dr Ash you’ve given me such feels this morning and I’m at a loss on how to express it. :’)

UM, I THINK YOU WILL FIND IT IS YOU WHO GAVE ME SUCH FEELS THIS MORNING........

Hitori is a complicated character. I’ve always harbored just the tiniest pinch of worry about my Worst Bird tag for him - not because I don’t think he’s the worst bird, as far as my judgements go he absolutely is, but because it reduces the complexity of his character. And the complexity is the thing I love most about Hitori! My favourite characters always end up being the most awful, unrepentant people - people who are driven by their own motives and believe so powerfully that they are right, or even that whether they are right or not doesn’t matter. Writing that sort of mindset is always a tough mental exercise.

I think it’s important, though. I’ve talked with Logic before about how the silly birbgame explores abuse, and, well. An important, distasteful-but-necessary component of abuse is that abusive people are just Normal People. Kazuaki Nanaki was the first bird I romanced, and I was in hook-line-and-sinker. Because he was a Normal dating sim route - haha, hot for teacher, that’s a little skeevy but why not it’s a cultural narrative just roll with it - and then he had Dating Sim Tragic Backstory - and then, oh god, the hints all clicking into place as Hitori lost his shit in BBL. He’s broken, and he’s cruel, and he’s single-minded - but he’s a person. He’s also selfless, caring, and dedicated.

And hoo boy. Holiday Star. Holiday Star may be the greatest characterisation piece I have ever - read? experienced? It hurt so much because it - it showed the cracks in Hitori being pried apart, the divide between who he became and who he could have been. And then that was compounded by the shrine dates and the Kyoto trip - he’s still no cardboard cutout, is what amazed me there. It would have been so easy to just wipe the board clean of Hitori’s sins and make him warm and caring and nurturing - but Moa brought his negative qualities even more to the forefront. He was quietly, carefully bland as Kazuaki Nanaki, but living as himself? He’s overbearing with Nageki, disdainful with Kazuaki. Like you made the distinction - in the shrineverse, I can respect Hitori, I can even admire him for the sacrifices he’s made, but he’s not very likable.

AND ALSO: And in truth I could write paragraphs about Hitori and his resentment towards Kazoo’s suicidal idealization when poor Nageki never had a chance at life but that’s not my point here. NO BUT OH MY GOSH WHAT A GREAT POINT. I am so here for all the compare-and-contrast Kazuaki and Nageki meta. This shit is my lifeblood.

ANYWAY I HAVE A LOT OF FEELS ABOUT COMPLEX CHARACTERISATION OF OBJECTIVELY BAD PEOPLE and I’ve been longing to dig my hands into Hitori for a while now, so. I’m so very glad that my overthinking this sort of thing has apparently worked, if the reaction to this fic has been anything to go by!

[formerlyashkatom]

@logicalframework replied to your photo “in-between doing things I am also planning things this is not how my...”

that... that looks like a timeline! of times. the colored dots are a nice touch, also some snazzy arrows.

it is! my main point is LOOK AT HOW ORGANISED EVERYTHING IS, this is definitely not something I am used to and I can hardly believe it is coming out of my hands.

everything is also colour coded i might have a problem

[formerlyashkatom]

@rocketmantis replied to your post “I have been telling myself to do my laundry for three weeks now, so...”

I need to do my laundry too, so let's make a laundry pact, I guess!

@logicalframework replied to your post “I have been telling myself to do my laundry for three weeks now, so...”

oh shit I also need to do my laundry (for like, the last 3 days of re-using dirty washcloths). Ok look, I'll do my laundry and you do yours, ok?

LAUNDRY CLUB \o/

[formerlyashkatom]

@madamehardy replied to your photo:anyway my anxiety scarf has been getting a workout...

Tell me which pattern and yarn that is?

the pattern is this noro bias lace scarf! it is thusly named because it’s intended to be knitted up with noro yarns, which are usually self-striping and are SO UNIVERSALLY LUXURIOUS, UGH. the yarn I’m using isn’t noro, sadly :( it’s a fairly cheapo superwash/polyamide??? this is the first time I’ve looked at the label. anyway the brand is ‘moda vera’ and the yarn is ‘fayette’, labelled as ‘plum mix’ 

[formerlyashkatom]

@siadea replied to your post “you can currently buy hatoful boyfriend and hatoful boyfriend: holiday...”

No. There is no salvation. This is bird hell, nor are you out of it.

“But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. She had won the victory over herself. She loved birb hell.”

which is to say, oh, I’m not trying to be saved from birb hell. I’m trying to save myself from being alone in birb hell.