#plague yaps

[plague-agent]

Reminder: do not open YouTube on August 13, and do. Not. Give. Your. ID. To. YouTube.

When you open the site, it’ll probably say “hey, we think you’re a minor, so show us your ID or we won’t let you watch videos made for not kids.” Don’t. Don’t do that.

If you need something to watch or listen to at work or something, find some videos now and download them off the site to watch or listen to locally. But don’t give Google the last piece of information they don’t have about you, don’t accept that this is an okay thing to have happen, don’t be complicit in it. Listen to every computer class from the 90’s and don’t give random companies and corporations on the internet your ID. It’s that simple. Spend a day watching streams on Twitch or watching podcasts with video on Spotify, or pick up that game that’s been sitting in your Steam library for eight months, the one you keep saying you’ll play but don’t get around to. Or read that book you thought you’d be interested in, but put aside when your friend sent you a meme and that sent you into a rabbit hole of Wikipedia links. Or listen to a new band - any band will do, maybe try some genres you don’t normally listen to and pay attention to how the patterns of time signatures and instruments shifts through genres and years, and how it stays the same.

Just don’t open YouTube, and don’t. Give. Them. Your. Fucking. ID.

[plague-agent]

Being a Ghost fan is so unique sometimes.

“What kinda music do you listen to?”

“Oh, you know, a Swede pretending to be six different Italian satanic popes singing in English, with a lore that rivals Five Nights At Freddy’s and performances that have won a Grammy and pissed off most of hyper-religious America.”

“Oh, what genre is that?”

“Metal, but if you call it metal, actual metal fans will kick your ass.”

In all seriousness though, I was listening to the live performance of If You Have Ghosts and TF’s mid-song speech hit really hard, because yeah, the rituals and the songs and the laughter and the joy are all so fleeting, just brief respites from whatever else we face in day-to-day life; dark fascist regimes, greed, hate, manipulators, the horror and rot that infests the world. But something that being a fan of Ghost, going to a Ritual, and engaging with the community taught me is that those respites are everywhere if you seek them out, and the best and most lasting of them is in finding people who share the same suffering or find solace in the same comforts.

The voices of applause from people who went to a show two years ago hundreds of miles away from you rings out in recorded tracks like ghosts, joy frozen in time and relived every time someone finds in that music, in that community, inspiration to write, to draw, to sing, to get up another day or just to smile and nod along. The legacy of progress, the promise of a better future and the comfort in a global audience who shares in musical solace with you are all encapsulated in Ghost like nothing else I’ve ever experienced. It healed something inside me from the first time I went to a ritual and saw just how many people, young and old, of all walks of life were united under neither god nor man, only under a shared hope and love and connection and lifted burden, singing together as one.

Ghost has become so much more than one man’s dream from a dead end job at a call center, and that’s something truly unique and beautiful to me.

And if we have Ghost, we have everything.

[plague-agent]

Thinking about Flambae’s niece, who inherited her uncle’s hater energy - in fact, she’s almost a carbon copy of the fiery hero, much to her mom’s dismay, right down to the same missing tooth in the middle of her mouth.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that the first thing she does upon meeting Robert is bully him relentlessly.

(Spoilers for future chapters of my fic below the cutoff)

Somehow, by some set of circumstances, before Robert and Flambae were a couple, she and the dispatcher ended up in the same room together. As soon as Flambae leaves their earshot and she catches sight of how Robert’s eyes follow her uncle with a look her grandma usually reserves for her grandpa, she catches onto the secret Robert had been sure he’d hidden so well.

Not well enough to prevent an eleven-year-old menace from calling him out on it, apparently.

Any time they’re alone together, she’s poking fun at him for it, and unfortunately for Robert, she definitely inherited her uncle’s ability to mock people where it hurts, albeit with a clear distinction between actual malice and general menace.

He knows she’s not too upset about his apparently obvious feelings for her uncle, though, because with the same shit-eating smirk he’s seen on Flambae’s face a thousand times over as she says her goodbyes to the pair of them, she loudly proclaims, “bye uncle Robert!”

[plague-agent]

Can I talk about how Gaster in Deltarune is a representation of our connection to the game, our love of the characters, our suspension of disbelief, the things that keep us playing the game? Hence why he acts as a way for us to play in the first place, by placing us with Kris, and keeps us chasing our goal by allowing us to restart the Knight fight? I’m going to talk about it. If Chara is the feeling you get when you level up, as they say at the end of a Geno run, choosing LOVE over Love, then Gaster is the feeling you get when you attach yourself - your love - to these characters. Gaster is a metanarrative representation of what binds us to this game. Our connection. And he’s right - how lucky we are indeed, to need each other in this way; without a player, there is no experiencing the game, and without a game, there is no experience for the player. When the game is put down, the little world within it ceases to exist except within our minds. By loving that world and the little pixels within it, by coming back time and time again to see them, we give that world life, and in turn, it gives to us. It gives us a sense of hope. It gives us entertainment. It gives us community. It gives us laughter. It gives us tears. Every time we open the game, every time we forge a connection, when we stop being ourselves and start being a little red heart controlling a teenage human, that is where Gaster lies. To me, at least.

[plague-agent]

So I had this really stupid idea for a 5+1 fic, involving 5 times Robert tried to ask out Flambae, but if I start working on it, it’ll probably result in my current fic (also Flambert; Robert’s post-Shroud identity crisis) taking a bit longer. So I’ll crowd-source the decision: finish the angst first and write this new one after, or fall into the trap of having two simultaneous WIPs?

One at a time or both?

Finish the first fic first, coward

Start the 5+1

Voting ended onFeb 18

[plague-agent]

A second hyperfixation has hit the my brain.

Yeah, post-canon Flambert fic incoming... eventually, because this game has consumed so much of my brain in the past few weeks. Look forward to everybody being very stupid all the time, as soon as I myself stop being stupid long enough to sit down and finish the damn fic.

[plague-agent]

So @queer-fictions, @assmaster37 and I were talking about how we write fics, and it was revealed that I'm the only one of us who preps entire outlines, divided by chapter if necessary, before I even start writing the actual stuff that people see, and we were wondering if I'm in the minority for this or if this is the way most people do it.

Fanfic authors: how do you plan your fics?

Full outline, divided by chapters

General outline, unspecific ideas

Fuck it, we ball (just start writing)

Not a writer, just curious (show results)

Voting ended onSep 28, 2025

[plague-agent]

One of the greatest joys in life is presenting my moots with angsty headcanons that garner this sort of response.

This is a formal apology to Brian @queer-fictions for subjecting him to emotional and psychological distress via thoughts about Terzo.