My name's Jasper (he/it), I'm a 25 year old genderqueer professional artist (allegedly). I originally started making IFs on here back in like 2020, before I even realized there was a community for it, and like all of my hobbies I've struggled to keep it up. This is now a personal blog.
Some of my projects include:
UNNAMED WESTERN
Status: I'll uh... I'll get back to it
After the assault and subsequent death of his sister, a young Ebenezer Osborne seeks out infamous (retired) outlaw Abel Wright to take revenge on the corrupt sheriff who started it all. When the ashes settle, what will be left behind?
Read it here.
SIGNAL HILL
Status: HIATUS
A hedonistic romp through a strange, post-apocalyptic city. This caravan job was meant to be your ticket to a better life in the big city- instead, you were robbed outside the gates and nearly met your end in the ensuing slaughter. After being nursed back to health, you're free to roam the streets of the big city, make your fortune, have some questionably moral fun, and maybe figure out what dark secrets are hiding in the neon-lit streets of Signal Hill.
Demo | Intro Post
13 LAUREL ROAD
Status: COMPLETE
Your cousin needs somebody to pick something up from their old house. You're the only one with a pickup truck, so that means you.
Nobody's been back there since it happened.
You don't believe in ghosts, but you do believe that places can be haunted.
Play it on itch.io
FOUNDATIONS
Status: INDEFINITE HIATUS
You've wandered this Earth for centuries, an immortal spirit tethered to human bodies after being exiled from your own world. Alongside your most recent tether, Tobias, you seek refuge in the remote mining towns of Colorado. You're being pursued... and he's getting closer. Unbeknownst to you, however, dark things are unfolding in the mountains- things you're about to be pulled into.
Demo | Intro post
RE-BREAK MY BONES
Status: Finished
A young man discovers that the bad boy he was obsessed with in high school is in prison and suspected of murder. On a whim, he decides to bail him out.
When a Dana Air flight lost power on both engines on final approach and slammed into a suburban area in Lagos in 2012, all 153 people on board and 6 on the ground were killed. Investigators from Nigeria's Accident Investigation Bureau found more than just an explanation for the accident itself. This story is one of negligence that traces its roots back not to Nigeria, but to the United States of America, where a pattern of abuse of poorly regulated countries in the "third world" has long allowed companies and individuals to make a quick buck at the expense of lives.
I'll just warn you now. This story is going to make you really, really angry.
Nigeria is currently one of the most powerful, populous, and rich countries in Africa, but it had suffered near constant political unrest for decades before finally settling into a stable democratic government in 1999. It goes without saying that a short-lived military dictatorship is not going to be prioritizing public infrastructure projects, meaning that by the time the new millenium rolled around, the road and rail networks were not nearly sufficient for a populous urban nation. Several small local airlines popped up to provide easier travel between destinations within the country, one of which was Dana Air.
While airlines like this serve a vital role, that doesn't mean they're... good. In fact, it seems like Dana Air was pretty fucking bad. Airlines are businesses and operate on thin margins, so in countries where oversight is less well developed (like if, say, the government hasn't even existed for a decade yet), the less scrupulous will cut every corner to eke out a profit.
That's where our first major issue arises. Captain Peter Waxtan. If you're thinking that doesn't sound like a Nigerian name, you would be right. Captain Waxtan was from Florida. If you are the hiring manager of a small African airline, that should be a massive red flag. Working abroad is common for pilots, but an American pilot typically does not quit their day job at Spirit Airlines to fly for a struggling regional carrier in Nigeria. If they have ended up applying for a job at Dana Air, it's probably because there is some reason they're having trouble getting work elsewhere. In the case of Waxtan, this may have to do with the time his license was suspended by the FAA due to a series of hard landings and failing to adhere to proper maintenance procedures. Doesn't look great on a resume.
Captain Waxton and his First Officer, Mahendra Singh Rathore (who doesn't have a similarly checkered past- he came up through the company as a cabin attendant and this was probably just a small step in a normal career for him), were flying 147 passengers from Abuja to Lagos that day in a secondhand MD-83. Although the takeoff was normal, a problem presented itself soon after- the left engine stopped responding to throttle commands. It was still running, but it wasn't producing any more than idle power, and moving the levers did nothing to change this.
The crew discussed this issue at length, but at no point did they decide to just turn around and get it checked out. In fact, they didn't even ask the company for directions or let anyone on the ground know what had happened. They simply continued flying on one engine. Captain Waxtan seemed intent on getting the plane to its destination- maybe because Lagos was also the location of the company's maintenance base, or more cynically, because after this duty he was set to fly back to the USA for fifteen days off. In fact, he seemed more concerned about being investigated by the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority than about the safety of the flight.
Let me just make this clear: this is completely unacceptable. The only reason an engine failure on a commercial plane isn't a complete emergency is because any aircraft with two engines is certified to fly with only one. But "certified to fly" and "fine to just keep going" are two very different things. Redundancy doesn't mean you can just keep going about your merry fucking way. If it saves your ass, that's great, but now there is no more redundancy.
That's the second issue. If you have a bizarre and unknown mechanical problem with your left engine, there's a slight chance that whatever caused that issue is also present in the right engine. On approach, descending at idle, the pilots had no idea their right engine had failed until they tried to increase thrust to slow their rate of descent. And... nothing. Neither engine was capable of producing more than idle thrust, and that was not going to get them to the runway in their current configuration. They tried several troubleshooting techniques, but at no point did they consult the dual engine failure checklist. The plane was descending rapidly over the suburbs of Lagos, and where it came down was a matter of chance.
Thankfully, the first building struck was an under-construction apartment block, which likely made the difference between a handful of deaths on the ground and dozens or hundreds. At least six people in Lagos were killed as the wreckage careened into a printing press and several houses. Not a single person onboard the aircraft survived the crash or the subsequent fire.
So why, exactly, did the engines fail in the first place? That was the first question the Accident Investigation Bureau had to answer, and believe it or not, it led them right back to Florida.
The engines had last been overhauled in 2011 by Millenium Engine Associates in Miami. During this maintenance, they had neglected to bring the left engine into compliance with a service bulletin intended to strengthen the fuel manifold. This exact weak pipe is what fractured in the event, leading to the engine failure.
But then... what about the right engine? It clearly suffered the same or a similar failure, but its fuel manifold had been brought into compliance with the SB before it was even sold to Dana Air. What happened to it?
Well, dear reader, that's the final "fuck you" in this case. If you're not already pissed off, this should help. The AIB had sent the remains of the engines to Millenium Engine Associates for analysis, and when asked to return them, the company just... didn't. They sent back the left engine, but the right engine has never been seen again. It's a blatant act of disrespect (and frankly, probably a coverup) by a company confident that they would see absolutely no recourse.
That's the unfortunate reality we have to face when discussing a crash like this. It is tempting for people in so-called "first world countries" to blame any and all accidents in the "third world" on the simple fact that these countries are poorer and less developed. But time and time again, whether it's this incident, UTA 141, Ethiopian 302, or dozens of other crashes, the blame instead lies with the way the rest of the world actively abuses these nations who are not powerful or rich enough to stand up against it. Sometimes, like in these cases, it's quite literal. But even when it's not, the legacy of colonialism and the years of political unrest that follow it make countries like this often incapable of maintaining the high safety standards their people deserve. Yet people in the rest of the world click their tongues. Of course something like that would happen there, they say, bloody hands and all. The people there just aren't as advanced as us.
I don't have a quippy closing statement or an uplifting ending. Fuck the system that allows hundreds of people to die for some asshole in Florida to make a buck. Fuck colonialism, fuck capitalism, fuck you, fuck me, fuck planes. I told you this story would make you angry. You should be angry.
If you want a more in-depth discussion of this accident ft. a funny lady rather than an extremely pissed off man, please check out Disaster Breakdown's video on the subject. She's really fucking funny.
I used to use Google docs, but the white mode only was really annoying me (tires my eyes), so I swapped to Ellipsus (which I genuinely love and recommend), but it was bothering me a bit that I need wifi in order to use it, so now I switched to LibreOffice Writer, which I do like.
It very much has a Microsoft Word feel, but is open source and you need no accounts to use it. It's local on your device, so no AI can scan it, and no wifi is needed.
I still wish it had the Google Docs cards, because, bitch, that thing is so good for easy organizing.
Talked to a guy on a dating app who suddenly goes like "Oh what are your thoughts on AI"
So I send the pic of Ayo Edebiri in the "if you talk to me about AI I will kill myself" shirt
And he goes oh I think there are potential applications like in medicine but it's horrible for the environment
And I'm like yeah absolutely, also this wave has driven off many actual experts from the field and so a lot of actually useful applications of machine learning have completely halted research in favour of just churning out chatbots
And he goes oh yeah absolutely I hate AI. That's why I limit my use to characterAI, and using ChatGPT to edit my papers, and creating meal plans-
And I'm like hold up what. That's like. A lot. That's like constantly using it.
And he goes oh well it's inescapable, even my school says you should use it. But I only use it minimally
And I'm like boy all those things are also bad for the environment??? And that's a lot of things you do not need to use it for?????
And he starts talking about how traumatic it is that everybody on dating apps yells at him and cusses him out because of his "minimal" use of AI and I'm like trying to explain to him that this is not in fact minimal and also I would not be rude to him on any basis
And then he just. Stopped texting me back š¤·āāļø
Every once in a while, I wish the friendship meter from the Sims was real so that way when people tell me "I used Chat-GPT" they can visually see just how much respect I just lost for them in that moment.
One time an acquaintance told me she entered Snape's star chart into chatgpt and I could physically feel that meter dropping three separate times over the course of her sentence
I do not like discord because of servers or custom emojis or buying avatar decor or whatever, I like it because it has no "read" for messages and you can mute people and close DMs with no consequences and the online indicators are so unreliable you don't really care about them. It's the only platform I can use to text my friends that feeds into exactly 0 of my anxieties
Working in retail is really fun, and the times when major fuck-ups happen, they can be either anxiety-attack inducing, or make it possible to get through the rest of your god-awful shift with a smile depending on the customer. My all-time favorite absolute fuck-up is as follows:
This kind woman is just doing her thing. She scans her membership card from her keychain. The register beeps to acknowledge the scan. We continue as usual. Neither of us notice right away, but after Iāve scanned a few more items, I hear a very quiet, āUm,ā from the lady, very polite. I look at her. She is looking at the screen of my register, blinking. I, too, look.
And lo and behold. There is a charge of over four-thousand dollars ($4,000) worth of garlic bread staring us in the face. There are no words for a minute. Weāre justā¦ in awe. How did this happen? How the hell did this happen?
She didnāt even have garlic bread in her cart.
I sputter a partial apology - I was incapable of forming actual sentences in the moment - and try to void the garlic bread. Since there was no garlic bread to scan, I try to manually remove $4,000-some from this transaction.
Well, the registers donāt like it when you try to void off more than five dollars ($5) from a transaction, so naturally it pings my manager for confirmation, but sheās not by her pager.
At this point, both myself and the lady are justā¦ dumbfounded. Sheās not even mad. Iām not even all that embarrassed. Both of us are just looking at the screen. Thereās a bit of laughter, but itās mostly justā¦ confusion.
I have to call through the whole store for my manager on the intercom because sheās not answering. She shows up, ready to override and void it, when she too, sees what exactly is being voided.
āWhatā¦ did you do?ā
āI genuinely. Have literally. No. Idea.ā
She voids it, and I go to finish the transaction and tell the woman her total (minus the garlic bread). My register pings. It tells me that she hasnāt scanned her membership card. Odd. I distinctly remember her doing that. The woman goes to scan her card again, and I notice that her library card is stuck to her membership card. I tell her gently, and she separates the two and scans her card.
My manager, hovering nearby still, sees this and says, āI think it mistook the barcode of her other card for garlic bread, and the remaining digits were read as the price.ā
And thatās when the laughter really came over us. There were no hard feelings at all. In fact, the woman was incredibly glad that the receipt still showed the garlic bread and the voiding of. I will remember it until the end of time, my only regret in the entire situation being that I didnāt take a damn picture, because she has proof and I donāt. But I swear to God it happened.
TDLR; Library Card Charged $4,000 of Garlic Bread.
A picture is worth a thousand words, a library card is worth $4000 worth of garlic bread, if we can figure out how many words the average library card can check out at once, we can probably work out a picture-to-garlic bread conversion here, too.
Hey uhhhhhh anybody have any commerically successful queer horror romance novels they can recommend me. I need to start doing research for when I query this fucking manuscript š„²
I love how color can tell a story. In this case, it reflects the way I tend to see colors within colors, layers unfolding into more layers, endlessly connected, just like life and the universe itself. Everything contains something else, and every small detail is part of a much larger story.
Maybe thatās also why childhood memories feel so vivid to me. As a child, the world is experienced through all lenses at once, with fewer filters and less judgement and a heightened sense of awareness. Sounds, smells, colors, textures, and sensations are all felt more intensely, not necessarily because they carry a specific meaning, but because they are so immediate and alive.
"You should create for yourself" and "it's okay to feel discouraged when creating your own original projects if no one interacts with them" are two sentences that should be able to co-exist with each other
On the one hand, you should kill that capitalist in your head that tells you to make art only for the enjoyment of other people. On the other hand, it's totally fine to be disappointed that you spent hours or even days on something that only got 4 notes. You can feel both ways.
