Steel, straight through me. Blood. Blood and copper, and love straight up the spine, and -

- and I wake up with a jolt, sitting upright stiffly as my eyes snap open.

I shake my head. My stomach rumbles, and I smell something delicious from downstairs.

( Read more below the cut. )

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it very much gets stronger as the days pass. hell a week ago we even made a silly powerpoint to prove to ourselves that this was stuff we *could* get out of our head and across to the family we live with, and i think that has helped push that line a little further.

we really REALLY gotta. 2025 is gonna be the year it happens we swear

as road work sign guy/youtube personality drew gooden once put it, "new year, new me? hell nah. i'm still a little bitch."

one final RIV to cohost, which is returning to the primordial computer soup and leaving archives behind. i'll miss you funny website

our new year's resolution? finally fucking start doing literally anything in the direction of transitioning, no matter how much harder it might get in the recent future. we can't just stay in this holding pattern forever

a friend's considering running an eidolon: become your best self second edition one-shot this weekend, something goofy where all our eidolons are named after christmas songs, and it'll be super funny if it happens. we have a guy planned and her eidolon, "The Polar Express", is a real actual steam train that she cannot easily use in any situation that isn't long distance travel by way of "how are you going to fit a steam train into literally any conflict in a space tighter than wide open area big enough to comfortably fit a train". it could be so fucking hilarious if she gets to use train ONCE in combat

in more video-gamey news: i've been worried that i was missing one of my favorite yearly livestreaming events, the Kusoge Advent Calendar (every day brings a new fighting game that is usually, in some interesting way, shit! it's a great time). turns out my worrying was for nothing: it's not happening this year for real life reasons. wishing tyron the best! instead, chose to read over the write-ups for last year, which you should also do... i really need to drag a friend into playing some more change air blade

wishing y'all well! let's make next year a good one despite it all

Hey all! Sorry for our relative silence, we just don't have much to post-write now that we don't already just shake out in our friendcircles and we don't reaaaally feel like writing fiction or trawling through the archives. Y'all are great at blagging and fiction though keep the writing a-coming

That said! Something we think about sometimes is how we as a collective kind of kicked off properly with me splintering off - the kind of fundamental mismatch in identity that you stumble upon without realizing. "If I'm Alice, I'm not Gull, but I have to be Gull so what does that make me" felt like a bizarre question to ask myself when - as far as I knew - I was a single indivdual, but it was just something really important to pull at and figure out

And it's something a decent chunk of the rest of us have asked ourselves when starting to congeal, too, and every time it feels so weird internally? It's just still a strange thing to look at yourself internally, say "I am not who I was, but I'm nobody else I know I am", and go from there

But it is something important! Can't just let the brain brain itself into a hellcorner can you

something we collectively have been doing a lot internally lately is kind of... absorbing recently-surfaced undercooked alters? i guess something the whole of us is in a kind of concordance about is that we're kind of big enough as it is. there's enough of us in here to really be enough until something really... *gives?* even the less formed bits of us surfacing don't, like, mind - we really are ultimately all the same person, mostly, and this is something we together just kind of acknowledge.

if one of us does end up coming along without feeling like glomming back into another one of us i mean. we'll be waiting. but until then i guess this is kind of an era of variation and expansion upon the me-s that's already here.

god fucking dambn it gets hard to discuss the superposition of one and many that comes with our flavor of plurality haha oops!

i found it recently. it isn't even, like, a proper song - it's Catwalk, one of GarageBand's premade sample loops. no wonder i couldn't find it lmao

it fucking threw us for a loop when we finally found it in the wild, then threw us for a loop again when we managed to *identify* the thang ding. still not entirely sure this is real lol

I like that guy and his funny show. Been rewatching it a lot recently. Peter Falk really did such an incredible job *being* Columbo, expressing all the subtle bits about him that make him such a compelling character. The villains rule, too - even if they're all high-society types with some degree of ego, there's still such an incredibly rich variety.

Top three favorite episodes from our randomly watching around thus far... probably Make Me a Perfect Murder (it's so concerned with the mechanics of television program production that it makes for some really gripping and inventive feeling moments, also Kay is a GREAT villain and I ship her and Val), Forgotten Lady (another one where the mechanics murder involves film reel changing, coincidentally, but also almost certainly the most tragic twist on the formula), and Any Old Port in a Storm (Donald Pleasance as Adrian Carsini). But... got damn, does this show contain so many really really stellar episodes that I feel like this list could easily change.

i just think you should. the problem with most walking simulators is that it isn't interrupted by halo (game series) trying to kill you in the middle of listening to audiologs, which this one thankfully fixes

more seriously, it permanently altered our taste in world and character building, and opened our eyes to the power of locations as characters in the literal sense (without it being, like, transforming or just being a representation of a place). plus the engineers are like a kind of weird puppy to us