Status: FUBAR

See hi-res version here: patreon.com/posts/105215999

Updating every Tuesday and Thursday Chapter 7: Epilogue of Lone Emmet and Cub AU !

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Imo ramen (potato ramen) is a menu that actually exists in Hokkaido! I thought this was a very fitting thing for Emmet to order.

Additionally, here are some interesting comments from a Mozilla employee who's been working on these features:

hello again everyone! i’ve decided to make a whole new masterpost for my beyblade subs, all the links in the old one died like a century ago and i’ve wanted to do things a bit differently anyway and. stuff. i’m slowly working on editing and uploading new versions that will replace the old files, but the old files will be available here for all the episodes i haven’t edited yet. (also i’m aware that there are other subs in existence by now too but i just like being thorough. plus i was asked to do this)

***what’s different in the new versions*** - well first of all they’re all available for hardsubbed streaming so you don’t need to download anything to watch - improved translation, a fixed arial round font, overall better readability, no colour coding (it was difficult to maintain what colours i actually wanted to use lol), no changing font sizes etc - uniform spellings for all the names and terms (i try to go with what’s more or less official. even though that’s kinda elusive in this franchise but. anyway) - karaoke effects for opening & ending themes. in the old files, all of the above is just chaos with no coherence. that’s why i’ll be replacing them. it’s going to take a while but i’m on it

the episodes are grouped in batches of tens below. google drive allows downloading an entire folder so you get the whole batch in one (depending on the folder view, the DL link changes places a bit but it’s at the top of the screen). or you can also just pick individual episodes.

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BAKUTEN SHOOT BEYBLADE (season 1):

Episodes 01-10 **all new versions**

Episodes 11-20 **all new versions**

Episodes 21-30

Episodes 31-40

Episodes 41-51

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BAKUTEN SHOOT BEYBLADE 2002:

Episodes 01-10

Episodes 11-20

Episodes 21-30

Episodes 31-40

Episodes 41-51

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BAKUTEN SHOOT BEYBLADE G-REVOLUTION:

Episodes 01-10

Episodes 11-20

Episodes 21-30

Episodes 31-40

Episodes 41-52

sorry

He’s since been open about the emotional difficulty of having written the song since many people now message him on October 1st to ‘wake him up’ despite the song being a memorial to his departed father.

Yes, even if you're neurodivergent. I don't have ADHD, but it is allegedly a thing with ADHD as well. And I am autistic, and after a bunch of nerve damage (severe enough that I was basically housebound for 6 months), I had to completely rebuild my ability to get my brain to Do Things from what felt like nearly scratch.

This is specifically from ADDitude magazine, so written specifically for ADHD (and while focused in large part on kids, also definitely includes adults and adult activities):

Here's a link on this for autism (though as an editor wow did that title need an editor lol):

Resources on this aren't great because they're mainly aimed at neurotypical therapists or parents of neurdivergent children. There's worksheets you can do that help a lot too or thought work you can do to sort of build the neuro-infrastructure for tasks.

But a lot of the stuff is just like. fun. Pulling from both the first article and my own experience:

Play games or video games where you have to make a lot of decisions. Literally go make a ton of picrews or do online dress-up dolls if you like. It helped me.

Art, especially forms of art that require patience, planning ahead, or in contrast improvisation

Listening to longform storytelling without visuals, e.g. just listening regularly to audiobooks or narrative podcasts, etc.

Meditation

Martial arts

Sports in general

Board games like chess or Catan (I actually found a big list of what board games are good for building what executive functioning skills here)

Woodworking

Cooking

If you're bad at time management play games or video games with a bunch of timers

before murderstuck, gamzee has no idea that he is a clown. sure, he anoints his face with greasepaint, rides a unicycle, and juggles, but these are serious religious sacraments to him. and, sure, sometimes he trips on his giant floppy shoes and lands face first in a pie, but that's just being blessed with a miracle, because he was just thinking about pie. and, sure, sometimes his friends say things like "HEY ASSHOLE. CLOWN ASSHOLE. YOU WORSHIP A CLOWN RELIGXON. FOR CLOWNS." to him, but he's too zonked on sopor slime to extract any meaning from it.

when gamzee sees the ICP miracles video, he's too sober to dismiss it as a mere coincidence; for once, he gets the joke, and realises that he was the butt of the joke the whole time. he understands that every time he fell face first in a pie, it was the work of an unsen riddler. he grasps that he is, in a cosmic sense, a clown, and hates it.

the next time the curtain rises and hussie says "everyone look! he's about to do something stupid!" gamzee goes shithive maggots and starts mauling his friends and fondling corpses; every time hussie says "don't worry, folks, he can't hear us making fun of him! everyone point and laugh!" gamzee gets angrier. that's what the "are you next?" bit is about - gamzee is aware of, and hates, the audience.

when the murder spree is over, gamzee's beatific grin returns; no longer a look of blank ignorance, but a knowing smirk. he's successfully ruined his character forever - no one wants to see him and no one thinks he's funny. hussie seems to say: jesus you are such a shitty clown. and gamzee's impassive face seems to say: i know.

there are a bunch of free monitor tests, but here’s an easy one you can use. the passmark and eizo tests are also pretty good, though passmark doesn’t work in your browser. be warned that some tests may cause eye strain.

It's just in the past that more people had household staff (and more people *were* household staff), so historical media that is at all accurate is going to have background characters to do things like open doors, greet visitors, and mind their employer's small and portable valuables.

1.) The telephone--your cell phone especially, but landlines too! Before that, if you needed to get in touch with someone faster than a letter would get there (which might have been pretty fast, depending on time and place--in Sherlock Holmes's day, London had three daily mail deliveries! but that still wasn't instaneous), your only other option was to knock on their door--and if they weren't in, someone needed to be there to take a message.

2.) Electric lighting and heat. The porter would sit up till (and often past) your usual hour to come home, and if you still weren't there, they would leave some kind of light burning and a taper for you to light your way to your room. In multifamily buildings, they'd often have a room right inside the door with a small window opening in it, and leave a lamp burning either just inside or outside that window, where they could reach it without getting up, so that that live flame was never left unattended.

In general, it's hard for modern people to understand how ubiquitous, and how necessary servants were in the past, in almost every social stratum. Managing a household run on fire for light, heat, and cooking simply required so much more work--making fires, tending fires, CLEANING THE GODDAMN SOOT OFF OF EVERY SURFACE EVERY DAY--that almost every family had to outsource some of it.

And even if you lived in one of the cities where most of that work could be outsourced outside your own home, the one indispensable servant you still needed was the porter.

In Paris circa 1830, visitors from abroad would often note, in wonderment, that it was possible to live with no servants but the porter. You could hire a cleaner who didn't live in; you could order dinners from the traiteur, who would send them over hot along with dishes and set the table for you--you could even order dinners on a regular schedule, basically a meal subscription; there were even companies that would deliver a bath to your home, with a portable tub and a cask of hot water, and haul away the dirty water when you were done. (If you were already paying for water delivery--which many people did; most of the city got its water from public fountains rather than private wells--economies of scale for fuel meant it was only very slightly more expensive to use one of these services than to heat water yourself.) But all of these services were made possible by having the porter there to let all these other people in and out, take messages, and keep a light burning.

In small multi-family buildings this role was sometimes played by the landlord, which obscured the service relationship, but often (and almost always in larger buildings) they would be hired by the landlord and their wage folded into the rent; they were also often the onsite handyman, just like a live-in superintendent in some apartments today. They would also often be available to take on other service work for the tenants--cleaning, shopping, errands.

It's also hard, I think, for modern people to grok how much cheaper labor was compared to the price of things--food, clothes, manufactured goods. We are used to thinking of things as basically costing their labor costs, with the price of raw materials a rounding error; before industrialization, that ratio was reversed. You've heard the line attributed to Agatha Christie, about how growing up she never expected to be so rich as to be able to afford a motorcar or so poor as to not be able to afford a servant?

Again, Paris circa 1830: In Les Misèrables, one of the privations we are told Marius endures while working his way up to merely poor from absolutely penurious is "sweeping his own landing." By the time he's living in the Gorbeau House, the filthiest tenement we see in the book, he still doesn't have heat in his room, but he is paying the portress to clean his room and buy the bread and eggs for his breakfasts. He pays her, for these services above doorkeeping, thirty-six francs a year, which is six francs more than his rent. His food costs ten times that--one franc a day, three hundred sixty-five a year, eating very frugally but adequately. (He was also spending one hundred francs a year on his outer clothes, fifty francs on underwear, and fifty on laundry, for an exceedingly inadequate wardrobe which did not really allow him to maintain a respectable appearance.)

(Note that laundry is outsourced; no one in a city at almost any income level did their own laundry. Mrs. Beeton--English and half a century later, but applicable--said that in most middle-class households sending out the laundry and hiring another servant to make it possible to do at home cost about the same, and that of the two, sending it out was by far the easiest; she only recommended trying to do laundry at home for large country estates that had less soot to deal with, more space for drying, a long distance from the nearest town, and a large enough household to make it worthwhile.)

AT ANY RATE. tl;dr:

1.) Everyone except the very poorest and people who were servants themselves had servants until very recently. (And the servants did have servants sometimes--in a very large estate, part of the job of the stillroom maid was to wait on the housekeeper, cook, and butler.)

2.) Even the very poorest of the poor still had porters and doorkeepers, if they were renters in a multi-family building, because the building itself could not function without them. The porter or doorkeeper was the single absolutely most essential piece of domestic labor, full stop.

The room was quiet, which was very rare for Casey. If not loud music, then maybe the occasional practicing of trash talking for hockey games or both. But tonight it was quiet aside from the running water coming from the connected bathroom.

Well, that and Mikey telling his story.

And even after he finished talking, the silence stood, an awkward air between them. Casey had so many thoughts going through his head that for once he had no words.

So for quite a few minutes after Mikey's tale, it was quiet. It might've even been over an hour, he wasn't sure as he simply focused on washing his hands and arms.

He could hear that Mikey had gotten up from his bed and was now walking around his room, he wasn't nervous about that, he already spilled all his secrets anyway. The human didn't realize how tense he was until he looked in the mirror and saw how scrunched up his shoulders were. Casey almost jumped out of his skin as he caught a reflection of ice in the mirror as Mikey glanced at him.

He didn't think Mikey's eyes could get any colder.

Somewhere in the back of his mind he remembers someone saying that ice can get so cold that it burns. That's what it was, Mikey's eyes had gotten so cold that he could feel them start to burn.

"Don't scrub your skin off." Casey actually jumps this time, water splashing onto him and the mirror, Mikey's reflection distorting through the water droplets.

"Shit Mike... Scared the shit out of me." He chuckled nervously, turning off the water and taking a nearby towel to dry off, he looks down at the towel and idly thinks that he's glad it's not white.

"My apologies." Casey isn't looking at him, but he can practically feel the cold radiating off of the turtle as he steps closer. "But I seem to remember you mentioning that you like to be scared."

Casey felt shivers like claws raking down his back, "Y-Yeah I guess..." Once again, the silence returns, the human's hands have been dry for a bit but he keeps a hold of it, eyes not leaving the bundle of cloth. The cold drifts away as Mikey goes back into Casey's room, his footsteps audibly portraying his wandering, he had been silent up until that point, seems he wanted Casey to be aware of his presence now.

Casey sighs, deciding to splash some cold water on his face. "Stop freaking out..." he mutters as softly as possible to himself in the mirror, glancing back at the cracked door to make sure Mikey didn't hear. Though from the pause in his footsteps, he may have anyway.

Whatever, take a deep breath Casey Jones, you're not in danger.

He once again directed his gaze to his own reflection in the mirror... Maybe he should change.

As though reading his mind, Mikey suddenly appeared at his door, holding some of Casey's clothes "Here. Thought you'd want to get changed."

"Oh, thanks..." He took the clothes, Mikey turning to go back to sit on his bed, monotone, numb, apathetic, nothing new. This was Mikey, it's always been Mikey.

"So," Casey slowly started, looking over as Mikey's head perked up over to him, his blood was already frozen at this point with how often Mikey stared at him, the ice was starting to burn. "What does rat taste like?"

Mikey tilted his head like a confused dog, before pausing as he thought. "Do you remember how they smell?"

Casey shuddered as the same memory flashed to his mind as he nodded.

"Kind of like that. They can be chewy and stringy, I avoid the fat ones, fat never has a good texture raw." The turtle stated simply, matter of fact. "It's been a while since I actually had rats."

"Right... How often do you get... uh, hungry?" Casey fumbled his words a bit.

Mikey stared at Casey, he was forgetting to blink again. "Do you want the truth?"

They let the question linger, Casey chewing on his lip. Morbid curiosity. "Yeah, the truth."

"I'm always hungry." Suddenly Casey realized that at times that piercing cold, was a hungry gaze. "But I can keep it at bay, I eat once a week to avoid it from getting worse."

Casey was the one staring now "How many?"

"Depends on the day. Sometimes I can't risk getting out without being noticed or caught by my family so I postpone it. Thus I eat more the resulting night."

Missing persons posters, there had been more of them recently. Casey thought it was because of the Kraang or people getting mutated and having to retreat into the shadows.

Casey kept staring at Mikey, taking in his answer, his instincts going haywire, screaming at him that Mikey was dangerous.

"I'm gonna... get changed..." He slowly said as he retreated into the bathroom and closed the door, alone with his thoughts.

What did Casey know? First, Mikey never lied to him, he kept things hidden, slowly streaming out info to Casey, but he was honest about it every time he did it. There was clearly a lot that Mikey had kept to himself for years, so the least Casey could do was be patient. Though to be very fair, he never fully expected anything like this. Who would? Second, this wasn't something new. The only difference is that he knew now, but Mikey had always been like this.

His fight or flight had been activated many times just from being around the true Mikey, his gut always warning him. Hell, he knew Mikey was kinda fucked up. The second that the turtle allowed him to see the strings, how he plays with his brothers like it's a game. Even now, looking in the mirror, he could see the strings around his own wrists and neck. An unspoken threat, if he tried to tell anyone about who Mikey really was, he'd be fucked. The only thing he'd accomplish with that would be seeing Mikey truly pissed.

Holy shit.

Mikey wasn't pissed. Everything he saw, but Mikey hadn't been angry, not even a little upset. As he realized this, he looked at the clothes he had been wearing, now a pile of the floor, stains of red still vaguely seen. His gaze then went to his sink and he realized that it was going to need some cleaning as well, he hoped the red didn't stain too much. He could always pass it off as him tending to his own hockey caused wounds if anything. It's the same excuse he used when he ended up banged up from being out on the streets...

He sounds like Mikey.

This might've been fucking with his head a bit.

Okay, a lot.

He took another deep breath as he slipped on new clothes, calming down his heart, the adrenaline still in his system. At this point Mikey was just a constant source of adrenaline for Casey.

Maybe that's why he found it almost intoxicating to be around the turtle. Maybe it's why he missed the cold truth of Mikey whenever it was hidden behind false warmth and large dramatic smiles. It felt so fake whenever they hung around Mikey's family, a performance. Mikey had been giving him tips and helping him out, building a mask for Casey.

Really thinking about it, Mikey didn't have to go through any of this. He didn't have to explain so much to him, didn't have to help him, he revealed the strings most likely as just insurance, a just in case.

Plus, considering what he just saw, if Mikey wanted him dead, he would be.

It was almost sweet in a way...

Yeah, Casey's fucked up, but he's always known this so why act surprised now?

"So," Casey opened the bathroom door, clearly no longer as nervous as he casually leans against the door frame, "what do humans taste like?" his relaxed posture conveyed more curiosity than fear, something almost seemed to spark in those ice cold eyes.

"Like chicken. That's a joke." Casey actually laughed at that as he tossed his clothes with the rest of his dirty laundry. "You'll want to use hydrogen peroxide."

"Hydrogen peroxide." Casey said at the same time as Mikey as he nodded and sat next to the turtle, laying down on his bed.

He saw Mikey's head tilt out of the corner of his eye, "You know?"

"I'm trans, dude."

It took Mikey a second "Ah, right." Casey could feel the turtle's eyes as they scanned him, it caused another shiver. "You're... much calmer..."

Casey shrugged "I mean, if you wanted me dead you would've done it by now... and like, you only eat people cuz you gotta. You're still the same Mike, I just learn more about you but you ain't changing..." His gaze went from the ceiling to the turtle just in time to see said mutant practically jump on top of him, those ice cold eyes inches from his face. This close, Casey could see some of the blood still staining the edges of the scales around Mikey's mouth.

"You're not afraid..."

That familiar adrenaline quickly caused his heart to beat in his ears, "I ain't gonna lie Mike..." he spoke barely above a whisper, "You scare the shit out of me..."

"And yet... you don't run, don't stop coming to our talks, and you haven't tried telling my brothers a thing, listening to every tip and suggestion I say..." Casey feels the turtle's fingers tracing a line across his neck, "I've shown you the strings I have tied around everyone around me, even you... and yet you obediently follow the tugs of said strings..."

Casey didn't flinch, just looking into those eyes, now welcoming the freezing burn. "Yup."

This close, he saw those icy blue eyes widen a bit before a smile crawled onto Mikey's face, wider than his usual small genuine smiles, showing off sharpened canines that Casey knew the other turtles didn't have. The smile almost seemed manic "You... get better everyday Casey Jones...~"

Yeah, Casey was scared shitless, and he loved every second of it.

Meanwhile, one thought echoed in the turtle's head:

@daboyau

@theawesomeninja-xd

@nights-flying-fox

@phoebepheebsphibs