Under a Clear Sky, In a World Untarnished,

You may need to learn how to set up your paints and such… but this is what people did, live, while the show aired. That’s what the show was for. I had family members create lovely works of art they enjoyed, which I still have on my walls, because William Alexander and Bob Ross both said:

SCREW METICULOUS CLASSICAL ART PRACTICES — JUST GRAB A PALETTE KNIFE AND BIG OLD BRUSH AND PAINT!

They freed a whole generation of people who were taught to paint detail and realism and exact representation of reality — people who largely gave up this kind of thing because it got tedious.

I watched the joy of family members as they rediscovered art as a messy fun spontaneous half hour activity.

been getting people asking me to draw stuff so i am opening my ko-fi for sketch requests! send me $10 and a character, ship, or meme redraw (no scenario requests please, but thesis statements are welcome)

i mostly do top gun/hbowar/sas rogue heroes but i WILL take requests for other things if i enjoy them! please ask or search my blog first if you are unsure, tysm! i like to draw things i like!

someone texted the shop phone lmao, assumably to chat up one of our lady artists, and u know, i spend a lot of time around cishet men and yet it's always so utterly fascinating to directly interact with THIS type of cishet man

my favorite parts:

- the initial attempt to save face by acting like "Whatchya cookin'" was not a simple answer and i somehow was unnecessarily rude in my response, hence warranting hostility

- perfect???

- the pointless recontexualization of the peace symbol emoji??? because the way he originally meant it was apparently flirtatious so he had to make sure that it now meant something different and NOT gay ! !!!!

- the absolute brain blast of simple vs single, hell of a save my guy

- bold of you to assume I have a girlfriend

- "i don't take getting fucked with easy " is some shit you'd hear from the antagonist of the first episode of a shounen anime, the big guy that they set the mc against before getting thrashed to show how strong the mc is

- this reads like a 15 yr old looking up how to sound intimidating but i really hope this is like, a 30yr old guy who went, "how do i show this guy i'm very tough and heterosexual, what do tough heterosexual guys have, uhhhhh GUNS and uhhh OH CARS! nice

It doesn't even cross Kip's mind that hate crimes exist when he asks Scott what's the worse that could happen, because that's not a consequence possible in regency romance. A demand to choose a partner over hockey polite society happens all the time in regency romances. The privileged partner not understanding the dark side of hockey classism, check. A partner caving to the societal expectation of his station and staying the closet is framed as an act of selfish cowardice that he needs to overcome to be worthy of love.

And usually in regency romances, like Pride & Prejudice, the solution to this barrier is for the couple to just choose each other and declare their love and it all works out (due to the man's extreme privilege shielding his wife, which doesn't map to homophobia) or for the couple to happily leave the nasty gossip-mill of polite society (Montreal) to more comfortable country social circles (uber-supportive Ottawa). This could be why the Russian issue is waved away, because regency stories usually end with the couple either winning over dynastic acceptance or with them in a more powerful position than their disapproving relatives. Neither of which can be applied to this situation, so there is no roadmap for Reid to continue the issue.

This could explain why Reid feels that coming out publicly is imperative to a happy ending. If homophobia is positioned by the writer as the modern take on romance novel classism, then remaining in the closet--in any capacity--functions as an adherence to social hierarchy, which the regency genre demands their love interest grapple with and reject.

I work in tech, and much of what I do is support sales reps within the company by resolving errors with the software they use.

There is one sales rep who, every single time I send her a message or email with extremely specific instructions that will resolve her issue, does something completely different from what I tell her. Every time. Without fail. It is so glaringly obvious that she has never read even a single word that I have written to her.

So one day, she sends me a message that says little more than "(software) is broken, help"

So I do my standard song and dance of asking her what she's trying to accomplish, and what specifically is stopping her from doing that. And eventually, after much unnecessary back and forth, she tells me there's an error message. I ask her to send me a screenshot of the error message. She does.

The error message basically says, "these two required fields are blank. To resolve this, please fill in these two specific fields, and then click save."

So I take a few deep breaths.

Then I lie to her.

I message her back, saying "hey yeah, for some reason it's not loading that screenshot on my end. Could you type out the full text of the error message for me?"

She does.

I ask her if she still needs help.

Client is reporting that Some Thing Program doesn't work. I ask if there's an error message with further information about what's not working. Client says "no". I go over and ask Client to open Some Thing. Client double-clicks on the icon for Some Thing, it starts to boot, an error message dialog flashes up on screen, Client closes error message before I can read it, Thing closes after the error.

"What did that error message say?" I ask.

"What error message?" asks Client.

I tell Client to open the Some Thing again and then not click anything else. Client opens Some Thing, error message appears, Client clicks it away again.

I tell Client to stand up, step away, and give me physical control of the computer. I open Some Thing, start looking at the error message without closing it, and Client says "You should close that." I tell Client that I am reading the error message. Client is apparently accustomed to treating error messages as a kind of spam email that should be deleted as fast as possible, and gets agitated that I'm reading it.

I read the error message. It tells me what the problem is. I fix the problem. Some Thing works now.

---

Later, I start thinking about how such an error message might perhaps be engineered to be more attention-grabbing and close-resistant as a way of making people read it. It's not important for some random program here, but there are more important systems (medical, etc) where it would be reasonable to demand the user's attention because people's lives depend on paying attention to the error message.

She was a computer programmer / analyst, a... Long Time Ago. Called in for a system she'd installed before, the office folk said they kept having problems where it Didn't Work Right (no error, a malfunction)

She investigated, and told them that could only happen if they did 3 specific things in a specific order, which they should not ever do.

So, she asked, did they ever do that?

No! Of course not, was the answer.

So she made a couple of small changes, packed up and said that should be fine, but they should call her if there were problems.

The next week

She had a call saying "We're getting a strange error message on the system, can you help?"

She said, of course, can they tell her the error?

And the message was:

Rocky hums. “Close. Skip first note.”

“Why? You always include that.”

“This means… of Rocky, possessive. Of the speaker.”

“My.”

“Correct. But only for names.”

“So you’re calling me…?”

Rocky repeats the word: “My Grace. Yes.”