I’ve been that 26-year old barista. I’m still there. When the pandemic hit, I had to quit college to take on a retail job and work as a full-time caregiver to a disabled family member. Fortunately, I’m no longer juggling two underpaid jobs (just one) but I still have student debt to pay and no degree to show for it.

I have a way better work-life balance now than I did when I was in high school struggling to juggle several AP classes, multiple clubs, and too many hours of homework with an ADHD brain. The only time in my adult life I’ve surpassed the levels of burnout I had as a teen was during the pandemic, when I was thrust into a full-time caregiver position for a disabled relative at the same time as I was working a minimum wage retail job while also trying to complete online college courses. The one lesson I learned from my teen years was that no, I couldn’t do it all, and I was going to go banana bonkers trying.

Despite all the effort I’ve put into schooling over the years, both as an adult and as a teen, I still don’t have a college degree because it wasn’t reasonable to keep up with that on top of my other obligations.

For the first half of high school, it was biology, because my teacher was kind of terrible and therefore the subject was unapproachable. For the second half, it was English, because even though I was a strong reader and writer, writing essays every couple weeks about bullshit details like the color of someone’s dress burned me out so quickly and completely turned me off from something that I used to love doing as a hobby.

History was terrible the whole time though. I’m not good at remembering names and dates and numbers and how many people were killed in which battle of the civil war. I managed to get good grades with medication but it was all a fever dream and there’s no way in hell I’d be able to replicate that kind of temporary academic competence now.

One go through lasts a solid 30-40 mins, and there’s like 15 paths (if not more) to explore. No story spoilers, but there’s additional content you can unlock after every group of 4-5 routes. It makes more sense if you actually play it but for me, the playtime was well worth the price.

I grew up in Catholic schools and going to Catholic Church. Yes, this was me 😂 seriously, the whole “idk why everybody’s making such a deal about sexual sin it’s so easy” was my entire teenage experience.

Also, it’s not like the Starcruiser was closed down because of Jenny’s video. The opposite happened. She started filming and researching everything, and had to re-work it because it closed down so quickly.

I do think it’s an “important piece of work in the immersive field”, in that there’s a lot of lessons to be learned in its failure as an overpriced LARP experience peddled forth by one of the most money-hungry media conglomerates in the world. There are lessons that can and should be learned about the Starcruiser failures if Disney is ever going to foray into similar experiences, but that’s not to say that Starcruiser is therefore worthy of being protected from criticism.

Incidentally, this is exactly one of the main points that Jenny makes in her video.

I feel like Lapin also belongs in this lineup, for reasons I can’t explain but believe strongly in my heart.

You fall into the Lot when you can’t remember where you parked and start wandering around, only to turn around and realize that the parking lot you’re standing in is stretching in all directions, ad infinitum, and there is no hope of finding your car or any way out.

I was really invested in Adaine and Aelwyn’s arc through Sophomore Year, so the Dangerous Mind of Aelwyn Abernant is gonna be my rec, but My Green Heaven is also so good. I found it easier to listen to it as a podcast, especially for the last few episodes. To me, the story was worth dealing with some of the technical issues, and it was definitely easier for me to get invested once they left Leviathan.

And he’s left his poor wife to care for his aging father and the kid too. She deserves better.

God tier comfort food. I was turned off of it for a while, mostly because back in college, I had a severe depression breakdown and spent an entire night eating an uncooked microwave Mac and cheese meal (do not recommend, macaroni is not meant to be eaten al dente with raw cheese powder). I recently decided to go back to it and I fell back in love.

Longtime Haley fan here. I love my rude wife 💖

Just Good Enough Lawyer, now with 25% more gay tension (compared to the next leading brand)

I was gonna say this! Didn’t know it was a city too 😂

I was gonna say they look like they’re going in for a hug!

I just wanted a vampire/frankenstein-ish mad scientist AU where my OTP gets together in a gothic mansion and gets up to some weird fun vampire sex. I didn’t mean to create a whole ass magic system, a religion, TWO dangerous cults with opposing goals and viewpoints and their respective deities, and a huge conspiracy network of liars, murderers, and religious zealots. Oops.

A next gen fic featuring one of my Entrapdak child OC’s as an adult who’s doing community service for her crimes by going on volunteer space missions, with chaotic consequences. With the number of WIP’s I’m currently juggling I don’t think it’ll ever see the light of day, but theoretically it’d be a fun sci-fi space comedy featuring family drama, surprise space pets, a lesbian love triangle, aiding with anti-authoritarian alien revolutions and blowing up lots of stuff.

I’ve had someone say “this is probably the most messed up thing I’ve seen in the fandom” and I considered it a compliment.

I’m feeling this now and I’m only about 1/3 the way through my longfic 😭 it’s like one of those fake backdrops that looks real and detailed from an audience perspective, but from the side view you can tell its all just plywood and cheap hardware that I’m fixing as I go along. I’ve set up a lot of stuff and mystery and now I have to build it up and pay it off.

I do, but that’s partly because reading the stuff I’ve already written helps me hype myself up to keep going, and also because with my longer WIPs I need to keep my plot threads straight.

I download my fics off AO3 as e-books and go through them in my Apple Books app (I don’t just do this for my own fics, but for other longer fics that I enjoy reading too) the e-book format is more easily digestible for my ADHD brain and the highlighting feature helps me remember details that I want to callback or payoff in following chapters (I have 60k+ words on my longfic to keep track of, lol). Each new chapter or oneshot I write is a separate document on my computer so using the e-book app is the best way I’ve found for myself to keep track of my own continuity.

I’m willing to overlook the sins of stale dialogue and an underdone plot, but if you don’t know how to use paragraph breaks or punctuation between sentences, that wall of text is going to be unreadable. Stale dialogue is fine as long as it has proper punctuation and formatting.

I’ll say this: the first thing you write for a pairing won’t be perfect, and that’s cool (if it is, then you’re a god among AO3) It’s fine if it’s just a drabble or something simple. I started writing for my OTP with a (still incomplete) songfic, followed up with another fic that’s just seven chapters of loosely connected drabbles. That gave me a feel for writing the characters and figuring out what stories I wanted to tell with them, and now I’m juggling a couple of ongoing WIP’s and AU’s that I’m really excited about.

Idk if that’s helpful but it just took me a few ficlet exercises to get the hang of writing again for these new (to me) characters.

Lmao I’m guilty of “tab A into slot B” but I disguise it by surrounding it with feelings and banter. I’m an impatient bitch and I’ll take shortcuts with the body mechanics, but that’s just cuz I want to skip to the cozy aftercare.

In my corner of my preferred fandom, there’s some very talented writers who are all very skilled at writing smut that my asexual ass takes cues from. I read a lot of smut ranging from intense and heartfelt to dramatic and angsty to cracky and cringy before I tried writing it, and even though I’m not by any means an expert on reading or writing smut, that’s basically how I learned.

I usually write the flirty banter and aftercare first because it’s easier for me to get through the nitty gritty if I know what’s leading up to it and what ending I’m writing toward. I tend to get kind of impatient when I’m writing the actual body mechanics, doing dialogue and expressing feelings and emotion are more my strengths so that’s what I tend to lean on even in explicit scenes.

But they’re allowed to just be messy and horny too! I’m trying to get better at turning my brain off and letting my characters bang like a couple of wild rabbits. Do I cringe at myself? Yes. Is it fun to read back when I’m editing? Heck yeah, and that’s the important part. I have a couple of smut chapters planned for an ongoing AU that I’m very attached too and it’s going to be so fun for me to write those horny lil bastards.