jupitermelichios

[jupitermelichios]

Man, you know when you revisit some bit of media you liked when you were younger and you remember how much you used to ship something?

I’ve been buying the ‘perfect editions’ of 20th Century Boys as they come out, and I’d totally forgotten how much I shipped Otcho and Kenji. And according the AO3 I’m the only person in the world who does but man, I really just wanted those two to be happy together at the end of the story because they’ve got like 30 years of mutually unrequited pining to make up for.

[jupitermelichios]

a really underrated feature of bg3 i don't see enough people talk about is that it's the only game i've ever played that lets you fully play a gender-fluid character.

as long as you're playing custom character or durge, rather than one of the pre-made origin characters who have their own gender identity independant of the player's preferences, then at any point after the tutorial, you can use the magic mirror in your camp to change your appearance, or your gender identity. (and these are completely sepperate options, i'm obsessed with the fact that identity, overall body shape, voice, and genitals are 4 sepperate options which can be mixed and matched)

changing your gender identity doesn't change anything except how characters adress you, the game never gender-locks anything, which means you can just change it at any point, and your adventure continues on as normal except all the npcs and companions will address you according to your newly chosen gender. also there are 3 gender options, male female or non-binary, and the enby-ness is handled really well. the couple of moments i thought felt a bit odd, i've since played with other genders, and discovered no, it's not the writers being odd, it's a deliberate characterisation choice. Volo calls everyone 'my good fellow' regardless of gender. he's not being transphobic, he's just Like That (TM).

i've played games that let me be enby before, and i've played games that sepperated out appearance and identity, but never one where you could just decide at any point you want to be adressed differently without needing to roll up a new character, and I love it so much.

[jupitermelichios]

Timeloop polycyle portal...

Oh gods, I'm getting isekai'd aren't i

Somewhere out there, truck-kun is hunting for me even as I type this

Dammit, I knew dying my hair blue would consequences, but I thought I'd aged out of the main character danger zone!

The first three words you see will manifest in 2025.

[jupitermelichios]

I started adding this to the tags, but apparently tumblr doesn't want people writing novels in the tags because they're cowards

as it stands in the show, i don't ship them, because i think edrissa deserves better than mal is currently capable of giving her, or anyone. (I do want them to be best friends and go to medical museums on the weekends and eat lunch together in the morgue so they can talk about corpses without the others complaining, though)

however.

it's ten years later. martin is dead. mal has taken a break from the police to work in academia, teaching students and writing papers. he's calmer. he's stable. the nightmares aren't gone, but they're better than they've ever been, and he eats multiple meals without needing to be reminded almost every day.

edrissa is still working in the morgue. she had a serious relationship for a few years, but in the end they grew apart and called in quits, and she's been single for a couple of years.

they haven't seen one another in almost a decade, but gil is finally retiring for good, and they bump into one another at the party. they mean to just catch up, but once they get talking they find they have so much to say. it's not like old times - it's better. edrissa is more confident. mal is calmer, and has a life that isn't just work and his father's legacy. and there's this spark not that wasn't there before, and next thing they know the party is ending and they haven't talked to anyone else all evening

they exchange numbers, but edrissa doesn't know if she should call. maybe she's too old for him? her hair is more silver than black now, and she likes how it looks, but mal has barely aged. if anything, he looks younger without the weight of his father to carry. the age difference between them is the same as its always been, but she convinces herself it feels larger

but she also knows that if she doesn't try, she'll always regret it. even though mal's interest in her back then was as a friend rather than a romantic possibility, she's always thought of him as her 'one that got away'.

and she also knows malcolm bright is never going to be the one to make the first move

however has hasn't counted on mal being a lot more emotionally mature than he wasn't when she first met him, and she's especially not counting on the fact that Dani and Gil saw them together and immediately decided to play matchmaker, or that Gil would get Jessica in on it

so before she's managed to psych herself up to make the first move, mal calls. tells her he knows they're old friends, but he'd always have regretted it if he didn't try, and would she like to get dinner?

she's so shocked she almost forgets to say yes, just sits there silently until mal starts to apologise, but they get there, and she accepts.

the experiment proves replicable. the spark is still there on the first date, the second, the third. they don't run out of things to talk about. the sex, when they eventually get to it, is great

it's not always easy. mal's healthier than he's ever been, but there are some wounds that are never going to entirely heal, some scars that won't fade. And edrissa's got scars of her own, along with a stubborn streak a mile wide

but they work at it. they compromise. they figure out which issues can be overcome with time and patience and which are best left alone. they don't move in together - edrissa has spent a lifetime currating a very specific space, and mal needs somewhere he can retreat to on his bad days. they've both got tempers and deep insecurities and a tendency to get absorbed in their work and vanish for days at a time, but they figure out ways to live with all of them.

their lives grow together, like intertwining vines. they grow together.

and they're happy.

Don’t die. - I won’t. I promise.

Malcolm and Edrisa, for @actuallylukedanes ♡

[jupitermelichios]

17 year old cousin spent the entire 2 hour drive back to Brum from visiting family arguing why she should date a boy from college (originally she asked our opinion, we all told her he sounds awful, this turned out to not the answer she was hoping for lmao) and recounting all the drama there's already been even though he hasn't even asked her out yet, and idk if it's just teenagers being dramatic or just her bombastic storytelling style, or if there really is some 5D chess shit going on in their relationship, but she made trying to work out if this guy actually likes her or is just stringing her along sound like death note level mindgames.

(this for a guy who's biggest selling points are 'he showers, he likes ed sheeran, and he doesn't eat fish'. he is also, i have been informed by her and all her sisters, extremely mid looking, and takes pure mathematics. for reasons I'm unsure of this last appears to be more of a sticking point than the fact that he may just be playing with her emotions.)

i'm now a) extremely disapointed that i won't get an update on this drama for months, since they live quite a distance away and we only see them a few times a year, and b) repeatedly reminding myself that there is no level of abstraction that makes basing a fic on my teenage cousin's romatic life acceptable behaviour. no matter how great the concept of death note style drama and mindgames but the stakes are just that a guy you don't even like that much might not be that into you.

[jupitermelichios]

@wajjs

Alarm cock is this anything

[jupitermelichios]

Happy Hannukah to everyone who's celebrating!

[jupitermelichios]

I got a lovely comment on a fic of mine the other day, but it ended with the reader asking if I'd ever write more for that ship. They'd commented on fic one in a six fic series, and looking at my kudos emails, I don't think they found the rest of it!

Also extra bonus of clicking through, some authors (me included) use public bookmarks to write recs. Chances are if you like my writing, you'll probably like a lot of the same fics as me. I have 205 fics and 892 public bookmarks, and nowhere close to the most prolific writer or bookmarker. That's so much fic to discover! Some of my time faves I've found by checking the bookmarks of fave authors. Some of my fave random I've entered by taking a risk on a fic for a fandom im not yet in because I love the author. You'll have such a good time I promise!

I am incredibly serious right now when I beg you all, please, and if you have Twitter or Tiktok or whatever to please spread the word: click on an author's profile on Ao3.

You want to know if an author has written more? Want to know if they're still writing? Want to see more from them? Want to know if they've written a trope or kink or sex scenario you enjoy?

Click on their name. And look at their profile.

I cannot tell you how many times in the last six months someone has read a new or newer fic of mine and said they (a new reader who has read nothing else I've done) "can't wait to see what you do next!" I've written 50+ fics and over a million words already.

"I don't know if you're still writing..." click on my profile. I am. I literally wrote a 128k+ fic for that ship last month.

"Would you ever do X?" "Please do Y!" I already did. Click on my name and look at my works.

Archive of our Own is a library. It's an archive. Not social media. It is your responsibility to fight back against the laziness that corporate algorithms have trained into you.

Click my author name. Just click it. Just click it.

Before you demand more, or ask if a writer will do XYZ, or wonder if the author still writing, or anything - click on their profile. Click on the author's profile.

I'm not trying to be mean or condescending or anything like that. I'm just exhausted. It's disheartening and frustrating to repeat myself ad nauseam, because someone couldn't take thirty seconds to do the tiniest bit of work to see if I've written lately, if I've written more for their ship, or scan my works to see if I've written what they're asking for. Please. Please. I'm begging.

Click the author's name, and explore before you ask.

[jupitermelichios]

Part 1 is arguably a version of the sethian heresy, and was propsed by various gnostic sects (see the gospel of judas), but afaik no one yet has a name for the hersy of shipping Jesus and Judas.

Based on the naming scheme of existing heresies, and op's username, I propose either pondism or matthaeism

Alternately, heresyshipping

They say judas is in hell because he betrayed jesus but thats actualy a misconception, that was gods plan and so he didnt do anything wrong. Judas however IS in hell because god thinks he made his son gay

[jupitermelichios]

I hope those who celebrates has a lovely Christmas, those who don't aren't too inconvinienced, and everyone who's working gets time and a half 😊

[jupitermelichios]

so much of the experience of being a person who enjoys reading bdsm fic written by adults who know what they're talking about and aren't ashamed to get a bit weird with it is just opening AO3, desperately hunting for anything in your fandom de jour as good as what the stucky writers will give you, and most of the time, failing to find it and resigning yourself to spending yet another evening in the MCU trenches

[jupitermelichios]

So I decided to play around with letting Astarion go full mad with power supervillain as research for a fic and uh...

This legit might be the single horniest animation in one of the horniest games of the last decade, and yes i am including the bear-fucking in that

[jupitermelichios]

the cool and fun thing about having a tumblr is that i have somewhere to go when i want to dunk on noted papier mache ghost enthusiast helena blavatsky and my partner is asleep and the joke isn't funny enough to be worth waking him up for

the downside is that i was halfway through editting a video and i only meant to make that one post and leave but now it's been two hours 😔

[jupitermelichios]

(spoilers for the ending of assassins creed 1, and i guess technically the whole franchise)

Her name was Helena Petrovna Hahn von Rottenstern, aka Madame Helena Blavatsky, and she's one of the most influential people of the 19th century, and for some reason we don't talk about her

in response to being married at 17 to a man 40 years older than her, she ran away and travelled around for a bit (we do not know where, because she lied about literally everything all the time and 99% of the things she said about her own life were probably bollocks - we only know for certain when and where she was born because her mother was a reasonably well-known writer and her life was therefore documented by people who weren't compulsive liars!). She claims these travels included going to tibet - as it was a closed country at the time which did not allow foreigners to visit, this is probably bollocks, but who knows

eventually she washed up in america in the 1870s with minimal money and a hundred-a-day smoking habit to fund, so she immediately starts running the popular scam at the time of pretending to be nobility in hiding so people will let you stay with them for free (she was from a noble family, but a pretty minor and unexciting one). While doing this, she encounters spiritualism, and claims to be an immediate convert. Actually, she's just spotted a good grift.

she works as a medium for a few years, conning people in a very mundane and kind of sad way, and then has the genius idea that actually the best way to make money from this would be to start a religion, so she does.

it was called theosophy, and it was mostly based on the Edward Bulwar-Lytton novel fantasy novel Zanoni, which she was very familiar with because her mother did the russian translation for it, with a big dose of spiritualism and orientalism on top, and its big innovation in the cult and spirituality space was the "secret masters"

see actually madame blavatsky wasn't a fake medium, she was the student of an immortal enlightened being from tibet (because being a closed country meant it was cool and mysterious and also you can't prove it's not full of immortal wizards) called koot hoomi, who was part of an order of ancient beings who had been guiding humanity from the shadows for centuries. (in some accounts they specifically lived inside the earth which was hollow, but i can't remember if she introduced that or one of her followers later on. probably once tibet opened its borders and everyone realised it was just a normal country full of normal humans)

for the low low price of massive donations to her cult, and also maybe moving to india to live in their compound, you too could become a student of the secret masters and learn the wisdom of the ancients!

my favourite thing about this grift is that she had a papier mache koot hoomi head which would get pulled up on a wire during seances to convince people he was a) real, and b) physically mannifesting in their house.

(she also convinced her followers she could teleport, and to do this she'd pay their servants to drop cigarette buts and ash in their houses and then tell them they were from her cigarette when she teleported in earlier. no really, she was here, she left just before you got in. the 'i have a girlfriend she just goes to a different school' of fake magic powers)

my least favourite thing about the grift is that a group of her followers calling themselves the order of the star in the east became convinced that the son of one of the compounds gardeners in india was actually the messiah so they basically purchased this kid off his dad and raised him in the cult to be the messiah, and she was cool with this. (he ended up shockingly well adjusted, basically did a press conference when he turned 20 where he publically announced that he was definitely not the messiah, and moved away to the country to live a pretty normal life)

the big long term effect of theosophy is a) every modern cult that isn't just 'existing mainstream religion but real extreme' is just theosophy in a funny hat, and b) the idea of this super intelligent powerful ancient race that taught humanity everything they know and you too can gain their knowledge for the low low price of loosing all your friends as you fall down a conspiracy rabbit hole caught on in a massive way.

this leads to a whole of lot very bad nazi and nazi-adjacent beliefs (the nazi spin is that the aryan race were the secret masters and all blonde people are their direct descendants). then in the 50s you get roswell and the alien sighting craze, and suddenly everyone's asking 'but what if the secret masters were aliens'

that gets us to another horribly influential terrible person, Erich von Däniken, who publishes Chariots of the Gods in 1968 about how ancient brown people were too stupid to do anything and actually everything cool they did was done by aliens who visited them (and probably looked like white people - not all ancient astronaut belief systems are racist, but like 99% are)

this book became massively popular and pushed the secret masters idea fully mainstream, and you started getting a whole lot of pop culture stuff based on it (so much of marvel comics. so much. jack kirby fucking loved that stupid book. the Eternals are literally just chariots of the gods fanfic)

from there, it's a straight step to Assassins Creed, a game about how the bible and also greek mythology is actually just describing a race of super-advanced immortal aliens who have guided humanity and gave them technology etc etc (if you did not know that's what those games were about and instead thought they were about being a cool assassin doing stealth missions, sorry for the spoilers. this tumblr post is allowing you to experience first hand how fucking jarring the final act reveal of that game was without needing to spend $20 and 30 hours playing it - a bargain!)

and then michael fassbender made one of the worst decisions of his whole career, and now I have to get jumpscared by a 19th century conwoman and her stupid papier mache ghost when i'm just trying to learn about d&d mechanics, lmao

tl;dr - conartist creates a cult around the idea of secret immortal beings guiding humanity, second different conartist goes 'yes but what if they were aliens and also racist', this idea goes on to be central to way too many marvel comics and also the assassins creed franchise

i was watching a video about d&d and the creator said he thought it would be cool to have a setting where elves are a lost race of powerful ancients rather than a current-day player race, so now i'm thinking about how much of modern pop culture wouldn't exist without one specific 19th century conartist again

(also cults. so many cults. minimum 50% of modern cult belief systems wouldn't exist without her)

[jupitermelichios]

i was watching a video about d&d and the creator said he thought it would be cool to have a setting where elves are a lost race of powerful ancients rather than a current-day player race, so now i'm thinking about how much of modern pop culture wouldn't exist without one specific 19th century conartist again

(also cults. so many cults. minimum 50% of modern cult belief systems wouldn't exist without her)

[jupitermelichios]

i was accidentally a pretty funny red flag for my brother's gf - me and my partner, and my mum and her 3 dogs, managed to independantly crash the same date

it was their first date

it wasn't even at home or anything - my partner and i got to my mums house for a family dinner and no one was there so thought maybe they'd gone to the pub down the road and went to join them, saw brother and a woman, but he's got a lot of female friends and he didn't want to just tell us to fuck off when he was trying to make a good impression, so we didn't realise until after we'd bought drinks and sat down at their table that it was a date. i thought it would be weirder if i drew attention to it so just tried to finish the drink super quick and leave, but at that point my mum got home from walking the dogs, found there was no one there, and thought we'd probably gone to the pub, and since it allows dogs in the garden and it was a nice day, brought all three with her. then also didn't realise what was going on until after she'd bought a drink and sat down 😭 (he did tell us to fuck off soon after, but he waited until his date went to the bathroom 😂)

any other woman would have been like 'this guys family are insane stalkers imma dip' but it turns out the reason they were at the pub next to my mums house was because they'd tried to go somewhere further away... only for her dad and brother to turn up with no idea she was there on a date and join their table!

my poor brother was mortified at the time, understandably, and i still feel so bad about it, but theyve been together four years now so it didn't do any actual harm! (i guess there's something to be said for just speedrunning the 'meet the family' so you don't have to worry about when the right time to do it is 😂)

okay unrelated but what was the funniest red flag in ur worst relationship

[jupitermelichios]

even if this was going into production to be sold, when's the last time you saw a Ferrari FXX on the road? An Aston Martin Valkyrie? How about a Lambourghini Essenza? A Bugatti Bolide?

Trick question: the answer is never. They're all commerically available sports cars, and none of them are road-legal.

The most expensive designer cars these days mostly aren't. (and BMW, who made the concept car we're talking about, were one of the first companies to start this trend, so we know they follow it). The majority of them are track only (meaning you can drive them on properly inspected and liscenced racetracks, but not the road), but in the case of the Ferarri XX cars, you can't even take them on racetracks, you can drive them on your own property or on Ferrarri's property only.

we might, in 30 years time, be seeing cars based on this design on the roads, but if BMW do start selling something using this, we'll almost certainly see two or three generations of eye-wateringly expensive track-only cars before they ever consider trying to make something that's certificed road-legal. and once it is, it'll be a limited run bought by people with seven zeroes on their monthly pay check. and then a marginally less limited run purched by people with six zeroes. And only after that will we reach a point were there's any chance that you will actually see something based on this on the road. that's how it goes with cool interesting new car tech - especially when it's cool interesting new tech designed to make your car lighter (and therefore faster) or weirder looking (and therefor cooler).

worrying about BMW's cutting edge sportscar concepts backing into you on the street makes about as much sense as worrying that everyone who owns a light aircraft is going to start taxing it down the road to take their kids to school. that's not the environment that vehical is designed for, and its not going to be where anyone uses it.

BMW's concept car: give it a carussy and a gear shift that looks like a clit. men aren't gonna know how to drive this thing