#( this was last year can u believe?? )

[notbecauseofvictories]

as much as I love history and Chicago history especially, I do sometimes forget how recent everything here is. I was at the Hull House Museum with a friend of mine the other day, and we had a wonderful time listening to the curator talk about the birth of social work, the women who drove it forward, and the ghost stories that haunt their stomping grounds despite no one really dying there.

As we were walking around after the tour, my friend pointed out that Jane Addams' dress (the one on display in that room, black and small and otherwise unremarkable) had an uneven hem. "Oh, good eye!" the curator, who was walking alongside us, exclaimed. "Addams' tuberculosis left her with some spinal curvature, even after corrective surgery. She had most of her dresses altered to ensure the hem would be straight when she wore them---but on a standard dress form, the hem looks uneven."

"I always forget that having a tailor or dressmaker was considered typical back then," I said.

"No, by that point it was much more common to buy a dress from Sears and have it altered," the curator replied cheerfully. "That's what Addams did."

The whole exchange was maybe a few seconds, but it sticks with me even now. The idea that Jane Addams bought a dress from Sears---where I have also bought dresses, where my mother bought dresses---makes me feel insane. And yet, we're only talking about a hundred years ago or so. Is it so unreasonable that I, as a disaffected teen, was drifting through racks of mass-produced garments, just as Jane Addams did a century before? The exact location of the hands making those garments has changed of course; the workers' protections that Addams' contemporaries fought for have resulted in offshoring that work to less-guarded parts of the world. But it gives me a strange sort of fellow feeling to think about it, all these many decades later.

[charcarts]

red rescue team

redraw of something from 2017:

[luck-of-the-drawings]

POOR GABRIEL MONTEZ! YOU NEVER SAW THIS COMING DID YOU? ALL YOU WANTED WAS POWER. SECURITY. SAFETY. & THATS EXACTLY WHAT YOU GOT! JUST IN EXCHANGE FOR YOUR BODY. LETS JUST HOPE NO ONE FUCKS THIS UP. LETS JUST HOPE YOU WONT HAVE TO CLEAN UP THE MESS.

[captainofthetidesbreath]

To expand on a prior post I've made, it is really fun and it makes a lot of sense and it feels ultimately natural that Spahr is here at the end, in this last confrontation with Weepe, because he and Weepe are rivals. They're, almost unexpectedly, foils.

They're arrogant men who allow and enable awful things to happen to others to protect and increase their social standing. They hurt the people they care about most for self-serving reasons—but in the end, only one of them takes responsibility for that. (Trustfall and Ghosts are inverse parallels, and this post discusses a portion that is most relevant here.) Weepe increasingly identifies with the Trust as Spahr is increasingly disillusioned with it, and Weepe rises to power at the same rate that Spahr falls into disgrace. Just as Weepe is convinced that he will always be an awful person and fatalistically believes he cannot ever do better, Spahr has been convinced he has a self-evident righteousness but eventually sees that not only does he not, but he can and must do better.

Beyond that, they're narratively tied together. Weepe is in the Highest Light because Spahr agrees to bring him. Spahr helps Imelda lock Weepe in the Arca, and he does it in part for smug satisfaction because of his personal dislike for Weepe. He wronged Weepe by participating in engineering the circumstances that led to his torture and by failing to intervene against it out of fear for himself, and the fact that he wronged Weepe is something that Spahr is explicitly aware of and is something that weighs heavily on his conscience. It is through the Arca that Spahr traces Weepe's ascension to Tripotentiary as a direct result of his actions; he believes that he failed to stop, or even facilitated, Weepe's rise and everything that results from it.

For much of the narrative, they're racing to the same goal, even sometimes without knowing. Spahr is on Midst specifically to find the Breach centerpoint, and Weepe identifies it as the cabaret and turns it over to the Trust before Spahr has any chance to start looking. Weepe pulls the Fuze-Loxlee investigation out from underneath Spahr when he convinces Sherman to name Fuze's murderer, ultimately succeeding where Spahr fails. He takes the information to the Upper Trust himself after Spahr was removed from the investigation for, simplistically, lack of progress. Sherman chooses to trust Weepe over Spahr, and Weepe wipes his debt before Spahr can.

When Spahr is court-martialed, he is given the opportunity (read: pressured) into donating all Valor accrued during his tenure to his successor — and then that donation apparently goes to Weepe as part of a series of donations to help set him up as Most Valorous. The role of the Prime Consector gets folded under the new position of Tripotentiary, and without a Prime Consector appointed, Weepe is the sole direction that the Company has. Weepe even moves into the residence held by the Prime Consector, as we're often reminded that Spahr lived there before Weepe did. Weepe is Spahr's successor in all but literal title.

Spahr waits until Weepe repeats the order to bring Lark and Phineas to refuse. At the moment where Weepe is at his most elevated and Spahr at his most diminished, when they are such extreme ends in the hierarchy, it is to Weepe that Spahr says, finally, "No."

As Prime Consector, Spahr was ideologically (though not materially) the truest manifestation of Valor. A Consector's job is to hunt, to pursue those who have escaped the Trust and restore them to the Trust. At this point, Weepe is all that is left of the Trust, its only manifestation, and all he does now is hunt Lark and those who aid her, to rebalance and to restore what is felt lost.

As funny as it is that Spahr is here at the end as the only one who isn't a protagonist, it makes so much sense that he is here in the confrontation against Weepe. He has to be. They're foils to one another, one of their many. Their actions have deeply entangled themselves in one another's arc. Over the course of the story, very slowly, there's been a changing of places between Weepe and Spahr.

Of course Spahr is here too. He was a razor's edge from being the one bearing down on that cabin. He was very, terrifyingly close to being on Weepe's side of the door.

[arcanegifs]

Caitvi Scenes: 1/? ↳ Caitlyn and Vi get caught sneaking into Cait's room

[rebornrosess]

A WORLD OF NOISE: THE ZABAJABA JUNGLE

ZABA by Glass Animals is 10 YEARS OLD TODAY.

A poem/stream of consciousness I wrote about ZABA on a rainy September night in 2022, one month after seeing Glass Animals live. ZABA was the album by which I found Glass Animals in 2018, and its abstract yet visceral nature continues to fascinate me. The more I listened, the more I felt I could understand the imagery drawn across its 11 tracks.

Essentially, I believe ZABA can be understood as a Queer reading and apologue of Plato’s allegory of the cave. There are many lines that allude to a (Queer) awakening from perceived societal constraints such as in Walla Walla (“it’s a ruse, all these creatures are a lie” & “i clap my hand and they’re gone into the night”), likely referencing the shadows projected by the puppet showmen in Plato’s allegory. Thus, the anguish expressed in songs predating ZABA’s release such as in Golden Antlers and in Exxus are symptomatic of a speaker trapped in a cave, unable to escape a deeper feeling of unease because they are only seeing the reality projected to them by a cisheteronormative system. It is only when the speaker escapes this metaphorical cave in Flip, the opening track of ZABA, (“I’m gonna shake my fetters / I’m breaking loose”), that they finally enter the confusing, overwhelming, but beautiful and fluid “world of noise” mentioned in Pools (and sonically created in Intruxx). Over the course of ZABA, the speaker wrestles with their preconceived notions of reality (Walla Walla uses a ton of imagery from The Matrix), relationships, gender, and sexuality, while simultaneously feeling betrayed by their family and society (Hazey and Toes).

The B-Side of ZABA dips into existential dread, as the speaker mourns the time they lost to the incomplete reality they had accepted in the cave, and the effects it had on their mental health (Wyrd), climaxing in Cocoa Hooves, as the speaker (or someone else), confronts them(selves) and the changes they have undergone in the ZABAJABA jungle. The speaker must choose if they wish to stay in the confusing yet euphoric jungle, or self-destruct (“set [their] wings on fire”) and return to the cave after flying too close to the sun and after indulging too deeply in their primal instinct. However, just as the freed prisoner in Plato’s allegory, the speaker runs the risk of never being able to live in blissful ignorance again, as their eyes may never re-adjust to the incomplete, crafted reality of the cave.

The last track of the album, JDNT, presents a conclusion as ambiguous as the title Dave refuses to explain. It is possible the speaker is accepting their doomed fate as prophecized to them by the antagonist in Wyrd, or radically accepting their outcast status, enjoying the “life untamed.” And perhaps, in the end, they triumph over their internal turmoil by recognizing it only has power over them if they allow it to, as it cannot “breathe without [them].” And thus, they return to the Earth, unfettered and born anew.

[apollos-boyfriend]

last year, i ran a survey to gauge tumblr's headcanons of the dream smp characters' species, and have decided to turn it into an annual thing! as always, here is the full powerpoint + the full data spread, for anyone who wants to look through them! thank you all for your continued participation, and i hope to see you again next year for round three!

[skrrtscree]

Stuff I drew in the last few weeks bc we're going 3 years obessed with this man

[fraiserabbit]

my favourite spaghetti person ever (sorry v&v)

[humofbumblebees]

hey, you guys think about how agatha’s probably so mad at rio because she didn’t get to say goodbye to nicky

[cator99]

You know you're about to get the best T shot of your life + some strong opinions on the bullshit ways people are doing it when u go in to a rural pharmacy and the 55 year old guy behind the counter is so jacked he barely fits into the damn lab coat

[ukitakejuushiro]

BRO FINALLY LEARNED HOW TO TIE HIS NECKTIE PROPERLY 😭😭😭

[soup-is-nice-sometimes]

throwback to the time I actually went bonkers and wrote an entire paragraph on conjunctions (I think they're classified as conjunctions 💀) in the song Famous Last Words by American rock band My Chemical Romance

The lyrics "awake and unafraid/asleep or dead" are incredibly significant in the song, and are repeated four times in quick succession after the lyrics “Cause I see you lying next to me/with words I thought I’d never speak”. These lyrics are a direct contrast to each other, with 'awake' and 'asleep' directly juxtaposing each other, and the usage of inclusive and exclusive conjunctions. 'And' is an inclusive conjunction, and due to the nouns surrounding it, has a positive connotation. He is awake, and not afraid of what is coming next. Conversely, 'or' is an exclusive conjunction, as it gives a choice between two (or more) options. The words 'asleep' and 'dead' also tend to have negative connotations. In this case, the words also refer to the uncertainty of not knowing whether the patient is asleep or if he has died. It also links in with him not knowing if he will go to sleep like normal and wake up in the morning, or if he will die in the night.

[deus-ex-mona]

i miss her…

[unalivejournal]

if I had a genie, my first wish would be to drink wine together

Um I think your wish would be to drink it all by yourself while I sit next to u doing nothing🙄

[oceanmoss]

I loooooove having a summer vacation I never want to work again in my whole life . (Girl who is utterly broke)