#Hard To Say Goodbye

[horizonspurple]

Song sharing Sunday

'It's hard to say goodbye Oh, I tried couple million times Missed a million signs'

[bloodyroseart95]

My heart is broken from losing my best friend yesterday. I watched him take his last breath through a screen since I couldn’t be by his side. I’ll love and miss him always 💔💔💔

I hope you and your little brother are rolling in the grass and eating treats together and being loved cuddled and kissed by god since I can no longer do it myself 💔💔💔😭😭😭

[amphibianaday]

Taking a break from amphibianaday soon and may or may not return

Day 1821 is coming up soon, marking half a decade of amphibians! After day 1821 I will be taking break to re-evaluate if I'm still drawing because I want to or because it's become a habit. Between fulltime work and hrt turning me into some kind of extrovert I have a lot less free time now. I guess I'm figuring out how I want to spend it?

I don't want to promise any kind of return but I also can't quite commit to deciding to stop for real yet. So. I'm waiting until day 1821 so I can end on a good milestone if I don't decide to keep drawing! :D

a bunch of personal soppy thoughts about it below if you're curious!

It's been part of my life for so long, it's hard to imagine not drawing every day now. But my life is in such a different place now than it was when I started, in so many different ways. When I started I was living with my parents, working a part time job I hated, hoping to study to become a game animator. I had only barely figured out my gender situation after years of questioning and denial. Since starting this blog I have:

come out as trans

got accepted at my dream school

changed my legal name

moved out

realized I didn't want to be an animator actaully

fell in love with rigging and programming

graduated and started working as a professional technical animator

started HRT

got top suregery

Kind of wild to think about how drawing amphibians has been with me quietly in the background through all this. I'm sort of moving away from bein An Artist™ (at least professionally), but drawing all these amphibians so far has been awesome and improved my art so much. I've made lots of art I'm really proud of!

Alos gotta take this time to say a Huge thank you to anyone who has ever said something nice in an ask, dm, reply, tag, etc. I read and treasure every kind message and it's always made my day to hear my art has brightened someone else's, or been an inspiration :)

See you in 2025!

[grapejuicegay]

7.01 Abandon Ships

7.10 All Fall Down

[ahappydnp]

got sooo sad all over again hearing them talking about the plan to end dan and phil in 2018. like it was obvious and we knew but god. i didn't want to believe it then

i just can't cope with knowing we almost didn't have this

[astralhope]

Episode 146 & Rank 55

[peachesofteal]

Simon + mama epilogue today on Patreon

[nekky-nek]

Will I ever recover from Xemnas saying to be human must take incredible strength? No. No I will not.

[alacants]

i really love fics where there is clearly a fully-realized world underpinning the story but it isn't overexplained—the author relies on you to intuit the necessary background from the information presented in the foreground. i'm therefore about to overexplain the figure skating au to within an inch of its natural life. 

this is tagged role reversal and that was the basic premise—au where jannik is the one from a country with a recent record of success and carlos is from the middle of the fucking wilderness. tennistically skateistically speaking.

fs fans will know that the italian skating federation is right on the border of powerhouse status—it's not quiiiite big 3-4 (russia, canada, us, arguably japan/france) but it's real close. their greatest success hasn't necessarily been in the men's discipline but should a generational talent come along all the elements would be in place to immediately launch him into the stratosphere from the comfort of almost-home. jannik's nearly-lifelong training base—the icelab in bergamo— is only about 100 miles from sexten as the crow flies, just a bit farther than the distance between murcia and villena. the sacrifice is his mother driving him 3 hours there and back on saturdays, then later on boarding in bergamo during the week and going home on the weekends. a small metaphorical price to pay to train at an isu center of excellence from literal childhood.

(so why did it take jannik so long to break through? jump consistency—he lost his jumps after a massive growth spurt and, as the headcase references indicate, even after he got them back he stayed spooked for a long time. the real bergamo legacy is his pure and flawless skating skills, good enough that even the heavily foreshadowed simone-fixing-carlos montage won't be enough to catch up. and he'll still have those skills after his body can't hold up to the jumps any more, just as carlos will still have unmatched performance quality. in a way their late-career competitions are going to be much more interesting than their peak.)

meanwhile, spain. if you don't know much about figure skating i cannot emphasize the extent to which, on the figure skating map, spain is nothing and nowhere. …or was, until out of the blue they produced world champion and olympic bronze medalist javier fernandez. javi falls neatly in between the juanki and carlos generations, so i've split him in two and made juanki the freak pioneer, the one didn't quite beat the structural disadvantage, and carlos the freak protege, the one who will.

juanki… oh juanki. comment referring to him as the local narrative punching bag couldn't be more correct. imagine if irl juanki was exactly the same except born in a country where no one played tennis. this is what it's like to be figure skater juan carlos ferrero, a special talent in an esoteric sport with no resources whatsoever.

the only way juanki would have been able to achieve what he did in the late 90s/early 2000s is to have begun training abroad no later than his mid-teens. you can draw the obvious corollary wrt his family history. something he would have deeply conflicted feelings about, even today, manifesting in a total commitment to his life's mission: a real purpose-built training rink in his part of spain. a mission that is much, MUCH more quixotic than a tennis academy. the most he can dream of is to provide a good environment to learn the fundamentals, help young skaters start competing, bring in guest experts and host training camps and maybe, just maybe, someday, this will help a kid with promise make a real go of figure skating. and then he gets carlos.

right person, right place, right time. carlos is able to launch himself as a competitive junior skater while training in his home country, propelled by juanki's resistance to the idea that the only path to success must be for a child to leave their home and family + learned experience that it's possible to come from a humble skating background and still medal at the top. this is very good for carlos at first. this is less good for carlos later.

namely i think that when carlos first begins to advance there's an element of… idealism? pride? naivete? in how juanki understands his own career, that serves as a early blind spot. like, yes, world bronze, european champion… under the 6.0 system, courtesy of a certain amount of patronization. the judges are happy to reward this obvious talent who may not have the technical chops but has a real feel for the ice, a special quality to his performance… to a point. but that bronze was his ceiling. he was never going to be in the running for gold next. (which doesn't matter, since in 2004 he got the first of several injuries and by 2006 it was all over.) 

20 years later, this is not that different from the judging that lifted carlos to the euro gold. here is an obvious talent performing the skate of a lifetime and landing quads. when the faves flop—casper ruud that was your title for the taking!—you bet he's going to get rewarded. but you only get that shock and awe bump once. (also those quads were sooooo underrotated. his jump technique is Not Good.) afterwards, he's going to suffer from an expectation gap. seventh at the olympics is a much more realistic assessment of the tier he'll find himself in…. unless he makes a big change.

for non-fs fans… it's hard to explain all the factors that influence a supposedly objective score, but suffice to say there are many, many intangibles including but not limited to politicking and packaging. politicking = networking and advocacy on your behalf by your federation and/or coach. a federation like spain has zero power, so it would all come down to the coach. packaging = your combination of music/costume/choreo style, your image on the ice. does it look good and do you sell it well. a coach who hasn't been engaged at the elite senior level for 18 years is going to struggle because what worked in 2003 isn't necessarily going to work in 2022. and part of coaching is understanding what judges want and giving it to them. 

(you know juanki's still resisting the music-with-lyrics rule change so hard. he might understand it but he does NOT like it.)

juanki's a fast learner but he's all on his own out here—trying to coach carlos and teach regular lessons and keep the rink operational. he's doing everything he possibly can to revive all his old skating connections from 2003 and leverage them on carlos' behalf but that's only a drop in the bucket. he could drop all his other obligations and devote himself solely to leveling up as an elite senior coach for carlos, but it still might not be enough, fast enough. and it would kill the rink.

deep down he knows that he should have pushed carlos to make the switch immediately after that breakthrough season. he just resisted it for a long time. he doesn't want carlos to leave! he cares about him so much! how could he not, this magic gift from the fates, the consolation and the reward and the meaning to everything he's worked for over the last 17 years of his life! like. jesus. i am actually making myself feel bad thinking about this but it has to happen and juanki knows it has to happen. carlos fought him for MONTHS before accepting it, and it should go without saying that the major reason he did finally accept it was—in every sense of this word—the carrot. lmao.

(what finally pushed juanki over the line? well, it hurt to see carlos' scores that post-euro season, when he knew what they really could be. he loves carlos. he wants more than anything for carlos to be the skater he has the potential to be. and also oh idk maybe there's a new relationship in his life that's helping him face up to some of these emotional challenges. examines nails.)

juanki's still going to be listed as part of carlos' coaching team, carlos is still going to spend the off-season training in valencia, the odds are good that juanki's going to be the one putting the cry in kiss&cry when milan rolls around. i think the carlos experience does inspire him to commit to high-level coaching and he becomes a fantastic and highly-regarded junior coach, with young skaters from across europe choosing to train with him. the rink in valencia gets a major upgrade and it might not ever be an isu center of excellence but it's a beloved community institution and a source of local pride. HAPPY ENDING!!!!

…got sidetracked there. anyway, the point of this story is: what if jannik was the one who desperately wanted to connect with someone on his level, only he didn't know it. until it happened. 

[prettysweetprettysweet]

I fondly remember all my emotions I felt after I had watched the first episode of Iwtv. In the lead up to it, watching the teasers and reading the articles, I was thinking 'are they really doing all this...they can't be doing all this, it's too good' and then after the premiere I was completely floored, like holy shit not only are they doing all this, they're doing it well and it's incredible. I replayed Louis' confession over and over and over and was dumbfounded by the raw talent they had managed to pull when they hired Jacob Anderson. I was so, so excited about the groundwork they had laid. Minus a few off beats towards the end, these two seasons are perfect to me. I can't imagine any piece of media, or any character, ever surpassing the show/Louis' effect on me.

[alatabouleau]

Some weeks ago, I finally watched the first two seasons of Doctor Who (2005). And it was. Beautiful. So, I just wanna say, one thing I love about The Doctor with Rose is that it's not a "will they, won't they" story. Throughout these two seasons, it's pretty clear that these two are in a committed relationship. Only that this relationship transcends human categories as much as everything else they do together on their adventures. It's not fully romantic, yet not entirely platonic, either. It's something in between, something you cannot pin down, except for one thing: This relationship is vital for them. They are better together than on their own, a one-in-a-lifetime-kind of thing that happened completely by chance, yet changed both of them forever. Soulmates. I love it.

[mintraindrop]

This is really it, right? Everything feels like it's ending.

With this not only being the last race weekend this season but also all those goodbyes, teammats leaving, either for another team or completely abandoning F1, all those tributes, thank yous, dedications, helmet swaps, childhood dreams coming true and ending at the same time. All those eras coming to an end.

And all the while the buzzing excitement and nervousness underneath because it still is a race weekend and the Constructor's Championship is still going but everyone is emotional. And so much has changed this year but so much hasn’t but now it will and there is just so much going on.

Like, Charles' tribute helmet for Carlos (this one was the last straw for me btw), the Scuderia saying thank you in all kind of ways, Carlos' race suit for this weekend, all his achievements printed on the back, his childhood dream of driving for Ferrari ending tomorrow night.

And we have all those other special helmets like Lewis' and also the tribute livery on his car. And there' Kevin's helmet, which has his family on it, Zhou's 'thank you' to Valtteri, the helmet swap between Zhou and Alex, and so much more that I'm probably forgetting right now.

I am honestly not okay right now.

What am I supposed to do after tomorrow? I'm going to bawl my eyes out.

And HOW am I supposed to wait for NEXT YEAR? Only Oscar and Lando staying where they are is giving me some sort of peace.

And no, I won't shut up about this. My emotions are all over the place.

So, please don't hesitate to reach out. I'd love to talk (and cry) about this with you.

[theartistaslisalee]

This past week my dad suffered a seizure and spent several days in the hospital, and the cause was a sudden drop in blood pressure. Incidentally my mom also suffered with low BP which it was later revealed were the side effects of aggressive chemo she had undertaken many years before for lymphoma. She had passed away back in summer of last year and now Dad ( who himself had gone through chemo for gastric cancer in the past and currently battling prostate cancer which unfortunately has spread to his bone) is starting the decline. And its really sinking in that, in due time, that me and my three siblings will be left alone on this Earth without our parents ( it’s still hard to believe that it will soon be one year that Mom has gone to heaven ). We take so many aspects of our lives for granted; we often forget about our mortality, or the fact that nothing lasts forever. I know that every parent/child relationships are different, but whatever the circumstances, we should remember that we would not at first exist without our parents. And life is short and unpredictable, so we should take every opportunity to show our love and respect to our parents and/or settle whatever loose ends that had been left between us; I've read many accounts of people who live with regrets at having not settled things with their parents before their passing and sometimes it can be debilitating. Even something as simple as "I love you" can make a big difference.

[vaguely-concerned]

the sheer 'fucking GOTCHA!!!!' energy of harding when she oh how the turntables lucanis about the people pleasing issues pots are apparently having the audacity to call kettles black over in this lighthouse fhdksjfha. she has been grousily thinking about this for days. her 'oh and another thing -- !!!' capacity brought on by all that repressed rage that's never been allowed to move freely within her before is unmatched I love her so much

[ultimateplaylistmaker]

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