#I am so trendy

[consult-sherlockholmes]

You're trending today, sweetie

I am always trending, especially on the days I post.

But why is it in those colours? They seem familiar.

[justablah56]

every time I see someone type ahh in the place of ass I am fighting the urge to kill

[nipuni]

Some requests were for modern AU so I played dress up with Erik in some modern outfits 😊

[bylrndgm]

GOOD OMENS (2019 - ) 2.01 The Arrival

[fuckingstupidbracket]

like a regular bin, not even recycled or anything

[monkee-mobile]

widdle ones !!!!! 🥺🥺💗💗‼️‼️💕♥️❤️💗💕

[goosegoblin]

the best part of being recovered from anorexia is that i no longer have to see a thousand pictures of those fucking engraved spoons

[tg-headcanons]

Two thoughts:

Does the ccg use dogs to sniff out ghouls? If they do, i almost imagine they would develope a specific, ghoul hunting breed - one with an excellent sense of smell but, unlike most hunting dogs, with no instinct to bite or attack their prey but rather to just find, follow, surround and hold in place (a bit like a rhodesian ridgeback, perhaps.) After all, the dog trying to attack the ghoul would absolutely not end well at all for the dog

And

I imagine some instruments must be more grating on ghoul ears then others - i.e. a piano, for example, will generally sound nice as long as it's in tune and so i imagine ghouls wouldn't have much of an averse reaction to that instrument, even if its a beginner playing. But say, for example, you have a beginner clarinet whose instrument squeaks and shrieks like a cat that just got its tail shredded — i cant imagine that would pair terribly well with their hearing

GHOUL HUNTING DOGS GHOUL HUNTING DOGS (IVE NEVER CONSIDERED THIS BEFORE BUT MY DOG DAYCARE EMPLOYEE ASS IS GOING WILD)

The practice of using dogs to search for ghouls is a very old one, but despite falling out of practice around the 1960s due to breed health problems and more effective methods being discovered, some of them are still around like other breeds no longer used for their original purpose

Arracht hounds are an old breed that split off from Bloodhounds. They were meant to track and hunt, but some had a behavioral quirk of howling and snarling at their prey rather than attacking, alerting humans of their location but quick to scare off animals and a liability to hunts. They were mostly deemed useless bloodhounds, until a small community in rural Ireland during the Middle Ages had one of their bloodhounds do this alert display at a seemingly normal human who was later discovered to be the monster preying on their village

The breed started to be cultivated for ghoul detection. They eventually ended up as tall, long legged and wrinkly animals bred to shriek and follow their marks, and trained to seek the smell of ghouls. Before the invention of better methods, these dogs were revolutionary and often the best detection system anyone could get. They were trained to stay out of a ghoul’s grasp to keep making as much noise as possible for as long as possible until humans could show up, and their wrinkly, loose skin made it easy for them to escape, better to lose a handful of skin than be killed

This obviously wasn’t a perfect system. A lot of those dogs, even the best bred and trained, didn’t survive their encounters. Others would find false positives and cause their attending humans to attack and kill other humans. Still, back then, an imperfect alarm was better than nothing. Many places in Europe became very dangerous for ghouls, and as those dogs spread through the world it only got worse for them

Eventually the dogs fell out of use. With better methods such as rc testing discovered they were no longer the most reliable source, and both human rights organizations citing the amount of innocent humans they got killed and animal rights groups citing how many of the dogs get killed, there was less and less reason to keep them on. The final straw was just how bad the breed got. Over time the breed developed issues the same as any other, but this one had a tendency to lose hearing and eyesight early and get neurotic and dangerous when working around ghouls for too long, so most ghoul extermination organizations retired the Arracht Hounds

Most of them are now housepets, some are trying to retrain them into guard or hunting dogs, and a few rural ghoul hunting organizations still use them, but for the most part they don’t work anymore. Every once and awhile there’s a headline of a ghoul getting caught when a family’s Arracht hound went wild over an inconspicuous neighbor, but that’s as far as it goes. People in cities are advised against getting them. They shriek very loud and maybe it’s all false positives, but you really don’t want to know just how many ghoul are around you

And as for the instruments: the ghoul hatred of squeaky clarinets and trumpets is visceral. They will actively avoid middle schools and music shops where kids are learning to play them

[beejamas]

[unbearable-lightness-of-ink]

today I'm thinking about how disabled characters fit in a zombie apocalypse. I'm not Very Disabled but if I had to cross the country while fleeing and fighting hordes of ravenous undead and negotiating periodically with strangers carrying guns...

like okay I currently can't walk long, far, or fast, and am in increasing pain the entire time I do so. my first step would be to steal a car, and if that wasn't feasible, a bike. bonus if it's the kind you pedal with your hands. next step would be to steal a bike trailer and then whoever I'm travelling with would have to do the biking and pull me along.

my other first step would be to jerry rig some kind of fastener to hold my glasses to my face, because I would be 100000% fucked if I lost them. I can't see across a room without them.

I'm on meds that have serious side effects if I don't taper off them. I'd need to start breaking into pharmacies as we travelled and if I got toward the end of my meds I'd need to plan to taper off them. fortunately I wont die without my meds, but I'd start having a much harder time thinking clearly. which would affect those split second life or death zombie fighting decisions.

I'd also probably need to come up with strategies on the fly for dealing with issues that aren't deadly on the reg but could get me killed in a zombie apocalypse, like dissociation, selective mutism, and sensory overload.

idk if this is going to be a very useful exercise but I'm trying to get a sense of what my characters are dealing with and the thing is that instead of a macho Fight Your Way Out video game style apocalypse you wind up with a very community-driven one, where we all have to help each other and come up with ways to meet needs that aren't represented in most apocalypse fiction. we would have a very different apocalypse, those of us who aren't abled and lucky.

[mysticfemme]

I consistently say that I'm not sure whether I like medieval studies, and yet when I'm doing an assignment I often end up focussing on something medieval. I just took ELEVEN BOOKS from the shelf on the Gawain poet because apparently I'm a nerd

[poems-of-a-lover]

god i need straight ppl to be fuckin normal abt gay intimacy like right now

[windor-truffle]

...how did i end up w 50% of a shitty richard costume? 😅

[marypsue]

I'd love to hear your thoughts on S1 of ST being a tragedy! No main character dies, so I never thought of it that way before

I mean, nobody has to die for a story to be a tragedy (at least, in the modern definition. I'm pretty sure '(almost) everybody dies' is a requirement of Greek tragedies and Renaissance revenge tragedies). But also, no main character dies in season one...if you take season one as part of a series. Which it wasn't originally conceived as.

I am not going looking for copies of the original pitch bible, because I am lazy, and also I only saw them floating around this webbed site. But the show changed a lot from the initial pitch (Joyce had a Long Island accent! Lucas' parents were divorcing! Murray was there and named Terry Ives! Most of what ended up in Hopper's character originally belonged to Mr. Clarke! The original pitch bible is fascinating). And part of the original pitch was a proposal for possible sequels.

The Duffers' proposal for a possible sequel was "It's ten years later, and Eleven is dead".

So that's the setup. Everything that came after season one was made up wholecloth after season one was a hit and people wanted more, but also people loved the adorable little psychic murder child (cue the Duffers shockedpikachu.jpg) and Netflix obviously recognised it would be a bad call to make a new season without her in it. So it makes sense to take season one as a unit, as a self-contained story on its own. You can also take it as part of a whole, but it makes sense to read it first as a complete story. Especially given the thematic drift of later seasons and the way they are...I'm just going to say it, each new season is very much added-on to what came before rather than being built on foundation that the earlier season(s) laid. It is very clear there was never a planned five-season story arc from the beginning. (This isn't necessarily always a bad thing, when it comes to sequels, but it does mean it makes sense to 'read' each season as its own thing.)

Okay, now that we've established all of that. Season one has one very clear goal, one very clear stake for the characters: save Will Byers from the Upside Down. (I like this. It makes the stakes both extremely high and extremely personal, it makes it very easy to understand each character's motivation, it also keeps the stakes grounded in reality. I like this a lot.) And by the end of the season, that goal is accomplished. So at first blush, you're right, season one doesn't look like a tragedy.

But when you start to unpack it a little, you start to see just how many important things were lost along the way. It's most glaringly obvious with Mike and El, with Nancy and Barb. The whole Wheeler family is fractured down the middle, with Mike and Nancy on one side and Ted, Karen, and Holly on the other, and Karen, who's been trying so hard the whole time to be part of her children's lives and understand what's going on with them, is aware of the ever-expanding gulf between them but will never be able to cross it, and will never fully know why. Hopper's finally managed to snatch a kid out of the jaws of death, save a woman he obviously cares about from the pain of losing a child, and Joyce has finally had someone believe her, support her, trust her. But it became blindingly obvious to me on my fourth rewatch that Hopper's plan, from the moment he went to leave the middle school gym, was always to trade El for Will. And that decision (and the fact that Joyce obviously understands that he did something to get the lab to let them go after Will, but she obviously doesn't dare press him on what) has broken her trust in him, and left him with what looks like an equally heavy burden of guilt as what he was carrying before. The lab stays open. The government gets away with everything. No one will ever know the true extent of the hurt they've caused.

And in the end, none of it even saved Will. He's back. He's alive. But he's spitting slugs in the sink. He's permanently marked by the Upside Down, and by trying to hide it from his family, he's putting a crack down the centre of them, as well. They're losing Will, just as surely as they had when they thought he was dead, just without him going anywhere.

And there's still a hole in the world.

The fragile bonds of community, the things that people share in common, the way catastrophe can bring people together and bring out the very best in them, are the major thematic threads woven through season one. Human connection is the only thing that can change what seems inevitable, the only thing that can bring back what's seemingly lost forever.

And it's still not enough to protect anyone from the random tragedy of the world.

The love was there. The love mattered. The love bent the entire course of the world around itself.

And it still wasn't quite enough.

If that's not a tragedy, then I don't know what is.

[moonsidesong]

ai chatbots are so corny and they drive me slightly insane. just go write bad fanfiction in your notes app. like “wowie look at what this computer can do!!!” ok dont care have you considered finding intrinsic value in creating something with your very own hands

[bravemercutio]

hate to admit it but the oreo coke zero fucks severely