#I've not been normal about these three.

[splinter-sister]

A cowboy, a cat and a punk walk into a bar.

@gunslinginnhogtyin @werexcat

[tired-beholding-bitch]

[id: two ibm desktop computers on a plain white background. their screens have been coloured in bright blue with green sad faces on them. the first says “i’m chester”, the second says “i’m norris”, and together they say “we are in agonising pain”. below them is flame-text that says in all-caps “the puter boys”. end id.]

do the kids still say this

(id and image are courtesy of my pal @saintbleeding because graphic design is not my passion) (however shooting the shit on discord is)

[every-sanji]

[creamiceandsugar]

something in sctir i'm obsessed with and cannot stop thinking about is when song taewon sees yoohyun break down when he thinks yoojin has gone off to die and taewon, for the first time in his life, thinks about an s class hunter: "oh. this is a child crying"

like when he realizes how serious yoohyun's love for yoojin is and i read it and i go yeah. yeah! that's what happens when you're the only one who loves a monster. it loves you back.

in the same vein i Love it when novel or manhwa go a bit into yoohyun's perspective and it is so clear that he really is something Other. something Not Human. (and that's not a bad thing) my money was on some fire elemental reborn into a human body (because of that whole part where he went 'i'll burn everything and return to my original form') but idk. he's Something for sure and i think about it a Lot

[dailyloopdeloop]

DAY 76: louis wain

[rose-n-gunses]

Okay so there's all the headcanons and AUs about Chrissy lives and helps the party clear Eddie's name but what if they failed. She's alive but he gets arrested anyway.

There's zero proof that he did anything (because he didn't) but in a small town in the middle of nowhere, confirmation bias has gotten the best of them. Eddie's lawyers are doing their best but there's only so much they can do against Jason's family and Fred's family and Patrick's family and all of their lawyers, not to mention the fact that the entire town has turned against him except for Hellfire, the Party, his uncle, and Chrissy.

The trial's a shit show, the judge is an asshole, the prosecution are assholes, the population of Hawkins are fucking assholes. And he loses. Of course he does, because there was never any other way this could have gone. Not when the real suspect is an interdimensional mind demon thing. Not when the entire town has been itching for an excuse to see him locked up. It's like blinders on a racehorse; they had him in their sights, finally, and he has no way out.

Chrissy had spent enough time in Hawkins' "high society" to know that these people fear and abhor that which they do not understand. They couldn't understand him, she could see that now. She watched them tear through his room, his car, his family, his history, his entire life, only to come up empty but still point at him and say "he did it" anyway.

It makes her furious. She wants to tear the limbs off of everyone in that courtroom, but she can't. So she does the next best thing.

She goes to law school.

She'd never really had the best grades, but now she has something to work for. It takes some time, but she never stops advocating, never stops fighting. Nancy's a big help, too. She's a journalist, she's got contacts in the industry that are helping to get the word out.

She writes him letters the whole time, too. By the time she graduates, damn near at the top of her class, she's realized that while she started this thing because of that deep-rooted sense of injustice that came out of watching the boy who saved her life get torn to shreds on the stand, it's turned into something else. Now she's fighting for him because she loves him (and maybe she had all along).

Eventually they get enough support from enough people, from enough big names (fucking Metallica, for one -- she couldn't tell them exactly how Eddie used their music to save her life, only that he did) that he's granted a new trial. This time, he doesn't get a shitty state-appointed attorney. He gets Chrissy fucking Cunningham, and she's not going down without a fight. (She feels it's the least she can do. She loves him, she owes him, she still feels like it's her fault, in a way.)

It's a long and gruelling process, appeals and analysis and arguments. She calls a probably record-setting number of character witnesses, brings the Party in to provide an alibi. (They all remember that week down to the last detail, even after all these years. Scars might fade but those memories don't.)

She's determined to beat this thing. She can tell that it's almost beaten Eddie, she knows that if they lose again he's going to give up, and she's not going to let that happen.

Finally they make it to trial and it's nowhere near as cinematic or dramatic as she had been imagining it for the last few years. It's the same agonizing slowness as the first time around, only this time there's hope. A glimmer of hope, a flash of hope, a blinding fucking beam of hope.

The place is packed this time, too, but it's mostly people there in support. Eddie nearly falls out of his chair when he sees James Hetfield sitting there. For him.

Chrissy finally gets to tear apart everyone that had been in that courtroom, only she gets to do it the way she's always done it best: with her words. She's got the odds stacked against Hawkins. They had no investigation, no evidence, just a hunch. They couldn't figure it out, couldn't explain it, so they called it a cult killing and found somebody weird!

The jury is appalled, thankfully. How could anyone possibly get convicted on such little evidence? The verdict is a unanimous not guilty, and then...it's all over.

Well, it's not over.

Eddie's released, he's reunited with his Hellfire, the Party, his uncle. Chrissy.

He loves her, too. Always has. How could he not, after all she'd done for him? He tells her he wants to marry her as soon as she'll let him and she says that he could've asked any time in the last however many years and she would have said yes in a heartbeat.

But first, she leads him away from the chaos for a moment of quiet. He thanks her and she shakes her head. She'd done it all for him the same way he'd stood on top of his trailer with his guitar.

And she tells him that. She'd been telling him for years, even if he couldn't hear it. She'd said it when she graduated high school, graduated college, passed her LSATS. She'd said it when she passed the bar and walked at her law school graduation and right before she walked into the courtroom. She says it again now, just so he knows she means it, because he'd meant it and he means everything to her.

Eddie, this is for you.

[novelconcepts]

Great news. I've accomplished very little in my two years of unemployment, but between working for this company last time and working for this company this time, I did read over 700 books. So. There's. That.

[alien-burst]

Is it possible to feel nostalgic towards something that happened 2 months ago? Well, maybe yes, maybe no, but Team Present won in my heart and thats all that matters

[batsplat]

Batsplat, I am not into tennis exactly but this year I have been exposed to a lot of Tennis meta, per se. I love reading through your tennis posts they reveal such a rich human side to a sport, esp the agassi sampras post. Wanted to ask, if you have read Infinite Jest and what you think of it. Additionally, do you see any parallels between motorcycle racing and tennis? Fundamentally different sports, but still crazy in their unique ways. Keep posting, many hugs!!

hugs back to you anon, really am very pleased that post has struck a chord... going to put a pin in the infinite jest half of the ask because I recently got another ask about that book and want to organise my thoughts a bit more. tldr I have a lot of fondness for the thing. I actually reckon being invested in tennis is a bit of a cheat code where that book is concerned, like it kind of gives you something to immediately latch onto... dfw has a reputation for being the writer about tennis - and he does capture something of the soul of the sport, both in IJ and in his essays. in IJ, he makes it feel claustrophobic and inescapable, like a curse of the blood. as it should be. there are many descriptions of the sport itself I love, ways it is integrated into the narrative, the meanings that are extracted from it... I'm not sure there's a concise way to talk about IJ and if anything that feels like it'd be against the spirit of the book, so for now I'll leave you with this: dfw knew ball, but his taste in tennis left much to be desired. religious experience my ass

anyhow, let's transition to the other half of the ask with an IJ quote chosen completely at random

'We're all on each other's food chain. All of us. It's an individual sport. Welcome to the meaning of individual. We're each deeply alone here. It's what we all have in common, this aloneness.’

on tennis and motorcycle racing - I think I do have a bit of a problem in answering this question in that those disciplines are the only two individual sports I have followed closely for a long period. (I suppose f1 is edging itself into that conversation, but that at least is relatively closely related to motogp.) so there is a bit of a 'getting a lot of boss baby vibes' issue here in that... things I feel are similar between the two of them might be equally present in croquet or skimboarding. but, well, I can only talk about what I know. I think they can both be quite lonely sports, though tennis is lonelier. motogp can be circumstantially lonely, tennis is so in its soul. this is because competing in a tennis match is such a fundamentally lonely experience in a way I'm not sure any other sport replicates. motogp is loud - tennis is defined by its silences. motogp is defined by its action while tennis lives and breathes in the negative space. the connection between ball and racquet is infinitesimally brief... the time between points stretches out as a void. a tennis match is a thing of many rhythms, superficially reliable, yet the experience of living through a match eats away at your perception of time. the match is provided structures by its units, wherein each can feel like it lasts a split second or a decade. motogp is fierce and noisy and full of life. tennis is empty

I think you can probably draw numerous fairly trite parallels between the two - the emphasis on one-vs-one duels, for instance, albeit a non-negotiable element of tennis in a way it isn't for motogp. different virtues and tropes represented by different athletes... offensive, defensive, the wild talent, the cunning mastermind, the tenacious and the feeble and the limited and the all-rounder - archetypes of a sort that recur even when the exact way they express their archetypal nature varies between sports. perhaps even a fanbase that neurotically oscillates between yearning for drama and hounding almost anyone who supplies it. there's some ways in which I have to follow the two sports completely differently... for instance, I am far more sensitive to injuries in tennis and tend to get peeved when anyone competes with injury - one of my least favourite things about federer (amongst some sturdy competition) was how big a virtue he made of never having retired from a match, and how it influenced the generations to come. I mostly stand by the same principle when it comes to motogp, but it does force you to readjust your idea of what kind of an injury is acceptable to compete with. (obviously to some extent this is just practicality - I'm sure plenty of tennis players would love to try and compete with broken ankles, but that sort of thing just physically isn't possible in tennis.) motogp is considerably less stressful to follow because of how concentrated it is. there's nothing quite like the death by a thousand cuts that experiencing a drawn-out defeat in tennis inflicts on you

but none of that is particularly interesting or insightful. I actually think following tennis has given me a pretty good grasp of sports psychology because, not to brag, tennis is kind of the sport for understanding derangement. I'm not talking in terms of pure drama - unfortunately, motogp is miles ahead of us on that front. but in terms of actually understanding the intricacies of how competition fucks with the brain... motogp is so macro, races are building blocks of entire seasons, your results in march help determine your standings in november. it's also a lot more mysterious - I can't read as much into motogp results as I can into tennis, not just because of my personal level of expertise but also for the simple fact that there are far more hidden performance variables in motogp, mainly related to machinery. when I talk about how 'clutch' a player is in tennis, I can show you actual numbers to describe what I'm talking about that I can pull up for any player (unlike for instance stats relating solely to title contenders) and have a pretty big sample size and can be used to meaningfully draw conclusions. a big reason why tennis is considered the mental torture sport is because of its unambiguously deeply fucked up scoring system, making use of the units of 'point' and 'game' and 'set' within a single match to ensure that all your effort can be repeatedly rendered meaningless in numerous ways. what this does help us with in analysis terms is that not every point is 'equal' - they might be in literal terms, but the stakes vary drastically. which affects the amount of pressure you are under and what type of pressure it is. to use a very basic example, one measure of 'clutch' performance might be how a player competes in tiebreaks, given that they are inherently higher pressure situations where you can compare those points to the baseline of all the other points. tennis and motogp (+ motorsports more broadly) are kind of on the opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of how many raw numbers like that you will have at your disposal - with plenty of other ball sports like basketball or football or baseball slotting in somewhere in the middle

and what this DOES help you with is that if you are a proper student of tennis... y'know. you'll probably have a slightly more refined understanding of how mentality in sports works. more than just sorting every athlete into two categories of 'mentally strong' and 'choker', which is how a lot of discussion can read. even on platforms theoretically interested in serious sports analysis. how pressure affects competitors... so many motorsport discussions feel oddly naive to the basic concept that competitors may handle pressure completely differently if they are ahead or if they are behind. sometimes you hear motorsports reporting treat mentality as completely irrelevant, outright say that people should stop focusing on psychological factors... which is just not the kind of thinking you get away with in tennis

that being said, the real lesson tennis can teach you is if anything the very opposite: often, performing better under pressure is only very loosely correlated to mental strength. this is a bit of a bugbear of mine so if I've posted this before my apologies, I always have a version of this rant in my brain and genuinely cannot recall if I've put it on here before but... look. say you have two tennis players in a match. say each player is winning roughly 50% of the points, both players managing to drive up their side of the scoreboard. but say that one player, player A has to take a lot more risk to do so - and is aiming for about half a metre inside the baseline in every point. say the other one, player B, can aim for a way more comfortable metre inside the baseline. now say you get to a pressure situation, a tiebreak. tension rises, the muscles get tight, it's harder to swing through the ball... let's say that both of them are suddenly more likely to misfire - and that in every third shot, they will miss their target by over half a metre. even if the pressure has the exact same effect on both of them, player A will end up making more mistakes than player B - and they will be doing so disproportionately in the tiebreak, a high pressure situation. which means that on paper, they are less clutch than player B, even though in reality they have both been affected to the same extent by the pressure of the situation. one simply was always operating with a bigger margin of error, which suddenly became more noticeable in the pressure situation

this is obviously an extremely simplified understanding of tennis and it's never going to be as straightforward as that. the point however is that a lot of what people think is mentality ends up being down to technique. good technique isn't just effective - it's repeatable. it's all about optimisation, right... it's even the little things, like how much your technique asks you to use *force* - there are different muscle movements that are going to be affected in different ways by stress. if your motion always looks the same, then it's more likely you'll be able to repeat it under pressure - if you tend to hit the ball wildly differently each time, then however well you are doing it, quite likely that's going to be tougher to do under pressure. good technique is replicable even under pressure, but having good technique is obviously in itself not reflective of mental strength. in tennis, it is critical how much margin of error players have - both in terms of where they literally aim in shots, and in terms of how much a small deficit in absolute performance will spell relative catastrophe

and again. all of this is extremely basic. but it does feel like... how do I put this diplomatically. sometimes it doesn't feel like everyone's on the same page even with this basic stuff. because at the end of the day, it's going to roughly be the same situation in motogp, right? champions are seen as particularly clutch versus competitors who aren't champions... and sure, there probably is an element of mental strength to becoming a champion (though often that will also be in terms of macro career arcs, key choices and so on, not just performance in the moment) but it's not going to be that simple... because better riders are operating with a bigger margin of error. if you assume that every crash in every pressure situation is a uniform case of choking, then, y'know, this is bad analysis. fans are entitled to their bad analysis, but that doesn't make it any less bad. there is a tendency to just assume that the best athletes are the mentally strongest, rather than just blessed with a wider window of performance, and it can be. slightly galling. icl this a bit of a theme in a lot of the stuff I write, if you know to look for it lol (e.g. here)

reading the passage back it's... well. a bit funny. any tennis fan familiar with my history as a tennis fan will immediately recognise what match traumatised me so thoroughly I still see its shadow everywhere I look. sports, don't you love it

obviously there are more contemporary examples you could pick up on, but this is incidentally something that slightly ticks me off when people discuss valentino's rivals. like, with all love to casey, it is a lot easier to be 'mentally strong' and 'not broken' and bounce back from psychological torture when you have enough talent in your index finger to disrupt the orbit of a small moon. no shit he had better chances of rebuilding his confidence than some of his precursors. the game's rigged! always has been

none of this is to say that mentality doesn't matter in sports, which would be a bizarre stance for me to take. if player A and B had the exact same margin of error in their shots, one of them would still play that tiebreak better - and that's the clutch factor. it's just often harder to tease out than you might think, even in a sport with so many numbers at the tips of your fingers. sometimes you're just not going to be able to tell from the outside at all. that's the loneliness, right - constantly observed, but fundamentally unknowable. and of course, there's far more to get into here... given that tennis does demand more engagement from the outset in matters of psychology. it is a sport that is all about interaction, where every choice you make preempts the choices you believe your opponent is about to make - it's all psychology, all the time. motogp brings the macro dramatics in its rivalries (or, well, one guy did anyway), but tennis provides far more tools to understand said dramatics... it cannot help you understand motorcycle racing, but it can help you understand its psychology. but I think I'll leave it there lol. idk if these are really the parallels this ask was looking for, it's just really how I think about the two. obviously I'm biased in that I think tennis is the most important sport in existence, just like mr wallace. every bit of motogp analysis I write is inevitably shaped by my experiences with tennis, which probably also limits me in some ways. but, y'know. it is what it is. it should also be said that most tennis fans don't understand shit about sports psychology either. we persevere

anyway. yeah. for the parallels between the two. main takeaway - like I said, the game's rigged. always has been

incidentally, here's a passage of IJ I was thinking about recently

Bodies bodies everywhere. A tennis ball is the ultimate body, kid. We're coming to the crux of what I have to try to impart to you before we get out there and start actuating this fearsome potential of yours. Jim, a tennis ball is the ultimate body. Perfectly round. Even distribution of mass. But empty inside, utterly, a vacuum. Susceptible to whim, spin, to force — used well or poorly. It will reflect your own character. Characterless itself. Pure potential. Have a look at a ball. Get a ball from the cheap green plastic laundry basket of old used balls I keep there by the propane torches and use to practice the occasional serve, Jimbo. Attaboy. Now look at the ball. Heft it. Feel the weight. Here, I'll… tear the ball. . . open. Whew. See? Nothing in there but evacuated air that smells like a kind of rubber hell. Empty. Pure potential. Notice I tore it open along the seam. It's a body. You'll learn to treat it with consideration, son, some might say a kind of love, and it will open for you, do your bidding, be at your beck and soft lover's call. The thing truly great players with hale bodies who overshadow all others have is a way with the ball that's called, and keep in mind the garage door and broiler, touch. Touch the ball. Now that's … that's the touch of a player right there.

cutting it off there... obviously dfw being dfw, this paragraph continues another dozen odd pages. (I say this with fondness; unsurprisingly the parts of the book about jim and his father are some of my absolute favourite.) maybe you can guess why I was thinking about it... motogp worships its machinery - tennis has no such affection for the tools of its trade. even when we philosophise the body of the ball, all we can truly access is its emptiness. a ball is like a body because it is empty... that's the illness of a mind touched by tennis right there

[cranberrymoons]

.

[ladyminaofcamelot]

Okay, here is my detailed analysis of the symbolism in Michael J. Sullivan’s, “Disappearance of Winter’s Daughter” that no one asked for, because here’s the thing. This book is chalk full of symbolism, mainly concerning unicorns, polka dots, stray dogs, cats, and one very special knife, all of which point toward hope, and more specifically the hope that Royce and Hadrian have because of each other.

So, unicorns represent hope. This is established both in the initial conversation about them and when Royce puts unicorns, Hadrian, and Alverstone in the same category, with Alverstone having been explicitly stated to be hope earlier in the book. Royce and Hadrian both call each other unicorns over the course of the story, so they are quite literally each other’s hope. 

Hadrian presents an anomaly to the worldview Royce previously held where everyone looks out for themselves and those who don’t look out for themselves wind up dead, because Hadrian is good and honorable and somehow very much not dead. To Royce, good and evil in the cosmic sense are random, and survival is a perfectly reasonable justification for doing evil to others. In the moment that Royce compares Hadrian to a unicorn, it is because he feels he has been sabotaged by Hadrian’s ideas and worldview in his own actions all night, and is aggravated because they are working. But the thing is, just because he believes the world is cruel and that survival is the goal, doesn’t mean he actually thinks that’s a good world to live in, and Hadrian has shown him that maybe, just maybe, there is a world out there where justice exists, and even if he doesn’t fully believe it, that it could exist gives some meaning to life.

When Hadrian calls Royce a unicorn, Royce is quite literally his only hope for survival, but I think it’s also deeper than that, because of cats. Royce is compared to a cat quite often, and in this book there is an expanded metaphor to a cat when he is about to kill someone, who he notably doesn’t kill in part because of Hadrian running interference. Later, Hadrian thinks that, “cats were picky, untrusting things. Being fragile, they had to be. Whenever a cat sat on him, Hadrian felt special, as if the animal approved, and their acceptance was some sort of gift. Makes a body feel worthy of something to have a cat trust you that much.” And also, “Cats don’t sleep on monsters, do they?” From another conversation they have about his time in Callis, we know that Hadrian actually thinks of himself as a worse murderer than Royce, who he himself has called a monster. Royce may think he’s too saintly for his own good, but Hadrian doesn’t think of himself that way, which is why Royce is the cat on his lap and therefore his unicorn. Royce doesn’t trust anyone, but he trusts Hadrian, so Hadrian is able to believe, or hope, that maybe, just maybe, he could be more than a monster.

This all comes back to the polka dots. Because Hadrian is kind to Royce, or “wears polka dots,” as it were, Royce thinks he is a kind person (though he usually uses the word stupid), and places trust in him, which also results in his being kind (in the big picture sense) to Hadrian because he doesn’t want to lose the one person he can trust. This unintentionally promotes Hadrian’s world view that kindness is mirrored back, and that how you treat others changes how you yourself are treated. So not only are they each other’s hope, but together, between the two of them and a few select others (such as Gwen), they are creating a world where unicorns exist.

This plays well into the idea of the stray dog. They see a couple strays throughout the book, who are compared to Royce and used to emphasize his world view. After all, a stray dog is kicked to the curb and fights for scraps and if it died no one would care, but every time they see a stray, they realize that it is wearing a blue collar, so it is not actually a stray. The fact that the collar is blue, the color of purity (which unicorns are also a symbol of), helps to indicate that the dog belongs to another world, a different, more magical world where it is loved. Royce, whether he realizes or not, also belongs to this world by virtue of being loved by Hadrian and Gwen. It is not insignificant that Gwen is painting the House blue at the beginning of the book, when that is their home base, nor insignificant that she is wearing a blue dress, since to Royce, she is the most pure thing he can imagine. 

Which makes me realize that I need another paragraph for Gwen, because she’s part of this too. Even if she is never called a unicorn, we have seen in previous books how she trusts Royce, and believes in Riyria, but also that she does not always think well of herself. The world has beaten her much in the same way it has beaten Hadrian, and though she suffered as the victim rather than the perpetrator, she still struggles with some of the same ideas of self worth. She thinks of herself as a prostitute, as someone no man has ever thought himself unworthy of, yet Royce thinks of her as someone you can’t just kiss, and calls Hadrian insane for even making the suggestion. His respect for her gives her hope, that maybe, just maybe, she really is more than a prostitute, and she in her turn believes in him, becoming another anomaly in his grim worldview just like Hadrian is.

Because Royce trusts Hadrian, and because Hadrian trusts him, and because they both trust Gwen and she them, they are all able to create their own little world where unicorns do exist, where there is hope, because they are able to afford it with someone who loves them. None of them are strays or monsters in the eyes of the others, they are all unicorns, and because someone else believes in them, they are able to have hope for themselves.

[perhaps-mr-collins-has-a-cousin]

Hello praying people, I'm not doing well and would really appreciate your prayers right now <3

[mercuriallily]

I have 103 hours playing StP and all 97 achievements and I'm still finding new lines of dialogue every time I play so naturally I'm going feral over the Pristine Cut and the ability to track my progress

[sysig]

Just Desserts continental northern map made using this method! :D (Patreon)

[queen0fm0nsterz]

Reading my fave thin man and lady fic. Kicking my feet a lot because tbh. Sometimes a sad man really is just a weird woman's science project in a way that is so homoerotic

[antihibikase-archive]

Pokemon Blight / Blur - Nuvema Gang Character Sheets

Aspertia Trio here.

A group of friends who, two years ago, journeyed the Unova region together; however, an undisclosed incident at the Pokemon League has changed their lives forever. In the absence of their Hero of Truth, they have decided to seek their own paths.

Hilbert Blackburn - An earnest youth from Nuvema Town, and Unova's Hero of Truth. His current whereabouts are unknown, as he's fled the region with Reshiram. Not many people, besides his secretive friends, seem to know the real him- outside of the fact he was very honest about his feelings.

Cheren Slater - Aspertia City's new gym leader, and the trainer school's teacher. He holds the truth to Hilbert's disappearance and what happened at the league that day, but refuses to share. The traveling companion and mentor of the Aspertia Trio.

Bianca Alabaster - Assistant to Professor Juniper and Fennel, and a protege of Lenora and Shauntal. She has a lot on her plate, particularly with investigating the legends of the dragons and exploration of the dreamworld. She has a keen eye for seeing the truth beneath the surface.

Hilda Weiss - A battle prodigy of Nimbasa City and the Battle Subway's most beloved regular, who had started her journey four years prior to the other three; as a result, she's the most experienced, and is considered an Ace Trainer. Somewhat cynical and grounded, but holds all her friends close to her heart.