#JB is web weaving

[webanglikethat]

On the journey of platonic heartbreak;

The Bruise of Love / The Shadows of Loss / The ruins of Us.

now and then she rereads the manuscript of the entire torrid affair // and at last, she knew what the agony had been for.

click here to view the sources

[bloodlessharmony]

stay down, boygenius / song in e, julien baker

“Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you've been ruined.” ― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

x - x - x

[chattahoochiecoochie]

There is such quiet tenderness in the relationship JB Mauney has with Arctic. To bring home the thing that took everything from you. To walk beside it, to hold it, to keep it safe. To make a home for it inside of your own. Arctic broke his neck and ended his career and all JB can say is that where Arctic did his job, he didn’t that day. That mans a cowboy through and through.

Washington Post Article by Sally Jenkins / 2020 // Photo by Scott Stebner // Arctic Assassin in the pasture of JB Mauney’s ranch photographed by Toni L. Sandys // JB Mauney’s back / photographer unknown // Article by Ryan Osborne / 2024 // Drawing by Starpark Designs // Photo for Sports Illustrated / Erick W. Rasco

[sunlightthroughtrees1]

Please stay/ favor/ not strong enough by boygenius

PLEASE GIVE ME, @sunlightthroughtrees1 CREDIT IF YOU REPOST THIS

[everythingisconfetti]

Frightened Rabbit- Floating in the Forth(1,7), Boygenius- Stay Down, Frightened Rabbit- Swim Until You Can't See Land(3,5), Julien Baker- Sour Breath, Boygenius- Anti-Curse

[some-spinner-in-june]

giorgio hamato, on rediscovering your family

web weave on giorgio hamato of the archer au, created by @goodlucktai, @mykimouser, @soldrawss, and @remedyturtles! such a wonderful character created by wonderful creators <3

---

credits:

raised on little light, taizi || @/soldrawss || northern attitude, noah kahan || raised on little light, taizi || last of the real ones, fall out boy || wild geese, mary oliver || two, sleeping at last || live to let you shine, gibbouslunation et al. || two, sleeping at last || live to let you shine, gibbouslunation || @/soldrawss || @/inkskinned || a vote for the gentle light, charles bukowski || the collected poetry, 1968-1998, nikki giovanni || raised on little light, taizi || @/soldrawss || @/myfakeplasticlove13 || raised on little light, taizi || @/jb-blunk || good bones, maggie smith || raised on little light, taizi || the song, allen ginsburg || @/soldrawss || raised on little light, taizi || orange juice, noah kahan || welcome home, warsaw shire || unknown || raised on little light, taizi || @/soldrawss @/theolddivorcedzukka

[batsplat]

Bat……baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaattttttttttttt. The Casey / vale web weave….oh my got I am unwell 🥲🥹🥲🥹 truly outdid yourself on that one holy hell

:))))) thank youuuu exactly the feeling i'm trying to evoke

obviously this specific topic is one where i could like... go at it again from a completely different angle with plenty of other material, like it's such a rich mine of parallels. i mean the big parallel between agassi and casey is of course the whole 'hating the sport they dedicated their lives to' thing - and we have valentino being baffled at agassi's pov, which!! if you read the quote about valentino going 'well EYE could never hate motorcycle racing' then that has such rich implications for the casey/valentino dynamic, like agassi almost acts as this fun little proxy that allows valentino to say things he wouldn't say directly *about casey*. and pair THAT with valentino thinking casey isn't a romantic rider and all the riders today are too serious and sad..... huh. thinking

anyway that was one thing i barely touched... another bit i was thinking about is that obviously comparing the 1995 us open final with 2008 laguna seca does involve a bit of artistic license in that casey sticks clear from describing the laguna loss in quite such apocalyptic terms. idk if casey was really 'fantasising about retirement', though... i mean, he could have been!! i think one thing that is so special about agassi is that he's actually willing to SAY stuff like that, like i've said this before but his gift is this real vulnerability where he's also willing to kinda make himself look weak, look like an idiot. like emphasising how extremely not seriously he took sampras before the 1990 us open final!! and i don't mean this as a BAD thing, but casey is just not capable of that kind of emotional honesty - certainly not publicly. like agassi is just definitely a lot more self-aware. and... if you're describing this loss as the turning point of your entire career, saying again and again how everything changed... i am still going to do a PROPER laguna post, hopefully in the next few weeks, but i think the more time you spend thinking about that race the more you begin to understand just why it was so emotionally devastating to casey. it doesn't send him on a competitive spiral the way it does with agassi. but you also need to not just pay attention to what casey's literally saying and also how often he's saying it and why he's framing it that way. he has a real morbid fascination with that race that to me did really remind me of the 1995 us open agassi experience. unlike agassi, he doesn't see it as a 'deserved' loss, so the bitterness and frustration is definitely DIFFERENT... but yeah. for both of them it is The Loss. it is valentino's great betrayal

and speaking of laguna 2008, if there was one quote i really would have liked to include but couldn't quite justify sneaking in, it's what valentino's crew chief jb said about that race in 2010 (x):

MM: I remember watching Rossi and Stoner through Turn 1. Rossi would come out of the final corner ahead, Stoner would start catching him and Rossi would slide across leaving Stoner only the outside line around Turn 1. JB: It wasn't a case of offering him anything, that was the only place to pass, it was a case of not giving him the ideal line. So if Casey was going to pass Valentino round a corner, it was going to be the long way round, which is the only place to pass, unless you do it in the braking area. My feeling at the time was that Casey probably only had one game plan, and having watched Casey over the years, he doesn't have a plan B. If it doesn't go his way from the outset, it's probably one of the weaknesses that he had through the youth that he had, through the lack of experience that he had. That's not a criticism of him per se, he was still only 22 at the time. And that was it, it was clearly a tactical race. They both cleared off in the vicinity of 20 seconds ahead of Chris Vermeulen, and Casey was able to pick it up after slipping off at Turn 11 and still finish second.

again this is something that will very much feature when i get around to properly dissecting that race, but to me this is crazy revealing on several levels. i mean, first off, i do always enjoy jb being a bit of a dick about valentino's rivals. i like the slagging off, i like it even more when he basically does some of valentino's psychological warfare *for him* like with jorge in 2009, i think it's a cute relationship and it's just conceptually kinda fun to have valentino's crew chief being so ride-or-die for him on the feuding front. like they quite simply do not make crew chiefs like that any more

secondly, i find the parallels with catalunya 2009 interesting in that jb is basically also calling casey too rigid - cf jorge not thinking anyone could pass at montmelo's final corner. again, it's valentino fighting against opponents who may well be faster than him (especially when it comes to casey) but just having this... creativity, intellectual flexibility going for him. casey needs to have a plan b, casey thought he was going to win that race easily, casey couldn't react when he was challenged

thirdly, obviously this does come round to playing into the whole ambition vs talent theme, where casey is this wild raw inexperienced talent who valentino bests with his brains and grit. keeps coming back to that somehow!! idk i know i've talked about this again and again but i just think it's neat to have what essentially amounts to a 'catchphrase' of a rivalry that also basically provides *the* central theme. and if there is one bit of wildly underappreciated casey/vale lore, it is that casey preempted his most infamous line THREE years earlier. like i swear *nobody* ever talks about this, including the guy who wrote the article where i found the quote, but casey literally says "in laguna he let his ambition to win take control over his technique"!! it's so fascinating!!

it does ofc confirm that jerez 2011 wasn't just some kind of spur of the moment bout of poetic genius. it's something casey had been stewing on for years!! casey feels at laguna 2008 that he *should* have won because he was FASTER, goes on a tear in the media, gets massive backlash, has to apologise to valentino, and then bides his time for several years to get the blow in when he is given the opportunity. in some ways it's so valentino-esque, like he's learning to bide his time from the very best. it's fantastic!! the whole thing's fantastic, it is so revealing. which, idk, to some extent the ambition vs talent thing is obviously a framing casey plays into himself - but to some extent it's a framing he finds deeply frustrating because obviously he does *not* enjoy the flip side of that contrast and the implication he is either less intelligent or less mentally tough. that's why it's so interesting that the one word casey used to describe himself is calculating, which does reject that particular dichotomy!! nyhh

fourthly, i feel like we do need to address the "one of the weaknesses that he had through the youth that he had" line. the jb/casey relationship forms such an interesting backdrop to this rivalry, where obviously they kindaaa knew each other and jb MAYBE would have liked to work with casey if valentino had fucked off to f1 and there was that whole quirky element of casey's italian team vs valentino's australian team and casey feeling a bit territorial over his home race and then casey becoming extremely resentful towards jb in those last few years to the point where jb gets slagged off in casey's autobiography... idk, obviously it's a throwaway line but i can't help it, i can't not be interested in valentino's crew chief basing his psychological profile of casey in part on what casey's childhood/adolescence was like, ofc implying that this is something jb is very much aware of

and if you're saying casey is intellectually rigid and doesn't have a back-up plan because of what his youth was like then that means... what, exactly? idk i think you can read that in several ways - and it really does reveal a certain level of thought being put into casey's psychology!! and if you think about jb's role as valentino's proxy and how they ofc hatched The Laguna Plan together and again that remark valentino made about young riders closing up and becoming serious and sad because they were being put under too much pressure... i mean, look, it's obviously not a big revelation that valentino put some serious thought into casey's psychology, like i reckon you can figure it out if you simply. watch that race. but yeah, just getting these little hints confirming it, of valentino carefully studying casey like the intricate puzzle he was... i might be off-base here but my personal interpretation is that... i think valentino *did* see casey's joylessness as a weakness of sorts, this seriousness born from the pressure casey had been put under as something that limited his creativity. treating racing too much as a profession and not a passion, a struggle to adapt to valentino uprooting the status quo...

idk, i obviously am deeply compelled by both valentino and casey watching and studying each other so closely, even though we have heard way more of the conclusions that casey has drawn than vice versa. i think that's really the magic of laguna 2008 - and by extension the entire rivalry - the specificity of the whole thing. the race would not work so well if it involved any other two riders than valentino and casey, it relies on the build-up, it relies on the precise conclusions valentino has drawn about casey's psyche and where he decides to attack him, it relies on casey's complicated and at times tortured feelings towards valentino. it relies on that dichotomy between wild talent and ruthless cunning, it relies on the faster rider losing the race. it relies on that specific track and its specific character. i kinda feel like that makes the race pretty unique where the whole thing depends... so heavily on the specific contours of their relationship, of how they match up as athletes, like if you altered a single detail you would make the whole thing worse. it's such a rich text!!

even though i don't understand shit about motogp, i am always someone who likes to analyse my sports first and foremost As Sports. like i think you can kinda get rich narratives anywhere, you can get them in plenty of fiction i've been told, but crucially the thing about sports is that it's such a controlled playground with these specific modes of interactions and structures and rules shaping the landscape of the narrative. and when i'm looking at sports rivalries, what i really want to see is how interpersonal relations and even, y'know, Themes TM are expressed through the *fabric* of the sport itself. which obviously is extremely easy for me to do with tennis, and i do think tennis is also kinda ideal for that given how interactional the sport is at its very core - the cliche goes that tennis is a game of match-ups. every single match is a deeply rich text that i can analyse if i am so inclined - though there the sports element is unfortunately often a lot more compelling than any sort of overarching narrative. with motogp, i do need a bit more hand-holding. i think what makes laguna 2008 so great for both new and veteran fans of the sport is that it's so *visceral*. you see this relationship and the emotions behind it play out in front of your eyes with relatively little knowledge of the intricacies of motorcycle racing needed. you are immediately dropped into the narrative, you are immediately presented with these two contrasting characters in violent combat - you immediately learn so much about them. you watch them learning about each other. it's great!! guys, it's so great. they're so great

[epaulando]

if you ever decide to do that web weave... for your consideration as well... https://www.tumblr.com/cuthechicane/768594889105670144/jb-that-was-brave-as-well-though-in-a-way?source=share -- wiz

ty!!! love jenson’s obsession with hyping lando like YES that is your special boy!!!

[the-uncanny-dag]

Decided to webbed weave a series of my favourite posts about an incredibly hard to swallow pill

UPDATE: Part 2 of this is here now

[a-poet-young-and-hungry]

“The Two-Character Play” by Tennessee Williams // “Spring Awakening” by Steven Sater // “Clay Pigeons”, Michael Cera // “Whatsername”, Green Day // “The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt // “A Little Life” by Hanya Yanagihara // “Halloween”, Phoebe Bridgers

[webanglikethat]

on c!tommy, The End.

[bloodlessharmony]

reckless serenade, arctic monkeys // guthrie, julien baker // read my mind, the killers

[texaschainsawmascara]

False Alarm - The Weeknd / Christopher Abbott, On the Count of Three

[bittenbywolves]

jennifer’s body (2009) // demolition lovers - my chemical romance

[beyondtheciouds]

Dru couldn't help but feel like she was carving herself out of the past. A ghost; ghastly and haunting as she eyed the intimate initials carved into the wood.

Her blue-green eyes scanned the windowsill searching for another significant signature. Any sign that this was not a coincidence. The past certainly wasn't far from where she was standing.

The wallpaper was yellowed with age; dark green with tiny pink flowers on vines. The furniture was dusty and rotting; mostly made of expensive wood.

JB + LH. Intials of infamous names every Shadowhunter knew crossed out underneath the window.

The two were traitors. Necromancers. Tragic lovers who hadn't fallen far from their family trees. Ancestors who betrayed the Clave and Consul by falling in love.

Like Jules and Emma.

The air faintly smelled of concealed lilies and the scent of congealed lilacs wafted throughout the interior of the room. A chill siphoned all the warmth from the thick, leather coat she wore. She shivered, feeling the ghosts all around.

Dru's eyes wandered further down the window sill; steady and slow in approach. Her inky eyebrows knit together as a spider slipped down the glass and crawled along the splintering wood. She would loathe to admit it, but sometimes she felt like a spider, creeping around weaving webs of lies.

Drusilla's fingers slipped along the ruined window frame; the tips glazing the outlines of the raw letters as though she carved them in the wood herself.

Jesse Blackthorn. Drusilla Blackthorn.

Lucie Herondale. Kit Herondale.

We are following the paths of ghosts.

Dru bit back the hysteria that bubbled up instantly and bit her lower lip. Never would he know.

She hesitated before she lifted a finger and blew on it; dust and mites still clinging to the tips of her long, black nails.

Dru realized the relics of the past were all around her here; heartache and tragedy embedded in the walls. The furniture of the library was spattered with dust and ash. Old bound books lay on the floor; splayed open to passages of yellowed and torn pages.

Spells.

Dru took a deep breath and shivered. She felt like she was in one of her screamfest horror movies.

The eerie presence was splayed on her back like a sharp knife. She knew the uncomfortable feeling as much as she knew Kit was in the next room.

The ghosts of the Institute were quiet for the moment; not a peep to be heard in Dru's ears. They appeared to reluctantly listening and behaving.

Dru kept an open mind as many of the spirits aburptly fled to the cornerstone of the room.

Dru was acutely aware of another spirit and she instinctly knew he was watching her from the shadows with those hypnotic and strange blue eyes.

Dru's breath seeped out her lips and steamed the window before a breeze of bitter cold wafted throughout her bones as if a spirit flew past her.

The future seemed uncertain and distant; like a star that was falling, but one thing was for certain; this place held secrets about the Herondales and Blackthorns.

Secrets that Drusilla Blackthorn was determined to know.

[scoundrels-in-love]

hiraeth for the meme? JB?

Anon, you did what I thought was impossible, as in, made me write again. Thank you for picking one of my most beloved words of longing, ever.

Hiraeth: a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past.

Also on AO3. Just excuse to write emotional introspection & landscape porn.

---

Jaime hadn’t been shipwrecked and cast onto Tarth's shores, but he might as well have been, with the odd sense of wonder that fills him as he cranes his neck to peer at the cliff faces that give little way to a rocky beach, as if pebble by pebble Tarth has reclaimed land from sea's unending touch, with sheer determination, like its people create houses and turn them into homes upon the rock.

A castaway might feel fear and longing for their home once the marvel of feeling land beneath their feet wanes, but instead, Jaime feels as if he's been castaway his whole life and finally arrived at the gates of his home. The great, sharp gates that lead onto a steep and sometimes narrow path toward the clifftop that he has walked through a hundred times and still feels humbled and welcomed by.

He climbs slowly, because he has nowhere to be right now, other than this moment and this familiar journey upward. And yet, it is still opposite of the aimless days and months he has known before Tarth. Being here is being , in a way that aches as much as it soothes, from the early morning sun carving its way through the clouds as he works the land to golden, wind swirled evenings spent on docks or in Davos' inn or the longing that's on cusp of being fulfilled, but all the more aching for that, that fills him when he is here.

Finally, he reaches the top, hauls his gaze over the even page of clifftop, though its edges are greatly torn and moves toward one of the further ledges, leaning directly over the sea in a far reach. He would call it desperate, but what can a cliff be desperate for, when it holds its opposite in gentle grasp?

From up here, he sees the port and the town to the North with its beach line that he had followed to the base of these cliffs, deeper inland where the Evenfall Hall lays with the villages that have scattered around it, like crumbs of its marble walls sprouting seeds of homes. He knows the little paths connecting them, can spy his own house and plot of land that will bear his feeble farming attempts this year. It’s not the view he needs, right now.

He looks ahead, instead. To the vanishing line of the horizon where the gray of the sky and sea reach to mingle together, though the grey veil fails to imitate the shifting waves below, try as it might. And it does try , shedding streaks of grays from misty white to muted storm almost-black that take up the rest of the sky, gradually toward the meeting point.

The wind tears at his clothes, bites through the unbuttoned shirt collar like a jealous lover -- no, it does not deserve the comparison. And though the thought is fleeting, he already feels his sense of peace wobbling to the side, like a pile of pebbles built to make wishes with he's seen children build on the beaches.

It's odd, how being almost happy can ache. At least Jaime thinks he is almost that. Happiness is a ghost he has only heard of, sees its blurry outline when he recalls how laughter gilded faces of his mother and sister. It's a grief, maybe, that echoes hurt, for time taking the feeling of happiness with careless hand and even more so for all the laughter that died with his mother that could've spun toward the sky, the way he imagines he could've loved Casterly Rock then, the way he might've belonged.

Being here, makes him all the more aware of it, like a gap between something trembling and warm (he thinks about how a week ago, he had ended up helping Old Jenny when her cow had twins and the sticky, slightly bloody warmth that had imprinted into his hands) in him and the emptiness so large it almost feels like a thing has been drawn all the more sharply, marking the width newborn, wobbly thing must cross before it could even brush up against the void in him, risking being snuffed out. But maybe just that it exists before it dies, is enough.

He knows death like every other soldier does, but here on Tarth he's been learning of birth, too, (of calves and gardens, and dreams) and it scares him, some, with the inevitability it brings into the world. Jaime's never been good with constants - maybe because they've never been that, not to him. Not his mother, not even his twin's love and the sense of belonging she had weaved for him like a home of golden spider web (still clinging to his clothes in places he can't reach to brush them off), not honor or justice.

Only the search has remained.

Because it's never been wanderlust that chased him from city to port and across the sea and back again, though there had been a thrill in seeing new places and exploring every nook and cranny he could. Thrill and eventual disappointment, resignation even - no, not here either. Though he has hardly ever known what he's been searching for. Is, still. Because even now, here, where every step feels familiar and soothing like the sea's back and forth that he has always sought out since childhood, something is missing.

Jaime is content, though, more than ever and he is thinking of what he hasn't in over a decade: stopping. Staying. The thought had shot through his mind before a few times across the world, like a bird speeding across the imprint of sun in the sky, but it had never circled back, never sat down and never made a friend of him. Now, it's grown as familiar as his own worn-in work boots.

He has things here that he couldn't even imagine before, like the sense of marvel at how much the great oak tree has grown (since the last time, since the last time that never was) when he wandered up to Evenfall hall for the first time or the cutting clarity of things he cannot find words for when he's up in the cliffs, and things he never thought he even wanted, like people who smile and greet him, a cat that mills evenings into nights, and even a house that's one something short of home. (Just one, when it's never been anything less than an eternal list of indefinable.)

It used to make him angry, the way he knows homesickness as well as his own heartbeat, without ever knowing what it’s like to be at home, at peace. What kind of wretched thing runs in his blood that doesn’t know rest? What kind of love or hate chases him onward without direction, only with a want that he shouldn’t know, if he doesn’t know what the shape of what he’s missing? But the fall storms and quiet months of winter on Tarth have subdued the anger, drawn outlines in the sand that are almost an answer.

The sun breaks through the clouds then, pouring like rain in rare, bright streams onto the sea and he inhales deeply, as if he could take the light in him to dispel the smothering at the edges of his emptiness. And that's when he hears steps behind him. He half turns to see who it is, expecting one of the children though they're told not to play up here, but instead he falls - no, is pierced by, no, falls - into eyes impossibly familiar, when he knows he's never seen a blue like this, not even in his dreams that often spin blue and gold and gray across his heart.

But he knows them still, somehow, and if colors had sounds then this would have the soft bell of the final piece falling in place, of first notes of welcome home hymn, of relief's sigh - oh. Oh , it's you. You're here. (I've been waiting for you.)

Jaime draws a shuddering breath, tries to ground himself in taking in the rest of the person that makes him want to run away and toward them all at once.

It's a woman, taller than him he gauges even with the distance between them, and broader, too, with features arranged just shy of wrong, but not shy enough for most to not call her ugly, he guesses. (But he can't, because factuality doesn't stand a chance against the gale so high up.)

There's scowl on her face, maybe from the sun or the wind though he feels it's not, and wind has untangled pale strands from her braid to whip into her face and tug along in its rush. Freckles dot her face and for a moment, he believes he could find well-loved patterns in those and the rest, hidden by her dark blue coat and the slightly wrinkled shirt seen beneath the blue and gold brocade vest.

Jaime swallows and looks into her eyes again, trying to remember what is the image of the puzzle that feels complete now, but it's been locked away already. He finds that he doesn't care, he's just happy, because not seeing it doesn't change the truth of it. Just yesterday, he had planted apple trees in his garden and the promise of the pale pink blooms against bowed branches that always seem to remember the weight of all the fruit they will ever bear, alone had been enough to make his step light all the way to this moment.

So he smiles at her.

"Lady Brienne Tarth, I presume."