#Maybe that's why my random number generator is obsessed with it?

[piperamitt]

Did you guys know Poof has a Crash Nebula lunch box? If not...

Now you do.

[biolumien]

Hi Hi! first time requesting like this and I just recently finished watching the latest episode of Kaiju number 8. I was wondering if your could write something for Vice Captain Hoshina.

I was thinking something along the lines of a reincarnation storyline? Maybe Reader is a renowned painter or something. And one day they come across a dream of Hoshina in their past life and they paint his face. And Hoshina is suddenly bombarded by a few officers/cadets a few days later about a sudden article blowing up online with a painting that had extremely similar structure to his face. And maybe they'd end up meeting because of it?

I love your writing. Particularly the one with the glasses reader that I read a few days back. You're free to change things as you see fit. And I'm sure whatever you come up with will be very nice. Sorry if my words are confusing. I don't speak english language that well. 😊👌 Thank you if you decide to write for this ask.

notes: ok the way i am. actually obsessed with this i hope you enjoy!!

every 'one line' drawn.

soshiro hoshina x gn!reader no warnings, i think wc: 1768

in your dreams, you always see the same face. red eyes watching your face, purple hair framed over his face and the feeling of a callused hand on your hand, on your cheek. and every time he leans into kiss you, you find yourself pressing your face closer to his, as if desperate, and then you wake up. 

and when you wake up, you always feel the telltale trickle of a tear down your face, the feeling of salt on your tongue. 

there’s no time to wonder what the dreams ever mean, what with your job as a painter. you lived commission to commission—and while your customers were always high brow and paid generously, still meant that you couldn’t be lost in daydreams forever. 

and in your studio, with the pungent smell of turpentine and linseed oil, with your hands inevitably smeared with oil paints, it was easy to forget the stranger whose hands felt rough and weary, and yet held your face with measured gentleness. it was easy to forget him—up until you went back to bed, and you’d always be back in the same dream. 

“i keep seeing you,” you murmur in your dream. “who are you?” 

the man laughs. 

he seems sad, for a second. 

“a dear friend,” he responds. you see it on his face, the way his lips twist at his words, that it’s not quite true. and he leans in again, watching your face. “it’s okay if you don’t remember me.” 

“but i do,” you say in protest. you think you remember this face. “i want to.” 

you must remember this face, surely—this face that, upon your words, looks sadder. and then you wonder if he’s even real—or if this is simply your subconscious, saddened that you can’t remember. saddened that your mind replays this moment, again and again, a repeated brushstroke pulling open the blank canvas underneath. 

“we all want things we can’t have, sometimes,” the man says. 

he leans into kiss you, 

and you jolt up out of bed, awakening to a phone call from your manager. 

“hello…?” you mumble into your phone, pressing it against your cheek as you rub the sleep out of your eyes. “it’s rare you call me randomly like this…” 

“tis no random call,” your manager responds. “you’ve received a request to exhibit some of your works from a museum. will you do it? i hear the pay’s pretty good.”

“mmm… any specific theme?” you ask. 

“not really. they said to let your imagination go wild.” 

“hm.” 

you touch your lips, and when you close your eyes, you see a hint of those crimson eyes again. 

“alright. i think i’ve got a pretty good muse this time,” you say. 

[…]

hoshina wasn’t exactly someone who was very in the know about art. his job, for one, meant that it’s not like he would exactly be interested in art in general, and it’s not like he was even spending his days off on art museum trips or admiring the local art scene. 

so why was it that everyone seemed all abuzz about art today?

and why did it seem like there were more eyes on him than before? not that he particularly abhorred attention or anything, but the eyes seemed to be looking at his face specifically. 

his eyes flit to some of the new officer recruits—iharu, reno, kafka… fuck, even haruichi and aoi? what the hell was going on—huddled around a laptop. haruichi’s brow furrows as he stares at the illuminated screen, and then flits up to look at hoshina. when hoshina stares back, harder, haruichi’s gaze immediately ducks back to the laptop.  

okay. 

well, something was definitely up. 

hoshina strolls over to the recruits, who immediately seem to start panicking—the panic is written across kafka’s face more obviously than the others, and reno elbows kafka in the side. 

“what’s all this about? if you’ve got time to huddle you’ve got time to run laps—” hoshina starts, leaning over at the screen before—

“about that, vice captain,” iharu says. 

hoshina’s in stunned silence staring at the screen, because… isn’t that—

“holy shit,” hoshina says. 

“holy shit indeed,” haruichi says grimly. 

on haruichi’s laptop screen is a painting of— him. hoshina’s damned face, brows gentle and a softened smile on his face. it was a beautiful painting, and yet—there was something sad about the smile, the brows belying deep sorrow. 

“this painter’s pretty well-known, too, aren’t they?” kafka asks. “for like… the psychedelic stuff.” 

“no,” reno says. “they’re like our modern-day monet or something. impressionist paintings.” 

“impressi-what? how do you know this much about art, reno?” iharu asks, wrapping his arm around reno’s neck in a headlock. reno coughs, slapping iharu’s arm. 

“shut up,” reno chokes out, but even as the bickering picks up, hoshina’s gaze is still transfixed on the painting. 

it’s him. no doubt about it. 

“i’ve never talked to them before,” hoshina says after a moment. at once the arguments rattle to a halt, but in the empty relief of silence is the carved truth—that the painting is definitely of him, and its painter was a person who he’d never talked to before in his life. 

“the artist is going to be doing a panel about their exhibition soon,” haruichi says, glancing up at hoshina. “i think they can get me a ticket if i ask.” 

“… just don’t expect me to lighten your laps around the training course,” hoshina says with a chuckle. 

[…]

you hated speaking in front of an audience. cliche, of course, the introverted artist that squirrels away in in their studio—but that was often your reality. you liked to say you wanted your work to ‘speak for itself’, as it were, so you didn’t often make public appearances. 

but your most recent exhibition, featuring the painting of your mysterious dream visitor, created far more buzz than you could have asked for. suddenly everyone and anyone wanted an answer as for who your muse was, why he had a very striking resemblance to soshiro hoshina of the japan anti-kaiju defense force’s third division, and had you gotten permission from hoshina to do it? did you have a specific message surrounding your work?

“just stick to the script,” your manager says to you. “i talked it through with some of the reporters and i wrote some answers for you if you’re scared.” he hands you a slip of paper, and your eyes scan the page, and you swallow the lump in forming in your throat. 

“i shouldn’t have done the painting after all,” you say.

it was strange. in the days and weeks you’d worked on the painting, you hadn’t seen your muse in your dreams at all. you’d been forced to rely on only the memory of the dream–which only seemed to get fuzzier and fuzzier until it became barely a wisp. and now, in those ensuing weeks that the painting has been on exhibition, you almost felt embarrassed of the painting–its vague subject matter might have been charming and a little kitsch, but charming and a little kitsch wasn’t supposed to garner this much attention.

“nonsense,” your manager says. “it’s a wonderful painting.” he pushes you by the back, gently urging you forward. “they’re ready for you.”

you push past the door separating you from the reporters–and then are immediately flashbanged with cameras and lights, and jumbling, layered voices creating a discordant symphony that made you wince.

“um. thank you… for…” you wince as your grip fumbles on your microphone, nearly dropping it, the feedback screeching across speakers. “um. sorry. i’m not exactly the best public speaker–my repertoire of events… like this, isn’t many. but thank you for attending this panel… surrounding my exhibition of my latest work. i’ll answer… a few questions.”

the reporters looked like a jumbled blob for the most part–a thrumming organism of similar faces that melted together into one homogenous mess, a splotch of badly-mixed paint on the palette that you’d scrape away with a knife and discard. 

reciting your manager’s written responses wasn’t the hard part. as you continued to banter, your eyes swept across the crowd.

what were you even doing here?

you wanted to crawl back to your studio, already, and go back to painting. at least then the idea that you’d dreamed up some man who bore a striking resemblance to someone who already existed would fade away with time. and then your eyes found that telltale shade of crimson and purple–for just a moment. and you think his eyes meet yours, too–crimson eyes the exact shade as the one in your dreams. 

his eyes widen. 

“... as you were saying?” a reporter’s words float back to your ears, ephemeral, and you pause.

“can we… no more questions.” you shake your head, finding your vision swimming, blurring, and you raise a hand wiping tears from your face. “sorry. something just… came up–”

and you push into the crowd, trying to find the face from your dreams.

that had to be him, right? his face? it was like as soon as you saw him, the underpainting of your memories flowed back to you–a heartaching loss pounding in your chest. something was wrong. something was missing, because you’d forgotten–and now that you’d remembered it, it hurt. 

“i’m sorry,” you say. 

“you’ve nothing to be sorry for,” the man says to you, and leans in to kiss you. “i’ll find you again in the next life.”

“i’ll remember you,” you say. 

the man watches you, a somewhat sad look on his face.

you press your thumb to the corner of his lip.

“and when i do, i’ll do something big. to capture your attention. and then your eyes will be on me forever.”

you finally manage to catch the man in the crowd, and you realize you’ve seen him before. only once or twice, though–on a small poster or on television. soshiro hoshina, of the third division. you did know this man–but just barely.

he lets out a surprised noise as soon as you collide with him, and you gasp breathlessly. 

“i’m sorry,” you say, looking up at hoshina. “i just… have we…”

“met?” hoshina answers your question, cocking his head, blinking down at you.

“yes,” you say. “i think… i think so. maybe. we… you look familiar.”

hoshina blinks, and then smiles.

it’s so different than the way he smiled at you in your dream. the corners of his lips quirk up, his eyebrows relax almost as he watches you. 

“i thought so too,” hoshina says, and you hear relief in his voice. “so… um. hi.”

“hi,” you respond, and he laughs.

[avpdvoidspace]

Since you've mentioned a couple of times having comorbid OCPD, would you mind explaining more about the effect that disorder has on you? Out of every PD, it's the one I never find people talking about. Due to that, and the diagnostic criteria itself being (as ever) exasperatingly superficial and vague, It's hard to know where to even look for information about it..!

Sure. I agree that it's very difficult to find information about ocpd online. I guess I could categorize my experience with ocpd into three categories: things that are absolutely recognized symptoms of ocpd, things that overlap with other obsessive compulsive spectrum disorders (like things more traditionally thought of as OCD symptoms), and things that I have to assume come from ocpd because they seem to but I don't know if they're universal because I don't see other people talking about having ocpd. So in terms of things that are definitely ocpd experiences: I really don't feel safe or comfortable in situations I don't have at least some control over. I need to control my space, my food, who is around me, etc to feel safe. This also applies to my time and schedule. I get very agitated when it's interrupted, even if I don't show it. I tend to plan my day's activities pretty rigidly and it stresses me out when I'm not able to follow through. I also have very rigid ways I like to do things, and it stresses me out if I have to do something with someone else's method or if someone in my apartment does something differently to how I would do it, especially things like eating without washing hands first, not taking shoes off before coming in, etc. I try to keep this kind of thing in check because I don't want to be controlling or obnoxious, but it causes me a lot of stress internally. This has been very difficult when I've had a job and I'm being told to do things a particular way but it's not MY way. It's also difficult when I'm intentionally trying to push myself to try a different method for, say, drawing something. Even though I'm making the choice, I'm breaking my method and it feels extremely Wrong. The next category is overlap with other obsessive compulsive spectrum disorders. I definitely get intrusive thoughts and the anxiety inducing spiral of 'something bad will happen if I don't have the tv volume set to an odd number' and 'I feel compelled to make sure my foot touches to the floor in a very certain way right now for Reasons'. I also have health anxiety that gets worse if I try to engage in reassurance seeking behavior (but this only started after I got diagnosed with a chronic illness, so it could be a combination of ocpd and trauma). But you can apply the mechanics of health anxiety to other things that pop into my head to frighten me with no basis in reality that start the reassurance seeking/me becoming more convinced the terrible thing is true cycle. Then the third category, which is random things I think are ocpd but who knows because there aren't a lot of other people out there talking about their personal experiences with it: I like recording things. Every day, I write the weather conditions down in a notebook. I also have very rigid records of my drawing time and draw with a stopwatch going to make sure I'm keeping track and write everything in a notepad++ file like so

I get extremely stressed out if anything gets in the way of this process! You could say my life kind of revolves around this actually. I've actually drawn at least an hour a day for about a decade (knock on wood...), and I track it every day. In general, I have a lot of fun creating methods and systems to follow rigidly. It's like a game even. Maybe why I like playing games with a lot of organization/time management... Love giving myself a list of tasks and completing them. Speaking of games, I love Pokemon Legends Arceus because it is essentially a checklist simulator. Also, I experience something similar to special interests but maybe not exactly the same. I wouldn't say hyperfixations either because they're not fleeting. They're very enduring. I wish I could explain more about how they're unique from either special interests (in the autistic meaning of the phrase) and hyperfixations (like with ADHD), but it's kind of hard to explain without feeling like I'm explaining it poorly. And last, something that could go in either this category or the second because it's something I've heard people diagnosed with OCD talk about experiencing is I have a weird thing with my memory where my visual/auditory memory are weirdly strongly connected. So if I'm listening to something while drawing, if I listen to it again, I can 'see' what I was drawing at the time. If I look at the drawing, I'll remember the part of the audiobook or whatever I was listening to. It's to the point that if I was listening to an audiobook while playing a certain video game, hearing the audiobook again will make me crave playing the video game really intensely! It's like I can see exactly where I was in the game as if I was playing it right now. Anyway, I hope that was helpful. I tried to include everything I could think of. My life is very rigid, but I guess if there's one more thing I could say about that, it's that the rigidity excites me and feels like it lights up my brain with feel-good chemicals. I think having ocpd is like a combination of extreme anxiety and the ability to create fun engaging activities all by myself and with very few resources.

[accio-victuuri]

I usually see posts on weibo including Yibo, a comparison with people his age or like the 95+ group in terms of fan engagement and likes on certain posts. Why WYB seem to not be the leading in numbers on that area. The easy ( and somewhat harsh maybe ) explanation would be — all these people have are likes and online engagement but no actual talent or award nominations/wins to be called an actor. being a celebrity is what they are. a celebrity actor if you will. an idol actor. there is nothing wrong with that. a lot of c-ent personalities go this route, even wyb started as an “idol actor” but the difference is, he is not contented in staying that way.

I also read a post that went like this:

It would be strange if fans don’t leave. He is famously not fond of business, and his account number is equal to that of an advertising blogger. There is almost no fan interaction, he only has fans who love him for years and this is not enough to last forever. Now that he is filming a movie, he will disappear easily. He used to send WB frequently. In a few selfies, his face was even covered up.

Then it goes on to say how this is basically not sustainable and fans will want something in return to stay.

Right from the get go, the person who posted this already answered their own “question”: He is famously not fond of business. Meaning, WYB is already known to keep a clear line between him and fans. He appreciates his fans and those who support his work ( clear example is his interactions during movie roadshows ) but most of those going into the fandom already know that about him. A lot of us are even attracted to him because of it.

Not to mention he has challenges with security, even if he always has 1 or 2 bodyguards always with him. He still gets trackers placed in his car, stalker harassing him on the plane, people touching him etc and you all wonder why he isn’t enthusiastic about sharing personal things 👁️👄👁️

This obsession of wanting to know everything about someone and needing celebrities to share their life like some influencer is gonna get old real soon. It’s actually what’s not sustainable — especially if you want to be a serious actor loved by the general public. You can’t share too much. You have to keep a certain mystery. What people should focus on is the movie and your acting, and not your personal life. Yibo understands that. The shift is so obvious and I get it if some fans don’t agree, but I love it. I have always been vocal with my support in Yibo’s acting career track. I miss random douyin posts and other things but I understand that keeping that limited is better for him. If that’s what gives him some sense of peace and privacy, then I’m okay with that. Plus there is a thing called over exposure — so yeah. Being on hot search daily isn’t a good thing like people make it out to be. If being on HS @ weibo is all a fandom and a celebrity aims for, then go ahead. Yibo is not the same. I’m not even gonna talk about how many of those fan engagement are real and not a water army.

Anyway, he really has to do things differently if he wants better results ( be nominated and win legitimate acting awards, not hand outs ) in his career. If he just goes with the blueprint, then he will end up in the same way as other c-ent celebrities. Bloggers who post stuff like what I shared don’t get it. Yibo is an anomaly in the industry. People fear and reject things they don’t understand. They can’t figure him out, he keeps on going against the trend. As a fan, that’s what is exciting. Yibo is making a path of his own and i’m here for it. ✌🏼

[lunarfied]

19. WHY DIDN’T YOU STOP ME ? ; oops

scaramouche x gn! reader smau

both pov;

"welcome to the stream everyone!" you waved to the webcam as soon as venti switched over to the right screen. soon enough he pushed his chair into frame (and almost knocking you over in the process) and waved to the cam as well.

"what's up guys, your fav is here!" venti did a little spin in his chair as the viewers started rolling in. this would be the first stream you did since you face revealed last week and you expected to be swarmed with viewers but were still a bit surprised to see the surge in numbers only five minutes into the stream.

lunafied: omg my silly little pickles hiiiii machiroll: IS THAT MY FAV STREAMER VENTI !!111!!1111!!!!! ynventishipper: my fav couple streaming again awww creep: toe reveal?

"alright, alright - today we're going to do a fun little stream." you began, reading over the chat. at least you weren't alone and venti could also read the influx of messages.

"yeah! we're reading viewer's confessions~!" venti brought his knees up to his chest, "it's anonymous so you all could've gotten away with saying anything... anyways!" they turned to you, "since it's your stream, y/n, you should read the first one! here, i'll even pick, hehe."

"what the fuck are you making me read-" you cringed, running your hands down your face, watching venti laugh at the weird confession. and here you thought the stream wouldn't start off bad.

"there's no way that's even real- everyone knows i'm with xiao!" venti wiped a tear from the side of her eye. streaming with your friends was fun, but the downside of that always came with the fans who obsessed over your relationship with them. misconstruing every platonic relationship you had.

"gods, anyways, your turn." you gestured for venti to continue reading.

"can't even be upset with that one because it sounds just like me-"

"venti! stop!"

――――――

"i bet more than half of these confessions are people coming out to us."

"yeah, our fanbases combined are like, 90% fruity."

――――――

you both turned to each other in disbelief at what you just read. you didn't even know what to say.

"some things... you should keep to yourself..." venti stifled his laughter behind his energy drink.

you just kept staring.

――――――

"how do you accidentally... what were you even looking up!?"

"hey, don't question them."

you turned to venti with a raised brow, "did you send rule 34 to some by accident too?"

"i refrain from speaking at this time..." venti made a face and looked the other way.

――――――

"you pissed on your teacher!?"

"it wasn't on the teacher- they said in front! anyways i really hope that was fake or you were like, five-"

"why does that sound like something childe would do-"

"you're kinda right about that..."

――――――

"okay! i think this was a really fun stream, and even more fun that venti was here with me." you clapped your hands together, beginning to end the stream.

"aww, ending already?" venti pouted, moving closer to the mointors on your desk, scrolling through the google form. "let's just read one more, hm? here do a random number generator." they grabbed your hand, pulling you closer to the screens.

"oh wow, number 69, how nice." you rolled you eyes as venti cackled, pulling up the confessions form.

"alright, read away, my dear~"

"okay, okay ― let's see here; i broke up with my ex, and haven't spoken to them in years until recently due to hanging out since we have mutual friends. and then i kis- venti, is this a joke??" you turned to your best friend, confusion and annoyance mixed in your expression. whoever confessed this was oddly spot on with what was going on in your own life. venti stared at you with wide eyes, shaking his head quickly.

"no, this wasn't me ― promise! maybe childe? i don't know... who else knows about you and scara??"

"i don't kno ― venti! you didn't mute the stream!" you placed a hand over your mouth in shock.

lunafied: oooooo venti's in TROUBLEEE scarasleftnut: y/n and scara are dating?? since when?? akiangelenjoyer: you're out of touch im out of time angelfire69: THAT SHOULD BE ME!!!11!! markiplier: Hello everybody my name is Markiplier

"okay, uh, fuck ― just end the stream we can deal with this later." venti reached over to press the end stream button. you rubbed the side of your head in annoyance, already over the whole day.

"uh oh..." venti's mouth formed a thin line as she glanced over her shoulder at you.

"what?"

"i may have accidentally... raided scara's stream instead..."

masterlist | playlist | <- prev | next ->

-> notes: pls don’t come at me for my editing skills i have the oldest laptop known to MAN and the most cracked iphone ever ALSO!! i am well aware of the fact that when you raid someone on twitch, you have to type a command but i don't care it's my smau and i make the rules

-> 🏷️ (1/2): @machiroll @raideneiari @mariusvonhangme @inlustris-is-slowly-dying @sakiimeo @ferumie @plinkuro @scaraapologist @baelloraa @bubblesmei @lovelyiez @isa-solasun @lazy-sanns @thenightsflower @divinechicha @rxd-iant @elysiasgf @cerisearan @alwaysmentallyill @kaoyamamegami @richxelle @monochromaticelliot @kunikuzushiit @thedumboneforsomereason @lordbugs @osamusswife @useless-potatho @tsuyumbrella @orionicchaos @lxry-chxn @twistedrxses @akagism2 @kxr0mi @angryhope @ivylibrary-00 @makilovescofi @mechanicalbeat1 @erosdevil @ghostsaysno @anotherdayanotherobsession @garlicforthewin @oliver-s-worlds @lunavixia @arizzu @meigalaxy @hydration-is-for-weenies @yuyan @soleillunne @xiaossocksniffer

[cinturon-cadena]

DP x DC Smallville

Okay, I've been forming this theory for a while now, but this scene just cemented it:

The bottom of her boots? Fenton F??? There is no way you can't tell me those aren't Fenton-grade boots!

Hear me out. I have other evidence.

The principal in season 1 is a man of Asian decent named Kwan. Who else do we know named Kwan?

And to top it off, Smallville's Kwan has a son named Danny. Now obviously, his son isn't Fenton/Phantom, BUT assuming at least the class and maybe the entire town of Amity Park learns Danny's secret, it wouldn't be out of the ordinary that some of his classmates grow up and name a child after their town hero. Even if they never learn Danny's secret, Danny Fenton himself did lead the entire class against Ember and Youngblood, as well as exhibited other noble qualities, so it's not out of the question that at least one of his classmates had a child whom they named 'Danny'.

2. As discussed in this post, the whole 'Kryptonite-is-crystalized-Ectoplasm' theory. Now some of the more meticulous (me) might be wondering, 'if this theory holds up and Kryptonite-Ectoplasm is giving random people in Smallville super/ghost powers, then why didn't Amity Park have the same activity?' Why thank you, Skeptical Voice In My Head! I'll tell you why. First of all, Smallville has had 12 years-worth of exposure to the Kryptonite-Ectoplasm, that's why! During the course of Danny Phantom's runtime we only get to see ~1 year pass. 2 if we're being generous. In addition, despite having a literal portal to Hell the Infinite Realms open basically 24/7 in the town, along with near-daily/hourly ghost attacks, the citizens of Amity Park themselves do not seem to regularly come into contact with any form of Ectoplasm. Unlike in Smallville, where people are handling the stuff almost daily - hell, dozens of people just casually wear it as jewelry, and I guarantee more than 1 person has at least a meteorite rock or 2 in their home, as a keepsake. There is also a potential argument to be made about crystalized Ectoplasm-Kryptonite being more potent than the ambient radiation/gas/liquid stuff we see in Amity Park.

3. There is literally a canonical town near Smallville called Amityville. Enough said.

4. Which brings us to number 4. The Boots.

I propose that it is highly likely that Danny's class grew up through the events of Danny Phantom (sin Phantom Planet), and that Smallville takes place somewhere around ~25 years after the Portal opens. Kwan grew up to be a teacher, then principal, and named his son after Danny (whether he knew Danny's secret or not). Fenton Works continued on in some capacity, whether it's still the Dr's Fenton going at it or if Danny/Jazz inherited the family business, and at some point made a line of Fenton-grade combat boots. Heck, maybe Sam had a say in their design (it is the kind of thing she'd wear).

In addition, if this is ~25 years later, then Amity Park would be full of Liminals right now - probably keeping their nature on the down-low so the rest of the world doesn't know, or being held under a Team Phantom (Foley/Fenton/Technus) or GIW-mandated blackout. Either way, the general world knows Amity ParkVille exists, but not that Liminals live there (unlive?).

And because their exposure to Ectoplasm was much more gradual and they would have had enough cultural exposure to ghosts, they would adapt to their newfound Liminality powers much more effectively than the poor flash-exposured citizens of Smallville who end up insane because they can't handle the sudden influx of power they're granted. The citizens of Amity Park have the tech and know-how to deal with weird ectoplasm-induced ghost powers. They've seen and interacted with enough ghosts that the idea of Obsessions/Purposes/insert-headcanon-here isn't far-fetched and they'd know how to deal with it in a slightly more constructive way (or at least, be able to handle the ghostly aggression that Liminals seem to have, if Smallville is any indication).

SO, In Conclusion, Danny Phantom's Amity Park and Smallville are in the same universe, albeit DP is ~25 years ahead of Smallville's setting.

Just Saying.

[secretgamergirl]

To everyone who keeps writing these posts about weird marginalized infighting crap and especially to the people who keep reblogging them onto my feed: Please quit falling for the number one play in the nazi handbook.

So this is my experience with Tumblr, I don't know if it's true for everyone else. I sit down, I load up my feed, I see a couple weird/cute nerdy things maybe, and then within the first 3 or 4 posts, there's something that reads like this:

"So check this out, I look in my inbox today and there's this anonymous post from a three-headed five-legged slumf who is just randomly laying into me about how their life is made of pain and suffering thanks to all the special privileges they for some baffling reason believe I have as a two-headed nine-legged slumf. It's so weird and creepy and wrong! Obviously all slumfs are seriously oppressed, I don't get why I keep seeing so many three-headed five-legged ones coming after us two-headed nine-legged ones. It's some real serious 2-9-slumf-phobia within the community though and we need to address it."

It would really mean a lot to me if you would all just stop posting and sharing those sort of things, if you'd be so kind, and ideally pass this post along to others. The reason for this should be obvious if you look at the title I slapped on this, but you know me, I'm going to keep rambling below the fold.

As documented in articles like this one, and this one, hardcore bigots have been completely obsessed with "false flag" operations for... at LEAST the past 20 years or so. The way they do it is pretty simple. Pick two broad groups you hate and want dead. Make some social media accounts (or better, re-do the profiles for the one you used the last time you did this, older ones look more legit) where you pretend you're a member of the one group, and speaking broadly on their behalf, and just vomit a ton of hate at the other group with that disguise. For best results, use some other accounts to pretend to be the second group and vomit hate at the first.

Aside from the immediate satisfaction of hurling hate at the target, there's this general hope that it will cause real strife between the target and the group being impersonated. And there's even some benefit in just getting people venting about it so people who aren't affected see commentary on this crap and just come off thinking "damn, look at all those crazy slumfs and their weird factionalizing and infighting. I don't want anything to do with that."

Now maybe you're thinking, "OK, but I'm pretty sure this creep harassing me really was a three-headed five-legged slumf, and even if this one wasn't, I've definitely encountered such in real life." We could go back and forth on this all day about whether people are who they say they are and how being a gross bigot and being a target of gross bigotry aren't mutually exclusive at all, but at the end of the day, I don't care in the slightest if someone spreading this kind of crap is just stirring crap or legitimately personally what they claim and bent out of shape. Getting real people on board is explicitly part of the goal. If it's working that doesn't make things better. The point is you are sharing something which doesn't really serve any purpose beyond encouraging animosity between two groups (or hell, two individuals even) that bigots are out to get, and people's exposure to it are going to be advancing those bigots' goals.

You could also argue, hey, no, it's important to share this stuff to educate people. Educate them about what, though? That random creeps give marginalized people are hard time? That's pretty common knowledge. Some members of marginalized groups are huge bigoted creeps? Also goes without saying, there's bigoted creeps all over.

Or maybe we're just sharing this yarn because dealing with creeps sucks and it helps to vent about it. That's totally valid, we all need to vent about stuff that sucks. I'm doing it right now! But like... you can talk about how lame stuff is personally affecting you without vaguely insinuating whole groups suck by association. Just tell me you've been dealing with BS from some bigoted creep, I'll sympathize. You don't need to quote all the awful gibberish and personal identification. Consider something more like this:

So hey. I'm a trans woman, and I had this total creep start messaging me out of the blue one day, blaming me for all the problems in the world from like famous bigots existing to having abusive parents, being part of some huge conspiracy with a bunch of other people apparently selected at random, something about sexual favors with a long time stalker of mine, and a bunch of other random crap, and then proceeded on this weird crusade to get my patreon shut down and failing that harass anyone supporting me there until they stopped.

I'm not bringing up any of the axes of marginalization this weird creep may have been on and giving anyone any ammo that way, just pointing out the sort of weird freaking crap people like me have to deal with regularly. Also hey fun fact, the above example is a real thing that happened to me, it really did have a serious impact on my income from which I've never recovered, and once my landlord cashes this month's check it's gonna leave me with something like $39. So uh... have a link to said patreon? Point is, like... try and focus your highlighting of the plight of the marginalized on actionable stuff and important information to be shared, not pointing at other people who are/claim to be marginalized who are being complete creeps.

[where-dreamers-go]

Reading and rambling: The Fork, the Witch, and the Worm

(Tales from Alagaësia VOLUME 1: ERAGON)

~~~

PART ONE: THE FORK

I. Mount Arngor

~~~

Ahem.

*looks at tiny, cute, little, colored map of the EASTERN REACHES*

That looks like it would have taken me the days to color. *imagining the ache of non-stop coloring the same spot over and over and over)

Anyway, what's with the random mountain? They don't get earthquakes do they?

*flipping pages*

Angela! Angela!

... Hmm 2018 copyright. Took me long enough.

*sees drawing of a fork*

Oh! The Little Mermaid! Cool.

What's with the hanging ornament with the page numbers? Should I know these symbols??

The day had not gone well.

I'm sorry. .. Blackberry mead... Like wine or expensive juice?

...picking berries in Palancar Valley.

Awh. Farm boy.

A pang of homesickness struck him.

Now?

...the Academy...

Academy? Oh okay. Not sure I even thought of him giving it a name. Then again he gives names to a number of things. Right?

He sighed, finding the sight depressing.

Do you need help? I can do that. Is it a lot for you? Or a lot in general? Are you exaggerating "mounds"?

It stood alone in the green expanse...

Oh, gosh of I were a place to have dragons... Where would I be? Hmmm. Maybe the big random mountain. A good stronghold though.

Two weeks of sailing to get there??? No. A close environment with the elves and Eragon? No. Can't do it.

How many names can this mountain have? Au least the dwarves know their history. Also, what the crap, elves? You know the mountain's name, but not where or why it has the name??? What? Like that's all you remember from class or something? Not important enough as your obsession with dragons and controlling nature that you claim to respect?

Dealing with them had proven far more frustrating than Eragon anticipated...

FINALLY! Eragon is with all the races in one place. Not just one. At least the dwarves gave him access to history and a MAP back in the day. But now... Oh oooooh. Do you know how happy I am, years later after reflection, that he's able to compare and contrast people? Also in a completely different situation.

Okay, so Eragon is eating. But it's never enough with all the energy he's using to help build??!?!!

I need to introduce him to carbs and stuff. Something.

Good, good. He doesn't want to experience anything like what happened fighting the Empire. Yeah, exciting, Eragon, but... Maybe you need a small hobby to entertain you.

"Barzûl," Eragon muttered.

Oh! That's a curse word. I know that. Right? Wait... Ha! Yeah.

A quill. Good to know.

Awwwwhhh he sleeps under one of Saphira's wings. Where else would he sleep? A rock?

Oh my goodness. Eragon and Saphira, let me do the paperwork. Just pay me in telling me what words you use to get the hair off your face.

A dragon destroyed his homework. That's messed up. I'd be upset about just that. Why don't you just burn it? Huh?

I wanna help decorate the halls!!! The echoes must be creepy in a place that large.

...and then the elves had refined the details.

Dude! The dwarves know very well how to build! When was the last time elves build anything out of stone? You didn't like Eragon's plan enough?? Just want the last say?

Darn, Eragon, get an assistant. Please.

I'll do it, but I require indoor plumbing and a cool cloak.

Oh. Eragon wants to problem solve. He wants to feel productive. Same.

Okay. I need to look up what an 'eyrie' is exactly.

Yeah, those Eldunarí need years of therapy. Poor things.

They can feel the light on their facets? For real or...?

Oh, the elves did windows. Cool. Cool.

*reads about Eragon talking with dragons*

See? I was right. Eragon needs something to do to distract himself.

Wow. That's a lot of information. I'm glad to see Eragon in a different setting, not war. But it's very new for him having so much pressure for the present to make sure the future is safer.

He's working smarter, but also a lot harder.

Woo!

[ourlonelymoon]

I just want you to know that I think this is the nicest offer! Obviously, you don’t need to give us anything beyond what you have already written. However, I will say I absolutely adore that you do analysis of your own writing in the end notes! It makes me super happy to see why you do stuff and I get giggly when I notice things that you did on purpose and I’m like, “I SAW THAT!”

If you want to talk about your fic as a way of engaging with us, maybe you could answer one or more of these random questions? Literally no pressure, I’m just trying to make sure you know I’m obsessed with your story.

1. Do you have a favorite line or section so far? Why?

2. Do you have a section you wish more people commented on? If so, maybe we just missed it. What makes it something you want to discuss?

3. Do you have any questions for us, as readers?

4. If you (as yourself, just like a part of the adventure family) were on the skiff with all our faves, what would you be up to? What would you think about what’s going on with Kit?

5. Why do you write (or read) whump? (Seriously, can you break down why this stuff makes me feral. I love whump but I don’t understand it psychologically. Is it the catharsis?)

6. What do you think Kenneth thinks about all of Kits screaming? Does he care, or is he just a good boy?

Bonus Question: Can you tell I typed this without my glasses because they fell under my bed and I can’t find my glasses without my glasses? I have literally no idea if there are a million typos because I can’t edit my writing without glasses because everything is tripled and fading in and out of my left eye’s one focus spot.

I’m glad you enjoy the analysis of each chapter - I keep a list of things I want to say as I write so it’s nice to know you appreciate it! Also thank you for the questions, I’m going to answer them all while I’m bored in the car.

1. I really enjoyed the hallucination chapter from a creative perspective because there was literally no limits. It was so fun to write anything and everything that came to mind and find ways to weave reality with Kit’s experience. My favourite scenes are yet to come, both involving Kit. One is with Jade in the next chapter and the other is with another character in the penultimate chapter - I’m not going to tell you who! The fake escape attempt right at the beginning is also a favourite!

2. People have been so nice with comments and generally pick up on the main points of each chapter. Usually I’d say if something goes under the radar it’s because there’s a bigger plot point happening so I don’t mind if it doesn’t get picked up on.

3. This is a really interesting question. I guess it would be interesting to know if you have any theories on where the story is going? Or if you think that there was a smaller plot point that could have been expanded on?

4. I think I’d be pretty useless here I’ll be honest. I’m a chronic worrier, very clumsy and have not exercised properly in ages so I think I’d probably be the weak link. I reckon I could read a map? Is that helpful?

5. I think the appeal of whump for me is the comfort aspect of it, especially as a reader. Maybe that’s surprising given how many chapters I spent beating the shit out of Kit. In terms of writing it, I’ve always found it somewhat easier to write very angsty things. This fic was born because I wanted to read a Kit torture fic and there wasn’t any out there when I started it.

6. I think Kenneth remains unbothered. He’s lived with Zeb, who has been tortured by the Crone for an unspecified number of years, so I reckon he’s used to the dramatics. Besides, water is pretty good at blocking out noise.

[the-rewatch-rewind]

New episode!

Script below the break

Hello and welcome back to the Rewatch Rewind! My name is Jane, and this is the podcast where I count down my top 40 most frequently rewatched movies in a 20-year period. Today I will be discussing number 22 on my list: RKO’s 1938 screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby, directed by Howard Hawks, written by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde, based on a story by Hagar Wilde, and starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant.

Paleontologist David Huxley (Cary Grant) has a lot going on. He’s about to marry Alice Swallow (Virginia Walker). The final bone to complete the brontosaurus skeleton he’s been assembling for four years has just been found. And the wealthy Mrs. Carlton Random (May Robson) is considering a million-dollar donation to his museum. But while David is golfing with Mrs. Random’s lawyer, Alexander Peabody (George Irving), his ball gets mixed up with that of zany, scatterbrained Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn), who leads him on a series of misadventures involving wardrobe malfunctions, a thieving dog, trouble with the law, and two leopards.

When my mom was starting to introduce me to Old Hollywood, she got Bringing Up Baby from the library and said something along the lines of, “I don’t particularly like this one, but you probably will.” And, um…that was an understatement. I was obsessed with this movie in my early teens. Like, to an embarrassing degree. I quoted it constantly. For example, whenever there was a curb or other uneven surface, I had to walk along it with one leg higher than the other in reference to the part when Susan loses the heel of one of her shoes and says, “I was born on the side of a hill.” I’m pretty sure I had watched it a few times in 2002 before I started keeping track; then I saw it five times in 2003, twice in 2004, and three times in 2005. And then as I got older, I started to cringe about my initial enthusiasm, and to listen to people I knew who didn’t like it. I watched it once in 2008, once in 2013, once in 2014, once in 2016, and then I decided I liked it again, so I saw it twice in 2018, twice in 2021, and once in 2022.

This movie flopped in its initial release, but its reputation has grown over the years, and it’s now generally considered to be the definitive screwball comedy, one of the greatest comedic films ever made, and according to some, one of the greatest films of all time of any genre. And yet, many of the people I know in real life who have seen it don’t like it – apart from my brother; I could always count on him to watch it with me. I think a lot of people find it too unhinged and chaotic and frustrating – and, to be fair, they are correct in that assessment. But it happens to be unhinged and chaotic and frustrating in all the right ways for me. I totally get that it’s not for everyone, and I think it does tend to be over-praised now, perhaps to overcompensate for the lukewarm response it generated in 1938. Back then, Howard Hawks attributed the box office failure to the fact that there were no normal characters in the film, so there was nobody for the audience to identify with. And maybe that is the problem. Perhaps the people who don’t like this movie are too normal for it, and the reason I enjoy it is because I have never been normal.

I think especially when I was young, I saw a lot of myself in both David Huxley and Susan Vance, even though they are pretty much opposites. David is mild-mannered and socially awkward, which is how I tend to be around people I don’t know very well. He also has a fairly passive role in the story; lots of things happen to him, while he’s unwillingly along for the ride, and that was definitely how I perceived my life at the time when I was most into this movie. Susan, on the other hand, is outgoing and self-assured when she shouldn’t be, and she frequently prattles on to the point of obnoxiousness, which is how I tend to be around people I’m comfortable with – again, even more so when I was younger. The fact that I’m basically a combination of the two leading characters is not something I consciously noticed until recently, but I think it explains a lot. Like why I find this movie comforting when it seems like I should find it irritating. I truly cannot overemphasize how ridiculous this movie is. Nothing about it makes any sense, which normally would bother me, but the thing is, it’s clearly not supposed to make sense. David refers to his skeleton as a brontosaurus, when at the time most paleontologists considered them the same as an apatosaurus (although recently that’s been called into question again). The final bone he’s waiting for is the “intercostal clavicle” which would be a shoulder bone in between the ribs, which…is not a thing in any animal that I know of. And the main leopard, Baby, is introduced to the story because Susan’s brother sent him to her from Brazil, which means either the brother or the leopard was very lost, since leopards are native to Africa and Asia. These factual errors introduced early in the story help set the tone for the nonsense that’s about to ensue, and oh boy is there a lot of nonsense. I mean, not that there isn’t a story at all; there definitely is, and the plot is relatively easy to follow. It’s just absolutely bonkers. Nobody would wind up in jail for trying to get a leopard off a roof, after mistaking it for a different leopard. But it’s very funny to see what would happen if they did. Ultimately, this movie is just trying to be a comedy, and it very much succeeds at that. Most of the movie is witty dialogue between wacky characters in ridiculous situations – basically my favorite brand of humor. There is also excellent physical comedy, including lots of falling down, which normally I’m not a huge fan of, but for some reason this movie’s brand of falling humor works for me. It’s a fun silly movie that is clearly not meant to be taken seriously. And I would argue that its central romance isn’t meant to be taken seriously either.

Because this movie has a male and a female lead, predictably they end up together. But the thing is, I don’t believe that David and Susan truly have romantic feelings for each other. After they have run into each other a few times, Susan asks a psychiatrist she’s stumbled upon what he would say about a man who follows a woman around, and when she talks to him, he fights with her. Now, this is an extremely inaccurate representation of what has been happening – first she took over his golf ball, then she stole his car, then she dropped an olive causing him to slip and fall on his hat. He’s not just randomly picking fights with her; he has reasons to be upset with her. But based on what she said, the psychiatrist tells her, “The love impulse in men frequently reveals itself in terms of conflict.” That leads Susan to conclude that David must be in love with her, and she then decides that she is also in love with him. Which very much sounds like the behavior of someone who does not understand romantic attraction. Throughout the rest of the movie, Susan keeps coming up with ways to prevent David from leaving, which she thinks is because she’s in love with him, but comes across to me as a lonely person desperate for a friend. David spends most of the movie trying to get away from Susan. He does help her resolve some of the situations that she gets herself into, but mostly because she’s either tricked or trapped him. At one point, he tells her, “In moments of quiet, I’m strangely drawn toward you, but there haven’t been any quiet moments,” implying that he is not, in fact, drawn toward her at all. He does care about her wellbeing in spite of himself, but that doesn’t automatically imply romantic feelings. At the climax, when David is trying to fight off the wild leopard that has been mistaken for the tame Baby, he urges Susan to run, and she says, “No, I won’t leave you, I love you!” and he just responds with an unpleasantly shocked, “WHAT?!” Granted, at the end, David confesses to Susan that in hindsight, the time he spent with her was the most fun he’s had in his whole life, to which she replies, “That means you must like me a little bit,” and he says, “It’s more than that! I love you, I think!” But then she accidentally breaks the dinosaur skeleton that he’s spent four years working on, and before he recovers his power of speech, she says, “Oh, David can you ever forgive me? You do? And you still love me!” and she embraces him, and he just goes, “Oh dear,” and hugs her back, and then the movie ends without even remotely convincing me that they’re really in love. I think the psychiatrist’s suggestion combined with amatonormativity has convinced them that they were thrown together by fate and destined to fall in love, so they decided that that was what had happened without really feeling it. The characters strike me as being better suited for friendship than romance, and I hope they discover that after the events of the film. I can see them meeting up every once in a while for more absurd adventures, but I feel like they would destroy each other if they tried to live together.

Now, could this all be me projecting my aromanticism onto these characters so I could relate to them even more? Absolutely. But there’s something indisputably queer about this movie that is definitely not all in my head. These characters are just so fascinatingly quirky that they can’t possibly all be straight allos. Apparently the script had scenes of David and Susan declaring love for each other in the middle that Howard Hawks cut during production, which implies that the director agreed with me that the leads weren’t intended to be too into each other that way. And of course, there’s That One Line. If you’re at all familiar with this movie, you probably know the one I mean, but for those who don’t: after they take Baby the leopard to Susan’s aunt’s country house in Connecticut, Susan convinces David that he needs to take a shower before he can go back to New York to marry his fiancée, and while he’s bathing she takes his clothes and sends them into town to be cleaned, so David won’t be able to leave. When he gets out of the shower, he has nothing to put on but a frilly woman’s bathrobe. Then Susan’s aunt (who also happens to be Mrs. Carlton Random, but he doesn’t know that yet) enters the house and asks who he is, to which he replies, “I don’t know, I’m not quite myself today.” And then when she demands to know why he’s wearing the feminine robe, he can’t come up with a good explanation, so he bursts out, “Because I just went GAY, all of a sudden!” This was an ad-lib by Cary Grant that somehow made it into the film and is now probably its most famous line. At the time, the word “gay” was being used by the homosexual community to refer to themselves, but that use had not entered mainstream consciousness yet, obviously, or the censors wouldn’t have allowed it in the movie. Most uses of “gay” in old films were clearly meant in the “lighthearted, carefree” sense, or were at least ambiguous enough that they could mean that, but in this context, that definition doesn’t really make sense. I don’t like forcing labels onto real people, but it does seem like Cary Grant was probably bisexual, and therefore it’s reasonable to assume that he would have been familiar with the less common definition. Of course, David is saying this sarcastically; he’s wearing the feminine robe because that was the only thing available to wear when he got out of the shower – it has nothing to do with his sexuality or gender presentation. But the idea that the character would be familiar with that use of the word “gay” raises some interesting questions.

In addition to Cary Grant, it’s also been widely speculated that Katharine Hepburn was not straight. She certainly was at least somewhat gender-nonconforming, frequently wearing pants at a time when that wasn’t socially acceptable for women. Susan Vance is one of her more feminine-dressing characters, and she doesn’t say anything about being gay, but right after that scene, when she hears that David is looking for clothes in her brother’s old room, she cries, “If he gets some clothes, he’ll go away, and he’s the only man I’ve ever loved!” I’m told that making it to 30 without having loved someone of the opposite sex is not a typical straight, alloromantic experience. So even if my initial theory is wrong and David and Susan are attracted to each other romantically, that doesn’t rule out the possibility that they’re some form of queer. And as for David’s fiancée, Alice, she’s not in much of the movie, but she makes it clear that her marriage to David is going to be more of a business arrangement than a romance. She has no interest in a honeymoon or children, insisting that the dinosaur skeleton will be their child, and like, I know she was probably meant to be a stereotypically frigid geeky girl with glasses, and it’s harmful to imply that women can either have brains or heart, but at the same time “why would we need to have sex when we have a dinosaur skeleton” is such an iconic ace attitude that I can’t help but admire her. Anyway, she breaks up with David after Mrs. Carlton Random finds out who he is and decides not to donate her million dollars to a museum that employs someone as unhinged as him, but I hope Alice finds happiness, preferably with another asexual dinosaur enthusiast. Most of the other characters also seem at least somewhat queer – Constable Slocum and his assistant Elmer kind of seem like they’re in a relationship with each other, for instance, and Major Applegate doesn’t seem very straight either. All of this might have been completely unintentional, but what the heck, in honor of Pride month, I’m declaring that every character in this movie is somewhere under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella. This is my podcast and I make the rules.

Bringing Up Baby was reportedly very difficult to make. Production ended up taking 40 days longer than scheduled and costing $330,000 over budget. Part of that was because Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn kept cracking each other up and ruining takes, and because Howard Hawks had a fairly leisurely attitude on set, sometimes cancelling shooting early to take the cast to the races. They also had to deal with animals, which is always tricky. In modern films there are usually multiple animals playing the same character, but in this movie they only had one Leopard, named Nissa, who played both Baby and the vicious circus leopard. Katharine Hepburn seemed to enjoy working with the leopard, and she wasn’t afraid of it even though it did almost attack her at one point. But Cary Grant was terrified of Nissa, so most of his scenes with a leopard were either filmed with his stand-in, or his part and the leopard’s part were filmed separately. The visual effects were fairly advanced for 1938, and even though you can sometimes tell that the actors and the leopard weren’t actually together, it works well enough that you won’t really notice unless you’re watching for it. There’s also a dog named George who steals and buries the intercostal clavicle, and that dog was played by the famous Skippy, who had also played Asta in the first few Thin Man movies and appeared in a different Cary Grant movie called The Awful Truth. I haven’t heard any stories about how Skippy behaved on the Bringing Up Baby set, but I assume he was very professional.

Although the film’s box office failure did nothing to help Katharine Hepburn’s floundering film career in the late 1930s, I personally feel like it represents a significant turning point in her acting abilities. There’s a staggering difference between her pre-Bringing Up Baby performances and her post-Bringing Up Baby performances. Early in her career she was extremely overly dramatic, and while some of those films were still fairly good, many are painfully unwatchable. The story goes that initially, she wasn’t very good as Susan Vance either. She kept trying too hard to be funny, which ruined the comedy. Unable to get through to her himself, Howard Hawks asked Vaudeville veteran Walter Catlett to show her what she was doing wrong, and Hepburn found him so helpful that she asked Hawks to cast him in the movie so he’d be around to give her more pointers. So Walter Catlett played Constable Slocum, and Katharine Hepburn learned how to do comedy. Her character is relentlessly annoying and over-the-top ridiculous, but Hepburn commits. The knowledge that she needed help to get there in no way detracts from the brilliance of her performance. She plays everything Susan does as if it’s the most logical, natural thing in the world, and that’s what makes the movie work. If Susan was aware of how silly she was, the whole thing would have fallen apart. We all know that I love Cary Grant, and I do greatly enjoy his performance here, too, and I think they play off each other very well, but I feel like it’s mainly Hepburn’s performance that has compelled me to keep revisiting this film. As a young person, I related to certain things about Susan and wished I could be as carefree and self-assured as she was, although maybe a little less obnoxious. Now I relate to her less – I wish I had half her energy – but I still find her antics amusing. And it’s also fun to see how much better her acting got after this movie. Clearly she took Catlett’s lessons to heart, and combined them with her natural talent and determination and hard-working spirit to fully become the force to be reckoned with that she’s remembered as.

There is so much more I could say about Bringing Up Baby, like how much I love the scene when Susan pretends to be a gangster to get out of jail, but I’m worried I would just end up quoting the whole movie if I kept going, so I think I’ll wrap it up here. Thank you so much for listening, whether you love this movie, hate this movie, don’t have a strong opinion about this movie, or have never seen this movie. I appreciate you all so much! This will be my last solo episode for a while, as I have guests lined up for the next three episodes, so stay tuned for some fun conversations. Next up is the fifth and final film I watched 19 times while keeping track. As always I will leave you with a quote from that next movie: “A date! What’s a date?”

[kyovtani]

Bf!Shinsou is a bit shy when you ask him if he’s ever had a crush on you before getting together. It’s funny because the mere thought of your being his drives him up the wall and if you’re especially needy after he returns from a mission, this man will make you see stars; also, I think he might be an underrated boyfie who has an oral fixation, hence why if you’re walking around the comfort of home without a shirt on (or bra/bralette//etc) he’s 100% into body worship by popping a tit in his mouth saying something cheeky.

^also, the “maybe I did wanna fuck after class face”

oh my goodness sora your BRAIN 💞💞

shinsou's just generally not really the type to easily talk about how hard he was crushing on you before gathering up the courage to ask for your number, not because he doesn't want you to know but because he's shy. like a little child who has to go and buy something from the grocery store for the first time or a pre-teen whose friends basically push him into the direction of his crush to make him confess.

it's not until his friends start talking about the way his whole body would be covered in the deepest blush after talking to you on the phone or the way he'd smile exhra big whenever you texted him something absolutely random. hitoshi tried his best to not let the teasing get to him because he's a grown man and doesn't really need to be embarrassed in front of you, his now actual prtner, because he's definitely done more than just confess his love, yet every time they start imitating his mannerisms when it came to you, he couldn't help but roll his eyes and bury his face in your chest.

and there he is, the giant pro hero who saves dozens of lives every day – getting all shy and embarrassed because of how obsessed he was (still is) when you didn't even pay him a second glance at first.

and to add to your oral fixation part: absolutely agreed. whenever toshi feels the tiniest bit of nervous or needy or excited he just pushes your shirt up and takes your tit into his mouth, knowing you're gonna get needy and let him take off some of his steam. sometimes you push your fingers into his mouth when he's laying in betwene your legs with his head on your chest and he falls asleep within minutes. 🥺

[adriennefrombrooklyn]

Hello, this is your Secret Santa!

Could you maybe expand on your favorite McLennon moments? Like why they stand out to you, etc?

Any preference/kink beyond bottom Paul for the smut?

Anything you don't want in a fic?

And in the case you get fanart, what would you like to see?

I already have a few ideas and outlines but I'd like to make sure it's correctly tailored to you!

(and this is late but I swear you'll get your present on time!!)

Hi lovely Secret Santa <33333

Thank you so much for the ask!

I'm trying to remember specifically what I put down for my fav moments lol. Off the top of my head I love the years '63-'65 just because of how mutually delighted/obsessed they were with each other. And what with them touring all the time they had plenty of opportunity to hook up with no stress or extra effort. I love the kind of heady, no complications, just music and fucking, vibes of those years.

And '67 will always be important to me because of how deeply domestic, clothes-sharing, doing everything together, living at Cavendish and shagging all the time the whole year was.

And I love early Liverpool for mutual pining, Romeo and Juliet-type "my dad won't let us be together" ridiculousness. I especially love a pining Paul perspective with Jim being an asshole (bc he was and I love angst)

On the subject of angst I LOVE it but only if it doesn't end with any breakup or unrequited heartbreak. I'm all for fic where some external angst makes things terrible for them, or one of them is being a dick because of some dumb insecurity, but I need it to end in real reconciliation and a way forward. I really love me some dark heavy angst (Manila, the cherry bomb, Paul getting arrested in Japan) that is outside of their own drama and could mean some really A+ hurt/comfort.

In terms of kink, I love me any good bottom!Paul, sub!Paul, just Paul getting railed, by John but honestly by anyone. J/P is my number one but I do love some good Paul/Robert smut, or even Paul and some random dude/dudes.

As far as things I don't love in fic, I tend not to go for anything that is built on the idea that they never fucked until the 70s or later (altho I have read some AMAZING fic based on that premise) but generally its not my thing because 1. I don't find it particularly believable and 2. it just kinda depresses me to think about all that wasted time. So it's generally not my thing. And as I said earlier, any angst that's mostly them fighting or breaking up with no reconciliation is a nope for me.

As far as fanart, I love NSFW if it's something you would be comfortable with, J/P, bottom!Paul, I'm not that picky on the other details lol. But if you'd rather do something more general, anything of them kissing. I need more otp kissing art, always.

I am honestly so excited for whatever you're planning, I'm sure I'll love it. I hope this info helps, ilysm!! <33333

[unhingedwomandiaries]

There's this blonde woman who used to constantly pop up in my YouTube recommendations back in the early 2010s. I have no clue who she is or why the algorithm was so obsessed with her content. From what I could gather, she was some kind of family vlogger, but I never subscribed or anything. To be perfectly honest, I found her completely unremarkable. She wasn't unattractive by conventional standards, I suppose, but there was nothing especially interesting or captivating about her online presence. Just another face on the internet, you know?

Well, this week it was announced that this random YouTube mom is getting divorced after eight years of marriage to a dude she's known since elementary school. She's only 28 years old, by the way, and she dropped this divorce bombshell on the very same day she announced the birth of her third kid. Naturally, the Reddit hive mind is absolutely losing its mind over this news, dissecting every minute detail of her personal life like it's the Zapruder film or something.

It's moments like these that make me grateful x went under back in the day, because I saw firsthand how vicious the online commentary could get when I was working in social media. I'd have these kids - literal children - telling me they'd lost all faith in love after x dumped me. They were devastated over the breakup of two people they'd never met in real life. It's insane how easily personas can be fabricated online. Internet me might be a Sudoku savant who can conquer the most diabolical New York Times puzzles in under three minutes, but in reality, my husband is over here telling me I've been playing the game completely wrong this entire time.

One Redditor chimed in saying they weren't surprised this YouTuber's marriage imploded since she and her husband had gotten hitched at 19. My response? "So what?" I know plenty of couples who married young and stayed together for decades. My own parents tied the knot around that age and made it almost 30 years before my dad passed away. Hell, one of my uncles just celebrated his 50th wedding anniversary down in Cabo. Age ain't nothing but a number, folks. There could be a million different reasons why this internet rando's marriage crapped out - why are total strangers speculatively scrutinizing her life choices based on some dumb statistic?

And this woman has the audacity to come at me saying something along the lines of "Okay, maybe that was normal for your parents generation, but it's really common for young married couples to simply outgrow each other these days. And let's be real - a lot of parents stayed together because women had basically no rights back then." Just laying it on thick with the condescending faux-historian feminist analysis while simultaneously insulting my own family's legacy. As if she's some kind of expert on the dynamics of my parents marriage. So I fired back because hey, I'm not just going to let some rando insult me and mine. Her genius response? "Peace, I'm not reading that." Then she downvoted me for no logical reason whatsoever. Get fucked, lady.

[selormohene]

day 114 (wednesday, october 25th 2023)

I saw someone I recognised from undergrad, which I'm pretty sure was on the Wednesday for which I'm writing this post (still caught up with backlog), but in any case was on a Wednesday. This was someone I knew quite a bit about, actually, where he was living in freshman year and with whom, where he lived as an upperclassman and who he lived with, what he majored in, what he ended up doing after college, what he’s doing now, back on campus. The interesting thing is that, and in retrospect I’m not sure if or why I’d expect anything different, the person had no idea who I was.

This happens to me quite a lot, that I recognise and even know all sorts of things about certain people who in turn have little to no idea who I am. I think there are two aspects to it. First of all it's rarely that I set out to gather information about people — rather, I just have a way of picking up certain things and, if I see someone around often enough, or pick up information from enough places, I tend to build up a web of associations related to them, even if I otherwise haven't interacted with them much, and even if these aren't people that I'm inclined to obsess over or anything — which is hardly anyone, really. But the second thing is that I think that I'm less visible than most people, for whatever reasons, and so I'm more likely to recognise people than the other way round. This would seem paradoxical, but it isn't once we consider the whole thing from the perspective of the entire distribution of visibility in a certain community. Let's suppose that there are in any situation a few highly visible individuals and a bunch of not-so-visible ones. If you're highly visible a lot of people will recognise you and you may not recognise all of them, whereas if you're not, you'll recognise a lot of people and not so many of them will recognise you. This holds even if we extend the model to include two-way recognition, or friendship if you want. Consider the fact that when I was a junior in SOS, I had a lot of friends who were seniors, and so I thought when I was a senior I’d have a lot of friends who were juniors, and to some extent I did have quite a few friends who were juniors, but not nearly as many as I’d hoped or imagined. The point was that my senior friends were the highly visible, that is to say outgoing and gregarious, seniors, along with of course some of the less visible seniors, but when I became a senior there was only the question of whether I was one of the more visible ones or the less visible ones. I happened to be less visible, and so while I did have some number of friends who were juniors, it was just a lot fewer, more like the less-visible seniors that I also happened to be friends with when I was a junior.

I've also heard that having a good memory for other people is partly a result of not having a lot of people in your life who are nice to you (or who were nice to you) and so being better able to remember those who are. Or at any rate it might be a manifestation of the idea that having unreliable people in your life means you have to develop the power of memory, maybe because you need to be able to make sure you're not crazy, or whatever. There's some theory along those lines floating in the background and I'd imagine that whatever the theory is, it has something to do with me, but I can't remember it in enough detail to say much about what it might have to do with my situation.

But anyway, the point that this particular episode brought back to me is that, whereas certain interactions with the people in your lives may show up to you as characteristic instances of a pattern, those very experiences (and your role in them) may simply be isolated data points in theirs. So, just as this one instance of recognising someone who didn't recognise me shows up as part of a more general pattern, it's probably just something random that happened to this other person. (And, similarly, a lot of interactions with other people which, to me, are simply random, isolated events are part of an ongoing pattern in their lives. I was going to say that this means they'll be more likely to remember the event than I will be, but the funny thing is that it's possible to remember an event either because it's anomalous, or because it's part of an ongoing pattern in your life.) But I think about this duality in other contexts, say — take the context of incels, for instance. It's said that people should just learn to take rejection, and yet there's a difference between the occasional instance of rejection which is a blow to an otherwise intact ego and, as it were, a subjectivity which is constituted by the experience of social rejection, or at any rate which has been constituted by fixation on what may at first have been merely an above-average rate of rejection, but which through the process of fain and fixation on pain and festering resentment has been built into the defining aspect of one's existence.

Another very different thing: there's this idea about how relationships shouldn't take work, at least not in the beginning. But there are two ways in which relationships can take work. One of them is that we don't like each other, or at least one of us doesn't like the other, and we're trying to suppress the fact or to make something happen that isn't going to happen, but another is that we're perfectly well into each other and perhaps could be great but there are things about us that need adjusting to each other. And the second, I think, is perfectly normal and innocuous, even if the first is an indication that you should lock it off as quickly as you can. And I think there can be difficulties telling the two apart, and incentives or past experiences leading one to interpret the first kind of strong incompatibility as an instance of the second kind where you just need to get into the rhythm, but there can also be incentives or past experiences leading one to interpret the second thing as an instance of the first. And I don't think that it should always be taken for granted that if things don't seem magical from the beginning then the relationship is doomed. Because part of what happens with that mindset is that if things later stop seeming magical then it's believed that the relationship is also doomed, which sets upon a relationship the burden of a perhaps unrealistic and certainly elusive ideal, that of feeling magical all through its existence. And of course we should keep in mind that part of what makes a relationship feel magical or not can have nothing to do with the mechanics of the relationship itself and everything to do with the relationship between the mindset of the person in it and the reality they inhabit (or ought to inhabit but from which they are in flight).

[revui]

blorbo rundown

finally giving updated and halfway sufficient descriptions of 4 out of 16 of the major blorbos that i'm constantly tagging and going insane over. these descriptions are rambly and longer than i thought they'd be. enjoy(? i don't know if that's possible)

blorbo #1 is harker karamazov. a poet. a dragon. genderfluid (he figures this out over the course of the story, at first he thought he was just transmasc). bro spends her entire section of the narrative assuming that the plot goes by jurassic park t-rex rules as in, if she does absolutely nothing then it won't get her. (spoiler he is got). her major conflict is against a fully grown man who treats his obsession with finding and killing dragons like a side hobby. like knitting or cocaine or whatever. harker is a 6/10 blorbo and loses a lot of points for thinking he could escape the lens of the narrative

blorbo #2 is miranda hilton. a human. autistic (no inside voice). requires that everyone likes her all the time forever or she might melt into the floor. unlike hark she is an eager participant in the narrative, not the broad narrative but the threads of a fabricated narrative within the wider story that she has unwittingly woven herself into. she nearly sets an entire town on fire multiple times (and it's always the same town too). her major conflict is against a random teenage boy who would definitely use reddit on earth and unironically say "why don't women like nice guys." he wants to date her but miranda has a girlfriend already so she goes "no thanks man" and he refuses to take that like a rational human being should. anyway miranda is like a 9/10 blorbo and i only dock points because she isn't as pathetic as she could be

blorbo #3 is ignatia twist. a bitch. a perfectionist. comes from old money. one of her dads owns mines. her entire family line for like 13ish generations (i think? can't remember the exact number off the top of my head) has been known for having really powerful magic and naturally using a very difficult casting technique but ignatia actually can't do that so she uses illegal earrings that artificially enhance her magic and allow her to pretend she can hang with the cool kids. she's bisexual. she has 2 dads and they got a hashtag #gay divorce. her major conflict is against a literal actual animal who hates her dads but would prefer to destroy their reputation than just murder them so she tries to frame them for ignatia's murder. she eventually learns to hate ignatia on a personal level. ignatia is a 10/10 blorbo because depending on which point in the narrative i met her i would either ask for her hand in marriage or kill both of us immediately

blorbo #4 is quintilian holmes. a florist. a domestic terrorist. flower demon. he has a disability that's complex to explain but has the most obvious effect of weakening his magic significantly. his magic specialty is literally just blasting things into a fine dust. occasionally by accident (oopsie!). he witnessed the horrors. he's like if sasuke had pink hair. he's bi and he pines for a gay dude but that gay dude is gay for a different bi dude (quin still thinks he has a chance). also he is a domestic terrorist, as i said. blows things up with his girlfriend of three days who is also later the antagonist he goes up against. the moral debate to be had between them is surprisingly complex considering the broad ideas of their feud is quin saying "maybe we shouldn't kill people" and her saying "ok but consider: killing people." quin is a 7/10 blorbo he should've killed people

[little-blackbird-atmidnight]

Being a musician: Stranger Things

Fandom, stranger things 

Pairing: Eddie x r, Steve x r, Billy x r, 

Warnings+Others: we ignore canon here. Mc is a pianist, I’m projecting. Also can play other instruments. I'll be doing a separate post for the party and Others I forgot about. Fluff. Mentions of back, wrist and hand pain.

Billy Hargrove:

let’s be honest, he’s always staring at your hands. 

Piano? Yep, he’s right next to you watching your hands.

He loves hearing you play when he comes over for dinner or just whenever 

Your parents have grown accustomed to seeing Billy around the house at random times

Anyways, he’s forcing you to take breaks in between because he’s seen you in pain from constantly playing 

When he sleeps over, you randomly get up and play when you have an idea 

And then you decided it wasn’t enough to play it on an upright, but on the grand piano downstairs. 

Billy only noticed that you weren’t in the room when he heard you playing A Man Without Love in the common room 

So he did what any responsible, concerned boyfriend would do 

He got up, went where you were, and picked you up. 

Your father had also come to tell you to go to sleep but saw Billy carry you back into your room 

And so, you love Max 

And you’re also teaching her how to play 

You treat her like a little sister, 

Forcing Billy to be nicer to Max and her friends 

But anyways, he loves hearing you play. 

Will kiss your hands and palms 

-------

Steve Harrington: 

oh wowie 

He won’t stop bragging to anyone who would listen 

“My boyfriend can play piano-“ “Steve get back to work.”

When meeting the others, you had to shut Steve up bc you being a pianist was all he talked about 

Robin enjoys being around you definitely 

She asked you if you could teach her a song to impress Vickie 

You taught her one 

Now your responsible for their relationship 

:)

Steve is always making you take breaks 

He does his best to comfort you when your hands and wrist start to hurt 

He won’t let you pick anything up or just do anything in general 

You love him a lot 

So do your parents 

They saw him freaking out because your wrist was hurting and decided that a himbo was what you needed 

Once he learns that you play other instruments, he is both ever more proud, loving and concerned 

Definitely makes you take more breaks 

“Baby, can you come cuddle with me?” If you refuse, he will come and pick you up.

he’s your number one supporter, you love him dearly 

The kids always hear about you, they never got why he was so obsessed until you ended up making a small soundtrack for their dnd games 

It could be an extremely important part of the game where they’re stressing and you’re just in the background with a violin causing them to be even more stressed and nervous 

Also when you’re annoyed with Steve you just play over his talking 

But, Steve loves and worries for you. 

Who knows, maybe you’ll be playing in your new home with him soon.

----------

Eddie Munson 

definitely has asked what other instruments you play 

Tried to recruit you into Corroded Coffin 

Watches you play any instrument with curiosity and sense of pride bc you know how to play all these instruments 

Definitely plays his guitar along with you with some really random instruments 

The most successful one has been his guitar with a cello 

As with the others, he forces you to take breaks constantly 

Biggest supporter 

Sometimes he drags you to his dnd campaigns to keep you from practicing too often 

You always sit in his lap unless you’re restless and pacing around the room or sitting in a corner 

Sometimes in school, you end up sleeping on his shoulder or just on him during lunch 

No one says anything 

Because first of all you aren’t really asleep, just waiting for someone to talk bad before you go feral 

Although Eddie is already death staring anyone who may wake you 

He once saw you in pain from your back and wrists because you were too still and too tense. 

Sometimes you two end up not sleeping at all and just play his guitar 

You watch him and laugh as he tries to get a certain part of a song right 

He has definitely made a song for you 

“This is for you, babe.” And everyone is expecting this soft song but it’s the heaviest thing they’ve ever heard 

You love this idiot and he loves you <333

---------

All in General: 

has definitely made a song for them 

one is too low 

…

Okay fine there’s eight so far.

————-

Midnight here, ran out of ideas