#Why is our generation like this

[darkandwholesome]

me, at 2am, just finished writing 2 hours work (2000 words) of fanfiction, not being able to post it because my internet it down, drinking hot choco, and scrolling through Pinterest:

im

i

i w

i wanna put

i wanna put it in my mouwth.

in my mth.

plez

[narwhalsarefalling]

my (cis) brother is using my old license to buy wine and it has the gender marker F on there. so whenever he gets asked he just says “oh i’m trans”. its literally worked every single time.

[demaparbat-hp]

Their actual first meeting in the Kyoshi Warriors AU!

Katara had her Oh moment before exchanging a word with Jian Li, and while she gets over it in time (or, at least, convinces herself that she's not embarrassed by her initial reaction to him) this quasi-interaction haunts her for the first couple of days of their stay in Kyoshi Island.

It's just not fair that the place is full of gorgeous people! Or that he's not only beautiful, but also kind and awkward and respectful and dorky and—oh, La—she's in trouble.

[egophiliac]

redesigning my headcanon for Sebek's parents, based on important new information (SCALES)

(you can't see it but they're both wearing crocs)

[chase-prairie]

Shout-out to the guy who took in four women 25-40 years old with a big formal display table that I introduced as "Hello! We are all scientists here at the [institution] who do research on improving lawns with native plants!"

Guy said: "Oh. [long pause] This is not what I thought 'Science at [institution]' would look like."

WHAT DO YOU MEAN, SIR? [increasingly manic polite smile]

[elftwink]

to preface this post i am anti-advertising i think we should explode the entire industry but it's sooo funny when you people make posts like "and they don't even work!!" like. sorry to be the bearer of bad news but yes they do. that's why we have to put up with so many despite everyone hating them and thinking its annoying. because they actually work really well and make a shit load of money

[morganbritton132]

I like to think that part of the reason why America Ferrara’s character in Barbie so easily accepted that this grown woman was a Barbie doll that came to life was because she watched Life-Size as a kid. She was prepared for this.

[sysig]

my 2nd request !! The skeleton brothers wearing matching pajamas :D

Day 13 - The Friendship Brothers

[sad-emo-dip-dye]

Oh god I can’t do this again

[dxxtruction]

Louis' "You're boring!" Could mean so many things, but I think what's most apparent about that line is that Armand takes no initiative just for himself. He's not really anybody, because he never goes out and finds himself or gets attached to anyone but Louis. Without Louis as his guide he's literally just sitting on a couch picking lint! That's the thing.

He orbits constantly around what would make Louis happy, and never really fully going what would make me happy? Ultimately that drive to please Louis is what drives him to torturing Daniel, not so much that he'd care to just do it. Ultimately, not giving proper care to Louis is just a way to make sure Louis knows he has to orbit around him as well, with shoving Lestat onto him just that other nail on the coffin. So, even if he fails to figure out how to make Louis happy with him, he still knows what Armand is good for, and better than.

That dependency is what drives Armand's abuse. It really just comes down to that. Armand doesn't even realize how suffocated he is by his own dependency. This is just how life is to him. (It shouldn't be lost either that dependency is a theme considering this episode also deals with addiction).

Daniel's fascinating because he's just so driven to be somebody. He's largely independent, he seeks things because he wants them. It's his drug to poke and prod at all the things that he shouldn't. Daniel's exciting because he lets Louis in to something different, lets him in to all this potential in another person that he can also do the same with for himself. It's a real connection. A two way street. It's easy to tell how Armand can be smothering then because he's never introducing him to anything really new, and most the ways both of them connect are all painful and traumatic. It's never just fun because there's always that layer of that pain. Fun died with Claudia.

50 years on they've gotten to a lot better place, both of them, but it's still that same shit. No seriously, "How is this any different from last time, Louis?"

Well... Because Armand's going to be, at the very least, making one [1] decision only for himself - and that's to hold power over Daniel's life. Fucking sick foreshadowing.

They aren't driving each other to the brink anymore but "The vampire is bored" STILL. Maybe it's even worse, despite being in better places, because Louis' sort of just been defeated by it. (I mean, can he even really leave this either?). He's accepting the dependancy cause he kind of has to. He'd literally ended up letting all the enjoyment be up where he can't reach [The book shelves]. Armand so desperately wants Louis happiness but what really ends up happening is that Louis ends up having to give Armand all his own. He's got no one or anything else to get it from. But like an iPad and an over the top eating ritual. Two extremes of what's just more lint picking.

This whole relationship is one I find just tragic inside and out. You have to just pity it, really. There's ways in which you can find yourself feeling bad for both of them. But you can only really be mad at Armand for any of it. Armand, who isn't even 'free' in any sense, having so little concept of his own independence, but is at the same time so controlling over other's. It's a tragic cycle. It's an infuriating one.

Louis at least has the mind to know when enough is enough. If just needing that extra push to get there. Armand's too scared of it being over to even try.

[wavesoutbeingtossed]

I know you don't like discussing the muses but i love your takes and perspectives and i had to ask you about this. after listening to ttpd, did you have the impression that she really loved matty more than any of her exes/previous relationships?. And listening to the whole album as a whole would you call it the ''matty album'' or do you think there are more prominent themes in there than their period together?. (hope this doesn't bother you, feel free to delete if you don't feel like answering it)

hey anon! You're right, I don't really like to get into the muses as I don't really think there's anything to add to the conversation at this point, and ultimately I don't think it matters.

That being said, and with the caveat that I am not Taylor and I do not know Taylor so I cannot speak to her thoughts and can only make relatively educated guesses based on being an avid consumer of her work and a student of the human condition (lol), no I do not think Taylor loved Matty more than anyone else. I think there was maybe a brief period in the thick of things where she *thought* she did because she was not thinking clearly and was in full-on denial, but to me the message that is loud and clear in the album (and more or less explicitly stated in the epilogue) is that it was not any kind of real love affair. It was certainly infatuation and lust and the promise of something more, and there may have been some love as well, but he was in no way the love of her life by any measure.

I would call it a "Matty album" insofar as they're about events in which he was present, sure. But I feel it much more as a Taylor album, if that makes sense, even though I know that's a cop out because every album is to a degree. I can't explain it well, but I don't see TTPD as a Matty (or Joe) album in the way that I would maybe say Red is a "Jake" album or 1989 may be a "Harry" album or even Lover being a "Joe" album whatever, because even if they don't figure in all the songs, that kind of heartbreak permeates so much of the material.

The thing about TTPD and the Matty situation is that the Matty situation is really a Joe situation (which in some ways is actually partially a Jake situation). I always say I hate treating Taylor like a character so I hate speaking about her and her work in this way, but you don't get the Matty situation without the Joe situation precipitating it. It's @taylortruther's now-infamous donut vs. hole analogy. The reason Taylor makes the choices she does with Matty is directly tied to what happened with Joe that made her feel she needed to. Which is not to say Taylor isn't responsible for her own actions or doesn't have agency in her own life, but I mean it in that the situation in which she found herself with Joe, and the pain it caused, is what made the alternative so comforting and perhaps even necessary in her mind. It's why it makes it so hard to "paternity test" the album, because the stories are inherently intertwined and you don't get the former without the latter.

The major "theme" of the album to me is the loss of a very specific, very personal dream, and the way in which she lost it, and the way in which grieving that loss drove her to make the choices she did. We're all talking very delicately about it because it's a sensitive topic, but it's late on Friday and few people are going to see this, so I'm going to say it: it's the give you my wild, give you a child of it all. The yearning she expresses both overtly and sub-textually for having a family in the album is palpable in a very iykyk kind of way, and it's the realization that those plans are not going to come to fruition in the way she had once imagined that drives a lot of the pain she experiences, and makes her jump at the chance to find that again with someone else.

I started a draft post about the theme of womanhood and motherhood on TTPD three months ago that I never finished because I ran out of time and ran out of steam, but it was the most striking thing to me on the album, not because I didn't know that she wanted those things because that's been obvious for years (definitely since Lover, and again, peace put it all on the table), but because the vulnerability she expressed about it on the album is incredibly moving, and it's so generous of her to trust listeners with those feelings and experiences.

Again, it's the thirtysomething of it all.

She is in relationship A which she at one point believes is forever, one which she at one point believes is going to lead to marriage and children. She is so committed to that dream that she either ignores or tries to fix serious issues that may otherwise lead others to think the two people in the relationship are incompatible, both because she loves the person deeply and because she feels that this is meant to be the way she achieves that dream. She gives it her everything, and it still dies a slow, painful, onerous death, and she feels like it may take her along with it. The dream of getting married and presumably having a family gets taken off the table: how we don't know and will likely never know because that is private between the parties involved. All that matters in the context of the album is that those plans never come to fruition and never would.

Then you have relationship B, an old flame who knows just enough buttons to push both to trigger and to flatter. A person who she presumably trusts with very sensitive, personal information as her life slowly crumbles, and this person is telling her all the things she wants to hear because he knows about what is happening in relationship A because she's told him. Person in relationship B doesn't get an "in" with her and sell her this dream unless what happens in relationship A precedes it. It's not a grand love affair for the ages, it's not a mutual decision on building their own dream together. It's Person B learning about what is happening with Person A and saying "I can do that!" even if he can't or doesn't. The dream he sells her is a rental car; it's not his own, he's just borrowing it from someone else and selling it back to her.

And the reason she falls for it is because it is what she aches for the most in her personal life, and she is grappling with it disintegrating, so she (unfortunately for her) falls for the easy way out, and in turn sells herself a story about how this must be fated, and this must be meant to be, because this person wants all the same things she does and she didn't even have to bargain for it! Well, yes, because she fed him the dream in the first place. (Like a mark falling for a sleeper cell spy.) It's too good to be true because it isn't true. IMO Person B doesn't come running out of the gate with the marriage/baby/dream life promises unless he knows that is what she most desires. But what's left unsaid out of all of it is that: those dreams were her dreams because they were her dreams with Person A. It was a whole life they had together, and a whole life they had planned for in some fashion, and a whole life that has to be dismantled in the aftermath.

So all this to say, yes, on the surface, Matty is a "main character" on the album, but truly he's a side character to Taylor as the narrator and person experiencing it and Joe as the ghost bit-player-who-haunts-every-scene. (Again, I hate referring to real people as characters, it gives me the absolute ick, but in this case it's the only way to answer the question.) I jokingly call it the Matty album for shorthand or when I want to say something out of pocket, but really, it's a disservice to the album to say that because it's not a muse album as in it's about the romance (like, say, Red often is), it's about a soul-crushing heartbreak that goes beyond it. The romance is the symptom, not the cause.

The loss of youth is tied in with all this: she's not 22 anymore. She isn't even 32 anymore. She had a very specific idea of what her life was going to look like at this point and had planned for that life, and it goes up in smoke. But again, to bring the womanhood into it all: there is, unfortunately, a deadline for these things. You're with someone for over half a decade you think is going to be your life partner and father of your children and and then he's not. You spent half a decade building this relationship for it to crumble, but now you're in your mid-30s and you don't necessarily have another half-decade to build that trust and faith in someone else before being ready to start a family. And maybe you're scared that anyone else who may become your partner will need that much time to build that trust and faith, because that's kind of all you've ever know in relationships. But lo and behold, someone comes into your life you once had feelings for and maybe now do again and is offering you everything you want and thought you'd have by this point in your life right now. It feels like an elixir that as we find out is actually poison.

That youth is not just the chance for motherhood, but it's also the hopes and idealism and belief in the future that often gradually erodes as we age. But for Taylor as well, it's also tied into the trauma of what she went through particularly in 2016, which kicks off a lot of things on the album as well (her retreat, her relationship with Joe, the pivoting in her career, etc.). That event caused a pretty clear before/after in her life (like a few other events, I suspect), and another major theme in the album is her finally grappling with the full weight of that. They're all different branches of the same tree of the story of TTPD and her life.

I could talk about this stuff forever, but I'm going to stop here because it's long enough and I should save stuff for one of the dozens of drafts I have half-baked lol. But this is just something I needed to get off my chest perhaps.

[arsenicflame]

i Do Not Trust people who make Mary the bad guy in their stories when the show went out of its way to specifically show us how she was suffering just as much as stede was in their marriage and that shes, yknow, a good person

[episodes-without-incident]

10/12/2023:

0 episodes since Drawfee last referenced Cats (2019)

0 episodes since Drawfee last referenced Everytime We Touch (2005)

[poppy5991]

The Todoroki siblings trying to decode the family lore after Enji or Rei casually drops a trauma reference.

~

Enji in family therapy: After I watched my father be murdered…

Shoto: When you WHAT?!?

~

Rei, in family therapy: Well, I didn’t tell my parents my new address after I married so they couldn’t contact me.

Shoto: They’re not dead???

[aropride]

u can literally talk abt ur own experiences with transphobia and people being violent or bigoted or cruel towards you because you're a trans man and people will compare you to deranged conspiracy theorists for daring to say you might experience discrimination. it's fucking crazy like what level of internet brainrot do you have to have to think it's helpful on any level to deny someone's experiences and call them conspiracy theorists because they're a trans man and "men aren't oppressed" or whatever

[titanofthedepths]

I was talking about this on a call the other day but one of my favorite things about Sea of Thieves is that the characters are allowed to be ugly and so wildly diverse. Even the skeletons are diverse and have compelling and fun designs.

Note that when I say ugly I don’t mean that as a bad thing - I’m a firm believer that ugly doesn’t have to be a bad word, just the same as fat doesn’t have to be. Nobody’s perfect and that’s beautiful etc etc, when I say ugly I mean “not conventionally attractive” and it’s something I wholeheartedly appreciate

Like. Player pirates are randomly generated, which can be frustrating but at the end of the day it’s refreshing to not be able to sit and put together the perfect pirate. There will always be little scars or nicks or features you didn’t choose to place there, but they’re your pirates’ features. Just a couple days ago I realized my pirate has a snake bite on her cheek, and I LOVE that it’s there, though I never would have considered it for her had I been given the option to build her from scratch.

The NPCs, too, are diverse, and allowed to be flawed, and ugly. With their crooked or missing teeth and imperfect proportions and scars and asymmetrical faces - Rare could have very easily chosen to make every last NPC a perfectly pretty face fit for a magazine, and they chose not to. It makes the characters feel a little more real, more like they’re people - I can’t tell you how often I sit and examine the models of NPCs to look at every little detail and just appreciate how imperfect they are.

And like previously stated - and perhaps the thing I appreciate the most - even the skeleton characters are widely varied. Rathbone moves with a hunched posture that hides the fact his frame is fairly small, Grimm is tall and wide in that way that Sea of Thieves builds their fat characters, one of Chi’s horns is growing from her eye socket and she’s lankier than Ruth’s sturdy frame, Horatio has arms that are just a little too long, so on and so forth.

Just… Sure, I don’t by any means love Rare as a company, but the character design we see in Sea of Thieves is some of the best I’ve ever seen. I have a lot of love for this pirate game and the amount of love the design team put into every single character they offer us