#about mason or anything

[to-be-a-dreamer]

I’ve been reading the Grishaverse books/watching the Netflix show for the first time over the past couple weeks or so and I just have to say that I think it's so funny whenever Kaz gets snarky about Inej's proverbs or Matthias's religious talk or Jesper’s Jesperisms or anyone else being even slightly philosophical or theatrical or whatever because Kaz Brekker is the most dramatic bitch in all of Kerch. Like. I'm pretty sure this kid graduated top of his class from the School of Dramatic One-Liners with a double major in "Commit to the Aesthetic" and "Writing Epic Love Poetry Whilst Maintaining the Bad Guy Reputation". Dude wanted to impress a girl and wasn’t sure if getting the whole ass king of Ravka to find her long-lost parents was enough so he bought an entire warship from his friend who absolutely would have just Given It To Him but noooooo Mr. Protecting-My-Investment over here had to pay a fair price otherwise it doesn’t count.

The only, and I mean the ONLY reason I don't say he's the most dramatic bitch in the entire Grishaverse is because Nikolai Lantsov exists and that man once wore his entire army uniform under his jacket to go volcra hunting in the Shadow Fold on the off chance he would get to make a dramatic reveal at the end. He put a spring-loaded curtain in front of the weapons rack on his personal ship just in case he had guests he wanted to show off for. I wouldn’t be surprised if he did the dramatic flourish every time he opened those curtains for literally no one but himself. I also wouldn’t be surprised if he made that set up after he had guests he wanted to show off for. That curtain either went up two hours before he used it or it was the first thing he built on that ship there is no in between.

I need copious amounts of Expo markers, PowerPoint slides, and glitter to figure out which one of them takes the title it is CLOSE.

[deadscell]

You receive one drug addiction, I receive one burnt Alessa…….

[arthursfuckinghat]

"Still, I feel such a fool around you, sir.."

"Don't worry about it." 3/~

[hawnks]

A werewolf knight promised a bride in return for his unflinching loyalty and unmatched battle prowess.

His Jarl thinks the most beautiful, talented, and wellbred Lady of the island will suit nicely as his gift.

But the wolf has already made his choice -- he'd made it long before he ever went to war. Everything he did, every terrible, horrible, deadly thing, he did it for her.

And since he was promised a bride, well. Who can stop him? It's his due, after all.

[funkinmadnesss]

Throws these here finally KDMDHSSK

I was. Hoping to have posted more original art of literally anyone else but Mysterio before these saw the light of day but uuuhuuhghhg that didn't happen got bless <3

But huzzah! Earth-4918's Sinister six (Vaguely) TSSM styled (and by Vaguely I mean I put way too much detail in them, there just TSSM shaped)! (+Tinkerer, he's not a member but I'm posting him so it's even. The last member is Sandman but he belongs to my best friend and we haven't got around to making him a TSSM ref like these yet </3)

All references/orginal images I used came from here (x) (x) !

Little facts below cut for those itchrested :]

General info: They were all Human at some point and bonded over the fact they became this way by Norman's hand. Every inhuman feature about them is purely genetic now (Excluding Myst+Tink+Sandman). The whole group bonded over their shared hatred for Osborn in general though.

Adrian: He's an Egyptian Vulture. Tall as HELL, he's the second tallest. He's technically the leader and carries the burden of having a team made up of traumatized mutants while also being a traumatized mutant-

Lizard: Trans woman, Her name is Camila :] She has exactly 5 different lizard species in her DNA (5 points for anyone who can guess them all just from her design)

Rhino: It no longer identifies with anything from its life before getting mutated in an attempt to have some control over its life. Rhino strictly uses It/Its. Aside from Rhino DNA, It also has wooly mammoth DNA.

Lizard and Rhino fuckin HATE eachother. It stepped on her tail ONCE and she never forgave it. Mysterio often has to split the two up with his Alien form.

Electro: Graffiti artist. Has somewhat control over his bio electricity, Gloves and chestplate (which is what that tube attached to the back of his head is connected to.) help maintain that control.

Tinkerer (bc he's there): (My silly, my skrungly, my funny lil old man blorbo hehheghem-) Trans man :] Has a cat he rescued off the streets (bc i kept seeing people give him a cat and its like. Its a good headcanon) He and Beck met during his stuntman days (He was technical support on a movie Beck worked on), He isn't very fond of alot of the sinister six (Him and sandman are chill tho) but he tolerates them for Beck.

Okie thats all mwah/p

[vesteneris]

some of my favourite hunger games pages from my sketchbook, mostly from 2023 and also Annie Cresta centred, bc I was doing a comic about her at the time

[marblish0220]

Book Club

[noctilu-uca]

CAN I SEE THE SLIDE PRESENTATION

yeah sure keep in mind this was made DAY OF announcement so i literally knew nothing all i knew is that i had to put my thoughts on a google slide for my friends who literally could not care about the reboot

Jyushi hutcherson is real in my heart

[ruvviks]

it's been a hot sec since i've talked about cyberpunk and i was initially working on a fic that would tell the story of this whole thing, but i've abandoned it many months ago and cannot say when i'll be picking it up again SO! i've decided to instead make this timeline. sorry in advance for how much information is in this thing the cyberpunk extended blorboverse essentially refers to the story parallel to the in-game events of cyberpunk 2077 that @mojaves and i came up with. we don't really have a better name for it but at this point the term has been used so many times that i feel like everyone here knows what it is by now, but at the same time we've never really explained the full scope of what the story is by now (it's a lot sorry). so in an attempt to get you guys a little bit more up to date with it all, here's a semi coherent timeline that describes the core events of the story and every branching story that came out of it! for additional background information, you can check out the following posts (timeline 1 / timeline 2 / timeline 3) to catch up with the continuation of the in-game storyline that's referenced in this timeline, but it's mostly irrelevant to everything here save for a couple of referenced events that cross over between the stories. it all ties together very intricately sorry about that. don't worry too much about it i've included my taglist down below to make sure people who are interested won't miss this post, but feel free to skip over this if it's not your thing! won't be doing a lot of this kind of stuff in the future but i'm trying to get back to the cyberpunk roots so this is kind of like, a good starting point and reference point for later posts!

The story starts in early 2077 and is centered around Sebastian Vidal, gang leader of the Cobras and previous test subject of Arasaka Special Programs (the linked page is a lot of information but gives the most coherent overview of what the branch actually is). The current director of the SERPENT projects, Andrew Colton, and Dr. Alana Cartier, both want him dead, to tie up their last loose end before the rest of Arasaka can find out and shut down Special Programs once and for all.

Over the past months they’ve been hiring various assassins in secret, to try and get Seb killed; however, these assassins keep failing, and their latest attempt lies in the hands of Cassidy Shaffer, an ex-corpo turned assassin with a strong moral code and plenty of experience to his name. With little to work with, as his mysterious client doesn’t give out much information, Cassidy starts with what he thinks is gonna be a quick and easy job– but he ends up hunting after Seb for essentially a year.

During this year, the two men have a series of wild encounters that get more and more insane the longer it goes on; it includes, but is unfortunately not limited to, Cassidy biting off a chunk of Seb’s ear, the two of them running over the highway, the two of them getting handcuffed together and chased by the NCPD then hit by a car right in front of the hospital, and Seb sensually licking blood off Cassidy’s face after having stabbed him when Cassidy wanted to strike at a concert Seb is visiting.

All of it comes to a sudden stop when Cassidy learns his client has been lying to him the whole time, and since he does not appreciate lying clients he ends up jumping sides and teams up with the Cobras to do some cleanup duty in Arasaka Special Programs. He and Seb work together to go after a list of targets to get the still ongoing projects mostly to a halt, while remaining in the shadows themselves as to not draw too much attention their way; and during this collaboration they meet several people from their past, bringing back both good and bad memories.

One of these people is Hanan Chisaka, the Head of Security at Special Programs. She ends up becoming the next test subject of Project Cobra after the last successful subjects, Xavier and Gabriel Mason, end up escaping in the midst of the chaos of Hanako Arasaka’s capture in mid-2077. Once Seb’s best friend and Cassidy’s mentor, she’s now forced to hunt the both of them down; but in their final confrontation she snaps out of the controlled mode Arasaka keeps her in and runs away with them, effectively leaving Special Programs without any test subjects. Another one of these people is Reid Bennett, Cassidy’s ex and ex-coworker back at MaxTac. He still works for the corporation and has been on an ongoing investigation into Arasaka Special Programs; seeing Cassidy alive and well, working together with Seb no less, piques his interest and he continues to look further into the case, which will cause him to make a very big mistake later on in the timeline.

By September 2078, Seb and Cassidy have successfully taken down all their planned targets and retreat back into the shadows, leaving Special Programs with many losses and no test subjects. With the APEX program discontinued a month earlier (incident discussed in this fic, which is a continuation of the in-game events), and Hanako Arasaka recovered and ready to take the corporation back from the hands of her corrupt brother, Special Programs ends up having to retreat for the time being, and cook up a new plan in the background.

Special Programs by this point is run by Andrew Colton, Alana Cartier, and Kaida Akiyama, three players who have been in the game for a long time already in the SERPENT projects’ runtime. Colton and Cartier are married– Cartier used to be married to Seb and cheated on him for a good amount of time when he was still at Arasaka– but their marriage is starting to fall apart. Akiyama has had to watch over Special Ops agent Ambrose Hawthorne for a while during his chase after the Mason twins, which ended up with the twins dead and Hawthorne going into early retirement (Arasaka doesn’t know the twins faked their death and Ambrose is now dating one of them lol), and xe is now determined to help Colton and Cartier get Seb back into Arasaka so the projects can continue.

Cassidy’s initial plan was to leave as soon as the collaboration would come to an end, but he has found his place with the Cobras and instead ends up officially joining them.The next chapter in the story is a more laid-back and easygoing chapter, in which Cassidy learns to be part of real life again, and in which Seb learns to let people get close to him again after spending years trying to convince himself he doesn’t need any help. Over the course of a little over a year (all the way to November 2079), the two grow even closer than they had already done, going on gigs together and, you guessed it, slowly but surely falling in love until they inevitably end up together at the end of it.

Not long after the two get together, Reid returns into Cassidy’s life. He wants to try and be friends again and Cassidy gives him a second chance, though this soon enough turns out to have been a mistake, with Reid trying to create distance between Seb and Cassidy and then going as far as trying to sell Cassidy to Kang Tao (one of the few corporations that have been hunting Cassidy down for a while now) in exchange for his own freedom from MaxTac (where he would have otherwise been stuck at for probably the rest of his life). Naturally, Reid can’t watch Cassidy get tortured for long and leaks his location to the Cobras, who find and free Cassidy and take Reid into captivity instead– he does not get killed, but instead has to sit out some time at a safehouse somewhere in solitude, where he gets to decide what kind of person he wants to be in the future.

This brings us to Elysium; a gorgeous spaceship which was supposed to be a relatively cheap escape from reality for everyone who wanted a refreshing break from Earth, but through Arasaka sponsorship has become just another cash-grab project to compete with the Crystal Palace– and considering the megacorporation has its greasy hands all over it, the secret labs in the spaceship are used for a series of very unethical experiments. Naturally so, it would be the perfect place for Colton to continue his SERPENT projects without the risk of Hanako Arasaka finding out and shutting the place down. He sends forces up to Elysium (obviously after his other attempts at relocating the project to space have failed tremendously, having lost contact with every single crew in the smaller Arasaka stations in orbit around the planet), but since he’s not there himself his cousin (one of the CEOs of Elysium), Maxwell Crane, unbeknownst to Colton, takes control of the SERPENT projects in space instead. From the earlier linked Special Programs page: “Project Eryx used the technology of previous projects, but took a completely new approach in the hosts it used; rather than focusing on the human psyche it attempted to create a new type of cyborg which would lack the humanity that caused previous projects to fail. The Cobra chips were no longer used and the software was instead installed directly onto the host’s mainframe. The flexibility of the new hosts– more robot than human, and in some cases the entire human aspect was lacking altogether– allowed for experimentation with highly advanced cybernetic enhancements and military grade tech and upgrades, turning the test subjects– dubbed ‘prototypes’– into dangerous, unstoppable killing machines.”

Things settle down for Seb and Cassidy, but this moment of peace does not last long. In January 2081 the two find themselves traveling to the spaceship Elysium, to investigate a curious situation in the laboratories– they’ve been hired by Arasaka without their knowledge and it’s a setup to get Cassidy killed and Seb back in Cartier’s control.

While in space, they learn that the secret labs have suffered an outbreak of the above mentioned prototypes. They quickly connect the dots and realize Special Programs is back in the game, and they work together with security guards Aubrey Valentine and Leon dello Russo to try and fix the situation before it gets out of hand. Obviously this fails tremendously and Elysium ends up on a complete lockdown after a ship-wide outbreak, which is eventually contained in late March of that year, with CEO Maxwell Crane dead, leaving only his wife Kinsley Osborn behind.

Elysium continues to exist and is rebuilt after the crisis, and Kinsley Osborn can now finally turn it into the retreat it was always meant to be. Previously, most Elysium employees were to be stuck in space for the rest of their lives; however, with Arasaka out of the picture they are free to leave as they please, which results in a gigantic cut in total employee count in the months that follow.

Seb and Cassidy return to Night City and take Aubrey and Leon with them. Aubrey reunites with his sisters; Becca, James, and Rikki, and soon after his return to the city he opens an LGBTQ+ nightclub called Bodytalk with them, found Downtown, City Center, in June 2081. Not only is it a fun place to hang out at, it’s also his main hub as a fixer, and he starts a collaboration with the Cobras to get business going between the gang and the club; and soon enough it grows into a large and powerful network of connections, which is the foundation on which the rest of the stories are built.

After this point in time, many many more things happen but it would take me another hour or ten to go into full detail of all of that, so instead here’s a quick rundown of some of the other things that Bodytalk gets involved in:

Reid Bennett is handed over to Aubrey and he starts working at the club, and he becomes a very valued employee as well as a good friend to many now that he’s no longer fucking insane

Kaida Akiyama returns from Elysium and shows up to Hanan’s doorstep, to ask for her help with getting out of Arasaka for good; much later on, xe starts working for Bodytalk as well, in an attempt to put xyr past behind xem and become a better person

Urban Dynamite starts performing at the club regularly, and it becomes their home base

Luna Serratos, Cassidy’s ripperdoc friend from all the way back to killing era, gets involved in the Harbinger case from Maelstrom (one of the gang’s most feared members); turns out the Harbinger is in fact Reuben de la Rosa, a by then 22-year-old kid who has ended up in Luna’s care with his friend Noah Telavera after the two got caught up in an explosion. She requests the Cobras’ help with getting Maelstrom to let Reuben go

Officer Michele Diaz from Militech (who used to be Cassidy’s boss) is demoted following the lawsuits after the Elysium incident, and her investigation into the incident in hopes to get her job back leads her to Bodytalk; she begins threatening them and sends the whole club and their allies into uncertain times

Many people get married. There’s so many fucking guys here we went a little insane with the numbers but there’s several weddings and there’s a whole polycule going on too feel free to send asks about this if you’re interested

Cobra Cybernetics releases a new line of cyberware, which is incredibly buggy and dangerous to the public; it’s brought to the club’s attention and it makes them realize that Luiza Vidal (Seb’s sister), who not that long ago asked them to kill her husband (William Colton (Andrew’s brother), CEO of Cobra Cybernetics), has gone missing; they now need to get involved without getting the news out that they actually didn’t kill William and that he is still alive somewhere, while also balancing out dynamics between Biotechnica (angry at Cobra Cybernetics for stealing their designs) and Arasaka (the actual reason why Cobra Cybernetics’ designs look like Biotechnica’s designs, because William stole designs from Special Programs after halting their partnership after the Elysium incident, but these designs had been stolen by Arthur Jenkins from Biotechnica even BEFORE that to be able to hijack the European Space Council’s cybernetics following the Frankfurt incident. Are you still with me)

Vitali Dobrynin (fixer and main character from the in-game events storyline and the continuation of it; Vincent “V” Mayer’s boyfriend) ends up visiting Bodytalk after meeting Aubrey at a Fixer Council meeting, which happens in late 2083; this essentially ties the two main storylines together, which means that yes, a lot of the characters from the two separate storylines end up meeting :]

Officer Ulysses Dimakos (used to work with Reid at MaxTac) is sent to investigate Bodytalk following the Cobra Cybernetics scandal, and ends up teaming up with the club to get MaxTac on a dead trail in exchange for his freedom of the corporation

On top of the Bodytalk / Cobras centered storyline, there’s a couple of side stories that are still connected to the whole thing but are more of a standalone thing with only a few touching points to the rest of it all:

This obviously takes place a lot earlier because it’s already mentioned above, but Special Ops agent Ambrose Hawthorne is tasked with chasing after the escaped Mason twins; naturally he lets them go and ends up going into retirement, and Xavier Mason later on ends up becoming Bodytalk’s part-time repair guy on account of knowing Kaida

Gabriel Mason ends up in a car crash with retired security specialist Ames Ortega, who was also in Elysium during the incidents there, and the two end up babysitting Ambrose and Xavier’s kids together while those two are helping Hanan with getting Kaida out of Arasaka (Are you still with me. Blink if you can hear me)

Mercenary Frankie Sayyad gets a promotion from his fixer, Vulture (real name Diana Crane, Maxwell Crane’s older sister and cousin of the Coltons), and becomes one of her Bloodhounds; he works together with Evelyn Harris, Nimue Nkuna, and Beckett Rydel, the latter being one of the very first test subjects of Arasaka Special Programs, and the four accidentally get themselves mixed into a mystery concerning their secretive fixer

Caleb Harris, ex-security at Biotechnica, ends up back at Club Bodytalk not long after the conclusion of the Cobra Cybernetics scandal, and starts working for Aubrey; he is partnered up with Ramiel Al-Masri, a mercenary who has been working for Vitali Dobrynin for a while and has recently joined Aubrey’s mercenary roster too, and together they dive into a series of gigs neither of them had expected

Journalist Bodhi Shankar has finally found more evidence and information surrounding the mysterious cult gang Umbra and its so-called Prophet, Thiago Salazar; however, his antics have led to him accidentally becoming part of the gang himself, and he has to figure out a way to get Thiago to stop listening to the supposed deity that the gang worships known as Scintilla, before she makes him do things that will get many people killed

taglist (opt in/out)

@velocitic, @deadrlngers, @euryalex, @ordinarymaine, @gurathins;

@mojaves, @shellibisshe, @dickytwister, @mnwlk, @rindemption;

@ncytiri, @calenhads, @noirapocalypto, @florbelles, @radioactiveshitstorm;

@strafethesesinners, @fashionablyfyrdraaca, @aemondtargeryen, @radioactive-synth, @katsigian;

@estevnys, @elgaravel, @aezyrraeshh, @carlosoliveiraa

[mayasdeluca]

“I love you. And I’ve never said that about anyone before except my brother, so it means something.” Is this about to be tainted?!

We should have known once seeing this shot that it was someone Maya recognized immediately and how she reacted. (Danielle’s acting is going to ruin us all as usual.) For her to find out that her brother is protesting the rights of her community, her family, possibly as a new mom?

We also know that Danielle had a stunt double for this episode. We heard shots fired in the trailer. Are they from Mason? Are they directed at Maya? Does she get injured? It seems like Carina isn’t at the parade, she’s somewhere with Bailey. Will they find out about the attack and see Maya getting brought into the hospital if they’re at work?

If we aren’t going to get happy Marina with their baby at the Pride Parade, I need to see Maya completely confiding in Carina about discovering that her brother who she hasn’t seen in god knows how long is against her being who she is, having a wife and a family, being queer. We need to see this conversation. Give me Maya breaking down in Carina’s arms. It would show so much growth in Maya too, how far she’s come and how there used to be a time where she would shut Carina out when something like this happened with her family, she’d be in denial (Season 3)…let Maya lean on her wife and let them get through it together and discuss the hardships of being a queer family in the US. That what happened at the parade is unfortunately realistic and normal in this country. How it can be even the people closest to you or the people you love who end up betraying you the most.

[catastrxblues]

the hunger games brainrot is real right now

[ziggy0-o]

footage of me for the past four months reading everything i can about pink floyd

[yellow-py]

:)

[waugh-bao]

I found a little gem of a video on dailymotion. "Equidia chez Charlie Watts des Rolling Stones"

I think its the first time I've seen anything where Charlie and Shirley are talking to one another, at least audibly. It is wonderfully cute.

This is so lovely! I saw a version of it years ago, but it was much shorter and the quality was so poor that I never bothered to post or gif it. It’s a shame we don’t have more footage of them interacting because they’re exactly as funny and cute as one would expect. (Also, sorry about how the thumbnail looks. If you click on the video to play that header and the control buttons will disappear after a few seconds, there was just no way for me to screen capture the first bit of the video without them).

Also, I’m not a dog person, but I love the Wattses rescue dogs. Especially this girl who is so emo about her mum and dad not paying 100% attention to her.

[crossbackpoke-check]

Looks like that video is about a month & a half after The Trade and trevors broken ankle 😣

re: this video… anon 😭 i had suspicions but it is so much worse to have them confirmed that really was like. trevor’s first Public Appearance without jamie AND post-broken ankle which is traumatic in and of itself no wonder every beat reporter was like ‘oh yeah trevor’s just devastated’

wouldn’t you be miserable too if your best friend just got traded and your body betrayed you and what if it was maybe all your fault!!!

[sayheykid]

anyway captain mason mctavish. thoughts.

this is nothing i haven't said before. but. everyone thinks it's going to be zegras eventually but honestly i just don't think he's captain material? face of the franchise sure but he hasn't settled down enough to be someone who handles the locker room/other captain responsibilities. maybe eventually he'll prove me wrong.

but anyway the team is very young and has a focus on drafting and development at the moment. limited options, not as many veterans now as there were a few years ago. so what's the solution. young guy who plays and conducts himself like an old guy.

mctavish is what. 21. i expect to see him in the league for like 12-15 more years, that's not unreasonable. that's a guy you can build around. someone who's going to grow into the role but to me is already very capable. i think you could give him the C tomorrow and have no problem

there is a precedent for this, which is already being proven. first of all, he has set himself apart from his peers on numerous occasions. he made his nhl debut TWO MONTHS TO THE DAY after being drafted. (he was 17 btw) the ducks second pick in the 2021 draft, olen zellweger, made his debut this past season. no one else from that class has come up.

at the nhl level, mctavish, zegras and drysdale were the same cohort of like young guns/future of the team. let's revisit where they all are now. drysdale was done wrong by the ducks - never given the time or support to really develop and get healthy before getting shipped off but that's besides the point. zegras is the most well known of the three of them, doesn't really have anything to show for it either. mctavish is the one who got the A in just his second full season.

another cohort has now joined the team, newer rookies who are still figuring things out. mctavish is no longer the youngest one on the team, but it's not by a ton. he's perfectly positioned now where he's been around long enough that he's looked up to but doesn't necessarily seem like an Authority™ you know.

also the ducks have been without a captain since getzlaf, but were able to get by on the leadership of henrique, silfverberg and cam fowler. (they had five guys wear the A this past year though? that's too many) but losing henrique and silfverberg, while a hit to the veteran presence, really streamlines the leadership core if i'm being honest. it feels like as good a time as any to really commit to making this a defined era for the ducks. i really like this year's As too - cam fowler as the throughline for half a decade of ducks hockey, plus troy terry as another older guide, i think that's a really strong foundation and baseline for further development, not only for the team as a whole but specifically for mctavish as future captain.

i'm not necessarily saying give mctavish the C right now, though I think he's more than capable. we've seen young captains before (landeskog, crosby, mcdavid etc) who have done tremendous work, and I don't see why that list couldn't include mctavish