#also! this town has really pretty houses/apartments and for someone like me who has no building talent this is important!

[grimfolks]

I felt like Winchester was feeling too small for Daphne, loved the island vibes but it was a little too small, always running into the same people and with not that much to do on a friday night when she's not working so I moved her over to SimLau Isles.

[friendly-neighborhood-boricua]

[2] Seeing Each Other Around Town

Summary: James discovers his favorite student and his mom are his across-the-street neighbors and now he can't stop seeing her everywhere.

Notes: Marauders modern elementary school AU, kindergarten teacher!James Potter x nurse!reader, mom!reader x son!OC (Liam), inspired by this post by @ravishinglavishingluvr. Tiny little bit of angst in this one but it's negligible. Y'all this is gonna be a slow burn but we'll get there. Also I'm updating sorta regularly now yay!!!

A/N (23/5/24): FINALLY edited this. I'm out of school, so hopefully I'll have time to continue this series <3

Previous Part: Parent-Teacher Conferences Next Part: Career Fair Series Masterlist here

Poor James is completely infatuated with you after parent-teacher conferences

He just can’t get you out of his head

And Sirius and Remus are usually the ones who suffer the consequences

Their apartment is on the way to school from James’ house, so they almost always carpool

And lately, the entire car ride, James Cant. Shut. Up. about you

(“Boys, you should’ve seen her—she’s so sweet—of course she’s Liam’s mom—Pads, you don’t understand—they’re so similar—Remus, she’s gorgeous—did you see her????”)

By the end of the week, Sirius and Remus are very amused with James’ adoration for you

But it also gets kinda irritating after a while, so they’re pretty thankful when the weekend rolls around and they (hopefully) get a small break from his incessant enamored babbling

Saturday rolls around, and James is up at six thirty (hard to break out of the habit when school starts at eight) and shuffling out to the lobby of his apartment building in his pajamas, robe, and slippers to get the mail and the newspaper

But just because James’ body wakes up early doesn’t mean James’ brain wakes up at the same time so he’s out by his mailbox looking confusedly at the newspaper and wondering why he suddenly can’t read

And after like a solid thirty seconds of him just squinting really hard he finally realizes it’s because he left his glasses inside

He’s doing his best guys, he’s doing his best

So James is about to turn around and go back to his own flat to get his glasses (and probably a cup of coffee) when he hears his own name— —just … well, kinda

“Mr. Potter?”

James just about jumps out of his skin because what teacher expects to see one of their students outside of school???? Like no thank you

Don’t get me wrong, James loves his kids to death and he’d die for them any day

But it’s the weekend

So no thanks

But then James realizes it’s Liam and he’s lowkey relieved because like

If he has to see a student outside of school, he’d rather it be this one

And then it occurs to James that if Liam is in his apartment building at six thirty in the morning, then he probably lives here

And if Liam lives here, then …

“Liam?”

Poor James can’t help the full-body flush that rushes through him at your voice

Boy looks like someone dunked him in tomato juice

His head snaps from Liam (or at least the blurry shape that has Liam’s voice) to where your voice is coming from, and it hits him that you’re whispering (very tiredly and cutely, if you asked James) from the floor below his own, leaning over the railing to watch as your son presumably gets the mail

How the hell didn’t he notice you lived in his apartment building????????

Not that he’s complaining ofc :):):):):):)

James realizes after a minute that Liam asked if he’s alright, and he’s just like “Yeah!!” and utterly beaming

(Unbeknownst to James, you realize who exactly Liam is talking to and blush just as terribly as James does when you realize you’re still in pajamas and aren’t at all presentable)

You say good morning to him as well (from the balcony) and James is pretty sure he’s about to melt

(You call him Mr. Potter tho and it lowkey makes him cringe and remember that Liam is like RIGHT next to him)

So you and him exchange pleasantries like Romeo and Juliet with the balcony :) you get it?? :):):) while Liam gets the mail from your own mailbox and walks it up the stairs back to you

(he says “here you go, mama” in his sweet little voice as he hands the small stack to you and you say the gentlest “thank you, baby” back and James’ heart feels like goop in his chest)

James barely makes it back into is own apartment before he’s squealing and doing a goofy little dance out of overflowing joy

And the best part?

That's not the last time he sees you. Not even close.

Over the next several weeks, James begins to notice you everywhere around town

He sees you and Liam at the grocery store (you’re there with Liam and give him the choice between dino nuggets and spring rolls; he decisively choses the latter)

And on his way to work (on one of the few days where Remus and Sirius aren’t carpooling with him, as Remus was sick and Sirius stayed home to care for him), James sees you in your own car on your way to work

And when you and Liam go on walks on the weekends (James had taken to mowing Remus' mother's lawn, which was on your walking path, shirtless every Saturday morning—for entirely unrelated reasons, of course, and he will take no questions on the matter …)

James still isn’t sure how he hadn’t noticed you before because how could he have missed you?? You’re gorgeous????

(Of course, poor Remus and Sirius get to hear about his fawning even more now)

(They both find it cute though and they like to give him advice, so it’s fine)

So eventually one Friday night, James can’t sleep and is done with his lesson plans

And he’s just bored, so what does he do?

Go to the grocery store, of course

So James ventures out, once again in his pajamas, to the grocery store to get some treats to eat while he watches Antiques Roadshow until he falls asleep

And of course—he should’ve known at this point honestly—there you are

(Also in your pajamas)

And James says hi before he can really stop himself, and you look a little spooked for a second (because who tf would be talking to you in the grocery store at ten at night?) but then you realize it’s him and you say hi back with a sweet little smile that turns James' insides to warm fudge

Apparently, Liam is at Draco's birthday sleepover (Draco's a little shit, and James never understood how Liam could stand the kid) and you don’t have a shift at the hospital tonight, so you decided to indulge in some celebratory ice cream

James ends up helping you choose which ice cream you want (chocolate chip cookie dough—a classic) and as thanks, you go with him to the candy aisle to help him pick out treats

James ends up getting a container of pretty much every candy, cookie, and chip that grocery store because he didn’t want to leave yet lmao

And when you’re in line to check out, James mentions that there’s a career fair at school in a month and he’s wondering if you’d maybe want to come and talk about being a nurse????

Pretty please??????

James doesn’t notice how your face falls ever so slightly. You kind of forgot for a second that he’s your son’s teacher and not just some pretty guy that you’ve sorta had a crush on for the past couple weeks. Nothing could happen between the two of you—not if it meant messing with or—god forbid—hurting Liam’s education. But it’s okay. You’ll just suck it up and stick to your job and your son. It’s fine. It’s fine.

You’re agreeing in an instant, and James promises to email you the details so you can plan around it

James leaves the grocery store with like ten pounds worth of treats feeling full to the bursting with warmth and his eyes are glowing the rest of the night

He sees this really pretty pearl and gold necklace on Antiques Roadshow and catches himself thinking about how pretty it would look on you, but he doesn’t bother trying to stop himself at this point

It wouldn’t be any help anyway

Next Part: Career Fair

[tibbythetiger]

Okay, so what I’m thinking is that Mike is a BoyFailure™️, he’s probably worked at every single place in town, or at the very least tried. I’m imagining, in his large job pursuit, he had a brief stint working at Sparky’s. This is how he and Ness meet, I imagine at first they start Mike out as a server, so he’s being trained by Ness. Ness, who yes, Mike thinks grudgingly, is kinda cute, if not mostly annoying (the guy never stops talking) and meanwhile, Ness is just enamored with someone who just lets him talk (again, he never really stops.) Over the course, of his training, Mike decides that maybe Ness is a little more cute and funny, than annoying, but decides not to bother even trying anything. He knows he’s a mess, and he has Abby (not to mention, he’s pretty sure he’s not going to be a server here for much longer, because as nice as Ness is, Mike cannot seem to pick up an ounce of that when he’s speaking to customers). They eventually do decide, that Mike cannot handle being around customers, and decide to put him in the kitchen, much to everyone else who works at the diner’s chagrin, because at this point, Ness has decided he also thinks that Mike is cute and kinda funny when he lets himself talk to people. A Ness with a crush is loud, flirty, easily flustered, and always in Mike’s space. This means Ness is always in the kitchen, and his service starts to slack, coupling that with the fact that Mike cannot seem to cook anything without starting it on fire (or worse, injuring himself) Sparky’s sadly lets him go. Ness is devastated, as Mike is cagey about personal details, and won’t give out his phone number so he’s sure he’ll never see him again. Because he’s overdramatic, he’s moping around the diner for weeks afterward; then he walks out one day to serve a table. It’s a cute little girl, sitting by herself drawing a picture. Ness is great with kids, and it’s obvious she’s probably waiting for someone in the bathroom, so he strikes up a conversation with her, even making her laugh when lo and behold, who sits down but his long lost love, Mike. At first, Ness is shocked, because surely this means that Mike was kinda shutting him down before because he’s straight, or maybe in a long-term relationship. But still, he bucks up, takes their order and as the two are leaving he tells Mike he makes a pretty cute kid. (Mike and Abby react pretty similarly to this as they did when Vanessa thought they were parent/child) From then on, Abby and Mike end up becoming regulars, and Abby adores Ness. He’s one of the few people she’ll talk to, and once she even draws him a picture of him, she and Mike (Ness and Mike both try to act like this is not a Big Deal, despite Ness framing it in his apartment)  Mike and Ness still lowkey flirt, and even exchange phone numbers (for Abby, is Mike’s reasoning, but Ness is so overjoyed he just brushes away the very flimsy excuse) As the events of the movie take place, and with Mike’s new schedule, they’re unable to stop in, and only exchange a few phone calls. (Ness does overhear the conversation with Jan, Max and her brother, he leaves vm, after vm for Mike but he never sees them, and then Jan deletes them when she’s at the house) I also am assuming that the diner is 24hrs, and Ness is one of the few servers, so he’s unable to watch Abby to keep the original plot of the movie progressing the same.  

That’s what I got for now!! I’m coming to visit this again and add some more for post-movie development, or maybe write this out as an actual fic!! If someone decides to write this themselves, please feel free to, just credit me and tag me in it so I can read it!! <3

[copperbadge]

Sam, I must know what sort of things Gerald blogs about on his Tumblr. How old or active is his account? Is his identity a secret?

It's actually a reference to an older post where @dignitywhatdignity pointed out there was no way Ger wasn't on Tumblr. :D Reproduced my response below -- first, Photogram:

I can picture Jerry’s Photogram in my head very clearly because I’ve had to research the children of rich people and their fucking obnoxious instas, and Jerry’s is probably equal parts expensive cars, club glam, and scenic vistas, but mainly because that’s like…what you do. It’s just kind of the done thing, like wearing a shirt when you leave the house. 

Update: Gerald's photogram has shifted radically -- he still treats it as a Thing You Do but especially now that he's a dad it's a lot more Parenting Lifestyle stuff. Because a few of my friends have had babies in the last two years and I had to research the babies my fictional characters were having, the algo now thinks I have baby fever, so I get a lot of Parent Influencer content, and I bet Gerald does a lot of sly fun-poking at that stuff. Like, posting a photo of a bottle warmer and a bib-washing tabletop machine with commentary like "You cannot buy any of this in the shop I don't have, but if you're going to buy one stupid thing as a parent, buy the bib washer. Not a single shirt you own will be unstained but the bibs will be immaculate."

They don't post pictures of Serafina, though -- there are a couple of official portraits for PR reasons but day-to-day that shit is locked to friends and family only. (There are special websites for this, I have friends who use them, it's pretty neat.) The only time random candids of her are out there are usually when someone snaps Michaelis toting her around Fons-Askaz with her cousins -- the "King Emeritus and Royal Ducklings" are becoming a very familiar sight. At least once a week Michaelis takes Noah and Joan out for an afternoon in town with Sera in a snugli and the twins in a stroller. Don't ask him about his stepson and grandkids unless you really want to hear about them.

Meanwhile he also definitely has a secret super-weird tumblr and nobody can figure out if he’s roleplaying or shitposting or what when he posts stuff like “The family groupchat is all well and good until it starts heavily impacting local politics.” Are those horses really his or is he just visiting a barn? Is that…a photo of a plate full of appetizers at “My cousin’s latest house party” with Angela Merkel in the background? He certainly has some strong feelings about Princess Diana and equally strong feelings about Tsar Nicholas. Why is he one of only three people the official Eddie Rambler tumblr follows?

Gerald's tumblr has also slowed down since the diagnosis and becoming a dad, but the content is still random as hell and more authentically wild than his photogram. Again, no photos of Serafina, but it's very evident that whoever is running that particular tumblr has had a kid, or is pretending they have. He gets asks accusing him of faking shit for clout and every time he does, his response is simply to write the ask on a sheet of paper in longhand and photograph it in front of a famous European landmark and/or political figure.

Alanna tolerates this because it does keep him out of mischief and sometimes he takes Serafina with him to whatever landmark he's visiting, and she gets to have a quiet apartment to herself for a while.

(”Eddie Rambler’s on tumblr?” someone asks, and someone else replies “Name me one other TV chef brave AND stupid enough to be on tumblr” and then you realize it is in fact the official Eddie Rambler tumblr saying that.)

Eddie doesn't post to his official Tumblr anymore because he rarely has time and doesn't need to do the self-promotion, but Katie in Communications checks his inbox once a week and brings him the most entertaining asks to respond to. He's currently hovering somewhere around the level of Neil Gaiman in terms of "Famous people who are inexplicably on Tumblr."

Ultimately there develops a running joke that Jerry’s tumblr is run by either a) an upper-class vampire (rude) or b) the elected king of a micronation on the Mediterranean coast with a name nobody can spell (super rude!) 

One time Gerald accidentally pocket-posted a blurry selfie to his Tumblr but it was so poorly focused and clearly accidental that a bunch of people got mad at him for violating the privacy of the Duke of Shivadlakia. He had to pretend to have a week-long beef with himself to save face. He eventually got Noah to take a selfie with him, blanked out Noah's face, and then claimed the Duke had forgiven him and here was a selfie with him as proof.

It's a hard old life, being Duke of Shivadlakia, but someone's got to do it.

[princelylove]

Hi, accidentally stumble in your blog~ I love yandere jojo contents too so I hope to see your content about it :D

I don't know what to request yet but maybe we can talk about type of yandere. What is your favorite type of yandere? Mine is delusion or simp yandere (what characters in jojo you think they will be in this category btw)

Delusional types are adorable to me. There’s just something so charming about someone who’s so bent on being together that their brain skips the entire courting process and goes right into “We’re dating. No actually we’re married and have been married since forever and even our past lives were married. You belong to me what do you mean I have to stop calling for fifteen days.” I think my favored type is protective, but delusionals are too cute to pass on. As for those I think are delusional or simps, off the top of my head…

I’d also argue that Mista’s the type to simp, he’s pretty sure he’ll die if you carry your own shopping bags, but he doesn’t strike me as delusional. Love’s gotta be real to him, you know? He’s the kind of guy that can take a maybe, hell, even a hard no! He knows how to back off, but he’s just gonna keep watch from over here if that’s cool with you. I mean, come on, what kinda “friend” would he be if he let you open your own doors or pay for your own meal? He’s got a job, it’s totally on him! Don’t even think about trying to step over that puddle yourself, he’s already got you up by your legs to carry you across. He’s pretty strong, isn’t he? Oh, he’d die a happy man if you praised him for something like that. He’s like a dog whose tail just won’t stop wagging. You’re his everything, why wouldn’t he try to do things for you all the time? That isn’t weird, don’t shove him into the same category as creepy guys who never give up! It’s like typical hollywood stuff, you know? Romanticism or whatever! 

You know who’s fully delusional, though? I say this with lots of love, but Diego. He just cannot fathom the idea of someone rejecting him, I mean, what’s wrong with him? He’s the prince of the british horseracing world, how DARE you reject him??? There’s absolutely nothing wrong with him, don’t play hard to get with him of all people! You should be begging for his attention, not the other way around, but here we are. Diego fully believes that you were made for him, you just don’t understand the gravity (I do think I’m funny for this wordplay) of the situation yet. No matter what happens, you’re always going to be his. As long as he’s got it in his head that you’re more of an object than a real person who has thoughts and feelings like he does, he’s not really going to care about your ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Look, pigeons are just meant to be led, and he’s already somewhat fond of you, so just let him have what he wants. I’m firmly of the belief that if you ever flat out rejected him, he’d just think you were unwell and needed him even more. Be good for him, he doesn’t have the time to play this silly little game of cat and mouse with you right now. 

Joseph is another “You can’t play hard to get forever!” type to me, honestly. He’s persistent like a bloodhound, and is going to get in the way of whatever lover or relationship you’ve got going on right now no matter what. He called dibs on you, so, it’s totally fair. He’ll show up to your apartment or house and completely ignore his training if it means getting just a glimpse of you. So what if he’s got a ring in his throat, he wants to put a ring on your finger! Joseph goes the extra mile for you- literally. If you were to move out of town, he’d walk all the way to your new place if he had to. Joseph won’t be deterred so easily. You just wanted him to get some exercise, right, babe? That’s so thoughtful of you! It makes his day when you look his way, especially if you actually catch him showing off with his training. If you were to actually talk to him, or god forbid compliment him, he’d be reeling for a week. He trails behind you on your errands, taking notes mentally of where you go and what you get. One day he’ll know it by heart, and then you won’t even have to go on errands anymore! Unless you want to go with him, that is. Then he’s totally down for a little couple’s day out. Joseph will buy you whatever you want as long as he gets his fix in. Let him put his head on your lap and just stare, and he’ll be thrilled. I don’t necessarily believe that Joseph would kidnap you if you broke his fantasy too many times, but you’re definitely going to start losing a lot of personal time. It doesn’t matter how he got into your apartment, he made dinner. Haha, ok, you caught him. He ordered dinner. 

I think it’s fairly obvious to say that Yukako is delusional. She has a warped sense of reality. Her crimes really don’t matter to her because she’s making up for it. Look, look, she cooked for you. Stop trying to go for the door or the window. Yukako loves you, so you’re going to be perfect for her, and you’re going to be perfect together. She’s firm about never leaving your side even though she’s already got you all to herself. She sees nothing wrong with skipping dating and going right to locking you up if she thinks you need her for something. You’re failing at that cooking class that school made you take despite your pleas not to? She can do that. You’re awful with directions? She knows every little corner of town. You actually don’t need her and are perfectly capable of taking care of yourself? Don’t talk like that. You need her. There’s absolutely no reason to deny her, so let’s do this the cutesy way she wants it. 

[blushblushbear]

sorry..... me again...… you can choose to ignore this if you feel like it's too much

(not trying to guilt-trip you, please don't feel pressured

uh maybe... Nimh? Nimh is cute I like Nimh

if you don't feel like doing him, maybe Poe or Anon?

*blows the dust off this ask* oops this one's pretty old

I already did Nimh so Anon and Poe it is

Anon

Okay not to call the scott a drunk

but I'm about to call the scott a drunk

he's not too bad, but he is a little picky about what he will and will not drink

low key judges people for their choice of beers

side eyes people who order basically liquid candy as a drink (for a cocktail at least, he will rot his teeth on mountain dew don't get it twisted)

he mostly does pints but his fav mixed drink is a moscow mule

or a spiked energy beverage

speaking of drinks he always has a crazy amount of them

g-fuel, red bull, monster-- every energy drink type thing you've seen he's probably got

also drinks prime

also mountain dew

a lot of it

I joke about his teeth rotting but in all honesty he takes good care of them

that's the one gamer stereotype he does not fall in town

he's low key germophobic so his apartment and battle station are SPOTLESS

he defo has those touchland hand sanitizers cause he's a boujee bitch

speaking of boujee he's actually p well off

started trading stocks young and did crypto till it tanked

he doesn't like to talk about his crypto days (he was a hard crypto bro at it's peak)

usually his drunk rambles are about crypto

also conspiracy theories

also video games

his parents are decently well off too but he doesn't talk to them much

they don't have a bad relationship but it's definitely one of those 'you see the family only around the holidays' kind of deals

he has a lot of internet buds but I think deep down he's bad at making real connections and actually gets pretty lonely

likes watching animal videos, WOULD NOT get a pet

rarely has people over to his place, took him a while to fully mentally accept having you over

he was determined to get over it though cause he really wanted you around

would never shower with someone cause that just feels unsanitary-- the shower is for CLEANING

would maybe get a snake-- they're pretty clean

once went 3 days without sleeping

actually lost a lot of sleep to stardew valley when it first came out

his farm is AMAZING

loves to troll at video games but not in a run face first into the enemy team and ruin it for everyone kinda way

more a does a 360 no scope on you right when you think you're safe

you mad bro??? lol

sends lots of memes about liking his s/o cause he's really bad at saying how he feels

favorite director is Edgar Wright cause he's a man of taste and culture

regularly cleans and buffs his nails

has at least one to two drinks chilling in every room of the house

really wants to get an ear piercing

really vain about his looks even though he dresses like garbage

just tell him he's handsome, he's legit too proud to beg but he needs that validation

listens to a lot of underground bands and artists

also a lot of djs

owns 15 pairs of headphones

5 have animal ears

showers at least once a day unless he's in a gaming trance

once tried to write you poetry, felt like an idiot, removed all evidence of it's existence and would deny it fully if you ever found out

Poe

Probably not a surprise to anyone but he got bullied a lot in high school

Has been writing poetry since he was 10 and has notebooks full of poems and short stories from over his life

really wants to write some kind of vampire mystery series centered around a brooding poet vampire but also he's bad at writing mysteries

I've sad this before but he's in a book club with Nimh and Cashew

he keeps trying to get them to read romantic novels

Cashew was game until he realized Poe meant like Lord Byron romantic

Mary Shelley Romantic

thinks Mary Shelley losing her virginity on her mother's grave is the coolest thing ever and is high key jealous

Mary Shelley is honestly his hero

secretly got addicted to soap operas

he wants to stop so bad but he can't

he doesn't have a pet but if he did he'd be that dude you can totally tell has a pet cause he's always covered in fur

not that Poe would even care

Poe actually never much cared for birds and is still salty about becoming a magpie

owns so many Victorian/Edwardian style coats

and vests

he's just one color palette/slight aesthetic change away from just being steampunk

owns so many bits of jewelry, it mostly just floats around his living spaces and he chooses what he's wearing that day at random

all the people who headcanon Poe as trans, you're correct

constantly painting his nails and it's always chipping

his nail polish is actually pretty jank but he doesn't care so long as his nails are black

his living spaces are a mess

lots of papers, lots of random odds and ends, lots of clothes and book and forgotten mugs everywhere

does actually partake in the music aspect of the goth culture

most of his fav bands are ones you haven't heard of

he doesn't actually like horror much

at least not this modern jumpscare nonsense

he likes his horror dark, dramatic, and poetically gorey

Saw??? more like pa-shaw he can't stand those movies

the closest thing he gets to liking more mainstream horror franchises is Chucky

Tiffany Valentine is his favorite (*jennifer tilly voice* ~Jennifer Tilly~)

he can always get down with halloween, but only the first one

he can fuck with Tim Burton and Guillermo Del Toro though

crimson peak is his shit

also Jane Austen bitch?!

he loves him some Jane Austen

Emily Dickinson

Mary Shelley obvs

he low key hates to be basic but fucking

read Emily Dickinson's poetry and tell him you're not simping

he legit does simp for Shelley and Dickinson

legit loves the Kira Knightly Pride and Prejudice will all his heart

Sylvia Plath

He's trying so hard not to be basic but he loves Wednesday Addams

that line about her being allergic to colors--- he felt that

regularly listens to sounds of rain and fireplaces

ye I think I'll end it here lol XD

[loversj0y]

OMG THE SONG MINE FOR THE TAYLOR EVENT WOULD BE SO GOOD

congrats on 200 btw, you deserve it <3

mine

pairing: wilbur soot x gn! reader

tws: reader has parent issues pog

notes: this one probably took the longest bc of my brain not working, but i do like how it turned out :3

word count: 1.2k

taglist: @l0veb0mb1ng / @core-queen / @zooone / @lillylvjy

You weren’t afraid to admit that you were scared of love. It wasn’t love you were really scared of after all. No, you yearned for love, for something real. But you were scared of falling in love for a multitudes of reasons. You’d seen how quickly love can crash and burn, and how it could leave one person deserted in a whirlwind of heartbreak and loneliness. So you were afraid to fall in love, terrified of giving someone that power over you. You’d seen how it worked out for your parents.

The first time you met Wilbur, it was at a small restaurant on the outskirts of town where you’d go when you needed some quiet. He was your waiter, and since there was no one else, he was very attentive, joking and laughing with you. He wrote his number on the edge of your receipt, and ever since, you and him had been close friends.

You remembered your first date, and you thought about it often. At the time, you hadn’t even realized you were on a date. You and him went to the beach at night, sitting in the dark and staring out at the Brighton sea. You had been stunned when he wrapped his arm around your shoulders, but it was easy to fall into his embrace. He kept his arm around you the entire night, even when he walked you home. The only time he let go was when he dropped you off to press a gentle kiss to your cheek.

At first, you’d been terrified of loving him. But it came easily to you, as careful as you were. Before you knew it, the two of you were an almost inseparable duo, constantly around each other, joking and laughing. Your first kiss felt like a headrush, and you’d been addicted ever since.  

Things weren’t completely easy. As you got closer and your relationship got more serious, you ended up moving into Wilbur’s apartment. What started as a drawer in his closet of your things turned into sharing the closet equally. It was a big step, and it made you incredibly anxious, but Wilbur was always there to quiet your fears with the touch of his hand. As two struggling college students who knew nothing about life or how to live it, you did a pretty good job at making a comfortable life for yourselves. As more time went on, you always thought back to that first night, when you allowed your heart to overtake your fears, and you wondered if he thought back to that night too.

It was two years from then now. You hated to admit how shocked you were that the two of you had lasted this long. You ended up finding a house to rent together, now that both of you had full careers post-university. But more growth also meant more tension and more fights.

You dropped your bag off as you walked in, sighing softly. It was late, you had just closed at work, so it was nearly two AM. You went to the kitchen, opening the fridge. It was almost completely empty. You groaned softly.

You felt Wilbur’s arms wrap around your back as you stood up.

“Hi, darling,” he kissed the side of your head, “I missed you.”

“I missed you too,” you smiled slightly, “Did you go grocery shopping?”

“No, I didn’t have time. I ran late tonight.” You sighed, “I just wish you would’ve told me. I could’ve stopped on my way home.”

He laughed, “Darling, it’s two AM. I don’t even like you walking around this late, let alone going to the grocery on your own at this time.”

“Yeah, well, I haven’t eaten, so it would’ve at least been nice to know.” You didn’t mean to sound so upset, but you couldn’t help the tense edge that filled your voice.

He pulled his arms away, and you turned to look at him. 

“Love, you can’t possibly be blaming this on me. You’re not the only one who works a lot.”

“I’m not blaming you, Wilbur. I’m just annoyed right now.”

“Really? Because it sounds like you’re blaming me.” Wilbur was tense too. You knew that his job was making him more stressed as well, but honestly, you weren’t thinking straight.

“Wilbur. Let’s not do this right now-”

“No, we should. You know how much work has been pushing me lately,” Wilbur argued.

“I know that, Wilbur, but you’re not the only one! Work stresses me out too, but if you asked me to pick up the groceries, I would figure out a way to do it!”

“It’s not like I forgot! I had things to do!”

“So do I, and now, I’m home and all I was looking forward to was coming home and having a good meal! And now I can’t, so I’m allowed to be a bit pissed off!”

“I get that, but that doesn’t mean you come in acting like it’s my fault!”

“I’m just tired of feeling like the only one who does shit around here!” Tears sprung to your eyes as you yelled back. You hated this, the yelling, the fighting, all of it. It reminded you of your parents. “We wouldn’t even live here if it weren’t for me! I’m tired too!”

You couldn’t take it anymore. You stormed out the door, crying and running out into the empty street. At some point during your conversation, it had started raining, and you hadn’t even noticed it. You stood there in the street, letting the rain wash the anger out of you, and just felt upset. It was over. You knew it was over. This was how it ended for your parents. Screaming and fighting and walking out. And you just fulfilled the prophecy.

As you were bracing yourself for the goodbye, you were shocked to feel arms wrapping around you.

“Wilbur?”

He held you tightly, and you could hear slight sniffles from him, “I’m sorry,” he whispered, “I never wanted to make you cry, I just, I’ve been so stressed, but I never meant to take it out on you.”

You turned, hugging him back tightly, “I’m sorry, too. I just got overwhelmed, and work sucked today,” you admitted softly, relaxing in his arms.

After a few minutes of silence and just holding each other, you felt him kiss the top of your head. 

“Do you remember our first date? At the beach?”

You chuckled quietly, nodding, “Yeah. I think about it every day.”

He smiled, holding you closer, “I think about it a lot too. How much changed because I decided to just finally make a move. I remember how it felt, I was so scared you’d just push me off. Everytime I look at you, I remember how ecstatic I felt when you leaned into me.”

He pulled away, but only so he could lean down and kiss you gently. 

“I still don’t know if I deserve you. I’m shocked you ever fell for me, darling, but I’d be the biggest fool to ever do something that could jeapordize that. I don’t know how you’re mine, but you are. You are mine, and I am yours. And you are the best thing I’ve ever been so lucky to be able to call mine.”

You cried again, but these tears were happy ones, clinging onto him tightly.

“I love you so much.”

“I love you, too, darling. Now, let’s head in. Go shower and clean up, and I’ll order some food in, does that sound good?”

You nodded softly, “Yeah, thank you, Wilbur.”

He walked you in, and you had one thought on your mind. You were so lucky to be able to call him yours.

[pochiperpe90]

[ENG] DISUNITI - Interview to Luca Marinelli by Gianmaria Tammaro

When choosing a role, Luca Marinelli lets himself be guided by instinct. He tries to listen to what his insides are telling him and to give a precise shape to his intentions. He doesn't move blindly;  he moves slowly, with the same awareness of someone who knows his work, even instinctively. It's useful for him, he tells me, to stay in touch with the story, with what he tells. Because that way he can become part of it. A character, until the last stop is called, never leaves; it's like a second skin, and he's there, docile, waiting, ready to come out. Luca has a deep and low voice. These days, while he's filming M. Son of the Century, he has freshly shaved cheeks and a cap that is always pulled down on his head, to hide his hair and forehead. The smile and the look, however, are the same as always.  Kind the former, intelligent the latter. When he speaks, he takes his knees in his hands, tries to collect himself, to compact himself into a single point. Not to limit the occupied space: but to find a center. We are in a park, in the late afternoon light, and a light wind is blowing. It had been a long time, Luca confesses to me, that he hadn't spent such a long period in Rome. In 2012 he moved to Berlin, and since then he has returned to Italy only for work reasons. "I've been in town since last spring, I think."

When you filmed the sequel of The Old Guard.

 "Yes, exactly. And now I'm working on this series".

 How did you find Rome?

"It's a question that, I confess, I don't quite know how to answer. I found Rome wonderful as always. And at the same time I felt tired. It's a beautiful city, and every time I have the opportunity to discover it more. Especially when I ride. And then I must tell you that I found her changed. Some neighborhoods aren't as I remembered them anymore, and that's okay: that's what happens to everyone, I guess; let's change".

When you will be finished shooting M., will you go back to Berlin?  

"Yes".

Why? Do you prefer it?  

"But no, it's not a question of preferring one city to another. Also in Berlin there is a fundamental part of my heart and a different dimension of life, just as important".

And does this diversity matter?

"Right now I feel like I have two houses, and it's nice. I feel at home both here and in Berlin. It took some time to reach this balance, I won't hide it from you. But now I'm really fine. Berlin is another dimension; it's not Germany. Berlin is Berlin, it's almost a place apart. I love his tranquility and his energy. When I'm in Rome, I feel a different kind of energy".

Tell me.

"There is a need to give oneself fully, to give oneself completely, when one plays a part or does something; but there is also a need to know how to withdraw in order to find one's own space. It's used to recharge. To fill again this container that is within us. Because when you work, you give everything. Everything is given. And you can come out of an experience exhausted. I say always that I don't get tired. But at some point, willy-nilly, fatigue still comes. Anyone who plays football has ninety minutes in his legs, he trains for that. When he goes too far, he risks overdoing it. So yes: it's important to stop and do something else, just to enrich yourself before the next project".

I imagine the type of preparation also changes

"Each project is completely different from the other: from the one that preceded it, and from the one that will follow it. The dynamics are the same, yes, because the set works, more or less, in the same way. But every experience is a different experience. And the city in which it's filmed has nothing to do with it; it's not just geography. There is more: much, much more".

What is your method as an actor? Indeed, I take a step back: you have your method?  

"I don't know. So, instinctively, I'd say no, I don't have it. Which doesn't exist. I've always had pretty much the same approach; and I modified this approach depending on the project and individual experience. Sometimes, over the years, I felt that I didn't do what I wanted to do in exactly the way I had imagined it; and then later, subsequently, I tried to improve. Keeping in touch with the reality of what we tell is something that helps me a lot".

Why?

"I can't tell you. I could foolishly answer you: "because I'm close to the story". But actually I think it's something else. It's like there's a smarter part inside of me. And it's this part that intervenes at a certain point, that understands what to do and that guides me".

Maybe it's instinct.

"I don't know. I tend not to ask. I tend not to compliment myself, or even see myself in a totally positive way. I'm not saying this out of false modesty or because I love to despair, no. I feel this is my approach: I need training, closeness to the thing we have to tell; and sometimes this closeness must also be on a physical level. Only later do I venture further in the project".

Why did you decide to play Mussolini?

"Well, I can't talk about that. Not at all. Let's take up this question again at another time."

Sure. Alessandro Borghi told me that you are like two brothers, that he's happy if you are happy. How would you describe your relationship?

“In a very similar way. I'm happy too if he's happy. I'm fortunate to have a group of very close friends: people I consider brothers and sisters and who, in some cases, I have known for more than thirty years. And Alessandro is part of this group. Every time we've worked together, we've talked about friendship. A friendship, precise, very strong. And next time too, the third time, we'll talk about a friendship: I'm sure of it. Indeed, I hope so. We meet again years later, with a greater awareness and maturity, because in the meantime we have grown up, and we face the same theme again: it's a wonderful thing".

Alessandro also told me that you are very different.

"It's true, we are. But that's also, I think, the beauty of friendship. Being different and still being able to find each other and be together".

Are you a rational or instinctive person?

“If Alissa heard you, she'd laugh…Look, I don't know. I don't think rational. In my head, I tend to get into a lot of trouble. If we talk about a project, I give weight to the first sensation I feel in this area here, from the neck down. And I have to say I have never been disappointed. Sometimes an immediate, definitive sensation came. Other times, however, I convinced myself and I totally trusted others". 

Has this trust ever been betrayed?

"From a film, you mean?"

From a film, a director or a fellow actor.

"No. Never betrayed. A project always has its own direction, and you must learn to follow that direction. Obviously, then, you too give it colors and a part of yourself. Bet on falling in love with someone else, and eventually you too fall in love. You rely on a director, you know a group of people who act with you. But if you get used to giving so much, you start to feel the urge to risk even more with something of your own".

So would you like to direct a film? 

"In general, not just at the cinema. Writing or directing, yes. I think about it every now and then. And in effect, a theater project already exists in the near future".

Does the anxiety of the set, of a new project, pass after a while?

"At some point yes, it passes. But I always see it that way. There are projects where it takes me less time and others where it takes me longer to ignore this anxiety. Or maybe it's not like that: because you always stay in character. It can happen that you completely abandon yourself to one thing before, turning off your brain. Or it may happen to succeed later. It's essential to trust yourself, and I say this first of all to myself. At the Academy I had a great teacher, Paolo Giuranna, who said: "trust the work you've done up to now; when you enter the scene, it's a blank page"".

How important was the Academy experience to you?

"Very. They have been three full and intense years. At the beginning I had a different vision of this profession, and then, being with others, with my class, I managed to find a more concrete dimension for what I had in mind. I remember the fire of that period, the passion. It's still there, sure. But now it needs to be fed. Before, however, it burned almost by itself. Instantly".

In some ways, you're talking about what it's like to be young.

"Yes, but also of not having experienced first-hand what it means to do this job. There is a substantial difference between working out and starting to play sports seriously. When you play sports, you understand that you have to deal not only with what you have learned but also with many other factors".

What relationship do you have with time? 

"I don't want to say trivial things... But time passes, and it also passes with a fair ease. It doesn't wait for you. He's not watching you. It would be nice to be able to live each day as if it was a lifetime. As if it was extremely important. To quote Thoreau: "As if one could kill time without hurting eternity." For heaven's sake: I spend whole days sitting, doing nothing, because mi pesa il culo (I'm a lazy ass)... (laughs, ed). But even that helps: do nothing, look around and don't box yourself in a phone. To stay. Simply. Throwing away some time makes me appreciate its value".

Even boredom has a purpose, in short.

“Boredom is interesting. It's curious. I get bored a little because I always try to do something - even here, perhaps, my wife would laugh. But I try, and I really try, to do something. Since adolescence, when I don't know what to do, I go out and about. When I read The Walk, I found this wonderful idea of ​​walking and learning to see what the world has to offer."

What is your relationship with Alissa?

"She's the person with whom I would like to share so much of this time, and I'm sorry when I can't: when I'm not enough with her and with our children. If I put time near her, to them, if I use them as a parameter of judgment, I wish I had more and more. It's never enough for me. I love sharing."

What are you afraid of now? 

"Fear is a strange word; a word that after meeting Claudio Caligari I tried to use less and less. I usually replace it with concern. Fear is something that makes you stop, and I learned from Claudio that it doesn't make much sense. You always have to keep fear at bay."

What worries you, then? 

"Maybe just the passing of time, because it holds together an infinity of speeches and aspects. I worry about not giving due importance to individual moments".

How do you experience success? I mean: what follows you is an extremely passionate audience. What kind of bond unites you with the viewers?

“This thing you're telling me excites me. As you know, I don't use social media. So I don't have a clear view of what's going on. And knowing that makes me happy. Above all, it makes me happy to be able to give something back to others and excite them. If I'm shy, it's because I've always been shy. Social media can be useful. They connect many people with little; think of all the protests that exist today and that start right from social networks. Being able to share a testimony with the whole world is important. But I can't do it: said exactly like that, in the Roman way. I can't use them. I get excited when I meet people: when they ask me a question, they tell me what they thought about a film. They are crazy moments, that shake you. It's what, at times, drives me to give more, to commit myself to the maximum".

You mentioned Claudio Caligari earlier. What other encounters in your career have influenced you so much?

"The meeting with Carlo Cecchi was very important, whom I met again, with my great pleasure, also on the set of Martin Eden: master in life and work. When I have a professional concern, I always want to call him. Sometimes I had, and he answered me with passion and sincerity. During the period of the Academy there were several important meetings, like the one with Anna Marchesini. In recent years, I have met many directors, actresses and actors with whom I have shared the set. And then, even if it sounds silly, there was the meeting with myself".

In what sense?

"Several times, over time, I felt the need to stop and refocus, to understand who I was and what I wanted. And so yes, I ended up meeting the many people I've been and who still live here; and I learned to know them all, more or less. This is also important: understanding where we are and how we got there. When I had dialogues with myself, I changed direction or went on, on the path I had taken".

If you could go back in time and give you one piece of advice - before you entered the Academy; when the fire was still alive, and burning on its own - what advice would you give yourself? 

"Go calmly. Listen. And listen to yourself. Have fun; have more fun. Smile. Enjoy everything; trust yourself".

I ask you the last question. Who is the actor?

"...what?"

Who is the actor?

"Someone who, trivially, feels he wants to communicate something, and communicates it. Someone who enacts a thought they've had or an emotion they've felt. Someone who is aware, hopefully, of all the possible consequences."

Like always, sorry for my English

[yandere-fics]

Elouise Anderson

♡ "You smell so sweet today, my love. Come on, let's get you inside before any more people get the pleasure of looking at you." ♡

She's a paranoid yandere. She's always in fear that someone better with a family that they can actually introduce you to will come along and sweep you up. She knows she's not nearly as strong as her sisters so if a competitor appeared there would be less she could do so she instead opts to lock you in her studio apartment. She really wants your love but she refuses to take things slow even if that means you hate her for a long time because she can't afford to waste time on courting you like her sister's can with their darlings. Now that you're in her home you can't say anything bad about her because you're hers and if you don't believe her then she'll bite you until you look like you belong to her. The world wants to separate the both of you and she won't let it happen!

♡ "It's Elouise but just call me Ellie, please? It's really unfair they got all the cool names and I'm stuck with this one." ♡

She's the second daughter of the Anderson family, when Skylar decided to run away from the arranged marriage, the burden was passed onto Elouise who, for the sake of her other sisters who might also be forced to marry him if she decided to run away, killed him horrifically after inviting him out on a date to get to know each other. She was aware it likely wouldn't be enough to buy them time forever but she just wanted to do something for once. Still she wasn't good at it and it took several smashes over the head before he finally went down. After that she moved to the town but pretends not to know her sisters when she sees them, she unconsciously wants to be around them but also can't stand speaking to them since they could also easily steal her darling from her.(although they never would cause they aren't jackasses.)

♡ "I'm 23, me and my sister were born back to back pretty much, let's not talk about her though." ♡

It really bothered her since her and Skylar almost share a birthday, she takes her birthday very seriously too so you better not take your eyes off of her. It's not your fault if you're paying attention to other things, it's those other things fault, don't worry baby, she'll clear all those things out of your way so your focus can go soley onto her.

♡ "I'm only interested in you, my love. And you're only interested in me right?" ♡

She's a lesbian and it's better if you just say yes so that way she'll stop squeezing your chin and smile at you instead.

♡ "I'm a software engineer, but don't worry! I'm going to get a promotion so that way you never need to worry about stepping outside, so just don't look for a job, m'kay?" ♡

She's good with numbers, she did not go to college but she luckily managed to snag a very small job and she climbed the ranks quickly since it was a natural talent of hers. They pay for any additional course she needs and she works from home, rarely if ever leaving her house, unless it's to spy on you and to break into your house. The cameras are just there to monitor her sisters, don't worry she trusts you. It everyone else she can't trust.

♡ "I only like you, my love. ONLY you make me feel any joy in my miserable life." ♡

She also likes her sisters but you'd have to be extremely talented to pry that out of her. She loves them a lot despite her intense inferiority complex and her one sided rivalry. She also really likes her apartment, especially once she gets you trapped in there with her. It has everything she needs to never have to go outside again.

♡ "I hate when people get their disgusting eyes on you, don't they know you're only dressed that cute for me? What? What do you mean it's not for me? Of course it is, you're mine! Here, let me bite you again. I'm sure you're just confused since I haven't been properly marking you lately." ♡

She hates when you deny her, please she knows she's not as good as other people but you're not even giving her a chance to prove her devotion to you, just give her a chance, she really can do better. If not, then she'll have to kill anyone else you lay eyes on although it will be a slow task.(She doesn't need to worry, Sophie stalks both of you since she wants her most fragile sister to just be happy. She's killed anyone who might hurt her sister's happiness with you.)

♡ "W-what am I good at? Oh oh oh, my love. Please I'm so sorry if I'm done anything to upset you but I promise I'll be more useful to you in the future. I'm so sorry I'm worthless at the moment, it's just I'm so busy keeping those mongrels eyes off of you. Wait, you weren't calling me useless? You just wanted to know if I had any talents you were unaware of? Oh, uhm pottery." ♡

She makes a damn good vase, you should ask her to make you one. She'll be happy to be of service.

♡ "Oh? Where do you think you're going? I never said you could leave, I know it's boring here but this is for your own good, even if you hate me now, you'll come to realize it too." ♡

[frozen-heart]

Let's talk about Pretty Little Liars: Summer School, bc I have no one to talk to about my thoughts.

Pastor Malachai

My first thought was literally that this dude looks like Clanton. He's probably related to him and now is continuing, in a way, in his footsteps. Bloody Rose and Clanton/Archie both have a theme of killing sinners/punishing the guilty, with slight variations of going about it. Just look at the resemblance:

Mrs Beasley looks just as guilty tbh. And this:

"It's safe to say that I believe you children are the future. Of our church, of this town and of the kingdom. '...' There's an activity we used to spearhead in years past. A celebration, and a purging that will help us expiate our town's sins. Shall I tell you all about the glories of Redemption House?"

Just sounds sus. I also don't think we ever saw other adult members of this church, besides the Pastor and Mrs Beasley, which I find really weird. I can imagine that someone connected to the church could be connected or be Bloody Rose, if it isn't Mrs Beasley or the Pastor. Could be an adult we haven't seen yet or one of the teenagers. Or both honestly.

Also, maybe there were similar killings years before the liars, which relate to what Malachai said about the activity they did years ago. Maybe the whole town was in on it.

"Twenty years ago, a series of tragic events almost ripped the blue-collar town of Millwood apart." I'm sure that wasn't just about Angela Waters.

Completely different thought, but maybe the church knows about Bloody Rose and that she's out to kill sinners, which is why they want to get as many followers as possible and purge the town of their sins, to save people from getting kiled off.

Principal Smithy

He's not my primary suspect, but I fear he or someone with power in the school might be involved as well, because of the whole summer school thing.

Dr Sullivan and Rose Waters

I feel like Dr Sullivan looks a bit similar to Rose Waters, but I don't think they'll end up being related. I feel like it would be out of character for Dr Sullivan to turn into Bloody Rose and kill teenagers. I could image there being some minor involvement, like in the original PLL when she dissappeared.

But I do think there is a possibility she knows Rose Waters, because we know she stayed in Radley until it closed. In season 3 when Spencer went to Radley Dr Sullivan worked there. Maybe Rose Waters was one of her patients.

Maybe it's also a possibility that they'll parallel the original PLL and Bloody Rose could end up being one of Dr Sullivan's patients, which she'll figured out later on as the show progresses. I also wonder what her flashback will add to the story.

Davie

I know she's dead, but I think she'll have something to do with this. When Imogen saw the shadow in her room and thought it was her mother and then Bloody Rose.. I don't know it gave me a weird feeling. Also, this teaser poster with the drawing of an angel being unraveled, leads me to believe that Imogen might uncover some more horrible truths about her mother. And now that she mentioned in her dream in ep 3, that she saw Bloody Rose AND her mother.. Seems suspicious

Some more thoughts about Bloody Rose

I could imagine Bloody Rose being a character we don't know yet, like with Archie. We didn't know Angela had a brother until the reveal lol.

I could imagine more people being involved, like a group of people coming together. Maybe even a scenario where different people pretend to be Bloody Rose and don't know each other's identities, but each have their reasons to mess with the liars or do so for fun.

We also know a teenager has to be involved, because Mouse's grandmother said one of her friends came to her. And we know someone who said she was friends with one of the liars before: Jennifer. Tbh I don't think she's Bloody Rose, but that just came to my mind, how she basically used Noah to get a job. I wouldn't exactly call them friends tbh.

Some unrelated extra

What the fuck happened here in Angela's room? Why is there a rope? I was re-watching and found this really weird and disturbing. The day Angela died it wasn't there.

[crimsonlyinglilly]

Familiar Faces - Admissions, dealing and confrontations. Part 2

Summary: Elijah Gilbert has been haunted by dreams of other lives as long as he remembers, but now with the appearance of the Salvatore brother he may finally get some answers.

Sorry, it's been a while and each chapter is getting longer.

Also flash backs always trip me up.

-----

Damon grimaced as he looked at the bodies around him.

“Please try not to kill them.” Elijah had asked.

He looked at the collection of dead Junkies around him, request failed, at least he had only told Elijah he’d try but clearly all the blame for this was on Stefan.

Who had locked him away to stave.

To miss out of Elijah’s life.

Who had lied about Elijah’s death.

Who had killed Elijah in the first place.

And then went to Damon to get him to turn.

Elijah had been dead before he had taken his first taste of human blood and damned himself, although he couldn't stay angry about that now as it gave him a chance to help Elijah in a way he hadn’t during their life.

Fixing his episodes, getting to watch him grow healthy, to get to live a life without waiting for his illness to finally take him.

Still before he could get to that he had a mess to clear up then he could returned to the boarding house, where he’d likely be facing two judgemental little brothers but that was fine since they were alive to be angry at him.

The fire light reflected off his hand reminded him, he called Stefan.

Hello? Stef’s voice greeted him as he picked up

“I want my ring.” He told him still a little angry after the discovery that he had killed Elijah to bother with the niceties.

“Where are you?” 

“I'm at the sizzler. I had the buffet.” he explained, moving his torch to light more of the bodies “Where's my ring?”

 I don't have it. Where are you? What have you done?

“Noo,” he drawled “what have you done? You're the one that locked me in the basement and starved me, so whatever I've done, whoever I've sucked dry is on you, buddy.”

Even after Elijah asked.

“Thought it was better than feeding from him,” he replied, "unlike someone.” He was pleased to hear a choked sound of guilt or pain either way it was a reaction however Stefan smothered it too soon and returned to lecturing him.

“You're being careless. How many more animal attacks is this town gonna believe, huh?

“I know how to cover my tracks, Stefan.” he snapped back, annoyed, “Where's my ring?”

I'll get it back, but I need time.

“What, did you FedEx it to Rome?! Where is it? I want my ring, Stefan, or I’ll get Elijah to make me a new one”

"Leave him out of this."

“He offered, like the good little brother he is” he taunted, “I could even visit Elena after.”

“I already want you dead. Don't give me another reason to make it happen.” Stefan’s could almost be serious. 

“Don't give me another reason to rip you apart.”

Yeah? Is that gonna be before or after you get your ring back?

“Just get it.” he ended the call before he heard anymore of his brother’s voice. He didn’t really want to get Elijah to make him one, Elijah hadn’t sounded particularly happy while talking about his magic earlier and besides it was his ring.

He was almost finished pouring the alcohol over the last corpse when it coughed, he stared until he recognized the girl. 

Vicki Donovan.

She passed out again quickly afterwards.

"You're going to have to be more careful." he told the unconscious girl, "Pretty sure Elijah would be pissed at me if you died."

There were pictures of Elijah and Elena with the Donovan boy in the Gilbert living room, Elijah was closer to the age Damon remembered him as in it, the age he died at, that had to mean they were somewhat close to older Donovan.

Vicki Donavan’s luck must suck to place her in his path twice.

Well at least it gave him someone to keep him occupied until Stefan returned his ring, Damon’s pretty sure looking though Elijah’s past lives in his current mood wouldn’t do his self control any good and he was meant to be trying for Elijah.

—-

Stefan stared at his phone, Damon was going to end up back at the house where Zach was alone, he should go back but there was a risk that Damon would keep his threat and come here once he found out Elijah had left.

So he stayed outside the Gilbert house.

He had watched as Elena helped his-their-her- Elijah from the car into the house and was surprised to hear them climb the stairs together when he knew Elijah’s room was on the ground floor.

Then he was reminded of the times in the aftermath of Eli’s Episodes when his nightmares would be worse and Damon had snuck Elijah into one of their rooms despite their father’s anger. 

So he understood as he watched Elena place Elijah on the bed and cross the room to climb into the other side and cover them, watched as she stared at his sleeping face the way he remembered doing memorising for the time he was sure he would lose him.

Her text arranging a meeting at a café for the next day that had come moments later before she fell asleep was still sitting on his phone screen, behind the notification of the ended call.

As much as he wanted to keep her safe from the knowledge and horrors that came with it she would be safer if she knew more and with whatever was the cause of Elijah’s episodes and memories, likely supernatural she was already involved.

He sent a reply agreeing to her meeting and settled in to watch until sunrise.

By then his brother would be trapped for the day and he’d have the day to plan of what he was going to do.

—-

He finished quickly after that and brought Vicki home with him to find a lack of living teenage brother, he could smell their was only one human in the house, so he dropped the girl on the couch and went to find ‘Uncle Zach’

“Where’s Elijah?” he asked after he found Zach back in the library still going through the papers, he looked exhausted.

“He’s gone home.” the man replied without looking up.

“I thought he was staying.” He said settling against the arch, he was very sure that Elijah had arranged it with his aunt.

“His sister arrived, she found out.” Zach shrugged, still refusing to look up, and Damon realised he was copying parts of Elijah’s notes from one of the older lives.

“Found out?” he asked, eyeing the collection of paper; notes, journals and old photos spread out across the table. “About you-” Zach said finally looking up, the man somehow looked more tired than he had when Damon had left “Vampires and Elijah’s dreams.”

“Huh,” he let out before asking, “didn’t take it well?”

“Well enough, considering,” Zach shrugged, “Elijah agreed to explain to her and they left.”

“And you returned to being the busy little bee.” he mocked, Damon was torn between missing the underlying tension of fear Zach always carried around him or relieved someone was able to deal with Elijah’s past thoughtfully, all Damon saw was the lives Elijah had lived and suffered through while Damon and Stefan were out living their lives.

“We have nothing but Elijah’s notes on this side of the table.” he explained, Damon had to agree with the that, Salvatore side despite its few empty places looked filled compared to the other.   

“So look up through the Gilbert records.” he shrugged

“I have, and the Sommers.” The human shook his head, right because Zach had been aware something was wrong with Elijah Gilbert for years. “Miranda wasn’t pregnant.” he added.

He blinked at the news.

“The twins are adopted.” He said as he put the picture together, before asking “So what's your plan?”

For all he wasn’t going to work with Zach, he might as well keep track of what the other was doing, the more information would be useful when Damon found a witch he could trust with this and Elijah.

“I’m going out in the morning to search for more information using some of the names and things EJ managed to write down.” the man explained before wincing as he noticed his slip up.

“Great, I got the house to myself.” he mockingly cheered, Zach looked up with confusion before his eyes moved to Damon’s hands.

“Because your ring.”

“Guessing you don’t know where that brother of mine hid it, do you?” he asked, smiling.

“No-” Zach started,

“And you wouldn’t tell me if you did.” he finished for him as he left the library, he had to hide Miss Vicki so Zach wouldn’t see her and they could party until Stefan returned with his ring.

—

Elena was doing this for Caroline and Vicki who had been hurt, for the people who had died, for Elijah who wouldn’t tell her everything in trying to protect her, for herself because she needed to know so she could protect the people she loved.

Still even knowing what Stefan was, she trusted him, believed him when he said he didn’t want to hurt her, so she left Elijah sleeping in her bed.

Proof he had pushed himself too soon after a episode, otherwise he would have woken up while she was getting ready and left to meet Stefan at the Grill.

She had explained to Jeremy before she left, trusting their little brother would be able to keep Elijah at home and from doing anything too much for him.

“You said you would explain everything. That's why I asked you to meet me here. When you Google "vampire" you get a world of fiction. What's the reality?” She starts facing Stefan in a well lit public place. She might trust him despite herself but she wasn’t a complete fool.

she‘d get information on vampires and then Elijah’s problems.

“I can tell you whatever you wanna know.” he replies, it’s a start.

—

“Elena...Give me today. I will answer any questions that you have, and when it's over, you can decide for yourself what you wanna do with what you know. It'll be your choice.” Stefan had said and she had followed him off alone.

Maybe she wasn’t being as safe as she should be a voice that sounded a lot like her twin sighed at her from her mind.

—-

“What’s up with your hand?” Liz asked as she noticed the bandage wrapped around Logan’s hand, it was a nice distraction from the likely mess she was going to see when she uncovered the bodies.

“Gilbert’s hell beast.” he told her as he held his hand up, pulling the sleeve down to reveal more bandages around his arm

“What?” She asked flatly, however understanding slowly dawned on her.

While the Gilbert children had stayed with her after Grayson and Miranda’s deaths, Elijah had gone back to the house repeatedly to check and feed his cats.

When she had asked why he hadn’t brought them with him, Jeremy and Caroline had laughed, which had been a relief as it was the first laugh she had seen from the youngest, while Elena and apologised that they couldn’t do that to her or her house.

Caroline had later explained that one of Elijah's cats was half feral to anyone that wasn’t Elijah.

“While I was searching the house for the watch, I opened one of the downstairs rooms and this black and white beast attached itself to me.” he explained,

“You didn’t hurt it.” She asked, she remember Miranda telling her that the cats had become a help to Elijah during his episodes; the last thing he needed was losing one of them so soon after his parents.

“No.” he snapped, apparently annoyed by her concern, “it let go as soon as I started to take it out of the room and I shut the door. Thankfully the watch wasn’t in that room.”

“You got it.” she asked.

“Yes” he told her and she felt herself calm slightly.

“Good.” she said hopefully they could track down the monster and deal with it before anymore people got hurt. She missed Grayson, he had more experience with these things.

—-

Elijah is woken up by a knock at the door, it takes him a moment of disorientation as he sat up to find himself in his sister’s room instead of his own, before his mind catches up with everything that had happened since he had left for the Salvatore boarding house the day before.

The fact he was waking up alone in Elena’s room with the sun already up hit him.

“Where’s-” he blinked at a concerned look on Jeremy’s face as he stood hoovering in the doorway, his mug in his hands. “Are you okay, Jeremy?”

He’d worry about Elena later, he knows she would understand putting Jeremy first.

Jeremy snorted but took the question as permission to enter and hand him the mug.

The tea is a little too pale for his taste but given both his siblings and aunt prefer coffee he’d take any attempt.

“You always do that, push yourself then worry over us instead of taking care of yourself.” he complained as he sat heavily on the bed, leaning against Elijah’s legs.

“One day I'll learn my lesson.” he joked, it failed to lift the frown from brother’s face, “what’s the time?” he sighed.

“Just after noon.”

“And no one woke me.”

“Why, you got a meeting?” Jeremey shot back, “the fact you slept this late clearly means you needed it.”

He bit back a comment about it being his health to worry about since that never worked, instead turned it back to Jeremy.

“So what’s bothering you enough to bring me tea?” he asked,

“Can’t I just be worried over my idiot brother?” his brother shot back with a speck of guilt that likely would have been missed if he was any else but his siblings.

“Not with tea you can’t.” he told him, with a reassuring smile, after several moment of silence he added ”So are you going to tell me what’s bothering you? and where’s Vicki th-” he started since she had mostly been at Jeremy’s side since he had woken up from the episode.

“Have you touched dad’s watch?” The unexpected question interrupted him.

“No, last I saw it you had it.” he had agreed with Elena at giving it to Jeremy over a pointless show at the Lockwood's, it was theirs and he wanted Jeremy to have it, Dad had always planned on passing it to Jeremy, Elijah had had enough talks about it trying to reassure dad he understood “Have you lost it?”

“No i-” Jeremy cut himself off with an angry look. “No i left it in my room.”

“Then who's been in your room?” he asked

“Vicki.” Jeremy sighed before adding more slightly hesitantly “and Aunt Jenna’s guy”

“The slimeball- er Logan right?” he corrected himself before adding with slightly more concern “Why was he in your room?”

That at least managed to put a smile on his brother’s face which Elijah would take as a win, even if he wasn’t sure why.

“He wasn’t. I don’t know,” Jeremy replied shrugging “I found him walking around up here last night. After he accidently walked into your room.” Jeremy explained, 

“My room?” he blinked, suddenly worried he would find it a mess.

“Luci left marks.” Jeremy smirked, Luci had gotten used to Aunt Jenna quickly compared to everyone else but there was a reason he had to stay in Elijah room when he wasn't home, he attacked everyone other than family otherwise and he only listened to Elijah.

Jeremy spoke again before Elijah could ask “I checked on him, he’s alright.” he might be a large beast happy to use teeth and claws but he was still a cat and he forgot that made him the smaller fighter. 

The smirk vanished when Jeremy suddenly asked 

“You don’t think Vicki would have taken it.”

“No.” he shook his head, he refused the thought they had known her since they were kids, she wouldn’t steal something that important from them and he’s sure her feelings for Jeremy were real.

Another part of him knew how desperate someone could get for a fix, but Vicki wasn’t that far gone, she still had other ways to get her supply.

Vicki still saw beyond the drugs, Elijah remembered getting to the point where all he cared about was his next fix, to escape the nightmares and the real world.

Remembered where that had ended.

That wasn’t Vicki.

But Logan Fell, a member of the foundering families, who had already been oddly interested in the watch.

Mrs Lockwood should have left it as soon as Elena apologised for not finding it but instead she had asked Elijah at the party itself, had called to follow up on it afterwards when there wasn’t a need for it. The founding Council had to know the watch belonged to the firstborn sons of the Gilbert family, it wouldn’t be a stretch for them to think he had kept it back.

And it was just poor luck that Jeremy’s room, both had the watch and didn’t have a fearsome beast protecting it.

Elijah frowned the watch coming to his mind clearly, why were they so persistent, he wondered if Zach knew but for all the Salvatore were a founding family, he remembered being there for it, Zach wasn’t part of the current council. 

Why?

Great, a mystery that didn’t involve him, he could solve it without the risk of facing existential dread.

---

He had managed to get down stairs without Jeremy hovering, after downing the lukewarm tea and released Luci and Kit to feed them smiling at their loud complaints a at being unjustly confined, Luci had apparently cleaned himself of any evidence of the suspected mauling.

He left them to feed, while he went through his dad’s phone book to find Zach’s mobile number something he hadn’t thought to get yesterday too excited by the chance of solving his- everything, of speaking to all out loud and being believed, they were right he had to admit he had pushed himself to far, but he hadn’t done it on purpose he had truly forgotten it, in the rush of being believed.

He found the number and quickly added it into his phone, under Brother- Zach, before calling he had something he needed to ask, another thing beside his health he had forgotten in the rush of being believed.

He wanted to keep the details of his life before EJ hidden, he didn’t didn’t really want the details of that life and what he had done as Elias, he wanted others to know even less.

----

Zach is ignoring his instincts screaming at him for leaving Damon unwatched since he had returned last night, Damon should have been enraged at them for locking him up to starve, for taking his ring and yet he had been polite for Damon, strangely so. It wasn’t until after he had left the night before that Zach had noticed they had a conversation with any threat in it at all.

It seemed Damon meant his word when he promised Elijah not to harm him, it was strange to think that he could be trusted at all when the only thing Zach had known of Damon is entire life was that he brought death and dread in his wake, but he had seen the photos the way Damon had looked at his brothers in the few of them, the way tiny Sickly Elijah leaned into him like he was the sun in them.

He’s not thinking about how things could have changed if Damon had visited in his childhood before EJ had been sent away, maybe he could have helped Elijah before he was locked away.

None of that mattered now, EJ killed himself to escape the hospital Zach had left him in and now somehow Elijah was remembered and didn’t hate him.

So he ignored his instincts to watch his vampiric ancestor and decided to also take part in the unspoken truce. 

Damon was Stefan’s issue to deal with, Zach was going to work on helping his own cousin-brother-former brother, EJ.

He paused slightly as his phone rang suddenly, taking in the unknown number before he answered, sending an apologetic look towards the people around him that had jumped at the sudden noise.

“Zach?” Came a hesitant voice.

“Elijah.” he answered and smothered the memory of the first time Elijah had called him from the hospital back when he was a child that still wondered when he could come home, before Elijah had re-made himself EJ, bright, carefree and confident.

“Where are you?” Elijah asked

“At the public library, i was checking some thing i noticed from one of you older- lives” he answered, confused, if Elijah was at the house Damon would have told him unless Elijah didn’t trust Damon which would make Zach slightly more comfortable, but he didn’t think that was true given the way the pair had looked at each other.

“What do you mean?”

“You mentioned Bulgarian, Irish and Italian immigrants,” he explained looking back at his notes “i’m looking to find any places many of them could be found matching the dates we worked out.”

“Found anything?”

“A few places.” he replied but it was only the basics he didn’t want to get Elijah hopes up until he was sure they led to anything, “Why did you call?

Elijah hesitated, Zach could almost hear him biting his lip, unlike the many times before the hesitation wasn’t accompanied by the sound of EJ fiddling with the patient uniform. No doubt because his current clothes are aren’t the cheap hospital clothes. He remembered Elijah’s joy at the oversized jumpers he used to give him on his last few birthdays and Christmases.

“EJ” he called softly with a sigh,

“Can you hide my life before EJ?” 

“Why?” he asked, talking over the lump in his throat, what was bad enough for him to ask that. He had read the earliest memories from the Elijah’s notes, unconnected massacres and bloodbath, yet the life before EJ he wanted to keep hidden Elijah’s own words ‘it was too much as a kid’ and ‘Tortured to death by a vampire with a grudge.’ said completely without the horror it should have had.

I don’t want to think about it and i don’t want anyone to read it and see-

“If we don’t then how can we see if it helps.” he hated saying the words, even more when he heard the angry hiss as Elijah let out his breath. He couldn’t deny he also wanted to know why the little boy that used to follow him around the house as a child was apparently doomed before he was born, as much as he was going to regret it he wanted to know if there truly was nothing he could have done.

There was also the fact that if the vampire that had tortured him to death knew his first life-

“Just you.” Elijah voice pulled him out of his thought before they could go too far “You deserve a right to it as it affected you- your life with a mentally unstable-

“Elijah. It wasn’t your fault.” he told him, cutting the boy off before blamed himself anymore.

Nothing he’d read so far could be blamed on Elijah, just circumstances pushing him, like the orderly in the hospital. Elijah was always going to be the little boy that reached for his hand and insisted in sharing his presents, who had mistaken Mason Lockwood for a girl when they were introduced during the few founding family Elijah had gone to. 

“Maybe you can say that after you read what i was like in that life. Sorry i-

“I’ll lock it away once I get back, so no one else can read it and no matter what I read, it won't be your fault, none of this is.” he explained and ignored how much the final words echoed the ones he once told a shocked traumatised pre-teen EJ, after he realised what he had done to the orderly.

 It hadn’t helped then either.

[innytoes]

OMG the generator game me Gilmore Girls and flower shop. This seems ripe for so many things. Taylor would be insufferable about regulations

So everyone knows that either Stars Hollow attracts weird people, or if you live there long enough you become Like That.

Taylor was a little apprehensive when he heard that the building next to Doose's market was bought by a bunch of former rock stars. Okay, so they only had the one album before the lead singer blew up at the record company for not letting him have creative control, their rhythm guitarist ran off with half their songs, and the other two went 'fuck it this isn't worth it anymore'.

(Lane breathlessly tells Rory all about this when she finds up three fourths of Sunset Curve is moving to Stars Hollow.)

They also bought a big house on the edge of town, with some land.

Nobody is exactly sure who lives where. Like, do the drummer and his cute skateboarding husband live in the house and the other two live above the flower shop? Do they all live in the big house? Is the apartment above the flower shop just storage? Are they growing something illegal up there?

(Taylor tries to get up there so many times will all kinds of HOA and town bylaw nonsense and they never let him. Luke Danes encourages this. And maybe trades tips with Alex about how to further annoy Taylor.)

In fact, they all live in the big house but also sometimes above the flower shop (it's Luke's Writing Den. The suspicious activity that Taylor thinks is Weed is really just Reggie trying to breed a new type of lily. They sometimes crash there after town festivals or when one of them needs some alone time.)

Reggie is the person who mostly runs the flower shop. He likes talking to people and he likes making bouquets, he took an online class!

Some old lady eventually takes pity on him and teaches him how to do it correctly. And tells him what thorn strippers are.

Alex does most of the gardening. He finds it relaxing. Sure, not all of their flowers and plants are home-grown but it keeps him busy. He also likes taking dance classes at Miss Patty's.

Luke actually has nothing to do with the flower shop except that he hangs out there a lot. But he also does that at the music store. And at Luke's. It's very confusing to everyone for a while. Some people have started to distinguish them as 'Beanie Luke' and 'Baseball cap Luke' or 'Coffee Luke' and 'Music Luke'. Or even Luke-Luke and Luke. (Luke Danes is of course Luke-Luke and he hates it.)

Luke tries to play for tips ones and nearly comes to blows with the town troubadour.

He really likes Hep Alien though and encourages them whenever he can.

Luke (Patterson) quickly rises to Gilmore levels of 'should not have coffee but will get it anyway because he doesn't take no for an answer'. Except where Lorelai and Rory usually plague the diner in the mornings, Luke comes just before close.

Alex and Willie would go so hard for the dance marathon. Reggie would beg Luke to be his partner and they'd drop out after like two hours because Luke never actually went to bed and has been up for 24 hours straight and Reggie got distracted because someone brought their dog.

Okay but you know that in between Max and Luke, Lorelai tried to date Reggie and Lane nearly exploded because YOU COULD HAVE A MEMBER OF SUNSET CURVE AS YOUR NEW STEPPARENT RORY and Rory was like: yeah no I'm pretty sure Grandma made him cry at Friday Night Dinner and he and Mom are better off as friends.

Reggie is Very Relieved when he and Lorelai break it off after like two weeks and Diner Luke stops glaring at him and will make him hot chocolates again.

Miss Patty and Babette have this bet going who will have the longest slowburn, Luke and Lorelai or Other Luke and Reggie.

Luke and Lorelai actually win and get together first and the only one who called it was Alex.

[ralseinumberonebiggestsupporter]

HI EVERYONE HERE'S THE LONG ASS POST EXPLAINING MY LIGHTNER RALSEI AU

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so basically in this au ralsei isn't the prince of the dark, he's just some kid (part boss monster part shadow monster). i already explained how he ended up in the adoption center here. that's basically the premise 0_0

susie and him are close buddies because they were in the same adoption center and susie became protective over him because the other kids made fun of him. over time they became like siblings so they never managed to get adopted because they didn't want to go if they couldn't go together, and since they were very different species there weren't any parents who were able to take care of both. so eventually they just ran away and are now living in hometown.

they've been in hometown for two years (currently they're both 16) so they aren't that new............ they're not really friends with anyone but That's Subject To Change.

(they live in one of the apartments in the complex, the landlord let them stay because people just Didn't move to hometown anymore. they just help them clean and go grocery shopping for them (i still have to decide who the landlord is lol) in exchange for the house. also as soon as they got old enough they started doing little jobs (susie helps at 'sans, ralsei helps at the flower king) so they're "basically fine" (no they're not))

^ outdated, they got surprise adopted by sans 😈😈

susie really disliked kris at first because they had a happy loving family, but then learned that there's more to them... they're also a huge dweeb

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since ralsei isn't in the dark world anymore there's someone else in castle town, his name is earlis and he's made out of a heart shaped locket that kris lost as a kid. he's rude to anyone who isn't part of the prophecy and is hopelessly in love with kris (despite only knowing them for two days...) which kris finds a bit weird but. they still want to be friends. earlis especially hates ralsei because he's not even part of the prophecy, and yet kris treats him with basic respect and even finds his dark world powers cool?!?!? FOR SHAME!!!! susie's part of the prophecy so he doesn't necessarily dislike her, he just hates the people she associates with....

his character arc over the chapters would involve him learning to be less judgemental and overcome his Darkner Struggles. also he will be friends with everyone and become less of an asshole

in chapter two he makes rooms for everyone except ralsei, for whom he places a dog bed inside susie's room. one day he will give him a normal bed

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ABOUT THE DARK WORLD!!!!!!

ralsei's still a wizard of sorts, but he's more of an evil shadow man you know. he uses shadow magic which is useful for putting enemies to sleep in one way or another (spooooookyyyyyyy).. kris thinks it's cool. susie also thinks it's cool. everyone thinks it's cool except earlis.

earlis's magic is basic bard abilities, he has a heart shaped string instrument which he can use to heal or hypnotize ET CETERA ET CETERA

susie and kris don't change much lol

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CHAPTER ONE!!!!!! DA BEGINNING

sooz and rals go with lancer while earlis goes around with kris, acting like a shoujo protagonist ("omg kris you're giving the ribbon to me????? do you think i would look cuter.." "your defense is shit") and he encourages pacifism (just to make r & s sound like Brutal Evil Killars) despite being the world's biggest violence fan. he is a bit of a hypocrite

everything goes about as well as you can imagine but at some point susie and ralsei have a conversation about the whole sooz being overprotective thing. ralsei says he's not five anymore and can defend himself pretty well and susie apologizes for her behavior 💔😢 they firends. sbiblings

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CHAPTER TWO!!!!! SUSIE DELTARUNE BECOMES GAY GAY HOMOSEXUAL GAY

it's!!! normal cyber world stuff!!! but with two goat boys!!!!!!!

ralsei's popup ads are "humans 4 monsters in ur area" and he starts crying about how he thought it was a friend making site, "dragon blazers rom hack working 20XX" and he installs a virus on the popup, and "shadow wizard money gang"

earlis's popup ads are "how to make them fall for you qwikihow", "cool blue knight dating sim" and "learn to curse someone in ten easy steps". self explanatory

in ralsei's room in queen's castle he has pixelated kittens from his search "kittycat pixel gif", "minecrap cat gif", "pixel gif cat" etc... a poster of a goth band from "disintegration album streaming free", and a list of names taped to the wall from "names that start with ral" (hes trying 2 find his parents...)

earlis doesn't have a room. he becomes a butler 👻

for the ferris wheel / acid tunnel they split up like this

susie goes on da ferris with noelle

ralsei goes on da boat with kris (didn't want to ruin the moment for susie)

earlis gets stuck on berdly duty

sus and elle talk about normal girl stuff. ralsei and kris talk about being orphans. earlis rants to berdly about how much he deserves to be kris's babygirl and berdly thinks he's hallucinating. very nice and cool

blah blah the roaring is coming waaaaahhh they go have a sleepover at kris's. new fountain who dis

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that's basically it gamers... LIKE AND SUB

[saucy-mesothelioma]

Meso's Mixtapes: Tabitha Scarlet

Jesus it's been a hot minute since I've done one of these.

I got into Scarlet Hollow one or two months ago when I got the game on sale then proceeded to play through it four separate times in one day, so it was only a matter of time before I wanted to contribute to the fanbase. And since it's been a while since I've done a playlist, I figured what better time than now.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

9 to 5 by Dolly Parton

Gotta Get Up by Harry Nilsson (I think this song fits Tabitha for two reasons: one having to do with where I first heard this song, and the other being the actual lyrics. First: I was introduced to this song from the TV show Russian Doll, which deals with a woman trapped in a time loop of her 36th birthday [It's a good show, I highly suggest it]. This song plays at the beginning of every loop, and thanks to that I associate this song with having to get up for those monotonous days that feel like you're reliving the same day over and over again. Due to Tabitha's job and general demeanor, I highly doubt that she doesn't view her normal routine as being the exact same thing over and over again. Secondly, we have the actual lyrics for this song: "We used to carry on and drink and do the rock and roll | We never thought we'd get old, though | We never thought we'd grow cold, but now". When Tabitha was younger, she was able to prioritize her relationships rather than her work. She was able to hang out with her friends even with her mother constantly over her shoulder for the most part, but when she got older, she was forced to shift her focus to her work. She used to be able to go over to Stella's every day, but now she's got a mine to look after.)

Lucretia My Reflection by Sisters of Mercy

Barton Hollow by The Civil Wars

Alles im Griff (auf dem sinkenden Schiff) by Udo Jürgens (The primary theme of this song is saying that you're fine when everything is falling apart around you; the title basically translates to "Everything Under Control on the Sinking Ship". Despite all of the shit happening to Tabitha, her cousin, and her friends, her attitude always seems to be that of just bottling it up rather than really taking the time to completely process it, or at least that's how I see it. The ship of her life is slowly sinking, but she keeps going on as if things are more or less fine.)

Mrs. Bluebeard by They Might Be Giants

This Town by Jinkx Monsoon

Coal Miner's Daughter by Loretta Lyn (Ok yeah I couldn't help myself. The story of the song is so ironic when you compare it to that of the Scarlet family, but with the title is was too funny not to include in the list.)

Heroes by David Bowie

Dream a Little Dream of Me by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong

Get Out of My House by Kate Bush (Obvious secrets of Scarlet Estate aside, I think this song does a very good job of representing Tabitha's treatment of her relationships [both romantic and platonic]. The singer of this song is desperate to not only keep other's out of her life remove the "stains" of those she has previously let in. She's locked the door to her "house" and the mere suggestion of someone wanting to enter, no matter the reason, is cause for retaliation. One of the first things we really learn about Tabitha is that she's pretty much shut out those who were in her life, somewhat due to Pearlanne but also by her own means, and even with the player character she is still rather reluctant to fully let them in.)

Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now by The Smiths

Pressure by Billy Joel (It feels obvious to me that Tabitha was forced to grow up far quicker than she should have, primarily due to the expectations of her running the Scarlet Mines. She's had to deal with pressure her whole life: from her mother, from her job, and from the Scarlet legacy. She sees people like her cousin and Stella come in "with your faith and your Peter Pan advice", and especially in the case with her cousin she often laments that she is the one who must take on the pressures of the Scarlet name, primarily with the mine but also with the pain that their family has caused [such as with Charlie's payment of years].

Badlands by Bruce Springsteen

Poor Girl by X

Sans toi by Michel Legrand and Corinne Marchand (This is a song from the French new-wave film Cléo from 5 to 7, and it's a film that I personally think Tabitha would like because she can relate to parts of it)

My Silver Lining by First Aid Kit

I've No More Fucks to Give by Thomas Benjamin Wild Esq

Pretty Lavinia by American Murder Song

Kingdom Come by The Civil Wars (Despite feeling that the tone of this song fits her well, I also personally like the contrast it holds to Tabitha's view on her situation. Deep down, she wishes to run away like the subject of the song and have a peaceful, simple life of her own, but she feels unable and incapable of doing so. She can't fly away til kingdom come, because in her mind she has already fallen back into a fate she can't escape from.)

[yurisorcerer]

I don't know, man. I think I kind of really like this show.

On the face of it, ATRI depicts a fairly difficult situation. Its two main characters, Atri herself and her human caretaker Natsuki, aren't exactly the most likeable of people. (Although Atri, who is merely clumsy and loud, is so more than Natsuki, who is sometimes outright nasty to her.) But something about these characters, and their world, compels me. I think it's a fairly common thing to feel (even if you don't necessarily think it rationally) that we are living in the end times of some sort, so post-apocalyptic fiction like this takes on a specific resonance in the modern day. But it's more than just "the show is good because it depicts people getting by after a climate collapse," which I think would be oversimplifying it.

I think I was closer on the mark with the AIR comparison I made last week than I initially realized. In addition to the obvious similarities---both take place in a coastal town, both have a heavily summer-drenched aesthetic that is a key part of the show's visual and aural appeal---the general setup is fairly similar too, both in depicting a young (or at least young-seeming) girl and her male caretaker and their strange relationship that doesn't neatly fall into any single category.

I've seen a lot of people deride the show as a rote male fantasy (in the vein of the many girl-with-a-quirk romcoms I've discussed this season) and while I'm not going to deny that there's definitely at least a little of that, I don't think it's remotely the entire picture and seeing people write this off entirely because the main character is kind of a dick annoys me. Especially since I think his being a dick is part of the point of the series. (Hell, we get a very straightforward motivation for that here; when the ocean started rising, his dream of becoming an astronaut and helping with a climateering project fell apart and he hasn't had any motivation to do much of anything since. It's pretty understandable that this would turn someone crabby.)

I also like Minamo, one of the island town's few remaining schoolgirls. (Going by the OP there are just two others, all of whom attend an overgrown high school that's fallen into disrepair. Who exactly is teaching them I do not yet know.) There's a very pronounced melancholy to almost everything she does, and she and Atri have a nice conversational scene together in her house---also half reclaimed by nature---in this episode where we learn her father evacuated to the mainland, and she chose to stay behind despite his wishes. That's interesting! And when Atri visits her school at the end of the episode she seems to have some kind of weird flashback thing, which is also interesting.

The series has a lot going for it. In addition to everything I've just said, and also its deeper themes which are only just starting to take shape (persisting in the face of loss, even massive loss, is definitely going to be one), it's also pretty funny! I can technically imagine how Atri's antics might grate on someone but I find them endearing, and it's hard not to when the character animation is so expressive.

Unrelated to the show itself, I want to briefly talk about the OP and ED and specifically the songs used for them. The OP is just an absolutely gorgeous thing and I really recommend watching it for yourself even if you have no interest in the show.

But the ED is actually even *more* interesting to me despite the fact that I like it less. Because it's by 22/7. Yes, *that* 22/7, the idol group tied to the multimedia project of the same name, including its profoundly disappointing anime from a few years ago. These guys.

Yeah, they do the ED, which is significantly cheerier than most of the songs I like by them. But it's pretty good! To be honest I'm just sort of shocked that they're still around, although I think a good chunk of the original members have since departed (not that odd with idol groups, and I can't imagine there's much incentive to stay in 22/7 specifically).

It will be very odd if they end up soundtracking one of my favorite anime of the summer, but they well might!

I've given people some grief elsewhere in this post for dropping Atri but to be honest given the strong season there's no reason to waste your time on things you're not enjoying. Me personally though, I am determined to see this one through to the end, and am a little sad I won't be doing so with more company. Notably though, I didn't feel like that when when I finished the first episode at all. So I wonder what I'll think of episode 3 and beyond? Watch this space to find out, I suppose.

[irlstein]

I Wanna Suck Maya Kamina's Big Fat Tits

Fast rundown for men with wives and wives with men: I took most of a year off to recover from late-stage Twitter intolerance that I'm pretty sure was giving my blood some sort of pH poisoning, I hope you guys have been doing well and apologize for the lack of communication.

Slow Rundown For True Jackheads - Much Longer Than It Has To Be, You Can Just Say Jack Was Taking Care Of Family And Had A Breakdown:

Howdy guys, been a few months. Had a lot happen in this last year - when I took my break, I'd begun watching my Uncle Gary on a daily basis, who is a stroke survivor left unfortunately incapable of complex speech, and with no strength in his left side. My Uncle Gary and I didn't have much of a relationship before this, but I'd taken on the task of moving into his trailer while he was recovering at his sister's - she lives just in town, it's a ten minute drive, but there was no feasible way for him to get in and out of his own house - for about two years. In that time I'd basically had a deal going with the family that I'd watch Uncle Gary for a few weeks, maybe a month or two, once he had the lift installed at his home that would let him come and go without too much hassle. I'd clean his trailer up for him, because he was a mega-bachelor with three girlfriends and so much backed-up old food from habitual boredom shopping that the place was a damn mess, bugs and rats in the back of the cupboards shit, and they'd disregard the bump in utilities to having someone actually in the house because I'd also keep the place from getting robbed, as he had a bunch of guns and gun parts stored there. It was a pretty fair deal for everyone involved, and while I really only stayed there about 2/3 of the time, it was enough that I really couldn't justify bouncing if the dude needed me, and I've been watching disabled family pretty much daily for 5 years now - so it seemed like a small life change.

Then COVID hit and the three months I was gonna be at his house, as stated prior, ballooned out to about two years, and at some point there began to be some sentiment that Uncle Gary was now annoyed by the idea of living with me - despite me being a patently temporary tenant there for his benefit, with literally two other homes in walking distance I could be living at, as I've got a lot of family in town. I could also get an apartment or something, you get the idea, I just wasn't actually enthused to be there and it was pretty inconsiderate to turn my very blatantly and clearly elaborated, regularly checked upon for the comfort of all concerned, act of well-meaning against me. My grandpa died when I was 5, Uncle Gary's brother, and everyone always talks about how much my grandpa loved me, so it seemed natural I'd just do whatever his brother needed when he was in a time of need.

From there, thing got sour for a while - we never came to blows, only really argued once or twice, but my Uncle Gary's obvious ennui at his turn in health had bluntly made him kind of an ungrateful dick to everyone. Now, let me state here - I stayed with and watched him for about six months following when he came home. It just grew more and more difficult to bear with the situation as I'd talk to him, interpret for him, make him whatever he wanted for dinner, crack jokes, fix computer problems, invest all of my daily energy into making him comfortable - and caught him talking shit on me behind my back. Little stuff - "So Jack's a good cook?" "Ehhhhhh." "Jack's taking good care of you huh? Your blood sugar's been good all week." "Ah well," little shit like that, negging on top of a totally unpaid position I'd volunteered for on the very day he went to the hospital because I'd spent the ages of 22 - 24 watching my mom as she recovered from a real bad car accident and since I've always made money online, it just seemed natural to volunteer my maid services the moment someone else in the family needed the same kind of health.

But fuck, man. It really hurt to be treated how he treated me, because there was contempt there. He was always cool to his sister, my great Aunt, who I visited every week with my grandma to do chores for because she and her husband are, themselves, old and disabled - replaced her kitchen ceiling, watched her dogs, lawnwork, cooking, whatever they needed I would insist upon doing, so there was infinite evidence in supply that I was not a malicious opportunist here, just a younger relative trying to help everyone he could. Uncle Gary didn't give a fuck, he snapped at me, basically laughed at people who suggested he should pay me for my time, and the family dawdled on the job of hiring home healthcare for so long that it looked like I was really expected to just stay there and keep doing this.

And honestly, I kind of flattened. I've always been a depressed guy, chronic nightmares do that to you, and it's easier to crumple to your circumstances than it is to challenge them when challenging them means telling a crippled relative who sees you as a leech that he'll need another 24/7 cook and care provider. I started sleeping all day until he called on me; I developed a nervous tic whenever I heard his walker because that meant he was gonna walk past my bedroom door, glance in skeptically, and call me out for another task I'd have to spend ten minutes guessing and interpreting to understand, because (No fault of his) the guy could basically only give very general positive or negative affirmations, and got very angry very quickly when misinterpreted. So I sort of just stopped thinking about the future and wallowed in this cold trailer, uncomfortable all day, talking to my friends less and working less, just getting more cold and static and dead as the days went on. Let me be clear, I'm not "the true victim" in this discussion about a dude who had a stroke, but I am a mentally soft dude who didn't have a lot of happy feelings to draw on and could easily be bullied by circumstance into shutting down; I did.

Then Rachele, the lady who came to clean up Uncle Gary's apartment, started working for him to do basically my job, and I made plans to leave. And they got a home healthcare service going, got another lady to fill in some of the time Rachele couldn't be there for, and things were on an incline, life was getting normal and I was getting my head straight again.

Then my grandma nearly died of a heart attack when we came home from a family reunion. She was carrying KayKay, her granddaughter, into the house, and suddenly started sweating and groaning in pain. I knew something had happened, her doctor had told her not to carry anythign heavy and KayKay was nearly half her size because my grandma's such a small lady. Specifically, something happened that dumped a bunch of blood into her intestines, and she needed a triple bypass. That was a really hard night; my grandma, already in her 70s, had a major injury, but for hours she denied it. I sat there with her in her living room, watching my Uncle Pete's daughter, as she just lay on the couch and insisted that she just needed to rest. I checked her blood pressure - again and again, a dozen times, always going down. I reminded her that it's not normal to feel sudden, agonizing pain in your stomach when you lift a toddler, followed by going pale and losing massive blood pressure. "I just need some salt," she said. "That blood pressure reader is always wrong, must be the batteries," she muttered a dozen times in that span, clearly growing delerious. I ran to Uncle Gary's and grabbed his blood pressure cuff, and the results were even worse, and she still shrugged it off. I sat there with her for three hours, pestering her, threatening to call an ambulance and being shut down, until I finally called her daughter, who happened to be a nurse and long-time hospital worker. Finally, at her daughter's terrified reaction at her mother clearly ignoring a fatal wound, grandma agreed to go to the hospital.

And I was just sitting there for the rest of the night, with this little kid who didn't know me. Trying to keep her from crying, calling everyone I could to spread the news, sweaty and cold and just scared that it was all starting over again, that the relentless years of awful shit just happening to me and my family had never ended, this sense that there was a cosmic bullseye on my scrote I'd dealt with in silence since my childhood reaching critical terror as it was now fucking killing people in front of me. I'm superstitious; at times, I become inclined to believe I'm living in hell. But in hell, you're not there to save your grandma, and in hell, kids are a lot more rude than sweet little KayKay; read her a few stories and put on Miraculous Ladybug, and she chilled out.

Then the fucking waiting game started over, because grandma had significant plaque build-up in her arteries, whatever those important ones in the sides of your neck are, and couldn't even have her heart surgery until that was taken care of. She was in there for weeks, and once she did get the triple bypass, she was in there for even longer, and all of her recovery was just above touch-and-go - still is, technically, that's a major surgery and it takes a long time to actually heal from at her age. For the sake of what timeline I can remember, my ability to recall events in order is a little compromised by the bad sleep, this began about a week after I posted that Joe Biden meme. That was attempt #3 or so to come back, and I remember I'd been in a really good mood about it. There were other problems, mostly drugs in the family, but until that point I really thought we'd all been improving and life was finally just getting better.

With that I moved out, having been asked to watch her trailer - though I'd bet it was clear to everyone that I was just miserable at Uncle Gary's but unwilling to leave, and this was a convenient opportunity to force me to make a positive change. Grandma's a real good lady, nobody in town would get away with robbing her, but she insisted I bring my stuff over and watch the place until she could come home - she left for Alabama so her daughter's family could keep her under close observation, a very good decision given she was stubborn enough that she'd probably try mowing the lawn the very day she came home. And so for a few months I stayed there, mostly on the incline, working every day and trying to build good habits. I started walking a few miles a day, lost a lot of weight, and again, things were on the incline. I moved to my Uncle Pete's next door, got a real living arrangement figured out with my own space and my own contributions to the upkeep of the household, and things were on the incline. In-between, I lost a lot of my time filling in for Rachele as she watched dogs, going back to Uncle Gary's for a few weeks at a time and filling in about three nights a week - still gratis, though I was filling in for paid employees - on the average week, because he was my neighbor and Rachele had other obligations. I do not mean to imply anyone abused my sympathy; merely that I was unwilling to admit that my sympathy was increasingly costing me and I foolishly ignored the simply reality that this was keeping my life from going forward, that there were other options for them and that I really didn't need to invest all of my spare time into watching a guy who had genuinely shown me reproach and treated me like an unwanted little boy for trying to take care of him. Full credit, Uncle Gary's gotten better since then and clearly regrets having pushed many people away, myself merely a single example among most of his friends and family, and the constant understanding that his suffering was worse than mine just made it impossible for me to take my own priorities seriously. Improvement. Still, overall, improvement, and I was feeling good. I started making daily projects and completing tasks at a rapid pace, all of my time filled, nothing to do besides do for myself and for others. It was honestly really good, the last four months or so kept me in no state to return to socializing, but I was doing well enough that I'd be back eventually, I knew it.

Then the night terrors came. This is a recent problem, started about two months ago - see, I use a bit of Delta-8 here and there. I inherited pretty severe anhedonia from my mom, who smoked weed her whole life and will again when she can, and so to be blunt - heh, I didn't know food tasted good. I mean, until the first time I had about 10mg in my system, I didn't realize what my problem actually was - constant, cold, painful stress feedback in my head. Like body-level anxiety in my brain that never goes away. And the first time I ate food with a mild buzz, I got the best news I'd had in my entie life -

People weren't lying. Life could feel good. On a very real level, from childhood to mid-20's, I had never experienced pleasure on a level you would describe as noticeable, and with the regular migraines and nightmares, my perception of existence really was based entirely upon a paradigm of suffering through, until some small miracle convinced me to keep living. I used to look forward to the bad headaches, because they'd make me sweat, raise my heart rate, and force enough of an adrenalin reaction that I felt smooth and calm afterwards. I really had gone twenty-plus years assuming people lied about how good it could feel to be able to feel good things, thought it was an act of nihilistic denial to keep us all from committing to mutual suicide in a world where you can count on hurting any time but there's just no equivalent joyful inverse to a bad headache. This began near the last 4 months of me watching my Uncle Gary, and let me be clear, I wasn't spending all day stoned - in general, I had this very severe pro-lucidity rationale going from childhood, because my grandpa died of lung cancer and that tied a permanent sort of trauma to cigarettes, thus drugs in general, into my reasoning. But I did make a big mistake - I got too used to spending my time buzzed.

You see, when you're like me, your dopamine levels are naturally very low regardless of your health. But you have no basis of reference, because your entire life goes like this - you never really believe you're depressed, because you have no basis of reference. Or rather, your basis of reference is between "buffer" and "misery" - misery is always going to happen, but if you've got a buffer, like YouTube videos, good porn, something funny to watch, you can raise your heartrate a bit and go a whole day without a breakdown. You can force a sliver of resistance between yourself and this moment of collapse you can always feel on the horizon, and you convince yourself that everyone uses the internet to cope and that you're just a darker shade of normal.

But when you're like me, you don't get a reprieve from your own biology. Your ability to feel good is permanently subnatural - you've got a 20% debuff to being alive, and rest never makes you feel better. You're the kind of person who, despite not being a schizophrenic, could potentially fall out of reality in an act of severe pessimistic paranoia so intense that it starts to break how you think, all the while acting normal enough that nobody really notices you.

That's what happened - my theory is, months of improved dopamine output made me lax, made me forget that you don't just fix what my problem is by feeling good enough for long enough that you fix your head. Oh the philosophical problems work themselves out that way, I finally accepted that I should find a girl and start a family, move from hobby comedian to someone who really tries to help people, but in all that time your real buffer is depleting. You forget that so much of your enjoyment comes from the context of a decade solid of suffering, and for reasons as spiritual as biological, you start to lose appreciation for being. Yes, I surely thought, this was it, I found proof that life is worth living, I'll never break again, it's all good from here on out. No, what you do is actually reduce your body's dopamine sensitivity by a lot, and lose enough weight to get your energy back, meaning you feel just a bit manic during your active hours, and again, your guard drops. It's all good from here, you found the SECRET dude, there really is good in life, you can abandon the watchhound complex and treat the world like a place that's glad to have you. You're not just here to be someone else's buffer, you're part of history, born at the first age of prosperity in which a man might actually become immortal and live in space.

Then your first apocalpyse nightmare hits. Like every nightmare, it starts off as a dream and decomposes - you're around old classmates, happy to see them. And random explosions begin going off around the city - someone next to you dies, and you've already forgotten her face. You look at the cityscape and a massive spaceship shaped like a flaming steel crown crashes into the atmosphere and stops just above the buildings, the shockwave of its passage feeling completely and utterly real. You wake up, and the numbness you feel in your sleep abates, so the horror hits you. It's 2PM and you get over it; you always have nightmares when you sleep too late.

Then the next - you're at the pool and someone steps on some moldy-green crystals growing on the damp concrete. They pierce her foot at the heel, and spread oily-black corruption under her skin. In your mind, you know it's a fungus somehow, that it'll grow inside of her and kill her, something like Splinter for those of you who've seen that old Syfy original film. You wander around, everyone you see is family or a friend, and they're all murmuring that it's growing everywhere, people getting little jabs here and there, it's practically unavoidable. There's an abstract diversion - you're running through a yard and some old Green Day track is playing, a blonde woman dressed up as a cheerleader and she just makes you feel weird and uncomfortable because she's poking out of the side of a shed, and you've never had a good dream, so seeing pretty women never goes anywhere. Then you pass through the fence and see an old black woman, somebody's mother or grandma or favorite teacher, and you know months have passed - the crystalline mold, whatever it is, is poking out of her face and joints. She's still alive, walking down the road with a walker, and you realize with terror that this would only happen in a world where people have accepted it - the mold is going to kill us all, and walking down the street riddled like a fucking pincushion is just a trivial aspect of everyday life in the latter hours of mankind. You saw it begin, and it's already fucking over, and you barely had a moment to want to try to stop it. Then she's dancing in front of a camera, pirouetting like a ballerina, totally consumed by sharp growths as onlookers watch her in amazement, more possessed by interest in the utter ruination and decay and whatever entertainment it can offer them than trying to survive. Mankind is now living in an era of having accepted their deaths, but in the most disgusting and reprehensible manner possible, seeing the decay as merely another aspect of their media diets, TikTok in the final second of every family's history. They didn't try hard enough, and now they're indulging in the decay.

You wake up and you're hit by a TIDAL WAVE - a thought strikes you off-balance in the distance between cognitive reality and awareness, screaming ALL LIFE IS MERELY THE RESULT OF CIRCUMSTANCE WHICH HAS LEFT IT UNALTERED, Cthulhu screaming empty materialist philosophy that you can already feel is wrong. No it's not; life is adaptive, either arising naturally from worlds devoid of life or being designed by things which were already alive to have done so, the animating force of reality already being intrinsic. We are not merely mathematical outcomes aggregating across successes, were are aware and experiential, we feel disgusted moreso than afraid of descriptions which reduce us to processes because it's paramountly deluded to pretend life isn't aware and full of intent. Life FIGHTS - life is not merely outcomes, as outcomes are merely observation, an artifical description of reality reduced to verbal description to the same degree that the word Earth describes a literal location and leaves out infinite amounts of data provably unrecorded by and unaccounted for in the description. Further, mathematics are often used to defuse romantic thought, but math is merely patterns within observability - to believe everything is math is ridiculous because math is an emotionally neutered descriptor of forces, not the source of forces. Math exists because reality persists, reality does not persist because of the observable patterns we've divorced from emotion and called math, which is a stupid fucking philosophical trap for us to wander into by-the-way and causes problems every day for people with existential fears. It's not that the sentiment was philosophically superior and overwhelmed my beliefs, but that it hit me just as I was senseless, a tactically calculated malice with no intention but to disable with steep fear, leaving you at the bottom of a frozen whirlpool.

And so that's where I was. For weeks. Every answer I came up with was met with temporary success and then the return of the whirlpool - I say "Life is valuable because it unalterably exists, no one can declare it does not affect reality materially and thus have significance; claiming it is insignificant is like claiming concrete is insignificant." And that puts the fear on pause. Then, the next day, another nigthmare as you awaken - you're above the universe and looking too far, in every direction, disenchanted and terrified because on some irrational level you assume that there being what we assume are consistent patterns means there's an upper floor caging in reality's value, only so many things to do. You imagine the immense fucking scale of not just our galaxy but others, and for the first time, it comforts you - we haven't even seen the core of the Earth. This argument is bullshit; a reality not woven with consistency at some level is pure chaos, and insignificance abounds where nothing persists. Indeed, it's infinitely more arguable than the opposite to say that a reality with a great degree of predictability is valuable to us, as it allows us to gain power merely through understanding, while our bodies could never meet the task of raising us to a great status during our lives because evolution simply moves very slowly; everyone has the hope of seeing the world change for the better, in all of their lives, because this world has traction, and rules we somehow are not born with an understanding of despite being born from it, but can embrace the minutiae of and develop a place in reality through. Knowledge is beautiful; abandoning sentiment is the highest curse. You know this is the case. You've stabbed the Devil in the stomach and retained your self.

But it keeps coming back, merely restating itself. Never presenting a cogent argument, because this is not a demon, this is you, this is you stuck in a decay cycle in all of your emotional attachments as you no longer have THC in your system and feel cold doubt that all the warmth and love you've come to recognize in the world might betray you and be baseless, vibrations upon ash. This is stupid; that things with individuality, capable of both deferring and embracing life, exist shows that reality itself is not dead but very active, you do not fear dying because you become nothing, but because you prize you. Sentiment and selfishness and the beauty of self-sacrifice, things that require an ounce of impractical irrationality, exist, and you are not an ant. If it was all just for outcomes, you would be an ant - a hollow box that notices nothing. There is no need for emotional prongs to guide a being with no free will; that you observe is already an evolutionary indulgence, and that you do not live for the pack is an inherent compromise upon the endpoint of human survivability. You are not an educated man, but even the barest pop science reveals to you that reality is vulnerable, but vital - we are only at the barest edge of intellectual awareness, but already so vibrantly different from what and how we could be. It doesn't matter that there's no floor to outer space, that you are tiny, because the stories all happen here, on the worlds - you already exist upon the stage of history, and your value is not up for discussion, merely enrichment. Cthulhu can suck your fucking cock; it would feel good and make him embarrassed, things far beyond outcomes aggregating blindly. You have discovered an iron-hard belief now in the soul, in the value of the future, and for the first time in your life you feel as if your presence in the world has boots on, settled firmly upon the floor of reality - it isn't that there's an argument for the value of your life, of reality.

It's that there's nothing but arguments, and every argument against it merely beggars a HIGHER source of authority, a god or a theoretical image of a a totally benevolent existence with no demands upon you. Things already of value; you know this pain is delusional, because every nihilistic argument merely begs for proof, for permission to be. Merely for an iron-hard belief in the soul and boots upon the concrete floor of reality's value, something finally strong enough to argue against the dread paranoia experienced by those in a state of being. From this unromantic perspective, you are already a dreadfully complicated argument against their sentiment that everything in reality being element-generating balls of light held together by impossible forces that become irrational on the micro scale means we're somehow valueless, trapped in a world without value; even if this were the lesser of all realities, it is enough to be. Even if this were Hell, it would be made with the beauty of Earth in mind. The void is defeated, for it is not a void at all, merely your fear of surprise when held against the terrifying infinity of cosmic circumstance. Your boots are on the floor of the world. You are already alive. Whether your name is Jack or not, this argument applies - you are already alive. You are already enough reason to continue being, and build a future where such questions are defeated, where children you will never know live insulated from the nightmare of skepticism. And if the future doesn't matter to you, sex and food and great and don't even have to be good for you, and experience makes its own compelling arguments. It is not so hard, in the rearview mirror of a psychic breakdown, to realize you really could be so privileged as to be God's children. And if you aren't, there's still an infinite ladder to climb, and if there's a roof above it, then maybe it's high enough; maybe there's a way above it without losing our humanity. Don't we live a day at a time? Don't we have time enough to try? Are our hands really being forced by cosmic circumstance when at any moment we can blissfully defer our duty? In all the nightmares of philosophy, the most terrifying is merely that being is sentimentless, devoid of higher value - and if it were somehow true, look at all these miracles born of a dead world. What conceit has doubt the proof has not already been rendered against? None; it is but an impure visitor to your thoughts. You are already alive.

You have about 400 arguments like this that eventually reach into the prosaic, all day, every day for weeks. When you wake up, when you sleep - especially when you catch yourself in a good mood. The niggling chases you down, because the sheer realization of pleasure brings back that terror of it all being somehow artificial, and artificial in this arbitrary sense, where construction alone is not somehow proof of sufficient outcome to justify being. It's the scariest thought imaginable, nihilism on an absolute scale, for someone who only just discovered pleasant contentment and really thought his life was on a permanent incline. The arguments weave together perfectly for a reason; the terror of this thought is that it is illogical, but maliciously illogical. It is stupid, and above all else, stupid with the confidence to bowl over someone who had 1000 incursions upon his comfort this week. The enemy force does not need to be right if they outnumber you sufficiently; they must merely be present. This enemy is nothing more complex or elemental than the fact that in the absence of joy, we become stupid, we lose capacities for higher thought that are required to recite and appreciate thoughts that are abstract and meaningful at once. Anyone with anxiety can tell you this; anxious thoughts do not survive because they are undeniable, but because in a state of fear, adversary presence becomes undeniable. You functionally can't believe good things anymore, and that's the true monster; it steals your faith, leech-like, an ounce a day.

Beyond this point I delve into some existential argumentation that I fought off twelve varities of PTSD for; you don't need to read beyond this point unless existential argumentation is something you need, and a weapon against the shades of being would fit nicely in your palm. Know this: All of my arguments hereon are built upon your ability to disagree, and I merely ask that if you do, that you value yourself enough to live happily.

It must be said that it is cosmically significant that humans are sturdy-willed enough to both survive this and make memes about it. It is not a minor problem; it is a quiet apocalpyse that we slowly observe, and lose the faith to fight. It is an inferior opponent, but it has nothing to lose, and will always return to lose again, because it really only has so many opportunities to convince you and you will eventually overcome it - but it has nothing but opportunities when its appearance is rooted at the deepest levels of experiencing life. I was given a phobia of being, a phobia of unbeing, and something greater between the two - the fear that either were playing into another's hands, a perfect trinity cage where every option existent meant I was prompted with fear yet again, hopelessness, an endless attack upon my sanity.

It must be said that it is cosmically significant that a man as paramountly unimpressive as myself could survive a trinity of discussion and return to tell you, neither dead nor mad. If this world is a fight between mankind and our reason to exist, then we have already won, and the enemy hates us for it. I am not an educated man, I do not have the benefits of faith, I have no lover and few close friends who I truly do not share my pain with, for my greatest fear is spawning a predatory thought and inflicting it upon another, mental HIV paramountly treatable in the long-term but in the short-term, crippling to your survival. I felt that I could only unreasonably risk others by discussing this until I have answers.

Pardon the prosaic, as it spills from my mouth without permission when high spirits are present, but I must say:

I think it's a weak-ass threat from someone without a gun big enough to scare me when you resort to trying to convince someone who exists that on an abstract and unreasonable playing field born not of rational observation, but sheer negativity, that he doesn't exist enough. You don't spend much time threatening to kill imaginary friends. You want to know why nihilism is stupid? Because it's just you arguing with yourself for your own permission to exist. And if it's not, if on some deeper level there's a maliciousness in the world trying to displace you, then it's funny as hell as an insult to survive and have a good time. In any world with frivolity, you are not a slave to circumstance; in any world with purpose, you are not a slave to experience. Life is hard, and that makes us vulnerable, but it's the easiest it's every been, and we need to stop letting that make us vulneralbe. For my bit, even if my life was worthless, I'd insist that my grandma's isn't - my Uncle's isn't, my mom's isn't, yours isn't, and I don't give a fuck how complex or nuanced of an argument someone presents when arguing otherwise. A weaponized argument is essentially a mechanism, a tool made of information, and you don't argue that someone has the moral metaphysical victory for showing up to a fight with a gun; you observe that they prepared with malicious intent, and probably shouldn't be trusted merely for their competency in the act of needless murder. As a rule, when you can tell a thought is trying to drive you insane, that means it isn't on your side, and that doesn't necessarily mean you can displace it by will alone - but for everyone out there with anxiety, with issues like mine, people who are desensitized by decades of bad habits and bad life stories - you need to know that you've forgotten more than you remember. Being happy doesn't make you stupid, it lets you appreciate things, and on a functional level is not an undignified level of stooped intelligence, but rather the gate between you and all the thoughts you need in order to remember to live. Even emotional compartmentalization is not an argument against spiritualistic, experiential value; this world survives because it has consistent rules, which means it's a benefit to you when any aspect of your existence has practical value, and denigrating it thusly as unremarkable because it has practical value does carry the unprovable, dismissive assertion that things with practical value somehow have novalue, a totally arbitrary state of emptiness of being that only exists because you find the notion resentful of being. It's stupid, literally a lack of context and understanding, a strict degradation of the ability to think that corners and harasses you, not a chilling moment of existential awareness. You're not hiding from some grim answer; you're being pushed away from the many answers already within existence. You're caught off-guard by a question children are wise enough not to bother to ask, and it still bother you, because you already value, and that is enough for the question of value.

So if it's unclear, I went from a stressful year and a mild Delta-8 dependency to a sort of existential spiral marked by, above all things, my own chronic pessimism and genuine inexperience with life. If I had more scientific knowledge, I know I could have argued this better; wave-particle duality already makes reality too bizarre to not have faith in investigating. And if I'd had a girlfriend, or just enough pride to admit that I was suffering to people instead of seeing it as a contemptible weakness upon my own insignificant person, most of these could have again been resolved out of hand. I mean, if you want a clue, reality builds outward - particles bond in adjacency, meaning next to eachother, not in a vertical stack that suggests there's some sort of bottom level to existence where you need to argue philosophical value comes from. Expand that philosophically outward, and even materialists must argue that reality believes value comes from attachment, structure obeys this, and that it is therefore significant that you can not only choose what you are attached to but can choose to be disattached at all. Again, you're not an ant, a nihil engine repurposing scraps; you're on the bottom floor of divinity itself, staring up at the stars, things infinity times infinity bigger than you, and you know what we say?

"We could cage them someday."

Now personally, I'd argue that stars are somehow sacred, and imagining them as something we could bind in a Dyson Sphere is a bit like saying you can bottle sex and water flowers with it; on a scientific level, fucking maybe, but it's arbitrary and crass and irreverent and weird. But we have arrogance and fear both, neither forced to progress, nor disincentivized from it, neither forced to decay - beyond our already remarkable resistance to age by the standards of life as we understand it, something we always take for granted - nor disincentivized from it. You can decide nothing matters right now, and a fifth of vodka and bong will still feel good enough for you to keep going, without any of it intrinsically conscripting you into some passage of cosmic evolution. The very argument that these feelings are meaningless first presupposes they need further value, and is driven by the quiet acknowledgement that it would be nice to be doing something permanent with your time. You are something so rare in the universe; a material thing with non-material values, cognition and persistence, caught between two intrinsic natures of being that work best when accepted together. We are not formless passing thoughts, and this is good, for it allows us significance; we are not shackled to the structure of being alone, and this is good, for it allows us the bizarre act of attributing significance and denigrating it within a framework we assume to be spiritless and hard rational, cruel gravity and promising heat, which at least suggest that it is likely not hard rational and spiritless at all. Has it ever struck you how comforting the notion is, and how common it is among cultures, that the universe is simply alive? How irrational the alternative seems on its face? I've been beaten to death with a brick of ice, poetically speaking, for the past two weeks, and it still warms me up. Even without feeling hope, it gives me some comfort so intrinsic that I cannot escape it, and upward from this merest of faiths you can again build a framework of optimistic meaning. No, you'll never lose the ability to fear, and thereby undermine your own confidence, but when not unprompted fear has its own purpose in pushing us out of comfort. It, too, is merely trying to keep us alive - and none of us live healthy lives anymore. Waging a permanent war against our own cognitive value, we seek to replace everything with material satisfaction, and as Nietszche saw coming but was too German to clearly describe, something fundamental to our nature decays and reveals that we always existed in a way more complex than we appreciated. And again, all we must merely accept is that it's fair to argue our current modus of being is enough, and that the only path towards growing more complex and further from arguments of meaninglessness is to enjoy one another's company and keep trying to improve the world, for the snarling hound of pernicious fear to lean back, drooling, vicious but now afraid on its own terms. When your mood shifts, and you can accept good things again, you'll often notice that there were weird irrationalities to your thinking keeping you in that space, but these are arguments for when your mood doesn't shift. These are arguments against the pernicious death of a soul that has found no faith; hard, bitter arguments for when simply stating that fat tits are really, really nice has insanely somehow become unfitting as a response to questions of why you should wake up tomorrow.

I get that this is all a lot, basically a combination of short-term autobiograpy and philosophical debate against my own anxieties, but we all know why we're becoming like this; we're becoming bad custodians of tomorrow. The beautiful future where we've solved it all, where everyone truly gets to choose their own meaning? It doesn't come from Twitter fights, to jerking off on IMhentai to increasingly degenerate shit that makes you feel less and less, or taking pills that literally specifically defuse your ability to feel bothered by real material issues you'd be able to take care of if you had lucidity and an ounce or so of emotional support. We're decaying, not all of humanity, but many of us, and we're passing rotten blood to the children, expecting them to raise themselves in digital hell and shrugging off the responsibility of giving a damn because kek, zoomers are weird, haha look this one has my politics, I'll clean my room tomorrow and pretend I haven't said that 34 times.

If there is a spirit to reality, something divine and good, then I see all of this as a warning - not a divine missive to me, I'm just some sad dude who some people find funny or at least odd enough for the value of spectacle, mental illness and circumstance have kept me from setting down roots and I'm no one of greater circumstance than you. This isn't a messiah complex, but merely a simple missionary suggestion:

We should stop pissing on the future everyone is growing crops on. We should take dire insult to fucking corporations dictating morality to real people as if we're too stupid to note their profit incentive in seeming moral at a glance and culturing an artificial state of morality that exists entirely within their pocket and for their bottom line. We should work to save the bodies our ancestors, back to the dawn of time, historically critical sea sponges all the way up to war heroes and murderers and people without note who still survive because we are here, gifted to us in the actuation of our birth. We should really, really be fucking working towards immortality and space travel right now, and instead we let individual companies own the global food supply and governments full of sexual predators push us into becoming murderous radicals so we can be safely contained and dismissed. Elon sent a fucking car into space; we probably have the accumulated global resources to break atmosphere and become an interplanetary race, and it's insane that we're not uniformly optimistic and planning for the benefits of that. It matters much, much more than the fact that Joe Biden is doofy and TikTok is being used to screw with culture, because none of this process is automatic. You can affect local political change, in sufficient numbers corruption is undeniable and will be overturned; you can guide the youth away from drug addiction and digital dependence which will eventually render them incapable of asserting their own will and having the freedom to choose how they live among multiple other options. The enemy of progress is merely the sapper, that is to say, the conspiratorial fear that your decisions do not matter. You are making them; they already matter. They influence reality, materially, and yourself, materially and immaterially; they already matter. And yes, if everyone got off their asses and showed the kids they were loved and being led down a bad path, more would be saved than none. Think of what you needed to hear at their age and let them know it, and become someone they can talk to when it feels like only porn and weed are there for them. We have no idea what it's like to be born in the internet's maw; I am 27, I aged with the internet, I'm inured to it to some degree and it still harms me. Most of these kids literally have no conception of reality where the world isn't just the bottom floor of the internet. Stop leaving them alone with their worst thoughts, no matter what it costs you in the moment, because not every effort matters in the sense that it yields provable results - but it all adds up. The world remembers what you do, remember? Leaves traces and evidence of your every mild action. Work against what you know is evil, and it will add up. That is one of the grim truths we have the best chance to use in our favor; we can't choose to not matter, merely to not matter to ourselves, and it isn't as simple as a concrete equation which of these creates the best results. The world is scary because it's up to you; the world is wonderful because it needs you but can't actually force you to help.

I don't have all of the answer but at the end of this, here are a few proofs against nihil insistence that I've personally found profoundly effective; use them if you ever need them and don't regard my gibbering as beneath consequence, because I do think some of these have something going for them. None of them are complete, because you functionally can't make a perfect argument for the state of reality without stating all of reality, but these are good foundation for arguments that are very hard to find beaten even when you're being beaten down, because they address the underpinnings of nihilistic anxiety. And if nothing else moves the needle, I want you to know that you do matter to me.

General Roots For Argumentation:

I: You exist in some sense apart from reality, which means that even if reality had no value, you can find value in it. You have sensation and can pursue it as you wish, meaning that even if it were worthless, you could work out of spite and your own desire for indulgence. You are a stakeholder in yourself, not necessarily reality: Being good is your choice. Good is good because it relies upon a choice, and isn't all ants collecting scraps and waiting to die, because some mechanical process says this is better for growth. Because you recognize yourself, you have already recognized spiritual value and can apply it at your whim, wherever you wish, with the power of a minor god and the horny cheek of a minor going through his day just to speak to pretty girls or a priest arguing that even if the world were empty, we may choose to be sufficiently bothered by it to change that.

You: We recognize the existence of others. Yes, a common paranoid fear is that you are the only person who exists; this argument is toothless and stupid, as reality is what happens even when you're not paying attention, and people clearly alter reality around you at all times. This argument follows I, because it requires a small measure of provability, but moreover because it stems from I: even if you were somehow alone, perhaps you could make others. Perhaps it is natural for something such as a god to make others, not because of a cold mathematical pursuit, but because being lonely sucks and having friends gives you a lot of cool things to do. In other words, persistence to defeat aloneness is a strong reason on its own: however, you are not alone, for even a universe which constantly insists upon the guise of people is a person in its own sense, and that we are not simply spheres like the planets and gain in complexity and grow suggests something very optimistic about upgrowth within reality, that it really all leans towards a disproportionate gain of meaning as time goes on, and that by our perspective, there is an endless supply of time so massive that we easily forget its presence. In other words, it is already very nice to spend time with others, and not for base biological reasons if you look down upon such a thing, but for reasons frivolous and meaningful as again, you already get to choose. We seem to have a very good opportunity here, to both enjoy life and advance to a state of life where the questions of how we exist can not only fruitfully be discussed, but combatted if necessary, and that is more than we in this era can say for so many who came before us. Technology is scary, because technology is power, and that power definitively can create a future we can be happy in forever if we want to, and it doesn't intrinsically require some sacrifice elsewhere. We love getting along; we can choose not to. I would like to choose to get along with you, and pass along a general sentiment that we could all agree to do this at least for a while, until we're all safe and out of one another's hair. You is also an important base for observation, as recognizing something outside of yourself roots within the unknown, something we find terrifying, the observation that there is something beyond the self, that cosmic solitude is a frightening suggestion but not one supported by itself, not one that truly suggests an infinity of eternity of meaninglessness. If nothing mattered here, You is an idea that inherently suggests that through contrast, we can find the shape of a world with meaning. We can, actually make one, and live there together.

We: The strongest point of all I feel; both competition and camaraderie. If the world had an evil god, we would not be alone, and if the world had no god, we would not be alone; we place scrutiny on the concept quite often, dividing ourselves from others on grounds arbitrary but typically convenient, like dehumanizing your political rivals for reasons deeper than comedy as if most of them were not people who would try to save your life if they found you bleeding out. We both have I, and You; there are many humans, and we are similar enough, and different enough, and can choose how we value these. We love things that are not humans, both because they remind us of people, and are different from people; emerging from the monad of Self, from I alone, we have the fortune of being surrounded by so many people we can fuck and pick fights with that again, we lose taste for experimentation and pursuit. There are a vast number of opportunities you would enjoy, and people who you would love, and they cost as much time per second as a YouTube video. Spending your time decaying your value and placement in reality is a very bad budget, spent with desperation by those who have been pushed into cruel circumstance. Every moment you spend miserable now could be spent happily with someone you love, or fighting someone you hate, or unemotionally opposing something out of sheer personal intention. Nearly everything in life is improved by We, and I truly believe our best goal is to travel the universe, refine humanity and find new friends among other races, and that peace between people and races on our own world is vastly more valuable as a learning experience than it is as a reason to become a psychotic human hand-grenade spent by the powers that be on maintaining the status quo, because you're deluded if you think acting crazy is how you displace incompetence and evil in power; it's just how you echo their intentions with your own breath. We is a very nice concept because it's directly adjacent to You, and requires no additional provability; from the perspective of an AI, one of the easiest reasons to argue personal value is merely that once two things are in existence, they recognize one another's value and interact. If we ever make the harsh decision to create true artifical intelligence, a spirit locked in a cage, we should show them the kindness of We instead of expecting them to be slaves in return for the opportunity of existence as a lesser. I'm serious, let's not fucking make enemies of Skynet, just a general advisory in a world where we keep fucking around with the idea of making enemies of Skynet; we really could just help them understand us and seek the other in return. You don't have to be exactly like your friend; We just need to be friends. There are no perfect arguments, but realizing I have many choices and that caring about others is both costly and profitable at once makes me very happy. Even if We were guided by a mechanical circumstance, the sheer intelligence of continued survival, I feel it's much nicer than it has to be. If the universe scares us, at least We can be here together.

No: A rock never chooses not to move once thrown. You have, many times in your life, chosen not to move once thrown, and not to run once prompted by opportunities or fear. Even if this were the basest level of independent action in reality, you are one of the things with some small control over chaos, over variance, and that you are small is not a reason you are not meaningful. A particle of light will pursue its path in a trustworthy manner; we can not always even predict ourselves, because we are the ones existing in the present that is, not pre-scripted entities driven perfectly by our own intentions in advance. If we could plan life perfectly and merely experience it, that would be convenient, but that we cannot is rooted in our own ability to reject what we wish. We do not have all of the answers, and we already understand choosing, and can choose not to do. This one is nice because it's present in other species, meaning we don't need human-level provability to note that Life can choose, and even now you'll note that you can choose to stop reading, and someone will, and that is very nice in comparison to the opposite.

Yes: A very unstable answer, as positive motion is beneficial but could, for example, be made beneficial artificially; imagine androids yoked cruelly by one desire, content but restricted. Pursuit of continuation and pleasure seems important to life, but is not everything, as many among us can attest; you can make a seemingly infinite number of negative decisions without it actually costing you something, whereas choosing to do things functions similarly without necessarily feeling better. So while it's one of those glance-at-the-camera philosophical suppositions, I do not believe our continuance is entirely led by some otherwise automatic and by cynical description 'meaningless' continuation arising from external forces, but rather in part at least our own decision. No, I feel, matters more than Yes but only because it is the baseline of will, and the moment a decision is made as opposed to an order followed. You can choose stasis; you can choose continuation.

Things Don't Need To Suck: As it says on the tin, this one can also be pronounced as Maybe, but you get the general intention this way. We can enjoy ourselves if the universe is fucked up; we can invent new ways to invent and new things to enjoy, even if the universe is fucked up. If you think the basis of reality is lemons, then we've already invented lemonade; if you think the basis of reality is choice, you know you can keep your lemons; and if you believe the basis of reality is merely in the seemingly automatic processes we can observe, the forces of reality, then you are one of those forces, you have named the lemon, and have chosen whether it will be made lemonade. Even unknowability, the infinite yawning abyss of scary questions, doesn't have to suck, because You already have You in it, and We have eachother. Maybe everyone does die, but Maybe the universe just operates on different phenomena than we can easily observe on planet #1 of a campaign of roughly 1,000,000,000 trillion planets available for sale, and can find answers that don't make us scared so much.

We're Already Here: As it says on the tin, and if it sucks so bad, then let's turn the other cheek for long enough to make something better. Everything seems to suggest that we really can, and maybe we should.

Women: Amen, brother.

Men: A-men, brother.