#and life as you know it to end

[echodior]

would anyone be interested in a small closed discord verse based on leave the world behind but instead of two families. it's 10-12 college friends (26-30 age range) who booked a really swanky airbnb away from the city for a long weekend due to celebrate the engagement of two of the friends? then the apocalypse breaks out and they are stuck there now? and oops, did these rich people have a secret basement that's actually a doomsday bunker? that's convenient. and maybe later on in the plot we can introduce new muses into the dynamics? idk i just think it'd be fun.

[asteroidtroglodyte]

5 years ago, I was in Rehab.

10 years ago, I was watching my Potential and Opportunities dissolve and evaporate in an ocean of cheap gin and expensive whiskey.

But 5 years ago, I was in Rehab.

One of the exercises they had us perform was to imagine ourselves happy, 5 years in the future.

Many of us in that room had forgotten how to imagine nice things happening to them. A few snorted (well, I snorted), finding the notion that we’d even still be around in 5 years grimly humorous.

For about half of us, it was the last stop on the way down.

But I indulged the therapist. I was there, after all, because I did not want to die. So, I imagined myself, 5 years hence.

Happy.

It came to me all at once; an artistic remix on Norman Rockwell’s Freedom From Want, reframed with myself placing food at the table.

Sunday Dinner At My Place, I answered, when it came my turn to share my fantasy. I was asked what food I imagined eating.

It’s not the meal itself, I said, it’s the implications framed around it. Sunday Dinner At My Place means that I have a Place. It means that I have Family that will actually speak to me and friends who actually want to see me. It means money enough not just to feed myself but others too. It means having the time to spare to take the time preparing the meal.

A lot of nodding heads all around me. A struck chord. Many people with no Place, in that place. Nowhere that would lament their leaving.

5 years hence, as I lay down to sleep in my Home, with my Wife and my Son, surrounded by my Art and my Flowers, I reflect.

It was a long road. It was hard. We lost people. So many people. There were long days and long nights and hospital stays. Angry arguments with ghosts. I changed, in ways I never hoped for, or expected. Good ways, finally, for once. Slowly, against the backdrop of a world in chaos, I found my mind.

Sometimes, My Wife wondered aloud, what she did to deserve me. After some stumbling with my feelings, I eventually settled on an answer.

I’m a Rescue.

She gave me a Home.

And, so, I gave her a Family.

It seemed fair

This Sunday, my folks, which whom I have not had a shouting match in years, will come over for dinner. We will cook and eat together. My Friend became My Wife, and she took a piece of me and with it she made Our Son. There will be many hugs, and no violence. Good Things Happened.

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you don’t know what the future holds.

don’t give up yet, ok?

It could get good, even.

[abracadaze]

i feel so bad for nikola tesla like imagine spending years beefing with a guy who has conned the public into believing he's some sort of supergenius when in reality it's his overworked employees developing all of his world-changing inventions and you end up dying broke and starving and alone and then 100 years later another guy cons the public into believing he's some sort of supergenius when in reality it's his overworked employees developing all of his world-changing inventions and he's doing it all IN YOUR NAME. he must be rolling in his grave like a fucking rotisserie chicken

[malinaa]

if i think about the hunger games in peeta's perspective i WILL start sobbing

[coddda]

I wish we could have met in some other way.

Lawlight Week Day 2: Soulmates

If you saw me repost and re-edit this several times uh No you didn't </3

Still frames/Individual gifs:

If you know what every frame is from you get a free cookie. by the way

[ruporas]

need to exist in your warmth (id in alt)

[inkskinned]

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

[lotus-pear]

mourning black and the death of ideals

[egophiliac]

like mother, like son, but less wholesome this time?

(I couldn't decide whether or not to put them together, so have them in all the different ways!)

[thefloatingstone]

Appleseed PDA montage to save you from reading endless pages of unimportant politics that don't amount to anything

also because I have nothing better to do, I'm bored, I'm moody, my gaming laptop is still broken so no BG3, and it's too late at night to start drawing after doing animation clean-up all day.

[ash-and-starlight]

season 2 romancing (+ extremely low quality kissy)

[bluebells-and-dragonflies]

Imagine Astarion with ears so sensitive that he's never willingly allowed anyone to touch them except for you. Imagine laying next to him in your bed, facing him, lifting your hand up slowly for that first touch. His eyes on yours, the rapidity of the breath he doesn't need to take, but still does reflexively. Seeing that he's nervous, but that he's trusting you, feeling his shaking hand come to rest on your waist. The audible sound he makes- half a moan, half a gasp- when you finally brush your thumb over the soft skin at the tip of his ear.

You trace the long shell of his ear and watch his pretty eyes, deep red like velvet in the moonlight, flutter shut. He says your name softly, as close as you've ever heard him to prayer. You pinch his earlobe gently, and his hips roll forward involuntarily, the jut of his hipbone pressing against your thigh as he makes himself still. Heat flares low in your belly, but you tamp it down as quickly as possible- likewise, Astarion makes himself still against you. This isn't sex and won't become sex, you'd promised each other (though that's not to say that you won't explore this thoroughly during one of your hours-long lovemaking sessions. He is all about experimentation these days, after all).

You lay there, touching him in his most vulnerable place, with reverence and grace and occasionally disbelief that you could be here at all with this beautiful, horrible, ridiculous and wonderful man, that you could be trusted so completely. You take in his every shuddering breath, the flexing of his fingers in your shirt, the softness of his mouth when he presses his lips to yours and tells you he loves you. If you have your way, if he has his, if somehow your utterly insane lives hold together for a year or a decade or ten, it will always be like this.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

I want it back / I drag its dead weight forward.

[isjasz]

[Day 192]

Double life big silly cats and a lil cat <3

[zuzu-draws]

"Well Well... Aren't we gawking with a little too much enthusiasm?"

[mxmarsbars]

happy pride month (again)