#and meat puppets

[squshymarsh]

DCxDP Prompt #5

For the bit(we’ll be cultists)

When Danny won the title of Ghost King, he wasn’t expecting some of his more ghostly attributes to seep over into his human form.

Or to be unable to control his powers like at all for a month or two after gaining his new title.

He’s still 14-15 though and has to be in Highschool to make sure his grades don’t fall any further. Even if he did just save the town with only his piers in his grade know about him.

It’s no surprise when he accidentally walks through a door after trying to open it only to find himself intangible or to start floating away with no way to control it and need one of his classmates to save him from floating into the stratosphere.

It’s all fine for a while, people help him. Those who used to bully him now lend a hand when he needs it. They aren’t kind about it but they aren’t shoving him into lockers anymore.

But that doesn’t last.

People start to notice the strange things that keep happening as his powers grow and become harder and harder to hide even with help. He had made an entire class take place on the ceiling one day. Another he made half the town float.

The Fenton parents and the GIW start working together to figure it out. It’s only a matter of time if no one does anything

So what is Danny, his friends and his class going to do to hide the real reason of what’s going on?

They pretend to be a cult. Full on cartoonishly cult like. The chanting, the robes, the sneaking out to an old building on the edge of town to have a ritual kind of cult. Playing off Danny’s fluctuating powers as the results of their work.

This gets the opposition to back off a bit. Not their circus not their monkeys. And the rituals release some of Danny’s pent up power.

Danny just had to lay in a circle, surrounded by the faces of friends and classmates while they chant and his powers gets released a little at a time.

It’s a great deal.

Until Danny is found out one day unable to use the cult as an excuse and has to bounce out of town. And the rest of his Casper High Class, ever committed to the bit, follow him since the GIW and the Fentons are laying waste to the town and it’s just not safe.

Where do they go?

To the Crime Capital of the world of course!

Gotham is the perfect place to continue the bit. Their ‘cult’ runs all the way to Gotham, looking out for one another and the such. Not because they care about each other, of course.

They all tell themselves that but there’s only so much chanting in ghost speak and Latin a frenemy relationship can take.

They are tight knit by time they settle in a collection of old buildings on the edge of Gotham. Danny’s powers are starting to settle, but he still has bad days. Those days the cult gathers and ‘performs a ritual’ but really they just have a little get together, sitting in a big room set up with a circle with Danny laying and meditating in the middle and chat in Latin or Ghost speak.

For the bit, they preform a fake ritual. Headed by Sam since she has all the knowledge on what cults do. For the bit, the give offerings to Danny in exchange for him protecting them both back in Amity and in Gotham. For the bit, they make it a monthly thing or as needed.

Sure Danny doesn’t realize he’s given each of his friends and classmates blessing from a literal King of Gods and Beings Beyond Human Comprehension.

It was for the bit.

What wasn’t for the bit was getting caught by the local furries.

Danny hadn’t had a ritual in a month, his powers were building up but he was stressed with work and school.

His cult of friends decided he needed a ritual and pseudo-kidnap him to sacrifice his own power to himself.

Don’t ask them, it just works.

Mid ‘ritual’ Danny is trapped in the circle while they keep his powers contained as it’s released. He could destroy the building if he so much as blinks. They are nearly through with it. Can return to the party after they’re done and he’s ‘normal’ again.

So when the Bat and Co. crash the ritual, right before the end. Danny can’t do anything while his classmates both defend him, each other, and those trying to finish the ritual.

It’s looking bad but the ritual finishes. Danny is freed from the circle and starts helping his friends defend themselves and escape. Of course, he knows what this looks like. And he knows that the Bats and Birds are just trying to keep their own city safe from a perceived threat.

So he apologizes to them while he takes down the Bats and Birds then absconds with his Cult&Co. hoping they would understand. No one was hurt and there was no loss on either side. Alls well ends well?

To the Bats and Birds.

They find a group of robed cultists that established themselves quickly and then they see the cult gather, having a party until another group come in dragging Adoption Bait behind them. They start the ritual. Bats and Co. think kid is getting sacrificed and step in. Only to be nearly fought off and the ritual to complete.

They then have to watch as some entity controls the kids body to fight them off. The kid looks terrified, apologizing while he is forced to fight for the cult.

Then they all get away.

(I have the flu, have this lil idea/drabble while I try not to die)

[spookyweaselbones]

Please support local business

[lesbx]

fallout 4’s faction system really breaks down when you realize every choice is like Okay which do you wanna be a 24/7 hitman for. not even really just fighting for your cause, more just going out of your way to mass murder for your team. this varies though because the railroad doesn’t send you on assassination missions too much but it does happen and every ending culminates in the total annihilation of at least one group. the minutemen are maybe the worst actually bc they’re supposed to be the most blank slate do whatever you want route and it still involves 1000 quests of people telling you to go kill other people sight unseen. hey these people are harassing us. Go kill every last one of them and salt the earth where they stood. in return you will be allowed to redecorate my house however you wish. this is all radiant there is literally No end to the amount of life we can request that you snuff out, human, beast, mutated creature, we leave no survivors here. at what point are the minutemen just the actual most murderous people in the commonwealth

[whiteboardartstudios]

I SAID I WAS GOING TO DRAW THAT CAR SO HERE WE ARE (I hope you enjoy this is the stupidest thing I've drawn in months /affectionate)

(I put the image descriptions in the Alt text this time because there's so many images. If it doesn't work please tell me and I'll yeet them in the actual post!!)

happy finale of Wild Life everybody! :D

[bluecollarmcandtf]

The New Garbageman

Lance slowed from his run and glanced at the trash compactor sitting outside his apartment complex. He needed to catch his breath, but he hated being so close. The young man gave a disdainful look to the laborer who seemed wholly unbothered by his choice in career. 'Some men are just meant for menial crap like this,' he thought to himself, 'God knows I wouldn't be caught dead doing it.'

The jogger looked straight ahead as he passed, not wanting to make eye contact with the sucker lugging away a week's worth of his building's refuge. Lance thought the smell alone was enough to make him gag, but he was even more disturbed by the garbageman's indifference to the squishy contents leaking all over his clothes.

'At what point is that worker just considered trash himself?' Lance pondered with a grimace.

Just as he was about to escape into the entrance of the complex, a sharp ripping noise sounded behind him, followed by a clamour of things crashing to the ground.

Lance made the mistake of looking back, seeing a huge mess scattered across the sidewalk. It looked like a garbage can had exploded and now there was rotten food and crumpled papers everywhere, but that damn sanitation worker had vanished!

"The hell!" Lance shouted in anger, but his rage didn't last long.

A sudden pain stabbed him in the back and he crumpled to the ground like all the garbage had moments before. Everything went black...

Lance shook off the daze and found himself leaning against one of the garbage bins. The pain in his back didn't feel as acute anymore. All he could feel was an unusual warmth spreading from where he had been stung.

"Where is that goddamn garbage man," he growled, wincing at the litter surrounding him. He was ready to give that idiot a piece of his mind.

He put his hand on the concrete in an attempt to get himself up, but was surprised by the feeling of gloves over his fingers. Lance stared at his gloved palms with total confusion. He was sure as hell that he didn't put those old worn things on!

Then he noticed his shoes. They weren't the sneakers he'd been jogging in moments before. They were some kind of work boots!

"What the hell!" he exclaimed, wondering if he'd actually been knocked out and robbed.

Lance pushed his fears aside and began climbing to his feet, but as he did, he noticed something had appeared over his shoulders!

"Where'd this come from?" he cried, becoming more and more angry as articles of clothing just kept appearing on his body.

He was positive this dirty old jacket didn't belong to him. It was covered with stains and reeked like a public bathroom. Lance had a habit of always keeping his clothes freshly laundered and fragranced. He wouldn't even wear jeans two days in a row without washing them, so what was this raggedy work jacket doing in his back?

Lance frantically started to pull the thing off, but it seemed stuck on his waistband or something. No amount of thrashing could get him to pull the thing over his head!

He moaned in frustration and threw his fists down angrily. Then, he noticed why the jacket wouldn't come off. It took him a second to realize what he was looking at. The jacket was attached to the new pants he had on!

Lance shouted out in a state of confused panic. "Help!" he cried, not knowing what else to do, but even if someone did come over, what would he tell them? They'd never believe that his clothes were magically being replaced!

He couldn't even bring himself to look down at what he was wearing. Gone were his running shorts and tank top. In their place, a gross old jumpsuit had enveloped his body. Lance was struck by the itchiness of the course material, but he was even more horrified by how damp it felt against his skin. He didn't want to know what liquid those coveralls were saturated with; oil, sweat, or something even worse?

Lance couldn't find his phone in any of his new attire's pockets. He didn't know what was going on, but he was about to start screaming if he didn't find out soon. His breathing intensified while his heart raced out of his chest. He could feel the panic attack coming.

Then all of a sudden, he stopped...

That warm feeling in his back had washed over his entire body and told every tense muscle to relax. Lance's heart rate eased and his breathing slowed. The confusion, worry, and panic in his face was gone: a numb expression sat in its place.

Lance didn't understand why he had suddenly become so calm. Internally, he was still disgusted, horrified, and outraged, but he couldn't deny how relaxed his body had became.

Finally able to gain his bearing, the former jogger climbed up from the ground and gave his new outfit another look.

"What the hell is this thing," he wondered, but his voice had a comparatively lifeless tone.

Lance studied the clothing. The boots were caked with dirt and grime. He could feel his feet sweating inside them. In fact, his entire body felt like it was being cooked. He was completely covered from the neck down with some pretty heavy duty work wear. It was all clothing he would never be caught dead in, yet it looked kind of familiar.

Suddenly it, clicked.

"I'm dressed a goddamn garbage man," Lance spoke again with a monotoned voice.

Then his mouth moved on its own, "I am a garbage man."

The words chilled him to the core. He had not meant to say them! That warm feeling that started in his back had moved to his throat and taken over.

Before he knew it, his hands were moving on their own too. They were picking up the trash littered around him! His legs moved to, crawling his body across the concrete, and Lance couldn't do anything to stop himself.

His mouth wouldn't open when he tried! He wanted to scream! His arms and legs weren't doing what he wanted either. He was trapped in his own body! Lance couldn't speak; he couldn't run; he couldn't hide; he couldn't even panic. His own heart beat at a steady pace like he was the calmest man in the world! His lungs systematically drew in breath after calm breath, and his face was locked in an empty look of indifference...

Lance would have to get used to being around the trash. He was a garbageman now...

One Year Later...

Lance had never imagined he'd be trapped as a garbage collector for this long. His body hadn't let him look back once since he walked away from his old life. Who knows what happened to his apartment and family. He'd long since given up on the idea of ever going back to his old life.

His days were now spent being puppettered to take out other people's trash. It was disgusting hard work that he got no thanks for, but that didn't matter. He wasn't in control of his body, and his body just kept lugging rank bags of garbage day after day after day.

He'd been subjected to millions of dirty looks as people caught sight of him. Lance knew he must seem pathetic. He was sure he smelled even worse. How could anyone respect a man like him? Even after a year, his face still burnt red when someone looked grossed out by him.

The discomfort of his uniform has become normal to Lance. It was itchy and humid under there, which made sense since it hadn't been washed in the all the time he'd had it on.

Well, that wasn't entirely true...

Every night after work, his body would hop on the garbage truck and get dropped off at the sanitation department's parking garage. There he and the rest of the garbage crew would hose each other down. It didn't do much other than make him cold, but at least he got that.

After the makeshift shower, he and the rest of the guys would file into the garage. Lance assumed that every one of the laborers were being used as puppets like him, because they appeared just as numb and lifeless as he did. There was no chummy chitchat; there were no friendly waves or claps on the back; hell there wasn't even a smile or frown on any of their faces.

All the garbagemen acted like robotic slaves for unpaid labor, which is exactly what they were.

Lance's theory was that when he'd felt that pain a year ago, he'd had some sort of Syfy-futuritic-techno crap inserted in his back. It had to be controlling his actions. He could feel it on his spine, sending signals to the resto for his body for how to behave.

It was just a theory. He couldn't prove or disprove anything when he had no autonomy over his own body.

So he was stuck seeing himself play out the same awful routine everyday. 'At least the day's almost over,' he thought to himself. At least he could still dream of a life where he didn't wear this disgusting uniform and pick up garbage all day.

Lance's body joined the rest of the men on the floor. This was where they spent their nights. Whoever was controlling them was clearly too cheap to buy them beds let alone showers or laundry machines

It usually got pretty bleak in there: a whole room of men that aren't allowed to talk or interact outside of working together. There was nothing else to do but sleep, so Lance slid down to the concrete and closed his eyes, wondering if he would ever be anything other than a smelly garbageman ever again.

He thought back to his old life, dreaming about that last morning run he'd gotten before all this happened. He fantasized about what would have happened if he'd just ran around the block one more time.

Would he have avoided this fate or was he just destined for menial crap like this?

Thanks for the Ask, workgearfan

[ovcheonok]

Guest

[capesch-arts]

I wholeheartedly believe that Larson would immediately croak and die when exposed to 1% of the shenanigans Arthur went through.

My guy would trip in the living forest and immediately whimper and whither away because of the minor inconvenience

I hope if he ever survives it's not because he can adapt, but because Yellow managed to take control of his body completely

[tiktoks-for-tired-tots]

Transcript:

Fem Tiktoker: Here's what I eat as a high fat carnivore. Lots of raw steak. Just kidding. I actually like to wear my steak-

Mickey: The fuck you mean just kidding. I WATCHED YOU EAT RAW MEAT-

[cinnabon0]

-"do you like meat?"

[xuviio]

Nobody gaf about him but me part 2 💔

[ckret2]

I've looked at your early answers to questions about how Bill's image-spying works. In sum, it turns out that Bill can see through anything that can be perceived as a triangle with an eye (Including folding fingers around the eye socket as McGucket did), photographs and images of Bill (But only if they depict a triangle Bill, and not, for example, Goldie), anything where there is a photo Bill's eyes (a photo of Goldie with her eyes open, just Goldie's eyes on a black background, maybe photos of people possessed by Bill). Perhaps the image should be visible at least partially (You see him, he sees you), a clear answer was not given because different people see differently and his eyes work even when no one is looking at them. And also Bill looks through the birch trees and won't be able to look through his organic eyes if they become eye bats.

So, the question is - what about ambiguous image, collages, optical illusions? What about paper clones made by cloning copy machine? What if someone builds an image of Bill in Minecraft or shoots at the wall in any shooter until they get an image of Bill (Will he see through these images as if they were in the real world, or will these images work as if they were on a computer monitor?)?

This is a collage made out of food and it canonically works.

I'm not sure what you mean by "as if they were in the real world," do you mean like as if the video game world was a real world, would he be able to see around the video game world? If so, no; I assume he'd see out of the pixels on the screen and stare at the computer user. When the gamer changes the camera angle and the screen's pixels are no longer being lit up in a pattern that depicts Bill's face, that eye ceases to exist and turns off until the gamer turns the camera again and the pixels light up in a Bill pattern again.

I'm gonna give a "sure, I guess, why not" to the paper clones, and tbh I have no plans to explore ambiguous images or optical illusions so that's a shade of gray I'm not motivated to render a black-or-white judgment on.

In the fic the only things I plan for Bill to see through are extremely unambiguous "that there sure is an image of Bill that looks like Bill made by someone trying to depict Bill" symbols, his hoodie, and maybe birch trees if I ever come up with a plot that needs him to be omnivident in the forest. MAYBE fingers-around-eyes if I come up with a clever reason for him to ask someone to do that to help him spy. Anything beyond that is a thought experiment with no bearing on the story.

[album-tourney]

[just-bee-lieve]

by a black hole of vanity- blossoms the age of greed.

[doomandgloomfromthetomb]

Sonic Youth - Gila Monster Jamboree (January 5, 1985)

How are you spending the first weekend of 2025? I'm going to suggest you join me in a little time travel to the infamous/incredible Gila Monster Jamboree, which took place just about 40 years ago. Saying "things were better back then" is a losing game, and obviously kind of dumb. But things sure were different back then, right? The tale of this hallucinatory desert festival has been told many times, most comprehensively in the Desolation Center doc. But the OOP VHS of Sonic Youth's set is evocative and astonishing all on its own.

Stuart Swezey: I don’t think I actually even offered them the idea of doing a desert show then, but because they were here in Los Angeles, I met them again and we started talking about this possibility. It just seemed like what a great venue for what they were doing. They had just put out the “Death Valley ’69” single, so there was sort of this fascination with Charles Manson going to the desert and Death Valley. Again, not an obvious place to put on a Sonic Youth show because they were very much associated with New York and this East Village sensibility or whatever, especially for people out here in California, but at the same time it was actually a really perfect idea because I think they were very interested in dark aspects of Americana. Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore were together then. Her family lived in LA and so they were going to be visiting her parents over the holidays. They were like, “Well, we can stay until after New Year’s and then we can do a desert show.” So we picked the first full moon after New Year’s and we went back to the location where we did the first desert show, but used a different side of the same dry lakebed. We all went out there and scouted it. There was a graffiti spray-painted Blue Öyster Cult symbol on a rock. Thurston was like, “That’s where we’re going do it, under the Blue Öyster Cult symbol.”

Lee Ranaldo: This gig, January 5, 1985, 100 miles out into the Mojave Desert, was our first "L.A." gig, first time we'd played on the west coast, part of an airplane tour from Seattle on south. That picture of us "in the back of a Chevy" on the Death Valley '69 12-inch is also from this trip. The gig was organized by one Stuart Sweezy, now of Amok Press (check it out!), who had this penchant for strange locations -- Minutemen and Meat Puppets on a barge on the S.F. Harbor, another desert gig with Einsterzende Neubauten... your ticket entitled you to a map to the gig site which was not handed out until the morning of the show (to prevent scans). Else you could buy a place on one of the buses hired to transport those transported souls with better things to do than cope with the road. The gig started early in the day with Psi-Com, which featured a barefoot Perry Farrell skanking in the sand and waxing poetic. Redd Kross followed, and by the time we went on it was about twilight. These songs were mostly brand new at the time, from the as-yet unreleased Bad Moon Rising LP. We'd waited a long time to make it west, and this was a pretty perfect introduction. Bob Bert was on the drums with us at the time. The cover photo, by someone named Alan Peak, all trails and blurr, sums up the occasion quite well. Band portrait by Naomi Petersen. This video was shot by the folks at Flipside Magazine. After us came the Meat Puppets, who played on into the night as the desert cold set in, under a big ring around the moon.

Oh and hey, check out the Meat Puppets set if you know what's good for ya.

[nightmarerequiem]

on the edge

[surly-sara]

I shouldnt be surprised that the fandom is doing to caleb what it did to sylus. Even at their most possessive and dominant, none of these men would ever be cruel or mean to mc (sylus’s intro is an outlier that deserves its own essay), especially not to the point of pain unless it is mc’s specific kink, during sex or otherwise.