#and the brain turny off stuff

[catboyfurina]

i think it would be so rad if my only problems were ones i actually caused

[i-literally-cant-with-this]

A/N = Aki burrowed into my brain yesterday after finishing Chainsaw Man. I hadta write something. This is a little twisty & turny. Aki & F!y/n/reader have a bit of a history. I don't get too much into that. But they get together here. Who knows where they end up? It's just a quick little blah blah blah.

C/W = P -> V (unprotected), a little bit of emotional stuff (they have a history, it wasn't all kittens and rainbows). If I missed anything else, let me know so I can fix this.

It was nearing the end of fall, your second favorite season. Aki and his friends came over to help you clean out the leaf-filled rain gutters in your new house. And for free (you insist on paying them, though)! But did he expect a tip? Do you want his?

You sat on your porch steps and sipped on iced tea as Aki's friends were busy cleaning the gutters. Aki was at the top of your roof, and you couldn't see much of anything other than his legs and feet.

"Thanks a lot for hiring us, Miss y/n. My little girl is gonna have a nice Christmas thanks to you." His friend gushed about his daughter for a while before moving on to the next section of the rain gutter.

Aki climbed down the ladder and came over to you. "Y/n, may I please use your restroom? Could you show me where it is?" He smiled. Not a large smile, but you knew he wasn't the type for donning a wide grin. You appreciated that about him. He seemed more genuine than other people. He was calmer, too.

"Oh, yeah, of course. Follow me, please."

He walked toward you and extended his hand to help you up, and you led him through the kitchen to the back hallway of your house.

"It's right through there just ta‐OH!" He pressed you into the gray wall and held you there with his hips against yours. His arms were on either side of you, hands palm down on the wall and essentially trapping you.

The thing is, you felt anything but trapped. You felt like you were home. You were home. But where you always lived alone, it was just a house. With Aki here, standing over you, it felt like so much more.

"What's with the 'please'?" He put his face into your neck.

"Heyyy Aki." You spoke breathily, your face flushed from his touch. Your cunt all but wetting your exposed skin because you didn't wear panties today. And your skirt wasn't too long, either. There wasn't really anywhere to hide.

"Mmm... y/n..." he trailed off. His mouth was hot against your neck as he left little bites and kisses on your skin. His breathing was cool and steady in comparison to yours. He moved his right hand to squeeze your breast and run his fingertips over your hardened nipple and his left hand started to lift the hem of your skirt. But just as suddenly, he stepped away.

"Excuse me," he looked at you, and you could feel his gaze holding you in place. But he stepped away and pointed to where he thought the restroom was. "M–mmhm. Yeah, t-turn right at the end of the hallway."

When he was out of sight and you heard the door click shut, you slid down the wall. Squatting there for a moment, fanning yourself unsuccessfully with your hand, you heard one of the workers at the front door. "What the hell ...?"

"Miss y/n? Would it be possible for us to get some drinks out here?" The question startled you. "Oh! Ohmigosh, yes. I apologize. I, I, I –" your head fell. Giving up the ruse that you were just in your hallway hanging pictures or something. It wasn't apparent how much his friends knew about you and Aki together.

You appeared from the shadowy space with a smile on your face. A nice little pink hue had taken over your cheeks spanning down to your chest from Aki touching you.

I'll make up some ...? Lemonade? Iced tea?"

"Iced tea will be fine, Miss –"

"Call me y/n! I insist." You said warmly. "There's no need for such formalities. I'll be right out [male name]."

You set to work making up a pitcher of iced tea for everyone who's working. Your back was to the side entrance into the kitchen, and Aki snuck up behind you and slid his hands around your waist

"Oh! Aki..." You moaned a little louder than intended and leaned your head back over your shoulder. "The drinks..." You whispered, putting your hands on top of his that were holding the rolled edge of the counter.

He pushed his crotch against your ass as he breathed into your ear. "You got something I can use to wet my whistle?" He tucked his thumb into the waistband of your skirt, pulling the fabric down and softly bit the nape of your neck, causing you to shutter and jump back against him.

"You don't have to go through the trouble of getting the drinks for them," He chuckled. "They're busy with their work anyway."

"But [male name] asked me for some iced tea and ... and ..." You couldn't think with Aki's thumb so close to your throbbing core.

"What if I said I want you?" He started to walk you backward out of the kitchen. "What if I said I want my mouth all ... over ... you.

"But ... the, the dri–" you mumbled.

He took your face in his hands. His blue eyes hypnotize you where you stand. You reached out and traced his lips with your finger. He opened his mouth and bit your finger lightly. "What if I said I want you ... all over me."

You nodded your head slowly at his request. He led you down the hallway to the guest room, and you followed him willingly. But you wondered if he planned this out beforehand. Truth be told, you couldn't care less. You'd follow him just about anywhere.

When you arrived at the room, Aki closed the door behind you, and he clicked the small lock on the doorknob. He immediately started unbuttoning your shirt, kissing the exposed skin as he did.

"Mmm ... Aki ... someone could...see through the window if they're cl–ah– cleaning the gutters ..." You didn't have it in you to protest and conjure up scenarios you really didn't care about.

You were pretty sure his friends didn't have their tools and ladders at the back of the house yet. Because with the blinds open, you'd be pretty easy to see. Aki seemed to ignore your protests as he threw your shirt on the floor, pulled down your skirt, and laid you down before you could even take a breath.

"Aki..." You sat up, "I ... we ..."

He kissed you deeply, "Shh shh shhh. It's me. Just relax. Ok? I'll pull the blinds." He laughed softly.

You nodded your head and noticed just how tightly your brows were furrowed. You concentrated on relaxing them.

"Better," he smiled at you.

"Mmmm," you exhaled heavily as you ran your hands through his dark hair. "It's been too long..."

He laid down on his back, propped up on the fluffy pillows, put both of his arms out, and motioned for you to get on top of him.

"It's not been that long." He said, rather confident in his decision.

"Oh yes, it has." You slid down his body, unbuckling his belt and unbuttoning his pants. You unzipped the fly and reached into his boxers. "See, even you're excited." You smiled as you pulled his hard cock from his pants.

You laid down on the bed next to him and wrapped your hand around him. "Aki, fuck, I want you."

He slid his hand down between your legs and moaned at the feeling of your wetness. "I'm excited? Look – look at this! He dipped a couple of fingers just inside your pussy and gathered up some of your wetness. He rubbed it over his cock with his hand.

"It's only been a few months y/n. And besides, you were ..." He slid his fingers back into you. "You were cheating on me with ... with that piece of shit." He pulled out his fingers and held your gaze as he stuck them into his mouth, licking them clean.

"That wasn't cheating. It was just sex."

He raised his eyebrows at your statement.

"Why are you looking at me like that? You're the one who didn't want ... y'know, never mind. You're here now. I'm not 'cheating' on you with anyone." You began to move closer toward him on the bed.

"Is that all we are y/n?" He said it matter-of-factly. "Sex?"

"What? No. Aki ... you know me better than that."

"Yeah, I know you, y/n. But do you know me. I had to leave for a while. It's not like I wanted to go away. To be away from you." He was starting to look a little sad. The way he does when you hurt him unintentionally. The way he does when he knows you didn't mean to, though it still feels like a knife to the back. But his shoulders slump a little bit, and he has trouble keeping his eyes on yours.

It breaks your heart.

"Aki, I asked if you wanted me to wait for you. I'm sure you didn't hold out for me all that time." You stood up and peeked out the blinds. No one seemed to be looking, so you went back to the bed.

He started to sit up, but you pushed him down. "Stay. Stay right there." You turned around and straddled him. You kissed him softly.

"Y/n..."

"What is it, Aki?" You breathed against his lips.

He shook his head and looked away. "I, I..."

"What Aki?" You were more insistent this time. "Tell me."

"I love you, y/n," he whispered, his lips just barely brushing yours as you hovered over him. "I missed you so much, and I love you. I just ... I want you." He ran his hands on the underside of your thighs, grabbing your ass he pulled you closer over his lap and lined himself up with your entrance.

You carefully lowered yourself onto him and tipped his chin up with your fingers so the two of you were inches apart. He looked at you as though he might cry.

"I missed you too, Aki, but we've been without each other for a while." You began to move up and down on him slowly. "How do you feel about the time we were apart? Were you with anyone else?"

He shook his head. "I was scared of what would happen if i was, y/n. I didn't want to hurt you. I don't know if I should want you, though. Do you w–." He stopped himself. Partially because of how good you felt and because he didn't want to know the answer.

"Do I what, Aki?" You put your forehead against his.

He shook his head, unable to voice his question.

"I'm sorry, Aki. I didn't know you wanted me to wait for you. But I would never cheat on you. I'm sorry that I ... that I – well, you know."

"I know, I know." He said as he rubbed your back. "It's ok. It's not your fault. I ... I know that. Fuck. Look at me. Whining while you're fucking me. What a gentleman." He laughed to himself. "This is embarrassing."

You kissed him. "No. Don't be. You have nothing to be embarrassed about. I don't mind, though." You pressed your lips to his ear and whispered, "I missed you so much. Any extra closeness we get is a bonus."

Aki nodded, and you were relieved he didn't try to continue the previous conversation.

"Aki? What's your favorite position?" You asked him as you fucked him. "With me, of course."

He wrapped his hands around your waist and pulled you close. "This is my favorite position. On my back, you on my cock so I can see your pretty face and pretty mouth twist around. I wanna see how good I make you feel."

His words, his face. Just him being him was pushing you over the edge. "I'm gonna cum, Aki ... oh ... ah shit ..."

He grabbed your ass as he thrust upward. "You're gonna cum just like this, aren't you?" He groaned.

"Y-yes... yes, Aki, please. Oh ... my god, I've missed you so much! Please stay with me, I want you." You bounced up and down on his cock, your tits covered his face. He licked and sucked on your nipples while his hands sat at your waist.

"Aki, I'm cumming!" You cried out as you leaned over to brace yourself against his chest. "Fuck ... oh fuck!" You panted, and cried out, your head falling back as your orgasm flooded through your body.

"S'fuckin' hot, cum for me y/n," he grabbed your ass hard and lifted you up, sliding his cock out of you. "Turn around." He held you by the waist and moved so you were on the bottom. Knees on the bed and your ass in the air.

"Spread your legs." He placed his hand on the back of your thigh, pushing it apart. You looked over your shoulder at him. "Let me see how much you missed me." He sneered.

Aki pushed his cock back into your pussy from behind and slammed into you. He squeezed your ass with his left hand and reached around you with his right hand to pinch your nipple.

"Aki! Yes ... fuck ... please. Please ... I missed you so much, don't... don't stop!" You grabbed the pillow under your head and gripped it as he fucked you harder.

"Oh, you missed me?" He pulled out of you and turned you over on the bed. He held your legs up and slid right into you again.

"YES!" You shouted as he slammed back into you, fucking you hard. His face was contorted as if in pain or pleasure or both.

"You like it rough, huh y/n?"

"I like it with you." You said. Tears stream down your face from another impending orgasm. "I only like it with you, Aki!" You threw your legs down on the bed and wrapped your arms around his neck, pulling him in to kiss you.

"What if I say I wanna make you cum like THIS?" He slammed into you hard.

You arched your back, lifting your ass into the air and whimpered, "Please, please Aki, cum inside me.

He slammed into you once more. His body convulsed as he came. "Fuck! Yes! Ah y/n!"

The two of you were so lost in your own little world that you didn't hear Aki's friends by the guest bedroom window.

"C–can we have some iced tea now, Miss y/n?"

Thank you for reading!

╭╯Sarah╰╮

[fairytsuk1]

despite everything, it’s still you | (a)

character: tommyinnit

genre: angst

words: 1.8k

summary: tommyinnit is sent to the afterlife after being killed by dream, his experience as a broken soul in the afterlife is different than he'd imagined.

warnings: head injury at the beginning and it’s a bit graphically described! also depersonalization with the afterlife

notes: a bit different from my usual stuff but i had this idea and wanted to do it!

     The last thing Tommy's present body feels is his brain practically leaking out of his ears. The force with which his head is knocked into the ground is too strong, and he instantly blacks out. Dream's fists collided into him much harder than he thought, and it was even harder to try to block each hit as he was instantly overpowered by the godlike man. He just couldn't seem to get away. His soul might have even been connected with Dream's at one point; how could someone live every day of their life and always go back to the one who caused so much pain?  It's not a peaceful end; it's gory and sticky with blood splattered on the quickly growing pale skin. When Tommy opens his eyes, there's no Tubbo or blue sky; it's just white. The first thing he realizes is that he's not breathing, but he's not dying because of it. Because, well, he's already dead.

"Dream?..."

     His thoughts are there, at least the most important ones. There are some of them that blur together, like watching a movie on fast-forward and not pausing. He couldn't remember his life so far up to his death, and the panic was setting in; what man didn't remember their own life? Was he even Tommy?  A thump beats in his chest but looking down...there is no chest at all. In fact, there is no skin, bones, no solidifying figure that could tell him, "ah, I was a person."  Tommy doesn't even want to think about what would happen if he didn't know his own name. Would he be lost to time forever?

"What the fuck is going on…?" his finger jabs at the translucent blob of a figure, he's still got limbs, but he looks like a bucket of slime rather than a fleshed-out human, "Hah! I'm like fuckin' Charlie Slimecicle…"

      His humor hasn't left him, which warms his heart. Well, he supposes he has no heart as Tommy continues to poke and prod the gelatin-like substance he was hosting. It was weird seeing the ghostly shape of your own body, long legs, and big yet bony hands...it was freaky.

"This is just disgusting, actually. Fuckin' hell…"

     He stands and tries to ignore the way he feels weightless; it's depersonalizing. Makes him nauseous to think of how he doesn't exist in the mortal realm, but instead, he's here in some sort of blank space.

"Wilbur!"

     Walking, he realizes that he feels loose and lets out a laugh when he twists his body and finds it going farther than any human could. His ghostly capabilities were kinda cool! He had to focus though he needed to find a way to jump back down to Earth if he was dead. As much as he enjoyed being able to touch his toes and squat with his feet flat on the ground, the loneliness was starting to get to him.      Though he didn't say anything out loud, being dead was starting to get a little scary. Of course, the lead-up wasn't nice, and he's glad to be pain-free (though he does jerk out of shock once he realizes his head is caved in). There's something about being alive that is just so...he misses it, that's all.

"Wilbur!...Schlatt??"

     Tommy walks for a while with no changes to his atmosphere. For a moment, he thinks that he hasn't even been walking with the lack of environmental changes. That train of thought simmers to a stop as he spots a bench in the distant future, running towards it at lightning speed. There's no sound when he runs; his voice doesn't even echo. It's as though this afterlife has nothing in it at all. Like it's made of nothing. Like he's made of nothing.       He relaxes into the bench and smiles widely; if only he had his favorite disks! It's like being with Tubbo again, like being kids again! The warm touch of affection kisses his cheek as warmth spreads through him. When can he go back? He's so ready to go back.

"You know, Tubbo, I hope you're not all focused on Ranboo to forget about me! I mean, I'm that one that, you know, died!"

     Who is he speaking to? This afterlife is really getting to him, there is no Tubbo here, and there is no Mellohi. The smile fades as he glances around, white on white: white walls, floor, ceiling.

"Whoever the God here is, your heaven is shit."

     He shouldn't have said that. The bench rumbles, and he's shocked to see it crumbling underneath him. Chips of wood fly into space, and he scrambles off of it, watching it decompose his very own eyes.

"Ah, ah, wait! I'm sorry, I'm really sorry! Give it back! Give me my damn bench back, you bitch!"

     A bigger piece flies off and slices his hand, a glob of his fingers falling off and melting into the ground as he stands panicked. There's no blood, but it suddenly hits him. He isn't even human; this is all he has left. He's lucky to have his thoughts. That is his last tether to all he knows. If he lets himself be broken down, he'll never be human again. His time is limited. He has to find a way out.      

     His feet take off before he can even realize it, sprinting as he shouts for Sam, Tubbo, Wilbur, and even Phil.      

     But nobody came. No-one scooped him up and rescued him like they should've. He's only a child, for god's sake!

"What have I done to deserve any of this!? Let me go back! I want to go back!!"

     His voice is shaky as he spins, decomposed and blocky trees forming around him like corroded pixels. He could cry, but he's holding it back; Dream instilled that in him. The less you care, the better the ending. The trees fall in shards, and each one that touches him breaks off a piece of him. He's practically melting as he runs through the rain of pixels, each one hell-bent on destroying his soul.      Right now, he's no human. It's his soul in the purest form. His feet stick together before pulling apart, and he collapses onto the solid white ground. Everything jiggles, and he thinks he might pass out with the pure shock of taking in everything around him. His body ripples like water as he hears a faint and distant voice call for him.

    "Tommy?"

     A memory.         "My first decree, as the President of L'Manberg, the EMPEROR, of this GREAT COUNTRY! IS TO REVOKE! THE CITIZENSHIP! OF WILBUR SOOT AND TOMMYINNIT! GET 'EM OUTTA HERE!"

      Is that his savior? The one who's come for him? The one who caused his life hell in the first place? Well, maybe it was Wilbur who did that. Or Technoblade. Or even Dream, but Dream was his friend even though he struck him so hard he sobbed for someone to help him—

     "Hey, Tommy! What the hell are you doing, kid? Where the fuck's your body?"

     He's being hoisted up by his arms, and he pushes into Schlatt's chest as he cries and cries. The Ram hybrid grunts and mumbles something before pushing him back to hold his shoulders. He was never one for affection.      When Schlatt looks at Tommy, he knows this is the book's doing. Dream, the current owner of the book, had done this all in preparation. The easiest way to bring someone back was to only let their pure soul transfer on, everything else remaining the same.

     "It's easier than moving a whole body, right?"

"Whatever, just take the fucking book, man. I'm busy."

     Tommy's damaged. He's deformed, and his soul is hot to the touch. He's in agony. He didn't know he could sleep till it was over or relax. He tried to fix things and find a solution like he always does. Now, he was broken like he always was.

"Schlatt I...how do I go back? I don't want to be here anymore! It's fucking shit! And, and it hurts! This isn't some heaven; it's fuckin' hell!"

     Dream sat on the prison floor after arranging Tommy's body in a relaxed position, the book open in front of him.

     "Time to come back, Tommy."

     "Hey, hey! You listen to me! That fucker Dream, you have to be strong! He's messed you up, but this isn't the Tommy I know! You don't fucking cry, and you don't fucking get scared! You're the bravest kid I know!"

     Tommy feels flashbacks come to him, slowly but surely. Him rowing to fight Dream, the bravery he had when he fought him one on one. The first disk war...he was so brave.

     When he looks up at Schlatt, he sees the man he fought so hard against and won. He clocks in at that moment.

     I used to be someone. Now, I'm just like everyone else. Scared and weak.

     "You used to be someone, Tommy! You are someone! You just have...believe and know... you're stronger…!"

     Schlatt gets all twisty and turny, his vision fading in and out as he feels himself being dragged away from his arms. For a second, Schlatt reaches out, seeing his son in a box. He retreats and opts to yell out as Tommy fights to regain himself.       The strength is unrelenting as the young boy's head twists to see his arm pulled like taffy towards a glowing light. It's so pretty; he could almost just touch it and forget it all.

     "You are stronger than anyone else, Tommyinnit!"

     His head whips back, and he extends a jelly arm, his fight coming back to him.

     "If you fucking lose yourself, you'll lose everything!"

"If I lose myself, I'll lose everything…"        "You were made to beat this world, and don't you dare fucking forget it!"

     It makes Schlatt grin as Tommy's widened eyes get pulled as he's compressed into a singularity. There's a sudden pop, and Schlatt's knocked back as the white walls envelop him. He wants to yell more, but Tommy's already back where he belongs. He's already gone.

     "Tommy? Hey, Tommy!"

     His cerulean eyes open like he'd just drank an energy drink, a smiling mask staring up at him. For a moment, he wants to shrink back into the floor.

     "How was it? How was the afterlife?"

 If I don't beat him, how could anyone else?

     He snickers, "awful. I'm never going back there again."

     Tommy feels determination settle in his soul. After everything, he's still him. If he loses himself, he'll never be able to bring it back. So, the only other option is to fight.

     If I win, maybe then, I can know who I am.

[mariephillipswriter]

Square Eyes

Do they still say that if you watch too much television you'll get square eyes? Or is that an expression that went out of fashion when kids started spending all their time in front of the internet? Putting aside the obvious riposte (televisions aren't square, they're rectangular) I can report that I have been doing extensive research in this area and have come to the scientific conclusion: no, you won't. I have been watching so much television. SO MUCH TELEVISION. I never believed that I could watch such an immense quantity of television. On the whole I don't watch it during the day except for sometimes when I am having my breakfast and also when having my lunch, but in the evenings, when I have finished pretending to work, I might start watching television at about 6pm, or 5pm, or 4pm on a bad day, and keep going until, say, 11pm or midnight. HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE. HOW CAN A PERSON LIVE THIS WAY. Well it's easy enough, it turns out, if you're under lockdown in London in December and it's dark from 4pm and raining most of the time and you have the emotional resources of a gnat and reading is too demanding and talking on the phone is too exhausting and the light in the living room is not good enough for doing a puzzle in evening hours and you quit social media a month or so ago because it was driving you out of your mind with anxiety. I don't watch six or seven or eight hours of television every night. Don't be ridiculous. Some nights I only watch about three hours of television because I have a Zoom call or I'm cooking dinner or I've got stuck into a good cryptic crossword, maybe the Saturday Times Jumbo one because the Guardian ones are too gimmicky, or at last I've found a book gripping yet easy enough that I can't put it down (thank you Robert Galbraith, thank you Marian Keyes), but I would say that three hours is the minimum and my god that is a LOT. EVERY DAY. THREE HOURS. MINIMUM. But you don't need to me to explain that to you because you are all watching three four five six seven hours of television every day and when you are not watching television you are phoning your friends and first of all talking about the specific way that your own personal lockdown is terrible but then eventually saying 'what are you watching on television' because what else is there even to talk about? At the start of lockdown there was quite a small pool of television that everyone was watching (that thing about the Tiger King, which I didn't watch because by the time I got back from my early lockdown in Costa Rica you'd all seen it, and Normal People which I didn't watch because I was too embarassed to sit through all the sex scenes with my flatmates, and I May Destroy You, which I didn't watch because about five minutes of it was enough to send me into a massive panic spiral, but I hear was very good), but once we had all (other than me) got through that and Covid dragged on for months, our conversations began taking on the tenor of Vikings crowding around one another as a boat returns from a foray, WHAT IS OUT THERE, WHAT DID YOU FIND OUT THERE, IS THERE SOMETHING OUT THERE THAT I MIGHT DESIRE? And the Viking says yes, there is this thing called Schitts Creek but you really have to push on through the first season because I promise you it gets better and better and you will start to love that obnoxious family. And then we all watched Schitts Creek. (Including me, it's wonderful, you have to push on through the first series you will start to love that obnoxious family, Dan Levy is a divinity in human form and if you want more of him you could do worse than checking out the lesbian Christmas-themed romcom Happiest Season, which you can rent from Amazon Prime.) And now we are beyond even that and all our lives resonate with the screeching sound of a televisual barrel being scraped and now this is when things get really interesting (or put another way, VERY VERY BORING) because everyone has fractured and we are all watching different kinds of random stuff found in the dusty corners and unloved algorithms of our streaming services. There's the friend who has got into watching obscure French crime series on Netflix (The Chalet! La Mante!) and the friend who is watching every episode of Poirot on Britbox (thirteen series, 70 episodes) (though that pales in comparison with the friend who did a total rewatch of Friends from beginning to end (236 episodes) and finished it ages ago and is starving for more) and the friend who calls me up seemingly every week with a new old show nobody else has ever heard of (such as the early 1990s Nigel Havers and Warren Clarke comedy spy drama Sleepers, which he is watching old-school-style on DVD, and which apparently is like The Americans only with Nigel Havers and funny, and also, you should watch The Americans.) When I look back on the amount of television I have watched this year it defies comprehension. There were the things I would have watched anyway like the whole of Strictly Come Dancing and His Dark Materials, and the things that took me by surprise, like the stealthily hilarious Danny Dyer gameshow The Wall that was on straight after Strictly and drove me into a total obsession with the way that Danny Dyer says "Drop 'Em" (he's talking about the balls that are dropped down the wall, it's hard to explain, you can find it on iPlayer, but meanwhile if you only click on one link in this whole newsletter PLEASE click on that one), there were the things that were created especially to get me through lockdown (the wonderful David Tennant and Michael Sheen Zoom comedy Staged, which is not only extremely funny but allows you to see inside David Tennant's house which I'm not sure I am technically allowed to watch because of the restraining order? Anyway, new series coming on Monday, fellow DT fans) and the familiar things I watched to soothe me when it all got too much (Doctor Who, starting before Tennant even gets in on the action, right at the begining of the New Who seasons with Christopher Eccleston, because armchair space travel is the only kind of travel we are going to be getting for a while) and the exciting things I watched when I could no longer bear the tedious repetition of every identical day (Line of Duty, in which the famous-for-the-far-inferior Bodyguard writer Jed Mercurio delivers ludicrously compelling twisty-turny stories about police corruption that cannot be predicted for even a nanosecond) and the things that I watched just because I loved them (Fosse/Verdon, the Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon bio-series starring the breathtakingly charismatic Sam Rockwell and Michelle Williams, which is one of the best-made pieces of television I've ever seen, Love Life, the Anna Kendrick romantic comedy series which was surprisingly touching and truthful about the relationships that make up a life and which didn't make me want to open a vein as a single person the way that many looking-for-love shows do, and Better Things, a sort-of-comedy sort-of-drama written, directed by and starring Pamela Adlon, which began as a collaboration with Louis CK and initially reflected the sensibility of his show Louie, but became far more experimental and interesting once, after CK's disgrace, Adlon took over completely - the fourth series is maybe the closest thing I've seen on TV to a representation of the rhythms of real life, with long scenes of Adlon just cooking a meal on her own, or contemplating the rain, of having arguments with her children that explode from nowhere and end just as suddenly with tears or laughter or nothing at all.) And this entire paragraph is just things that I have watched on the BBC. Not even everything that I have watched on the BBC. The BBC is INCREDIBLE and my license fee has been serious value for money, before you even count all that time spent watching the news [Munch Scream emoji]. But overall, it doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of television that I have watched this year. Though while we're here, have you noticed that sometimes it's more relaxing to watch something bad than something good? Have you noticed that a vapid, cliched show like Virgin River (heartbroken city nurse with a secret moves to small town and falls in love with battle-wounded bartender with a secret), a show that makes This Is Us look like Succession, has the same effect on your brain that taking off your work shoes and putting on your slippers has for your feet? You can rest now, it says, there is nothing more for you to do. Have you noticed how easy it is to chug down, say, four episodes in a row of Designated Survivor - a show designed by a committee charged with taking elements of The West Wing, Homeland and 24, and making something similar but, crucially, much more ridiculous - without your mind even noticing that anything has happened at all? And if you're really ready for something utterly idiotic, might I suggest The Bold Type, in which three twentysomething girls in bonkers designer outfits "work" at an aspirationally "feminist" glossy magazine, and by "work" I mean constantly leave the office in the middle of the day to take care of personal business, and by "feminist" I mean "empowering women by for example having them post selfies of themselves looking perfect but without makeup on social media", a feminism so very feminist that they called the magazine's parent company Steinem in the first series and then had to change it to Safford, I can only presume because Gloria Steinem threatened to sue them. A couple of episodes of that is the televisual equivalent of having a nice relaxing full frontal lobotomy. Don't get me wrong: I love these shows. I owe them more gratitude than I can say. I would be unable to survive without them. I've managed to watch five hours of television just since starting this post24 hours ago (three episodes of Doctor Who, half a really cheap and very bad Sky Arts documentary about the musical Hamilton, and a travelogue in which Torvill and Dean go in search of a frozen lake in Alaska on which to dance Bolero but can't find one for almost the entire show because of global warming, which made me simultaneously and conflictingly want to give up air travel, fly to Alaska immediately, become obsessed with Torvill and Dean AND wonder how they managed to skate together all these decades without killing each other especially Torvill but also especially Dean). Five hours of TV, sounds like a lot, but with eight hours of sleep, that still left me eleven hours to fill in this boring boring boring boring BORING BORING BORING boring boring BORING boring BORING BORING lockdown. I think I am being incredibly restrained, all things considered. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some time to kill, having finished writing this post, and with at least five hours to fill before bed. I wonder what's on TV?

***

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[helenarlett-rex]

Goosebumps Review #6

Oh my god… I may not have found a new favorite Goosebumps, but I have definitely just added this one to the upper half of my top 10 list.

Moving on with my little project of reading all the Goosebumps I never got the chance to read as a kid…

(Spoilers)

I Live In Your Basement!

Goosebumps (original series) #61

This was the 2nd to the last book in the original series. The last Goosebumps R.L. Stine would write before releasing Monster Blood 4, which was such a crapshot he would have to reinvent himself with the Goosebumps Series 2000 the following year. And it’s a wild one. But in a very good way. This book really screwed with my head. I almost want to compare it to Oculus levels of mind fuckery. I’m also going to say, that as far as Goosebumps goes, this is probably some of the most disturbing imagery I have ever seen in the original series.

The cover is a little misleading, making it look like just another silly monster book of which Stine has given us so many already, but that’s because you don’t understand the context of what you are looking at. That and the cover artist doesn’t even come close to capturing the grotesque horror of what it should actually be.

Now I need to point out again that I’m going to spoil the story here, (in fact I’m going to ramble on a lot on this one) so if you are at all interested in reading the book yourself, please go do that before reading this. Go buy a copy or, if you don’t want to spend money, go to your local library. If they don’t have a copy, ask about Inter Library Loan. You can do that you know... You can ask a library to have a book shipped to them from another library. That’s actually my day job... This is one where you really don’t want spoilers if you are going to read it. If you have no interest in reading a Goosebumps book and just want to hear my review then please continue.

The story revolves around Marco, a young boy who lives with his incredibly overprotective mother. His mother is never named in the book. She is always just called “Mom”, and his father is never mentioned at all. We don’t know if Marco has a father, if he is always away at work, if he is dead, if he ran off after getting Marco’s mom pregnant… it’s just never talked about. And the reason behind all the lack of info on both of his parents won’t make much sense until the end of the book.

Marco’s mom is so overprotective she doesn’t allow him to do anything because he’ll “break every bone in his body” among other excuses. So Marco has to sneak out of the house to go play softball with his friends from school. And that’s when his friend Gwynnie promptly smashes his head in with a baseball bat… on accident mind you…

When Marco comes to he finds himself laying on the couch in his living room with his mom worrying herself into a fit as she fusses over him. Most things are a blur at this point but as he is drifting in and out of consciousness there is a point where he is woken up by the phone ringing and his mom is nowhere to be seen so he answers it. The voice on the other end sounds like a young boy who says, “I hope you’re okay. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you. Because you’re going to take care of me from now on.” When Marco asks who this is the boy answers that his name is Keith, and when Marco says that he doesn’t know any Keith, Keith replies with, “You should know me, Marco. I live in your basement.”

This understandably freaks him out but his mom thinks he was only dreaming it and chocks it up to the blow to the head, because after all, “Marco, there’s no phone in this room.” As the story goes on Marco continues to hear from Keith either from more phone calls or from Keith talking up to him directly from down the basement stairs. Eventually Keith actually shows up in Marco’s bedroom and he appears to be just a young boy around the same age as Marco, who happens to look just like L from Death Note (judging by the way Stine describes him). But any time Marco tries to prove Keith’s existence to his mom, Keith is always gone. Even when Marco locks Keith in his bedroom he is gone by the time Marco drags his mom up to the room and unlocks the door.

The book was very creepy throughout all of this and did a good job keeping me on edge. But after a while of this Marco’s mom thinks he’s hallucinating and may have brain damage so she takes him back to the doctor, and this is where the book starts to get weird. It’s also where Stine does something hilarious I’ve never seen him do before. The chapter ends with the doctor suggesting that he would like to remove Marco’s brain so he can study it under a microscope to find out what the problem is. I’m sitting there thinking, okay Stine… you are starting the fake-out scares now are you? I’m going to turn to the next page and the chapter is going to start with the doctor laughing and telling Marco it was only a joke. But then I turn to the next page and… it’s not a joke… The doctor is serious. And even more surprising, Marco’s mom is all on board with this idea. I keep reading and waiting for someone to tell him it’s a joke, but they never do. They are seriously considering removing his brain.

Do you see what Stine did there? The fake out was in itself a fake out. He built up my expectations to the point where I believed it was going to be a fake out, and then it wasn’t. The only fake out was the fact that he made it look like it was going to be a fake out. A double fake out. Stine wrote 60 books filled with fake out scares just like that only to finally turn it around and use 60 books worth of expectations against me. This was amazing and it really caught me off guard.

They don’t actually remove Marco’s brain, deciding to wait and think about it for a while, but from that point on the story just kept getting weirder. Such as when he goes to Gwynnie for help and asks her to come with him to explore his basement to try and find Keith (because Gwynnie is the biggest, toughest, meanest girl he knows and Marco couldn’t give a shit about gender role stereotypes at this point). Then they naturally don’t find anything and Gwynnie thinks Marco is just trying to scare her, but she tells him he can’t scare her, and she’ll show him why… Which she does by ripping her mouth open wider than the size of her entire head and vomiting up all her internals until she has turned herself completely inside out and lays on the floor as a bloody, pulsating mess. (Which the book’s cover does a poor job of trying to depict.)

Are you still with me, or have you just spit out whatever you were drinking and shouted “what the fuck?” while scrolling back up to the top to make sure I am indeed still reviewing a Goosebumps book? Because this is the part where Marco wakes up in the hospital only an hour after getting hit in the head and I find myself saying, “Hold on… We are only half way through the book? It’s too soon for the twist ending… If it was all a dream what are all these other pages? I still have half a book to go!”

Well the second half of the book is where the story keeps twisting and turning to the point where I never know what is real and what is a dream. Marco can’t tell either. When he wakes up and finds out that Gwynnie is not his best friend, but is instead his sister, and he was actually hit in the head by his friend Jeremy, he’s unsure if these facts are correct or if the way things were before Gwynnie turned herself inside out was how it was supposed to be. And then naturally, more disturbing stuff keeps happening. Keith keeps contacting him and insisting that Marco is going to take care of him, that doctor keeps changing in appearance every time Marco sees him… Reading the second half of this book you start to fall down the rabbit hole fast and hard. Even when Marco would wake up from something horrible I still couldn’t be sure if that had actually been a dream, or if him waking up was the dream.

I personally suffer from sleep paralysis. I’m no stranger to waking up only to still be in a dream, and then waking up from that to still be in a dream. It’s a terrifying experience. And then when you finally do wake up for real, and you think back on what you just went through, and you can’t be sure it really was a dream, is equally terrifying. And this book captures those feelings quite well. I’m not going to say the book is about sleep paralysis, but as someone who has it, it’s a pretty scary similarity.

But then things lead up to a final confrontation with Keith and after a battle that I wasn’t sure was even happening or not, he wakes up again only to find that he is Keith. He and his mom are both those inside out monsters, and they live in hiding down in Marco and Gwynnie’s basement, and he got smashed in the head by them and this is why his mom keeps warning him that he is a monster and he can’t go play with those humans, as much as he might want to. And we still have a few chapters left to go… Every time I think I finally know what’s going on, I’m still second guessing if it’s real or not.

Even when the book finally ends with Marco discovering Keith in the basement and Keith tells him that he’s only dreaming, I’m still unsure of things. How much of it was actually a dream and how much was real? Who’s dream was it even? Was it  actually Keith’s dream all along, or was it Marco’s dream? Given the way other characters shifted throughout the story, such as Gwynnie starting out as Marco’s best friend and then becoming his sister, it’s not out of the question that Marco may have started to dream that he was Keith. Was Keith ever even real at all? But then it’s also not out of the question that Keith would have been dreaming that he was Marco. And if the mom was actually Keith’s mom and they are the only two monsters living down there, and he carried her over into being his mom when he was dreaming he was Marco, then it would explain why Marco’s father was never mentioned. It’s all just very twisty and turny and I still don’t know what’s what… and I rather loved it.

[timelordvictoiouspartyof1]

Getting Into You

Summary: John is being pressured to have second thoughts about his relationship with Sherlock

Word: <1500

Warnings: None

A/N: This is my first time writing JohnLock. Hope I did it justice. This is the shortest thing I have written so far! 

---------

John had always been confident. Starting with his pursuit of Sherlock. It was casual at first; he would pop by his studio at the end of practice to make casual conversation. It had confused Sherlock, why would the handsome, popular captain of the rugby team spend a moment of his time with the weirdo outcast, too smart for his own good, ballet dancing boy two years younger than him? Let alone that he was doing it on purpose? That Sherlock had decided was outside of his realm of understanding so he ignored it because it pained him to not know something, and he didn’t want to question it and have it go away either. Over time it had grown into more, oh, so much more. Sherlock had welcomed his friendship openly, never having had a friend before, he quite enjoyed it. He indulged in it completely. John giving him a ride home after both practices had finished. Spending most of their weekends together, Sherlock would study and John would wander around his room digging old things out of his closet or drawers to investigate or just listening to music on the bed. John often stayed nights there, Sherlock never questioned why, assuming he already knew the answers.  Then things changed one night when John showed up at his house late, sweaty as if he had run the whole way. He had collapsed into Sherlock's arms and wept openly about his situation at home, confirming all of Sherlock's deductions. It was then, wrapped in Sherlock's arms sitting on the bed, that John gave one last confession, lacing his fingers in black hair he pressed his lips to the other boys mouth, putting all of his wants and desires in a single kiss. 

After that John seemed more alive. Sherlock had felt that way the moment John had walked into the studio for the first time. It was the start of his second year, seeing John walk in and appraise him in full leotard and slippers, dance belt and all, he had braced himself for an onslaught of insults and vulgar slang but John's words had been kind.  

"That was uh," his eyes cast down, unable to meet his object of desire, that he had pined over all of last year, for fear of not getting the words out. "that was bloody brilliant. Can you do that turny thing all the time, or just like uh...." He didn't know a thing about ballet and cursed himself for not doing enough research to call it anything other than 'that turny thing'. That was the moment Sherlock came to life. Regardless of if this moment would turn into anything more, finding kindness instead of hate lit something inside of him. Spending the next few months with his rugby playing jock best friend had only fueled it.

This fire was now burning inside John. He never wanted to be apart from the other boy. He went out of his way to catch him in the hall for a quick kiss. He held his hand at lunch. Sherlock had tried to stop him by slowly pulling back but he loved seeing the shy smile that crept across his new boyfriend when he did this too much to stop. John was so confident that, against his better judgement, Sherlok indulged these open displays of affection.

Then it started. In the locker room, a few of his mates were talking to him as they were getting things together to leave and one of them started in. "We're just worried about you mate. You could have anyone, being with him is just going to make things hard for no reason. No one cares he’s a bloke, it’s ‘cause he’s sooo weird.  He's not like you, you’ll see. I just don't think you know what you're getting yourself into." 

"Yeah, no man, it's ok. It’s worth it. He makes me happy." John replied, always polite. They were just looking out for him he thought. He grabbed his stuff and walked off. 

The second time it happened it was much less kind. John was sitting at the usual lunch table waiting for his gorgeous boy to arrive when a pack of cheerleaders made their way over. One of them slid his lunch tray to the side and sat in its place, straddling her feet on either side of John's chair. Leaning forward deliciously she whispered into his ear. "Come back to us baby. Think about all the fun we used to have, and can again." She placed her palms on his chest. His whole body tensed and he cleared his thought, not giving any other response. This apparently was not the response she was looking for and her words turned sour. She leaned out of his personal space and told him crossly, "You have no idea what you're getting yourself into. But figure it out quickly or we might not be here when you do." With that she hopped off the table and walked away revealing Sherlock sitting in his usual spot across from him fidgeting with his fork. John cleared his throat, baring himself for whatever lashing he was sure was about to come. 

"Right then," the younger boy started, taking a bite of macaroni, "how was bio?" Looking up at him, expression unphased.

The third time hit the hardest. He was giving his sister Harry a ride home. As they pulled into the drive she sighed, placing a soft hand on his forearm and turning to face him. "Look, all I'm saying is that I'm no stranger to self-inflicted heartache. And I'm saying he will break your heart but being with him isn't going to make things easier. I hear people talking and no one is happy about it. I guess all I'm asking is, do you really know what you're getting yourself into?" With that she kissed him on the cheek and got out the car. So there he was, his relationship less than two weeks old, wondering 'did he know what he was getting himself into?' He pulled out the drive and headed to Sherlock's.

John was pacing the room. He was tossing a ball back and forth between his hands. A ball he was certain he must has left there at some point. Sherlock would never own something to trivial as a ball. He was rambling. Sherlock was sitting at his desk, his nose in a textbook, scribbling things into his binder, studying, as usual. John's brain was moving just as fast as his mouth was words and thoughts mixed together as he tried to work this all out. He had been so confident in his pursuit of Sherlock. He had wanted him, laid a plan carefully, stalked him like prey and now he was his. He knew he had wanted him that's why this was so hard, they were already messing with his head and he didn't like that. He usually relied on Sherlock to sort things like this out. He had grown accustom in such a short time to having him do the work. So he rambled on trying to sort it all, good thing Sherlock wasn't really listening. As fast as he was talking he was still minding his words. He didn't want to say anything that would hurt his beautiful boy or God forbid something that would make him lose the boy forever. 

His brain was racing faster, reasoning out thoughts. Sherlock was resilient and rational. He was logical. Not emotional. But he was still unsure his limit of what he could say to get help reasoning this out but in turn not hurt his feelings that he might he questioning this. All the words were spilling out too quickly now, "I'm not a weak minded man, you know that Sherlock. But what am I getting myself into? Is th-" John stopped when he saw the pen in the other boy’s perfect hand stop writing. He had done it. Sherlock was furious. He had every right to be. John had pursued him. Called him out of his comfort zone for his own selfish desires. He had done all this with the promise of safety and time and now he was questioning things. Moments passed and the only thing registering in John’s head now was the sound of his own breath. 

Not looking up from his page he said, “I love you, and that is what you are getting yourself into, John Watson.”

 All the air left John’s body and he was certain that his heart had actually stopped, or at least skipped a couple beats. He realized for the first time in his life that no one had ever said those three words to him before.  He did not deserve Sherlock Holmes. He knew that now and he would not stop pursuing him until that gorgeous boy before him knew it. 

“Now, would you please stop of that incessant pacing and LIE. DOWN.”

[sunderlorn]

Got tagged in this big long Describe Yr OC Meme by @chameleonspell because they love to make me suffer as they have suffered, toil as they have toiled. I am more merciful, which is why I am tagging no-one. (Also cos chameleonspell tagged most of everyone I’d’ve tagged anyway.)

GENERAL

Name: Simra Hishkari. Alias(es): Sim. Harmless. Flintfingers. “Hey, greyling…” Lonya, to his mum, but not for a while thank fuck. Gender: Cis male. Age: That depends where you’re reading, doesn’t it? Uhhh. He’s 11 in chapter one of part one, poking his nose around Senvalis’ shop and bothering the poor mer for paper. And now in part three, he’s recently endured his twenty-fourth birthday. Place of birth: Chiming Row, The Rigs, The Grey Quarter of Windhelm, Eastmarch, Skyrim. Spoken languages: Native Level Grey Quarter Dunmeri Patois. Fluent Marchspeak. A flexible range of Tamrielics, from the sort of versatile trade-tonguey Imperial Tamrielic you’ll hear at the docks of any major city, to something like the closest thing Skyrim has to a unifying language: an archaic version of Tamrielic with enough in common with all Skyrim’s dialects that it’s at least mutually intelligible for most people. Fluent House Dunmeris, with a few dialectic oddities picked up and understood. Relatively fluent Velothis. Some Riftspeak. Can curse a bit in Jel. Sexual orientation: Insert a withering stare and a question as to why it’s your fucking business. Practically speaking, bisexual. As in, he’s been attracted to men, women, and in the words of the warrior-poet Fred Durst, people who just don’t give a fuck. He doesn’t really have the terminology to parse that out in his own words though. Probably thinks of sexuality more in terms of activity than identity. Occupation: Murderhobo. Uhhh. I mean…freelancer. Currently, anyway. That is to say, sellsword, bounty-hunter, scavenger. Formerly? Semi-pro urchin. Carrier of heavy things on the Windhelm docks. Soldier-of-fortune. Prayer-scriv. Storyteller and sort-of-kind-of-sheriff at one point. Basically like a literal  accountant at another point too. Moral support to more qualified goatherds. Fireman — like, literally, a man who makes fires happen. Quartermaster’s assistant. Caravan guard. Itinerant herder and spokesperson of certain itinerant wisewomen. Bootleg performer of certain Temple rites and duties.

(This is long, so more under the cut.)

APPEARANCE

Eye colour: A reddish shade of amber or an ambery shade of red. Hair colour: Cinder-white. Height: About 5’10” (178 cm or s0). Scars: Oh god I literally have a fucking like reference sheet to keep track of all these. His Velothi harrowmarks: a hornlike curl out from the corner of his left eye, and a tapering line underscored for half its length with a series of dots, curving from the right edge of his mouth up towards his ear. A deep stiff scar through the left side of his lips, diagonal, from near his nostril to the beginning of his chin. A shallow horizontal scar across the side of his throat. A ragged starburst of scar tissue, in the muscle between neck and shoulder, just above his right collarbone and again at the back of his neck, from taking an arrow and having it pushed out. A flat diagonal stab-wound, on the left side of his ribs. A torn right earlobe. A straight raised scar up the back of his ribcage, on the left. A series of silver lines on the outermost three fingers of his right hand, where the joints meet the knuckles, and lightning-scar-looking traces following from those fingers over the front and back of his hand. And a plethora of tiny nicks and burns, mostly concentrated on his forearms and hands. Does a twice-broken nose count? Overweight: Nope. Underweight: At several points in his life, yeah.

FAVOURITE

Colour: Sea colours and shades of bronze. In clothes? Leather tones, slate greys, off-whites, neutral gloomy blues, details and decals in reds, silvers, copper, brass. Doesn’t tend to wear pure blacks or whites, or any particularly saturated colour — they spoil too easy. Hair colour: Statistics suggest red, though he’d be quick to insist it’s just coincidence, not, like, a fucking Thing or anything. Eye colour: Not red. Light-coloured eyes are weird and novel. Music genre: Weirdly he doesn’t enjoy music with lyrics all that much. (In canon, anyway — he’d feel differently in a modern AU or whatever.) Finds it distracting. They can be interesting, of course, but it’s not something that makes him happy hearing it. He likes stringed instruments with an emphasis on drones or echoes and silence. Things like the Tamrielic equivalent of qanun, koto, morin khuur, etc. Side note, but in modern AUs he’s definitely the sort of person who’s physically incapable of doing anything as mundane as laundry or tidying without putting a podcast on first. Movie genre: This is AU stuff, but yeah, he might talk a big game about being into Deep Penetrating Drama and so on, but he’d most often find himself watching the feature length equivalent of all you can eat hi-octane junk food buffets. Fighty action movies, particularly with an emphasis on melee combat. Finds revenge narratives particularly rewarding. Only genres he really considers himself a buff on though are samurai cinema and westerns. He’ll yammer at length about Anti-Westerns too if you get him started. (Don’t.) TV show: Hates the idea of having to watch anything live at a particular time. Fuck letting something as petty as TV schedule and section his life. Will gladly on-demand binge on historical drama, gritty travel documentaries, and twisty-turny political and intriguey thrillers. Doesn’t like cooking shows. Doesn’t want personality with his foodporn. He’d rather wait for the book to come out. Food: The Platonic ideal of Simra food is basically like soft starchy silky carbs with something sharp and heavily spiced on top. Rice porridge and preshta-jan, maybe with a raw egg stirred in while it’s hot. Fresh soft panbreads used to mop up redspiced mutton. Meat still feels like too much of a luxury to have often though, and he has a lot of feelings about vegetables. Pickled carrots, cucumbers, turnips, greens, green tomatoes, soft or crisp, spiced or just salty. Yams roasted in embers, smashed open, drizzled with spiced honey. Dried fruit is a particular pleasure as well, with a special place in his heart for persimmons and figs. Drink: Black tea of any sort – Nordic pine-smoked, Dunmeri fermented, light or dark, toasted or not – taken with sugar or honey. Alcohol of any sort felt like a luxury to be taken whenever luck offers it, back when he was a little younger. He’s got preferences these days, though whether he sticks to them is debatable and down to circumstance. He likes red and dark beers, biscuity flavours in the former, bittersweet in the latter. Hasn’t had either in a good few years though, and mazte compares oddly, to him — too starchy and sour. He once drank some Colovian grape brandy before he realised it was expensive enough that he really should have just sold it, and liked that well enough. He’s had actual grape wine once or twice and liked the idea of being the sort of person who liked it. He doesn’t especially like sujamma except in some freak cases – almondy and subtle vanilla-y wood flavours in that one bottle that one time – but he’ll drink it anyway because at least of all the quietly awful things Morrowind might offer you to drink, you have to drink less of it to know you’ve drunk it. He can’t remember if he liked mezga better or whether he was just less fussy back then. Book: Ideally he would have a larger foundation for reference than he does, but he doesn’t. Still, his basis for comparison has grown a little since he first learnt to read and first got covetous of books, so he does at least have some preferences. He’ll still hoard up and devour literally any book he can, good or bad, because books are expensive and serious business – even the cheap ones – but there are some where he’ll fall into impressed absorbed silence and others where he’ll complain the entire time. He has a thing for treatises on use of one sort of blade or another, not because he really enjoys reading them, or really because they’re very useful. Mostly they’re awfully written and opaque to the point of being very unhelpful. But that puts a sense of the arcane around them, doesn’t it? If something’s hard to read, it must be hiding something worth knowing. Simra reads, trawls, lives in hope that one day that assumption will prove right, but really the issue is that if you never check you’ll never know. Back in Suran he read a lot of pre-Red Year devotional poetry from back during the time of the Tribunal. That and poetry the old Temple couldn’t or didn’t censor and so decided was devotional even if it wasn’t. A lot of that was just wankery – tongue twisters for the brain, either thematically or in terms of its showy prosody – but you’d occasionally get the odd scrap of lyric that was just effortlessly well-turned. There was a third era Dunmeri poetess called Anthiss for instance, the printing of whose work the Temple officially banned which only stoked its popularity. It was only after she died – mysteriously, it’s worth noting – that the Temple lifted the ban and claimed all her work had been religious allegory all along, revealing a conflicted but truly faithful sole. Simra’s pretty sure that, no, she was just writing about her girlfriend the entire god damn time. Between that and tracts on philosophy, interpretation of scripture, hagiography…he enjoyed reading it all but in retrospect couldn’t say he liked all of it. At the heart of what he really enjoys unreservedly in books is escapism. Travel narratives – little holidays for the brain – they’re what put a glint in his eyes and a lightness in his heart without really having to try much.

HAVE THEY

Passed university: Nope, nor has he had any formal education of any kind, yet. Given my headcanons about the state of the Mage’s Guild, for instance, in the 4th Era, and other Imperial institutes of higher learning there aren’t quite as many opportunities for that sort of thing as there used to be. Not in the parts of the world Simra’s kept to so far, anyway. Had sex: Currently, not in a while.   Had sex in public: Define public… The tonghouse of the Dyer’s End Few wasn’t a premises as rich in privacy as it could’ve been, but I’m inclined to say no. Gotten pregnant: Please no. Kissed a boy: Yes. Kissed a girl: Yes. Gotten tattoos: Do scarifications count? If so, yes, facial ones. Gotten piercings: Six in his left ear. Mer have more cartilage than humans. One through the lobe of his right ear too, but that doesn’t really count as a piercing anymore — just a tear. Had a broken heart: Don’t ask. Been in love: Something like that. Stayed up for more than 24 hours: Here’s where he laughs in your face and says “twenty-four?” and kisses his teeth for two minutes.

ARE THEY

A virgin: Covered this. A cuddler: There’ve been times. Sometimes being close to someone’s all you want to fill your head with, your time with, your world with, and all you can do is do that. Not many times though. They’re more anomalies than anything else. Prolonged touching, or lengthy physical intimacy — he’s pretty averse. A kisser: Mouth-on-mouthy kissing makes him nervous. Half his lips don’t really work right and he gets very conscious of it. Makes him feel ugly, clumsy, exposed. Scared easily: Terrified, yes. He doesn’t exactly keep a level head on him all that easily. Jealous easily: Statistics would suggest yes. Worth noting thought that this is less in terms of seeing everyone as someone his lover might leave him for and so being possessive and shitty and more like he feels left out easily, left behind easily, and if he sees someone he cares about sharing some sort of positive experience with someone else, he’ll feel a sense of abandonment and sadness about it. It’s not an angry or suspicious feeling so much as a melancholy self-effacing one. Trustworthy: In what sense, exactly? Depends who you are, what you’ve done to deserve Simra’s trust or respect, what the circumstances in both your lives and their mutual conjunctions are, what there is to be gained from breaking your trust, or what there is to be lost by keeping it or sticking with you. Depends how strong Simra is at this point in his life. Uhhhh…this number of variables probably suggest that, Simra is not inherently a trustworthy person by nature. But that doesn’t mean he’s never loyal, or faithful, or worth putting your trust in. Dominant: Uhhhhh. Submissive: Fuckin uhhhhhh. In love: Right now? Fuck off. Single: And ready to mingle. (God can you even imagine.)

RANDOM QUESTIONS

Have they harmed themselves: Not with anything sharp. Thought of suicide: Yes. Attempted suicide: Comments on my fic suggest that a lot of what he does, accidentally or by choose, basically constitute attempts to die. Thing is though, Simra’s pretty much more terrified of dying than of anything else. Any attempts at straightforward suicide would be impulsive cries for help or lashings-out against feeling particularly helpless. The goal wouldn’t be dying. Wanted to kill someone: Wanting to sounds way more personal than he really wants to have to deal with. Appreciating the reasons for having had to do so? Fine. (Yes, yes, yes, but funny how the people he’s really wanted to kill are for the most part still alive.) Ride a horse: He regrets to inform you that, yes, he has ride a horse. Have/had a job: We’ve covered this. Have any fears: Ghosts and bones, yes. Death, or more accurately, ceasing to be alive and existent. Being maimed; no longer being whole. Blindness, deafness, muteness. He has a pretty primal flight-or-fight response to the idea of being caught out in any sort of lie. Oh, and he’s not fond of dogs.

FAMILY

Sibling(s): Yes, Soraya. Does she still count? Parents: Sambidal Dunsamsi Hishkari nas Mabudani nas Zainab, his babu, Windhelm dockworker and former adventurer. Ishar Dunsamsi Hishkari nas Nem nas Zainab, his ammu, Grey Quarter spellwright, seller of medicines, and former adventurer. Children: No. Pets: No. A cat might be good, but he’d get terrified of it deciding to abandon him, and would take it very personally if it was ever gone for very long.

[asthma-goddess]

LMAO every physics major I know gets high or drunk on the weekends (including myself) It's like "gimme that brain turny off stuff please"

Can I genuinely ask how you do any type of math beyond arithmetic without throwing up and/or crying. I need some genuine advice here i'm hella jealous.

[tl-the-celestiamod]

Goosebumps Review #6

Oh my god... I may not have found a new favorite Goosebumps, but I have definitely just added this one to the upper half of my top 10 list.

Moving on with my little project of reading all the Goosebumps I never got the chance to read as a kid...

(Spoilers)

I Live In Your Basement!

Goosebumps (original series) #61

This was the 2nd to the last book in the original series. The last Goosebumps R.L. Stine would write before releasing Monster Blood 4, which was such a crapshot he would have to reinvent himself with the Goosebumps Series 2000 the following year. And it’s a wild one. But in a very good way. This book really screwed with my head. I almost want to compare it to Oculus levels of mind fuckery. I’m also going to say, that as far as Goosebumps goes, this is probably some of the most disturbing imagery I have ever seen in the original series.

The cover is a little misleading, making it look like just another silly monster book of which Stine has given us so many already, but that’s because you don’t understand the context of what you are looking at. That and the cover artist doesn’t even come close to capturing the grotesque horror of what it should actually be.

Now I need to point out again that I’m going to spoil the story here, (in fact I’m going to ramble on a lot on this one) so if you are at all interested in reading the book yourself, please go do that before reading this. Just do a google search for “i live in your basement pdf”, you can find a full copy of the book for free. This is one where you really don’t want spoilers if you are going to read it. If you have no interest in reading a Goosebumps book and just want to hear my review then please continue.

The story revolves around Marco, a young boy who lives with his incredibly overprotective mother. His mother is never named in the book. She is always just called “Mom”, and his father is never mentioned at all. We don’t know if Marco has a father, if he is always away at work, if he is dead, if he ran off after getting Marco’s mom pregnant... it’s just never talked about. And the reason behind all the lack of info on both of his parents won’t make much sense until the end of the book.

Marco’s mom is so overprotective she doesn’t allow him to do anything because he’ll “break every bone in his body” among other excuses. So Marco has to sneak out of the house to go play softball with his friends from school. And that’s when his friend Gwynnie promptly smashes his head in with a baseball bat... on accident mind you...

When Marco comes to he finds himself laying on the couch in his living room with his mom worrying herself into a fit as she fusses over him. Most things are a blur at this point but as he is drifting in and out of consciousness there is a point where he is woken up by the phone ringing and his mom is nowhere to be seen so he answers it. The voice on the other end sounds like a young boy who says, “I hope you’re okay. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you. Because you’re going to take care of me from now on.” When Marco asks who this is the boy answers that his name is Keith, and when Marco says that he doesn’t know any Keith, Keith replies with, “You should know me, Marco. I live in your basement.”

This understandably freaks him out but his mom thinks he was only dreaming it and chocks it up to the blow to the head, because after all, “Marco, there’s no phone in this room.” As the story goes on Marco continues to hear from Keith either from more phone calls or from Keith talking up to him directly from down the basement stairs. Eventually Keith actually shows up in Marco’s bedroom and he appears to be just a young boy around the same age as Marco, who happens to look just like L from Death Note (judging by the way Stine describes him). But any time Marco tries to prove Keith’s existence to his mom Keith is always gone. Even when Marco locks Keith in his bedroom he is gone by the time Marco drags his mom up to the room and unlocks the door.

The book was very creepy throughout all of this and did a good job keeping me on edge. But after a while of this Marco’s mom thinks he’s hallucinating and may have brain damage so she takes him back to the doctor, and this is where the book starts to get weird. It’s also where Stine does something hilarious I’ve never seen him do before. The chapter ends with the doctor suggesting that he would like to remove Marco’s brain so he can study it under a microscope to find out what the problem is. I’m sitting there thinking, okay Stine... you are starting the fake-out scares now are you? I’m going to turn to the next page and the chapter is going to start with the doctor laughing and telling Marco it was only a joke. But then I turn to the next page and... it’s not a joke... The doctor is serious. And even more surprising, Marco’s mom is all on board with this idea. I keep reading and waiting for someone to tell him it’s a joke, but they never do. They are seriously considering removing his brain.

Do you see what Stine did there? The fake out was in itself a fake out. He build up my expectations to the point where I believed it was going to be a fake out, and then it wasn’t. The only fake out was the fact that he made it look like it was going to be a fake out. A double fake out. Stine wrote 60 books filled with fake out scares just like that only to finally turn it around and use 60 books worth of expectations against me. This was amazing and it really caught me off guard.

They don’t actually remove Marco’s brain, deciding to wait and think about for a while, but from that point on the story just kept getting weirder. Such as when he goes to Gwynnie for help and asks her to come with him to explore his basement to try and find Keith (because Gwynnie is the biggest, toughest, meanest girl he knows and Marco couldn’t give a shit about gender role stereotypes at this point). Then they naturally don’t find anything and Gwynnie thinks Marco is just trying to scare her, but she tells him he can’t scare her, and she’ll show him why... Which she does by ripping her mouth open wider than the size of her entire head and vomiting up all her internals until she has turned herself completely inside out and lays on the floor as a bloody, pulsating mess. (Which the book’s cover does a poor job of trying to depict.)

Are you still with me, or have you just spit out whatever you were drinking and shouted “what the fuck?” while scrolling back up to the top to make sure I am indeed still reviewing a Goosebumps book? Because this is the part where Marco wakes up in the hospital only an hour after getting hit in the head and I find myself saying, “Hold on... We are only half way through the book? It’s too soon for the twist ending... If it was all a dream what are all these other pages? I still have half a book to go!”

Well the second half of the book is where the story keeps twisting and turning to the point where I never know what is real and what is a dream. Marco can’t tell either. When he wakes up and finds out that Gwynnie is not his best friend, but is instead his sister, and he was actually hit in the head by his friend Jeremy, he’s unsure if these facts are correct or if the way things were before Gwynnie turned herself inside out was how it was supposed to be. And then naturally more disturbing stuff keeps happening, Keith keeps contacting him and insisting that Marco is going to take care of him, that doctor keeps changing in appearance every time Marco sees him... Reading the second half of this book you start to fall down the rabbit hole fast and hard. Even when Marco would wake up from something horrible I still couldn’t be sure if that had actually been a dream, or if him waking up was the dream.

I personally suffer from sleep paralysis. I’m no stranger to waking up only to still be in a dream, and then waking up from that to still be in a dream. It’s a terrifying experience. And then when you finally do wake up for real, and you think back on what you just went through, and you can’t be sure it really was a dream, is equally terrifying. And this book captures those feelings quite well. I’m not going to say the book is about sleep paralysis, but as someone who has it, it a pretty scary similarity.

But then things lead up to a final confrontation with Keith and after a battle that I wasn’t sure was even happening or not, he wakes up again only to find that he is Keith. He and his mom are both those inside out monsters, and they live in hiding down in Marco and Gwynnie’s basement, and he got smashed in the head by them and this is why his mom keeps warning him that he is a monster and he can’t go play with those humans, as much as he might want to. And we still have a few chapters left to go... Every time I think I finally know what’s going on, I’m still second guessing if it’s real or not.

Even when the book finally ends with Marco discovering Keith in the basement and Keith tells him that he’s only dreaming, I’m still unsure of things. How much of it was actually a dream and how much was real? Who’s dream was it even? Was it  actually Keith’s dream all along, or was it Marco’s dream? Given the way other characters shifted throughout the story, such as Gwynnie starting out as Marco’s best friend and then becoming his sister, it’s not out of the question that Marco may have started to dream that he was Keith. Was Keith ever even real at all? But then it’s also not out of the question that Keith would have been dreaming that he was Marco. And if the mom was actually Keith’s mom and they are the only two monsters living down there, and he carried her over into being his mom when he was dreaming he was Marco, then it would explain why Marco’s father was never mentioned. It’s all just very twisty and turny and I still don’t know what’s what... and I rather loved it.

[darkwavevisionquest]

WE’VE GONE ON HOLIDAY BY MISTAKE

88 movies. A chronological year in review. Faded impressions of films, some old, some new. Spoilers, naturally. Here’s 41 to 50.

41. Withnail and I (1987)

I watched this in Limerick, sprawled on the couch over at my brother’s place while we ate pizza, the night before a marathon day of metal gigs. It was a strange, oddly muted venue in which to watch this film, but appropriate. Under the absurdist comedy and sharp satire, this is a fundamentally melancholy film, one where bohemian London is being torn down around the main characters’ flat, where friendships end, where everything that can go wrong will go wrong. Like all good comedy, it is essentially drama with the dials turned all the way to the left and then broken off.

42. Zardoz (1974)

To many, this is just a weird film. And it is weird, don’t get me wrong, but it’s also funny, in and of itself, and dark, and sometimes haunting, and oddly poignant. The film opens by telling you that it is a warning, and it feels like one, through and through. There is a creeping sense if inevitability and despair to it all. More than anything, Zardoz is a work of great science fiction speculation. That it happens to also be a satire about fiction and the stories we tell ourselves to make it seem like we’re more advanced marks this out as yet another masterful entry from John Boorman, here let off the leash to run wild. It’s glorious, and might be one of my new favourite films.

43. High-Rise (2016)

It’s Ben Wheatley. What more is there to say?

Okay, there’s a lot to say, as it turns out. The editing is incredible, an elliptical high-wire act that exploits our abilities of pattern recognition and dot-connecting, telling entire stories with single cuts, with single images flowing through effortless montage. The whole thing is the absurdity and dark underbelly of British culture writ large, where polite smiles hide insanity and murderous intent, where a party goes on far too long and suddenly everyone is very, very willing to kill each other and eat dogs, even as they quietly sign their heating bills and sip wine and play squash and have dinner by candlelight. In High-Rise, the power going out is not the impetus for society’s degradation - it’s the excuse.

44. The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)

They really don’t make ‘em like they used to. This is an adventure film through and through - colourful, fun, and with one of the greatest sword fights committed to celluloid. It’s simple, yes, and maybe quite twee, but it’s just plain good. You can have your likes and dislikes, your preferred tones and the stuff that puts you off, but sometimes you’ve just got to recognise when something’s well-crafted, when it just works so damn well.

45. In The Heat Of The Night (1967)

Sidney Poitier is magnetic, the solid, powerful presence at the heart of this film, a film that feels lesser whenever he isn’t on screen. What’s more, the film is entirely on his side as he navigates the racial insensitivity of the southern town in which he finds himself, investigating a murder, a rare thing in mainstream American cinema even today. When his anger bubbles to the top with every slight and micro-aggression, and every putrid example of southern aristocracy still reigning strong, we’re right there with him. In the end, though, he’s a detective, an example of the great American tradition of detectives, hard-boiled and no-nonsense. He investigates not because he has any stake in it (not to begin with, anyway), but because he has to. Because it’s a mystery and it needs to be solved, and he’ll be damned if he lets the redneck local sheriff fuck it all up. 

46. Bad Lieutenant (1992)

VAMPIRES ARE LUCKY, THEY CAN FEED ON OTHERS; WE’VE GOTTA EAT AWAY AT OURSELVES

47. Captain America: Civil War (2016)

While it unnecessarily softens the blow in the final minutes, Civil War is an unexpected superhero movie in many different ways. For one, it’s relatively small and personal where other films go big and bombastic. Its stakes aren’t the safety of the planet, or the protection of humanity. Its stakes are loyalty, and friendship. The disaster the heroes are up against isn’t an army of aliens, or a silly sky vortex, but themselves, their own worst impulses and unresolved traumas, activated by a mere nudge from an obscure villain they almost never meet or even know of. The disaster met at the film’s end is visualised as superheroic combat, but is really a mental and emotional one, in which these larger than life characters are peeled apart, broken down into base, illogical, human beings. It’s exhausting. You just want them to stop fighting, but they can’t, won’t. Their trajectories have already been set.

48. Serpico (1973)

This is a film about the banality of corruption. It seeps in everywhere, a spreading cancer, and Serpico seems almost powerless to stop it, or even resist it. In some ways, the cops are just big kids, playing out the playground game of peer pressure - everyone else does it, so why don’t you do it too? They needle Serpico to join them and, when he won’t, they turn on him, turn inwards. This is the nature of police as presented in the film: they are a closed social group, a fiefdom to themselves, their corrupted culture arbitrarily decided and then enforced as a social norm. If you aren’t on the take, then you’re not one of us. Loyalty to their brothers in blue goes too far, and too deep, supersedes their loyalty to the law. They are no longer police, but just another gang. But Serpico resists this at every turn, never succumbs to the temptation of taking protection money, and works to end it. Serpico never gives up his integrity, even though it would, from a certain point of view, benefit him.

Serpico is a real guy. The fact that people like him exist gives me hope.

49. The Usual Suspects (1995)

Some twists are classic, get passed around so often that, even if you haven’t seen the movie, you feel like you have. You get déjà vu when you finally catch it, some evening on TV flipping between channels. You realise that you’ve absorbed it via osmosis from the chemical soup of pop culture.

Somehow, with this film, I managed to avoid that. Not that my enjoyment of a movie is entirely dependent on me knowing nothing about it - on the contrary, a good movie can sometimes be improved by knowing the turns it takes down the line - but it definitely helped with this one. This is, after all, one of the all-timers of the last couple decades as far as a twisty, turny story goes. It’s trashy, and pulpy, and boy does it hit the spot. Watch it blind, if you’re able, and then watch it again with perfect knowledge.

50. Billion Dollar Brain (1967, dir. Ken Russell)

This isn’t the best Harry Palmer film, nor is it even close to being the best Ken Russell film, but it has the ingredients that make both of those things great: Michael Caine’s charisma, the gritty Cold War spy backdrop, the grimy ‘60s aesthetics, Ken Russell’s dueling senses of craft and the absurd. It wanders and muddles around a lot, and goes a bit more Bond than you’d like, but it comes to such a madcap, farcical, weirdly-relevant ending that you don’t really care. If every cut-price James Bond was this gloriously odd, I’d be a happy movie-goer.