#anyway it's been really cool and I've had some less than great experiences but I've backed off. processed them. and come back for more

[neverendingford]

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[kiarastromboli]

You’re mine (Chris Sturniolo x y/n)

Masterlist.

Warning: smut content, drug mention, toxic relationship, argument, rough sex.

Summary: y/n and Chris are in a toxic relationship, and y/n is about to tell him that she wants to end it.

Note: This fanfic is entirely inspired by a past relationship I had. I want to emphasize that I'm writing it as a way to talk about my experiences and for fun. If you're in a similar relationship, please, for your well-being, escape. Don't let anyone, under any circumstances, treat you this way. It's destructive, trust me, it's not worth it.

•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•.•

Here I am again on a Thursday night at 12:30 AM, sneaking out to see the boy I promised to stop seeing.

I'm pathetic; it only took one message for me to go against my principles, and now I find myself making the same mistake that I've been repeating for over a year.

But this time is different; tonight, I'm going to end this toxic relationship once and for all.

The boy I'm talking about? Chris, a guy from my high school with whom I've been in a secret relationship for a little over a year.

It all started when he replied to one of my Instagram stories. At the time, I had no idea how much of an asshole this guy was. I was naive and carefree, smoking joints with my friends to have fun, and I only knew Chris by sight.

He hung out with the "cool" people at school—the ones my friends and I desperately tried to become by smoking and adopting a delinquent attitude.

When Chris responded to my story, telling me he found me cute, I couldn't believe my eyes. No one really paid attention to me despite all the effort I put in.

Anyway, after a bit of conversation and some innuendos, I eventually understood what he wanted from me: to hook up. And, to be honest, that was enough for me. I was ready to settle for just that if it meant being closer to him.

That same night, I sneaked out to smoke a joint with him, and I discovered a whole new Chris, far from the one I saw at school.

He was funny, attentive, nice, caring, and very open. I quickly felt comfortable with him; the connection was great. Eventually, we ended up sleeping together in his room.

I had sex with a guy before him, but it didn't go well, and I didn't know much about it. Chris was super understanding and took his time with me. He helped me discover my body and taught me how to please myself and him.

Our relationship helped me become more comfortable with myself. Chris always took the time to kiss every inch of my body to make me understand how beautiful he found me.

"You're so beautiful, Y/n."

"I forbid you to have any complexes; you're perfect."

"Look at yourself; you're gorgeous."

You're probably wondering why our relationship is toxic if Chris helped me so much. Well, the thing is, our relationship has always been a double-edged sword. When the doors were closed, and it was just him and me, everything was fine. He only had eyes for me, complimented me, and listened attentively. But as soon as we were in public, everything changed.

I wish he had just ignored me because he didn't want to acknowledge our relationship, and that was the case at the beginning. But it went much further than that over time.

At first, he ignored me at school, and it hurt a little, but I signed up for it. He made it clear he didn't want anyone to know about us, so I had no say in the matter.

But over time, his friends and mine became friends, and we started hanging out together before, during, and after classes.

That's when things took a different turn. I knew I had to keep a low profile, so I tried to keep my distance from him without looking suspicious when our friends hung out together. However, he started acting strangely.

Whenever I opened my mouth to say something, he hurried to cut me off, diverting attention to himself, making me look like a fool.

Whenever he had the chance, he made more or less hurtful comments about me to amuse the group.

"What's with this outfit? You look like a clown."

"Are you naturally stupid, or did it come with time?"

"You know, you can hide behind all the makeup you want; we still see your face underneath."

In short, he acted like a real jerk when people were around, and in parties, it was even worse. He would grab my attention and then proceed to hook up with other girls right in front of me, as if to provoke me.

He spent all his time humiliating me. The thing is, it happened gradually. It started with a few tasteless jokes from time to time, so I never really took the initiative to defend myself. I don't know why, but I already felt like a fool, and I didn't want to worsen my situation.

At first, I tried talking to him privately to understand why he did that, why he treated me like his princess in private but like a dog the rest of the time. And his responses were always the same.

"Babe, don't stress; it's just how we joke around with my friends."

"It's not a big deal; I just had a bit too much to drink. It happens."

"I treat you the same way I treat my friends so that we don't look suspicious. You know very well that I don't mean any of what I say in front of them, Y/n."

And after that, he would kiss me and make me forget everything with a few caresses. I blamed myself for being so weak, but he was so good with me.

I felt alive and considered with him. No one looked at me the way he did, and no one treated me like he did. But what I hated more than anything was the way I belonged to him while knowing that he didn't belong to me at all.

"You're mine, Y/n; I don't want any other guys putting their hands on you."

"We're not together; I have the right to see other people."

"Who the fuck was that guy in your story this morning?"

I found it cute that he was jealous, but I quickly understood that it was just possessiveness. I was his trophy, and he loved knowing that I adored him, maintaining this destructive little link between us.

I struggled to realize that it was bad for me; I idealized him so much that I normalized his awful behavior towards me. I reached a point where I thought it was the price to pay for having such a perfect guy by my side.

I know it sounds insane, and you probably judge me, but when I met Chris, I was not doing well. I felt bad, lost, and he helped me appreciate life again. He helped me with my body and mind, treated me like a princess, and I was ready to endure all of this not to lose what he gave me.

It was like a drug; without him, I was doing very badly. As long as he was there, everything was better, but I knew it was destroying me, and I knew it was bad. However, cutting ties with him meant giving up on my happiness, and I didn't have the strength for that.

I began to realize how bad it was on the day I broke down publicly with him, during a party with our friends.

Start of the flashback:

What a shitty night; I'm wasted, and Chris shows up with another one of his girls. I don't want to see him; he disgusts me.

I headed to the kitchen to take another shot when I felt hands wandering on my hips. I immediately turned around in surprise to find a Chris even more drunk than me. "Oh my god, Chris, don't touch me," I spat out, rolling my eyes before removing his hands from me.

He chuckled before leaning into my ear to say, "She doesn't suck as well as you, you know?" I felt anger boiling inside me; I pushed him away before starting to walk towards the terrace where the others were.

"Hey, I'm kidding; it's fine, don't make a scene for that, Y/n," he said, grabbing my wrist as I reached the door leading to the terrace.

"Damn it, let go of me, you asshole," I said, opening the door and breaking free from his grip. "Go to hell, Chris," I shouted, unintentionally drawing the attention of others to us.

Chris clenched his jaw and shot me a hateful look when he realized that everyone was fully focused on us. "Stop acting like a bitch and giving a show in front of everyone, Y/n; I don't have time for your bullshit," he snapped, and everyone around us sighed, shocked.

I felt tears welling up. "Damn it, what's your problem with me? Just leave me alone!" I said before breaking down and leaving the party.

End of the flashback.

After that night, nothing was the same. I hated him in public, always making a promise to myself not to go see him again, until he sent a message, and I caved.

It was always the same, the same message, "Come smoke a joint with me." I said no the first time, he insisted, promising it was just to smoke a joint. I'd give in, we'd smoke, end up sleeping together, and again, I'd go back home annoyed at myself for succumbing once more. Secretly, I hoped that the next day, when we met in class, he'd treat me well. But it never happened; he always ended up treating me like crap, and the cycle continued when he sent another message.

A damn vicious circle I tried to break free from as best I could, and for a while, I succeeded. Three months had passed without giving in. Three months of ignoring his messages. But tonight, I allowed myself to go back because I wanted to tell Chris that it was officially over. I found a guy, and I was determined to forget Chris in the arms of this guy I had met a few weeks ago.

I knew it wasn't right, and I had promised not to go back, but it was stronger than me. I couldn't wait to give him a taste of his own medicine, to see his face when he learned the news. Yes, I was acting out of revenge, but you couldn't blame me; he had ruined my life for over a year. I had the right to get back at him.

Anyway, here I am, after a 15-minute walk, in front of his house. I knew where the keys were hidden; I was used to coming here. I stealthily entered his house, being careful not to wake up his parents or siblings. I headed to his room and stopped in front of his door.

Oh my god, what am I doing? Suddenly, stress invaded me, memories flooding back. I thought I was over this, but now, standing in front of his door again, all those good moments rushed back, only accelerating my heartbeat.

I shook my head to clear my thoughts. It was too late; I was already here. I opened the door and closed it behind me, making sure to put the towel at the bottom to prevent the smell of weed from escaping his room.

I took a deep breath, memories swirling in my head—the smell of weed and his deodorant, the green glow of his LEDs, his slightly messy room—nothing had changed. Chris was slouched in the chair at his desk, shirtless, and hair disheveled. He had just finished rolling a joint, looked up at me, and I saw the smirk that I hadn't seen in ages. "Long time no see around here, princess."

"Yeah, I've been pretty busy," I replied, rolling my eyes before removing my sweater; it was unbearably hot in his room.

Chris stood up and started walking towards me. My heart raced, and I stood there, watching him approach. "I missed you," he said, running his hands over my waist.

I cleared my throat before moving towards his bed to sit at the edge. Damn, I just lost my composure in front of him. I was confident just a few minutes ago; all of this was a bad idea. "Shall we smoke this joint?" I said, hoping that the joint would help me feel more at ease to accomplish what I came here for.

He turned to me with a confused look before sitting back in his desk chair and grabbing his joint. "Very eager tonight?" he said, raising an eyebrow.

"I'm eager to shut you up and pass me that joint," I said, giving him a fake smile. He chuckled before lighting the joint and handing it to me.

"You're sexy when you're angry, you know?" he said, leaning towards me from his chair. I rolled my eyes before taking a drag.

"Three months without seeing me, and you're acting like a real bitch with me," he said, smiling and watching me smoke his joint without passing it back. "You're not even going to let me have a little, mama? Are you that angry with me?" he said, tilting his head to the side and placing his hand on my thigh.

I jumped at the contact of his hand on me, immediately passing him the joint, hoping he would take it with the hand resting on my thigh. However, he did the opposite, pulling his chair even closer to mine, blowing his smoke into my face. "You're chattier than that usually," he said, smiling before taking another massive drag and placing the joint on his desk. He then leaned in, burying his head in my neck, extracting a sigh from my lips.

He started kissing my neck, placing his hand on the back of my head to keep me in place. I couldn't help but tilt my head back, offering him better access, and as he nibbled on my skin, a warm sigh escaped my lips. I could already feel my panties getting wet at that moment.

My head began to spin, unsure if it was the effect of all those drags at once or the way he devoured my neck as if it were his last meal.

Suddenly, I regained my senses, remembering why I had come here in the first place. I pushed him back by the chest, forcing him to sit up on his chair. "Chris!" I said, catching my breath, and he looked at me confused when I did that.

"I didn't come here for this, damn it," I said, getting up from his bed and starting to walk away from him.

"Why are you here, then?" he asked, turning his chair towards me without leaving his chair.

"I came to end this, Chris. I'm tired of your shit," I told him, crossing my arms, and he chuckled. "Is that funny to you, you jerk?" I asked, furrowing my brows.

"Come on, baby, stop your drama. I acted like an idiot, let me make it up to you by having a good time," he said, getting up from his chair.

"No, it's over, Chris, I'm done," I replied sharply.

"You say that every time, y/n, and we always end up here," he sighed. "Can we avoid going through this again, please? You know very well that you and I won't end." He said this while caressing my arms once he reached my level. "These were the most complicated three months I've had since I've known you. You've punished me enough like this," he added, rolling his eyes.

"Do you hear what you're saying, Chris?" I said, shaking my head. "You don't even realize how toxic you are to me," I said, getting angry. "Damn, it took me three fucking months to have the courage to end this relationship. Three fucking months of crying and lamenting because of you, Chris."

"We'll figure it out, y/n. You can't just leave me because you're feeling bad; it's selfish!" he replied. "Do you think I was doing well these last three months? Fuck, y/n, we'll find a solution; we always find a solution."

"We always find a solution?" I said with a fake laugh. "Because treating me like crap in public is a solution for you, Chris?" I said, pushing him, carried away by my anger. "You only think about yourself; damn it, I can't fucking take it anymore. It's not a healthy relationship, none of this is healthy!"

"I told you I didn't want others to know about us, y/n. I don't like airing my life; you can't change who I am!" he said, advancing towards me.

"But damn it, you don't listen to anything I say!" I told him, shaking my head. "This discussion is fucking pointless; it's over. I found someone else, Chris, and he'll genuinely make me happy, not like you," I spat out full of rage before heading towards his door.

He grabbed my arm abruptly and violently slammed me against his door, causing me to release a groan of pain. "What the fuck did you just say?" he said through clenched teeth, bringing his face closer to mine and tightening his hand around my neck to force me to look him in the eyes, where I could see all his burning rage.

"You're hurting me," I said, closing my eyes as his grip tightened around my throat, forcing me onto the balls of my feet. It wasn't the right moment, I knew, but somewhere deep down, his reaction satisfied me. He was furious, and that's exactly what I wanted. I wanted him to feel the hatred he made me feel, and I knew he felt it at that moment.

His hold around my neck loosened, and a smirk appeared on my face. "You heard right, Chris. I found a guy better than you," I told him, looking him in the eyes before leaning toward his ear on tiptoes, resting my hands on his shoulders. "A guy way better than you for me, a guy who will treat me much better than you, and especially a guy who will fuck me much better than you," I whispered to provoke him.

I slowly faced him again, never breaking eye contact. He ran his hand over his face before pressing against the door behind me with his other hand. I could feel the anger boiling inside him, and I liked it. He raised his head to look at me before running his tongue over his teeth and fake laughing. "What's happening to you—" I started to say before being cut off by his lips on mine.

At first, I tried to push him away, but his hand caught both my wrists, pinning them above my head without his lips leaving mine.

No matter how much I resisted, it was useless. When I entered this room, I already knew how it would end, so I ended up giving in and kissing him back, letting his tongue into my mouth.

He pressed his body against mine, and the kiss was hungry and furious. I couldn't help but moan into his mouth. I must admit that this burning fire in the pit of my stomach had been missing, a sensation that only Chris had the power to provoke.

"You're mine, y/n," he growled before reconnecting our lips immediately.

"No, I'm not, Chris," I tried to deny despite having just succumbed for the thousandth time.

"Then why do you always end up here, huh?" he said between hungry kisses on my jaw and neck.

"Because—" I said, moaning as he started to nibble on my earlobe.

"Because you're mine," he insisted, placing his hand on the side of my neck. "I'm going to fuck you so hard you'll forget the name of that guy you're dating," he said, directing his lips towards my breasts.

"Chris—" I said before being interrupted by his hand on my mouth.

"Shut the fuck up, y/n," he said before pulling on my tank top to expose my chest and began kissing me. "This guy doesn't know you," he said, inserting one of his fingers into my mouth for me to suck, which I did. "I know you inside out. I know where to touch you and what to say," he said, straightening up so his face was in front of mine, lifting his knee between my legs to apply pressure to my pussy.

"I can't believe you even thought for a second that another man could ever fuck you better than me, baby," he said, smirking and rubbing against me, making me moan at the friction of my clothes against my clit.

"Chris, fuck," I said with his fingers still in my mouth. Suddenly, he pulled them out, removing my top in one swift motion. "Please, Chris," I said, desperate. At this point, I could deny it all I wanted, but this guy could reduce me to my knees with just one sentence. It had been three months since I had a proper orgasm.

"Please what? I thought you had someone else, someone better?" he said with a sly smile, grabbing a handful of hair at the back of my head and pulling to make me lift my head toward him. "What's the matter? Cat got your tongue?" he said, stopping the friction between my legs, driving me completely crazy.

"No, Chris, don't stop!" I said in a frustrated moan.

"Say it, y/n," he said authoritatively, looking me in the eyes and pulling harder on my hair. "Fine, since you don't want to say it," he said, dragging me by the hair to his bed where he threw me before swiftly removing my bottoms and panties in one go.

I knew it was wrong, but I couldn't stop. I was dying to feel him inside me. I sat up from my previous position lying on the bed to kiss him. Before I could reach his lips, he pushed me onto the mattress with a sly smile, making me let out another frustrated moan. "Why?" I said, furrowing my brows.

He didn't answer and walked towards his dresser, taking out two pairs of handcuffs we had used in the past. I watched him come towards me with an apprehensive look. "Tell me if your new guy can make you cum like I can," he said, grabbing my face before suddenly releasing me and handcuffing both my arms to his bedframe.

"What are you doing, Chris?" I asked, feeling my breath quicken. He came to kiss me briefly, pushing me to pursue his lips in the hope of reconnecting them hungrily when he broke our kiss.

"Shhhhh," he simply replied before proceeding to kiss every inch of my body except where I really needed him to, making me squirm under his lips. "If only you were less complicated with me, y/n," he murmured, kissing the hollow of my waist. "You're driving me completely insane, y/n," he said, biting the inside of my thigh this time, prompting me to let out a moan.

"Chris," I said, unable to bear the way he teased me. "I need you, please," and with my words, he abruptly spread my legs and dove his head in.

He began licking my wetness from my hole before moving up to my clit, making me moan at the sensation. His left hand came to play with my breasts, while the fingers of his right hand teased my entrance as he stimulated my clit with his tongue, causing me to roll my eyes. "Oh my God, Chris," I said in a broken voice, trying to free my hands from the handcuffs to run them through his hair, but in vain.

Chris continued to groan against me, sending vibrations to my clit, making my head spin. Without warning, he inserted two fingers inside me, causing me to throw my head back and release another moan at the sensation.

He began to move his fingers in and out progressively faster, bending them inside me and hitting that spot that made me see stars. Chris knew perfectly well that he could make me climax very quickly; he knew me inside out. So when that familiar knot formed in the pit of my stomach, I didn't need to alert him for him to know that my orgasm was dangerously approaching. "Can you feel it coming?" he said, continuing to finger me. I simply nodded, too intoxicated by the impending orgasm to speak. "You want it?" he asked, accelerating the movement and making me lose my mind.

I was on the brink of climax when he withdrew his fingers without warning, making me moan in frustration and lift my head towards him. "Chris, no!" I gasped, "Don't stop, please." I pleaded desperately, closing my eyes and rubbing my thighs in the hope of feeling something.

"What's the matter? Did I frustrate you by making you think I was going to let you cum on my fingers?" he said mockingly. "Go ask your new guy to finish the job," he spat, grabbing my throat.

"I lied! Chris, I lied, please!" I said desperately. "No guy can make me cum like you!" I exclaimed, agitated and looking pathetic. "Fuck me, Chris, I beg you, just fuck me!"

He licked his lips while looking at me, then smiled and removed his underwear. I let out a whimper when I saw his member for the first time in three months. I bit my lip, remembering all the things he could do with it. "Did you miss this, little slut?" he said, slapping me before positioning himself between my legs. I nodded vigorously, making him smile. "I missed you, princess."

He began to slap his cock against my clit, making me lift my head and moan at the teasing sound. Then, he started rubbing against me without penetrating. "Chris, stop teasing me; I can't wait any longer," I said, frustrated and hungry.

"Say it, baby, say it, and I promise to give it to you. I promise to stop messing around, and I promise it'll be the last time you have to run away from me," he said between several kisses on my lips, jaw, ear, and neck.

I knew that if I said it, there would be no turning back. I knew that if I said it, the three months I've spent without him would have been for nothing. And I knew that if I said it this time, I was screwed. But it was Chris, the only guy who shone in my eyes. So, for the umpteenth time, I swallowed my pride and principles. "I'm yours, Chris, only yours."

He gradually entered me, almost making me scream when he hit the depth. "Fuck, I missed this pussy, baby," he said, moaning before starting to penetrate me. "I never want you to let anyone else touch you, do you hear me?" he said, thrusting abruptly into me, and I nodded furiously. "You're mine, y/n, only mine. Fuck!" he said, trying to contain his moans before burying his head in my neck to bite me.

"Oh my fucking God! Chris! Shit!" I exclaimed when he began to thrust in me at an inhuman speed. "Yes, yes, yes, don't stop, oh my-" I felt like I was losing my mind. He pressed his lips to mine to kiss me fiercely, our kiss filled with growls and moans.

"Damn, y/n, I missed you so much. Never leave again," he said, moaning against my lips and thrusting impossibly deeper.

"Never again, baby, I promise!" I said, looking at him with furrowed brows and a face tense with the pleasure I was receiving.

"You're the only good girl for me; I want no one else," he said, placing his forehead against mine while grabbing my legs and wrapping them around his waist. "I'm going to do things right; I'm going to fix things for you," he said, moaning when I started to clench around him.

"Chris, I—fuck, please," I uttered a sentence that made no sense. I no longer had the ability to formulate a coherent sentence, but he understood what I wanted. He untied my hands from the handcuffs without withdrawing from me. He turned us around so that I was sitting on him, and his back was against the headboard.

I moaned at the new angle, which allowed him to reach even deeper. I could feel him in my core. I began to bounce on him at a steady pace, and he threw his head back. "Oh my God, you're so good for me, baby," he said, closing his eyes.

My hands came to grip his cheeks, making his beautiful blue eyes meet mine. His hands grabbed my hips to guide and pull me even closer to him. Our torsos were pressed together, and our lips brushed against each other as I bounced on him. No words came out of our mouths, but we communicated through our eyes. His grip on my hips tightened, and he began thrusting from below. I felt my orgasm approaching. "Baby, I—I can't—I can't—I'm going to—" I tried to articulate, but once again, everything tangled in my head, and I couldn't say it.

"I know, princess. Let yourself go. Come for me, baby. I want you to come for me, ma , please don't stop," he said, biting his lips and clenching his jaw. I could feel him twitch inside me, and within seconds, I started to climax. He grabbed my neck roughly, kissing me while forcing me to continue bouncing on him until he also climaxed inside me.

I let my head fall on his shoulder, and he began to stroke my hair. We were both out of breath. "I never want you to see that guy again," he said.

"Fuck you, Chris," I replied without moving from my position.

"I'm serious. If I see you with him, I'll kick his ass," he said, grabbing my chin to make me face him.

"I won't see him again," I replied simply, and he smiled before kissing me slowly and gently.

Masterlist.

[taffywabbit]

idk if i'm way off the mark on this, but the way some people are responding to that Guillermo del Toro interview about the decline of studio animation is a bit frustrating to me. specifically the bit where he talks about "emoji animation" and how everything is over-animated and pushed too far and things are rarely allowed to not be ultra-cartoony (y'know, because animation always needs to be marketable to children who are never trusted to have attention spans, right?). like, i think he's generally correct about it! but some folks are taking the wrong message away from that.

i've seen people going off about how "soulless" and "corporate" various recent examples are, and talking about these pieces of media as though they're the result of some kind of personal failing or lack of skill/range on the part of the animators, and it's just like. do people realize that's the only animation you're usually allowed to DO in the industry, unless you get incredibly lucky and land yourself on a project/studio that's unusually cool?

when i was in college for animation it was literally drilled into us nonstop that everything had to be pushed more, that exaggeration was not a guideline or a sometimes-treat but a hard rule that always had to be applied regardless of what was going on, because the viewer couldn't be trusted to pick up on subtlety and we sure as hell couldn't be trusted to convey it. you ever wonder why there's such a specific vibe to a lot of self-directed student films, particularly ones that are focused on character acting/interaction or deep emotions and introspection (especially when there's minimal/no dialogue)? it's because for a lot of young animators, they haven't had the freedom to experiment with realism and subtlety up to that point and they're likely not going to have it again for a while (or at all, unless their career path leads to higher positions where they might have more creative direction over the things they work on. which also becomes a lot less likely if they're anything other than a cishet white dude, for what it's worth).

i would LOVE to see more nuanced, realistic, understated motion and acting in animation. i WANT more characters to be able to express what they're feeling through natural body language and facial cues and for scenes to allow me to breathe instead of spelling everything out in giant bold flashing text all the time. what del Toro wants to see changed in the animation industry sounds great, and i hope others join him in seeking to revamp what modern animation is allowed to be.

but as things currently stand, and as they've stood for a long while now, most artists doing the grunt work on the shows and movies you see are completely at the mercy of corporations and networks who have a vested interest in producing a very specific kind of marketable and cost-efficient media all the time. (and by extension that style is ALSO what's taught in most animation schools, because their job more than anything is to grind you down into a perfect little sweatshop worker who will bend over backwards to meet quotas and get your work approved and not question the higher-ups, even if you have little to no personal investment in the projects you're working on, so that the studios who employ you can maintain their good reputations or whatever)

anyways idk what my point was here, this really just sorta became a rant and my views have undoubtedly been coloured by my own personal experiences (this kinda shit is largely why i dropped out before my last year of animation school, for the record).

i guess just be kind to folks in the animation industry? they've had it fucking rough nonstop for well over a century (the majority of them are still not unionized and there's HUGE pushback against doing so in many places). i assure you they are doing their best to infuse the latest uninspired illumination flick or weird spinoff kids' show with literally any amount of soul they can. you don't have to like the stuff that gets produced by any means! be a hater! i'm certainly not gonna stop you. just remember where these creative decisions come from and why these conditions exist, and consider that when YOU watched something and thought "hmm that could've been done better", you can bet your ass someone actually working on it probably thought the same thing but couldn't do anything about it. these things WILL change as the industry itself improves, but in the meantime folks have to pay their rent, and that usually means doing what they're told and working in a way that will minimize revisions and meet quotas so they can keep their jobs. it sucks, but it is what it is.

[despite-everything]

play rich is so fun.

i work serving really rich people, but just got off work and played a fun little game. i work near this fancy eyewear boutique that i knew had frames from my all-time favorite brand (that's too expensive for me to justify buying from), but had never gone in until now. my work schedule changed and i just got off - it's snowing outside so i decided to pop in the (tiny) shop at which point i spotted my dream sunglasses.

i asked about them, and the two shop workers were absolutely fabulous. they really knew what they were talking about and we had a great conversation about japanese eyewear, the company, the details, leather, luxury upcharges, damascus steel... just an interesting conversation sparked by the sunglasses. they offered to order any pair i like in any color i like from that brand (small, employing a small number of well-compensated craftsmen, i dig their ethos as a company) with no obligation of purchase for free.

i am most interested in a color way they didn't have in the shop, but i asked for a quote with prescription lenses. they said their optician would be able to answer once she had my prescription, but she was not in today and i didn't have a copy of my prescription handy. so they gave me her card and told me to send an email. and then they showed me some more cool frames from the brand, we kept talking, and i had such a nice time.

i told them i'd reach out and would let them know if i'd like them to order a pair to try in the palladium i like, but that the frames are currently backordered, so they'd need to talk to the company to get an estimate on when they would be available. i thanked them and left, and now i'm just so happy. when i say expensive i mean that i think the base price is like $700 before a prescription. maybe $1000. but i love them and tbh if i ever do decide to be a bit financially irresponsible, i'd get them from that shop for sure.

i have some friends who encouraged me to get those lenses before, and while they're both much older than me and really successful and i value their perspectives (major role models and tbh goals for me. so grateful for them), they have Money. i don't lol. but they also came to town and we actually met up last night so it kinda feels like a sign...

and i want to say that i'll get the sunglasses if i get this job i'm deciding to apply for... i'm underqualified, but they posted the job a month ago, then relisted it like 2 weeks ago. and i do have education and experience, but less than they're looking for. plus i don't have as many community connections here because i literally moved a month ago, but i'm very dedicated to forming them (with or without the dream job). but my friends from last night think it's worth a shot?? but they also don't know my full situation so like... idk. but many people have now suggested i apply anyway, so i think i will? anyway. i'm afraid i've now jinxed it. debating deleting this whole bit, but i've now articulated the thought, so is it too late now? i think i can get with the concept of something like that being possible. i've been reading a lot on relational quantum physics lately. and i'm high on the train. regardless, if i got that job, i would get a massive pay bump. my income would literally triple. and it's the role i want in the career i want in the location i want. so of course i don't want to get my hopes up. but if i get that job... maybe i'll get the sunglasses as a reward.

regardless, those glasses are well outside my economic class. almost everything im wearing is second hand, i feel like i look a bit of a mess because id gotten 2 hours of sleep before a really long day at work, and my umbrella and bag are clearly old and beat up. and the neighborhood is one of the most expensive in nyc... i just work there. so i was honestly worried about the staff being dismissive or rude (this has happened to me before. i work in service and know how annoying customers can be, but i also have dealt with judgement in rich spaces before) but they were so kind and knowledgeable. it obviously helped that i know about leather and steel craftsmanship, so we had common interests, but i still felt like they were genuinely interested in speaking with me and not just doing it out of obligation to their jobs.

idk i just felt like in order to make that work i had to fake the confidence of someone who "belonged there" and act like money wasnt an object. and maybe i didn't, but it still felt necessary. but its fun when it works (despite my physical appearance) and opens up another world.

or maybe they were just nice.

[phantomspren]

I always feel so weird appreciating the aesthetics of plague and gas masks.

Yeah they're kinda creepy as hell when used in a certain way which is very cool.

But at the same time they are both direct results of literally some of the deadliest events in human history.

And then with the gas masks, I'm American, the most recent relative of mine to not be born in the US is my great great grandmother (my great grandpa fought in WWII for reference) and so I literally have very little actual experience with how awful the world wars were, because they left the US relatively untouched.

So it's just this weird dichotomy of "oooh creepy nice" and "lots of people died and not being super impacted by these events is a significant part of what led the US to be super prosperous for decades after the wars while other countries needed to recover to a MUCH greater degree and so I'm much less aware of the impact of them because I don't live in places that were physically impacted like that."

Anyways I've been watching Doctor Who and the creepy empty people in the gas masks are great. I do think that Magnus cured me of fear when it comes to stuff like that which is EXCELLENT and super wild considering that I went on a ghost tour for five minutes one time like three years ago and I had a super intense and irrational fear of ghosts for over a year after the fact. Highly recommend not doing that. Oh this episode also got Gunpowder Tim versus the Moon Kaiser stuck in my head which was a weird experience and also I can't watch part two until tomorrow night because my mom needs to go to bed and she's been watching with me.

Also just to be clear I have no like "here is a moral conclusion to be drawn/that I drew" they're just things that I've been thinking about.

Also I do want to note that more bombs were dropped on Vietnam by the US during the Vietnam War than were used during the entirety of WWII, including the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The book Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen has a chapter on the Vietnam War and how poorly it's talked about in US schools.

Also worth noting is how bad the firebombing of Japan during WWII was. It killed WAY more people than were killed in Britain. The book Flyboys by James Bradley has a chapter on it that's quite good.

OH MY GOD I should read Guns Germs and Steel after I finish Wicked. Though I also have this book on different authors and classic literature that impacted the Cold War which looks really interesting. Mmmm but book on the Silk Road.... Book on how Salt has shaped history....

And I really need to read more of Paul Farmer's stuff.

Gahhhhhhhhhhhh

And I have a ton of books on race and gender but that's what a good chunk of the nonfiction I've been reading is about lately and I always forget that I LOVE history in general. And social justice is very important but sometimes you just gotta read about salt. (I'm sure it can be directly connected to racism in America but that will not be the focus of the book. How did salt shape other things????) (Also by that I mean I know that salt was super important in West Africa (the kingdom of Ghana taxed people in salt and gold) and so that influenced politics there and West Africa was where most enslaved people were taken from and slavery is literally just. At the root of most racism in the US. So I'm assuming there can be a direct connection drawn between salt and the slave trade.) (Extra disclaimer: I'm white as fuck, please do your own research on this.)

Also Wicked is fine but I am getting bored. 150 pages left. My goal is to finish it this week. It is very rare that I find the second half of a book more boring than the first.

Shout out to the two people who read this I love you and you are wonderful.

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

There is a lot of comedy stuff going on this week, in my personal corner of comedy. On my personal hard drive. I've gotten my hands on so much cool stuff that my biggest problem is I don't know what to turn to first, when trying to get into it all. I've hardly been posting lately, not because I don't have anything to say, but because I have so much to watch and listen to and file and track and edit, that I don't have time to sit down and write about it. It's great.

However, there are a couple of things so cool that they cut through everything else and I need to share them. Two comedy specials that were both filmed about a year ago, and I've been really really excited about their release for ages, and they both finally came out this week.

Grace Petrie streamed her stand-up hour Butch Ado About Nothing in 2023, and I loved it. I'm pretty sure it has the honour of the most I've ever straight-up cried during a comedy show (or it had that honour at the time... Robins' Howl might have beaten in 2024), which doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement of comedy, but I promise it's also funny. Really funny. It's fascinating and intelligent and sad and also really really funny. Impressively funny, for what is technically a debut hour, even though she's been a brilliant performer for many years (everyone should check out all her music, but I think her latest album, which came out last year, is her best one yet). You can see she has the advantage of stage experience, years of being funny between songs as a musician, because comedy-wise, this is way too high calibre for someone's first stand-up show.

Without spoiling the content too much, it's about being a lesbian, and being a butch lesbian, and how to respond in a useful way to TERFs who use her identity against our fellow queer people. A topic that could not possibly fit more nicely into my personal niche, so I will fully admit to a bias here (like with Howl getting released as I was trying to quit drinking - you don't get that level of tears at a comedy show without some personal stuff coming up), but I also think it's an objectively brilliant show, no matter who you are.

I've not watched this version yet as it only just came out, so all those comments are about the version that got livestreamed in 2023, but she said this re-recorded version will have stuff that got left out of the 2023 version, so I've been excited for ages to see this. I recommend it very very much.

You do need a NextUp subscription to watch, but if anyone is interested enough in British stand-up to want to watch Grace Petrie's stand-up hour, then it's probably worth getting a NextUp subscription anyway. NextUp is the only streaming service of any kind that I subscribe to, I'm not a fan of the streaming model in general and I don't like paying for media in a way that my money goes to a corporation rather than the artist, in order to rent monthly access to that media but only through their player. I'd much rather pay the artist directly for a download, like with Bandcamp.

However, NextUp is a small enough company so I'm fairly confident that my money will go somewhere worthwhile (not all of it directly to the artists, of course, but some of it is, and lots of it is going to the many costs involved in filming and distributing comedy, and to paying the many people whose labour makes that happen, rather than the bulk of the money lining the pockets of Netflix executives). And the vast majority of stuff on NextUp can't be found anywhere else. They do a great service to comedy, preserving comedy that would otherwise get lost and showcasing lots of interesting stuff that won't get on more mainstream platforms (and some stuff that will), so it's worth the money.

I have less to say about this other show because I've not seen it in any form yet, but it is, unlike the last one, free on YouTube. So no one has any reason to not watch it!

This is Marjolein Robertson's 2023 show, which is called Marj. I've not seen it yet, but I did see her 2024 show live when I was in Edinburgh last year, which is called O. She's making it a trilogy, with a 2025 show called Lein, to complete her name (Marj-O-Lein - though if anyone's wondering, it's pronounced "Mary-O-Lane"). The idea is that the first show, Marj, was about the mind; the second show, O, was about the body; the third is about the soul. I think. That's what she was saying at the end of 2024, anyway.

Her second show, O, was one of the very best things I saw in Edinburgh last year. She tackled very tough subject matter, of her experiences with possibly life-threatening menstrual complications and a medical industry that doesn't know enough about it, but she wove it around Shetland folklore and she was captivating for every moment of it, and was very funny for all parts except the parts that were specifically designed to not be funny.

Seeing O in 2024 made me want even more to see Marj, which I'd already wanted to see because during the 2023 festival, I kept reading stuff by people who said it was brilliant. I don't know much about it, except that it's the "mind" portion of the trilogy and discusses how abusive relationships can mess with someone cognitively.

This one's been out for a few days now but I've still not gotten to it because, seriously, I cannot explain how much amazing new comedy I've gotten my hands on this week. But I'm going to watch it this weekend, and in the meantime, I've rarely been more confident in recommending something without even watching it. I can pretty much promise it's worth your time.

Marjolein Robertson is from Shetland, that group of Scottish islands way up north that has a murder show set there, but she's recently moved to London, so if nothing else, you can be cool by getting on board with her stuff now, before she's on Taskmaster and the entire world falls in love with her.

[itsclydebitches]

The opposition to rewrites in the FNDM is just so goddamn weird to me, given that one of the cornerstones of another fandom I'm in is a rewrite of a canon storyline that had some really cool ideas but dogshit execution. I see people saying that the rewriters are arrogant for thinking that they can do RWBY better than the official team, but no, in my experience even if they are arrogant it's equally possible that they're right. Official doesn't mean "The Best" or even "Good", just official.

Exactly. Ultimately it shouldn't even matter whether rewrites are "good" or not because

a) That's a highly subjective interpretation no one will ever agree on

b) They're written by amateurs for free as a hobby - with "amateur" meaning someone who does not produce RWBY writing in a professional capacity, not someone who is automatically "bad" at the art - and thus rewrites would be at huge disadvantage even if we did want to judge their quality

and c) That's just what fanfiction is?? Transformation??? The writer's motivation is inconsequential. Whether they're producing this because they think they can craft a better story than canon, or whether they simply want a creative means of celebrating it, the end result is still the same: a new, unofficial RWBY product that readers will inevitably compare to the original, favorably or otherwise

So yeah, it's wild to me. I've literally never seen another fandom so anti-rewrite. It's usually the opposite - as you say, a cornerstone of fan engagement - where fans, both jokingly and not, talk about how sometimes fic is a love letter and sometimes it's a "FUCK YOU STRONGLY WORDED TELEGRAM TO FOLLOW." Despite RWBY appearing unique at first glance (from my perspective, anyway) I wonder if part of this is due to larger fandom trends? Meaning, RWBY is comparatively young as fandoms go and I've noticed in recent years a prioritization of canon that hasn't been around before, particularly when it comes to shipping. Some of that is good imo (like the push for queer canonization) and some of it is just downright odd (what do you mean I'm not "allowed" to ship them just because they haven't spoken to each on screen? Since when is THAT a requirement?). Though RWBY is definitely an extreme case, there seems to be this generalized move from, "This is our canon and it's great, or maybe it sucks, but either way it's a spring board for all of THESE cool things" to "This is our canon and it is scared. It is perfect, flaws and all. If you're going to add to it I need a detailed proposal for how this fits into the established world, encapsulates the original author's vision, and maintains characterization even though I'm too young to know what OOC stands for." Certainly in RWBY's case, I wonder if part of it stems from the rise in social media and, as a result, fans "personal" relationships with the actors and writers. When you're seeing a creator's tweets all day and feeling like they're your online friend, you might be less inclined to "mess with" their work; as opposed to seeing an actor/writer at a con once a year, going home, recognizing that they're a complete stranger outside of any fantasies, and then getting on with playing in their sandbox because why wouldn't you? They're never going to know. This is the age of fans sending their fic to actors to read aloud and tweeting at writers that such-and-such had this to say about the show. Though this was done in a cool and positive light, I have legit had a meta of mine tweeted at a OFMD actor and, if the like he gave is any indication, he read it... which is a weird thing to think about considering he was not the audience I had in mind while crafting it. Those kinds of interactions has got to have some kind of impact on fans' perception of what they can and cannot do with the material...

Anyway, today's PSA is that if you want to do a rewrite of any story - yes, even RWBY! - you are absolutely allowed to do that regardless of how "good" it supposedly is. Go forth and get creative. Get messy. Do whatever the hell you want and if someone in the fandom tries to make you feel bad about that, tell me and I'll manifest a Lego in their shoe.

After all, it's not like the entirety of RWBY is built on transforming others' stories or anything :)

[grison-in-space]

Hi. I am stuck in how to get a job I want. How did you do it? The little I know about it, sounds cool.

Ahahahaha. I'm not sure how great my job actually is, but it does give me the opportunity to chase down questions. It's also pretty good for adapting to my various neurodivergences because the hours are flexible and it's got a high tolerance for an absolutely batshit random scattering of skills.

On the other hand, it doesn't pay for shit and I spent eight years getting my PhD and making even worse money, so. And it requires so much moving. Traditionally, I should be done here within a few more years—I've already been at my current position two years but I'm doing a weird thing that is moving slowly—and then have to make an interstate or even intercontinental move. In practice, I may change careers again to avoid that: eight years of PhD in Texas left me with some pretty bad scarring, and I don't know that I have it in me to move again.

Anyway, you asked how I got here. I have a basically boring career progression for an academic: I started by working in a lab tech during undergrad, and then I applied for PhD programs during my senior year. I really should have taken another year or two to grow up some more and figure my shit out, but that's hindsight. My program was oriented around ecology, evolution, and behavior, with a distinct slant towards evolution; I worked with a behavior lab within that. I graduated in 2020, which was incredibly bad timing: normally, after you get the PhD you go work for a year or two in a lab under a senior scientist that heads the lab (a PI or Primary Investigator). Their grant pays your salary, right? But no one was hiring during COVID, because everyone good to work with I had been cultivating was hunkering down and not taking new people; they were busily sheltering existing postdocs or students in place, or the funding opportunities we had planned to pursue together dried up and were outright canceled in the wake of COVID. Not that I'm bitter. I wound up making a huge field move in order to stay in academia and keep doing work I cared about, which has meant leaving EEB and moving into neuroscience.

Less specifically, if you want to know how I got into a job I liked? I did (and do) a lot of yelling on the internet, both pseudonymously and under my real name, about the things I think and feel strongly about. One of those things went moderately viral back in 2017, and my now-boss saw it and loved it. I approached her about a potential job when my other opportunities fell through, and she had money and she made space for me. I'm extremely grateful.

In my experience, the best way to get a job you like is to talk a lot and compliment all the people you genuinely think are doing cool things. Even if you're shy—and I am, I have leveraged the hell out of the internet to do this because it takes so many fewer spoons for me than making friends in person—you gotta take the risk and spread out friendly communications with a real wide net.

Focus on finding people doing stuff you think is interesting and give them honest compliments, then ask questions. Lots of low grade positive interactions, and you want to invest more in talking to people who also talk back to you. I have had good luck with mostly approaching other low ranking new folks like me; they tend to be more surprised and delighted by compliments and then they're willing to give me a little more attention. If people don't respond I shrug and move on: the important thing is that I try to make the people around me whose work impresses me feel good about that. I am a really critical person by nature, so I work hard at deliberately looking for things to praise in the work of people around me.

Anyway, you asked how I got here, and the short answer is, I made a lot of good friends and that saved my ass when I wound up in a tight place.

[bluntforcespatter]

trying's still good too ywy o u g h yeah, i get that. we spent way too much time on the internet too, my system n stuff i mean, to distract from irl stuff. tho ofc that led to. way more stuff happening, but i'm not gonna get into all of it rdgtfnhj but it was def easier to throw ourselves into pixels than deal with irl issues, esp when there were good things among the bad. most of our friends have been online, since ig maybe we aren't really someone ppl are interested in irl =w=;; anyways, i get it in my own ways lol. OHH we were on Quotev when we were younger. still go on at times, but we're way less active. most of our roleplays took place on Amino n Facebook tho which were....yeah lol. still, it was fun. kinda miss doing rp, less for the...acknowledgment of identity ig n more just cuz it was fun. but it's def hard, esp with current issues n such. hell ya, digital bestiess ywy YEAH, yeah. unfortunately i also get the whole...static brain thing. sometimes it calms down but it's been pretty constant over the past...year or two? cuz of stuff. anyways yeah, it's nice to have some sorta physical reminder ywy n yeah np! that all sounds nice =w= hopefully by the time you get this you'll be at home n stuff. n that's fair, good to know drthb i'll try to keep all that in mind ywy aa well thank you, idm the cheese, it's nice. :3 i appreciate it lol n dw about the switching, i get it lol, it was still cohesive n made sense so it's chill :3 - 📺

oh it's cool tht you're a system too !! we have been wanting more sysfriends (°ロ°) ! it's nice to gave people who understand. sort of. like of course all of our experiences are different but. ╮(￣ω￣;)╭ i find other systems are less likely to be like "wtf are you talking about you crazy person" and more likely to just. accept. which is nice.

i do get the Bad Internet Stuff (tm). i simply refuse to think about the bad stuff that happened to me because if i do i will actually disintegrate (◎ ◎) i think im the same way, my best friends are all internet peoples... it's really hard to talk to people in person. i don't make enough eye contact because it causes me physical pain. i've found in person people seem to find me off putting, i get called creepy and weird a lot. i sort of stopped trying to interact with people because of a very bad experience i had when i was 19-20. i do try very hard !! but i think i try way too hard and freak people out. ugh i dunno it's just. yeah. im don't think im someone people like IRL either.

it is super fun to RP !! it's harder for me now because like... people can be gross with it and so i don't like to do it with strangers, but it was SO FUN. i miss world building and doing fanart for everyones charas and stuff... i also used Facebook to RP jskwhshsj i was just pretty popular on QV because of my stories and quizzes n stuff. i was part of the creepypasta craze... Decidedly Normal Now (lying)

＼(＾∀＾)メ(＾∀＾)ノ

my brain is a big swamp bog full of fog. brain is mud soup. no thoughts head empty etc. it isn't great but again we try our best and whatnot ٩(× ×)۶ if you ever need to talk about it, i am allegedly a good listener (￣ ￣|||) i do my best anyways.

and thank you !! i am pleased to hear from you again, thank you very much for this conversation (*^_^*)♡

[quaranmine]

The Incandescence of a Dying Light (Chapter Eight)

July, fireworks, and some insight into someone we don’t actually know much about.

Chapter Eight: 5,436

<< Chapter Seven | Masterpost | Chapter Nine >>

HEY Y'ALL! Those of you who follow me on tumblr have been kept pretty well apprised of this chapter's progress, but it's good to be back. I've struggled with this chapter a lot, not out of any fault of its own, just because real life decided to beat me over the head in July and August.

Anyway, this chapter has a few content warnings.  CW for past injury, car accident, death, and as always…grief. Nothing graphic but it beat me over the head while I was writing it oof.

Finally, as a disclaimer—there is information in this chapter about wildfire survival. I’m not an expert, and some of these topics are quite literally life or death in real life. I’m an entry level environmental scientist whose only professional experience is in topics entirely unrelated to this. While I have done my research on this fic and done my best to always present accurate information, I am not a reliable source. This is a Hermitcraft AU fanfiction. Please do not take or substitute anything I say in place of information from actual professionals, lol.

“I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.”

Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

»»———-　　———-««

July 1989

It’s July, and there’s a complete burn ban put in place for Shoshone and the other national parks and national forests that surround it. If you ask Scar, it should have been put into place two weeks ago. The scattered storms and rain in May and early June has done nothing for the landscape now, which is dry and still full of theoretical tinder from years of fire-suppression activities. 

It’s July, and it’s sweltering outside. The main radio chatter during the daily weather conditions report says the temperatures have been record-breaking in the region. This is unsurprising to Grian—his cabin feels like less of a lookout and more of a greenhouse these days, with the inescapable sun taking great advantage of all the windows. He’s not really cut out for the heat of the summer. It makes the days feel listless and blend together, but at least it cools off in the evenings.

The fire season starts to ramp up in other ways too. There’s a fire reported in the Bridger-Teton National Forest, located immediately to their southwest, and officials seem concerned it will grow quickly with the hot, dry temperatures and wind. Elsewhere around the country the picture seems just as bleak: fires in the 1989 season have already burned hundreds of thousands more acres than the same time period in 1988. 

Apparently, the Two Forks lookout had gone unstaffed for several years prior, before the Yellowstone fires last year caused the agency to consider hiring more staff. The fires last year also, coincidentally, increased the budget for this year’s activities.This seems to have been a prudent decision, because the season is shaping up to have a spark indeed. They’re keen to use Grian as much as possible. 

Grian can’t see the smoke column from the Bridger-Teton fire on the horizon; it’s too far away. Instead he starts to notice that his visibility on the horizon is worse now, as the haze in the sky slowly grows. Distant mountains that were once brown and green are now wispy tones of flat yellow and gray. The Trout Fire still burns steadily in the distance. It’s a stubborn nuisance to the Forest personnel, but not a big enough fire yet to garner any worry. There’s more than enough worry to be passed elsewhere.

All of this would be enough on its own, but another contender has just stepped into the ring: Independence Day. 

The 4th of July is on a Tuesday this year, which means Grian and Scar get the wonderful privilege of working overtime all weekend watching the mountains, and holiday pay for the day itself. In all likelihood, people will be just as likely to celebrate on Saturday or Sunday or Monday as on Tuesday. Mary, a lookout in a more northern section of the Forest, has already called in to report a few incidents in her sector. The extra pay is welcomed; the responsibility for idiots is not. 

Fireworks are strictly banned, of course. The acknowledgement of that, however, requires campers to actually care in the first place. They do not. 

And so the month begins. 

»»———-　　———-««

Fire is, both philosophically and literally, one of the most important things humanity has ever been able to harness. It can be the difference between life and death, and yet it is both life and death. Fire fosters warmth and light and power and life. Fire caresses life and leaves behind destruction. 

Shoshone National Forest exists as part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, one of the largest mostly-intact temperate-zone ecosystems in the world. It’s part of a great chain of protected lands and wilderness spaces in the northern Rocky mountains. Shoshone is the second piece of that puzzle—just as Yellowstone National Park was the first national park to be established, the neighboring Shoshone National Forest was the first ever national forest to be designated in the United States.

It is also, like the other lands in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, fire-dependent. Plants and animals living in such ecosystems are often adapted to their local fire regime, which is the expected pattern, frequency, and intensity of the fires in their area. 

Lodgepole pines dominate the middle elevations of the Shoshone National Forest, and are the poster child of a fire-dependent species. These trees produce cones that are sealed with a tight resin that relies on fire to melt it. Fire is, therefore, essential to the reproduction of the species. But fire is also essential to their life cycle in another way: just as fire is necessary for the baby trees to sprout, lodgepole pines are very easily killed by fire.

And if the fires kill the weaker Engelmann spruce found in Shoshone’s higher elevations, that’s okay too—it just leaves room for the much more tolerant whitebark pine trees to grow without being outcompeted. Fire similarly benefits wildlife in Shoshone by diversifying the forest understory, encouraging growth of new plants, and providing dead tree snags for shelter. 

It kills, but it also supports life. 

The history of Shoshone National Forest and fire has its bleak moments. In 1937, a lightning strike started the Blackwater Fire in the Absaroka Range, a range of mountains located predominantly in the national forest. Dry weather and high winds turned the fire into one of the deadliest wildland firefighting stories in American history, with 15 firefighters killed and 38 injured. 

Labor laws are written in blood. Safety rules and best management practices are, too. Although no fault was assigned for the tragedy—a rigorous investigation deemed the situation was out of anybody’s control—the Blackwater Fire would ultimately change the landscape of wildland firefighting. It is remembered in the Ten Standard Firefighting Orders, a set of systematic guidelines developed by the US Forest Service afterward to reduce danger for firefighters.

These orders are still in use today. 

So what is a lookout’s role in a wildfire, other than keeping watch for it? Historically fire lookouts were used as firefighters themselves—expected to hop on a horse and head straight to a fire after seeing it, tools in hard—but in modern times lookouts are primarily used for providing updates. A lookout’s job is not complete once a fire is spotted and reported. They are expected to provide constant updates on its size and location, as well as assist firefighters and smokejumpers from their position. This work is very important—so important that sometimes fire lookouts don’t evacuate the scene until a helicopter is required for their rescue. 

And what if you’re a hiker? What if you’re on the ground? The prospects aren't good: hikers should just avoid being caught around a wildfire at all costs. Survival odds are, unfortunately, low. 

But what if you can't avoid it?

Try to determine which way the wind is blowing and remain upwind of the fire. Fires also burn fastest uphill, so seek lower ground. Fires will burn cooler and slower downhill. Try to find a safe spot from the fire, something that would burn less easily such as a rock slide, a large meadow, or a lake. Crown fires burn tall and hot in the tops of trees, so even a meadow will be safer than a forest. Cover your nose and mouth with clothing to protect your airways. Huddle close to any large object that can buffer the ambient heat. Lay face down. Don’t attempt to outrun the fire. 

Sometimes, setting your own fire is an option. Burning out an area large enough for you to lie in can allow the wildfire to move around the already burned spot—but this attempt is best saved for a grassland. Forests take too long to burn. And if the fire is close, and if you can see a safe, already burned spot through it, and if the flames are less than five feet tall, the best option might be to just run through the fire. 

Jumping in water is an option, but that might not save you. Superheated air, smoke inhalation, and lack of oxygen in the area is a primary concern. Fires move faster than most people can imagine. Fires can create their own wind, their own weather.

Fire, above all, should always be respected.

»»———-　　———-««

“Draw something for me,” Scar says suddenly into the still blue air of the dusk. “And, dude, turn your light on already.”

“Huh?” Grian says. He frankly doesn’t mind sitting in the dark while there’s still a little light left in the sky to adjust to, but his hand reaches automatically for the lantern’s switch before he even really processes Scar’s words. With a soft click the cabin is bathed in warm tones. Really, the reflections on the windows only obscure their visibility now that it’s mostly dark, but it’s undeniably more cozy now. 

“Ah, it’s good to see your little light in the way over yonder,” Scar says. “You’re like my little firefly in the mountains!”

Grian rolls his eyes at that. “What did you mean by ‘draw for me’?” he asks, blocking any spontaneous attempts at poetry Scar can make. 

“I mean, I’m bored. And I know you’re bored. It’s been a long day.” He hums a little to himself. “Figured you might wanna do something to pass the time.”

Scar’s right, it has been a long day. It’s the 4th of July, and they’re in it for the long haul. Grian thinks they should have just been allowed to sleep and clock in later in the day—who sets off fireworks at 8 AM?—but the fire season doesn’t rest and neither do they. Now, it’s evening, and this is where the real monitoring begins: after dark. 

Unfortunately, it’s also when the morale to keep sitting at the desk is starting to dip precipitously. Firewatching after dark is difficult and typically something they aren’t required to do. As a lookout, he primarily looks for smoke, not fire. Fires themselves are often too small or too tucked away for their light to be seen, and at night the smoke blends into the dark sky. But fireworks, fortunately, tend to announce themselves gaudily. 

Mostly, it’s the sheer personal resolve to pay attention that takes the greatest hit. Scar’s idea isn’t a bad one, there’s just one significant snag:

“I don’t draw,” Grian reminds him gently.

“But you used to,” Scar persists. 

“I drew houses,” Grian corrects, even though he knows that his drafting is far from the only thing he’s practiced over the years. “For work. It’s not the same.”

“Well, then draw your lookout,” Scar says and then seems to almost cut off his own thought with a—”Ooh, maybe draw mine instead!”

“I can’t do that.”  It’s a black and white statement of fact, but Scar doesn’t agree. 

“C’mon,” he says. “You definitely brought your materials with you, I know it.”

“You don’t have any way of knowing that.”

“You have to have a pencil and a notebook, right? How do you take your notes for the morning reports?” Scar says this in the sort of way where he knows he’s right. He says it playfully, like it’s a silly mistake right under Grian’s nose. 

“Okay, fine,” Grian says, trying to imbue an eye-roll into his words. “I get it.”

He’s not really sure why he picks up the yellow legal pad from the corner of the table, or the pencil in the cup. He tears the top sheet off where he had, in fact, scribbled some notes earlier about temperature and wind speed.

The thing is, Scar can’t even see him. He could lie to Scar and say sure, of course, I’ll do it, and Scar would be none the wiser, miles away on the horizon. 

He picks up the pencil. The notebook stares back, blank except for the faint lines. 

He does try to draw his lookout first, from memory. He thinks of it the way he always does in memory—a snapshot, perfectly clear image his mind took one day. In his mind's eye, the lookout starts to rise over the horizon in the late afternoon sun while he hikes up the hill towards it. He doesn’t have a ruler in the tower, so he carefully uses the spine of one of the old paperbacks as a straight edge to run his pencil against. 

It just…doesn’t look right. First of all, angles are off. He’s messed up the two point perspective somehow and he doesn’t have his usual drafting materials with him anymore. But it’s more than that. The lookout, despite being bathed in golden light in his visual memory, just doesn’t feel inviting. It’s just intimidating. A place where, despite its natural beauty, Grian just sees his worst days play out over and over again. 

He crumbles the paper again and tosses it to the side. He grabs the radio again. 

“Scar, you paint don’t you?” Grian says. “You’re an artist.”

“Well, I guess if you say so,” says Scar slyly, “one could refer to me as a bit of an artist.” 

“Why?”

The bluntness throws Scar. “Huh?”

“Why do you do it?”

“Why am I an artist?”

“Yeah. What made you start?”

Scar is quiet for a long time. Not too long to be worrying, but enough to seem…contemplative. He finally replies, “You know, I always liked it. In school I’d always get recruited to help with posters and stuff ‘cause I was one of the better ones at art, which maybe said more about them than me because I wasn’t an artist then. I didn’t practice. I didn’t know anything.”

There’s another pause, but not as long. Grian doesn’t interrupt. 

“It wasn’t really until after my accident that I started pursuing it more. It was somethin’ to do! And one of the nurses told me it might be meditative. Help me out a little.”

“Did it?” Grian asks softly. 

“I think so,” Scar says, and then with a little bit of a chuckle he adds: “But I don’t think I have to tell you though that sometimes a drawing frustrates you so much you want to throw it across the room! It isn’t all meditation. But I think that’s the point.”

Grian flushes a little. Scar’s comment is truer than he knows; the crumpled evidence of his most recent drawing attempt still sits on the floor by his chair. He reaches for the pencil again, and looks at the page once more. Maybe he will try to draw Scar’s lookout. He won’t tell that to Scar, of course, because he’ll be insufferable about it, but maybe he’ll try. 

Grian doesn’t really know exactly what Scar’s lookout looks like. It’s far away, and he’s looked at it in the binoculars a few times, but the details are always fuzzy and hard to make out; each shake of his hand jolts the image at that level of magnification. And it’s far too dark for him to look again, so—so he improvises. Scar’s cabin is not on a tower like Grian’s is. It's situated on a large piece of rock at the top of a mountain. It doesn’t need to be on a tower, because there’s nothing around it tall enough to block the view, unlike the trees next to his tower. He fills in the details as he remembers, and creates new ones in the place of things he forgot. 

The soft scratch-scratch of the pencil is lost to the noise of the radio again. “I broke my arm pretty badly at the time—needed surgery on that—but it wasn’t my dominant hand so I still painted. I like doing landscapes, mostly,” Scar says. “Pretty things. I grew up in nature. My dad and I went camping a lot. I missed it. I…wanted to do that again. Didn’t know if I would do that again.”

“I would love to see one of your paintings,” Grian says. 

“I don’t really think they’re worth getting excited for,” Scar says, doing a bit of regrettably predictable artist’s humility. “But I’ll mail you one, if you want. Oh! Maybe you’ll even get a little surprise. Jellie likes to help me sign a few pieces, whether I want her to or not…”

The idea of a painting signed with a paw print is so utterly charming to Grian that he almost suggests that Scar should do it with all his paintings as some sort of signature flair. Then it occurs to him that it might be hard to wash a cat’s paws, and starts to ask Scar about what he does—in his cabin in the middle of nowhere with no running water—when a sparkle catches the corner of his eye. 

Grian whips his head around just in time to see the sparks die. “Ugh,” he radios. “I just saw a firework. Super far away though.”

“Well, I was surprised neither of us had seen anything yet. Go ahead and mark the general direction of it even if it’s out of your district. Hopefully if there’s a fire someone else closer will catch it, but you could always check on it in the morning.”

Grian wanders over to the firefinder in the center of the room. Conveniently reminding him of which direction it was, several more fireworks go off in quick succession—golden, blue, red. It’s too dark to take a real reading, so he just points the sight in the general vicinity of the celebrations and takes its azimuth. He’ll spend extra time tomorrow examining this direction. 

As he takes the measurements, a thought drifts into his mind. It’s something about the convergence of this specific job, a job nobody’s ever heard about in a Forest overlooked because of its more popular neighbors, and the wistful quality of Scar’s voice when he spoke about the subjects of his paintings. He found this job advertised in a newspaper. How did Scar find it? Who trained him to do this?

He sits back at the desk, and starts to sketch in the mountains around Scar’s lookout. This, he remembers well. He knows the familiar fold of the hills and peaks like the back of his hand, even after a little more than two months on the job. 

The question circles his mind. 

“Scar,” he says finally. “You know why I came here. To this job. To this National Forest. I’ve…made that really clear, whether I wanted to or not. But I don’t think you’ve ever said why you came.”

“Oh,” Scar says. His voice is quiet. “I guess I haven’t.” 

Grian lays the radio down on the table, giving Scar space to speak. There’s something about the way Scar acknowledged him that sounds like he’s been exposed. One thing Grian has come to learn about him is that he’s a smoothtalker, and an excellent actor. Scar has dramatic flair in spades, and if he really wanted to, he’d spin a captivating tale for Grian about the totally-true events leading up to his place in this forest. It’d be as truthful as his name. 

He doesn’t, though. 

“People come out here for a lot of reasons, but not every person can stick with it. It’s lonely, for sure. And, of course,” he chuckles, “the bugs are pretty bad. I’ll tell you right now, I’ve seen more than a few volunteers and new lookouts suddenly get afraid of the dark when it’s just them and no one else for miles,” Scar says. “But the people who stay tend to fall into two categories.”

“What are they?”

“People who are running from something and people who are looking for something.”

There’s no need to question which category Grian is in. Not when he’s already laid his whole soul open for Scar to pick through and deeply intertwined himself in this mystery. 

There’s only this: “Which one are you?”

“It’s hard to say,” Scar replies. “But I think I was running away.”

And Grian wants to say from what? but he doesn’t. And he wants to be sitting in Scar’s lookout right now, or anywhere but here, but he isn’t. 

He sets the pencil down, temporarily abandoning the drawing he’s been scratching this whole time. He looks straight ahead through the window, but the glare from the lamp on the glass just reflects his own face right back at him. In the shadow where his head is, he can pick out the faint outlines of the hills beyond. 

“You can’t run from yourself though,” Scar says. “‘Cause it just follows you. And being alone with yourself just makes you face it faster. I think my mom was right. She was worried about me. That’s why she made me take Jellie to keep me company.” 

“I think I need to meet this Jellie,” Grian says, because he doesn’t know what else to say. Scar doesn’t typically sound so serious, and it’s a little jarring. “She sounds pretty fantastic.”

“She is, she’s—hey, what about meeting me?”

“Nah, I think I prefer the cat,” he says. Cheeky. 

“Well, I can’t say I don’t agree,” Scar says. He sighs. “I guess I should just talk about it, right? You can ask me whatever you want. ‘Cause the more I ramble, the less I talk about it, and the less I actually answer your question. Which is the fun of rambling! If you say enough words people forget about what you’re distracting them from. Oh, but I don’t know why I’m telling you that. A true salesman never gives up any secrets. I’m only a salesman in the winter, though. What am I selling now? I guess I’m selling myself. Wait—no, not like that, don’t you dare be laughing over there, G-man!”

Grian says nothing, and he isn’t laughing. He just lets Scar’s words fill the space. He doesn’t ask anything else. It feels hypocritical to do so. He’s dying to know everything, of course, but he also knows what it’s like—that looming weight on your neck from the pressure of well-meaning friends who just want to talk when all you want to do is be alone. If Scar has come all the way out here, then he must really have wanted to be alone. 

Scar seems to rattle himself out of it on his own. “I’m stalling again,” he says, voice like lead. “I’ll just start. It’s okay. It’s been 10 years. I’m fine.”

“You don’t have to tell me anything,” Grian says. “I was just curious. You know all this about me but I didn’t know anything about you. But if it’s a…thing then you don’t have to.”

“No, no,” he says. “It’s fine. I already told you a lot of the story. I just left out some pieces.”

“It’s a slow night,” Grian says. “Only a few fireworks. Plenty of time to talk, if you want…or plenty of time to just watch.”

“I appreciate that,” Scar replies. He takes a deep breath. It’s a funny thing, that. Grian can’t see Scar’s face—he has no idea about anything, even what color hair he has—but he knows the sound of Scar’s breathing. 

“I told you about my accident,” Scar begins. “I told you about how it nearly killed me, about the hospital, about taking up painting. And I told you about the way I’m still in pain, even years later. I don’t think it’s ever going to fully go away. But that wasn’t really the whole truth, or the worst part. The worst part was that I wasn’t the only one in the accident.

“I should have been, though. I was the one driving. I was just running an errand, but I was living with my parents at the time so I asked my dad to come with me to help me pick something out. I don’t even remember what it was. And I don’t remember the accident, either. I only know what they told me. I read the accident report. But there’s a wall of glass between me and what happened. Apparently, we hit some black ice in the road and it spun the car into the other lane. We got hit by a truck. It happened so fast. He didn’t know what was coming either.”

Scar pauses there. Grian tries to take in the story. “I’m sorry,” he says. “That sounds terrifying.”

Scar’s voice breaks on the next line. “The doctor told me my dad was dead when the paramedics arrived. They think he probably died instantly. I don’t remember that, though. I don’t remember anything. I just—I just woke up a week later in the ICU. That’s what I remember. Everything was just so fuzzy and hurt so bad. I could tell something was up but I was too tired. I slept. They waited three days and made my mom break the news.”

“Oh, Scar,” Grian says. “I’m so sorry.” But everyone is sorry. They’re always sorry. It doesn’t do anything. So instead he adds, “You must have been so scared. It must have been confusing.”

“It was ten years ago. I’m fine,” Scar repeats, and Grian doesn’t comment on the way it sounds like a lie. Maybe it isn’t a lie on most days of the week, but it certainly is tonight. Scar continues to talk. “I don’t know why that’s what messes me up the most. That I caused it and I don’t remember it. That it’s my fault but I didn’t know for so long.”

“It’s not your fault,” Grian says gently. “It was an accident. That’s what accidents are, they’re not on purpose. So it can’t be your fault.”

“And you’re right, G-man,” Scar says. His voice wavers. “I already know that. It isn’t my fault. I didn’t mean for any of it to happen. I didn’t know about the ice. I know it’s not my fault but…it’s really hard to believe that, isn’t it?”

Grian swallows against a lump in his throat, and flicks his eyes down to the table. It’s the hardest thing in the world, just below staying alive. 

“I just think about everything I could have done differently. Why didn’t I just go alone? Why didn’t I wait until the next day? What if I was driving slower? Would the difference of one mile per hour, or five, or ten have been the difference between life and death? What if I had reacted faster, or better? What if I saved the car from spinning? If I had left just one minute earlier, or five seconds earlier, there might not have been traffic in the oncoming lane. If I had left three hours earlier, maybe the temperature would have still been high enough to keep the ice from refreezing.”

He stops to take a breath. “It doesn’t ever stop. And it doesn’t bring anyone back. The worst is thinking about the things you did and the things you didn’t. Like maybe I would have told him I loved him that morning if I’d known that was the last day I’d see him. Or maybe I wouldn’t have stolen $20 from him and then lied about it when I was 8 years old. Or maybe I would have asked him again to tell me about his funniest story from when he was a teenager. But that’s just how it is, I think. It all comes back to you.”

“How do you deal with it?” Grian whispers. 

“Badly,” Scar says, and for once he doesn’t sound like he’s on the brink of tears. “You go forward. And then backward. And then forward again. You live through it.”

“I don’t think I can.”

“You’re already doing it.” 

“I’m not doing it very good.”

“That’s the only way you can do it.”

There hasn’t been any more fireworks since they started talking. The night outside is dark, with only the slightest sliver of a new moon. Millions of tiny stars glitter in the sky in nearly uninterrupted view. It’s a beautiful night out there, hot and still, but Grian stays in the four walls of his cabin. Enclosed.

Scar speaks. “One of my steps was coming back here. I think, in the end, it was a step forward. This place gives me comfort. I always liked this part of the state. My dad used to take me camping out here all the time, like once a summer. Sometimes we went to Yellowstone National Park. Sometimes we went to Grand Teton National Park. Sometimes we went to Bridger-Teton National Forest. And sometimes we went here. It’s the quietest here.”

“It sounds like you were close with your dad,” Grian says. “It sounds like fun.”

“It was,” Scar says. “My dad was cremated. It was a while before I was out of the hospital, and it was a while before traveling somewhere wasn’t an ordeal. We saved some of his ashes for closer to home, but we made a special trip out here and scattered a little in each spot.”

“That sounds nice…” Grian trails off.  “Like he’s still here, somewhere. In a place he loved. In a place with you.”

“I think I fell a little in love with this place then, in a way I didn’t when I was just a child. Or maybe I was just antsy. I wasn’t doing very good, I guess I can tell you that. There was too much guilt and familiarity at home. I wanted out. I wanted to be anywhere else but there. It took me two years after the accident to make it but I came here.”

“So,” Grian says. “Running from something. I see it.”

“Yeah,” Scar says with a huff of air. “Not that great at running these days though! I mean, I’m barely a hiker anymore without being wiped out for a few days! My mom thought this job was a terrible idea. She thought the last thing I needed was to be alone. I guess you know what that’s like.”

“I didn’t even tell my friends or my mum I was taking this job,” Grian admits. “They’d freak out. The reaction from people I knew back in Colorado was bad enough. So I just sent ‘em a letter the first week I was here. A ranger told me I had mail at the main office but I don’t want to check it.”

“They’ll give it to you at the end of the season if you don’t come pick it up,” Scar says. “You can read it then, after you’ve already done it.”

“Was it what you needed?” Grian asks abruptly. “Being alone.”

“I needed it. I think—sometimes everything in your head makes you want to avoid people. You feel like you need the silence of an empty room to just let it all fall out and fix itself. It helps. But only for a little while, because it never really fixes itself. After a while it just eats you up.”

And Grian wants to say, I think it’s eating me. And he wants to say, I think I am not alone enough, I still need more space, I still need more time. And he wants to say, Everything will be fine, I just need to find him. And he wants to say, I don’t think I would have lasted this summer without you.

“I didn’t have anyone to talk to my first summer as a lookout,” Scar admits. “But you have me. And I think—Grian, I know you think you’re alone, but you aren’t. And I know you think nobody understands, but I do. I’m trying to.”

“Oh,” he says. Oh.

There’s tears suddenly welling up in his eyes, and Grian rapidly tries to blink them away. He sees it in the incessant chatter that had annoyed him on the first week. He sees it in their radio channel, the one just for them to talk on, the secondary channel that ensures the main frequency is always open for real emergencies. Scar’s been cultivating the perfect landing spot for Grian to fall into, before he even knew Grian needed it.

“It’s not actually two different things, is it?” Grian finally responds. “Running away from something, and looking for something.”

And Scar says, “I don’t think it is, in the end.”

<< Chapter Seven | Masterpost | Chapter Nine >>

[nerdgirlriot]

Green Dayyyyy

Going to live events was never really my THING but Green Day being one of my favorite bands on this planet, I will move heaven and earth to see them live.

Anyway, adventure chronicled after the cut:

BART'ed into the city from the East Bay. Our transit system has gotten a bad rep over the years since COVID but the few times I've had to use it, I've never had any issues or weird interactions or anything. I'm probably too nondescript to be bothered with lol

Anyway went with my partner of 25 years who is also a massive Green Day fan (I wouldn't be with him if he wasn't tbh lol), and we managed to navigate to Oracle Park without getting lost, even though I was kinda worried that we'd gotten on the wrong MUNI train but we got to the stadium easily

I'm not a baseball fan so I've never been to Oracle before (and I didn't go to the Hella Mega Tour with Green Day, Weezer, and Fall Out Boy because I was still anxious about COVID) but it's a really nice stadium! And even though the A's are the East Bay team, the whole rigomarole and bullshit about moving the team to Vegas kinda soured me on the A's. But I will be a fair-weather Giants fan, sure. But yeah, Oracle (or AT&T Park as it was known for a while) is a great stadium. And the staff were all cool and helpful and friendly and a lot of them were also excited for the concert.

As soon as we got through the gates, I knew I wanted to get some merch. So I got a Saviors Tour shirt and one for the Linda Lindas too. And I picked up a patch because I'd heard that the patches were specific to each city and the one of San Francisco is pretty simple, but I kinda like it that way?

We got seats on the club level (because I am smol and old and I would not survive in the pit or floor) but I didn't realize how nice it was. Easy access to lots of food and more importantly, bathrooms. We passed by a ton of conssessions options getting to our seats, but we got garlic fries for a snack before the show. And then during the show, (right before Smashing Pumpkins took the stage) I hurried off to get pizza. The counter is run by Tony's Pizza (which is kind of a Bay Area thing, and one of my favorite pizzarias in our area).

And then Green Day happened and everything else is kind of a blur...

They played Dookie AND American Idiot in their entireties and along with some songs from their newest album Saviors (and also Minority and a few others). It was clear that Billie's voice was kind of faltering near the end, but he still had energy and passion and he was powering through it all because it was the homecoming show.

I also think the venue was the best venue because you could see San Francisco Bay and the fog rolling through made it so surreal and magical. Like...when the spotlights shot through that lingering fog and smoke from the pyrotechnics and became shafts of pure light shooting across the crowd

and idk about anyone else but Death of St. Jimmy hits SO MUCH HARDER when you're hearing "he blew his brains out into the Bay" and that's the fucking Bay, that's the Bay, right there. It's the Bay in the song. You can fucking see the fucking Bay. aldkjalsjdlsjkl lsdkjalksd

I sang along and so many other people did too and it was a fantastic experience, almost transcendent and i guess that's the power of live music and an energized crowd

I was trying not take too many photos and videos and just live in the moment but I did get some videos of the crowd when they had all their camera flashlights on and it turned out kinda magical

Had a bit of a walk trying to get back to BART because I didn't want to wait for the next Metro train (which would've taken 20 minutes and walking back to the BART station took less than that) and again, the BART ride back home was uneventful and actually pretty comfortable because I'm still enthused about the new traincars

honestly taking BART to the city and seeing Green Day is probably one of the most Bay Area things to do and I'm so happy that I've gotten to do this both at Oakland and now in San Francisco

i thought Billie roasting Vegas for stealing Oakland's sportsball teams was great and also a little ???? because hey, Vegas is where his very public rant/meltdown happened during that late I Heart Radio Festival set and then he went to rehab soon after so yeah...nothing good happens in Vegas :P

I'll be carrying the memories of last night for the rest of my life

some photos:

View from our club level seats. I was a little worried because Ticketmaster for some reason put in "Obstructed View" on our tickets after I'd bought them but the only obstruction was one of the speaker towers and honestly it wasn't much of an issue because I could still see the screens and most of the stage:

The poles at the stadium had Dookie & American Idiot flags, along with a Saviors tour flag, and also here's a view of the Bay:

The Linda Lindas were greattttt

[moistvonlipwig]

so i grew up in los angeles (and then lived there again for almost 2 years during covid) and i would be so interested to hear you discuss your experience of it! it is unique place, hard to describe. plenty of good things but "vampiric" is also extraordinarily accurate, i think. personally i will never go back. (living there, not visits!) you come off as very intelligent and intuitive and have such a way with words

haha thank you (i say 5 months later)...so i guess the important thing to keep in mind wrt my experience of los angeles is that i'm from boston and i didn't really...want to move here lol? i'm not gonna get into Why i moved here (and why i probably won't move away unless i get an amazing job/school opportunity somewhere else) but it wasn't a decision i made for my own happiness let us just say. so that obviously influences how i feel about it.

but broadly i guess my experience of los angeles has been:

awful public transport. just dreadful. i mean no transit system is perfect, growing up i felt that the T certainly sucked in many ways, but looking back on it now i'm like wow the T was so good i miss the T!!! because the LA metro is just not good. the bus system (which is what i mainly rely on) is heavily under-scheduled and the rail system operates within such a limited area that it takes forever to get anywhere. i don't have a car and likely never will -- i know how to drive but frankly it terrifies me and i'd rather invest in learning how to get by with public transit, biking, and walking. but LA is very much built for cars. this is one of the aspects i would call vampiric honestly. the car culture of LA sucks the lifeblood out of the other elements of the city. highways dominate the land like parasites. if you don't have a car, you will be bled dry either by the time sink that is the bus system or the costs of ordering frequent ubers.

food really depends on where you are. yes DTLA has lots of great food but the surrounding valleys can be hit-or-miss. in particular it is hard to find good mexican food. when crazy ex-girlfriend's rebecca bunch said that she felt gaslit by a mexican restaurant in the san gabriel valley she wasn't lying. i'm not even talking about 'authenticity' which i think is a really charged & complex topic when it comes to food. i love me some good americanized mexican food like tex-mex or my beloved new mexican cuisine. but cali-mex is just. not good. (cali-mex gothic: everything is covered in Red Sauce. what is Red Sauce? no one knows. can i get this enchilada without Red Sauce? sure, says the waiter. your enchilada arrives. it is slathered in Red Sauce.)

the weather is also kind of hard on me. like to be fair it is convenient to be able to wear shorts year-round and not have to constantly check the weather to see how much i should bundle up. but the lack of seasons kind of makes it seem like time has no meaning. (i'm sure this isn't helped by the fact that i moved here less than a year before the pandemic started which also had a time-distorting effect.) also the summers get SO HOT, like 90 degrees fahrenheit/32 degrees celsius every damn day. and yes it is much less humid than boston thank god. but it's also not exactly a dry heat? like i've spent weeks in northern new mexico in the summer and it is MUCH cooler there with the elevated altitude + actually dry heat. whereas in los angeles it is sea level and it can actually get quite muggy. in the dead of summer it also doesn't really cool off at night because everything is paved over with asphalt which just absorbs the heat during the day. it's may right now as i'm posting this and the weather is actually still pretty nice but i'm dreading june. also the leaves don't really change color in the fall, at least not on the same scale they do in new england, which is so sad because autumn leaves are so pretty. :(

anyway, because the weather never significantly changes, los angeles almost takes on a kind of artificial quality in my eyes? it doesn't quite seem like a real place. and then this isn't helped by the aesthetics of the city & the flora. there are a lot of non-native plants that people have planted here existing alongside native plants which creates a very strange picture, and the buildings seem almost peculiarly generic -- neither the wood & brick of new england nor the adobe blending-into-the-desert of the southwestern u.s. it makes the city & surrounding county seem false and sort of shallow, like a tv set i suppose you could say.

another thing i really don't like that took me a while to realize is the lack of cemeteries. in new england there are cemeteries all over. they are nice places to walk & to drive by. in los angeles there are a couple very small ones scattered throughout the county (as well as some bigger hollywood ones) but in general cemeteries are just not as much of a thing and i miss them so bad.

also the music scene is...really different and not my thing. :[ i enjoy all kinds of music but my favorite genre is folk and a lot of my favorite artists would regularly perform in boston or massachusetts but in l.a. you mostly get pop music. there's also less of an emphasis on live theatre which saddens me. growing up in boston i saw nearly every shakespeare play live due to the thriving theatre scene. there IS theatre here of course it's just not as big.

now that being said of course there are things i like...i like the diversity of people and cultures here. i like that there are mountains in the distance as is good and proper. i admit to still getting a minor thrill out of knowing i am right next to major movie/TV studios -- and related to that, as someone who dreamed for a long time of working in TV (though i'm switching gears now for my own peace of mind & wallet), it's nice to be able to meet other people who work or want to work in that industry. i got out to the picket lines a couple times during the writers' strike and it was really fun.

that said i really cannot abide how angelenos will literally complain that it's cold the moment it drops below 80 degrees fahrenheit/26 degrees celsius like come the fuck on bro 😭 that's some buffy the vampire slayer behavior right there

[chirasul]

so, you want to assemble a music library with physical media huh?

lately i've been seeing a lot of people advocating for collecting and utilizing physical media for the assembly of a music collection (good, based) but then their primary way of advocating for it is.... by collecting CDs. this isn't bad per se (CDs have great sound quality, don't take much space, and are generally cheap) but i need to tell you some important info about CDs.

like i was born in 1990 don't get me wrong, i LOVED my huge collection of burned and purchased CDs (had like 3 or 4 fat CD wallets) but also CDs are the form of physical media with the LEAST longevity. unless they're made with gold, CDs are gonna last you like 10-15 years maximum. even less if the CDs experience a lot of temperature and humidity changes. why, you ask? the data layer literally falls apart, a tendency called "disc rot". i noticed this happen to my own collection of CDs, the discs are now completely unplayable and unusable. they aren't that old! but even my dad's old 8-track and vinyl record collections are perfectly playable, while my CD collection is now garbage.

i know that being able to rip the music onto your computer is probably a factor for using CDs, but if you want a truly sustainable and long-lasting collection, i'd try to collect vinyl records or cassette tapes. yeah, tapes! tape sales shot up in 2022 for some reason (the reason is Guardians of the Galaxy) and a lot of artists are starting to release on tape, so why not? tapes are really fun and a little easier to both collect and play than vinyl records

personally, i like collecting vinyl records because not only do i love having music on physical media, but i also love having giganic beautiful album art, which is super easy to frame and display. it looks super cool. here's a picture i found online of someone framing vinyl album sleeves

anyway, i'm not telling anyone that collects CDs that they're a dipshit or anything - I still have plenty of CDs and I still like to burn mixes for my friends and stuff - I just also think that it's not really the best way to build a physical music collection. if you'd rather collect for longevity than for ease of use, try something other than CDs. there's probably a lot of people who disagree with me about CDs, so if that's you, please email your reply to me and we'll talk about it.

happy listening!

[lighthousegod]

Hello and welcome to my rant from my time on Stranger Things Steddie and Friends Twitter for the past few months.

K I'm really pissed but its fine I wrote this all before the poll thing. Now I just. Can't get rid of it. (Me at tumblr headquarters right fucking now)

Anyway. Sorry for the interruption.

The fact that I've seen several ST fans claim most people who like steddie are fetishizing them is already shitty, but what makes it even more shitty is that they focus on them being two white cis guys fetishized by "white girls".

To reference the two white cis guys first, yeah, you got me there. That really is all those two are in the show. And if you wanna talk representation, well shit! Let's do it! Out of the main cast, we have 3 people of color: Lucas, Erica, and Argyle. Lucas is much too young to be in a relationship with either of them and already has one of his own, and Erica is ten years old. Now, I love Argyle, but he was written to be a comic relief character that had no arc and never met either of them. I think that's a wasted opportunity, Eduardo is great and would've done well as a fully fleshed out character, and there is a conversation to be had about whether that character would've been received the same way Eddie was being a white guy. But the thing is, he was never even CAST as a character who could be compared with Eddie- again, his whole character was "funny stoner." THAT is fucked, and people have definitely decided to ignore that fanon. In fact, Jargyle has become a pretty well known ship! Weirdly enough, the content I've seen of them has majorly been from people who also ship steddie! It isn't as popular as Steddie, though, and I don't think that's ONLY bc of half of the ship has less lore than eddie. There definitely is at least some internal bias us white queer folks should take into account when considering what ships we focus on in media.

However, I don't think that's why it's being brought up. I don't think I read tweets from lesbians with she/her in their bios condemning all us steddie ppl who just ship it because "they're two white guys we can fetishize for being in an mlm relationship" bc they're trying to be good allies. That COMPLETELY disregards that transmasc and nonbinary people (ESPECIALLY transmasc people of color) make a BIG chunk of the steddie fandom. Crazy, it's almost like Eddie was written to represent an outcast and literally GOT TARGETED BY CHRISTIANS and a bunch of people in marginalized communities related to his struggles! Except oh, yeah, that'd exactly what happened. And yeah, okay, he's a white guy and it IS pretty shitty that they cast a white dude to represent outcasts in general, but the people talking shit are watching the SAME DAMN SHOW that has a huge fucking cast and still has minimal representation. Fuck, man, Caleb McLaughlin has faced SO MUCH hate from assholes "fans" as the only black main character. Why the hell are people using that very real issue to back their shitty arguments against a gay ship on twitter?

Again, I wanna preface that 90% of these kinds of comments come from lesbians and bisexual people with she/her or she/they in the bio. I thought yall were COOL with the gay and trans people. Yall ARE queer people. Some of them were even big Ronance or Rovickie fans! YALL. WHY IS FRIENDLY FIRE ON??

A lot of this argument is backed by claims that steddie fans ignore canon queer rep, too, and I just don't understand that.

I know. Robin is representation. I am SO HAPPY to have her, and I'm so happy that Maya pushed for it, and as a transmasc person who was not out at the time and likes girls, I felt very seen when watching her coming out scene with Steve. However, I know I don't fully understand the lesbian experience as someone who likes guys too. I know Robin means a lot to wlw fans, especially lesbians. There have been instances where steddies have co-opted that scene to make it about steddie, and that is not okay. (I've never SEEN this happen, but I've seen people talk about it. All the steddie guys on Twitter that I follow were making it pretty clear that that was not cool and pretty fuckin lesbiphobic. I agree, whoever did that, fuck them. Wlw and specifically lesbian wlw relationships have very little rep and Netflix canceled all their shows and it's super fucked.) But besides this, I actually see a LOT of steddie fans who very much love Robin's character. Most of the steddie artists and fic writers I know are also ronance, rovickie, and/or Buckingham creators. A lot of them are wlw themselves!

//I should also note that Will is canonically gay now and I'm super excited, but truly, I just don't see as much appeal in byler because they're so much younger than me now. I totally love Will as a character, and I was around the kids' ages when the first season came out, but I'm in college now. I relate a lot more to the older kids! I'm real happy to have will as mlm rep and I hope he gets his moment in s5. I just didn't latch onto him and Mike the way I did Steve and Eddie! We all got preferences and that's fine.//

All this to say, I'm just so tired of Twitter, man. I just saw a post about how many cis women who claiming its "ableism" to say they have to be around anyone who identifies as masculine, including queer men, queer mascs, cis men of color, butch lesbians, etc. And I've seen a lot of that lately too. It's just so weird to see someone who identifies as a queer woman talk shit abt a steddie fan with a hellcheer shipper.

(man I can't even get into that rn. Chrissy and Eddie shippers in ST fandom are a whole other bout of drama. I've seen steddies be pretty nasty on the issue toward bi women who ship that bc of age difference, which I never really understood because eddie has no confirmed age?? Like idk how he can be a super senior AND 17 on his missing poster but whatever, I'm not stressing abt that as long as you dont make them have a weird age gap on purpose. Hell, I even thought they were love interests at first, too. But DAMN I've seen some hellcheer people that hate steddie. None of this justification type shit either, they just say "it doesn't make sense" and "I'm scared of steddie" and "they ruined the fandom and eddies character" like bro that's literally homophobia. like oogily boogily gay people jumpscare homophobia. So I just don't talk to those guys usually.)

Whatever abt the straight ppl tho they're never gonna get my weird gay stuff. But what SUCKS is when it's other gay people saying this stuff. Like what about mlm wlw solidarity man? Why do I gotta see a rovickie stan and a hellcheer girl talking abt how steddie shippers are all misogynistic and hate women?? Esp when so many are transmasc?? It's getting weird and TERF-y and I just. I wish we were cool again. ST is abt outcasts at the end of the day, it's why we root for them and relate to them. There aren't even a lot of queer people from the 80s around because of the kinda hatred people like us face. Not to mention racism, ableism, misogyny, all of it. For centuries. The people up top all hate us. We gotta have each other's backs and twitter is making us INSANE instead. God.

Anyway I'm gonna go watch the mandalorian now later losers.

[misscammiedawn]

50 Days of HypnoKink - Day 29: Safe Spaces

Alignment: 105% Bottom Only --- I'm not comfortable doing this one for others

By now we're kinda out of "this is hot" and I'm just writing about things I think are cool. This one may be one to skip if you're following this for scene ideas and stories of things I've done with trance.

A lot of inductions, especially with older files, have you imagine a safe space. A relaxing and gentle calming place.

Therapists also do this for EMDR work which-- is uncomfortably close to hypnosis in my experience--

The idea is to turn a piece of your soul into a location of softness and tranquility and I've always found a lot of interest in that. Like a lot of folx who I get close to in the hypnosis community that I feel safe asking, I ask them to describe their place.

That is a super private thing and I will not even elude to what people have told me.

But it makes me smile. Like I get to see a piece of them.

It lets me know what they find enchanting and soothing. How they visualize safety and comfort.

Then you can ask little questions.

What do you do there?

Are there any smells to this place?

What time of day do you picture it as?

Are you alone?

Are there ambient sounds?

Though maybe phrase a little less leading? I dunno. I'm not good at guided hypnosis. I just know if you say "is there music in the air?" people will hear music because you put the idea in and if you ask "Focus on your sense of hearing, really take notice of the space. Is there anything you can notice?" then at least you're asking input.

Huh? I guess I do know my stuff. Just not performative.

Anyway!

I'll talk about my place in a bit but I wanted to say it has always smelled of coffee. Goddess and my former partner used to guide me through "refreshing the grounds" when I needed a boost.

The reason it's not a Miss Dawn special or anything is that when you're in someone's most precious imaginings it's difficult to tread lightly.

If you raise attention to how someone internally perceives themselves in that space, it could lead to dysphoric feelings. You could introduce new elements.

Like I don't mean to be all Inception or anything. But my space has been a consistent location for over 2 decades at this point. More than half my life the same space has existed in my mind. That kinda means any changes made in that area are important and stick.

Which is a lot of responsibility.

Fuck... I could only dream of having a place I call home for a single decade. Let alone 2. This space has been more a constant than my literal homes. Though I carry them with me.

I am so so off topic right now x.x

Maybe I should just talk about my experiences outright, then--

My Safe Space is... private and I have complicated feelings about it.

To date only 3 people other than therapists have been allowed to explore it or make changes and only one - my Goddess - has been allowed to be visualized within that space.

Until Goddess made that request, understanding the importance of this next sentence, I had never visualized anyone else in that space.

Sometimes animals from memories or imagination but even then with great discomfort.

99% of the time nothing that exists outside of my head is allowed in that space. It is hallowed ground in my mind.

The person who helped me build it abused me and hurt me. I don't want to talk about that. But I think it's important that I note it. A part of him is in the walls. There's an area that is sealed off with yellow security tape and I haven't been in that area since I was a teenager. Like a scar on my soul that I cannot escape. Goddess once asked to remove it. I like the reminder. I like the feeling of power I have over knowing it. Knowing I sealed it and him out of my life.

So... edited within the realm of privacy--- I just wanna describe some things:

It's built from memories and emotional connections to those memories. It's always night there and the sky is the sky I saw at a precious friend's home in North Wales back in 2005.

There's a camp fire that has taken on attributes from a certain backyard fire pit in recent years.

My safe space itself is a log cabin. I call it The Lodge. The person who knows why isn't with me anymore.

There's a hidden room behind a bookcase that leads to the "Room of Doors" which is a staple from Goddess' hypnotic files.

A recliner I picture myself trancing in when I am asked to imagine myself in trance.

A little kitchenette with a coffee nook that fills the place with the scent of coffee.

There are two doors and--- the blocked off area---

One leads to the bedroom and one leads to the basement.

The basement is full of bedrooms.

The bedroom will select one of those bedrooms and it will be a place of comfort. Every one of these is a place I've called home.

I have never worked out why that is there. But it is.

Minds are weird.

Sometimes cats from my married life are there. Most of the time they're not.

I don't want to describe the main floor, the colors, the way it feels, how I feel there. That's more than I feel comfortable being open about. But I really love how firm and stable it has become. How even after all these years it's still the same room.

Sometimes it's nice to have consistency. I don't have a lot of that.

Anyway...

If you've never done it. Really take a minute to think about yours. Really build a place you can feel is a part of your soul to rest in.

Not gonna lie? It's pretty great!

---

Day 28: Adoration

FULL SCHEDULE MASTER POST

Day 30: VR Helmets

[alexracheltravel]

Day Four: All About That Expat Life!

It was a fun weekend, but like everyone else, we had to go back to work! Fortunately, we're working American hours, so we get to take advantage of having our mornings free. So, we decided for some reason to go to the one museum that stays open late: the Fotografiska!

This was a great museum. Neither of us have been to the New York one, but here we saw a handful of innovative exhibitions that expanded what either of us thought photography could do. The first major exhibition was from an American artist who did the Obama "Hope" poster. We watched a brief film that showed the way he created etchings on top of existing photographs, combined it with collage techniques to create something really unique. It was more than just portraits, a lot of his art was filled with activist statements against fascism and climate change.

We've all seen this print before but seeing the art up close was really fascinating to see all of the work that goes into what seems like a simple print.

Other exhibits at the Fotografiska conveyed experimental photography, using negatives and exposure techniques that we didn't quite understand, but the works themselves were quite cool to look at.

Others experimented with technology, using AI tools combined with an artist's own work to craft something unique. This wall was a slow animation filled with pleasant, ambient music.

Climate activism is big on Sweden. Everyone here seems to be aware about waste and eco-friendly products. Most vehicles are hybrids, and hydro-power generates electricity. Even the art on display tackled the climate. We loved this photograph of a fjord in Iceland.

After all was said and done, we popped around the area and got a traditional Swedish lunch: fried Herring! We thought of it as the Swedish equivalent of a burger: fried fish on a piece of toast, topped with pickles and red onion. There's a variation that also had mashed potatoes.

The fried fish was very tasty! It definitely had a very fishy taste, but the pickles and onion were excellent!

But before work we needed a quick caffeine boost, and got a coffee and cinnamon bun before heading to work.

So, it was a simple day, but we had to manage both sides of our lives!

Alex made some pasta and chicken for dinner and Rachel had her usual 4+ hours of meetings! Wahoo!

Alex: so, Rach, how was the transition back into work?

Rachel: it was not the easiest but had a very productive full day and was very manageable! How was your day? I worked for 8 hours and how did it feel for you to also do work in a foreign country?

Alex: it didn't feel that different because I have been doing asynchronous work anyway. The museum creatively charged me but I felt like I couldn't do any creative work until I got this grading out of the way, which I did.

Rachel: and you cooked me tasty dinner! Another thing we don't typically do outside of cooking classes when we travel. This whole trip is feeling very different in a good way! Not better but good! Speaking of the museum, I loved it so much! What beautiful exhibits with interesting utilization of photography! What did you think?

Alex: it made me want to go to the one in New York. Overall I found a new appreciation for the medium although I did find the whole place to be smaller then I thought it would be.

Rachel: me too, but I do appreciate that all of the museums we have gone to feel really manageable in a few hours. This feels really different than New York or other countries where it feels like there is no way you could finish the full museum in even 8 hours. It feels like Stockholm has more museums than are smaller than less than are huge.

Alex: at this point I feel like I've hit all the museums I wanted to and now we have the whole week to have fun.

Rachel: so maybe the ABBA Museum is in store!

Alex: mamma mia!